Local Energy

Last Wednesday we meet with the head of Local Energy which is a non-profit organization dedicated to the keeping money inside the local economy. During our discussion Mark gave us massive amount of relevant, useful information, in fact each one of us took at least 4 pages of notes up to 7 pages of notes. He told us that the main way to get the infrastructure from PNM would be to use condemnation, which means that the City can simply say 'remove your infrastructure within 24 hours or else it's ours.' Mark also mentioned that the efficiencies of electric grid are low somewhere in the range of 25% efficiency, the loss before any electricity reaches your house. As such, he suggested a system that is designed to be as efficient as possible.

On a slightly less important note, we recently discovered Albertsons Market. Its like Price Chopper from Worcester, but bigger and better, and best of all its about the same prices, which is to say reasonable.

The Ore House

If you are looking for a place to grab a bite to eat that's not going to destroy your wallet there are a ton of awesome places you can go in Santa Fe. The Ore House is not one of them. A few of us went there for dinner this past Friday night and had an experience that was less than acceptable. When we looked at the menu the first thing to come to mind was the narrow selection, there was a grand total of about 9 maybe 10 choices, most of which were similar to each other. To top off the lack of a selection there was the unpleasant fact that the least expensive thing the menu was $15. I cant speak for everything on the menu but I was unsatisfied with my $15 half rack of ribs. To start with there were only 6 ribs, I may be wrong on this but I'm pretty sure there's supposed to be 8. Basically I finished everything on my plate and was immediately thinking about what I was going to eat when I got home to actually feel as though I had eaten dinner. I will give credit where credit is due, the food was good, however we all left in agreement that it was not good enough to justify the cost. We came in hungry and $125 later the 5 of us went home still hungry.

In summation, if you have more money than you want to have then stop by the Ore House to take a load off your wallet and get essentially a $20 appetizer.

Teamwork: The Story of Two Misguided Youth Robbing My Project Team and Our Countermeasure Against Them

On April 5, 2010, the Santa Fe D10 Renewable Energy Team rolled out of bed at 9:00 AM to meet nuclear physicist, Fred Seibel, at the Santa Fe Complex at 10:00 AM. After learning about underground electrical transmission lines and their inadequacies, we returned back to our compound to find something astray: one of our window screens had been popped out of its sill and was resting neatly under a window left ajar. It was then that I realized why off-campus IQP's are done in teams, and human emotion took over.

Fear

I stared through the open window into a room that had become familiar over the course of a month. The coffee table was still littered with candy wrappers and empty soda cans. Steve's XBOX and laptop were still there. Had we really been robbed?

Joel entered our house first, while I trailed the group. It was then that we saw two Hispanic kids in the kitchen committing an injustice to us all. One of them was of stocky build, the other scrawny, and both were about 16 years old. "Brother, pull out the gun," one of them said. I shut the door behind me to give me time to think. "Where was the gun? Is there any sign of aggression?" I thought. Scrawny one walked briskly towards the open window and proceeded to shimmy through it to freedom. I grabbed his leg. With his ass up in the air and his head outside the window, he couldn't shoot me even if he had a gun. I yelled, "Call 911!" Joel obeyed immediately while Andrew ran to his room to get his camera (which was later found to have no memory card).

Brotherly Love

After five or ten seconds of stalling scrawny one in the window, stocky one ran over to me to free his brother from my grasp. Shit, I can't fight both of them. So, I aborted the apprehension of the windowed youngster to focus on stopping my more immediate threat. We scuffled on the couch for a moment as he punched, no, lightly tapped my face with his fist.

When people attack me, the same thing always happens. I grit my teeth and inhale with a hiss. The ensuing adrenaline, oxygen, and anger make me think of the best way to inflict damage on my adversary. Should I throw a haymaker to answer his straw tap of a punch? Or, should I grab his throat with the grip developed over years of turning wrenches and carrying groceries?

The answer this time proved to be neither. I looked at his face and my grip from his neck relented. I just wanted to know why he did this, not hurt him. All the while, Andrew was working to separate stocky one and me, and Steve was engaged in a bout with scrawny one who had equiped himself with a tire iron. The boy swung four times at Steve, but none of them were homeruns. Steve took the tire iron from him, mid-swing, and followed with a front kick to the torso of the scrawny one to knock him back like a sheet of paper in the wind. Knowing that he could not win, scrawny one fled with asthmatic Steve in pursuit. He got away.

Remorse

Andrew failed to separate stocky one and me, but stocky one side-stepped from the couch and opened the door. I thought quickly about how to stunt his progress, and grabbed his left leg to anchor him effectively. He kicked me against the turquoise door repeatedly, like a feral cat with duct tape stuck to one of its paws. My grip did not fail me. He then tried running away with a 160-pound Asian strapped to his leg. As he moved about, our porch pottery clattered and my knuckles scraped on the brick patio to draw blood. Eventually, stocky one tumbled down to give me a chance to advance on him with a rear-naked choke in partial lock. "Andy! Help me!" The six-foot-five, three-hundred-pound gentle giant obliged by putting his knee in the fat kid's back and pinching the pressure point in his neck kindergarten style. Adding insult to injury, Andrew punched the kid in the side. This, coming from the biggest pacifist in our group.

"You're hurting my neck!" The kid says.
"I don't give a fuck. You shouldn't have tried to rob us," Andrew replies. Just then, a mailman strolled nonchalantly by the ruckus to place gingerly two packages on the rocking chair of the patio. He left.

Acceptance

The police arrive about five minutes after I yelled the instruction for a call to them. First on scene is a female officer who cuffed the perpetrator while simultaneously putting her knees into stocky one's back. She asked the cuffed youth, "Hello. Santa Fe Police Department. How are you today?" The rest of the morning was filled with the formalities of crime: paperwork, witness testimonies, and the inventorying of our belongings. The police left around 1:00 PM.

"Rebuild," I said. It looked like a drunken stupor had run its course about the room. After the carpet was straightened, the couch relocated, and the lamp put back on its base, we laughed. We laughed at the expert apprehension performed by the policewoman, and at the random appearance of the mailman. Unfortunately, I didn't come away from this with all my belongings. I am less a cell phone, green knife, and 200 dollars. But, we also laughed about how the boys must really hate me.

Grocery shopping

Now as you have already seen if you have been following our blog we have been liking the prices of trader joes for our main super market, however today I discovered something. From the time we got here we had been tole that Albertsons grocery store was way over priced by a few different people, however we checked it out today and I strongly beg to differ. Upon entering the store the first thing is said was "My God, this place is HUGE!" I walked around for a little while, I wasn't Really looking for much but every price I saw was nothing but reasonable. I was particularly happy when i got to their meat department and for the first time since arriving in Santa Fe I was able to but a steak at a price that was reminiscent of what I would pay back home. They are also currently doing a Monopoly Sweepstakes similar to the one McDonald's does every year. Specific items throughout the store have tags on them that say they will get you a game piece. Between the 4 of us we ended up with around 15 game pieces and even though we didn't win anything it is still some more incentive to go shopping sooner rather than later! The only complaint I had was that as I was leaving the parking lot the handles ripped off one of my bags and the bottle of hot sauce I had bought shattered, I'm not going to blame that on the store though, for some reason it has seemed that shopping bags have hated me this trip haha.

Albuquerque Zoo

Saturday, April 3rd, we decided to take the train down to Albuquerque so that we could check out the Zoo. A round-trip ticket costs $6 for students. Unfortunately, the earliest train leaves Santa Fe at 11:20am, so you get to Albuquerque at around 12:50pm. The last train leaves Albuquerque at 4:44pm, so that only leaves about 4 hours to spend in the city, unless you want to stay there all night. The Zoo takes about 20 minutes to walk to, and we decided to stop and get some food from Asian Noodle's and Bar on the main street in Albuquerque where you get off the train. The food was very good and reasonably priced.

The zoo's admission costs $7 for just the zoo, and then some additional charges for the aquarium or train rides around the zoo, but you can only get the package deal if you get there before noon (which I would recommend doing if you would like to be able to see everything in the zoo... so you might need to go there on a weekday so that there is an earlier train ride.)

Carbon Futures

This week I didn't go anywhere special except of course for our weekly trip to Trader Joe's and the daily trips to the complex. However, we have delved deeper in the exploration of renewable energy and incentives for it. One interesting facet is that of carbon credits. Carbon credits allow you to sell the amount of carbon you save to someone else who might be going over their limit. At the moment the market seems to be $6.50 per 100 metric tons of CO2, while this sounds like a lot of CO2 keep in mind that the US puts out 5.8 billion tons of CO2 a year and that number keeps increasing.

De Vargas Middle School

Tuesday afternoon we went to De Vargas Middle School so that we could work with the middle school students there. The students we worked with are enrolled with the GUTS Program (Growing Up Thinking Scientifically).