The Science of Keeping your Boat Dry.

The science of keeping your boat dry.

 

Fall hit us like a hardwood 2x4 across the neck. It was warm, sunny 27 C and suddenly the sun set two Saturdays ago and the next day was wet. The day after Grandview looked like a horizontal waterfall at 5 AM. I was up, looking at it, thinking that, paradoxically, Grandview now being a waterway did not mean more opportunities for sailing. Depressed, I spent a day upside down in the boat, bleeding and changing the oil in everything I could think of that should have oil in it. 

Luckily this called for a trip to Steveston Marine to get a little something to fell better with.
In my case, it was a boat dryer, 120W this time - I have a little 70W one with a fan in already.

This one did NOT have a fan. I was considering whether the 120W would be better than 70W + fan. 

The science of keeping a boat dry is not exactly rocket science. Which is a pity for a rocket scientist.

I used to fly gliders a lot and we had almost the same problem with the transport trailer over the winter. Many things were tried. I had a lovely old Standard Cirrus and every winter, we took the instruments out and made some provision for drying the air in the trailer. A glider trailer is about 8-10 meters long, made of fiberglass and contains about the same amount of air as a 29 foot sailboat. I have some experience keeping the trailer and plane dry, but it never really went 100% well and we had to remove seats, parachute, radio, variometer and what else was in there which could not be dipped in water. In the spring there might be water in the hoses for the instruments working off air pressure and it was not pretty.

Usually we would try the bags of desiccants, but after a short while, all we had was a bucket of suspicious chemicals and a flaccid bag the chemicals used to be in. Ventilation did not seem to do it either. We left the hatch slightly open and put venting holes in the top, but nothing made a really huge difference. People who had farmer friends would store the trailers indoor, which works.

Finally one fellow hooked up a 2000W heater blower. That worked. He was expelled from the club when the board of directors figured out he had hot-wired his electricity meter and the club was paying for the feast. Yet, the effort remains the only successful method at that date. Later, quite a bearable solution was found with the solar powered ventilators. They worked better than most of the methods, except the 2000W heater. I believe this now is the vanilla solution.

Since the Marina has its very own special price for electricity, I do not really feel like putting a 2000W heater in the boat. 190W seems a little more reasonable, so I have the two air dryers running now. 70+120W = 190W of heat. One works by convection, the other with a little fan. I had turned the big one off, as an experiment, last night ... and now with a humidity of 94% outside and a temperature of 14 degrees, I thought I better go turn both on. On the way I passed Canadian Tire and picked up the temperature and humidity meter at the top. Inside the boat was 17 degrees and a relative humidity of 75%. It was time to get scientific about it.




The various temperatures right now are as follows.

Boat: 17C, 75% RH. (Calculated dewpoint, 13 C)
Air: 14C, 94% RH, dewpoint 13C. (as per weather man).
Water: 14.1C (as per my sounder).

The weather forecast says we may hit a low of 11C tonight.

The parameter that does NOT change for air is the dewpoint - the temperature at which water starts coming out of the air, because the air molecules can't hold the water molecules suspended anymore.
Water only changes dewpoint if it manages to suck up water or get rid of water by condensation. 

We note that the dewpoint inside the boat is exactly the same as outside the boat, the air is just 3 degrees warmer, thanks to my 70W heater. The inside humidity CAN be affected by either wet or very dry cushions and so on, but it was not. Any fabric or water absorbing material will create a balance with the air, so if my cushions were bone dry, they will take a bit of the humidity out of the air. I was very quick and careful going down the hatch and closed it immediately after me, so I could get a reading. My sense was correct, my ventilation was adequate - which means the outside air came in with its dewpoint of 13C, but the air was warmed up by 3 degrees .. thus making my stuff drier.

Looking at those numbers, the boat should be fine tonight.
The water is 14C, which is one degree over the dewpoint of the ambient air, which will continue to find its way into the cabin (dewpoint=13C). There is no way for the inside of the hull, below the water line, to become so cold there will be humidity coming out of the air.

The problem may be on the roof. The outside temperature may well drop to 11C, which is two degrees BELOW the dewpoint inside and humidity will then form on the roof of the cabin.

A vent or blower would have done nothing to prevent it.

Now of course I have 190W of heat going, which is blown upwards towards the roof. At least in the main cabin, I will have no trouble at all. I am pretty positive the two will keep the temperature of the cabin at 3-4 degrees above the outdoor temperature, so the fresh air coming in will have a dewpoint that is at least 3-4 degrees below the temperature it will be heated to. At the same time the roof has lots of circulation from the two driers.

If air is cooled down to the dewpoint or below, the dewpoint moves down with the temperature as the water comes out of the air, so if the outside temperature drops below 13C, so will the dewpoint.

I could however have a problem in lockers over the waterline - and if the water was colder than the dewpoint, I would certainly have a problem if I did not have circulation of the air.
For condensation to happen on the inside of a fiberglass hull, the INSIDE of the fiberglass has to be below the dewpoint. If there is plenty of circulation, the inside of the hull will warm up towards the air temperature inside the boat and the entire temperature drop happens inside the fiberglass. If there is very little motion in the air along the inside, the temperature drop may very well happen in the first few mm of air next to the wall ... and then it starts raining from the mm closest to the wall. 
Here ventilation is great - but it has to get to ALL the places that we need to keep dry.

Of course the white Naugahyde wallpaper that was so modern in the early 70's will completely thwart that  effort. It has a layer of insulation behind, which will have have unmoving air in it .. and if that air is humid, it will create rainy weather behind the Naugahyde. Then the Naugahyde falls down and it's black behind it and the cleanup crew has to come in.

So does ventilation help?
YES, but only if the dewpoint of the air outside is lower than the dewpoint of the air inside.
Otherwise it is a completely futile effort. If there is no heating of the cabin added, the air vented out is the same as the air vented in, except if the boat is wet inside. In which case the dewpoint inside is higher than that of outside and rule 1 applies.

Ventilation combined with a slight heating works, since heating the outside air creates a dewpoint buffer of a couple of degrees. With a fan inside the cabin, the surfaces will be warmed up as well as the air and condensation will not happen because the temperature drop happens inside the fiberglass hull, not in the air just over the inside wall.
It is still possible to exhaust that temperature buffer, if the air temperature outside drops fast or the water is cold. The places with still air will be raining first.

Remember also that on clear nights, the temperature of the top of the boat will drop UNDER the air temperature because of radiation exchange with the Universe, which is -57C in terms of IR radiation. That is why the ground gets cold and the grass gets dew on it.  The surface can easily be a several degrees colder than the air just over it. In that case a fan ON TOP OF the boat would work. Except people would think you are silly fanning your boat.

The only really solid idea that works all the time is to lower the dewpoint inside the boat. That can be done by means of the dehumidifiers sold at home and hardware stores, Canadian Tire etc. They have a compressor and a fan inside them, which cools a surface inside the machine down to below freezing. This immediately gets the rain going, but inside the machine ... the air that comes out of it has a dewpoint of, say, -10C or whatever the cooling element can get it down to.  The rain is collected in a bucket and the machine continues to do so until the relative humidity is below a setpoint chosen with a +/- selector. Usually the larger dehumidifiers has a hose option, which can be dropped into the bilge or into a sink. Now THAT's good news for a control freak.

You can for instance set the machine to 60% relative humidity. At 15 degrees, that corresponds to a dewpoint of only 7 degrees. At 10 degrees, the dewpoint at 60% RH is 2.5 degrees.
Even freezing water outside will not be able to condensate water on the inside of the hull.
Another great thing is that a medium sized dehumidifier uses about 500W and blows a storm out of the top of it. It will not run all the time, but it WILL increase the temperature in the cabin by about 5 degrees, at least.

DO NOT set the dial lower than 60% ... 50% will dry out your teak and it will end up warped and cracked.

If the boat's vents are closed, it does not have to work nearly as hard and you can save some power.
This also means it heats the air less... so when you can't dry out your teak, perhaps let in a tiny bit of air it can be allowed to suck dry, so it, as a by product, heats up the air a bit. Both are beneficial effects. Hotter air = bigger temperature buffer.

The humidity will be completely under control inside the boat, the papers crisp and the Naugahyde will not be naughty. The downside is that those dehumidifyers are fairly big and noisy, but coming out to a boat that's heated up a couple of degrees, smells nice and has no mildew ... priceless.

Kent

Candle Meditation

Guru-Ji 

gave me 

this candle

and told me 

to light it

close my eyes

and meditate.

 

Then he went to the other corner and lit a candle of his own, sat down, like me, meditating on the flame. I watched him, wanting to be the same, to learn his peace of mind. 

My candle is very thin. It burns fast and it is burning towards my hands. I remember my mother told me to not touch fire. I did it anyway and I got burned. I was very young. My finger got red and I got a blister and it hurt for a long time. 

I wish Guru-Ji had told me what to do with the candle, when the flame gets close to my hands. It will probably burn down in 15 minutes, this candle. What will I do then? I can see the light through my eyelids and I think I can feel the heat a bit. I am not supposed to look and I have to hold my hands like this, so I can't feel the length of the candle. But I will know before I burn my fingers. I am sure I will. What if the candle drips? Will it be hot? 

I wonder how fast it burns and how much time has gone. 

I wonder what Guru-Ji will do with his candle. Will he extinguish the flame with his mind - or will he simply transcend the fire and not be touched by it? Guru-Ji knows the Element of Fire. He is great. He has the power of mind. Will he know how to squeeze the candle so he can get it to extinguish?

I know he will do it in an elegant way. A Guru way. Will the flame touch him or not? Will I be able to do the same? Does he expect this of me? I fear the fire, but I want to please Guru-Ji. I should do what is the least disruptive. I do not want my flame to go out, the candle symbolizes the inner enlightenment and one candle can light 1000 other candles and its flame will not diminish ... but it will go out, if I do not figure this riddle out.

Maybe I'll just PEEK a little and check .. yes... lots of candle left. Lots of time to figure it out. I will not get burned yet. Maybe I will get lucky and Guru-Ji's candle will burn down faster than mine and I can see what he does with it and how long he endures the flame ... but I am not supposed to look. I am cheating now, I just don't know how to do it without knowing what will happen and what is expected of me... No. I don't think I will be in luck. Guru-Ji's candle is burning slower than mine. He is holding it very still, so the wax does not run or splash up on the sides, so the wick gets longer .. that's what mine does. I am sloshing it! It burns fast! Guru-Ji burns the candle better than I do mine. I am wasteful and I am not sitting still and I am sitting here looking around. I'll close my eyes and sit VERY still, perhaps my candle will burn less fast. I will MAKE my candle last longer than Guru-Ji's candle. Maybe he will come over and take my candle and tell me what to do.

Maybe I did it too late! I can feel the heat on my middle finger get stronger. It does not hurt still, but it is getting warm. I wonder how Guru-Ji is doing? Bother! He has a LOT of candle left. Mine is almost down to my finger. Soon I will get burned on my middle fingers. And my index fingers soon after that. I have not made a decision! Guru-Ji's candle will outlast mine and he is not moving at all. I did not hold the candle all straight and a stream of wax is moving slowly in between the tips of my index fingers... if I tip it back, the flame gets closer to my index fingers. I can't do that, I will burn my fingers soon! I am scared. I don't know how to transcend the fire or the flame or where to put the flame so it does not go out! Will I fail my test??? What am I supposed to do? I can't disturb Guru-Ji, he is meditating. Should I put the candle down? It will tip over! Should I blow it out? Guru-Ji will know I was looking! I am sure of it! I don't want to make a sound blowing it out! I want to be as discrete as possible. Maybe I can pretend I did not know the candle went out, if I blow it out very carefully???!?! Ooooh! What would Guru-Ji do?

Ah!

The candle drops to the floor, spilling wax on my left leg. Then it rolls a bit, leaving a trail of wax.
Guru-Ji does not even flinch. It sounded very loud. My leg does not hurt a lot. I keep my hands together, but my fingers hurt. Guru-Ji still has lots of candle left. He can go much longer. He is sitting very still. Can I meditate without my candle? I don't think so, it is a candle meditation ... so what should I do now??!?!I hope Guru-Ji soon ...

Guru-Ji now opens his eyes, blows out the candle and puts it down on its end. It balances upright and he does not spill a drop of wax. I watch him with envy. I wish I had known it was okay to just do that. So simple. He slowly rotates, still in lotus position and looks straight at me.

He does not waste a word. Words are too many. He just looks at me, with a kind look that says

"yes, that simple". 

And I realize I have not spent one second in the present for fear of not delivering the perfect ending.

Guru-Ji later that day told me he had put the candle out with his mind, when it woke him from his meditation. I probably looked puzzled. I thought I saw him blow it out, like an ordinary human being.

He smiled and said that his mind told his mouth to blow out the candle and it did.

Ich bin ein Alien.

 Let me just be entirely clear:

There are no such things as aliens!

Yesterday I read a blog about how the Aliens are sneakily visiting our planet with the purpose of incarnating as seemingly human, but yet no better than the bad reptilian money grabbers, whom you can recognize on them having strange eyes and zippers in their meat suits.
They walk among us, originating from some far away life-supporting planet with strange suns and sonic screwdrivers and now they want ours. They want to live here. Some are still in the form of Elementals (Earth, Water, Air, Fire) and have no bodies, but THEY ARE HERE. They are hanging out on the Astral, watching us. They come from FAR FAR AWAY.

Thank you, oh thou enlightened warrior of light, tolerance and spiritual freedom.
I hear you are not your body. You're a spirit WITH a body odor.
Thank you for warning us that spirits of the wrong color may be visiting.

And ... btw ... you there behind ...


Paddle faster, I hear banjo music....

Another enlightened warrior, perhaps not as advanced in their homeland security tendencies, was at the same time elaborating about how there is no time and space. It is an illusion. We incarnate, as we please, on any planet, anywhere we may desire. We are free to pop out of the Astral where-ever we please and live a lifetime of learning on some far-away Rastafarian beach paradise planet where mango, banana splits and margaritas fall softly from the trees into the undergrowth of cannabis and all the beach animals looks like "My Little Pet Store" and have big heads and eyes.


Meanwhile the "master race" of the planet is going:

"Oh No! Alien Rastafarians are occupying our beaches".

 I am not really in the mood to make the decision for any of the combatants, but could we please make up our minds? Are WE the Aliens? Well, judging friendly little Earth Elementals this harshly seems an Alien thought to me. If there is no time and space, just incarnating souls experiencing a mutual illusion to grow and learn, perhaps we should not be so concerned about Gnomes being from Aldebaran.

This completely futile thought has been brought to you only because it thoroughly irritated me to see the discrepancy in the ideologies. Now move on. Nothing to see here.

Damn hard

I was cleaning my son's room up a bit today.
He ran off in June of last year, as a result of 8 years of parental alienation.
His mom finally "won" last summer.
He was set up, armed and triggered and he ran. It was not pretty.
He broke Elaine's foot. He involved the police and he lied. As he was taught.
I have so many marks in my back from his knives.
His mother raised a good boy. Her little mercenary.
"Turn counterclockwise to unscrew knife" on the hilt. Yea we know it's from her.
But he's my son.
It does not matter.
I may have yelled a tad, when it again scraped my ribs,
but the love was always there.
I was just disappointed.

His room has been sitting there, untouched for almost a year.
Right here by my work desk. 
I have not seen him since. I have not heard a word.
A big change from having full custody and having him around every day. 
Yes it has been much more calm.
No lawyers. No court. Just silence. And debt. And wounds. And stress. And loss.
And a missing kid.
A kid missed.

Summer is coming.

Getting back outside reminds me of him.
The back yard, the brown mark from the swimming pool.
The hockey net, the DAM hockey net. 


All the things I have not seen since last summer.


I have not wanted to clean up his room. I just kinda moved some boxes in there.
A bit of sage, I picked in Cache Creek that summer. Actually a lot of sage.
Some prickly roots, an old PC.
A shelf I did not need.


I hardly knew what was hiding under and behind.
But today I did it.
I walked with my bleeding heart in my hands and removed that black shelf.
All the sage, many little bags with dried sage, carrying the scents of that summer.
Behind was his Halloween bag from 2012, hanging on a cupboard door knob.
Angry bird eggs. Hard candy. Lots of unwrapped paper.
His usual mess. Why use the garbage can.
Two perfectly good whoopee cushions, no leaks.
Captain Underpants, several volumes.
Bits of hockey gear.
And there his shoes, laces still tied.
Trodden flat from not being able to tie bows yet, aged 12.
The shoes were hard to find.
So much him.
He would not be able to fit them anymore, so I threw them out. That hurt.
They are kinda sitting on top of the garbage can.
Being wrong, there.
It feels like they should still be useful, because that never happened.
Nah-ah!
It was all a dumb, impossible mistake that just needs to be fixed.
One more idiotic attack, easily deflected with lawyers and more debt and court and .....
We'll just rewind time and it will never have happened.
It was too unfair.
Shoes are still good.
They're just sitting on top of the garbage can.
For now. 

My cover up mess on top of the bed. Layer upon layer like an archeologist, brushing away
the aeons of dirt. Scared.  The stuffy he got when he was four and his family fell apart.
When he was taken away and told his daddy did not want to be the daddy any longer.
The first lie. He never believed it was wrong, because I could not correct him.
I could leave every lie and give it to the wind or make it twice as bad.
No drivers license for the karma truck.

I remember thinking I would do anything to help him and support him.
There are lots of little leaves of sage all over the bed. 
Then two or three viking swords, from when he had a Danish family.
Grandma and grandpa miss him too.
Grandpa took him hunting and fishing that year, when I finally got custody and he could
go see them.

Sage symbolizes strength.
The knights had sage painted on their shields.
It did not help me much.
I gathered the sage in my hand and smelled it.

So much stuff there I wanted to do with him. RC cars and planes, robotic kits. Microscope, never unwrapped. Dad and son stuff. Always under the gun, always made suspicious, always put down.
He never got into it. Could not allow himself to have too much fun with me.
I was the enemy, you see. Whenever Mom was in his mind.
Much stuff was never unwrapped. Train stuff. Lots of train stuff. A half finished white railroad table with no tracks. Hundreds of dollars in small nails and grass like fabric.

His robe. Clogs. Laundry bin with a pair of socks in.
A moment frozen in time when he suddenly with no warning had seen his room for the last time. 
He left in the clothes he wore to the rec center.
All else is there. The perfect imprint of having a son, once.
A son who is now almost a year older. Soon a teen.

His bag of hockey gear is under there. Zipped. Everything too small. Hockey sticks. Too short.
Toys of a child and he will be a teenager soon.
But I am sure we will just rewind reality. It's all new. 

I curse the mother and the lame, toothless family law system.
This I cannot forgive.
I have its big hairy fist squeezing the juice out of my heart right now.
My little daughter misses her brother too. She talks of him every day.
She wants him back. Every meal. Every trip into nature. Every car ride.
Still.
"I wish Ben was here".

I miss my son.

I have to try and forgive the summer and let it in.
Right now, it just hurts.

Information Overwhelm: The Conspiracy!

DEATH THREATS & SECRET SOCIETIES

You know, erh, I'm probably going to get killed for this, but ... I have not told you I am a Freemason. Like HIGH up, WAY up there, like, ... I drank from a skull, you know. They all talk about that.
They have a lovely skull at Lonsdale, allegedly it belonged to an old lady who lived in the building. She was very insistent that she would donate her skull for that purpose, because she was very fond of the Knight Templars.


But.. that aside... that's just my credentials, so you'll believe me when I tell you this shocking fact:

Humpty Dumpty was pushed. 

There, I said it.
This is why all the Jews go to the Wall in Jerusalem and put little notes in holes. And cry.
All the King's men (King Solomon of course) WERE actually able to put him back together again, contrary to the blatant lies spread in popular media, like Children's Books.

Humpty took the gral cup (an egg holder, which held his yolk). That's why egg holders look like this:

Then he rowed to Southern France, where he lived a long life and spawned lots of children. This is commemorated by Easter, a festival all about eggs and fertility. The eggs are decorated with zigzag lines to commemorate the glue that resurrected Humpty Dumpty. 

This is why Easter has to move around in the calendar. It's a secret holiday and if it's too predictable, it will not be safe. The secret society dedicated to preserving the TRUTH has cleverly, to its initiates, made the holiday predictable only by advanced astrology - and dependent on both Sun and Moon (it's always on a SUNday and the Paschal Moon).

You will be utterly surprised to know that the day of Easter was the assimilated original date for Passover, STOLEN by the Counsel of Nicaea in 425AD. We have to wonder if this is a Jewish or Roman Catholic conspiracy. Why this disproportionate effort to conceal the TRUTH ?!?!?
In the light of this, the Easter Egg Hunt is pretty tasteless, akin to the Witch Hunts.

The Secret Order was very wide spread around the Russian Revolution. We have all seen the Faberge eggs, which are the sacred artifacts of the Order. Often they are adorned by the 5 petaled Rose. Is this a mockery of the Rose and Cross? Or is this witnessing the TRUE story?

 The current headquarters are in France and England, hidden in plain sight. The building is deliberately phallic, referring to both the Great Rite (Sex Magick!) and to the bloodline of the Egg.

-------------------------------------------------- Here I draw a line ---------------------------------

You know I could continue with this for several days. I could make up titles and credentials and rites of this order and elevate myself to its Grand Priest and hope to get laid by dozens of little hopeful yoga bunnies, who are on a naive quest for the TRUTH. See, I mentioned TRUTH several times and I constructed a nice little secluded information bubble, which EXPLAINS IT ALL. I should perhaps have shopped for a nice URL, something with TRUTH or NEWS or REAL or something. But all the good ones are taken. Because there is a SHITLOAD of people out there doing this "thing". We're in a sense ALL doing this "thing"...

My friend Larry dug this up for Facebook the other day.

This is exactly IT!

Somehow an externalized enemy and a solid information bubble makes us feel OH SO SAFE.
We are BOMBARDED with stuff. Our brains can take in about 10 bits pr. second and we all have a megabit pr. second data lines in our freaking cellphones. So what do we do?

We create information bubbles. Or, rather ... we purchase them.

Facebook mines our preferences. Google mines our preferences. They want to be USED and just like the "Evil Banker Conspiracy" count their success by the dollar, Google and Facebook count their success by CLICKS. That's how they survive and grow. So when you "just have to see, once" that ad on the right side of your "timeline" with the big boobs or tight butt, you're suddenly getting friend suggestions from every soft-porn (excuse me, nude art) Facebook teaser page that also had leather.
Or whatever. It takes 3 weeks to shake that kind of ads off again.

If you like me have some 1300 friends or something even more ridiculous on Facebook, you would get overwhelmed if it was real relationships or real friends. If each one has 10 posts a day, you'd have to read 13000 posts in an 18 hour workday, which gives you exactly 5 seconds for each post. Fifty seconds for each friend - and good luck with the REST of your life.

Facebook and Google wants you to not get overwhelmed. They are kind people and they want CLICK$. So they make sure that everything that pops up SUPPORT your forming or already existing information bubble, or rather "comfort zone".

That's when we stop looking for the TRUTH. We're prepared to settle for a really good fantasy that explains it all in a simple way and with no contradictions. That's why we can no longer look up  when we're riding the Skytrain. There are people out there we may disagree with and who might demand their fifty seconds. Begone with them! Off with their Heads! UNFRIEND.

Our World is SO MUCH EASIER to handle when it's viewed through something WAY better than a pair of colored glasses: Retina Displays. Almost as good as real, 4.3" in diagonal and it has ALL of the World's non-offensive wonders sifted right to a Theater Near You. And Me.

 SPIRITUAL & SPECIAL
Hey, I'm not like that. I hate Harper and fight the Evil Illuminati and Monsanto and Fracking and Oilsands, The Enbridge pipeline and Senseless Giraffe Murders. I do Yoga and play drums. I even wear strange socks. I play an 800 year old Tibetan Singing Bowl and Moonbathe my crystals. I believe we are all connected. In La Kesh. I am another You. Mitakuye Oyasin. Aum!! I hate Big Pharma. I hate Big Banks. I wear organic cold pressed virgin sweaters and I like Vegan. I am also a Google Witch and a Google Shaman. FUCK, I am SO DIFFERENT I should be covered in gold and worshiped. I doubt I could do any better.

I am THAT special.

So are my all my electronically pre-selected Facebook friends. Google immediately suggests the TRUTH I want to hear on the first 3 "hits". Hundreds of tools are at my disposal through my 4.3" Retina Display that will help me build any f*king reality I want and keep the rest away from me. I nestle comfortably between the other Google Witches and Google Shamans and share cat photos and hate Harper and Monsanto with a dangerous vengeance.

So why am I doing this? Is this some kind of CONSPIRACY by the 5 people who own all the media? Are they keeping me passive and happy in my little Matrix Pod with all the hoses coming out of my neck without my knowledge? Something EVIL must be behind this. (It's not MY fault).

Yes. The exact same "evil" that created religion, secret societies, spirituality, systems of magic, rituals ... you name it. Everything we do and everything we "are".

We made it to be comfortable and unchallenged,
while feeling "part of".  
We want to be connected in comfort!

And it went completely askew on us. That's why we're pissed off. Monsanto is giving us comfortably available food (albeit somewhat carcinogenic) and Facebook and Google and TV is giving us TRUTH that's comfortably available (albeit not in any way representing the actual World). Big Pharma is giving us comfortably available quick fixes (albeit with lots of side effects, such as sudden death) to have a Nyquil Day or go to work even though our body is invisibly struggling. We're not willing to go the long way around to get results. We want to be comfortable and unchallenged and FEEL connected.

Here's my news for you (and me): We're doing it wrong. 

Because we're neither comfortable, unchallenged or connected.
And I don't see it ending there, the way we are doing it.
This is not my dream Rastafarian Paradise Island with Fruit Abundant.

As I have now managed to offend everybody, yet two big questions remain:

Why the hell are we doing this to ourselves.
And how do we stop.

We are doing it because the overwhelm is real. 
350 years ago Francis Bacon wrote "The New Atlantis" ... which revealed the invention of how knowledge could be shared and built upon, layer by layer. Before that time, each person of wisdom was to acquire a complete understanding ... from the heart. Through the Alchemy or other discipline, he would slowly absorb, into his intuition, a way of interacting with the World that even transcended Death, if you got really good.

The Royal Society was formed and defined "Science Glorious" which implemented Bacon's scheme. And "Science Glorious" prospered. It completely exceeded critical mass and blew so much out of proportion that all us little cogwheels in the machinery lost overview. This was anticipated by Bacon, he was merely wondering, how far this could go if we started working together in a structured way.

I have the answer for you, Francis Bacon: The rudder fell off. 

The World as such has no rudder even remotely connected to us, but we lost our personal rudders. This makes us lousy leaders, just like Harper and Putin and (insert name here).

We ALL suffer from the lack of overview. It was DESIGNED that way.
That's why we now have to measure our success by dollars or clicks.
We serve the "system" - because it has become bigger than us.
It feeds us and entertains us and we'd DIE without it.


What I want to tell you with this is that we still have a rudder.
We just forgot.
We don't trust it any longer.
Giving the stupid reason that we know we don't know it all.

We have been suffering trying to create small, safe Worlds, information bubbles, caves, that keep us safe from that "great unknown" out there, which seems threatening. We don't LIKE our SPECIES.
The conspiracy is US. What we DID.

We KNOW inside that Fracking and Oilsands and Pipelines are not right.
They are not respectful to the Creation. 
But we can't prove it.
We can't prove that there is global warming or that vaccinations are bad for you.
So we end up in emotional, scientific bickering, because even the best of scientists protect HIS or HER little bubble of safety and sanity against the overwhelming World.
We all have OUR OWN conspiracy. Which is - all that's outside our friendly friend bubble.

I think we're wrecking the planet.
It does not feel right to me.

So here's my rudder speaking: it's my heart.

It may not contain all the knowledge of the Internet, but it knows enough to be a Creature of this Planet, living in a respectful way.

I may be delusional in my beliefs and decisions, but due to the sheer amount of information out there, I can't take it all in. I'd explode or go insane. I have tried and continue to do so with little result - and people tell me my IQ is over 160 and I spent 12 years at University to boot.

We're all in this boat.
There's no way around it.


What we can't do is to follow our convenience and try to be connected again by carving out well protected information bubbles. No matter what the "bottom line" says, whether it is in clicks or dollars. It does not get us there. We're putting the planet at risk because we are blind and big.

What gets us there is to return to RESPECT. Some really right things can't be proven or argued.
They simply feel right, in the heart.
They can only be implemented by making a vow - sometimes against all evidence.

When asked why we put those stupid solar cells up, the answer can never be better than:
"This is the way I walk". 

In some strange way, our information bubbles are training us for this return to respect and heart-centered dignity as a species. They make us immune to all the information contained in the "conspiracy". Nobody fights harder than a conspiracy nut confronted with facts.

We just have to take it that single, little step further ... we have to include our own information bubble in the conspiracy. We have to face our darkness and make it visible:

We are overwhelmed.
We don't know anything.
We just work here.

And you know ... we were actually designed to do that.
Follow that heart. Walk in respect.

Mitakuye Oyasin.
Kent

TEA LIGHTS and energy waste.

So .. I see you can heat your home with a tea-light under an inverted flower pot.
It just appeals to my debunking instinct, so here goes.

A tea-light weights about 17 grams. Paraffin contains about 49 kJ/g.
Total is 833kJ. If it burns in 4 hours, we have about 833/4kJ/hr = 208 kJ/hr
= 208kJ/3600 seconds = 57.8 W pr. tea light.

Knowing it takes about the 600W setting on my heater blower to heat my fairly large office, I speculate I could do it with 10 tea-lights instead of electricity. A trip to IKEA would get me about 100 tea-lights for $4 and I'd be looking at about 40 cents to heat the office for the 4 hours they burn.
In tea-lights, that's about 40 cents for 2.4kWh (600Wx4h).

Should I instead decide to turn my electric heater on, 
I'd pay 6.9 cents pr. kWh or 16.5 cents in electricity. 
If I lost all creativity and just used my natural gas forced air furnace, I'd pay about $7 pr GJ for the natural gas, which is 2.5 cents pr. kWh or 6 cents for the 4 hours.

Let me say that again; 4 hours of heat costs me:
Tea lights :   $0.40
Electricity:   $0.17
Natural gas: $0.06

What if we went to Sweden and did the math there?
After all the IKEA tea-light mine is in Sweden.
Hmm... over there 100 tea lights cost 42 kr. or about $8.25.
That's 80 cents for 4 hours of heat. 

In Sweden electricity is about 60 cents against our 17 cents for the 2.4kWh

Tea lights :   $0.80 (SWEDEN, IKEALand)
Electricity:   $0.60
 
So our Swedish cousins could actually save 50% in heating if they had electric heat and could tow massive amounts of tea-lights over from IKEA in Vancouver.
Now it's getting crazy.

The crazy part is not the difference in price, but how SLOPPY it makes us here with our energy consumption and thereby CO2 budget.


A typical 1500 square feet home in Denmark uses about 18 MWh a year. By law they are insulated with 300mm of insulation material in the roof and most have double or triple windows and zone heating. The price is about 3300 dollars a year.

My home here in Vancouver used about 70GJ last year, which is 20MWH, for which I paid about $1200. ABOUT ONE THIRD of what it would have cost in Denmark.

But I did that with a year average outside temperature of 13 degrees, which means I heated my house by 6 degrees for that sum. The Danish year average temperature is 8 degrees C and the wind is always up. They need to heat the house by 11 degrees to get 19C inside (twice as much as here). Vancouver has no wind to speak of, but Denmark has a fairly steady average wind, which increases the heat bill by at least 50%. This leads me to conclude:

A conservative guess is that my (rented) Vancouver home here leaks heat about 3 times as fast as the average Danish home. My CO2 footprint could be 1/3 with proper insulation.  
If I took an average Danish home and plonked it down here in Vancouver, insulated to standards, I would be paying about $35 a month in heat, one third of what I pay now.

If I took a Vancouver home and plonked it down in Denmark, I'd be paying about $10000 a year, $833 a month, in heat, with the current Danish energy prices.

That about sums it up when it comes to a Canadian or North American CO2 footprint.
IF our energy prices hit the Danish (European) levels, I bet we could reduce the damage we do.

But not by burning tea-lights from Ikea.

/<

It has been 30 days since my last squirrel.

My name is Kent Johansen,
I am a distraction addict.
It has been 30 days since my last Squirrel.
(audience applauds)

So, people are teasing people with ADHD and ADD and such that they chase squirrels and (where did my coffee go) suddenly disappear out of conversations. Their minds fly around. Mmmmm. Mango Pudding. That's not fair. The teasers are just not noticing really loud distractions.
Christina Hendricks. Hrm. Where were we?

Here's what I am going to tell you about Squirrels and people with AD(H)D.

Have you ever noticed a squirrel trying to warn other squirrels? They are completely, super, over, mega, hyper vigilant and see any danger coming. They go through insane measures to warn the entire forest against approaching danger:

Here's what they do:

They tap their teeny weenie front paws two millimeter up and down and whisper "tsk tsk tsk".
The insane racket of the alarm can be heard almost 2 meters away on a silent morning.
Sometimes they even shake their tails a teeny weenie bit. More like vibrate.
Usually they will make the spectacle even more insane by hiding behind the tree trunk.

Believe you me, squirrels are able to make quite impressive sounds. We once caught and relocated a two-colored pirate squirrel from the garden. He was really foul mouthed and had several tattoos and a wooden leg. He screamed and growled and yelled and swore at us, even pissed through the bars to show us how mad he was. He'd have torn our heads off given half a chance and pee'd down the throat hole. Squirrels are not fun animals, they are just member of The Union of Cute Animals. They are killers. Egg thieves. Roof wreckers. Pirate squirrel was relocated because he tore entire boards out of our house with his left hand to get in and wreck the home from inside. His rage was impressive.

Are squirrels not interested in warning other squirrels?
Is this some kind of pirate animal "psst, you, you dropped a $100 note ... oh I guess you did not hear me". ??
Are they faking it?

NO!

I figured it out. Usually people who are easily distracted or have been lucky enough to be diagnosed having ADD or ADHD by a well meaning drug pusher, sorry, psychologist ... are actually sensitive artists. They may even be psychic empaths. Things are LOUD, BIG and EMOTIONAL to them.
They feel the grass grow, hear the sun shine, sense the storm brewing 200 km away or the Earth cracking, preparing for an earthquake. The heartbeats of Birds. The horny of the Elk.

Empaths regularly find themselves in other people's shoes. POW. It happens to them in supermarkets and crowded places. Suddenly SAD walks up behind them and they shed a tear. Or happy. Or serial killer. That's why empaths don't like Boxing Day and Black Friday. They can do 10 minutes and they want home because they are tired of feeling like Jack the Ripper and Mr. Rogers alternating every 10 seconds.

At the risk of being really weird (a risk I frequently and joyfully take) I will reveal the secret about squirrels: They warn other squirrels by telepathy! The tapping and shaking and tsk tsk ing is just to get the juices going. Meanwhile the Ether resounds with a 150 decibel telepathic squirrel warning: WHEEEEEEEE INSANE GUY IN CRAZY NON-MATCHING SOCKS ENTERED FOREST. 

And I go: "Look! Squirrel"

To the mundane person, sadly limited to only 5 dull senses, it's a little tree climbing, unionized rat with a bottle cleaner tail that's tapping its tiny fingers self-importantly. Nothing to write home about.

Not to me.
I'll have my squirrel, thank you.
If you had a 150 dB siren go off next to your ear, you'd be distracted too.
And put the Ritalin away.

/<

Micro-kindness

Remember the movie "Gaslight"?
Being Gaslighted is a psychotherapy term for a relationship, where one partner drives the other insane by removing all their faith in themselves. Their sense of reality is bent until it breaks.

In the movie, it was done deliberately and with a motive. Events were staged and evidence removed.
This happens ... but something happens even more often:

There is a danger in any relationship, which have taken out more relationships, I believe, than any other single danger. It's called micro-aggression. I heard that term for the first time this morning and I realized it is a very very important concept to REALLY get.

In the day-to-day noise of life happening, we make tiny little choices all the time. It's not unlike making the choice of rounding a payment ending on 5 cents up or down to the nearest dime.
The microscopic acts of kindness or cruelty are so small, they all end up hiding in the noise.
Each cruelty so small, it's not fair to make an issue out of it. It's just not worth the sore throat, the potential passive aggressive retaliation and the sinking feeling for the rest of the evening to actually call it and DO something about it.

Besides, you'll look like a nutcase.
Because it was really nothing. Arguing about nothing is called bickering...

The downside to keeping peace is that it will drive you absolutely up a tree. 
Chinese water torture. Drip. Drip. Drip. Disguised as rain. All natural.
Nothing to see here. Nothing to complain about.

Of course, it affects whether YOUR next 5 cents are rounded up or down.

Ignoring a question.
Pretending not to hear.
Doodling around when the partner is in a hurry.
Taking the last cup of coffee.
Not emptying the dishwasher.
Leaving the dishwasher open to point this out.
Bringing up stressful issues when the partner asks for connection.
Being annoyed about hugs at the wrong times.
Being too busy to hear a story ... watching the food channel. 
Not saying thank you.
Borrowing tools and not returning them. Again.
Ignoring repeated requests to wrap food when returning it to the fridge.
Putting gross things in the kitchen sink.
Letting the heat out before leaving the partner home alone.
Being late.
Not waiting for the partner to buckle in before driving off.
Going to bed much later than the partner and waking up cranky.
Making idiotic things more important than the now.
Finding the little thing that's wrong with the gift.
Finding little things too small.
Big things too big.
Right things slightly wrong.

If you, at the end of the day, have more than $1 in cruelty cash on your hands, maybe you're short-changing yourself in the process of short-changing your partner.

It's not going to break the budget in any way to round the 5 cents the right way every time. 
Misery is expensive in lost efficiency and lack of motivation. Not to speak of divorces.

Therefore ... resolve to micro-kindness. Make the noise of life a happy noise.
Even if you don't have money or time to give great gifts and luxurious vacations,
remembering to give, a symbolic offering at the Temple of Love is considered as great
as truckloads of gold and myrrh in the eyes of Cupid.

/<

Carving Runes

I seem to have this urge to write long thoughts.

It's not from my Viking ancestors, who tended to write very short thoughts on rocks using runes, like "Gorm carved these runes after his father".
Which one might think kinda translates to "Hey, watch me, I can write with a hammer and a chisel."

Or I could decide that's what Gorm did.

I could also decide that Gorm perhaps, one frosty morning, put on an extra pair of woolen pants and a fur coat. He was thinking about his father and he walked out to that place, where the two used to sit. His father used to tell him stories about Freya and Heimdall and Valhalla and how the World was created by Fire and Ice, all the while teaching Gorm how to make little ducks out of reed.
Gorm is thoughtful this morning. He kisses his wife and kids and tells them he'll be gone for the day.
He gets his stone hammer and makes sure the head is tied on properly, then goes out the heavy wooden door and closes it carefully to keep the heat inside.

The sun is just rising. The cobwebs have caught the dew and Gorm's legs get a bit wet, as he carefully, with long steps, lifting his skin boots high, walks through the purple headed thistles to his fathers final resting place.
Next to a standing stone, he puts birch bark fibers and bark down, lights it carefully with steel and flint and adds pieces of 5 sacred woods to the fire. The sweet smoke rises, meets a temperature shift a couple of meters up and fans out, drifting slowly East towards the rising sun. Soon a good fire is going. Gorm can feel his dad's presence and there is a little tear blurring his vision.
His breath hangs in the air as little clouds of frozen steam. Gorm remembers he is alive.
That air has the breath of his father in it too, but it is no longer warm.

Gorm opens his bag and takes out some good, salted sausage and some mead. He carves a slice of sausage with his knife and puts it at the base of the stone. Then he pours a bit of mead next to it. He pats the ground, which still has that little hollow where his dad used to sit. 

"Dad", he says aloud, keeping a little pause as his breath recovers after stumbling in its pace. "We're going to do something today, which I always will remember." I will write on this stone what we did today, Gorm thought. "Today" he said. It seemed that everything listened. He knew that his dad could hear him too. Then he started to write the memory of the moment, the precious now, the prayer of the present moment, nothing else:

"Gorm carved these runes after his father".

These words describing precisely what happened that day still wind along the edge of the stone, while not much but a few bones are left of Gorm or his wife or his children or even their children's children. Gorm was remembered as husband, father, then grandfather, then next great grandfather then great great grandfather ... but as time went, only the name remained and the memory of his habits, his essence and his kind heart dispersed like the morning dew on the thistles.

This present and precious Today, thirty five generations later, the latest of Gorm's lineage of firstborns is riding a Skytrain, not knowing how special he would be to Gorm. His name is Andrew. Andrew is a bit hung over from trying to entertain himself during the weekend and swearing about his iPhone spell checker. He's a bit depressed because he has nothing meaningful to do, you know, anything meaningful is expensive and he's short of cash, LOL.

Once he wrote something on his messenger about his dad, but he dropped the phone down a fish-tank in a drunken stupor at a friends place. It was time to get a new iPhone anyway and they were free because he was about to get his contract renewed anyway. With a data plan. Nothing less than 1GByte is meaningful, you know, LOL, Facebook eats so much bandwidth.

While this young man was already forgotten and his dad even more so, ... out in some foreign field, among purple thistles, forty bytes continued to witness that once, on a frosty morning, two hearts connected across the realms of existence.

Andrew does not know this.
This is why he is not happy with his spell checker.