Last year had a couple of surprises for us, although most of these have yet to be completely realized: we found a new house, but we have yet to move there; we began planning our trip to Togo (and Ghana) for the upcoming July; and the Democrats won back the U.S. Congress.
One of the biggest [...]

Busy, hot day today at the Eno Festival - but lots of fun! The festival was well attended and we had a constant stream of people with questions about biodiesel: “Can I use it in my car?” - “Where can I get it?” - “How is it made?” - What do you do with [...]

It’s spring and the wildlife in the woods is going - uh - wild!
Chipmunks
The cats are out hunting every day. They catch frogs, lizards, shrews, and chipmunks. Yesterday I saw Deha, the Siamese, in the driveway, hovering over what I thought was fresh kill. So I went to see what she got, and found [...]

Yet another cold front moved in today, and the temperature dropped 20 degrees Fahrenheit in one hour. This cold front spawned some severe thunderstorms and at one point a 15-Minute hailstorm that almost covered the ground with chick-pea-sized hail.
I like the effect of the hail in the flashlight in the picture above.
More pictures below the [...]

Yesterday, I got a huge, 82 gallon used waterheater from a guy in Raleigh. This gray monster is going to be the cornerstone of my biodiesel homebrew operation, as I am planning to turn it into a appleseed reactor.
I also have begun filling a 250 gallon storage tank with used fryer oil. I scored that [...]

Oh yeah, baby! Veg Power rules!
Grease be with you!

Julia makes it all the way to the top of “The Rock” at yesterday’s Earth Day Celebration at Duke.

Last weekend my dad visited us and since we were doing a bit of sight-seeing, I figured a trip over to Chapel Hill would be fun. I had not visited my alma mater in a long time and this time of year the old campus at UNC is just gorgeous (despite a huge amount of [...]

Don’t know exactly what’s come over us, but recently Laura and I have been listening to some of our records. You know, vinyl records, the black, 12-inch wide disks with grooves all over them. You put a needle on them and they produce a scratchy hiss with some music. You put one of those things [...]

Last night we did our post-solstice ritual and torched our christmas tree. The tree was still way too green - we should have let it dry out more. Still, it was quite a firework ….

What a year: Nature terrorized humans with hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. Awareness rose of the threats of a global flu pandemic and global warming. Terrorists killed innocent people around the world. Human rights abuses, government secrecy and spying were uncovered in the U.S., in Europe and in many countries around the world. The new pope [...]

We woke up this morning at 5:30 because Julia was not feeling well, and noticed the woods behind our house were burning. Across an area of about an acre (roughly a third of a hectare) the leaf litter on the ground was burning and the fire was rapidly spreading in a wide swath across [...]

I like my cars with a hitch. I have a small utility trailer that I use to haul garbage, furniture, cinder blocks, firewood, and other stuff that I don’t want inside the car or that does not fit inside the car. Over the years I found the trailer-car combo much more efficient than owning a [...]

It’s a beautiful late summer day in North Carolina, gasoline costs $3.20 a gallon, and I reached a personal fitness milestone today, by biking 3 miles around the property in under 30 Minutes. Not that anyone rally cares, but that’s where I was at last Winter, when my bike broke (the free hub). It took [...]

Last weekend Laura went to see the new Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie. She had been very anxious to see it, and she seems to have really enjoyed it. I am looking forward to seeing it one of these days myself. But today I heard about a movie I really want to see as soon as [...]

My photo album for our Iceland vacation is finally ready. It took a while to get it ready, but I had a lot of pictures to sort through; almost 700 from our 5 days in Iceland! I ended up using 220 images for the website. I took all the images with my Canon D350 [...]

The “Unity Parade” is one the highlights of the Eno Festival.
The 26th Festival for the Eno is one of the biggest community events here in Durham. The festival lasted for three days, Saturday thru Monday and it was, as always, great family fun. This year, the 4th of July weekend (US Independence Day) was a [...]

So I guess I survived the first day back at work after our awesome, two-week vacation in Iceland and Germany. We are still processing the sights, sounds and cultural impressions. Iceland struck us as a very cool and quietly very powerful place. Huge geological forces are at work here, glaciers and volcanoes shape this island. [...]

Wow - back in silly-visation after 5 days in Iceland! What a gorgeous, wild raw place! Pictures to follow. After that, Germany seems twice as hectic and crowded. But the weather is great and the beer is a LOT better and more affordable than in Iceland.

It is spring in North Carolina. Finally. We are all completely drained from the deprivation and hardship of six weeks of Winter, i.e. six weeks of temperatures below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, 9 days of “hard frost (below 32 degrees Fahrenheit), and two “snowstorms” (average of 1.5 inches of snow) that shut down everything. But all [...]