My motivation for jumping into the car and going was simple – I had to give a presentation at the fifth annual Ammonia Fuel Network conference in Minneapolis regarding our activities in the Niagara Falls area.
I've appeared as a speaker at national conferences in very large rooms and I'm perfectly comfortable with a microphone and a crowd of five hundred. Today's gather was about a hundred and forty researchers and business people. I went at 2:30 and I was joined by Larry Bruce, our strategic marketing guru.
Our presentation was well received – twenty five minutes of talking, several questions at the end, and then afterward Bill Kumm from Arctic Energies, LLC and Phillipp Andres from Sustainable Energy Link came up, introduced themselves, and handed me their cards. That repeat of the P at the end of his name is no mistake – I think he is French Canadian based on his accent. We've got a cocktail party tonight with Kathy Showalter from Enerjyn, our grant writer, and I know both John Holbrook, one of the Ammonia Fuel Network founders, and Bill Leighty from the Leighty foundation will be there. Some other luminaries have been invited but I haven't yet internalized who does what so we'll let that be for the moment.
We had some other networking over lunch – we met Stephen Boergert, who does what they call "super safe" ammonia storage tanks. This sounds perfect for our plant design; cards exchanged and soon we'll have information on the storage tank costs.
Larry and I are the only marketing mustelids present and we came hoping for additional business contacts. It seems like some of these folks might be ready to do something.
I'm a bit worried about money – hotel, food, parking ... I sure hope that A.) my last week's job pays promptly and B.) I get solid arrangements to work in central Iowa finalized tomorrow.
Larry and I were talking about the curious dichotomy – starting this thing from scratch, the lack of funds, and so forth. I can roam or I can be a professional, but this frequent "crossing the border" is a bit disconcerting. I've written about my desire to wander for a variety of reasons – because I enjoy it greatly, because publishing it here is a conscious branding effort calculated to protect me against the discrimination autistic adults often face, but some of it is simple service for my countrymen. This banking bailout is a total scam which will hobble the next administration without fixing anything and many, many people are going to have this experience of getting knocked down ... but not all of them will be standing back up.
If we have any sort of economic renaissance I think it'll be coming on the back of renewable energy. When we had the internet bubble we had a mess, but we got stuff we could use – this marvelous network which so facilitates our communication. The housing bubble produced nothing but liabilities – debt, both local and foreign, and misallocated resources in the form of far flung exurbs that'll politically suck us dry before they finally die. A renewable energy boom (and the inevitable bubble) will, like the internet bubble, leave us with things we can use, and the outputs will be tangible, even if they're not sufficient to service the debt associated with their creation.
I must say again that I'm delighted to have finally received proper treatment for the Lyme disease that has dogged me for the last year. I've diaried, worked on various telecom and energy stuff, and I feel much clearer mentally. The simplest and best indicator that treatment is working? A week ago I'd read a page in a novel, then maybe have to flip back to the previous page and start over because I'd lost track of the plot. These last few days I've been reading Kerouac's On The Road and I'm back to my old method of bookmarking – simply throwing the tome down when I'm done with it and remembering which page I was on(!)
This level of improvement in short term to long term memory after only a few days of tetracycline fills me with hope. Hope, personally, but I've very worried about what will happen nationally. We're going to have a time of great upheaval and fear of loss of health insurance will tie people to sinking ships ... unless we get national health care. The freedom to simple leave an employer without losing care will facilitate the move from our consumption economy to one of production; there are 75,000 jobs waiting for wind turbine maintainers alone.
OK, I could say so much more, as I'm about to post this after the cocktail party, but instead I think I'll let some of that play out and just share some pictures of the McNamara Alumni Center, our humble venue, with you ...