photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Here in Asheville, the number of vegetarians is quite high compared to national averages. Many restaurants and groceries have a multitude of vegetarian food to eat. I suppose that’s probably due to the number of hippies and beatniks populated throughout the area. Asheville seems to be a magnet for art, hippies, vegetarians, musicians, outdoor enthusiasts and generally weird people.

There is also another part of Asheville which is quite large. It’s the old school—the rich, who live up on the mountain sides and grill steaks. These are the people who are older, probably baby boomers, with older, traditional values. When you mention the stereotype “Vegetarian” to them, they will probably mention “wacko” in the next couple of sentences. Asheville tends to stand out some as a city, but in general, we are a meat-loving country. On our trips to Myrtle Beach, Dawn and I are shocked to find 0 vegetarian restaurants and few vegetarian dishes to eat. Groceries may have a frozen vege-burger but that’s pretty much it.

Stop the pattern of “stamping” people as either a carnivore or vegetarian.

The tendency of our society is to stamp, or better yet “stereotype” people into categories. I think often that meat eaters are completely turned off by the holy sermon of vegetarians because of the ‘all or nothing‘ angle that many hard-core vegetarians take. Those on the hard left are what conservatives, like my Dad, refers to as ‘those god damn PETA nuts.’

I’ve wanted to make this post for a while now and a clip from CNN and all over the web reminded me of it. Paul McCartney who has been a huge advocate for meat free diets since the 70’s is simply calling for a “Meat Free Monday” to lessen the strain on our environment and animal well-being. Here are some astonishing facts on carbon output and livestock.

• Livestock put out about 18% of the worlds greenhouse gasses ( more than all the world’s cars )
• About 3/4 of livestock in this country is cattle, a heavier contributor than other animals

Lately, all we hear about is ‘being green’ but often the war on waste focuses on coal fired plants, cars and electricity. What many people don’t know is that livestock farming is a HUGE part of the problem.

Eating less meat is a small gesture, than can have a enormous impact if everybody participated. This is where I draw a vastly different concept:

Your not being labeled a ‘vegetarian’, you’re simply eating a ‘vegetarian’ meal.

I think that once you let meat eaters know that they get points, for eating less meat, it will be an easier process for them. Encourage them to reduce consumption as time goes on. Encourage meals with ‘meat mixtures’ where reduced amounts of meat are mixed with vegetables, pasta, rice and beans.

As far as my own life, I know that I don’t need to carry the stamp on my chest that says ‘vegetarian’ even though I once did. I once was a vegetarian, even a vegan for some time. Now, I try to eat meat only when I truly crave it. One of my issues is that I cannot digest the massive amount of soy products on the market. My body does not like soybeans, wheat or gluten which vegetarian based hamburgers and hot dogs are made up of. I can eat other beans like kidney beans or chick peas. So in a way, I can eat like people in the 70’s, before companies like Morning Star Foods started in with the frozen vege-burgers. Any vegetarian knows that you can mix beans and brown rice and basically have a full protein. Add an egg to the mix and you have a rock-solid protein. Still, there are simply times when I want meat. I can identify with a carnivore. I think meat and eggs taste good on occasion. But in the end, we have to balance many things like finances, health, ethics and carbon footprints. It all translates to a reduced consumption that we must face.

These are the reasons I’m still trying to eat less meat.

• It’s definitely stressful to the planet to be raising so much livestock. It takes tremendous amounts of water and land. It emits large amounts of greenhouse gasses.
• It uses a great deal of foreign oil to ship and cool processed meat. I’m sick of seeing these rich Arab’s dictate our economy.
• I’m getting older, and it’s harder for my body to digest.
• It’s getting damn expensive for my budget.
• It often creates a ‘factory farm’ situation where animals are not treated humanely.

Ethics

The last point is one of importance. Some people don’t really care for the welfare of the animals. Some, like my wife don’t believe you should eat animals period, the end. Still, others like myself believe in some meat consumption, but a humane situation. You can’t cram animals in tight cages or filthy conditions. Its basically torture.

There is a vast difference between a factory farm and a local ethical and sustainable farmer.

In the old days, we only had local farms. Then factory farming came along and tried to figure out how to make the biggest buck. That cheap meat is often at the expense of the living condition of the animal. If you must buy meat, buy from local farms who engage in ethical treatment and sustainable farming practices. Make sure the animals have adequate space and so on. Investigate the company or person you are buying from some. Lately our local Ingles stores have started selling Springer Mountain Chicken , which is 100% natural and also humanely certified. Ingles also has at lest two brands of cage free eggs. I also try to buy meats and eggs from local farms such as Hickory Nut Gap Farm and East Fork Farm. Both farms can also be found on Saturday mornings at the UNCA farmers market.

In the end, you have to realize you have choices to make. The choices will be realitive to your situation, however the worst practice to engage in is pure laziness. You don’t have to fit into a sterotype. Each step helps. Each person who participates helps. Take that information and run with it.

Many who know me often get a dose of my ‘tread lightly and enjoy life’ philosophy. I generally hate working for other people, no mater what it is, so I try any way possible to be efficient in my life. My main motivation is to save money, but lessening the impact on our environment and resources is always an added plus.

Americans are generally sloppy, heavy footed beasts who consume to no end. I think they call that the “American Dream”. However, here’s another saying you often hear, “Americans are the hardest workers on the planet.” I think that often refers to how much we actually do work. We don’t know how to stop working.

Part of our hunger to work 50-60 hour weeks for the entire year is so that we can have what the advertisers think we should have:

• a huge 2,500 square foot home on 2 acres
• a fat steak on the table every night
• the next best gloss black SUV

I love one of the lines from the Movie “Fight Club” where Tyler Durden says,

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.”

Ask most workers to sit down for just a second and they will admit how miserable they are at their job. Perhaps the only thing that get’s them through the day is that latte from Starbucks in the morning. Maybe it’s the gloss black SUV in the parking lot. You can go out and look at it during lunch to see what you’re working for.

photo credit: foundphotoslj

At one point, Europeans seemed to have a much better idea of how much to work. France worked 35 hours or less. Germans often took a month off for vacation. I don’t know how it runs now.

We all have to work some, but is it really necessary to work 50 to 60 hours? If you could cut your hours in half, would you? To fully answer that question, you have to convert the value of the dollars you earn into the value of the things you buy.

Do you really feel like all the things you buy make you happy?

This morning, I was turned onto a new site by CNN. It’s called EatLowCarbon.com. It’s a simple visual site showing you the various carbon output of foods. In simple terms, the biggest offenders were beef and cheese. That’s your basic cheeseburger. Other meals like salads, and rice & beans scored much lower (better for the earth). Of course most people will say:

“Yeah, but I really like cheeseburgers.”

It doesn’t take complicated math to understand that rice and beans are much cheaper than beef & cheese. Most doctors will agree that it’s a great deal healthier as well. You get plenty of protein. So on that line of thinking, you have three or four incentives to eat less beef and cheese:

1. It’s much healthier for your body as you age.
2. It reduces the energy consumption and carbon footprint of this country.
3. It saves you a lot on your grocery bill.
4. It puts a damper on factory farming which is considered unethical.

To me, that’s a great incentive. By eating more vegetarian meals, we have reduced our food bill a couple hundred bucks. Dawn eats all vegetarian, but I eat some meat still. I try to mix meat in with other things like beans and rice if I can. That’s a start. You don’t have to be a hard core vegetarian. Just eat ‘less’ meat for a start. Work your way down. For instance, eggs have much less an impact than beef does.

There’s other parts of the formula as well. Buy from local farms by using local Asheville farmers markets. Buy in season. Grow food in your own yard. Raise your own chickens. Visit local garage sales. Buy used goods off eBay and Craigslist.

I seriously believe that with a little effort, many Americans would only have to work 30 hour work weeks. Saving that extra 10 to 30 hours is like heaven. And could you imagine the reduced impact on the environment? Think about the other ramifications like a reduced money-flow to Arab countries who support terrorism. Because in the end, everything we buy revolves around oil. It all has to be shipped somewhere. Do you really need that stuffed bear from Hong Kong?

You don’t have to make hard core changes, but each small change you make towards less consumption will translate towards less hours at a job you hate. That’s how I look at it anyway. It’s a way to be selfish and also help the earth. Perhaps we can call it environmental capitalism.

Usually I don’t double post, but I’m so furious at Linksys, that I have to get as many links flying around as possible. I have the lemon piece of crap WRT310N which I paid over $100 bucks for. If you are one of the many owners that are experiencing dropped connectons and overheating issues, ride on over to Central 183 where I have written more on my experience. My only satisfaction is getting the word out about a company that’s gone down hill.

I finally got a colleague to sell the old G4 PowerMacs in his office on eBay. I had to promise to wipe the drives and eBay the machine off. In actuality, one of the drives in the machine had gone bad, so I had to pull it out. Anybody who has worked on a G4 PowerMac knows that the back drive bay is a little janky. You have to unscrew the carriage and kind of wiggle it out. It’s not a natural motion. I think the current crop of PowerMac’s make the situation a lot better.

Needless to say, I was having some issues with the drives. One was broken, the other I wasn’t sure about. I kept trying to start up with an old ‘slow as heck‘ Panther start-up disk. Each time, getting to the disk utility was such a pain (1Ghz G4 chips seem so slow now). Then, after wasting valuable time, I found I had to try something else and restart again.

Often times with tech problems, you have to be able to cut the problem in half and choose which half is the problem. With this issue, I couldn’t tell if the PowerMac had craped out or just the drives. But since all I have in the house now are MacBooks and small notebook backup drives, I had to have a way to test a big-ass 3.5 hard disk.

I finally broke down and bought one of these nifty-as-all-get-out “3 in 1 USB 2.0 To SATA / IDE Adapter Cable” deals from Amazon For The Win. Although a bit cheap, it does what it advertises. Just plug the adaptors up the way you want and then a USB cable will hook right into your laptop. For $13 bucks or so, it’s a ‘must-have’ item in your tech-man tool box. Eforcity shiped the thing fairly fast for like two-something bucks. I think it took 3 to 4 days.

I s’pose that some will say that external hard drive cases do the job just fine, but I think this niftly piece of plastic crap is the perfect combination of price and utilty. I look forward to using it for easier disk-cloning when hard drive prices come down.

photo credit: Caveman 92223

The other day, several on Twitter floated an article from EcoGeek on the fact that Ace Hardware will be selling micro wind turbines for family homes. Around 6 grand will get you one of these suckers installed on your roof right next to all the bird poop. The idea is fascinating. We would certainly go to the hardware store to buy an oven or electric mixer. Why not buy something that created energy? We’ve been trained to think that the current electric grid is the most efficient way to create and move energy. Perhaps this conventional wisdom can be proven wrong. One thing that people don’t realize is that some energy is lost from the time the power plant makes the energy and the lines deliver it to your house. I would have to research more to find exact numbers, but heat, voltage, storms and other factors can figure in.

The word you never hear anymore “Conservation”.

Perhaps the biggest thing that irritates the shit out of me these days is people who complain that the current system can’t ‘fit our power needs’. This also gets applied to alternative energy all the time. I’ve heard silly old men say, “That will never be enough to power a whole city.” The thing is, you have to think about problems in parallel. There is a two part solution or more to many problems, especially with energy. We need to use more alternative energy and at the same time, use less energy to begin with. Take this new turbine. EcoGeek is saying the thing will generate up to 2,000 Kwh for the year which is about 166 Kwh for the month. They say it’s about 18% of the average household’s needs. That’s probably based on somewhere between 800 to 1000 Kwh’s per month. What if you could buy 3 turbines and reduce your consumption by 1/2.

I know my wife and I burn around 800+ Kwhs per month. That’s even with us doing the things we can to conserve, like using compact florescent light bulbs, notebook computers, filling the fridge with liquid and turning down the hot water heater to 120 degrees. We live in a crappy rental for the moment because of my wife’s work. I know for a fact that half of our problem is the inefficient window based air conditioners, the hot water heater, dryer and a house over 50 years old. The house has so many holes in it that we only bother to heat the area we are currently in, not the whole house.

Then there’s another whole basic book of common sense conservation. Anybody can practice this whether you rent or not.

• Sponge all your dishes with sudsy water first, then rinse them all at the same time.
• Run ovens and dryers at night to lessen strain on cooling systems.
• Don’t put hot food in the fridge.
• Shut off air conditioners when the sun goes down.
• Avoid heavy cotton clothes that take much more energy to dry than wool.

Now if we were home owners, we could invest in some insulation, central heating and air, and possibly solar hot water. At the very least, we would install an on-demand hot water heater. If we we were building a home, we could design a home much better with passive solar aspects and so on. It’s not hard to believe you could get your electricity consumption down to 500 Kwh per month.

Even Condos, which are by design, very efficient, could make use of turbines on the roof. Many people in the middle floors of condos, hardly have to adjust the heat and air because of the apartments on bottom and top.

So how do you store the power?

Of course the new wind generator from Honeywell is only supposed to ’supplement’ your power for now. In the future, it may be able to fully power you house. The biggest problem is that wind does not blow all the time. The same goes for the sun. There are interesting solutions to this. Probably one of the most fascinating is the ice air conditioner. It’s a simple idea where ice is made at night when the sun is down. During the day, the machine makes use of the ice to cool your home. In other projects, especially solar, they are using huge vats of synthetic oil or steam filled salt vats to store energy for later use. The examples I use are to show that some energy can be harnessed when available, and used later. Other times, you realize, that you can afford to wait for the energy you need. For instance, you could put cloths in the washer and wait for the wind to blow if needed (if you had enough extra cloths). Other things are much better accomplished without electric like heating your water, food and house. There are many technologies that should be used instead like solar and geo-thermal.

In the end, with a little wind and solar, my belief is that each home or even condo complex will have it’s own independant energy source. This will depend of location of course. The huge cities like New York will likely still depend of huge power plants, but the homes past suburbia strung together by an ugly patchwork of powerlines will soon be all by thier lonesome with solar arrays and wind turbines. You’ll simply go to the local hardware store and pick up a unit to create electric energy for the whole house

photo credit: Svadilfari

Baltimore Sun ran a story today about how local library usage was up now that we’re all broke for the 2009 recession. I thought that kind of interesting since last week, I went down to the North Asheville branch for the first time in a year. It brought me back to my 20’s when I was dead broke washing dishes at the local steak house. I didn’t have a phone or TV, so my Library was a fantastic resource. I even ‘checked out’ a painting each week in addition to books, cd’s and videos.

In current times, I like to think of myself as fairly cutting edge. I usually like to jump on “second generation” products. For instance. When the iPhone came out, I was pretty sure I would by the next version of the phone to come out. To me, that let’s the price settle a bit. It also lets them work out any bugs. So when the first generation Kindle came out, I was tremendously interested. I was sure the $300+ price tag would come down and the technology would get better with the second version. Well the current Kindle still costs an arm and a leg and only has marginal better technology. It’s such a shame because I would find its features so useful.

One feature of the Kindle that would help me so much is the built in dictionary and wiki access. I’m currently reading “Vodka Neat” by Anna Blundy, and all the various Russian references sometimes send me for a spin. I often fantasize about how lovely it would be to read this book on a Kindle.

The Kindle is this fantastic idea. You can see it as a problem solver. Paper is saved. Waste is reduced. Gas is conserved. Reading books will be more interactive. You could also rent books from the Library right over the internet. There’s so much to look forward to, yet there’s so much in the way. Economy of scale hasn’t kicked in yet. Authors who don’t understand the device are suing left and right over dumb things like ‘read to me’ features.

But that’s that. With electronic books costing 10 bucks a pop and a prohibitively expensive device, I’ll just have to wait. It seems that Apple may finally come out with it’s “jumbo iPod Tablet thinger” this year. In addition. Google may be striking up deals to feature it’s scanned book library on a new Android-like device. I’m hopeful. People like me have to be patient while all the fanboys and early adopters waste their money on overly priced products so we can buy them as a commodity at a later date.

photo credit: KF6OAK

Sometimes it’s the smallest things that piss me off, and fate of lemonade is one of them. Here we are in working America, and dumb ass moms who run power-positions at the bank can’t teach their kid to make a decent batch of lemonade. Recently, I went to a yard sale at in Asheville ‘where the rich people live’. You know, up in the mountain side where all the 300K + homes are. It was the usual yard sale fare. Oh, there’s a nice oak armoire. Hey, there’s a hibachi grill. And over here folks, we have . . . a really cheap looking plastic vinyl lemonade stand with a completely disinterested child behind it. The whole pitiful thing looks like it came from mail order for $19.95.

Still I felt compelled to help this child feel the power of American capitalism, so I thrust forth my change for a cookie and lemonade. What came to my lips was the same crap from the store; boxes and bags of chemicals and corn syrup in the form of Gatorade and Chips Ahoy. It was just this huge horrible let down, this disintegration of the American fabric. I can’t tell you what I felt, just something really wrong.

As each weekend comes around I see it more, clueless kids who would rather be on MySpace then be interacting with people. A lemonade stand is the usually that first foray into money exchange for a kid. Every now and then, I’ll see one ‘done right’. It’s obvious that work went into every aspect. Fresh baked cookies and brownies. Fresh squeezed lemons and real sugar (Hey, even half lemon juice is OK, as long as you use real sugar). It’s those times I have to applaud the child and parents for keeping the American dream alive. Any other time, I have to ask stupid questions like, “Is-this-lemonade-made-with-reaaaaallll-lemons?” The poor kid doesn’t know, nor does he even give a shit. The parent is off on a cell phone somewhere.

It’s not as if the kid wont be successful in life. He’s probably training to be a banker or stock broker as we speak. He can go to Starbucks and buy a fresh lemonade for $3 like rest of the idiots out there. That’s all fine during the good times. But thrust a nation into recession like we are now, and it might be nice to know that you can follow a recipe. It’s good to know you can hammer a makeshift kiosk together. Maybe later in life, you wont have to hire somebody to hang a picture becuase of your hammering skills.

What does ‘done right’ mean. I would think it means this:

1. An actual ’store front’ look which can be as simple as an upside down “U” shape hammered together with 3 boards. If you want to go further than that, fine. The actual table could be a card table or maybe dad’s workshop table with a table cloth. The important thing is the framed “U” that says, “Lemonade” on top. Extra points for crooked letters.
2. Actual lemonade made with lemons, sugar and water. Some real lemon juice could be substituted to keep down costs. One lemon should be scrubbed down, sliced and dropped into the container to show that, “yes indeed, there’s real lemons in here.”
3. Real Toll House cookies are a must. Just buy a package of Nestle chocolate chips and follow the recipe on the back. Use real butter, not crappy margarine spread. Extra points if you make walnut brownies.
   
4. An attentive child who sticks to their post and has a great big smile.
   

Why?

The point is to teach the child skills for life.

• Using a hammer is actually a very useful skill and confidence building exercise. Same goes for a hand saw. Sooner or later, that kid will be an adult and have to fix things around the house.
• Following recipes is a basic skill that is lost upon a whole generation of kids, especially gen X and onward. It builds confidence. It’s something to fall back on in hard economic times.
• Exchanging money and interacting with adults is basic capitalism. You learn the value of time and money. You learn what people will pay and what sells well.

“Filthy rotten water, yeegads!” I would yell at our dog as he drunk out of a dirty puddle. He would do it all the time during walks. I suppose a dog doesn’t care or know better. Perhaps, as my Dad always said, he has the correct metabolism to drink dirty water. At any rate, I was usually able to steer our pet away from puddles laden with salt, mud, engine oil and a bit of stinky beer, towards the fresh bowl of water waiting at home. As far as my own body, I would never in a million years think of drinking that crap in the puddle!

For 1.1 Billion people in the world, there is no choice like that. You can have the dirty stuff or just greet death with open arms. Those are your choices. Scott Harrison of Charity Water felt that shock after visiting Africa. Since then, his charity water organization has been partnering with various programs to provide, wells, pond sand filters, rainwater catchment and water towers. To date, there are 1,247 water programs that are either completed or in progress.

How Asheville and the Tweeterverse comes in.

The Twitter web site is such a hoot, but more importantly, to some of those who are rather observant, it seems to connect communities. I’ve been messing with this strange bird for around a year which has enabled me to meet a whole passel of weirdos from Asheville, NC. Normally I’m a rather quiet person, but Twitter is the trick for getting me to talk with people I would otherwise not know what to say to.

Behold! We all got together for lunch at 9-mile a while back. (It was my birthday actually, but I was quite about that!) Several tweeters including @h0zae, @itswendylou, @juneallison, @ellelily and @rorris got the ball rolling on the Twestival. Soon after, the web site for Asheville Tweestival went up by the ornery @loknessmobster. There are several ways to donate, even if it’s 5 lousy bucks, so no bitching about the bad economy. Hell, you’ll blow that on a gormet beer someplace.

The big deal though, is the Asheville Twitter Festival (Twestival) being held at Windows on the Park on February 12th. There will be some cheap $1 beers from Bruisin’ Ales ($10 cover . . . It’s nothing!) along with music, a silent auction and plenty of colorful people that make this town lovable.

So try to come out this Thursday if you can, or least donate a lousy 5 bucks. You’ll sleep better for it, I bet.

This post was done from TextMate.

I am using the tutorial at: Asheville Web Design. So far it’s going well.

This is my Duck and Cow

I’m adding more text now.

photo credit: webg33k

Well, today we officially went into a recession according to some ‘very important’ economists in a faraway land. I’ve always been fairly good at saving money. We grew up that way in the Great North Woods. It was second nature. Just because you had lots of money one week, you didn’t go out and blow it. There may be a financial dry spell for the next 3 months. We were taught to buy a cupboard full of can goods during good times.

This weekend, I was discussing with Dawn that financially, there are 3 kinds of people in regards to budgets.

1. The kind who work hard and spend hard. They don’t mind getting their hands dirty, but they tend to spend heavy on meals and entertainment towards the weekend.
2. The kind who expect handouts. These are the lazy. They don’t want to work. They expect everything to be handed to them because of some kind of created victim status.
3. The kind who work a modest amount, but know how to make every dollar stretch. These are the people who have a great idea of the value of things. They have a modest lifestyle. Generally, they are relaxed.

I tend to fit into group 3. I hate working, but I don’t like getting handouts from others. Anyway, it’s during financial times like this that group 3 tends to thrive. We’re used to making dollars stretch and having less than 40 hours per week to work.

The idea for me is to share some of my crazy ideas that save loads of money.

Tip #1 Crockpots that heat you from within.

We’ve heard at least 4,283 times that turning the heat down to 65 in the winter can save you heaps of money. The problem is that many people don’t feel comfortable at that level. There are two cheap ways to stay warming during these times.

1. Get a crockpot and put some hot food in there. Keep it on low all day long. Don’t eat meals as much as getting a small bowl or two every so often. Little bites of hot food can heat your body much much faster than a hot room. Today we had mashed potatoes, mac and cheese and stuffing in there. It was left over from Thanksgiving. You can put in chili, a roast, a big chicken and potatoes, whatever.
2. Tea or coffee also work. Make a huge batch and store it in a thermos.

Our house has been 65 all day and it hasn’t bothered me as I work at the computer. Usually it does.