Climate Control

I work in an industry designed to satisfy every downward dial your air conditioner. So to say I work with guys that talk about the weather is a massive understatement.

As we advance toward the 3-day weekend, temperatures in the central U.S. are forecast to plateau somewhere upwards of the 100-degree mark, and in many areas it will feel much hotter than that.

It’s the latest breath of a heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere summer that has shattered records around the world.

Industry wide the hot weather is chugged into an equation that models and predicts the electrical demand. I'm only cursorily familiar with the equation. I can make no claims of being an expert there.

As a lifelong Midwesterner I'm also familiar with the relief you feel when you can escape the heat. As an environmentalist I'm rather proficient with climate models. The ozone depleting properties of air conditioning refrigerant that provides respite from a hot summer day. The foundation of coal fired generation upon which the electrical grid is built. That as the planet warms, the relief from the weather will become more crucial which will cause the planet to warm which will kick air conditioning into the category of essential.

It made me consider the term climate control in a whole different light.
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Reading: Game Change by Heilemann and Halperin
Recent Laughter: Portlandia: Technology Loop
Personal Soundtrack: All of Me (Louis Armstrong)

Two Things

Thing One: Flatwater Shakespeare Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream performs in my neighborhood (at Naomi's schoolyard Prescott Park) this Thursday. It's part of an open air tour the show will do in some of Lincoln’s finest parks and other outdoor venues.

Audiences are asked to bring blankets, chairs, and cushions to sit on. Free ice cream will be provided by Ivanna Cone. Here are the scheduled venues. Showtime is Thursday at 7 p.m.

This is a show worth seeing, so get out under the stars and dream a little!

Thing Two: I was riveted by this Terry Gross Interview last night about the way mass-produced tomatoes are bred in order to ship well and not necessarily to taste good. I went home and checked if the tomato plants in the backyard needed any water.

News Reel

Today a federal jury convicted former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich of corruption. I guess, in life, there are some binds that you just can’t Larry King interview your way out of.

Field Notes

Drove out to pick up N from her 4-H Camp in Halsey Forest. Having never been to Halsey we made a weekend of it. I made the following set of field notes from our trip:

It turns out that the Gas-Stop-Convenience stores along Hwy 2 are called Woa & Go. The kicker was in Thedford where patrons wore both boots & spurs.

The Nebraska Sandhills never fail to inspire a deep urge in me to lay down for a long nap in the hot sun.

Picking up N from camp where she inner-tubed down the Loup River I posed the obligatory question "how was camp?" My nine year old responded with an impressive litany of candy she'd eaten over the course of the past 72 hours. And that was all she wrote.

The Nebraska Forest in Halsey was lovely, actually. 90,000 acres of planted forestland. Mainly cedar and pine trees in the established stand plus a pretty impressive nursery. It could arguably be the state's greatest unnatural wonder.
I had forgotten the pleasure of waking up in a tent the morning after a rainstorm. The air was cold and wet. It had that fresh stinging smell of green things growing.

Denver Homesteaders

It's no secret I spent the vast majority of my twenties in Colorado. I'll occasionally still suffer pangs of longing for the Front Range, actually. But this week I had a quantum physics sort of an alternate reality moment when I read this article. Evidently the Denver City Council passed an ordinance easing the restrictions of chicken and goat keeping within the city limits.

It made me smile to think of the first blog entry on meleeska, of my neighbors' chicken coup here in Lincoln. This wasn't the first occasion where I thought that, in an alternate reality, I would have stayed in Denver. And it wasn't at all a stretch to think I would have befriended these Urban Homesteader/Sustainable Food people. But reality collapses in on itself eventually. Denver or Lincoln, I'm thinking I would still live within earshot some chickens.

Meditation Class

I was watering the garden tonight. I have a special fondness for the way the soil gets drowned and then its surface re-emerges with musky breath both wet and new.

Naomi and I have started a meditation class. She has inherited my tendency to over think things, and to let thinking lead to worrying and worrying lead to panic. So I thought a little skill building with meditation might be good for both of us.

Our first class was Saturday. She left frustrated. The whole concept of keeping her mind still was confusing and difficult. Nobody could describe what she was supposed to do, nobody could tell her if she had done it correctly. It was all very upsetting.

Two hours later, though, she bounded down from upstairs to proclaim victory and said she’d mastered the whole meditation deal. She’s so used to picking things up quickly. She wanted to skip the frustration or learning bits of this process and jump right to the praise that comes with early mastery. Did you know a great outlet for all your overachiever tendencies happens to be meditation? Who knew?

I thought of her as I was out watering my garden tonight. Her disappointment in realizing whether she's mastered meditation or not we are still going to class next Saturday morning. I believe in finding the stillness at the center of yourself. A space that doesn't chatter, comment or criticize. If Naomi's found it already: great. I hope she finds it again and again.

It Was A Dark and Stormy Night...

So we're getting N all packed up for a short inner-tubing trip down the Loup River. It's thunderstorming outside as we pack the bug spray & sleeping bag. We zip-lock her clothes into freezer bags so she'll have something dry and sand-free to put on after a day on the river. Last, but not least, we equip the flash light with D-sized batteries.

"Here," she says, "we should turn off the lights and see if I can find my way to the bathroom in the dark."

"Good idea."

She stays in the dark bathroom long enough that I put an ear to the open slit of the door. I take it the flash light works just fine. She was telling spooky stories to her reflection in the mirror.

Father's Day

Park Playground: Crowded

Picnic Line Up: Deviled Eggs with Curry, Red Grapes, Spicy Couscous with Asparagus & Parmesan.

Weather: Warm With A Pleasant Breeze

Photo @ Left: Film-Food-noir.
Our picnic presented the opportunity for me to use my Gam's Deviled Egg plate which always makes me smile.

Acceleration

So, N acts as my Physics Class lab partner. Geeky but true, we have spent several pleasant Saturdays with weights, measurements, and time intervals. The lab requirements are generally tasks such as:

Drop this box from a great height and time how long it takes for the box to crash to the floor. Now repeat this task with your eyes closed.

-or-

Weigh this bolt from a spring scale as it dangles in the air, now take another weight measurement as the bolt is suspended in water.

Today we were studying acceleration. I was tasked with throwing a tennis ball as fast and as hard as I could, her job was to operate the stop watch to record how fast the ball traveled various distances. Well, I'm not so great with aim and on one time trial I pegged my kid in the arm with the ball. We both gasped with shock.

"Youch," she squealed.
"Oh, God are you OK?"
"Yeh. Yeh, mom, you'll have to do that one again. I forgot to hit the stop button."

Tree Atlas

I had the forester urge to visit Central Park this week in the worst way. Evidently there is a newly published map which details each of the 19,933 trees in the Park. A couple of friends started with the idea of a Central Park book. Two and a half years, and forty thousand dollars later, the book idea morphed into a map. The two friends had marched over 500 miles in order to essentially create a tree atlas of Central Park.

Only about 150 of the original plantings from Central Park’s designers (Frederick Law Olmsted & Calvert Vaux) are left standing at this point. One of them is a black tupelo which dates back to 1862.

With storm damage and new plantings occurring all the time the Park and the map are a work in progress. Sigh. Keep an eye out for cheap flights to NYC for me, will ya? I'm thinking fall would be spectacular.
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Quote of My Day: "Yeh, I would expect some rain delays with that." [Upon hearing that the College World Series will proceed on schedule despite the flooding along the Missouri River.]
Recent Goodness: Naomi has merged Harry Potter obsession with her interests in web development. She would love it if you would visit HarryPotterHopscotch.
Currently Reading: Packing for Mars (Mary Roach)

Water Rising

Like a lot of us, I've been following the flood advisories all along the Missouri River this month. There's a lot of blame thrown down over the static water levels appropriate for each reservoir, the failings of the FEMA Flood Insurance program, sandbagging and engineering controls being insufficient, etc. For some reason all the rhetoric and aerial photographs on CNN were sitting like a stomach ache with me.

Finally, today, I came across a quote from the US Army Corps of Engineers that made more sense to me than anything else, "All rivers, streams, and lakes will flood eventually. There are no exceptions. Given enough time, any levee will eventually be overtopped or damaged by a flood that exceeds the levee’s capacity."

The design engineering at work does it's best against a formidable opponent. We can grab every media outlet available, blame whomever we choose or talk however long we want to, but the rain continues and the water rises to remind us that this planet is a place we occupy rather than control. Photo ready, camera rolling or not it provides some of the most powerfully humbling experiences any of us will ever have.

My heart goes out to those who brace themselves and their homes at the water's edge.

Groundswell

On May 4th a coordinated set of lawsuits and administrative petitions were filed across the country which assert the States and Federal Government are obligated by the "public trust doctrine" to regulate and reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane.

One of these petitions was filed in Nebraska and will be an agenda item on the next Nebraska Environmental Quality Council. It appears the petitions were part of the nationwide effort coordinated by an organization called Our Children's Trust with partnering organizations such as Greenpeace and 350.org.

It's the next evolutionary step of a grassroots effort to push for the regulation and reduction of Greenhouse Gas emissions. Last year the 5th District Court agreed to hear a class action law suit case brought by the Hurricane Katrina victims who claimed oil, coal and chemical companies contributed to global warming, increasing the ferocity of the hurricane that damaged their property.

I'm in support of reducing our Greenhouse Gas emissions. I'm also supportive of a grassrooty sort of an uprising. I feel the regulatory process is improved by public participation, but the end result is usually different than where anyone (industry, regulators, politicians, pundits, or the public) would expect. I'm also familiar with how entrenched all sides of this discussion are and I'm interested to see where it all lands.

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Quote of My Day: I have refined my palate for words I will eat later.

All is NOT Lost

I'm laying in bed this morning thinking, "Woah, I am soooo tired and sore. I don't think I can move a muscle....wait...that's not true....I think I could text."

Building Blocks

Smart growth.

OK, outside of my Urban Planning program, it's a term I haven't heard in a long, long time. Smart Growth is a land-development theory that concentrates new housing developments into compact, dare I say, walkable areas. Compact developments are easier to traverse, they're set up for efficient transit and public works systems, can more readily be served by fire and police departments, and the reason the phrase has been recycled makes the tree-hugger in me proud: it's environmentally sustainable.

The term 'smart growth' has been in circulation in North America for some time and, more specifically, it was the pervading philosophy in Lincoln for most of my growing up. So I had a nostalgic sort of a swell of retro-love as the term resurfaced recently.

Evidently Lincoln was among a group of 32 communities tasked with finding ways to incorporate sustainability into our local zoning codes.

I know...I know...most of the time zoning codes aren't exactly the sort of thing that puts a real fire in one's belly. Not usually. But I was looking into it and some cities have made some serious progress toward encouraging and sometimes requiring better environmental practices as developers build homes and businesses through their codes.

• Chicago, for instance, requires new downtown buildings to have green rooftops.
• Builders in Austin, Texas are encouraged to put showers in new buildings for bike commuters.
• In Clayton, Mo., a developer who chops down a tree has to replace it with trees making up the same caliper inches.
• New homes built in Tucson, Ariz. are required, by code, to be solar ready with the duct and electrical work necessary for roof mounted solar panels.
  

All-in-all I was pretty pleased to see Lincoln has an eye for revising these zoning codes. Integrating more sustainable practices is a strong bump in the right direction.

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Recent Goodness: Noticing this morning the gray light that blankets the air just before the sun comes up.