A friend pointed out a recent article in our local paper on a really interesting new alternative energy for homes and small offices. It’s a sculpural-looking turbine covered with solar material - if it’s windy, it spins, if it’s sunny, it sols. Or whatever Solar things do. If we’ve got anything out here, it’s wind and sun. They’re not like the big Danish windmills you see proposed every time there’s an article on a “wind park,” they’re just a couple yards tall. I didn’t dig up the exact height, but they’d appear to be between 2-3 yards or meters high, so you could probably install them on your property in a wide variety of places without violating any zoning or covenants. Don’t take my word for it, though.

Since the solar materials rotate, you eliminate many of the placement issues that come up with a solar array, and unlike bigger windmills, it doesn’t have to be shut down in heavy winds or rotated to take advantage of the wind direction. Unless it screeches like a howler monkey, the cost may be the biggest downside.

The company is called Bluenergy, it’s worth a look. The costs appear to be competitive with other small-scale “get off the grid” kinds of setups, but their cost estimates seem a bit high. Whatever.

I love living in New Mexico, and I love the seasons. Autumn has gently started; we still have mild weather and quiet nights, but the leaves are changing. It’s beautiful. I’ll trick myself into ignoring that it’s what precedes winter - not my favorite time of year - and enjoy what is usually a long and enjoyable autumn. Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished Week 1 of my Super Busy Period™ and survived. It’s been so busy I haven’t had time to quite stress about any of it, and now that I have a minute to breathe, I’ve done a little math so I can quantify my relationship to it, the numbers tell stories. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure what sort of metaphysical dynamics are involved, but I’ve gone from almost no music involvement to a temporarily crushing workload. Pretty amazing. I’m not sure why music, of all things, tends to be like that for me - it’s like an on or off switch and very few shades of gray in between.

It’s been OK to not be busy; conceptually I hate the idea of not playing more, but realistically, I have a pretty full plate with my business and my family so it’s usually OK. Like I didn’t have any gigs or rehearsals last weekend, so I built gates. Wooden ones. And I barbecued. And the weekend was too short. Add to that a couple of 150 mile drives and several hours of practicing or playing, and they get even shorter. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend of ours who has just about completed a house she’s building invited my little family over to be part of the blessing ceremony she had arranged. She’s a Buddhist, I can’t remember if she started with the Zen tradition and moved toward Tibetan or the other way around. Anyway, there are some visiting Tibetan monks in town, and it can be arranged that they come to your home to bless and purify it as well as anyone within it. Read the rest of this entry »

I just read an interesting article in Wired Magazine called The Critics Need a Reboot. The Internet Hasn’t Led Us Into a New Dark Age. It’s not one of their 20-page epics, it’s more of an editorial piece. The premise is that “the experts” are all atwitter about how computers and technology and video games are making us dumb.

I’ll spoil the ending; it’s still worth a read. The answer is that they’re not. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve confirmed that a new generation of angst dreams have started. My family’s in them now, but I don’t know why it should change now as they’ve never been in them before. They still don’t cause the angst for the most part, just typical “But that’s not what I want to eat” type stuff. I’ll probably figure out something. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been a pretty enthusiastic outdoor cook for the last couple years; I’ve always loved it, but living in New York and New Jersey in apartments limited my opportunities. Not as much as I would have thought, but that’s another story. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a nightmare-haver. I’m not an ecstatic flying-with-dolphins dream haver. Most of the time I have dreams, they’re usually angst of some sort. I’ll have a dream where I’m back in college and miss the deadline for dropping classes and have to catch up in some class I never intended to take. Or endless long beurocratic lines somewhere, each of which proves incorrect. Or realizing I have left for a meeting or class, so I’m going to be 10 minutes late no matter what I do. Nothing terrifying, just not pleasant. I even went through a period where I dreamed I was awake all night. I’d wake up exhausted, and it took me a while to catch on. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading a compilation of Hopi stories called Hopi Stories of Witchcraft, Shamanism, and Magic. It’s mostly been a lot of fun, and the stories come straight from transcriptions of Hopi storytellers hoping to document their endangered oral tradition. There are some puzzling editing choices; I’ve come across 3 sets of stories that are almost identical and separated by a couple of chapters, but given the author and editor’s apparent qualifications and reverence for the Hopi culture, I’m reluctant to attribute it to any sloppiness, I just haven’t discovered the logic behind it. I haven’t spotted the important differences, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. I hate to catch myself yadda-yaddaing through 20,000 year old stories, it may very well be that the little things that matter greatly in a context like this, so I will tiptoe around the idea that I haven’t been patient enough to A/B the similar tales to spot the important differences that justified keeping both versions. Read the rest of this entry »