Bored. Bored. Bored.

I am totally checked out for the day.

Here is a poem I wrote in a staff meeting this week.

Staff Meeting. A Poem of Despair.

A bunny came upon a building; 7 people sat in a conference room around a table meant for 25.
They talked around each other, over each other, through each other.
Language bouncing off, hitting walls, reflecting into faces.
Everyone trying to throw their speech higher, faster, harder.
The bunny fled away from the oversized table, the flinged words, the building.
The bunny fled into the road and was hit by a car.

What's up with the bees?

So this is a question for Chris and Kelly...

I've been hearing all over the place lately that there is some mysterious affliction affecting beehives. One friend of mine at work told me that she heard that cellphones may be responsible for interrupting the hives? Hope that yours are all OK!!!

Great way to pass time at work!!

So I discovered this tonight while on my quest for quilting patterns (more of an obsession)...
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/offthemap/html/create_your_own.html
I couldn't get it to save my design, but it was fun to create anyway!

Hope everyone is well and fairing in Northeaster! So far it has been heavy snow and lots of rain!

Quick Survey

I was recently talking with someone who called our office, concerned about all the kids that play in a local creek during the summer time- worried that their play (turning over rocks, building forts, miniature dams, etc) would be having a negative impact on the stream. We talked for a while and I was also reminded of an article that I read this past year...

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March06/wild.nature.play.ssl.html

Interesting, that more formal types of environmental education do not have the same type of long-term impact on kids that "free time" play outdoors has. (or so they say) I can think of quite a few people that fall into this category and others that do not.

Likely the kids playing in the creek are lucky to have "freedom" to explore outside, that many others' parents don't allow because of safety concerns, jam-packed school and sport schedules, etc. I wonder if most kids still get unsupervised times in the woods or off on their own, like most of us probably did. I know my parents didn't worry if, as a kid, I was outside and out of sight for hours and hours at a time- up in trees, in the woods trying to get birds to eat out of my hand, capturing catepillars to build my own butterfly conservatories, crawling through stream culverts, sending messages down the creek on homemade boats, catching & categorizing bugs I collected in the fields, running around in corn fields, or buiding forts under the neighbor's forsythia bushes. My brother Nick was usually with me- and we didn't grow up to be exact opposites, but I don't think the fact that he doesn't recycle weighs on his conscience any...

So out of curiosity, here's a quick survey ...

How many of you, assuming you generally consider yourself to be an environmentally-minded person, spent a lot of time playing outdoors in "wild"nature before the age of 11?

Article referenced was: http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/16_1/16_1_01_NatureAndLifeCourse.pdf

Your daily dose of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

What better way to come back from vacation than to stumble upon this recently released GAO report:

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07283.pdf

Don't read it. Really.

NZ Wallpaper

Back to our blogging roots. A selection of possible wallpapers...
More photos on Flickr.

Pasture land, near Mt. Doom

Abel Tasman National Park

Tasman Bay, near Nelson

Bubbling mud in Rotorua

Follow-up to Camera Post

Here is the information Dad provided me about the camera flash. I have to be honest I don't know much about the electronics lingo...

"Below is the website that I found for the strobe information. The
plans called for a 103D SCR that is used for the strobe that works
with the amplifying circuit that you make yourself.

If you use a cassette recorder that has a monitoring system that uses
an earphone, you can use a 106B SCR. I found these SCR's to be more
common than the 103D.

I also put a RCA jack in the back of the camera so I can use a regular
patch cord to make the connection from the strobe to the amplifier. Of
course, you could solder the wire directly to the contacts in the
camera and have this wire connect directly into the cassette recorder
using a mini-phone jack."

http://hiviz.com/tools/triggers/makeown.htm#st

Who is the better enviromentalist...?

Look over the descriptions of the following two houses, and see if you can tell which one belongs to an environmentalist.

HOUSE # 1:

A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In one month this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an entire year. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern “snow belt,” either. It’s in the temperate South.

HOUSE # 2:

Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every “green” feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps, which draw ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

HOUSE # 1 (20-room energy guzzling mansion) is outside Nashville, Tennessee. It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist (and filmmaker) Al Gore.

HOUSE # 2 (model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas. Also known as “the Texas White House,” it is the private residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.

It's one thing to fear monger and tell other people that they need to be environmentally aware (through movies/mainstream media liberal bias ;-), public policy, etc... ) it's another thing completely to set a positive example for others to follow. At what level do/should we hold ourselves responsible for our actions?

Mmmm... mussels.

We had our first ever mussels in NZ. Green lipped mussels are big busines there. Also - pate. This lunch was courtesy of Uncle Tom and Dena... Enjoyed next to a pond at a winery and quilt shop in Blenheim.

Post tagging...

One of the added features of upgraded blogger is the ability to label posts. I've taken the liberty of tagging the past few posts, so if you click on the 'travel' tag, it should open up travel related posts that have been tagged, etc. Other future tags may include "sheep", "food", "movies", "wildlife", etc... Mmmm. Food. I think I am gonna post a pic of some food...

Interesting Photos

Michael found plans for a device that synches your camera to a flash allowing it to take pictures like the one with the bullet piercing the apple. Dad built one and sent me these pictures today.