taco truck now has mole poblano on friday nights

happy happy happy

Trip to Bali: the conference pretty much controlled our time from 7:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. (This included meals). But the meals were mostly eaten at the Beach. (Bali beach eateries typically consist of a roof and a floor with no walls. On occasion the floor is also optional. ) I did grab an hour here or there to walk along the beach or into town.

The food was delicious, and I impressed a few Balinese with my Koreatown developed tolerance for and love of chile. (The Balinese have the biggest variety of really tasty chili sauces I have ever had. ) Also the fresh fish was wonderful. I always thought I did not care for red snapper, but it turned out what I don't care for is old red snapper. Really fresh red snapper is delicious. Also great squid, marvelous grouper. And they make a dish with tiny frogs they deep fry whole. They do great Satay, and rice noodles, and vegetarian peanut dishes. Bok Choy to die for. Indonesia is influenced by a lot of cuisines, so you get these things that are a cross between croissants and Vietnemese buns. And real croissants and real Vietnamese buns. And great Chinese and That food as well. I don't think I bothered eating an American dish the whole time I was there, including breakfast, and I don't think I ate the same thing twice.

The beaches are gorgeous as are the flora in general. The architecture is lovely too. There was a lot of the same thing I saw at the beach restaurants -- buildings with floors, ceilings and two or fewer walls. I suspect that on an island where the lowest the temperature ever drops is 80 degrees that is probably a sensible way to build - at least before the invention of air conditioning, and for the vast majority who are still too poor to afford air conditioning. More later.

What a great thing for A's teacher to say, Susan. Very cool.

Lots of eye~ma (and flying car~ma) for your mom, WS.

Sounds like a great time, TB, I look forward to hearing more.

I finally got around to making latkes tonight, with my Black & Decker food processor that I did not know I could love this much. I guess I've only used it for chopping stuff before, which it's good at but not markedly better than a blender. But grating, whoa Nelly, that's where it shines.

We've only eaten out once this week, lunch today. Pretty amazing considering I haven't finished unpacking the kitchen.

More on Balinese architecture. Almost always three stories, built from lovely hardwood or stone, carved or sculpted elaborately. All the roofs were very much the kind of elaborately steep pointed roof I associated with pagodas. (I know nothing of this kind of architecture.)

For some reason, no mosquitoes, but plenty of really aggressive black flies I still have bites from. Also a lot of sharp hardwood corners on furniture, which are not real compatible with klutzy Americans. I am at the moment covered with various bites, cuts, abrasions and bruises.

Much surgery~ma to your mother, WS.

They had a real live baby playing the part of Baby Jesus, a fact I only noticed about halfway through, as I was doing the mom thing where you focus on your kid almost to the exclusion of everything else, until I saw something out of the corner of my eye and was all, "Wha?! Baby Jesus moved."

Thanks for all the ~ma, everyone!

Typo Boy, it sounds like you had an amazing journey. How was it, conference-wise?

Wow! Bali sounds amazing.

Honey, can we go to Bali?

Yay Annabel!

I just experienced one of the most amazing theatrical experiences of my life. "August: Osage County" on Broadway. It was un-fucking-believable. Over three hours long, with two intermissions, and not a single moment of boredom. Hilarious, sometimes depressing, always interesting, and astonishingly well-acted and directed.

If you are anywhere near NYC you should REALLY try to get there. I've seen a LOT of theater, and this was just a cut or three above even the best normal fare.

I'm now third-wheeling at an overloud bar. It is not as awesome.

We made it too seattle. matt's glasses broke, somehow a pareing knife ended up in matt's carry on ( WTF) and the plane was delayed 3x. It is not warm here - but there were tons of underdressed people here.

Typo Boy, it sounds like you had an amazing journey. How was it, conference-wise?

OK - how to answer that without writing a book?

The conference was a meeting of the Durban Group, prior to the official UN conference. The Durban group is a bunch of organizations opposing carbon trading, for a number of reason. Here is a link to a pdf of the orginal declaration behind this group: [link]

The short version is that the group thinks emissions cuts should come from not burning fossil fuels, and not cutting down forests. They should not come from paying people in India to pump water with child labor instead of diesel so that we can continue to burn coal in U.K.

Among the examples we have of offset projects gone wrong:

A forest in Uganda where people were driven from their land at gunpoint so that "carbon storing" trees could be planted. (I put "carbon storing is scare quotes, because they will probably be harvested eventually.)

Or the Durban landfill in South Africa in a residential neighborhood that was supposed to be closed due to containing toxic wastes. But by burning the methane from the dump, carbon credits were earned; so with that guaranteed revenue source, it was kept open. One of the founders of the Durban group lived near that dump and died recently of cancer.

Or refrigerant factories in China that produce HFC-23 as waste gas get paid more to destroy the HFC than the usual profit from their product. As you would expect,the factories are expanded, run 24 hours a day, and reductions are made from this greatly expanded baseline. Since the permits generated are used to allow UK coal plants, this scheme (like many offset schemes) actually inrease emissions.

The conference dealt not only with problems with offset schemes, but problems with carbon trading in general.

My contribution: I'm one of the few people in the group who deal on the solutions end. If we are not going to use carbon trading what policy means can effectively stop global warming? Also, what technologies are available today to replace fossil fuels? I'm revising the presentation I gave at the conference based on feedback from the conference. Once it is posted, I'll link it in announcements. It is actually quite short.

If you want to learn more about the problem with offsets and carbon trading, there is a link a web page that deals a bit with the subject: [link]

And from the same page, the pdf of 22 meg book.

[link]