Production homes of the future — The Clean Energy Age

“The changes that we need to make in this industry are not huge, they’re not impossible, and they can be embraced by all developers, all builders and all cities,” says Douglas Gilliland. He is the President of Taurus of Texas, and I interviewed him recently in a new subdivision in Austin in which the homes…

via Production homes of the future — The Clean Energy Age

A Billion Tiny Flowers

I have been technology challenged for about ten years.  Before that I felt I could hold my own. Now, age, concussion and recently, ambivalence have led me to the shoals, the place where many older adults find themselves, muttering and cursing and occasionally exclaiming “YuReeek Ha!” as some colourful object washes onto our shoal and makes us happy.

I spent an entire weekend, possibly the nicest weekend of the summer trying to sort out why I could not longer watch television (Star Trek) or googly or putz on the various devices in my home! I must say here, if you are patient with the poor techies they are appreciative. I may not be able to defuse racist Nazis but my Zen practice has taught me to be attentive and patient while on hold.

Mostly I want to have Star Trek, any version, playing while I do my sewing. I could put on the radio but sometimes (gottalovem) CBC radio is just dumb and my stitches get tight while my mind boggles. (Star Trek is often dumb but it is Sci-fi, come on!)

Last night while falling asleep I realized my dreams were of a billion tiny flowers, each providing a context for perpetually opening complexity, which viewed as a whole was breathtaking. From my perspective they were the flowers of a quilt that I painstakingly was appliqueing one at a time, made of billions of threads of cotton, manufactured and dyed, all by human hands from plants grown in sunlight and with water and tended by more human hands on a beautiful planet spinning within spinning galaxies.

So as glitchy as these entertainments are from my point of view, some things, important and awesome, never change. 🙂

 

Buying Time

This is a link to some famous guys talking about their time.  You can Google Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and find out who they are if you don’t know.  Which is cool right?

http://www.swiss-miss.com/2017/03/you-control-your-time.html

Anyway, a basic lack of awareness is the biggest time waster of all and no amount of structure, lists or schedules can provide it.  I remember when a mom I knew who had been a palliative care nurse in a hospital told me she had had nervous breakdown.  She said the cut backs in support staff were so severe that her job had become moving patients around like cords of wood just to get the basics done like changing sheets and cleaning bed pans and she realized that she had started to see them as impediments to the function of the floor rather than the reason why she was there. “I wasn’t interacting with them as human beings. I had lost it”.  What had she lost? She lost the awareness of what she was actually doing there, perhaps because it was no longer possible.  I don’t know, I don’t doubt it was devastating for her.  She loved her job, she said she felt had been good at it.

This is a drastic example but not unusual.

Still, we have more time than we know, we have right now.  We have the breath in our bodies. We have the light entering our eyes from whatever screen we are looking at this from, the air moving around us, perhaps playing with dancing tiny flecks of dust, the sounds around us, intentional or insidious, humming aspects of twenty-first century life.  Or maybe nature: Robins bursting with exuberant declarations of spring love, or trees swaying in the wind or rain falling on hard ground…

Ah but there is that other blog we wanted to check and the coffee we want warmed and damn aren’t we late for something!!!  But if we bump into another human being as we rush to where we are going we can take a moment to notice them (if we are Canadian we can apologize) before we rush off.  We can be AWARE and it can make a difference.

Have a Nice Day!

This moment is brought to you entirely free. 🙂

 

 

The Things I`ve Seen Standing on the Corner!

Okay, the laughs are hard to come by these days but last week I watched a young woman with headphones on and her hood up (it was cold and had snowed the night before) walk along at a leisurely pace as a sidewalk snow plow continuously honked the horn at her, FOR AN ENTIRE BLOCK trying to get by her.

FYI: I now help texting people across the street as I count them as visually impaired. I have a great idea for improving the smart phone:  Put left and right turning signals on the side so other people can tell which way they are going to go!

Perpetually hooked up people are sensory disadvantaged!

I Went to a Movie Alone

My New Year’s Eve involved going to bed early. But during the day I did two things I don’t usually do, I got a burger at my favorite place and then went to watch “The Imitation Game”, by myself.

I had considered a few of the people I could ask to go with me but I wanted to go that day and not be swayed into putting it off or just giving up due to the lack of enthusiasm and spontaneity of others. So much to my amusement, there were more “singles” there than I had ever seen at a theatre before. Single seating does tend to make the audience look bigger at first. Every one first sits in the middle row, in the middle, and with at least two seats (one being an empty seat buffer) to every person and then they spread out from there. Gradually, the gaps start to fill in as, you guessed it, singles have to bunch together to allow seating for couples and triples…The other difference I saw in this audience from the usual was how many white haired people there were, so many that anyone without white hair stood out. Perhaps all the young people were getting dressed up for a New Years Eve bash?

The Imitation Game is about code breaking in the WWII but really about Alan Turing. It is one of the most tragic stories about a genius that I know. Given that some tweaking of the chronology was done, and with a few emphasis adjustments,it pretty much illustrates how amazing it is that our species survives given that we are so often offended by the irrelevant and yet thrilled about violence, whether it is the bureaucratically sanctioned kind or just your usual bloody thugism. Is Thugism not a word? Weird, it is so prevalent.

It’s a really good movie. You should see it. There’s even a joke in the middle.

My Cell Phone is Sick.

I had to take it to the service provider who’s name cannot be spoken.  Saturday I was all set to run out to the mall (killing two errands with one bus ticket) and S. called.

She is my Scottish friend who is of Chinese decent, she has the weirdest accent you can imagine, plus she seems to have adopted the stereotypical traits of both cultures, she tends to be blunt, likes to save money and shop for a deal (she is a one woman resource for where to find things in town) and she has a rather perfunctory approach to friendship. She calls me and tries to drag me out to go swimming at 6:30am on a weekly basis, “because it is good for you and everyone needs to talk to five people a day to stay happy”.

I disagree with this on so many levels. (I could write an entire post about it and it would be funny. “Oh Rio, you make me laugh!” is her response to my opinion.)

We compromise with going for coffee and complaining about our aged mothers. She is a caregiver too. So she offered to drive me to the mall.

Apparently they need a R.C.M.P. dossier on you before you can get them to do anything. My passport is out of date and I don’t drive. The little girl, and this is not meant to as a derogatory expression, (she was tiny and maybe eighteen years old, this was her first job and her last day), well, the wee pet, I’ll call her Janet, was willing to take my phone and send it for repairs but she would not be working there when I came back and without proper documentation/I.D., they would not give me the phone. Argghhhhhh. This is not an Ipod, it’s not even a phone they make anymore but it has a slide out keyboard arranged in the same layout as a standard keyboard and I can use it without my glasses. I REALLY LIKE IT. IT WORKS FOR ME. I AM WILLING TO PAY TO FIX IT… I don’t think it would be worth it for a stranger to pay for the repairs to steal it. I was proud of the fact that I didn’t get upset.

I said, “I am so glad you got another job, I hope it is better than this one!”
“Oh it is!” Janet smiled.

Meanwhile, S. is waiting and waiting. She decided to wander off and do some of her own errands.

They had no courtesy phones left to lend me, never a good sign, but I suggested that she introduce me to someone who WOULD BE THERE ON MONDAY and she could give me her name and number and I would do the same (it would be on all the forms I had to sign) and we could keep in touch as to when I could get a courtesy phone and all the details of the repair, cost, time etc.

I introduced myself to another young lady, A. She questioned whether I had gotten the phone wet and Janet defended me. I really congratulate Janet on finding a job where her customer loyalty might be rewarded.

S. had returned after completing several shopping miracles. “THIS IS WHY I’M NEVER GETTING A CELL PHONE! TOO MUCH HASSEL…”, she announced to the store in general. We went for coffee a quick coffee after that. It was getting late and my mother would be back from her church bizaar…

I have call Voldemort this afternoon, just to keep the relationship between “A” and I fresh…