I should make multiple posts, I suppose, but I’m taking the shotgun approach and putting the current ideas all in one.

First, the upbeat part, Darlene Ryan‘s Five Minutes More is an excellent read.  Darlene writes YA novels, but I enjoy them anyway.  Five Minutes More‘s main character is a teenager whose father has committed suicide.  We enter at the funeral planning stage and continue from there.  We have multiple relationships in play from boyfriend to best friend to half-sister to new found male friend, to mom who’s devastated by the death too and too distracted to help.  Darlene seems to handle it all well.  While there’s a happy ending, it’s not a perfect future, and I appreciate that more realistic approach.  There are threads I’d like to know more about, but there wasn’t a realistic way to pursue them in the novel.  I have a minor quibble that the “five minutes more” theme did not continue or reappear after the opening scene.  It seemed like it might have a been a touchstone for D’Arcy to use or be reminded of to keep or bring her back on track as she faced some of her trying moments.  Minor quibble though.  I highly recommend this book.  It’s one of my favorite of Darlene’s works.

I’ve fought to disbelieve the notion that the NBA doesn’t like the see the small market Spurs in the playoffs.  I’m not saying the Spurs are necessarily contenders this year — but I won’t discount them either; I believe they have the talent and the heart to pull it off.  I see a lot of non-calls in the refereeing of the game that makes me wonder sometimes.  There’s also a dearth of reporting at the NBA.com level, including zero tweets from @nba (except for one tweet the day the Spurs announced Manu was out for the season and post-season).  Let’s just say my suspicion about the NBA’s disingenuousness is increasing.

Finally, we have Earth Day.  It’s been around for years.  It’s designed to encourage us to pause and reflect upon what we can do to take better care of our planet.  Now that there’s been an administration change in Washington, the people who want to take things over the top seem to think they have free reign to implement the most far-fetched of their desires.

On a small scale, at least locally, there’s talk of a seven cent tax on each plastic bag used for purchases.  I believe this is intended to encourage us to use reusable shopping bags.  I have several problems with this.  First, I don’t WANT plastic bags.  They’ve been shoved down my throat.  I prefer paper, and it seems the only place I can get them easily is the military commissary.  If my local authority decides to tax me for plastic bags I don’t want, I’ll be spending even more of my money at my local commissary, where I can get earth-friendly paper bags.  Second, if they’re going to charge me for plastic bags, I had better not find them doing the one item per bag and frequent double-bagging I see now.  I better not have the extra one that came off the rack by accident either.  Third, if I do use a reusable bag and happen to train myself to remember to bring it, impulse shopping will diminish.  If I take one bag in with me for the items I plan to pick up, I won’t have room for the three other bags I pick up as I browse the store.

What do I do for “greenness”?  Hubby and I maintain 100 acres of woods and hayfield.  Twelve of the one hundred acres are hayfield.  The rest are natural woods.  Eighty-eight acres of continuous birth, growth, death, and decay.  We have numerous wild animals:  racoons, deer, hogs, foxes, bobcats, snakes, armadilloes, squirrels, rabbits, numerous varieties of birds, and the occasional errant cow.  We collect the leaves from our other three properties and spread them on the roadbeds to mulch into the sand and reduce erosion.  We grind up tree debris (about half of it) to also spread on the roadbed.  We use fallen trees from the ranch for firewood in our fireplace. What has Al Gore done except have a “for show” Prius while he drives around in several SUVs kept running while he gives his “save the planet” speeches?

Which brings the whole carbon credit scam to mind.  Mr Gore claims he buys carbon credits to offset his jetsetting and other polluting ways.   That consists of claiming someone who isn’t polluting balances out someone who is.  It’s a joke.  For now, somone’s profiting from it, but it sure seems like a ripoff to me.

Our Central Texas house, built in 1900, has high ceilings and transoms designed to naturally cool the interior.  Modern “greenies” would do well to study pre-central air conditioning technology homes for the natural heating and cooling capabilities.  Instead of painting over the transoms and tearing out the adjusting mechanisms, they would do well to consider the advantages offered by those capabilities.

Mostly I resent the implication that only the radical environmentalists care about this planet and only their methods will save it from ultimate destruction.  Radical environmentalists seem to have some kind of god complex that only they can stop mother nature from her appointed rounds and reverse the natural tendencies of the earth’s heating and cooling cycles.  If everyone doesn’t do as they say, we’re all doomed.  I hate to break it to you, but we’re all doomed anyway.  If not environmentally by a leadership dead set on mortgaging our great-grandchildren’s economic future.

I’m not going to tackle my outrage at the apologists for America.  At least not today.