Wednesday, July 29, 2015

When is a Beer Not a Beer?

"Glass of the Berlinerweisse, please," he says.
"You drink that stuff?" asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around his Coke. "Man, you don't want to do that! It's full of alcohol!"
Manfred grins at him toothily. "Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: There are lots of neurotransmitter precursors in this shit, phenylalanine and glutamate."
"But I thought that was a beer you were ordering ..."
 - Charles Stross, Accelerando

I once thought the most difficult decision I ever made was when I decided whether to try harder or to walk away.

Some days – like today -  a beer is not just a beer. The hardest decision I made today was whether to wake up when my kitty slid off my side and kissed me good morning with her whiskers or to roll over and take another hour or so.

No wait. It got harder. I went grocery shopping. One thing always on my list is “dinner”. The original concept for using this ambiguous word was to find something inspiring and fresh in produce and get creative. Lately, it has been trying to find the latest trend in pre-made dinners: fully cooked but fresh dinners. You could take them home and freeze them, or you could take them home and put them on a plate and feel like you were slightly more righteous than eating microwaved organic pencil shavings labeled non-GMO and/or gluten-free. Eventually, it’s Mrs. Paul’s Fish Cakes with that mutant condiment son of mayonnaise and chopped pickles: tartar sauce. Just as long to nuke as a handful of frozen Tater Tots on the same plate.

Today I was in the middle of those extremes for the simple reason that the store closest to me doesn’t have those fresh prepared meals in a cooler next to the golden rotating kiosk of small lemon- and barbequed chickens. I decided to find my holy grail of steak: prime (not choice) rib. Which is just a metaphor for how my life is an ongoing circus of disappointment. You can only get choice cuts in generic grocery chains. Why do I keep forgetting that and going through the pain over and over?

I ended up with some Bread & Cie seedy whole grain bread, and almost got some quinoa crackers with walnuts and cranberries but came to my senses. Also, and totally offsetting the fact that I forgot cream cheese, I did score a memorable picture. It was not a hard decision to continue my search for inspiration. I chose to pass on deciding whether to unravel the mystery of meat. As Dr. Who said, humanity is just nature’s way of keeping meat fresh.


Sometimes meat is just meat. Instead of buying the strangely-coloured (sic) mystery meat I decided instead to have a beer for dinner with my grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, side of home made dill pickles.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Stern Lessons


The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not to tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
 - Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

I do not consider this un-chosen journey as one where other women dare not tread. 

Shame and despair are part of the deal and nobody needs a passport to those regions. 

If we learn the lessons aright, we gain wisdom. Such as learning the difference between surrendering and dying.


I do not consider solitude a stern wild teacher that has taught me anything amiss. In fact, I find comfort in solitude. 

Every season, I change the things on the shelves in my front window. I just put summer in. 

Notice there is a cat in each picture. They have taught me the difference between solitude and loneliness.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Water Wars are Coming

I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.
 -  Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Brook

Maybe Not

Last year, for the first time, the amount of water transferred from Lake Powell to Lake Mead was reduced, by enough to supply about 1.5m homes. If the snowpack on the Rockies is as bad as Davis fears, then there is likely to be a deeper cut in the coming months under a series of agreements which allocate water rights.
The original agreement, the Colorado River Compact, carved out nearly a century ago, divides the river’s water between the states that rely on it. With hindsight, it sowed the seeds of some of today’s problems. It failed to foresee the rapid rise in population in the desert states of Nevada and Arizona, and the demands of their cities and farms. Nevada, for instance, was allocated only 2% of total of the water distribution.
The compact was also premised on predictions of snow packs on the Rockies which some environmentalists have concluded were based on a period of abnormally high rains in the west during the first quarter of the 20th century.
The agreement gives some states greater claim than others when the water runs short. Arizona loses out, except for a county next to the Mexican border which has what are known as “senior rights” because it produces much of the US vegetable crop in winter. Nevada also does badly. The big winner is California, which gets to keep its much larger allocation, for a while, at least.
That state of affairs can be traced back nearly half a century to construction of the largest aqueduct system in the US to deliver the Colorado’s water to central and southern Arizona. The canals of the Central Arizona Project (CAP) provide water to cities such as Tucson and Phoenix, and irrigate close to 400,000 hectares (1m acres) of farmland. Without it, Arizona would be less fertile and, probably, less inhabited.
But the CAP required the support of California’s members of Congress to win funding and they exacted a price – if the water is rationed, Arizona’s allocation is cut by half before California takes any hit at all.
In 2007, seven years into the present drought, new allocations were signed by the US secretary of the interior in case the water shortages grew. The cutbacks to the states kicks in if Lake Mead falls below 1,075ft.
In April of this year it was just 4ft short of that benchmark as it fell to its lowest level since 1937, when the lake was still being filled. If the water levels continue to drop, Arizona and Nevada will face immediate cuts, escalating as the lake falls further.
That would threaten cities such as Las Vegas and the very existence farms fed by the Arizona aqueduct. If the lake sinks below 1,000ft, the water intake pipes would start sucking air. The Hoover Dam power turbines would also stop spinning, interrupting an important source of electricity to the region.
Davis said it’s a prospect that kicked state governments into gear.
“We signed these guidelines in 2007, so all of the states have been very proactive in storing groundwater, implementing conservation measures, using recycling technologies. They have seen this coming,” she said.
Nevada is recycling most of the water used by residents and tourists in Las Vegas. The Southern Nevada Water Authority put in place a conservation plan that includes limiting the size of lawns, restrictions on watering gardens and campaigns to shorten the time spent in showers or running dishwashers. The authority says it has reduced demand from about 314 gallons per person per day in 2002 to about 205 gallons per day last year, and saved 32bn gallons of water despite the region’s population rising by more than 500,000 people.

How the west was lost

The Colorado River Basin is the water lifeline of the western United States.  It provides water to roughly 40 million people in 7 states and to Mexico.   It supplies water to major metropolitan regions including several of the country’s largest and driest — Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas — and enough water to support irrigation on 4 million acres of farmland.  As the water future of the Colorado River Basin goes, so does that of the west.
In our new study, we used NASA satellites to find that between December 2004 and November 2013, the Colorado River Basin lost a total of 65 cubic kilometers of water, or roughly the equivalent of two full Lake Meads.  This was a period of prolonged drought in which the water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell (the United States’ second largest reservoir) had fallen to dangerously low levels, and were being carefully managed to prevent further declines. Surprisingly, we found that 75% of the water lost was from the Basin’s groundwater supplies.
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/07/24/how-the-west-was-lost/

Abstract – Groundwater depletion

Streamflow of the Colorado River Basin is the most overallocated in the world. Recent assessment indicates that demand for this renewable resource will soon outstrip supply, suggesting that limited groundwater reserves will play an increasingly important role in meeting future water needs. Here we analyze 9 years (December 2004 to November 2013) of observations from the NASA Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission and find that during this period of sustained drought, groundwater accounted for 50.1 km3 of the total 64.8 km3 of freshwater loss. The rapid rate of depletion of groundwater storage (−5.6 ± 0.4 km3 yr−1) far exceeded the rate of depletion of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Results indicate that groundwater may comprise a far greater fraction of Basin water use than previously recognized, in particular during drought, and that its disappearance may threaten the long-term ability to meet future allocations to the seven Basin states.
 - Research Letter, “Groundwater depletion during drought threatens future water security of the Colorado River Basin. Authors:
            Stephanie L. Castle,
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                                            UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
                                            Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
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Brian F. Thomas,
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                                            UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
                                            Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
                                            NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA
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John T. Reager,
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                                            UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
                                            Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
                                            NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA
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Matthew Rodell,
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                                            Hydrological Sciences Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA
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Sean C. Swenson,
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                                            Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, USA
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James S. Famiglietti
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Corresponding author
                                            UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
                                            Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, California, USA
                                            NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA
                                            Correspondence to: J. S. Famiglietti,
jfamigli@uci.edu
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                        First published: 29 August 2014Full publication history