The foundation is up

Well now that things have gotten started, they're really rolling! They've almost completed the foundation. On They will be pouring the basement walls. This is all very exciting! Well it is to me. I bet you're yawning right now, but that's OK :) There will be more updates of this kind in the future, I'm sure. My general contractor is really doing a good job penny pinching so that I can get a couple necessities added to the house for resale, so hopefully I'll be able to sell it if the market stays where it is for a couple years.

Kristin and I drove around the area today and every time I do I am excited to explore it more. I'm less than a mile away from a river and there a bunch of riverfront cottages just down the road from me. It was such a beautiful area. I feel like it's a vacation home community. I'm sure a few people have weekend homes out here. It's not that far from downtown, but probably far enough for some people to feel removed from the hustle and bustle of the city. So it's a pretty calm area. I am told that there are hot air baloon launches every weekend from one of the local parks, so that will be really fun to watch and photograph once I move in. There is a lot to be excited about!

construction... Finally!

Today they finally started digging on my lot. Four and a half months after originally signing my real estate contract, construction is beginning!!! I finally have something to be excited about! Supposedly it'll be all done by 8/1! I'll have a house on 8/1!

Ethanol: Our Knight in Shining Armor... not quite

When you do the math, and don't just listen to what popular media tells you about how corn ethanol will free us from oil dependence and make our environment cleaner, you see that using corn ethanol is really just a shell game that's hiding a bigger issue.

First and foremost, most everybody now knows that the world is going through a food crisis. People whose main expense is food can no longer afford it, and this is largely due to 2 things, increased cost for transportation (fuel prices) and increased cost food crops in general (due to use of food crops for fuel). That alone should be a huge red flag for us Americans to think twice about upping our Ethanol use for fuel to noticeably reduce our dependency on foreign oil. (Nevermind the fact that if we used all of our corn crops produced today some estimates say that it would only reduce our crude oil usage for gasoline by 20% [oh and forget the fact that we use it for plastics, diesel, almost anything rubberized including tires, and much more]) Currently we use about 20% of our crops to produce ethanol which accounts for 3.5% of our gasoline consumption. So if we used 100% of our corn crops and used it to feed nobody, we'd only reduce gasoline consumption by 20%. I wonder what would happen to food prices if the worlds biggest corn producing country stopped selling corn... "filling the gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn -- roughly enough calories to feed one person for a year." --Source: The Rolling Stone Issue 1032

Secondly, ethanol's energy density is about 1/3 less than that of gasoline. That means that one gallon of pure ethanol would get your car 1/3 less miles. (don't mind the fact that your car won't run on pure ethanol or if you use more than a small fraction of ethanol your engine would corrode) But proponents would argue that ethanol burns cleaner than gasoline. So even if it was 1/3 less efficient, you're still reducing your emmisions. That is true, but did you ever stop to think of how ethanol is produced? You need to run diesel powered farm equiment to harvest it and use chemical fertilizers and pesticides to maximize your yeild. And what kind of fuel do you think the ethanol refineries are using to generate the energy required to ferment our corn ethanol? Mostly natural gas and coal. Dunno if you heard this, but those are also fossil fuels.

Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy source. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog. --Source: The Rolling Stone Issue 1032

Lastly, it will take more than just ethanol to really reduce our dependency on foreign oil. As the quote above suggests there are more energy efficient fuels such as sugar cane ethanol, and possibly ethanol made from plant cellulose, which would not require that ethanol is made from food crops. We should never forget our clean renewable resource that everybody has access to called the sun. Too bad solar panels are so inefficient today that it costs too much to deploy them in any sort of large scale and be profitable. Otherwise, you can be sure that companies would've cornered that market as soon as it became available. Ethanol, just like oil, is all about profit, whose pocket it is in doesn't change the fact that they both pollute the environment and replacing one fuel with another won't change our emission creating habits.

original article
I have more sources, but I don't remember them :P

All I did all day

Was clean!

Well thats a slight lie. I did cut my hair and go to the grocery store.

After cutting my hair I did the normal clean up the bathroom routine, but surprisingly after all that hard work scrubbing my tub, I felt like cleaning the rest of my apartment. So away I went. I vacuumed, cleaned the kitchen, did my dishes, swept the floors, folded laundry, and I even cleaned my welcome mat with some Resolve carpet cleaner. How exciting it was to clean the whole apartment like that. I don't think I clean that often, but it really does feel good when you see results.

Now I am outside listing to my "stompy" upstairs neighbor grillng his meal. It smells like hamburgers, or if it's anything else it has absolutely no flavor! He's cooking with a gas grill, so it'll taste just like he pan cooked it. You gotta use charcoal man! And wood chips!

For dinner I plan on making a marinated beef tri tip roast in the oven. I got it from Trader Joe's last week. So it's high time that I cook it! I really do enjoy cooking, and eating!

Speaking of eating, yesterday, I went to a local restaurant called Hackney's that was featured on the Food Network show Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. I was super excited to try their onion ring loaf and famous Hackney burger. The environment was nice and the service wasn't overly slow either, but the food left something to be desired. The onion ring loaf was fried to perfection and there was not a bit of batter that was left uncooked, but the flavor just wasn't there. It really needed a little more salt and a couple spices would've been nice. The onions were very sweet so all was not lost, they tasted fine by themselves without any breading. The Hackney burger must've become famous because it comes on dark rye bread, because it was also a very lackluster burger with little flavor. Why can't people use spices? I'm not talking hot sauce, or a bunch of pepper, I just want to taste something other than pure beef when I'm eating a hamburger. The rye also was indistinguishable when eating the burger, but that's ok! I still had a great time eating with Kristin's family!