The first stop on our personal version of the Green Buildings Open House tour on Saturday was off the beaten path, if not the grid, to the several buildings of the Sirius Community in Shutesbury. Even before we arrived, the last dot of the Prius's gas gauge was blinking, with no gas stations in sight for several miles back.

"If your car used vegetable oil, we could help you," our tour guide said. She also told us about the community's root cellar, which was being put to good use again this fall, with perhaps a little more urgency this year because of concerns for the economy, but with the same practices the community has always strived for.

"That's part of trying to live efficiently," I observed, sagely but glibly, "you don't do it only when you have an extra good reason to."

I'm conversing with an architect this morning in advance of a consultation next month about expanding our house. No matter which way we imagine it, we're two rooms short, although we could probably get by with just one more.

It's just unfathomable that we are in this position, since we did a not-small renovation after we moved in just four years ago. Could we have resolved this problem then? Who knows; what I do know is that we didn't, and it's in the past. In the same coulda/shoulda category is that we didn't approach the job with nearly enough green consciousness; this is slightly more difficult to let go of, since "mistakes" made in such a (usually!) one-time event can last for decades.

Another in the series of posts of what we do in our home that is, or isn't, sustainable or otherwise earth friendly.

I've been off red meat for at least a decade, which at the time was more pointed toward easy weight loss, rather than any consideration of sustainability. I saw a friend drop perhaps 20-30 pounds without trying, strictly as the result, he said, of marrying a vegetarian who did all the cooking. I was also influenced by my sister-in-law, Beverly, and her daughters, who are vegetarians.

This is another in a series of posts about the actions we're taking — or not yet taking — to lessen our footprint on earth.

A lot of our lighting is with CFLs. We can't use them in the kitchen ceiling because they're not compatible to the fixtures, and we're in the same situation in the downstairs bathroom. But where we can, we do. A question I've asked before: What to do with all the old bulbs?

This could easily be the post about the energy audit that we got from our utility, but instead, it's about our insulating the pipes in our basement that radiate heat.

We're really struggling with phantom power load at our house.

The phantom power load, which is estimated at 15 percent of the household electrical bill, is what goes to devices when they're not doing anything directly for us. TVs, phone chargers, computers, etc. As a pretty electronic family, we have lots of these.

Georgie and I live in mutt of a house, partly thanks to our extensive renovation when we moved in. But it was built in bungalow style in 1938, and given a second story in the '70s.

I don't think these will continue in parallel, mostly because we (try to) do more on the positive side. But still, both with the foreshadowing from yesterday's post, and the fact that we have a very visible sign of unreconstructed vehicle thinking, it seems only fair to come right back with it.

I've been thinking for a while about making a "sticky" post that would talk about all the things we do in our household with a green purpose, and all the things we need to change.

But today, I decided to start a series of shorter posts to cover the same ground, instead, and am beginning with the obvious, our "status symbol": 

1. We have a Prius.

My increased focus on the green side of life has produced actual action, in addition to a shift in blog-reading (others’) and blog bloviating (mine):

* We have ordered replacement windows for the first floor of our house, and are considering forgoing a trip to Mexico in April in order to apply the saving to a better (but also far more efficient) back door. Partly we were motivated by the expiring tax credit for such work, and have to be sure to pay for it before the end of the year, even though the installation won’t come until January.