heliopsis

The Little Engine That Didn't Feel Like It

My solar panels were activated just over a week ago, but I was too busy with the Caroling Party to post about it. On a sunny day this close to the solstice, I produce over 10kWh of electricity, and I'll produce lots more than that on the longer days of summer. There's a website where you can look at the production of my solar installation, and it's quite nifty: you can see how much power each panel is producing right now, and a time lapse of the past 24h, and track productivity in the preceding weeks and months the system has been active.

Inexplicably, the site requires a password. There's no data on this site that anyone could use, as far as I can tell. It's not like you could sign onto the site and steal the energy my panels are producing. I can't imagine why anyone but me would want to look at the site twice, so it's not even worth sharing the password, really. It's just another example of spurious "security" on the interwebz. Everything has to have a damn password, even if there's nothing to protect.

I see that there's an API reference on the site, so perhaps I can write a script to extract the super-secret information and make it public. Maybe wikileaks would like it.

Anyway, I'm pleased as punch with my new solar panels, and I'll show you the website if you're interested.

This reminds me of something. I drink a cup of Yogi tea almost every morning, and each tea bag has a little snippet of wisdom from, I suppose, the yogi. One of the snippets I see regularly is "you will feel fulfilled when you do the impossible for another." Every time I read this, I feel a bit depressed: it sounds awfully difficult. So I've decided to settle for feeling smug when I do something nice for myself. Hence the solar panels.

Many of you have visited my home for the Caroling Party or for post-show parties from Theatre at First. You may have sat on my sofa, a sturdy, grey-brown Jennifer Convertibles from about 2001. It unfolds into a reasonably comfortable, queen-size bed. It's been a good, sturdy sofa, but I just bought a new sofa from IKEA and I need to get rid of the old one. Oh, and I've never had pets, so it's free of scratches and allergens.

Here's a picture:


Would you like a sofa? If so, come and get it!

I realize I am out of step with the world. I'm supposed to keep two chat windows open at all times, send text messages and tweets continuously from my iPhone, read and update facebook and Google+ hourly and LJ/DW at least a couple times a day, but I just can't. I would rather do actual things.

But I would like to keep up with my friends. For a while, checking FB and LJ once a day sufficed, but the signal-to-noise ratio on FB is awfully low, I find, and I have largely abandoned it. I ought to be gung-ho for Google+, but I've kind of lost my enthusiasm for the whole game. I have never been able to convince myself that twitter would be a good idea for me. What I really want is a daily digest: something that scoops the whole mess, chaff and all, into a single hopper and lets me filter out what looks interesting.

Has anyone heard of such a thing? Am I the only one who'd use it?

I heard about Occupy Wall Street through the news, and the Occupy Boston protest through the Globe and WBUR. This feels important to me, and I decided I wanted to do something to help—but camping in downtown Boston was not it. I discussed it with the Deacons at First Church Somerville, and got support but no firm plans. (Well, our minister was planning to take her kids, and some donations, down on Friday.) so then I sent a note to the church mailing list, announcing my plan to head down after church today. That got a bit more attention: in particular, the church admin sent me a link to a Google spreadsheet listing what they need. In the end, Harold Jones joined me, and Thom Whittemore donated some reusable plates. I had a bunch of reusable, plstic plates and plastic cutlery from my party supply as well. Harold and I stopped at Goodwill in Davis and picked up all the comforters and blankets they had: that set me back a whopping $50, then we took the T down to South Station. The protest is pretty obvious, once you step out of the red line station: bunch of tents and signs huddled on the ground in the middle of traffic and enormous buildings. This was, if I'm not mistaken, where the Boston Horticultural Society was supposed to build a botanic garden, but failed to organize themselves or anyone else. I think this was a better use of the space. It was messy, but organized and the young people in the camp were uniformly polite and pleasant. It was easy to spot the Logistics tent, where a young man thanked us for the blankets, and pointed us to the Food tent to drop off the plates and utensils. At the food tent, they were grateful for everything and seemed to have a plentiful supply of muffins and peanut butter, among other things. Harold and I then made a loop though the camp to absorb the atmosphere (messy, but earnest and sweet-natured) and then Frankin called. He had had a practice with his swim team this morning, and was waiting to pick me up by South Station. Since it was just Harold and me, Frankin gave him a ride home, too.

All in all, it was an easy and pleasant experience, and I feel like i'm on the right side of history (by standing on the left side of politics, but what else is new?) I encourage you to check the Google spreadsheet and take down what yu can to help.

When Google bought ITA Software, the options I had been granted years ago turned into money. A nice chunk of money, but not enough to retire on. I decided to spend some of the money on improving the energy efficiency of my home.

I had an energy audit, complete with IR photos of my walls. This revealed that my walls were well-insulated, which I find a bit hard to believe. They're certainly not up to Canadian standards of insulation, but then again, winters here are not as severe. It's also true that my gas bills are not outrageous. I used to pay more for gas in my previous apartment, which was a lot smaller. Anyway, it was good to know that the previous owners had done a good job with insulation, because that's a messy job and not much fun.

What I really wanted was solar panels, so I looked into this. (OK, actually I started by looking into solar panels and then, when I felt guilty about doing the fun thing first, I did the energy audit.) It turns out to be a really, really good idea to put solar panels on your house these days in Massachusetts. The state has big subsidies, and even the federal government has a bit of a subsidy for this. There are plenty of companies eager to install solar panels, several of which will install solar panels for free. Yes, for free: they install the solar panels and you buy your electricity from them, at a fixed rate, for a few years. They collect the subsidies, you get electricity at a discount, and everybody's happy. But when I talked to one such company, they were only willing to put enough panels on my roof to produce half the electricity I consume. I figured I could do better than that.

Sure enough, I found a couple companies willing to install enough panels to generate all the electricity I use. I have to pay some money up front, but I happen to have some money at the moment. Once this is done, I'll get my electricity for free. The panels should last 30 years; certain components will need to be replaced in 15. They estimate that the system will pay for itself in about 5 years. Oh, of course I'm not simply disconnecting from the grid. The way it works is that my panels pump energy into the grid during the day, and I draw from the grid as I need it. The net over the course of a year is expected to be neutral, but I may need to pay a few bucks some months, while I'll get a refund in others. I'll have to track this to see how it turns out.

Really, why wouldn't everybody do this? Well, of course not everyone has a roof that's well suited for solar. I have a south-facing roof with no shading, thanks to Medford's anti-tree policies. And as usual, it takes money to save money, even despite the subsidies.

The solar installers will be here Wednesday to get started, and they expect to be done this week.

I've also started down the path of replacing my old boiler with an ultra high efficiency boiler. The energy audit said that I could probably save 30% on my natural gas bill by doing this, and that's significant. The subsidies for efficient boilers are not so generous, and I don't yet have an estimate of the total cost, but I expect it's well within my Google-enhanced budget.

Next, I'm hoping to persuade F. to replace his car with a plug-in hybrid of some sort, so that his daily commute can be solar powered. Of course, that would be a significant increase in our power consumption, so I'd end up buying electricity again...

I drink a cup of Yogi Tea most mornings at breakfast, and each tea bag has a little fortune on its tag. One of the recurring ones is "You will feel fulfilled when you do the impossible for another." Whenever I get this one, I think yes, I suppose so, but that seems awfully hard. I've decided to settle for feeling smug when I do something sensible for myself.

I read about Solar Metal Roofing through spam from Angie's List, and I'm intrigued. I think I'd like to use some of the money I'll get from the purchase of ITA by Google to improve the energy efficiency of my home, and I've been thinking I probably need to deal with the roof sometime in the next couple years anyway. Unfortunately, none of the providers touted by Angie's List happens to be anywhere east of the Mississippi. So I thought I'd ask the wide, wide world of the web if anyone has any experience with this. I've contacted a provider in Walpole, MA that looks promising and also Angie's List's top-rated "earth friendly" roofing contractor in the Boston area and a Medford company to see if they provide solar laminate metal roofing, but maybe somebody knows somebody who's cousin's rabbi's uncle's brother-in-law's neighbour's friend did this recently. If you have any recommendations (or warnings!) please let me know!

I woke up in the middle of the night, as one does, with the vague notion that there ought to be a word that sounds like "procrastinate" but which alludes to Procrustes from Greek mythology. I got up to go to the bathroom, which is usually the correct response to these midnight musings, and came up with "procrustenate." (sovay may be wincing at the mashup between a Greek name and a Latin ending. Sorry!) Then I started to wonder what the word would mean.

Now, Procrustes was a nasty piece of work. He pretended to be a friendly innkeeper, inviting travellers to spend the night. But he only had one bed, and if you were too short for the bed, he'd stretch you on the rack; and if you were too long for the bed, he'd cut off first your feet, and then your head, to fit you in the bed. As a Very Tall person, you can see why Procrustes' story has always held a grip on my imagination.

So, what would it mean to procrustenate? Well, it would mean to cut off essential things in order to meet an arbitrary requirement. And then I realized with a start that this was a word we have needed for a long time. "I wish the damned Tea Party would stop procrustenating, and get serious for a change."

There are several things I like about this new word, none of them conducive to clear and precise communication. One is, of course, its extreme similarity to an existing word that is just on the edge of familiarity for many people, such that using the new word will leave them utterly confused. Another is that the unstressed syllable simply must be spelled with an 'e,' distinct from the 'i' in its more familiar near-homonym, creating opportunities for generations of pedants to click their tongues in dismay at the ignorance of the spelling public. Finally, Procrustes himself is sufficiently obscure that any well-meaning writer pretty much has to explain him when alluding to him, so the word, while precise and valuable in meaning, is also likely to leave even well-informed people scratching their heads.

You might reasonably object that the semantic space of "words alluding to Procrustes and meaning foolish or dangerous omission in pursuit of arbitrary goals" has already been amply filled with "procrustean," and you would be correct. It's a good, sturdy adjective with a proven track record and plenty of mileage left in it. But it lacks the urgency of a verb, and I think that's what "procrustenate" offers. We no longer have politicians who are willing merely to talk about monstrous cuts to essential programs (and simultaneous, identically vast cuts to taxes on the richest people); no, our current political life is filled with Procrustes' disciples, eager to actually increase the suffering of the poor, the sick and the old in order to "reduce the deficit." Not because there is any actual, pressing need to reduce the deficit (interest rates on government bonds remain at historically low levels) (and anyway, Bush II ran up a much larger deficit pursuing his Thrilling Adventure in Mesopotamia) (and besides, if there were such a need, surely the richest americans wouldn't mind so much having their tax rates raised to, say, the rates charged under Holy Saint Reagan) but because, as far as I can tell, they hate poor, old people and want them to suffer.

So I urge you to use this new word in all your correspondence. It shouldn't be hard to work it into conversations about the economy or the government. You can use its noun form, procrustenation too, but I recommend against creating any new adjectives. Let's leave some room for good old procrustean to breathe.

In the world:

visited 7 states (3.11%)
Create your own visited map of The World
Pretty pathetic, really.

In the United States:

visited 18 states (36%)
Create your own visited map of The United States
I have a whole lot of the US to visit.

In Canada:

visited 9 states (69.2%)
Create your own visited map of Canada
I have much better coverage here, though of course it's illusory. Since the Western provinces are about as big as France or Germany, it's a bit spurious to say that I've covered so much territory when really, I drove through. One more thing: I notice that James Bay is rendered as land rather than water on this map. For shame!

while searching Amazon for a poodle-shaped dish (for reasons too complicated to go into here), I encountered this:
CK Products "I Love You" Break-Up Bar Chocolate Mold
Well, which is it? "I love you" or breakup?