Pwr iv

Following along my theme of power and electricity: Lights have gone out in Ecuador, according to the Beeb,

“Ecuador has introduced electricity rationing after a drought led to acute water shortages at the country’s main hydro-electric power plant at Paute.

…Ecuador depends heavily on hydro power to produce electricity….”

Pwr III

So Gordon Campbell suddenly notices we are importing power or fails to notice, has his head as usual up a chicken’s arse and announces apparently we’re going to be exporting power as of Tuesday.

Why? Because independent power producers are ticked off at the … well likely at the sanity of workers being paid a living wage.

Very curious how he’s keen to export energy of all of a sudden, while failing to notice erm.. we don’t have any to export currently.

Is he planning to give up eating toast and export the wattage in a jiffy bag?

Rhotic 10

Ding
Go maire tú do lá breithe
Ag deireanach
Cé go leor blianta tar éis glacadh sé liom cuimhneamh seo?
Bua.
Le grá.

Passing II

I think the person witnessing the passing of the person who had no one to witness it would have to be someone completely unknown to the person dying. That way the witness could learn about the person’s life in the final moments of their life. It could be a construction or it could be the truth.

Obviously the person dying would have to want their passing witnessed.

But if  a baby doesn’t know it’s alive except by human touch, where does that leave the dying?

I wonder if there’s any reassurance for someone dying who has no one to know someone would be present. Or would it be an empty gesture if that person had never been present for the entirety of the actual life?

Passing

Another great chat in another caff today. I have been blessed with good conversations with strangers the latter days. Today I was thinking about people who die with no one present to witness their passing.

I learned how hard it is to access hospice services and thus many people have home care or palliative home care coming into their dwelling, but it’s entirely possibly the carers may be the people who find them.

It strikes me that there isn’t anyone born without someone to witness their birth because of the nature of birth. Death likewise — one’s exit — should somehow be witnessed and I was imagining the many circumstances in which someone’s passing may be an incidental act witnessed by no other. It seemed somehow terrible. Then I was trying to imagine the practicalities of some kind of volunteer force who would offer to witness the passing of someone who had no one and I became confused by how it could possibly work.

Allen King’s documentary Dying at Grace is a portrait of the approach to and the final moments of several individuals and they’re beautiful moments. Hard, beautiful moments.  And there was something so extraordinary about them being witnessed and recorded.

I am very confused as to why it’s so difficult to obtain that documentary or much of his work at video stores. He appears to have made a staggering contribution to documentary in this country — why this absence?

Islensku

The ILAC miðstöð í Dublin verður mjög rólegur án þess að allir þessir íslensku kaupandi á þessu ári.

Beidh an t-ionad ILAC i mBaile Átha Cliath go ciúin gan dóibh siúd go léir shiopadóirí Íoslainnis na bliana seo.

I used to sometimes meet the Icelandic women walking along by the Baggot Street Canal, passing a bird-shat-upon-bronze Patrick Kavanagh with their shopping bags.

Rhotic 9

Ding,

Táim trioblóideacha ag an teanga Béarla

Cosúil nach féidir liom labhairt Béarla

Mo pronouns agus tenses misbehave

Níl siad comh-oibriú an tslí is cóir dóibh

Conas a raibh an Ding tarlú?

Is é mo teanga an mBéarla? Nach raibh?

An raibh a thagann sé síos go maith?

An-aisteach.

San iomlán.

Gan amhras. Gan doubt ar fad.

Tusa?

siege

I was thinking today about empty buildings and new buildings and why we empty one and fill the other. I was thinking about this because I was sitting in an empty building, converted to an instant vaccination clinic. I was sitting in a place where so many other activities had gone on, sports, basketball, badminton, tango dancing, baby drop in, toddler gym, etc and today it had immediately assumed a new purpose and adapted to it instantly: giant clinic.

Perhaps it was that all these resources had been pulled from around the city into this recently emptied building to respond and administer these vaccinations. There was something redolent of a useful siege or takeover that was compelling because it worked so well. A system that was functioning inside a building that had been recently deemed no use.

The odd thing is I’ve only recently become accustomed to utilising that building: this seems ever the way in Vancouver just as you’re growing vaguely attached to something. Ding Dong wreckers ball. It’s like pastry the folds itself over and the crease attempts to disappear.

Didn’t buildings used to have multiple purposes?

The other thing I noticed now I am more often inside a car is how little of any building you see, except your final destination. On foot the details of everything are so much more apparent.  You do notice different vistas in cars though, they’re significantly different from those a pedestrian takes in. Much more dominated by line and lights.

If the city is offering daily readings of turbidy in the water, I wish it would take marginal more interest in the wind and offer some more accurate weather readings. It could be v sci-fi and useful if we had little weather stations on every street corner where you could find the precise details of your weather on this block.

Perhaps the stations could have small people inside them who you can call things into and based on how riveting you are they’d reply with a good joke or a bit of a song. And if you were not interesting or rude, perhaps you’d get a tickle or a tap from an arm that would poke out.

Pwr

So my little flutter into our power situation has produced even more of determination to have more info on the wind. Really if people were a little more clued into the weather, life would just be a great deal merrier.

In a very quick bout of reading, I came across a few sites — there’s v little mention of where we’re buying the 20 percent power we’re not producing from. This I am v curious about. I am so curious I’d like to know the precise town or turbine it’s created.

I did find this from July http://greenpolicyprof.org/wordpress/?p=289 an examination of why the BC Utilities Commission reject BC Hydro’s long term plan. I recall during the election there was a lot of focus on the BC Liberals silent plans to privatise rivers and BC Hydro or some madness.

In my small effort to get off the grid that unfortunately did not produce much of result, I did learn how significantly difficult it is to generate power. I was able to generate 12 volt power that needed to be converted and in that conversion a great deal was lost.  Another friend said marine batteries were the way to go, so that’s another route. Basically most of the scuppering occurred because I plugged the panel into the wrong hole and hence no charge was created.

There’s lots of ingenuity out there and hopefully garage, kitchen pioneers will start building small devices involving clothes pegs and circuits that will be open source and shortly we can create them to power the fridge.

There was such a movement of home inventors in the 1950’s. Some of the inventions and entrepreneurial spirit can be seen in the bag of the Homes and Gardens type mags from that era. I have a bunch and will describe some of the ads in another post.