Automatic doors 2

As Tiger notes there has been a positive rash of automated doors here there and everywhere. In the Arts building at UEA we have some sets of double doors such that the ordinary door that you push also has an electric mechanism which you can activate by bashing one of those metal pads with a wheel chair sign on it. It's placed on a nearby wall at wheel chair height. You know the sort I mean.

The implication of the wheel chair button is that the electric mechanism is to help those with disabilities to get through the door.

How many able bodied students and academics bash the wheel chair button just to go through a door?

Maybe about the same number as the number of able bodied individuals with nothing to carry who get in the lift to go up one floor.

Roast beetroot and potatoes with rosemary and garlic

Here is one of my favourite recipes for Beetroot. This is probably enough for about two people.

Ingredients:
Two or three medium sized beetroot
Two or three medium sized potatoes
A sprig of fresh rosemary
Two cloves of garlic
A generous tablespoonful of goose fat or olive oil.

Method:
Preheat the oven to a fairly hot temperature. A conventional oven is best. If using a fan oven, you may want to use an enamel roasting tin with a lid, or perhaps a terracotta brick, to prevent the vegetables from drying up.

Put the goose fat (or olive oil) in the bottom of a roasting tin, and heat it in the oven for a bit.

Scrub the mud off the beetroot but do not peel them. Do the same to the potatoes. Cut off the scabby top and the tail of the beetroot. Cut the vegetables into portions, about the normal size for roast potatoes or a bit smaller.

Peel the garlic cloves and cut them in thin slices. Rinse the rosemary.

Take the tin of hot fat out of the oven and put the vegetables in it, turning them over to coat them with grease on all sides. Scatter the rosemary leaves around and drop the garlic slices in between the vegetable pieces.

Put the tin in the oven and roast them for about 45 minutes or a little longer depending on the size. It is best to turn them again in the fat part way through the cooking. Make sure the potatoes are quite tender before serving. Just before serving grind some sea salt over the roast vegetables.

Serve piping hot, with anything you like. Yummy.

PS you can do the beetroot without the potatoes, but I quite like the way the edges of the potatoes get coloured pink by bumping into the beetroot in the pan.

The experience is completely different if done with olive oil instead of dripping, but both are yummy.

Heating 2

Sources of heat in our Cambridge house:

1. Gas boiler with radiators
2. A coal effect gas fire
3. An aged electric convector heater (rarely used).
   

What does it mean to be green?

It means that when you could do something using a machine, or you could do it just as well or better without using the machine, you do it without using the machine.

Automatic doors

There's a way into our local Shopping Centre (the nearest way in if you start from our house) which has two sets of doors, one at the outer end of the passage and one at the inner end.

Actually there are four sets of doors, two at the outer end and two at the inner end, so if there are a lot of people coming and going the ones going in can go through one set of double doors and the ones going out can go through another set and they don't get into collisions. It's sensible, on the whole, to keep left, which is the normal way of doing these things in this country.

The doors on the right as you go in are automatic doors, at both ends of the corridor. The double doors on the left are ordinary doors, such that you can push them from either side. It's a lot quicker to go through the ones that you push, because you don't have to wait for them to sense you and then open for you. The automatic ones are particularly irritating when you're approaching from the side where they open into your face.

There's also another reason why it's a lot quicker and easier to go through the non-automatic doors. It's because everyone else is trying to squeeze through the automatic ones.

Young and old, fit and unfit, slim and obese, the lot. They would prefer to jam themselves into a bottle neck with all the rest of the lazy bunch of chavs rather than push a door open.

In fact some of them stand outside the non-automatic doors and smoke, and look most surprised when someone (i.e. me) comes out that way. I do so habitually, partly because I think a little exercise to the muscles of the arms, chest and abdomen will be good for me. It's not much, but if you do it regularly I presume it helps to keeps them in trim.

So there are three advantages to going through the doors that you push: (1) speed, (2) not having to negotiate a way through a crowd of fat and unattractive specimens of humanity, (3) improved fitness.

A fourth advantage is that you use your own renewable energy, not the electricity that powers the mechanism of the doors.

And why would you prefer to go through the automatic doors, assuming you're not in a wheel chair or walking with a stick? Because you're lazy? Any other reason?

Washing up

Today at 1340 I started running the hot tap to get the water to come hot. While it ran I cleared the washing up rack of clean dry things left from the breakfast washing up.
At 1343 I had a bowl of hot water and a clear rack. I pulled on my rubber gloves. I started washing while the tap filled the rinsing bowl.
It was a cooked lunch. There were pans, two chopping boards and a measuring jug as well as the plates and cutlery. At 1348 it was all done, a full rack of washed dishes were draining, and I had cleaned the kitchen surfaces. I took off my rubber gloves and went back to work.
I'd be interested to know from anyone who uses a dishwasher for day to day usage, how much time it takes to load a dishwasher and unload it when it's clean, including the time spent cleaning the filters and so on? Aside from the frustration of finding that the item you need is in the dishwasher waiting to be washed up, and the frustration of finding that the rack into which your item would fit is already full, and the cost to yourself and the environment of running a dishwasher, is there actually any saving in effort or time?

What does it mean to be green?

It means eating beetroot.