Year Two and A Damn Lot of New Lights!

These are the light bulbs we've replaced with CFLs over the past few weeks. Made the last big switchover today.

The timing is very nice -- tomorrow is our one year anniversary in the house, so beginning tomorrow, we'll have a pretty accurate apples-to-apples comparison of energy usage and PG&E bills.

Today I even made a spreadsheet to analyse usage last year to this year, and month to month. Here's what I know so far: Last year, we used an average of 33.4 kilowatt hours a day and paid an average of $0.21 per kilowatt hour. When I insulated to spa last July, usage dipped significantly. I marked the months I know I changed the spa water, but obviously there were some I missed.

Anyway, we had a few rooms done a few weeks ago, and the early daylight savings time, and our bill in March was about the same as our February bill, even though we drained and filled the spa. So it's a start.

All right already!

Unfortunately I didn't take a before picture, but this is a reasonable substitute. The woody shoot things (to use the formal, Latin name...) make a pretty effective screen.


This is the after. Looking at it, when I wrote yesterday I had cleaned up the first third of the creekbed, I think I meant the first fifth. There's still a long way to go...

Raking and Hauling and Burning, Oh My!

Spring is nice. Owning four-tenths of an acre of well-forested land is nice.

Spring cleaning on said well-forested four-tenths of an acre is something other than nice.

We did expand the visible look of our land today. The creekbed that run on the left side of the house was always hidden from the street by a dense stand of trees and these woody shoot things that grow on the edge of the roadway. I had already limbed the trees up about 10 feet, which opened things up some, and removed one dead tree. (It was leaning, rotted away at ground level, held up by other trees. So I grabbed the trunk and ran opposite the lean and it fell quite nicely. Yesterday I knocked over some dead trees just over the back fence. Don't tell my absentee neighbor...) (They were dead, though...)

Anyway, today I cut down the woody shoot things and raked the first third or so of the creekbed clean of debris. VASTLY expands the look of our place, and will so even more when I find a matching two-rail fence to put up on that side.

CrawBerry

Goodbye Craw World

A (Craw) Fish Tale

Spring, Sprang, Sprung

Not a lot of explanation necessary...

Numbers

I'm not sure what it is with the movies right now, but there are a couple of numerical flicks out there. The Number 23, with Jim Carrey, which I'm not going to see (and which is redundant because once I write it stars Jim Carrey I don't need to add "which I'm not going to see"); and 300, which I will see.

I have a new favorite number: 4442.

That's the tax refund check that just appeared in my mailbox. Another happy number is 6, which is the interest HSBC is going to pay on new deposite until April 30 (after which is goes back to 5).

And in the number arena, 9 is a bad number -- my Sallie Mae student loan interest rate -- but 3.9 is a better number, and I was able to transfer most of my outstanding student loan to a Discover Card with a 3.9 fixed rate on balance transfers until 2011. I'll get the rest paid off myself in the next month of so.

The Thumbs Say "Yea!"

The Blackberry is the bomb.

I've had the 8700 for about a week now, and although it hasn't saved my life or won us any contracts all on its own, it is handy, light, cool and fun.

(It did settle a bar bet when Diane and I were out the other night, but since she was right and I was wrong I consider it a knock against the device...)

I don't know if my timing was right in buying it -- I wanted to wait until we were busy enough to justify it -- or if buying it influenced business directly, but whichever way it was, it's working. We're busy. People I've pitched in the past are calling, and for the last week or two I've been scrambling to try to keep up.

So why, might you ask, am I taking the time to write this post, when Blackberry isn't giving me a cut for this quite positive testimonial? Have you seen the post below it? Isn't it obvious?

Off Kilter

Let me say up front I know this is a bad idea. When you have sisters and brothers-in-law as smart, clever, funny and merciless as I do, you don't have to give them any ammunition to work with.

Having said that, here's a picture of me in my kilt. Like I said, the Elliott tartan is quite striking. The sporran is a great place to carry your Blackberry!

I led a foreign policy discussion this afternoon (I get asked once a year for the past three years) and today's topic was immigration, and I thought I'd remind them we all came from somewhere else. Besides, it let me make a good joke.

"I suppose I should address the way I'm dressed," I said. "I've been doing this for three years now, and this is the first time I've worn a tie."

Yeah, well, polite laughter is still laughter...