Coffee Time ...

Ahhh ... cool, crisp nights and sunny days. It's Fall again, and that means it's time for coffee. Started making up batches of that this week and it tastes really good. I use a flavored decaf along with a bit of Amaretto flavored coffeemate ... tasty! This is also a good time of year to be letting the sun in during the day so that the house warms up enough to make it through the nights (which are in the 40's and there's talk of being in the 30's for lows) without running the furnace.

Not really looking forward to winter but this is a good time of year ... and I am looking forward to two golf tournaments coming up between now and the end of the first week of October.

And about my carbon footprint ... besides having replaced all my lighting with compact florescent bulbs and getting newer, more efficient appliances (refrigerator, washer/dryer) over the past few years, there are more little things that I think are good to do. Reducing plastic bag use is one of them. So I have a cloth bag that I'm starting to take to get my (few) groceries in and I've been looking at things like how long the fridge is left open. It looks to me like it makes quite a difference in how much it runs by simply knowing what I want to get and taking only 5 seconds to remove it rather than 10 or 15. A check of the fridge was showing that opening it for 15 seconds allowed the internal temperature to get to the mid-50's, whereas with only 5 seconds of open time, it rarely reaches 45 degrees. It's all energy that is easy to save, so I say "why not?"

Have to really work at keeping the bicycling going this year as long as I can but I do take a day off now and again and it feels good. And, good news, I've finally gotten my "true" weight (i.e. with the new, more accurate, balance scale) back down to 160. So all is well (smiling). The only complaint I have with the SECA 700 scale is that the weight measuring arm tends to oscillate more than it should, often never stabilizing no matter how still I stand. It's not a big deal, but, for the price, the scale should have some built in dampening of that oscillation so that the arm quickly stops moving.

Later ...