We're Home! How Many Miles Was That?

Hi friends,

We’re home! Actually, we’ve been home for days now but we needed some time to get unpacked and get settled, so I’ve been a bit behind in the updates.

The official grand total number of miles for the trip: 12, 624 in two months!

So now what? There is a lot to get working on now that we’re back in Massachusetts; I have to transfer many hours of video onto the Mac for editing and get working on that, plus we have more video to shoot here in New England that we weren’t able to get to before we left in May. Here is a list of the upcoming New England topics yet to film:

Red Sox – Fenway Park sustainability measures
Cape Wind project – Cape Cod, MA
Hull, MA - municipal wind turbines
Poulson Hybrid, CT
Verdant Power, tidal power, East River, NYC
Stephen Lacey, Inside Renewable Energy Podcast, NH
Francis Moore Lappe, author, MA
Deep-Energy Retrofits, VT
Green City Spotlights: Boston, MA
Fosters Farm, methane digestors, VT
Timberland, NH
Recycline, MA
Owl Power, veg oil for power, MA
Geothermal heat, residential example, MA
Maine Solar House, net-zero solar heat and electricity
Connecticut small-scale hydropower

Just a few more topics…we also are planning a visit to Washington DC in the beginning of October to see and film the Solar Decathlon 2009, and visit the Green Festival put on by Green America. I’m also working on getting interviews while we’re there with William McDonough (author of the book ‘Cradle-to-Cradle’) and Bracken Hendricks (author and fellow at the Apollo Alliance, a non-partisan advocacy group for renewable energy in Washington DC).

I managed to break my ankle soon after we got home so that affects things, but I’m using whatever downtime I have to get cracking on the videos. I’m able to continue working until I have surgery a week from Monday, then I’m supposed to stay parked with my foot up and let it mend.

On the advice of friends of mine who work on video production professionally, I began using Final Cut Express for the Mac to edit videos, which is a program that is a big leap from what I’ve always used, which is the free editing software that comes with PC (Windows Movie Maker) and Mac (IMovie). I’m putting myself through a crash-course in how to use the new program, plus there are many features that I can use to make our videos even better than what we’ve done before. I’m also upgrading the computer memory to handle the strain and am picking up an external hard drive (video footage takes an incredible amount of hard drive space!)

I have plenty of thoughts to share about all we’ve seen and done over the last two months, and to speak of the things I feel the most hopeful about, but I’ll make that a separate post so I don’t go on forever here. I’m overdue in getting this message out, so I’ll leave it at that.

Be well,
Colin
www.OurRenewableNation.org