SAVE OUR BEAUTIFUL PLANET

Climate Change is the theme for this year's annual BLOG ACTION DAY.

"BLOG ACTION DAY is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance."


On the corkboard that covers the walls near my desk, I post photos of the ones I love. Even before the "Eagle has landed", when the first astronauts had circled the moon without landing, I pinned up their photo of earthrise over the edge of the moon. They were awed by it, and so was I. What a beautiful planet we live on, blue oceans and lands tinted blue with atmosphere, all swirled with white clouds and glittering snows!

It looks indestructible, but it is not. Global climate change is happening at an accelerating rate due to the rapid buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Glaciers and polar ice caps are melting. They have served through the ages as reflective surfaces that moderate the amount of sun rays striking the earth. And as they diminish they not only lead to climate change for us, they themselves become the victims of the increased heat. It is a positive feedback system.

I feel confident that many bloggers are posting remedies that can be applied on a personal basis. Here is a link to my friend Aurora's blog. She has a list of excellent suggestions.

What I would like to address concerns larger projects that must be addressed by governments or industries if we are to save our planet from its catastrophic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This is how Otto spent the last part of his life, seeking to convince those in power that the sun and the wind are the only solutions, that they were being used successfully in other countries, that the components were essentially "off the shelf". He had designed an even more efficient conventional steam power plant. I have shown a diagram of it previously on this blog.

Just this morning I saw a program on PBS that showed wind farms in Pennsylvania, and the acceptance of them as things of beauty by an initially hostile populace. They are tall, slender and quiet, a lacy decoration on a beautiful landscape.

There are many ways to store the energy of alternative systems when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine, especialy when wind and sun are integrated into utility systems.

Because it is BLOG ACTION DAY I will post once more the information about improved solar plants. Skip it if you have read it too many times already.

Otto proposed building solar-turbine power plants in such places as the Gran Desierto of northern Mexico, the Yuma desert of Arizona, the Sahara and Gobi deserts.

The power plants, of his improved design, would be the conventional steam turbines now used, with the schematic below showing a more economical design than any current solar plant. Low-cost parabolic trough concentrators would boil water. The wet steam would then be dried and superheated by the focused solar light of tracking heliostats.

This would significantly reduce dependence on fossil fuels. It would be a first step toward slowing the accelerating pace of global warming before it reaches the point of no return.

This is an example of the single-axis parabolic collectors
that would be used for the pre-heat.
These are at Kramer Junction in the Mojave Desert.

Their are improved versions of the above type of pre-heat collector using Fresnell lens for even greater efficiency (i.e. lower cost).

This plant, CPS 10 in Spain is an example of the
tracking heliostats that would provide the super-heating
for the seccond stage.

And here is a part of our earth to be saved.

Delightful Surprise!

I came home at suppertime last night and turned on my computer for the first time that day. And guess what?! I found that Laini Taylor is awarding me a copy of her newly released book Lips Touch: Three Times autographed by herself and her husband, Jim Di Bartolo, who illustrated it. The book I am winning is one of the three prizes for entries in her first kiss contest (see my previous blog). Isn't that fabulous?

If, by any chance, you have missed Laini Taylor's blog Grow Wings it will be well worth your while to get acquainted with this incredibly gifted and energetic author of the Dreamdark; Blackbringer and Dreamdark; Silksinger. She is also the new mother of Clementine, one of the world's cutest baby girls. I don't know where she gets the vitality to do all that she does, including hosting Sunday Scribblings, book signings, conferences and family celebrations and still write an almost daily blog that bursts with happiness and gossipy bits that make one feel that one is getting a long letter from a favorite sister.

This is the current heading of Laini's blog
showing the covers of her three books

Jim Di Bartolo's illustrations in Laini's books and on their covers, are like jewels in a perfect setting.

Oh, and she has pink hair.

First Kiss

The Sunday Scribblings prompt is First Kiss.

The first time I was kissed, other than by my close relatives, I was outraged. Phillip had no right to seize my face with a hand on each cheek and press his mouth to mine. I was almost four years old. He was a few months younger.

Yes, I guess I was pretty cute.

As far as I was concerned, kissing rights belonged to one’s daddy or mama, not to a playmate chosen by Mama. Phillip lived on the high side of the street and I lived on the lower side. One or the other of us had to be escorted across the street so that Phyllis and Phillip (and weren’t those names cute together?) could play while their mothers visited.

Yes, I was truly outraged by that unsolicited kiss. I burst into tears while Mrs. Lathrop told my mother how they had always encouraged Phillip not to inhibit his feelings but to express them freely. She frowned at me. Apparently she felt that I was expressing my feelings much too freely.

With this early conditioning against kisses, I managed to avoid most of them for the next fourteen years or so. That’s when I had my first real kiss, the kind that can resonate for a lifetime.

Early sketch that I did of Otto

It was a late afternoon of a spring day, the air balmy and fragrant. I felt pretty in a floaty green dress with white polka dots instead of my usual sweater and skirt for a day of classes. I knew that he - he of the blue eyes and wavy brown hair - would probably be sitting on the curb in front of the art building in which he thought that I would be working on an assigned project.

We had held hands. We had compared philosophies. We had hiked together, gotten poison oak together, sung together. But we had yet to kiss. And I wanted desperately to be kissed by Otto.

As I crossed the quad and skirted the chapel, I entered a cloud of fragrance from a planting of small trees with tiny flowers with the texture and scent of gardenias. I broke off a twig and stuck it in my pocket. The sun was setting and the first star appeared, and, quickly, before the appearance of other stars destroyed the magic, I wished on the first star that tonight he would kiss me.

I don’t remember exactly how we reached the hill overlooking lake Lagunita, on the waters of which myriads of stars were now afloat. I think I may have positioned myself so that it would be very easy for him to kiss me. And he did so.

It was the first of seventy years worth of kisses from the one I love forever. He couldn’t return our last kiss, which I gave to him in the hospital as he lay dying. I miss his kisses, but I have a treasure trove of ones to remember. Especially that first one.

Cheese Challenge

"No one chooses to be cheesy!"
I wouldn't be so sure.
Don't mystery writers find cheese easy
To use as metaphor?

Just listen to the tough detective:
"She's full of holes as Swiss!" -
a description that's effective
for a bullet-riddled miss.

Tattoo

The Sunday Scribblings prompt is TATTOO.

I've never craved tattoos as body art -
except your name tattooed upon my heart.

H is for Houses - Berkeley styles

Daughter Candace Shock took these pictures of Berkeley houses during the many weeks that she stayed with me after Otto's death. She didn't include one of the more common styles, derived from the Mediterranean, perhaps because she grew up in one, the one in which I still live. She has returned to her own husband and household in Ontario, Oregon. My son Otto is here for this week, and soon (maybe Wednesday) I will begin sharing the house with a friend.

Here a Tori gate sits easily next to a driveway

This is a house I have long admired for its architecture
and the way in which the current owners
have painted it to show its decorative details.
It's a shame about those overhead wires, isn't it?

Some of said decorative details.

Details on a somewhat less elaborate Victorian.

And this little Victorian cottage boasts solar panels on its roof.
Very Berkeley!

There are many half-timbered houses

I think a witch might like this one.

Another delightful little Victorian - and too many overhead wires.

Details. Please enlarge this photos by clicking on them.

To link to other ABC Wednesday participating blogs, go to Mrs. Nesbitt's ABC Wednesday Round 5 or click on banner at top of page. And hope that MakLinky is behaving better than he did last week.

Keys

The prompt for Sunday Scribblings is "key". While I suspect that the intention of our prompter was that we should write metaphorically about abstract keys, I am going to be very literal and write about honest-to-goodness, real-life, fit-into-a-lock keys. Dozens and dozens of them.

My children (if one can call senior citizens "children") and I (but mostly they) have been sorting Otto's belongings, clothes to go to various charities, millions (literally) of pieces of paper any one of which might be of vital importance, odd items that have accumulated during the fifty years that we have lived in our current home, thousands of slides, snapshots, photographs, certificates etc.

And KEYS, all carefully marked, but not always in such a manner that it is easy to fit them to the many keyholes and locks in our large house and our Mendocino county vacation houses ("the cabins").

These are a few that daughter Candace and son Otto were trying to fit to their appropriate keyholes.

It has rapidly become obvious that husband Otto and I had become unintentional pack-rats. It wasn't that we were acquisitive, but rather that we never threw anything away. Candace points out to me that she has found at least twenty more keys since these photos were taken.


No, I'm not planning to leave this house full of joyous memories, but there will be a little more space in the the drawers and closets. I am too lazy today to photograph the boxes and boxes of pencils and pens or the two large packing boxes that Candace has filled with empty ring binders (planning to donate them to women's shelters where the children of the sheltered women need back-to-school supplies).

Be sure to go to Sunday Scribblings to find what many clever writers have written about keys.