Joshua's birthday

Here are some darling pictures from Joshua's birthday. We had such a great time together!

Pictures of our Fall

From Halloween to raking leaves; this has been a great season! I didn't know raking leaves could be so much fun, and neither did our kids!

Alternate wind generators

There is a new wind technology that harvests wind energy through a simple piece of plastic stretched between two poles with magnets and copper wire. I heard about this technology Sat and got the link today. I was up thinking about how great it sounded last night. I was a little dissappointed that these generators don't produce more energy, but am fascinated anyway. I commented to Ken that it seemed like a wind generator on a car seemed like a good idea. I hope I get to see one on a car someday!
Flutter wind generator
This link sends you to a conference with some inventor interviews.

hydrogen induced sleeplessness

The other night I found myself awake most of the night, upset over Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles. I think it is great that they don't produce any pollution - fantastic point in their favor actually. But I was thinking of the hundreds of millions of dollars the US government has spent on developing hydrogen fuel cells . My simple point I want to make is that if our government had spent as much money developing Solar Electric Vehicles, which are also non-pollutive, I am convinced we would be much closer to a viable form of transportation. We might even have had the cars available for purchase - since they actually are already available. President George W. Bush, in the State of the Union address on January 28, 2003 said "Join me in this important innovation to make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of energy."

It is true that hydrogen powered cars is an answer, but it isn't the anwer that has made any difference in our environment or in our goal of being less dependent on foreign energy since then .

If you are like me, pro-solar, you might question his motives on moving towards such a difficult to procure source of energy. The answer is painfully obvious - $$$. Sure he has our economy in mind - we can't just get energy for free, how would all the fuel companies get paid? What would happen to all the gas station owners, builders, fixers, cleaner-upper-afters? What would people spend their money on that they would otherwise be spending on fuel?

Now I say that sarcastically, but it is also true - what would happen to our economy if we weren't dependent on foreign oil?

That is the subject for a future discussion!

I just want to point out something interesting. Look at the picture above very carefully. Do you see the Shell label and symbols? I don't know much about Shell. But I do know that buying hydrogen fuel from Shell seems a little removed from the effort to distance ourselves from foreign energy, not just oil.

But to get back to my sleepless night, I want to relate something funny. I was all unhinged about hydrogen, but when I traced back what had caused me to get upset, it was a notice from my dairy telling me that, "due to the rising cost of corn and feed," they were raising the cost of my milk. I had confused ethanol and hydrogen in my sleepy mind. I could go off on government subsidies and ethanol too. But that will have to wait.

Enjoy!

Trip to the Treehouse museum

The Treehouse Museum is so fun for our children, each one finds so much to do and enjoy - you can see that Joshua loves trains. It takes a tremendous effort to get him to look at anything else, and even then he is only diverted from the trains for a little while.

Eliza loves the flowers and the grocers best, then the computers. Grace loves the floor. :)

This is Ken's sister's dog, Sophie. She really liked our fish, who had never known danger before. Even now, our fish remains ignorant of its (brief) dire peril.

Sophie jumped up at the fish for perhaps four hours and ran around the fish tank hoping to get a clearer shot. It was amusing to say the least to watch the fruitless attempt of one so determined to get what she wanted.

One of my goals in life is to get a solar powered electric vehicle. Solar is the way to go!