spain - march 2008

lunch at the beach on the Mediterranean

Luis with his dad, Filo, Ana and Andrea.

Somebody needs happiness!!!!

It sounds like someone got up on the wrong side of the bed!

If Theresa wants to be happy let her be happy!!!!!

We here in Malone are happy and we have crappy weather!!!

HAPPY!!!!!!!!!!????????????$$$$$$$$$$$

Don't get mad at me.

But when I read this:

"Happiness is something so personal,Yet influenced by others.When happiness is shared,It seems to multiply.Contagious like the flu,But also only last for twenty-four hours at times.As most thing in life,Happiness must also have an opposite to balance itself.My only wish for you,Is that you spend more time with happiness!To go through life happy is wise,Yet, not to pursue this most important possession, is unfortunate.Within your entire existence, peacefulness should thrive;After all, truly, what else is more righteous?"

I get a bit miffed.

According to the above quote, is this happiness?

They look happy to me! Yet, they will probably die by 50.

How would you define happiness. The above quote from the "eldest", who does not wish to identify himself/herself directly, is "fuzzy". Happiness has no physical attributes. As Charlie Brown and his friends well knew, happiness is two kinds of ice cream, finding a pencil, having a sister, anything and anyone that's loved by you.

The word "happiness" does not get us too far. Too often when we talk today we rely on overly broad, categorical and static words like fear and happiness to describe, diagnose, predict and expound words that don't get us very far as family, friends, lovers and co-workers. This explains why, though we all say that we are happy, the library of how-to-get-happy books and why-we're-not-so-happy books is expanding.

So, let us on our blog agree to a moratorium on the use of single words, such as fear, anger, joy, happy, said, and write about emotional processes with full sentences rather than ambiguuous and naked concepts that burden us with the task of deciding who, whom, why and especially what is happiness. A more direct approach of talking would be welcome!

January 1953

Art and Bob stopped to have a drink at Crackers, a bar on Highland Avenue, after a long cold day working at the Carborundum Plant just down the street. They were electricians in a carbon plant. It was a miserable, dirty job. Bob sat next to Frenchy who was sitting at the bar with a beer in hand. The usual conversation about the war in Korea, sports and family began. Frenchy was a friendly sort and joined in the conversation. When the subject of family came up he proudly reached in his pocket and handed Bob an invitation to his son's upcoming wedding.

Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Smith

cordially invite you to the marriage of their daughter

Anne Catherine

To

Rene A. Sauvageau

Son of

Sylva and Cora Sauvageau

On February 7, 1953

10:00 A.M.

St. Theresa's Church

Macklem Avenue

Niagara Falls, New York

Reception to follow

St. Theresa's School Hall RSVP 1/20/53

Bob glanced at the invitation, took a long second look, and said, "Hey Smitty, isn't this you!" Sure enough it was one and the same Art Smith. That was how our father's met.

Mom and Dad

and the rest is history.......... as they say.......

Spring!

I was unable to spend Easter with these two joyful girls this year, yet I did make it to Niagara Falls to spend time with the Sauvageau clan. Though it was a quick trip, I was reminded of how beautiful family is, and the love our family has for one another.
I arrived Good Friday afternoon and went to Fatima for Mass. Aunt Joan and Patrick sang and I was able to sit with Grandma Anne and got to see Cody and Aunt Denise. After Mass, we headed out to get some pizza at good ole Favorites. There we met up with Uncle Tom and Aunt Marcy.
Saturday we were able to get a group together for dinner again. This time Uncle Jay joined. It was great to see everyone and catch up with them.
Unfortunately, I have a midterm coming up and had to leave Sunday morning. Yet the time I did spend with the family was extremely refreshing...quality over quantity. It was, HONESTLY, a great weekend.
I called home when I got back to school on Sunday and was able to talk to Veronica and Magdalene. Both girls had found their Easter Baskets, along with Paul's and John's. Magdalene asked about everyone who I had visited, making sure the Bunny had done his job and had left everyone a basket.
Well, I hope everyone is doing well. Looking forward to warm weather! Come visit me in Steubenville anytime!
-Claire

Carbon Footprint

How much greenhouse gas does one single cheeseburger emit into the atmosphere? According to one study, about 6.5 pounds per burger; considering that Americans eat an average of three burgers per week, it adds up to be the same carbon contribution as 75,000 to 15,000 SUVs each year -- that's a lot! Can you say Carbon McCredits?

The Academy Awards Changed the world!! That's when we saw a beaming Al Gore waddle on stage to the roar of Hollywood's dream-makers to get his Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth.
It should have been for the former US vice president -- now the world's most famous global warming alarmist -- his finest hour.

Here he was, receiving film's highest honour for his smash documentary, in which he warns that within a century the seas will rise up to 6m while monster hurricanes tear through what's left of our cities.

Never mind that scientists reject such wild claims. Gore was getting the endorsement that counts -- an ovation from the diamond elite of showbiz and the media -- for preaching that only one thing could save us from the apocalypse he imagines.

And how wildly this Use Less preacher was cheered on Monday as he stood there in his hair-shirt tuxedo. Cheered by actors who'd actually flown in by private jet. By actresses who'd driven up in stretch limos. By agents with solarium tans glowing under the brightest lights.

At almost the very instant Gore was handed his Oscar for best documentary, The Tennessean, his home state paper, reported he'd in fact won an Oscar for hypocrisy.

Billing records of the Nashville Electric Service revealed that the local Gore mansion -- a 20-room, eight-bathroom behemoth with a well-lit heated pool -- used more electricity each month than the average American household used in an entire year.

Use Less Gore had so many lights burning, heaters running, computers humming and gadgets whirring that he burned up 221,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, or more than 20 times the national household average. Worse, he was using more electricity now than he did before he made An Inconvenient Truth to hector us into making do with less. And this isn't even counting all the power he uses for his other two homes, and his endless flights around the world, in private jets and civil, to flog his film.

Gore's staff, sensing a PR disaster the size of the Exxon Valdez, rushed to explain away this great oil spill. Unfair, wheedled spokesman Kalee Kreider. See, Gore and his wife tried to offset their "carbon footprint" by buying their power through the local Green Power Switch program.
"They also use compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy efficiency measures and then they purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero.".
But time is also up for this kind of easy virtue. Let's work through those three common excuses.
So Gore has low-energy light bulbs.

And he still uses all this power? !! So Gore uses the local green power program. But isn't that green power just an add-on to the Nashville Energy Service's main source of base-load power -- gassy coal-fired power plants? And doesn't the NES's green methane-burning plant still need to burn some dirty coal to work properly? Don't its emissions still contribute to global warming?
And so we get to Gore's final excuse -- the get-out-of-jail card of so many of our warming prophets of doom, from Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery to that Jeremiah of the airport lounge, David Suzuki: Gore buys carbon offsets!

That actually means he pays other folk to use less dirty power themselves, or take out the carbon dioxide he pumps out. It's a bit like paying someone to starve so you can gorge.
But there are at least four problems with such offsets, the first of which is very particular to Gore. And that is Gore buys his offsets through Generation Investment Management, whose chairman is . . . Al Gore.
What's more, GIM's business is not to itself remove carbon from the air, but, it says, to "buy high quality companies at attractive prices that will deliver superior long-term investment returns".
Oh, and by the way, those companies have to be green. Some are even wind farms, although even they -- don't kid yourself -- produce some greenhouse gasses. So Gore isn't so much buying offsets as investing in fashionable companies for profit. Lucky him. Rich him.
The second problem with his offsets is that if global warming really is going to fry us to Hell, shouldn't Gore cut emissions, rather just be carbon neutral?

Third problem is that even green groups now doubt many carbon offsets actually work.
For instance, the most common offset scheme -- especially here -- is to simply plant trees, often in places where people would probably plant them anyway. But trees die and rot, and when they do they release much of the carbon they've trapped back into the air. As Prof. Oliver Rackham, the Cambridge botanist and author, says: "Telling people to plant trees is like telling them to drink more water to keep down rising sea levels." What goes in will come out.
Besides, who checks these schemes to see they do what they claim? The band Coldplay, for instance, last year found that most of the trees of the mango plantation it planted in India to offset its world tour had actually died.

And, lastly, there's a moral problem. Offsets are really best suited for people rich enough -- like Gore -- to afford them. They let the rich pay someone else to use less so they can use more. And so the aristocrat can party on under the chandeliers, while the power-rationed peasants sit out in his dark.

Of course, one hypocrite like Gore shouldn't discredit an entire cause. Yet it can't be an accident that global warming attracts more hypocrites than most faiths. There's Tim Flannery, criss-crossing the world by jet to tell us to use less oil. There's British PM Tony Blair lecturing Britons to cut their emissions, but declaring it "unreasonable" to expect him therefore to stop flying off on his overseas holidays. And there's Prince Charles booking out all of a jet's first and second class to fly to New York to accept a green award from Gore. Ah, Gore again. Which reminds me of Laurie David, one of the producers of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. David, too, demands we save the world by cutting our gasses, yet turns out to be as addicted to private jets as her friend Al. Asked recently to explain such inconvenient hypocrisy, David spluttered: "Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year." But -- and here's where she shows she's nobler than you -- "I feel horribly guilty about it."

See? The global warming faith is more about how you feel than what you actually do. Even the makers of An Inconvenient Truth demonstrate that. What a circus. So what is the moral in this carnival of hypocrisy?

It's that global warming is an apocalyptic faith whose preachers demand sacrifices of others that they find far too painful for themselves. It's a faith whose prophets can demand we close coal mines but who won't even turn off their own pool lights. Who demand the masses lose their cars, while they themselves keep their planes. It's the ultimate faith of the feckless rich, where a ticket to heaven can be bought with a cheque made out to Al Gore. No further sacrifice required.
Except, of course, from the poor. While Gore's lights burn brightly, for you the darkness is coming.

Crunchy Granola...

It's a grey and dreary day here in Chicago, and I am sitting around waiting for the Ice Mountain truck to come and pick up some water coolers my roomate rented last year for a frisbee tournament and never returned so I figure there's no better time to do a little blogging.

First, I realize that I do not have up to date email addresses for everyone and I was thinking that it would be nice to have a mass email list that we could all use, so if you read this would you mind sending your email address to the sauvageau mail box attached to this blog (sauvageaublog@gmail.com)? I will make a contact group and we can email eachother through that address.

Seeing as though I have yet to find a full time job and enter into the "real world" I have been teaching in an after school program on the Northwest side of Chicago since last summer. The program is geared toward bringing environmentalism and local activism to high school kids in Chicago Public Schools. I am friends with the woman who started the program and got the job through her (meaning I did NOT earn it with any kind of experience or credentials and therefore have more to learn than I have to teach). That being said, I have certainly learned quite a bit, from my students, from my coworkers, and from the field trips and guest speakers we have brought to speak to the kids. Environmentalsim is a real hot topic these days, and I was baffled by how much I didn't know (once it had occurred to me that all my knowledge of the environment was from what I was taught in fifth grade- circa 1995- the realization was less profound).

One of the first activities we did as a group was calculate our ecological footprint. We used an online survey that asks you questions regarding your energy usage, size of your home, etc. and then gives you an approximate calculation of how many earths we would need if everyone lived like you. I scored somewhere in the 4.3x earths range. Here is the link to the website we used: http://www.earthday.net/footprint/info.asp. There are also lists of averages so you can compare your score to the rest of the world (http://www.ecologicalfootprint.org). This is a very cool way to put into perspective your own energy usage and come up with specific ways to improve it.

I was surprised at how many things matter here. Perhaps most surprising was the distance food travels to get me and the pollution it costs to get things like grapes to me from Chile in the winter. All of a sudden my mother's quest to reduce her family's intake of processed food seems more relevant.

So here is my next challenge for you sauvageaus out there: do you own eco-footprint and post your results. Then tell us what you think of the environmental issues that have arose in the last few years (e.g. global warming, alternative energies, water conservation, etc.). Is there anything you do that you would like to share or promote? Is there anything you want to know more about? GO!!

-Colyn

New York's New Governor!

Today, two blocks from my apartment New York's 55th Governor was sworn in! It was beyond busy in front of the capitol today, bustling with reporters, etc. If you want to check out some of his inaugural speech... HERE

All in all, Albany has been quite an interesting place ....

Oh yes, speaking of interesting... here is some old news, but nonetheless, interesting news about an occurrence where I work, at the State Library. It was, needless to say one of the most interesting days in the library... check this article out... Click THIS!

On a lighter note... recently Luke and I went to "The Egg" which is a concert hall next to the capitol and saw the Marcus Roberts Trio during the Gershwin Festival ... it was great! check it out...
Hope all is well for everyone!
~Maureen

Your Happiness Is Your Responsibility!!!

Happiness is something so personal,
Yet influenced by others.

When happiness is shared,
It seems to multiply.

Contagious like the flu,
But also only last for twenty-four hours at times.

As most thing in life,
Happiness must also have an opposite to balance itself.

My only wish for you,
Is that you spend more time with happiness!

To go through life happy is wise,
Yet, not to pursue this most important possession, is unfortunate.

Within your entire existence, peacefulness should thrive;
After all, truly, what else is more righteous?

-the eldest-