Actually, I’m in their Thursday Down to Earth newsletter that goes out to thousands (maybe tens of thousands?) of people worldwide. I’m in their regular feature “The Change I Made.” Though I included a pic with Parker lounging in the sun, it was towards-the-street, so they chose a different one. Here it is!
As for childhood goal, well, I became a teenage environmentalist in the latter part of last century, and wore my Friends of the Earth T-shirt with pride. Earth Day is on April 22. If you’d ask me back then, I would have wanted to have been more ambitious and more accomplished by now, but as an adult who sees how much we have to bargain and compromise for every advance we make, I think I’ll take every win I can get. And share it, so that maybe it can become your win, as well. (Because, as YouTube personality Nick Lewis says, it’s good to set goals so low you can trip over them.)
Today has another win, as well:
I got my post-winter consumption scorecard from Hydro-Quebec (most homes in Quebec use electricity for heating, which I sometimes supplement with the pellet stove on cozy evenings). This winter was particularly bitter. You can see that in the comparison between this year and last year. Nonetheless, though I used 8.8% more energy than last winter, the difference in kWh between my increase (982 kWh) and the increase in the average usage (1285 kWh) of my comparison group was 303 kWh less. I was 24% more efficient.
You can read about my earlier success at reducing energy consumption here, when I used an incentive program to improve my insulation and weatherstripping and installed a pellet stove (eliminating a big energy guzzler, the old fireplace).
Personally, I did waste some electricity this winter by opening the patio door several many times a day to feed the squirrels (gimme a break, it was a bitter winter, and some of them I raised from infancy!), but I also had a bit of an open-wall problem for an extended period of time.
Because I had to open some walls to get at the service void early in the winter, I discovered an unpleasant truth about its 1980s construction. It’s still the case that houses are usually built with basements that the homeowner has to finish themselves, but in the 1980s, there was scant code about doing so, and sometimes homeowners skip code. The walls only used 2x3s for studs, not the typical 2×4 or modern standard of 2×6. They didn’t have a gap behind the studs to accommodate rigid insulation, it was just wall, stud, batt in between, paper vapour barrier, and then drywall or firring strips and wainscot panel. And that was just on the exterior-foundation walls! Interior walls don’t “need” any insulation, but some walls that should have had insulation anyway had none – not even from the service void behind the back of the closet of the TV den, nor along the wall next to the slab of the garage. Gosh darn it.
Adding insulation: NBD, nice payoff
So before Christmas, I rectified the under-insulation both in the basement and in weather sealing my over-the-garage storage space. I made noticeable improvements in its gale-force leaky seams, and the door finally seals properly (and looks much better!), but I’ll have to revisit that space this summer.
It’s the basement that I’ll credit with the improvement: I put in Rockwool Safe’n’Sound insulation all along the party wall wainscotting, from the fire blocking on down. As soundproofing, it has no R value, but it still insulates, and it drastically improved the acoustics of my TV room (benefit: nighttime tinnitus goes *poof*). Behind the closet wall and along the garage slab, I put in Rockwool Comfortbatt (R14).
Cost: $200 and two half days of work, plus extra time for painting. I was waiting to do this work before the painting that needed to be done, and now it looks good. (I corrected a weird choice made by the people who built my basement: they used tapered drywall, and did not fill in the taper where it met with the wainscotting. I hadn’t noticed it until I painted the long wall white; now I couldn’t unsee it.)
Still, the unpleasant reality of how under-insulated my basement is, with some other changes wanting, behooves me to do a total renovation downstairs. I really do mean total, so I’ll do it in five years’ time, when the house will be 50 years old. Even if my energy use has proven to be so scant as to not economically justify the expense of further insulation work, the fact that anything is cold or losing heat is something I want to address. I don’t want any surface in my house (aside from the window panes) to be radiating cold. I’d like the always-on heaters to be heating at 900W instead of 1500W. I’d like to have the same energy use overall, but I’d also like to not have cold feet or feel chill anywhere else. And no heat loss except when I open the doors to feed the birds and squirrels.
Mud Season! The first part of spring
After the end of winter comes mud season. This is when you get out and not-exactly-clean-up (too soon, let it linger) but lift and move around your decomposing plant matter, sweep the cinders away, set the rain barrel up in a good location (and don’t forget to use a rainbarrel diverter!), and prune whatever needs pruning before new growth.
It’s also a good time to just enjoy nature before it gives you too much gardening to do. Here’s something:
April is National Frog Month
As a favorite animal of children and nature enthusiasts alike, frogs are (still?) common enough to be readily found in the wild, yet diverse enough to capture interest. Frogs are bioindicators, which means a healthy frog population indicates a healthy ecosystem in general. City parks might give you the impression that they’d be devoid of such wildlife except closest to a river, but fun fact, Montreal – and most cities! – have exactly that kind of riparian habitat. And if you get outside and start actively searching in the unbuilt areas around our neighbourhoods, as well as suburbia and anywhere that’s not too bounded by concrete barriers, you can find living things, like frogs! Here’s a lovely article about doing exactly that, featuring the Spotted Salamander. Same technique. Give it a try.
In recent decades, many frog populations have been declining, and extinctions are increasingly becoming common. The deadly chytrid fungus is a major reason for that, but some populations are being succesfully inoculated with novel treatments such as frog saunas, where they’re given protected habitat they like, which is also too warm for the fungus to survive, and helping them generate immunity at the same time.
National Frog Month culminates on April 29 with Save the Frogs Day.
Did you know that . . .
• . . . there are no hard-and-fast criteria to differentiate between a frog and a toad? Generally speaking, however, toads have warty skin and short legs, while frogs have smooth skin and long legs.
• . . . frogs can breathe through their skin? Though their permeable skin helps them conserve energy, it also means that they can easily dry out, as water evaporates from their bodies much more rapidly than in land animals that have hair, scales, or feathers.
• . . . tadpoles are herbivorous, while adult frogs are carnivorous? Tadpoles largely eat algae in the water and play a role in keeping the waterways clean. Adults mostly eat insects, including ones like mosquitoes, which can carry diseases such as malaria that can be fatal to humans.
• . . . some tadpoles have colorful or otherwise distinctive tails? These elaborate tails are a defense mechanism. If a predator spots the tadpole, it will be more likely to attack the tail rather than the head. The tail may break off, but the tadpole will still survive.
• . . . frogs and toads have more than one type of call? Much like with birdsong, each call type has a different function and is accompanied by a certain behavior. Males have one call when they wish to attract a female, and another when they wish to ward off a rival male, for example. Some species of frogs use a distress call when caught by a predator. This loud sound might distract the predator or it might attract a second predator, in which case the frog can escape in the larger animals’ scuffle.
Note: I didn’t write this, but I got it from somewhere so long ago, that it’s no longer on the web (or perhaps it came from a paper source). I would like to cite the source, but I just don’t have it. Nonetheless, it’s stuff worth sharing.
If you’d like to learn more about frogs and how to identify them, see FrogWatch, AKA NatureWatch and just get out there for a morning (or evening). It’s like a newbie (experienced welcome!) introduction to taking frog censuses, with their How-to Guide walking you through it. Every observation counts, and make sure you drop them into iNaturalist, too.
Until tomorrow when the new mention in The Guardian comes out, that’s it for this month. Happy Earth Day, everybody!
