Where our Mouth is

Andy and I have a lot of opinions about the world and how we would want to better it.  It's tricky, though, to invest in good principles like solar energy without our own house to install into it.  Then, there's the up-front cost which is also a little difficult to us right now, when we weigh the balance between trying to pay off my student loans with paying a little more in groceries to ensure that we have responsibly sourced food.  

We try to make minor but important changes were we can.  

• We're exploring more about taking the train when we can for different trips
• We recycle even though we don't have a curbside pick-up
• We bring reusable straws with us to restaurants and use them instead of plastic
• We're trying to focus more on fixing what we have instead of throwing things out and buying a replacement
• I'm learning to ride a bike and we're evaluating when it might be better (both for our health and the environment) to take those instead of the car
• One of the major reasons for Andy's dietary change to vegetarianism is lessening his ecological footprint--I have not made this jump, but certainly with his change we eat a lot more Boca than burger in our household now

And that leads me to another major change.  Andy has this annoying habit of finding things that we're looking for.  It's actually very helpful and wonderful, but as the person trying to balance the budget, sometimes that means that we find an excellent deal faster than I'm comfortable jumping on it.  Our current home, for example, came together in a very short period of time for such a large decision, and while I was immensely grateful for how things turned out, I was also very frustrated with him for pushing things into such a small interval. 

Whelp, he's done it again, folks.  We have traded in our car and gone electric.

Yes, that's a Birdie sticker in the upper right.

It's a 2013 Chevy Volt.  Fully electric, but with a gas motor that powers the electricity for those longer trips.  We'll be able to make longer trips by filling up the tank like anything else, but for all of our in-town driving, we're saving quite a lot of emissions.  This was triggered by the visit of a couple of friends that visited (shout-out to the Browns!), having driven from Colorado to Illinois in theirs.  Andy then dove into his research, gathered all kinds of different leads, flooded our family contact with options, sent me dozens upon dozens of "what do you think about this one?" links during work breaks, saw that we got in to test drive a new one more or less immediately, and all other things in between.  Of course, the more we learned about it, the more we liked it, but, Lordy, we were still moving faster than I was comfortable.  But this was familiar--this was how we got our Ford Escape.  

Our Escape was a wonderful vehicle; it was a good car to have at that point of our lives and has seen all kinds of loving use.  But it is more car than we need.  And it's another step we can make toward bettering our world even in a small kind of way.  

So we plug in our car now, working on saving gas money and emissions in one blow.  Small steps, but we try to put our money where our mouths are whenever possible.