If you drive east from San Francisco (going over the Bay Bridge first, of course) to pick up I-5 heading down to Los Angeles, you crest a hill and are suddenly in the midst of a wind farm. Up on the crest of the next hill, on either side of the freeway, are dozens of tall, elegant windmills, supplying power to Northern California. Not all the power we need, but lots. It’s one more nibble at the great mountainous problem of global warming. PG&E does a lot of advertising, supporting use of compact fluorescent bulbs (if everyone in California replaced one incandescent lightbulb with a CFL, PG&E says that would be the same as taking 40,000 cars off the road for a year) and their Climate Smart program. I always feel guilty that I can’t replace an incandescent lightbulb with a CFL, because we’re already using CFLs everywhere we can–but this says more about my propensity for guilt than anything else.

We’ve just signed up for the Climate Smart program, which is one of those carbon footprint offset deals: they calculate how much energy your household uses in a month, and assess a monthly fee–maybe $5 or so–to offset the greenhouse gas emissions from that energy use. It’s a small thing, maybe the cost of a couple of cups of coffee in a month, and allows me to feel a little better about the size of the household footprint on the earth. We recycle, we compost, but I always feel like it isn’t enough, and I’m frankly too lazy to do much else (well, and we just bought a whole slew of new energy-efficient appliances, but that’s a one-time thing). PG&E keeps saying that there’s no one solution to global warming (which sounds realistic to me), but that these small things make a difference. In that hope, I will keep collecting newspaper and plastic bottles and using CFLs, however small a gesture it may seem.

I went to our doctor today. (Noble Girl has an ongoing sinus infection.) I’ve known our doctor socially for a long time before she became our doctor so when I showed up with Noble Girl she said, “Speak of the Devil!”

Seems that, for the second time in a little over a month, she’s been cleaning the iguana cage and, on putting fresh newspaper in the bottom, has found my face looking up at her.

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