My cats won't come home, so I'm blogging. We made the mistake of turning our inside cats into outside dog-cats, and though it was a slow process, (involving harnesses, leashes, walks in the arboretum, hikes in the oakland hills, trial jumps from the top of the compost over the fence into the neighbor's yard) the transformation is nearly complete...the cats want to be out in the dark instead of heeding my sweet pleas to come back and get the fu%& inside.

I want the cats in because I am tired and want to curl up with my book without worrying. This week I've been teaching canoeing, leading to some minor shoulder aches and a lot of laughs. It is yet another one of those rediscoveries of youth, having grown up with a canoe and a big pond around the corner. I haven't really paddled much since Nat and I did a canoe camping trip for a week on Moosehead Lake in Maine a couple of summers back, and I forgot how relaxing it is...as long as the waves are slight and there aren't any tankers or sailboats about to sideswipe you. Definitely a cool skill to teach. J strokes and T rescues come in handy for Jeopardy, too.

I also got to do a tour of my office building today. It is a straw-bale building, using photovoltaic to generate electricity and solar panels for water and radiant heat. We've also got sunflower-seed boards for desks, natural linoleum, recycled glass benches, and wheat-board walls. Pretty green stuff, and practical for residential use. But it is interesting to try to teach kids about green building when they don't even have any real concept of energy use. Launching into an explaination of photovoltaics, I asked the kids where they thought the electricity for their homes came from. "The sun, AND the moon, " says one kid. "Wires," says another. Hmmm. "What about your car? What makes it run?" That was a bit easier. From there we could move on to water, coal, fusion, all the major sources here in California. But I still don't think they get it. Maybe if we hooked up the gameboy to the fuel cell, that might ring a bell...