Just Something I Was Thinking
Recently got lost on this really cool map of electricity generation across the world. I had no idea Brazil was so far along in renewables. My service area is more carbon intense then I realized, and solar doesn’t make up as much system-wide generation as you’d expect. But wind is a lot more stable then I expected, and it is close to the number #1 power generated for us, consistently dangling around 48%.
Read full post →Okay, in slightly less life-or-death news, March was a busy month for us.
Got a new washing machine. In February our dryer broke which prompted me to buy a new one, and this month we decided to go ahead and get the matching washer.
We always had to run our clothes through the dryer a couple of times to get them fully dry, and the new washer has solved that problem. Apparently it uses less water in general, but it also gets more water out of the clothes before going to the dryer. This is a nice upgrade as it means less wear and tear on our clothes, and less use of the dryer electrically.
Also we redid our bathroom floors. We found some marvelous hex marble tiles. It turned out great! We embarked on this project because the previous owners had used some stick and peel vinyl and it’s starting to come up in both the bathroom and the kitchen. We felt the bathroom was the priority fix because of all the moisture, we wanted to prevent any rotting of the subfloor or structure.
While we were at it, figured might as well get a new toilet. So I got the Swiss Madison Classe after reading so many reviews online of people who love Swiss Madison toilets. The dual flush system should save a bit of water, though I doubt we will ever notice much of a difference on our water bill, it’s nice to conserve wherever we can. Lowe’s has it for like $300.
In non-house projects, Noah had his spring break and he and I stayed a long weekend up in Leadville and went skiing. So much fun!
Completed my state/federal taxes and got the refunds back. Our refunds are substantial every year and I know people say that you’re just giving the government an interest-free loan. But I feel like our tax situation has been so fluid I have never wanted to take the risk and end up owing.
Took the whole family to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. It was the first time for our 14 year old, and he loved it. It gave me a great opportunity to take lots of pictures. I love photography and need to get out more and shoot more often.
I hate that at this point, just reading the title of this post, I’ve already lost ~40% of you because of presumptions one way or another about what I’m going to write. I don’t like that we as a society have just decided to be angry with each other and that we can’t find ways that we can reduce violence and increase the well being of people. This post will not be well written or well organized, it’s just my raw thoughts from the past several months of reading and absorbing what people are saying and my thoughts on each.
I reject that we are unable to find common ground. I reject that we can’t do anything. I reject this idea that we are as a society stuck and powerless to do anything about the very real prevalent gun violence in this country.
“Shall not be infringed.” This was trending on Twitter earlier and I watched an old Penn and Teller video where Penn is going off about this phrase in the 2nd Amendment. People were going off about this because the idea is that nothing should infringe our right to get a gun.
Knowing that I’m not a constitutional lawyer, I have often looked at the earlier phrase “ a well regulated militia being necessary to a free state” and thought the “well-regulated” part strongly hinted at the need for regulations. AKA laws. AKA limitations. Is not being able to own a tank an infringement to bearing arms? Should private citizens get to own nuclear weapons? F-16s? Missiles? Canons? Machine guns? Turrets? Where do we draw the line? Nowhere?
“Three fifths of all other persons.” Honestly, even if legal scholars decide that “shall not be infringed” means that we can’t restrict people from owning certain weapons such as nuclear weapons, tanks, missiles and automatic weapons—none of which were envisioned by the founders when this amendment was written— we can change the constitution. The constitution is not a divine document, and I’m tired of treating it like it is. It counted each black person as 3/5ths a person. We decided to change that.
Twenty Five Amendments. In fact, we’ve changed it twenty five times. There’s a built in mechanism to change the constitution when we decide that it no longer is suiting us. We’ve done things like prohibit alcohol, then oopsie daisy, maybe that was a bad idea. We’ve changed how the Vice President is elected. We changed how Senators are elected. Etc. We should change the constitution to work for us.
Is this working for us? More than one mass shooting a day so far. I watched an interview from a state law maker who said he’s not going to do anything about this, and when asked about his own kids he said he homeschools them to avoid violence. This has been a common attitude in my family. Why can’t we work to make the outside world safe? Why accept that you just gotta stay home, in your cocoon, and that’s the only safety you will ever get?
Air travel continues to get safer. MIT did a study and the statistics are fascinating to me. Worldwide, the risk of death in airplane accidents has been declining by a factor of 2 every decade. Every decade! Millions of people travel and despite the natural fears of flying, it’s one of the safest things you can ever do, even with the residual fears from 9/11, and mechanical problems, and crazy problems.
Air travel got safer through incremental improvement. I think the NTSB is a gift to the world. The National Transportation Safety Board is that rare government bureaucracy that I think about when I pay my taxes and I am head over heels excited to pay my tax bill for. They take a look at every airplane incident and investigate what went wrong, without blame or prosecution, and then make recommendations for how to make things safer. Whether it’s a weird failure from a mechanical component that needs a new inspection process, or new recommendations for how pilots communicate in stressful situations, they are just always looking at what went wrong to try to figure out ways to make it work better.
And it’s working. Turns out that if you put aside ego and ask how to really fix things, you get better ideas. And when you implement those ideas, you can learn from it, and improve those ideas further, and make things better and better.
We’re doing the opposite with violence in America. We just all have our opinions on what will make things better, shout at each other, and then nothing changes, nothing gets better, and we just shout louder and louder.
It’s worth shouting about. No one should be burying their children, especially not because of some crazy person with a weapon. Why can’t we put aside all our other differences and agree on this one thing: people are needlessly dying.
So, what should we do as a society in response? I sincerely don’t have the answer, but I think as a society we should take a less egotistical approach and a more NTSB approach. I think we should be incremental, and we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.
400 million guns for 330 million people. These are big numbers. This isn’t, even in the best case, going to be solved overnight. We shouldn’t expect that any change we make will lead to zero mass shootings, the problem is too big for that. But can we improve the situation? Can we find ways for there to be only one mass shooting per day? Or one every couple of days? Or for the number to go down?
Not just guns, but not just mental health, either. I get a little frustrated when I read that people want to deflect from guns and say that we have a mental health crisis. Let me generalize only law-makers: why is it that the law-makers who are most likely to defend gun rights and decry mental health challenges are almost to a T the ones who also vote against all mental health support?
I think we need to have a conversation on what we can do as a society to help improve mental health outcomes. There’s a whole host of things we can do, a few that come to my mind immediately:
incentivizing people to become psychiatrists, therapists, and psychologists.
funding mental health programs across the country.
funding outreach services
funding R&D into better medication
funding medication so the people who need it most have access to it
making health care affordable so all people have access
making life more affordable so fewer people need crippling levels of debt
And probably a hundred more if I spent more than 30 seconds writing down only the things that first came to mind.
“But it’s not the role of the government to …” Says who? The Constitution? Well the government is “We, the People” — so the government does whatever we collectively decide to do. So if, we the people decide we’re finally fed up with a 1700s government in the 2000s, we can change it.
The Bible? Au contraire. Read Leviticus and all about how God uses the people collectively to care for the poor and destitute, especially (but not exclusively) through the jubilee. Then go read the minor prophets (you’re familiar with those, right? Since you’re such a Bible scholar?) and how God is fundamentally pissed off over and over again at the people for their collective sins for not taking care of the least. And over and over again, God connects how they treat the poorest and worst off in their society with how God judges their society.
I don’t think 21st century America would fair very well under that scrutiny. And I worry about my own complicity in my society’s sins.
We have collectively sinned against our children, against ourselves, and against God by not taking this seriously. Like when God told Jeremiah to stop praying because their words and their fasts were many but their lack of concern about the things God cares about angered him. (Jeremiah 14:10-12)
I think God cares about children suffering and dying, about poor people being trampled upon, and sick people being cared for. I think that because God says it over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
I don’t know what God is calling you to do specifically to help correct our collective sins. I felt called to foster care. I feel called to lead young men closer to Jesus. I feel called to be a voice calling for action amidst inaction. I feel called to repent of my own sins and failings.
But I think he’s going to call you to something. Be brave. Do it.
Read full post →I just discovered Free Tax USA. I filed with them this weekend.
I have used TurboTax for a while but never really liked it, and hate all the interstitials of marketing screens and animations you have to click through. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was getting an email after inputting all of my information saying that I better hurry because their prices are going up soon.
Like, who does that? Plus Intuit is just a shady company.
So when I discovered I could file federal taxes for free and it’s only $15 to file for state taxes, sign me up. I also feel like it took me a lot less time to input my information because I didn’t have to click through three screens for every single document. And they reminded me that I added insulation to my house and I can get credit for that.
Read full post →It was hard to walk into the humane society and look at all the kitties yesterday, as it brought up so many memories of Lokie who passed away last May. But I have missed having a cat, and after looking at all of the options, we found a beautiful 2 year old girl that we’ve named Ruth.
She met the dog Stanley earlier today, he sniffed, she hissed, he cowered, she smacked him in the face. Now Stanley is worried about why we have a demon in the house. 😆 She’s still getting used to the new situation but we already love how sweet, playful and soft her fur is.
Welcome to the family!
Read full post →I’ve been finding some really cool personal websites that are inspiring me to try to do more with my own site.
First is Henrique Dias. Really dig the clean appearance, and all the content. I also really dig the More section where he posts things like his impossible list of personal goals and accomplishments. Bonus points for the guest book powered by web mentions.
Next is Barry Frost. His main blog entry is a weekly journal entry on his blog. I’ve never met Barry and only know him from these posts, but I really dig these little peeks into someone else’s life. He also posts bookmarks and checkins (like the old Gowalla) fairly regularly which is pretty cool though I only follow the blog.
Next is Aegir which I have posted about before. Every post is a different photo and page style to match.
I don’t know about Aegir, but I know Henrique and Barry both have their own blogging software as the backend running everything. I’ve just been using Wordpress to focus my time less on the tech, but I’d really dig to run a blog on Cloudflare workers or AWS Lambdas. And I also would really dig having a section for different post types such as bookmarks, checkins and photos. 🤔 Maybe I need to write my own blogging engine. Maybe.
Read full post →People talk about having an existential crisis and it is amazing to me how often I feel some version of that, but rarely does it feel like a crisis. More like a little pinch.
I feel like I’m a fairly driven and motivated person (even though I don’t know if I want to be) — I always want to make forward progress. And rarely do I feel like I’m making negative progress, but there are seasons in life where I feel like I’m just standing still. And that makes me feel like I’m wasting my life.
I was telling Alissa about this and that I feel like what am I really accomplishing. Am I just living one day to the next? And she gently and lovingly but firmly rebuked me by reminding me that I’m helping raise two boys and helping them be better men. Okay point taken but is that it?
Well first of all, if that was it, that would be more than enough. That has been the focus of my life’s work for the past 4 years since we started as foster parents and while I’m infinitely aware of all my short-comings in a million different ways, I’m also really good at this. And Alissa and I are really good as a team at this.
And it isn’t all that I’m involved with or doing. I’m treasuring up all the things that I’m doing and just remembering that God is so good.
I think it’s really easy to read other people’s blogs or watch YouTube videos and think — I don’t have the time to build projects with wood like I would like. Or, I’m an okay photographer, but I’m not a really great one like that guy. Or how cool would it be if I was great at cooking, but my 14 year old said my spaghetti sauce this week was good so why isn’t that enough?
Basically, my existential pinch is because I don’t have time for normal people hobbies? I don’t have time to invest in woodworking because instead I’m spending my time working on training materials for this trip I’m leading to Uganda later this summer and I want to equip 31 mzungus how to think about poverty and I’m having an existential difficulty because I also don’t have time to progress on my woodworking backlog?
Brains are weird. One of these will have a lasting (I hope) impact on the lives of the poor and vulnerable, and one of these will be sold at a garage sale for like twenty bucks when I’m dead. And my brain is questioning whether my life has enough meaning because I won’t have another piece of junk my kids have to get rid of when I’m dead.
Okay, brain. Go be weird. I’ll ignore your existential questions until you stop being dumb.
Read full post →Bartholomew, our fiddle-leaf fig that I’ve written about before (yes we named it. It’s such a distinguished plant it deserves a name) has really started to thrive.
It lost a lot of leaves and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make Bart happy. Here’s the routine we’ve used:
We water it on an exact schedule of once a week.
We now have a set watering can that we use that ensures that we cover all the roots and thoroughly water it, but a small enough amount of water that it completely dries out.
We add a splash of fish fertilizer (pictured below) that we found on sale when one of our local gardening businesses went out of business. It smells TERRIBLE.
And then we don’t do anything else. We keep Bart in a spot where he gets lots of morning sunshine, and he’s in front of a heating vent that I’ve pointed right at his pot which I think helps dry the roots out. And he’s thriving! Lots of new leaves, the young leaves are shiny, and we really stopped losing leaves all of the time. Hashtag relief!
Love this post quoting Randy Pausch’s last lecture:
It’s very important to know when you’re in a pissing match, and it’s very important to get out of it as quickly as possible.
Professor Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
I don’t generally think about it in these kinds of terms, but I can’t tell you how many times I find myself “stuck” with someone who won’t budge from an insurmountable obstacle.
Whether’s it’s a work colleague, one of my kids, or someone I’m trying to work with in the community — one of the most clarifying questions I ask in these situations is, “What do I want, really?”
It’s easy to form an adversarial relationship where what I want is to win and for the other person to lose. That’s human nature when you don’t get what you want. You’re not giving me what I want, so I’m not going to give you what you want, nanner nanner nanner.
But rarely do I really want them to lose. And recognizing that neither of us are getting what we want right now enables me the freedom to think outside the box and give something I don’t care about in exchange for something I really, really care about.
Read full post →There’s a hundred things I want to say about this but I don’t have the words. We are fostering again, a wonderful teenage boy. Who knows what the future holds though we hope to do everything we can to help his hopes and dreams.
Parenting has been one of the best and hardest things I have ever done. It’s revealed a million flaws in my own life and my own heart. Pray I can do it. Not by my own strength.
Read full post →Every time I see a post from Aegir in my RSS feed, I make sure to open it in my browser.
Every post is a unique visual style. I love the craft, and photography posts are just wonderful. One of my recent favorites was the post The Yellow Season.
Read full post →Earlier this year, Alissa and I decided we wanted to take a big trip just the two of us for the first time since 2018 when we went to Peru together. With a son off in college and a (for now) empty nest, the world a bit more open since Covid, this fall seemed like the perfect time.
We debated a bunch of different destinations. Hawaii? Greece? Iceland? New Zealand? All sounded great but not quite right, and I threw out: what about Switzerland? I think we both latched onto that idea and it felt just right. Trains and villages and mountains. All things we love.
We flew direct on Lufthansa from Denver to Munich. Then Munich to Zurich, which I didn’t realize was going to just be a 35 minute flight. Haha.
We did not come into this trip with any pre-planned agendas. “Ride trains and look at mountains” was about all we had planned. We booked a hotel in Zurich for one night, and two nights in St. Moritz, beyond that we planned to play it by ear and see where the wind would take us. Here’s where the wind ended up taking us:
Day 1. Zurich. Rest in the hotel from jet lag, and exploration of the old town during the evening.
Day 2. Train ride to St. Moritz, via a quick stop in Chur. Beautiful lakes, spectacular mountains. St. Moritz has a beautiful lake and town.
Day 3. Bernina Express train to and from Tirano, Italy. Viewing the village of Poschiavo from above with the alps in the background might stick with me as one of the most spectacular villages I’ve ever seen.
Day 4. St. Moritz back to Chur for a single night here. I spent most of the 2+ hour train ride in the observation car taking pictures. Spectacular! And since I was taking pictures from a moving train, I had to be fast. The first time landscape photography felt kind of like sports photography! Had some local Chur wine with dinner, so good!
Day 5. Chur back to Zurich, to Bern, to Interlaken. Wow, what a spectacular little town Interlaken is! The mountains around the town remind me so much of when we visited Banff, Canada.
Day 6. Paid the money to see Jungfraujoch, the “top of Europe”. It involves riding a cog-railway train inside a mountain and a spectacular gondola ride into an environment that feels a lot like Hoth in Star Wars.
Day 7. Visited the Matterhorn. Uh. Wow. I thought yesterday was spectacular but this is even better. We took the lift up to the Klein Matterhorn and wow, just wow! We could see all the way to Mount Blanc on the Italian/French border which stretches up 15,774 feet high.
Day 8. A more low-key day. Took the Harderkulm above Interlaken. Then took a several hour cruise on Lake Thun.
Day 9. What better way to spend the day than to cross the entire country by train? Went from Interlaken to Bern to Geneva. Lake Geneva is cool and the town is old and beautiful. Got lunch and then headed from Geneva (the far south west corner of Switzerland, right on the border of France) to Zurich (on the north east side, closer to Germany).
Day 10. Airport and travel home, heart completely full.
If you decide to travel to Switzerland (and you should), we recommend the Swiss Travel Pass. I also used Holafly with an e-sim on my iPhone to get unlimited mobile data to keep me in touch with Instagram. Do it for the gram!
Read full post →A few weeks ago I hopped on a plane and my altimeter on my Watch has not been the same. Either it wouldn’t show a value (just three dashes) or it shows a wildly incorrect one. (off by 2,500-5,000 feet)
A live view of my elevation while hiking was one of the factors for upgrading my watch so this was a bit frustrating. I tried a lot of things on my own, and finally ended up contacting Apple support for the first time in … ever? Even unpairing my watch didn’t do the trick.
Last week I let my watch sleep overnight turned off. In the morning I decided to try something different. I turned my iPhone off, then I turned my Apple Watch on.
That was about a week ago. It’s been correct ever since, even through two additional flights.
Hope this helps someone out there.
Read full post →Yesterday I noticed my Day One streak is 1,200 strong.
I journal every single day. It’s fun to look back and see what I was doing a few years ago.
I have been using Day One for 10 years. It has its problems but it’s been a good app.
I’ve been following the Practical Engineering channel for the past year or two, and it’s got tons of great civil engineering information. Now, there’s a book: Engineering in Plain Sight. I pre-ordered it months ago and it arrived last night and I love it. Lots of accessible descriptions, and wonderful drawings. I got lost in it last night.
I highly recommend it, especially if you have any kids (or adults) on your Christmas list who like legos and building things, I think they’ll love it.
Read full post →I keep meaning to post some photos from my new camera. I would write about how much I love it, and how motivated I have been recently to go out and take pictures. But enough of the yippy yappy, here’s some of my recent favorite pictures. (I hate editing, and I don’t bother with RAW. All these jpegs are straight out of the camera.)
We’re looking at electric vehicles and just the thought of dealing with a car dealer is draining me.
I think Tesla is on the right track for going direct to consumer, but I would never buy a Tesla for a few reasons:
Elon Musk. There was a time I liked and even admired him. How cringe. That changed quite a bit when he called one of the rescue cave divers a pedophile.
I have read too many accounts of poor service from Tesla. Add to it poor quality control.
Tesla’s base model is approaching $50k, which is more than I really want to pay for a car that will just get me from point A to point B.
I might consider a used Tesla which solves, mostly, the first and third issues, if push came to shove, but I’d rather get a different car anyway
I emailed a few dealers and, even over email, I hate dealing with dealers. Most of them are up-charging $5k-$10k above MSRP, and none of the cars I’m looking at are worth as much as 25% more. I’ve found one dealer that isn’t doing that, and has been relatively responsive, and isn’t trying to push me into a phone call to pressure me into buying a car, so that’s probably the dealer I’ll use. But it shouldn’t be this hard to buy a car.
Read full post →Now that I’ve had the S8 a bit longer, it has really grown on me. A few things I really like:
Fast charging. It actually does charge plenty fast, if you have a 20 watt or higher brick. (Which I do, I think from my iPad. This should have been included with the Apple Watch, however)
Beautiful screen. The OLED screen really is spectacular. Most of my watch faces have color back grounds and they look amazing.
Fast switching of Watch faces. I never did this on the S3 because it was just slow, but on the new watch it’s really fast to switch different watch faces. I have one that I use that’s more activity focused, showing my heart rate throughout the day and my rings progress. The next one shows me all the location data from the compass. The live altimeter is really cool (I live at about 5,360 feet). I have about 5 other faces I use to mix things up and they all switch and load quickly enough I do find myself switching throughout the day.
Always on display. Sure, it dims when you’re not actively using it, but being able to glance down and see the time is so important in a watch. I know some people turn off the always on display to increase battery life but this feature alone is why I went S8 instead of SE2.
Read full post →Just got the new Series 8 Apple Watch and have had it for 24 hours. There are plenty of reviews online, so go check those out.
I’m coming from the Series 3 Apple Watch which Apple unceremoniously dropped support for in the newest WatchOS.
I originally got the Apple Watch because I wanted to try out Apple Fitness Plus and until recently, you had to have an Apple Watch to use it.
The Apple Watch is one Apple product I really don’t love. I laughed when I looked at the apps list and saw Mail. Mail on my watch? Not sure I have ever needed or wanted that. Everything that makes an Apple Watch “better” compared to a Garmin seems unnecessary, and it creates too much of a battery drain.
That said, the thing the Apple watch does better than anything, I think, are the rings. There are three of them: stand, activity, and move. (you can customize each of these goals) Stand I don’t really care about and it encourages you to stand for at least 2 minutes out of every hour. People talk about sitting being the new smoking, but I’m not sure 2 minutes is really enough to move the needle. I could lose this ring and not care in the least, it’s really more annoying than helpful.
But I think Apple got the next two rings right: move and activity. Activity minutes counts how many minutes throughout the day that you have an elevated heart rate. The move ring counts how many active calories you burn throughout the day.
Compared to the FitBit I used to have which was obsessed with hitting 10,000 steps a day (a goal I eventually lowered to 7,500) — I like these metrics way more. I can fill these moments with any exercise of my choosing and the Watch will monitor my heart rate and approximate my active calories burned and move my rings accordingly. I often go for 20-30 minute walks, but sometimes I want to go for a hike, or a bike ride, or lift weights, or play gagaball. It doesn’t matter. My watch is… watching (sorry I had to) and tallying up my points accordingly.
I definitely feel like I’m a lot more likely to hit my (self-set) activity and move goals because I can fill my day up with activity that counts towards them, but I can choose whatever activity feels right for me. It was always discouraging to me with my FitBit to hop in bed and realize I had 9,800 steps and would somehow have to find 200 more steps to go. When I’m similarly close on my rings it makes way more sense for me to go for a five minute row on my rowing machine to get those last few activities.
So, Apple really hit the gamification on the head for me. I’m definitely more encouraged to be active with my rings than with anything I’ve had with Garmin or FitBit.
That said, if you gave me an Apple Watch with a simple LCD/e-paper/whatever screen like most of Garmin’s line up, and it only had the sensors necessary to count calories and heart rate, but had a week battery life and (pretty pretty please) made it round instead of square, I would buy it instantly.
All the other features and bright beautiful color screen are fine, but most of the time it just gets in the way. All I care about is a long battery life. I could charge my Garmin once a week and wear it 24/7, and it would track all of my activities and sleep and … that’s all I really wanted to use it for.
That said, the Apple Watch S8 hardware is nice. It’s got a beautiful screen. I still think square watches look dumb, but this one looks less dumb than the S3 because it is just a bit bigger (going from 38mm case to 41mm) which I think allowed them to “flatten” it a bit. I haven’t measured but the S8 on my wrist appears thinner which makes it look slightly less dumb.
There’s an array of new sensors in the S8 that my S3 didn’t have. I have a complication that shows a live view of decibels. As I type this with a house fan running, it says we’re at about 47dB. I was in a quiet room and I farted while looking at my watch and … well let’s just say I have an idea for a new competition in the future.
The sleep tracking is a new feature in WatchOS 9. I didn’t get much sleep last night. I’m not sure what to do with this information. We will see if I keep wearing the watch while I sleep as this information seems like the same thing I used to get with my FitBit and it was never that actionable or terribly interesting, and with the poor battery life, waking up with less than 100% battery means I need to think about it the next day. I will need to experiment and see if charging it while I’m in the shower will be enough to power throughout the day.
I do appreciate the always on display. Apple’s wrist raising detection is way better than FitBit’s, but it’s nice to not have to move my wrist to just glance at the time. It feels ridiculous to write a sentence like that about a watch.
I guess the bottom line of my review: the Watch is great for gamifying fitness, but you could literally leave out every other feature except telling time and as long as that improved the battery life, I would be so much happier. I’m not really sure what to think about having paid $399 for this thing. It certainly delivers a lot of features, but I’d take 10% of the features for 50% of the price and 700% the battery life any day.
Read full post →There’s always so much whining and complaining about things online, I’m going to try to change that with my own little ray of sunshine on my little corner of the internets. These posts will sound like I’m trying to sell you something and I’m not. No affiliate links here. Just a few of AJ’s favorite things.
You see them everywhere, so I’m hardly unique when I write about insulated water bottles. There’s MIIR, and we have some Yeti tumblers, and Hydroflasks, and some S’wells, but my favorite are the Hydroflasks.
I’m a fan of the 32oz wide mouth. Alissa got one for me for my birthday with custom colors of gray and orange, and when I accidentally left it behind in a rental truck, she ordered me a second one.
It’s the little details that I like about this. The lid’s inner seal is depressed just a little bit, enough that if you drop it on the ground, the part that goes in the bottle isn’t going to make contact with the dirt or ground. I also like that it comes with a little rubber “boot” that acts like a built in coaster.
I’ve relegated all my old uninsulated Nalgene bottles (the ones that don’t cause cancer) to the refrigerator. I love cold water, and keeping them in the fridge lets them cool the water off before filling my Hydroflasks.
Read full post →The black and white portrait of the Queen used to announce her death is really beautiful.
I got my new camera (loving it so far!) and this photo of the Queen was a good reminder that black and white is such a great artistic choice as I play with colors, light and composition.
Read full post →We spent the spring and summer trying to get clover to grow in the front yard and it just didn’t quite take the way we had hoped. Tired of having a yard full of weeds and mud, we decided to take a different path and we called a local tree company and they delivered 20 yards of mulch.
I think we might need another 20-35 yards to really get the depth we need to keep weeds at bay, but it’s a start. Last weekend we got some new plants through a friend of ours that is able to order at wholesale prices. We selected native plants that are drought resistant and will hopefully be both beautiful and low maintenance.
I went to Home Depot and got a starter drip irrigation “system” and additional parts and … that’s a lot easier than I really imagined. Now we have each new plant with its own drip water source. Each plant gets 1 gallon per hour, and we just run it a few times a week for a couple hours to ensure the plants have enough moisture to grow and thrive in this crazy September heat.
I’m kicking myself that we didn’t do this sooner. The drip system was shockingly easy to set up, and I just buried all the lines under the mulch so very little digging is required.
Meet Oto
This was one of those things I saw on Instagram that looks cool but not sure if it’s going to work out to be practical. 😅 I originally had it set up in the front yard but I was concerned someone would just steal it, and it didn’t quite have the reach that I was hoping for.
Oto is a wifi watering robot. It comes with an app that lets you customize your watering any way you would like. We are using it in the backyard with our trees to make sure they get established with enough consistent water, but it will water lawns as well and also has support for adding fertilizer and other treatments to the water. It’s a neat thing, but I am always nervous about expensive devices that require a cloud service from the manufacturer. We’ll see if Oto sunsets this service eventually but for now it’s nice to get the trees some consistent water and take at least some things off our todo list.
In the future I think I’d like a few additional fruit trees in the back yard, and we can move Oto to water those.
Read full post →Much has been made the past few years about various faults and failures in utilities across the country. Of course there’s the famous incident from Texas a few years back, and now California is facing grid problems during an unusually hot September.
Many people are pointing out the irony that the same week California is struggling with power, they announced a ban on gas powered cars. That ban is, of course, years away, but that doesn’t stop plenty of pundits from making their comments.
Something else I’ve found interesting lately is the Tesla virtual power plant. The TL;DR is that plenty of Power Wall owners (people who have a big freaking battery in their house) are getting paid to send some of that power back to the grid when needed. $2 per kWh is crazy.
People have this overly simplified model in their mind that the whole country is connected with a big wire, and you can add or remove power as needed. That’s sort of how it works, but as you could expect, it’s way more complicated than that.
One of the biggest issues is that wires can’t carry an unlimited amount of electricity. Electricity moving through wires creates heat. More electricity means more heat. So even when power grids are interconnected, where they are interconnected matters a whole lot, and how much power can go through that interconnection is limited by the size of the interconnection. If you need a lot of power in Los Angeles, having a bunch of extra hydro-electric power from Oregon available might not do you any good if there’s not enough carrying capacity from point-A to point-B.
The other issue is that it takes time to add capacity to the grid. It doesn’t take any time at all for me to use that capacity. The dryer and air-conditioner are the two largest consumers of electricity in my house. I can turn both on at the same time with hardly a thought. If everyone does at approximately the same time (such as coming home from work), people working at power plants have to fire up the generators and that takes time.
Add this up and when people use electricity is almost as important as how much is used. Air-conditioning is hard because it is extremely power hungry, and most of the demand is going to follow the sun heating the earth up, so a lot of people will want to use a lot of power, all at the same time. Or, a lot of people get home from work to a house that has been heated by the sun all day, turn their air-conditioning on, and now the grid has a problem. (this is also a problem because most people are getting home from work about the same time that solar power is waning as the sun is starting to go down)
There are a lot of schemes to help with this. Our utility provider Xcel is introducing time of use pricing, which uses meters that track when you use power as well as how much, and you get charged more money when you use power when the grid is already close to max-use. This is an economic incentive to encourage you to dry your clothes at off-peak times when the grid is less maxed out.
The other thing that you could do that’s really interesting to me is to do some thermal shifting. If you normally set your A/C to cool to 75º at 6pm, you could set it to cool to 70º at like 2pm. You might use more electricity in total this way, but you’re potentially shifting your power use to when the grid has less demand and more renewable power available (because of solar). Your house can “store” that cool air until you get home, and when you arrive at home from work, the house is already cool and comfortable and you don’t use any grid capacity at 6pm when the grid is at its max.
But what’s really interesting to me is the Tesla Virtual Power Plant when it comes to electric cars. As far as I can see, the Tesla power plant only uses the stationary Power Walls installed in customer’s homes. But what major battery capacity has been coming online the past 10 years or so? Electric cars. Many of these electric cars have 300+ miles range. What if on the days that you don’t need to go somewhere 300 miles away, you could trade some of what’s stored in your batteries for a free payout to help the grid out?
What if you could help your neighbors out, power their A/C, and make like $30-$60 in the process? And the only thing you’d be giving up is 150 miles range for the evening?
I assume the Tesla Virtual Power Plant only covers Power Walls because using cars to power the grid requires a bit of extra hardware. The higher trim F-150 Lightnings actually advertise being able to connect the truck to your house and using it as a battery backup for “2-3 days” for most average sized houses. That’s crazy! And there’s no reason you couldn’t do the same thing with that equipment that Power Wall owners are doing for a “virtual power plant”.
This has a lot of really interesting properties. Decentralizing power means the grid doesn’t have to be upgraded as much, which saves a ton of money. It also means you can operate fewer generators and use those generators within their optimal usage range. But grids are also not perfectly uniform either. Maybe one neighborhood has more people working from home, or more solar, or an electrical problem. You can imagine the grid putting some of those distributed batteries to work to help even out differences and make the grid more intelligent.
If we’re going to put very large batteries in most garages over the course of the next 20 years, there’s a lot of interesting things you can do with that, if you have the right hardware. But honestly, even if you can’t feed power from the cars back to the grid, there’s still a lot that makes sense. Let your car charge when the grid has excess capacity (such as late at night when most people are asleep and not running much A/C, or in the middle of the day when solar is at its peak) and don’t charge your car when you need to run A/C.
I guess I just don’t see the humor in what the pundits are saying. Electric cars don’t automatically mean the end of the California grid, or anybody’s grid. In fact, they could be a really helpful tool in making the grid a lot more stable and resilient.
Read full post →I got some new AirPods Pro a couple weeks back when they were at sale. (undoubtedly on sale to clear out some inventory before a new version arrives) I had tried out the AirPods Max in the Apple Store and was really impressed by the noise cancellation but I didn’t want anything so ostentatious or as expensive.
I was apprehensive because I never loved my original AirPods. They never switched as seamlessly as I would have liked between devices and I had a fair number of issues with audio cutting out. I always preferred the original wired ear buds, except that Apple removed the headphone jack from their phones so I had to carry a lightning version for my phone and headphone version for my laptop.
AirPods Pro are what the original AirPods should have been. Truly seamless switching between devices. And I think the head tracking/spatial audio feature is a bit of a gimmick, there were several times I have had to stop and make sure that I was playing audio through my headphones the tracking is that good.
The noise cancellation has been really great.
Overall just really happy with these.
Read full post →I keep coming back, over and over again, to the recently released pictures of the Carina Nebula. Simply spectacular. It’s hard to imagine this beauty exists “out there” in the depths of space.
Read full post →Joey Cofone has a free time menu that he uses to help narrow his focus during his free time.
I love this idea and am going to attempt my own version of it. Here’s my current free time menu:
Just got back from my last physical therapy appointment. Been feeling so much better since I started going. I’m always impressed at their knowledge of biomechanics.
They had me ring a bell. I laughed because it’s not like I beat cancer but I am glad to be back in a spot where my leg doesn’t hurt anymore.
Read full post →Finally produced enough power to run our electric meter backwards!
I was super curious how this would show up. I was hoping it would show a negative sign, but instead it just counts down from 99999.
