Monthly Archives: January 2011

January 18, 2011: First Step/Home Energy Assessment

Okay, today, in preparation for a Mass Save Home Energy Assessment, I watched this video—and sent it along to our tenants and to my got-other-things-on-his-mind-besides-energy-efficiency husband.

BTW: My friend Lynne explained that the reason utility companies do this is, surprise, they actually make more money when their consumers save energy!

January 17, 2011: “We’re all in this together”

This afternoon I joined my friend Lynne  at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall for A Day of Service and Celebration in Honor of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I’d thought I’d gone so as to spend some time with Lynne—whose wise counsel re writing is always helpful—and because Nikki Giovanni was to be the keynote speaker.  But when I teared up singing “Lift Every Voice,” I realized, “Patricia, you’ve been hungering and thirsting after this kind of righteousness.”

So, yes, it was teary afternoon, a powerful afternoon: seeing and listening to those beautiful, talented young people of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra. Nikki Giovanni’s passionate and wry enlargement of the Rosa Parks story.  Listening to Dr. King’s words read aloud. And how wonderful to hear the crowd roar when Chief Justice Roderick L. Ireland, MA’s first African American Chief Justice—and one of the readers—was introduced!

AND, if that weren’t enough, I had a personal satori, as Lynne would say: A couple of days ago another Friend/friend who’s interested in leadings, asked me: “Civil rights, the criminal justice system and climate change? How do those fit together?”

My answer was something about being open to Spirit and believing that working on climate change was what was being asked of me right now. (And, oh, yeah, while keepin’ on keepin’ on re criminal justice, too.)

But, hey, what did MLK have to say about interconnectedness, huh? That concept that’s so much at the heart of the climate change movement? Dr. King said this from the Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

So that’s why the Transition Towns movement/permaculture/working on global warming issues so powerfully speaks to me, huh?

Nice to know.

January 15, 2011: (Packing) Heat

Even Tombstone had gun laws

By KATHERINE BENTON-COHEN | 1/10/11 10:53 AM EST

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, during a press conference about the Tucson shootings, called Arizona “the Tombstone of the United States.”

Some journalists gave the word a lowercase “t,” but the sheriff was clearly referring to the infamous silver-mining town 70 miles from Tucson — site of the shootout at the OK Corral.

Journalists invoke the hoary image of “frontier violence” and “Arizona’s poisonous political rhetoric,” it is not that surprising it took less than a day to mention Arizona’s most infamous bloodshed—and from a local sheriff no less.

The irony of Dupnik’s remark is that Tombstone lawmakers in the 1880s did more to combat gun violence than the Arizona government does today.

For all the talk of the “Wild West,” the policymakers of 1880 Tombstone—and many other Western towns—were ardent supporters of gun control. When people now compare things to the “shootout at the OK Corral,” they mean vigilante violence by gunfire. But this is exactly what the Tombstone town council had been trying to avoid.

In late 1880, as regional violence ratcheted up, Tombstone strengthened its existing ban on concealed weapons to outlaw the carrying of any deadly weapons within the town limits. The Earps (who were Republicans) and Doc Holliday maintained that they were acting as law officers—not citizen vigilantes—when they shot their opponents. That is to say, they were sworn officers whose jobs included enforcement of Tombstone’s gun laws.

Today, in contrast, Arizonans can legally buy guns without licenses, and are able to carry concealed weapons without a permit. The state bans cities from passing their own, stricter laws. The legislature will consider a bill this session that would force schools to allow guns on campus — like Pima Community College, which the alleged shooter attended.

There are comparisons between the horror that unfolded in Tucson on Saturday morning, and the bloodshed on that cold October day in Tombstone, 130 years ago.

Vitriolic politics served as the backdrop in both cases. Most historians of the Shootout at the OK Corral now agree that partisan divisions between the mostly Republican Earp faction and the Southern Democrat Clantons and McLaurys helped stir the pot. The violence can be viewed as a last battle of the Civil War — the bloodiest political conflict of them all.

Arizonans, myself included, love to tout their vaunted independence and Western values. But when we perpetuate the idea that Arizona is some unchanging Wild West, we fall into the trap of a myth that only serves to embolden those who refuse to support commonsense restrictions on purchasing firearms.

Even the Tombstone town council of 1880 realized that some people with guns have intent to kill—and that reasonable laws could help stop them.

Katherine Benton-Cohen, an Arizona native and history professor at Georgetown University, is the author of “Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands.”


January 14, 2011: Here’s the skinny*

If you live in Massachusetts (and given our stringent gun-control laws, right now, in this fraught moment in American history, I very grateful to be living in this state), here’s an excellent source of info, advice, ways to save money, etc. re heating your home, replacing appliances, burners, etc., etc.

Mass Save

* Although, cynical me, I don’t get why consumers are supposed to trust utility companies for this kind of information!

January 12, 2011: testing, testing

So, yes, the blizzard did hit and, lo, we lost power from about 6 until 9:30 am. Since we’d been out late last night—to see “Ruined,” a brutal yet redemptive play at the Huntington—it was very easy to simply curl up next to the warm body sharing my bed (Yes. Yesterday’s blog re body heat was on my mind) and go back to sleep. Eventually, however, the wonder of the hushed, whitened world outside drew me out of bed around nine.

First challenge: How to make coffee. Happily, I discovered that I could light the hi-tech gas stove with a match. Arright! I even remembered, sleepy as I was, to add extra water to the pot so that when I heated it for coffee I was also heating the kitchen.  Slightly.

In those first few minutes of being awake, fortified by coffee and in my warmest robe, pajamas, socks and slippers, I thought: “Well, this isn’t so bad.” But with no cars on School Street, no refrigerator noise, no rattling radiators, no children walking by on their way to school; in utter, utter quiet, I could actually hear this old house start to gently creak. It was cooling down.

That’s when it hit me: This could really, really suck.

I’m not going to claim that in those, literally, chilling minutes before the power came back on and the radiators began cheerfully clunking again that I had an entire mind-meld/totally empathetic Ah HA understanding of what it feels like to be poor and cold and helpless.

But I was pretty close.

January 11, 2011: Buttonin’ Up

An old New England expression, buttonin’ up means preparing for winter: Putting up the storms, stacking the fire wood close to the house, checking food supplies, candles, lanterns, etc. Another winter storm approaching, I find myself caulking a few more windows and—locating my seldom-used cross-country skis. Yup. This storm, I’m gonna do a little skiin’.

I grew up skiing, or so it seems, old-style skiing, “baggy knees skiing.” When the sport got way too chichi for old-style me, I quit. But was delighted in the early 70s to discover cross-country skiing. Definitely a good fit.

So tomorrow I’ll be generating another form of heat as I glide over snowy sidewalks for a spell (I’m still not used to that dull thud when my ski poles hit asphalt or concrete.). I’ll be buttonin’ up my body to go outside, then, after a few vigorous, cardiovascular minutes, unzipping my jacket, removing my scarf.

Sunday night, when the group of people I was with visited the JP Green House, we collectively caused the temperature of that super-insulated home to go up 2 degrees.

Body heat. Hmm.

January 10, 2011: Reflections re yesterday’s visit

Here’s what I learned after visiting the JP Green House yesterday:

I don’t know enough. Not about the basic scientific principles of heating, nor about the current political support re alternative energy. I don’t know how I really know what’s best for the environment. So I guess, like the woman I met last night studying bees, I have some deeper research to do.

Here’s what I was reminded of last night:

Like the leading that resulted in Way Opens, like working on the daunting issues of our criminal justice system and climate change (I must be nuts!), like the writing of a novel or screenplay, devoting X amount of time to completing a project—like learning everything there is to know about heating my house this month—ain’t gonna happen. For one thing, I need more time. And for another, “continuing revelation” happens. Everything’s unfolding.

So the trick is: stay open.

January 8, 2011: At the chimney and fireplace store

So although there’s a ton of alternative ways to heat stuff out there (check out  yesterday’s comment/link re compost-pile water heating, for example), I’ve already confessed that I’m a hopeless aesthete, right? So when browsing Cambridge’s Black Magic Chimney and Fireplace store today, do I investigate pellet stoves?

Hell, no. I fall in love with a Vermont Castings stove. Which can be turned on with a remote. So is operational should we lose power.

And it’s so old-fashioned and pretty!

(I’m hopeless.)

Now: anyone want a baby grand piano? (Which is currently occupying the space this coveted stove could go.)