So just who did kill the electric car?

It wasn't the Stonecutters, despite their claim of responsibility.

Who Killed the Electric Car opened here this weekend, and I met up with Amanda and Punkass Marc to check it out. You may think corporations do some screwy things, and you may think oil companies put profits ahead of every other damned thing on the planet. But until you've watched perfectly good, zero-emissions electric vehicles go from the streets to the shredder at the behest of the companies that manufactured them, you have no idea.

The film documents the electric car's brief ride on California's roads as part of the state's now-defunct zero-emissions quotas and GM's simultaneous manufacture of and destruction of the EV1 electric coupe. Apparently zero-emissions, gas-free vehicles are such a threat to the republic that GM not only rounded them all up and destroyed them when the lease terms were up -- no one was allowed to actually buy one -- but the one surviving EV1 parked in the Petersen museum in LA was "disabled" by GM, presumably to keep the car's hardcore devotees from springing it from its underground lair.

When I say hardcore, I mean a multiple-week vigil outside the lot where the cars had been impounded, small protests throughout California, offers to buy the cars outright en masse. These folks loved the EV1 and were thwarted in their efforts to do right (and spend their money) by GM. It's baffling and heartbreaking to watch. So much for the invisible hand of the market.

I left wanting to walk home just to spite big oil, a nonstarter in 100-degree weather ten miles from the house hauling rabbit hay and enormous chew bones. But it did get me thinking about some of the options shown at the end of the film. WKEC makes hydrogen fuel-cell technology look damned weak -- prohibitively expensive and more costly in energy terms than electric. Gas-electric hybrids are the working compromise for now, with the possibility of plug-in hybrids getting about 100 miles per gallon and recharging in your garage overnight. This ties in nicely with efforts to green electrical power, as illustrated by Tim Walker's article on Austin's renewable energy program:

The wind blows strongest at night, when electricity needs are lowest. Which is where Austin Energy's Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle initiative could help. (See "Austin Plugs Into the Next Hybrid Revolution" in the March 2006 edition of The Good Life.) Owners who plug in to recharge overnight would be in effect storing that cheap energy as well as reducing pollution by not driving conventional cars.

It's a great idea -- reducing coal-fired power-plant pollution and cutting car emissions in one move. But Austin's plug-in hybrid electric program right now seems to consist mainly of petitioning manufacturers to make plug-ins, to demonstrate consumer demand. Who Killed the Electric Car shows, unfortunately, that consumer demand isn't the issue for carmakers. After all, the film includes Phyllis Diller (!) reminiscing about the electric cars that were popular during the early days of the auto industry. The big carmakers could have been cranking them out and refining the technology for decades, but they chose not to.

If you're carbound and greenminded, that leaves settling for a regular hybrid like a Prius, which ain't gonna haul two kids and two big dogs. And let us not speak of Ford's hybrid SUV. I'm familiar enough with Ford's products to know that I would sooner walk home with my rabbit hay in the heat than pay money for a Ford.

If you or someone you love is a total gearhead, you can convert a car yourself, either from gasoline to electric or a hybrid to a plug-in hybrid that can just about do without gas. It takes a lot of money and time, but it might be worth it.

Or we could develop a sensible national fuel-economy and energy policy and make the technology GM literally threw away available to all car buyers. Sure, it sounds like crazy talk, but after seeing the way GM moved the goalposts on crazy, it makes sense to me.

Bonus: Amanda's review is here. There's an interesting discussion in the comments thread about whether going from gas- to electric-powered cars is just shifting the environmental burden rather than lifting it.

I can't believe it's not bragging!

Look what Hurricanehead found last month.

No brags today from me; feel free to step right up with yours. I send you into the weekend with one of Rocketboy's original folk-blues lyrics:

I got me a water gun/
But I don't have self-control

Brag away, folks.

I digress, but you'll thank me for it

Have you seen "The Education of Shelby Knox"? If not, do. Hombre and I watched it last week and it absolutely blew me away. I read about it last year in the Texas Observer and waited patiently for Netflix to stock it and send it. Totally worth the wait.

ESK is a documentary following one good Christian girl through high school in paleoconservative Lubbock, Texas. Specifically it follows her efforts to get real sex education and a gay-straight alliance into the Lubbock public schools, which had (and for all I know still have) an abstinence-only curriculum and deep-seated homophobia. You will be unsurprised to learn that Lubbock also had a teen pregnancy rate of 1 in 14 girls, and a very high teen gonorrhea rate to boot.

What's amazing about Knox is how she balances her own faith with her understanding that it doesn't apply to everyone. She herself goes through one of those creepy purity-pledge rituals with her parents at church, but she understands that for one reason or another, it's not the path everyone will take. Watching her deal with the unresponsive school board, aggressive local defenders of the status quo, and the politically minded leader of the teen group she works with is like slow suffocation, but Knox doesn't go under.

She doesn't go off the deep end, either. I told Hombre if I'd had to deal with an environment like hers I would have shaved my head and pierced my face out of sheer frustration. Watching the sweetfaced Baptist teenager calmly tell off one of the pillars of the community after he threatens her group supervisor's job is particularly satisfying. If you ever get "blog poisoning" (Hombre's term for feeling overcome by all the stupid crap in the world) watching Shelby Knox fight the good fight will buck you up, not because she wins her battles, but because she fights them without becoming hateful like her opponents and she fights them knowing she may not win.

And here's the digression: Members of what I can only assume is the Westboro Baptist Church are up in the film, picketing as local LGBT teens sue the schools to allow gay-straight alliances on campus.

Here's the Phelps crew more recently, getting sent up by an Australian reporter:

A tip of my floppy garden hat to Pam at Pandagon.

Never thought I'd be glad I grew up in the '70s

No Omnivore's Dilemma writeup tonight. I'm planning more garden beds for the fall and trying to keep the current crops in the victory garden from dessicating under the July sun.

I found this reeking, vintage gem by way of Amanda. It scares me to think that this drecktacular article ran in a widely read magazine just three years before I poked my little girl-baby head into the world, and it makes me so glad I wasn't born earlier. But now at least I understand why, back when we had the time and money for such things, I always liked going to the ballet more than Hombre did.

It's because my big ass held me firmly in the auditorium seat, while Hombre had to struggle to stay upright. No, really, it said so in Reader's Digest in 1966:

Why do women go in for concerts and "“culture"” so much more than men? There'’s a biological basis. Such things call for sitting still, and it'’s hard for a man to sit still. Woman'’s greatest avoirdupois is around her hips. This makes her more comfortable in chairs. A man is top-heavy, with his maximum weight around his chest and shoulders. He'’s built for action, not sitting.

But that's not even the best part. Go read about how the female thyroid gland affects furniture placement. The whole thing is so offensive it's funny, at least to me. But then, I didn't live through that era so take my reaction with a grain of salt.

You just think you're an omnivore, Corny Cornerson

As promised, a little on The Omnivore's Dilemma. I first heard about this book a couple of months ago at a groovy-homeschool-knitting-mama gathering. Leslie related Michael Pollan's tale of what it really means to be an organic chicken on a factory farm, and it piqued my interest. I'm halfway through now, and it's one of those books that compels me to read passages aloud to Hombre and take notes as I go.

In the first of the book's three sections, Pollan traces the food chain from an Iowa cornfield to a McDonald's to see all the steps involved in getting his meal from field to table. It's a long road, to say the least. Along the way, a couple of facts jumped out at me.

The first was that industrial agriculture was turbocharged by Fritz Haber, a German scientist who figured out how to do in the lab what had heretofore been the sole province of certain soil bacteria and lightning strikes: fixing the nitrogen from the air into a form plants and animals can use. (Pollan notes that Haber, a Jew, also developed poison gases including Zyklon B, which was used in Nazi concentration camps.) Haber's biographer is quoted as saying that without that ability to jack up the amount of nitrogen available for plant and therefore animal consumption, "two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive". (43) Put that in your global-population-growth pipe and smoke it for a while.

The other thing that got my attention is just how much corn is in our food:

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget'’s other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "“fresh"” can all be derived from corn. [...]

There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. (18-19)

To explain the rise of corn, Pollan takes us through plant evolution and American history, lessons on alcohol and food processing, plant hybridization, the origin of the term "corn hole," leftover military explosives, the role of capitalism and what scientific hair analysis reveals about the American diet. Bottom line: Americans eat a hell of a lot of corn, whether we realize it or not, even if we think we're eating a varied diet.

Making electricity while the sun shines

I came downstairs this morning to find sugar ants marching into the kitchen. Something somewhere needs to be caulked. Hurricanehead is announcing the appearance of each new ant as if it were a guest at a royal ball. I need to deal with it.

When I'm not ant wrangling I'll be reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. I'm in love with this book because Michael Pollan writes so well and because he pulls together so many of the food issues and questions that I've heard about or wondered about. I'll write more about OD this week.

While I herd ants, take a look at this article on alternative energy. The author is an acquaintance of Hombre's (he also talked to me for the piece). I think he did a great job of explaining, through the lens of Austin's efforts, the ins and outs of getting green energy to market and why it can't happen fast enough.

In which I criticize the parenting of others

Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/AP

Found this photo at the Guardian's blog in a post by Mark Oliver: Israeli girls decorating live artillery shells that were about to be shot into Lebanon.

There's been a lot of anti-Israeli sentiment vented over this photo, as people take it to mean that the parents were teaching their children to hate. Lisa Goldman has her own take on the event, having spoken to people who were there. Based on her account, the girls' and parents' ire was directed at Hezbollah and not at the Lebanese in general.

Still. I try not to make quickie judgments of other parents' choices, but there's a war on so I'll make an exception. Children and live ammo do not mix, folks. Yet this happened with the girls' parents right there and about a dozen photographers clicking away. Call me overprotective, but I still haven't forgotten the bomb- and fireworks-safety field trip my third-grade class took. Firefighters showed us shells and ammo and also slides of people who'd had hands and faces badly burned or blown off .

Now leave aside, if you can, the fact that the girls were playing with live ammo that could have vaporized them had it detonated. Even if they were not being taught or allowed to express hatred for Lebanon, they were decorating instruments of death. Not toy bombs, but shells that by the time I write this have probably already found their targets in Lebanon, with God knows what results.

Goldman says the girls had not seen any pictures or presumably heard any news of the many civilian deaths in Lebanon, which of course include children. She points out that the girls had heard about buildings -- but not people -- being bombed. They didn't know the implications of what they were doing.

That's what breaks my heart about this picture. Maybe the parents weren't teaching their girls to hate, but they were teaching them that war has no human consequences for the other side. I have no doubt that these girls know what attacks from Lebanon mean for themselves, as they'd just spent several days in a bomb shelter. But they apparently don't understand what attacks on Lebanon mean for children over there. In shielding these girls from the full reality of war, their parents missed the chance to pass on an important lesson, summed up best by Chip of Daddy Dialectic. Chip was writing not about this photo but about pro-war propaganda in general:

Our kids have to know that war is not a game, and that violence should only be used as a very last resort. They have to know that our society tries to create the false impression that war is exciting and fun and bloodless.

But these girls learned, hands-on, that artillery shells aren't really dangerous. How could they be if you can draw on them while Mom and Dad look on and photographers take pictures for the news? After days of being stuck in a bomb shelter, they got to have a little fun and excitement, and no one got hurt -- not anyone they know of, anyway.

How to win friends and influence people

I thought it was bad enough that Bush made such a to-do of his estate-tax repeal plans at the NAACP convention. Didn't realize he'd then topped himself by "playfully" slapping a delegate.

Simply the brag

In the interest of clean, unadorned bragging, here's mine:

Rocketboy does a wicked emperor penguin call.

All right, folks. You know what to do. Make me proud.

Company's coming

Hombre's mama will be here in a few hours, and we've got to straighten the place up. I try not to go overboard on cleaning for visitors. I think it sends a message to the kids that we aren't important enough to warrant a clean house for ourselves alone. But it would be nice if we could wrestle the slipcover off the futon mattress so Mama de Hombre doesn't have to bed down on crusty vanilla yogurt stains carefully applied by Hurricanehead.

Oh, and we've developed a little rat problem out in the kids' play shed. Fun morning ahead!

While you count your blessings for not having to deal with rat poo and sour dairy products, you might also get comfortable and read this long essay by Joe Bageant:

Waking up to suburban life's true global cost is like finding out that you have a hundred slaves in some unseen place on the other side of the world making your clothing, working in your mines and harvesting your Gevelia coffee. It's more than a conundrum. It's a moral confrontation with real justice and values. Jefferson had the same conflict about his slave ownership. He never came to grips with it either. Old Tom never freed that piece of side action, Sally Hemmings. Nor are we about to demand freedom for the sweatshop slaves who turn endangered nyatoh rainforest trees into Sears "classic and timeless patio furniture." Who is gonna turn down an Everyday Martha Stewart Stockbridge 5-Piece Bistro set for a hundred and fifty bucks?

I found it through Neddie, who seems to be recovering nicely from his hip surgery.

Carnival and an affirmation on photo paper

The Nineteenth Carnival of Feminists is up at Figure: Demystifying the Feminist Mystique. Lots of good reading here, including a piece on women's economic development in Rwanda that includes a link to the Rwanda Knits blog. Regular readers know that Rwanda and knitting are two subjects dear to me.

I've been meaning to post about the most recent letter I got from my Rwandan sponsorship sister, J, telling me about her seven children from her two marriages -- one before the 1994 genocide and the other after the war left her widowed. She included a photo of herself, the robust and happy-looking kids, and the family's goats and rabbit on the lawn in front of their home.

The photo reminds me in its composition and mood of pictures I've seen in old albums. Families posed, scrubbed and pressed, with their homestead and horses or automobile, not as a fun snapshot but as a document: This is who we are. This is why we do what we do. This is the fruit of our work and good fortune.

The personal is geopolitical

There's nothing I can say about the Israel-Lebanon situation that you can't read elsewhere, which is why I direct your attention this evening to a post by one of Hombre's long-time friends, describing what it's like to live and work in Tel Aviv right now:

Although Tel Aviv is probably out of missile range (although these days, who knows?), you can still feel the war here. Military helicopters fly by regularly. Naval cruisers patrol Tel Aviv's shoreline. At work, we were issued with a booklet outlining the emergency procedures in the event of the building being attacked. Just in case.

I worry about Shai and his family and all the families on both sides. I wonder why violence is so easy to commit and peace is so hard to achieve? When you consider the pros and cons of each, you'd think it would be the other way around.

I can't say he never did anything for me

On this, the second anniversary of my grandmother's death, I must give public thanks -- just this once -- to President George W. Bush.

Without ever even meeting my grandmother, he pulled her back from the brink of death. If it were not for Bush, my grandmother most likely would have died before her sister and I could go to see her one last time.

Hurricanehead was just an infant when I got the dreadful call one morning. It was one of my aunts at the hospital in Arkansas, saying Grandma had taken a terrible turn and wanted to speak to me before she died. As I sat numbly on the edge of my bed, my grandmother hoarsely said goodbye. Her lungs were filling with fluid. It was all going to be over soon. She was ready to go.

I told her that I loved her. After she got off the phone, I told my aunt we'd try to get my grandmother's sister there by evening. They'd been close all their lives, and I knew that Auntie D would want to see her sister one last time -- if Grandma could just hang on. Hombre hit the road to Kerrville to pick up Auntie D and bring her back to the Austin airport while I packed light, taking care not to wrinkle our funeral clothes.

The plane was a little later arriving than Hombre and Auntie D, thank goodness. After a hard day of transfers and pushing my great-aunt through long terminals in various wheelchairs, we arrived in Little Rock, loaded up our rental and hit the road to Jonesboro.

Auntie D, being of a certain age and condition, needed to use gas station facilities about every half hour. Rocketboy was tired but stoic. I was beside myself, hoping hard that Grandma would still be alive and lucid upon our arrival. Night fell, and Hurricanehead began the tireless keening of a baby pushed beyond his limit. Floodwater from recent rains flanked the edges of the unfamiliar two-lane roads, and I wondered what I'd been thinking. Grandma had said good-bye already. There was probably no need to go hell-for-leather, but we did it anyway.

When we got to our hotel, we called my aunt and found that my grandmother was not only alive but doing much better. The doctors were surprised. I was relieved. The next morning, we went to see her. She was clear-eyed, lucid and talking, although tired and obviously ill.

What had prompted this turnaround? Who knew? While I waited my turn to visit the ICU, my aunt told me a funny story. A nurse had come in and done one of those little checks to see if a patient is still lucid. Grandma was laid out with her eyes closed, weakly answering when asked her name and if she knew where she was. Then the nurse asked my staunchly Democratic grandmother if she knew who was the president.

"Now," said my conservative aunt, rolling her eyes, "everybody in the county knows how Mother feels about George Bush. She started snarling, 'Bush! Bush is the president!' That got her going."

I found that fairly amusing and was a little unnerved when it dovetailed with what Grandma told me later that day.

"KC, there was a beautiful, white light, and I was moving toward it. It was so beautiful and calm," she cooed. Then her brow furrowed as she recalled the rest of the vision. "I looked over and there, moving with me, was George Bush. Well, I wasn't going anywhere with that man."

And that was that. I can only assume the nurse's question influenced her vision somehow.

We knew that Grandma's chances for a full recovery ranged from slim to none, and she died three months later. But that weekend, the weekend that she had called her loved ones to tell them goodbye, she pulled out of it and spent that time in the company of family who had come from around the country in the hope of seeing her again.

That sliver of time with her was a great gift to all of us, given unwittingly by someone my grandmother could not stand. So there you have it. It was, in my opinion, the highlight of Bush's presidency.

Crappiest gift ever

Did you know that the speaker of the Texas House considers his dream potty to be a "gift to all Texans"?* I'm afraid it's true, not that the rest of us will ever get to use this fabulous present.

See, Speaker Tom Craddick and his wife are shopping around a wish list of expensive fixtures and appliances in the hopes that lobbyists and businesses will chip in to renovate the speaker's private apartment in the Capitol building. Among the items on the list are a $14,000 kitchen range and two toilets at $1000 a crack (sorry).

The Craddicks, who own two other homes, say soliciting gifts eliminates (sorry again!) the need for public funding of the renovation. Thank goodness, because with Texas ranking 39th on the latest national survey of children's well-being, there's no public money to spare for poo bling.

Apart from the obvious potential for conflicts of interest, there's the tastelessness factor. The same week that the speaker's gimme list was in the Statesman, another wish list made news in Austin. The city housing authority opened its waiting list for Section 8 affordable housing assistance, the first time the list has added new applicants in more than five years. During three days last week more than 6,500 people applied. They now can expect to be on the waiting list for several years before actual help becomes available.

What does it cost to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Austin, anyway? An average of $900 per month, according to the Statesman piece. That's more than a month's worth of full-time, minimum-wage income, but less than a toilet -- at least if you're Tom Craddick and you think your personal crapper is a gift to society.



*The Statesman and KVUE require registration. It's worth it to read the details of the man's chutzpah.

Friday brag: fish fecundity

It's braggin' time. You know the drill -- offer up one brag on a child/pet/other beloved critter. Feel free to admire the brags of other readers, too.

This week, mine's a fish brag. A few weeks ago our lone angelfish, Diablo, starting snacking on the neon tetras. (No, I'm not bragging on that.) The fish shop owner said Diablo might be feeling territory pressure and suggested a bigger tank. He also warned me that once they get a taste for tankmate blood, some fish turn rogue. Unfortunately, this turned out to be Diablo's diagnosis. In spite of a huge new tank, he kept right on eating tetras, prompting Hurricanehead to stand at the glass chanting, "poophead fish!" Diablo's back at the fish shop now, happy but perhaps a little hungry in solitary.

Despite the move, the new tank cycle, and the carnage, some of my little guys spawned. I got four new fish for free! They look like platies, but I can't be sure yet. I first noticed them a couple of weeks ago when they were fry the size of dust motes. I still can't believe the other fish haven't devoured them all because that's usually what happens with fry. I suspect if it were going to happen, it would've happened by now, as they're a quarter-inch long now and clearly visible to their tankmates. Peace and fertility in a 20-gallon tank. How 'bout that?

Pure joy

Twisty is up and blaming again. Take that, patriarchy.

Whither nautie?

I'm almost done with the knitted nautiloid. I've finished the coiled shell and the face; it's now down to the last three tentacles and the eyes. And the weaving-in of the ends. Always with the ends. I suppose I would've finished weeks ago but I wanted to knock out a blanket for a cousin who's expecting a baby next month. I'm at the weaving-in-ends stage on that one, too. Once I get them done I'll show them off.

The poop

Now I know how to draw commentors out of the woodwork! Ask about dog poo and let Haloscan do the rest. Thanks, y'all. I loved binky's composter suggestion, but we have the kind of clay soil it's expressly not recommended for. I wanted to try it anyway, but the section on clay soil included the phrase "back up into your yard." Eck.

I picked up a midsize scooper today while out and about and hung it on the fence out of reach of the kids. Then I saw Perrito trot past a window proudly holding the scoop. He was quite sad to have to give it up.

That's when I had my shit epiphany. To hang the scoop out of the dogs' reach, it would have to go on the top rail of the run where the dogs chill when we aren't around to supervise them. Because the boys don't go into the run, I could use anything to scoop crap -- a scythe, an old rusty-bladed shovel, a snapping turtle -- as long as it hangs inside the run but out of the dogs' reach. No chewed scoop, and no scoop-as-weapon episodes.

Bottom line: We can use a lot fewer plastic bags on dog cleanup, giving me the excuse I've been needing to knit up a few shopping bags to stash in the car. And the knitting is what it's all about.

Making do

My friend Jennifer sent me a link to a pro-environment site with a twist: it also encourages people to treat each other well as part of improving our world, almost as if we were all part of some kind of crazy society-type thing.

Like a lot of these sites, this one has a list of everyday things you can do to help out, and at the top of the list was reducing consumption of plastic shopping bags. I think my greenie creds are all right -- organic garden, rain barrel, rooftop solar array -- but I admit I get about half a dozen of those flimsy, fart-gas producing bags from the grocery store each week.

I've obsessed about them before. Today I realized that the responsible thing to do would be to knit my own shopping bags from recycled or leftover yarn, and I even have a pattern passed along by a friend. I could knit up half a dozen in a few days and use them for years.

What's stopping me? Dog shit and sibling rivalry. With 130 total pounds of dog in our yard, we've got to pick up the poo with something. Bags work; they're like little gloves that turn into containers. I tried keeping a little plastic scooper on a nail high up on the fence, but it wasn't big enough. A larger scooper would solve the problem once and for all, leaving me free to skip the disastrous bags. But a larger scooper, like tree branches, t-ball bats, and the closet rod someone snuck out of the house, would only end up as a bludgeon in the hands of one or more of my children.

Kids will be kids, but I draw the line at feces-laden weapons. One of my own siblings still has a scar on his face from getting hit with a baby potty full of toddler crap a quarter-century ago. (My other brother is the one who launched it at him. Never mock a tot who's learning to use the potty.) I don't mind having a scooper around, but I do mind cleaning out any wounds it might inflict if used improperly. And yes, my children do require that I stay this many steps ahead of them.

So what to do? I need something reusable and durable that cannot be used as a cudgel and/or can be stored outdoors out of the boys' reach. I'm on antihistamines right now so my thinking is far from clear. If you have any unsolicited advice on the matter of matter, I hereby solicit it.

What price peace? It's cheaper than you think

The new Time cover story is on how siblings affect each other's development. I welcome this, in part because anything that shifts the blame from mothers has to be good. Also, the article allowed me to calculate a precise dollar figure for the peace and harmony in my home this week.

See, in the section on how sibling battles teach conflict resolution (slowly, the way stalagmites form), there's an interesting figure: 6.3. That is the average number of times per hour that a two-year old will come into conflict with siblings. This is one area in which I have to say that Hurricanehead is squarely average.

But his target, Rocketboy, is at camp this week, away from the house eight hours a day Monday thru Thursday and half a day on Friday. Subtract an hour a day for Hurricanehead's nap, and we get a total of 32 potential conflict-hours that Rocketboy is missing out on, much to his relief. 32 times 6.3 is 201.6 little sib spats I don't have to deal with this week.

Now, the actual price of peace: This particular camp (and yes, readers, it is horse camp again) costs $250, meaning that the cost of household calm is $1.24 per squabble. Is it worth every penny? Oh, yes.

Ain't too proud to brag

It's Friday. Last week's brag was a treat so let's do it again. (Feel free to review the ground rules if you're unfamiliar with them.)

Mine: Hurricanehead, almost 2 1/2, is talking well now. So well that when Hombre called him "little man" recently, he said as clear as a bell, "Don't call me 'man.' I'm tiny boy."

Brag on, readers. When you're done, you can go here for dessert and something called Frankfurter Spectacular.

Break out the beer and Depends

Forget about that other guy who has a birthday today. The real news is that today Hombre has joined me in what he calls "the 35-to-55 demographic." Happy birthday, babe!

BushCo to EPA: We work without real information and so can you!

Yes, BushCo has found a way to choke off the flow of information at the Environmental Protection Agency -- cut the library budget:

Some 10,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientists, engineers, and other technical specialists have asked Congress to stop the Bush administration'’s 80 percent budget cut that would close the agency'’s network of technical research libraries.

Of course this budget slash will put all kinds of research out of reach to the public and EPA employees alike. The real motivation behind the cut is revealed here: "EPA internal studies estimate that library access actually saves staff time valued at three times the $2.5 million agency library budget." They can't say it's about thrift. This is a strategic cut aimed at foreclosing facts that don't serve the Bush administration.

The letter of protest is here as a .pdf file, addressed to Senators Conrad Burns and Byron Dorgan of the Interior and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. Neither of my Senators sits on this subcommittee, but perhaps one of yours does.

via ResourceShelf

June utility roundup

Got my 'lectric bill. KwH usage for June: 903. June of 2005: 1502. This June was warmer than usual, but we used 40% less city-provided power than last June. In fact, I've noticed that unless the dishwasher or the air conditioner is running, the meter usually runs backwards.

Thanks, PV system!

I walked four miles to save sixty cents

Now that toll-road construction has closed the convenience store and gas station nearby, the nearest businesses are about a two-mile walk from my house. I've been biking to the yoga studio when time and weather permit, and I chose our fabulous vet largely because of his location. I was tired of driving back to our old town for checkups, and this would save gas.

Monday, though, with global warming in mind, I walked Perrito to the vet for a booster shot. I figured it would take a little of the starch out of him. He tends to jump on counters and lunge at other dogs in the waiting room. But by the time we got there, all he wanted to do was drink water and roll on the dog treats the receptionist gave him, down on the nice, cool tile floor.

As we headed home, I assessed this subversive thing -- walking on an errand in the suburbs. I'd certainly done my exercise for the day, as had Perrito. I had a well-behaved dog at the vet, a nice sidewalk chat with a neighbor whom I only see occasionally, an hour to myself to gather my thoughts. And I saved 15 cents per mile on fuel. It felt very Henry Hikes to Fitchburg. I liked it.

18 already?

Yes, Carnival of Feminists XVIII is on at Ink and Incapability. What better way to ease back into the workday routine after a long weekend?