Doing Our Part to Save the Planet

There was snow on our roof but that didn’t stop the field crew from installing solar panels on our house last week, Gilda’s and my latest attempt to be responsible citizens of the world.

According to our provider, SolarCity, during the course of our 20-year, no money down, lease we will offset 381,219 pounds of carbon dioxide. That’s the equivalent of driving a car 409,434 miles, or the CO2 absorbed by 206 trees, or the use of 96,134 gallons of water to make electricity.

Of course, we also will save thousands of dollars we would ordinarily be sending to ConEd during the next two decades. SolarCity estimates the panels on our southern facing roof and on the east-west sides of the garage will produce 87% of our power needs. 

We are waiting for final White Plains Building Department inspection and approval before we go live, sometime in the next few weeks I hope.

Solar panels are the latest artillery in our battle to live a more ecologically healthy life. We’ve reduced by about 50% our garbage production, and thus landfill contribution, by composting almost every bit of natural, uncooked waste from fruits and vegetables. Last year I built two compost pens at the side of our yard while Gilda bought a compost bin at a Westchester County-sponsored environmental event at Croton Point Park.

Raw produce is mixed with leaves I shred each fall. Like people you see collecting discarded empty cans and bottles, I scavenge our neighborhood, scooping up leaves piled up in the street, usually about 16 33-gallons bags each foray. I chop them up in a funnel-shaped shredder bought from Craig’s List before putting them in the compost piles where the mixture will eventually turn into black gold for Gilda’s garden.

I’ve previously written about Gilda’s hybrid car, a Ford C-Max that even in this frigid winter is conveying us at 44.2 miles per gallon.

Coupled with lower thermostat settings during the day—yes, I wear extra layers indoors, sometimes even a baseball hat to keep warmth inside my body—and a more energy efficient oil burner that replaced a 35-year-old unit, we are burning less fuel to heat our home. We also replaced most incandescent bulbs with LEDs or fluorescents.

A final healthful tactic is more personal than environmental. As much as possible we have eliminated plastic containers, even ones claiming to be BPA-free, replacing them with glass. That includes how I quench my soda habit. I now buy Diet Coke in 8-oz. glass bottles which has the added benefit of influencing me to reduce my consumption of soda with each meal. 

My Inner Lumberjack, SleepIQ and Does Hollywood Think the Bible Is a True Story?

You probably wouldn’t assume it by looking at me but I have a streak of lumberjack in me. It’s not just the flannel and chamois shirts I favor once the air becomes nippy.

My constant gardener, aka Gilda, loves her compost and mulch, resulting in many an afternoon spent by yours truly collecting fallen leaves to be pulverized in my Sears Craftsman Leafwacker Plus. One day last week after chopping up 15 bags of leaves I filled another 18 black, 40-gallon Hefty bags with the discards from maple and oak trees. I shredded those leaves this afternoon. 

A few years ago I bought the Leafwacker from a Craig’s List poster in New Jersey for $25 and have enjoyed the annual autumn ritual of mulching leaves. It’s a lot less laborious than my two decades-ago lumberjack toil of collecting, chainsawing, chopping and stacking tree limbs culled from the roadside for our wood-burning stove.

Anyway, there’s a back-to-nature type of pleasure I get from this exercise, which almost got stopped in its tracks this year. Shortly after starting last week, the Leafwacker ground to a halt. I thought it might have shorted out on the foil wrapper of a Twix bar that had infiltrated the leaves. I took the machine to the Sears repair shop. They said it would cost some $125 with no guarantee they could fix it. 

I passed on that “reassuring” estimate and turned to Google. Sure enough, there were several posts about sudden stoppages of a Leafwacker, including one suggestion to hit the reset button on the bottom of the inverted machine. Who knew there was a reset button? Again sure enough, the Leafwacker sprung back to life. A short while later the mulcher stopped again in mid-stream but this time I knew what to do. Hooray for technology. 

Sleep Tight: The good people who sold us our Sleep Number bed called over the weekend to ask how we’ve been slumbering and to suggest a technology add-on. With SleepIQ, we’d be able to monitor things like how many times we got up in the middle of the night, how often we tossed and turned, our heart rate and breathing rate, and how our diet affected our sleep. All this for $499.

I respectfully declined, though I would have liked to find out how SleepIQ distinguishes normal tossing and turning from the bodily movements of two people making love. 

Here’s another question I’d like the answer to—when Gilda and I recently went to the movies, we saw a preview for "50 to 1," what was said to be “based on the true story of horse racing legend Mine That Bird.”

Okay, lots of pictures these days originate from “true” stories. The next preview was for “Exodus: Gods and Kings.” It did not say the movie was based on a true story. I’m guessing the producers did not want to take sides on whether the Bible was fact- or myth-based, but I’d like to know their reasoning. 

Spoiler Alert: The movie we saw was “Gone Girl,” which contained one of the best puns I’ve heard recently. It concerned Amy Dunne who masquerades her own disappearance and possible murder. In describing missing person Amy, a TV personality said she “forged a successful career in journalism.” As the British say, brilliant.

Look to the News for Inspiration

Whenever I lack inspiration for a blog post all I need do is read the newspaper or listen to the news on TV or radio. Some cases in point:

Watching CBS Sunday Morning on Sunday I couldn’t help but be thrilled by the show’s choice of Santa Fe as the backdrop for its annual special edition on design. Gilda and I will shortly be visiting the colorful capital of New Mexico, though not as a replacement for our previously planned and now scrapped cruise of the Black Sea with stops in Odessa, Yalta, Sevastopol and Sochi. 

CBS Sunday Morning also ran a feature on tennis great Venus Williams and her apparel company. She named it “Eleven,” a number dear to Gilda’s and my heart (among other reasons, we were born 11 days apart 65 years ago and our house number is 11). I liked Williams’ reasoning behind her name choice: “Eleven stands for being better than a 10.”

A third tie-in appeared, courtesy of a piece on treadmill desks (for the uninformed, these are raised desks you work at while walking on a treadmill underneath at roughly two miles per hour). 

Joanna Coles, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, shown in the segment walking on her treadmill desk, said, “I’m more contemplative on the treadmill desk. I find the action of walking helps me think better.”

Steelcase manager of health and wellness Carlene Stevens explained, “As we exercise we send endorphins to our brain which then kind of increases our innovation, creativity and it could increase productivity, as well.”

Which might explain why some of my best ideas came to me as I walked up and down Park Avenue on my way to and from Grand Central Terminal and work.

Road Trip: The Travel section of the Sunday New York Times carried an article entitled “To Campuses Without a Campus.” I was hooked by the first sentence: “The last thing a dad gets to really teach his daughter is how to drive a car.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/travel/to-campuses-without-a-compass.html?_r=0)

It reminded me of a trip Ellie and I took to Oberlin College in Ohio when she was 16 and recently licensed to drive. On our way home along Interstate 80, I felt sufficiently comfortable to let her drive across half of Pennsylvania and all of New Jersey while I dozed in the shotgun seat. Before nodding off I told her, just go straight, no turns. 

I awoke as we passed the toll booth for the George Washington Bridge. I panicked as I realized Ellie had never crossed a bridge and as soon as she entered Manhattan she would be an illegal, underage driver on a highway. The alternatives were frightening—proceed straight onto the heavily trafficked Cross Bronx Expressway or take the exit ramp from the bridge onto the Henry Hudson Parkway North, with some of the most belly-churning curves in the region. 

We chose the latter with Ellie trying to calm me down. Only, we didn’t go north, we wound up going south, while all I could do was loudly tell her to get off at the first exit. Ellie successfully maneuvered us off the highway. 

Ellie chose not to apply to Oberlin.

Recycling: The Sunday Business section depicted how cities and companies are trying to minimize food waste by encouraging composting (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/business/cities-and-companies-tackle-the-food-waste-problem.html). 

Gilda and I have been doing our fair share. For the last 18 months we’ve been placing uncooked organic waste in a countertop compost bin. When full, we dump the contents into an outdoor plastic garbage can aerated by holes I drilled into the sides and cover. The food is mixed with dry leaves I process in the fall in a leaf shredder I purchased for $25 off of Craig’s List.  

When the garbage can is full we transfer the contents to an outdoor compost heap. Last weekend we went to Croton Point Park for Earth Day celebration and picked up a plastic compost bin. 

Gilda the Gardener is thrilled. She considers her home made compost to be black gold.

In case you’re wondering, the organic compost does not smell.

Nail-Biting Time: Finally, the Workologist column of The Times dealt with a thorny problem of office etiquette, namely, what to do when co-workers cut their fingernails in public.

True confession time—until I was 28 I bit my nails. I couldn’t stop. Like smoking, I was addicted. But the day I started working in Manhattan 37 years ago I stopped. Cold turkey. 

That day I also began carrying a nail clipper wherever I went. It turned out to be among the most useful tools I could ever imagine. I prefer a nail clipper with a small file, the kind the Transportation Security Administration at first deemed a weapon and wouldn’t permit you to carry onto a plane in the months after September 11. I’ve used a nail clipper to cut those pesky strings that tie shoes together in stores. To slice through package wrappings. To cut a nail that I would otherwise bite off.  

But I try to never cut my nails in public.