Off On A Tangent

Jaime seems very mechanically inclined.  He really doesn’t get this from me, but I suppose it could come from either of his grandfathers, or his mother, who is very craft-y.  From the earliest ages, he always thought the vacuum cleaner was the best toy in the house.  He likes to take it apart and study all it’s internal parts.  He loves anything with buttons and knobs and seems to know intuitively which gadgets should be push, which should be rotated, which pulled, and which flipped.  We went out to dinner last night (at the wonderful, Timothy Patrick’s restaurant), and he spent most of the time being enamored with the cigarette machine.

This morning, we found he child proof bottle caps are no longer safe, as he opened the baby benadryl bottle and drank and dumped out the contents.  Fortunately, he didn’t seem to ingest enough to have any noticeable effects.  But those caps are tough to open, requiring one to press them down fairly hard and turn them at the same time.  I did not think he could do it, but he did.

This weekend we tackled many projects around the house - I put up a new high shelf in the computer room so that we could eliminate one of the shelves that is in Jaime’s reach.  I fixed a kitchen cupboard safety protector (keeps Jaime from being able to open the cupboard under the sink).  I started work to fix the wall in our bathroom shower, killing the mold, scraping off the paint and decrepit drywall, and layering on the spackle to rebuild the drywall.  I didn’t get to painting it yet because it took a while to dry and I have to work around Jaime’s sleeping schedule.  there is also some ceiling drywall in the garage that is starting to come down that I wanted to secure again.  This turned out to be pretty difficult since it’s very heavy, and getting one screw in does no good as it just rips through whatever holding power a single screw can exert on the drywall.  So I had Vivi with a long board holding the ceiling up while I put in several screws.  This worked for some sections, but it was hard, painful work and we didn’t get very far.  I’m hoping we can get Vivi’s father to come over and help us finish the job.

Vivi did a lot of work on the front gardens and the walkway.  She severely pruned back the bushes, weeded the front garden, cut away all the grass growing over the walkway, and laid down some nice red mulch to prevent new weeds from growing back.  While we were out there, we discovered the back part of our roof is in dire need of being replaced.  Fortunately, we have had no obvious signs of water coming in the house, but it can’t be too far off!  Scratch another couple thousand out of our non-existent budget….

I’ve started reading John Dewey’s “Philosophy of Education”, and although I’ve only just begun, what a brilliant writer he is (I’ve never read anything before, by him).   In mere few introductory pages, he has said more concisely and accurately, more insightfully, and with greater awareness of the complexities of the issues all that Richard Dawkins seems to want to say in “The God Delusion”.  I can’t believe I bought that book, but I felt that if I was going to continue to criticize Harris and Dawkins for their war on religion, I suppose I should read their books (my knowledge of Dawkins’ and Harris’ positions and aims currently comes from their websites and their on-line writings, and even a few videos of interviews).   It is saddening and maddening that our public discourse is so dominated by watered-down versions of real thinking, and dressed up in as divisive and insulting a manner as possible in order to attract attention.  I wonder what people get out of reading these books?  Can they really say they learned something from “The God Delusion” that they didn’t already know or think?  Because I very much doubt that many people with devout beliefs would voluntarily pick the book up (I mean, the very title reaches out to insult them, why would they read it?).  And if you’re not learning something from a book you read, what’s the point?  Ego stroking?  (Ha!  Look!  I was right!)

Last week, we had snow on the ground. About 50 miles south of here, they got a foot of snow. Yesterday and Saturday we had bright sunshine and 80-degree weather. Today is the same. Felt like Florida this morning. We filled up Jaime’s kiddie pool with water on the deck yesterday and let him play naked in it, it was so warm. Who needs Spring? We’ve gone straight from winter to summer. It was the most beautiful weekend I can remember in a long long time. Both days perfectly bright and sunny, not too hot, not humid. So naturally, Vivi, Jaime, and myself had to come down with head-colds. Again. Seems we’ve been sick a lot this winter. We must not be eating right or something - I have never had so many illnesses in a few months time since just before my tonsils were removed.

Vivi and I both won our chess games last night - a very rare occurrence. Mine was particularly sweet since it was against the same opponent I lost to last week, and it was a very decisive victory, resulting in mate on move 20. Vivi played a mother of a very strong 5-year-old chess player - she is trying her best to keep up with him (not succeeding, naturally, those pesky 5-year-olds are tough!).

Meanwhile, Jaime has been in a great mood lately, and is talking up a storm. Every day, he makes Vivi call me at work so he can tell me how his day is going. So far, his days go like this:

Jaime: Dada Dada Dada Dada Dada Dada

Dada: Hi Jaime!

Jaime: Hiya!

Dada: How are you?

Jaime: *Kiss*

Dada: Ah…

Jaime: Itsa Cars!

Dada: Yes, Lot’s of cars!

Jaime: Buh-bye Dada!

Dada: Ciao, Jaime!

Or some variation on the theme of Dada, Hi, Cars, Ciao! He is SUCH a cutie.

Well, Vivi finally did it - she took Jaime for a haircut. He loved it, of course. Socializing! Pretty girls to flirt with! Mechanical doo-dads that buzz and whirr! All things right up his alley. He looks like a boy for the first time in his life (everyone always calls him “her” at first). He seems very pleased with his new doo, and so is mommy and grandma. Daddy misses the curls though. He’s a little boy now, whereas before he was just so damn cute.

He’s learned to spin himself silly too. He really likes spinning round and round, and then stumbling around like a drunken old man. Whacks his head pretty hard against things in this state, but apparently that’s part of the fun. He does insist that music be playing when he does this though, and he’ll get one of his toys and turn it on himself to provide it. He’s also begun speaking in phrases and multi-word communications. Things like “and this?” “and this?” “of course”, “What’s this?”, “Daddy bye-bye”, “Mama tuta” (mommy sleeping), and more. He still has his own words for some things - birds are “Ma’m” (best I can spell it, used to be more like “pa’m”), and horses are “aji”. Cars have become all plural “cars”. Most animals are named for the noises they make (”woof-woof”, “ow” for meow, snorting for pigs, “booo” for cows).

I guess the people have gotten tired of talking about the future and oil peaking and all that, as no one has made any comments to me about it for a long while. Oh well, I think maybe the shit has to start hitting the fan for people to take it seriously. I just hope people are willing to move some of their money out of the markets before then.

I’m working from home these days as my car registration expired a few days ago - a not-so-friendly cop informed me of that fact. I hadn’t noticed, and both Vivi and I missed the letter that came about it. So, I am working from home until my car is legal again - which will be a week or two from what the on-line site said would be how long it takes them to mail me the registration.

I’ve been reading the 2004 book The End Of Oil and it’s made some interesting reading. It’s amazing how much is changed in just 3 years actually. The author does a good job closing the book on conventional oil - it’s a done deal. First comes the peak of light, sweet crude oil (that may have happened in the late 90’s). Then comes peak of light, sweet crude plus condensate. Then peak of all conventional crude plus condensate (possibly 2005 was the peak - we won’t know till a few more years go by most likely), then peak of all liquids will come (includes liquid natural gas’s), then peak of all oil, conventional and unconventional (ie, tar sands, oil shale, etc may have already peaked too because unconventional oil is so hard to produce in quantity), then peak of natural gas (north america has peaked, asia still has a lot left, but a “lot” may mean til 2015-20 range, and it’s hugely expensive to liquify natural gas to ship it over seas), and then peak coal (some say it has no more than 20 years left before peak, other say peak was in 1998 because if you look at peak coal in terms of energy content then we have yet to surpass 1998’s harvest of coal). The 3-year-old book though is behind the times on coal, and he throws out the old number of 200 years of coal reserves. This is before world coal reserve estimates were updated and down-graded substantially.

Natural gas is going to be huge in the next decade. Unfortunately, it will always be expensive here, due to the shipping costs, and it will be snapped up eagerly by every sector of industry, because it is so useful for nearly any task - electricity generation, hydrogen extraction (used to make tar sands into real oil, for example), and can even be turned into gasoline fairly easily. And as oil declines, it’s only going to get more expensive, and we’re going to run through our reserves of natural gas very quickly. And possibly the worst aspect of it is that when a natural gas well goes into decline, it is steep, and usually completely dry in just 3-4 years. Whereas an oil well can continue producing less and less for decades. This means if we fool ourselves into thinking “well, oil is done, coal is declining, but gas - gas will go on forever!” (which seems to be our modus operandus), then we’ll be in for a tough time when gas starts to fizzle out, cause it’ll be high one year, and 3 years later, we’ll have lost 50% of it, and that crash will be ruinous.

Today the oil drum has a good article about Thermal Depolymerization and the hype from the Discover magazine article from 2003. It follows up on the story about how a small company was going to generate $15/barrel oil from wastes such as turkey carcasses and car tires. As it turns out, they can’t produce the oil for less than $80/barrel. And as the oil drum author astutely points out, so many cost estimates for alternative energies are based on the current cost of oil (as all these solutions generally require a lot of manufacturing, which is energy and fuel intensive, so the current cost of oil is one of their costs). At $20/barrel, the cost to depolymerize turkey carcasses is one thing. At $60/barrel of oil, it’s something else. Guess what turkey gas will cost when oil costs $80/barrel? More than the current estimate of $80/barrel, I bet. And though it may seem like eventually the two costs must cross, that is not necessarily the case, as it matters what the overall EROI of the process is. Part of the reason for the $15/barrel original estimate was based on the idea that they could get waste products for free. But that means, their costs weren’t reflecting their energy inputs (their turkeys represented a fair amount of energy input to raise and feed and transport them). As energy costs increase, we get closer to correctly matching cost inputs with energy inputs, and if a new processes EROI is lower than oil’s, then it will always remain more expensive than oil. Well, maybe an over-statement there, but the fundamental point is sound, and it’s one most people don’t think about. As oil prices go up, the cost to create solar cells goes up too, and the cost of manufacturing wind turbines. If we don’t start this manufacturing process while oil is still cheap enough to do so, then we may miss the chance to do it.