• Be a better citizen of Earth

We’re pretty nice people, all in all; we treat our friends and family decently, we are polite and never flip people off on the highway; we never litter, and recycle as much as we can. But we own one SUV and one sporty car, we use a lot of electricity – to the point that the electric company categorizes us as “gross consumers” :-( 

So we have decided that 2008 will mark the dawn of new era at Chez O’Shea. This is the year we go green – well, greener anyway.

First up: vermicomposting! On Christmas Eve the sink backed up again, due to the icky-doo-doo stuff we stick down the garbage disposal on a fairly regular basis. After cleaning the drain out, Chuck and I decided that the time had come to call in the worms. My nephew and his wife have been doing it for a while and swear by the richness of the resulting soil that the worms poop out. So our first purchase of 2008 is going to be the Worm Chalet!

Second: reduce our carbon footprint. We fly a lot on business, and also for personal/family reasons. That’s a lot of carbon waste. Oh, and we live in So Cal, freeway central where public transportation is a dirty word. Check out this carbon calculator and be mildly horrified by your footprint. Here’s a website where you can start to zero out your footprint (I did).

Next up: solar power. If there’s one place where we fall flat, it’s in our electrical usage. We have a lot of computers, and a lot of other electronic stuff, and we both work from home so stuff is on A LOT. We looked at solar over a year ago, but the cost recovery time (10 years) just didn’t make fiscal sense to us. The 2007 California Solar Initiative may offer us the added incentive we have needed to move ahead with our plans! The downside to solar is that it may compel us to replace our roof (a bullet we have been dodging for a few years).

That’s the plan. Hopefully we’ll stick to it.