Surprise

This is on the sly...


Because my mother doesn't have internet access right now, I can post these pictures of her birthday present without too much fear that she'll see them.



The pattern, which I adjusted a little bit, comes from Stephanie Japel's wonderfully hip book Fitted Knits. Stephanie's blog, Glampyre, is also amazing. She's not only an inspiring pattern designer, but a geologist, a custom yarn dyer, a seamstress and a mom. A girl after my own heart.

We opened The Foreigner last Thursday (that link is to Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park's website; there are a few production photos up now). It seems to have been received well, but I made a vow a couple of years back not to read reviews until after closing. Although a bad review is only one person's opinion, it's amazing how much it can unravel your self esteem. So...while I have a hunch that the buzz might be good, I'll just stay away to be safe. In any case, we are having the time of our lives with this comedy, and I'm so grateful to be here doing it.

On other fronts, it's looking like upon my return to Ashland I will be trying to downsize from my lovely Jetta, Horace, into an older Benz that I can hopefully pay off in full up front. We'll see how it goes. But if I do end up in a vintage Mercedes, it will be a new and slightly different world of biodiesel use (I may have to change hoses from rubber to synthetic, etc.), with more careful attention and DIY repairs on my part. But Janis will be proud.

SPRING IS SPRUNG! June will be busting out all over before we know it. Where does the time go?

--Nell

Theater/Travel

Just got back from Portland and seeing The Seafarer at Artists' Repertory Theatre -- pretty exciting play.

I am gearing up for a two-month trip to Cincinnati Playhouse to do a play of me own: The Foreigner, by Larry Shue. I am GUNNING to get there...luckily, Fleet Fuel Testing has been cool with this prolonged absence from the start. I'll continue to work by computer, phone and snail mail from Cincinnati. I've never been there. Sometimes I'm startled by the sheer size and diversity of this country. Really, how can one entity expect to govern it all? We are so different, our land is so different. When the constitution was written, we hadn't even acquired much of the territory that now makes up the US. We weren't commonly mixing races. We weren't so many. How can those old words still stand? But they do...

Which brings me to the airing-out of some guilt here: I fly on commercial airlines frequently. I wish that I planned better, that I had the fortitude and patience to work a 3-5 day train ride into my schedule. That's another big change I'm going to make. Auto or Train only. And it's funny: I dont' even like flying anymore. I necessarily had to travel through Kennedy airport several times right after 9/11. I fell prey to the hysteria. It was SO tense. And then, on top of that, my father mentioned in some casual conversation that smoke, flames and loud noises are indications of major trouble mid-flight. Which forever destroyed my peace of mind. And now we see just how threatening geese are above the Hudson river. My little body shouldn't be flitting around thousands of miles up in the air anyway. 'Sunnatural, I say, 'sunnatural!

But on to renewable news: I remembered reading about solar paint in one of my grandfather's science magazines awhile back (I can't remember which one). Here's a little article that I found at New Scientist online. It's dated March 2008. At that point, the companies involved were postulating that a commercial version would be available in 2.5 years...which means that in some cases, expensive solar panels may not be necessary (its application would be probably be with very large buildings). I originally thought that conventional photovoltaic cells would somehow be involved in solar paint...this article sets me straight. Googling around, I find that people have been talking about this for several years. This makes me think that the technology is still a quite ways off from being affordable and practical for most companies (the article above even admits that dye-based solar cells are less efficient than their traditional PV counterparts). But if it does happen, and an effective, productive solar cell can be worked into a paintable liquid -- the possibilities seem limitless. And in any case, it's an imaginative, exciting idea.

--Nellamity