Two Houses -- I know which one I prefer!

I just couldn't resist posting this -- HT to Mommy Life.

HOUSE # 1:
A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas.

In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern "snow belt,"either. It's in the South.

HOUSE # 2:

Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every "green" feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifyingtanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

HOUSE # 1 (20-room energy-guzzling mansion) is outside of Nashville, Tennessee. It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist (and filmmaker) Al Gore.

HOUSE # 2 (model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford , Texas. Also known as "the Texas White House," it is the private residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.

So whose house is gentler on the environment? Yet another story you WON'T hear on CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC or read about in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Indeed, for Mr. Gore, it's truly "an inconvenient truth."

The Technology Meme

I realize that I have been derelict in keeping up with my posting, so I thought maybe doing this meme, which I got from CJ via Tracy, might get me back in the swing..

Cell phones

1. How long have you had a cell phone? (If you don't have one, why not? What would prompt you to get one?) Since Christmas of 2006. My husband, who had been delaying, finally got one for business that September, and decided that I needed one too.
   
2. How much do you use it? Our phones are prepaid, with the condition that you must buy extra minutes (about an hour's worth) every four months. So far, I use about an hour every four months! :-)
   
3. Do you get jittery without it? Only if I 'm expecting someone to call -- a kid to be picked up from school or something. Since I didn't get it until Christmas, last year the number wasn't on their school emergency cards. But this year it will be. I also like to have it when I am driving a fair distance from home.
   

Computers

1. How many computers in your house? Since my husband is a self-employed computer consultant, I can see four just from where I'm sitting! And each of my kids (and kids-in-law) has one -- George has two, desktop and Macbook -- so when everybody is here we could have as many as 14, counting the ancient Mac classic on which we still play SuperMines and Spin Doctor.
   
2. How much time do you spend on the computer in a day? From as little as two minutes just to quick-check email, up to 6 to 8 hours if I'm working on a project for church or Right to Life. Most days about an hour between everything.
   
3. How does the time break down? (work/play/email/blogs/etc.) Email - 2 to 5 minutes; Blog reading -- (including a couple which are prayer-request update blogs for some folks with health needs) 10 to 30 minutes; Work -- nothing to 6 or more hours if a music planning sheet is due; Games -- more than I'd like: 15 minutes and up; Blog writing -- almost none. But I resolve to do better!
4. If your computer malfunctions, do you-
   1. Log in as root and fix the problem in a few swift keystrokes? Only if I'm home alone and it's a recurring problem.
      
   2. Get some online help and fix it yourself with slightly slower keystrokes? Never
   3. Enlist outside help? from whom? How does he or she respond when you ask for assistance? Say "Honey, would you take a look at this?" or alternatively "How do you .... again?" In-house tech support rocks!! He loves me! He always fixes it!
      
   4. Opt for the wishful thinking computer repair strategy, also known as the reboot-with-fingers-crossed strategy? I play certain games that occasionally freeze my machine, and since the in-house tech support assures me that the solution is a hard reboot, that's what I do. But I don't cross my fingers.
      

Meta

1. What techno-gadget would you most like to own? Photo printer for pictures of my grandchildren that I can carry in my purse,instead of reciting the URL.
2. Of those you own (including PDA, iPod, etc.), which would you miss most acutely if you dropped it in the lake accidentally while canoeing? Everything I've got except the phone is WAY too big to take in a canoe. I had an iPod nano for a while (George got it free with his Macbook) but I gave it to Katie because I almost never used it.
   
3. What's something you'll never buy? (Careful with the nevers, though, says this brand new cell phone owner.) A big screen TV, or any other kind. We have been TV free for our whole marriage (26 years in three weeks!) and I would NEVER go back, especially since I can play DVD's on my computer. ;-)

Since I can't think of anybody who actually reads this blog (mea culpa, mea culpa .....) I won't tag anybody, but if you do it because you saw it here, PLEASE let me know!

George #1

So if I am going to catch this blog up to date with real life, I should probably start with "George". "George" is my older son, who is 18 and in the Coast Guard. When I last posted last fall, he had just gone to boot camp, and we were waiting for a address so we could send him mail. Actually, from now on I'm just going to call him George with no quotes, even though it's not the name he regularly answers to. Although my daughter Arwen uses her real first name in her blog here, (because Googling "Arwen" gets you a million Lord of the Rings hits), for privacy purposes she gave the rest of us pseudonyms, and I'm going to stay consistent with her usage. She calls me Mom, naturally, and Salome Ellen is my real name, but I don't use both names anywhere but online, so it's not findable.

George's letter arrived shortly after I posted, and consisted of one page from a 4 by 6 notebook, saying: DOING FINE
SPREAD ADDRESS
WRITE BACK

(five lines of address)


LOVE TO ALL,
GEORGE

This is typical of my son; he writes almost nothing except on a keyboard, and my husband assures me that the all-caps style is required on official Coast Guard paperwork and George figured that would also apply to letters home. So we threw all the letters we had already written into envelopes and sent them away, and of course we continued to do so as long as he was in boot camp. Unfortunately for my 2 non-family readers, my beautiful granddaughter Camilla was born two days after that letter (and that will get a post of its own..), and what with writing to George and helping my daughter, I stopped writing here.

George had been due to graduate from boot camp on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and the plan was that my husband would pick him up, drive as far as my brother's house in Pennsylvania, and return home Thanksgiving Day proper. We would have our family dinner on Saturday, which would be nice for Arwen, whose in-laws live here too. They could make both dinners!

Unfortunately, there was a monkey wrench in the works. George, who had spent several months working on his running and stamina before boot camp, had forgotten about his arms, and couldn't crank out enough push-ups in the required time. So he was "rephased" -- which means kicked back a class -- and didn't actually graduate till the first of December. The downside was no whole-family Thanksgiving, but the upside was that I was free to go along to pick him up. I was able to visit in my hometown, walk on the Atlantic beach, and renew my acquaintance with an almost-forgotten New Jersey delicacy: Taylor pork roll.

Of course I also attended the graduation, and I was expecting it to be very emotional. I was proud, of course, and happy to be there, but a little wistful because I would not be meeting the people with whom George had spent most of boot camp. "His" boot company was O, or "Oscar", but they were ten days gone, and he would be graduating with Q company, called Quebec, but always referred to by George as "the dreaded KAY-beck." So I was a tad melancholy as the band filed in, tuned up, and prepared to play. I was expecting Semper Paratus, and would have been bawling very quickly, but instead they broke into Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer! (It was December, after all.) But the contrast was enought to make me laugh, and after that I was just proud and happy.


(Note: I still have a lot to say to get caught up on George, but I think I'll publish this now to keep my [infinitesimal] audience happy!)

Promises, promises ....

I promise that I will put some content here soon - catching up on all the things I left hanging last fall and so forth. But today... it's HOT here, and when you're having hot flashes anyway.... UGH!! Cooler weather, come soon!

She's Baaaaaack!

Roz over at Exultet called me on welcoming her back when I hadn't posted myself in almost 8 months. So I did the switch-to-the -new-Blogger thing, and here I am. I'm less busy now than I was in the winter, so I'll try to do this for real this time!

Thanks, Roz -- I needed that!

Waiting and Writing

Since I posted last week, "George" has gone off to boot camp and I have missed him much more than I realized I would. On the other hand, I have learned again how much information is on the internet if you want it! After about the third crying spell, which my husband, bless his heart, assured me was not only OK but a good thing (none of the "thank goodness he's out of the house" stuff), I got on Google maps with the satellite overlay feature. I can see the track he'll be running around, and the barracks building where he sleeps, and so forth. The base even provides a "driving tour" for people who are coming to the graduations -- every week, year round-- and I can identify the buildings by name. When we finally get some mail, I'll be able to visualize what he's doing pretty precisely.

Which brings us to the "waiting" part. The first week of boot camp is essentially "intake processing", where they sort out the ones who maybe have a medical problem missed by initial physicals, or don't have all their ducks in a row with some other aspect of their life. Some they keep, some they send home. But during this process all the recruits stay in an intake barracks, (which I can see on Google ;-) ) until they are assigned to a recruit company with a number (e.g. N175) living in a "squad bay" in a particular barracks. And until they get that assignment, they don't have a mailing address.

My husband, who did all this himself just over 30 years ago, assures me that as soon as the assignments were given last Friday, they sat all the recruits down and had them send a note home with their addresses (and probably not much else.) Since getting mail is good for morale, they want those addresses out there to family and friends. (We have an email all prepped to go to the whole extended family as soon as we get it.) But since yesterday was "Columbus Day" -- and I'm old-fashioned enough to like Columbus, and think he did a good and useful thing -- there was no mail service. Our long-awaited address was just sitting somewhere. No wonder they call it "snail mail" ; and then the snails get a vacation!

I have about a four-page-both-sides-on-legal-pad handwritten letter waiting to go, and the minute I get that note I'm going to address an envelope, slap on a stamp, and head for the nearest late-pickup mailbox. He may not be my baby anymore, but he's my son, and he's going to get mail!

Back from Real Life

Not to imply that my blog is unreal, but typing here requires TIME, which in the last month has been used up by a lot of "real life." This does not include the catering job, which is being indefinitely postponed because so far there are no registrants for the local class. We did acquire a pod-type coffee machine, which is a much better resource for a smallish (10-15 max) class size then trying to make the right amount in a large brewer. But I have been confirmed in my opinion -- my family are "hot beverage snobs!" I knew they were picky tea drinkers, as I am one myself (the water must be boiling, the pot must be preheated, it must brew for exactly so many minutes, and so forth.) But when my 13-year-old's (!) comment on the pod coffee was "Well, it's better than that stuff they make in the urns at church" I knew we must be snobs. Sigh!

The "real life" which has happened in the last month has been quite varied. My younger kids went back to school, and for the first time since 1993, when our oldest entered middle school, we have children in only one building, on one schedule. It's almost disorienting! There have been band practices, football games (including the great cross-town rivalry, which the blue team - ours - won),
a trip to the state capital for a get-away weekend trip which our kids gave us for our 25th anniversary, another trip to the state capital for the annual conference of the state pro-life organization, three out-of-town business trips for my husband, and visits from our grandson, and of course his parents.

But the "realest" part is what we did today -- we sent our 18-year-old, our older son, off to the Coast Guard. He's not quite gone yet; along with 10 or 12 other wet-behind-the-ears types, he is checked into a hotel near the recruiting office for the night, and we will go and see him sworn in tomorrow. But he doesn't live here any more, and probably never will. (Of course his "stuff" still lives here - he was allowed to take one very small duffel bag to hold the clothes he is wearing, and nothing can go with or to him until he ships out to his A-school in California after Thanksgiving. And considering what we still have that belongs to his older sisters, including a wedding dress, I don't expect we'll see it moved out anytime soon.) This was a different kind of "going" than we've had so far with his sisters, since when kids go off to college you assume that they'll be back for at least a couple of summers, and two of our three so far have gone to schools within an hour-and-a-half of home.

Since he will only be able to send and receive real ("snail mail") letters -- no email, no online access, no computer at all, no ipod; no wonder boot camp is hard -- I have made a resolve to write him at least one letter a week. And here is where it gets good for anybody reading here: the resolve includes writing here, and catching up on my other letters and emails as well. (Writing, that is. I read them as fast as I get them ;-) ) So my "real life" will now include enhanced communication, and you're the first to know! (I can't send a letter to him until he sends his address; even the recruiters don't know what it will be until it's actually assigned.) Details will follow.

Guess I'd better get started..

Wow! I can't believe that I have actual comments! I guess that means I had better write more posts for people to comment about.

Today my husband and I drove to nearest-big-city to check out and make a deposit on the meeting room he is renting for the esoteric-computer-stuff class he teaches. This is a big step of faith, because always before (for the last 17 years!) when he has taught these classes it has been under contract to someone else; they provided the place, the students, and the amenities. But the folk who did that have mostly moved on to other things, so if there are going to BE classes, my sole-proprietor husband will have to offer them: with money up front and no guaranteed takers. Scary enough for him.

But then there's the other part -- the amenities. ( In this case that means food and drink. ;-)) The cost of in-house catering drove him away from one possible site -- coffee at $26 per gallon, a dozen bagels the same. And NO offsite food permitted. So we moved on to another site, which doesn't care how you cater.

Which is very good, because the caterer of choice is -- ME. This is not entirely outside my scope; I have a food-service background (I helped open a small deli-type restaurant) and actually catered our second daughter's wedding reception. (Full disclosure -- it wasn't the same day as the wedding; she got married in a far-Western state and had one reception there, and then we had a local reception for people in this area.) But I've never been solely in charge of the food for a four-day schedule of classes all on my own.

Fortunately the numbers shouldn't be too high. A class of 25 students would be pushing our wildest-dreams limit, especially till we get husband-offering-classes down to a part of the local business routine. And when our whole family is home, I'm regularly cooking for 10 or more. But this is not in my own kitchen (it's about an hour drive away; refigerator, sink, and dishwasher, but no stove.) And I want to plan for a minimum of leftovers. So, while I have lots of ideas, and a rudimentary guess at needs and costs, I guess I'd better get started! Good thing the class isn't until the second week in October. I'll keep you posted.

Still here...

As I suspected, I don't have much time here, especially when Tommy hijacks the computer I mostly get to use to take to an overnight LAN party. I can't believe my "baby" will start high school in just over a week! This really is a new phase of life, and I hope I'll make the time to document it. So much of the kids' growing up has run together. And Daniel (my grandson) is 2 1/2 months old already. He's changing every day, and I'll forget this, too, if I'm not careful. [ Resolve to write here more often!] And I wish my daughter would post more, but as she's two years and hundreds of posts ahead of me, I guess I'd better not complain.....

Numero Uno

So -- this is my first, very private, post. (Mostly because nobody knows I'm out here.) I think I'll leave it like this for a bit, and see if I actually want to do this, or whether I'll just keep this so that I can sign on to Blogger-limited comments. I guess the pace of life will determine that!