O is for Oil

For those of you here for cuteness:

This is D2. He often stands like this and leans his body on the couch. Doesn't look even remotely comfortable but it's his favorite position for watching TV. He was sick last week (he's fine now) and actually fell asleep like this!


For those of you here for yarn:

Yarn Hollow - Artichoke color - Merino/Bamboo/Nylon sock yarn

and this:

It's from Yarn 4 Socks and it's the first installment of the yarn club I'm in there. I know, I said I wasn't going to do clubs again but I also said I was going stash diving only this year. HA! Fooled ya! (Fooled me too. sigh.)

Those here for Alphabet Soup, here's today's installment...

I read Patricia Cornwell's Body of Evidence last month. It was OK. I like more of a twist at the end of my thrillers. Not so much with the random killer thing. Anyway, there was a piece of the evidence puzzle that blew me away:

[They are talking about carpeting used in cars]
Any chance of tracing them back to a make and model?

I'm afraid not. .... Unless we're talking about a very unusual fiber with a patented modification ration, tracing the darn thing back to a manufacturer is pretty futile, especially if the vehicles in question were manufactured in Japan. Let me give you an example. The precursor to the carpeting in a Toyota is plastic pellets, which are shipped from this country to Japan. There they are spun into fiber, the yarn shipped back here to be made into carpet. The carpet is then sent back to Japan to be placed inside the cars coming off the line.

Is it just me or doesn't that seem like an enormous waste of fuel???? I also, recently, reread The Jaunt, a short story by Stephen King found in The Skeleton Crew. It involves teleportation and mentions that when it was perfected, the cost of fuel went down to about 4 cents a gallon! Because fuel was no longer needed to ship goods/people/whatever and things were just teleported to where they were needed.

I got to thinking about my own consumption of fuel. I come from California and Californians would drive to the bathroom if the house were big enough. I drive to the post office nearly every day because of the swaps I'm in, the yarn I order, and the Stitch Savers I need to mail out. (Speaking of swaps - I started a new one and it involves yarn and knit-themed T-shirts. It's here if you want to play.)

I'm just as guilty as the rest of over-consumers and I try to balance that by recycling. I don't think there's enough recycling in my house to make it a proper balance. I've seen a lot on the TV lately about how things we think are green, actually are not. Boston Legal talked about how the billion dollar bottled water industry takes up not only fuel for shipping but the petroleum (which is a byproduct of oil) used in the making of the actual plastic bottles is astonishing.

And it cracks me up when I see those cars plastered with yellow ribbons and Support our Troops ribbons. Y'all know how much our troops mean to me since, a) I was one and b) some of my friends still are troops. But I wonder if these plastic magnet ribbon people realize that those things are also made from petroleum.

There's the report that making fuel out of corn is going to cause tons of toxic waste in the chemicals and fertilizers used to grow the stuff and that it'll take something like 6X as much as one would use in traditional oil just to make your car go as far.

I guess I don't really have a point here other then to hope that the government sends more grant money to whomever is working on inventing that teleportation machine!

Needing to walk more, Ruth!