Tarballs from the Deepwater Horizon spill are now washing up in Galveston, with oil on other East Texas beaches. Granted, tar isn’t exactly unusual on the beaches here, but it still feels ominous.. They’re combing it up off the beaches as it shows up (like they comb up any other crap that washes onshore).

Police were called in to deal with an unidentifiable animal – turned out to be a dog that went swimming and got tangled up in seaweed that had tarballs in it. (I can see the headline now: “Police called in to investigate Galveston Beach Swamp Thing”). The dog is OK, thankfully. How long before it’s the turtles that nest on Galveston’s beaches?

My brother and his fiancee visited us this weekend, and we decided not to go down to the seawall – probably not the best decision, but since we’d have packed a lunch, we wouldn’t have been doing much for the tourism there anyway. Much like the areas of Louisiana that are still struggling to recover from their hurricanes, Galveston still wears heavy scarring from Ike. September 11th of this year (that’s become something of an ominous date, yeah?) will mark 2 years since we were evacuated for Ike. I wonder what will have washed up in Galveston by then?

And there’s very little I can do.

I’ve made my donations to the relief effort, written letters. Now, I suppose, all that’s left is to wait and be thankful I’m not living on the coast farther east of here, where the oil and sludge is washing onshore in a toxic slurry.

In Texas, it is HOT in the summer. Our air conditioner runs almost continuously during the heat of the day, and we keep it set at 80 degrees. Running an electric clothes dryer, even one next to the wall that vents outside, only adds to that burden and contributes to my being a sweaty mess, sitting half-naked under a ceiling fan eating frozen grapes.

Ahem.

So I decided to pester Spaceship Husband until he’d help me set up a clothesline. (I’m short, he’s tall. Much easier if he helps.)

After some hemming and hawing, we opted for a “trial run” of a clothesline looped between two trees in our yard. I’d suspect it cost about $10 to set up – two bags of clothespins and a length of poly clothesline. It’s not perfect (it tends to loosen itself), but it works for now and will be super easy to take down if we have guests/etc.

I’ve learned a few things though, since I installed it. Call it “trial by sunlight” if you will:

• If you have a yard full of mosquitoes, they will eat you alive while you hang clothes. Bugspray is your friend, and try not to be out at twilight.
• Clothing hung on a line can be a little stiff if it’s a “knit” and not a “woven” – a couple of good shakes and snaps can help, and that stiffness will wear out in a few minutes.
• If you hang your clothes in the sunshine, hang them inside out, otherwise the sun can fade them.
• A clothesline that is a little bit too tall is OK – it’ll sag some when you get clothes on it.
• You’ll want a good number of clothespins (50 is a good start, I have about 100 – they’re very inexpensive), and you’ll want an easy way to get to them. A canister in the laundry basket works. My favorite is in a simple pocket-apron. You may also be able to find patterns for cool clothespin hangers that actually hang on the clothesline.
• Put the laundry hamper in the middle of the line and work from there, otherwise you’ll have to keep moving the hamper.
• You can pair up your socks as you hang them – leave space after each one, and add in the second of the pair when you find it. Then you can just fold straight from the line.
• It takes about an hour for average clothes to dry on the line - longer for towels, less for sheets. Your mileage will, of course, vary by location, temperature, and wind.
• Some things (like jeans) you’ll probably still want to put through the dryer. That’s OK too. It’ll take a few loads of laundry to figure out what those items are. One run of the dryer is a LOT less hot than four.
• Some things, like sheets and cotton things, will actually be LESS wrinkly if you dry them on a line. Which means less ironing. Woo!
• If you don’t have a yard, you may be able to hang a retractable clothesline on a porch (if you have one of those). If you can’t hang a clothesline in the yard OR on a porch, consider some wooden folding drying racks that you can put up inside. I got mine at Target, I think. I use them for … unmentionables … but they can be used year round and in the rain too. Actually, I think having at least one is a good idea for anyone, clothesline or not.
• Don’t be afraid to leave things overnight if you need to – one night won’t kill the clothes, and the sun should burn off any dampness quickly. Rain, however, poses a possible soggy problem.
• Your clothes really will smell good. Kind of… breezy and outside-y. They won’t smell like overheated fiber, like clothes out of my dryer do (even on “low”). And it’s free, post rope purchase.

I’ve been pretty pleased with the results. For one, it encourages me to do laundry intermittently, and not try to cram it all into one hot day whereby I swear off even looking at the washer for another two weeks. It also gets me outside – which is HOT too, but for some reason it’s different being in the sun/wind than it is roasting away folding hot clothes in my living room. (Also, the clothes off the line are sun-warmed, but not nearly as burn-your-knuckles-on-a-button hot as clothes out of the dryer).

And honestly, with as much time as I spend in the garden, I’m out there anyway – I can usually hang a load of damp clothes from the washer, water the garden, weed, do any other garden chores, and then take things down.

Now for the eco-bullshit part.

I’ve debated about writing this post for a few weeks, because of what it could get construed into meaning.

There is so much crap, for lack of a better term, piled onto things like this. I’m not necessarily trying to “get off the grid” (I like me some internets), and I’m not trying to be political. But I do think it’s smart to take advantage of things – like my time (I’m still unemployed) and the sunshine and wind, and my love of gardening and being outside. And if that can be “eco-friendly”, save energy or water, or save myself a few bucks, I’m all for it. That doesn’t give me any moral superiority, it’s just what I can do with what I have.

I think taking care of the earth is smart and responsible. I also think that living like a “modern human” is pretty great too.

I’m not sure why it’s so politically charged to replace burned out light bulbs with fluorescents (which, admittedly, have their own issues) or use reusable things vs. disposable ones or have a garden or recycle or maybe put up a clothesline or a rain barrel (most of which are done as much in the name of saving a few dollars as being “eco-friendly”) without getting sucked into the judgmental, us vs. them, “green” bullshit.

I guess what I’m looking for is perspective – not making things into some great political decision, not demonizing someone who can’t afford to do “X”.

I like showers and my washing machine and being able to read a book in bed with the light on (or turn on a light so I don’t stub my toe into the bathroom door at 3am). And I like growing a garden and finding ways to keep it happy without using chemicals (when I can) and drying my clothes on a line and canning pickles.

That shouldn’t sound mutually exclusive, and I don’t think it has to be.

And I’m really not sure where I’m going with this, at this point. I’m obviously not saying that being environmentally conscious is bad. I just think that there HAS to be a middle ground somewhere, and that there’s a level of name-calling and finger pointing that gets lumped into these kinds of discussions that I don’t like. These kinds of “eco-conscious actions” get politicized so often, and they don’t need to be. Some of them are just fun for me to do (pickles), others make financial sense (clothesline, energy saving appliances), others are little, practical things that anyone can do (using a reusable vs. disposable thing). There’s a HUGE margin (and a happy medium) between Patrick Pollution and Ginny Granola*.

I think most of us fit in the middle somewhere, and that’s OK.

*How did granola get to be such a symbol of the radical environmental movement? It’s tasty…

Everyone knows that cell phones and water just don’t mix that well.

I had yet to discover this personally… until Saturday evening. My inlaws were in town and had made a quick run to the hardware store with Spaceship Husband to purchase… something. Plywood I think (we were hurricane-prepping the house). Anyway, I opted to stay home and get some work done, folding some laundry off the line and doing dishes and stuff. While I was doing dishes, I decided to move my phone so it wouldn’t get wet.

Oh Murphy’s Law, I should know by now not to tempt it.

Long story short, I dropped the phone in a sink of soapy dishwater. It went burbleburbleburble for about 5-10 seconds while I fished around trying to find it.

I voided the warranty on both the phone and the battery (my little red “you were an idiot and put your phone in water” stickers are both very very red). Thanks to some people on twitter and some quick Google-Fu, I learned the process by which you attempt to salvage a wet cell phone:

(Note: If your phone was submerged in salt water, you should rinse it completely in fresh water before doing any of the following – water is bad, but dried salt will corrode the inside of your phone. VERY bad news.)

1. Immediately remove the battery cover, battery, and SIM card (if you have one)
2. Set the phone on some absorbent material (paper towel, regular towel) and try to get as much water out of it as possible – the best way to do this is either with a can of compressed air or a vacuum cleaner. I think a vacuum cleaner is the better option, because it’ll suck the water OUT, instead of blowing the water through the phone.  Just make sure you put a washcloth on the end of your vacuum hose so you don’t short out the vacuum. You should NOT use a hairdryer or set the phone in the sun – melting little inside parts of your cell phone will also make it not work.
3. Get a container large enough to hold your phone and all of it’s accessories and fill it with rice. Silica gel packs would be better, but I don’t have a whole drawer of those around, and speed is of the essence here.
4. Submerge the cell phone and battery in the rice.
5. Every 8-12 hours, change the position of the phone, so that water will run out of it (if there’s any left).
6. Leave the phone in the rice for at least 48 hours.

At that point, the phone will be pretty well dried out. Shake all the rice out of it (I had a few pieces get into the back cover of my LG Vu but they were easy enough to dislodge), put the SIM card and battery back in, and see if it’ll start. If it does, give someone a quick call to make sure the mic and speaker parts are still functional as well.

If it /won’t/ – give it a few extra days. I was lucky, and after 48 hours in a plastic container full of brown rice, my phone started up with no problems.

Ideally though, just keep your cell phone out of the dishwater.

The scene this morning, around 8am:

SSH: “I have no pants.”
Me: “No pants? But I did laundry last Tuesday.”
SSH: “All my pants are in the hamper.” <points to empty closet rack, containing only empty hangers and no pants>
Me: “How did you wear every pair of pants you own since last Tuesday?!”

Turns out his usual work jeans had escaped behind the hamper, and I’d not washed them with the rest of the clothing. So he went off to work in his least-rumpled pair of Khakis (Downy Wrinkle Releaser is a WONDERFUL MAGICAL THING).

Pants 1

I set out to do the rest of the laundry. Separated, etc. Set the first load – which was mostly pants (both his and mine) – in the washer, went to turn it on… and I was out of laundry soap.

Pants 2

So I found some more laundry soap under the sink (Thank Whatever for Target having the soap we use on clearance a few months back so I bought an extra bottle). Did the wash, etc. Wash machine beeps loudly, I transfer the soggy pants into the dryer and turn it on.

At which point I find myself standing in a cloud of flying fuzz.

Let me explain. Yesterday was Anti-Bugs-In-House day, whereby we put down more borax in the attic and baseboards and stuff, and SSH put spray foam (aka: Great Stuff) in any holes in the brick and whatever. Apparently this included the dryer vent, and thus required that the dryer hose be disconnected. I, not noticing this, turned on the dryer. The hose, disconnected, blew dryer lint all over my kitchen.

Pants 3.

I’m glad I wore a frigging skirt.

(Oh, and no. There are STILL no clean pants. I will update if the pants score more points.)

Right now my neighbor and his three kids are in our cul-de-sac, running around with an octopus kite. The sound of giggling and flip-flops is wafting in through my front windows, making me smile.

And making me remember going to the beach as a kid.

My dad loves kites. For as long as I can remember, there’s been a kite or two in the garage – sometimes even crazy cool box kites or stunt kites that look like stealth airplanes. On windy days he’d schlep my brother and I out to fields behind schools and office buildings, and we’d try to fly them, but it doesn’t often get windy enough in the hills of central New Jersey to pull off flying a kite like that for very long.

The beach, however, is another story.

Every trip to the beach involved a kite of some kind – big or small. I think the current kite is a big long spiral, black with bright jewel toned panels, that flies easily in a breezy beach wind. Setting up the kite was as much a part of going to the beach as setting up the chairs or putting on sunscreen or finding the appropriate sand-castle-building tools (that’s another blog post, for another day).

Because, you see, kites on the beach are more than just fun.

They’re identification.

I can remember being told “and if you can’t find us, go to one of the lifeguards – they’re the people on the big red towers – and tell them you’re lost, and that your dad has a big blue and yellow box kite”. And a well flown kite on the beach can be seen for quite a long way. So we’d run like idiots until we got the kite up high enough to catch the sea winds, and then tie it to … something. A chair, a beach pavillion, a really big rock. Basically anything that would hold it.

Sometimes “can hold the kite” is a bit of a gamble. I’ve seen kites drag beach chairs, unwind themselves from tent stakes, and otherwise randomly wreak havoc.

I’ve also seen kites mysteriously untie themselves and make a break for it, tearing down the beach at full speed in a quest for freedom.

This results in having to chase down the kite – on one occasion, with my brother running full tilt down the beach, waving his arms and yelling “NO, KITE! COME BACK!” We always did manage to find them though. Or at least, I don’t remember ever truly losing one. I can remember a few /broken/ ones… but that’s not quite the same.

Still, I can’t think of kites without thinking of those memories, of beach vacations and running down hills and hanging out with my family. I count myself pretty lucky. (And I hope, someday, the kids running around in the cul-de-sac with the big, pink, octopus kite will have their own fun memories.)

Anyway, that’s my storytelling moment for the day.

You can go back to your Saturday now.

• Step 1 – Have an idea. Possibly mine said idea out of twitter, emails, conversations, comments, or creative friends
• Step 2 – Start writing something. Be unhappy with it, but write anyway. Keep writing until you have something kind of sort of like your idea (or not, sometimes ideas suck and sometimes they are shapeshifty and hard to pin down.)
• Step 3 – Ask for outside input, then accept or reject said input. Often, realize that your friends are smarter and better writers than you are, and might be more qualified to write the post.
• Step 4 – Realize the post is totally discombobulated, and might actually be three posts. Remove the parts that aren’t relevant, rearrange the paragraphs twice. Start two new posts with the various other ideas, realizing they’ll probably never get written.
• Step 5 – Make sure it actually makes sense. Realize it doesn’t, fix a couple of sentences, add clarification. Delete clarification. Add it back.
• Step 6 – Adjust flow, pacing, sentence length, and how many times you use the word “that”. Check for repeated words. Make sure you don’t start every sentence with “You,” “I,” or “It.” Decide you suck at writing upon realizing 2/3 of your sentences start with “You”, “I”, or “It”.
• Step 7 – Repeat step 6. Probably twice.
  
• Step 8 – Read it. Then, read it again. Realize you hate the second paragraph. Repeat Step 6 on the second paragraph three times… and then undo half of it.
• Step 9 – Have someone else read it. Argue with them when they say it’s good and you should publish it. Edit the second paragraph again. Decide you hate your idea, but you’ve put all this time into it, so you might as well post the damn thing. Tinker with the conclusion anyway.
• Step 10 – Say “to hell with this” and hit publish.
  

(Steps 11 and 12 – realize you typo’d something, have a bad comma, forgot to tag and categorize your post, screwed up a sentence, or possibly said something you didn’t mean. Edit the post twice. Or fourteen times.)

Here’s the setup:

• Four 1” thick center cut porkchops (or whatever porkchops you have, enough for 4 people)
• Two small or one large onion, cut into bite-sized chunks
• Two cloves of garlic, diced.
• 1 8oz can of tomato sauce (plain or seasoned)
• 1 14oz can of no-salt-added diced tomatoes (plain or seasoned) with liquid
• Non stick skillet
• Oil
• Shallow pyrex baking dish (I usually use an 8” square pan)

Pick your seasonings before hand – I’ve tried several, and these two seem to work wonderfully:

1. Salt, Pepper, Italian Seasoning Blend, a sprinkle of parmesan cheese
2. Salt, Pepper, Grill Seasoning (I use Lawry’s Seasoned Pepper plus a little crushed red pepper flake)

So here’s how it goes:

Preheat your oven to 350F.

Place about 1 TBSP oil (or a spray of non-stick cooking spray) in the bottom of a non-stick skillet. Heat to HIGH. Season your porkchops liberally with whatever seasonings you choose. Sear the porkchops for about 1 minute on each side – you’re looking for golden brown and delicious, not cooked all the way through.

Evenly space the porkchops in your baking dish. Dump the onions and garlic over top of them and kinda spread them out some. Follow with the tomato sauce, and then the diced tomatoes. Mush it around so it’s mostly level and you don’t have any really high/low spots (some onions poking through is OK).

Sprinkle the salt, pepper, and seasoning of your choice over the top of the tomatoes and don’t be shy – probably a full teaspoon of whatever seasoning blend, plus a good pinch or two of salt, and several grinds of pepper. Your tomatoes should look well seasoned.

Bake for 45 minutes or until the porkchops are done.

Serve plain, with mashed potatoes, with (brown) rice, with egg noodles, with salad, or with whatever side dish your heart desires.

Good, simple, easy food. Healthy and delicious.

(I apologize to anyone who is not expecting political talk on this blog. I rarely go there, and if you hate me for it, you can pretend this post doesn’t exist. )

Let me start this off by saying that I am not a rocket scientist. I don’t claim to be one, but I am married to one. My rocket scientist spouse is a contractor for NASA working on the Space program – both with the Shuttle and with the International Space Station.

Today, President Obama released his proposed budget for 2011. You can read all of it online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/- the part I want to talk about is here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2011/assets/trs.pdf – specifically page 18, “Termination: Constellation Systems Program”.  You can read all of it, if you like. I did.

In the words of a very famous person… “Let me explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

The President’s 2011 Budget proposes to cancel the Constellation program, allow the current Orbiter/Shuttle program to die of natural causes when it terminates sometime in the next 1-2 years, and replace it with a yet unnamed, yet undetermined, “bold new approach” with “game changing technologies” that “embraces the commercial space industry.” Constellation is being canceled because it costs too much money and because it “doesn’t meet our national priorities.” This budget will, instead, accelerate work in “climate science, green aviation, science education, and other priorities,” all with money previously slotted for space exploration.

There are a lot of problems with this, not least of which is “And what are you going to do with all the people whose living depends on these programs, considering we’re in the midst of a very large economic recession and that job futures are extremely dim for just about all of the aerospace and defense sectors already?”, but I’ll let that go for a minute and focus on that last sentence.

The President wants to increase funding for science education… and get rid of the only active space exploration program (Constellation) to do it, with no actual replacement in mind.

To put it in other words: the President wants to spend lots of money promoting young scientists into making robots, aerospace engineering, all of the specific and technical fields that make Space possible… and then cancel the program that puts those scientists to work, in favor of some amorphous “new and awesome thing that we’ve not decided on yet.” Everyone thinks that it is great! when someone features a young group of scientists that make a robot that will find, pick up, take apart, and store tennis balls. As soon as those scientists grow up, go to college, get jobs, and make a robot that will find, pick up, take apart, and store molecules and objects from other planets, asteroids, or whatever… nobody cares.

It’s as though they don’t see the connection.

We instill in our youth the joy of space exploration – go see a movie like October Sky – only to take away their opportunities to follow that career later in life to greater fund “green aviation” and funnel more kids into math and science careers. (I’m sorry, I don’t work in the field, but even this pea-brained Anna can tell you that it’s a lot cooler to say “I ran data for that project that went into space” than it is to say “I ran the data on those fuel efficiency cells on an airplane that nobody’s ever heard of” not to mention the buzzword “green” thing.)

As for embracing the commercial space industry…

“… investment in a well-designed and adequately funded space technology program is critical to enable progress in exploration, that increased international cooperation could lead to substantial benefits, and that commercial services to launch astronauts to space could potentially arrive sooner and be less expensive than Government-owned rockets.”

When I read that, this is what I hear: “We think that commercial space programs are going to get here sooner, so we’re not going to bother, because it’s expensive. Instead we’re going to do a Bold New Thing like make all our people that are here to work in space exploration into R&D scientists in buzzword technology like “green aviation”. All those kids that we’re spending all that money on can either pray that they get picked up as a corporate shill or come join the lab rats working at NASA.”

To add a layer of complexity, there is currently one commercial space exploration company in the United States – SpaceX. To some extent, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, The United Launch Alliance (which is both Boeing and Lockheed Martin) and Orbital Sciences all operate rockets as well, but currently SpaceX is the only US company actively entering the manned spaceflight field. All other commercial manned spaceflight is foreign, and that – combined with the phrase “increased international cooperation” smacks too close to outsourcing to make me really thrilled, especially considering the constant pushing of “science education” and the number of engineers already trained and working in the US.

The other possibility with this statement involves the government purchasing spaceflight technology from those companies instead of developing it themselves… which probably doesn’t do a lot in the saving money department, or will end up screwing over the engineers that developed it in the first place. (I bet they don’t tell students about that when they’re doing all that “science education” promotion.)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s 2010, we’re at the ass end of a NASTY bit of economic downturn, and though the “end is nigh”, we’re not seeing a lot of bounceback yet. I get that it’s all about the dollars.

But if it’s all about the dollars, why bother funneling millions into creating new aerospace and robotics engineers at the expense of the jobs of an entire generation or two of existing aerospace and robotics engineers that really would like to continue working in that field.

It doesn’t make any sense.

I love them. I have them in multiple sizes and colors. (I even have some 12”x12” ones. Yes.  one foot square) I use them to remember stuff, to overwrite things in my planner, to make notes that can be moved around. I even use them to organize things in a video game. Upon upgrading my desktop to Windows7, I discovered that there is a /program/ for sticky notes. (It’s called, ironically StickyNotes) StickyNotes lets me put notes of different colors on my desktop itself.

Currently there are three notes on my desktop:

• Stop. Breathe. Be here now.
• Write it all down.
• Mind like water.

That should tell you something about how my last few weeks have been.

That was the trip out. Trip back will probably look similar, actually. (Usually I fire up some podcasts too, but I forgot my iPod, so I’m actually listening to this stuff ON CD’s. GASP!)

What do you listen to on long trips?