Author: Doris

It’s snowing again tonight. This is the snowiest winter I’ve ever remembered for a Maryland winter. Jeremy, who didn’t grow up here and keeps commenting “We live in the South! It’s not suppose to snow in the South!”, is a bit shocked to see so much snow and is sore from shoveling so many times.

This past weekend, we went to Lakeforest Mall – which was my high school hang out mall – but it’s lost a little of that high school magic. It’s been overshadowed by some of the fancier malls around the area. When I was in high school, Lakeforest had an awesome water fountain in the central atrium. They’ve turned off the fountain and built over it a children’s playscape which kind of covers most of the fountain, but not all of it. It looks a little kludgy. Oh well, no matter, the kids enjoyed the soft area playscape. Actually, Vince is getting to be almost too old for it, running around all these barely mobile teetering 12-18 month olds…

fyi

Among those concerned is Ellen Vancko, nuclear energy and climate change project manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In a statement posted on its website, she says:
Both the Congressional Budget Office (2003) and the Government Accountability Office (2008) have estimated that the risk of default for new nuclear reactors could be as high as 50 percent based on the industry’s history of cost overruns and plant cancellations. In 2007, six of Wall Street’s largest investment banks told the Department of Energy that they were unwilling to accept any financial risk for nuclear power loans.
….
….
….
Of 26 new nuclear reactor license applications submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 2007, nine have been canceled or suspended indefinitely in the last 10 months. Ten more have been delayed by one to five years. The Tennessee Valley Authority has canceled plans to revive a partially built unit.
Much of this chaos is because cost estimates for new reactors tripled while natural gas prices declined precipitously.
….
….
….

By Matthew L. Wald, The New York Times

Obama acts to ease way to construct new reactors.

The Obama administration moved vigorously on two fronts Friday to promote nuclear power, proposing a tripling of federal loan guarantees for new projects and appointing a high-level commission to study what to do with nuclear waste.

Administration officials confirmed that their 2011 federal budget request next week would raise potential loan guarantees for the projects to more than $54 billion, from $18.5 billion.

A new Energy Department panel with examine a vastly expanded list of options for nuclear waste, including a new kind of nuclear reactor that would use some of it.

The current loan guarantees were provided in the 2005 energy act bt have not been disbursed because of bureaucratic delays. The Energy Department has sai it would start issuing those soon. Because the loan guarantees are supposed to cover 80 percent of contruction costs, the current amount of $18.5 billion would cover only about three projects.

Opponents have complaine that loan guarantees for projects that cannot attract commercial investment amount to “nuclear socialism.”

Oh, I think Obama should have done that long time ago. Nuclear energy is pretty “GREEN” and has the potential of employing a lot of people acrossing the board – politicians, bureaucrats, professional, craftmen, clerks and laborers. Of course, it is NOT 100% percent safe. But, remember, our lives are not 100% safe either. There are always risks that need to be dealt with. But, risks are everywhere all the time. As an employee of power industry, I would rather visit a Nuclear Power Station than a Fossil one. No one knows exact what are in a fossil power plant. But, almost everyone knows exactly what are in a nuclear station. It has been recorded and watched all the time from various regulatory agencies.

Well, based on the math included, USA now should be able to fund 9 new reactors with government loan guarantees under Obama. It is far off compared to 45 reactors proposed by John McCain. But, anyway, it is a good start. And I think, of course, it is good for me. It is good for improving the employment too. Above all, it is good for America.

Well, it snowed more than I was expecting it to. So we’ve been in the house all day – kind of trapped!

We tried to go do some errands today:

but we turned around and headed back home after driving for a few minutes.

Jeremy baked bread, here’s the starter:

I repaired a massive dragon head for Chinese New Year.

We swept.

Suppose to snow tomorrow – we’ll see! We’ll see! Some more slippery pictures of a mini-hike a weekend ago.

Last week, our previous au pair, Yvonne, came by to visit us. She was in the states for two and a half weeks to visit her pals who are still here. We had a wonderful meat-centric meal since Yvonne is pretty famous for not eating vegetables. She had mailed us a fondue set for Christmas which we were going to use when she was here for dinner, but somehow we didn’t manage to break it out.

So this week, we had chocolate fondue.

Vince checking out the flame:

Edda doesn’t really like chocolate and anyways, she was pretty much asleep when dessert time rolled around.

It’s a blah kind of day. When I’m moody, I look through old photos. Look how young Jeremy looks – no wrinkles or white hairs.

Well, we are all waiting here with baited breath here for tomorrow to come! Apple’s big announcement AND the State of the Union address all together in one big day; as someone in the house said, I guess tomorrow we’ll save the world AND also have the State of the Union address. ha ha. To top it all off and make it a super duper blockbuster day, I think we all decided that tomorrow’s dinner will include tater tots. Woo hoo – triple play.

Last Saturday night, me and a few friends from work gathered in my pal Darcy’s apartment for a girls board game night. Darcy has a lot of hobbies which include baking, so there were awesome desserts.

She is also a belly dancer who dances with her pet snake:

The highlight of the evening was watching her snake eat four mice – I guess she feeds the snake every month or so and I got an amazing photo of the snake devouring the mouse (which was dead and frozen in the freezer and thawed out so that the snake wouldn’t freeze her insides). But I know there are some mouse lovers (KGM – that would be you) that might not appreciate seeing a snake eat a mouse, so don’t click here unless you want to see a snake eating a pre-dead mouse.

I’ve been trying pretty hard to bring Edda out into the community more. This seems to be my major “Edda” priority this year – to get families in the neighborhood to know Edda and for Edda to get to know them. This has been made a lot easier with Vince, who is a naturally outgoing kid and is not shy about having his sister along for the ride.

Today we went on an outing to the recycling center with the scouts. I know I talk about the scouts a lot, but it has been a good group of parents to get to know. Edda walked around the center aimlessly and with very little eye contact as she is wont to do – a dad patted Edda on her head as she walked by, moms encouraged their kids to say “hi” to Edda, a scout made sure that Edda had her foam earplugs for the “factory” tour. It was all really nice.

And the recycling center is amazing! Magnets to separate the metals, people to separate a lot of the other stuff. It is not an easy job to sort co-mingled recycling. (A lot less smelly than you’d think it’d be).