One thing about the Blogosphere that I hold true is that it is GREAT at spreading/echoing ideas. I like this idea written over at boingboing about the economic situation. Its a conversation with the editor of Rolling Stone where he says we should be making koan-style one liners saying the truth about whats going on with the banking fiasco. As American as the situation is, and as much as everyone feels like it is our capitalist obligation to ourselves to prop up business as usual, it just doesn't feel right, like Morpheus says in The Matrix; "...it's like a sliver in your mind". So I am echoing this line, "debt is not a good product". I know the banking industry is more complicated than boiling it down to that, but ultimately the nations largest industry survives because they make money with money. Can't we found our country's well being on something else more meaningful and fulfilling for more people?

In planning the front yard, I would like to make a landscape that doesn't require any watering during the dry season. My mom suggested that we make a creek bed down the middle of the space, so I worked on a design that will route rainwater runoff from the down-spout into a depression lined with rocks that will become our little creek. To form the creek, dirt would be removed to form a depression running down the middle of the yard and mounded up on either side to create little hills that run parallel to the creek. My only concern with the creek bed is that we would need a lot of rocks which require a lot of fuel to transport from where ever they come from, but I thought we might be able to get a few car loads from a beach or something. On the mounds next to the creek we would plant dwarf fruit/nut trees that would benefit from the water that collects in the creek. Around the outside of the trees I have indicated bushes of lavender which attract bees and have a nice flower in the summertime. And the rest of the space around the lavender would just be seeded with California poppy for a nice seasonal color. And for an added touch, we could move the planter box that is already there and transplant some artichoke from the backyard into the front. It would be in the shade of a young oak tree during the hot months and probably do really well there.

Slowly, I've been working on transforming our front yard from something that commands an enormous amount of resources and gives very little value in return, to something that hopefully re-aligns with the natural growing patterns of our local environment. Before I cut off our lawns water supply some two years ago, it was probably consuming water in the ball park of 10s of thousands of gallons in one summer! According to the this article,

"Most single-family homes use about 20% of the water coming through the water meter for household use. The remaining 80% is used on the lawns, trees, shrubbery borders, flower beds and vegetable gardens. It is said that about 50-75% of outdoor water usage is given to the lawn."

Put those numbers next to the "160,000 gallons of water per family per year" that the Santa Clara Valley Water District figures we use, and its pretty clear we are using WAY too much clean, drinkable water on our lawns each year.

Last week I moved this site to a new hosting service called A2hosting. I didn't really have many problems with Bluehost, but I've read so many bad things about it, I thought I would consider myself lucky and move on. There wasn't much written about A2 one way or another, but the little I did read was positive and they tout themselves as being 'green' hosting providers, and that is good!

On an airplane last year I saw a 10 minute news segment on Dubai where the interviewer was ogling at Sheikh Mohammed's splendid city in the middle of one of the driest places on earth. He let the man talk about the wonders and opportunities that he was bringing to his people who have lived as simple nomads on the land until 30 years ago. The interviewer tried to ask some hard questions, but nothing that would bring any disrespect, like maybe asking why the hell they have an indoor ski slope? of doesn't it bother you that you are living we'll beyond your financial and ecological means? The little challenge he did present was met with a furrowed brow plead to make us somehow feel that what he was doing was simply trying to survive and make a living for their people. I was left smelling the reek of that city, but without hard facts. It just simply didn't seem like a good thing to build artificial islands, and a city full of high end shopping malls, a municipal water supply entirely fed by desalination plants, all on speculation from a relatively small amount of the one resource they have; oil.