Wax your chin?

I have never heard of a punishment like this. Run down the street drunk and naked in the snow I remember, but this poor guy is gone over the top. John you are a true spirit.

Just walked to the store to buy some pickles and got a picture of Mount Anthony which is the mountain right in Bennington, VT.

Solar powered house I built.

My boss and I built this house last year. It's a "green" home that is completely off the electrical grid. You can't see the PV panels and solar hot water heating tubes in this picture because I took it before they were installed. I will try to get some pictures of the finished job sometime soon, I forgot my camera last time I was up there and it's about 40 minutes from my house. We used a lot of earth friendly products in the construction process and the house stays very warm in the winter and very pleasantly cool in the hottest part of summer. The owners are wonderful people and good friends now. We hope to keep building Green homes in the future, Vermont is a great place to do it. Below are more pictures from the job.

Setting up the solar hotwater piping, the cabling for the PV panels, and the various wires for the upstairs.

Solar tubes are free lighting and although you can't read a book with one you won't trip over the dog walking into the den to grab a book!

Those are 3 of the 5 solar tubes that light the back rooms of the house where no windows can go. The concrete behind the blue foam is about 2 feet thick. Off to the left and higher is the stainless steel triple walled high efficiency stove pipe we used.

The whole foundation is now buried up to where you see blue foam insulation. This earth burming technique saves tons of energy due to the earth having a constant thermal energy. Once they heat up the massive amount of concrete that holds back all of the soil it stays warm for much longer than a conventional house would.

We used a cistern to retain well water nearer the house than the well. During the day when there is more solar energy than can be used to charge the batteries and operate the house the well pump fills up the cistern, then when the house needs water a higher efficiency DC pump brings the water in from the cistern. It works very well.

The kitchen area with the big Amish made cast iron stove on the left. You can also see 2 passive solar lighting systems we installed over the sink / gas stove area. I installed CFLs throughout the entire house.

That's me finishing off one of the 5 sliding doors that allow passive solar heat from the south facing building to warm the interior of the house.

The batteries showed up towards the end of the job. These plus about 10 more will hold the energy that the PV panels generate. As soon as I can I will get more pictures of all the finished installed stuff. The coolest area is the utility room where the power inverters and the hot water system, the timers and service panel are all installed, like I said more pics soon.

The most evil of them all. Bottled water. When I was a kid we drank tap water. We would make cool-aid with it, it would turn into ice for our sodas, we used it to bathe and brush and clean, to make our hot chocolate and our iced tea. I used tap water to make freezies and then sell them in my front yard for 25c. There was a lesson in moderm economics flowing from my municipal water plant and it taught me the capitalist spirit. Someone else learned that if you tell people their water is bad you can sell them water for more than you can sell them oil. They learned that if you tell people this water is from far off exotic places you will never be able to see because you spend all your money on water, they will buy even more water! Our world is in jeopardy and it is a product like this, the most abundant resource on Earth, monopolized by the elite, sold at inflated costs to the middle class, and exploited from the countries of the ultra poor, that rank number 1 on the most evil commercial products list. I bought this water today to make a statement, and I intend to use this bottle for my drinking water from my tap for as long as I possibly can to atone for my ecological sin. Stop buying water in a bottle, I will too, I promise.

Who doesn't love a nice cheap bottle of wine? This product has done more to thwart natural selection by making weird and inferior people seem super sexy for the breading and making of more weirdos it is actually called the Anti-Darwin potion in some circles. My guitar play is so mediocre I use this as a practice aid to make my playing seem more productive. Other than that it's not recomended that you inbibe in the Pinot without a wingman or winglady present to stop you from shmoozing the bigger ladies.

Ah, Frito Lay knows my dipping styles. A milk product that has a non-perishable shelf life of 50 years? Sounds like we got a winner here. This is going to be one of those essentials you are going to need in the bugout bag when the apocolypse hits and you need to hunker down in your makeshift bomb shelter. This has no nutritional value, it actually falls somewhere between a food product and a rodent poison. But it is dang tasty, at thats what America needs, tastiness.

Dinner

This product tastes great, in fact, it is my most desirable snack cracker. It's baked, but still has the guts to maintain a high level of MSG. There is no lacking of the fats either, this baby has Saturated, Trans, Polyunsaturated, and Mono unsaturated. That there covers the fat bases, but I bet we can hit a grand slam with this product. 13% of your daily allowance of sodium, in 12 crackers...Holy bat guano, that's the highest salt content value this side of Mormon country. Nabisco hit one out of the park when they made this beauty of an overindulgent anorexia weapon.

We need reinforcements.

I'm going to talk about the war which is rare for me to do. It warrants me pointing out the human value just in case people miss the part that deals with this article from CNN.com about redeployments and the men and women that have to deal with injury and hard knocks just to get shitty health care after the fact. War sucks, its like the highest suck of all the sucks, other than immanent doom from giant meteor killing us all suck, war is like neighbors with all kinds of meteors.

But not paying attention doesn't make the malfeasance fair or decent. We all remember a few weird vets who would wander around town and cause generally uncomfortable experiences from the Vietnam era. Well imagine 300,000 American veterans who are all impacted by long and sometimes multiple deployments in harsh conditions. Consider the fact that the military turn over rate is creating a lot of sick people, churn causes more people to be affected by PTSD and such than just your deployment level, those people are replaced, if they weren't they would go crazy.

The world needs our help, not our harm. Bring my friends, our soldiers, our heros home. NOW!

Do you help the World?

Today I found a way to help that has evaded me for a very long time. Now, don't take this the wrong way, but there have been times where I would walk by a homeless person and when asked for money, I didn't give any even though I had money to give. Why would anyone do that? Well, my logic was that this person asking me for money appears to be able bodied enough for work yet has no job, and if I give them money they will waste it on drugs and booze.

That is no longer a problem because the site I talk about just below this post has turned me onto a new form of charity. Micro financier Loan Repayment which seems like a system that just works. I have money to give, but no one to take it from me that I trust to use it for the betterment of themselves or others. Where do I turn to? KIVA is the solution. They will take your seed money and hook you up with an aspiring business owner who needs to expand, or a shoe saleswoman who needs to stock an inventory. The repayment rate is upwards of 98% which can be higher than some U.S. financial institutions.

Check out the whole thing in full detail at Kiva.org or better yet, hop over to Brotherhood 2.0 and watch John explain it better than I can.

Helping these people in impoverished countries helps the world as a whole more than passing a few coins to a bum to drink away the pain of hardship. If you want to help people in your community, try jumping over to Food Not Bombs and join their fight for peace and a full belly for everyone.

Let's talk Video log sites. I have been reading and watching a site called Brotherhood 2.0 for the better part of this year and let me tell you it is one of the most fun places I have ever been to on the internet. Hank and John Green are brothers who have given up on text based communication for 1 year, each day one or the other posts a video to youtube and they alternate day after day. They are witty, and zanny; wacky and hair brainy. They exhibit the style of the Marx brothers, with a dash of Dilbert. Join them and their crazy project at the link above, or see the great Earth friendly things Hank is doing over at EcoGeek.

Helen Hunt is awesome.

Would you jump from a space ship?

They want to make a suit that allows you to space dive from 120,000 feet. Righteous.

Some guy said:
"There's also the intriguing possibility that, should your chute fail to open, you'll hit the ground at around twice the speed of sound. If Jackson Pollock was still alive, surely he'd be salivating at the artistic possibilities." -Rob

Hahaha

Under the bridge down by the river after a rain storm.

Where the highway to Hell starts.

I am really depressed in this picture. :p

Ido or Idon't

Let's talk Iphone folks. 8 hours of talk time, touch screen, high resolution 3.5 display, mind blowing. Or is it? Let me preface this by saying this, Steve Jobs is very good at being the guy who yells loudest with the product in his hand that requires no hassle. He did it with the Apple 2, he did it again with the Macintosh, again with the Ipod/Itunes, and he is holding the next item up above. Is he a genius? Hell, maybe. He's no worse off in the brains department than say Bill Gates, however, there is only room for one "World's Richest Human" and that title went to mister quantity. I admire Steve for his dedication to all things simple, but that is his Achilles heel also, simplicity means I can't change my Ipod battery. It also means Apple will suffer market share loss for principal alone. I wish Iphone huge success and I wish Steve would change that awful turtle neck.

My new hat.

It's about 95 degrees here right now which sucks, but I got myself a new guinness hat which rocks.

This is down the street from my house, that giant spire is called the Bennington Battle Monument, it commemorates a battle that was won by militias against the British, but the catch is the battle took place like 20 miles away in New York, where there is another smaller monument. Silly I know, anyways it is 360 feet tall and proportionally similar to the Washington Monument.

My landlords are an older couple and the Mrs. does a lot of gardening, this just one of the beds I like.

These were the best of times?

Web Browsers

It's high time we take a look at web browsers.  I recently started to test out Apple Computer's new offering of Safari within Windows.  Apparently all is well other than the Windows OS version which has inherent security flaws which,  I must admit Apple has done a stellar job in securing their baby.  Since it came out there have been a dozen fixes and not to be brushed aside I personally think Safari has the claws to go long term.

You may be nervous or hesitant because of change but I assure you with a bit of time, and some good old fashioned American guff,  you can switch to a new web browser too.  However I am still in testing mode and until I go die hard critical mass I still advise anyone I know to use Firefox.

The bridge near my house.

This is Tayler and I at the boat harbor in Sarasota, Florida I would guess around 2004 late summer. She loved the waitress, and as always they just adored her.

I believe the story behind this was that a photographer at a wedding Tayler was attending saw her eating this strawberry and asked to photograph her and this is the resulting pose. Sickeningly photogenic she is.

My precocious young daughter Tayler coloring in a book. It was hot this day so she is a little miserable from the heat. :)

Virtual Construction Job Tour

Here is a small tour of a building I helped to build.

We built this garage over the last few months.

Heading into the garage.

Inside the garage.

Heading upstairs.

This is the second floor facing out.

Second floor heading upstairs.

The third floor perch, I did the banister you see with the clamps. It was a cool project and the people we built for have become good friends, so thanks for the opportunity Joe, Christine and Ella!

Poetry

There lays not one for who we jest
but one of us is thus the quest
of overwhelming love of fuss
there lies a one of us who's thus.

Tayler doing what she does best, concentrating on the television. 6-10-07 :)

Hahahahahaha what truth is there greater?

My sister and her boyfriend grow fresh herbs and veggies in these boxes each year. I will try to get a picture of the goodies when they start to overwhlem us.

This is Henry's meat market where I get my food from. They co-op with local produce and dairy farmers so I get fresh local stuff and I can walk there from my apartment. Carbon cost zero.

This is one of my favorite pictures of Tayler. She was about 4 years old here, the picture was from the summer of 2003.

Ahhh, my day off. I took this picture at about 11:00 from my bedroom window. That is one of the smaller peaks around Bennington.

I took this picture in Jemez National Park in New Mexico in 2004. There was a hot spring flowing to the left of what you see here.

My guitars and amp.

I saw this car on the highway driving to a camping trip with my friend Matt about 2 years ago, I always thought it was a cool car.

This was on my way home from the deli after work today. That river is the "Roaring Branch".

Opera singer

I seriously cried when I saw these.

Singer 1
Singer 2

You will not regret watching these videos.

Just got home to Bennington and thought I would post a picture of my back yard, thats Mr. Squirrel eating cracked corn.

This was Tayler's first day of riding lessons, I think she was a bit nervous.

I took Tayler down to Brownie's ice cream stand, she has a spoon in her mouth.

This was on the pier in Wilson looking East over Lake Ontario at about 9am.

My sister Susan's son Conner is always happy it seems.

Conner under the coffee table.

My mother Eileen and her grandson hanging out.

Flowers near the elementary school in Wilson.

Tayler brushing her training horse Teak.

Tayler outside of Wilson library on her bike.

Tayler and Teak first day.

Conner the Gerber baby.

Conner loves my camera.