One more for KwkDrw!

Renewable energy is lurking in the background but doesn’t seem to be leaping forward as I once thought it would. Maybe that’s because it’s an idea with too many possible expressions of itself, like a river that has become a delta.

No clear single alternative has as yet emerged for transport. We can go partly electric with a hybrid, fully electric, needing to plug in every couple of hours or exchang battery packs. We could generate as we go with fuel cells using Hydrogen, but no support for these latter options exist so we still buy petrol or diesel vehicles.

Using existing delivery systems, we could go bio-diesel using vegetable oils (not sustainable), diesel fuel from algae but that’s still a long way off, or we could use 100% ethanol if we could brew enough of it.

Hydrogen generated by electrolysis on site at wind or solar farms (or geothermal or wave, or tidal or, or, or…) is another exciting concept that is hampered by lack of a delivery system. In other words, Hydrogen could replace oil, but with so few vehicles, there is little demand for Hydrogen and with no delivery system, miniscule demand for vehicles.

Honda has taken the plunge and released its hydrogen powered fuel cell car and
Gm has just passed a million miles of testing with its version, not yet released for sale and other carmakers are hurrying to get theirs ready.

But it’s still a chicken and egg conundrum. Before there is a widespread roll out of support infrastructure there exists the belief there must be a huge investment similar to national railway, a postal system or a high speed broadband system. However, unlike those clear cut needs, energy is a now a nightmare of competing technologies with so much room for expensive redundancies.

That may be the crux of the problem. Large scale commitment and investment is fraught with danger of error so perhaps we need a new paradigm.

Maybe the day of centralised power production and fuel delivery is passing and we will generate most electricity locally, fill our car with hydrogen from the house supply (Honda has one that generates house power and Hydrogen for the car running on natural gas) and if we have an electric commuter car, plug it in at home and top it up at the parking station, itself producing much of its needs from roof top panels.

What an exciting time for urban planners as solar passive accommodation uses geo cooling and heating, stores rainwater and reuses grey water for flushing WC’s from where it goes on to be processed into fertilizer. Solar arrays, partnered by unlimited charge/discharge batteries can supply buildings and hook up with existing grids to transmit low loss DC power between communities. Some dream while local government seems to be driven by developers and their high energy McMansions breed like bacteria on agar!

And aeroplanes? Well, Hydrogen powered planes may not be able to leap across oceans in a single bound and horrors, we may need to break our journey for refuelling in some Polynesian paradise that generates Hydrogen as an industry. While we wait, we could maybe take a dip in an ocean that has begun to give up its stored CO2. What an achievement that would be!

'Pascal's Wager'.

QwkDrw has prompted me to expand on the renewable energy theme.

There must be a time when we realise the planet cannot continue to support human life in the manner to which some of it has become accustomed. It seems acid seas, polluted air and land, multiplying populations, loss of species and habitat, climate change and mountains of non-degradable rubbish etc are not enough to frighten us into taking decisive action now.

My beef, for over thirty years, has been that the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive the fix will become. We will never be more equipped to change the way we generate power and manage resources than we are now. We have the technology and we have the wealth. It has been said that if the Rudd Government had spent the stimulus package on renewable energy, this country would have come close to carbon neutrality within a decade. Maybe so, and it didn't happen so what now?

For anyone who doubts the science of climate change, or doesn’t want to look in case it might requries a change in lifestyle, consider this ‘Pascal’s Wager’.

1. Greenhouse gases are causing climate change and we fix it, we’re OK.
2. Greenhouse gases are not causing the problem and we ‘fix it’, we’re still OK and we enjoy other benefits, like saving the oceans from disastrous acidification.
3. Greenhouse gases are causing the problem and we don’t fix it, we’re buggered.

Waiting for irrefutable evidence is like the sky diver who says, (when told he might have forgotten to put on his parachute).
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll check after the jump!”

How cool is solar!

There are more cold stores in Brisbane than I ever imagined. Some are huge, think Big W on ice and multiply that by the three or four that I visited, then think maybe a few hundred others as big as a small house, then thousands as big as a room.

Being a climate change tragic, having designed and built a solar passive house in 1960, wrote letters, harassed politicians for decades, wrote plays (‘20-20 Vision’ in 1990) and even a political suspense novel about climate change (no sign of a publisher so far), basically making a nuisance of myself for half a century, I wondered at the sustainability of such huge cold stores.

So you see where I am coming from. When I was looking at the refrigeration units that ran these stores, their umbilicals as thick as your arm sucking power from the grid I wondered ‘how could we ever hope to generate that much power from renewables’!

Then my thoughts ran to the pattern of demand. Days require more than nights. Doors opening and closing gain heat, adding more daytime need. Hotter days demand more than cooler days and so on. Then I did the maths as far as I was able.

A typical large cool store, say, 50mX50m covers an area of about 2,500 m2. A roof that size would accommodate enough solar panels to generate 250K, or about 1,000 amps at 240V for an average eight hours a day. That adds up to 8,000 amp hours and must go a long way to providing enough power to run the thing. So, except for cloudy days, generation would roughly parallel demand. Fairly neat.

The same applies to solar generation for desalination plants. The sunnier the weather, the greater the demand. Really neat. So why aren’t we going there?

Driver Report 3. (last for now)

I used to say: ‘before anyone is allowed to be a pedestrian he or she should be a driver’.
Pedestrians take risks around vehicles that curl the hair. They walk behind reversing pantechnicons, ignoring the beep-beep-beep, seemingly unaware that the driver probably can’t see them. Now I say that every car driver should drive a truck first.

Of course over the two weeks I drove for Sean, I was terrorised by all sorts of motorised stupidity, with cars ignoring turning indicators, pushing past on either side until with the lane running out, I just had to move across the line slowly to reinforce the message that I needed to change lanes.

For years, since I gave up being suicidal, I have driven as if we drivers are all part of a team, moving in ways to maximise the team’s performance, allowing people into queues, using the ‘zipper’ technique in merging traffic and so on with the result I have never injured anyone despite a few prangs over almost sixty years of driving.

That almost changed in Sandgate Road Brisbane at about nine O’clock on Friday. Up ahead, traffic had stopped so I began to change the gears down, braking gently leaving plenty of room to stop.

Suddenly, a small sedan appeared from the kerbside lane travelling at something over the limit, swerved in front of me just before the lane ended with a blockage of parked cars. Then, and not until then, the driver saw that traffic in my lane had stopped. She still had plenty of room ahead, but was spooked and gave the car a panic brake test not three metres in front of me. Luckily my foot was already poised over the pedal, so the brakes bit immediately.

All six wheels locked up, fighting to stop as ten tons of load and truck seemed to accelerate towards the little faces of three uniformed and behatted school kids in the rear seat, alerted to their possible demise by screeching tyres and blue smoke from scorched rubber blown forward around the little car.

Whether she realised I was there, or whether the traffic began to move and she accelerated in response, I will never know. But suddenly the gap widened from the ten centimetres to which it had shrunk to widen rapidly as she fled the scene.

I pulled over for a few minutes to let my heart rate come down, narrowly escaping cardiac arrest. I sat, sweating and breathing deeply for a while, had a drink of water then very gingerly guided the old thing back into the traffic. After going over the incident a few times, replaying the tape in my head, I gave her a pat on the dash and thanked her for having great brakes.

PS. I guess the take-home message is that discs all round with low profile sports tyres are no defence against ten tons of steel climbing up your boot lid!
PPS. Most drivers of both genders are courteous, but truck drivers as a group are clearly the safest people on the road! Comments not welcome. :-)

Driver report 2.

Friday:

“Quick one today mate, no problems!’
Why did I believe him!

Different truck, smaller and air conditioned, but the running sheet was again very short on detail and the day was stretched by several false starts and one misspelled street name to be twelve hours of frustration.

Parting words from me:
“Sean, if you can’t give me that addresses of the drops and pick-ups, I can’t do it. I need it all, like street number, street name, suburb and post code.”
“Post code! Waddaya doin’? Posting (expletive deleted) letters!”
“No, but the GPS doesn’t always like your spelling. A post code gets me close and I can ask someone.”
“OK, I’ll get it off the computer. Happy?”
“No, if you can, I’d also like a phone number.”
“Shit!”
“Look, I don’t need the stress. I want to do a good job, that’s all! Like, I need all the help I can get!”
“OK,OK!”

Monday morning:

Valentines Day must be close!
Another full load of roses in the big truck and a running sheet with… Glory be! Addresses! Not all, but most.
Only five drops and four pick ups.
“A piece of piss!” I’m assured.
And it was, up until the hospital.

One huge pallet of mixed fruit and veg aboard for delightful Maleney, promising 120 kms of eye candy, winding through the Glasshouse Mountains, plus some chilled meat and cheese for two other drops, further along the beautiful knife edged range at Montville, picture perfect village behind the Sunshine Coast where the view is worth the drive anytime.

Hospital instructions were detailed. ‘Go in the main entrance. I can’t get in with the semi, so call me when you get there and I’ll meet you later to take that package. Call Suzie (number supplied) and she’ll meet you outside the lobby with the package.’

Like he said, ‘A piece of piss’.
Driving a small sedan into a hospital main entrance requires faith, but taking a huge freezer van in requires absolute stupidity. But, I was following orders and did as told.

The building is new, with grey aluminium shaded walkways beside roadways separated by Agapanthus gardens. At the end is the covered portico, too low for me to enter, but there is a gap in the garden wide enough for me to turn and just enough room for vehicles to pass on every side if needed.

A look around. Where is Suzie? I park and climb down.
Before I have time to wonder if I am at the wrong hospital (there was no mention of ‘Public’ or ‘Private’ and there they were side by side), the parking Nazi was there.
“Yer can’t park there mate!”
Some mate!
“Look, I’m just here to pick up a medical package. It’s being brought out.”
“No matter mate, you move now or I call the police.”
The phone was at the ready and I have always had a problem with uniforms so I complied.
“Where do I park?”
“There, in the taxi rank.” A pointing finger indicated a space about a millimetre longer than the truck.

Reverse parking is easy in an MX5. In a six pallet van with no rear vision, not so easy.
Back I came, eyes darting from mirror to mirror like I was watching Federer and Hewitt, all going well until I heard a sound like a crushing beer can.
Emergency stop and a sinking stomach.

Too high to be seen in the mirrors, I had not noticed the shade awning, all new, grey and shining aluminium overhanging the kerb by maybe ten centimetres. Its perfect line and curve were now destroyed. It really was a small ding, but in the midst of such perfection it was as noticeable as the gap left by nine-eleven.

And he was quick. By the time I checked I had not run over an old lady in a wheel chair, there was the security bloke, notebook in hand taking down info from the truck door.

“Licence!” he demanded and I complied.
“Sorry about that. Lucky I wasn’t hurt!”
He looked at me as if I’d lost it.
“Might have had to find a hospital!” smiling, to let him know it was really a joke. It was a bit lame, but considering how bloody stupid I felt, it was about as funny as I could manage.
“Shit happens!” he grumbled as he finished his report.
Suzie arrived ten minutes too late to save my hide. And the package! The package was only just too large for the average trouser pocket. It looked like a match box inside the almost empty of the freezer van.

But Suzie’s tardiness had started an expanding ripple on the pond of consequences. That, the unreasonable demands of the parking Fuehrer and my compliant nature resulted in an unfortunate sequence of events that will be long and costly. I reckoned the income from that pick up would be about ten dollars while the repair bill could be two or three thousand as I hoped Sean’s insurance covered dented hospital awnings.

Driving Report 1.

It should be compulsory for everyone to do teacher training.

Thursday.
The running sheet looked like a cryptic crossword puzzle. The directions seemed to bear little relationship to the task. When I agreed to drive for Sean I had stressed that Brisbane was a mystery to me, an ex-Sydneyite. But all I got to guide me to unknown destinations were nicknames of businesses and sometimes a road name, not always spelled correctly.
Navman hates misspelled street names.

The hour late start from the first pick up was not an auspicious omen. The open door revealed eleven pallets of long stemmed roses double stacked to fill almost all available space plus one pallet of chilled crabs. Note that the roses were numbered eleven in a six-pallet truck. That left one pallet of roses not double stacked.

First pick up was half a dozen tubs of iced mullet (apparently being returned to the supplier and already a few days old) to be squeezed in under the odd bin of roses. Loading was delayed by fifteen minutes by a garbage truck blocking the loading bay while he worked his way through at least twenty-five bins of shop refuse while I and the fish shop bloke waited and the mullet sat in the sun. Added next were twenty-three boxes of de-boned ham which were precariously perched on top of the crabs. A cockroach would have had trouble finding an entry point.

At last, with the first drop planned, well, I did punch a street name into the GPS, I was away. But the street was long and the flower wholesaler hadn’t bothered with a street-front sign, so after missing it in the first pass and needing to go at least a K to find a place to U-turn, I rang the boss.

“It’s down the back beside a dance school or something. You’ll find it.”
Right! I couldn't miss the dance palace sign and drove in.
Nothing there except a bemused dance instructor who had no use for a million roses or pallet of mullet, so I backed all the way out, beep, beep, beep…, turned around and crept along the road, stopping at every driveway for over a kilometre until there it was, almost totally obscured by a buttress. ‘Pine Valley’ and the flowers were gone.

The mullet again sat in the sun while the roses were fork lifted out. Next time the doors were opened there was a distinct but still not overwhelming smell of mullet. One down and nineteen to go.

There are fifty-four Hope Streets in Queensland, about half in the greater Brisbane area, so the next clue, just two words, ‘Hope St’ didn’t cut it, so it was onto the phone for the tenth time at least to get more info. Sean was driving a semi himself, so was not always in phone range, so I asked Scotty. His help was not all that helpful.
“Head along until you see the pub.”
“Name of the pub?”
‘Buggered if I know, but you’ll see it. Anyway, don’t turn there, go on ‘til you see the Toyota dealer and you’re close. OK? Better still, turn at the pub and take the next left after the park...” And so it went, all confusing and time wasting.
Teachers are trained to organise information in a logical sequence and impart it in a way that is clear to the student. Some teachers don’t get it either, but at least they try.

By five that afternoon, at least ten unnecessary trips to places that didn’t exist, numerous desperate calls to Telstra ‘Call Connect’, tracking down businesses to get addresses and the fish were eventually unloaded. The remaining cargo, now too late for ‘same day’ delivery was at last not threatened by the smell.

A last call to Sean and he seemed relaxed.
“Forget it mate, just drive safely home”.
My last words to him: “If you want me to drive tomorrow, I need addresses. Like, it’s handy to know where I’m supposed to be going!”

Keeps me on the roads

It was hilarious watching the faces.

Scotty, about forty, separated and a bit testy at his ex, filled in the details as we barrelled down the M1 with a load of chilled fish bound for Brisbane’s sushi bars.
He had an audience for the first time and took advantage. After all, I was his captive for two whole days as I was taken around his run as training for my new casual job, driving the six pallet chill truck.

“Yell out if you want coffee!”
An apparently humane offer, considering the breakfast free five AM start at a Mooloolaba cool store, inside which very sharp knives in expert hands reduced huge swordfish into steaks.
“OK, whenever it suits you!”
Wrong! It never suited Scotty. He never stops. Drinks his coke while driving, eats while driving, gets updates on schedules while driving and talked to his eight year old many times by phone, also while driving.

Scotty doesn’t stop for anything except pick-ups and drop-offs. Forget smokos, tea and meal breaks or rest periods. Welcome to the real world or free enterprise. I did the math and asked if the truck made money. A guarded ‘yes’ revealed the truth. If the drivers don’t run all day, the trucks lose money and the jobs go. It’s survival of the fittest out there, and they need to be fit!

The stares were funny. At each stop, we carried boxes of swordfish or tuna into shops and I was introduced as the guy doing work experience. Each time the double take as my age was estimated, probably correctly and the not always verbal reaction was: “This must be a joke!”
But joke it was not. What prompted a mid seventies SOB to go back to work in such a demanding job had them scratching their heads. “Why?” was the occasional question and I answered with the truth.
‘Anybody living on a boat knows the age pension doesn’t make it’.

I must say, people were cheerful and pleasant everywhere we went, maybe because Scotty is such a nice bloke or maybe because they are like that with everyone. A bit of both, I reckon. Later, I might have something to say about the shop where every morsel was weighed before the receipt was signed and what that said about business practices in whatever country the owner originated.

Driven by the need to find the readies to have Tiziana surveyed for insurance drove me, in a rash moment, to offer my rusty services. Sean was stuck for an appropriate licence holder to fill in for the occasional unavailable driver. Chilled fish needs to get there now, not next week when a sick driver returns. So here I was, balancing the big wheels between lane markers that were suddenly narrower than I ever remembered them.

I completed my full driving day on Friday, no bent panels, no scratched paint, no skittled pedestrians or cyclists and only the occasional red face when a gear was missed. But I was buggered!

If anyone reads this and you are, for some inexplicable reason, interested in how I cope next week, I will try to marshal the energy for a report. A comment would be good, even if it is only a “Tsk! Tsk!”

The third shoe

Anyone living here knows how hot it has been. Working in a kitchen is even hotter, so we took a break and drove over to Warana beach for a swim.
So tired after long days baking, packing hampers and delivering hams, cakes and puddings all over, we dumped our clothes next to the flag and staggered into the cooling surf to loll around, not enough energy for real swimming, pushed in and out by the small waves, luxuriating in the relief, relaxing tired muscles and tireder minds.

I was born at the peak of power of the Third Reich. Hitler was plundering and killing, demonising Jews readying his constituency for the coming genocide while France was still drinking wine in her delightful cafes, not quite believing it was happening again.
Chamberlain still called the mad dictator Mr Hitler and hoped it would all go away. Of course it didn’t and as they say, ‘the rest is history’.

For most Australians of my age, that and the threat of rape and pillage by rampant militant Japanese, systematically gobbling up the Asian land bridge to Australia, was a traumatic time. I use the term in its correct meaning. It wasn’t just extremely threatening. It created a life long fear that still reverberates through people who were children then. Whenever we hear German spoken or see Japanese people we remember. It fades but never leaves.

When guilt drove us back to the beach, nowhere near fully refreshed but feeling better than before, we collected our clothes and returned to the kitchen. An hour or so later we had had enough for the day and headed home. Stopping for petrol, I couldn’t find my wallet.

I remembered having held it in my hand as I picked up my clothes at the beach and was reminded with a pang of fear that it contained several hundred dollars, money I had loaned to IXL that she paid back in cash.

A frantic search of the car drew a blank so we raced back to the beach, arriving just as the life guard was packing up his toys. “No”. No wallet had been handed in.
Back to the sand, looking for a mark where the flag had been. Nothing.

Then we noticed an excited looking lady, waddling her plump frame in our direction and waving her arms frantically with a wide smile lighting her sun burnt face.
Her husband dragged himself to his feet and followed her slowly, clearly the less agile of the two.

He held in his hand my old wallet and was calling out in a mixture of German, of which I understand abut ten words and very accented unintelligible English.
They were so excited we had returned looking for the wallet, we must have appeared unenthusiastic in comparison. The man pressed the wallet into one hand while he vigorously shook the other and the woman hugged LJ in her joy.

I resisted the temptation to look inside to check on the cash until we had thanked them, said our good-byes and were back at the car and out of sight. It was all there as I had expected.

We used to say; “The only good German is a dead German.”
Of course I haven’t thought that for many decades, but the simple honesty of those lovely people who must have suffered so terribly at the hands of Hitler then from Allied bombing and then on through the cold war and the partition of their fatherland were still able to rejoice in such a simple thing as the loss and return a stranger’s old wallet.

Waiting for the third shoe to drop.

The happy ham scammer was soon forgotten in the rush and looking back, it was a hundred invested in our education. But the well dressed elderly lady at Noosa was something else.

She came to the stall and pushed to the front when we were busy.
“I’ve come for the pudding I ordered last week.”
She looked classy and proud, a no-nonsense lady of maybe sixty-five.
I was busy serving and handing out change, only partly aware of the exchange beside me.
LJ began flicking through the orders, carefully arranged by numbers, with names, addresses and phone numbers recorded along with the amount paid.

“Do you have your receipt?”
She delved into her shoulder bag for a second.
“Must have left it at home. Name’s Smith. Paid Wednesday.”
“We’re not here on Wednesdays, we’re only here on Sundays.”
That’s it, I paid you on Saturday. I paid for a pudding!”
She was becoming excited, attracting attention as onlookers became aware something out of the ordinary was happening. She pointed to the Christmas cakes and Dolce Fortes.
“I got them too and ordered the pudding and paid for the lot on Saturday!”

LJ was still leafing through the order book as the crowd thickened. Some grew tired of waiting and drifted off, sales missed.
“You say you paid on Saturday?” LJ asked. “Did you pay at Eumundi?”
“No, I paid you here on Saturday.”
“But we’re only here on Sundays. We were at Eumundi on Saturday, in the sheds.”
“Well it must have been Sunday. All I know is, I paid for a pudding and I want it now!”

On the way to look at LJ, my eyes passed over the crowd. They had the fidgets, becoming impatient as she frantically leafed through the order book for the third or fourth time. I engaged her eyes, shrugged and picked up a pudding, handing it over.

My wry ‘Merry Christmas’ was as lost on her as it was on the perplexed onlookers. She was gone. I lost sight of her as she had disappeared into the crowd clutching her purloined pudding and I was drawn back to the waiting customers.

But I continued to follow her progress in my mind, maybe on her way to claim other real goods, secured by imaginary deposits made last Wednesday, or Saturday or Sunday on other imaginary orders.

Come in Spinner!

If took twenty-four hours too long to recognise the trick. We should have known, but when the tall New Zealander turned up at the kitchen door with a wad of cash and an order for six premium hams and six puddings, a sale of somewhere like six hundred bucks. It got IXL’s attention!
“Look! she grinned, “I’ll take one ham now and pick up six hams and puddings tomorrow.”
I collected the ham, placed it in a cool bag and deposited it into the boot of her beat up Nissan as instructed.

As I walked in again, she had placed the ham money, seventy something dollars on the desk in front of IXL and the money for the future sale of six in front of herself and was saying,
“I just won twenty-five grand on Lotto and I want these people here,” she said, waving a fine brown arm towards the kitchen where Deb was baking Christmas tarts and Rae was packing hampers, “to have some champagne on me.”

She took two ten cent pieces from a dish on the desk, handed one to IXL and held one in her hand.
“Here’s what I’ll do… mind, this has nothing to do with the six hams and puddings I’ll pick up tomorrow. I’ll bet you the seventy there against the six hundred I have here that I can pick heads or tails of two coins we throw up like this.”
She then flicked one of the coins and caught it, slapped it down on the desk and grinned.
It was a tail.

“It can’t be fairer than that. Here,” passing the other coin to IXL, “You try.”
IXL flicked the coin and slapped it down, revealing another ‘tail’.
“That’s it!” the Kiwi laughed. “Now this has nothing to do with tomorrow’s six hams. You call heads or tails and then we throw the coins until we get two of what you call, or I get the opposite. OK?”
We both nodded, wondering why she would bet her six hundred bucks against IXL’s seventy on what was clearly an even bet.

As if she head read our thoughts, she assured us that “I don’t care if I lose, I won plenty and I just want those people there to have some champagne on me!”

That’s when I had a mental niggle but nothing specific came so I said nothing.
IXL chose tails, I guess because two tails had already been thrown and the bet was on.
Up went the coins and they were slapped down. My side had a tail and the other was a head.

Next throw, again IXL got a tail and the other was a head then it was over. IXL threw a head and the other coin was a head. A big brown hand grabbed the pot and it disappeared into her jeans only to reappear accompanied by a hearty laugh.
“Look, I really do want you to win. I’ll give you a chance to get it back!” she grinned. “I bet all this against a pudding.”
I couldn’t believe it. She was betting almost seven hundred against a thirty dollar pudding. I knew the puddings were then best around, but seven hundred bucks!?

IXL looked at me for assurance which I stupidly gave.
“Chances are even and you’re on a hundred to one shot.” I said, airing my impeccable knowledge of odds. “You’d be crazy not to try.”
So on it went. IXL chose tails and after a few tosses she lost again. The pudding disappeared out the door to join the ham.

Next day it hit me. I hardly had the heart to tell IXL, but I had to.
At school when I was about ten years old, we learned to toss a shilling in the same way. We could almost always predict the outcome. Start with a ‘tail’ showing and flick. Catch it and turn it over and it almost always came up heads.

With the call made before the throw, our wily ham snatcher knew what she needed to get. In the excitement and in front of a gathering group of bystanders, nobody noticed how she carefully chose which side was up before flicking.
There was always a chance she could lose but I remember at school, way back then, throwing maybe a hundred correct calls in a row.

Of course, she didn’t come back for the six hams and puddings. We had been scammed, victims of just a little greed and my faltering long term memory.