Speaking of city chickens reminds me to post overdue photos of a trip to Toledo, OH in April of 2013 to speak at a conference which involved my first encounter with the breed of Silky chickens. Here is the master chicken, clearly of emperor status as he stomped around wide-legged like an over-bulked weight lifter. The boxes behind him contain bee hives. This one behind the chicken wire may be a Silky hen or young Silky since this one below clearly is a Silky hen brooding. The youth group responsible for this suburban garden with chickens on land beside and part of the church where the conference was held were hoping those eggs would hatch into baby Silkies Here's a view of the large plot with garden boxes. The youth group putting up a play set. Also some kind of water collection and/or water purifying system Inside the church meeting room, a caterer created a totally amazing carved fruit display, with a watermelon with solar panels on one side, windmills on another and a tree and stream on yet another! tomato rosettes and cantaloupe roses, etc. As for the conference itself, the speakers covered almost every topic dealing with sustainable energy. Jill Stein was a keynoter. Here's another speaker. I was pleased that they had diversity amongst the speakers as so often at events on sustainability there is none. I spoke on conservation, efficiency and deep retrofit. After the conference, my hostess drove us back to her neat, cozy house to freshen up before proceeding on for a fund-raiser at a downtown meeting place for youth (so lovely that Toledo has such a thing!) for a young Green Party candidate for city council. He gave a good speech at a well-organized event. The next day my hostess took me to the Toledo Art Museum, which has an extensive glass art collection, along with a opportunity to try your hand at glass-blowing. Upon leaving the museum we went on a driving tour of old Toledo to check out the many grand houses with large front porches. The next day we drove the hour or so to Ann Arbor, MI, which is so totally a college town that the campus is embedded into the city itself, no fences, no gates separating city from campus.

ETM Solar of Endicott, NY, hosted a solar house tour starting at a house in Binghamton. On Oct. 5, 2013. Before I saw where the solar panels were, I honed in on the city chickens! The home-owners also have a food garden, what looked to be bins to catch rainwater and, of course, the solar panels, set to catch the sun's rays but also discreetly hidden from street view. Inside the garage you can see an example of the array of boxes and dedicated meter for a solar panel installation. I understand that NYSEG installs a digital meter since the powers that be require it. The house meter located on the exterior wall of the house itself also has to be digital. The second house I visited was in Vestal and is a ground mount. The homeowner explained that many things he had to do to prepare the site for the installation and why he chose to not put the panels on the roof of the garage. . Both homeowners were very happy with their approximately two year old installation in terms of saving money on their electricity bills. Here's a home in Endicott with both electricity and hot water from solar on two different parts of the roofing. Proof that you don't need a "perfect" location in order to go solar. Notice in the photo of the meter that even on a semi-cloudy day, the little arrow on the left points to the left at the time I took the photo, meaning metering is going backwards thus saving the homeowner some $$.