environmentally friendly | Tuesdays with Laurie

During our recent cross-country trek, we encountered what would have been the bane of Don Quixote’s existence — ginormous windmills! In Miguel de Cervantes novel the word “tilt” comes from fighting; Don Quixote jousted with imaginary enemies (windmills) that he perceived to be giants, thinking the blades were their arms.

Like a grandmother’s fluffy quilt, wind turbines cover the plains. At one particular spot in Iowa, we got to have an up-close-and-personal look at a Siemens Energy blade and learned that:

Each individual, joint-free, seamless blade is 148 feet long, 11.2 feet wide, and weighs 23,098 pounds!
Standing over 400 feet tall, each complete wind turbine has three blades, with a rotor diameter of more than 300 feet — nearly the same length as a football field.

One wind turbine can power up to 700 residential homes with environmentally friendly, carbon free electricity.
A single wind turbine needs approximately one-half acre of land and uses 40 acres of wind space.
Blades sweep an area of 75,000 square feet with each rotation.

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Laurie's Kindle by Len Buchanan

With the death of my hard drive (yes, she’s still with the Geek Squad), I’ve had the unexpected opportunity to fall back in love with Mrs. K. — my Kindle. I don’t have one of the new fancy-schmancy Kindles. No, not me. I have the original model. And I’m smitten with her.

Now before any potential naysayers jump in, please let me say that I adore printed books. As do so many of us. But that very love has a negative impact on my first-and-foremost favorite things on this planet—trees.

As of September 6, 2008 the figure of 20 million trees was the common estimate for the number of trees cut down annually for the production of books sold in the United States alone. That figure doesn’t include the production of newspapers or magazines — just books.

No trees — none — are harmed when you read books on a Kindle or any other type of eReader.

The cost of a book on Kindle is at least half (if not less) than the price of a printed book. Because most of the classics have been in the public domain for so long, many of them are available for free, and there are a multitude of website that give away free books for the Kindle.

My Kindle weighs the same or less than a regular book and takes up the same amount of space, or less, all the while, carrying about a hundred books (depending on their length). Once it’s full I simply move them over to the “shelves” in my private Kindle “library.”

If I ever lose my Kindle, all of the books I’ve ever purchased are still mine (even if I haven’t moved them to my library yet).

If it’s ever stolen, with one quick phone call, my Kindle quickly becomes nothing more than a paperweight to the person who took it.

And yes, I can still lose myself in the “pages” of a Kindle, just like a real book, only better because I can adjust the font size bigger or smaller — depending on my need. The screen looks just like the pages in a print book. There’s no back light or glare. I can even “dog ear” a page if I want, but the Kindle automatically remembers my last location so it’s really not necessary.

By the way, I’m currently reading The Genie in Your Genes: Epigenetic Medicine and the New Biology of Intention by Dawson Church — I highly recommend it.

Listen with your heart,

Laurie Buchanan

“Whatever you are not changing, you are choosing.”
– Laurie Buchanan

Tuesdays with Laurie

"Whatever you are not changing, you are choosing." —Laurie Buchanan

Tag Archives: environmentally friendly

Tilting at Windmills

I’m a Bookie – I Love my Kindle!