Beo has an interesting post up about how some people can afford all the crazy luxury items they’ve been buying. It makes sense to me, and finally answers that question for me.
I’m going to plug a story of mine at GG too. I want people to move over and vote in a poll I linked to. While you’re voting, vote for the new GG layout and let us know what you think. There’s a poll in the right hand side bar.
Categories: Blogroll · Groovy Green
I like doing this roundup thing so you can expect to see it more often. A lot of my topics don’t merit a post on their own, but in something like this they are OK.
The busy task of collecting leaves for the garden has already started. While I won’t be competing to collect leaves like last year, I will be collecting as many as I can. The garden ended up being quite successful this summer. Between it and the market our basement is packed with things to eat this winter. I’m still putting together a lessons learned about this past summer.
The conference was great. I’ll have some thoughts up soon about it when I collect them all. Right now I’m floating all over the place trying to figure out what my plan should be in the future. The conference was held in Yellow Spring, OH, which is a great little town. They had some great restaurants and everyone there was really into the environment and being concious of their impact on the earth. Great environment to be in, and tons of great stimulation and conversation.
A few things I am going to work on over the next few months are window insulators, insulation for our walls and sill plates as well as working to seal up all the air leaks in our house. This winter I also have plans to build a trellis outside to help shade our front south facing windows and who knows what else.
I have some cider hardening on our table and it’s starting to look all cloudy and kind of funky. I’m not sure if it’s any good anymore. If you’re reading this Wendy I wouldn’t mind having some input, or anyone else. 
When in Yellow Springs I met some online people for the first time. I met Steve, Aaron, E4 and Sharon, among others. Aaron brought gifts. He brought up a luffa for us to have and also this mix cd cleverly title “The world peaked in oil production and all I got was this damn cd”.
We had a new shower installed recently. It’s a ReBath system. I highly recommend it. It’s very nice. Our previous shower was tile and had that standard problem where water got behind it and then the walls started to crack and buckle.
That’s all for now.
How you doin’?
Categories: Gardening · Groovy Green · Peak Oil
Categories: Groovy Green · Peak Oil
Tagged: , community solutions, Peak Oil
I’ve been a busy boy putting stuff up over at Groovy Green. Make sure you check it out over there.
Categories: Groovy Green
I was out of hat at the end of the week of June 7th because I had a quick trip to Detroit that Weds night. And then, as they say, hilarity ensued and it proceeded to mess up what little excess time I had the rest of the week.
I went to Detroit to observe the end of the Challenge X competition. (You can see that write up soon on Groovy Green) But this post is about my personal thoughts on the trip.
I was a little scared because I hadn’t heard a lot of good things about Detroit, and I was staying downtown. But it was actually pretty darn nice. I stayed at the Renaissance Center and it was close to a lot of interesting things downtown. Detroit has a nice little rocking downtown area, although all the locals complained about it how lame it was. I guess they should come hang out in Iowa for a while.
I ate dinner Weds night at Sweetwater Tavern. It was fantastic. If you ever get a chance to eat there do it. Especially have the chicken wings. The service left quite a bit to be desired, but when the food is this good I can put up with bad service…And I have no idea what the hummer is that they are world famous for, according to the article. I didn’t see any mention of it on the menu…
Thursday was mostly taken up with Challenge X events but I did get to ride the Monorail around the city a little. It goes in a circle from the Renaissance Center so it’s not really a mass transit thing. But maybe they’ll get it expanded someday. According to the locals the only mass transit they have is a bus service, which is not really much for a city that size.
I did notice a lot of vacant, decaying buildings in the city and along the highways to and from the airport. I guess that’s a result of the slow death of the city from the heydays of American car making. I’ve never seen a more evident example of urban sprawl than Detroit actually. There is so much developable land close to the heart of the city, but it would require a teardown, so developers stack things up on virgin land around the outside of the city. It’s too bad really. By the time people are ready to compress the city I’m not sure we’ll have the capacity to tear these bygone remnants down.
The flight home was murderous. I hate to even talk about it. But with the nasty weather that came through the Midwest that Thursday night I had a hard time getting home. I know better than to take the last flight into a city, especially CR, since it is so small. But I wanted to stay as long as I could in Detroit, so I did it. So I was to fly from Detroit to Minneapolis and then to CR. Only they had Minneapolis mostly shut down because of tornados and such. So I ended up spending most the night in Detroit. (Wish I had known so I could have stayed longer at the nice dinner we were having.) We finally left for Minneapolis at 11:20 (originally 8:20 departure), which was the time I was to be home in CR originally. We got to Minneapolis around 12:20 (we’re on Central now) or so. Northwest did hook me up with a hotel and a shuttle to the hotel. Except the hotel is on the other side of Minneapolis from the airport. So a 30 minute van ride ensued (with 9 other stranded riders cram in the van). We finally got to the hotel at about 2. Of course I was so exhausted I couldn’t sleep so I fell asleep about 3 and I was up at 4:45 to shower and catch a 5:30 shuttle to the airport for my 7:00 flight.
Why don’t airports just have locker rooms like a gym? I would have been happy to stay on a mat at the airport for the little extra sleep and then just shower there. They could have saved a fortune on me by doing that. The only reason I went to the hotel was to get the shower.
I couldn’t see much of Minneapolis, but it looked nice, even I was just along the highway.
Gina–if you read this I waved as I went by on the highway, although I have no idea where you live there.
Northwest did give me a $5 voucher to cover breakfast the next morning, which is nice, but then I had to eat the food at the airport. Ugg. And then I forgot to redeem my voucher for a complimentary item for my trouble. Whatever that item is. Guess I’ll never know.
Then after I got back I went home to change clothes, came to work, worked most of the day, even though it was employee appreciation day, and then participated in events in the afternoon. Signed papers for a refinance, came back to work for dinner, drank a few beers, ate some food and then skipped out to go see Wild Hogs. (Funny movie)
I didn’t have any trouble falling asleep when we got home.
I guess that wasn’t all about Detroit but it made for an interesting end of the week.
Categories: Global action · Groovy Green
Lately I’ve had quite a bit of stuff published up at Groovy Green. Here are a few links.
Way awesome challenge going on.
FGLB
Categories: Groovy Green
I’ve got some new stuff up at GG.
An article about the sub prime mortgage fiasco.
And two blog posts. Here and here.
FGLB
Categories: Groovy Green
“…Despite many doom-and-gloom predictions, explosive growth in the world’s population isn’t something to panic about says Nicholas Eberstadt…”
So starts a WSJ opinion article from Friday February 23, 2007 discussing overpopulation and how the planet has not reached it’s limits. How all the previous naysayers regarding population expansion have been wrong. How the predictions for the future are dubious at best.
“Mr. Eberstadt says the strains that Malthus and others predicted from a surge in population haven’t materialized. Instead, as population has increased so has most people’s standard of living. The world’s population quadrupled to more than six billion people during the 20th century, a time when per capita gross domestic product almost quintupled. Similarly, while a shortage of resources would be expected to drive up commodity prices, costs actually fell in the 20th century…”
He is correct. Projections for practically all matters into the future are difficult to pin down and really count for something. But here are some statistics you CAN count on.
Currently half the people in the world live on less than $2 a day, almost 3 billion people. (So much for an increased standard of living.) And don’t forget about those books out there like Nickel and Dimed or Morgan Spurlock’s reality series discussing how people try to live on minimum wage in America. They are making a lot more than $2 a day and they are not getting by.
Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are chronically malnourished, while most Americans are severly or grossly overweight.
Almost 11 million children under the age of 5 die every single year from poverty.
From a survey published in 2000, 47% of the world’s agricultural land is considered severely degraded.
In China in fact, 900 square miles of land is converted to desert each year. (If our agricultural land is degraded and disappearing how do we feed this endless supply of humans?)
For 6 of the last 7 years the annual grain harvest has fallen below the annual grain demand. And even more scary, that doesn’t even take into account all the demand from the enthanol plants that are coming online. That means less and less of our grain will be exported to other countries for their consumption.
Mr. Eberstadt forgets the one thing that most everyone who isn’t concerned about the population levels of our world forget. Oil. Oil makes the world hum and he is forgetting the bonanza that was the Petroleum century. This stored energy allowed humans to way exceed the carrying capacity of the earth by using millions of years of stored energy to generate more food and feed more people. Oil allowed countries to ship excess food all over the world and allowed many, many countries to dramactically exceed their carrying capactiy. We’re all aware that oil is already running out, and with it our ability to produce copious amounts of food will run out. Oil allowed some countries to subjugate other countries and extract their natural resources and exploit their populations. Oil is the thing that makes it all possible. What happens when there is less oil?
It’s time to start talking and thinking about this forgotten bogeyman hiding in the closet because sooner or later it’s going to rear it’s ugly head.
Sources:
Cross posted on Groovy Green
Categories: Conservation · Global action · Green Living · Groovy Green · Peak Oil
I’ve got a couple posts up at GG if you haven’t traveled over to see them.
Click here for the GG blog and scroll to find mine.
FGLB
Categories: Groovy Green
 | kcd75 on Living in Iowa |
 | Daddy87 on Back in the saddle |
 | Settor93 on Books |
 | Loy60 on Back in the saddle |
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