Cedro's perfect dream

conservation consternation

It is the end of the dry season.  What a thing, to feel the tiniest changes in the angle of the earth in every drop of rain and air current shift.  The winds trade in credits and abundance, the clouds give and take, and we shower when we can.  April is an amazing month here.  The ground is bone dry, though the air is thick with potential.  A few cat hairs gently brush the surface of our nightly thirst  - damn! mist again!  My mouth is too dry for singing, so I hum to the empty tubes. 

I feel as a frontiersman, collecting  what I can of the stuff of life in buckets, barrels and old orange juice bottles (man, those frontiers people missed out by not having those!).  When the water trickles to life at 6.18 in the morning, there is a mad excited rush, as though the derek has just broken through to a buried treasure trove, and we must act quickly before the riches evaporate into emptiness.  There are clothes to be washed!  Dishes to be rinsed!  Showers to be had!  Bottles to be filled for drinking later... We laugh, synchronizing movements, skillfully catching the flash flood, knowing that all too soon (somewhere around 7.30) the faucets will spit air and go silent until the dinner hour.  If we are late to rise or if we dally in town too long in the evening, we miss our chance and I go to work with an extra layer of yesterday stuck to my skin.  This is the risk of living on a mountain top - the reservoirs and rivers all run away from us.  This is the value of teaching children about conservation and the tens of thousands of liters of water turned gray and useless each day, regardless season and planetary geometry.  Soon we will be inundated.  The water will flow from our ears and around our rubber waders, and the lessons of yesterday will be drowned by storms, but the echoes will remain.  We save water, the tanks fill slowly, and we give thanks for the rain that soon enough we will curse when the Earth shifts and brings the clouds back up the Pacific rim and over the continental divide. 

barbarism

Perhaps it is just me, having effectively extricated myself from the proverbial rat race and relocated to a place where meditation is a matter of waking and stepping outside, but it seems like large portions of the human family have spent the last few years regressing to a state of partially suppressed lawless barbarism, not unlike what used to be commonplace under the Roman Empire or Vlad Tepes's Wallachia. 
    When I was young, there was plenty of violence out there for my young eyes to absorb.  We had WWF wrestling, we had Die Hard, We had Freddy and Jason, etc.  Now, however, we have This.
When the book Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk came out, I thought "this is a wonderful examination of the darker side of our animal nature.  We all have the potential for horrible acts of barbarism within us.  People will read this and realize we have so much work left to us if we are ever to truly civilize."  Instead, Fight Clubs are actually rising out of the dust of cubicle life, and the UFC is more popular than ever.  I miss the innocent days of Junk Yard Dog and Hulk Hogan.  Such lovable, hug able creatures they were...  Twenty minutes of tough talk and shirt tearing, followed by foot stomping and mat slapping, and a faked knockout.   These days,  I get my fix by watching scarlet toucanettes fight over tree limbs (and the occasional Tony Jaa flick).   

biodiesel lives!

Thanks to some generous donations and the hard work of Ryan and Alex, our biodiesel gurus, Matt from Piedmont Biofuels, and Javier from the Guatemala biodiesel coop, we now have a small bodega at the CEC where we make our own biodiesel bus fuel out of used restaurant grease!  We are currently running B5, or 5% biodiesel in the buses, largely because they are old, and the fuel we make is too clean for their systems.  If we add a high concentration right away, we run the risk of sweeping all the rust and particulates that have built up over the years directly into the fuel filters, clogging them and causing school delays.  No one wants that...

We will add more and more biodiesel to the mix as the weeks progress.  Alex is already running B100 in his Hyundai Galloper and it is fine after three weeks.  We are all very excited about this project, and are hoping to stay ahead of the game, even as the Costa Rican government enters negotiations for a country wide biofuels conversion, which they hope to begin in the next five years.  We hope to soon secure the necessary permits to sell biodiesel to the public, which we believe they will line up down the mountain for, especially as regular diesel sits at about $4.00 a gallon up here.   So pass the freedom fries and start your engines!

Chump USA part Deux

Friends and readers,

My faithful Compaq died a noisy death about two months ago, and I'd given up all hope of having communication with the outside world for awhile.  As I wrote here, Comp USA sold me a three year warranty and then went belly up, rewarding me for my fidelity with naught but a putrid techno-corpse and an insipid recording telling me to hold the line...
Then, on my recent trip to the Northeastern United States, I actually managed to talk to a living humanoid at the recently revived Comp USA call center, and, while physical stores exist only in Florida now, I'm happy to report that they are actually honoring their warranties by mail!   They sent a box, and the defunct machine was tarried off to meet its maker. 
Now, with the next trip to the US planned for late June, I am filled with hope that I may be back up and blogging regularly by early July, if all goes well.  We'll just have to wait and see.  For the time being, look for posts whenever I can sneak away from class long enough to sequester myself in the CEC's computer lab. 

Peace, and thanks to those of you who have offered support during my various computer trials.  Ah, life in the jungle...