Read this when you get a chance:

I have all these memories of watching kids getting their teeth brushed from when I was growing up, either my brothers or kids in other families that we knew.

Most of the memories went like this: kid lying on back screaming, parent trying to hold him or her down, while simultaneously forcibly opening the child's jaw and counting to ten while scrubbing each surface of every tooth.

This usually does not end well, and the child does more for his vocal cords and other muscles then is achieved for his teeth. The parents grit their teeth and end up with anger and sore jaws of their own


I was thinking about this while Mark and I were brushing our teeth tonight. Mark is thirteen-and-a-half months.


Humans have a strong instinct to imitate. Without thinking about it, when it came time for Mark to start cleaning teeth, i.e. when his first tooth broke through, we simply handed him a toothbrush and let him watch us brush our teeth.

If you think about it, the solace that one person wants while brushing their teeth is equivalent to another person brushing their teeth. Teeth brushing is a communal experience. No one wants to brush their teeth alone, except perhaps, in a few dark-and-medatative moods.

Mark now will brush his teeth for an indefinite period, brush more intensely when I brush more intensely, rinse his toothbrush in water every few seconds, and attempt to spit into the sink.

Sometimes he'll try to brush the drain at the bottom of the sink. But all in all, it's a lot better than physical restraint and sore jaws all around.

The world will not be housed in $200,000 stick frame houses, but rather in cob, or the climate-adapted equivalent, built at minimal cost, from locally available resources, by their own hands. This is what we want to do, too.

Well, we survived three days and two nights of camping in the chilly February air...

Of course, we were in a heated, two-room cabin, but still... It was cold outside in the mornings!

We finally got to test out our new MSR Dragonfly stove, but first I had to swap out the DG jet (white gas and gasoline) for the DK one (kerosene, aviation fuel, or diesel).

Then I filled up the MSR fuel bottle with biodiesel (a B20 blend) from the spare 5 gallon tank in the back of the car.

It took about three matches to get going -- the MSR has a cotton wick that you saturate with liquid fuel and light in order to get to the vaporization stage. Then, as that catches, the diesel is black and smoky. As soon as you get to the vaporization stage (where presumable the flame spreader et as is hot enough to instantly vaporize the fuel) it burns very cleanly and hot.

So biodiesel was a success.

More Biodiesel links:

http://localb100.com/
http://www.b100supply.com/
http://www.biodieselcommunity.org/gettingstarted/

My Wife thinks this is ghetto, but I kind of like it. Although we do want a stove we can cook on easily for the main house... Maybe I can put this in the shop/barn/guest cabin out back?

I used to look at lights left on and say "somewhere, there's a coal plant burning."

That's still largely true, for America, and it's still true that the intermittent "power crises" of the last few years in California could have been averted by malls turning off their lights at night, BUT. For my little apartment, a light left burning means that somewhere, a picturesque windmill is lazily turning, or a non-destructive, salmon-friendly, side canal (NOT a dammed up river), has a small turbine winding away.

Of course, we hardly use any power here, but according to Pacific Power, we saved the equivalent of ~700 driving miles of automobile pollution (that would have been put out by conventional power plants) in 2007.

We're so eco-friendly around here.