Front Yard Update: Welcome to Crazy Town

...f should just be the right size for the space. Trimming is just a waste of energy for you and the plant. But I’ll leave it for now, and if I decide to give the slope over to the golden yarrow, I’ll let the Mexican sage and the purple sage go, too, and see who comes out on top. It would be like botanical cage fighting. Speaking of cage fighting, at the very top of the slope we have a cardoon plant. You can see it in the top left of the top picture....

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Sorting Family Photos

...t home, with a friend and in the cloud (Though I feel some guilt about the energy used for cloud storage of photos I might not look at). And they don’t’ suggest throwing out the originals. Lacking a way to project the films and slides, digitizing is the only way that I’ll be able to see them. But there’s a funny way in which grief works. With the photos in the shed I could put off dealing with the loss of my parents by keeping that grief at a dist...

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Free Qigong via Zoom

...appears below (subject to change). * Thursday, 3/26, 10:30AM orientation / 11AM Qigong. https://zoom.us/j/832068559 * Friday, 3/27, 10:30AM orientation / 11AM Qigong. https://zoom.us/j/387723400 * Sat., 3/28, 1PM orientation / 1:30PM Qigong. https://zoom.us/j/712246953 * Sunday, 3/29, 3PM orientation / 3:30PM Qigong. https://zoom.us/j/472877790 * Monday, 3/30, 12PM orientation / 12:30PM Qigong. https://zoom.us/j/560949674 * Tuesday, 3/31, 6:30PM...

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Natural Cooling: The Fresh Air Bed

...t the window. The idea lives on, but only for cats, in the form of the Cat Solarium and in many homebrew kitty window solutions. But enough about cats, what we really need is to bring back the California Fresh Air Bed Company’s clever indoor/outdoor bed. As many consider downsizing to smaller houses, space and energy saving furniture such as this make more sense than the oversized sofa sectionals that plague our modern mega-houses. Save Save Save...

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Who Needs Windows?

...ded me of this issue. If ever there was an example of the over-reliance on energy intensive HVAC systems it’s the idea that buildings don’t need windows. I can’t possibly, in a short blog post, round up all the windowless buildings such as phone company switching facilities (like the famous brutalist AT&T switching center in New York above), all those Amazon warehouses, or Los Angeles’ hidden and still functioning urban oil wells. Our window free...

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