BOOKS--my passion. Prowling used books on the internet has become my extreme sport. To me there is nothing better than finding book that you are completely interested in and then hunting it only to find it in usable condition at a reasonable price. The people's economy--that's what used books are.....cheap knowledge---power for $4.00. My required reading averages two books a week and used condition is the only viable option for me....Two of my most recent finds in used books that are presently in route to me are "Bowling alone" a study of the collapse and rebuilding of american culture...by robert putnam...i am always interested in the how's and why's of how i do not seem to get along with the concept of surrounding culture...any surrounding culture, anywhere----i am pretty much a hermit and if it was'nt for work i honestly would never come out of my hobbit house...so the collapse part of this book is what interests me.....the second book is--after reading through Kuntslers book on peak oil and feeling trashed about--i discovered i missed his writing style and since he and i agreed on how horrible surburbia truly is i decided to pick up one of the two surburban hating books he's written. This one is "Home from Nowhere". Kuntsler made sense about hating surburbia and how ridiculously bad planning, design and operation of the typical american surburb is i hate it but i had to follow through buying this particular work of his....we'll see how it goes with both these books.....

48.3 m.p.g.




my upcoming time off will be spent organizing, cleaning and designing---i am driven to replace and re-design items in my home environment to fit my activities, to wrap around that new skin we all get every so often, where certain items, or things simply do not fit any longer so to say----a block of time just makes it easier to do things--it's taken two months of regular time off and i've just about accomplished the goal of painting my workbenches in the garage white---the better to see ALL the tiny parts when working on something with admittedly, now, old eyes...but fighting off the regular world around me requires time which in turn cuts into project development capability....I have prepared lists after lists of items to do, and create....i'm planning on doing solar panel work, laptop work, construct a wind mobile, read, write computer, record a little music, blahblahblah---this time i have also sworn to take pictures of items that i am working on and involved with to post here....i swear, i mean it this time.....no kidding.....

an item that is constantly mentioned in the "when we run out of oil books" is water in the southwest..pumping will stop,etc----therefore i want acouple of these--english rain barrels. One of the more interesting things about an adobe house like mine is the rain cannales---chutes which protrude through the upper flat roof area of your house to allow the rainwater to drain in specific directions----so i have the perfect directional device to shoot rainwater into one or more of these storage barrels which will allow me to put this free water to usage later for plants, etc....or for in an emergency with some purification provide just plain old drinking water. http://www.gardeners.com/English-Rain-Water-Barrel/default/StandardCatalog.Watering_RainBarrels.33-402.cpd;pgid=LB4Hwoos00000000000000000000ooet38-u;sid=0j_i1BB7mWbMWFZBS4zD1hBx8xVaH0cLTfwu;sid=0j_i1BB7mWbMWFZBS4zD1hBx8xVaH0cLTfwu;sid=0j_i1BB7mWbMWFZBS4zD1hBx8xVaH0cLTfw
i think it would be exceptionally cool to be prepared in this
manner for this kind of problem and it would allow me to put
to use a free natural resource....i'm thinking on it.

i am considering trying unbuntu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbuntu in my Toshiba libretto laptop..just as an experiment---i've read so much about linux from every different viewpoint. I enjoy the concept surrounding this application so much---a group's social capital constructing a useful tool and providing it to the world----i feel that although i am completely and totally ignorant in everyway on doing this type of thing...i'm only considering at the moment i don't even know if my libretto will work with this system, but i am thought experimenting the issue.Besides i still love this little computer and want so desperately to do something with it..

those of you doubting the peak oil concept http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

or that american oil consumption will not have to be modified in the future--- check this out---price of gasoline--graphed.

it's always amazing what a graph will do as a method of displaying information....of course this graph is probably only good till the summer starts-- and something that we may actually see this time is a US government ration coupon for gasoline--note that it says "one unit" not one gallon...these were printed but never used during the last "gas crisis" in the 70's before most of the world was born....strange times eh?

and with this i publish