I had a dream

My mother (the best realtor in the world) was showing us houses.  "How much is that one?" I asked about the largest and newest house.
 "$4000," she answered.
"You mean $400,000," I muttered-real estate smarts being in my blood and all.
"No, I mean $4000.  That house has no water."


That is a great example of a dream, I don't want to come true.


I visited my friend Christina Bletzinger Cooper in Melbourne, Australia in approximately 1993.  All the water in her house came from rainwater collected in a cistern. Can we do that here? Absolutely!  But someone doesn't want us to.


I would love to be one of the people that radically changes our country for the better. But one of my goals for the last 2 weeks was simply to review my last year of utility bills.  Unlike the process for collecting rainwater, transfer of my money to the utilities is so smooth that it's difficult to find a trace. Puget Sound Energy is  busy trying to take over an old railway bed to generate more power so they don't have time to answer the phone or emails or update their website so average customers can review their bills.




But that's OK!  That will make it even more fun when customers realize that they themselves can generate and profit from power.  The May 4th New York Times describes New Yorks's State Energy Plan: Con Edison has been selling it's power generators to small independent producers since the 90's. Soon, they won't generate power at all. Their new role will be  running the grid and making sure energy is distributed fairly.   This is one reason why Timothy Egan can concede Congress to the Koch brothers' "cohort of people flopping around in the waters of stupidity" and still be optimistic.  As soon as I  can generate, control and profit from power production, I will never go back to paying Puget Sound Energy an average of $225 per month (it took me 2 minutes to find it on my bank website),  nearly $400 in colder months, and then beg them to show me the records.


Then there's water:  our most valuable resource.  Even here in the rainiest corner of our country, our water is centrally supplied and should not be taken for granted.


Citizen's Climate Lobby started with 3 local groups in 2007 (San Diego, San Francisco and Anne Engstrom's group in Seattle) and the number of groups has doubled each year.  Including my new Bellevue group, we should have about 300 groups in 2014.   Our purpose is to "create a political will for a stable climate and to
"empower individuals to have breakthroughs in exercising their personal and political power."
I'd like to help each person in my group meet with a lawmaker and write a letter to the editor. I'd also like to join toastmasters to improve my speaking skills.


Here's  a  dream I do want to come true (from CCL's website): "Cool the planet with your voice."