Saturday, July 8, 2023

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Heat Pumps - a gentle, steady warmth


An air-to-air, ductless minisplit heat pump is a kind of sneaky device. 

It works very quietly extracting little bits of heat from the cold air outside and adding them to the inside air.  And quietly, gradually, without out fanfare or glare or anything burning or glowing - your house is warm - and it stays warm too.  All at 3 times the efficiency of "resistance" heaters.

Conventional thought says you pull your chair up to a heater, warm your hands on it.  But new-fangled air-to-air heat pumps really aren't like that. At any given moment the indoor fan might be pushing out a sort of lukewarm air, occasionally warmer - but nothing like a wood stove or an infared heater. Yet your home is quietly warm. Very strange.

Pictured above at right, is the outside unit - a Fujitsu Halcyon Inverter installed a month ago. This heat pump installation is designed to heat the areas I actually live in - a core area of bedroom, kitchen, dining room, living room. And as it gets colder its proving its worth. I'm waiting for the first month's electric bill. (This time last year I was heating with electric space heaters instead of using the furnace.) 

And I will be quite happy not to buy more #2 heating oil for a while.  Instead of six tankfuls a season I'm hoping the full tank I have (delivered in MARCH when I didnt need it and when prices were skyhigh) will last a lot longer. I  will not turn on the regular heat until it's really frigid outside, to keep the pipes in the unused rooms here from freezing....  

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

poem: Goodbye 45



Lives ruined.
Experts & careers crushed.
Half a million dead.

Mothers and daughters,
Wives,  grabbed or mocked, 
Advisors fired, sycophants abandoned.

Suddenly they all appear
for an audience with you 
to address their grievances.

In this dream they offer 
a last meal on a golden platter,
your favorite greasy burger

dripping with banality. 
For special sauce: 
your disinterested casual cruelty. 

Unclasp your hands and surrender
your unfathomable arrogance  - 
if only you could.

You lack some essential organ,
know nothing of guilt,
will find no redemption.

----
This is my first poem of 2021. I posted a first draft over on April30Poems.blogspot.com where there was a very inspiring prompt yesterday by Tad Richards! Nice to know I can still get in the flow and make poem. Nice to know 45 is outgoing but he will cause more trouble, more heartache and political upheaval. May our country outlive him.

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

May, May, go away

May has a worrisome cruelty underneath, and I cant seem to let it go.  My father died in May. My mother too.

May arrives, the azaleas bloom, the lilacs too now. But the beauty is not enough.

Today, this year with the pandemic, I didn't visit my parents' grave. I stayed home again. And tomorrow too. I'm not dead as yet and hope to remain in this state for the foreseeable future. Hope to live to vote in November, live to get my shots: flu and someday, for the novel coronavirus. 

I've always been something of a stay at home, but I balanced this tendency with small scale excursions: lunch, coffee, an exercise class, an art workshop, some local live music, a lecture. Little, short, nearby diversions for mental health,.

Now its just scary grocery store trips. And I struggle with everyone else to figure out how to get stuff delivered. It's tricky. 

And though the world is opening tomorrow - I am not fooled. The virus is still here. And I am still securing against it. I don't care what opens. Each time I think of going out from sheer restlessness, I think  - is it worth dying for?  

I proceed with caution only. 

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Praying Mantis in the Fleabane!


In August I planted a dwarf butterfly bush, a sterile cultivar called Pugster Blue Fragrant. While not a native plant, it cannot be invasive like its larger relatives. I got it locally at Halas Nursery and even there it was swarmed with pollinators: butterflies, moths and bees. It was pungent and had filled my car with its heavy sweetish smell on the ride home.

After all the digging and watering, I went in the house for some coffee. I looked back out the window and there was a black swallowtale on my new butterfly bush already!  For the next few days, there were always one or two butterflies enjoying the flowers.  But after a week I didn't see any. I figured they were enjoying a change of diet over in my neighbors cone flowers. I kept peeking about but no butterflies.

All summer I have been nurturing a few stands of wildflower weeds as a garden project. The weeds in question are four-foot tall forests of Daisy Fleabane and Queen Anne's Lace. While I was looking for the missing butterflies, I found three praying mantis

- mostly hanging from the stems of Fleabane by their back legs - looking a lot like dead leaves. They have a reputation as voracious indiscriminate predators, even cannibalistic. Mantises eat a lot of annoying insects. But I think they may have eaten the butterflies as well.

Nature is capricious and pragmatic. Next year I think I will let the Fleabane grow elsewhere in my yard - somewhere not in a direct line between the butterfly bush and the cone flowers down the road....

Saturday, June 29, 2019

Conversation Styles Differ



Hot Air
Conversation Styles Differ .... Well that's an understatement. For some, conversation is a stream-of-thought run-on-sentence without punctuation or paragraph marks. Do you talk incessantly in ever widening circles as a way of thinking out loud? As a self-soothing smoke screen to fill up the space between you and another person? If so, this is written for you.

Some other people (including me), need to breathe and have silences in a conversation. We need a meaningful deep pause to collect our thoughts and share or to respond to a speaker. If there are no silences then we will just let the speaker go on and on.

I am listening, but I might be four sentences behind your rapid speech, thinking that what you said doesn't make any sense, seems out of proportion, relies on circular reasoning or a 'straw-man' argument, or that there are facts you mentioned which were improvised out of thin air. Or that this is the 3rd time you said the same thing. Sometimes I see an assumption you have made about me which is upsetting.

But you are six or seven paragraphs ahead of me now, chatting on all by yourself, making more statements that make no sense. So I think - there are so many disparities in this that it's pointless to bring it up any of them - so I let you go on and on and on even though I am beginning to feel beleaguered, buried under all the words.

And you wont find out for weeks that that my ex-husband is dead, or that I locked myself out last night at midnight and had to climb in through the window. At some point I might seem to be getting tense. I might quite suddenly say - "let's change the subject." or "I have to go now." I might quite suddenly, vigorously object to the last thing you said -- but the arc of it is this:
You have created a lengthy machine gun attack of words, and I have finally responded by running into an underground bunker and closing the door.


Wednesday, March 6, 2019

DRAWING: from a writing exercise



I once belonged to a poetry writing group or two. This side-long looking doodle is what resulted while words for a writing exercise were being chosen. Yes, she is quite asymmetrical with hair askew -- and I don't care..... Though I often digitally clean up these little drawings, this one is just as exists in my little book of paper.

Originally posted (and in the present tense) on 8/15/2010