Solar Power

When someone installs solar panels, they use less power from the grid, meaning they spend less money on electricity. power companies are saying that when someone leaves the grid, it increases the price of electricity for those who stay on the grid. Well, doesn't that assume a fixed revenue?

This article takes the price hike to be a given:

http://www.abc15.com/dpp/news/region_phoenix_metro/central_phoenix/solar-power-in-arizona-aps-in-fight-with-rooftop-solar-firms-over-rates




From page 2:
"She said utilities are worried about a vicious cycle -- more rooftop solar panels means they have to raise other users' prices, which drives even more people to solar. She also said the installations are more common in affluent areas, shifting costs to poorer customers."

For the first point, I have to say that there is nothing vicious about the cycle. But,if the price hike occurs, the second point is a genuine problem , since some people don't have the cash to install solar panels. So, what is necessary for everyone to benefit from the use of solar panels is free installation.

Alright, maybe not EVERYONE is going to benefit from that, or, at least, there will be some people, for example, power company employees, who will complain, even if the environmental impacts are good for them. But what if the rich people who can afford solar panels today do not reap the benefits of net metering. What if instead, they just get to save on the lower consumption of power company provided electricity due to their personal collection. Well, who would get the cash from selling the extra solar energy  to the power companies? Well, I propose that the money goes to installation of solar panels on the homes of people who cannot afford them. So power companies will be buying the products that are going to render their current product useless. But they would also, as a part of the deal, earn stock in the solar companies with which they ally. That way, power companies will willingly shut down their polluting power stations in favour of a predominantly localized and environmentally friendly energy solution, in which they have financial interest.

This vicious cycle of increased solar panel usage making solar panel usage increasingly popular sounds to me as good as cold fusion or any other perpetual energy solution.

Anyway, I think that the situation is a bit more complicated than I have portrayed it. Solar panel users do not generally leave the grid. Actually, in some situations they don't even use the energy from the solar panels on their roofs. They sell it all to the power company. Further, solar panels panels feed the grid at night. But in Arizona, AC must use more energy during the day.

One week from visa decision

Apparently, there are eligible voters, and voters that are on the voting list. Each election, people are sent to every home where there is an eligible voter. If there is someone at home, the eligible voter makes the voting list. So some of my friends, for example Gaelle and Fany, were unable to vote in this election, because they were not at home to receive the election employee. For them though, there is good news. Their dad had a stroke about 3.5 weeks ago. He came home from the hospital on Tuesday. I saw him yesterday. His movement was limited, but he seemed as lucid as anyone does when they are speaking a language I cannot understand.

No, my understanding is improving. I was able to catch a few conversational points Rado's mom made at lunch and another in the teacher's lounge yesterday. But each time, I was involved in an english conversation, which  was continued in Malagasy to another person. In that way, even getting only one word of an utterance was enoguh for me to guess the meaning. On the flipside, I am definitely learning something about English as I tried to teach. The thing that impresses me most though is how much people want to learn English. But I am a bit worried that I am compromising my English to make it easier to understand. People comment that I swallow the letter /t/ in certain words, especially when it occurs at the end. I don't think i completely swallow the sound, but I don't at an /s/ sound to the end of my /t/ sound so 'lot of' sounds more like 'lodov' than 'lots of'. And somewhere in the middle, I can now watch films subbed in french and films dubbed in French pretty comfortably. I am going to try an actual French movie one of these days.

I finished reading One Hundred Years of Solitude yesterday, on Thursday November 7th. It is by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A married couple flee their town. The woman is afraid of inbreeding, but they were haunted by someone the man killed. They founded a new town. Gypsies visit. They have kids. A war breaks out. The kids have kids. The man and a gypsy study. The woman grows old, keeping order. The kids kids have kids. A train comes to the town. A banana company is founded in the town. The working conditions are not good. Their is at least one more generation. What is crazy is that the guys are all of two names. One wife is from a neighboring town. She has the habit of not calling things by their names. One of the original kids crafts some golden, jeweled fish, boils them, and restarts. The book is only annoying because it never calms down. The writer will tell a story in the past tense, and ends it by telling the end of another story. He proceeds to tell the story, but always from a seemingly unrelated starting point. It is only as he is about to end the next story that I remember what he is explaining. There is a lot of magic in the village, and people are unimpressed by technology. There is also a lot of talk of the circularity of time.

Election Weekend

Gae, Miora, Tony

 

View from the house of the man below

 

 

Happy on voting day

 The man: Tovo

 Toaka gasy warms the belly

Learning to flow

Below is the hostess, whose wedding we went to in Ambositra

 

AFter party

quirks

On thing that everyone must know is that there is some tea that smells and tastes like a fruity pebbles with milk: verimanitra/

Another thing: this is such a poor country. There is trash everywhere, the streets are use as toilets, most of the buildings are severely damaged, and the cars were made before catalytic converters. What gets me is how ridiculous people look when they get rich. They spend their money on a new car, flashy clothes, and a nice place. But when everyone is wearing dirty clothes, you just look like a chump getting out of your Range in a suit.

Another thing that is important: the different between loaka and a vegetable dish in the US or Europe is not in the ingredients. Rather, since loaka is made to be eaten with rice, it should be that a small morsel flavors a spoonful of rice, so it needs a lot more flavor than a side dish.

Google loses searchers to Facebook, because when people watch a video that is posted on fb, they do not search on Google for the video. What may have been outweighing this fact is that Google gains searchers via the gain in number of people using the internet caused by Facebook.

I was asked by three guys who smoke and drink at the market near my place my opinion is on how to improve Madagascar. I was surprised, but I talked, even though I am sure they have ideas of their own that they wanted to tell me. But you know, the French abused the Malagasy, and the Malagasy still want to be like foreigners. In fact, the only foreigners the Malagasy people know well were abusive. The people that are in power are those who are willing to be as abusive as the French, so it is pretty amazing the is no civil war; I mean, it shows how the Malagasy understand without imitating, all except for those in power. What matters is that the Malagasy thought the French were abusive. I don't know whether the French were actually abusive; I don't know whether they tried to be abusive. They might have thought they were doing a lot of good by bringing cars here. Cars are a lot less useful when you cannot use them to travel to other countries. Plus, they brought dirty, old cars here. Anyway, I told them they should not rely on another country.

Another weird thing about this country is that potholes are not always covered. So, once in while there is a hole on the curb. Most of the time its only a few feet deep and full of trash. But sometimes the drop is about fifteen feet down a narrow passage. So, pedestrians and drivers have to look out for these. This is another danger of traveling at night.

There are some streets that have bumper to bumper traffic all day long. One such street is home to the school where I teach. Despite the fumes from all these cars, there is a huge tree across the street from the school that has managed to produce blue flowers.

I recently finished reading The Pillars of the Earth by Keith Follet. It was fun to read, but it was a bit shallow. The best part was how the book covered such a long time period without dwelling on boring events. That is to say, the pace was good and the distance was also good. But the book was written by a good observer, not a great inventor. It is a long book, and sometimes he used the same words to describe one of the villains. That was one way I picked up on his weaknesses. But the lack of depth was mostly in the commentary on the relationship between secular magic and Christian magic.

Two people have told me that one reason there are so many forest fires here is that people like to see them. As a volunteer, we were told that the practice, tavy, is to fertilize the soil, but that its effect was short lived.

Shoulders

OK well its ten pm on Sept 26. This is Thursday. Tomorrow is the last day of the second week of my first trimester teaching English at CNELA. It has been fun. I tell a lot of jokes and I get the students to talk at lot.

I am living with Fred. He is 27 and he has a high paying job in the surveying industry. He is a boss. He works late. My second class ends at seven thirty pm and my first class starts at four pm.

I teach from a packet and original materials. So far, I have had some success with having a few plans from which I can chose. The first class is going a bit better than the second. But the second class is a bit bigger than the first, so it is a bit harder to keep everyone interested.

I am cooking a lot. There are bugs in the house, but I am starting to get used to them. I was only slightly bothered when I found a dead cockroach in my bed two mornings ago. I guess they are here because my roommate was living alone for a while before I moved in and he doesn't really clean the kitchen all that much. 

I plug some weird type of thing into the wall in the evening to repel mosquitoes. I would prefer to use a net since I have no idea what I am breathing, but I am just using a mattress with no bed frame, so there really isn't a good way to put up a mosquito net.

I started drinking beer again. The few cigarettes I smoke leave me paying the price of a sore throat the next day.

I meet with the mother and family of my roommate on Wednesdays. We speak in English mostly, but they aren't quite as good as my roommate, so I usually learn some Malagasy. The second son of the family is my age. This weekend he has his finals for a correspondence course in computer science. The last child is a teenage girl who seems pretty mature.

Last weekend I started learning Wushu from some sort of official school. The master didn't really appear, but there is probably a lot of conditioning work for me to do before it is really worth his time.

I am watching Naruto. It is OK, but I had to start with the second season, in which Naruto wears orange and black. There was an arch in which four people attacked Konoha that seemed pretty worthless. It is becoming more serious now: Team 10 and Team Kakashi have just defeated two Akatsuki.

Lastly, the internet needs to be free and stay free. The biggest problem with democracy is that voters are uninformed. The internet gives people a chance to be informed. Therefore people need access to the internet. Further, the information on the internet can neither be censored nor costly. That is way I mean when I say that the internet needs to be free and stay free.

Brooklyn

So on the day after I got back from Ambositra, I went to see a dance contest with Gaelle. The contest was for a position in a Brooklyn Arts School competition. There we many foreigners amongst the guests. We sat with a boy and his sister. I have seen the boy before, but I don't exact remember where. He must have been a contestant in the last show I judged. Anyway, there was a band playing while we waited for the contestants. I got to hear the traditional instrument, Faly incorporated into a band, instead of into a sales plot for tourists. It is cylindrical, but basically like a guitar. At first I could hear it, but not the accompanying guitar, but I learned to distinguish the guitar from the sharper notes of the Faly.

There were four performers: the first incorporated many different tribal traditions. It was the best all round performance. There were bright colors, many costumes, and enthusiastic dancers. The second group feature some boys in shiny, sky blue suits with white sashes. Their dance was a bit like some of the Tai Chi I know. I really enjoyed this, but then some big middle aged women came onto the stage and I was a bit disappointed since they couldn't really dance and their voices were pretty much drowned out by the band and the other signers who had mics. After, A beautiful young girl came out alone. She was nervous but capable. At the end she settled down. The third group I don't really remember that well. Oh yea, the second group was from the Highlands according to Galle. Anyway, I think the third group was doing a Tandroy dance. There was a mock fight over water. The last group depicted a famadihiana, or turning of the bones. There was some miming that I didnt really understand. I haven't actually ever seen a turning of the bones festival, so I guess that is one reason I didn't get the mining. this group was pretty creative with some dark cloth. They created something like a tomb, and did some visual trick with the body in which it was difficult to track which person was supposed to be dead. Then everyone was dancing.

Well, after the first two groups, there was a performance by a younger group. Two kids that must have been less than ten years old were the main singers. They had pretty big voices. Also, at every break, there was an emcee who did his best to speak in Malagasy, French, and English. His comfort decreased while using languages further towards the end of that list. He was pretty funny anyway. The competition ended with a talk by two guys from the US. It was translated into Malagasy by an internationally famous Malagasy singer. I hope someone will remind me of her name so I can listen to one of her songs. At the end, it was announced that Bakomanga won.
I walked Gaelle home with Francia, the previous president of the group that put on the English Speech contest in Trano Pokonoly. We were a bit scared to walk in the dark, but there were no buses. I took a bus back to CNELA from Gaelle's.

Double vests

I went to Ambositra on the morning of the 25th of August. I was with Fred and three of his colleagues. We arrived at the house of Jira, the boy whose wedding we were to attend, just before dark. We had some beer on the balcony. I think that gave me a headache. Over 50 percent of the last five times I drank beer I got a headache. Around nine pm, we were invited into the kitchen. It was about the size of a closet and featured two open flames. Oh man there was a lot of smoke. But it was warm. I wasn't feeling great when dinner came around. I remembered some times in Nepal when there was an impossible amount of food in front of me. I had to concentrate to stomach every bite. Deep breaths. Its not that the food was bad: it there were even vegetables for me. But the traveling, the beer, the heat, and the foreign environment got to me. We slept in the groom's room. I woke up earlier than the rest to hear Fred snoring. I though, geez, I will never get back to sleep. But when everyone was up, the others said I was just as loud as Fred! 

We took a long bus ride in to the town of the bride. It was nice because we had frequent stops and I got some mofo gasy and a finger of toaka gasy. We arrived at the civil building just before lunch. We waited outside as the entourage of the bride walked up the red, dirt street. There were three officials in the hall. Two of them had some things to say. The other supplied the couple with some papers to sign. The father of the bride said a prayer. To me, this ceremony married the couple, so I left some money in a collection box.

Next, we went to the house of the bride's parents. There was a buying ceremony, in which small amounts of money were given for one reason or another from the groom's party to that of the bride. With each addition to the pot, there were some formalities said on both parties. Fred told me that most of the time a professional takes care of this. It was a bit trying for the patience of some people. I was just trying to understand.

Lastly, we went over to a recreational center for a feast. Boy, radish, cauliflower, potato, zucchini, and I don't know what else made for a great salad. There must have been some type of mayonnaise. The next course was bread in a really rich cream. Then we had rice and zebu. I was not a vegetarian during this trip. Zebu was fine, but when I ate chicken, I didn't feel great. Anyway, everyone who attended was introduced over the microphone. The dad proved a funny emcee. The was karaoke, dancing, and cake. Then we left. It was really simple, but there is still supposed to be a marriage in the church. When we returned to the house of the groom, it seemed like the whole neighborhood was there to usher the newlyweds into their chambers.
We grabbed our stuff and headed for a hotel. We had a nice meal in a touristy spot and stayed in a great hotel.

The next day, I had tongotromby, or zebu foot soup for breakfast. It was alright, but there was not much meat, mostly just fat. I should mention that all Fred's colleagues and the couple could speak OK English. Still, mostly everyone was in Malagasy, so I was pretty quiet. Fred has a tendency to repeat things three times for emphasis, and imitating him helped me get comfortable with some easy phrases. I learned how to say 'no way' (tsy tafa voaka) and we all repeated it frequently. We met the bride and the groom one last time after breakfast before going to the taxi brousse station. While waiting, we had some spirits and some seriously salted jerky. The ride home was a bit rough for the kid next to me. We were four, but a manager insisted we squeeze another full size man in the row. So this preteen had two shoulders nearly touching in front of his face for about eight hours. We had to stop to change break pads on the way back. Hmm... When we arrived, another employee of Fred's company (ILS?), which, btw, is where the bride and the groom work, was at the taxi bus station to pick us up. We has some soup and I finally tried Nem;).

I didn't bring my camera, but maybe there will be some picture on fb soon...