Dash

05:13 pm: Help me, lazyweb!
I'm in Milan, building huts. The nice folks in the museum have purchased woodworking tools, since in Italy doing light carpentry is actually pretty rare.

For cutting the lumber, they purchased a Nutool BT251 combination table saw-mitre saw. Unfortunately, the instruction manual was not included, and we can't figure out how to open in into mitre saw configuration. Help me, lazyweb!

11:54 pm: Earth Day post

Didn't do anything special for today. I think that our lifestyle is fairly green, but could be better. But I get the impression that by most folks' standards, we're eco-nuts. Not really, though. What happens is this: you make one change, then another, then another, and after a few years you don't resemble anyone around you anymore. We've done lots of easy stuff, and lots of stuff with fast payoff, but the many of the more tedious or long-term changes haven't happened yet. But they will!

Here's a list of various things, big and small, we've make our lives more eco-friendly:

( It's surprisingly easy to be green )

11:09 pm: Much love!
I just want to thank all you folks for the outpouring of congrats and advice on our upcoming October Surprise. I'll try to keep this blog from becoming an all-kid fest (Buggydoo and Dooce do it better than I ever could, anyhow), but there will definitely be entries where we try to come to grips with parenthood. Hilarity should undoubtedly ensue.

10:43 am: Big News (3/3): Three, as in trimester
Heard the heartbeat today. rosindust and I are gonna be parents. Due date in mid to late October.

10:53 am: Carb counting...

Food	lbs CO2/100 Cal
shrimp	6.79
lamb	5.71
beef (grain fed)	3.04
pork	1.99
fish (avg value)	1.33
salmon (farmed)	1.07
tuna	1.05
eggs	0.64
milk	0.62
chicken	0.37
herring	0.06
apple	0.06
potatoes	0.05
veg (avg value)	0.03
corn	0.02
soy	0.01

The above table comes from "Fat Knowledge" post entitled "Vegans Vs. Hybrids". Lately, I've been trying to 'downgrade' my meat consumption for environmental reasons - instead of going vegetarian, I'd eat pork instead of beef, chicken instead of pork, etc. But I didn't really have any numbers outlining how much better or worse one type of food was than another, in terms of CO₂ emissions. This post seems to do the trick, but I can't claim to be able to verify the numbers (calling tongodeon!).

Some of the results are surprising - chicken has less impact than eggs? And what's up with herring - does it jump straight into nets? The biggest heartbreaker, for me, was lamb. Oh man I love lamb - but it's worse than beef (but better than shrimp?!?) in terms of carbon impact. Good thing that I don't eat it very often... but I'll have to cut down on the shrimp. Who knew?

If anyone can find a more comprehensive list out there, I'd appreciate it.

01:41 pm: Telecommuting today from mom's house in the country
It's pretty nice...
( Read more... )

10:33 pm: Big news (2/3): The Unburned Man
It's strongly looking like we won't be going to Burning Man this year.

rosindust's father has spoken Russian since childhood, and he's always wanted to visit. This year, he finally decided to go - and rosindust's going with him for free, thanks to his awesome frequent flyer miles. I can go, too - see St. Petersburg and Moscow, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, BUT:

Yep. The FF restrictions mean that the ONLY time to go is during Burning Man.

I guess it says something about me that I'm more bummed about missing the Burn than going to Russia. The Russia trip is not something that I planned, and it's kind of abstract to me, but I'd be a fool to pass it up. So this is definitely a head over heart decision, and I'm confident that this time next year I'll confidently say that I've made the right decision. But for now... there's a certain mourning.

At least the passports are gonna get a workout this year!

09:11 pm: Big news (1/3): Milan!
It's been coming for awhile, but I didn't want to say anything until the tickets came through... we're going to Milan!

Amazingly, it's because of the Mad Housers. La Triennale di Milano, Italy's first design museum, is flying Salma and I to Milan to build three huts and a Low Rider for an exhibit opening in May. At least one of the huts is going to be built out in the city square - "They might get vandalized, is that a problem?"

"It's your hut - if it's not a problem for you, it's not a problem for us..."

It's clearly an offer we couldn't refuse. Salma's bringing her boyfriend and I'm taking rosindust, and after the structures are complete we'll head our separate ways to see the sights.

Tracy and I will be in Italy from May 4 'til the 11th. Wish us luck!

PS: Future syoooper nerdity blogpost: converting hut plans to metric.

10:04 am: We're fine
We live intown, but a few miles south of where the tornado hit.

05:59 pm:

No, this has not happened to me. I think.

12:37 pm: Quick note
If I drink any more coffee, I'll be able to fly by flapping my arms.

10:11 am: Important discovery!
You can make boba in your coffeemaker! The water may have a little coffee residue in it, but if you're putting the pearls into coffee anyways...

10:57 am: Read this.

09:12 am: And now for something completely different
Bacon!

03:21 pm: Late January: The northwestern Atlanta suburb of Marietta decides to evict all the homeless.

Early February: Four homeless folks, three in northwest Atlanta, are found dead of exposure.

I was out of town at the time, so I missed this tidbit.

11:11 pm: archy
It's been an odd few days.

Thursday I started feeling stabby pains in the stomach, but I put it down to stress from work, where the registration machines decided to tank horribly. Then storms kept rosindust from leaving Athens until midnight and I stayed up worrying until she arrived at 2:30. So on Friday stabby pains were still there, but so was work stress, and between barely being able to eat and loginess from sleep loss, I decided to go home at 5 instead of waiting until 9 for rosindust to pick me up on her way home from teaching.

Good thing I did, too. Once I got home, my GI tract informed me that no, the stabby pains weren't just stress, and I'd better not venture further than 45 seconds from a bathroom if I knew what was good for me. I was settled in with my laptop when the phone rang.

It was Jason, one of the Mad Houser volunteers.

"Hey, where are you?"

(where am I supposed to be? is there some sort of benefit tonight?) "Uh... at home? Am I supposed to be somewhere?"

"Aren't you coming to the airport?"

(Airport? Airp - OH MY GOD AIRPORT)

"AAAAAA I TOTALLY FORGOT! I CAN'T BELIEVE I FORGOT! WHEN DOES THE PLANE LEAVE?"

I was supposed to leave for St. Louis this weekend, to put up a structure for Gallery 210 at University of Missouri St. Louis. They're putting together a very cool show titled "Urgent Shelter". Jason and I were being flown there by the gallery to help them build a Low Rider for the display. And I had utterly forgotten about it. I had a little over an hour to get to the airport, and no car.

DAMNED good thing I was at the house; it's much closer to the airport than my job. I threw some clothes in a bag and took the scooter to the MARTA station, where I locked the scooter up and threw the key to the lock inside the scooter's seat compartment. Thankfully, there were hardly any people at the airport, so I made it to the terminal with time to spare, which I spent clutching my stomach. The plane we were on was tiny - maybe 20 rows of seats, with two seats on one side and one on the other. It was like flying Air Greyhound [ed. note: huh, there actually used to be a Greyhound Airlines, weird].

So right now, I'm in St. Louis, which has just been socked with the biggest snowstorm in the past ten years, AND folks are celebrating Mardi Gras. Jason's gone off to socialize, but I'm still recovering from a hard day's work while recovering from a gut bug, so here I am. We're staying at the Cheshire Lodge, which is apparently the result of a drunken tryst between a Holiday Inn and a Steak and Ale.

The show looks like it'll be really cool. It's featuring four structures: a Low Rider, a Global Village Shelter, a paraSITE, and an Electroland "Urban Nomad". I've seen the Global Village Structure before, at the Cooper-Hewitt, and I'd heard of the paraSITE but never actually saw one up close before. The Urban Nomad I'd never heard of and it wasn't there yet, a pity.

10:59 pm: Syuper dyooper OOPER POOPER nerdity
I guess I never mentioned it, but while I was away on vacation in beautiful Yosemite I also took the opportunity to wrap up making a Sketchup model of a stove. I then animated the hut and low rider models, took screenshots of all of the models, and built a brand-new construction section in the website.

Working on the stove moved me from 'beginner' to 'intermediate' on Sketchup, I think. I had to learn how to work with round things, how to do radial copies, how to make smooth bulges and bumps in the model, all kinds of stuff. I'm pretty happy with the results, although I'll need to go back at some point and clean up the assembly instructions and cut guides - at the time, I just wanted them out of my head and recorded SOMEWHERE, damn the typos.

09:52 pm: radio, radio
Looks like I'll be on WRFG tomorrow, talking about the Mad Housers(what else?) on the show "Class Chronicles. That'll be from Wednesday, Jan 30, from 7 to 8; anyone in the Atlanta area who wants to tune in, please do!

11:08 am: Marietta situation update
The first camp we helped out in Cobb has several long-term campers who are on the property with the owner's permission. Susan went out there yesterday to check out the situation and encountered the property owner.

Turns out that the police had shown up at his house asking him for permission to clear the camp. He refused. They then returned with a sanitation citation against the camp. So what did he do? He had pizzas delivered to the camp and was there helping the campers clean up the property. No trash, no citation. No citation, no sweep.

The owner is trying to help the guys who are living on his property, and in turn, the guys help him by watching after the property. This is exactly the type of stabilization and reintegration with society that the Mad Housers wants to encourage, and I'm thrilled to discover someone who Gets It. Furthermore, Susan reports that once all of this folderol blows over, the gentleman in question would like to talk to us about providing more and better shelters for the camp. Awesome!

It's still dark days, but things like this remind me that there are heroes out there, too.

10:08 pm: We lost one
After a rash of burglaries committed by a homeless guy, the city of Marietta decided that the correct response was to evict all the homeless.

We help a few camps up there, and we were told to remove the shelters on public property, which we did, today, taking out three low rider shelters that were along DOT right-of-way. The rest... well, they're on private property with permission.

But I just found out today that we lost one of our clients out there - Dominic, found frozen behind a liquor store. Dom was nice old dude. He didn't rob anyone. He didn't deserve to freeze to death.