My rig, and simpleness

I thought it would be interesting to post up a picture of my bicycle here.  Most of the time a bike is posted on a blog it’s to talk about how fancy it is and all the features and what they cost.  Blah blah blog

A picture of the road bike.

I’m much more into simple and functional.  And cheap.  Now that’s not for everyone.  If I was older and not able to handle discomfort perhaps I would care that my bike is just a little bit small for me.  Or that it only has one gear.  If I was riding across the country, instead of across town, I would certainly care about the gear part.

Missing derailleur

But as it is, I usually ride 5-10 miles and this works just fine for me.

What you are seeing here is a $50 investment in an old frame and adding about $175 in components (and bike shop labor) making the bike a fixed gear bike. I’m a fan of simplicity and fixed gear bikes are that.  And cheap. If I were to buy a new fixed gear frame it would cost around $400 just for the frame.

I think a bike like this is a good metaphor for America in a lot of ways. We, as Americans, always feel like technology will be the answer for us. Whatever is next and newer and better is always better. I’m not so sure. James Howard Kunstler talks a lot in the Kunstlercast about the diminishing returns of technology.  I think we are squarely in the middle of this.  No one needs a bike with 30 different speeds, or carbon fiber or special low resistance wheels.  What we need are bikes that are simple, reliable and efficient.

Some technologies do make your life better. As I’m writing this I’m sitting on the back porch using a WIFI connection to “work” while I listen to birds (and not bite my kids’ ears off because they are so loud) and enjoy some peace (not withstanding all the lawn mowers chugging away).  The WIFI connection has enabled me to make any room of the house an office instead of one central spot.  It has done amazing things for the way I work while in the office as well, and for others.  To me, this is a good example of a technology that has an increasing return on my life.

Think about the technology in your life and figure out which ones make your life better, and which ones actual create a drag on your life’s momentum.  Do you still need them?  Can you jettison them?  To me, asking questions like these are the basis of living simply.

I’ve Got Worms!

I combed through the worm castings tonight. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do it, but I did. Last year I chickened out and just dumped the whole bucket on the compost pile. Today I actually dug through it and pulled out as many worms as I could.

This bucket is full about 2 inches deep across the whole thing. And worm castings are way stronger than compost. I’m anxious to get them on the tomatoes and the corn.

The burden of receiving a gift

Recently my work place gave me a gift card to Target for some extra effort work I did.

(This is neither here not there, but the extra effort wasn’t that much.  I think they set the bar too low, but I still appreciate it.) 

Anyway, it’s for $200, and I’m going crazy trying to figure out what to do with it.  I’m obviously watching my consumption, like always, but this is “free” money.  It was given to me.  And what should I get with it?  That’s the first idea that pops into my head.  

I could buy a CD, but I’m not much of a music person.  In fact, the last time I bought a CD was probably 2 years ago after I watched Walk the Line.  I thought about a handheld stick blender, but my wife raised a valid point of how much I use our current blender.  A food processor then.  I’ll surely use that, and a lot.  But, I’m not so sure.  My friend doesn’t seem to have a problem letting me borrower hers (probably because of the items that come back with it as a thanks), and borrowing is better than buying something, even if the money is free.  My wife put in a claim for some weights for when she works out, but I think we can find those used somewhere else, not new from a store.

So what then?  What’s left?  Should it just be used for boring everyday items that I need to buy from the store anyway?  Should a gift like this cause me so much stress?  My co-worker gone one also, and her opinion is that a little should be used for a splurge that you wouldn’t normally allow yourself, but the rest should be for every day items.  Maybe that’s the route to go.  Either way, the company will get their money.  If it’s not used in a reasonable amount of time Target will take it and that will be all there is. 

Who would think that a gift would drive me so crazy?

Almost time…

It’s almost time. Only one more day until the big day. Which is good, because I’ve spent to much time in the kitchen I think my kitchen utensils have become extensions of my hands.

I’m to bring the bread to Christmas dinner, but with my schedule I had to make it today. I hope they taste OK by Tuesday. I made rolls, which is my first attempt at that. I simply made my whole wheat bread recipe, then rolled little chunks into balls and put 4 in a muffin tin to make a clover leaf type of roll. I sampled one and they taste fine so that’s good.  Now I’ll have to get to work on the squash dish…

It’s my little lady’s birthday tomorrow, so we celebrated tonight since it will be hectic tomorrow night. Usually she has angel food cake, but tonight we had a pineapple upside down cake. My first attempt at that. (Certainly not local but at least homemade) It needed more pineapple, but otherwise it is pretty good.  You can make this with apples too, which I’ll try, but it didn’t look nearly as good as I knew the pineapple one would be.

We got a ton of snow last night, so there has been quite a bit of snow time the past few days. I wouldn’t be shocked if we had 8-10 inches. I know it was at least 6. I’ll get some pics up after I get a chance to resize them and get them looking OK.

As an interesting note, we moved our corn stove upstairs from the basement to heat our house more easily. This necessitated that we redo our clothesline situation, so now our family room looks like this.

The corn stove is straight in front of my wife (you can sorta see the very nicely laid tile floor under it, along with the dog bed which she was happy to have us move).  We have two retractable clotheslines that stretch across the room to hang clothes on. We’re still working out the kinks, but it appears that with two busy weekend days we can get all the clothes washed and hung up to dry. Put away is a different story, but we can at least dig them out of clothes baskets after they are clean.

Our house is kind of like a mullet in reverse.  It’s casual in the front but all business in the back!  Hope you all enjoy your holiday time doing whatever you do with whoever you do it with!

The world is thirsty

Sharon tipped me off to this article, but it is really sobering how no one is talking about the implications of the drought conditions we are having in different parts of America, and across the world. 

Has our population grown so much that we are already too large to be supported by nature?

Do we just need to stop wasting so much water showering every day and watering our yards?

What needs to be done to use water more efficiently?

I live in an area with what seems like plenty of water resources, but should I be concened anyway so we can protect and better manage what we have?  Should I worry about refugees coming here because of our water resources?

These are interesting questions.  As the article points out, there are no easy answers. 

When will we be able to start making the tough choices we need to all make? 

Hell, a lot of these choices are easy.  It’s time to use some common sense folks.

Carefree spending of our tax dollars

According to this article there are 101 Million residential houses in America. 

I have read news blurbs that suggest the current bill for the war in Iraq has passed the $1Trillion mark.  (No telling where it will end, and don’t forget the annual budget in excess of $500billion for the Pentagon.)

That means that we have effectively spent $9900 per house for this war in Iraq.

$9900 would pay for a pretty nice beginning solar array for each house in America to reduce our need for electricty. Or a nice package of new windows and insulation to tighten up the houses.

Granted, the war in Iraq was about oil for cars, but reducing our needs at home would help our country’s energy profile immensely.

Imagine what could happen in America if we would approach our energy wants in a different way.

FGLB

Designs on permaculture

 

This is a picture of my house. Click it if you want to enlarge it. I’m enlisting some advice from any of you that might be perma-culture people. We want to increase the food production of our little lot while still maintaining a “normal” front yard and also attempting to shield the house from some of the sun during the summer.

 

In this picture you are facing north, which means that the front of the house faces south. In the winter we get great solar gain from this but I want to shade more of the house during the summer. Especially the windows on the right and left of the front door. I was thinking about planting cherry trees about 5-6 feet in front of those windows to provide some sun blockage in the summer. I expect they will grow about 8-10ft tall so that seems like it would work.

 

We are also trying to determine what other trees to add to the front of the house. I think we will only add two trees. The existing tree you can see on the left is a maple tree that is almost dead, but I left it there to provide some shade until it completely dies. Any trees we plant in the front yard will be mostly on their own as the front yard is the play yard at our house. Behind our house our neighbors have an apple tree and a pear tree that we are allowed to assist with tasty fruit removal so keep that in mind. Personally I’ve been interested in paw paw trees, but I’ve never had one and I don’t want to invest in a tree until I have one. I just haven’t found one to try yet.

 

Also, we want to remove the evergreen bushes you see on the front. We’re thinking about making those blueberry bushes, but I’m not sure if that would be too much sun. Most likely I think it might be. I also would like to add a rosemary bush in there somewhere. And over to the far right by the clay pot, which isn’t there yet, will be the spot of our solar water heater, so I have to keep the need for full sun for that in mind when I place the plants in their spots.

 

Well, do any of you have any ideas on what we can do to get some Gaia going on over here?

 

Thanks

FGLB

 

“Overpopulation is not a problem”

“…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:  

Poverty Facts and Stats

China’s desertification

Soil degradation

Cross posted on Groovy Green

18 seconds.org

There’s a new site out that tracks the amount of CFLs sold by location.  So you can see how many bulbs have been sold in your specific location.

Check it out.

http://green.yahoo.com/

They even have a tool where you can display a running counter for your city on your sidebar.  (If you have WordPress and can figure it out let me know.  I couldn’t.)

FGLB

Train ad

You remember in my post a while back that I stated that trains can pull more freight for their fuel load than trucks?

Well in my recent Fortune magazine there was an ad from Norfolk Southern railway that stated that their engines get 410 MPG. Now this caught my attention, so I read the ad. (I have tried all over the place to find the ad or get it scanned onto here but haven’t been able to make it work) Basically they are stating their trains can pull one ton of freight 410 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel. I’m curious what trucks can do.

I tried to find the mileage on trucks but it doesn’t seem they really put that information out there, so I’ll be very nice to semi trucks and say they get 10 mpg. That seems fair don’t you think?

How much weight can a truck carry? I really have no idea. Perhaps 5 tons on average? Maybe more? What constitutes a “heavy load”? Let’s just assume they haul 5 tons. Some probably carry less. I imagine a truck full of Fritos weighs very little while a truck load of cars or Pepsi’s would be very heavy.

But if a truck holds 5 tons and it gets 10 MPG then wouldn’t it be able to go 50 miles on one gallon of fuel if it only had 1 ton?

So, a train is 8 times more efficient per ton of freight in its use of diesel fuel.

Now, I know that this is a seriously simple exercise and there are plenty of variables here and we don’t even know how accurate the train company’s number is, but it still bears weight about showing how much more efficient trains are than trucks.

You know what else is cool about trains? They pay for their transportation needs as part of their business. Yeah trucks pay use taxes and tolls, etc, but that doesn’t come anywhere close to covering the cost of the roads they travel on. But trains bear the cost of their rail system completely. They might get some tax breaks here and there on it (and I bet trucks do too) but that is a huge difference to our society from trucks. One maintains its own system for its use and the other acts like a parasite on a system funded by tax dollars.

FGLB