The Mountaintop

This week I went to the inauguration, sardined onto the Mall with 2 million other very happy people. There were some serious crowd management problems, but no one seemed to mind too much (except the people with tickets who got shut outside the gates). I was close enough that I could see figures moving around who were obviously Roberts and Obama doing their thing. The crowd was loud and joyful the whole time, but during Obama's address everyone fell silent to hear every word. Afterward some people (mostly older black women) were sobbing uncontrollably. It felt as if we'd all been released from something. Part of it was being released from the Bush administration, but there was also a sense of an older evil being lifted off us. The air smelled better afterward, the sky was bluer, and the crowd sang goodbye gleefully to Bush's departing helicopter.

Winter sports a-go-go

I'm trying to set some kind of winter sport decathlon record. Tonight it's ice skating with various kiddies. It's amazing how willing parents are to let near strangers haul their children away when they've been trapped in the house with them for a week. I learned to skate on figure skates but now I only use hockey skates. They're so zippy and sexy. You can change directions in a heartbeat. Good for chasing little blighters.

Extreme oof

This afternoon while Bu went skiing, Andy and I rented snowboards and tried to make it down the bunny slope without hurting ourselves or others. I've boarded before and it went pretty well, until this kid fell right in front of me and I t-boned him in the gut. He acted like it didn't hurt but I think it must have.

Over the river and through the woods!

It's COLD here, I mean Norske-get-your-boots-on cold! Yesterday I persuaded the boys to bundle up and go Nordic skiing with me with the wind chill at 20 something below. Exhilarating! As long as you're dressed right the only thing that freezes is your eyelashes (soon to be remedied with ski goggles for everyone at Christmas). It's so cold no one comes out and shovels the sidewalks so you can ski everywhere and telemark down the side streets. Hooray! I'm a giant down-swaddled abominable snow monster while everyone else is huddled inside and I couldn't be happier.

Keep Your SUV Off My Bumper

Ice, ice and more ice. I'm the only person in the office today because between the snowstorm two days ago and the ice storm predicted for today, no one wants to venture out. The roads would be a lot less dangerous if it weren't for giant SUVs whose drivers seem to think they're invincible and don't acknowledge that there's anyone else on the road. A white Sequoia backed full speed out of the school parking lot yesterday, straight into the middle of the street, and would have driven right over my Corolla monster-truck-like if I hadn't honked. There ought to be a special kind of license required to drive one of those things. They seem to have checked their brains at the Roadhog dealership.

Blinders

When you train for instrument flight conditions (i.e., you can't see the ground, or sometimes anything outside the plane), you put on some kind of contraption that blocks your view of everything but the instrument panel in front of you. They can look kind of like lab glasses with portions "fogged" out, or they can resemble an optometrist's torture device. So I take off and fly us to the practice area, then spend an hour or so looking only at the instrument panel and get to take off the blinders just in time to land the plane. A real out of body experience.

The new instructor is a former Navy medical officer who learned to fly because he was spending a lot of time hanging out on aircraft carriers and decided what the hell. What the hell, by the way, is always the right answer. Then the Navy really needed flight instructors so he wound up spending a lot of time at it, including a stint at Miramar (aka Top Gun). Now he's a retired general and just a tic past Martha Stewart on the Perfectionist Scale. As the airport owner told me cheerfully, "He may drive you crazy, but he'll make you a very safe pilot."

The good news is he says I'm going to be a natural at instrument flight. I said "JINX!"

Itinerary

There should have been a flight today, but my windshield was icing up as I drove to the airport so the general and I called it off. For my instrument flight training I have to get checked out on a plane I've never flown, a Piper Warrior, because it has the instrumentation I need.

It's not like driving a different car. Every plane's instruments are placed differently, its balance is different, you have to get used to it. This new plane is a low wing. I've only flown high wing Cessnas, although I've ridden a lot in the passenger seat of my friend's low-wing Mooney.

We're on for a Thursday night flight in the Warrior now. This is after meetings in Ames and Des Moines on Tuesday and Wednesday, and before a weekend over in the river hill country along the Mississippi, skiing with the girls and bitching about the men in our lives. I try not to think about the miles on the odometer.

We Don't Need Roads

Getting back to the Road Scholar theme, if there ever was one. This weekend I have my first official Instrument Flight lesson, with the retired general who considers every flight another day at boot camp. At least he hasn't issued me a helmet with the call name Washout lettered across the brow. Yet. I've been reading the training manual with great enthusiasm. If your day job involved utility regulation, you might find this kind of thing fascinating too. It's so mechanical. It engages a whole different part of my brain. I'm turning into such a gearhead that I had a problem with my car the other day and correctly diagnosed an alternator malfunction. How sexy am I??

Thanksgiving But No Thanks

This Thanksgiving is the first one without my dad. There's plenty I'm thankful for, but I wasn't up for a big family thing. Instead of eating I flew to Wisconsin through a gray haze and came back into a red radiant sunset. There's snow on the ground up there already. We threw some snowballs, drank hot chocolate, admired the ski runs from the air. It's a cold season and I'm cold all the way through. The photo has nothing to do with the Thanksgiving flight, it just makes me feel warm. My boy is the greatest.

Not Enough Time

Bu says I don't spend enough time with him. The irony kills me. I don't spend enough time with anyone, particularly myself, but if I spend quality time with anyone, it's him. He gets the best: all the patience and selflessness I can produce in a given 24 hour period while juggling everything else behind my back. Not enough time. If he only knew.

The Princess and the Soccer Ball

I have bruises, little ones from the impact of a soccer ball, an elbow, a toe. Playing indoor soccer is dangerous, especially when it's with a bunch of hyper-competitive middle-aged men, several of whom are twice my size and have forgotten that shoving other players into the bleachers to get the ball would get them a red card if we had a ref. It just gets me going. It reminds me of playing with the boys as a little girl when we had a bitter German former pro player as a coach. Before games he'd gather us in and mutter through tobacco-stained teeth, "If you can't win, at least you can hurt them."

There were only a few girls in the league and they tended to drop out as years passed and the boys got bigger and started to run over us. But our coach taught us well. I learned how to get the team bully between me and the ref, sucker punch him where the welt wouldn't show and steal the ball. The girls on my team were the only ones who kept playing until we aged out of the league at 12, because our sociopath coach taught us to fight. He thought we had a right to be on the field.

Friday Fill-in-the-Blank Meme

Because I can't write any more testimony about energy efficiency until I rest my brain.

1. My blueprint for success includes swallowing my pride and begging everyone for help.
2. Ghirardelli Twilight Delight 72% Cacao was the last candy I ate.
3. The best facial moisturizer I've ever used is C the Change from Kiss My Face.
4. Sex can be good therapy.
5. I'd like to tell you about the evil plan for the next bad idea adventure.
6. Cussed determination is my strongest characteristic.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to the Lincoln Cafe, tomorrow my plans include painting the house so I can sell it and Sunday, I want to go see Vance Gilbert!

Flyover Land

Photos from an epic trip to Montana to get sworn into the state bar. Modes of transportation included a 1981 Toyota Celica, a Cessna 172, a Dodge sedan, a Cessna 172RG, a Toyota Camry, an old Dodge pickup, a Honda Civic hybrid, and a Dodge Caravan. The other people in the pictures are Josh Foersch, who used to be my flight instructor and now just gets dragged along on manic cross-country flights and deer-feeding outings, and Eldena Bear Don't Walk, who put in a cameo appearance moving my admission to the bar of the Supreme Court of Montana. Aside from them, I'd like to thank the Academy.

Lignite

Crazy but true. Here's how it went down. Back in 1995, Minnesota passed a law assigning a cost to carbon for purposes of utility planning (go Minnesota!). North Dakota, which sells a lot of coal-fired power to Minnesota, got worried that this law would hurt its in-state lignite coal industry. The western half of North Dakota sits on a giant bed of lignite, a very low-grade coal also referred to as North Dakota mud because when they strip mine it the product looks a lot more like dirt than coal. You have to burn a lot of it to get the same energy value as richer coal, which in turn releases a lot of carbon dioxide.

The lignite industry - which receives major subsidies from the State of North Dakota - argued to the legislature that attaching a cost to carbon would put lignite at an economic disadvantage to wind power. They produced charts comparing lignite to wind, with and without carbon regulation. Now you might think that the Minnesota law presented a fabulous opportunity to North Dakota to build up its wind industry, because North Dakota has some of the best wind in the country and could produce mass quantities of cheap, carbon-free electricity for the power-hungry Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

But no. Instead, the visionary North Dakota legislature passed a law (NDCC 49-02-23 if you're interested) banning the state Public Service Commission from considering any environmental externalities, including the anticipated cost of any future environmental laws or regulations, in making planning decisions about new electrical generation. Our humble challenge now is to drag North Dakota kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

Bismarck Ho!

I don't mean that in the Don Imus way.

I'm needed in Bismarck, ND, to argue a motion before an Administrative Law Judge on whether my client, Dakota Resource Council, can bring evidence about the future economic cost of carbon regulation in a proceeding for siting a new coal-fired power plant. It might seem like an obvious thing to consider, but the North Dakota legislature has taken care of that. They passed a law barring regulators from considering the anticipated cost of future environmental laws or regulations. We have to try to convince an elected judge in lignite coal country that the law doesn't apply to our particular proceeding. Which saint do I pray to?

Powerless

We had a doozy of a storm over the weekend. First freezing rain, then horizontal snow, followed by more freezing rain and snow until the tree branches hung down to the ground with the weight of ice, and so did the transmission lines. Around 2:30 on Saturday afternoon we lost power. Often losing power is a delight: the candles, the quiet, the neighbors talking to each other because there's nothing else to do. It was that way all afternoon and through the evening, when we had cheese, crackers, fruit and wine for dinner because our stove is electric. It was that way through the night as the temperature dropped and we slept cozily under down comforters.

Come Sunday morning, the whole adventure began to lose its charm. We have a gas furnace, but the blower is electric, so the temp had dropped to below 55 degrees. We ate breakfast with a neighbor who has a gas range and spent a large part of the day shoveling to keep warm. The major crisis of the morning was averted when we discovered that we could use our hand-cranked nut grinder to grind coffee beans. The fire station and city hall were running off the same generator, but the rest of us fell back on fireplaces, flashlights, candles, and one guy's crank-powered TV. The estimates were anywhere from 24 hours to a week without power, with temperatures in the 20s and 30s (that's hovering around zero to you celsius types).

The grocery store in town was closed, but we heard that the one on the near side of Cedar Rapids was running on generators, so we piled in the AWD Subaru and headed out. The store was full of farmer types who look like they don't come to town much, filling carts with huge water bottles and propane. We hatched a scheme to haul the Weber grill up onto the back porch, boil water on the Coleman stove, and rely on down sleeping bags and the gas water heater for warmth until our connection to the nuke plant could be restored. Luckily the juice came back a little after 5 on Sunday evening. I reckon we saved at least $10 on power, but we spent over $200 at the grocery store, so no net gain. It's good to be warm again!

To those who are hungry,

give bread.
To those who have bread,
give the hunger for justice.

Because you can't get to the hunger for justice, until your stomach is full.

Flat snow

I grew up on vertical snow, slanty at least, the kind you could slide down on skinny sticks, jumping off the bumps, flying through the trees, screaming as you went waaaaay too fast until the thrill of speed overcame the fear of death. A few days ago we got the first snow of the year here in Iowa. Of course the first thing I did was head over to the sledding hill to help the kiddies get started constructing a terrain park for their sleds and snowboards. Not half an hour later a guy in an orange truck from the city pulled up to tell us to knock down our most excellent little jump, because someone would fly off it and crack their head open.

Will they take away my Mom Card if I admit that what ran through my head was, "Oooo yeah, cool...."? You're not really having fun until somebody has a concussion.

My friend met David Lynch

Maybe you're like me and wouldn't recognize David Lynch if he danced down a dark alley at you in an eerie pink glow surrounded by a troupe of dancing dwarves. If so, you are not like my friend Joan, who thinks he's one of the all-time geniuses, uses a photo of him for her computer wallpaper, and wishes her husband would grow old to look like him. Now that Joan has forced me to look at photos of David Lynch, I think he looks sort of like Eraserhead and don't really get the obsession. But then I have my own thing about Hendrik Hertzberg (the images come up side by side in my browser - you'll have to guess which is which), so I won't throw stones.

So Joan was going into the local natural foods hippie co-op and whom should she run into but Eraserhead himself. I shit you not. Joan, being Joan, screamed "YOU'RE DAVID LYNCH!!" and jumped up and down. I would have at least tried to play it cool. He could have had scary California bodyguards or an attack dog or something. But David Lynch was not at all intimidated. He gave her an autograph and posed for camera phone photos while other shoppers looked on, wondering who the hell he was. This preternatural calm is probably the result of Transcendental Meditation, which is what brings Lynch to Iowa. He goes to see the gurus at Maharishi International in Fairfield. If only Hendrik were into TM.

For Porter

In honor of my most loyal reader, a new post.

2007 brings with it a new nonprofit organization, Plains Justice, conceived in hope and consternation, and dedicated to the proposition that the people and places of the Northern Plains deserve better environmental justice than they have been getting. We've got funding, a great board, and a lot of work to do. Back at it.