Craig and I decided long ago that we wanted to have a geothermal system for our heat and air conditioning.

I have it on good authority that a lot of new homeowners go through a stage where they claim they'll be getting geothermal. This lasts right up until they see the price. Then, despite the fact that they've been bragging about it to all their tree hugging friends, they stampede in the direction of a more conventional system. This saves them a few bucks in the short run, but their heating bills are awful and everyone in their crunchy-granola clique laughs at them mercilessly for months.

As you can see by this actual photo of an actual geothermal heater/air-conditioning unit, in our actual basement, we have actually reached--the point of no return.

So despite the fact that the price makes our collective knees wobble, we are going ahead. Hopefully next year when our heating bills are in the negative numbers on a normal day and mere pennies when we crank the heat to 150, we'll feel better about it. (See, there I go lying to myself again. But we should still have some pretty low heat bills.)

We went with a company called ClimateMaster for the unit.You can visit their site for a more comprehensive idea of how this whole shebang works. I certainly have never had any success explaining it to people.

The fellow on the floor is Seth. Evidently he has to wrap every single duct in insulation by hand. That's a lot of ducts.

In one day they made the machine in the photo above look like this. It's like some kind of insane Willy Wonka machine, isn't it? I don't think I was so far off when I named it the cave troll.

I accused Seth of not being a duct guy at all but an abstract tin foil sculptor, using our house as his temporary studio. I just can't imagine how all of these tubes have a use, but he says they all do. He gave me a simple breakdown:

"All these on the top," he said. "These blow. All these on the side...they suck. That's all you really need to know."

And...that's all I know. It's the clearest explanation I've had so far.