One Hundred Things My Mother Taught Me A Million Times – Chapter 57

#57– “Turn the lights off when you leave a room. It saves electricity and helps keep the house cooler.”
(This is my mom’s college graduation photo, which was taken when she was approximately 50 years old and had raised five children. She had also graduated from high school just a few years earlier.)

Our generation is pretty self-righteous about “saving” the environment. Some seem to think this generation invented conservation and environmental consciousness and that environmental heathens are ruining everything. I have a slightly different opinion about that. In the words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and it is us!”

Since the beginning of time everything in our known environment has been evolving, and some of the earth’s characteristics and inhabitants haven’t and won’t survive, probably including us. Which brings me back to mom’s #57, “Turn the lights off when you leave a room. It saves electricity and helps keep the house cooler.”

I suspect that mom had a tiny carbon footprint, as she was religious about recycling and conserving even up till the day she made the ultimate sacrifice and stopped breathing oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. Somewhere along the way I guess I adopted #57 from mom. I am constantly following my hubby around turning off lights, TV’s, radios and anything else that sucks electricity. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not really a very dedicated environmentalist. I just think that we don’t give much credit to the good land stewards and conservationists that have been around for a very long time, like my mom. We didn’t invent this stuff; we’re just looking down the throat of a disaster that has been creeping up on us for a very long time, and now we’re scrambling. This is a good thing. Click on Read More Below...

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach

Mary Roach has an amazing curiosity, is a very competent researcher and writer, and is FUNNY (not that dissimilar to Bill Bryson), and these combined elements,  create one hell of a entertaining read. Nearly everyone, including me, went crazy for her first book Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers, which was about more than anyone could ever want to know about dead bodies. Then she stumbled into her next book Spook: Science Tackles The Afterlife, rebounded pretty good with Bonk: The Curious Coupling Of Science And Sex, and now in Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, she’s packed the pages with space travel trivia not ordinarily covered by NASA (or anyone else for that matter).

Roach covers peeing, pooping, farting, barfing, sweating, and sex (acts that significantly rely on gravity, which isn’t readily available in space). She shares much (almost too much) history about the space race between the US and Russia, but since it’s mostly stuff I’d never heard before or have forgotten (“thank you Teflon brain”), it was interesting. She interviewed a wad of ex-astronauts (aren’t they all?) and that was sort of interesting, too.

But the part I liked best was the extraordinary NASA and science focus on trying to help humans function in space. Apparently we’re not meant to go where no man has gone before. The lack of gravity really messes us up, and the length of time it takes to get anywhere is longer than anybody wants to spend with anyone else in a capsule the size of an SUV. Packing for Mars brings to light just how daunting a task this is. As such, I don’t think we’ll need to worry about packing any time soon.

On a final note, I would add that I listened to this book on my iPod and wished I hadn’t. In spite of fascinating factoids, and Mary Roach’s spanking good writing and fab sense of humor, Sandra Burr’s monotone reading of the audible version dang near put me into a coma. Do not listen to Packing for Mars but read it. It’s fun.