Save my Ass.

UNDERWOOD, Minn. - A donkey is happily eating grass again after falling down a dry, abandoned well and being freed in an intensive rescue effort. It appeared that the animal wandered away from its farm and onto some boards covering the well, which broke, said Bruce Huseth, fire chief in this western Minnesota town. Firefighters quickly realized that the animal, which belongs to farmer Warren Gundberg, couldn't just be pulled from the abandoned well on Bryan Nelson's land.
So they started pulling away earth with a tractor and dismantling the well block by block Thursday. Once one wall had been taken apart, firefighters put a harness around the donkey and guided it out with a rope.
"Whatever it takes," Nelson said as he watched his well come down. "I love animals, and I'm just glad it's OK."
Gundberg admonished the animal after the rescue: "I bet you'll think twice about doing that again. If you would have stayed home you wouldn't be in this trouble."
Huseth said that he has rescued cows that have fallen through ice, but that the donkey was a first.

What do you want to do when you grow up?

From Wraithfodder:
1. Go to http://www.careercruising.com/.2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.4. Post the top ten results

1.Purchaser

2.Venture Capitalist (money not included... :o(> )

3.Mining Engineer

4.Industrial Engineer

5.Electrical Engineer

6.Mechanical Engineer

7.Aerospace Engineer

8.Health Care Administrator

9.Research Analyst (Financial)

10.Economist

Wow, way too many engineer thingies. When I started college I was in Electrical Engineering. Ick! Dropped that like a bad habit. 80% of our high maintenance customers are engineers. What does this mean?? I like the venture capitalist idea. Too bad that takes a ridiculous amount of money and I am not a member of the lucky sperm club or won the lottery yet. I guess I like the number one. Who wouldn't want to shop all day? :)

Temple Gardens

A good friend of ours once said, "I know how you can become a millionaire by farming." (beat) "Start with three million dollars!" Never ones to shrink from a challenge we are going to rent our greenhouse to a local organic farmer. We will put a pellet stove out there to extend the growing season, and replace the old pump in the water pond that supplies the greenhouse. We plan to replace the plastic on the back half of the greenhouse with the more durable plastic panels, but for now they will start in the front section, which is maybe four to five hundred square feet. Our organic farm may be producing again soon.
Foods grown commercially are so laden with petrochemicals- between pesticides, fertilizers, and transportation that organically farmed food can take as little as 10% of the energy to produce. It is estimated that "the average American needs 20 to 25 acres of land to produce our food and assimilate all our wastes…" If the entire planet’s population had similar requirements we’d need four or five planets to meet the needs. If you divided up the productive land available worldwide it breaks down to about five acres each. Unfortunately, with populations at such an enormous and growing rate we cannot all eat organic foods. Did you know the average person eats ~235 pounds of meat a year and ~330 pounds of fruits and veggies? Over a thousand pounds of food annually.
A definite benefit to organic farming can be found in saving carbon emissions. If only 10,000 medium sized farms in the U.S. converted to organic production, they would store so much carbon in the soil that it would be equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road, or reducing car miles driven by 14.62 billion miles.
So, for better or worse, we launch our experiment. At least we will be saving emissions, and hopefully they can provide good quality organic food for people in this area, and with any luck we will get to have some of the fruits (or veggies) of their labor.

Pellet Heat

Today's Bloomberg Energy headline:

Bodman Says $80 a Barrel Oil Prices Are `Troublesome'

Oil futures rose to (a record HIGH) $80.18 a barrel in New York after a report today showed a larger-than-expected drop in U.S. oil inventories. The rise in prices follows yesterday's announcement that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries would increase production by 500,000 barrels a day. Full Story

Also on this day our bulk feed bin for our pellet boiler was installed. Last fall we were so thrilled to start our new addition by ripping out the ugly, drippy, slimy, and smelly oil tank and boiler. We had our Harman Pellet Boiler installed. It heats our 3,000 sq. ft. house and hot water with ease. It has a 200 hopper. This means that last winter we filled it every ~2-5 days. This fall Harman created a bulk feed bin that holds 1400 pounds of pellets (35 bags of pellets or about 90 gallons of oil heat equivalent). Now we will only need to fill it once a week in the coldest months, and maybe a couple times a month or less otherwise! Imagine what this renewable fuel could do with government support and incentive! Either way I am saving a couple to few thousand dollars this year alone by heating with pellet, not to mention the saved carbon emissions since I am no longer burning oil or propane.

Remembrance

In memory of all those who lost their lives, loved ones, and colleagues.

Flix

Art and I are not very responsible video renters. We were so frequently late, and lost so many of those slippery little discs that we decided it was less expensive to just buy them. So we would go down to the video store every few months and scoop up some of their used movies at four or five bucks a pop. Well, now we have a closet full of movies. Too many of which we only watched one time. We farm them out to family members on occassion but (too) many times they have the same one already. Not very environmentally conscious. Wasteful really. So, we decided to switch gears and join the hoards who are enjoying Netflix. We have a couple of family members who use it and enjoy the movies, although our nephew probably gets more picks than anyone. We also have some friends in the next town who are addicted to their documentaries. Gray Gardens is their current recommendation. We cancelled the newspaper that my Mom signed us up for last fall, Finally! and with the added funds decided to try Netflix. We sat down and chose which movies to start with. I let Art go first. He chose Fahrenheit 9/11. Very disturbing, heavily slanted against Bush, but I HATE Bush and his policies so I was o.k. with that. We signed up on Labor Day, and by Wednesday we had the movie. Art took it out of the envelope, and I sent it back. Blonde moment in the repacking precluded me from returning the little sleeve that identified who the movie was assigned to. So I had to call and explain my stupidity. The nice phone support guy (actually a US Citizen living and working in the US!) told me it was o.k. and he would get my next movie right out to me, but please remember to return both the sleeve and the movie in the future. Our next movie Supersize Me came the next day. It was a flick I wanted to see but didn't want to buy because I knew we would only watch it once. Also heavily slanted, as many documentaries are, it showed what would happen if you binged on Mc D's and stopped exercising for a month. The grain of salt is that his beloved is a Vegan Chef, and he was an avid exerciser before the test... Go from there. Our next movie is the 300, then Cars. Should be here tomorrow. We already have 18 movies on our list; well 14 movies and the first season of Firefly. I have always wanted to see that and this seems like a great time! Happy watching!

Old Friends

Many years ago I joined classmates.com. I was pretty bad at keeping in touch and maintaining friendships after high school, and thought that might be a way to reconnect with a few old friends. About a year after I had posted my information I got an e-mail from my old friend Sharon! I was so excited. She had also kept in touch with Sara. We would all get together and have the best visits when I was in Colorado. Then Sharon moved to Kansas and I lost track of her last fall. Sara didn't know where she was either. I signed up for a MySpace page a while back. Nothing fancy, more of a place holder. But I found Sharon on there. It was a long shot but I sent out an e-mail hoping it would find her. Today I opened it up to check a friend's from one of my group's page, and also checked my account. Well, I had two messages from old friends in there! One was a response from Sharon. She is doing great and has six kids now! Another old friend Sandy had found my page. We were on the cheerleading squad together. We used to have so much fun! I think we had lockers next to each other one year, too?? Of course I had to drag out the yearbooks and show Art all the pictures. Ah, memories...

Frogger

Aaahhh relief. The long dry spell that was August has been broken with cooler temperatures and rain. The grass was looking reminiscent of Colorado in late summer, dry, brown and crunchy. Even the weeds that had taken over my as of yet un-loamed back yard were suffering. After a snap two day heat wave where the temperatures reached 90, we heard the winds of change. Then the thunder, then the pit pat of rain on the roof. Happy Day! Driving home that night was a uniquely New England experience. When it rains like that the frogs and turtles all congregate in the streets. It's like stepping into the old computer game- Frogger. Except you are the car and there are dozens of frogs... The frogs are hopping every which way, in a complicated dance that is part joy of rain, and part oh, crap that monster is coming to squish me! Some of the big guys just sit there daring you to try to hit them, and the poor turtles don't stand a chance. The turtles are not very good at getting out of the way, and they are difficult to see with their dark shells. It is a very distinctive thump-thump when you accidentally find one. Art masterfully manuevered with a series of guesses and swerves to try to miss them all. There was one close call with a frog hopping right into the path of the passenger side tire. We were both yelling, "NO! Go the other way!" Art missed him and won the game tonight!