Since the Fat Quarter Challenge was accepted, there's been a frenzy of lists - ideas, schedules, possible shops and cafes this is a good excuse to visit, and most ironically, a list of all the other projects that really ought to be completed before this one is undertaken... such as the scarf Mellie ordered for her birthday - only one third completed. But, I hope you'll agree, looking slightly fabulous (the photo uploader thing didn't work - nearly got it! sorry).
This project is working excellently to take my mind off the impending horridness of Post Peak Oil* or whatever we're calling the trainwreck in slow-mo that is rolling down the mountain of non-renewable resource gluttony towards us. Kewl. Mission, pretty much, accomplished.
Bring on the Craft.
*"Impending" in the sense that it is the future at some point. However I don't (and no-one really does) know when exactly which is strangely what I find most stressful about the situation.
Showing posts with label Peak Oil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peak Oil. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Does my mind know my mouth is typing?
I'm not sure I've got anything to say tonight, but I wanted to squeeze one more post into September as a pretty soft way of making up for the whole lack of an August thing.
This month has seen a small variety of fairly mundane things happen (that is to say - on top of the interesting things which I have already written about so very entertainingly) (stop fishing and get on with it!- Ed) ...
My leg has healed well and the physiotherapist certainly shamed the doctor with her knowledge, professionalism and capacity to give helpful advice about healing. It also gave me an interesting series of cultural vignettes - she kept tying to give me analogies and motivation based on the Broncos and football. I kept giving her utterly blank looks. I feel for her. That stuff probably works with the vast majority of people who sustain a "sports injury". It would be tough for me to find an upbeat parallel in, say, the life and works of Jane Austen or, worse, Virginia Woolf. No, I'm not ready to wade into the Bremer with my pockets full of stones. Not yet at least. Certainly not over a calf muscle. Anyway we're back up above 80% and frankly I'm not sure I even had a 100%. She lost me when she said "when you start running again..." and I was all "What do you mean again?" and she had a moment and just plugged the electric current octopus thing onto me and left me humming happily with my book. That thing is awesome. I asked her what it is called and she didn't know. It has no labels on it, and these weird 50s plastic tube things that end in a large suction pad that has a bit of sponge roughly cut to fit inside. It vacuums onto one's body and then they let it make a circuit and just run an electric current of some kind through you. Brilliant! I asked what kind of current - couldn't tell me. I asked how it worked, or what it did - couldn't really tell me (she literally waved her hands). How fantastic! I go to a scientific-y type place (where people have clipboards and machines that go "ping!") to get ritual magic performed on me. I so wish I could hear what Tesla would say about this.
Also, from the "it had to happen sooner or later" basket, Ma&Pa bought a 20something year-old caravan which they've parked next to the house and I don't reckon will move again for at least 6 - 9 months, but that's probably why they're not talking to me. Rationality ought never be injected into tightly held dreams. I got confused about that and now I will be given the cold shoulder until I am considered to have learnt my lesson. As with many of the baby boomers, my folks wish to spend their grey years nomadically traipsing this wide brown land soaking up the pleasures of the road and seeing the myriad sights of wonder. I can get behind that vision. I just thought it would make sense to wait until my Pa could fit the the door and maybe walk more than 5 or 10 meters unaided, or my Ma had finished working as a wage slave, or they'd sold the 155 acre property that takes up every available waking minute and dollar to keep functioning, but no. They scrimped and saved their whole lives for this and BY GOD they're going to have it. Well I am glad for them that it has manifest in their lives, and I hope they enjoy looking at it from their bedroom window as they run endlessly around the wheel of their life waiting for the pattern to change.
I really didn't want to get too caught up on that. It's an ugly mofo too - all brown and beige as only the very early 80s can be. *sigh*
But I digress.
In funnier news and for no apparent reason I have a massive, crippling crush on Jeremy Piven. I know nothing about this person (I had to point to a picture of him and ask around until someone knew who he was) other than that he is an actor who recently suffered mercury poisoning from living on too much sushi (no, really!), he does yoga, and he portrays a basically horrible agent in a tv show. How terribly modern! But none of that really matters, can it? After all I only found these meagre half-scraps out *after* the crush had formed. Ergo, he is a symbol of something (or someone) else. Still, it is entertaining. I've printed out a picture of him from the interwebs and stuck it on the wall opposite where I sit to eat my dinner. Hilarious!
"How was your day?" I ask
"Oh, the usual, but tell me all about you! You look tired, howabout a foot rub while you unload?" he answers....
haha. no I'm making that up.
I don't really say that out loud.
Was than an overshare?
Anyway. I have also spent some quality time with the "Amazon Recommends" software this month and that is a relationship that I can heartily endorse. It may not be fabulously healthy for the credit card, but the results will warm your reading heart and keep any problems in the real world with family or fictional lovers at bay. It will take anything and everything you might wish to throw at it - Batman, Georgette Heyer, Buddhism, esoteric reading, poker, sushi, peak oil, roman empire, gardening, knitting, sewing, and give you a hundred, two hundred recommendations, and you plough through those babies, rating the ones you've read, hooking the finds into the wish list and ploughing the corpses of the undesirables back into the database to fertilise the way forward for the next hundred. It is like some kind of Aztec blood cult for media. It is strangely addictive and although fundamentally consumerist, also culturally pleasing because it augments the ring of trust friends have - "oh I just read this - you'll love it!" and usually you do, or kinda do and want to find some more. In that way it is also often wrong, but then it just tries again, and doesn't entirely give up.
A bit like me and this blog (...sortof. Ok not really, but it would have been a nice tight ending, hey?! Now you'll have to make do with this limping "no you hang up" ending.) Bye.
This month has seen a small variety of fairly mundane things happen (that is to say - on top of the interesting things which I have already written about so very entertainingly) (stop fishing and get on with it!- Ed) ...
My leg has healed well and the physiotherapist certainly shamed the doctor with her knowledge, professionalism and capacity to give helpful advice about healing. It also gave me an interesting series of cultural vignettes - she kept tying to give me analogies and motivation based on the Broncos and football. I kept giving her utterly blank looks. I feel for her. That stuff probably works with the vast majority of people who sustain a "sports injury". It would be tough for me to find an upbeat parallel in, say, the life and works of Jane Austen or, worse, Virginia Woolf. No, I'm not ready to wade into the Bremer with my pockets full of stones. Not yet at least. Certainly not over a calf muscle. Anyway we're back up above 80% and frankly I'm not sure I even had a 100%. She lost me when she said "when you start running again..." and I was all "What do you mean again?" and she had a moment and just plugged the electric current octopus thing onto me and left me humming happily with my book. That thing is awesome. I asked her what it is called and she didn't know. It has no labels on it, and these weird 50s plastic tube things that end in a large suction pad that has a bit of sponge roughly cut to fit inside. It vacuums onto one's body and then they let it make a circuit and just run an electric current of some kind through you. Brilliant! I asked what kind of current - couldn't tell me. I asked how it worked, or what it did - couldn't really tell me (she literally waved her hands). How fantastic! I go to a scientific-y type place (where people have clipboards and machines that go "ping!") to get ritual magic performed on me. I so wish I could hear what Tesla would say about this.
Also, from the "it had to happen sooner or later" basket, Ma&Pa bought a 20something year-old caravan which they've parked next to the house and I don't reckon will move again for at least 6 - 9 months, but that's probably why they're not talking to me. Rationality ought never be injected into tightly held dreams. I got confused about that and now I will be given the cold shoulder until I am considered to have learnt my lesson. As with many of the baby boomers, my folks wish to spend their grey years nomadically traipsing this wide brown land soaking up the pleasures of the road and seeing the myriad sights of wonder. I can get behind that vision. I just thought it would make sense to wait until my Pa could fit the the door and maybe walk more than 5 or 10 meters unaided, or my Ma had finished working as a wage slave, or they'd sold the 155 acre property that takes up every available waking minute and dollar to keep functioning, but no. They scrimped and saved their whole lives for this and BY GOD they're going to have it. Well I am glad for them that it has manifest in their lives, and I hope they enjoy looking at it from their bedroom window as they run endlessly around the wheel of their life waiting for the pattern to change.
I really didn't want to get too caught up on that. It's an ugly mofo too - all brown and beige as only the very early 80s can be. *sigh*
But I digress.
In funnier news and for no apparent reason I have a massive, crippling crush on Jeremy Piven. I know nothing about this person (I had to point to a picture of him and ask around until someone knew who he was) other than that he is an actor who recently suffered mercury poisoning from living on too much sushi (no, really!), he does yoga, and he portrays a basically horrible agent in a tv show. How terribly modern! But none of that really matters, can it? After all I only found these meagre half-scraps out *after* the crush had formed. Ergo, he is a symbol of something (or someone) else. Still, it is entertaining. I've printed out a picture of him from the interwebs and stuck it on the wall opposite where I sit to eat my dinner. Hilarious!
"How was your day?" I ask
"Oh, the usual, but tell me all about you! You look tired, howabout a foot rub while you unload?" he answers....
haha. no I'm making that up.
I don't really say that out loud.
Was than an overshare?
Anyway. I have also spent some quality time with the "Amazon Recommends" software this month and that is a relationship that I can heartily endorse. It may not be fabulously healthy for the credit card, but the results will warm your reading heart and keep any problems in the real world with family or fictional lovers at bay. It will take anything and everything you might wish to throw at it - Batman, Georgette Heyer, Buddhism, esoteric reading, poker, sushi, peak oil, roman empire, gardening, knitting, sewing, and give you a hundred, two hundred recommendations, and you plough through those babies, rating the ones you've read, hooking the finds into the wish list and ploughing the corpses of the undesirables back into the database to fertilise the way forward for the next hundred. It is like some kind of Aztec blood cult for media. It is strangely addictive and although fundamentally consumerist, also culturally pleasing because it augments the ring of trust friends have - "oh I just read this - you'll love it!" and usually you do, or kinda do and want to find some more. In that way it is also often wrong, but then it just tries again, and doesn't entirely give up.
A bit like me and this blog (...sortof. Ok not really, but it would have been a nice tight ending, hey?! Now you'll have to make do with this limping "no you hang up" ending.) Bye.
Monday, July 06, 2009
Bronze Nails
I intended to blog tonight, and I even made a bit of an effort to think of decent ideas for once, but obviously this plan has not come to fruition. Please forgive me. I've just spent a cozy two and a half hours snuggled up to my Greader. So many blogs and articles and essays all queued up for me by topic or author. I have barely gotten through half of it. What a pleasure. If only I could read it on the couch.
The major distraction tonight was catching up with new posts from Club Orlov. One of the things I love about this blog is the "been there, done that" nature of the analysis and information. Just because the big big mass of Russia is a long way away (in all the different nuances that hang around after the cold war) doesn't mean we can't learn a lot from their recent history and experiences. It is one thing to look at a bunch of graphs and say, "This is going to be bad" and another to hear exactly how bad (and I don't mean just having to live on cabbage). There are little tidbits too, such as the value of bronze nails.
"It also makes sense to establish stockpiles of non-perishable materials that will preserve their usefulness far into the future. My favourite example is bronze nails. They last a over a hundred years in salt water, and so they are perfect for building boats. The manufacturing of bronze nails is actually a good use of the remaining fossil fuels - better than most. They are compact and easy to store."
I didn't even think about the possibility that nails might be made of stuff that erodes. I mean, that's a stupid idea, right?! What a perfect example of how our thinking as a system is faulty. Not that I'm ever going to be able to build a boat. Or even that I can use a hammer without hurting myself. Who am I kidding anyway, I'm almost certain to die off as soon as the chocolate supply gets dodgy. I've got three lightfittings in my house where I can't even get a lightbulb to work. Plus, I live nearly 150 kloms from the ocean. And I don't eat fish. Now. I reckon if rotten cabbages get on the menu, pretty much anything goes.
But I digress.
It's not just the handy hints towards a happy post-peak-oil-life that I enjoy and it is more than the fabulously footnoted details, it is that Club Orlov presents with a fabulous sense of humour. Anyone who can make me laugh involuntarily about global economic collapse due to the denial of the (easily projected) minimum production volumes and maximum affordable costs of energy has to be clever, resilient and fundamentally very, very funny.
I don't want to spoil it for you in case you have the urge to explore for yourself, and maybe you won't think so, but I'm still chuckling now. Anyway, that's the reason there will not be a blog from me tonight. I've been deliciously distracted and suddenly it is past my bedtime and time to don jammies and sleep. Ah, but my mind is spinning, trying to recalibrate my plan to take in all the knowables, the unknowables, the things we don't know we don't know and now to do all of this and yet remain flexible, with lots more humour!
The major distraction tonight was catching up with new posts from Club Orlov. One of the things I love about this blog is the "been there, done that" nature of the analysis and information. Just because the big big mass of Russia is a long way away (in all the different nuances that hang around after the cold war) doesn't mean we can't learn a lot from their recent history and experiences. It is one thing to look at a bunch of graphs and say, "This is going to be bad" and another to hear exactly how bad (and I don't mean just having to live on cabbage). There are little tidbits too, such as the value of bronze nails.
"It also makes sense to establish stockpiles of non-perishable materials that will preserve their usefulness far into the future. My favourite example is bronze nails. They last a over a hundred years in salt water, and so they are perfect for building boats. The manufacturing of bronze nails is actually a good use of the remaining fossil fuels - better than most. They are compact and easy to store."
I didn't even think about the possibility that nails might be made of stuff that erodes. I mean, that's a stupid idea, right?! What a perfect example of how our thinking as a system is faulty. Not that I'm ever going to be able to build a boat. Or even that I can use a hammer without hurting myself. Who am I kidding anyway, I'm almost certain to die off as soon as the chocolate supply gets dodgy. I've got three lightfittings in my house where I can't even get a lightbulb to work. Plus, I live nearly 150 kloms from the ocean. And I don't eat fish. Now. I reckon if rotten cabbages get on the menu, pretty much anything goes.
But I digress.
It's not just the handy hints towards a happy post-peak-oil-life that I enjoy and it is more than the fabulously footnoted details, it is that Club Orlov presents with a fabulous sense of humour. Anyone who can make me laugh involuntarily about global economic collapse due to the denial of the (easily projected) minimum production volumes and maximum affordable costs of energy has to be clever, resilient and fundamentally very, very funny.
I don't want to spoil it for you in case you have the urge to explore for yourself, and maybe you won't think so, but I'm still chuckling now. Anyway, that's the reason there will not be a blog from me tonight. I've been deliciously distracted and suddenly it is past my bedtime and time to don jammies and sleep. Ah, but my mind is spinning, trying to recalibrate my plan to take in all the knowables, the unknowables, the things we don't know we don't know and now to do all of this and yet remain flexible, with lots more humour!
Friday, June 20, 2008
Can we find another Ace?
It's winter solstice time again. The mornings have been foggy on and off for the last two weeks - lending a slight air of mystery to our walks. It burns off by 8.30 and then the days have been largely clear and bright. I can hardly believe it's winter. The full moon is gorgeous in the bright nights and I'm looking forward to Spring when I'll have my outdoor-moon-chair set up. The yard is still not an enticing place to spend time, but it will get there eventually. Or I'll leave. You know how it goes. So for solstice tonight it's just some incense, a candle in the window, some pondering ont he cylces of our world and a good dinner.
Rumi the Giant Snow Cat has taken to eating Riley's dinner as well. Riley sits and looks on with a slightly sad face as if to say "If that's what you really want, I'm not going to stand in your way." Meanwhile, Rumi seems to be attempting to grow to rival Iorek Byrnison for the kingship of the Ice Bears, but somehow is unable to stand his ground against Tiger the three-legged tabby who's just moved in next door.
I have been forgetting things lately. I've found it difficult to connect the list of words I know I have somewhere in my head with the idea I'm trying to express. Also, just simple forgetting - leaving my lunch on the kitchen bench, completely erasing conversations, tasks that need doing, or things I intend to do. It's really confusing. The world has a different tone to it. I think I'm still remembering the important stuff - but who's to say?
Last night on the "7.30 Report" (go the ABC) there was a fairly sober interview with an Chappie about how the price of oil is just going to keep going up, and how urgent it is to start switching over to renewable resources and so on and so on. I sat on the couch, thinking how nearly everything in the house (and the house itself) is cheap-oil dependent. Me too. I'm cheap oil dependent, I think nearly all of us are. Anyway, I won't get onto this again, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned peak oil before, and immanent ecological downspin etc etc etc Al Gore etc etc etc Global Warming etc etc etc Carbon Footprint etc etc etc. It was just, to hear this step-by-step implications on the ABC and realise that these issues do still not have a mainstream understanding, was beyond sobering. It was shocking all over again. If Kerry O'Brien has to work that hard to get his head around it (or to feel confident that his audience has their head around it), and the pollies have gone back to ducking the issue, what hope do we really have? If we wait too late we won't even have the reserves to build the new infrastructure we need! Isn't anyone project managing this thing? There are critical paths people!
I'm not a big fan of humans generally. Obviously there are some stunning human achievements, but they just don't seem to make up for this greedy, self-destructive impulse that over-rides all in it's path. We could call it the Trump Factor. Like there's this idea in the back of people's minds that we've anthropomorphised "Mother Earth" into reality, and like all mothers we can either threaten her children or pay her off, and she'll back down. It's Trump Brinkmanship. we are going to fuck ourselves because we can't grasp the simple rules of the game, and we think that oceans of cash will sort it out.
*sigh*
Rumi the Giant Snow Cat has taken to eating Riley's dinner as well. Riley sits and looks on with a slightly sad face as if to say "If that's what you really want, I'm not going to stand in your way." Meanwhile, Rumi seems to be attempting to grow to rival Iorek Byrnison for the kingship of the Ice Bears, but somehow is unable to stand his ground against Tiger the three-legged tabby who's just moved in next door.
I have been forgetting things lately. I've found it difficult to connect the list of words I know I have somewhere in my head with the idea I'm trying to express. Also, just simple forgetting - leaving my lunch on the kitchen bench, completely erasing conversations, tasks that need doing, or things I intend to do. It's really confusing. The world has a different tone to it. I think I'm still remembering the important stuff - but who's to say?
Last night on the "7.30 Report" (go the ABC) there was a fairly sober interview with an Chappie about how the price of oil is just going to keep going up, and how urgent it is to start switching over to renewable resources and so on and so on. I sat on the couch, thinking how nearly everything in the house (and the house itself) is cheap-oil dependent. Me too. I'm cheap oil dependent, I think nearly all of us are. Anyway, I won't get onto this again, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned peak oil before, and immanent ecological downspin etc etc etc Al Gore etc etc etc Global Warming etc etc etc Carbon Footprint etc etc etc. It was just, to hear this step-by-step implications on the ABC and realise that these issues do still not have a mainstream understanding, was beyond sobering. It was shocking all over again. If Kerry O'Brien has to work that hard to get his head around it (or to feel confident that his audience has their head around it), and the pollies have gone back to ducking the issue, what hope do we really have? If we wait too late we won't even have the reserves to build the new infrastructure we need! Isn't anyone project managing this thing? There are critical paths people!
I'm not a big fan of humans generally. Obviously there are some stunning human achievements, but they just don't seem to make up for this greedy, self-destructive impulse that over-rides all in it's path. We could call it the Trump Factor. Like there's this idea in the back of people's minds that we've anthropomorphised "Mother Earth" into reality, and like all mothers we can either threaten her children or pay her off, and she'll back down. It's Trump Brinkmanship. we are going to fuck ourselves because we can't grasp the simple rules of the game, and we think that oceans of cash will sort it out.
*sigh*
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