Well, well, well. Look at this. My last post was on December 13 and this one will be on December 31. The two numbers are the same, just reversed. SO WHAT! You say. Hey it's the kind of thing I notice.
And it is the last day of the year 2009. Next year is 2010 and I'm looking the big 6-0 right square in the face. Don't look too bad unless I use a mirror. (ugh! especially in the morning. Rearrange that mop on top of your head girl!)
This is when we are supposed to make resolutions to do better next year. I decided some time ago that the best resolution for me to make is to not make any resolutions. It's one of the few, other than to eat when I'm hungry, that I have a chance of keeping.
This past year has been as ho-hum as any other. I don't lead an exciting life. I did help my friend Peg by doing some drawings for a kids book she might get published next year. I've gotten a bit better at moving around. But I doubt I can ever again spend an 8 plus hour day walking or standing around on a hard concrete floor. Heck even sitting still at a computer like I do to read my e-mails, mess around on Face book, and write these witty (he, he, he!) lines gets to me when I have to get up and eeeeyow! my left knee doesn't want to work and tells me about it.
Next year will, hopefully be better.
Next year maybe I will get my seeds started in time to have a decent harvest of something besides cucumbers. ( Though my refrigerator bread and butter pickles were awesome if I do say so myself. And I should as there isn't one little chunk of those tasty things left!) Perhaps I can even convince myself to plant a fruit tree or two for harvisting a season or so down the road. I'd really like to plant some asparagus as well. Love that stuff but can't afford it much at the store. Which is understandable as the plant just won't listen to the big food combines and insists on doing things it's way. (It's usually two to three years before you can get a couple of asparagus spears from one plant and it doesn't take to replanting very well unless you are far more careful than a machine can ever be.)
I've spotted some big plastic, wire encased, square shaped 'barrels' that, if I can come up with the cash, I could turn into 'rain barrels' or cisterns. Of course then I'd have to find a way to catch the run off from my house and barns to direct it into them. Yes, I'd want more than one.
The problem, as always, is money. sigh. Now that I can no longer do a lot of the stuff I want done myself I have to ask, beg or hire others to do them for me. Be great if I ever win that big money from Publishers Clearing House but you know how that goes.
As for tonight and the New Years Eve celebrations. If I weren't a member of the local Vol. Fire Dept. I'd be setting here at home in front of a flickering TV snoring through the ball dropping in New York and even in Dallas. Then I'd snort awake, take the dog for a walk and go to bed.
But being a member of the VFD I will be with my fellow members of the department at the fire house, munching on pot luck goodies (I'm baking some cookies a little later to take), drinking non-alcoholic beverages, playing various games and waiting. Just waiting. Waiting for friends and neighbors to do something really stupid. Things like drive home drunk from a really rad party. Um. Make that TRY to drive home. Then there are the ones who get snockered and decide to celebrate by shooting their guns into the air, forgetting, in their inebriated state, that what goes up also comes down and can go through roofs...and bodies. Don't forget the ones who just have to have fireworks. Fireworks they may be too drunk to use responsibly. Fireworks that can hurt them or work just fine and set a neighbors house or pasture on fire instead.
Of course it has been real wet around here the past few days so the danger of grass fire's is not so great. House fires on the other hand are more likely as folks, especially if they are partying, can get clumsy with candles, fireplaces and/or wood stoves or even space heaters.
So the VFD has its own little, dry, party and we wait. We wait for the call's we really hope don't come. We'd all much rather stay in the warm, dry firehouse and munch on goodies and drink tea and sparkling grape juice. Yeah, that would be much better than being out in the cold and wet cutting a friend or neighbor out of a crashed vehicle or putting out a house fire, or any other of a lot of things we could end up having to do.
Hmmm. Just reread this. I really do need more sunlight.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Well Ain't That a Kick in the Arm.
I can now honestly and faithfully report that getting the crap kicked out of you by a horse is NOT FUN. It HURTS. It is also scary, chilling even. If that twelve hundred or so pound beast had kicked just six or seven inches higher he'd have smashed his muddy hoof into my face.
Big dumb cottonpickin' &*^# freaking $^%*! HORSE.
Note please that in none of the above (not even in the suggested vulgarity) did I say Stupid. That epithet I reserve for myself.
After all I was the one who did not observe the beast closely enough to realize that he was restive or starting to 'feel his oats' and was thus surprised into just standing there turned slightly to my left with my right arm pulled up over the right side of my chest as the beast brushed by on that side.
The good thing about that is I have two big nasty bruises, one on my forearm and the other on my upper arm where his hoof hit me instead of a bigger hoof shaped bruise on my right boob.
The bad part is he hit me hard enough to knock me down on ground that was, at the time, as hard as brick and I landed badly on my left wrist. A wrist now decorated with an ugly big black brace that the Dr. tells me I must wear until the fourth of January.
The brace does help keep the hairline fracture in one of the many tiny wrist bones from hurting much and the pain meds prescribed do a fairly decent job not only on the wrist but on the back, shoulder and assorted other aches and pains that showed up shortly after the incident. But nothing helps me cope with trying to type with the thing on.
I've recently stopped taking that medicine however, and switched to a plain OTC pain killer as I just don't like the idea of taking anything with a narcotic in it.
Don't know if it's the narcotic I don't trust (Think of the old Native American tales of either the Scorpion or the Rattle Snake) or if it is myself that I don't trust with the narcotic.
Oh, some of you may not have heard of either of those tales. They are cautionary tales, both of them, and follow the same general story line. Basically an innocent, either a young warrior or larger animal comes across one of the poisonous two I mentioned above. I believe that with the snake it is a young warrior on his spirit quest that finds a rattle snake high up on a mountain, nearly frozen. He starts to leave the snake there to die but it speaks to him and begs him to take it down to the valley where it can survive promising that it will not bite him if he saves it's life. So the young warrior puts the nearly frozen snake inside his shirt and starts down the mountain. The snake soon warms up while riding there and, as soon as it can move, it bites the young warrior. The warrior cry out as he falls, "Why did you do this you foolish snake! We are still far up the mountain! I will die of your poison and you will surely freeze and die as well!" The snake replies, "True. But I am a rattle snake and you knew what I was when you picked me up!"
The tail of the scorpion is much the same only, as I remember it is a wolf or some such that a Scorpion convinces to carry it across a flooded river. Half way across the scorpion stings the beast carrying it. The stung critter says "Why did you sting me! Now we both will drown!" To which the scorpion replies. "I only did what it was in me to do. You knew I was a scorpion when you agreed to carry me."
Much the same can be said, I suppose, for me and that horse. I knew it was a big beast. That much was obvious. I also knew that he had been penned up in a smaller area than he needed while a painful hoof was being doctored. A hoof that he wasn't limping on near as much as he had been. If I had been paying attention I might have already let the fellow out into the larger pasture where he could run and burn off those oats he expended by kicking me. Instead I went about my chores as I had been doing them during the time the horse was being kept up.
That is one of the things that we humans really must remember. Especially about our fellow critters that happen to be either/and/ or bigger, heavier, stronger than us or even with sharp claws and teeth. They have their view of the world and what should happen in it.
Horses like to 'play' and often do so by bumping past each other and letting their hooves fly 'knowing' that the other 'horse' will of course start running and bucking as well. I was not another horse but a rather clumsy, fat, slow, old human too startled to move. So instead of first shying away and then running and bucking along, I got kicked in the arm.
I knew what kind of critter I was walking into a pen with, I had just not been observant enough to realize that said critter had become restless.
So here I am, trying to type with a brace on my left wrist.
At least it wasn't a kick in the head.
(Note to any who may have read the tales I mentioned above: I'm doing this whole thing from memory. If I quoted too much to not say more about where I got those stories, please let me know the book they are in etc. Firstly so I can come back to this blog and make note of it and secondly so I can look the book up at the library and read it again. At least I don't think I own the book I read them in. Hmmm. Maybe I'll start rummaging around in the boxes of books I still haven't unpacked. As I remember that was an interesting book...now what was it called...)
Big dumb cottonpickin' &*^# freaking $^%*! HORSE.
Note please that in none of the above (not even in the suggested vulgarity) did I say Stupid. That epithet I reserve for myself.
After all I was the one who did not observe the beast closely enough to realize that he was restive or starting to 'feel his oats' and was thus surprised into just standing there turned slightly to my left with my right arm pulled up over the right side of my chest as the beast brushed by on that side.
The good thing about that is I have two big nasty bruises, one on my forearm and the other on my upper arm where his hoof hit me instead of a bigger hoof shaped bruise on my right boob.
The bad part is he hit me hard enough to knock me down on ground that was, at the time, as hard as brick and I landed badly on my left wrist. A wrist now decorated with an ugly big black brace that the Dr. tells me I must wear until the fourth of January.
The brace does help keep the hairline fracture in one of the many tiny wrist bones from hurting much and the pain meds prescribed do a fairly decent job not only on the wrist but on the back, shoulder and assorted other aches and pains that showed up shortly after the incident. But nothing helps me cope with trying to type with the thing on.
I've recently stopped taking that medicine however, and switched to a plain OTC pain killer as I just don't like the idea of taking anything with a narcotic in it.
Don't know if it's the narcotic I don't trust (Think of the old Native American tales of either the Scorpion or the Rattle Snake) or if it is myself that I don't trust with the narcotic.
Oh, some of you may not have heard of either of those tales. They are cautionary tales, both of them, and follow the same general story line. Basically an innocent, either a young warrior or larger animal comes across one of the poisonous two I mentioned above. I believe that with the snake it is a young warrior on his spirit quest that finds a rattle snake high up on a mountain, nearly frozen. He starts to leave the snake there to die but it speaks to him and begs him to take it down to the valley where it can survive promising that it will not bite him if he saves it's life. So the young warrior puts the nearly frozen snake inside his shirt and starts down the mountain. The snake soon warms up while riding there and, as soon as it can move, it bites the young warrior. The warrior cry out as he falls, "Why did you do this you foolish snake! We are still far up the mountain! I will die of your poison and you will surely freeze and die as well!" The snake replies, "True. But I am a rattle snake and you knew what I was when you picked me up!"
The tail of the scorpion is much the same only, as I remember it is a wolf or some such that a Scorpion convinces to carry it across a flooded river. Half way across the scorpion stings the beast carrying it. The stung critter says "Why did you sting me! Now we both will drown!" To which the scorpion replies. "I only did what it was in me to do. You knew I was a scorpion when you agreed to carry me."
Much the same can be said, I suppose, for me and that horse. I knew it was a big beast. That much was obvious. I also knew that he had been penned up in a smaller area than he needed while a painful hoof was being doctored. A hoof that he wasn't limping on near as much as he had been. If I had been paying attention I might have already let the fellow out into the larger pasture where he could run and burn off those oats he expended by kicking me. Instead I went about my chores as I had been doing them during the time the horse was being kept up.
That is one of the things that we humans really must remember. Especially about our fellow critters that happen to be either/and/ or bigger, heavier, stronger than us or even with sharp claws and teeth. They have their view of the world and what should happen in it.
Horses like to 'play' and often do so by bumping past each other and letting their hooves fly 'knowing' that the other 'horse' will of course start running and bucking as well. I was not another horse but a rather clumsy, fat, slow, old human too startled to move. So instead of first shying away and then running and bucking along, I got kicked in the arm.
I knew what kind of critter I was walking into a pen with, I had just not been observant enough to realize that said critter had become restless.
So here I am, trying to type with a brace on my left wrist.
At least it wasn't a kick in the head.
(Note to any who may have read the tales I mentioned above: I'm doing this whole thing from memory. If I quoted too much to not say more about where I got those stories, please let me know the book they are in etc. Firstly so I can come back to this blog and make note of it and secondly so I can look the book up at the library and read it again. At least I don't think I own the book I read them in. Hmmm. Maybe I'll start rummaging around in the boxes of books I still haven't unpacked. As I remember that was an interesting book...now what was it called...)
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Apologies!
Sorry! Just realized that I've skipped a whole month! And I can't even use the excuse of being busy getting ready for the holiday's as I'm to flat busted broke to do more than get a few (very few) cheap (very cheap) gifts for just the folks I see the most often.
No! One is not going to be for my shrink! Though sometimes I wonder if I might not need one really bad.
I know! I can blame it on the season this way. I can note that I've started wanting to sleep up to 10 hours a day now that it's getting cold and dreary and I see far less sun than I used to. What do they call it. It has some fancy name...seasonal depression? Nah. It's called something fancier than that I think.
It's supposed to be caused by the absence of enough sun light during the winter. It causes you to not want to move much, so you just stay in, eat and sleep. It's great for gaining weight. I just usually say that I'm just an old bear and that wants to hibernate.
It's what I feel like sometimes.
Yeah. I know! I should get one of those full spectrum lights and sit or work under it whenever it's cloudy out and after the sun goes down when it's not. Sigh.
All I can say to that is what part of the first part of this blog did you not understand. You remember, the part about being without a lot of extra cash. (Umm. make that Grouchy Old Bear. )
Well, it's not raining at the moment, maybe if I take my dog out for walkies that should make us both happy...at least for a while. Sigh.
I hate cold, wet and dreary. I could solve the problem if I were rich. I'd just pack up the critters and move down to the equator or some such. Down near sea level or far enough above to stay away from tsunami's and such. And hurricanes. But then there's the bugs and the guerrillas (not the gorillas). Oh, man, see what I mean.
Heck with it. I'm going for a walk.
No! One is not going to be for my shrink! Though sometimes I wonder if I might not need one really bad.
I know! I can blame it on the season this way. I can note that I've started wanting to sleep up to 10 hours a day now that it's getting cold and dreary and I see far less sun than I used to. What do they call it. It has some fancy name...seasonal depression? Nah. It's called something fancier than that I think.
It's supposed to be caused by the absence of enough sun light during the winter. It causes you to not want to move much, so you just stay in, eat and sleep. It's great for gaining weight. I just usually say that I'm just an old bear and that wants to hibernate.
It's what I feel like sometimes.
Yeah. I know! I should get one of those full spectrum lights and sit or work under it whenever it's cloudy out and after the sun goes down when it's not. Sigh.
All I can say to that is what part of the first part of this blog did you not understand. You remember, the part about being without a lot of extra cash. (Umm. make that Grouchy Old Bear. )
Well, it's not raining at the moment, maybe if I take my dog out for walkies that should make us both happy...at least for a while. Sigh.
I hate cold, wet and dreary. I could solve the problem if I were rich. I'd just pack up the critters and move down to the equator or some such. Down near sea level or far enough above to stay away from tsunami's and such. And hurricanes. But then there's the bugs and the guerrillas (not the gorillas). Oh, man, see what I mean.
Heck with it. I'm going for a walk.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Halloweeny story
It was supposed to have been clear and dry. It was also supposed to have been a night of fun, candy, silly costumes and general hi-jinks.
"This sucks." Randy grouched as he poked the smoldering lumps of what had been a fairly nice house with a pike pole. We were both going over the remains of the house, poking and prodding the various lumps and clumps of unknown and now unknowable objects trying to be sure they didn't have enough spark left in them to cause what is called a "re-kindle".
"Agreed." I grumped back. All that candy. Sitting there on my kitchen table. I glanced up at the clouds scudding past the crescent moon and began to feel the pounds adding themselves to my butt and thighs. I knew that if I didn't give that candy away somehow I would eat it myself. I've been poor to often to be able to force myself to throw anything labeled 'food' away. Even something that held that label as loosely as the high fat, high sugar goodies waiting inside the old plastic pumpkin.
"Have you heard anything about the family? The ones that lived here?" Randy rattled on. I wished he'd just shut the hell up. I was cold, I was wet, I was tired. All I wanted to do was go home, wash off the house fire stink and crawl into my nice warm bed. Something, I grimaced at the thought, that this family would be doing in a strange motel on the Red Cross's dime tonight. I mentioned as much to Randy.
He didn't answer.
I looked up from where I was carefully placing my fire boots to get ready to pull open the freezer of the fire blackened fridge where it lay on it's side. There was likely nothing in it but thawed out formally frozen meats and veggies and other assorted goodies. Possibly some melted chocolates that were to have been handed out tonight. "Randy?"
Randy was standing no more than five feet from me. He had left off his helmet and pulled his nomex hood down around his neck. His bunker jacket was laying over on the hood of the booster truck under his helmet so I could see how pale his face suddenly was in the harsh light of the lamps that'd been set up to light our way. "D-Did you see that?"
"See what?" I sighed standing up from where I had bent down by the toppled fridge.
"Over there, by what's left of the chimney! A-a mist of some kind."
"Rannndyyy." I sighed. "Cut out the Halloween crap, okay. I'd rather be at home handing out candy or telling ghost stories now too, but..."
I paused in my ill humored rant to look where he pointed.
Now, I know that many of you have never been involved in what firefighters refer to as 'overhaul'. It's where we go over the area that's burnt, whatever it is, and try to make double sure that the fire is totally, completely and permanently out. Plus we will rarely find a family treasure of some kind that will give some kind of comfort to folks who've lost a lot. Might be a photo album that something else fell on top of protecting it from the fire or one of those 'fire proof safes' that actually worked. Frankly that was one reason I was checking the fridge. Some folks stash their really important stuff in the freezer figuring that it being so cold and generally air tight it should survive a house fire. Anyway, there is almost always still some smoke and steam left at such a site for hours after all the flashing lights and firefighters have left.
Randy was staring, gap jawed, at something that I would have liked to think was just one more whiff of damp smoke and steam. It looked like just that. Except... except it was shaped like a man. A man who was moving purposely and steadily. As Randy and I watched the figure pantomimed starting a fire in the fireplace and then transferring something from it first to where a nearby window had been decorated with curtains and then to an area above the contorted springs and still smoldering wood of a couch before going on to where a second window had been.
I'm fairly sure we were both slack jawed as we watched the wispy form move toward what had been the kitchen...meaning that it had to pass between us on it's way to where the back porch still stood.
We both turned to watch the form go through the motions of opening and closing a door that was no longer there before walking down the steps and apparently getting into an invisible car before it just faded away.
"Y-yuh-" Randy gulped, "You saw that to?" he whispered.
"Don't wanna say so," I said after swallowing several times, " But, yeah, I did." We looked at each other for a few seconds more until Randy gulped again. Then he said, "I don't think this is gonna flare up again."
"Yeah," I shivered as I answered, "This is out, for sure. The storm that came through just before the fire wet everything down good so it definitely won't go anywhere even if it dose flare back up."
"Yeah, lets get out of here. Maybe we'll be in time to help the others finish cleaning the hoses from the engine, or at least help put them back on the truck. Huh."
"Yeah." I agreed as I frowned at the place where the specter had dissipated. "I'll just open this freezer and make sure there's nothing important in it, first. You go start taking down the lights."
In the freezer amongst the melted ice cream, still nearly raw meat and limp veggies was a gallon size plastic freezer bag with a thick brown legal size envelope in it. "Ah Hah!" I thought to myself.
Randy was strapping down the portable generator and I was stacking the last of the portable lights beside it when the tones came over the trucks radio.
"Report of a one car rollover on FM 2652 near county road 321," the radio told us.
"Well, hell," I groused. "That sounds like it's between here and the station."
"Yeah, There's a tight turn there. I came out with the tanker and we hadda slow down a lot before we could take it."
As we climbed into the booster we heard our med truck, engine and tanker call in route over the radio. We did the same as we pulled out. The ghostie that had chased us away from the burnt house was forgotten as we headed towards our fellows and the one car roll over.
Just as I suspect we both feared Randy and I got there first. We both slid out and headed for the car that was off the road with it's headlights pointed toward a tangle of trees across the ditch.
"Are you alright, Sir?" I asked the man leaning against the front fender of the small sports car.
"I'm fine." The pale man gritted. "I'm in a hell of a lot better shape than the guy in there!" he waved toward where his headlights pointed. "I just went off the road a little cause I was going to damn fast for the wet road. That poor sum-bitch," he shook, his head. "God Almighty, I swear he breathed his last as I walked up on him."
"Here, why don't you just sit down in your car, Sir. Our med unit is on the way as well as an ambulance." I said opening his car door and gently trying to get him to sit. "We want you to move as little as possible now, just in case there have been injuries you don't realize you have yet."
Randy had left me with the first victim and gone on into the tangle of trees, to check out the vehicle we could see now only because of the headlights of the car.
When he came out he was pale and I knew it would be a bad one. He went directly to the truck and called in what we had found over the radio. Soon the members of our Volunteer Department who were far more medically inclined than I would ever be arrived and relieved me of holding c-spine on the first victim. A couple of them had gone into the short tunnel another vehicle had burrowed into the dense tree line and come out shaking their heads.
I was headed out to the highway to help with traffic control - there's never any traffic until you need a clear road- when Randy came up beside me. He was still pale and I began to wonder if maybe he'd gotten a little dehydrated while we were overhauling the fire scene. "Katy," his voice was a husky whisper, "Come with me. It's gruesome as all git out but I have to have you see this."
"Look, Randy," I told him, "There's a reason I avoid the medical stuff. The only time I can handle the gore and stuff is when it's on the T. V. and I know it's SPFX."
"Katy." His voice became a plea, "I just want you to look at his face. You have got to see his face!"
Something about Randy's grim demeanor pulled me along with him. We climbed over broken and shattered tree limbs. The scent of their fresh sap only slightly dimmed by the rain that had pelted them either just after or even, perhaps as, they had been shattered. I quickly noted another, metallic scent that overlay the earthy oders of torn trees and turned soil.
"Look." Randy urged, and fearing what I would see I did.
I was very glad that this had occurred either before or during the heavy rain storm, whose lightening we had blamed the house fire on. The smell remained but the blood was mostly gone. There would have been blood. Lots of it. Some how this victim had managed to go air born out of his convertible. He'd likely decided he didn't need a seat belt. His car had pushed up a wall of broken and splintered tree limbs and now it's driver hung above the carcass of his vehicle impaled on several of those broken limbs.
"Look at his face, Katy! Look at his face!" Randy urged and I managed to tear my horrified vision away from the pieces of wood that protruded from places they should never be to look at the surprised, bloodless face that was a twin to the grinning continence of the ethereal image that had frightened Randy and I from the fire scene.
"Katy," Randy asked, "Dose it look like him? Dose it look like the spook we saw at the house?"
When I was finely able to convince my self to breath the wind had changed slightly and flowed over the corps and toward us. We both caught the scent at the same time. A scent any fire fighter, paid or volunteer knows intimately. We volunteers ofter wear it home to wash it off in our own showers. It sometimes takes two soakings to get it out of your hair if you have a lot as I do. And forget your cloths. Even protected by bunker gear they get permeated with it. They have to be washed in hot soapy water before the stink of a house fire can be gotten out.
The man hanging dead against those busted up trees smelled like he'd been in a house fire.
"I asked, Eric." Randy mentioned our chief medic. "He said this guy couldn't have died instantly as none of those limbs look like they go through anything vital. He probably bled out and it likely took a couple of hours."
"That house was down in an hour and a half." I stated grimly. "A half hour after that we were overhauling it."
"Yeah, and the guy who found this fella. He said he thought he died just as he found him and that was maybe fifteen minutes or so before he was able to find his cell phone and call 911."
"You want me to admit that what we saw was this guy's spirit reliving setting fire to that house?"
"I don't know. Maybe, just maybe, the fella wanted to confess somehow, y'know. And this was the only way he could. We need to say something to the coroner, the chief or somebody so there will be an investigation."
"Yeah," I nodded slowly. "But what."
We finely figured a way. We told the chief we'd gone in to find a way to get the body out after the coroner got done and that we'd smelled house fire smoke on the guy. The chief told the coroner and included info about a house fire not more than a mile down the road.
Two weeks later it was all over the local newspapers about how some hot shot developer had been trying to buy out the folks who owned the house that had burned. The stories went on to point out that when the developer couldn't get the county officials to go along with his plan to pull 'eminate domain' out of a hat to snatch the property he'd hired an arsonist from a nearby big city. Hired him to make it look 'natural'.
Randy and I were congratulated briefly by the county fire marshal for noticing the fire reek on the body. And that was the end of that.
Except neither Randy or I volunteer to stay behind by ourselves to over haul a burned out house after dark anymore.
"This sucks." Randy grouched as he poked the smoldering lumps of what had been a fairly nice house with a pike pole. We were both going over the remains of the house, poking and prodding the various lumps and clumps of unknown and now unknowable objects trying to be sure they didn't have enough spark left in them to cause what is called a "re-kindle".
"Agreed." I grumped back. All that candy. Sitting there on my kitchen table. I glanced up at the clouds scudding past the crescent moon and began to feel the pounds adding themselves to my butt and thighs. I knew that if I didn't give that candy away somehow I would eat it myself. I've been poor to often to be able to force myself to throw anything labeled 'food' away. Even something that held that label as loosely as the high fat, high sugar goodies waiting inside the old plastic pumpkin.
"Have you heard anything about the family? The ones that lived here?" Randy rattled on. I wished he'd just shut the hell up. I was cold, I was wet, I was tired. All I wanted to do was go home, wash off the house fire stink and crawl into my nice warm bed. Something, I grimaced at the thought, that this family would be doing in a strange motel on the Red Cross's dime tonight. I mentioned as much to Randy.
He didn't answer.
I looked up from where I was carefully placing my fire boots to get ready to pull open the freezer of the fire blackened fridge where it lay on it's side. There was likely nothing in it but thawed out formally frozen meats and veggies and other assorted goodies. Possibly some melted chocolates that were to have been handed out tonight. "Randy?"
Randy was standing no more than five feet from me. He had left off his helmet and pulled his nomex hood down around his neck. His bunker jacket was laying over on the hood of the booster truck under his helmet so I could see how pale his face suddenly was in the harsh light of the lamps that'd been set up to light our way. "D-Did you see that?"
"See what?" I sighed standing up from where I had bent down by the toppled fridge.
"Over there, by what's left of the chimney! A-a mist of some kind."
"Rannndyyy." I sighed. "Cut out the Halloween crap, okay. I'd rather be at home handing out candy or telling ghost stories now too, but..."
I paused in my ill humored rant to look where he pointed.
Now, I know that many of you have never been involved in what firefighters refer to as 'overhaul'. It's where we go over the area that's burnt, whatever it is, and try to make double sure that the fire is totally, completely and permanently out. Plus we will rarely find a family treasure of some kind that will give some kind of comfort to folks who've lost a lot. Might be a photo album that something else fell on top of protecting it from the fire or one of those 'fire proof safes' that actually worked. Frankly that was one reason I was checking the fridge. Some folks stash their really important stuff in the freezer figuring that it being so cold and generally air tight it should survive a house fire. Anyway, there is almost always still some smoke and steam left at such a site for hours after all the flashing lights and firefighters have left.
Randy was staring, gap jawed, at something that I would have liked to think was just one more whiff of damp smoke and steam. It looked like just that. Except... except it was shaped like a man. A man who was moving purposely and steadily. As Randy and I watched the figure pantomimed starting a fire in the fireplace and then transferring something from it first to where a nearby window had been decorated with curtains and then to an area above the contorted springs and still smoldering wood of a couch before going on to where a second window had been.
I'm fairly sure we were both slack jawed as we watched the wispy form move toward what had been the kitchen...meaning that it had to pass between us on it's way to where the back porch still stood.
We both turned to watch the form go through the motions of opening and closing a door that was no longer there before walking down the steps and apparently getting into an invisible car before it just faded away.
"Y-yuh-" Randy gulped, "You saw that to?" he whispered.
"Don't wanna say so," I said after swallowing several times, " But, yeah, I did." We looked at each other for a few seconds more until Randy gulped again. Then he said, "I don't think this is gonna flare up again."
"Yeah," I shivered as I answered, "This is out, for sure. The storm that came through just before the fire wet everything down good so it definitely won't go anywhere even if it dose flare back up."
"Yeah, lets get out of here. Maybe we'll be in time to help the others finish cleaning the hoses from the engine, or at least help put them back on the truck. Huh."
"Yeah." I agreed as I frowned at the place where the specter had dissipated. "I'll just open this freezer and make sure there's nothing important in it, first. You go start taking down the lights."
In the freezer amongst the melted ice cream, still nearly raw meat and limp veggies was a gallon size plastic freezer bag with a thick brown legal size envelope in it. "Ah Hah!" I thought to myself.
Randy was strapping down the portable generator and I was stacking the last of the portable lights beside it when the tones came over the trucks radio.
"Report of a one car rollover on FM 2652 near county road 321," the radio told us.
"Well, hell," I groused. "That sounds like it's between here and the station."
"Yeah, There's a tight turn there. I came out with the tanker and we hadda slow down a lot before we could take it."
As we climbed into the booster we heard our med truck, engine and tanker call in route over the radio. We did the same as we pulled out. The ghostie that had chased us away from the burnt house was forgotten as we headed towards our fellows and the one car roll over.
Just as I suspect we both feared Randy and I got there first. We both slid out and headed for the car that was off the road with it's headlights pointed toward a tangle of trees across the ditch.
"Are you alright, Sir?" I asked the man leaning against the front fender of the small sports car.
"I'm fine." The pale man gritted. "I'm in a hell of a lot better shape than the guy in there!" he waved toward where his headlights pointed. "I just went off the road a little cause I was going to damn fast for the wet road. That poor sum-bitch," he shook, his head. "God Almighty, I swear he breathed his last as I walked up on him."
"Here, why don't you just sit down in your car, Sir. Our med unit is on the way as well as an ambulance." I said opening his car door and gently trying to get him to sit. "We want you to move as little as possible now, just in case there have been injuries you don't realize you have yet."
Randy had left me with the first victim and gone on into the tangle of trees, to check out the vehicle we could see now only because of the headlights of the car.
When he came out he was pale and I knew it would be a bad one. He went directly to the truck and called in what we had found over the radio. Soon the members of our Volunteer Department who were far more medically inclined than I would ever be arrived and relieved me of holding c-spine on the first victim. A couple of them had gone into the short tunnel another vehicle had burrowed into the dense tree line and come out shaking their heads.
I was headed out to the highway to help with traffic control - there's never any traffic until you need a clear road- when Randy came up beside me. He was still pale and I began to wonder if maybe he'd gotten a little dehydrated while we were overhauling the fire scene. "Katy," his voice was a husky whisper, "Come with me. It's gruesome as all git out but I have to have you see this."
"Look, Randy," I told him, "There's a reason I avoid the medical stuff. The only time I can handle the gore and stuff is when it's on the T. V. and I know it's SPFX."
"Katy." His voice became a plea, "I just want you to look at his face. You have got to see his face!"
Something about Randy's grim demeanor pulled me along with him. We climbed over broken and shattered tree limbs. The scent of their fresh sap only slightly dimmed by the rain that had pelted them either just after or even, perhaps as, they had been shattered. I quickly noted another, metallic scent that overlay the earthy oders of torn trees and turned soil.
"Look." Randy urged, and fearing what I would see I did.
I was very glad that this had occurred either before or during the heavy rain storm, whose lightening we had blamed the house fire on. The smell remained but the blood was mostly gone. There would have been blood. Lots of it. Some how this victim had managed to go air born out of his convertible. He'd likely decided he didn't need a seat belt. His car had pushed up a wall of broken and splintered tree limbs and now it's driver hung above the carcass of his vehicle impaled on several of those broken limbs.
"Look at his face, Katy! Look at his face!" Randy urged and I managed to tear my horrified vision away from the pieces of wood that protruded from places they should never be to look at the surprised, bloodless face that was a twin to the grinning continence of the ethereal image that had frightened Randy and I from the fire scene.
"Katy," Randy asked, "Dose it look like him? Dose it look like the spook we saw at the house?"
When I was finely able to convince my self to breath the wind had changed slightly and flowed over the corps and toward us. We both caught the scent at the same time. A scent any fire fighter, paid or volunteer knows intimately. We volunteers ofter wear it home to wash it off in our own showers. It sometimes takes two soakings to get it out of your hair if you have a lot as I do. And forget your cloths. Even protected by bunker gear they get permeated with it. They have to be washed in hot soapy water before the stink of a house fire can be gotten out.
The man hanging dead against those busted up trees smelled like he'd been in a house fire.
"I asked, Eric." Randy mentioned our chief medic. "He said this guy couldn't have died instantly as none of those limbs look like they go through anything vital. He probably bled out and it likely took a couple of hours."
"That house was down in an hour and a half." I stated grimly. "A half hour after that we were overhauling it."
"Yeah, and the guy who found this fella. He said he thought he died just as he found him and that was maybe fifteen minutes or so before he was able to find his cell phone and call 911."
"You want me to admit that what we saw was this guy's spirit reliving setting fire to that house?"
"I don't know. Maybe, just maybe, the fella wanted to confess somehow, y'know. And this was the only way he could. We need to say something to the coroner, the chief or somebody so there will be an investigation."
"Yeah," I nodded slowly. "But what."
We finely figured a way. We told the chief we'd gone in to find a way to get the body out after the coroner got done and that we'd smelled house fire smoke on the guy. The chief told the coroner and included info about a house fire not more than a mile down the road.
Two weeks later it was all over the local newspapers about how some hot shot developer had been trying to buy out the folks who owned the house that had burned. The stories went on to point out that when the developer couldn't get the county officials to go along with his plan to pull 'eminate domain' out of a hat to snatch the property he'd hired an arsonist from a nearby big city. Hired him to make it look 'natural'.
Randy and I were congratulated briefly by the county fire marshal for noticing the fire reek on the body. And that was the end of that.
Except neither Randy or I volunteer to stay behind by ourselves to over haul a burned out house after dark anymore.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
digital farming
Now what did I say in my last blog? Face book is dangerouse! Oh, you betcha. Here it is after 4 pm and I'm just now getting to checking my blog. And guess what! I haven't posted a thing in, in...I don't know how long.
And I've been on the computer for at least 4 hours almost every day!!!.
I'd give up the farms in Farm Town and Farmville except....They are SO much easier to take care of than my real one!!
I mean a couple of clicks on the mouse and I've cleared and plowed a section of land. Another couple of clicks, a quick choise and another click and bingo! the plowed section is planted. Crops ready to harvest? Click on the sythe, click on the field or tree that's ready, and there ya go! Of course it's slightly different from one farm to the other but, hey, I've got well over two thousand 'coins' in each. Heck, on one I've got over 20,000 coins!
Sure as heck ain't got that on my real farm. Sigh. Do have lots of mud though. Lots of mud.
Mud and some hungry critters I hear calling me to come feed.
Latter.
And I've been on the computer for at least 4 hours almost every day!!!.
I'd give up the farms in Farm Town and Farmville except....They are SO much easier to take care of than my real one!!
I mean a couple of clicks on the mouse and I've cleared and plowed a section of land. Another couple of clicks, a quick choise and another click and bingo! the plowed section is planted. Crops ready to harvest? Click on the sythe, click on the field or tree that's ready, and there ya go! Of course it's slightly different from one farm to the other but, hey, I've got well over two thousand 'coins' in each. Heck, on one I've got over 20,000 coins!
Sure as heck ain't got that on my real farm. Sigh. Do have lots of mud though. Lots of mud.
Mud and some hungry critters I hear calling me to come feed.
Latter.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
The dangers of Face Book
Boy, oh, boy, am I in for it now. I'm on face book.
I'm on face book and I've found it to be both addictive and fattening.
It's addictive because I find I keep wanting to check on what's been posted on my wall and my friends walls. I also need to go check on my farm on Farm ville and the one one Farm Town. Once on those sites I naturally want to go over to neighbors farms and help them out by either watering flowers, raking, weeding or even chasing gofers or crows.
Sigh. Those farms are much more fun than my real one. After all, I can rake a whole farm with just a couple of clicks of the mouse at most! No sweat involved. No blisters either.
Unfortunately, I don't have DSL, only dial up, so the down loads of the individual farms take forever, especially for the farms of those friends who already have a lot of stuff on their farms.
Then, there's face book. With all it's temptations to visit other walls to read what's been written there and to make comments or add my view to the discussion...as you may have guessed, this thing is fattening for exactly the same reasons. I'm setting there at the computer with only my hands and eye's moving.
This face book thing is especially dangerous for me as I have never been much of a talker but rather a writer. I'm much more comfortable with a key board than a live conversation. After all in a live conversation if I get stuck for a word the conversations flow just goes on past me while I fumble for a word I know that I know but which has temporarily slipped away. Typing, like this, I can pause, even hunt for the little bugger until I catch it, so that I can use it.
I can even pause to consider not only what's been written already but what I really want to write back. This is often not an option when actually speaking.
Now days no one likes for there to be any quite time between what is said, even when there are only two people talking. There have been times when folks have asked me something over the phone and I've had my thoughts interrupted, when they almost instantly ask... "Are you still there?"
True, that last may be as much a result of the cell phones habit of dropping calls as the requirement for incessant conversation, but I've had it happen to me on land lines as well.
It begins to make me wonder. This constant need for stimulation. This need to either be speaking or listening. This requirement for distraction that seems to pervade society now. What is up with that? What's wrong with just being quiet. With just sitting and thinking your very own thoughts or even just sitting and watching those thoughts flow past you like a river...Uh. huh.
I think I just answered my own question. Not everyone has heard of, much less gotten a little into meditation like me.
Some times I think the whole world just needs to take a nice big cleansing breath, set down, and focus on their breath going in and going out, for about five or ten minutes. But that is just my opinion.
If you wonder how far into the Zen thing I got you can check out my store at www.cafepress.com/bettyszenstuff . Have fun looking.
I'm on face book and I've found it to be both addictive and fattening.
It's addictive because I find I keep wanting to check on what's been posted on my wall and my friends walls. I also need to go check on my farm on Farm ville and the one one Farm Town. Once on those sites I naturally want to go over to neighbors farms and help them out by either watering flowers, raking, weeding or even chasing gofers or crows.
Sigh. Those farms are much more fun than my real one. After all, I can rake a whole farm with just a couple of clicks of the mouse at most! No sweat involved. No blisters either.
Unfortunately, I don't have DSL, only dial up, so the down loads of the individual farms take forever, especially for the farms of those friends who already have a lot of stuff on their farms.
Then, there's face book. With all it's temptations to visit other walls to read what's been written there and to make comments or add my view to the discussion...as you may have guessed, this thing is fattening for exactly the same reasons. I'm setting there at the computer with only my hands and eye's moving.
This face book thing is especially dangerous for me as I have never been much of a talker but rather a writer. I'm much more comfortable with a key board than a live conversation. After all in a live conversation if I get stuck for a word the conversations flow just goes on past me while I fumble for a word I know that I know but which has temporarily slipped away. Typing, like this, I can pause, even hunt for the little bugger until I catch it, so that I can use it.
I can even pause to consider not only what's been written already but what I really want to write back. This is often not an option when actually speaking.
Now days no one likes for there to be any quite time between what is said, even when there are only two people talking. There have been times when folks have asked me something over the phone and I've had my thoughts interrupted, when they almost instantly ask... "Are you still there?"
True, that last may be as much a result of the cell phones habit of dropping calls as the requirement for incessant conversation, but I've had it happen to me on land lines as well.
It begins to make me wonder. This constant need for stimulation. This need to either be speaking or listening. This requirement for distraction that seems to pervade society now. What is up with that? What's wrong with just being quiet. With just sitting and thinking your very own thoughts or even just sitting and watching those thoughts flow past you like a river...Uh. huh.
I think I just answered my own question. Not everyone has heard of, much less gotten a little into meditation like me.
Some times I think the whole world just needs to take a nice big cleansing breath, set down, and focus on their breath going in and going out, for about five or ten minutes. But that is just my opinion.
If you wonder how far into the Zen thing I got you can check out my store at www.cafepress.com/bettyszenstuff . Have fun looking.
Friday, October 2, 2009
An odd little story
This is a story I came up with while eating my lunch at a desk in the quality control lab when it was just too far for me to hobble to the break room. I was setting there muching my sandwich and watching the screensaver set up knot after knot of pipes on the screen....
PIPES
I was in down town Dallas when that city’s destruction started, looking up into a lovely azure blue, cloud flecked spring sky. At least what I could see of it between those damned skyscrapers while wishing like hell I was home in Log Bottom. Anywhere but that freaking big city.
Unfortunately my potential publisher wanted to meet there. A greasy spoon or a fast food joint at the edge of that pile of steel and stone would have been fine with me but she apparently wanted to impress and had opted for a ritzy outdoor cafe` down in the West End. She was late.
She may well be obituary late by now. Too bad. She had wanted to publish my stories.
At any rate I was at this outdoor table looking up into that beautiful sky and wishing like hell I was at home doing the chores I usually avoid or anything but breathing what those city folk thought was air. If I had been chugging the beer or wine the waiter had been instructed to offer instead of the iced tea I preferred I’d have been far less likely to believe what suddenly appeared in mid-air about three stories above the middle of the busy street. It was a bright red pipe that began as if it had always been there and then stretched itself down the length of the street for a block or two while I sat blinking at it. I’d just decided that it was about six feet in diameter, going by the size of the architecture behind it, when it took a ninety degree turn away from my side of the road and blasted into the window and part of a wall a block past where I sat.
That got several people’s attention.
It’s weird when an overused cliché works but women really did scream and men
really did curse. With the odd exception of course. That would be me, Betsy McCongle, the unofficial Pipe Historian.
I remember that I did not scream, but I did curse, ”What the hell?” As the hair on the back of my neck not only stood on end but threatened to take flight. You see I had recognized that pipe. I had stared at it often enough as the screen saver took over while I tried to figure a way out of the mess my stories characters had gotten themselves into. I knew it was fast and that it could build itself into a logical but insane knot of pipe in no time.
“A screen saver is attacking us?” I continued to myself. Why I just sat there and stared at the hole it had made in the building across the way I don’t know. But when it burst out of a sixth story wall a block further back than it had started, I sat down my tea. When it turned an almost immediate ninety degrees down to blast into a sidewalk, possibly taking an oblivious man, brief case, cell phone and all, with it, I got up. Maybe the guy was smashed into Soylent Green, or just knocked aside, I don’t know. Nor do I know about the people on the city bus it skewered when it again took off toward the sky. I saw that only because the crash and rumble made me look backward as I ran with the rest of the stampede. I stopped where I’d left my reliable old F-150.
Needless to say I was extremely glad that I had worn the jeans and boots I prefer rather than the skirt and heels some of my friends had suggested.
My keys were in my hand as I grabbed the door handle and jammed them into the keyhole. I noticed that my hands weren’t shaking and wondered why. The kid who was supposed to be “attending” the vehicles was still staring slack jawed at the all too real
screen saver when I burned rubber out onto the street and turned toward home.
I expected to be pulled over for busting every existing traffic law, but I saw not one cop. I’m surprised that an irate driver didn’t shoot me. I’m sure I left plenty of those behind me. I don’t usually drive like that but you see I was scared. More scared than I’ve ever been before. I’d say ‘or since’ except.... Well, that’s another post-apocalyptic tale.
I didn’t calm down enough to start thinking until I neared the high ground of Rock Wall. As I did I felt my forehead. It felt as hot and sweaty as you’d expect a damn fool’s forehead to be who’d been driving with their windows up on a spring day in Texas.
When I flipped down my sun visor and peeked into the vanity mirror I looked ghostly pale beneath my sun bleached brown hair.
“Heat stroke?” I asked myself as my now shaking hand reached for the A/C controls and switched it on to its coldest setting. I felt the truck’s engine slow as the A/C kicked in and cold air began to trickle into the cab. I even noticed there weren’t many other drivers around me.
“Claustrophobia?” I countered, as I couldn’t remember visual phantoms being mentioned as a symptom of the former. I shook my head. I didn’t believe what I had seen. It was a screen saver for cryin’ out loud. I like to think I wouldn’t have run from fire or a natural disaster. I began to think that my mind had let the relative crush of humanity in the big bad ol’ city get to me and my fantasy soaked brain had come up with a reason to get the hell out. I pulled into a shopping center parking lot soon after I topped the hill just east of the lake. I parked and thirstily eyed a nearby fast food joint as I pulled out my cell phone.
I made up excuses as I listened to my possible publishers phone ring. Her secretary picked up. She was breathing fast and heavy as if she’d just made a short dash.
“Arkay Publishing, may I help you?” She gasped.
“Yeah, uh, this is Betsy McCongle. I had an appointment with Allison Kildare?”
“Oh! Ms. Kildare asked me to call you just a minute or so ago. She’s running terribly late today. I’d have called right then, Ms. McCongle, but I was distracted by these beautifully colored pipe-like balloons that have been popping up over the West End. Ms. Kildare said to tell you to enjoy the parade or what ever they were having over there and have another beer or glass of wine on her.”
I was silent a beat or two after she stopped speaking.
“Ms. McCongle?”
“It started near the restaurant where she was to meet me.” I gulped. “Call her and tell her I’m not there, that I ran like hell. That is not a parade! It’s a disaster. It’s blasting holes in buildings and the street and likely killing people too.”
“What is?” Gulped the very young sounding girl.
“That damn screen saver.” I answered. “The one that looks like a pipe.”
“This is a joke, right.” She sensibly replied.
“No joke, lady. I’ve seen that thing blast through buildings, busses and sidewalks, and I wasn’t drinking beer or wine on your boss’s tab. I was drinking plain ice tea. Run. Now. Call Ms Kildare on your cell phone. Tell everyone else in the office to run...”
“Don’t be silly, Ms. McCongle....”She began only to end in a slight gasp as she was interrupted by a scream. “It’s coming this way!” “It’s not a balloon! Didja see it blast
through that...”
“Hold on a sec. Ms. McCongle something’s happening...”
“No!” I screamed into the phone, “don’t go look! Run! Get out of town fast as you can...”
I was answered by another scream “it’s coming right at us!” Followed by the crash of glass breaking and then the silence of a dead line.
I burned nearly a minute of my cell time just sitting and staring at the thing in my hand before I could bring myself to hit ‘end’ and then ‘dismiss‘. I turned to my truck radio then suddenly wishing I still had my old citizens band. I keep the radio set on a golden oldies station in Dallas that does a lot of talking during the morning and afternoon rush hours. That, I realized, was probably why I’d had such little trouble getting out of Dallas. This time of day every one else in North East Texas was trying to get in.
“We’re getting all kinds of wild reports from down near the West End.” The DJ was saying as I turned on my ignition and punched the radio on. His voice was jovial but I heard the same edge to it that I’d heard back on 9/11. “We’ve tried calling up some of the folks down there who advertise with us but their phones are all busy. Busy, I hope, because they advertise with us! But hey, anyone out there with any idea of what’s going on, give us a call at...” He ended by rattling off a series of numbers I actually managed to remember long enough to punch into my cell after I turned off the radio. I let it ring ten times, hit ‘end’ and then ‘redial‘. Four rings later I was recording for posterity.
“I’m not nuts.” I began, “I just happened to be looking up when it started....” I went on from there telling what I’d seen and where I was when I saw it, finishing up with
what I’d heard over my cell while sitting in a Rock Wall strip mall parking lot. While I talked I got out and walked toward the highway telling the recorder what I saw and heard as I went.
“I-Thirty East is practically empty now.” I stated. “Across the median Thirty West is at a stand still but they are all mostly quite. Looking toward the distant skyline of Dallas I can see what looks like little lines among the sky scrappers. There are some that look a bit thicker like maybe they are closer. There’s some smoke rising but not as much as I expected to see by now. I see a big rig. I’m going to go find out what he hears on his C. B.”
I climbed up on the steps of the rumbling big rig and knocked on the window. The poor guy jumped a mile before he rolled it down. He was apparently used to the idea that truckers know everything about what’s happening ahead on the road. “Lady, if you’re head’n west forget it! From the sound of things further on, all hells broke loose in Dallas. If I could do it I’d turn this rig around right here and take the long way round before whatever the hell it is heads this way!”
I looked west again from the higher vantage of the big rig’s steps. The distance and the smog still turned all the brilliant colors grayish.
“Say,” the trucker went on, “ did you come from that mall across the way? Have you heard anything about what’s going on?”
“I only know what I’ve seen.” I answered. “And what I’ve seen isn’t pretty,” I paused, “Or believable.”
“What?”
“It’s pipes;” I shrugged, "Like those in that screen saver.”
“A screen saver?” His face telegraphed his disbelief.
“Yeah,” I grimaced at his disbelieving face. “That’s what I thought to, Man. That I hadda be nuts. But I saw the thing bust some things up before I got unfrozen enough to run like hell.”
“Who’s that on the phone?” He asked as though to keep the crazy lady busy while he tried to remember where he had hidden his gun.
“Recording at the radio station I listen to.”
“Which is?” He prompted.
I rattled off the station call letters and he reached to turn off his C.B. and then for the select buttons on his regular radio. A hissing silence greeted our ears.
“That’s odd.” He grunted before reaching again as if to twist the dial. A swift blur of colorful motion caught at the edge of my peripheral vision and I reached in and gave his beefy shoulder a hard shove before jumping backward away from the cab. Even as I jumped a six-foot wide blue green pipe rammed through the top of his cab sending splinters of glass and the screech of rent metal and rubber dragging on pavement ricocheting across the unnaturally quiet highway.
I landed on my butt but at least it and the glass arrived at about the same time. I only got a little sliver in my hand as I got up and was relieved to hear the trucker cussing.
The other cars were no longer silent. Everyone was doing what they could to get the hell out. I did the same. I don’t remember running but the next thing I knew I was back by my truck. My cell phone was still in my hand. I hit ‘end’ and ‘dismiss’ before using my free hand to unbend the one still clutching the phone. I was surprised there were no indentions in the plastic.
As calmly as I could I got in my truck, left the parking lot and headed for the nearest gas station slash fast food joint. I filled both my tanks, topping off the one I tried to keep full, then rummaged in the bed for my five-gallon gas can. It’d gone empty the last time I mowed my yard. I filled it up too.
I didn’t even flinch at the bite the pump took out of my debit card and wasn‘t even surprised it still worked.
Then I parked, went in to the fast food place and ordered the ‘hungry man truckers delight’ to go with an interstate size jug of tea. I sweetened that monster with real sugar and nervously eyed the now two lines of blue green floating serenely above the highway. I also watched the cars careening through the underpass and flying up to I-Thirty East. As I was about to pay a frantic driver pulled up to one of the gas pumps and began filling up his land rover. He started bawling as I watched.
By now the other customers and wait staff were beginning to notice something was going on.
“What the hell’s going on out there?” The teen behind the counter asked as she handed me my order and I passed her my plastic.
As she slid my card through the reader I said. “Oh nothing much. Screen saver’s eating Dallas.
Looks like Rock Walls next.” I ended jestureing toward the highway with the extra large drink.
“Ohhh kay.” She stated giving me that careful ‘ she’s obviously nuts but dose she have a gun?’ look. “What ever. Sign here.” I signed and left. I didn’t burn rubber this time. I figured tires just might become hard to come by.
I avoided Thirty, the crazed drivers and, I hoped the even more insane pipe. Some how down deep it had registered that the only places I’d seen the damn thing was in highly populated areas. I stuck to the back roads all the way home. It took a little longer but I still made record time.
The lunch sack was empty by the time I hit Log Bottom. I was still sipping on the tea as I rolled past my place on the way into the biggest city I ever care to live near. I slowed and carefully eyed my barns, as my singlewide is invisible from the road. The two mutts that I call guard dogs for tax purposes were sprawled across the driveway. They sat up and wagged their tails in greeting. I sighed in relief. If there were anything going on they’d be out barking at it. I rolled down my passenger side window and called for them to stay lest they decide to jump into my truck bed and tag along.
A minute or so later I was parking beside the big, red metal barn at the end of a strip of old brick buildings we call downtown. I headed for the open, roll up doors in the side of the place instead of the smaller people door on the narrow end close to the street. I walked between the big red tanker and the little white truck; both emblazoned with the sign “Log Bottom Volunteer Fire Department” bent around the fire fighters Maltese cross.
Ahead I could see several people setting in the relative cool of the radio room. That comforted me. It was familiar. How many times had I been setting in there after a fire or car wreak had been successfully ended talking about other calls that hadn’t or were just down right odd or even funny in a macabre way.
Some one further in than I could see might have pointed because the guy with his
back to the big window turned, saw me and looked surprised. The door popped open as I approached it. “Bets! Didn’t you have some kind of appointment in downtown Dallas early this morning?” Asked Adam Sands our fire chief.
“Yeah,” I replied. “In the West End no less. Have y’all heard about it on the radio?”
“Enough,” Kim our chief Medic grunted over a cup of coffee almost as black as his face, “Enough to wonder if we’d ever be seein’ you or any of the others that work in Dallas.”
“Have they said anything about the West End?” I asked, “About what’s happening?”
“First,” the Chief held up his hand and ordered, “Tell us what you know, Bet’s. I’d trust what you say over the crazy things we’ve been hearing over the radio. We've been told to stay here and stand ready.”
I gulped. What he’d just said meant a lot to me and I feared I was about to lose that trust but I couldn’t lie.
“Adam, I don’t think you or the others will believe it but,” I paused and grabbed a chair as I suddenly realized my knees were getting weak. “It was that damn screen saver.” I said as I sat down and rubbed my forehead. “I ran, Adam. I’m sorry but I ran. I didn’t see any thing I could do to stop it. People were already running but that thing’s so unpredictable about where it’s gonna go... I guess I just lucked out and went where it didn’t.” I paused a while longer before I got up the nerve for the next statement. “Besides,” I gulped, “I was scared. Sorry.”
“Did you say screen saver?” He asked.
“I said you wouldn’t believe me.” I sighed.
“Tell us the whole thing.” He ordered in that Drill Sergeant voice he sometimes drops into. Being ex- army I naturally obeyed.
As I finished Jill, his wife, said “I still don’t understand what you mean by ‘screen saver‘.”
“Come on, “ I sighed and got up to lead them all over to the office across the hall. I plopped down in front of the computer we have so we can send our monthly reports in to the county and to Austin, and woke it up. I clicked away with the mouse for a bit until I had the screen up that lets you select screen savers. I clicked on one and then on “preview”. After a short wait pipes started filling the smaller screen within a screen. I shivered as I watched it.
“ It looks exactly like that, except the pipe is about six foot in diameter and in three-D. Oh yeah, and it’s real enough to bust through solid stuff. It’s just as fast and unpredictable, too.”
“But, how does it just hang there in the air?” The ever practical Jill asked. “Where did it come from? Why?”
“If this was a story I was writing,” I grimaced; “I’d be hard put to come up with an answer for my protagonist to find.”
“But that’s what you saw,” Adam asked. “You’re sure.”
“Hell yes, I’m sure. The damn thing even followed me to Rock Wall!” I retorted. Then leaned back to rub my eyes before clicking off the innocuous screen saver that had become so terrifying to me.
“Take it easy Bet’s. I believe you. The morning news people managed to get
some fuzzy shots of it before their reporter was knocked down by it. But you saw it start...” he paused. “Were you looking right at it?”
“Not really, I was looking at the clouds and wishing I was home and suddenly there was this blood red pipe between the sky and me. It wasn’t,” I raised my left hand, open and empty.
"Then it was,” I raised my right hand, index finger marking a line in the air as if following the pipe I’d seen.
“That settles it then,” Adam said. “The worlds gone nuts again. With any luck we’ll find out who, what, where else and how eventually.” He sighed heavily and I could almost see the weight of responsibility settle on his broad shoulders. He straightened under the burden and began to snap orders. Soon the gas tanks on the fire trucks were all topped off and a couple of new five-gallon tanks were sitting near our portable generator. Push come to shove we’d still have our bass radio as well as the ones in the trucks. George, one of our night shifters, came in lugging a television and enough cable to reach outside. Being our local tech he soon had a TV antenna on the flag pole out front. Our reception wasn’t all that great, but we did manage to pull in the one station still broadcasting from Dallas.
That’s how we found out that multicolored pipe was no longer ravaging Dallas, but had moved on to Chicago, L.A. and, one by one, just about every other big city in North America. It was chewing on D.C. when it stopped.
It just stopped.
Only two days passed before what was left of the Government finely let the rest of us know what they had found out. Until then everyone in the world was on tenterhooks,
waiting for it to show up somewhere else.
According to the government report, some hacker in Washington State had hacked into some high powered mathematicians computer. Then the hacker had tried to use the ‘pipe’ screen saver as a model for a computer worm of some kind. He got careless. The worm started combining with the high powered dimensional math that he had stolen while the hacker wasn’t paying attention. He was on hold on the phone to the power company about his late bill when the mutated worm caused the pipes in the screen saver to come out of his computer, go through him and fill up his office before canceling out on that ‘screen’ and going on to another. Seattle, to be exact.
The officials also claimed that the only reason the thing stopped was because the power company sent out a guy to see why someone with a past due bill was pulling so many giga-watts. No one answered the door so the power company guy became a world wide hero by cutting the power, and thus the program that was intent on eating up the world.
The pipes, however, stayed.
Everyone half expected everything to fall apart but so far everyone’s just keeping on keeping on. There’s some big inconveniences for some folks. Like on 9/11 there were lots of heroes and even more tragedies. Dallas is building back around the pipes. I have no doubt but that the damned things will be used to anchor buildings in years to come.
Oh, and of course, you can’t find hardly any computer anywhere now with those pipes as a screen saver. But there is a computer game out where you have to cut the renegade computer’s power before it’s screen saver eats the world.
PIPES
I was in down town Dallas when that city’s destruction started, looking up into a lovely azure blue, cloud flecked spring sky. At least what I could see of it between those damned skyscrapers while wishing like hell I was home in Log Bottom. Anywhere but that freaking big city.
Unfortunately my potential publisher wanted to meet there. A greasy spoon or a fast food joint at the edge of that pile of steel and stone would have been fine with me but she apparently wanted to impress and had opted for a ritzy outdoor cafe` down in the West End. She was late.
She may well be obituary late by now. Too bad. She had wanted to publish my stories.
At any rate I was at this outdoor table looking up into that beautiful sky and wishing like hell I was at home doing the chores I usually avoid or anything but breathing what those city folk thought was air. If I had been chugging the beer or wine the waiter had been instructed to offer instead of the iced tea I preferred I’d have been far less likely to believe what suddenly appeared in mid-air about three stories above the middle of the busy street. It was a bright red pipe that began as if it had always been there and then stretched itself down the length of the street for a block or two while I sat blinking at it. I’d just decided that it was about six feet in diameter, going by the size of the architecture behind it, when it took a ninety degree turn away from my side of the road and blasted into the window and part of a wall a block past where I sat.
That got several people’s attention.
It’s weird when an overused cliché works but women really did scream and men
really did curse. With the odd exception of course. That would be me, Betsy McCongle, the unofficial Pipe Historian.
I remember that I did not scream, but I did curse, ”What the hell?” As the hair on the back of my neck not only stood on end but threatened to take flight. You see I had recognized that pipe. I had stared at it often enough as the screen saver took over while I tried to figure a way out of the mess my stories characters had gotten themselves into. I knew it was fast and that it could build itself into a logical but insane knot of pipe in no time.
“A screen saver is attacking us?” I continued to myself. Why I just sat there and stared at the hole it had made in the building across the way I don’t know. But when it burst out of a sixth story wall a block further back than it had started, I sat down my tea. When it turned an almost immediate ninety degrees down to blast into a sidewalk, possibly taking an oblivious man, brief case, cell phone and all, with it, I got up. Maybe the guy was smashed into Soylent Green, or just knocked aside, I don’t know. Nor do I know about the people on the city bus it skewered when it again took off toward the sky. I saw that only because the crash and rumble made me look backward as I ran with the rest of the stampede. I stopped where I’d left my reliable old F-150.
Needless to say I was extremely glad that I had worn the jeans and boots I prefer rather than the skirt and heels some of my friends had suggested.
My keys were in my hand as I grabbed the door handle and jammed them into the keyhole. I noticed that my hands weren’t shaking and wondered why. The kid who was supposed to be “attending” the vehicles was still staring slack jawed at the all too real
screen saver when I burned rubber out onto the street and turned toward home.
I expected to be pulled over for busting every existing traffic law, but I saw not one cop. I’m surprised that an irate driver didn’t shoot me. I’m sure I left plenty of those behind me. I don’t usually drive like that but you see I was scared. More scared than I’ve ever been before. I’d say ‘or since’ except.... Well, that’s another post-apocalyptic tale.
I didn’t calm down enough to start thinking until I neared the high ground of Rock Wall. As I did I felt my forehead. It felt as hot and sweaty as you’d expect a damn fool’s forehead to be who’d been driving with their windows up on a spring day in Texas.
When I flipped down my sun visor and peeked into the vanity mirror I looked ghostly pale beneath my sun bleached brown hair.
“Heat stroke?” I asked myself as my now shaking hand reached for the A/C controls and switched it on to its coldest setting. I felt the truck’s engine slow as the A/C kicked in and cold air began to trickle into the cab. I even noticed there weren’t many other drivers around me.
“Claustrophobia?” I countered, as I couldn’t remember visual phantoms being mentioned as a symptom of the former. I shook my head. I didn’t believe what I had seen. It was a screen saver for cryin’ out loud. I like to think I wouldn’t have run from fire or a natural disaster. I began to think that my mind had let the relative crush of humanity in the big bad ol’ city get to me and my fantasy soaked brain had come up with a reason to get the hell out. I pulled into a shopping center parking lot soon after I topped the hill just east of the lake. I parked and thirstily eyed a nearby fast food joint as I pulled out my cell phone.
I made up excuses as I listened to my possible publishers phone ring. Her secretary picked up. She was breathing fast and heavy as if she’d just made a short dash.
“Arkay Publishing, may I help you?” She gasped.
“Yeah, uh, this is Betsy McCongle. I had an appointment with Allison Kildare?”
“Oh! Ms. Kildare asked me to call you just a minute or so ago. She’s running terribly late today. I’d have called right then, Ms. McCongle, but I was distracted by these beautifully colored pipe-like balloons that have been popping up over the West End. Ms. Kildare said to tell you to enjoy the parade or what ever they were having over there and have another beer or glass of wine on her.”
I was silent a beat or two after she stopped speaking.
“Ms. McCongle?”
“It started near the restaurant where she was to meet me.” I gulped. “Call her and tell her I’m not there, that I ran like hell. That is not a parade! It’s a disaster. It’s blasting holes in buildings and the street and likely killing people too.”
“What is?” Gulped the very young sounding girl.
“That damn screen saver.” I answered. “The one that looks like a pipe.”
“This is a joke, right.” She sensibly replied.
“No joke, lady. I’ve seen that thing blast through buildings, busses and sidewalks, and I wasn’t drinking beer or wine on your boss’s tab. I was drinking plain ice tea. Run. Now. Call Ms Kildare on your cell phone. Tell everyone else in the office to run...”
“Don’t be silly, Ms. McCongle....”She began only to end in a slight gasp as she was interrupted by a scream. “It’s coming this way!” “It’s not a balloon! Didja see it blast
through that...”
“Hold on a sec. Ms. McCongle something’s happening...”
“No!” I screamed into the phone, “don’t go look! Run! Get out of town fast as you can...”
I was answered by another scream “it’s coming right at us!” Followed by the crash of glass breaking and then the silence of a dead line.
I burned nearly a minute of my cell time just sitting and staring at the thing in my hand before I could bring myself to hit ‘end’ and then ‘dismiss‘. I turned to my truck radio then suddenly wishing I still had my old citizens band. I keep the radio set on a golden oldies station in Dallas that does a lot of talking during the morning and afternoon rush hours. That, I realized, was probably why I’d had such little trouble getting out of Dallas. This time of day every one else in North East Texas was trying to get in.
“We’re getting all kinds of wild reports from down near the West End.” The DJ was saying as I turned on my ignition and punched the radio on. His voice was jovial but I heard the same edge to it that I’d heard back on 9/11. “We’ve tried calling up some of the folks down there who advertise with us but their phones are all busy. Busy, I hope, because they advertise with us! But hey, anyone out there with any idea of what’s going on, give us a call at...” He ended by rattling off a series of numbers I actually managed to remember long enough to punch into my cell after I turned off the radio. I let it ring ten times, hit ‘end’ and then ‘redial‘. Four rings later I was recording for posterity.
“I’m not nuts.” I began, “I just happened to be looking up when it started....” I went on from there telling what I’d seen and where I was when I saw it, finishing up with
what I’d heard over my cell while sitting in a Rock Wall strip mall parking lot. While I talked I got out and walked toward the highway telling the recorder what I saw and heard as I went.
“I-Thirty East is practically empty now.” I stated. “Across the median Thirty West is at a stand still but they are all mostly quite. Looking toward the distant skyline of Dallas I can see what looks like little lines among the sky scrappers. There are some that look a bit thicker like maybe they are closer. There’s some smoke rising but not as much as I expected to see by now. I see a big rig. I’m going to go find out what he hears on his C. B.”
I climbed up on the steps of the rumbling big rig and knocked on the window. The poor guy jumped a mile before he rolled it down. He was apparently used to the idea that truckers know everything about what’s happening ahead on the road. “Lady, if you’re head’n west forget it! From the sound of things further on, all hells broke loose in Dallas. If I could do it I’d turn this rig around right here and take the long way round before whatever the hell it is heads this way!”
I looked west again from the higher vantage of the big rig’s steps. The distance and the smog still turned all the brilliant colors grayish.
“Say,” the trucker went on, “ did you come from that mall across the way? Have you heard anything about what’s going on?”
“I only know what I’ve seen.” I answered. “And what I’ve seen isn’t pretty,” I paused, “Or believable.”
“What?”
“It’s pipes;” I shrugged, "Like those in that screen saver.”
“A screen saver?” His face telegraphed his disbelief.
“Yeah,” I grimaced at his disbelieving face. “That’s what I thought to, Man. That I hadda be nuts. But I saw the thing bust some things up before I got unfrozen enough to run like hell.”
“Who’s that on the phone?” He asked as though to keep the crazy lady busy while he tried to remember where he had hidden his gun.
“Recording at the radio station I listen to.”
“Which is?” He prompted.
I rattled off the station call letters and he reached to turn off his C.B. and then for the select buttons on his regular radio. A hissing silence greeted our ears.
“That’s odd.” He grunted before reaching again as if to twist the dial. A swift blur of colorful motion caught at the edge of my peripheral vision and I reached in and gave his beefy shoulder a hard shove before jumping backward away from the cab. Even as I jumped a six-foot wide blue green pipe rammed through the top of his cab sending splinters of glass and the screech of rent metal and rubber dragging on pavement ricocheting across the unnaturally quiet highway.
I landed on my butt but at least it and the glass arrived at about the same time. I only got a little sliver in my hand as I got up and was relieved to hear the trucker cussing.
The other cars were no longer silent. Everyone was doing what they could to get the hell out. I did the same. I don’t remember running but the next thing I knew I was back by my truck. My cell phone was still in my hand. I hit ‘end’ and ‘dismiss’ before using my free hand to unbend the one still clutching the phone. I was surprised there were no indentions in the plastic.
As calmly as I could I got in my truck, left the parking lot and headed for the nearest gas station slash fast food joint. I filled both my tanks, topping off the one I tried to keep full, then rummaged in the bed for my five-gallon gas can. It’d gone empty the last time I mowed my yard. I filled it up too.
I didn’t even flinch at the bite the pump took out of my debit card and wasn‘t even surprised it still worked.
Then I parked, went in to the fast food place and ordered the ‘hungry man truckers delight’ to go with an interstate size jug of tea. I sweetened that monster with real sugar and nervously eyed the now two lines of blue green floating serenely above the highway. I also watched the cars careening through the underpass and flying up to I-Thirty East. As I was about to pay a frantic driver pulled up to one of the gas pumps and began filling up his land rover. He started bawling as I watched.
By now the other customers and wait staff were beginning to notice something was going on.
“What the hell’s going on out there?” The teen behind the counter asked as she handed me my order and I passed her my plastic.
As she slid my card through the reader I said. “Oh nothing much. Screen saver’s eating Dallas.
Looks like Rock Walls next.” I ended jestureing toward the highway with the extra large drink.
“Ohhh kay.” She stated giving me that careful ‘ she’s obviously nuts but dose she have a gun?’ look. “What ever. Sign here.” I signed and left. I didn’t burn rubber this time. I figured tires just might become hard to come by.
I avoided Thirty, the crazed drivers and, I hoped the even more insane pipe. Some how down deep it had registered that the only places I’d seen the damn thing was in highly populated areas. I stuck to the back roads all the way home. It took a little longer but I still made record time.
The lunch sack was empty by the time I hit Log Bottom. I was still sipping on the tea as I rolled past my place on the way into the biggest city I ever care to live near. I slowed and carefully eyed my barns, as my singlewide is invisible from the road. The two mutts that I call guard dogs for tax purposes were sprawled across the driveway. They sat up and wagged their tails in greeting. I sighed in relief. If there were anything going on they’d be out barking at it. I rolled down my passenger side window and called for them to stay lest they decide to jump into my truck bed and tag along.
A minute or so later I was parking beside the big, red metal barn at the end of a strip of old brick buildings we call downtown. I headed for the open, roll up doors in the side of the place instead of the smaller people door on the narrow end close to the street. I walked between the big red tanker and the little white truck; both emblazoned with the sign “Log Bottom Volunteer Fire Department” bent around the fire fighters Maltese cross.
Ahead I could see several people setting in the relative cool of the radio room. That comforted me. It was familiar. How many times had I been setting in there after a fire or car wreak had been successfully ended talking about other calls that hadn’t or were just down right odd or even funny in a macabre way.
Some one further in than I could see might have pointed because the guy with his
back to the big window turned, saw me and looked surprised. The door popped open as I approached it. “Bets! Didn’t you have some kind of appointment in downtown Dallas early this morning?” Asked Adam Sands our fire chief.
“Yeah,” I replied. “In the West End no less. Have y’all heard about it on the radio?”
“Enough,” Kim our chief Medic grunted over a cup of coffee almost as black as his face, “Enough to wonder if we’d ever be seein’ you or any of the others that work in Dallas.”
“Have they said anything about the West End?” I asked, “About what’s happening?”
“First,” the Chief held up his hand and ordered, “Tell us what you know, Bet’s. I’d trust what you say over the crazy things we’ve been hearing over the radio. We've been told to stay here and stand ready.”
I gulped. What he’d just said meant a lot to me and I feared I was about to lose that trust but I couldn’t lie.
“Adam, I don’t think you or the others will believe it but,” I paused and grabbed a chair as I suddenly realized my knees were getting weak. “It was that damn screen saver.” I said as I sat down and rubbed my forehead. “I ran, Adam. I’m sorry but I ran. I didn’t see any thing I could do to stop it. People were already running but that thing’s so unpredictable about where it’s gonna go... I guess I just lucked out and went where it didn’t.” I paused a while longer before I got up the nerve for the next statement. “Besides,” I gulped, “I was scared. Sorry.”
“Did you say screen saver?” He asked.
“I said you wouldn’t believe me.” I sighed.
“Tell us the whole thing.” He ordered in that Drill Sergeant voice he sometimes drops into. Being ex- army I naturally obeyed.
As I finished Jill, his wife, said “I still don’t understand what you mean by ‘screen saver‘.”
“Come on, “ I sighed and got up to lead them all over to the office across the hall. I plopped down in front of the computer we have so we can send our monthly reports in to the county and to Austin, and woke it up. I clicked away with the mouse for a bit until I had the screen up that lets you select screen savers. I clicked on one and then on “preview”. After a short wait pipes started filling the smaller screen within a screen. I shivered as I watched it.
“ It looks exactly like that, except the pipe is about six foot in diameter and in three-D. Oh yeah, and it’s real enough to bust through solid stuff. It’s just as fast and unpredictable, too.”
“But, how does it just hang there in the air?” The ever practical Jill asked. “Where did it come from? Why?”
“If this was a story I was writing,” I grimaced; “I’d be hard put to come up with an answer for my protagonist to find.”
“But that’s what you saw,” Adam asked. “You’re sure.”
“Hell yes, I’m sure. The damn thing even followed me to Rock Wall!” I retorted. Then leaned back to rub my eyes before clicking off the innocuous screen saver that had become so terrifying to me.
“Take it easy Bet’s. I believe you. The morning news people managed to get
some fuzzy shots of it before their reporter was knocked down by it. But you saw it start...” he paused. “Were you looking right at it?”
“Not really, I was looking at the clouds and wishing I was home and suddenly there was this blood red pipe between the sky and me. It wasn’t,” I raised my left hand, open and empty.
"Then it was,” I raised my right hand, index finger marking a line in the air as if following the pipe I’d seen.
“That settles it then,” Adam said. “The worlds gone nuts again. With any luck we’ll find out who, what, where else and how eventually.” He sighed heavily and I could almost see the weight of responsibility settle on his broad shoulders. He straightened under the burden and began to snap orders. Soon the gas tanks on the fire trucks were all topped off and a couple of new five-gallon tanks were sitting near our portable generator. Push come to shove we’d still have our bass radio as well as the ones in the trucks. George, one of our night shifters, came in lugging a television and enough cable to reach outside. Being our local tech he soon had a TV antenna on the flag pole out front. Our reception wasn’t all that great, but we did manage to pull in the one station still broadcasting from Dallas.
That’s how we found out that multicolored pipe was no longer ravaging Dallas, but had moved on to Chicago, L.A. and, one by one, just about every other big city in North America. It was chewing on D.C. when it stopped.
It just stopped.
Only two days passed before what was left of the Government finely let the rest of us know what they had found out. Until then everyone in the world was on tenterhooks,
waiting for it to show up somewhere else.
According to the government report, some hacker in Washington State had hacked into some high powered mathematicians computer. Then the hacker had tried to use the ‘pipe’ screen saver as a model for a computer worm of some kind. He got careless. The worm started combining with the high powered dimensional math that he had stolen while the hacker wasn’t paying attention. He was on hold on the phone to the power company about his late bill when the mutated worm caused the pipes in the screen saver to come out of his computer, go through him and fill up his office before canceling out on that ‘screen’ and going on to another. Seattle, to be exact.
The officials also claimed that the only reason the thing stopped was because the power company sent out a guy to see why someone with a past due bill was pulling so many giga-watts. No one answered the door so the power company guy became a world wide hero by cutting the power, and thus the program that was intent on eating up the world.
The pipes, however, stayed.
Everyone half expected everything to fall apart but so far everyone’s just keeping on keeping on. There’s some big inconveniences for some folks. Like on 9/11 there were lots of heroes and even more tragedies. Dallas is building back around the pipes. I have no doubt but that the damned things will be used to anchor buildings in years to come.
Oh, and of course, you can’t find hardly any computer anywhere now with those pipes as a screen saver. But there is a computer game out where you have to cut the renegade computer’s power before it’s screen saver eats the world.
#
Needs work. Noticed I started telling instead of showing part way through. I think I was gettng bored with it. Might be what I call a 'seed' for something else later though.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
The Creek
The Creek
Now I know that it was Crawford Creek and that the park I used to pester my parents to take me to was named for it. But for most of my life it was just and only THE CREEK.
It was that deliciously wild place where, if I were lucky and promised to be good, my Dad would take me when he 'went fishing'. Honestly, now I suspect he was just looking for some alone time but occasionally agreed to share it with me.
He would sometimes let me help him fish and once I even caught one. A rather small sun perch that I was quite disappointed in. Only Dad grinned and said, "Well, if you don't mind. I could use it for bait." I agreed and quick as the sun shimmering on the water that little fish was in several pieces with one of them decorating the end of Daddy's fishing line.
But fishing is not what really drew me to that fascinating chasm of limestone. Dad had told me in passing what he had learned in school about how sedimentary rocks were formed. He also told me of that freaky new idea going around called continental drift. He even showed me the imprints of ancient shells that had fallen long ago into soft mud. Imprints that, when I saw them, resided in stone whose only softness lay in it's creamy white color.
I admit it, I was totally fascinated by the layer cake of those ever so slightly differing pale cream colors. Then there were the nuggets of iron pyrite that would sometimes make it look as though someone had shot the creek wall and it had leaked a streak of bloody rust down its side.
As I grew older and read more about geology and other earth sciences the creek began to show to me the grand forces of the planet and how they danced in a slow steady rhythm of subsidence, deposition and up thrust with erosion. It let me see the gradual inundation of the land by the sea that left the grittier layers of low water sandy marls where, when I was old enough to explore the creek on my own, I found shark teeth and, where, if I had had access to a microscope at the time, I quite possibly could have found various microscopic critters as well.
By then I was off to college most of the year. Visiting the creek only when home on holiday or over the summer break and when social obligations did not intrude.
Ah, how I loved to tramp up and down its length then! From the deconstructed dam well up river from where Old Homestead dead ended in the creek all the way down to the park the creek gave it's name to.
Only then, while going to ET and studying Earth Science, I could really appreciate that fascinating erosion feature. By then I knew that the walls of the creek were the Austin Chalk that lay beneath most of Texas. I even understood that the creek its self had probably originated as part of the outflow of the great glaciers that had covered most of North America during the last Ice Age. Glaciers that had stopped just north of Texas somewhere up in Oklahoma or Kansas. And that was why it was so flat here and there. Flat there because of the glaciers scraping along like a wood plane. Here because the outflow from the melting glaciers deposited so much of the mud and silt they had ground off of the rocks north of here.
Then, I graduated and having no luck finding a job, I joined the Army. Then I tried to go into business with some Army buddies doing Soil Analysis up in Kentucky, failed, came home and kept house for my parents while I licked my wounds and decided what to do next. At a loss, I saved up my money got on the GI Bill, and went back to school. Majoring once more in Broad Field Earth Science. Sigh. I never learn.
In any event, at this point in my life, life itself seemed to keep me from my beloved creek. I had my memories and some photos and I used both (I was also once more minoring in art.)to paint what I considered one of my best paintings. It was of a particular bend in the creek that I felt had been controlled by a fault. There I had found an outcrop of a mineral called slick and slide(though not formally named that I believe). This mineral forms inside old faults and records the scraping of rock against broken rock on it's sides and it was right along that line of outcrop that the creek had a slight little kink in its generally straight path.
I painted the scene from a photo I had taken, and from the memories I had of bright summer sun reflecting up from cream colored rock.
Of course the art teacher didn't like it much. After all he could tell what it was and there were no people in it. He of course didn't spot the unicorn I stuck in amongst some of the distant trees just for fun. He would not have thought it fun or cute.
I and my Dad got it framed and gave it to my Mom for her birthday that year. It pleased her I think. It was often hard to tell with Mom.
I left it in the house when I rented it to my Cousin Craig after both my parents died. He fell in love with it and has taken it with him when ever and where ever he has moved since. I suspect he has as much love for and fond memories of the old creek as I. Especially, as he got to ramble it with Granpa Montgomery and they both liked fishing.
Unfortunately, that old creek is dead now, as well. As dead as my parents and grandparents.
In their wisdom the city fathers of Dallas decided to put a north south road through and that required a bridge across Crawford Creek. It crossed just about where that little kink used to be. Areas up steam decided they needed more land area so they filled in parts of the creek, including an area where I had found a truly spectacular ammonite. Sigh.
Then while I was living in Grandpa and Grandma Montgomery's house; I had inherited half at Grandma's death and bought the other half from my Uncle who had inherited the rest, I started hearing cop-choppers whupp-whupp-whupping up and down the length of the creek, shining their bright light down into it. They were looking for drug dealers I was told. Drug dealers who had started using my creek to meet buyers and sellers. Then, a little later, I read in the paper about an abandoned stolen car being found dumped into the creek near my house.
Yes, my creek was dead. The bright shining, vanilla cake sided, geologic wonderland of my youth was now degraded into a dumping ground for stolen cars and a meeting ground for druggies.
The yuppies coming by to try to get me to sign a petition to outlaw farm animals and large dogs, while two horses grazed behind me and two big dogs barked at them settled it.
I started searching for another place to live. I found it here in Lone Oak. I haven’t been back to the old home place since the day we pulled out of the driveway with a two horse trailer loaded with two horses and the back of my truck piled nearly as high as the horse trailer with belongings. My Uncle followed with the rest in one of his closed trailers.
Some times I wonder what Crawford Creek is like now. Most times, I don't want to know, just to remember how it was.
Now I know that it was Crawford Creek and that the park I used to pester my parents to take me to was named for it. But for most of my life it was just and only THE CREEK.
It was that deliciously wild place where, if I were lucky and promised to be good, my Dad would take me when he 'went fishing'. Honestly, now I suspect he was just looking for some alone time but occasionally agreed to share it with me.
He would sometimes let me help him fish and once I even caught one. A rather small sun perch that I was quite disappointed in. Only Dad grinned and said, "Well, if you don't mind. I could use it for bait." I agreed and quick as the sun shimmering on the water that little fish was in several pieces with one of them decorating the end of Daddy's fishing line.
But fishing is not what really drew me to that fascinating chasm of limestone. Dad had told me in passing what he had learned in school about how sedimentary rocks were formed. He also told me of that freaky new idea going around called continental drift. He even showed me the imprints of ancient shells that had fallen long ago into soft mud. Imprints that, when I saw them, resided in stone whose only softness lay in it's creamy white color.
I admit it, I was totally fascinated by the layer cake of those ever so slightly differing pale cream colors. Then there were the nuggets of iron pyrite that would sometimes make it look as though someone had shot the creek wall and it had leaked a streak of bloody rust down its side.
As I grew older and read more about geology and other earth sciences the creek began to show to me the grand forces of the planet and how they danced in a slow steady rhythm of subsidence, deposition and up thrust with erosion. It let me see the gradual inundation of the land by the sea that left the grittier layers of low water sandy marls where, when I was old enough to explore the creek on my own, I found shark teeth and, where, if I had had access to a microscope at the time, I quite possibly could have found various microscopic critters as well.
By then I was off to college most of the year. Visiting the creek only when home on holiday or over the summer break and when social obligations did not intrude.
Ah, how I loved to tramp up and down its length then! From the deconstructed dam well up river from where Old Homestead dead ended in the creek all the way down to the park the creek gave it's name to.
Only then, while going to ET and studying Earth Science, I could really appreciate that fascinating erosion feature. By then I knew that the walls of the creek were the Austin Chalk that lay beneath most of Texas. I even understood that the creek its self had probably originated as part of the outflow of the great glaciers that had covered most of North America during the last Ice Age. Glaciers that had stopped just north of Texas somewhere up in Oklahoma or Kansas. And that was why it was so flat here and there. Flat there because of the glaciers scraping along like a wood plane. Here because the outflow from the melting glaciers deposited so much of the mud and silt they had ground off of the rocks north of here.
Then, I graduated and having no luck finding a job, I joined the Army. Then I tried to go into business with some Army buddies doing Soil Analysis up in Kentucky, failed, came home and kept house for my parents while I licked my wounds and decided what to do next. At a loss, I saved up my money got on the GI Bill, and went back to school. Majoring once more in Broad Field Earth Science. Sigh. I never learn.
In any event, at this point in my life, life itself seemed to keep me from my beloved creek. I had my memories and some photos and I used both (I was also once more minoring in art.)to paint what I considered one of my best paintings. It was of a particular bend in the creek that I felt had been controlled by a fault. There I had found an outcrop of a mineral called slick and slide(though not formally named that I believe). This mineral forms inside old faults and records the scraping of rock against broken rock on it's sides and it was right along that line of outcrop that the creek had a slight little kink in its generally straight path.
I painted the scene from a photo I had taken, and from the memories I had of bright summer sun reflecting up from cream colored rock.
Of course the art teacher didn't like it much. After all he could tell what it was and there were no people in it. He of course didn't spot the unicorn I stuck in amongst some of the distant trees just for fun. He would not have thought it fun or cute.
I and my Dad got it framed and gave it to my Mom for her birthday that year. It pleased her I think. It was often hard to tell with Mom.
I left it in the house when I rented it to my Cousin Craig after both my parents died. He fell in love with it and has taken it with him when ever and where ever he has moved since. I suspect he has as much love for and fond memories of the old creek as I. Especially, as he got to ramble it with Granpa Montgomery and they both liked fishing.
Unfortunately, that old creek is dead now, as well. As dead as my parents and grandparents.
In their wisdom the city fathers of Dallas decided to put a north south road through and that required a bridge across Crawford Creek. It crossed just about where that little kink used to be. Areas up steam decided they needed more land area so they filled in parts of the creek, including an area where I had found a truly spectacular ammonite. Sigh.
Then while I was living in Grandpa and Grandma Montgomery's house; I had inherited half at Grandma's death and bought the other half from my Uncle who had inherited the rest, I started hearing cop-choppers whupp-whupp-whupping up and down the length of the creek, shining their bright light down into it. They were looking for drug dealers I was told. Drug dealers who had started using my creek to meet buyers and sellers. Then, a little later, I read in the paper about an abandoned stolen car being found dumped into the creek near my house.
Yes, my creek was dead. The bright shining, vanilla cake sided, geologic wonderland of my youth was now degraded into a dumping ground for stolen cars and a meeting ground for druggies.
The yuppies coming by to try to get me to sign a petition to outlaw farm animals and large dogs, while two horses grazed behind me and two big dogs barked at them settled it.
I started searching for another place to live. I found it here in Lone Oak. I haven’t been back to the old home place since the day we pulled out of the driveway with a two horse trailer loaded with two horses and the back of my truck piled nearly as high as the horse trailer with belongings. My Uncle followed with the rest in one of his closed trailers.
Some times I wonder what Crawford Creek is like now. Most times, I don't want to know, just to remember how it was.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
My view of politics
Hmmm. Has anyone ever noted how the word politics sounds? First there is 'poly' which, if I remember tends to mean 'many' or 'lots'. Then there's 'ticks' which brings to mind those nasty fat little blood suckers you can find on your dog or on your own person if you go hiking through rough country. So we end up with ' lots of, or many blood sucking, nasty little bugs'. And, sadly sometimes that is how I tend to look at the politicians of both main parties and even some of the minor parties that are trying to drum up support. Nasty little blood sucking varmints just ready to jump on the average citizen and suck them dry.
Yeah, I know. Most politicians get into the frey for 'noble' reasons. They want to do something about some injustice or blight or whatever. Then the reality of the thing hits. The real give and take of politics. I would be suckered in, I am sure. All despite my high faluting so called values. Why? Simple.
Lets say I ran for some office or other on a 'green' (or blue, or pink or purple) platform. I'm sure it wouldn't be long before I found out that in order to get the votes for the 'green' laws I wanted passed I'd have to promise to vote, or even actually push for a favorable vote for some other law that I didn't particularly like. Maybe I'd have to agree to back some orange, yellow, or beige law or watch most of my lovely little green laws either die in committee or be voted into oblivion.
And if I went in trying to actually CHANGE some things! Oh, boy, would the bureaucracy get on my case. If there is one thing a bureaucracy hates it is change. Just try changing one line of a church, business or government form. (All bureaucracy's love forms!) Or worse, give them an answer on one of those lines that is even just a little outside the box of what they expect. My personal favorite is when the paper work asks me for my race, or what I believe my race to be.... I like to answer 'Human'. They may chuckle or smile, but they always come back to, "Now, really miss. We need to know if you consider yourself to be ...." and I know that if I stick to 'human' there will be a price to pay.
As for the politicians we have in office now. Sigh. I'm, as you may suspect, a little pissed at both parties. Yeah, one wants to, apparently, have more control over the kind of medical treatment I will be able to get. But the other seems to want me to shift for myself unless I have enough cash saved back to pay either ridiculous medical costs out of my own pocket or equally ridiculous insurance costs. Insurance that I have no certainty that a Doctor will take or that will require that I go to specific doctors who may be, well, just too darn far away for me to get to. (Like in Dallas or Rockwall) And I'm really not sure about this idea on requiring everyone to have health insurance. That could end up hurting the really poor and even others as badly as the requirement for car insurance.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I don't want to get in an accident with someone who doesn't have insurance on their vehicle either. However, I'd also like to point out that while folks in the cities just might be able to ride a bus, train, or even take a taxi to work...There ain't none of that there stuff out here in the country. Where I live. Where a lot of the folks that work in the cities live. A goodly number of those folks who live here while working in those cities, even local small towns, work for a pay that just barely meets their needs for the rent/mortgage, food, utilities and maybe either a car payment OR insurance but NOT both. But they still have to get to work so they can pay the mortgage, for the food and utilities. All while work can be anywhere from 15 to 60 miles away. One way! Way too far for a bicycle, or a horse (which is all I felt I had at one point! but lets not get into that.)
That's a position I doubt very much any politician in DC has ever been in or considers when making up these 'universal' laws.
Sometimes I really like the wild story idea I had a few years ago. It went something like this (I'm leaving out the characters and other details): Some congressional intern suspects the congressmen or senators don't read all of the law put before them. So in one bill that the intern knows will be passed because it's for either a raise for the politicians in office or because it's for paying government workers, he / she inserts a sneaky little paragraph or two that makes an addition to all, and I mean all, ballots for the presidential election. This addition allows that if you don't like any of those running for the office or feel it makes no difference then you can vote to use a lottery to choose the winner. Only the lottery will include everyone in the United States who is of age for the office, of sound mind, and with nothing on their criminal records above a felony. Needless to say, the character I have 'win' this lottery is a peppery old country gal with strong opinions and a complete lack of any party affiliation. Hmm sorta sounds like...never mind.
In any event, sometimes I begin to think that's how we should elect all of our government officials and that we should limit all of them to only one term in office. That way every one would face having to do their civic duty for good or ill. It would certainly be an incentive to teach how government works in school. Yes, you could end up with people in office with really radical ideas, that way, not to mention from all economic levels. But at least you wouldn't have folks in office who had to remember who had helped them get that office, whether it be the Republicans, the Democrats, Exxon Mobil or the big ticket drug companies. Yeah, you might also have more folks trying to influence those who won these lotteries, but, lets face something here. If you knew your representative was chosen by lottery and that, simply by living where you lived, in your district and being of age, sane, and not jail bait you could be next in line to clean up their mess...wouldn't you keep a closer eye on what they did?
One things for sure, it'd sure as heck cut back on the mud slinging, muck raking and finger pointing we have to put up with every few years. Plus all that cash spent for all the advertising? Just think what it could do if it were donated to better causes or even dumped into the National Treasury to be put against the national debt.
Yeah, I know. Most politicians get into the frey for 'noble' reasons. They want to do something about some injustice or blight or whatever. Then the reality of the thing hits. The real give and take of politics. I would be suckered in, I am sure. All despite my high faluting so called values. Why? Simple.
Lets say I ran for some office or other on a 'green' (or blue, or pink or purple) platform. I'm sure it wouldn't be long before I found out that in order to get the votes for the 'green' laws I wanted passed I'd have to promise to vote, or even actually push for a favorable vote for some other law that I didn't particularly like. Maybe I'd have to agree to back some orange, yellow, or beige law or watch most of my lovely little green laws either die in committee or be voted into oblivion.
And if I went in trying to actually CHANGE some things! Oh, boy, would the bureaucracy get on my case. If there is one thing a bureaucracy hates it is change. Just try changing one line of a church, business or government form. (All bureaucracy's love forms!) Or worse, give them an answer on one of those lines that is even just a little outside the box of what they expect. My personal favorite is when the paper work asks me for my race, or what I believe my race to be.... I like to answer 'Human'. They may chuckle or smile, but they always come back to, "Now, really miss. We need to know if you consider yourself to be ...." and I know that if I stick to 'human' there will be a price to pay.
As for the politicians we have in office now. Sigh. I'm, as you may suspect, a little pissed at both parties. Yeah, one wants to, apparently, have more control over the kind of medical treatment I will be able to get. But the other seems to want me to shift for myself unless I have enough cash saved back to pay either ridiculous medical costs out of my own pocket or equally ridiculous insurance costs. Insurance that I have no certainty that a Doctor will take or that will require that I go to specific doctors who may be, well, just too darn far away for me to get to. (Like in Dallas or Rockwall) And I'm really not sure about this idea on requiring everyone to have health insurance. That could end up hurting the really poor and even others as badly as the requirement for car insurance.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I don't want to get in an accident with someone who doesn't have insurance on their vehicle either. However, I'd also like to point out that while folks in the cities just might be able to ride a bus, train, or even take a taxi to work...There ain't none of that there stuff out here in the country. Where I live. Where a lot of the folks that work in the cities live. A goodly number of those folks who live here while working in those cities, even local small towns, work for a pay that just barely meets their needs for the rent/mortgage, food, utilities and maybe either a car payment OR insurance but NOT both. But they still have to get to work so they can pay the mortgage, for the food and utilities. All while work can be anywhere from 15 to 60 miles away. One way! Way too far for a bicycle, or a horse (which is all I felt I had at one point! but lets not get into that.)
That's a position I doubt very much any politician in DC has ever been in or considers when making up these 'universal' laws.
Sometimes I really like the wild story idea I had a few years ago. It went something like this (I'm leaving out the characters and other details): Some congressional intern suspects the congressmen or senators don't read all of the law put before them. So in one bill that the intern knows will be passed because it's for either a raise for the politicians in office or because it's for paying government workers, he / she inserts a sneaky little paragraph or two that makes an addition to all, and I mean all, ballots for the presidential election. This addition allows that if you don't like any of those running for the office or feel it makes no difference then you can vote to use a lottery to choose the winner. Only the lottery will include everyone in the United States who is of age for the office, of sound mind, and with nothing on their criminal records above a felony. Needless to say, the character I have 'win' this lottery is a peppery old country gal with strong opinions and a complete lack of any party affiliation. Hmm sorta sounds like...never mind.
In any event, sometimes I begin to think that's how we should elect all of our government officials and that we should limit all of them to only one term in office. That way every one would face having to do their civic duty for good or ill. It would certainly be an incentive to teach how government works in school. Yes, you could end up with people in office with really radical ideas, that way, not to mention from all economic levels. But at least you wouldn't have folks in office who had to remember who had helped them get that office, whether it be the Republicans, the Democrats, Exxon Mobil or the big ticket drug companies. Yeah, you might also have more folks trying to influence those who won these lotteries, but, lets face something here. If you knew your representative was chosen by lottery and that, simply by living where you lived, in your district and being of age, sane, and not jail bait you could be next in line to clean up their mess...wouldn't you keep a closer eye on what they did?
One things for sure, it'd sure as heck cut back on the mud slinging, muck raking and finger pointing we have to put up with every few years. Plus all that cash spent for all the advertising? Just think what it could do if it were donated to better causes or even dumped into the National Treasury to be put against the national debt.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Welcome to new friend
Well, what do ya know!
A nice person name of Petrea Rasmussen sent me an e-mail because she'd read comments I left on a permaculture site. She realized I lived here in East Texas and that she would soon be moving near here (down in Van Zant) so she e-mailed me to see if I was a) still here and b) still into the permie thing same as her.
Of course I answered her and told her about this blog. While she may not have left comments her next e-mail showed she'd read some of it and then when I next checked she showed up as a follower!
Thank you Petrea! Feel free to leave a comment on which ever rant or maundering that you wish to comment on. Even if you disagree and think I'm a nut case. I'm all about everyone having their own opinions and their right to voice them.
Oh, what I just said to Petrea goes for any other followers or visitors or passers by. Like any writer I yearn for what I write to be read and am delighted when someone reacts to it. No mater what said reaction is. Well, except the old 'hunt down and hang reaction' that some apparently feel they have the right to. Never did understand that one.
Yeah, I know it was quite prevalent in various old cultures and is still in vogue in some countries today. But this IS the USA last I looked. And I did raise my right hand and swear to God that I would protect it, it's citizens and it's Constitution way back when I joined the Army.
Okay, now day's there's a few citizens I'm not sure about and this countries done some dumb things and still is but it's still way better than any other's I know of. Now, if we'd stop reading bits and pieces of the Constitution, especially the Bill Of Rights out of context, I think we'd all be a bit better off. Oh, yeah, it'd also be nice if some folks stopped trying to twist those out of context bits and pieces to suit themselves. That really chaps my sit downer.
One of those often twisted bits is 'right to Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness'. Okay there's some out there that forget about the pursuit part and think happiness is a grantee even if they have to kill or lock up other's to get it. Nope. Sorry. That ain't it. EVERYONE gets Life and Liberty guaranteed but the only grantee we get for Happiness is the right to pursue it, to chase it down, rope, tie and brand it. If we can. If we can't. Oh well, have fun chasing it.
Hey, way cool. I think I've found myself something here to use for my Alternative Opinion article for the Lone Oak Newsletter.
See Ya, gotta get to work on that.
A nice person name of Petrea Rasmussen sent me an e-mail because she'd read comments I left on a permaculture site. She realized I lived here in East Texas and that she would soon be moving near here (down in Van Zant) so she e-mailed me to see if I was a) still here and b) still into the permie thing same as her.
Of course I answered her and told her about this blog. While she may not have left comments her next e-mail showed she'd read some of it and then when I next checked she showed up as a follower!
Thank you Petrea! Feel free to leave a comment on which ever rant or maundering that you wish to comment on. Even if you disagree and think I'm a nut case. I'm all about everyone having their own opinions and their right to voice them.
Oh, what I just said to Petrea goes for any other followers or visitors or passers by. Like any writer I yearn for what I write to be read and am delighted when someone reacts to it. No mater what said reaction is. Well, except the old 'hunt down and hang reaction' that some apparently feel they have the right to. Never did understand that one.
Yeah, I know it was quite prevalent in various old cultures and is still in vogue in some countries today. But this IS the USA last I looked. And I did raise my right hand and swear to God that I would protect it, it's citizens and it's Constitution way back when I joined the Army.
Okay, now day's there's a few citizens I'm not sure about and this countries done some dumb things and still is but it's still way better than any other's I know of. Now, if we'd stop reading bits and pieces of the Constitution, especially the Bill Of Rights out of context, I think we'd all be a bit better off. Oh, yeah, it'd also be nice if some folks stopped trying to twist those out of context bits and pieces to suit themselves. That really chaps my sit downer.
One of those often twisted bits is 'right to Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness'. Okay there's some out there that forget about the pursuit part and think happiness is a grantee even if they have to kill or lock up other's to get it. Nope. Sorry. That ain't it. EVERYONE gets Life and Liberty guaranteed but the only grantee we get for Happiness is the right to pursue it, to chase it down, rope, tie and brand it. If we can. If we can't. Oh well, have fun chasing it.
Hey, way cool. I think I've found myself something here to use for my Alternative Opinion article for the Lone Oak Newsletter.
See Ya, gotta get to work on that.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
bye bye stinky
Well, the man who owns that little ram came and got him today. Thank goodness. The little feller was cute as could be but; Lordy did he STINK!
I do hope he did his duty with my girls and that their kids have some of his color. He's cream, tan and black with a touch of white.
It will also be a good deal quieter around here as he was almost constantly baaing. Probably complaining that he couldn't jump that 8 foot fence of the dog kennel.
Oh, dear. Now I have to clean up that kennel. I'll need to wash down the dog house, inside and out. Probably with something to cut that terrible sent he left behind. Same for the food and water bowls I usually use for my dog. Though I must admit I have gotten fairly used to her being inside with me. I know she likes it except that I'm no where near as active as she'd like me to be. Sweet, big and clumsy Issa Dorable Dog would really rather be outside chasing balls that she seldom returns to be thrown again and running around like crazy sniffing things and maybe chasing squirrels, cats and anything else that was willing to 'play' by running away.
Unfortunately for her I'm not anywhere near that active. I'm completely unwilling to chase her down to get the ball back so I can throw it again. Tug of war pails quickly and, well, with my knees and feet, I do NOT run.
Well, when I get her run cleaned up I guess she can stay there during the day and I can bring her in at night, or when it rains. I'd planned to start bringing her in at night when it got colder at night anyway.
Trouble is I just gave her a bath this last week and fear if I leave her outside for any length of time she will get totally filthy again. Of course she is mostly lab and has that wonderful coat that mostly sheds dirt.
Oh, well. I'll get it figured out.
I do hope he did his duty with my girls and that their kids have some of his color. He's cream, tan and black with a touch of white.
It will also be a good deal quieter around here as he was almost constantly baaing. Probably complaining that he couldn't jump that 8 foot fence of the dog kennel.
Oh, dear. Now I have to clean up that kennel. I'll need to wash down the dog house, inside and out. Probably with something to cut that terrible sent he left behind. Same for the food and water bowls I usually use for my dog. Though I must admit I have gotten fairly used to her being inside with me. I know she likes it except that I'm no where near as active as she'd like me to be. Sweet, big and clumsy Issa Dorable Dog would really rather be outside chasing balls that she seldom returns to be thrown again and running around like crazy sniffing things and maybe chasing squirrels, cats and anything else that was willing to 'play' by running away.
Unfortunately for her I'm not anywhere near that active. I'm completely unwilling to chase her down to get the ball back so I can throw it again. Tug of war pails quickly and, well, with my knees and feet, I do NOT run.
Well, when I get her run cleaned up I guess she can stay there during the day and I can bring her in at night, or when it rains. I'd planned to start bringing her in at night when it got colder at night anyway.
Trouble is I just gave her a bath this last week and fear if I leave her outside for any length of time she will get totally filthy again. Of course she is mostly lab and has that wonderful coat that mostly sheds dirt.
Oh, well. I'll get it figured out.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Goats etc.
Well, well, well. The billy goat a friend dropped over here on my birthday (Sept 8Th) has lost interest in my 3 nannies. Lost so much interest in them that instead of keeping them cooped up in their stall he's jumping the fence! Guess that means they don't, uh, NEED him anymore. Y'know what I mean? ;)
If that is so I should know in, what? about 5 and a half months or so I've been told. Which puts me out there in the cold of the first part of February watching and waiting for new born kids. UMMM. Seems I could have planed this better.
Some who know goats may be wondering how this can be as this may not be the usual time of year for nannies to come in. However, these are Pygmy's and I've been told, and read, that they come in any old time.
Anyone who reads this and has some hands on info for me, let me know. I'm new at this.
I've got some plans for these goats. I'd like to have more than the 3 nannies I have. But I need to decide what kind of goat I want to raise. There are pluses and minuses for all the varieties of course.
The ones I have now, which are mostly Pygmy goat are cute and some folks like to have them as pets. Even the little rams if they are, well, lets just say, no longer rams. That way they don't have that distinctive boy goat smell. Smell!? They stink like, like, heck, like a boy goat!
I've never smelled anything in particular from my little nannies (doe's) and I've heard the castrated he goats don't have a notable scent either.
Oh, as for the father of the kids my girls may have? Right now the little jumping jack is in my dogs 8 foot high dog run, while my dog is gleefully putting up with me 24 hours a day. At least until that cute but stinky little horny fella 's owner comes for him.
Needless to say, my cats are NOT happy!
Now as I understand it, pygmy goats can also be used as meat if you don't want a lot at a time. Their milk is probably as good as any milk goats but in much smaller quantity. In other words they 'produce' the same products as any other goat only in smaller amounts.
And they can be pets.
Then there are the plain old meat goats. The ones that are born and bred for one thing only and that's meat. They tend to be bigger and meatier of course. Now the question is, do I want to fool with anything that big and strong? (for the same reason I've rulled out cows.)
Now the milk goats are, I've read, about as big as the meat goats. The culls and, um, jobless? Bucks can be neutered and sold for meat. Goat milk is, apparently, a lucrative business whether you sell it as is or turn it into cheese or soap or some other goat milk based product. However! And this is a BIG HOWEVER! there is all the upfront cost of setting up the milking parlor, keeping it clean, milking the goats and processing the milk...even if you just sell the milk. Perhaps especially if you do that as then you get into all that government inspection and paper work.
Another kind of goat is the fiber goat. I haven't read much about these but I'm sure you'd have to either shear them or brush them out to get the fibers they grow. Then you'd have to clean said fiber, package it and ship it to folks who spin and or weave. That, or take up spinning and weaving yourself.
All in all it's still a load of work no mater which kind of goat you choose. The meat goats seem to be the least labor intensive. But I'm not sure of the market around here for the meat. Heck, I'm not even sure if I like goat meat!!
At least I won't be tempted to eat up my profits. :)
If that is so I should know in, what? about 5 and a half months or so I've been told. Which puts me out there in the cold of the first part of February watching and waiting for new born kids. UMMM. Seems I could have planed this better.
Some who know goats may be wondering how this can be as this may not be the usual time of year for nannies to come in. However, these are Pygmy's and I've been told, and read, that they come in any old time.
Anyone who reads this and has some hands on info for me, let me know. I'm new at this.
I've got some plans for these goats. I'd like to have more than the 3 nannies I have. But I need to decide what kind of goat I want to raise. There are pluses and minuses for all the varieties of course.
The ones I have now, which are mostly Pygmy goat are cute and some folks like to have them as pets. Even the little rams if they are, well, lets just say, no longer rams. That way they don't have that distinctive boy goat smell. Smell!? They stink like, like, heck, like a boy goat!
I've never smelled anything in particular from my little nannies (doe's) and I've heard the castrated he goats don't have a notable scent either.
Oh, as for the father of the kids my girls may have? Right now the little jumping jack is in my dogs 8 foot high dog run, while my dog is gleefully putting up with me 24 hours a day. At least until that cute but stinky little horny fella 's owner comes for him.
Needless to say, my cats are NOT happy!
Now as I understand it, pygmy goats can also be used as meat if you don't want a lot at a time. Their milk is probably as good as any milk goats but in much smaller quantity. In other words they 'produce' the same products as any other goat only in smaller amounts.
And they can be pets.
Then there are the plain old meat goats. The ones that are born and bred for one thing only and that's meat. They tend to be bigger and meatier of course. Now the question is, do I want to fool with anything that big and strong? (for the same reason I've rulled out cows.)
Now the milk goats are, I've read, about as big as the meat goats. The culls and, um, jobless? Bucks can be neutered and sold for meat. Goat milk is, apparently, a lucrative business whether you sell it as is or turn it into cheese or soap or some other goat milk based product. However! And this is a BIG HOWEVER! there is all the upfront cost of setting up the milking parlor, keeping it clean, milking the goats and processing the milk...even if you just sell the milk. Perhaps especially if you do that as then you get into all that government inspection and paper work.
Another kind of goat is the fiber goat. I haven't read much about these but I'm sure you'd have to either shear them or brush them out to get the fibers they grow. Then you'd have to clean said fiber, package it and ship it to folks who spin and or weave. That, or take up spinning and weaving yourself.
All in all it's still a load of work no mater which kind of goat you choose. The meat goats seem to be the least labor intensive. But I'm not sure of the market around here for the meat. Heck, I'm not even sure if I like goat meat!!
At least I won't be tempted to eat up my profits. :)
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
rain, rain harvesting
Boy, oh boy, do I wish I'd had the money to set up what is now days called a Rain Harvesting System back while it was dry. I'd be ready for a long dry spell after all the rain we've had recently.
Whazzat? You may be asking if you don't know me and haven't been already board to tears about my plans, wishes, and hopes to put rain gutters around every roof on my property and connect said rain gutter's downspouts to an upgraded, modern version of the old fashioned rain barrels.
Big ones.
Yeah, I know. I've had some folks I've mentioned this to immediately ask: "But what about the 'skeeters? or the nasty stuff on the roof before it rains? There's dirt up there ya know and stuff like bird and squirrel poop."
I know. So do the designers of the modern type 'rain barrels' or 'water harvesting systems'. They add on a stand pipe like thingy that the dirty water that comes off the roof first goes into. Thus carrying with it the leaves, twigs, and poop along with dust and such. When it's full the cleaner rain water flows over it and into the downspout. On it's way into the 'rain barrel' it goes through a filter, or more than one if you plan to drink it yourself, and then on into the barrel. Which now days is more likely a big opaque plastic thing with a faucet attachment near the bottom and screens to keep out all kinds of things from the afore mentioned 'skeeters to other things.
"Why bother?" many of these same people ask. "After all you already pay the city a pretty penny for good potable water."
Yes, I do. And frankly I'd really rather just drink it, use it to cook, bathe and flush rather than also use it to water my garden and animals who do not use my toilet. Beasts and plants whose waste do not go to the local sewer. Especially as my sewer rates are based, gallon by gallon on how much water goes through my water meter. There is no sewer meter measuring what goes out, of course, so how else could they measure it.
Thus, I would be saving money if I watered my animals, house plants and gardens with rain water rather than with that chemically fortified stuff so many folks pay to filter before they drink it. Frankly, I'm not giving filtered or bottled water to my plants or animals. Way to expensive. Rain water on the other hand would be perfect for them.
Now.
If I could just afford said rain harvesting systems.
Sigh.
Whazzat? You may be asking if you don't know me and haven't been already board to tears about my plans, wishes, and hopes to put rain gutters around every roof on my property and connect said rain gutter's downspouts to an upgraded, modern version of the old fashioned rain barrels.
Big ones.
Yeah, I know. I've had some folks I've mentioned this to immediately ask: "But what about the 'skeeters? or the nasty stuff on the roof before it rains? There's dirt up there ya know and stuff like bird and squirrel poop."
I know. So do the designers of the modern type 'rain barrels' or 'water harvesting systems'. They add on a stand pipe like thingy that the dirty water that comes off the roof first goes into. Thus carrying with it the leaves, twigs, and poop along with dust and such. When it's full the cleaner rain water flows over it and into the downspout. On it's way into the 'rain barrel' it goes through a filter, or more than one if you plan to drink it yourself, and then on into the barrel. Which now days is more likely a big opaque plastic thing with a faucet attachment near the bottom and screens to keep out all kinds of things from the afore mentioned 'skeeters to other things.
"Why bother?" many of these same people ask. "After all you already pay the city a pretty penny for good potable water."
Yes, I do. And frankly I'd really rather just drink it, use it to cook, bathe and flush rather than also use it to water my garden and animals who do not use my toilet. Beasts and plants whose waste do not go to the local sewer. Especially as my sewer rates are based, gallon by gallon on how much water goes through my water meter. There is no sewer meter measuring what goes out, of course, so how else could they measure it.
Thus, I would be saving money if I watered my animals, house plants and gardens with rain water rather than with that chemically fortified stuff so many folks pay to filter before they drink it. Frankly, I'm not giving filtered or bottled water to my plants or animals. Way to expensive. Rain water on the other hand would be perfect for them.
Now.
If I could just afford said rain harvesting systems.
Sigh.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Down on the worm farm....again
Yeeyoww! I've been invaded! Attacked!! By them damn little piss ants. (pardon my Anglo Saxon)
Started noticing those nasty little beggars a day or so ago, snooping around on my kitchen counter near the stove, so I washed that area down to make sure I'd gotten up any spills or splashes. Then I went back and used the plastic bottle it came in to puff some boric acid into the area between the stove and the counter, behind the stove, and into that little crack that's appeared between the back splash of my counter and the wall. I figured that took care of that.
News Flash!
The next day I found a whole line of the dirty little creeps snaking along from just under my kitchen window down toward my sink, along the back splash right toward my WORM FARM!! I hadn't done anything about ants over there. I'd gotten lazy and figured the boric acid I'd put down last year was still working. I opened the farm and was confronted with hundreds, thousands!!! of happy little ants.
If you are wondering that would only be good if I had an ANT farm instead of a WORM farm.
Needless to say I was afraid that serious damage had already been done. I feared those fearsome little hunters had wiped out my whole herd(?) of worms. Daring them mean ol' ants to bite me I dug down and found my cute little red wrigglers still wiggling.
Relief!
But I still had the problem of the ants....IN MY KITCHEN! I'm fine with the worms but NOT with the ants. They bite me. They eat my food before I'm ready to even fix it, instead of waiting patiently for the scraps like the worms.
Now here is an illustration of why a lot of folks refuse to go 'green'. These non-greenies, lets call them brownies, would want to either just forget the worms and dump the whole mess out side somewhere and spray the kitchen area down with the strongest bug killer available, or maybe, if they wanted to keep the worms bad enough, just spray the area around the worm bin down. If they tried the later they'd likely wonder in a few days or so why the worms had died off. (duh)
What did little old greenie me do? I spread some newspaper sheets out on the back porch in the shade and dumped the ant infested worms/worm food/worm poo mess out on it. I knocked all the ants off of the container and sat it aside. Then I proceeded to pick out all the worms I could find as well as the bits and pieces of as yet unused food scraps that had no ants attached and tossed them back in the worm bin. Then I added some mown grass that I spotted that hadn't already gone back to whence it came and added that as a lot of the worms food was still ant infested. I dampened the grass down, added the tea bags I hadn't put in before I noticed the ants and closed the thing back up. Then I wiped down the place where the worms had been in the kitchen with a soapy dish cloth. I also wiped down the trail of ants that had returned looking for that tasty little farm. Then I blasted the little biters with some more boric acid! I puffed the stuff out where ever I'd seen them little varmints walking. I puffed it up under the bottom piece of wood on my window sill. I opened the window and puffed it there. I went outside and puffed it along that side of the house and then around the nearest corner and under the back door. I even puffed it around and in my houses AC unit.
Don't get me wrong. Ants are fine. Great even. But only in their place - outside - and NOT in my KITCHEN!!
Started noticing those nasty little beggars a day or so ago, snooping around on my kitchen counter near the stove, so I washed that area down to make sure I'd gotten up any spills or splashes. Then I went back and used the plastic bottle it came in to puff some boric acid into the area between the stove and the counter, behind the stove, and into that little crack that's appeared between the back splash of my counter and the wall. I figured that took care of that.
News Flash!
The next day I found a whole line of the dirty little creeps snaking along from just under my kitchen window down toward my sink, along the back splash right toward my WORM FARM!! I hadn't done anything about ants over there. I'd gotten lazy and figured the boric acid I'd put down last year was still working. I opened the farm and was confronted with hundreds, thousands!!! of happy little ants.
If you are wondering that would only be good if I had an ANT farm instead of a WORM farm.
Needless to say I was afraid that serious damage had already been done. I feared those fearsome little hunters had wiped out my whole herd(?) of worms. Daring them mean ol' ants to bite me I dug down and found my cute little red wrigglers still wiggling.
Relief!
But I still had the problem of the ants....IN MY KITCHEN! I'm fine with the worms but NOT with the ants. They bite me. They eat my food before I'm ready to even fix it, instead of waiting patiently for the scraps like the worms.
Now here is an illustration of why a lot of folks refuse to go 'green'. These non-greenies, lets call them brownies, would want to either just forget the worms and dump the whole mess out side somewhere and spray the kitchen area down with the strongest bug killer available, or maybe, if they wanted to keep the worms bad enough, just spray the area around the worm bin down. If they tried the later they'd likely wonder in a few days or so why the worms had died off. (duh)
What did little old greenie me do? I spread some newspaper sheets out on the back porch in the shade and dumped the ant infested worms/worm food/worm poo mess out on it. I knocked all the ants off of the container and sat it aside. Then I proceeded to pick out all the worms I could find as well as the bits and pieces of as yet unused food scraps that had no ants attached and tossed them back in the worm bin. Then I added some mown grass that I spotted that hadn't already gone back to whence it came and added that as a lot of the worms food was still ant infested. I dampened the grass down, added the tea bags I hadn't put in before I noticed the ants and closed the thing back up. Then I wiped down the place where the worms had been in the kitchen with a soapy dish cloth. I also wiped down the trail of ants that had returned looking for that tasty little farm. Then I blasted the little biters with some more boric acid! I puffed the stuff out where ever I'd seen them little varmints walking. I puffed it up under the bottom piece of wood on my window sill. I opened the window and puffed it there. I went outside and puffed it along that side of the house and then around the nearest corner and under the back door. I even puffed it around and in my houses AC unit.
Don't get me wrong. Ants are fine. Great even. But only in their place - outside - and NOT in my KITCHEN!!
Friday, September 4, 2009
The economy
Don't know why I keep thinking about the economy. I never studied it in school. I'm doing good to balance my check book and get it to agree with my monthly bank statement. (Happy to say I'm doing a lot better at that than the government and several big businesses now days!)
But back to the economy thing. Way back last summer and before, back even before this last big election was starting to heat up I was saying that the economy just couldn't keep going the way it was. It was unsustainable. It was gonna go flop any old time.
Surprise!
It did!
Now what did I think made our "great American Economy" unsustainable despite the fact that in form and use it has been exported to every other nation in the world?
First there is that basic out look it has that is best summed up in a spiffy little 3 word battle cry. One that a motivational group charged a factory I once worked for lots of money to try to indoctrinate it's workers with. The company paid them in the hope that we would become good little employees and be motivated to work harder, faster and make the company more money for less wages. At least that was MY view of it. This spiffy little slogan was "FASTER, HIGHER, FURTHER!" Sounds great don't it. Stirring even.
Sigh. In my mind it translates to Faster production, Higher quotas, and going further to help the 'company' make 'it's' goal of a bigger bottom line.
Odd thing is it can also be the theme of our over all economy. Faster growth, higher profits, furthering bigger bottom lines.
Now this general outlook ends up also giving us the 3 things I (and some others) see as the things absolutely required to support our present economy:
1) An ever growing, preferably single, source of cheep, easily obtained energy to run factories, etc.
2) An ever growing source of cheep, easily obtained uniform materials to feed into factories to make ever more 'stuff'.
3) An ever growing population of easily controlled workers for the factories and easily controlled buyers for the products of the factories. (This can be simplified down to just 'an ever growing, expanding population.)
Now I'm certain that just about anyone who looks at our economy in this light can see that it is totally, completely and insanely un sustainable.
Lets look at the requirements in order and I'll show why I think they are unsustainable.
1) The fuel for our economy at present is hydro-carbons. Usually in the form of oil. I know lots of people refuse to believe this but we are running out of oil. It's getting harder to get. Yes, we are getting more out of old oil fields that were shut down. They were originally shut down because the oil stopped just pouring out on its on and they started having to pay to pump it out or even had to start doing things like 'frac' (pump water or gas into the formation to expand and crack -fracture- the rock so more oil could be sucked out). All that cost money and until the price of oil went up it wasn't worth their labor to get it. Coal is still plentiful but it has an even worse polluting effect on the atmosphere than oil and if it's very deep you have to risk a lot of peoples lives and health to get it up where we can use it. If it's near the surface all you have to do is completely destroy the land above it and make an open pit mine. Nuclear power has no immediate emissions, unless there's a melt down which is not as likely with modern reactors. - I'm told. - But I still have to ask...What the heck do we do when these fancy new reactors become old and unusable. Turn their radioactive hulks into apartments or what?
2)One of the favorite and cheep materials now days is the ever present and ubiquitous plastic. Guess where most plastic comes from. -Oil.- That stuff that's disappearing. Or Coal, that stuff that's so expensive to the environment and people to get out of the ground. Metal deposits aren't as close to disappearing as the hydrocarbons but they are getting harder to find and get to. We've just about used up the hardwoods that grow down in the jungles of the southern hemisphere. And I'm not even going into what's happening with the soft woods we use to make paper or houses. Oh, all these materials can be got and often fairly 'cheaply'. All we have to do is turn our backs while multinational conglomerates move in and rape the ecology of delicate biologically diverse areas and/or steal the land of native peoples, forcing them to move into urban areas where their thousand plus year old cultures are lost forever and they become alcohol and drug soaked hangers on of society. No skin off our backs, right. Until they start picking up guns or backpacks full of explosives and coming after us.
3) This one is the real crux of the problem I think. It is an absolute requirement. Why? because we need ever more, preferably cheep, easily controlled labor to use the energy from 1 and the materials from 2 to make all the various 'stuff' that those of us here in the US and other '1st world', 'advanced' nations have been taught to think we can't live without. The companies that make this stuff are convinced that they have to have an ever expanding, bigger and bigger 'bottom line'. (faster, higher, further!) Therefore, they must have more and more customers while their workers must produce more and more product. Now, there is also a slight (?) disconnect here. The owners of the companies want that ever growing population of workers to work for as little money as possible while they charge as much as possible for their product. Thanks to modern advertising it was easy to convince those workers that it was perfectly okay to go deep into debt to get all those goodies they were making. Then it was just as easy to convince them that it was sencible to throw those goodies away, before they finished paying them off, so they could go into more debt in order to buy the 'NEW! IMPROVED!" model. We know how that has ended up.
Now the outcome of all of the above is that we now have a population greater than the planet can support, an atmosphere polluted with all kinds of stuff our ancestors never had to put up with and a generally degraded environment. Not even mentioning Global Warming. Which is another problem I think this 'run away' economy is responsible for whether anyone reading this dose or not. Worse, this totally unsustainable economy, after getting us this far in style and luxury, is finely starting to stumble. As I see it, this horse just can't run no further. We've run it into the ground. Literally.
Unfortunately the powers in charge at the moment, instead of trying to really change the economy to something sustainable is, instead, trying like all get out to prop up the old one. They are doing all they can to kick that tired, nearly dead, old horse back from it's present stumbling trot back into a full out gallop. I think we are headed for disaster here folks.
However, I can see the problem the powers that be have. They have grown up, been educated to see, the present kind of economy as the only one that will work. "It is really what defeated the communists" I'm sure they like to tell themselves. Yep, I agree. But we beat the commies only because the Free World had more of two of the three things needed. I'd say all three but while the communists didn't have quite as big a population it was very controllable. At least they thought so.
I have had a deal of trouble myself trying to picture what a sustainable economy would really look like. I had no luck at all until I decided to take the above 'rallying cry' of the present economy and the 3 things it has to have and reverse them. Just to see what would happen.
Now let me be clear here. I am not advocating any kind of controlled markets, communism or any such kind of thing. Mainly because they are even less sustainable than our present economy as the past few decades have shown. What I do advocate is individual independence, self sufficiency, responsibility, respect for our fellow beings; human, plant and animal, as well as cooperation with our environment and each other rather than competition.
Now let me show you what happens if we turn the present precepts of our economy on it's head.
"Faster, Higher, Further!" Becomes "Slower, Lower, Closer to Home." Note the absence of an exclamation point.
In other words, doing things slow enough to be sure they are done right and well. Maybe even thinking about the thing to be done enough to realize that it might not need to be done at all!
Lower expectations. Not nearly as bad as it sounds. How many folks out there get up and go to jobs they hate just so they can live a 'high life' that they don't even like living? How many young people are going to end up facing huge bills for college loans even though they know they would be lots happier working on the family farm, welding, or even throwing pottery rather than being managers or businessmen? How many Scientists are out working for companies whose philosophies and plans they don't agree with just so they can make enough for a high life when they'd be happier at a University, teaching new scientist (who really want to be scientists) and making new discoveries? And why must we have an ever higher income other than to buy more stuff we don't need? What's wrong with haveing just enough to get what we need? And what's so grand about buildings being so high you have to have an elevator?
Closer to home sounds dull I know. But there is a movement afoot already that emphasizes the better nutrition and taste of foods grown close to where they are eaten. The same is true of cloths and building styles as well as materials for all kinds of other things. I can see moving some things around. Lets face it, EVERYTHING, can't be grown or made locally. But loads can.
Now for the needs of this new economy. Remember I'll be turning the needs of the one we have upside down.
1) A steady supply of sustainable, renewable energy from various sources that can often be produced by individuals and used close to their source. (or added to a grid where it can be shared)
2) A steady supply of sustainably produced material that is often processed and usually used close to it's source. (or moved, sustainably, to where it is needed)
3) An individualistic, thinking, self sufficient, well educated population that maintains itself at a sustainable number of individuals.
What that kind of economy would actually look like in detail, I don't know. What kind of society it would evolve, I don't know. I'd like to think it would be a peaceful one as there would be no excess young bucks any government would want to send off to war to use as cannon fodder just to get rid of them. Indeed our government would likely be a shadow of it's present self what with an independent, well educated, and self sufficient population keeping an eagle eye on it. I also doubt there would be much pollution either.
I'm not, no mater what some may think, advocating doing away with technology or our present or future knowledge of the sciences. We will need those, and need them desperately, as our 'alternative energies' will be based on them. Nor do I want to see a one size fits all religion, or social structure rise out of this sustainable economy. I think it should be obvious that individuality, self sufficientcy and clear thinking will be the things of greatest value in such an economy.
Yeah, I know. I made no provisions for criminals or the insane. Frankly, niether dose the present economy.
So much for this rant. Feel free to rant back.
But back to the economy thing. Way back last summer and before, back even before this last big election was starting to heat up I was saying that the economy just couldn't keep going the way it was. It was unsustainable. It was gonna go flop any old time.
Surprise!
It did!
Now what did I think made our "great American Economy" unsustainable despite the fact that in form and use it has been exported to every other nation in the world?
First there is that basic out look it has that is best summed up in a spiffy little 3 word battle cry. One that a motivational group charged a factory I once worked for lots of money to try to indoctrinate it's workers with. The company paid them in the hope that we would become good little employees and be motivated to work harder, faster and make the company more money for less wages. At least that was MY view of it. This spiffy little slogan was "FASTER, HIGHER, FURTHER!" Sounds great don't it. Stirring even.
Sigh. In my mind it translates to Faster production, Higher quotas, and going further to help the 'company' make 'it's' goal of a bigger bottom line.
Odd thing is it can also be the theme of our over all economy. Faster growth, higher profits, furthering bigger bottom lines.
Now this general outlook ends up also giving us the 3 things I (and some others) see as the things absolutely required to support our present economy:
1) An ever growing, preferably single, source of cheep, easily obtained energy to run factories, etc.
2) An ever growing source of cheep, easily obtained uniform materials to feed into factories to make ever more 'stuff'.
3) An ever growing population of easily controlled workers for the factories and easily controlled buyers for the products of the factories. (This can be simplified down to just 'an ever growing, expanding population.)
Now I'm certain that just about anyone who looks at our economy in this light can see that it is totally, completely and insanely un sustainable.
Lets look at the requirements in order and I'll show why I think they are unsustainable.
1) The fuel for our economy at present is hydro-carbons. Usually in the form of oil. I know lots of people refuse to believe this but we are running out of oil. It's getting harder to get. Yes, we are getting more out of old oil fields that were shut down. They were originally shut down because the oil stopped just pouring out on its on and they started having to pay to pump it out or even had to start doing things like 'frac' (pump water or gas into the formation to expand and crack -fracture- the rock so more oil could be sucked out). All that cost money and until the price of oil went up it wasn't worth their labor to get it. Coal is still plentiful but it has an even worse polluting effect on the atmosphere than oil and if it's very deep you have to risk a lot of peoples lives and health to get it up where we can use it. If it's near the surface all you have to do is completely destroy the land above it and make an open pit mine. Nuclear power has no immediate emissions, unless there's a melt down which is not as likely with modern reactors. - I'm told. - But I still have to ask...What the heck do we do when these fancy new reactors become old and unusable. Turn their radioactive hulks into apartments or what?
2)One of the favorite and cheep materials now days is the ever present and ubiquitous plastic. Guess where most plastic comes from. -Oil.- That stuff that's disappearing. Or Coal, that stuff that's so expensive to the environment and people to get out of the ground. Metal deposits aren't as close to disappearing as the hydrocarbons but they are getting harder to find and get to. We've just about used up the hardwoods that grow down in the jungles of the southern hemisphere. And I'm not even going into what's happening with the soft woods we use to make paper or houses. Oh, all these materials can be got and often fairly 'cheaply'. All we have to do is turn our backs while multinational conglomerates move in and rape the ecology of delicate biologically diverse areas and/or steal the land of native peoples, forcing them to move into urban areas where their thousand plus year old cultures are lost forever and they become alcohol and drug soaked hangers on of society. No skin off our backs, right. Until they start picking up guns or backpacks full of explosives and coming after us.
3) This one is the real crux of the problem I think. It is an absolute requirement. Why? because we need ever more, preferably cheep, easily controlled labor to use the energy from 1 and the materials from 2 to make all the various 'stuff' that those of us here in the US and other '1st world', 'advanced' nations have been taught to think we can't live without. The companies that make this stuff are convinced that they have to have an ever expanding, bigger and bigger 'bottom line'. (faster, higher, further!) Therefore, they must have more and more customers while their workers must produce more and more product. Now, there is also a slight (?) disconnect here. The owners of the companies want that ever growing population of workers to work for as little money as possible while they charge as much as possible for their product. Thanks to modern advertising it was easy to convince those workers that it was perfectly okay to go deep into debt to get all those goodies they were making. Then it was just as easy to convince them that it was sencible to throw those goodies away, before they finished paying them off, so they could go into more debt in order to buy the 'NEW! IMPROVED!" model. We know how that has ended up.
Now the outcome of all of the above is that we now have a population greater than the planet can support, an atmosphere polluted with all kinds of stuff our ancestors never had to put up with and a generally degraded environment. Not even mentioning Global Warming. Which is another problem I think this 'run away' economy is responsible for whether anyone reading this dose or not. Worse, this totally unsustainable economy, after getting us this far in style and luxury, is finely starting to stumble. As I see it, this horse just can't run no further. We've run it into the ground. Literally.
Unfortunately the powers in charge at the moment, instead of trying to really change the economy to something sustainable is, instead, trying like all get out to prop up the old one. They are doing all they can to kick that tired, nearly dead, old horse back from it's present stumbling trot back into a full out gallop. I think we are headed for disaster here folks.
However, I can see the problem the powers that be have. They have grown up, been educated to see, the present kind of economy as the only one that will work. "It is really what defeated the communists" I'm sure they like to tell themselves. Yep, I agree. But we beat the commies only because the Free World had more of two of the three things needed. I'd say all three but while the communists didn't have quite as big a population it was very controllable. At least they thought so.
I have had a deal of trouble myself trying to picture what a sustainable economy would really look like. I had no luck at all until I decided to take the above 'rallying cry' of the present economy and the 3 things it has to have and reverse them. Just to see what would happen.
Now let me be clear here. I am not advocating any kind of controlled markets, communism or any such kind of thing. Mainly because they are even less sustainable than our present economy as the past few decades have shown. What I do advocate is individual independence, self sufficiency, responsibility, respect for our fellow beings; human, plant and animal, as well as cooperation with our environment and each other rather than competition.
Now let me show you what happens if we turn the present precepts of our economy on it's head.
"Faster, Higher, Further!" Becomes "Slower, Lower, Closer to Home." Note the absence of an exclamation point.
In other words, doing things slow enough to be sure they are done right and well. Maybe even thinking about the thing to be done enough to realize that it might not need to be done at all!
Lower expectations. Not nearly as bad as it sounds. How many folks out there get up and go to jobs they hate just so they can live a 'high life' that they don't even like living? How many young people are going to end up facing huge bills for college loans even though they know they would be lots happier working on the family farm, welding, or even throwing pottery rather than being managers or businessmen? How many Scientists are out working for companies whose philosophies and plans they don't agree with just so they can make enough for a high life when they'd be happier at a University, teaching new scientist (who really want to be scientists) and making new discoveries? And why must we have an ever higher income other than to buy more stuff we don't need? What's wrong with haveing just enough to get what we need? And what's so grand about buildings being so high you have to have an elevator?
Closer to home sounds dull I know. But there is a movement afoot already that emphasizes the better nutrition and taste of foods grown close to where they are eaten. The same is true of cloths and building styles as well as materials for all kinds of other things. I can see moving some things around. Lets face it, EVERYTHING, can't be grown or made locally. But loads can.
Now for the needs of this new economy. Remember I'll be turning the needs of the one we have upside down.
1) A steady supply of sustainable, renewable energy from various sources that can often be produced by individuals and used close to their source. (or added to a grid where it can be shared)
2) A steady supply of sustainably produced material that is often processed and usually used close to it's source. (or moved, sustainably, to where it is needed)
3) An individualistic, thinking, self sufficient, well educated population that maintains itself at a sustainable number of individuals.
What that kind of economy would actually look like in detail, I don't know. What kind of society it would evolve, I don't know. I'd like to think it would be a peaceful one as there would be no excess young bucks any government would want to send off to war to use as cannon fodder just to get rid of them. Indeed our government would likely be a shadow of it's present self what with an independent, well educated, and self sufficient population keeping an eagle eye on it. I also doubt there would be much pollution either.
I'm not, no mater what some may think, advocating doing away with technology or our present or future knowledge of the sciences. We will need those, and need them desperately, as our 'alternative energies' will be based on them. Nor do I want to see a one size fits all religion, or social structure rise out of this sustainable economy. I think it should be obvious that individuality, self sufficientcy and clear thinking will be the things of greatest value in such an economy.
Yeah, I know. I made no provisions for criminals or the insane. Frankly, niether dose the present economy.
So much for this rant. Feel free to rant back.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Uncle Ross is gone
I'm sad. So sad. My Uncle Ross died this morning. I just found out he had been diagnosed with Lung Cancer this Sunday after a stay in the hospital. His doctors told his faimily that he maybe had 6 months, if that left, and sent him home.
When my Aunt Virginia (his wife and my Mothers sister) called to tell me that news Sunday she was close to loosing it as she was waiting for the hospice folks to deliver a hospital bed for him to use. She was calling faimily and friends. I told her I'd call my cousin (on my Dad's side) and let that part of the faimily know.
Sigh.
Uncle Ross was a fellow gardener. He was always glad to get a horse feed sack full of well rotted horse manure for his compost pile for Christmas. It was something he (like myself) could appreciate. I'm gonna miss that. That and all those wonderfull potted plants he had hanging and setting all over the covered area where we'd eat at faimily reunions and such.
He was also a veteran. He survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor at the begining of our envolment in WW II.
Of course it didn't do him any good to have been a smoker for most of his life, but still he hadn't smoked in a long time. Guess it can still sneak up on you.
I can only guess that he passed on so quickly after the diagnosis because the BIG BOSS upstairs dicided he didn't want him to suffer, or his faimily to watch him decline any further.
It still hurts though.
When my Aunt Virginia (his wife and my Mothers sister) called to tell me that news Sunday she was close to loosing it as she was waiting for the hospice folks to deliver a hospital bed for him to use. She was calling faimily and friends. I told her I'd call my cousin (on my Dad's side) and let that part of the faimily know.
Sigh.
Uncle Ross was a fellow gardener. He was always glad to get a horse feed sack full of well rotted horse manure for his compost pile for Christmas. It was something he (like myself) could appreciate. I'm gonna miss that. That and all those wonderfull potted plants he had hanging and setting all over the covered area where we'd eat at faimily reunions and such.
He was also a veteran. He survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor at the begining of our envolment in WW II.
Of course it didn't do him any good to have been a smoker for most of his life, but still he hadn't smoked in a long time. Guess it can still sneak up on you.
I can only guess that he passed on so quickly after the diagnosis because the BIG BOSS upstairs dicided he didn't want him to suffer, or his faimily to watch him decline any further.
It still hurts though.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
trying to up load pictures
Well I guess I'll try to upload some of the drawings I've done on the computer. I invested in one of those neat mouse pens and that makes it loads easier to at least try to draw. Only thing is now I have to figgure out these things called layers and stuff.
Lets see what happens:
Nothing I tried so far works. Maybe a photo...Nope, same problems. sigh. I thought these things were supposed to let you upload pictures... photo's anyway.
Anyone got suggestions on how to do this? I'd like to share some of my pictures I haven't put up in that online t-shirt store of mine.
Oh, and it ain't easy getting a post back to edit once you leave the site unexpectedly as I did just a moment ago. I clicked on the wrong thing and presto chango everything was gone with me having to get back on Yahoo just to have a place to jump off from to get back here. Sheesh. Stupid machines doing what I tell'um instead of what I want'um to do.
Grummble, mutter.
Lets see what happens:
Nothing I tried so far works. Maybe a photo...Nope, same problems. sigh. I thought these things were supposed to let you upload pictures... photo's anyway.
Anyone got suggestions on how to do this? I'd like to share some of my pictures I haven't put up in that online t-shirt store of mine.
Oh, and it ain't easy getting a post back to edit once you leave the site unexpectedly as I did just a moment ago. I clicked on the wrong thing and presto chango everything was gone with me having to get back on Yahoo just to have a place to jump off from to get back here. Sheesh. Stupid machines doing what I tell'um instead of what I want'um to do.
Grummble, mutter.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Down on the farm...The worm farm that is.
It occurred to me that some might wonder just what a lazy but dedicated Permaculturest (aka permie) might do to get their selves in line with the stated philosophy.
Some of my methods are simple things dictated by the fact that I can't afford to go out and buy all kinds of neat new toys. Toy's like solar panels, wind turbines, batteries to store the energy those two produce or even solar powered electric fencing to keep the goats in. Or any kind of fencing for that mater.
Permie method #1. My thermostat is set at 80 degrees. Unless the weather folks say it's going to be lower than that and not rain. Then I turn off the ac, open the window's and lock the screen doors I added onto my house. I added those doors just so I could open the main doors and keep the cats in and the bugs out. #2. I try not to buy stuff that is over packaged. I get my top up card for my cell phone at the DG because they put the info on my receipt and I don't have a chunk of plastic to worry about. Shoot, I can't afford to buy to much of anything anyway!. #3. I rinse out the cans I get soup or beans or whatever in and place them in the container with the plastic, glass and metal. #4. I store up the junk mail I get as well as any other scrap paper I generate and the odd newspaper. #5. I either use the paper to make paper mache boxes or some such or I take it, cardboard I've collected, and the sack or box of stuff from #3 to the recycling place there in Greenville. I'm trying to do this once a month. The result is I only add about one trash can of stuff a month to the local land fill. #6. My small left over food scraps, and tea bags feed my worms. The larger, non-meat, scraps...if any, go to the goats. To bad I don't have chickens to feed meat scraps to. To bad I don't have any meat scraps. #7. I have horses on this place too and I refuse to let the folks who clean the stalls try to 'dump' or 'put out for collection' the leavings in the stalls. (yeah, they get odd idea's like that) Instead, I insist on it being piled up where it can compost and eventually be used to either feed the gardens I plan to have or the worms I hope to eventually have working away for me. #8. I don't turn on lights unless I actually need them. #9. As there is no one here but me, I only do one load of washing about once a week. That saves energy and water. #10. I'm watching the way things grow, even weeds and such, on my place. Where they grow and where I and others leave trails or insist on mowing. This will let me know where I can plan to plant gardens and possibly even what kind of stuff I can grow in them. I'm also watching to see where would be a good place to set up a worm farm larger than the one presently setting on the counter beside my sink.
Umm. I'm betting that some out there are saying: "Worms? WORMS!!? Eeeeeyuuuuu! By the sink!!! In your KITCHEN!!!"
Yeah, I know you're also likely thinking: nasty, icky, smelly and gross.
Me. I like worms. I also respect them for the yeoman work they do keeping the biosphere going.
You do know that almost all life on this planet...including our whole civilization is completely dependent on about the 3 to 6 inches or so of arable soil that covers the some of the land masses of this planet. And don't give me that foolishness about hydroponics. Talk about energy and work intensive agriculture!! Besides, they aren't smelly and are only icky and gross if you are a sissy. (So says the gal whose always been a 'tomboy')
Worms keep the soil alive, healthy and able to support crops. They aerate and mix the soil as well as digest and make available all kinds of nutrients needed by the plants we need to live.
Yeah, even us meat loving carnivores need plants. Remember, those critters we like to eat? They need plants to live and the plants also make oxygen for us all to breath.
So if your ever looking for something or someone to thank for your continued existence, thank the worms and, also, the bees! If you are wondering; no bees, no pollination, no fruit, vegetables or such.
Some of my methods are simple things dictated by the fact that I can't afford to go out and buy all kinds of neat new toys. Toy's like solar panels, wind turbines, batteries to store the energy those two produce or even solar powered electric fencing to keep the goats in. Or any kind of fencing for that mater.
Permie method #1. My thermostat is set at 80 degrees. Unless the weather folks say it's going to be lower than that and not rain. Then I turn off the ac, open the window's and lock the screen doors I added onto my house. I added those doors just so I could open the main doors and keep the cats in and the bugs out. #2. I try not to buy stuff that is over packaged. I get my top up card for my cell phone at the DG because they put the info on my receipt and I don't have a chunk of plastic to worry about. Shoot, I can't afford to buy to much of anything anyway!. #3. I rinse out the cans I get soup or beans or whatever in and place them in the container with the plastic, glass and metal. #4. I store up the junk mail I get as well as any other scrap paper I generate and the odd newspaper. #5. I either use the paper to make paper mache boxes or some such or I take it, cardboard I've collected, and the sack or box of stuff from #3 to the recycling place there in Greenville. I'm trying to do this once a month. The result is I only add about one trash can of stuff a month to the local land fill. #6. My small left over food scraps, and tea bags feed my worms. The larger, non-meat, scraps...if any, go to the goats. To bad I don't have chickens to feed meat scraps to. To bad I don't have any meat scraps. #7. I have horses on this place too and I refuse to let the folks who clean the stalls try to 'dump' or 'put out for collection' the leavings in the stalls. (yeah, they get odd idea's like that) Instead, I insist on it being piled up where it can compost and eventually be used to either feed the gardens I plan to have or the worms I hope to eventually have working away for me. #8. I don't turn on lights unless I actually need them. #9. As there is no one here but me, I only do one load of washing about once a week. That saves energy and water. #10. I'm watching the way things grow, even weeds and such, on my place. Where they grow and where I and others leave trails or insist on mowing. This will let me know where I can plan to plant gardens and possibly even what kind of stuff I can grow in them. I'm also watching to see where would be a good place to set up a worm farm larger than the one presently setting on the counter beside my sink.
Umm. I'm betting that some out there are saying: "Worms? WORMS!!? Eeeeeyuuuuu! By the sink!!! In your KITCHEN!!!"
Yeah, I know you're also likely thinking: nasty, icky, smelly and gross.
Me. I like worms. I also respect them for the yeoman work they do keeping the biosphere going.
You do know that almost all life on this planet...including our whole civilization is completely dependent on about the 3 to 6 inches or so of arable soil that covers the some of the land masses of this planet. And don't give me that foolishness about hydroponics. Talk about energy and work intensive agriculture!! Besides, they aren't smelly and are only icky and gross if you are a sissy. (So says the gal whose always been a 'tomboy')
Worms keep the soil alive, healthy and able to support crops. They aerate and mix the soil as well as digest and make available all kinds of nutrients needed by the plants we need to live.
Yeah, even us meat loving carnivores need plants. Remember, those critters we like to eat? They need plants to live and the plants also make oxygen for us all to breath.
So if your ever looking for something or someone to thank for your continued existence, thank the worms and, also, the bees! If you are wondering; no bees, no pollination, no fruit, vegetables or such.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
What to write on a Sunday?
Yeah, this is supposed to be either your day to goof off, or the day you go to church or maybe both, if you are so inclined.
No clue as to what I'm going to put on here today. But, hey, it's my blog, right? I can do anything here except slander someone, and why would I want to do that. After all,for most folks (especially the famous or the politically inclined) the plain truth about them is slander enough. :)
I know. I'll go on (and on and on most likely) about one of my other passions.
Yes, I have more than one.
There is writing, of course, as it is something I just can't help doing. I have to get those stories out of my head somehow and pouring them out through a pen or a keyboard helps.
One of those other passions has become something called Permaculture. Now, if you don't know already Permaculture is a, well; I guess you'd call it a philosophy of design. It originated in Australia from the mind's of two men. One of whom is Bill Mollison. I can't for the life of me remember who the other guy is at the moment. However if you go to http://forums.permaculture.org.au/ you can probably find out. As well as talk to some very interesting folks from Australia. Another site that can let you know some stuff about Permaculture is http://www.permacultureactivist.com/.
Now, I'm sure you are wondering why you should even bother. Well, one of the basic philosophy's of Permaculture design is that instead of fighting or trying to dominate nature, as we have been doing for ages, is that we should learn from and even, (gasp!) cooperate with nature.
Why should our proud and powerful species do anything so humbling as that, some of you may wonder. Simple.
We may think we are hot stuff. We might even, though there is some argument on the idea, actually be causing a serious (or not so serious, some argue that point as well) climatological change but we are still only one of billions of species on this planet. Sure we have single handledly lowered the number of those species some but still, we are only one life form and Nature, or Gaea (not the Greek Goddess, the interactive system of air, sea, and life that is the biosphere of this planet) is a bit bigger than we are. Not to mention more powerful and, as yet, quite unpredictable save in rather small ways.
So, given that Gaea could, with just a little shrug, wipe out our species or at least set it back so far that we would have to relearn how to invent the wheel, why not cooperate. Especially as cooperation could well lower the impact of our own foolishness, greed and general stupidity on not just the biosphere but on us.
Heck, it might even be a cheaper way to live and mess with the terrorists as well.
I became enamored of Permaculture when I first met up with the concept because it seems to say, and even have real world, usable ideas on how to do things that I have been trying to say, think of, find out for myself for a long time. It is about how to design not just your architecture, but your farmstead, your house, your life, your city, your country, everything.
No. It's not a religion. No gods except the ones you bring with you.
But it does have three ethics: 1) care of the Earth, 2) care of People, and lastly 3)Fair Share.
Then there are the 12 design principles: 1) observe and interact, 2) catch and store energy, 3) obtain a yield, 4) apply self regulation and accept feedback, 5) use and value renewable resources and services, 6) produce no waste, 7) design from patterns to details, 8) integrate rather than segregate, 9) use small and slow solutions, 10) use and value diversity, 11) use edges and value the marginal, and lastly, 12) creatively use and respond to change.
If you want to know more about these ideas there's a web site, http://permacultureprinciples.com/ethics.php ,that goes into greater detail.
I'm presently trying to get my little farmstead set up to mirror these idea's. I just need more ideas on how to do it with less funds and few folks willing to go along with my odd ideas. Though I'm sure a bit more energy and actions on my own part wouldn't hurt.
Seems people are willing to help me do various things but they want to use the old school ways that try to harness and dominate the land or use up resources. I want to nurture, heal, and bring back the diversity of the land I pay taxes to keep ... while I get my food, some of my energy, some of my water and maybe a marginal income off of it. I want to do this as frankly, I really don't trust the government to take care of me as I get older. I only trust them, the 'powers that think they are' to do what ever will keep them in power. I have always looked at this land as my real 'retirement package' not the measly little 401k I had at work or the benefits granted to me (and likely to be whisked away by) the government.
Let me know what you think of this Permaculture thing. Leave a comment or e-mail me if this silly blog won't let you comment. I like talking about Permaculture. And my worms, and goats, and plans for fixing up the place and....and.... well, you get the picture.
No clue as to what I'm going to put on here today. But, hey, it's my blog, right? I can do anything here except slander someone, and why would I want to do that. After all,for most folks (especially the famous or the politically inclined) the plain truth about them is slander enough. :)
I know. I'll go on (and on and on most likely) about one of my other passions.
Yes, I have more than one.
There is writing, of course, as it is something I just can't help doing. I have to get those stories out of my head somehow and pouring them out through a pen or a keyboard helps.
One of those other passions has become something called Permaculture. Now, if you don't know already Permaculture is a, well; I guess you'd call it a philosophy of design. It originated in Australia from the mind's of two men. One of whom is Bill Mollison. I can't for the life of me remember who the other guy is at the moment. However if you go to http://forums.permaculture.org.au/ you can probably find out. As well as talk to some very interesting folks from Australia. Another site that can let you know some stuff about Permaculture is http://www.permacultureactivist.com/.
Now, I'm sure you are wondering why you should even bother. Well, one of the basic philosophy's of Permaculture design is that instead of fighting or trying to dominate nature, as we have been doing for ages, is that we should learn from and even, (gasp!) cooperate with nature.
Why should our proud and powerful species do anything so humbling as that, some of you may wonder. Simple.
We may think we are hot stuff. We might even, though there is some argument on the idea, actually be causing a serious (or not so serious, some argue that point as well) climatological change but we are still only one of billions of species on this planet. Sure we have single handledly lowered the number of those species some but still, we are only one life form and Nature, or Gaea (not the Greek Goddess, the interactive system of air, sea, and life that is the biosphere of this planet) is a bit bigger than we are. Not to mention more powerful and, as yet, quite unpredictable save in rather small ways.
So, given that Gaea could, with just a little shrug, wipe out our species or at least set it back so far that we would have to relearn how to invent the wheel, why not cooperate. Especially as cooperation could well lower the impact of our own foolishness, greed and general stupidity on not just the biosphere but on us.
Heck, it might even be a cheaper way to live and mess with the terrorists as well.
I became enamored of Permaculture when I first met up with the concept because it seems to say, and even have real world, usable ideas on how to do things that I have been trying to say, think of, find out for myself for a long time. It is about how to design not just your architecture, but your farmstead, your house, your life, your city, your country, everything.
No. It's not a religion. No gods except the ones you bring with you.
But it does have three ethics: 1) care of the Earth, 2) care of People, and lastly 3)Fair Share.
Then there are the 12 design principles: 1) observe and interact, 2) catch and store energy, 3) obtain a yield, 4) apply self regulation and accept feedback, 5) use and value renewable resources and services, 6) produce no waste, 7) design from patterns to details, 8) integrate rather than segregate, 9) use small and slow solutions, 10) use and value diversity, 11) use edges and value the marginal, and lastly, 12) creatively use and respond to change.
If you want to know more about these ideas there's a web site, http://permacultureprinciples.com/ethics.php ,that goes into greater detail.
I'm presently trying to get my little farmstead set up to mirror these idea's. I just need more ideas on how to do it with less funds and few folks willing to go along with my odd ideas. Though I'm sure a bit more energy and actions on my own part wouldn't hurt.
Seems people are willing to help me do various things but they want to use the old school ways that try to harness and dominate the land or use up resources. I want to nurture, heal, and bring back the diversity of the land I pay taxes to keep ... while I get my food, some of my energy, some of my water and maybe a marginal income off of it. I want to do this as frankly, I really don't trust the government to take care of me as I get older. I only trust them, the 'powers that think they are' to do what ever will keep them in power. I have always looked at this land as my real 'retirement package' not the measly little 401k I had at work or the benefits granted to me (and likely to be whisked away by) the government.
Let me know what you think of this Permaculture thing. Leave a comment or e-mail me if this silly blog won't let you comment. I like talking about Permaculture. And my worms, and goats, and plans for fixing up the place and....and.... well, you get the picture.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
