Becoming one with the Earth Day

Earth Day has always been strange to me because you don't really go out and party and it is a day where the masses try to do some good for the planet Earth and then it is over. Or maybe not. Do people make life style changes because of Earth Day? I don't know. I'm not making fun of it, I'm just curious. We didn't do anything special today but our little family has recently made a move towards "greener" pastures, so to speak.

We are currently trying to switch to a real-time electricity pricing program where we pay actual market prices (which fluctuate hour by hour, from day to day) for our electricity usage. The trick is to know what the pricing scale is like and to adjust our major power usage to times in the day when rates are lower. We can track this online or call in to get an idea of what the pricing pattern is or we can potentially get an ambient orb, a small unit that puts out low energy light and changes colors according to what we set it to detect, in this case market power pricing.

They say the advantage to tracking it using the orb is that it makes "getting information a 'glanceable' thing" . My in-laws have one of these and I can tell you these orbs put out a lot of light so unless you are going for the psychedelic effect, I would recommend putting it somewhere away from sleeping eyes. They can be programmed to show real-time changes in all sorts of things, like weather, pollen count, IM buddy watch, tee times, etc.

I like green ideas even more when they can save me some money - immediate benefits for all. This will help us use our energy wisely and it will help extend our world's energy supplies while lowering my electricity bill. The people setting this up for us should be coming out any day now to see if our housing would qualify for the program so we will let you know more later. I really do hope we can participate because I've been told even if we didn't busy ourselves with tracking the rates and adjusting our laundry/AC times, we would still save money by paying market rates. Do some research to see if your power company offers market pricing.

We spent some quality time playing outside today - I'd like to say it was in honor of Earth Day but that wouldn't be entirely true. Well, if you can't tell by my overall tone, I'm a bit bitter towards becoming one with the Earth now because this happened...

Aedan got so many bug bites on his legs, arms, and some places I won't even write about. We think the legs and diaper areas were bit by fire ants and everywhere else can be blamed on mosquitoes. Not a pleasant ending to Earth Day for us.