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I’m lucky in so many ways to live in New Mexico. I mean, it’s not blind, dumb luck, it’s the kind of luck I sought out and it actually turned out to have been worth looking for. One very cool thing about New Mexico that not everyone knows about is Michael Reynolds, the innovative architect who creates Earthship communities up in Taos. If you don’t know about Earthships, he’s got a pretty comprehensive website on them. They’re handmade, self sustaining homes made out of recycled materials. They create their own electricity, cache their own water, and maintain an internal temperature in the 70s all year without any heating or cooling systems other than windows and walls. They’re wonderfully eccentric, with spires and walls with wine bottles in them that let in blue and green light and hand-molded bathtubs, and the south-facing windows are always lined with plants because they cleanse the air, the filter out UV rays, they and provide food, and their roots help cleanse the greywater. It’s a cool setup. Continue reading

I just read an article on ABC News’s website that described the great efforts the inaugural committee was putting into emulating what the 16th president served at his own, right down to the china patterns. It’s not the kind of article I usually come across, much less read, I’m all hung up on “real issues” and “substance” and stuff, but this one caught my eye for some reason. I won’t recap it, it’s concise and well written if anyone’s interested. 

What I thought was cool was that the inaugural staff has not only posted the menu itself, probably as expected, but also the recipes! I’m probably not going to make me any pheasant any time soon – you really ought to hunt your own if you’re going to eat pheasant, and I’m not going to hunt my own –  but I’m pretty tempted to scale down that seafood stew/puff pastry recipe my damn self. (The recipe calls for 6 Maine Lobster tails. I’m thinking of a quantity that is more in the zero-to-one lobster tail range.) My kid will probably make “that face” at me if I offer her some, she’s not big on seafood or creamy soups, but if it’s good enough for the leader of the free world (am I supposed to capitalize some of that?), it’s durned well good enough for my family. No matter. More for the grownups. Continue reading

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.

A blog that I like called Kicking Tires had a post about a real compact pickup that an Indian company called Mahindra is trying to build in the US and sell here. It’s kinda on that ugly tip, if you know what I mean, but it’s as close to that ’80s mini-truckin’ ideal that I’ve seen in ages. The first model is supposed to have an economical 4 cylinder engine that gets about 35mpg on the highway, and a diesel hybrid with unknown specs is due out after that. It’s small, but if it’s halfway tough, I could use it on my little ranch pretty easily, don’t have to worry much about street cred when you’re hauling alfalfa. Continue reading

I keep wanting to upgrade or sidegrade my busted Dodge pickup, and let me tell you, it’s not a great time for someone who thinks like me to buy a car. It’s really hard to find a family vehicle of any shape or size that gets even 30mpg on the highway; I haven’t actually kept a tally, but there probably aren’t even 10 vehicles on the market these days that can do it. When I was 17 years old, 30 or 35mpg was considered decent highway mileage, and the Chevy Sprint was getting close to 50 on the highway even then. So today, a very economical car (if you believe Kia and Toyota commercials) gets, well, 30mpg. 2 decades later, no improvement at all. My pickup has been averaging 15mpg, and there are still people out there who consider that pretty damned good for a truck. And to get close to 1988 Chevy Sprint mileage, you’ve got to cough up thousands of extra dollars for a hybrid and take on the added complexity of maintaining 2 separate drivetrains and whatever long-term liability the batteries impose. To be fair, there hasn’t been much drama about Prius or Civic Hybrid reliability, and to be even more fair, when the new diesel VWs come out this year, they’re rumored to get well into the 50s with just a normal diesel powertrain. But as fast as everything else in the world in every other area of technology is changing, fuel economy remains basically static in the US. Continue reading