Unit 1
After living in the 24-hour city of Las Vegas, Nevada for nearly ten years, my family and I decided to slow things down. My daughter wanted a hor. My husband wanted property. My son wanted a dirt bike. I wanted our family to be more lf-sufficient.
None of us felt that this could be acplished where we were living and we all agreed that a move to the country would be great for everyone.
Before long we t about looking for a home in Yucca, Arizona, a very small town of less than 1,000 people. It was while I was scanning listings from our real estate agent that I first learned of it. There was a home for sale there on 40 acres. When I called to inquire about the property, I was informed that there was no electricity available in the area. What? No electricity? I almost dismisd the idea immediately.
The property was off the grid. It was not connected whatsoever to any utilities — power, water or
虞山卿
wer. Power was supplied by a wind turbine and solar panels. Water had to be hauled in and stored in two tanks located on the property. Forty acres would give us plenty of room for all of our animals a
chopping
nd give my husband and son space to ride their ATVs. Besides, what better way is there to bee more lf-sustainable? After giving it some thought, we decided to put in an offer and moved in on Thanksgiving Day.
When we first moved to the property, we did some remodeling and stayed in our motor home. We were confronted with real challenges at the time. The power kept going out, the main water line to the hou broke, the plumbing backed up into the front yard and the generator died.
But the tbacks just made us work harder. We slowly got things fixed and moved into the hou after 38 days in the RV. The next challenge was to bee familiar with your power system, and to learn the ins and outs of hauling your own water and generating your own power.
Our off-the-grid system consists of eight solar panels (1,000 watts) that are mounted on a sun tracker rack. We also have a wind turbine that generates 3,000 watts in 24 mph winds. The energy generated by the wind and sun is stored in 16 6v golf cart batteries. We also have two 2,500-gallon above-ground water tanks and a 250-gallon propane tank. Every weekend, we haul two 275-gallon water tanks to the nearby town of Yucca and fill them with water, which we then pump into our big water tanks.
While living here for the past four months has been a big adjustment, there are many benefits to living off the grid. I think one of the greatest is teaching my kids the importance of conrvation. They ud to take water, power and gas for granted. The first week we were here, we ud almost 1,000 gallons of water. With only a
5,000-gallon water tank, it didn’t take them long to understand that we had to u less water. We started taking quicker showers, doing only full loads of laundry, turning off the water while brushing our teeth or shaving.
Over-consumption is even more clearly demonstrated by our electricity usage. We have a digital readout of how many volts of DC power we have stored in our batteries at any given time. If you turn on a light or the TV, the number goes down. In order to protect the batteries, the system is t up to shut the inverter off if the volts get too low. Then the power goes out. When we first moved in, we lost power almost daily. After this happens a few times, it bees clear very quickly just how often you waste electricity. Everything from lights and ceiling fans to puters and radios were left on when they were not in u. The cell phone chargers were plugged in even when they weren’t charging anything. All of this us unnecessary power. We are steadily learning to be
more diligent with our power usage.
音标的英文
In addition, we are also trying to make other changes. They include reducing the amount of trash we generate by recycling and posting, growing our own organic vegetables, and reusing and repurposing things that we would normally toss. We also want to produce our own eggs and goat’s milk in the near future.
Overall, going off the grid has been great for our family. We have learned how to conrve power and water and to really appreciate what the earth gives to us every day. I hope that once my kids move out of the hou, they will keep the habits that they have learned by living off the grid.
I receive d an email from a reader who asked, “Why do some friendships end, no matter how much you want them to last?” She referred to having en the question in one of my articles, Mystery of Friendship. As I wrote in it, I don’t think easy answers exist as to how friendships start, why some turn into lifetime ones, and why some end. Although I’ve tried answering the first two questions in other articles (To Have A Friend and Be A Friend), I still get surprid by friendships that endure and disillusioned by ones that slip away. Even so, I’ll try to offer some insights here as to why friendships end.
扬州教育学院My simple answer is that friendships end becau the situations friends are in or even the friends the
mlves change. Others have similar answers. First, the situations friends face may change. The decision to relocate for a new school or job cannot help but affect a friendship. Likewi, if a friend is in an accident, develops an illness, or los someone clo, the situations cannot help but affect a friendship. Does a friendship need to end becau of the changes? No, but it’ll require adjustments that one or both friends might not be willing to make. Second, the friends themlves may change. A significant reason that friendships often end when friends
are apart for an extended period of time (for summer camp, college, etc.) is that one or both of the friends change. I think it hurts less when both friends change, becau then the breakup is more often mutual and so both friends get closure by both deciding to let go and move forward in their lives without each
other. What tends to hurt most is when just one friend changes. One friend might change social circles,
bee involved in new social organizations, start to date, get a pet, or take on some
other venture that consumes more time and passion. Again, a friendship can endure the changes, unless one or both of the friends for some reason decide not to invest the time and energy involved i
n the adjustment period. (For example, one friend might forget the importance of the friendship due to the high of having a new pet or might feel that the change is impossible to overe when one gets married but the other is still single.) In this situation, breakups may not be mutual and so one or both friends feel betrayed and end up with bitter memories about what was a precious friendship to them.
There are other reasons why friendships end. For example, as much as two people might want a friendship
to survive, one or both of them might unintentionally neglect it. Friendship is often pared to a flower
garden. Well, if flowers don’t get expod regularly enough to sunlight and don’t get watered enough, flowers will wither and even die. The same applies to friendship. If week after week pass where plans are made to spend time together but are never honored, perhaps due to taking a friendship for granted, eventually even the clost of friendships may cea to have a reason to exist.
Conflicts can also cau the end of friendships. If the flower is a fledgling plant, one blow might destroy it just as sometimes relatively young friendships aren’t strong enough to endure much conflict. Even tho amazing clo friendships, where friends love us no matter what our faults are,
need care when it es to conflicts. Sure, if
a flourishing flower gets stepped on, it might revive on its own. Moreover, if it gets a little extra special care, it’ll probably bounce back as if it hadn’t ever been injured. At the same time, if a flower gets repeatedly trampled on, it’ll probably eventually break. Especially the friendships that have been around for a long time can endure storms, and even bee stronger for them, but most friendships have breaking points.
Nevertheless, while we can rarely predict at the outt which ones will last, most friendships do enrich us for however short or long they’re a part of our lives.
茄瓜炒肉
In the sleepiness at the end of a library nap, I wasn’t sure where I was. I stretched out my arm to reach for a human being, but what I grabbed was a ud copy of The Odysy, the book about going home. My heart ached.
It was The library, flooded with white fluorescent light and smelling of musty books and sweaty sneakers, was eerily quiet. My readings emed endless. I had been admitted into a three-cour, yearlong freshman program called Directed Studies, dubbed Directed Suicide by Yalies. It was suppod to introduce us to “the splendors of Western civilization,” in the words of the catalog,
发明电灯的故事by force-feeding the canons of philosophy, literature and history.
I wanted very much to study the Western canon, becau I knew nothing about it. Yes, McDonald’s ads and Madonna posters were plastered on Shanghai streets, but few Western ideas filtered through. We had been informed of Karl Marx’s habit of sitting at the same spot in the British Library, for instance, but had read none of his original words. Western civilization was different, mysterious and thus alluring. Besides, becau I longed to be accepted here, I yearned to understand American society. What better way to prehend it than to study the very ideas on which it is bad?
But at , I was tired of them all: Homer, Virgil, Herodotus and Plato. Their words were dull and the prentations difficult to follow. The professors here do not teach in the same way that teachers in China解除劳动关系协议书
do. Studying humanities in China means memorizing all the “correct,” standard interpretations given during lectures. Here, professors ask provocative questions and let the students argue, rearch and write papers on their own. At Yale, I often waited for the end-of-class “correct” answers, which never came.
透明图片制作Learning humanities was cure repetition in China, but it was shaky originality here. And it could be
even shakier for me. The name Agamemnon was impossibly long to pronounce, and as a result I di dn’t recognize it when we were discussing him in the minars. I had written my first English essay ever just a year earlier, when applying to colleges, and now came the papers analyzing the canons. And I simply didn’t write in English fast enough to take notes in class.
I hoped my diligence would make up for lack of preparation. On weekend nights, when my American roommates were out on dates, I would tell them I had planned a date with Dante or Aristotle. (They didn’t think it was funny.)
On one of tho weekend nights, I wrote a paper on Aeneas, the protagonist of The Aeneid, who was destined to found Rome but reluctant to leave behind his native Troy. “Aeneas agonizes,” I
wrote. “He hesitates. Natural instincts call him to stick to the past, while at the same time, he feels obligated
to obey his father’s instructions for the future. His prent life is split, pulled apart by the bygone days and by the days to e. ” I saw mylf in what I wrote.
During calls home every two weeks, my mother pleaded with me to take chemistry or biology. Scienc
e was the same everywhere, she said. And I, like everybody el from China, was well prepared in math, physics and chemistry. (To graduate from a standard six-year Chine high school, one needs to take five years of physics, four years of chemistry and three years of biology.)
Instead, I visited the writing tutor — there is one in every undergraduate residential hall — for every paper I turned in. My papers were always written days before they were due. I lingered after class to question professors. My classmates lent me their notes so I could learn the skill of note-taking in English.
By the time I misd home so much that soup dumplings and sautéed eels popped up in my head as I read, Nietzsche had replaced Plato on the chronological reading list and Flaubert Homer. And every paper of mine came back with an A.
脱离电网的生活：一家城市居民如何发现了简单生活
艾莉森·佐谢尔
1.在内华达州的不眠之城拉斯维加斯生活了将近十年之后，我和我的家人决定放慢生活节奏。女儿想要一匹马，我的丈夫想要一块地产，儿子想要一辆越野轻型摩托车，我想要一家人更加自给自足。
2.我们都感到这个梦想在我们居住的这个城市里不可能实现。大家一致认为，搬到乡下去对谁都是最好的。
3.很快，我们便着手在亚利桑那州的尤卡，这个不满千人的小镇寻找房子。我是在浏览我们的房地产经纪人提供的在售房屋清单时得知这个地方的。那儿有一处占地40英亩的房产在出售。我打去询问这处房产时，人家告诉我那个地区不通电。什么？不通电？我差点立刻打消在那里购房的念头。
4.这处房产不接电网，一切公用服务事业都没有——电、水、下水道。电由风力涡轮机和太阳能电池板提供，水得靠人力拉进来，储存在房里的两个贮水箱里。 40英亩的地给我们充裕的场地饲养动物，也给我的丈夫和儿子足够地方驾驶他们的全地形车。还有什么地方比这里更能够做到自给自足呢？考虑一番后，我们决定出价购买，并在感恩节那天搬了进去。
5.刚搬进来时，我们住在房车里，给房屋做了一些改建。当时，我们遇到了真正的挑战。电老是断，通向房屋的主水管破裂，水管堵塞，水流到前院，发电机也停转了。
6.但是，这些挫折促使我们更加卖力地干活。慢慢地，我们把东西一一修好。在房车里住了38天后，我们搬进了新家。接下来的挑战是逐步熟悉供电系统，了解自己拉水、自己发电的方方面面。
7.我们的不连网发电系统由8个安装在太阳跟踪架上的太阳能电池板(1,000瓦)组成。此外，我们还有一个在风速达到每小时24英里时能发3,000瓦电的风力涡轮机。风能和太阳能发的电存
