How this week has gone: (1) This link log contains one long comment on a headline for which I've yet to read and paste in the complete link; (2) I had it open this morning at dawn, then fell asleep at the computer, woke up, and dashed into town. It's 87 degrees Fahrenheit at the Cat Sanctuary, 92 at the weather station, 100 in Gate City when I climbed into the car in which I rode home, and God have mercy on downtown Kingsport. The warehouse is dark, without windows, but cool and dry. The cats have been doing TV-ad-worthy demonstrations of appreciation of that Pure Life water!
It's sort of a sad occasion, too. The big moving sale will continue next week, and fresh treasures you've not seen before keep coming to light as things are moved out of the cool dark dry corners of the warehouse, and the long-time-no-see, last-chance-to-see reunions among old friends are always cheerful moments. At the end of the day, though...a lot of charm and color and character is leaving my little old town. The Historical Society came in and begged for their pieces of it.
(Meanwhile? If you want fourteen matched Christmas-theme glass cups, plus a few more related ones in different sizes and motifs, still in their original cartons, go into the nice cool warehouse and ask. The box of odd antique silverware and kitchenware is still there, too. Likewise the box of fine china plates and platters. Lamps and more lamps are still available, and as floor space has been cleared the lamps have been moved down to highlight the previously covered antique tables. Vintage headboards are there, if you want a headboard for your bed. There is a dark walnut bedroom set with headboard, footboard, mirror mount, and vanity or small writing desk to match. The wood is sable brown but would look like black in a room with pale beige walls and sunbleached fabric. Several wooden dollhouses or birdhouses are there. Lots of pictures and frames are there. You can get fantastic prices when it's 92 degrees in the shade and sellers are loading furniture into cars. Anybody would rather move cash than furniture.)
So I feel sizzled and frazzled...and this weekend I've been challenged to write a research series about a piece of history I've never written about before, even in that European History course I took in university, ages ago. A review of a brand new book, which should have gone live this morning, will appear here on Sunday. This week's poem...we shall see.
Birds
Ducks and ducklings, and other things:
Music
Song for Bayer:
Local Warming
It's worse in summer because of all the heat pumps, pumping hotter air outside even as people run those electric stoves, basement water heaters that get no solar boost, even totally optional gadgets like TVs and computers that heat up the indoors, and the heat pumps put it all outdoors. In winter temperatures at the Cat Sanctuary have been pretty steadily 6 to 7 skinny Fahrenheit degrees lower than temperatures at the weather station. Today, at 9 a.m., we're seeing exactly 60 degrees at the Cat Sanctuary--nice!--71 at the weather station, and you can guess that it's already close to 80 in downtown Kingsport/ Although some places are reporting cold summers and some places are reporting hot summers, some are reporting drought and some are reporting floods, this kind of temperature range between points in cities and nearby rural areas really is constant. Worldwide. True Greens have been monitoring this for more than fifty years; we're only noticing more of it when and where Poison Greens have been allowed to implement changes that increase warming, like increasing urban or suburban population density.
What to do? One tree between every two families in any direction, minimum. Tall buildings are good for unheated warehouse space. Local planning committees should focus on getting rid of apartment blocks and reducing human presence in large commercial buildings. Stack-and-pack is fine for storage space, not acceptable for human beings.
If you keep a central heat pump to regulate temperatures for the whole house, make sure it's programmed to turn on the heater only when the temperature drops below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, the cooler only when the temperature goes above 85. Most of the time temperatures are between those unbearable extremes, so you can let the house breathe naturally. Open or close windows, add or remove layers of clothes, play with a laptop computer for individual heating or wash your hair for individual cooling. Unplug TVs and computers in summer.
Take out pavement when possible. Reduce driving. Make time to walk to work, school, the store.
For instant walkability, reverse "zoning" policies. Let new small businesses spring up where people want them. Grocery stores belong in the front room of a house every half-mile or so. Rethink the whole idea of office work to minimize commuting. Whenever people meet in the office, they should discuss how to avoid having to repeat this commute in the future.
Defund organizations that cling to untenable notions of "global" climate change as if the whole world's climate were changing in the same way. That will cut off a very large source of hot air!
Affirm and celebrate the fact that most women can enjoy being aunts--appreciating the company of children without ever for a minute thinking "I want to waddle around with one of those things growing inside me! I haaate my perfect body--I want scars, thyroid failure, diabetes, varicose veins, and torn muscles that will never do their job again! I must be disabled by having babies, more and more babies, even if there's no place for them to live and no work for them to do and even if they grow up unfit to reproduce, because I'm just craaazy about babies! I can't afford to feed or educate them, so they'll grow up brain-damaged and ignorant, but I just haaaaaff to have babies!" Accept that One Child Or None is a good policy for most people. If you want to widen the circle, adopt.
For policy wonks, consider ways to undo the policies that have made the population so uneven that people are still protesting that "there's plenty of room for more people where I live." How can more empty houses be made more affordable to young working parents again? Can huge factory "farms" be broken up without violence? If not, that might be one "war" worth fighting, but can simple tax incentives be used to return agricultural land to family farmers who will take the time to, e.g., dig out weeds rather than spraying poison on fields, so that farm work becomes a pleasant family bonding routine instead of a dangerous industry employing only people who don't want to live long? What about getting family farm names onto the food sold in stores, so people know whose use of chemicals is causing sensitivities to foods nature intended them to be able to eat? What policy reversals do we need to get humans to spread out over the land in a sustainable Green way, building walkable, family-friendly, climate-friendly neighborhoods for themselves?
Moving Sales
Yes, this is the way they go, and I might mention that despite the large amount of FREE STUFF that's been hauled away from the warehouse already, we keep digging back and discovering more treasures hidden away in there. There is still that beautiful maple dining table, with two drop leaves and a matching wall bracket, as seen on Marketplace. There is still a bookshelf headboard that makes me wish I'd ever had a use for an in-between bed, but no, it's always been twin beds that stack into bunks or line up together into a king-size bed. If you like an in-between bed, run don't walk. There are still some lovely fabric-upholstered chairs, some in deep red colors that would work in a Victorian Red Room. There are still a couple of carloads of lamps. There are still lots of decorative imitations of fruit and flowers to make into holiday- or party-theme centerpieces. I wrapped up some boxes of glass and china; there are still some nice tall water glasses and odd pieces of antique silverware in the warehouse. There are lampshades, and baskets, and all sorts of decorative accessories like curtain rods and rings, coat racks, umbrella stands, magazine racks, fireplace accessories (I didn't know they had andirons but somebody bought a pair today), needlepoint and cane chairs and stools, and just generally everything that a vintage furniture store would have sold in the past four years if the COVID panic hadn't happened. It's worth driving out even from Asheville to see. The display of FREE STUFF continues to be replenished about as fast as people haul it away.
Web Site Changes
As noted, older content is leaving this site. "Older content" is here defined as "our archives up to the point where a majority of the links still work." Some older content will reappear, revised and updated, if the content is still useful. (Recipes, book reviews, and Bad Poetry are likely to reappear. Posts about issues being debated in 2011 are likely to reappear, if at all, in a radically different form. Any viable links from old Link Logs are likely to appear in new Link Logs.)
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