The Time, She Flies

"Enjoy your kids, the time goes so fast!" this is a phrase that any parent of young children is sure to hear often. Kids grow and change quickly and so are amazing time markers.Here is a series of pictures showing how much our lives have changed since 2012.

Sibling hug 2012 & 2013

Halloween 2012 & 2013

Dinosaur ride 2012 & 2013

Reading with Daddy 2012 & 2013

Toddler bed 2012 & 2013

Places Ruined: Spills, Fires, Explosions

I follow a lot of environmental news networks so I see a lot of news that doesn't always get much mainstream coverage. I can't help think that if people heard about how frequently there are oil and oil related disasters more frequently they would be more fired up to get off of fossil fuels. Your energy source shouldn't kill you or the world around it. This list doesn't even include the evils of fracking.

How many of these disasters have you heard of? Almost all of them occurred in North America this year:

1. Canada's largest coal wastewater spill (264 million gallons) in Alberta, Canada on Halloween 2013. Downstream municipalities were told not to withdraw drinking water until it was deemed "safe."
2. Nearly 300 pipeline spills in North Dakota went unreported until the story broke in October 2013.     
   
3. Petroleum coke is now fouling Chicago and areas around Midwest refineries. "Petcoke" is a byproduct of tar sands mining. The Koch Brothers have been storing petcoke on Chicago's South Side as it waits export to countries with poor environmental laws that will burn this cheap and dirty form of energy (dirtier than coal!). It is blowing in the wind and fouling the air of middle and working class communities.                                                 
4. Exxon's Pegasus pipeline spill in Mayflower, AK, Mark 2013. At least 12,000 barrels of crude were spilled. This pipeline carries tar sands oil and made homes uninhabitable around the spill and left residents with health problems. 
   
5. A Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd train derailed in March 2013 (one week prior to the Pegagsus pipeline spill) and spilled 30,000 gallons of Canadian tar sands oil.
6. July 2013, a train carrying 7.6 million liters of crude derailed and ignited in Lac-Megantic in Quebec. The town was devasted by the resulting fire and 47 people were killed.
   
7. October 2013, Gainford, Alberta (Canada) Train Derailment. A  Canadian National tanker train transporting 13 cars of oil and gas derailed and caught on fire forcing 100 people from their homes.
8. Also in October 2013, another Canadian National train carrying propane derailed, exploded and caught fire near Edmonton, Alberta (Canada). Firefighters did not even bother to battle the blaze, they just let it burn itself out. No people were injured.
9. Just LAST WEEK (Nov 8) a 90-car train carrying 2.7 million gallons of crude oil derailed and spilled its contents into a wetland near Aliceville, Alabama. The fire is being allowed to burn itself out.                                                    

Though it occurred in 2010, I also want to mention BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which was not contained for 5 months and dumped 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. There are reports that it may still be leaking. The oil, combined with deadly dispersants that were supposed to help with clean up, left an ecosystem in crisis: fisheries decimated, cancerous shellfish, dead dolphins, tarballs still washing up on beaches that contain high concentrations of bacteria flesh eating. It will take decades for the Gulf to recover.

If you want to see a more comprehensive list of spills that goes back even further in time see this Wikipedia entry. It contains spills since 2012 that I wasn't even aware of.

Surprise Contact From My Grad School Professor

On Friday evening I got an email from one of the Town Selectmen. He was forwarding an email that was received via the Town's website contact form. The email was from one of my graduate school professors. He had Googled me and found that I serve on my Town Planning Commission. The professor was looking for me because he had "some questions about our past work." He included his email and phone number and requested I contact him.

I was surprised, and a bit flattered. But then I started to panic a bit. What did he want to ask me about? Would I remember anything about it? Could I sound intelligent on the phone even though it's been 6 years since I graduated, and 5 since I worked in transportation planning? I would have to fess up that I, a former "transportation scholar" who received funding from my university to study transportation, was now a stay at home mom in a tiny town and not doing anything transportation related.

"Did he find you on LinkedIn?" my husband asked. LinkedIn is another thing that makes me panic a little. Yes, I joined years ago when I had a professional job, but LinkedIn doesn't serve much purpose for people who don't work for an income. It's a point of embarrassment to think that old colleagues might find me on there and see that I have become irrelevant in my field. Or so my panicked brain told me.

So I emailed him, the phone would be too nerve-wracking, plus it was dinner time here on the East Coast and not far from the kids bedtime either. It was a very congenial email exchange. Turns out my old professor just was looking for a file from that project I had helped him with. Thanks to the never ending storage provided by my gmail account, I still had our original correspondence on the project which included the original database he was desperately seeking. He was grateful to find the database file, and told me about how much his kids had grown and made the usual "it goes by so fast!" kind of remarks. He was glad to see I was still involved in planning. He also mentioned that thanks to a generous donation my school had been renovated from a dumpy little building into something quite nice, and they had a full time staff person to help students and alumni find internships and jobs.

Thanks for the tip, Professor! I just may do that sometime in the next few years. But for now I'm good where I am, despite any insecurities I may have about not having a position in our economic system at this point in time.

 

Me in grad school, wrapping up a conference I organized.

Me in my current job

Still Adjusting to the End of Daylight Savings Time

On Sunday my FB newsfeed was flooded with witty status updates and memes about how much the end of Daylight Saving (aka "fall back") stinks when you have little kids. I, like many people, used to love gaining that extra hour of sleep. But as mommies and daddies know, kids don't know what time it is and they don't care if the clocks were changed.
 

 
We have been working all week to get the kids adjusted to the new time. After a busy Sunday, the kids were ready to go to bed at 5:00pm (old 6:00pm). It took a lot of effort to keep them up an extra hour so they wouldn't wake up well before dawn. We have been successful at slowly pushing back bedtime so they are asleep by their normal 7:30. Wake up isn't terrible...my daughter sleeps at least until 6:15 (old 7:15), and my son has generally been sleeping until he hears her stirring if not later.

The kids are not the only ones having a hard time adjusting. I am too. I am thoroughly on the kids' schedule which is set with the sun, not the clock. At 2:00 (old 3:00) the afternoon slump kicks in and I think "it's only 2? It feels like 3." Well, that, of course, is because it was 3:00 when the sun was an this approximate angle just last week. The "when will daddy be home" feeling kicks in for me at 4:00 now (formerly 5:00pm) which means 2 hours that pass very slowly until the new 6:00.

But it's not all bad. On Monday my son woke up to sunshine which made it much easier to motivate him, and the whole family, to get up and have more time together before school and work. In the evening after the kids are asleep my husband and I normally stay up way too late. But the dark and the cold and the transition have enticed me to crawl under the covers much earlier than I normally would, so I am getting some extra sleep after all.

Grape Jelly

I remember my first year of college in Maine at a tiny college full of earth conscious individuals. My housemates were way ahead of me in terms of wanting to be self-sufficient and depending directly on the earth. I remember them making lots of rather disgusting recipes, but at least they were trying. They collected acorns to make flour that they then baked into bread. It was bitter and awful, but resourceful. They collected wild edibles for teas and berries for jam. I remember the jam was also a disaster and they added more and more pectin and were confused why it still wouldn't set.

Here I am, 15 years later. I finally am feeling domesticated enough where this all makes sense to me enough to want to do it. At least the jelly part anyway, I will skip the acorn bread. I set out to make grape jelly with just my Ball Canning Book by my side.

First I boiled the grapes my friend gave me to break them down.

Then I let the liquid filter through some cheesecloth for several hours to separate the juice from the pulp.

I even used the food mill to turn the pulp into a smooth grape sauce. I have been reluctant to use it because of mess, but after finally trying it I see the appeal.

A couple days later I boiled the grape juice with sugar, then said a little prayer as I poured in the pectin and boiled it for one minute more. The jelly looked really soupy and I was afraid I had somehow repeated the mistakes of my Maine college housemates. But lo and behold, after a couple hours of cooling the jelly set! Now I can add jelly to my no-need-to-purchase-at-the-grocery-store list.

Is All Wind Power Equal?

Like solar power, wind power generation is a growing industry that hopes to provide clean, renewable energy to replace fossil fuels and fight global warming. So far the conventional wisdom in the wind power world is the larger the wind turbine, the more power you get. This means that windmills are growing increasingly large and tall. See the picture below that was generated by the US Department of Energy to promote a particularly large wind turbine project called the Lincoln Wind Tower in Euclid, Ohio.

The average wind tower is 150 feet. Almost as tall as the leaning tower of Pisa. The Lincoln Wind Tower in Ohio would be 443 feet tall, which is taller than the Statue of Liberty. Click here for some of the tallest wind turbines in the world at heights comparable to the Lincoln Wind Tower.

John Dabiri, a CalTech professor of aeronaturical and bioengineering, has a new idea for wind turbines that was inspired by observing the "pattern of spinning vortices that trail fish as they swim." He proposes making the blades vertical like poles on a carousel, and the towers much shorter. Then, positioning the vertical turbines in specific relation to each other they can generate more power by using air currents generated by other vertical turbines around them, just like the "fish vortices." Dabiri says the wind farms built in this fashion would be cheaper to build, quieter, and easier to maintain since they are only about 30 feet tall. They also don't need to be rotated to face the wind.

Prof Dabiri with Vertical axis wind turbines

However, many vertical turbines are still necessary to generate the power produced by just one large, traditional (aka horizontal) wind turbine. The industry still believes that bigger is better, but these smaller, verticle turbines are intriguing. Perhaps the vertical turbines would be more acceptable in areas where the largest objections to wind power generation are noise and aesthetics, or in remote communities where ease of maintenance is important. The US Military is also very interested in Professor Dabiri's idea because traditional horizontal wind turbines can interfere with helicopter operations and radar signatures.

It's nice to think that communities could have options on what is the right way for them to pursue wind power. Way to go Professor Dabiri!

Pumpkins, Prizes, Smashes, Smiles

We carved the pumpkins a couple days before Halloween. I thought it would be a fun activity for my son and I but he was less impressed. He didn't want to touch the goop inside the pumpkin, but he did love pulling out the cutout shapes after I had carved them. As he did at the Pumpkin Party, he gave creative direction on what the pumpkin should look like.

 

We did make roasted pumpkin seeds, and those were a hit at least for one snack. I ended up eating most of the seeds.

As you may have already seen, I did win the Trunk or Treat prize for "most environmentally friendly." All I did was carve "Compost Me" into the back of the largest pumpkin.The judges from the fire department were going to give me the prize based solely on the fact that I had real, live pumpkins--that's how slim the competition was. So when they saw "Compost Me" I think it was a nice bonus that there actually was an environmental message. But hey! I won! The shiny new numbers on my mailbox will be courtesy of the fire department Trunk or Treat contest.

And then perhaps the most fun we had with our pumpkins came after Halloween when we smashed them. This was of course necessary so they would break down faster in our compost pile. My son definitely enjoyed it, and I did too. I smashed the biggest one before letting him to the smaller 3. Here is a video showcasing his efforts. He is a good pumpkin smasher!