First off, a link to an article on CNN here.  Please stop having kids, burning fossil fuels and converting our biosphere into one big city / farm.  Ironically that’s what I kinda did with our six acres as I stripped it of plant matter and I’ve been planting berry bushes….In my defense though the house uses less energy than one half its size.  We’ve had a hot dry spring in northesat Ohio.  And by the looks of what the scientists say this will be the new normal.  Our house repels the heat extremely well.  Our furnace is set to kick on only if the house gets above 72 or below 65.  It hasn’t gone on in over a week, either way and we’ve had some pretty big temperature swings.   We also technically had it off for about 4 days with the windows open.  We have yet to set up and employ a window opening strategy but none the less all is working well, even with our willy nilly approach to temperature comfort.

The lack of rain continues to be our biggest concern.  Long term we’ll be screwed if annual rain totals start to diminish.  We’re actually doing a decent job of conserving water without even trying. Our low flow toilets help and in general we don’t seem to use a lot of water per se.  I’ve cut off doing any add’l watering of the yard.  We’ll have to wait til Fall to get grass back growing.  We’ll leave it in Mother Nature’s hands for the summer. I will continue to water the berry bushes and kiwi’s.  The female kiwi is not looking happy.  I’ll keep an eye on her for the next few days.

I’ve got an art show this weekend so I’ve been busy wrapping up my paintings and framing them and taking pictures.  I’ll share an impromptu framing lesson on the off-chance you want to take up art and whore your wares.  My paintings are abstract acrylics, done typically on stretched cavas.  I prefer using “floating” frames which impart a contemporary simple feel to the art.  I get frames and the hardware from PictureFrames.com