Now We Just Need to Generate our Own Water

As noted earlier, this weekend we turned on our solar power system, thus stigginit to the man, or at least generating a good portion of our own electricity.

If I’m doing the math right, and if the current information I have is correct, we’ve been averaging 17 kWh daily consumption from the electric company (I’ve only looked at one bill, so that number is suspect until I can look at a years’ worth). In the three days we’ve had our system on – including Sunday, which was rather cloudy – we’re averaging just over 20 kWh of power generated. In any case, we’re anxious to see what our next few bills look like from them.

However, the city of Ammon is now entering a test period for metered water. Insert frown here.

I understand they need to conserve water, as additional water rights are harder to come by. But our experience with metered water when we lived in Rexburg and Sugar City equals high bills and brown lawns. They propose now to let us use 7,000 gallons of water at a flat rate of $30, with a $1.25 per thousand gallon charge after that. For seven or eight months out of the year, that’s not a problem as we’re below that 7,000-gallon threshold. When we turn on the sprinklers in the summer, however, that’s when we get in trouble and, if we don’t reduce consumption, we’re looking at bills of close to $100 a month or more.

They’re telling us now that these are only preliminary numbers, which may face adjustment after the test period is over.

So my plan is now to eventually cut our watering time in half. For the first part of the test period, I want to run the system for about 2/3 as long, just to see what our bills would be like. Depending on what we see, we’ll adjust further.

Fortunately, our kids are already on the water conservation bandwagon, as they don’t take showers until we can present them with clear visual evidence of stink lines.

"He Cut Me Deep, B.C."

Flobar to the Rescue

NOTE: This bit of useless writing was inspired by a lament on a friend's Facebook thread to turn a discussion over the actual function of hair conditioner into a poorly-written action novel, using the post comments as dialogue. We all know I can do poorly-written.

Per and Angelique dove down the concrete stairs into the subway. "A little further! A little further! Then we'll be safe from the fallout!" Angelique screamed.

"It's lucky the dating service matched me with a nuclear physicist, on this day of days," Per said, his massive pectoral muscles heaving underneath his business suit.

They rounded a corner and Angelique screeched to a halt. "Oh, you don't know how lucky we are, Per. Quick! Into that salon!"

Per obliged. "Finally, in my element," he said. Angelique began grabbing bottles of shampoo. "It's not as good as Flobar, but it could save our lives! Detergent is perfect for washing away every radioactive particle that may fall out of the air and stick to our skin oils!"

"Forget the conditioner!" Per yelled. "Following a nuclear blast, hair conditioner could make it easy for tiny radioactive particles in the air to stick inside microscopic crevices that cover the surface of each strand of hair between scales of hair protein!"

"But you'll lose your fluff," Angelique said, running her fingers through his long luxurious Swedish hair. "I LURVE your fluff."

"We'll all have to make sacrifices," he said, and drew her close.

"WAIT! That sushi bar!" She yelled. "If we eat all the seaweed in the sushi bar, we'll ingest enough iodine to protect us from the radioactive iodine in the air!"

"I love you," Per said. And for a brief moment, as the atomic wind howled at the end of the staircase they would not ascend until after the apocalypse, they found peace.

"I still think we should take some conditioner, " she said. "Because fluff."

"We can use almost anything for conditioner," Per said. "It's easy enough to test even. Alkaline opens the hairshaft, acid closes it. The best conditioners are acidic. You can even use vinegar as conditioner."

"That settles it," she said. "When this is over and we're back in a world where civil defense symposiums are again the norm, I'll recommend hair stylists be included on emergency planning committees." She flung aside a wad of seaweed and ran her fingers through Per's hair. "I will so miss the fluff," she whispered into his ear.

"I don't condition," he whispered back. "Opening the hair shaft dries out and damages your hair."

Four Men

Television brought four men into my little life as a kid.

Four men.

Two were on the same show – Gilligan’s Island. Gilligan and Skipper. Skipper and Gilligan. The skinny oaf and the fat oaf. One who ate glow-in-the-dark glue and the other who’d get mad and swat at people with his hat. When we played at being Gilligan and Skipper, my younger brother and I, I was always Skipper.  The game involved me lying on the top of the couch cushions as my little buddy Gilligan lay on the couch. As was Skipper’s wont, occasionally I fell out of my hammock – off the cushions – to land on Gilligan.

The third was master of a glittering game show – Bob Barker on The Price is Right. They talked a lot about Rice-A-Roni on that show, but what I remember most was the three strikes game people played on the chance to win a car.

I made my own three strikes game and, I’m sure, drove my siblings nuts insisting they play it with me. Other games on the show, notably the big wheel, proved too difficult for me to create out of masking tape and cardboard, though I recall trying mightily.

The fourth man?

Mister Rogers.

Contrary to what you’re thinking, this is not going to turn into a paen for Fred Rogers, nice a man as he is. To tell the truth, I saw enough nice men in my early years, from Mr. Rogers to Skipper and Gilligan to my father to any number of other fathers in the real neighborhood I lived in for Mister Rogers to stand out as a spectacular example. I remember thinking he was a nice man who loved puppets and had a trolley and – inexplicably – a TRAFFIC LIGHT in his house.

Maybe he wouldn’t have appreciated the demeaning behavior between Skipper and Gilligan. But he might have appreciated the many games we came up with, and the many things, from houses to airplanes to cars, that we built out of cardboard and tape and other odd bits of junk, thanks to the silly inventions those castaways came up with.

Maybe he wouldn’t have appreciated the loudness and the in-show commercials for Rice-A-Roni in The Price is Right, but again, seeing all the stuff I made to imitate Mr. Barker’s games might have impressed Mr. Rogers.

I think Fred Rogers would have appreciated the fact that since I saw so many nice adults in my life, from parents to school teachers to Sunday school teachers and neighbors, that his niceness didn’t really stand out in my mind as a kid. He’d have seen a bevy of adults, trying in their own ways to help kids out, and appreciated what he saw.

He might have seen a kid with ordinary kid struggles, from being fat enough to be typecast as Skipper to being bullied mildly at school, and then seen plenty of adults around him working hard to see that kid do as well as he could with what he had – and he had plenty.

That I didn’t really need Fred Rogers in my life probably points to me having a pretty good life. Though I’m glad he was there, one more of a large group of adults who cared.

Why is this coming up?

I watched Benjamin Wagner’s “Mister Rogers and Me,” in anticipation that I’ll eventually find and watch the more current “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” both documentaries about Fred Rogers.

As I watched Wagner’s documentary, I thought there are plenty of lessons I can learn now from Mr. Rogers that maybe I didn’t need as a kid.

This quote hit me pretty hard: “I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.”

Deep implies, to me, slowing down, showing focus – as Mr. Rogers famously did. Whomever he was talking to at the moment was, in his mind, the most important person in the world. That’s something I could stand to remember, particularly as I interact with my own kids, my wife, and others. It’s easy to remain selfish, even when we’re interacting with those we love.

Another thought: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Maybe the most important part of that is to like ourselves. It’s pretty easy to maltreat others if we feel maltreated enough we treat ourselves poorly. That’s something Fred Rogers fought against mightily.

There’s the deep in Fred Rogers. Maybe I didn’t need him as a kid. But there are, clearly, things I can learn from him as an adult.

Nooclear, uh, Soooolar Power!

Since I can’t have a small modular (nuclear) reactor in my back yard (yet . . .) we’ve decided to settle for solar power.

QUESTION: Would I really want a small modular reactor in my backyard?

ANSWER: If I had the acreage, I’d do it.

Here’s our courageous story:

A few months ago, we had a salesman from Utah-based Blue Raven solar stop by the house (we also had a salesman from CenturyLink stop by as well; we ended up saying yes to both, so it was a good month for sales people to stop at our house). And lest ye think we were easily influenced by a slick salesman, we’ve been kicking around the idea of installing solar power since we moved to Ammon about six years ago. So we were eager to listen to what these folks had to say.

By the numbers, what they said made a lot of sense.

On average, we’re paying about $84 a month for electricity from Rocky Mountain Power. Now, it’s easy to hate your electric utility, seeing as there’s no competition among them. We fought back against high electricity bills when we moved into this house by ditching the electric water heater and the in-wall electric heat for gas appliances as soon as we could. (One of the benefits of converting an all-electric home to natural gas is that the outside walls are six inches thick, rather than four, so there’s that added insulation.)

As we put pencil to paper, we saw that, short-term, we’ll pay $90 a month for the solar power installation, plus the regular monthly fees – about $25 – to Rocky Mountain to remain connected to the grid. That seems expensive. But we’re hoping that our 4.72 kwh system will generate enough electricity, particularly as we engage other cost-saving measures such as shutting off unused computers and converting over more to LED bulbs, to help offset the increased cost as we sell electricity back to the utility. As it is, with optimum generation, we ought to be capable of producing 102% of our electrical needs. We’ll see what happens.

Then there’s the benefit of the federal tax credit – a whopping 30% -- for residential solar installations. For our system, that amounts to about $6,000, likely spread over two tax years. Our loan is structured that we have to put that money back into the system, or our payments go from $90 a month to $130, so it’s a good incentive to kick that money back into the loan, which is what we’d do anyway.

Blue Raven will also make our first eighteen payments of $90 a month, so if we also pay $90 a month, we’ll see that loan amount nearly halved in the first year.

While the numbers helped, two other factors helped us clinch the deal. First, a good friend of ours in Sugar City is also installing solar through Blue Raven, and he agreed with us that the numbers looked good. We also have a good friend in the neighborhood who had Blue Raven do solar on their roof almost a year ago, and they’ve been pleased with the results so far.

We’re about three-quarters of the way through the process – we still have to have Rocky Mountain come put in a new meter before we can turn the system on (and thanks to a hailstorm that damaged the roof, the panels will have to come down for a day as we get the roof repaired). We’re optimistic, however, that everything will be running by June.

I’m anxious to see what our performance will be like, particularly as we head into another air-conditioned summer. I’m planning on doing some economies with the AC this summer, as for about six weeks I’ll be the only one home as everyone else heads off to scout camp. I’ll put the temperature at 72 rather than the 68 most want it at, and we’ll see how it goes. That does make the top floor of the house a bit warm on the warmest nights, but I’ll just sleep in the basement with the dogs and turn the AC lower on the weekends when everyone’s home. (Although to sleep even better, I should put the dogs elsewhere as they generate a LOT of heat when they sleep.)

I’m also going to do some insulation – when we remodeled the laundry room last year, we discovered the roof above it had not been insulated, nor the roof above the adjacent bathroom. So I’ll be at work tossing some insulation up there in the hopes that’ll help cool things down/warm them up in that part of the house. I’m also working on insulating the garage. Though it’s not heated, having that additional insulated space next to the house should help a little.

Somewhere in the Ancient Mystic Trinity . . .

Oh.

You know, we take people for granted.

People we love. People we admire. People who create such wonderful things for the rest of us to share; things that encourage us to create things ourselves.

Like this.

Mr. Dorough, thank you for the music. And not just for the start of Schoolhouse Rock.

Bob Dorough has a unique voice and style. Not one of those you'd call a beautiful singer -- yet one whose voice is distinct and perfect in how he uses it.

Thanks for the talent, and for sharing it with us.

BFOO Ahead, with Robert Heinlein

Reading Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” kinda hits you with something: Whereas other science fiction writers are getting all philosophical on us and asking the Big Questions, Heinlein is busy answering the little questions.

Will settlements on the Moon and other planets develop their own cultures? You bet they will. And those visiting Earth from these other worlds will feel it.

Will kids wander off on the Moon and get lost? Duh.

Will these settlements be utopias, or will they have their own madmen? Do we even need to ask the question?

Heinlein is an eye-opener. Especially for a schlub like me who has written one speculative fiction novel that needs some brushing up.

Blinding flash of the obvious ahead: There’s such a variety of published matter out there. Who would have thought simple things like this would get ink (of course, this was in the era of pulp magazines and such, long gone now). And yet what Heinlein wrote certainly has a point: The normalcy of life here on Earth would follow mankind out into the solar system. Kudos to him for writing them down.

I Get Spam . . .

Yes, I get spam. So do we all. Sometimes, it looks like this, and it's obvious what the goal is:

This was so poorly to put together, you have to wonder why they even try any more. Especially on me, where I've already in the past had my Apple account used to steal my credit card information so people could:

1. Purchase some stupid in-app thing for $30
2. Buy a bunch of crap at a Canadian home decor store.

Both times, we caught the act in time to have our credit card accounts cancelled and the charges reversed. So to fall for this one, well, I'd have to be really, really stupid.

I'm not that stupid. This week.

Then there's spam like this, where the end goal seems a bit murkier to me:

I don't know what any of these mean. Particularly the last one, where they want me to give them the shaft, apparently.

I suppose it means, since I opened the emails, that they know they have a "live" email account. But I don't know what they get out of it really. It seems to be just as easy to send out emails from a freshly-minted email account to request shafts, hovercraft, and chainsaw distribution.

So I'll watch things, I guess. If I suddenly have a thousand chainsaws at my door, I'll know who to blame.

A Glimmer of Hope . . .

Spent some time re-reading the evaluations I wrote about in the last post.

Found this (emphasis mine):

Honestly, I didn’t know where this story takes place or is set. It seemed rather before-earth and in the middle of the creation, but not much made sense. It’s extremely poetic and with poetic language which seems more like a poem than prose. Just my opinion since I’m not a poet or get most poetry.

A glimmer of hope amidst the destruction. Because this is EXACTLY when my story takes place.

Could Be Worse. Could Be Raining.

So I entered a first chapter contest sponsored by a reading and critique group I'm part of -- and did not do so well.

That's okay. I mean, yeah. I know I've got to do some work on Doleful Creatures. Not going to let this get me down.

Still.

Five hundred words. I seriously have five hundred words to capture attention, or sayonara? That doesn't seem right.

Still.

These are professional critiques. From people buying books. I should probably listen to them.

Still.

I'll read them again, of course. And read my book again.

And maybe put it on the back shelf for a while and try something else.

Doleful Creatures Gender Swap?

I’m considering something for Doleful Creatures: A gender swap.

Although the gender swap feels, at the moment, wrong.

I’ll tell you why: My main character, Jarrod, has two principal motivators through most of the novel: Guilt and paranoia. Now, I know it’s not only men who get paranoid or feel guilty, but I know both of these feelings well from the male perspective. Perhaps the male and female perspectives aren’t all that different. But it feels artificial to project these feelings ont a gender I don’t understand as well.

Why am I considering a gender swap, making Jarrod a female (and possibly Aloysius too)?

Feedback.

Feedback from multiple readers who think there aren’t enough female characters in the book.

Granted, the feedback-givers are female. They see only one strong female in the book, and she’s the baddie. And I also know it’s mostly females who read fantasy these days.

Still . . .

I read a lot of fantasy. I have read a lot of fantasy since I was a kid.

And here’s the thing: If the story was good, I didn’t really care – and don’t care now – whether the characters are male or female. It doesn’t make a difference to me.

So it’s either me and my perceptions that are the problem, or the story is the problem.

I don’t know what to think, which is why Doleful Creatures continues to languish.

But I keep thinking back to something that was said to me when I was sixteen. I’ll paraphrase: Put effort into things that seem hard to accomplish, because many blessings may be obtained through that effort. Writing a book feels hard to accomplish. But I can see the blessings. I want them.

So I will continue writing. And editing. And figuring out the gender thing. Because I think it’s a legitimate comment.

I’ll pose the following question on Facebook, and see what the responses are:

A Writer Needs Help: Say through innocent actions on your part, several friends and others even closer to you were killed. What would your reactions be, particularly under the following additional circumstances:

1. Another survivor constantly blames you for what happened
2. That survivor constantly poisons those around you with that blame
3. That survivor has murderous intent towards you.

What feelings would manifest themselves, and how would they manifest?

Would different feelings manifest, and in different ways, if you were male or female? What would those differences be?

We’ll see what happens. I’ll post this generally, and in a few writing groups.

"This ifs Fine."

I have not made it a secret that I screw up.

I screw up all the time. And 99 percent of the times I screw up, I confess, I fix the problem as quickly as possible, move on, and work to make sure that particular screw-up doesn’t happen again.
Then there’s that other one percent.

(They, too, get fixed, rest assured. But sometimes that one percent just kind of . . . lingers.)

What I remember most is the feeling: It’s like I’m on fire inside. I’m sure it’s a combination of things like adrenaline and other stress chemicals zooming around the body and the brain just thinking and ticking away at the mistake. I’m sure many have felt that feeling. Many, too, feel the little respites that come with sleep, exercise, and other tasks or methods that help a fella temporarily forget that the Big Mistake still lies there, unresolved.

But the feeling always comes back; that fire within. And the respites seem futile, few and far between. Because all you know is the burning.

That’s what I imagine Richard Nixon and his compatriots going through, day after painful day, as I read John Dean’s “The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It.” I can practically feel that burning – and this was a burning that amped up and then remained for two years – coming out of every page, out of every conversation. It’s no wonder, during the fight and after the resignation, that his health was shot and he almost died.

If this sounds like sympathy for the man, so be it. He dug his own grave and buried himself to be sure, but it’s inhuman to look and not feel a bit sorry.

Because, to varying degrees, we’ve all been there. Maybe not at the impeachable offense level, but at some level, where we try to bury the burning or escape it, only to feel it coming back.

I wonder to what degree they suffered, though – they had their partners in misery, where they could commiserate and try mightily to explain away the mistakes they made, compounded by the mistakes they made afterward to try to cover up the first mistakes. Still. They had to have their quiet moments, when the only voice in their head was their own, screaming to be heard above the bubbling burning within.

There are days I feel I could write a dissertation on mistakes.

And on that sweet relief that comes when we emerge from the cauldron of burning and know, after all, things are going to be okay.

I have lived my life like this. A strong conscience, one might say. A commitment to self and God that I will be a better person by the end of the day. That I will recognize and fix the mistakes I make as soon as I’m able. Though I am human and let that one percent slip through and give the slow, painful burn for a time to remind me, maybe, what I “miss” the other times I work to make things right.

If anyone tells you they are not familiar with this phenomenon, that they have not felt the burn, that they have not let slip through that one percent, even for a little while, they are lying. We’ve all been in that self-created hell. We’ve all heard the alarms going off. We’ve all been in that spot of doing nothing, or doing only those things that will do all but fix the problem, all but put out the fire.



There are temporary solutions, and the Nixon team seemed to try them all. There was action – lots of it meant to create the illusion for both the public and the self that the problem was being worked and was eventually going to go away.

There was blame and paranoia – the thought that the problem wasn’t really all that much of a problem but was a problem because “the enemies” wanted it to be a problem.

And, on occasion, there was alcohol.

Only one thing fixes the burning permanently: Confession. And the inevitable repercussions, which we are all familiar with based on the burning sins we have committed.

"Exaggerating? Honey, We're Living in A Swiss Cheese with A Door."

For the first time in our married life: A homeowner’s insurance claim.

Not really all that excited about it, as we don’t know what it’ll do to our premiums. But nevertheless . . .

Saturday, we had a rather nasty hailstorm, which pelted the neighborhood with stones larger than a quarter. You can drive through the neighborhood and see most every house with shattered and broken siding, and quite a few fences that look like they were the victim of a target-shoot.

The siding on the back of the house took more than a dozen hits. We were lucky we didn’t lose any windows, and frankly I’m shocked that we didn’t as those stones were hitting hard and fast. I was expecting this to happen to me at any time:



We’ve talked to the insurance company and will have an adjustor call or most likely come out hopefully this week, though they said they’d received a lot of calls and were pretty busy at the moment. That doesn’t bode well for getting the work done, so we’ll see what happens. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll let me do the work.

I won’t hold my breath on that last one, that’s for sure.

I still need to check the roof – the house is so tall the roof is really hard to see from the back yard. I may have to vault the fence and get a pair of binoculars out.

Ironically, we had Blue Raven solar look at the roof as part of their pre-install inspection, and they saw no problems. Might have to double check what’s going on up there before they put the solar panels in.

It could have been a lot worse. The storm actually started out as a tornado warning, as folks had spotted funnel clouds west of town as the storm rolled in. By the time it got to us, it was just a severe thunderstorm. It was plenty scary without the twisters.

“Oh! Luncheon!”

Some weeks you’re the fat guy with the meat mincer, some weeks you’re the duck.

This week, I was the duck.

Lots of documents to do at work. Lots of revisions, and then Wednesday, lots of hurried revisions that spilled over into Thursday until about 11 am. I have more to do, but I’m sitting here feeling numb from all the work.

At last count, sixteen documents finished as much as they could be finished today. More to come next week, including those that got backlogged while I was working on the more exciting ones.

Two documents in particular got my attention yesterday, but in the typical roundabout way.

I should have suspected something was up when an operator came to find me Wednesday morning wondering about the status of a document. Found out a few hours later the entire plant was idled as they waited for this document to be revised. Found out a few hours after that, that there were two documents involved. But bonus of bonuses, in the wake of finishing one, the other just kinda finished itself.

Then I went this morning to send the documents to their owner for final approval, only to find twenty five (!) unresolved comments on one of them. I was able to put those off until next week and get the documents out.

And this is STILL better than journalism.

Not Quite the Brave New World. But Getting Close.

“We mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in history. [S]uddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn’t foresee and doing all sorts of things they didn’t really want to do.”

It might be too easy to look at social media and the Internet in general, read what’s said here by Aldous Huxley, and then say, “Yup. That totalitarian state where we’re all happy to be there is just around the corner. Or it’s here already.”

We’re not quite there yet.

There are still many, many people out there who have that awareness of the booby traps, as Huxley says, and can separate the fact from the fiction. And I think it’s hard to say there are fewer such people now than in the past.

We tend to fear the times we live in. Caution and hope, not fear, should rule the day.