Lee.org

After watching this 90 second video, I registered to become an organ donor.

I registered here: https://register.donatelifecalifornia.org/register/. I told them they can have anything except my heart and they can’t use me for “research”, which is (I assume) mostly being a cadaver for med school.

Thanks to Jim Fourniadis and Paula Peters for pointing me to it.

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 :-( )

The most exciting half-hour of your life begin when you click “Play”. View full-screen.

Cloud Gazing last week. We lay there for 10 minutes looking up at the clouds and sun glittering through the trees in the back yard. Perfection!

Abigail in the midst of the contents of her toybox. Many of these toys were given to her by friends; it feels great that friendship surrounds her!

My view as I write this post this morning!

And sometimes there are tears!

“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.

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!

Wow, Wikipedia shows Kevin Trudeau to be, if not a great snake oil salesman, an oft fined and imprisoned character. Hopefully his recent 10 year sentence in federal prison will keep him out of trouble for a while.

He has been selling goods with false claims for many years, and getting caught and fined most of the time. Good riddance to a person like that.

Let’s hope the owners of all the nail fungus scams take heart. I’m talking to you Fungavir, Purnail, Funginix, Fungusil, Fungisil, Zetaclear.

Update 5-14-15: I should add that the reason I am so bitter about Kevin Trudeau’s imprisonment is that I saw him on late night info-mercials for “Mega Speed Reading” and “Mega Memory” with Howard Berg. I knew they were shady when I watched the info-mercials and I was extremely bothered that they were playing on my desire to read faster and have a better memory.