So does anyone else feel the burning desire to get crafty when the first sign of Fall is in the air? I don't know what it is, but today I've been feeling inspired to paint canvases, make some cards, create noodles from scratch (although I have no clue how to do it), bake cinnamon rolls, and sew something. Martha Stewart, look out!
Of course I didn't accomplish any of those things because the inspiration hit too late in the day and Little Man was being whiny for most of the afternoon (teething). He did play in the Johnny Jump Up just long enough for me to get some dishes done and to *act* like I was on top of kitchen patrol. Now he is in bed, but I am stuck entertaining my BIL (just arrived for the night) while my dear husband is out picking up a late dinner for us. I need to get some writing done, so I think I'm going to sneak upstairs and do that once he returns from his errand. I'm not in the mood to sit with two grumpy men. :p
It is the start of the Labor Day weekend. I'd like to try to get some things organized over the next couple of days and feel like I have things a little more under control once the quarter really gets into full swing (after next week apparently). Maybe I'll have Jessica whip me up one of her infamous to-do lists. She loves when I tell her I have stuff to do because she helps get the list together. She should really be in management. She is good about getting the "to-dos" down and insisting that they are done, but not as good at following her own advice. LOL.
I saw an interesting class I'd love to take from Big Picture Scrapbooking. It is called Saving Your Sanity: Throughout the Holidays. I wonder if it can help with more than just scrapbooking and/or memory making? ;) My sanity can use a little saving.
OMG. Tim just returned with our dinner. I must say, it is amazing. We called in an order to a Warthog BBQ. We hadn't been there in years. I got a pulled pork sandwich, and it is probably the best I've ever had. Yum yum. I guess I'd better end this before I get sauce on the keyboard.
Have a great weekend!
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Friday, September 03, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Confession Tuesday
- I thought that after a couple of weeks off of work, I would miss my job and feel empty or possibly even depressed. That hasn’t happened, and I am now wondering if it ever will.
- Sometimes friends are far better and cause waaaaay less stress than family. I hung out with my friend Stephanie yesterday. We’ve known each other since 4th grade. Every time I get together with her, it is like a huge warm fuzzy and a jolt of inspiration in life. We talked about art and she showed me her work (I just love it). Jessica worked on some sketches, Steph worked on a piece, I painted a background canvas and was imagining circus tents. Here is a glimpse of one of Stephanie's pieces...
- I feel like a bad stepmother. Against my better judgment, I’ve acquiesced to the “hands-off” approach subscribed to by my husband and his ex. Now I feel like that was a mistake.
- This is so yummy and inspiring… from Michelle Clement’s blog…
- And then look at this goodness. I’m so envious of her creativity and cuteness. Gotta love Lolly at Lollychops.com.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Bad Medicine
I am tired of having a back “injury.” I say “injury” because I’m not really sure what happened to it in the first place. All I know is I was fine one minute, and the next minute, I felt like I had a sore back, and it progressively got worse until I ended up in urgent care: crying, shaking and struggling to climb off the x-ray table. I had “compression issues” and a “severe pelvic tilt” which meant that one leg was over an inch shorter than the other. Fun times.
No work. Off to PT, Chiropractor, back to the doc, on muscle relaxers, ibuprofen and ice packs. They gave me vicodin (the cure-all for the medical profession these days) but it does nothing for me, so I skipped it. Now I’m on the last work day at home before the weekend and the eventual return to work on Monday. I’m kinda scared to return to work because I know my problem is not resolved, and I don’t want it to get back to the way it was before. It has improved, but last night I was in tears from pain, and cranky from the steroids that they made me start taking on Wednesday. They cause sleeplessness and irritability… just what someone needs when they are in pain.
I’ve been doing some painting today, hoping that the creative therapy will stall the pain and make me feel better. So far it is better than yesterday, so that is good. I’m working on three paintings now. I am finishing one that I started quite some time ago, re-doing one I wasn’t even close to finishing before, and laying the background for another that I’ve had in mind for awhile. All in all, I’m realizing that I have a definite color palette that crosses all of my stuff lately. Maybe that will be my signature? Probably not a good idea. Maybe I will just finish these and get the colors out of my system.
Here’s a little mini scrapbook/art journal layout I threw together this afternoon. Kind of gives the feeling of the day.
The elements are all from Fiddlette Designs at Scrapbookgraphics.com.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’
It is Friday, and I’m totally in the mood for some Michael Jackson music. I was never what you’d call a huge fan, but I liked the hits. I have some good memories tied to a couple of the albums (the one that had Remember the Time). Mostly, I always felt sorry for the sideshow his life had become. This morning, on the radio, they were talking about “This Is It” and recommending it to anyone who liked his music because it is an interesting look at the behind-the-scenes production efforts. I know I am not going to go and see it in the theater, but might look it up once it graces the time slots on HBO. Tim really doesn’t like movies to begin with, and he isn’t a big fan of most music, so it would be a double whammy and he would just laugh if I asked him to watch it.
It makes me wonder though, how someone can *not* like music. I mean, he doesn’t hate music, but he’d probably rather have silence than music. If I’m working on a project or cleaning the house, I’d much rather have some good music on. To me, it just helps things move along when you are singing along or dancing around to a favorite tune.
I’ve been thinking about doing a scrapbook layout to highlight my favorite playlist of songs at the moment. I’ve never done one, and I think it would be fun to look back upon in the future.
Weekend forecast: blustery? rainy? artsy? I’m going to crank up the tunes and create something this weekend. Whether it will be a poem, an annotation, a craft project or a piece of art of some sort, I’m totally in the mood to get something started!
Thursday, June 19, 2008
How Amazing is This?
Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'
“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”
He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.
Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.
Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.
What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.
LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London. “How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?” he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being “prerevenue”.
Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”
Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.
For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.
The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.
Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.
The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.
However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.
That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.
“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.
Are Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug excretion in their cars? “It’s not the same as with food,” Mr Pal says. “We’re putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire universe is in that tank. When we’re done with them, they’re destroyed.”
Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. “I have two children, and climate change is something that they are going to face. The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a collective responsibility to do this.”
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'
“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”
He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.
Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.
Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.
What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.
LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London. “How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?” he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being “prerevenue”.
Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”
Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.
For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.
The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.
Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.
The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.
However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.
That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.
“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.
Are Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug excretion in their cars? “It’s not the same as with food,” Mr Pal says. “We’re putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire universe is in that tank. When we’re done with them, they’re destroyed.”
Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. “I have two children, and climate change is something that they are going to face. The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a collective responsibility to do this.”
