Greenery update

Some photos of the yard and plants. I finally got around to putting a seed-grown citrus tree in the ground, here you can see it surrounded by its anti-dog armor.

Rebar, plastic fencing and some sort of steel tube pot keep this tree from becoming sick-dog salad.

My 2 surviving cucumber plants (the other 3 became dog toys a while back when I carelessly left them at dog level.) are doing ok, but heading into November/December I will most likely have to move them inside somewhere, I started them at the wrong time
I sill have a bunch of seeds which I need to plant before I get too far into next year.

A Cucumber Blossum ! a solitary blossum... but still.

Table 1 awaiting a raised garden....

Table 2 awaiting a raised garden ....

I finally purchased a rainwater tank to experiment with, it hasn’t rained since I installed it but I expect some winter showers soon so I can water plants with it.

Yard view.

Another rescued life.

I drive the frontage road home most of the time, it probably doesn’t save me much time or gas, but its more interesting than taking the freeway. Megan and I where carpooling last Thursday and getting pretty close to the end of the road where we turn to get to our neighborhood 5 minutes away. “Dog!”
I hit the brakes, I wasn’t going that fast. Looking over to the side of the road there was a small black dog right there where grass meets asphalt. We pulled over and long story short, we earned ourself another microchipless, tagless dog, smelling of roadkill and a walking zoo for ticks, to ad to our herd.

We rescued another one. He could have ended up under a cement truck or car, starved to death or been coyote lunch or he could have met someone who would have simply dropped him at Animal Control, where he may have been adopted, but was as equally likely to contract kennal cough or distemper and die a miserable death.

When I looked at him playing with our other dogs last night it hit me pretty hard; all of thier futures could have been very different, all of them where taken from or found escaping from places, things or circumstances that would have killed them given enough time.

Plasma Arc Gassification

I first learnt about this interesting new technology via a Disclosure Project document. Yeah, that’s right, I’m a bit of a UFO nut.
The document was about suppressed technologies, a lot of it was kinda conspiracy theorist like, especially the fact that some of the technologies listed (like this one) are far from classified.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_waste_disposal

I’ve always thought that one day landfills would be mined for their resources, but its happening now. Factories are extracting methane as fuel to support their plants, and now there are plans to convert this waste directly into useful gasses as fuel and to generate electricity.
I read through the list of current and planned facilities and got a slight feeling of pride when I learned one such plant is planned for Swindon, Wiltshire. The closest city to where I lived in the UK.
It shows you just how much we’re progressing and that if you don’t look into some of these things you’ll never know just how much.

Written with current sunlight.

Just got finished changing the oil in my car. Drving 60 miles a day for 2 months (roughly 3750 miles, my service interval) adds up quick my last 2 tanks of gas also varied widely, 35.7 and 26.4 mpg respectively. Ouch. Talk about a pendulum. (something odd going on, but it averages out.)

So, last night I watched a very good movie, suprisingly so also. I didn’t have high expecations of it, but its on a subject I am pretty obsessed with; climate change. “The 11th Hour” is Leonardo Dicaprio’s take on the subject and I was highly impressed. It is a very human movie; it differs from Inconvenient Truth somewhat because it is not filled with a slideshow presentation with graphs and animations (which is also very good and packs punch) but it is a continual interview style film running through many many scientists, professors and concerned academia who really lend a great personal touch to the message they are conveying.

This really let the film collect momentum through various educated perspectives, one of which I liked a lot, mostly because of its unbelievable simplicity and the fact it stressed that climate change is not the planets problem, it is ours.

It went something like this: Way back when the human race appeared our population flatlined at about just under a billion people, this continued for many centuries, farmers, craftsmen, builders and laborers all worked from “Current Sunlight”. All the energy used to grow food and resources used in day to day life was energy directly from the sun; current sunlight. Therefore there was only enough energy to support a certain amount of people.
As human life progressed we developed tools, we progressed to eventually become chemists, miners & engineers, very good chemists infact, we developed a way to extract energy (hydrocarbons) from something that had captured sunlight from a long time ago; dead plants and animals in many forms.
The fossil fuel age had begun, and our population balooned from something like 2 billion in the 30’s to 3 billion in the 1960’s (just 49 years ago !) and slowly it has risen to the 6.5 billion today.

This sized population can exist because we are harnessing ancient energy, which as it happens is not being replenished. Now, I’m not saying all the progress the human race has made is bad, today we have some mind boggling technologies that have helped us as a race survive, and some have made the Earth a better place. But, the current trend cannot continue.

I’m not going to get into all the peak oil stuff and when thats going to happen (some say the peak was already reached a few years ago) But all our ways of going about life on this planet currently rely on something that could dissapear and is not going to reappear for another few million years.
Take oil away, and we’re in a nasty situation.

We have to, and will most likely be forced to go back to living off of current sunlight as our primary energy source. When I heard this is was an absolute shot in the arm. It makes so much sense !
In today’s world, we have many solar technologies to generate energy directly from our current sunlight, and this energy: Electricity.

We just have to convince everyone on the planet. That, there is the problem.
We could reduce humanities carbon footprint considerably if every house that gets sun year round (like in Arizona, California, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Mexico, Florida, Texas, Bermuda, the Phillipines, Hawaii, Many pacific islands, Spain, France, Portugal, China etc.. etc..) had some way of getting thier energy directly from the sun.

Now, I mentioned that this is our problem. It is, if we don’t want to see our population drastically & violently drop to sub 2 billion person levels when we run out of carbon based fossil fuels (remember, in 1960, only 49 years ago, the population was only 3 billion, the reverse could happen just as quickly, if not, faster.)
If we want to survive as a species and not become some post-apocolyptic warlike race scavenging for energy, then we have to adapt NOW.
And as climate change happens, keep in mind that things on this planet will make life here very difficult.
The planet will school us pretty well in inhospitible environment survival.

My favorite quote from the movie “The 11th Hour” was definately this:

The planet will survive this, the planet has all the time in the world; literally. We as a species, do not.

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Written with current sunlight; a very literal blog post title. My laptop is currently plugged into my “solar battery box” as it’s midday and the battery is charging; this is more efficient as more energy is being pushed to the battery, I can use this and still have the battery almost fully charged. Well, thats my opinion anyway but it was formed from empirical evidence; my battery is dying a bit and lasts a lot longer if I do most task that are required of it, while its charging. If I wait till the sun goes down and the battery starts to hover around 12.7 volts and below (used to be it would hold 13v for a fair amount of time) then the work that can be done by it drastically deminishes.

ignore this. its silly.

Read it. (click that link, then click on the title of the .pdf to load)

Sell your Television.

Put down the cellphone and talk.
Get out of your car and walk.
Run from the market and farm.
Don’t shop, build & make.
Talk to your children & thier teachers.
Recycle your waste. Don’t waste what you cant.
Consider your impact.
Consider your perspective.
Consider the unorthodox.
Be prepared.
Be sustainable.
Be educated.

Just don’t be an idiot.

Well, this may have been a little hipocritical of me. I just bought a used TV, so now I have 3
It’s a 1986 Mitsubishi 40″ projection TV, for $40 its a riot.
200 watts, as it has a large speaker cabinate. I can power it with solar no problems including a diddy 20 watt DVD player
Just ripe for Netflix nights.
Speaking of solar. I have a quote to aim for. $8 a watt for a tile roof mounted system, 1200 watts to qualify for our local utility company’s grid tie requirements. $9600+tax Whoo.
Save the pennies.

Cordless phone saves trouble.

A couple of days ago a guy came into my place of work and asked to use the phone. He said he had been rudely treated at a store down the street; asked to get his nigger ass out. Well, ok we’re not going to ask why that happend, sure you can use our phone. We gave him our cordless phone and he sat at the counter and made two calls and left. Not before asking if we knew what time the other store down the stree closed up, I said I don’t know, about 5-5:30. Whatever.

Well, a few minutes go by and the store owner from down the street came in and started asking if we’d seen a rude black man. We said we had, but he wasn’t exactly rude to us. We heard her story about how they let him use thier office phone, and he sat there for 45 minutes making calls, interrupted a sale of thiers apparently, and when asked to leave he got very abusive. It probably got a lot worse from there.

Anyway, it suddenly hit me a while ago that we had a much better experience with the guy for 2 reasons. We didn’t LET him take advantage of our kindness, and the soul reason; you can stay behind that counter and use our cordless phone from in the back.
We didn’t invite him to use a phone behind the counter and potentially interrupt the running of our business.

Now, would the situation have been different if he came into our store first ? yeah, it probably would. He would have sat at our counter with a cordless phone making calls for 45 minutes, probably pretty annoying, but it wouldn’t have impacted our buisiness much. He was pretty quiet for the 2 calls he made from our phone.

Technology. It saves a lot of f*cking hassle. Love it.

Crazy birds.

So, for my birthday a bunch of us went to Rooster Cogburns Ostrich Ranch. It was a great laugh and I recommend that eveybody go, oh, and definately take the monster truck tour of thier ranch grounds; WELL worth it, especially for the Ostrich Fishin’!

Feeding Frenzy!

I recommend feeding the Rainbow Lorikeets also. But beware, they will land on your head, and help themselves to the little tubs of nectar you can buy; they have become incredibly adept at opening the things themselves.

Bathtime.

If you can't get the cap off the nectar you're in trouble!

Operation Northwoods

Google it. Read the history. Be afraid, be pretty damn afraid of all governments.

The world is upside down.

Listen to this marines’ account of fighting our war. Support our troops, it doesn’t mean you have to agree with why they are there (I don’t)

and ….
How is it cheaper to print and ship 8×10 photographs from China than it is for me to order them from wal-mart, kodak-gallery, shutterfly, snapfish or even walgreens ?! all of which want $2.87-$3.99 Even when I’m ordering 25 !
As much as I hate ordering from China (ArtsCow.com), you can’t argue with $0.49 for an 8×10. Shipped, my order of 25 photos was $24.60.
From wal-mart, with me picking them up! (in 1-2 days) it would have been $60+ !!

Have we become so stupid that we don’t realise what is going on ?! how have our business overheads ballooned so much that there is a $2.38 difference in printing a piece of paper ?

What doesnt make sense to me at all is that a 4×6 is 9 cents, almost everywhere, surely then an 8×10 would be about 40 cents ? right ? (its roughly 4 times the paper and ink) I would even be happy paying about $1.30-$1.50 if it was printed in the US.

I’d be really interested to see the numbers on this, is the chinese guy pressing the print button actually getting paid less than the american guy ? or is wal-mart just netting more profit ?
I agree we need to keep jobs and money in this country, but every guy has a number, and mine was reached when it came to getting these prints.

Happy Birthday me. I’m 26. What did I do ? I went Ostrich Fishin’ … Yeah Photos soon.