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solar panel umbrella
Friday, May 16 2008
Despite the weather, with temperatures in the low 50s and nearly constant rain, today I installed the plumbing deck plumbing that will allow me to switch between running the solar panels in serial and parallel. While the weather wasn't ideal for such work, it would have been worse had the sun been shining and the pipes been full of scalding hydronic fluid. Indeed, even with overcast conditions, water in one of the solar panels was warm to the touch. This work wasn't as miserable as it would have been had not the large homebrew solar panel served as an umbrella, protecting me and my soldering from the rain.
This evening Gretchen prepared a pizza and I straightened up the house in preparation for another Friday night pizza and beer. This time our guests would be Dennis the dentist and his wife Laura (who had never visited before). At some point conversation turned to politics this way: Gretchen mentioned that, what with her new prison-related job, we finally have proper health insurance. To this I added, "Yeah, it doesn't matter any more whether Obama fixes health care or not." Disturbingly, I've noticed a fair amount of wishful and/or deluded thinking about McCain, even in circles I'm in contact with. When I was down in Virginia back in January, my father, a radical environmentalist, said McCain wasn't actually all that bad on the environment (relatively speaking, of course). And tonight Dennis claimed that McCain, Clinton, and Obama all had essentially the same health care plan. I had to set him straight on that one; in McCain's new form as an orthodox Republican, there is no problem that can't be fixed with tax cuts, including health care. That's all well and good if you happen to pay lots of taxes.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?080516 feedback
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