I had described to a few people in the last couple years what kind of construction I would use if I were to build again. It involved a cavity wall system with cellulose insulation and no break between the wall and attic insulation. Any settling occurs, you just top it up in the attic space…
Seems the Yukon Housing Corp thinks it’s a good idea too!
For those who didn’t know I was (am) a D&D geek. Recently, inexplicably, I have had a dogged urge to play again, or at least craft a campaign like I used to as one of the only DM’s in our group of gamers in high school.
Why would I create a campaign if I have no players to play it? Well, for creative expressions sake, to re-familiarize myself with the old rule books, but maybe most intriguing to put it out there for use by the growing number of retro gamers that seem to be on the net right now.
I have been following some recently discovered blogs, forums and websites devoted to retro and old school gaming. There seems to be a massive resurgence in interest in games that clone old school RPG’s or playing vintage rulesets again. Perhaps to stick it to Hasbro and the ever commercialized and accessory laden modern version of D&D or perhaps pen and paper RPG’ers are just primarily of an older generation that is feeling nostalgic just now.
So I think that is what I shall do, I’ll start writing, posting and anyone using the info feel free to let me know if it works or not as I have no way to play test it really…..
Over the course of the summer we decided to do a rain screen over top of our stuccoed straw bale walls. It took us a little longer than we had hoped and it was more work than we anticipated but I think the results look fantastic!
It feels great to have the scaffolding put away for a while and I am hoping not to have to use it again for a good long while.
Projects for next year include a wood shed, more landscaping, a chicken coop perhaps, some raised garden beds closer to the house, cleaning up the shed and running power to it, planting lots more trees, cutting the 8 cord of firewood sitting in 8 foot lengths in the yard and maybe a deck!
My last paper for Global Issues 151. I was a little behind when I wrote this paper and I feel it could have turned out better if I had spent a little more time on it but none-the-less I am still presenting it for comment here!
There are critics of the modern health care industry and medical profession that assert that we are becoming “medicalized” in more and more areas of our lives. Ivan Illich remarks “The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. Dependence on professional health care affects all social relations. In rich countries medical colonization has reached sickening proportions; poor countries are quickly following suit. This process, which I shall call ‘medicalization of life’, deserves articulate political discussion.” (287) Margaret Lock also weighs in on the subject saying: “’Fashions’ exist in medicine: technologies, medications, and practices come and go. Even the classification of diseases is regularly revised and modified in light of new knowledge. This expansion and refinement of medicine is assumed to be an entirely logical endeavor, but value judgments and unexamined assumptions are inevitably embedded in these processes.” (271) Illich and Lock both view the expansion and unquestioning devotion to modern medicine and health care as worrisome and perhaps even dangerous. With a critical view on the matter what can we see happening in our society as health care continues to evolve and grow without limits?
As I said in my previous post on UPEI’s Global Issues 151 I am posting my papers I have written for the course this year. This second paper I wrote for the annual Global Issues Excellence in Writing competition. I have just got home from the award presentation and public reading by the three winners this year and the quality of the papers and the passion the writers showed for their topics were outstanding.
Again, I welcomeall questions, comments and especially critiques!
Paper #2:
It cannot be said that technology alone has led to the current state of mankind’s disconnection from nature, its past and itself. Technology is as old as the first club, clothing, artificial shelter and stone tools early man used, all of which are forms of technology. There are those who keenly feel our disconnected state and advocate a return to a simpler form of life akin to that of the Quakers and Mennonites. Some even assert that a further regression is required, a more primitive existence with a closer relationship to the environment. We are however, in evolutionary terms, beholden to technology at some very basic levels. We are no longer naturally equipped to deal with exposure to the elements in most area of the world without protective clothing which is a form of technology. We no longer possess the natural tools required for hunting prey animals like sharp claws and teeth, heightened speed and agility and heightened senses. We need at the very least tool such as projectiles and snares to overcome these deficits. In some ways, the biblical assertion that man is apart from nature is very true. Our technology sets us apart and we have become dependent on that technology. If we were to forsake technology without forsaking the other pressures that drive modernity, globalization and the pursuit of perfection would we change the path we are going down or just slow our pace? What are some other forces that drive globalization, disconnection and exploitation or our world? As a phrase made famous in the Clinton/Bush presidential race of the 1990’s put it, “It’s The Economy Stupid.”
An interesting, innovative and inspiring course being offered at UPEI in the last few years is Global Issues 151.
UPEI’s Global Issues department
Global Issues 151 is a course that is unique to the University of Prince Edward Island. Its principal aims are to cultivate our students’ capacity for critical reflection, to enhance their ability to read texts subtly and sensitively, and to teach them how express their insights clearly and compellingly in English prose.
The uniqueness of Global Issues 151 resides primarily in the course’s pedagogy and content. Pedagogically Global Issues employs three different forms of instruction in order to offer students a variety of contexts in which to explore course texts and to engage with faculty members. Traditional lectures, small group seminars, and monthly town hall meetings – Global Issues employs all three pedagogical strategies to deliver its content. In doing so it exposes students to the work of some of UPEI’s finest scholars, teachers, and researchers. Students in Global Issues are thus given the opportunity to witness and participate in the highest intellectual achievements of the University in their first year of study.
I was so inspired by the course content, structure and goals I have decided to post the papers I have written for the course. I am posting them in the form they were submitted without correction or alteration. Maybe the discussions and lectures that inspired these papers and the ideas I present in them will provoke further discussion and thought among those who read them. I welcome all questions, comments and especially critiques.
Here we go with paper #1:
Andy Collier
Global Issues 151
Professor Srigley
October 5, 2010
Jean Baudrillard’s View on Modernity, Simulation and Indifference
Jean Baudrillard has said that modernity, which can be thought of as the ideal of continual progress and a technological worldview, resulted in a total liberation of all things, a “total orgy”: “The orgy in question was the moment when modernity exploded upon us, the moment of liberation in every sphere. Political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of the forces of production, liberation of the forces of destruction, women’s liberation, liberation of unconscious drives, liberation of art” (44). This total liberation has led us to an existence where profound boredom and indifference pervade as there is nothing left for us to liberate, where we have gone beyond all the “goals of liberation” (Baudrillard 44).
Sunday was preserves day! We started by gathering cucumbers, green beans, dill and zucchini from our garden, wild apples from our tree line and blackberries on the nearby Confederation Trail.
We processed the berries and apples and sliced and packed the cucumbers, beans, dill and spices.
We also transformed one very large zucchini into four loaves of zucchini bread, three went in the freezer one styed out for eating. We also ended up with 12 1L jars of dill pickled cucumbers and beans and 12 125mL jars of blackberry & apple jam.
All and all a productive day of making food for colder darker months, and we still have a lot of cucumbers, zucchini, blackberries and apples to pick!
