Monday, September 29, 2008

The US Government goes "all in"

Lowering interest rates didn't work. Cash infusions didn't work. Bank mergers, bailouts, and takeovers didn't work. More and bigger interest rate cuts, cash infusions, bank mergers, bailouts, and takeovers have still not worked.

So now they are to the point of maxing out the wife's credit card for $700 billion worth of chips, and pushing them all into the pile for one big double-or-nothing bet.

Is anybody else nervous as hell about all this?

If this were an energy-related crisis, I think I'd have a fairly good understanding of it. But the financial system is so shrouded in mystery, I don't even really know what or who I should believe.

I thought this news segment from PBS did a pretty good job of explaining the basics in layman's terms. I still wish I had a grasp of the bigger picture...





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Thursday, September 25, 2008

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure result

You walk out to the barn on a crisp fall morning, a little before dawn. Your decision made, you feel a weight lifting, knowing that this will be the last time you'll be hand milking for a good long time. After this, your wrists can recover and life can resume its usual crazy course.

As you enter the darkened barn, you are eaten by a grue. Your cow dies of dysentery.

THE END

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The real situation in Houston now

Sometimes collecting money for an assistance dog feels trivial compared to a crisis like the one described below.

From my friend Pat:

--

I know the woman who wrote the message below quite well; I've known her
online for more than ten years. This will not be rumor, but simple truth.

My friend is definitely of the 'be prepared' school of thought, and she
taught her daughter to do the same.

Not only is this a testament to the values of being prepared, it's also a
rather serious indictment of the present US administration: apparently,
they aren't doing a hell of a lot better than they did in New Orleans. With
all that time to get straightened out too....

It shows you what happens when cronies or political donors are appointed
rather than people with actual qualifications (qualifications other than
how much they bribed....err... 'donated' to someone's campaign, that is).

The message is unchanged, just as I received it, except that I put a few
more paragraph breaks in and took the writer's email address out.

Pat

==============================

My daughter Jennifer lives in Houston outside the outer beltway. Three
days ago, her electricity came back on. Since the hurricane, services that
we take for granted are a hardship, even for the people who are lucky
enough to have power. At the grocery store, people are allowed into the
store accompanied by store employees. Only 20 people are allowed in at a
time.

They can get a limited selection of groceries - milk, eggs and bread being
very precious and hard to get. They are then checked out using cash. The
lines are long and Jenny has waited upwards to a couple hours for food. Gas
lines are the same. This is still happening on a daily basis for her. Of
course, she considers herself one of the lucky ones - she had emergency
cash on hand and has non-perishable food to last several weeks.

Now, magnify Jenny's plight by millions. Not hundreds, not thousands,
MILLIONS. 1.2 million people are still without power in and around
Houston. These people are running out of cash, are having difficulty
getting around to get groceries because they need gas for their cars, and
are doing the best they can to survive. Neighbors and family are helping
each other. But there are people there without that family or friend
network.

Since she's capable of caring for herself, Jenny decided to volunteer in
some way to help the people who've lost everything, including their homes.
Because the news is filled with headlines about the latest political
campaign, Houston's massive cleanup and rebuilding its infrastructure have
passed from the public's eye.

Jenny has been volunteering at a Red Cross shelter for the past 3 days. The
shelter is an old big box store that was closed down. The Red Cross has
set up cots, handed out blankets, and given each person a small bag
of travel-size personal toiletries. Port-A-Potties and the trailer
showers have been set up outside for hygienic purposes. Hand sanitizer is
scattered throughout the shelter to help people keep clean. Each day, more
busses arrive with more people. An entire group of mentally disabled
people is now housed in this shelter. Their own facility is gone. The
website says that only people who are being bussed back are in this
shelter.

However, Jenny says there are several people there who claim they were
homeless before the hurricane. There are about 1000 people at this place.
So far.

There are 40 Red Cross volunteers - 2 groups are from Taiwan and Mexico's
version of Red Cross. One individual is the "mental health officer." In
trying to handle the crisis, the Red Cross volunteers have been at the
shelter from 6 AM to 10 PM - without breaks. Many have had nothing to eat
all day. Anyone who appears to possess food is descended upon by the
clients and there's simply no way to share with everyone. So because the
Red Cross workers can't take a break, they are simply not eating.

There is no way to cook food. The Red Cross is handing out self-heating
MREs (Meals-Ready-To-Eat). Tonight, Verizon donated 100 pizzas and 43
sandwiches to this shelter. Jenny said the "clients" fell on the food like
starving wolves. Many of them have had little to eat for days.

The volunteers are there to help the people fill out forms to get aid, try
to get them whatever they need as far as personal stuff (some only came
with the clothes on their backs) and generally help people get settled with
a cot and corner to call their own until FEMA and other emergency measures
can be taken.

From what I understand, FEMA has been so overwhelmed that the supply line
is backed up and people are not getting the resources they need. The
newspapers paint a rosier picture, but the reality is, thousands
and thousands of people have lost not only their homes, but their
livelihoods.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/us/21houston.html?em

Many of the clients come up to the Red Cross personnel and ask if they can
help find a job. They understand the predicament they're in, and are
desperate for work to help themselves. Sadly, there aren't any jobs
available and even if there were, the Red Cross can't give them one.

Up close and personal - Jenny says the biggest issue is FOOD. These
people, including the workers, are going hungry. At different times during
the day, she says even the Red Cross workers have broken down over the
misery of not being able to alleviate the hunger. Sure, the clients are
getting at least one meal a day, which is better than nothing, but for
bodies used to 3 meals a day, its hard. One Red Cross worker hid under a
desk so no one could see her crying. Then she wiped her tears, dusted off
her hands and went back to work.

I am asking each of you to go to the Red Cross website and donate money or
your time. If you can go down there to volunteer, please go give the aid
workers help if its possible. If you can, take a busload of people with
you - maybe your church group or your cheerleading squad or your boy scout
troupe. I realize school is in session and this is probably unlikely. But
you could ask your schools and work to do a fund-raising drive for the Red
Cross.

I realize a lot of folk were not happy with the Red Cross a few years ago
due to issues that made the news. But that has changed. Jenny has
volunteered to man a TV hotline for aid, a FEMA POD center and the Red
Cross shelter she's now at. She says the Red Cross, BY FAR, is the most
organized, most helpful and most reliable at getting the goods and services
out there. But they are being slowly overwhelmed by the magnitude
of Houston's dire straits. Here's the link for Houston's Red Cross:

http://www.houstonredcross.org/

Please, if you can help, donate.

Thank you!

P.S. You have my permission to send this email to anyone as you see fit.

==============================

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Too funny not to share...

SUBJECT: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

DEAR AMERICAN:

I NEED TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE.

I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY COUNTRY HAS HAD CRISIS THAT HAS CAUSED THE NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF 800 BILLION DOLLARS US. IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THIS TRANSFER, IT WOULD BE MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU.

I AM WORKING WITH MR. PHIL GRAM, LOBBYIST FOR UBS, WHO WILL BE MY REPLACEMENT AS MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY IN JANUARY. AS A SENATOR, YOU MAY KNOW HIM AS THE LEADER OF THE AMERICAN BANKING DEREGULATION MOVEMENT IN THE 1990S. THIS TRANSACTION IS 100% SAFE.

THIS IS A MATTER OF GREAT URGENCY. WE NEED A BLANK CHECK. WE NEED THE FUNDS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. WE CANNOT DIRECTLY TRANSFER THESE FUNDS IN THE NAMES OF OUR CLOSE FRIENDS BECAUSE WE ARE CONSTANTLY UNDER SURVEILLANCE. MY FAMILY LAWYER ADVISED ME THAT I SHOULD LOOK FOR A RELIABLE AND TRUSTWORTHY PERSON WHO WILL ACT AS A NEXT OF KIN SO THE FUNDS CAN BE TRANSFERRED.

PLEASE REPLY WITH ALL OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, IRA AND COLLEGE FUND ACCOUNT NUMBERS AND THOSE OF YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN TO WALLSTREETBAILOUT@TREASURY.GOV SO THAT WE MAY TRANSFER YOUR COMMISSION FOR THIS TRANSACTION. AFTER I RECEIVE THAT INFORMATION, I WILL RESPOND WITH DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT SAFEGUARDS THAT WILL BE USED TO PROTECT THE FUNDS.

YOURS FAITHFULLY MINISTER OF TREASURY PAULSON

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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

How much is $700 billion?


You may have heard something about a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry by the US Government.

A recent post by Wendy got me thinking about how much $700 billion is.

Let me write it out first, just for effect:

$700,000,000,000.00

Looks big.

Almost a trillion. Might as well call it a kazillion because our brains are not really wired to comprehend such numbers.

There are just over 300 million people in the US. So if we each do our patriotic duty and chip in our share (no slacking, you babies and children, unemployed, disabled, retired, impoverished...), it'll cost us a mere $2,300 per person. In my house, with a wife and 3 kids, that's $11,500. Then we'll be the proud owners of, um...

Okay, let's let the market fix it instead. I keep hearing how efficient markets are. I guess this must be the exception that proves the rule. But let's just say that this bail out is just what the market wanted, and it can earn back that $700 billion for us.

Let's say the value of those assets we just bought with our tax dollars were to increase at $1000 per second. Markets are global, so we can gain that $1000 a second around the clock. That's $86 million a day. We should have it paid off in no time, right?

Yeah, we'll be all set in 22 1/2 years. Then we can start working on paying for Fannie and Freddie and AIG and all those other cash infusions. After that we can start paying off the national debt. Then we'll be golden. Or, our grandchildren will be anyway.

So all we need is $1000 a second for a couple decades. What could go wrong?


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Side note - I'm glad to see some in Congress standing up to this proposal rather than seeing it sledgehammered through without much thought. I honestly don't know what the answer is, but let's remember that the people proposing the solution are really the same people who got us into the mess in the first place. You don't entrust the designated driver's keys to the town drunk.

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Monday, September 22, 2008

Another poll - Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style

You bought a Jersey cow about five months ago, and you've been hand milking her every day since. She's developed a persistent case of mastitis that neither veterinary nor homeopathic medicine has cured. Usable milk production is at about three quarts (liters) per day and falling.

Over the past two weeks or so, you've noticed a steady increase in pain and numbness in your right hand and arm: the dreaded carpal tunnel syndrome. It's making milking a bit harder. It's making your day job working with computers harder as well.

Your cow may or may not have been successfully bred yet, but at best you've got at least seven months between now and a new baby calf (and the new milk supply that comes with it).

Winter is coming. You'll be needing to buy hay soon. In the background, you hear loud creaking, cracking, and crunching sounds as the economy teeters on the edge of the abyss.



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[ Don't forget to vote in the previous poll as well... ]

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Thursday, September 18, 2008

Craziness all around, and my first ever poll...

Right. So we made the brilliant move of starting a big fundraising project on the day after a major hurricane and the day before a major stock market meltdown. Thank you very much to all who contributed, or even considered it. I'm hoping to do some fun stuff both locally and online. More on that below.

We had the odd experience of hurricane force winds in Ohio, as the remnants of Ike joined forces with a big cold front. We apparently had sustained winds of 50+ mph and gusts up to 75 mph. Lots of places around the state have been without power for days, and some places actually have gas shortages because so many gas stations have no power. We were lucky to have only brief outages, and no real damage.

Amelia had a blast sitting out in the wind, giggling like a maniac as her hair streamed out behind her. For some reason, I didn't take any pictures.

I'm really worried that we may have to get rid of the cow. I seem to be developing carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand. The cow thing has just been very frustrating in ways that nobody could have foreseen. I'm not giving up yet. Just venting. It doesn't help that the tractor died in her pasture, and she's been mercilessly trying to eat every cable and wire. She pulled the ends off two spark plug wires and pulled out two or three smaller wires (some several times). And every time I try to work on it, she starts eating my clothing, licking me and/or my tools, and just generally being a pest. I tried putting a tarp over the whole thing, but she just dragged it out of the way. So now I have a temporary fence made of cattle panels surrounding the tractor.

My attempts at taking advantage of getting to know my neighbors isn't going very well. The guy who helps me fix my tractor from time to time isn't returning my calls. He works night shift I think. The other guy who was going to cut our hay and bring us some loaner cows and a loaner bull and all sorts of other good stuff has also disappeared from the face of the earth. He did cut our hay once, but it got rained on about a half dozen times before it was baled. And it's pretty stemmy and weedy stuff anyway. Meadow won't touch it at this point.

Other than that, everything is under control.

Okay, not really. But let's just move on anyway.

Back to the service dog thing... I'll probably mostly post about this stuff on the 4paws4amelia blog, but it doesn't have much regular traffic yet, so I'm going to subject you to my fundraising brainstorming session:



Thanks for your input!

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Friday, September 12, 2008

A humble request

Greetings, imaginary friends...

I call you imaginary because I talk to you a lot, and yet I can't see or hear any of you. I hear voices in my head too, but they are not my friends... You are.

Over the two-and-a-half years I've been writing here, I've brought you an odd mix of farm follies, bad jokes, scary predictions, crazy schemes, kooky projects, and pure, unadulterated silliness.

And a lot of fragmentary sentences. And a lot of sentences (and quite a few paragraphs) beginning with conjunctions. I know this is wrong, but I do it anyway, at least here on the blog. Here, I like to think of punctuation and paragraph breaks the way a composer uses rests within a piece of music, rather than by the actual rules of English grammar. I want to establish the right cadence in the reader's mind. And it's my blog, so I'm allowed.

And now I've totally lost the thread of this post. Where was I?

Right... So a fair bit of my writing here is about my family. They are what this is really all about. Okay, maybe not the bad jokes, but most everything else, is either directly or indirectly about my family.

In particular, our daughter Amelia is a rich source of material, from the joyful to the cheesy to the downright whiny:
Now, we have an opportunity to do something very special for Amelia. And I'm asking for your help. Your help could come in different forms or at different times, and we'll appreciate any you feel is appropriate. We're just getting started, but we hope to get creative with this endeavor as time goes on.

So finally, after too many irrelevant and poorly constructed paragraphs, I arrive at my request...

Please visit this web site:
http://4paws4amelia.blogspot.com
Feel free to follow along as we start what should be a very interesting journey.

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Thursday, September 11, 2008

Shade screen made easy

Okay, so what if you could keep your house at least 12F degrees cooler than the outside, in the height of summer, without air conditioning, or even fans? How often would you even need that A/C?

See, they make this stuff called shade screen. It's like window screen, but it's designed to block more light. Apparently it's used most often in hot climates as a replacement for standard window screen, to cut down on sunlight. There are similar products used to keep greenhouses cool.

The window screen version doesn't show up much in cooler, more seasonal climates. I'm not sure why. It could be because while blocking out the sun is good when it's hot, it's not really desirable when it gets cold. Lack of sunlight in winter can be depressing enough without any help from your window screens.

But still... commercially available shade screen can prevent 80-90% of the sun's hot rays from entering your house. With summer temperatures here regularly over 90F, and plenty of humidity, I thought there must be a way to take advantage of this stuff without it being a giant pain.

My first thought was two sets of screens - one for summer, and one for winter. But that didn't come close to passing the "giant pain" test. My next thought was to attach the shade screen to the existing screen frames with velcro. That proved to be somewhat ineffective, as the sticky backing of the velcro heats up and becomes less sticky. The adhesion between the screen and the velcro wasn't very good anyway.

Finally, I realized that most of our windows slide down from the top as well as up from the bottom. If I put the shade screen between the window and the original screen, and then pin the top of the shade screen by closing the window on it, I'd be all set. No muss, no fuss.

I removed one of our window screens and used the frame as a template to cut the shade screen. I put the original screen back in place, opened the window from the top, slid the shade screen down between the glass and the screen, arranged it to the best fit, and then closed the top part of the window.



It worked like a charm. On a hot July day, with the sun beating down, I compared the surface temperature of the window with the shade screen to another nearby window.

After ten minutes, there was a 21F degree difference!


Lucky for me, all but a few of our windows are the same size. I took a screen back out and used it as a template to cut shade screen for all the other windows. I cut it maybe an inch wider and a few inches longer than the frame. It couldn't have taken an hour to cut enough for the whole house.

- -

I've found that there are a number of advantages to this approach, along with a couple minor drawbacks.

Advantages:
  • Easy to implement for summer. I'd estimate an hour to put them in all the windows in our house.

  • Even easier to take down for cooler seasons. I can't imagine it taking more than 15 minutes to pull them down, roll them up, and put them away.

  • If the window is open and there's any wind at all, the bottom of the shade screen is free to blow in the breeze and let the air flow in.


  • If you want the shade screen out of the way - to let a breeze in, or to accomodate house plants - you can just roll it up as far as you need and tuck it behind the window pane.


  • You get a privacy effect. From the inside, you can see out just fine. From the outside looking in, it just looks black...

  • It cost me under $200 for a 100-foot roll of 36-inch screen. I only used half of it for the whole house.
Disadvantages:
  • If it's raining and windy and you leave your window open, the screen will catch the water, and then fling it around the room as the wind blows the free-hanging bottom part of the screen

  • You get a "wavy" appearance because the shade screen is not pulled perfectly flat.
    (This photo makes it look worse than it is, but you get the idea.)


Of course, my approach won't work in every house. Your windows may not be the same as mine, so you may have to come up with a different method if you're going to try this.

I can tell you that getting it to stick directly to glass is challenging. We have a sliding glass door that gets a lot of afternoon sun. I first tried attaching the screen to the glass door with long strips of velcro. It quickly became clear that this wasn't going to work because of the heat. The adhesive just wasn't holding up. I tried sewing the velcro strips to the screen, which worked a little better, but the then the velcro adhesive failed on the glass surface - again because of the hot sun. My next attempt was with some suction cups. It worked "sort of," so I bought more of them to see if there was strength in numbers. I haven't had the chance to try it yet, but I give it a 50-50 shot. It's a pretty big piece of shade screen, so it's got a bit of weight to it - especially when it's wet and windy. If anybody has suggestions, let me know.


At any rate, with the windows open at dusk, the whole house fan pulling in the cool night air, and the shade screen keeping the sun out during the day, we can consistently keep the house at least 12F degrees cooler than the outside temperatures on a hot summer day.

For reference, I bought Phifer SunTex 80 from Wholesale Screens and Glass. (They also sell SunTex 90, which blocks even more sun.)

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Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Brilient

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Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Radio silence

Sorry for the unplanned hiatus from blogging. Life overwhelmed me a little bit for a time. And after that I got busy with something new that absorbed much of my blogging energies. More to come on that mysterious hint in a post very soon.

In the meantime, I've got a couple of posts up on Hen & Harvest. Green Fatigue has been up for a bit, but I had a good time writing it. I've heard from a few people that it really struck a chord, which is always a nice kind of feedback. And just posted is Black Magic, which may be familiar to readers who have been here for a while. I put a lot of time into that one, and I hop it can reach a wider audience over at H&H.

Hmm... Green Fatigue, Black Magic. I guess it's all about the colors. What color should I tackle next? Any suggestions? Raw Umber doesn't get much love.

Baby Owen has been a busy boy. Just since my last post, he's learned to sit up, mastered the art of sitting up, cut a tooth, and is getting really close on the crawling front. He can get up on his hands and knees. He can move backwards and turn. He just hasn't found that forward gear yet.

More on the way. But now I must try to sleep....

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