Solar Math

Word problem:  To date, our solar panels have produced 2831 kilowatt hours of electricity.  We have drawn 2525 kilowatt hours of electricity from the utility grid.  Question:  How much of our electrical needs have we met from our solar panels? 

I’ve learned to leave this in the hands of the professionals.  Here is an answer from Polly, a mathematician:  

“You have produced more solar electricity than you have used from the city.  The question (unanswerable) is how much of that solar electricity did you use, and how much did you send back through the grid?

If you used it all, then you have produced 2831 / (2831 + 2525) = 53% of your energy.  If you used none of it, then you produced 2831 / 2525 = 112% of your energy consumption. All the way around, impressive numbers.”

 

Wings

At the cabin, it’s finally summer.  Aspens have leafed out, filling the glen with quaking clusters of caterpillar green, a bright shade seen only in montane spring.  My mother follows me as we cross the stream, heading towards the bench set in the rustling aspen grove.  She bends nearly in half as she walks, stopping to examine mysterious new sprigs of bushes and wildflowers.  “A wild rose…” she says.  “And potentilla.  Is that…”  I smile vaguely, because I can’t identify much without a field guide. 

We settle on the bench, which invites us to look up, at pines and aspens that reach tall for the sun on the south-facing slope, along the narrow, flat clearing that adjoins the stream.  Or technically, the crick.  The stream runs seasonally, and seems dry now, though there must be water seeping under the litter of decayed leaves and pine needles, fed by small springs upstream.  Evidence of water surrounds us – green grasses stretching tall, tiny clumps of moss clinging to aspen starts, midges and mysterious insects that nibble at uncovered skin.  This is precious habitat in a semi-arid land of decomposing pink granite.  

 “Are there chiggers?”  my mother asks.  If there are, they’ll find me.  I’m particularly tasty to chiggers. 

 At bedtime in the mountains I’m reading Beyond the Aspen Grove by Colorado naturalist Ann Zwinger.  She tells me about the insects and fauna I’m missing while I sit on the deck and watch clouds, or stare at treetops, rather than look into a microscope and draw what I see.  Zwinger’s book describes years spent exploring her family’s land 40 acres north of Woodland Park, called “Constant Friendship”, after an ancestral home from the 1700s.  The cabin sits at nearly the same altitude as Constant Friendship, perhaps 30 miles away.   

Years ago I attended a Poetry West meeting led by Zwinger, where she handed out blank postcards printed with her plant illustrations.  She led a workshop on “postcard poems,” pieces short enough to be penned on a card.  I scribbled iffy stanzas in my notebook, and quietly stashed the blank cards in my copy of Beyond the Aspen Grove, purchased used from the Aspen Leaf Bookshop run by a friend.  I would read sections of the book, and long for the day when I might observe a mountain land as closely as Zwinger had.  With that book, I could carry a dream in my hands. 

At the end of the meeting, Zwinger signed my copy:  “A sense of place is what ties us to home…Beyond the Aspen Grove is where I’ve found such a place.” 

My family eats lunch on the large deck.  One end of the deck is marked with caution tape while the deck’s precarious steps are moved and rebuilt.  The east deck drops abruptly into space, like a third-storey door opening to nowhere in an Albert Campion novel. 

My mother says, “Is that an eagle?”  A dark raptor with a white cap makes a lazy circuit over the hilltop across from us. Perhaps he is eyeing the burgers and peach cobbler on our plates. I’ve seen eagles here only when my mother visits.  As the eagle heads downstream, I see the lift of his wing structure, shaped like a longhorn steer, as he sails just over the tops pine trees. 

Not long after, I point out a spectacular red-tailed hawk follows a similar circuit, cutting a circle over the aspens and then continuing west.  The hawk’s wingspan seems particularly broad from this close vantage–7 feet? Perhaps it’s a female hawk, which can be a third larger than a male.  The sun straight overhead shines through her feathers, making wings and tail glow a translucent, rusty red as she banks into the light.  She is the color of red granite lit and soaring. Her wings are flat and fringed with black as she flies west. 

Poetry Madlib

 

Found this via my FreeWill   horoscope (Leo) and a Google search:   

 “I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,

and I have been circling for a thousand years;

and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,

or a great song.”    from Rilke, Book of Hours, transl. by Robert Bly 

 

This poetry Madlib was posted by Turning Into the Slide:   

  I am circling around ______1_______, around the _______2________, and I have been circling for __________3____________, and I still don’t know if I am a _____4______, or a _____5_______, or a _______6_______. 

1. Something greater than the self/inspiring/sacred:_________

2. A mythic place or object:___________________

3. Measurement of time:__________________

4. Creature or person/vocation:____________________

5. Weather: _________________________

6. Creative act:_______________________

 

 

Signs – 2

Saw this at a Green City Summit event last night.  I’d like to see our city enroll in ICLEI (or something similar), but to date, the mayor has declined to sign on. 

Spokes

On Saturday, I bought a new bicycle, a Breezer.  The decision took several years.  She’s a beauty, with old-fashioned black fenders and a candy-apple red frame.  Shimano gears and a nifty hub dynamo in the front wheel that generates power for the lights.  Handy panniers to hold grocery bags.

I’d been researching electric-assist bikes, something to ensure that asthmatic, out-of-shape me could ride to the library or market or pet store, and return up steep hills while burdened with books, groceries, Scooby snacks.  A bike’s gotta be fun & easy, or I won’t use it.  

Found just what I wanted online—a larkspur blue Urban Mover step-through bike with a lithium-ion battery—only one dealer in the country carried it.   The holdback was fit.   I’m too tall for most women’s bicycles.  I’ve always hated men’s bike frames and the unladylike movement required for mounting them.  I worried the expensive bike would be too small, and make my wrists and legs burn, like the ill-fitting lilac Huffy in the garage.  It was too much money to risk on something that might not work. 

I wandered into Old Town Bike Shop on Saturday, expecting the kind, fit salesfolk to dismiss me with vague answers so they could focus on “real” customers.  I’m clearly not the cycling type, and they don’t carry electric bikes.  But they worked hard to find just what I wanted in the shop, answered questions on fit & function, and rolled the bike outside for me to try in the parking lot (a daunting thought for someone who hasn’t ridden a bike much in 20 years and worries about balance issues).  While I waited for the bike to be checked over before taking it home, a guy wearing a black bolt in his ear told me how thrilled he was when someone bought a town bike like mine, because it meant that many less cars on the road to run errands.  Felt I’d earned a little green star from Generation Y. 

Riding with my boys in the neighborhood (short trips first – I don’t have calluses in the right places yet), I remembered what a joy it was to ride a bike.  To coast down a hill and feel the rush of wind blow past, after earning that hill with breathless pumping to reach the yellow house.  Perhaps this week I’ll get to the school without triggering a full wheeze. 

As a teenager, I earned my 10-speed bike by babysitting the neighbors’ quarreling children at 50 cents an hour.  For a year I studied the Sears and Wards catalogs, deciding I wanted a bright yellow frame.  After finally saving enough, I bought a bike for $86.  The bike was cherry red—which I did not like—but summer had come, and I didn’t want to wait for a prettier color. 

I rode the cherry-bomb bike to Jenny’s house, mindful of catchy brakes. I loved the smooth shift of gears, the impossibly thin tires, the lightness of the frame.  I loved the delicate ticking of wheels that increased with speed, like the childhood sound of a playing card clipped to my bike spokes with a wooden clothespin for a July 4 bike parade.  It had been worth a year of boring babysitting to earn that purring sound, rather than to pedal the heavy tuck-tuck-tuck of the clunky used 3-speed Schwinn in the garage.  Sometimes I rode past Jenny’s house to the end of the block, where a popular boy lived, hoping he saw me zip past.  The road was level there, and with the momentum, I could sit up straight in the seat, no hands, and pretend I was cool.  

 “I seem to be doomed to red bicycles,” I told the Old Town guy.  The model I preferred didn’t come in periwinkle blue.  But riding the Breezer at home, I knew I’d picked the right bike.  I could feel the smooth operation of engineering at work, simple and elegant, and I could pedal uphill to the yellow house with relative ease.  This is halfway to the post office and gelato shop.  My wrists didn’t hurt, and I could imagine a day when I can return down the hill with a straight back, no hands, like when I was 15.  I miss being lithe and strong–dread getting back into shape–but choosing a top-of-the-line machine almost makes up for it.  Almost.