I just spent seven days on the island of St. John in the US Virgin Islands- no Internet, no email, no phone, hence no postings. If you have not been there the island is reachable by flying to neighboring St. Thomas and taking a short ferry. 75% of the island is a National Park donated by Lawrence Rockefeller in the 1950s, an incredibly generous gift considering even basic villas there now sell in the millions. It is mountainous with a top elevation of 1200′, covered in tropical forests and rimmed by beaches that look like something from a travel brochure- only better because you can feel the breeze, smell the exotic scents and put your feet in the warm water. Temperatures year round average from 77f to 88f. It is, in short, paradise.
Being in such a place puts you in a completely different frame of mind. You slow down. You read a book or stare off at the views of islands in the distance, steep twisting roads and colorful villas impossibly perched on promotories. If you’re me, you freak out at the driving when it seems like you’re either about to drive off a cliff or get run into a mountainside- everything is vertical on St.John! But you get used to it. It even get fun after a few beers when you’re not doing the driving.
There are catches to this paradise that are extremely relevant to this blog. While we were there it rained for the first time in 3 months. There are no wells. They make water with desalination plants and all houses are required to be built with cisterns to harvest rainfall (I’ll be posting in detail on the set-up where we stayed- it was a real eye-opener as water starts moving from something we take for granted to being a costly commodity). You buy water by the truckload and it is expensive- for the two bedroom villa we were in the cost per month during dry times was $375! The majority of that cost is trucking because they have to haul the water up extremely steep hills to locations that are typically only accessilble via rocky dirt roads.
Even small increases in temperatures will change the climate of places like this is drastic ways. More to come on St. John…

You might call this an anti-technology post because its about hanging clothes to dry. Today’s Times has a back to the past story from a woman in California who bypassed the rules of her community and put up a clothesline. I remember my grandmother having a line that ran from her second floor open porch down to a pole in the backyard. It was a continuous loop on pulleys so she could hang the laundry from the porch, give the line a pull and add more without leaving the house. Clothesline technology.
The first house my parents had had a t-shaped set of poles set in concrete in the backyard for multiple lines. I also remember a pole-mounted carousel type of thing that was round and rotated.
For a compendium of all things laundry-wise visit laundrylist.org- I couldn’t resist borrowing the image on this post from their site.

Many Eyes is a free beta tool from IBM that creates ‘visualizations‘ from data sets. These are then shared on the site (there are thousands). Anyone can use it. MIT’s Technology Review has an article with details.
The one shown is carbon emissions by country shown as a cloud diagram.