A Young Man's Fancy Turns to Bamboo

Had some connectivity issues on Thursday, was busy with work on Friday and today, Saturday, was too fine a day to post anything earlier in the day. We had lunch on the deck for the first time since sometime in September, though it was too windy to maintain a fire safely in the barbecue, at least with an unpredictable four-year-old around. So I cooked lunch burgers inside, and dashed them with Liquid Smoke.

The air is warm and there's a hint of green on the trees. By some coincidence, I'm in the thick of writing an article about green, or sustainable, design in the retail industry. Among other things, I found out about a car wash -- attached to a car dealership -- in McKinney, Texas, that recycles most of its wash water, something like 80 percent of the total. A car wash for cars on Dune, though I don't remember that they had that kind of transportation, prefering instead to ride giant worms. I think. Been more than a quarter-century since I read Dune.

Some bank buildings I'm writing about use bamboo as a interior finishing material it's a renewable resource, though I wonder how much water bamboo cultivation uses. That made me think about my grandparents in San Antonio. Instead of a privacy fence for their backyard, they cultivated bamboo. As a kid, it seemed like an enormous forest, high as I could see, thick and weird. The only break in it was for the back gate, and even that was surrounded by the knobby trunks and the slender leaves.

Later in life, I enjoyed wandering through a couple of bamboo forests in Japan. I don't remember where they were. Near Nara, maybe, but how green it all was, leaves and trunks, rustling and creaking in the light wind.