Wed 28 Jun 2006
(via BSB)
One of my favorite experiences in life was spending a year helping my best man’s father, Pastor John Anderson, build a environmentally friendly house in Clements, California. One of it’s design features was a swimming pool that stored heat from solar collectors. Just about everyone thought he was crazy. He wanted it to be able to survive armageddon, as he said, so he used 6x12s for the roof. We moved the massive pieces of timber around with a giant winch that he assembled from spare parts he had collected over time.
He was considered a radical in his denomination. A Missouri Synod Lutheran, he wrote papers arguing in favor of woman pastors and open communion. We would spend hours talking about just about everything. Once he told me that he would refuse a homosexual couple who wanted to take communion in his church. When I asked him if Jesus was the one officiating over the communion, would he refuse the gay couple communion, he thought about it for a while and then said, “No, I don’t believe that he would.” He had that level of intellectual and spiritual integrity. He was a fundamentalist, but in no way the type that seems to dominate today’s religious discussions.
Cancer took him before he could finish the house. When it was finished it sold for a lot of money. The locals nicknamed it the church for it’s massive cathedral ceiling made out of 6x12s. I remember the agony we went through assembling that thing with a back hoe over weeks. He was a great man. I miss him alot.
It is, indeed, totally cool. I was so angry with Duke Energy, our new friendlier energy provider today, that I told my husband we have to figure out a way to live on our own and not have to depend on the only ones who can provide power to us. You are lucky to have known this man.
What did Duke do to make me so angry? We have a house that is 105 years old. Our energy usage really goes way up and way down, depending on the season. We have had budget billing for years. Years. I have worked and worked at it, and it keeps going down. Yes, down. (We are sometimes hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Blankets work.) Well, they hadn’t read our gas meter for five months (I don’t know why since my husband works on the third floor of the house and there is always someone here during the day to let them in.), so they changed us to regular ole billing, with no warning, with no notice. To get back on budget billing, we have to pay $835.64 for July. Oh, we have two meters each for gas and electric, as this house used to be a two family. They kept budget billing on the account where we have an actual credit.
Budget billing means just that. People budget for it. I guess we’ll have no fun in July.
Sorry about that Muffet. Any recourse?
Editor – did he build a windmill with the house? That must have been a great experience and you must have learned a lot about building. I often wondered if it would economical to have small windmills for individual homes to generate electricity. Or a small one to charge an electric car. Do you know anything about the feasability?
I saw a news story on TV about a subdivision in in CA of new homes that were extremely energy efficient with solar panels that most of the time supplied their own energy through solar panels. The cost per month was usually a few dollars or nothing because they sold electricity back to the grid.
We should have been doing all of this since the first embargo. As usuall, Carter was right.
The design had a windmill for the well. It had to go pretty deep to hit the water table, so he said. I was just his lackey, enjoying (almost) every minute of it.
Brilliant branding.