flowers from my main lady, lauren. <3

"Nothing is known of Saint Valentine except that he was buried on the Via Flaminia on February 14." --wikipedia

(context: we live in a ~560-square-foot one-bedroom apartment with a gas stove and radiators. we don't have a television, microwave, or electric coffee maker, and we use our building's shared washer and dryer.)

after spending a significant portion of my workdays reading about home energy displays, i wanted to know how much energy my own home was using. my utility's online billing system made it easy to collect my monthly electricity usage data (thanks, nstar), which is plotted above.

what stands out the most is the huge increase in the summer months of 2010 (we paid $70 july 2010, compared to our usual $30), but what's more exciting to me is the decrease in the last eight months.

i started my internship on march 15, 2011. the initial drop in april might be partly from me not being at home using my laptop during the day, but more importantly, the reading i did at work about trying to get people to use less energy motivated me to want to save energy at home. one easy change i made was turning our refrigerator temperature up (from 9, 'coldest', to 5, 'normal'). it still keeps our food fresh, but it uses less electricity.

what helped a lot was learning about the kill-a-watt. i borrowed one from our local library and went around our apartment testing everything that plugs in. i learned that my iphone charger does not use any discernible power when it's left plugged into the wall. our toaster also wasn't using any standby power, so i stopped unplugging it when it wasn't being used.

however, i did identify some big power hogs. we had a water boiler that we used for coffee and tea that turned out to account for nearly one-third of our monthly electricity use, so tyler agreed to start boiling water on the stove. the kill-a-watt also inspired tyler to get rid of one of his two stereos. (luckily for me, tyler is a very conscientious apartment partner -- apartner?) and finally, i got a remote control power strip that we've been using to turn off the stereo we did keep when it's not in use because according to the kill-a-watt, it draws the same amount of power when it's just sitting there as when it's actually playing music.

this summer we replaced our ancient dorm-hand-me-down air conditioner with a brand new one and we were a lot more judicious about its use. we bought an electric fan to help with that.

now we pay about $15 to 20 a month for electricity and that's with a higher rate per kilowatt hour to support wind energy (4.791 cents extra per kilowatt hour). i am extremely proud of our energy savings, which is why i wrote this blog post. :)

01 - boston, ma
02, 04, 10, 12 - cambridge, ma
03 - somerville, ma
05 - myles standish state forest (~plymouth, ma)
06 - minuteman bikeway(~arlington, ma)
07 - lake pend oreille, id
08 - portland, me
09 - plymouth, nh
11 - charlottesville, va

(in the white blouse)

thank you for being the best gram apple a girl could ever have.

this morning. 29:38.

(click for larger version)

(and yes, i should have either italicized "to the lighthouse" or put the daily show and return to the ___ in quotes. it will haunt me for eternity.)

edit: and apparently i left off the last two down clues!
31 Bikini top / 34 Illmatic rapper

edit ii: and this is why i needed my valentine to test-run the puzzle before blogging it. i forgot to assign a number to the second to last down answer.
31½ Geologic period

me: you know
you could help shovel the driveway too
Nora: qwerwserwer--- wait kate i can't--asfdfsdf--- i thinke were---fda
me: ...
Nora: were breaking--hhhhhhhhh
Nora: fdgsfghfgshsfhsfghsfg

screen capture from the webcam tyler set up for spying on andré over the holidays. CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS, MY FRIENDS.

fine, fresh, fierce
we got it on lock
west coast represent
now put your hands up

so i put my hands up
they're playin' my song
the butterflies fly away
i'm nodding my head like yeah

my heart, it pounds
yeah, you got me
with my hands up
put your hands up

somehow this morning all these songs were stuck in my head at the same time. or maybe the "put your hands up" line was stuck in my head and when i tried to figure out which song it was from, these all came rushing in at once. (now put your hands up! oh, oh, oh)

why yes, i did hike to the top of the highest waterfall in north america. oh, nbd, just an elevation gain of approximately the tallest building in the world. (picture by aarti)