Life is mostly analog

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 on, get a glass of wine and settle down on the couch. Then you have to get up and flip the damn thing. And they skip …ey skip …ey skip …ey skip rrrup … sometimes. But they are fun, and I have not listened to many of these records in years. So Laura and I have spent a couple of evenings sitting around and taking turns at the turntable, dredging up some of our analog memories.

The kids are on spring break, and they get to go to horse camp all week. We found out about this cool horse ranch that offers full-day camp during intersession with riding lessons. The kids essentially spend all day among horses, between the barn, a nice playground and the ring. They teach the kids how to ride horses, how to groom the animals, how to clean the tack, how to stay safe around them, and how to clean the stalls and shovel the manure. And the ranch is only 10 Minutes from our place. I am so jealous!

Last Saturday I went to the peak Oil Conference at Duke University, which was also combined with an annual membership meeting for Piedmont Biofuels Coop. the conference was pretty interesting; the featured speaker was Larry Shirley, of the North Carolina Energy Office, and a tireless energy-efficiency and alternative-energy crusader. His peak-oil talk was really good, lively, but very technical and detailed, which was appropriate for the audience.

At the Piedmont Biofuels membership meeting the board appointed a new Bull City Biodiesel advisor to the board – yours truly – so I’ll have to make a monthly trek over to Moncure to attend board meetings. But that’s fine – I am pleased to get more closely involved with the coop, and a significant number of the membership of Piedmont is now based in Durham and associated with Bull City Biodiesel. So that’s all good, I think.

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