Sign of Truth

Irene shared this one with me (one of the many great signs from the recent marches):

Thank you, young man - I do feel little better now!

The show must go on...

Today I referred to my class as the "audience".  I made a lame joke and then said "tough crowd".  Later I said "I'm feeling under-appreciated by the audience today".  Then, as they were almost allowing themselves to be amused, I said "It's so much better for my self esteem to tell myself in the morning to get ready for the show rather than to say 'Oh, yeah - I'm a high school teacher'.

Why did this take me so long?

Better late than never!

Falling into Winter

Out for a walk with my kids, enjoying the fall colors. 

This year those fall changes cause me to reflect on my own ‘fall’: worsening eyesight, a pudgy middle section, and ever whitening, slowly thinning hair. 

My kids are still young enough to enjoy all the seasons.  But the fall means winter soon and winter is only enjoyable if there is a spring at the end of it, right? 

What if there’s no spring coming – won’t winter be sad and depressing?  I check with my kids “Would you still love winter if you didn’t have spring to look forward to?”  They look perplexed and say “Won’t we still have family game night huddled around the wood stove and dig out the driveway together and have family snowball fights?”

The wisdom of youth! Relieved, I go back to enjoying the fall colors.

The Message or the Messenger?

Everyone knows the sound of a violin is not the actual violin itself, right? I'm not so sure...

"North is that way"
"That car is red"
"This object is cold"

All of these statements are examples of us projecting an input into our senses as being a property of the object out there.  In essence, we humans seem to confuse the message with the messenger all the time.

The north pole of the compass in my hand points a certain direction, so I call that direction north, but really it is a magnetic south pole 'up' there somewhere that is attracting my magnet. So is North 'up there' in the direction your compass points?

Most objects (ones that are not glowing) are not a "color" - they re-emit certain colors being thrown at them and absorb others.  The ones that are re-emitted are what we see.  Look at a red car under a green light or in the nighttime and it will not be red.  So is it red?

An object feels cold because you are transferring heat to it.  If you had a lower temperature, it would feel hot to you!  So is it the object by itself that is cold?

If we do this all the time, what about when we see someone doing something bad?  Is that a bad person?

A person engaged in an act of kindness must be a kind person, right?

Someone acting in a warm way towards me must actually like me, right?

I should connect those happy feelings from advertisements to the product on the screen, right?

Wait a sec, I think I hear a violin...

How to know you are doing a beach vacation right

If you are leaving the beach in the morning when everyone else is arriving and then returning in the afternoon when they are leaving - then, you are doing it right!

The Power of Fusion

We're on our way to being an energy producer as well as consumer: Solar Power!

Two days of work by a team of four guys.  The work needs to be inspected and the power company needs to change out our meter and we'll be good to go.  We'll be generating at a max rate of 7.42 kW!

New electrical box, meter, internet connection, and switch in the basement:








Microinverters (DC to AC) under each panel:

28 Solar Panels to top it off (photo taken from the South of the house, looking Northward around 3pm).  We took out two trees that shaded the front left of the house even more than it is currently:



There's also a switch outside the house so the electric company can shut off our solar if they need to work on the power lines in the neighborhood!