Skylights Let the Heat Fly Out of Your Home.

I am not a fan of skylights. because they are a a very big hole in your roof. heat rises and like water, except upside down, it will find the easiest way up and out of your house.

This becomes a big deal if there is a utility failure disaster. If power goes out or the gas line is broken or a fuel delivery is delayed by weather or cost, then not having large amounts of heat escaping through a skylight or three would be a very good thing.

You can put plenty of good insulation in your roof and walls and you could super-insulate them and you wouldn't need much heat at all. I am also a bit of a cheapskate so making a home that I don't have to spend lots of money maintaining at a particular temperature is nice.

But a skylight like punching a hole through your roof. Heat is going to leak out of it like crazy. Sure, there are all kinds of fancy multi-pane, noble gas infused skylights but they will leak over time and their R value will be greatly reduced.

Now I won't say that you can't have skylights if you want them. I'm libertarian, if I was liberal I would want to ban them for all homes. I figure you can have them if you want them and just let you pay the extra cost in fuel yourself.

That said there are a few rooms I would strongly recommend against putting skylights in. Rooms with faucets: the kitchen, baths and laundry rooms all have water in them and if there is a skylight in that room then they will get colder in the wintertime. A cold room will make freezing your pipes more likely and frozen pipes in a home are a very bad thing.

I would also recommend against putting them in bedrooms. If you are without heat a bedroom can be made cozy enough with lots of blankets on the bed. (A four poster bed with heavy bed-curtains does make a nice tent.) With a skylight or a very large window, which I've noticed as fashionable in the last few years will let out a lot of heat. You can put drapes on a window, putting them on a skylight....

Well, I guess you could put an insulated panel of some kind over it. Home stores do have sheets of foam insulation you could cut to size. The edge around the drywall may have a metal strip around it, so you would be able to mount it using neodymium magnets. I did that with some posterboard to better seal the fireplace.

Nil by mouth - Roger Ebert's Journal

Nil by mouth - Roger Ebert's Journal: "I mentioned that I can no longer eat or drink. A reader wrote: 'That sounds so sad. Do you miss it?' Not so much really. Not anymore. Understand that I was never told that after surgery I might lose the ability to eat, drink and speak."

Here's a scenario you might want to ponder happening in your life.

We learn best by experience, but wisdom comes when we learn from someone else's experience.

Creating a Useful Kitchen

I was talking with one of my nephews about some of the frustrations we have with the places we are living in. Just about everyone joined in with stories of design decisions that just made no sense.

The kitchen was one of the favorite topics. The idea of the work triangle (sink, stove, refrigerator) has been around for a long time and it is still only mostly implemented. We still see places that put one corner way off to one side, or worse crush them so close together that the door clash.

One thing of the wonderful things builders have done is put the sink and dishwasher together. But in my nephews house the cabinets for the dishes are nowhere near the dishwasher. Putting the dishwasher and the cabinets for storing the dishes, glasses and flatware next to the dishwasher would make things much more efficient. We have that in our apartment and it makes loading and unloading the dishwasher pretty fast and easy. Unfortunately, it is not near the table so setting the table is a bit of a pain.

I've been in some pretty expensive houses with huge kitchens with top of the line appliances but there is an ugly trash can sitting at one end of the counter. One thing that is very surprising is that there is often no designed in place for trash in most kitchens. We are fortunate enough to be able to fit a small trash can under the sink but you would think they could come up with something better. We once had a house that had a really nice kitchen, there was a prep station next to the sink with the trash right underneath, it was the logical place to put it since you often open packages near the sink so you can wash or drain the contents and need to toss the packaging.

There is also a link between the stove and the table since most food is served hot having a clear, short path from stove to table is pretty nice so there is less chance of dropping, spilling or bumping into someone with pan of hot food.

But what does this have to do with readiness? Lots, really. A well designed kitchen can save you lots of time, energy and money. If you don't like to be in your kitchen you are going to go out more and that costs lots more money then making it yourself. It will also save you time because you won't have to go to the gym to work off those extra pounds from eating high-calorie, low-nutrient foods. And you'll have more energy because you can feed your family better and faster then you can get from eating out. Also, when you go through a period of infirmity, if it is easy to make food, the longer you can survive on your own.

Take a good long look at your kitchen and see if there are ways to rearrange things to make it better for making and serving good foods to your family.

Resolve to keep your computer backed up

There are two kinds of people:

Those who have lost data,

and those who will.

A long time ago I wanted to digitize the collection of posters our church library had. I was the librarian at the time and it was frustrating to try and find a image for the Sunday School teachers to help out their lessons.  Everyone knows that even a static image will help dramatically in knowledge retention.

There were a few thousand pictures and all I really needed was a thumbnail and the reference number. Someone had put reference numbers on the back and a slightly helpful catalog in a binder but unless you knew exactly which one it was it was a pain to find. I wanted something to be easier and faster to flip through.

So during class time and during the week I would take pictures of every image front and back until the cameras memory card was filled or the battery died. then I would type in the reference number, title and keywords in iPhoto. This part alone took a couple of months.

I was almost done, I uploaded the last batch of photos and then it happened. iPhoto crashed and the database was corrupted. While I had a backup of my family photos from before the project everything else was scrambled, badly. I was able to pick out our family photos but I gave up trying to reconstruct the project. A lot of work down the drain.

What would be lost if your computer's hard disk failed?

It isn't just family photos but many important documents and emails. Keeping them save is a bigger deal then ever before.

Nowadays, computers have backup software built-in, but have you turned it on?
The Mac has Time Machine and Windows 7 has Backup and Restore Center.

On the Mac if you just plug in an external drive it will ask if you want to use it as a Time Machine backup drive.
On Windows you'll have to tell it to use the disk but that is easy enough.

For more on keeping your Windows computer backed up and clean see this lifehacker post

But that is only the first level of keeping things backed up. The next level of backup is keeping a separate bootable backup. In case your computer goes completely belly-up you have a disk you can take to any other computer that you can boot from so it acts just like your old computer. For the Mac you can use Carbon Copy Cloner and for Windows Norton Ghost.

The next most important level is an off-site backup. If your home or office burned down having all the backups in the back room is not going to help, though a media safe would help (a regular fire safe gets to hot.)
This can be as simple as keeping a backup in your desk at work or at a relatives house. There are now also online backup companies, like Carbonite.
Now that your data is out of your direct control you may want to look into encryption, but don't forget to write down the password somewhere safe too. But that is another post.

Hundreds of cars torched in France at New Year | Reuters

Hundreds of cars torched in France at New Year
| Reuters: "Youths burned 1,137 cars across France overnight as New Year's Eve celebrations once again turned violent, the French Interior Ministry said on Friday"

I think that over a thousand cars burned would count as more then hundreds for a headline. No wonder the newspapers are having troubles they are not reporting very well anymore.
Europe has been in trouble for a while. I didn't know it was this bad, though.

Some New Year's Substitutions

Rather then New Year's Resolutions I am thinking about making them Substitutions.
Most of the things I want to change in myself are habits and it is way easier to substitute a new  habit then just try to dump an old habit without changing anything else.

One of the things I want is to fit in my skinny pants again.
The obvious thing is to Eat Well and Exercise.

I am 2 weeks into my Oatmeal Challenge and I am feeling pretty good. Okay, today I went with a couple of over easy eggs, bacon and Apple juice. I don't feel bad about doing that since it is a minimally processed and high-protein meal. The oatmeal is also minimally processed and is high in carbohydrates.

One of the problems that I am having is that there is information on diets but a lot of it is contradictory. High protein vs low protein, high carb vs low carb, all fats bad vs some/specific fats good.

Even trying to figure out my ideal weight is confusing. The BMI tells me that my ideal weight is something I haven't weighed since early High School and when I was in my best shape ever after biking around Germany for a year I would be classed as obese. So that is no use to me.

I'm going to have to do some information hunting and gathering but I can't classify the usual sources as good enough.

Happy New Year

Here's to a safe and better New Year.