Dorothy's Big Day

Dorothy and Jason were married on the 21st of June in Fairbanks.  It was a lovely wedding.  The skies were sunny with just a few clouds, the temperatures warm (for us), and a light breeze kept the bugs away.  There were a couple of snags, like the music not being loud enough for anybody to hear, but nobody seemed to mind (or even notice) what might not have gone according to plan.  It seems that with weddings, the only thing people are really interested in is seeing the bride and groom successfully wedded.  The food was good too.

We didn't see much of the young couple during our visit.  Dorothy apologized  at one point for not having much time for visiting, but I [Michael] told her apologies weren't necessary: Dorothy did most of the planning and a good deal of the preparation for her big day, and I knew that this was not the trip for a visit.  My gratification came from seeing them together, and happy.

Our drive up to Fairbanks was uneventful, although the runup to the drive was not.  Three days before our departure we decided that Sheryl's Isuzu was no longer suitable for towing (the frame is rusting away thanks to Juneau's climate), so we bought a car.  The next day we got a different car after discovering the dealership misled us about the availability of a trailer hitch (and they were disinclined to deal with us on the second car until we revealed that we took the precaution of cancelling the check we wrote for the first one, and the first deal was as dead as the check).  We drove up in a 2008 Mercury Mariner.

My dad joined us in Fairbanks and came along on our drive to Wasilla.  In a few more days Dad and I will fly down to Juneau to tackle a couple of home renovation projects, after which he'll be flying back to Illinois and I'll come back north to retrieve Sheryl and the kids, after which we'll drive back home.

I'm taking lots of pictures, as always, which leads to the topic of my column for June.  Sorry I'm late posting it, but we were on the road when it went to press.

 

 

If a picture is worth a thousand words

By Michael Wittig | At Home with the Kids

Click. A precious moment of my children's early life is recorded for posterity. Click, click. Two more precious moments. Click, click, click, click. Get the picture?

I inherited my photography hobby from my father. He inherited his hobby from his father, who served as the photographer for a small Illinois newspaper. Because of their passion for pictures I got to see snippets of my father's childhood, his tour with the Army in the 1950s, and my own early years a decade later.

I bought my first camera when I was 8 years old, a Kodak 104 instamatic. I also bought my first roll of film then, and when my pictures were all taken I paid to have them developed.

And then I stopped taking pictures for a few months. I had to, since there was no more money for film and developing.

Until the digital revolution, photography was a hobby with a price. Every picture cost money, good or bad, with more tending toward the bad side than the good. Worse yet, film photographers had no way to tell whether a given picture was any good until it came back from the processor, and only professionals actually exposed enough film to capture the "right" moment.

The opening years of digital photography were slow to reveal the promise of the new technology. Early digital cameras offered low-resolution images of mediocre quality, and limited memory storage meant that only a few pictures could be taken at a time.

But technology marched forward, offering better cameras and more storage for less money. In this decade, digital image quality has improved to the point of rivaling film, and on-board storage has expanded from kilobytes to gigabytes.

When I first saw my father taking dozens upon dozens of pictures with his digital camera I thought it was a novelty. When I saw the results it was a revelation. To be sure, many of the individual pictures weren't very good, but there were so many of them that the number of keepers was actually quite respectable. Additionally, the sequences themselves were fun to watch.

I adopted my father's technique. If a picture is worth a thousand words, after all, then a sequence of pictures should be worth thousands of words, right?

I did my father one better too, by changing the setting on my camera from single exposure to continuous, so that when I hold down the shutter button the camera takes a continuous stream of pictures, slightly more than one every second. I've been taking a lot of pictures.

But even good concepts can go awry. After a recent outing to the beach I came home to discover over five hundred pictures on our camera, which I added to the nearly 18,000 pictures already on the computer. More and more, I feel as if I'm trying to contain Pandora in a digital box.

I try to pare down the pictures, I really do. But the reality is that although 90 percent of my pictures may get deleted, 10 percent remain. What am I supposed to do with 50 great pictures of a day at the beach?

I'm not much better with videotape. On our last big road trip I recorded 14 hours of video footage. How many bowls of popcorn does that equate to? Surely, I do not know.

The upshot of all this is that I believe digital photography has diminished the value of a picture. The pictures on my hard drive do not represent 18 million words. Indeed, the whole collection can probably be summed up in two words: too much.

My kids are getting into the act now. We bought them cheap digital cameras at Christmas, and since then it has become a regular event for my 3-year-old boy to come to me with tears in his eyes because his camera has quit working. There's never really a problem with the camera, of course. He's simply filled the memory card again.

And so a fourth-generation photography buff has come into being. I can hear him now. Click, click, click. More pictures he wants me to look at.

I see one-terabyte hard drives in the store these days. How many words are a million pictures worth? I'll find out soon enough.

 

The Monthly Column

When I wrote last month's column I didn't anticipate a loss of our cheap electricity.  I actually got a few comments from locals who thought I might need to rethink my priorities after the avalanche, so with that in mind it seemed appropriate to continue talking about energy in this month's column...

 

 

Sprintime Activities
For those folks wondering how we’re doing with our electricity situation, we’re doing just fine.  Last month’s bill indicated our usage was down by over half.  Even better, the power company decided to implement the rate increase effective April 16 – the day of the avalanche that took out the power lines for Juneau’s hydroelectricity source – which means we got billed at the pre-avalanche rate last month instead of the anticipated higher rates.  We’re also informed that rates will come down at the end of June, when repairs are now expected to be complete.

On to more important things.

I [Michael] promised Sheryl that we’d set up the kids playground once the ice was gone in the back yard.  When Mother’s Day weekend rolled around it was time.  The fence came down easily, and even the posts set in concrete came out of the ground with some effort.  With substantially more difficulty Sheryl and I managed to move the structure from the side yard to the backyard.  Once there it wasn’t too difficult to level things up and bolt on the roof and swings.  Last year Sheryl got a trail for Mother’s Day.  This year a swing set.  Maybe next year she’ll get the first hole in our much talked about miniature golf course.  Maybe, but I doubt it.

Sheryl also had a birthday this week.  The kids loved it.  We (me and the kids) went shopping and the kids got to pick out the flavor of cake mix to make, in addition to having input on what presents to buy (“Do you think Mom will like this toy boat?”).  At home they got to help (mostly watch) with the cake, and with wrapping presents (ditto).  The steaks came out from under the broiler shortly after Sheryl walked in the door, and we all enjoyed a happy birthday celebration as a family.  The weather even cooperated, so we were able to try out the R/C boat in our pond without getting rained on.

It’s that family thing that makes for such good times.  Becky “gets it” more and more, and with her vocabulary and other progressing cognitive abilities she’s fairly easy to communicate with, and she has a sense of humor too, as evidenced my her smiles and laughs when I catch her in a prank.  Michael does not have Becky’s range of vocabulary but uses what he has with somewhat more ease than Becky.  The interaction between the two of them is remarkable to observe, with Becky teaching Michael vocabulary and Michael keeping Becky’s attention focused much better than most adults do.  Both of the kids are also interacting more and more with Sheryl and me, and it all certainly fits the “family” description.

The house Sheryl owned when I met her went up on the real estate market this week.  We’ve rented it since buying this home, and with mortgage rates where they are it seems like the right time to sell.  I am also selling property I own in Nevada (to the woman who has been renting it since I moved here in 1992).  The idea is that we’ll be able to take the proceeds from these two sales and refinance our present home, leaving us with a lower mortgage here, about as low as we were paying when we lived at Sheryl’s house.

We’re anxiously watching gasoline prices rise as our impending trip to Fairbanks and Anchorage looms closer.  We’ll go almost irregardless of gas prices, unless of course gasoline becomes unavailable at any price (highly unlikely).  At some point we’ll have to rethink the whole road-trip paradigm, I suppose, but there’s more to life than what we can see and experience in Juneau, so as long as it’s still possible, we’ll still be trying to wing it.  We’re still talking about using our Metro to tow our travel trailer too.

A Catastrophe in Slow Motion

Juneau did not get a disaster proclamation from the State of Alaska, contrary to the hopes of most folks here in Juneau, ourselves included.  That means the bill for repairs to the transmission line and for the diesel now used to provide over 80% of our electricity (there is still some hydro close to town) will be borne by each and every Juneau resident and business concern.  There is no panic nor any organized protest, yet.  For all the hype, the first bills should only now be appearing in mailboxes.  Our bill is still a week away.

And therein lies the first problem.  The new rates imposed by Alaska Electric Light and Power (AEL&P) apply to the entire month of April, whereas the avalanche occurred on the 16th.  Our meter was last read on the tenth, so we will be charged extra for the six days we didn’t know we were going to be charged draconian rates for the extra power.  AEL&P contends this is fair because we will be see relief sooner once the problem is resolved.  Of course, the rates are scheduled to come down in the middle of summer when electrical requirements are at their least anyway (very few buildings have air conditioning here).  Rate payers who get billed in the last half of the month also have the benefit of knowing they need to conserve and have the opportunity to do something about it.

There are other problems too.  The design of the original installation has been called into question, but the quick fix being pursued by the power company is to put up nearly identical towers on the same pads where the last towers were taken out by the avalanche.  No alternative repairs have been seriously mentioned, such as laying the whole wire underwater (it is said to be too expensive, but nobody has mentioned a price).  A lovely illustration of a concrete deflector (used in British Columbia and some western U.S. states without a single failure) showed up in today’s paper, but it wasn’t put in there by our power company.  Instead, AEL&P has committed to nothing more than the immediate repairs and “long term study” to investigate possible solutions.

My [Michael] darker (and realistic) side suspects there will be several class-action lawsuits that derive from this whole fiasco.  We may be a party in at least one of them.

Some good does come of our avalanche situation.  Citywide electric usage is down by 30% as residents and businesses tone down their lights, and will likely come down further.  Energy conservation is in vogue again in a big way.  There is even some prospect that this will give our city a cause to unite behind, improving our sense of community and maybe even improving life in our town.

But much of this lies in the future.

I went to work on my insulation project the same day my picture appeared on the front page of The Juneau Empire (pictured above, me posing with my insulation stacked in the garage).

I was quoted in the article too:

http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/042008/loc_270393062.shtml

Our cathedral ceiling, which accounts for about a third of our total ceiling area, was poorly insulated (like the rest of the house).  The four inches of foam now installed (two layers of two inch) should effectively triple the ceiling insulation in that part of the house.  We hated to lose the wood look of the original ceiling, and I tried to remove the cedar that was up there for reuse, but the pieces were sporadically glued and many of them came down in splinters when I tried to dislodge them, so the wood stayed.  We can always put up new wood later.

The biggest irony about our situation is that we used wood through the winter to supplement our heat, and I was burning the last sticks of dry wood the same day the avalanche struck.  Had we known I could have set some wood aside.

But all was not lost.  I save leftover wood from every construction project I tackle, including scraps, partly because I hate to throw anything away, but also because I think I’ll find a use for the wood in some future project.  Thus was born the “home heat” project.  For over two weeks we’ve heated our home almost exclusively with scrap lumber from the garage.  It works quite well, in fact it is the driest wood our woodstove has ever burned, having spent months or years (back to 2001) out of the weather.  Between the wood and the newly upgraded insulation, we’ve been able to keep all of the electric heaters off for the past two weeks, dropping our electric usage by over half versus the month before the avalanche, and about a quarter of what it was before the woodstove was installed (best estimate, accounting for lighting/heating requirements and outside temperatures).

I always knew I’d find a good use for that wood.

Unfortunately, we’ll be running out of scraps in another week at the rate we’re going.  Still, there are some pallets to be had around town (about a day’s worth of heat per pallet if the last two I found are any indication).  My next door neighbor also said he’s had some wood rounds for a long time but no splitter for them, so we tentatively agreed to have me come over with my splitter in exchange for some of the split wood.

I recall that Sheryl was somewhat taken aback by the price quoted for our woodstove when we had it put in.  It appears now that, if we can keep throwing wood in it, we’ll make up for the expense much quicker than in the original estimation.  And still we wait for our first bill at the new rate.

We’re lucky: Sheryl and I have enough set aside to pay our electric bills through this crisis.  Not only that, but we’ll continue with our home renovations pretty much per plan, since our renovations are largely to improve the house’s energy efficiency anyway.  We’ll still be driving to Fairbanks for Dorothy’s wedding too, although our plans for a larger trip down south had to be set aside (which was becoming tenuous even before our avalanche due to the price of gasoline).  We are acting proactively, I hope, rather than reactively.

I suspect the reactive responses to Juneau’s energy crisis (and it truly is a crisis) will begin within the next week, and will escalate with every electric bill delivered to the doors of an evermore distraught citizenry.  I also suspect that much of the town is still in denial over just how bad this really is, and won’t truly appreciate it until the bills are opened.  There are also a lot of people who simply don’t know how to cut back, people who are in many cases the same people who won’t have a contingency for this kind of emergency.  The same thing can be said about many area businesses.

But this is a catastrophe in slow motion.  It began over two weeks ago.  It will continue through the summer.

The kids, by the way, have been largely unaffected by all this.  They thought the ceiling insulation project was interesting enough, and they are a little more willing to wear sweaters in the house now. 

Bitter Irony

An excerpt from today's Juneau Empire (online):

Electricity bills likely to increase by 500 percent following avalanche
Story last updated at 4/16/2008 - 4:02 pm

Juneau’s electricity rates are likely to quintuple as the result of an avalanche early this morning that cut all hydroelectric power to the area, according to an Alaska Electric Light & Power spokeswoman.
Juneau is now running on diesel generators at Auke Bay and Lemon Creek, said Gayle Wood, director of consumer affairs.
One transmission tower is down and four damaged on the Snettisham line, which connects hydroelectric power from the Snettisham lakes to the service area.
Outages were limited to the Thane area this morning because the power load transferred to the diesel generators that were already running.
Wood said it would be two to three weeks before workers could safely begin repairing the line, and that hydro power wouldn’t be restored for at least three months.
For more, see Thursday’s Empire.