YES!! I had a chance to spend a few hours with Joanna while attending a meeting in Phoenix. It was great to meet someone 'in the flesh' after several months of contact online. We had a chance to wander for a couple miles in the deserts north of town.

While I have had some close calls at meeting some other Gaia members, it hasn't been easy to coordinate times during my travels.

I will keep trying ... every time I travel. Everyone in Gaia should do the same!

tom

Most of the time ...
when I have the option,
I would choose a ceiling of robin's egg blue
a floor of sand or forest pine needles
and walls of trees and rock
surrounded by the sounds of nature

Let's see, about twenty times every day at work. Most of what I find out at work starts with first really trying to listen to people. Alas, it is very hard to focus that long each day ... not uncommonly the simple route is to just get to the highlights. Takes less time and giving.

A couple hours ago a sat with an eighty-five year old man and his wife discussing his aggressive colon cancer. The risk of recurrence is very high. What I did learn after an hour or so of listening and discussing his situation was ... he really wants to be freed up at the end of September. The Coho are running in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and more than anything each year he looks forward to that fishing trip to the family's summer home.

trying to listen and learn every day ...

I just returned from a week in Clayquot sound - kayaking and camping off the central western coast of Vancouver Island. After traveling to Tofino by car and ferry, we loaded our boats at the public launch site. The four of us paddled and camped in winds, sun and rain. We explored coastlines and camped on windswept islands at the edge of the open Pacific. We set up our camps on 2-1/2 to 3 mile long beaches without a human in sight. There were lots of eagles, wolves, seals and whales.

Blissful wilderness. Good friends. Oh, yea and we ate really well ....

I took a religions quiz suggested by ~C4Chaos and I guess I'm no beacon of faith. I can live with that:

We have had record breaking temperatures just as the fruit trees were their most vulnerable. On 4/18 through 4/20 the temperatures overnight reached the high teens and low twenties in a wide area of eastern and central Washington state. Despite attempts to prevent freezing (heaters, wind machines and overhead sprinklers), the losses are overwhelming. As much as 50% of the soft fruit and apple/pear crops will be lost.

We are still trying to determine if we did any better. Our hilltop location favors less severe freezing conditions. In three more weeks we may have a better understanding if our crop year (~500 tons of fruit) is a bust.

Above is an early morning photo of a neighbor's orchard, covered in ice from overhead sprinklers - attempting to keep delicate fruit buds above 25 to 26 degrees F.

tom

I just returned from early spring paddling near Roche Harbor in the San Juan Islands (Wa state) with a diverse group of friends. What a lift! Rain, wind, waves, fog and snow ... I'm ready for anything now. It is always such a rush to escape the human designed environment and connect with the natural world - frozen hands, pelting rain, sea lions, bald eagles, porpoises, raging rip tides, even snow fall as we paddled and all ...
******************************************************************************

Warming triggers massive Antarctic ice shelf collapse
http://www.mongabay.com
March 25, 2008

Satellites have captured the collapse of a massive ice shelf in Antarctica. At 160 square miles the area of collapsed ice was seven times the size of Manhattan.

This image shows a high-resolution, enhanced-color image of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica on March 8, 2008. Narrow iceberg blocks (150 meters wide, or 492 feet) crumbled into house-sized rubble. Taiwan's Formosat-2 satellite acquired this image. Credit: Left, National Snow and Ice Data Center; right, National Snow and Ice Data Center/courtesy Cheng-Chien Liu, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan and Taiwan's National Space Organization (NSPO); processed at Earth Dynamic System Research Center at NCKU, Taiwan.
 
This series of satellite images shows the Wilkins Ice Shelf as it began to break up. The large image is from March 6; the images at right, from top to bottom, are from February 28, February 29, and March 8. NSIDC processed these images from the NASA Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor, which flies on NASA's Earth Observing System Aqua and Terra satellites. Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center/NASA

During the break-up, the Wilkins Ice Shelf broke into a sky-blue pattern of exposed deep glacial ice. This true-color image of the Wilkins Ice Shelf was taken by MODIS on March 6, 2008. Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center

Scientists say the collapse is the beginning of a "runaway" disintegration of the 13,680 square kilometer (5,282 square mile) Wilkins Ice Shelf on the southwest Antarctic Peninsula. The region has experienced the largest temperature increase on the planet over the past 50 years, rising by 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit) per decade.

"We believe the Wilkins has been in place for at least a few hundred years. But warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing a break-up," said Ted Scambos, a scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder (NSIDC). Scambos first spotted the disintegration via NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and data from ICESat.

While the collapse is dramatic, Scambos says it wouldn't trigger a rise in sea levels since the Wilkins Ice Shelf is a plate of floating ice.

"The Wilkins disintegration won't raise sea level because it already floats in the ocean, and few glaciers flow into it," he said. "However, the collapse underscores that the Wilkins region has experienced an intense melt season. Regional sea ice has all but vanished, leaving the ice shelf exposed to the action of waves."

Scambos adds that with the close of summer in the Antarctic, Wilkins is unlikely to further disintegrate in the next several months.

"This unusual show is over for this season," Scambos said. "But come January, we'll be watching to see if the Wilkins continues to fall apart."

When I was in sixth grade, I remember filling out a survey which classified my interests and then suggested the types of careers which would be best for me. The final suggestions were "artist" and "adventurer." So some 40 years later I find that I am most attracted to wilderness camping while ocean kayaking and photography. Damn that stupid test was amazingly right on!!

Air Force Tanker deal goes to EADS/Northrup Gruman

The Air Force, short on cash and wanting to acquire the planes as fast as possible, proposed an arrangement to Congress in late 2001 under which the Pentagon would lease the Boeing 767's in a multiyear sole-source contract. Chicago-based Boeing, had been supplying refueling tankers to the Air Force for nearly 50 years.

But just as the Air Force was about to sign that deal, it came under sharp attack from Senator McCain, a former pilot and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mr. McCain denounced the deal as a sweetheart arrangement between Boeing and the Air Force that would shortchange the taxpayer and that was arranged with insufficient scrutiny and oversight.

The Northrop-EADS (EUROPEAN AERONAUTIC DEFENCE AND SPACE COMPANY, N.V. is a Dutch company governed by the laws of The Netherlands) bid was a bold one that mixed business and Washington lobbying with trans-Atlantic politics. EADS lined up a politically powerful group of senators from Alabama and Mississippi with promises that much of the tanker would be built in their states. EADS CEO is French. The entire board of Directors is European! Most of the jobs will be in Europe. The Alabama and Missippi Senators celebrate the 2,000 to 4.000 jobs that will be developed in their states and ignore the 30 to 40,000 jobs sent overseas.

In Paris, at the annual air shows, Airbus officials and Southern politicians proudly displayed the proposed European tanker offering and made the argument that if the United States wants to sell its weapons to European countries, it should also open its doors to foreign suppliers. Politicking reached the highest levels — even Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany brought up the tanker bid in a White House meeting with President Bush.

Don't let John McCain fool you ... it is all politics!!  Dear Mr. McCain, who is being shortchanged now?

Air Force Gen. Duncan J. McNabb argued that we should send as much as $100 billion to France. Air Force officials offered few details about why they choose the Northrop-EADS team over Boeing since they have yet to debrief the two companies. But Air Force Gen. Arthur Lichte said the larger size was key. "More passengers, more cargo, more fuel to offload," he said. When you spending other peoples money that all sounds reasonable.

"We are very proud to have won a victory on the American market over Boeing," EADS CEO Louis Gallois told France Info radio. "We are creating lots of jobs in the United States but we are also creating them in Europe," he said.

Many insiders consider the Boeing product line to be superior to the government owned and run Airbus (EADS) - remember all the delays and false starts on Airbus? The EADS/Northrop Grumman team plans to perform its final assembly work in Mobile, AL, although the underlying plane would mostly be built in Europe.

tom