Metropolitan Rural

So, I’ve been thinking more and more lately about the idea of an electric car or NEV.  I posted some details a few posts back on Proposition M.  I’m seriously thinking about taking a trip down to Farmington sometime in January just to try and test drive a model or two to see how they are.  For me, it will require some planning as I would need to get some electric run to my garage again so I would have a place to store and charge the vehicle.  That would also likely need a new garage door as our current one is not in the shape to handle going up and down much more.

I was even thinking it might be a fun road trip for a handful of people to make.  Plus, that could really show some support of the idea to whoever it is that runs this business down there.  I feel like there is truly a pent up demand for an affordable commuting vehicle for those of us who don’t drive a lot.  I did the math on my daily commute, and came up with less than 3,000 miles per year.  It is so NOT worth my money to buy some $20k to $30k car to drive that few of miles every year.

With all this being in my head, a headline last night on Slashdot caught my attention (Bay Area to Install Electric Vehicle Grid).  Readig that story, a thought hit me.  Wouldn’t it be cool if there were outlets available in your everyday parking meter?  A quick Google search turned up several links to patents on various aspects of the idea.  But the reality of the situation is surely on the verge.  If an area the size of the SF Bay area has a billion dollar infrastructure in place that allows for you to pay for charging your car, then you extend the range of usefulness immensely.  In my little bit of travels I’ve seen parking meters that take credit cards and even a single unit for 2 spots.  These are so much more complex than your grandfathers parking meter.  There is obviously some circuitry and electronics going on in the industry.  How much more effort is it to attach a retractable power cord and apply some software that only turns it on if you pay extra for the service.  Heck, if you are paying with a credit card, then you only charge based on the actual electric usage as well.

Running in for a 30 minute meeting?  Top off your batteries while you’re there!

Of course, there will be vandalism and people cutting and taking cords and what not, but that’s no reason to let a few bad apples spoil it for the rest of us.

Now, next step, let’s make that electricity more renewable as well.  No since in cutting back on gas for electric if we have to burn coal or natural gas to get the electricity.  And heck, don’t forget to come up with some better batteries.  If we’re going to use batteries to store our electricity we don’t need to be relying on third world countries in a constant state of war for the materials for those batteries either (check out this NPR report for more on that issue).

So… who wants to make a road trip?

Two weeks ago I was standing in a conference center in Scottsdale, AZ.  I was with a good friend and business partner trying to hock our new business service to potential clients.  Things went really well and we’ve had a lot of follow-up and planning going on since.  Between that and trying to catch up with the new class I’m teaching, these past 2 weeks have been extremely busy.   I finally feel like I’m caught up at this point and wanted to share a few thoughts that have gone on with me the last several days.

1. I was really impressed on Friday night when we stopped by our local PetSmart to pick up some bedding for our guinnea pig.  Parked right next to us was a shiny, black Ford Escape Hybrid.  This was a car my wife and I had considered last year when we bought our new one.  It gets an EPA estimated 34 MPG in the CITY!  That’s right, 34 MPG In the city for a small SUV, that’s very impressive.  Still, we don’t drive enough to really justify the 10 grand extra that would have cost us.  What impressed me most was the license plate.  It read, “City of St. Louis, Director of Public Safety.”  Yep, a city vehicle.  And for an office that’s undoubtedly putting a lot of city miles on it.  Very smart decision and good use of my tax dollars.
2. Over the weekend I heard that Metro had finally announced their rate increases for next year.  My monthly pass will be going from $60 to $68.   Still not bad I guess.  My only problem still is the possibility that my express route could get canceled come spring.  That would mean my 35 minute trip to and from work would now become nearly an hour (if everything is on time).  That extra 25 minutes each way everyday makes me not want to use Metro.  I mean, I live about 5 miles from work, it shouldn’t take me an hour to get there, I could nearly walk that far in that amount of time!  So, I’m still thinking of options for me and waiting for the official announcement, but look for an extra car on the road for morning commutes come spring.
3. On Saturday I read a note on Mayor Slay’s website (he calls it a blog, but it hardly is considering there are no comments allowed) encouraging Metro to work out a deal to allow their system to be integrated with Google Maps.  I too would agree this is a great thing.  With my business I’ve started, I’ve got a cell phone with a data plan and built in GPS.  Google Maps has been great to have on my cell phone to look up directions.  To have easy access through there to bus routes and times would be awesome.

So, things have been busy, the holidays are upon us, and the boy is at the airport now on his way to visit his father for 10 days over Thanksgiving.  I’ve got lots of cleaning and organizing to do around the house so we can set up a Christmas tree in a couple of weeks and so I can turn our front “junk” room into a home office over the holiday.

We finally finished getting garden and plants taken care of this past weekend.  There is still one blueberry bush we want to plant, but we haven’t figured out where that is going  yet.  I’ll never know how we managed to fit watermelon, beans, peas, lettuce, peppers, tomatoes and cucumber into a 10′ x 12′ garden so don’t ask. 

We’ve also got a good size planter where we have the herbs.  The cilantro is already taking over and blocking out the sun, so we will need to start using some of it soon.

Personally, I’m just hoping we get a few things out of the gardent his year.  I’m not really looking for a bumper crop in any sense of the word.  I figure that by planting a small amount of a lot of things we might just figure out what will grow well enough we want to plant more of it next year.

We did use a technique we heard described as “Black Gold Agriculture” when planting our garden.  The technical term is Terra Preta.  Basically we ground up a back bag of real hardwood, lump charcoal and tilled it in with the soil.  It’s supposed to help hold the nutrients in for a very long time.  That’s good, because we had a pretty good balance and very good looking soil where we planted (meaning almost no clay in there).

Now we just need to get that rain barrel ordered.  Of course, after that arrives I’m sure we’ll start the drought season.

This weekend was the first mowing of the yard with the new manual push-reel mower.  It was a wonderful experience!  Most of our grass is dense, thick Zoysia that works very well with this type of mower.  I was even able to mow the entire back yard while I was grilling bratwursts for dinner, and nothing burned. 

From my own experience, here’s what I like about the new mower:

• It’s quiet, I could mow and still talk with my wife and son without yelling.  Plus, they could be in the yard and not be drowned out by noise.
• Safety, the wife and kid were able to be outside and not worry about flying debris from the mower.
• Smell, it was so nice to NOT smell like gasoline when I got done mowing
• Ease, I expected a rough workout with the mower, but I was pleasantly surprised that it really wasn’t all that bad.  Sure, it took a few more passes in some spots than the gas mower would have, but it’s so much lighter and easier to manuver that I really felt about the same when all was said and done.
• Convenience, being able to easily start and stop mowing let me do other things and take care of the yard in between checking on the food.
• Quality, the yard looks very nice after the mowing.  Everything I’ve read about reel mowers is that they provide a much better cut of the grass.  It’s often compared with scissors.  For a bit of proof to the quality, stop by your local golf course.  The golf community spends more money on research for grass than any group in the world, and nearly every golf course you see will be using a reel mower (though they are mainly pulled behind a large tractor to mow twelve foot plus paths). 

To top it all off, I know I’m not having to buy and use gas just to cut my grass.  Granted, I’ve only used a couple gallons a year for this yard, but that’s still a waste for such a silly thing as a bunch of grass.

Do you get sinking feeling every time you pull into the gas station to fill up?  If so, I’ve developed a fool proof solution to help you save some money.

STOP DRIVING SO MUCH!!!

Oh sure, you might not like my solution, but it’s guaranteed to work, 100% of the time.  I would offer a money back guarantee, but I’m not charging you for my advice.

I read the other day that Presidential candidate John McCain was going to propose a holiday on the gas tax for the summer driving season to give US consumers a relief.  Great, just what we need, another excuse to use more gas because it’s not so expensive.

You see, economics works from 2 angles called Supply and Demand.  If the suppliers of gasoline can continue to reap large profits by raising prices, they should be not only allowed, but expected to raise prices.  Honestly, if you ran a business and knew you would make more profit by simply raising prices you would too. 

If, on the other hand, the Demand becomes too inelastic (meaning demand falls enough when the prices is raised that the Supplier makes less revenue and thus less profit) they will stop raising prices and lower them in order to make more money.  Yet, as much as I hear people complain about gas prices, few people are changing their behavior around it.  I don’t hear those people talking about moving closer to work, cutting back on the kids activities, taking fewer driving vacations or even going out to eat less.  Instead, they’d rather complain and ask the government to fix it so they can continue on their merry way.

High gas prices excite me personally.  I just wonder how much farther we’ll go before people finally get the idea and conserve gas.  How much higher before alternative fuel cars like fuel cells, hybrids or even electric start to make financial sense for the masses?

Yesterday morning while half asleep and not ready to roll out of bed, I heard this story on NPR about a teenage girl in Maine who is taking on the challenge of Global Warming.  It’s not what you think though.  Her website, Ponder the Maunder, grew out of an honors class assignment in high school.  She did some pretty extensive  research to pull together some well thought out and well presented facts from scientific studies that are contrary to the global warming craze.

Most notably, she published an extensive review of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and pointed out where he was right and where he was sensationalizing.  Evidently, the article was so well received, that the family’s Internet provider sent them a warning letter about excessive bandwidth usage!

It is really cool to see someone who is willing to take the time to do research and see both sides of science.  So often the media presents only the most sensational version and glosses over all the other research that is done.  This includes the fact that she was not afraid to take on the Nobel Prize winning Al Gore.

My wife and I had a discussion about this last night as well.  It’s a shame that so much of science is allowed to be published without realistically reviewing the contrary opinion (or null hypothesis).  From my first basic science classes in school I was taught that you can never prove something to be true unless you can prove all other possibilities are false.  Yet, so much of what we read in the paper and hear in the media presents one researchers viewpoint showing that one thing and another are highly correlated.  The media picks up on this and assumes one causes the other. 

This is another HUGE mistake in statistics and science.  Proving a cause and effect relationship is nearly impossible outside of a highly controlled laboratory.  The phrase, “Correlation does not mean Causation” comes to mind.  Yet, our society is so inundated with news and media constantly giving us tidbits of information that we tend to take things at face value and never do the real research ourselves.

I’ve long been a sceptic of the global warming thing.  Of course, that’s not to say I believe we don’t need to conserve (I even had a recent post about how we are Going Green around our house).  Just like sensationalizing the ideas of global warming does a disservice to the intellect of the public, choosing to ignore environmental care is just as bad.  If only we could find some more moderation in the media and accept that people will make better decisions when faced with real information rather than bombarding them with sensational and contrary views and forcing them to decide.

We’ve been talking and working for some time around our house to make ourselves more environmentally friendly.  Here’s a few of the things we’ve been doing or talking about doing:

• Recycling - We’ve always been pretty diligent with recycling around out house.  The nearest drop off point is just a couple blocks from the house.  We’ve been more diligent lately in checking plastics and washing them out and such.   
• Compact Florescent- We’re about half way through replacing our old incandescent bulbs in the house with compact florescent.  As the old are burning out we are using the new CF.  I was hesitant at first because I’ve never been a fan of that florescent look, but the new bulbs are quite nice.  Our fixture in the bathroom had 4 bulb outlets at 60 watt max.  We’d only been able to get 2 of them on in the past with 60 watt bulbs.  With the new CF bulbs, we have all 4 of them lit up.  The bathroom is shining bright and we’re using less energy than we would have used in just 1 bulb before.
• New Lawnmower- Just bought a new lawnmower last weekend (well, new to us).  We got a used push reel mower from South City Lawnmower on Morganford just north of Utah.  For $40 we have an adjusted and sharpened mower that requires no gasoline.
• Gardening - We’re going to try a vegetable garden this year.  We’ve got the plot laid out in the back yard (making for less to mow!) and the seeds have been under the grow lamp for about a week by now.  We should hopefully get the soil ready this weekend barring too much rain and be ready to plant within a couple more weeks when the seedlings are ready.
• Rain barrel - In preparing a garden, we realized we will need to water said garden.  Well, our garage happens to need gutters as well.  That’s a pretty simple project I can do myself.  Since it is right out near the garden plot, we’re hoping to find a rain barrel to attach to the downspout to collect and use rain water on the garden.  This is not really a savings of cost for us as we are not on a water meter at this point, but it should be good water to use for the veggies!  Home Eco is just down the street from us and they just sighed when I asked about one.  Seems they sell out quickly and have been having to special order for people.
• Solar Energy - Also on our last trip to Home Eco, I talked about the possibility of putting some solar panels on the garage to run the power out there.  Since we were going to have some new electric service run out there, why not consider going off the grid for such a small use?  Well, with wanting to run power tools, it might be a bit more expensive.  I’ll have them out soon to take a closer look and get an idea of the cost compared to having conventional electric run from the house out there in a few months.

That’s what we are doing, what about you?

My family has discovered a way to help beautify our city.  The biggest help here is having a little boy around the house.  Anyone who has one knows about little boys and their fascination with sticks.  Take them for a walk around the block and see how many they bring back home if you let them.

That’s where it all begins with us.  We send him out to get a nice little pile of sticks.  We then send him out back with the loppers to cut said sticks into smaller pieces (hint:  little boys think this is pretty cool too).

Next comes another key part.  We’ve got  a small outdoor chimnea.  It’s like a little outdoor fireplace.  A little left over newspapers and a handful of our cut up sticks and we now have a small fire going that will generally burn out completely in just a little over 20 minutes.

What do you do with a small, contained fire in your back yard for 20 minutes?  Well, as you might have guessed from the title, you make S’Mores!  We grab the barbecue skewers to toast some marshmallows and hook those up with the chocolate and graham crackers and we’re all set.  It’s a great treat to have on a cool spring evening or any time of the year it’s not raining or wet. 

Plus, you’re helping to keep your neighborhood free from fallen branches without having to overfill the yard waste dumpster.  So, next time you are out shopping and you see one of those cute little outdoor fire pits, think how much cleaner you could help our city be with one of those! 

It’s Christmas time again. We went shopping last night for our tree. It is standing quietly in the basement right now in a bucket of water. We visited local icon Ted Drewes for our tree. Guess it was a good excuse to get some frozen custard! The trees are little more expensive than going to Home Depot or Lowes like we have in the past, but the selection and quality was much better. We’ve got a nice 7-8′ tall Balsam. They are very fragrant (meaning they smell good) and they also have very soft needles, so carrying it around to get it set up won’t leave you feeling like a pin cushion!

I realized something during the trip though. In my experience, shopping for a real tree at Christmas is really a city thing. Growing up in rural Missouri, almost none of my friends had real trees. We always had the fake variety that took up space in that box in the basement. It looked terrible and was always a pain to deal with. Yes, I must say, until I moved to a larger city, I NEVER saw a Christmas Tree lot.

Sure, back home there were places to go buy a real tree if you wanted one. They were mainly farms in the area that would grow them and you could pick one out and they’d cut it down. Or, the friend I remember having a real tree used to just cut one down on their own property. Of course, they had their own saw mill at home as well, so they would just use it to make lumber later. In the city I guess it’s more out of convenience. Not everyone wants to go out to the country and chop down a tree like Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation. Yet, the tree to them may seem more like living in the country because it’s not fake and plastic.

All in all, I think the real tree is not only better looking and smelling, but better for the environment (as long as you recycle it). The trees are grown strictly for this reason and we are not depleting forests so you can have your tree. It also saves the energy and oil that is used to make up the plastic things that so many people must get.

I mean, seriously, do you need a $250, 7′ tall pre-lit tree? Do you hate spending time with your family so much that you have to make even putting up the Christmas tree a world speed record event?

LINK

I’m sure many of you read the article above in the Post-Dispatch earlier this month. The revelation that Aquafina is getting it’s water from the city and then further “purifying” it before bottling.

I’ve never used a lot of bottled water, though when travelling and on the run I might pick one up to have something to drink rather than a soda (or pop for those native St. Louisans). My wife brought this article to my attention and pointed out the part about the plastic bottle. She has seen some information somewhere about how many plastic bottles used to bottle water are actually recycled. The number is not pretty.

It really makes you think when you are out at the store and see that “health conscious” couple with 4 or 5 CASES of bottled water in their cart. Why people think buying bottled water is healthier than using the tap is beyond me. Much less doing it and adding all of those extra bottles to our landfill.

In return, my wife and I have gotten rid of all plastic drinking cups in our house and got out the good glasses. We’ve also been more aware of stuff we are using when we are out to eat some places. For instance, the plastic cups used for drinks at The St. Louis Bread Company. Those go right in the trash there in the store. There is no recycling bin. So, we bring it home and put it in our recycling boxes to take to the drop off later.

Hopefully, you might be more aware now and help out in some of the same ways!