Beacon Group

Is it more sustainable to tear down a house and build something new with modern efficiency methods or to "green" a Victorian home as you go? 🏡💚

This gorgeous, charming home in a neighborhood of gorgeous, charming homes uses a mix of solar and high-efficiency gas for heating, cooling, charging electric vehicles, cooking, and hot water, all for about $1000 annually.

Keeping this home is a fantastic reuse opportunity, preserving its charm while embracing green technologies. 🌿💡💧 It seems like communities might be passing laws to encourage teardowns in the name of sustainability, but not seeing a complete picture of the issue.

Do you know someone passionate about sustainability and housing issues?

We are looking for a speaker for a workshop in Lexington (hybrid) to discuss topics like teardowns vs upgrades, the MBTA Communities Act, solar energy, heat pumps, high-efficiency systems, and preserving existing homes and neighborhoods.

Share your thoughts, links, and recommendations on these topics, or suggest any others we should explore! 🌞🔌🏠

Let's spark a meaningful conversation and collaborate to make a positive impact together.

And if you or someone you know is an expert in these areas, we would love to have you join us for a chat! 🗣️✨

A fun vacay for me? It isn’t usually the beach. I like widgets, history, and roads less traveled.

I loved this trip. I wanted a “hobby trip”, so I scheduled a few things to do around Geneva. This day was ridiculously fun.

I like watches. And yachts.

As an engineer, these widgets are amazing. Design, history, craftsmanship, adventure.

(At one time, I even took a job as a watch salesperson to get close to some of the most amazing watches in the world.)

So where does a watch lover go on vacay? Geneva. It was a fantastic trip. Visiting showrooms, the Musée International d'Horlogerie, and….I went to a manufacture….a watch factory. Historically, this was impossible. Watch manufacturers were incredibly secretive. The military advantages of timekeeping made clocks and watches as strategic as the Manhattan Project. And when I went to the tourism office in Geneva, they indignantly told me as much.

But….Franck Muller, a living watch-brand founder, actually built his manufacture for guests. You could go visit! The tourist office said we could not. But we did. :) It was magical. His manufacture is located in a mansion near the outskirts of Geneva, with two purpose-built buildings to house the craftsmen and their benches.

First we entered the business and development building. There were engineers and designers working on big monitors, with animations of the rendered parts. Moving. Breathing like watches.

Franck Muller himself walked by.

Then we went out to the buildings with the benches and saw the watchmakers working over their tiny creations, with views of the mountains.

And serendipity? We went down to the lake and saw an incredibly charming yacht club on Lake Geneva. It never occurred to me how popular, and GORGEOUS!, sailing there would be.

Now, I sail Boston Harbor and the Charles River thinking about gorgeous Lake Geneva and the slew of darling sailboats.

What's something you’d spend your vacay to do more of?

The other day I found myself musing on connections.

When real stories and environments intertwine, it fascinates me!

Just like the tales in books like "Krakatoa" and "In the Garden of Beasts", the allure of real places and people tied to them captivates me.

It's the reason I'm drawn to old cities over beaches on my travels (though, let's admit, beaches have their own tales too!).

I have some things that belonged to my parents and other family members.

Sometimes I imagine the connections between the people and the things, the travel of the things, and places they have been.

This watch was my father’s. My mother bought it for him as an engagement present when he was in the army in Germany. I imagine her happiness when she went to the store to buy it. On the square in downtown McKinney. Did she give it to him at Christmas before they were married? Did she give it to him in person at all? Or did it get shipped to him in Germany? In any case, the watch traveled by ship to Europe.

In Germany, he wore this watch every day. In foxholes (so he says), when he earned his marksmanship levels, as he worked on encryption codes, in taverns, and on the long journey home on the ship. To his wedding. Their honeymoon. To college. The days his children were born. Every family vacation. And every day through my childhood.

I am entranced by things and places, wondering who was there, what they thought and felt, where have the things traveled, where were they made, and by whom.

Share with me a personal story that connects you to history!

We broke up over toothpaste.

Did we really break up over toothpaste? Maybe.

(Not the guy in the photo. But I couldn’t make a post here about arguing over toothpaste and then shame the actual guy with a photo. So here is another guy, and we are showing our pearly whites.)

I’m no sage relationship guru, but I do know we turned a corner that day.

How did it come to that?

Let me start with a backstory to the story. In undergrad, I lived in a dorm. (Bexley, which is crushingly no longer with us.) We had a room known as a studio double, with a private kitchen.

One day I went to our kitchen. I opened the fridge. I grabbed the butter and opened it. SCREECHING SOUND! There were crumbs in the butter.

As I caught my breath and steadied myself, I thought about this sitch. What to do.

I could tell myself to chill out and not worry about it. A perfectly valid answer. I could tell my roommate to be more considerate and tidier. Maybe that could work. I could flip out about her horrible habits. Probably not the winner.

What is the *right* answer? Like any engineer, I used the KISS Design Principle….Keep It Simple, (Stupid) Silly.

In my mind, “simple” is letting people do what is natural to them. So our solution was….*your* butter dish. *My* butter dish. You don’t have to change what you do. I don’t have to see crumbs. We lived happily ever after.

Later, I had a boyfriend (not pictured 📸) and something was up with how one of us did the toothpaste. I don’t even remember if it was rolling up the tube and I was team roll-up or team squish-in-the-middle.

But he wanted me to treat the toothpaste the way he did. And I was like…no problem, we can have our own toothpaste. I did that in college with the butter dish….

Oh, no. This wasn’t going to work for him. *I* needed to be flexible and do it his way. WHAT!? Srsly?! Then there was gaslighting. There is something wrong with me. I am being unreasonable and inflexible. We must do it *his* way to be correct and fair.

Um. I didn’t ask you to change. I didn’t judge you for doing it wrong. And I don’t care what you do with your toothpaste. But seriously, you are going to judge me and try to control what I do with my toothpaste?