Thanksgiving means what to me?

As you can see by the number of post, I am a truely prolific blogger. I am hoping to start doing this more but time has not really allowed me to so far. Enough of the bellyaching about time.

So the title, Thanksgiving, what does it mean. For most if conjures up the image of the traditional trukey feast. This is true for me also, but has more meaning than that for me. As I come from a fairly large family, being the 8th out of 10 children....yes my parents may have been a bit crazy for having 10 of us but in the end we all turned out okay. But back to what Thanksgiving means to me. Thanksgiving has always seemed to have been the main holiday that I remember in the family. Don't get me wrong, when I was small it was all about Christmas and nothing else but as I grew and understood it better the importance of Christmas as the main family holiday faded. We always had the gifts and such under the tree at Christmas time, but as you aged you came to understand that you were a part of a large family. I can truely say that while I remember special gifts and such I really do not remember Christmas as vividly as I remember some of the Thanksgivings. Some of this may stem from the age difference in the family with about 11 yrs between me and my oldest brother, so by the time I was old enough to know what Christmas was, they just wanted to stay in bed. I can remember playing a trumpet one morning to wake everyone up as me and my little brother and sister had decided it was late enough to only be told by my mom to go back to bed it was like 3 in the morning. Later when I was the teen and did not wnat to get up, I can remember being dragged from the bed by my little brother and sister as they wanted me to open my presents. That year I got my first stereo. Being 16 at the time, not sure that I should how greatful I was for it to my parents....that would not have been cool. Looking back on it and having now raised a son who is 21, I realize how much I truely owe my parents.....

Back to Thanksgiving though. This was the one holiday that I can remember it seemed like the family almost always all made it home for. The earliest memories where of that, the entire family including the older ones all being around and talking to each other. The eating contest they had now are family stores that have made their way into family lore. My 3 oldest brothers would take serving platters for plates and keep going back until they could not move. My mother would get up before the sun to make the turkey and all of the fixings and have them on the table for lunch.

As the family grew with the addition of spouses and grandchildren, the meal transformed into a potluck feastival. Everyone would bring a dish and my mother would prepare the turkey and the gravy, the 2 most important peices of the meal in my opinion. The meals also included family freinds and whomever others in the family invited. It was not unusual to walk into a room full of people and have a few sitting there that you had no clue who they were. Girlfreinds and boyfreinds were put through the ringer, as most of my family has a tendency to pick on anyone sitting near them. Some of them have turned it into a true art form. For the last 6 to 8 years the counts have ranged from the high forties to mid sixties for attendees.

A few years ago, my mother finally decided it was a bit much cooking for that many people (she was 73 at the time). There was talk of stopping the tradition and allowing each sub-family to start their own tradition. Needless to say, this did not go over big with the family. We moved the celebration between houses to keep it going over the next 2 years. I built a new house about 5 years ago, and one of the main building requirements was for the house to have an open floor plan with a large kitchen island. The plan was for Lisa and I to start throwing parties. The first one we did was the Thanksgiving lunch that year, with over 60 people at the party. While we have not had much oportunity to throw some of the parties we would like to throw, we have hosted the Thanksgiving party for 5 years now. It has been great. It is a lot of work, last year I cooked 4 or 5 12~14lb turkeys and made over 2 gallons of gravy for the event. I actually take the entire week of Thanksgiving off to cook for it. It is still a potluck event with great food being brought in by all. There are always new dishes to try and family favorites.

At my parents 57th Anniversay party on the 14th of November, I was reminded again as to how lucky we are to be able to have a tradition like our Thanksgiving party. We have evolved to about 4 gatherings a year and everyone always seems to have a good time catching up. It is funny as we all live with in 20 or 30 miles of my parents, but with life being as busy as it is, we do not always take the time to keep up with each other. I will say that we have always been there for each other and would do anything to help each other though. I really appreaciate the sacrafices my parents made for our family. I am sure there are times we made them want to jump in the car and drive off with out looking back.

So what does Thanksgiving mean to me? It means family and appreaciaion of family to me. It means looking around a room full of my parents, brothers, sisters, grandchildren and freinds and seeing smiles whereever you look. It means saying thanks to my parents for building such a great support system for their children and instilling the drive and morals to be who we are, not perfect but just who we are.

Sterling Engines and Green Energy Movement

Lately I have been extremely interested in building a Sterling Engine to drive a small generator. The thought is not original by any stretch of the imagination as I found a number of references when I started my research into how to build a Sterling Engine. There is a lot of info on the topic and some very nice looking models for sale. Part of the interest stems from my desire to start using the lathe I bought some years back. I am currently looking for a small mill or a high end drill/mill. Anyways back to the whole solar powered Sterling Engine. I have been looking at parabolic mirrors to focus the incoming sunlight onto the heat chamber side of the engine. The issue is getting a mirror of this type with the size needed to drive and engine capable of producing somewhere in the range of 500 watts to 1kw. I have been researching some alternatives to this type of mirror including the method of allowing the reflective surface to form the focus point by itself. The a specific name for this is a Catenary Reflector. In the article in Make: it mentions that about a 1/4 hang versus width is pretty close to being a parabolic mirror and use to be considered a parabolic.

So the other day as I was driving home, I was listening to NPR...yes I do that a lot as most radio stations talk about nothing way too much, and they were discussing the plans for the new Nuclear Plants in the US. The Green Movement fanatic kept going on and on about how nuclear is a failed technology and how the Green Energy forms were the only way to go. He also discussed the environmental impact of the radioactive waste. Agreed there is waste, but the Green Movement always seems to forget that there are major environmental issues even with the green movements. Some of the things that most forget about most Green Methods of generating electricity are as follows n my mind:

You are reliant on something that is completely unpredictable. You cannot count on the sun, wind or any of the others to be steady and always be there, so you would need to combine at least 2 but probably 3 or 4 methods to be a viable alternative to a controlled source like a coal plant

You cannot easily increase or decrease production. This can also be said about typical power plants. The point I am trying to make is that the peak usage generally occurs at night, so your solar plant would be offline at this point or having to transmit the power very long distances. The same is true with the efforts to create power from tidal flow and geothermic. So the biggest issue with the green power movement is the ability to store the power created during non-peak usage but peak time for producing power. The only real method of storing power is batteries. The batteries and their production can and have been very damaging to the environment as they contain heavy metals and other toxins.

Above I referred to the speaker as a fanatic, which is not exactly fair, as he is probably just very passionate about the concepts of environmentally friendly energy. The point that most miss though is that there are issues with this energy and practical uses of it. A fully electric car sounds great and I would love a Tesla Motors car. But it has to be charged and that power has to come from somewhere, at night when the sun is gone. So the people screaming for the electric cars as being the only way to go that are also screaming about the new power plants being build (be them coal, nuclear or green) you cannot have one without the other.

I feel that we are going to have to address the production of power and figure out better ways to harness the avaliable power the environment provides. At the same time though the traditional power plants will ahve to exist to help fill the voids left in the system when using other methods. I was extremely happy to hear about California's law for putting solar panels on building, which makes perfect sense as the area is generally wasted space otherwise. Also what about the possiblitiy of harnessing the lsot power in parking lots? Parking lots produce a ton of heat that is just released back into the air. When I was a child, my dad fashioned a heater for the pool that consisted of a length of coiled black tubing ontop of a black board. He tapped off of the skimming unit. The coild was about 6' in length and the water that come out of the tube was hot enough to allow use to start swimming earlier and later than others in the area. How about continuing to improve solar panels so that they can be laid easily, preferably as shingles on houses to make the self sufficent during the day? There are a number of areas that we need to look at the waste energy that is being retransmitted as heat. Which brings us full circle backt to the Sterling Engine. An engine that can be run off of waste heat to drive generators. So would it be possible to bury piping in a parkign lot, fill the pipes with water, use the heated water to drive a helium filled Sterling Engine (multiple cylinder) and drive a generator that could offset the power use of the building with the parking lot?

The golden grail of all of the efforts for Green Energy and transportation is the development of safe high capacity batteries that do not cost a fortune. The Telsa Motor mentioned above at last check required a Lithium battery pack that ran about $30,000 and had to be replaced every so many years. hard to beat that old internal cumbustion engine that runs for decades with little repair. Yes you probably pay the $30,000 every few years in gas, but you do not feel it the same as a one time hit.