Woolsey Life

I posted pictures of this bike when I put the road tires on it and I thought I would show off the latest addition.

Today Vince had my truck and Christy takes her car down to Temecula to pick up the shuttle to work. Not having any other option I grabbed my clip shoes and hit the road. I found myself at Bicycle Warehouse and went ahead and picked up this rack and pannier bag set. The rack was a new arrival, Matt had to pull it out of a box to show me. It is rated for 50kg (thats 110lbs for you English speakers). That is a far cry from the other racks I had looked at and this one was $5 more. The bags were $39 and I really labored over spending the money on these bags since I wasn’t 100% sure how I would use this bike. I figured if I never used them the shop would take them back. On the way home I ran a few errands for tomorrow and couldn’t believe how the bags kept expanding every time I would stop to pick something up.  I stuffed a box of blank lables, several packages of badge lanyards, a 3lbs bag of grass seed and a new watering hose attachment.  I could have stopped by the grocery store too!  And even with the added weight on the bike it wasn’t too bad climbing hills. Nice thing about being a converted mt. bike is that this thing has LOW gears.

I have really come to enjoy riding this bike around town. I think at first I didn’t like it much because I was too easily winded, too much down hill riding on the DB. A few rides around this hilly town will whip anyone’s lungs into shape. Have any of you responded to fuel prices in creative ways?

People are always looking for ways to do things like purify water or generate electricity in a smarter, more efficient way. One advantage to this quest is that new technologies can be used in impoverished areas of the world to help raise the standard of living in those places. Well, I Stumbled this little video from Popular Mechanics and was impressed with the ingenuity. I would like to see some more discussion revolving around scalability. That being said this is fun, you could probably build one yourself!

These are the kinds of stories I like: sending up an array of solar panels that will collect pure, unobstructed solar energy and then beam it down to a relay station on the surface of the Earth. It has its technical and political challenges, but its a little bit of outer space fiction coming to life on a drawing board.

The good news? Beaming all the solar energy we could ever need down to Earth from space appears more feasible than ever before. The bad news? It’s going to take a lot of money and political will to get there.

Click here to read about it at Green Options.

The Twinkie was invented on April 6, 1930 by bakery manager James Dewar.  The way it is been made is a result of years of revisited recipes and growing efficiency in production.  Perhaps its not fair to pick on the Twinkie but its a good example of the downfall of the American (and international) diet over the years.  This article by Kate Thorp at Divine Caroline (StumbleUpon Find!) takes a quick look at the ingredients in the Twinkie and their origins on an international market.  The Twinkie just might embody where the nutrition of our nation has gone.  Mine is a generation that is fast racing towards minimizing, localizing, naturalizing and conserving, I wonder if things like this amazingly processed confection will have a place when my kids are old enough to pay attention…I hope not.

In an article in Green Options, Joshua S Hill posted an interesting blog about alternative energy opportunities. His post, US Power Requirements Solved in 92 Square Miles outlines a neat idea to generate power, AC power, using solar energy to heat tubes of liquid water that will boil and create steam to run nearby turbine generators. The spokesman for the project, Ausra David Mills said at the International Solar Energy Society conference that he even had a solution for night-time solar generation. His proposal suggests that enough heat can be stored in the tubes to continue to create steam over night until morning returns again.

This engineer is excited, if a little skeptical about the night-time generation. But they are going to build a test model so I really hope that we will see an alternative to our fossil fuel-dependent energy model in the United States.

Check out the write up if you haven’t already.