I'd like to say that the burning season is over. I'd like it to be over. But the fact that its May doesn't seem to keep the nights from dropping down into the mid twenties. Gads. The 2007 season pellets are gone, they went pretty fast:
| Month | This year | 2007 | 2006 |
|---|---|---|---|
| September | 160 | 360 | - |
| October | 960 | 1,360 | - |
| November | 1,120 | 1,640 | 1,200 |
| December | 2,080 | 1,920 | 1,720 |
| January | 2,240 | 2,360 | 2,000 |
| February | 1,800 | 1,920 | 1,280 |
| March | 840 | 1,320 | 1,080 |
| April | 240 | 480 | 440 |
You can see we burnt a lot less in March, but that was mostly due to the fact that there wasn't much left to burn. A lot more fires that much. April wasn't too bad, and I was home most of the month watching the kids while JM went overseas, so I let the temperatures in the house drop below 70°rees;F at night. But that's over now too.
Just when I was getting ready to enjoy having that third parking spot left, I got a call from a friend who had spotted a sale sign over at Ace.
2006 was a mess for wood pellet users. Nobody in town had consistent stock, prices was all over the place, and I ended up buying pellets from two hardware stores, Walmart, and the local gas station (who shipped in a supply from Canada). Part of the problem was a supply issue from a local pellet plant in eastern Arizona. So for 2007, the stores placed monster orders all over the place. Now it was May 2008, and they were sitting on top of a couple million tons still.
Ace blinked first. Normally a more expensive option (over priced only by the local grocery store), they dropped their price to $3/bag or $150/ton. There went my parking space. For about the same price as four tons before, I picked up six tons this time, and actually managed to get them all in the garage, in one parking spot. And because we now have what looks like an infinite quantity, we've relaxed a bit and started burning them again. Granted otherwise my basement would drop below 60°rees;F, but it still seems absurd.
I need to start setting up for next year with some solar plans. Maybe by 2009 I might not need to hand carry 12,000 pounds of wood pellets down into my basement.
At last week's green building meeting, there were a number of design students attending the meeting ( it was on campus at the university, go figure ), and one of them asked us "old folk" what advise we would give them, nominally about how to work renewable and sustainable technologies into their projects.
I gave half a good answer: when it comes to choosing projects, choose the customer who's willing to be more adventurous. NAU had just given us a tour of their new building which they built with un-tested concrete mixes, and where they were refining the process as they went. There's actually a difference in the final product between the first floor and the third floor. That's just an astounding thing, to have a customer spending millions of dollars, and still walk out on a ledge to try 40% fly ash content in concrete and use the project as a laboratory to work out the problems.
While it would be nice to have daring clients on every project, an even better strategy might be to help every client take a step, no matter how small, away from the status quo. And to do that requires a special kind of promotion. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to progress is not lack of promotion, its the opposite: hype. Hype has done more to stall the implementation of sound technical ideas than anything else. Every new idea has its rough edges, and running a reluctant customer right into one of those edges will cause more problems, bad will, and general long term loss of credibility; than loosing out trying a new idea two times out of three.
The other way to help around this, is find ways to take small steps before pushing the customer to take big ones. Don't expect the customer to spend thousands or more on some new thin film solar panel if you've never even seen the device in person yourself. When I want to implement new technology in my projects, I play with the language/database/operating system first personally before I claim it should be used on a project. Even in metal working, I spend my own money on something, and check it out before I expect the shop/school/customer to use it. Doesn't mean you have to go as large, or go as nice as what you would use for the project. Just get your hands on anything, in whatever state so you can say, "Yes this is real, and I believe in it." Ebay is great for that.
Going with the way things were before is always going to be the least effort, so putting effort into moving in a new direction is how things will get changed. Do what you can to take on some of that effort, and help everyone you meet put in what effort that they can. You won't turn things around in one instant, but if you can look back at the end of your career and see how you were part of a larger effort that pushed society slowly in a new direction, that's something to be proud of.
Still on fire. Another winter, another order of fuel. Last year I burned a ridiculous quantity of pellets, and it wasn't cheap coming up with them, or fun driving to home Depot to pick up 30-40 bags at a time then unload each carload in conditions that weren't always ideal. This year I decided to be a little more organized. I ordered a bunch early, which hopefully saved me some money, and also got someone else to deliver them.
All nice and neatly stacked in the garage for the winter (well kind of, one pile had to be left outside on the back porch due to logistic issues with the forklift). Only bought 8,000 pounds this year, mostly cause I didn't have the money to buy more, so I've been trying to make them last longer. Either this winter isn't quite so bad, or the fact that I'm not travelling as much (and thus keeping a closer eye on the thermostat), means our usage is down a bit, thankfully.
| Month | This year | 2007 | 2006 |
|---|---|---|---|
| September | 160 | 360 | - |
| October | 960 | 1,360 | - |
| November | 1,120 | 1,640 | 1,200 |
| December | 1,920 | 1,720 | |
| January | 2,360 | 2,000 | |
| February | 1,920 | 1,280 | |
| March | 1,320 | 1,080 | |
| April | 480 | 440 |
We are burning more wood, but that's fine with me. Next year, if I am really on the ball, daytime heat is going to be solar, and I'll just use the pellets to supplement at night. Or maybe its all wishful thinking, and I'll be spending all summer out in the woods gathering firewood.
They say procrastination pays off immediately, but of course the hard work guys like to think they end up better over the long term. Unfortunately the empirical evidence is not quite as conclusive, as you can see from this example.
My tire got a nail in it, which isn't that unusual. We built our own house about seven years ago, and I think the carpenters lost more nails in the dirt around the house then actually ended up in the frame itself. We have buckets filled with rusted nails gathered from the yard, and its still not unusual to pick out more after a fresh rain. Every once in a while one of those ends up in a tire, and thankfully the tire takes a little while to go flat so you have a chance to drive around a little while and maybe get the tire fixed.
Or sometimes not. Here, the nail went through the side wall, so the free patch option is off the table. Time to get a whole new tire, which just happens to be a special model that the tire store doesn't carry, and in fact they just started working with this vendor, so they don't even know how to order it exactly, but somewhere burried in the six manuals hidden under the counter is the proper code to enter into the computer to call up this mythical model (stock tire on 2004 Toyota Hylander btw), and maybe get it in in a week or two. Turns out not, but what the sales droid did find was the business card from the field rep who could get it ordered and it would be in in a week.
Luckily the Hylander has a full size spare, so I was driving around on that for a bit, waiting for my new tire to come in, which it did.
Now what I should have done was swapped out the spare for the new tire, since spares tend to age a little strange--being horizontal most of their life and subject to collecting water and mud up top and sort of just wallowing in it. This car isn't that old, but generally, the spare doesn't age as gracefully as the other tires, or get maintained as well. But in this case, forces were rolling my way to render the point moot. More specifically, I found myself running over the the drive shaft from a semi truck on the freeway, just a month later. These things make a regular car or truck drive shaft seem like a toy part made from legos. And they do a great job ruining tires too:
It didn't just put a hole in my tire, it took the whole side of the tire off. And not just the tire either, it took a chunk out of the rim. So, suddenly the whole spare tire situation was cleared up. I put my original rim and new tire back on (it was the same wheel that had suffered before), and my spare went into the scrap heap.
Oh, and instead of paying $340 to Toyota for a new rim, and spending another $160 on a tire; ebay fixed me up with a complete wheel and rim for $90.
My laptop got hacked last week, which is quite a milestone. I don't run any firewalls or virus software on my computers. At least I haven't in the past. Up until now, I was pretty safe just running non-microsoft tools. Sure IE is hacked every other day, but you'd have to get pretty obscure to be targetting Netscape. Well, I guess not any longer.
Being the geek that I am, I spotted some errant processes in my process table. (Yes, I pretty much have an idea of what processes are supposed to be there.) I immediately found a directory with curious CCC.exe in it, and wiped all that out, but figured that was not the end of it. I caught a few more files, and sort of limped along for a week.
Then this weekend, I spotted some more suspects and did another round of hunting. This involved pulling out several DLLs from windows/system32 and when one got especially tough to gouge out, I started blasting away at the registry.
Bad move.
Now my computer powers up, examines it navel for quite some time, then spouts off about lsass - service not found. It gives me an OK button to push, which is not ok, but I don't have anything else to do, so I push it, and of course it reboots. After five or six rounds of this, I realize that its not going to do anything different no matter how many times I tell it that its ok so I just power down and pull the hard drive out to get at the important stuff, like Chuck - epsiode 3.
Actually, everything of real value lives on the SVN server, or in Google Docs, so I'm not really all that excited about this setback, just a little annoyed. This week is going to be filled with hours of joy as I hunt down my recovery CD, and the install disks for all those ancient artifacts called Applications.
Ok, from now on I only browse the internet from linux. Or my Nokia N770, which I can't find. Ok, my used Nokia N800 that I won on ebay, which isn't here yet, but should be arriving any day now and it better work this time.
Trip to Arkansas $600
Admission to the Daisy BB Gun museum $2
Package of 5,000 BBs $9
Look on their mom's face when she sees what the three boys have done with the package of BBs ...
Hey, we got 4910 of them up pretty darn quick with that magnet.
If you are the type of person that likes things tidy, I suppose there is something subconsciously reassuring about sticking the kids in front of the TV. You know its not good for them, but while they're sitting on their buts, they're not running around the house making a mess. And trust me, kids are way faster at making the messes, than we adults are at cleaning them up.
I on the other hand, am not one for which organization and neatness are a high priority. (Just ask anyone around me.) So the kids and I have been having a great time these last couple of evenings.
Within minutes of playing last night, my three boys had organized the living room table, a left over box from a chair, blankets and pillows, and some giant cardboard tubes, into the most interesting collection of traps and travels for their marble collection; and they proceeded to spend hours inventing new games and spreading marbles throughout the house. Of course my ex-wife had a fit when she came home later that night; but I think the kids expanded their brains more in those few hours than they had in the last week.
For the first time--in what may months, or even years--I am all caught up on ebay. No pending auctions, no items waiting to be paid for or shipped. Nothing gone back to the seller waiting for a refund. Its all quiet.
Its not that I don't have anything I could buy. I'm just sort of taking a break right now, trying to catch my breath with everything else going on. Also saving up my money, because its the time of year when I have a lot of extra expenses (like annual insurance & property tax), and also some other stuff in my life has generated enormous bills.
I'm also in flux on metalworking, which was a big area for equipment purchase over the last couple of years. I teach at a rented shop, which is rented from the local high school for use by the Community College at night; but there's a new high school shop teacher, so we're still in the middle of a stare down contest.
So between the fact that I have no time, I have no money, and I have no place to put new purchases, a slow down does seem to make sense. Hmmm, but that Rohde & Schwarz portable spectrum analyzer does look nice ...
