Making those massive changes now

More than a year ago, two years ago, actually, I was thinking aloud on this blog about trying to go solar with the Republic, or how to make changes in our energy use on our house, but somehow, we Never Got Around To It. And now, of course, it's even more expensive, and we still don't magically have piles of loose cash lying around that we could spend on it. I am of the opinion that it will never get any easier to do what needs to be done, and really, the time is NOW. It's only going to get worse.

When Kenneth Deffeyes came up here to talk about Hubber's Peak, I remember that one thing he said seemed a bit odd at the time but now makes an immense amount of sense. He said that we ought to grow gardens, eat root vegetables in the winter. Do some canning. Stop importing our food from halfway around the world--or at least, stop relying on it. The idea of eating locally and in season wasn't so strange, of course, but it was the direct connection between oil and agriculture that I didn't viscerally understand quite yet. It was more an intellectual comprehension, a bit abstract. Yet now the news is full of stories about food riots, rising food prices and food shortages, impending starvation—all because the cost of oil is going through the roof.

So I'm looking at my garden a little more critically. How, I ask myself, can I store this over the winter?

And I'm looking at that list of things I came up with last year and thinking that we'd better get on it. And add a few more:

• get ourselves a masonry stove or some other sort of decent house-heater
• quit being lazy already and start biking in to work
• get an energy audit
• replace the damn leaky window and put the trim around the other unfinished ones (I can do that)
• FINISH THE STUPID CURTAINS!
• take care of the greenhouse/septic line repair
• get the gutters and water buckets set up