Summer is in full swing. Abigail is growing like crazy! Megan has been posting photos on Facebook. If you want to see them, ping me to ping her :-)
The plum tree in the back yard gave us about 10 pounds of plums… kinda all at once. I had been using a broom with a potato masher taped to the end to pluck individual fruit off the tree then I thought how I really wanted all the fruit that was about to fall off the tree. I gave the tree a shake and it was suddenly raining plums! DUM BUM BUM DUM plums hitting the ground and me with my arms over my head getting hit by ripe fruit! It was wonderful!
Last week a friend on our new parents group said she had too many lemons so we went over and got like 20. Megan got this great photo of Abigail swimming in lemons! I’ve got a photo of the lemon curd we made with it. It came out AMAZING, along with the lemon cake!
In the photo:
* Megan’s home made lemon curd in the big jar
* (what’s left of) My home made plum jam and plum coffee cake
* Caitlin’s home made ghee
Megan and I want to put a patio in our backyard. It’ll be about 12’x12′. There are a zillion options. What are your thoughts? Do you love YOUR patio?
Our thinking involves: easier surfaces to have family play play time on (smoother? softer?), natural beauty (not looking like a big concrete pad), cost (looks like wood is 3x the cost :-( )
“I don’t mean to be rude but I will not buy another Dell product until I stop getting your catalog.”
I’ve been getting unwanted Dell catalogs for more than a year. I’ve tried their automated unsubscription system and online chat multiple times. I called them today opening with this line. The guy on the line said he’d fix it. I’ll get back to you all in 2 months with an update.
Short form: sellers: if you offer weekly, monthly, and quarterly email options, you’ll have a place in my inbox. If not, you are out!
In the last few months, I have started getting daily emails from lots of the companies and organizations I have relationships with. Who the hell wants a DAILY email from their pharmacy or clothing retailer? I can’t imagine who buys that many drugs or clothes! Of course I have to unsubscribe from these things lest my inbox become useless. What bugs me is that none of these companies offer reasonable ways of me keeping in touch! I would stick with them if they offered weekly, monthly, or quarterly mailers.
Hey, this summer at the Crucible I’ll be teaching youth classes in Kinetics and Electronics along with some friends. Would you like to be a Teacher Assistant?
The program is running most weeks June 22nd thru Aug 7. Each class runs either in the morning or afternoon for 5 days. Monday-Friday 9a-noon, Monday-Friday 1p-4p; pick one or both… each week starts a new session.
– A little experience with basic electronics is helpful (basic soldering, switches, DC motors)
– Be able to relate to 8-14 year old kids that are already excited about building stuff.
– Be able to have fun learning how to do the stuff you don’t know from the experienced teachers while working with the kids
It pays $12.50/hr and you can get discounts on Crucible classes.
Look up the class times and descriptions: http://thecrucible.org/2015-youth-camps/
The July 6-10 class is extra special. We’ll be building smart Sumo-bots and the like. Arduino and programming skills a definite plus!
https://newstore.thecrucible.org/?product=youth-kinetics-immersion-program
I haven’t had a day off school in what feels like a million years. Not been getting nearly enough sleep either. But the end is in sight. I got a luxurious 9 hours of sleep last night, gave myself the day… morning 10am to 12:30pm off. And I feel quite a bit more human now. When school is done for the semester in week, I will sleep like the dead.
A friend recently asked me about Burning Man and balancing the experience with it’s sizable environmental impact. Here is my response:
It is completely true that all that burning stuff and all the travel to-and-from the event has an environmental impact!
Here is an article that is critical of the event talking about that exact thing:
“The average American is responsible for 17.6 tons of greenhouse gases each year, or 0.33 tons per week. The average Burner will produce 0.67 tons next week, or double the national average.” http://www.laweekly.com/music/lets-be-real-burning-man-is-bad-for-the-environment-5018359
From that same article, “Burning Man 2006 pumped out 27,492 tons of greenhouse gases. Eighty-seven percent of that was from travel to and from Black Rock City, while the actual burning man was responsible for 112 tons.”
So even the critics are saying that the vast majority of the carbon footprint is the travel, not the burning stuff. If instead you flew to a different vacation spot, you would have about a 13% smaller carbon footprint. That’s not trivial but it’s not so crazy.
I think that people at the event are completely aware of the conflict inherent in spending so many resources travelling to the event. Pack-in-pack-out high desert camping like at Burning Man reminds every participant of the finite nature of our resources and of the incalculable impact humans have on the world. This is reflected in the initiatives the event has inspired. Initiatives like Black Rock Solar that has given a lot of free and low cost solar to people in the area, the Leave No Trace policy which is considered VERY seriously by all participants, and on a personal level, a MOOP (Matter Out Of Place) art project a friend of mine made. I still vividly remember seeing an environmental poster at the event in 2006 about how “cell phones are killing gorillas in the Congo”; I thought it was ludicrous at the time but it got me thinking A LOT. The problem is: cell phones need a metal called tantalum to make their tiny capacitors, the largest supplies of tantalum are in the Democratic Republic of The Congo which is a fairly lawless place and gorillas and miners are treated poorly. Ah, I’m sorry, it was Burning Man 2007. Here’s the poster! http://www.lee.org/blog/2007/10/25/why-cell-phones-kill-gorillas/. I don’t have a solution but my awareness has been raised dramatically.
I think if you were to ask -any- burner, they would have a very conscientious answer to your question. I feel that heightened awareness makes it all worth the effort. Go ahead and ask a few folks and see what they say!
The plum tree in the back yard gave us about 10 pounds of plums… kinda all at once. I had been using a broom with a potato masher taped to the end to pluck individual fruit off the tree then I thought how I really wanted all the fruit that was about to fall off the tree. I gave the tree a shake and it was suddenly raining plums! DUM BUM BUM DUM plums hitting the ground and me with my arms over my head getting hit by ripe fruit! It was wonderful!
