Summer Time

New Home

So, we finally moved to our new home. It’s really nice here, but a lot of work remains.

We are still unpacking, and it look like it’s going to take a while. Floors were in a terrible shape (so much so that we got a sizible seller credit to replace them), and we replaced them — one project done, ten more to go. Painting walls, replacing blinds, light switches, sockets, shelves, and a ton of other stuff. We are taking it slowly this time around, but we are making progress.

Gardening is fun. I don’t have much experience with gardening, but we already had like 3 pounds of strawberries, growing a bunch of carrots, lattice and peas. I screwed up raddish and onions, but I know what to do next.

The next big project related to the outside is switching from grass lawn to meadow lawns and general landscaping around these meadows. Meadow lawns are amazing: they save water, attract bees, butterflies and birds, they are natural, sustainable, and low maintanance.

Also, lawns suck:

Speaking of sustainability. Recently, we had a record-breaking, scorching heat wave.

All-time temperature records had been broken day after day for 3 days, and not by a degree or two, but by 10+ degrees every time. This is something that will keep happening more and more all over the world; extreme weather and human-led changing climate will make it more and more difficult to sustain human civilization the way it’s functioning today. This sucks, and I’m looking into ways we can lead more sustainalbe life here. I monitor electricity we use via Sense, I set our Ecobee thermostat to eco-friendly settings, and set home automations to reduce what resources we use, how, and when we use them. We already replaced our appliences with top-rated Energy Star devices, and we are looking into ways to reduce our energy consumption even more, looking, for example, into solar panels (eventually).

These views from right above our house are worth preserving, don’t you think?

Interestingly enough, here in Washington we use mostly clean renewable energy to generate electricity. This is what my electricity generation breakdown looks like:

Summer Plans

Due to our move, all plans I had for this summer got postponed. I wanted to hike the Loowit Trail again this year, but there’s too much stuff to do at home. I hope to mostly settle in by next summer and resume whatever hiking activities I had planned then.

Now that we live in the “country”, and let’s face it, even though Arlington is usually included in “Seattle Metro area”, it’s very much “country”, there’s a lot of stuff to explore. Farmer’s markets, local restorants, trails and parks, and so on. What I’m saying it, hiking can wait.