Kirsten Mortensen's blog

Glenn Reynolds has been advocating the adoption of flex-fuel technology for our cars. The basic idea is that if our cars could run on ethanol and methanol as well as gasoline, we’d reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

The cost to convert our cars would be about $100 per.

Leave aside the ominous suggestion–on odd one coming from the good professor–that the technology be government-mandated, and it may well be a fine idea. But there’s another option that would be simpler to implement and would cost a whole lot less.

I first read about it in this article about hypermiler Wayne Gerdes.

Hypermilers try to improve their gas mileage by changing the way they drive.

Gerdes has taken the idea to an extreme–including doing things that are arguably unsafe.

But there’s still something here for the rest of us those of us–stuff like not accelerating so quickly at green lights, using cruise control for highway driving, and coasting to stops when possible.

The upside: according to this article on CNN.com, adopting some of the hypermilers’ techniques could reduce our national gas consumption by 35 percent.

It would help, of course, if we could get immediate feedback on how much gas we’re using, as we use it. And we can: according to Gerdes, it would cost only $10-20 to install fuel consumption gauges in our cars.

Personally, I don’t want our politicians mandating any auto upgrades–too much potential for mischief. But I’d gladly spend an extra $20 myself to be able to monitor my gas consumption in real time.

And hey, if that 35 percent figure is anything like correct, the gauges would about pay for themselves by the time we get home from the new car lot.

Technorati Tags: hypermilers, flex-fuel, gasoline consumption, foreign oil

Of all the things I’ve read lately about our current coaster ride, the most revealing was this couple of paragraphs, way down in a January 15 piece in the Wall Street Journal by Susan Pulliam and Serena Ng, titled “Default Fears Unnerve Markets.”

The article is about a class of derivatives called credit-default swaps. If you’ve never heard of them, it’s because they aren’t the sort of deals available to the the likes of you and me. The article does its best to explain them by analogy: they “work like a side bet on a football game.” Institutional traders place bets based on the perceived odds that other parties will default on bonds or loans. Then they buy and sell their bets amongst themselves.

Here’s the bit that opened my eyes:

With no central trade processing of credit-default swaps, defining trading-partner risks can be a Herculean task. Mr. [Warren] Buffett learned the difficulty of unraveling such complex instruments in 2002 when he directed General Re Corp., a reinsurer that had been acquired by his Berkshire Hathaway Inc., to pull back from the business of these swaps and other derivatives. It took General Re four years to whittle the business from 23,218 contracts to 197 by the end of 2006.

Doing so involved tracking down hundreds of counterparties to General Re’s trades, many of which Mr. Buffett and his colleagues had never heard of, he says, including a bank in Finland and a small loan company in Japan, to name just two. One contract, Mr. Buffett says, was designed to run for 100 years. “We lost over $400 million on contracts that were supposedly” safe and properly priced, “and we did it in a leisurely way in a benign market,” Mr. Buffett says. “If we had to unwind it in one month, who knows what would have happened?”

We’re about to find out “what would have happened” because it’s unfolding right now. Bets are getting called. People are finding out that liabilities they pushed out the door a long time ago have invited themselves back in and are licking their lips, ready to start biting arse. The stock market makes the headlines but it’s only a proxy for the real bloodbath.

Keep your fingers out of the way if you can.

Technorati Tags: economy, stock market

What you can’t really tell from the picture is how tiny she is. She weighs 20 pounds.

She’s about 6 months old–she has her adult teeth.

She came from a kill shelter in Ohio with two litter mates and her mom. A Beagle-Lab mix.

I’ll post more about her soon but at this point I’m too busy pinching myself. I never thought I’d luck into such a sweet thing so quickly . . . I thought when I submitted an application (to Black Dog, Second Chance, a local rescue organization) I’d be put on a waiting list, behind all the other approved applicants looking for dogs, and have to wait . . . But the fact is there are so many like this little girl who need homes, they were thrilled to give me first dibs on her . . .

Technorati Tags: dogs, animal rescue

I’ve lived with three dogs in my life. The first was Biddy, the dog we had when I was growing up. I’ll let my dad blog about her if he likes–she was his dog, and he used to hunt with her–but suffice to say, she was a dream dog: gentle and smart. An English springer mix, black and white, slender and more slope shouldered and more mellow than show Springers.

My next dog was a Dobie mix I picked from a litter of puppies in Vestal, New York, when I was 19 years old. I had her for 14 years, living off-campus while I got my BA so that I could have her with me, and on through the ensuing years, through many moves, some important relationships with (thankfully dog tolerant) people. She was a wonderful dog in many ways as well: strong, relentlessly upbeat, absolutely devoted to me. She was also a highly active dog, and when circumstances found me moving from the country to the burbs, the adjustment we had to make was a jarring one. I didn’t even own a leash for the first 10 years of her life, for instance. Let alone have a clue how to train a dog to walk on one.

Laykey was my crude attempt to find a dog who would fit better into a suburban environment. Corgis were bred as all around farm dogs–yes, for herding, too (droving, to be precise)–but they don’t have that need for hours of high-intensity exercise of say a Border Collie. They were more general purpose dogs. (And tell you what, nobody could come anywhere near my house, when Laykey was alive, without my knowing it. She raised plenty of false alarms [SQUIRREL ON THE PORCH! SQUIRREL ON THE PORCH!] but that’s an acceptable trade-off, IMO, for knowing I had a keen extra set of eyes & ears watching my property.) Corgis were bred to stick around the house, keep an eye on things, push the stock around once in awhile if asked to, lay low otherwise. Literally ha ha ha.*

So I knew Laykey would be happy in a world where leash walks, not hours-long rambles in the woods, counted as exercise–and I was right.

Where I missed the dingy was in considering other aspects of temperament.

Some might say that my fundamental error was in picking a purebred dog, and in some respects that’s a valid assumption, although not for the reasons most people have in mind. When I handed that substantial sum of money to her breeder, I rather thought it would buy me a certain sort of experience. Silly me.

I still believe that finely bred dogs can be excellent companion animals–it wasn’t the purebred/mutt choice that got me, but the lack of guidance. Laykey’s parentage didn’t let me down–her breeder did.

That said, I’m not going to do a purebred next time. Or I should say, purebred isn’t the spec. I’m going to choose my next dog by the company she keeps. I’ve begun, already, by looking into a couple different local rescue groups, and in a more-or-less random act, picking Black Dog, Second Chance. There are others, and if you’re looking for a dog, check Petfinder, you’ll find some in your area as well.

Here’s why I’m doing this. First, by working with a rescue organization I’m supporting people who place dogs that would otherwise, quite likely, be euthanized. So there’s the doing-the-right thing aspect. (This particular group focuses, although not exclusively, on black dogs, because they tend to be harder to place; according to their website, black dogs on average languish in shelters three times longer than light-colored dogs–which, if it’s a “kill shelter,” is tantamount to a death sentence.)

Another plus: rescue organizations, at least ideally, are staffed by people who want their dogs to be a good fit with the people who adopt them. This isn’t about finding a home, any home–this isn’t a game of “you touched the dog last, now he’s your responsibility.” BD,SC isn’t going to try to persuade me to take a dog that I’m not 100 percent comfortable committing to–in fact, I have the option of fostering a prospective adoptee for a week or two to see if she’s a good fit. That’s advantage number three. Even if I don’t ultimately adopt a particular dog, Ill be contributing by giving someone else’s future canine buddy a place to camp for awhile. I don’t have to feel badly, no matter what the outcome–I’m doing the dog a good turn.

I feel good about this.

There’s the issue of timing. Laykey hasn’t been gone very long. I still find myself expecting to see her. Expecting her to pounce, thrilled, on a bit of lettuce I’ve dropped on the floor. (Lettuce, really!)

I still get weepy over her–I saw one of my nextdoor neighbors for the first time since Christmas yesterday, and broke up when I told her Laykey is no more.

On the other hand, there are dozens of dogs in the Rochester area who need homes. And I want a dog. And when it comes down to it, I don’t think it’s disrespectful to take another dog in while still mourning a bit. One doesn’t take away from the other.

So if the right dog becomes available, I’m going to move on it.

I’m making a few preparatory arrangements. The most important: I’d been considering, for years, fencing in a portion of my yard–not for “dog storage” but as a place for supervised play and off-leash training.

Laykey would have adored it.

Add that to my regrets . . .

I’m not going to make the same mistake twice. I’ve gotten a quote and it’s a reasonable one, and being winter it shouldn’t take long to get the work done.

It means I’m giving up, for the next few years, my other fancy–the backyard vegetable garden. But I’ve lived without a garden for a long time now; I can manage a little longer. And if I don’t put in the garden, there’s no need to remove the massive silver maple someone planted smack dab in the middle of my back yard 50 or 60 years ago–little realizing it would one day render that space unusable for anything except . . . maintaining a massive silver maple.

But. It is a big old tree, a certain Englishman voted last summer to spare its life, and it’s got this huge leader (think “a second trunk that starts partway up”) that is dead–and the woodpeckers love it. There was a red-bellied woodpecker on it just the other day, when I walked back to consider it again.

An arborist took the same walk with me today and agreed the leader isn’t particularly dangerous–if I want to leave it for the woodpeckers, I should leave it for the woodpeckers.

Good. The tree stays, the garden idea gives way to the doggie play yard idea, and the woodpeckers will give my next dog something to bark at. If she’s a “looking up” sort of dog. My Dobie mix used to look up–if I said “birds!” she would look up and bark at birds flying overhead. Silly dog.

I can’t imagine living without a dog.

*This is a “Corgi’s got short legs” joke . . .

Technorati Tags: dogs

Most nights my culinary audience is limited to a nine-year old girl whose idea of an “awesome, mom!” meal is boxed mac & cheese. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But if I cooked to her taste only, we’d eat mostly chicken, rice, and run of the mill stirfried vegetables. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But I’m well past the point of boredom with our diet — and a few days ago, I found myself picking up a celery root.

And then, this morning, a package of D’artagnan wild boar sage sausages.

I didn’t even know I was going to pair them until a few minutes after I’d put the sausage into my basket — but that’s exactly what I did, and it turned into an amazing meal.

And simple. I peeled the celery root, diced it pretty small, then sauteed it in butter until it was tender and lightly browned. It couldn’t have taken more than 15 minutes or so. Added a splash of sherry vinegar, salt, pepper, and chopped flat leaf parsley. Meanwhile I’d fried the sausages and fixed a green salad.

The combination was outrageously good — the gamey, spicey sausage with the sweet, buttery celery root. But it got better — I’d also picked up a bottle of Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Fleurie on my way home from Wegman’s. I was about halfway through my meal when it flashed through my mind that the wine would be the third perfect element.

Now to recruit a dinner guest. Heh.

Technorati Tags: recipes, wine