Hotels - elkmoose or melk - magic light bulbs

Last week I attended a conference of the Rural Electricity Resource Council, in Johnston, Iowa. Last week I said something about hotel rooms all starting to look alike. My first item of business is to take that comment back.

The hotel and conference center in which this event was held was going for a northwoodsy sort of theme. The first thing I saw was a plaster - elk? moose? melk? - in a pond in the parking lot in front of the entrance. Why, that is something I bet you see every day in Maine, or Wyoming or Montana. Those places are just loaded with plaster melks standing in ponds. See 'em all over the place. I couldn't decide what exactly it was. The nose was too long to be quite an elk, but the body was way small and not proportioned right for a moose. Thus, a melk.

A few feet away from the melk in the pond was a plaster bear. I don't think it was a grizzly, but I don't think the owners were paying enough attention to detail to add the silver tips to the fur. I do know this: in the north woods, if a bear is a few feet from a - critter? - both the bear and the critter are thinking "Lunchtime for bears!" One is thinking, "Run!" The other is thinking, "Run faster!"

The room decor was not typical of hotel rooms I've seen. The nightstand lamp stands were shaped like cowboy boots. Besides the main bed there was a bunk bed. And, there was a teddy bear on the bed with a card: "If you want to take me home, just take me to the front desk and we'll charge the $19.95 to your room." It was a cute enough bear, but there were some issues. For one thing, "cute" doesn't really do anything for me. For another, the hotel charges were to go on an expense report. I could just see myself trying to explain a charge for a teddy bear in my expenses. For a third, we have ten grandkids. We'd have insurrection - maybe civil war - if I showed up with one teddy bear. I left it in the room.

I arrived in Johnston late on Monday afternoon. That evening some of us got on a bus and headed to Rollings, Iowa for a tour of an LED plant owned by a company called Innovative Lighting. We have an LED - light emitting diode - providing light in one of the fixtures of our house. I really think LEDs are the wave of the future. For one thing, the bulb we have is rated for a useful life of 25,000 hours. Even if you get half of that, 12,500 hours at 4 hours per day means that you won't have to change that bulb for 3,125 days - about 8 1/2 years. A second item: an incandescent bulb that is rated to use 100 watts would be replaced with a compact fluorescent using about 25 watts - or an LED using 12.5 watts. Yes, the upfront cost is a bit higher for LEDs, but for the life of the bulb it's worth it.

(BTW, if you do want to try LEDs, don't go for the generics or the store brands. Quality is a bit uneven. Stick with the name brands.)

As we left Rollings, I saw a scene that summarizes what I do for a living, and what my company is trying to do. As we left the plant that works on the LEDs it was about sunset. On the horizon I saw a wind generator. If you want to reduce the amount of carbon being discharged into the atmosphere you need to take action on two fronts: generate from clean renewables and use less. Not rocket science. I do not want to leave to my grandkids and great grandkids a world that we've turned into a chuck of charred ash just because we could. I don't want that for your kids and grandkids and great grandkids either.

A sight that struck me as odd on the bus trip back to Johnston from Rollings: a billboard by a farmer's field. Lord knows billboards are common in Iowa, and farmers' fields are not rare. But this billboard was at least 100 yards from the highway, and it was not large enough to be read from the highway. I'm guessing the farmer who owned the field is really familiar with the product advertised on the billboard. I hope the advertiser is happy with their audience of one.

One other thing that will stick with me: one of the presenters was doing a session on saving energy, and went into a discussion about some of the scams that are out there. One of the scammers advertised that their product would provide savings by removing thermodynamics from your electric lines. That got a laugh out of this roomful of engineers. How, exactly, do you remove the study of heat from power lines? For that matter, how would you get thermodynamics into a power line?

'Nuff for now. Thanks for hanging out with me for a few. I'd love your reactions!