Hurry Slowly

It is early October, the days are cooler, trees are shedding their yellow and brown leaves, but my lilac and azaleas have bloomed again. The azaleas did not surprise me, they are biannual bloomers, but the purple lilac did. The flowers appeared on the tip of dormant branches after the green leaves have turned brown and fallen off. The blooms are still fragrant despite their smaller size and the lack of leaves. One guy was complaining in a highly surprised voice on a reel video that his apple tree bloomed this October as well and he could not explain why.

Today I walked in the green grass that grew tall as if to make up for the dry summer when the arid lawn turned into a carpet of scorched yellow. No amount of watering helped and I finally gave up.

The footpath to the lake, well-tracked by deer coming through daily, is semi-green, even as the weeds have started dying. I am walking on the same path my mom used to stroll daily with our beloved cat Bogart. She used her straw hat to shield her eyes from the sun and the handle of an old broom to steady her gait through the tall grasses.

The neighbor on the other side of the pond used to mow the weeds surrounding the pond because he was afraid mom would get bitten by a snake crawling from its nest or from the water to warm in the sun. There was no young snake wrangler Gabe to protect her, so the best move was to mow the tall grass, carving a safe path for my elderly mom.

Her picture walking this path has made it into my children’s book, Being Bogart. I cherish that moment in time and the memory of it when I snapped the picture. I still have her colorful straw hat, resting by her glasses and the last piece of crocheted doily she made from memory with red thread during her art classes. Red was mom’s favorite color.

Today I am wearing a white straw hat which I purchased on Hollywood Beach during a hot August day while strolling on the boardwalk with my daughter Mimi and my husband. We bought new beach shoes too that day and we tried them in the crystal blue waters of Florida’s Atlantic Ocean.

This straw hat reminded me that I have finally become my mother after all, salt, and pepper hair too, more salt than pepper, a slow and unsteady gait helped by my regular hiking sticks. Regaining my ability to walk after a severe relapse of MS with transverse myelitis is giving me a new appreciation for life and for the ability to walk however slowly.

Years ago, when mom started walking unhurriedly because of arthritis and ageing, we were at the track, and she implored me to slow down at her pace. Sometimes I did, sometimes I did not – I walked faster or ran. As a young person, I took my ability to walk and fast for granted. Little did I know that fate was going to teach me a very painful and valuable lesson – if we are lucky to live long enough, fast walking or walking at all becomes a thing of the past.

Now it is my turn to feel what mom must have felt in the twilight of her physical ability but never expressed to me so clearly how disappointed she was that I rushed life and did not heed the old Latin saying, Festina lente, (Hurry slowly).

Now MS has forced me to slow down in many ways, and I came to the realization that I am my mom now - life and mobility are precious.

My hat is not mom’s gardening hat; it is more fashionable but still a hat which I must embrace with twilight dignity.

Mary's Biology Lab

Mary Davidson, Ph. D.
Photo: Ileana Johnson

There were always oddities residing in and escaping from Mary’s large room on the second floor and storage area serving as biology laboratory and classroom. Strange and unpleasant odors and miasmas were wafting down the hallways from Mary’s biology lab, truly a room of curiosities that attracted some and made others flee for fresh air. She had freezers full of dead cats and frogs ready for dissection. When the formaldehyde smell was so overpowering and nauseating at the same time, we knew Mary and her students were preparing for dissection and the critters had been brought out of the freezers. We opened windows to air out the smell but, despite our efforts, the stench became part of our clothes, our skin, and our nostrils for that week.

There was a tarantula and a pet snake that kept escaping from their glass enclosures and terrariums. Students were always searching for them and finding them in strange places, dehydrated and hungry. Mary was always looking for someone to care for her many pets during vacations and to water her many plants which together resembled a giant Venus fly trap.

There were collections of pressed leaves and flowers gathered from the many trips around Lowndes County and the state of MS. An assortment of rocks stockpiled from trips to caverns was assembled by a few passionate amateur spelunkers who collected them during cave adventures. Soil samples, worms, moths, butterflies, cockroaches, and other insects, live and preserved, were gathering dust and making babies in dark places, in boxes all over the lab, and in the storage area.

Students were taught how to be responsible humans by doing two hours of work service a week for a specific teacher, a lab, or to clean the dreaded bathrooms and hallways. When they had to clean the nasty bathrooms, they were always more careful not to make them really dirty to begin with. Not hiring full time janitors also saved the school money. Some students got cushy assignments; they just had to help a certain teacher grade tests. Others were not so lucky.

Mary was a fantastic teacher and motivator and students loved her but, doing work service for Dr. D, was not exactly an easy assignment as students often had to clean the lab, the tools used, the beakers, and other glass jars. Cleaning the lab was a nightmarish proposition as nobody knew if the caged pets were loose or safely latched. 

One day students had to clean cardboard boxes laden with former students’ projects, tightly taped and not labeled. Mary and a crew of four students were opening these boxes, like Christmas presents, never knowing what mysterious project would be inside, salvaging any glassware contained within, and throwing the rest in a large trash bin.

But one box was unlike the rest. Imagine the protagonists of the movie “The Mummy,” being chased by millions of beetles emerging from the sand and devouring everything in sight. Once this box was opened, hundreds of cockroaches began flowing over everywhere, on the floor, chairs, tables, and pretty much any surface available, including the soles of a female student who was wearing sandals – the roaches crawled in between her feet and the sandals. The students were paralyzed with fear and screaming from the top of their lungs.

Mary jumped into action, closed the two lab doors, and emerged from the storage area with two very large bottles of Raid. She sprayed them copiously into the air as if they were perfumed air fresheners. Laughing copiously as she twirled with the two spraying containers in hands, she reassured the students that “everything was fine.” Choking on Raid fumes, chemicals that no human should have breathed in a confined space, students followed the leader, a farm boy raised around pesticides who had more common sense, and fled the room. We can only hope that the escaped tarantula and other live pets in the lab made a good meal of some of the cockroaches killed by the Raid assault.

No matter how hard Southerners tried to exterminate this pest every month, cockroaches thrived because they survived on very little, like the book binding glue or their own excrement.

Mary passed away a few years later, a victim of metastasized melanoma, and I often wondered if her cancer marker was genetic or environmental. She had certainly exposed herself to so many chemicals on the farm in Woodland, as a graduate student working on a Ph.D. in Biology, and during her teaching career of twenty-two years. Students will always remember her with fondness, her scholarship, kindness, dedication, and infectious smile.

 

The Industry and Economics of Climate Change/Global Warming

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2014

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change met in Lima, Peru, December 1-12, 2014, determined to chisel a new treaty that would mandate a cap and trade on greenhouse gas emissions effective by 2020 and would “eliminate the use of fossil fuels entirely by 2050.”

The hypothesis that rich nations caused climate change by burning fossil fuels to produce energy has never been proven by IPCC’s computer modeling. The fact that now the hypothesis changed its name from global warming to climate change in the face of obvious 18 years of global cooling is enough evidence that the purveyors of the industry of climate change are desperate but are not giving up. Fleecing rich countries with carbon taxes is a very lucrative scam.

“We must leave fossil fuels in the ground and not repeat the steps of the developed countries that brought us to this point,” said Enrique Maurtua Konstantinidis, international policy advisor for Climate Action Network Latin America.

The Climate Action Network, “a conglomerate of 900 radical green groups from about 100 nations, mocked Australia, Belgium, Ireland, and Austria because they have yet to donate to a new Green Climate Fund.” The real agenda of spreading the wealth from developed countries to poor countries and arresting economic development could not be more transparent. http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/12/02/exclusive-new-legally-binding-treaty-emerges-on-first-day-of-lima-climate-conference/

Martin Kaiser of Greenpeace stated that, “In Lima, the countries must agree on the long-term goal of phasing out fossil fuel emissions to zero by mid-century while moving towards 100 percent renewable energy for all in a fair transition period. Subsidies for fossil fuel industries must be shifted towards renewable energy deployment and climate adaptation for vulnerable countries. In countries like the U.S., China, and the EU, the phase-out of coal must be accelerated.”

So how are renewable energy industries working out so far across the globe as replacements for fossil fuels? Judging by the number of bankruptcies filed and by the billions in taxpayer dollars wasted so far, with scant energy produced, not very well.

Take Ivanpah Solar Power Facility (ISPF), which cost $2.2 billion to build ($1.6 billion from government loan guarantees and $600 million from private investors, including one third from Google), “was supposed to deliver an energy output of approximately 1.7 million MWh (megawatt-hours) of electricity annually.”

According to Dr. Klaus Kaiser, the Ivanpah facility, which covers 4,000 acres and is located in the Mojave Desert, delivered a very low output of 250,000 MWh during January-August, 2014. The visionaries of solar power did not take into account the blasting of mirrors by sand and dust. To solve the problem, ISPF investors decided to seek extensions on the borrowed money and to use more natural gas, “doubling the amount of natural gas usage permitted for ‘preheating’ of the solar towers,” thus spinning the truth and “fudging the numbers.” http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/67861

Eric Wessof wrote in his article, “Rest in Peace: The List of Deceased Solar Companies, 2009 to 2013,” in which he tallied the solar companies that went bankrupt, were acquired, closed, restructured, sold for a song, or in the endangered category, a lengthy list of 102 companies, hardly a success story. http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Rest-in-Peace-The-List-of-Deceased-Solar-Companies-2009-to-2013

The Washington Post reported on the billionaire Vinod Khosla who invested in a biofuel plant called KiOR in Columbus, Mississippi, that “was supposed to turn wood chips into hydrocarbons that could be poured straight into a refinery, pipeline, or car.”

Instead of producing the magic catalyst, on November 10 2014, KiOR filed for bankruptcy, “leaving behind 2067 creditors, including the State of Mississippi which can ill-afford the bag of $75 million, 20-year, no interest loan.” The promised 1,000 jobs to be created by December 2015 never materialized. (“The Misadventures of a tech billionaire confronting the stubborn economics of the biofuel business,” Washington Post, November 30, 2014)

According to Washington Post, KiOR spent $5-$10 per gallon notwithstanding the cost of building the plant. KiOR’s losses were $629.3 million and had revenues of $2.25 million. The bankruptcy was inevitable even though “Khosla spent $85 million and Bill Gates $15 million in October 2013.”

The project of transforming biomass into fuels by using “catalytic pyrolysis, or cracking,” an invention by a company in the Netherlands, BIOeCON, turned out to be a renewable money pit for KiOR which produced very little energy. http://www.bioecon.com/

Among other energy programs and initiatives for renewable energy, President George W. Bush promised in 2006 “to make ethanol not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks and switch grass.” http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/energy/

Using corn as fuel was not such a great idea either; corn that fed billions of people around the world skyrocketed in price in recent years and became scarcer, causing people in many countries to riot.

Wind turbines caused health hazards in humans and millions of bird kills around the world, some on the endangered species list. The energy produced was certainly dirty green and inadequate for most developed countries. Conventional fossil fuels were used to run gears to prevent rusting and to supplant electricity when the wind turbines were idle. Turbines had to be cut off in some areas at speeds of maximum production of electricity because the noise and constant thumping was unbearable to the nearby residents. Just because a turbine rotates, it does not necessarily mean that it produces electricity.

Are most large economies of the world ready to ditch fossil fuels entirely as proposed in Lima Peru by the environmental architects of gloom and doom alarmism and replace them with renewables? The answer is a resounding no, unless we are ready to live in the dark ages again.

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2014