I've been writing for a while about what Georgie and I do, and don't do, at home in the name of energy efficiency and sustainability. (You can see the series here.) I've been lax on keeping up, but we've added a few things recently:

• We've been composting for a while, benefitting from a roller model left by the previous owner. Its drawback was that once it was filled, we had nowhere to put our newest compostables whlle it baked. This summer, we added a second model, of the type where you add at the top and take out from the bottom. Between the two, we're keeping a dramatic amount of food from the waste stream.
• For health and dietary reasons, we carry a lot of plastic containers, and a tiny benefit is that we have containers to bring home the peels and cores to be composted.
• We are big on travel cups. I get chided a bit for having hot and cold supersized vessels, but we've declined to take hundreds, if not thousands, of cups over time.
• I previously said we were struggling with vampire power, but we're making progress. We stopped having the microwave display a clock (though we don't know if it's drawing other standby power). We have unplugged the VCRs and DVD players that are part of our entertainment complexes but rarely used. And we unplug the coffeemaker now, too. We have more strides to make in this area, but this is progress.
• We turn down the thermostats when we go out, though Georgina is much more conscientious about this than I am. We have electronic thermostats and they're set low, which gives us a good baseline. But we can also dial them down when we know won't be there, and we do.
• We just started filling our household-plant watering cans with the shower water that's not warm yet.

The point of this post is not to say, "how great [or green] are we!" To the contrary, anyone could do these things. We didn't set out to prove anything. This is just how it's gone, and could for anyone else.