Tag Archives: life

Why I don’t watch the local news

Watching NCIS (and NCIS:LA), I always get some exposure to the local news and whatever they’re breathlessly hawking as something I should be interested in/terrified of enough to keep the channel tuned after these shows are over (hint: it will never be enough). Tonight’s poutrage involves some pedestrian crosswalk that apparently cost the city of Jacksonville a cool $200K. The news folks – whom of course I trust implicitly to design pedestrian walkways, or bridges, or multilevel structures that may need to hold hundreds of people at one time – want to tell me about the cheaper options. I’m tempted to watch to see if they offer up a solution of buying a couple of cans of spray paint from Home Depot and enlisting the services of some random homeless dude for ten bucks to lay down the lines. But I’m not going to.

When you think you’ve seen it all

And by “all” I mean the incredible stupidity some people possess, someone comes along and says something even dumber. It’s astonishing – especially given the blogger’s own obvious heritage – that they could possibly say such racist, bigoted things, but I suppose it’s a case of “MY multiculturalism being better than YOURS” (click on the About link to see why this is so ironic). It’s also richly ironic that she’s whining about the works of classical composer, who by far are foreign. How fortunate for her that the composers or their governments didn’t decree that non-natives were forbidden to perform their works. Or, in the case of Handel specifically, that the British government did not deem him too “ethnic” and deny him citizenship. That someone took the time to count – and calculate – the percentage of “asians” in an orchestra, and then posit that perhaps certain instruments are “too physically demanding” for them is just astonishing says great number of things indeed. About the person doing so.

(Not false) alarm

Last night was supposed to be the onset of several nights of hard freezes around here. With that in mind, I did some harvesting late in the day, thinking this morning would see the pepper plants dead and black.

Not so. It only got down to just below freezing, and not for very long, and the peppers were all bright and healthy when I walked around this morning turning off the remote taps. Ah, I thought, another misfire by the forecasters, and another testament to the oddball happenings here in the Bermuda triangle of weather.

Tonight, Mother Nature has decided she’ll show us: it is currently very near freezing already, just past real sunset, and the temperature is dropping like a rock in a well. As one of our clients did something incredibly stupid which requires me to go to the NOC, and since I am not a fan of this type of weather, I am not looking forward to wherever this may bottom out – the forecasters say in the upper teens by dawn.

I suppose I should have known that the request the user submitted was not quite right, but then again, despite what people think, we do not actually have ESP around here, nor do we claim that we do. Once again, trying to out-user the user has just resulted in the user doing something even dumber than normal.

The air up here

Bad blogger, bad! No posting on a regular basis, what is wrong with you?

Nothing wrong, just incredibly busy around here. Our season has lasted well into the winter, and we’re still harvesting peppers. The tomatoes that showed some promise going into fall succumbed to massive worm damage, so once again this year, like last, no tomatoes (although for wildly different reasons, given that last year it was a cancer of a different sort).

There’s a monarch butterfly chrysalis attached to the upended cooler by my garage, which is right near the butterfly bush I planted for the other monarch caterpillars that graced us with their presence before moving on to whatever secret place they chose to attach themselves. I’m hoping to capture it as it emerges, whenever that happens to be, and I have the plant cam set up on it.

My dreams have been invaded by images of paintings I’ve never seen hanging in galleries I’ve never visited (or heard of). My subconscious is probably trying to tell me something.

My puppy had to have the top part of one of his (non weight-bearing) toes amputated because he tore the nailbed right away from the bone on a ball-fetching excursion. It’s sad to me that he was in pain, but good that he’ll heal just fine and he’ll be right back to his duties.

The bees have been ordered, and should ship to us in May. We’ll be able to put these things to good use.

Most of this will be gone from the new barn when spring arrives, as they’ll be set up as homes for the three packages of bees (and queens) we’ll be receiving. Everyone is pretty excited about this, including me, and I’m looking forward to spring even more than usual.

Seeds for the new year were ordered and have arrived (mostly), and the next two weeks will be seed starting time in the small barn, under the lights – which I need to rerig for the pulley system I came up with to make things easier to wrangle under them. As with years past, we’ll be attempting a good variety of tomatoes to see what we like, or is we can just get any to maturity and get a harvest. This year will be better planned than previous years, to be sure.

The garlic went into the frames in late October, and is doing wonderfully thus far. By my estimate, I planted out over 2000 individual cloves this year, which will give us plenty to use and some to save as seed for next year’s planting season, I expect. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to sell some as well, since this is not the usual garlic found in grocery stores.

Here’s hoping the new year will be better than the previous years. Be sage, be happy.

Can you see me now?

As I was getting a prescription for eye drops filled – for reasons that will become clear – I was looking at all the food (in some cases, that term is used very loosely) that I can no longer eat for whatever reason. Many of those reasons are dental: I have crowns, missing teeth,  and some weak teeth, so terribly crunchy things are out of the question, and I have so little tongue movement that some foods I simply cannot move around well to chew enough to get down (lettuce is a huge issue). While some things are really unfortunate – I’d kill or seriously maim to be able to eat a good salad now and again – in other cases, like the sheer variety of Halloween candy, it comes in handy to be able to avoid chowing down. In a lot of cases, I no longer even have the desire to eat any of that sweet stuff anyway. Good and bad, pros and cons everywhere.

The drops were for my eyes, to help my night vision. About three years ago, I had lasik on both eyes. The right eye, where I had an astigmatism, turned out really well. The left eye I was never completely satisfied with, but the folks at the place where I had it done didn’t seem terribly enthusiastic about doing/recommending anything, and in both eyes, night vision is poor. So I found someone else, because lately, the left eye is getting significantly worse, to the point of giving me headaches from time to time. They did a full workup, even doing one of the image captures twice, and the doctor says there is some cloudiness at the bottom of the left lens. Precursor to a cataract? Some side effect of getting blasted with radiation (since the more powerful dose was on the left side, where the cancer was)? Who knows. In the meantime, he recommended doing nothing for now, and rechecking in six months. So we shall see (get it?) where that leads.

Some days

Sometimes, it seems like days just start off badly, as if the world wants to crack an eye at the sunrise, yawn, and roll over for a bit more sleep.

This morning was one of those mornings. The plan was to get up in the wee hours, get the smoker going, and have some pulled pork ready by the 1 PM games. I thought I had slept through my alarm, having had only two hours of sleep the night before. Not the case: I simply set it for PM instead of AM in my fog. When I did get up and go to get the smoker going, I found that the smoker portion of my Bradley was not working at all. I also found that I was going to have to go to the NOC to take care of a server that was simply down for no apparent reason and which would not respond to a reboot request.

Thinking the smoker issue may have just been built up sawdust in the feeder, I left the heating side of the smoker on, so it would be fully to temp by the time I got back, and hurried off to the NOC. Problem found: blown power supply. Easily enough solved by swapping out the power supply, but a pain in the ass for interrupting my day, which was already not starting off well.

Back at the ranch, I finally discovered the motor that powers the feeder arm was simply not working at all. I figured I could just rig something to keep the microswitch in the down position, hoping this would keep the smoker from knowing the arm was not moving. Didn’t work – the timer that feeds the wood expects the switch to trigger and then depress when the motor arm comes around once more. The switch is also not in a position easily reached when the control unit is back together. Alas, no smoking available. But the heat still worked, so I went in to rub down the butt and get it in the thing.

I made the rub, using my usual 20+ ingredients, and then dropped one of the bottles straight down on the tile while putting it away, shattering the thing and spewing glass everywhere. Swell.

By 9:30, the butt was finally on the smoker. We didn’t eat until the late games were well underway. It was good, but not as good as it usually is, of course. I also made rolls, mom made potato salad, and I’d made a huge batch of barbeque sauce the last time around, so at the end of the day, my sisters, newphew, mom, and I had watched a bunch of football and eaten good homemade food. Not a bad end to a day that started off so poorly.

On the plus side, it was another absolutely gorgeous day on the ranch, although unlike yesterday, almost all of which I spent outside, I did nothing outdoors today at all. Tomorrow after getting one of my eyes looked at, I hope to transplant some tomatoes at least to get the last ones out of the flats. From there, I’ll be left with the brassicas and the onions to get into the frames, and will be able to move on to breaking apart the garlic bulbs into cloves and prep for that planting. The great garlic plantout of 2011 is at hand.

Planning

 
My sister and nephew came over today to help with hauling mulch in the front garden. My nephew spent most of his time zipping around in his tractor, playing with the dogs, and playing in a kiddie sprinkler. He did, however, help me spread hay over a reseeded area, throwing the hay with gusto – and getting it in his hair and all over Einstein, who of course had to see what we were doing. This was taken by my sister as we took a break, discussing his need to play Wii while we were finishing up the day.

Slow burn

Every year in this area, we have at least one fire. This past summer was no different, but this time around there were multiple fires and one about two miles away.

For the past few days, we’ve had smoke drifting in and hanging around from a fire on the Florida/Georgia border – and naturally, all the tropical storms/hurricane activity has bypassed us and it, and still it burns. Since there has been virtually no wind here at all, the smoke lingers well into the afternoon, making work outside challenging. But work needs to be done regardless of this, and yesterday was yet another highly productive day: various irrigation lines repaired and extended, mulch delivered and started to be spread, and the rear garden now receiving the same treatment as the front, with the fence partially pulled, plastic laid, and the fence reconfigured. Still much more to be done, but that is always the case on the ranch.

CNN, you tease, you

I saw this headline on my ticker: “I’m through,” Palin says.

If only. Someone at CNN has a sense of humor and a surefire way to guarantee a click on a Palin story that most of us would avoid like the plague.

Alas, Palin the quitter is not through with trying to suck every nanosecond out of her fifteen minutes, but (claiming to be) through with the media. She says she’s done with whining about the media as she whines about the media, doesn’t accept unexpected support from NOW about something Bill Maher said about her, even though as a woman she should be able to gracefully put aside the political differences she has with the organization and understand that in this instance, agreement is correct – then again, nobody ever accused Palin of having grace of any sort – and then ends the whole thing with a double negative that means exactly the opposite of what she was presumably trying to say:

“It’s not America’s role not to be out and about nation building and telling other countries how to live,” Palin added.

Of course, with Reload Palin, that could very well be exactly what she meant, since she doesn’t seem to have any issues with Bush & Co getting us into boondoggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, I’m certain that what she actually meant was that anything Obama does must be bad by definition, and our support of our allies in enforcing the UN resolution – and not invading the entire country – is likewise bad.

But the very best part of the article is where she’s talking about how she’s looking at the field of GOP possible contenders for 2012 when deciding whether to get into the race.

“I am tempted to because I am still wondering who is going to be out there with a servant’s heart, willing to serve the American people for the right reason. Not for ego, not for special interests…I am waiting to see, who else is out there willing to do this.”

Well, it sure as hell is not you, Sarah Palin. You have no servant’s heart, unless you keep it in a jar next to your bed. You quit the Governorship of Alaska halfway through, and last time I checked, Alaskans were Americans. You have no desire to serve anyone except yourself, and the only right reason apparent in your activities comes in the form of a signed check.

Go away. Your “you betcha, aw shucks” routine may have worked at first on some people, but all that’s left are the most diehard fans who think anything out of your vapid head is sheer genius while the rest of us look on in horror, knowing these people cannot be reasoned with in this or other instances.

Ladies and gentlemen, to the right of the aircraft you’ll see…

Most people will never see a launch of the space shuttle live. We went two years ago to the Cape and saw one, and I have to say it is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever witnessed, being a space buff – I’m very happy to have gone, sitting in the blazing hot sun waiting, hoping the countdown would not stall. This one was likely no less a treat for the folks on board.