Today I read a book by Genie Chipps Henderson " A Day Like Any Other: the Great Hamptons Hurricane of 1938". I've long been interested in TEOTWAWKI stories, and this is one of those. It focuses on the days leading up to and the actual day of the hurricane with very little about the aftermath, but it reminds me starkly of Isaac's Storm, by Erik ( Read more... )

It was really hot yesterday, in the 90's, and I'd had the livingroom shut up all day to trap a rat. That's a south-facing sunroom and it was brutally hot in there. I opened the door to the deck to let some air in because the screen isn't on that door yet.

A bat promptly flew in.

My weather forecast calls for "cloudy" all day, but it's supposed to be rainy later in the week so I put a load of bedding on the line this morning in expectations that this would be a reasonable drying day.  Apparently not.  It's been lightly raining all morning.  So lightly that I thought it was just mist at first ( Read more... )

Here's what I said on August 20th:

"rising sea levels and more frequent storms means that a storm surge from a hurricane during a full moon is going to cause a Katrina to hit some city on the east coast on a regular basis."

The reason I keep thinking I can tell the future is because I'm pretty damn good at it.

Having been thinking about global warming, I realized I am going to want some shade on my south porch on the island. The fact that I don't actually have a south porch is not material to this discussion. I want a south porch and will have one in a few years. But the time to start growing a shade tree is somewhat BEFORE you need the shade. So today I ( Read more... )

I've been reading up on the expected impact of climate change in our area and the island.  Mostly I've been untroubled by this; warmer winters don't trouble me particularly, although I'll be sorry to see the sugar maples leave our hillsides.  The pests have already destroyed my stand of five hemlocks, they can't do much worse to me now.  The longer ( Read more... )

The first thing I have to tell you is that "The Sheep Look Up" by John Brunner is a really good book. I'm going to quibble a bit in this review, but let me tell you up front that this is well-written, with a tight plot that emerges in a wonderful collage style of writing. It's deeply literate yet easy to read.

It's a dystopian novel set roughly in ( Read more... )

It was brutally hot today.  It was over 90 by 9 AM.  After that I stopped paying attention, but I've heard it hit 100 here on our little island in the north Atlantic.  That's beyond bizarre.  I've never been on the island on a day this hot.  We started the day by installing an air conditioner in the Octogenarian bedroom.  I brought a table in and ( Read more... )

I went out to pick the last of the brussels sprouts today.  It was doing fine under the plastic in the most sheltered garden #2.  I considered letting it stay and keep growing another week, but so far we haven't had a solid snowstorm and we might this week-end so I figured I should pick it before the snow pack buried it ( Read more... )

At the Transition Town meeting yesterday a guy was there who had just moved from Boulder to Our Small Town.  When we were setting up the categories of critical things that needed attention to cushion the transition to a post peak world, he told us that he was just astonished, simply floored, at the casual way we treat water here.  Everyone blinked ( Read more... )