Glass House

I have a love-hate relationship with woodstoves. I love how warm and cozy I feel when I am sitting right next to one, reading an interesting book and drinking a cup of tea. I hate the mess left around the stove and along the trail from the woodpile as well as the choking, wood smoke that comes out of the chimney and joins with the smoke from our neighbors to create a suffocating inversion layer outside my bedroom window at night.
Before I moved here, I never ever saw a woodstove, in spite of growing up in the Northeast where winters are not for sissies. Where I grew up, we had steam radiators under the windows in every room. I guess the idea was that the cold air rattling through those single panes was moderated by the intense heat generated by the radiator it passed over on the way into the room. I don’t remember being cold as a child (though what child does?) so I guess the radiators worked.
I’ve seen some fascinating solutions to the home heating issue. Several years ago a friend of mine moved into a home that had solar-heated water circulating through thin pipes imbedded under the floors of the home. Her floors were deliciously warm to a bare foot throughout the winter. I’ve also heard of homes that are perfectly oriented on their lots to focus sunlight on a energy-collecting wall during the winter with the slight shift in the sun’s path during summer translating into no direct sun on the same wall during the hot months.
I am looking forward to one of the bright youngsters I have gotten to know coming up with the perfect solution to my love-hate dilemma. I’d still like to be able to sit close to a heat source when its cold outside but also wish for complete independence from the utility company. In the mean time, the sun is setting outside and the wind is starting to blow. Hope its not a “don’t light tonight” evening because I want to throw another log on the fire and settle down for a good read.

Posted by Laurie Feldman at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I went up to Five-Mile today to look at the beaver dam that was blocking the water flow (apparently some of it was just removed recently and water is flowing again down Big Chico Creek). While I was watching hopefully for beaver life, I saw two large dogs playing in the water. They were having great fun retrieving the tennis ball their owners were tossing into the water for them. I have a dog who is a retrieving machine too. A while ago we got tired of throwing the balls for her freehand so we bought a “Chuck-It” to do the work for us. With that wonderful device you can throw a ball much further, and much more easily, than freehand. This makes you willing to throw it much longer. Thinking about that reminded me of the time we took her on a vacation to the beach and threw the ball into the waves over and over until finally she got so tired that she didn’t go after it that one last time and it floated off. I noticed the couple I was watching lost their dog’s ball too and were looking downstream in hopes of finding it. They didn’t. And all this thinking finally led me around to thoughts of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
I just learned about this phenomenon last week while reading the San Francisco Chronicle. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 1000 miles off the California Coast on the way to Hawaii. They say its size is larger than the state of Texas and that its total mass equals 3.5 million tons. Some of the garbage in it extends under the ocean’s surface to a depth of 300 feet. It mostly made up of plastic. I think this garbage patch is misnamed. It should probably be called the Horrible Pacific Garbage Patch or the Utterly Disgusting Pacific Garbage Patch instead.
So what does this have to do with dogs and balls? Well, that ball we lost in the surf wasn’t the first one that went missing. As a matter of fact we now buy our dog’s tennis balls by the dozen because they get lost so fast. I bet the couple I saw today does too. So I started wondering, how much of the Great, Horrible, Utterly Disgusting Pacific Garbage Patch (GHUDPGP) is made up of our missing tennis balls? I think I’ll go back to throwing sticks. They make my hands dirty and are harder to throw (you can’t use a Chuck-It) but it might be worth it if the GHUDPGP doesn’t accumulate any new tennis balls.

Posted by Laurie Feldman at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)