I'm back in the Bay for a week. BadCAMP coming up, and business to conduct for our budding Cycling Empire. Also happy birthday Zacker. Good fun and a nice drive, so I'm content with all that.

Oft's the time I wonder about graphing my changes in mood and fortune, a little personalized stock ticker of the soul. Regular journal-writing is beyond me, and actually recounting the details of my daily life would be debilitatingly dreary. No one must know just how ho-hum my routine really is. Gotta preserve the mystery.

A numerical composite would be interesting, while (probably) allowing me to retain whatever shards of sex-appeal I can still muster. And what might such a life-market show? Finances flat but stable. Politics looking up and responsibility on the rise. Stress back down after peaking in August.

It's all well and dandy, and I'm especially happy that visible signs of over-stress -- e.g involuntary muscle-twitching -- are declining, but as things level out I worry muchly about the void, that it may just sit there gaping at me. Nature abhors a vacuum, and although I could really use a vaction, the kind of soul-emptying boredom that may be in the offing here seems dangerous.

The best answer seems like a long shot. Short-sellers are killing the Love index. The gut feeling: flat-lined.

This is starting to become a problem. Aphoristic wisdoms along the lines of "age is a state of mind" are cold comfort when contemplating a creeping case of cynicism. I really don't want to end up a jaded or pessimistic person. It's a shit way to live, but objectively that's the trend. Me no likey.

Canadia to the rescue:

In demonstrating the technology in practice, Keith and his team used a custom-built tower to capture CO2 directly from the air while requiring less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per tonne of carbon dioxide. The tower unit was able to capture the equivalent of approximately 20 tonnes per year of CO2 on a single square metre of scrubbing material -- which amounts to the average level of emissions produced by one person each year in North America.

While still in its early stages, the atmosphere-scrubbing technology has already been touted by environmentalists as an energy-efficient and cost-effective way to complement other approaches designed to help reduce transportation emissions, such as biofuels and electric engines.

Now, this should be pursued in addition to planting a lot of trees, but the truth is that over the past 300 years, we've dug massive amounts of shit out of the ground and set it on fire. Getting back into balance means taking a bunch of that shit out of the air and putting it somewhere else again. Trees don't cut it because when you cut them down they rot and the gas gets out again.

Basically the idea is you perfect this kind of rig along with some solar/wind power to keep it running -- just like highway lights on the remote parts of the highway -- and it becomes somebody's high-paying Union Job to service the thing, put the used-up scrubbers in a box car to be hauled off for burial, etc.

Maybe we can re-build the ruined mountain-tops of Appalachia.