Folks, I know what you're thinking. All this talk of solar power, I must have gone out and slapped a few rows of PV panels on my roof and am now surfing the Internets and cruising cable TV using only the glorious power of the sun.

Not really. It's been raining like a plague here in Boulder, making my main project of the week pulling the innumerable weeds that are popping up out of any spare patch of dirt on our property. (Don't worry, I'm composting the little mothers.) It's all very odd, like I went to sleep in Boulder and woke up in Seattle. The sun has been largely absent lately.

All of which has given me more time to ponder the next steps. I'm still waiting for my solar estimate (should be here by Thursday), and my home energy audit isn't scheduled until next week. But rather than go back outside with the Weed Weasel, I'll offer up this list of what I'd like to get done before summer's end. This is the real list, now, not to be confused with the Pipe Dream Projects I discussed a while back. Really. If I don't get through this list by August 1, I want y'all to come out here and rough me up something awful, pelt me with chemically treated sod or something.

#1 Get efficient: replace dying incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents; use kill switches or power strips for phantom loads like stereos and the cable box; buy a Kill-A-Watt to see which appliances are draining the most energy, so I know which ones to replace first when the time comes. (We've got two full-size and two half-size refrigerators on the property, one of which is about 20 years old; those things suck electricity like an unprintable metaphor.)

#2 Insulate the crawlspace. We've got a maze of hot water pipes zipping through our crawlspace, very few of which are insulated, meaning those pipes spend an awful lot of time uselessly heating the crawlspace. (Well, I shouldn't say uselessly. I'm sure the spiders and mice appreciate the warmth.) The insulation that is down there is from 1977, so the goal is to junk it all and replace it. The easiest option: Reflectix, which is a thin radiant barrier - basically a roll of bubble wrap sheathed in foil. It comes in giant rolls, and you just unroll it and staple it to the bottom of your floor joists. The foil reflects up to 97 percent of any bleeding heat from our radiant heating pipes and hot water pipes back up to the floor instead of letting it pool in the crawlspace. (The mice might be mad, but they can snuggle with the spiders for warmth.)

#3 Insulate the foundation. Bordering the crawlspace is, of course, our house's concrete foundation. In winter, that concrete absorbs heat from our house and transfers it to the surrounding freezing ground. I have sheets and sheets of rigid foam insulation (reclaimed from another eternally ongoing project, rebuilding the 400-square-foot work studio in the backyard, which I'll be talking about soon); I want to line the aboveground concrete with two inches of foam to keep that cold earth at bay.

#4 Insulate the attic. We have about two-thirds as much insulation as I'd like in the attic (as I've mentioned, insulating your attic is one of the cheapest, quickest ways of reducing your energy use), so I'd like to up that significantly. But before I get to that, I'd really like to put a radiant barrier on the rafters up there. A typical asphalt roof doesn't do much to protect against the onslaught of summertime heat. Heat moves in all directions: as the sun hits your roof, heat will migrate from the tiles into your attic, where the air can get heated to 150 degrees. One way to stop that thermal transfer is with a layer of Reflectix on the rafters to bounce heat back upwards. In the wintertime, that same barrier reflects heat rising from your house back downwards. And Reflectix is decently cheap, like fifty cents a square foot.

#5 Don't forget to check the weekly specials at Liquormart. This week: Six bucks for a sixer of (locally produced) Left Hand!