Red State Green

I cooked local leg of lamb in my solar oven. I put it in at around 11:30 am, rock hard frozen. At 4 pm it was done perfectly, using free energy and the house not heated at all.
I could get used to this

Remarks given to the Vestas Wind Technology Training Center, today, in Portland, Oregon.
The full text here.
Discuss.

I almost didn’t listen to Julie Frieder, research analyst for the Calvert Group, because this topic didn’t sound all that interesting to me. But the weather was blustery out, and they moved her from outdoors to where I already was, so I stayed. Am I glad I did! This turned out to be a speech […]

If you’d like to understand more about what’s happening with oil, take a listen to an interview last month with Matthew Simmons, author of “Twilight in the Desert”, a book documenting the global oil situation:
Part One
Part Two
I found the interview very interesting and informative.

Here’s an interesting article, even if it gets a bit weird at the end: The Waking-Up Syndrome
[…] While the sky may not be falling, this day-after-day onslaught of alarming news is making it more difficult simply to overlook the triple threat of environmental, climatic and economic concerns. It’s leaving many of us feeling like Alice […]

You might be surprised:
It all started last August when I used a coupon from Gurney’s to order asparagus roots. By the third week of September my order hadn’t arrived. I decided something was amiss and called the company.
The customer service representative I spoke with assured me my order would arrive at the proper planting time […]

Ice storms came through here on Sunday and Monday (click on a picture to enlarge).
This is our neighbor’s tree:

The crape myrtle bush in our front yard:

Our persimmon tree:

Each blade of grass and each twig was encased in ice. My son is showing off a blade of grass and a twig here:

Everything was encased in ice, […]

Take a look at this video of an engineer who made a solar tractor, solar-powered chainsaw, and a solar-powered car (suitable for driving here in America). Simple, easy, and not bad looking, either!

Our Thanksgiving dinner went well. This year, I put the potatoes and sweet potatoes in the solar oven!

The temperature inside got up to 220F, but after a few hours the clouds rolled in and eventually I had to finish them up indoors.
Here’s what we had for dinner:

Locally grown free-range turkey with regional brown rice stuffing: […]

I finally found my camera. For some reason it was in the boys’ room.
Anyway, here’s the picture of my backyard sweet potato harvest (click to enlarge):

That’s just the ones from the back yard. The small ones I’m saving to plant next year. Even though it doesn’t look like much I was still pretty happy with […]