Okay, I admit it: I’m not going to shake my iced chai latte addiction. I intended to give them up six months ago (and did for a while), but now I’m back to drinking them almost every day. So if I’m not going to make the perfect choice—stop buying the stupid things—I’ll make the slightly [...]

I confess to a misspent youth. Until about the age of 13 or so I listened almost exclusively to country music. (Alabama, Laurie Morgan, and Clint Black were actually my first concert—but usually I pass over that and claim Smashing Pumpkins.) So I have a bit of a soft spot for Kathy Mattea. I could [...]

We’ve done a bunch of stuff to try to save energy since we moved into this apartment two years ago, most of it documented right here. But while I had a sense it was working (at least to some extent), I never actually crunched the numbers. And this blog is really supposed to be about [...]

On Tuesday I talked about using incense to find leaks. But an even better way to do that is with a thermal leak detector. I didn’t realize how cool they were until Jason’s coworker Ahsan let us borrow his. This isn’t a thermal imaging camera; those show a picture with different colors for different temperatures and [...]

We’ve done a lot of caulking and weatherstripping since we moved into the apartment two years ago, and it’s made a big difference in the drafts we feel. But I knew there were some we still didn’t know about. So I pulled out an incense stick to help us find them. This is best to [...]