I’ve been watching the Doomsday Preppers show on National Geographic, and then the other night stumbled across Meet the Preppers: My Pink Gun on (of all networks) Animal Planet. The latter seems to be all about scaring the crap out of the kids, to the point of staging a kidnapping in a park of two of the kids. The people who are one hundred percent wrapped up in looking at everything as a disaster, or potential disaster – the show on NatGeo, for instance, had a couple who claimed to spend the equivalent of a fulltime job canning and putting up supplies each week – I have to ask: what about actually living the life that’s here right now? I’m all for being prepared, even though I discount some of the whacked out scenarios some of these people come up with, but I’m also a big believer in balance, and I have no intention of going down the rabbit hole and making it all I ever do. That’s no way to live, to me.
Monthly Archives: February 2012
Clearance
Me and my strained back stayed inside, and my brother and his son cut down the couple remaining trees along what will be the new fenceline with redneck neighbor, and removed the posts that remained from the section of fence he had taken down. We’re ready for the fence guys to come and start walling off redneck neighbor’s crap-filled property.
Hopefully my back will get over itself, get back in order, and let me go back to doing what I need to get done as the season is creeping up on us.
Taking the sting out
Reading around on some bee news today, since I’m in enforced idleness, courtesy of a horrendous back strain (from yesterday’s adventures in hauling dirt). I ran across this story about stingless bees. Very interesting stuff, and would be something to look into if we actually lived in an area where their foraging would enable them to subsist. To be honest, I’m not overly concerned about being stung by the bees we’ll be getting here at the ranch. Occupational hazard, in the same way that slicing open a finger or knuckle on a heatsink or edge of a server chassis is in my business. I’d like those stings to be as few in number as possible, of course – who wouldn’t? – but I have to say I’m just as excited now about getting bees here as I was when we first started discussing it.
In vino veritas
Coming soon to a wine bottle near you.
To be more precise, it will hit the bottling phase in about 10 days. From there, it will need to age a bit. This is a riesling type, as that’s what my mom and aunts like to drink. If I were still drinking wine, I’d be inclined to go for a pinot grigio, but I think the next experiment in wine making will be a fruit wine (blueberry!).
More reasons
Not to vote Republican. Seriously.
Something that serves no purpose whatsoever, designed merely to humiliate women and further degrade their control over their own bodies. Ironic that people who constantly harp about “too much government” have no problem with things like this, having the government step right in and dictate medical procedures. This ranks right up there in this war against women with the nutty debate over contraception (hint: YOU’RE ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THIS ISSUE), and the supremely odious implication that there isn’t such a thing as “too much rape” in the armed forces, or by extension, that apparently all male members of the armed forces are rapists. Luckily, Jon Stewart had a field day with that latter piece of nonsense, so there’s no need for me to point out the obvious, other than to wonder just why Republicans seem to hate women so much.
It takes a certain kind of crazy
to do this sort of thing: “sovereign citizen” sues prosecutors
As I mentioned to one of my employees, I’m happy we don’t have to deal with this level of craziness every day.
Just every few days.
Fine dining
Honey lime chicken, rice, black beans, onions, a touch of (very mild) hot sauce, wrapped in a tortilla, covered in a three cheese sauce, broiled for just a few minutes.
Delicious.
Only you
can prevent forest fires. Out here, that means keeping track of your kids and not letting them play with lighters and matches in the forest that backs up to all the properties on the south side here, especially during a period of very cool weather and no rain for over a month. A couple of kids – one of whom belongs to redneck neighbor, it seems – did not learn this lesson and yesterday we had a rather large firefighting group out beyond the south fenceline two neighbors down, putting down a fire started by a couple of kids. They pumped from our immediate neighbor’s pond to put out the grass on his side of the fence that had started burning. Fortunately, the are was not densely wooded, and they were able to get in there and take care of it. Also fortunately, the wind had died down from the previous day, as otherwise it could have been a true disaster. As it stands, no one was injured and no buildings or outbuildings were damaged. A lucky day.
Window on the garden
Best. Anthem. Ever.
So long, Whitney. Those of us who grew up in the 80s and knew (and loved) you before you went whack will never forget you.