Cloudy work day

No significant dreams to report, only one fragment of one where I was trying to jump across the driveway which was covered in ice or running water. No idea what that was all about.

Done with my tea and crumpet. Just gotta get on my work shoes now.

Should be a good one for work today. Supposed to be partly cloudy today so blowing up the greenhouse this morning will be nice.

An interesting side note, D-wave devices is supposed to be demonstrating the world's first 16 qbit quantum computer today. If true that is a dramatic jump in our ability to use quantum mechanics for computing. I'll be keeping my eye on developments and will try to keep you apprised.

Have a great day.

Twilight weirdness

Just after having dinner with mom and dad in the main house I was trudging out to my barn with laundry. It was dark and raining and I had left my jacket outside. In the distance, to the west, a murder of crows was cawing a ruckus chorus of crow laughter. The bastards! they couldn't see me but they knew I was getting wet while they were safely tucked away beneath limbs and branches.

Oh well. I guess crows need a little humor now and then too.

The last few nights I've had intense and portentous dreams which leave me with rich and delightful after thoughts so I am looking forward to tonight's episodes. If you read this before Tuesday morning perhaps my mind will draw upon your consciousness to form new and interesting reflections.

Good night and good dreams.

Gordon Smith on Cspan2

We've been listening raptly to a rather in-depth speech by our good senator Gordon Smith detailing the betrayal of Oregon by our federal government. This is part of the egregious program of social diminishment started by president Clinton that has led to the upcoming closing of all libraries in southern Oregon as well as the extreme reduction of all other government services: road maintenance, police, fire protection, etc. etc.

If you have a chance to catch it now, it is quite revealing. Otherwise I think you can get it from the Cspan website or catch it on re-run.

Back to work

Not much rain today so it'll be back to work for me. My two month long weekend is just about over with, the next few weeks are gonna be sort of like getting ready for work Monday morning. Getting your socks on, warming up the car, packing your bag lunch etc. as we put together all the stuff we need. Seed orders have to go in, the greenhouses have to go up. I'll start setting my alarm a little earlier each morning. If we have 3 or 4 dry days in a row we'll start plowing and finish the deer fence.

My only regret is that I didn't get the fractal scanning software I was working on with Paul finished before this winter was over. Always nice to have the loose ends tied up before changing gears, if you don't mind a mixed metaphor. Oh well, just something to putter around with until next winter.

Wishing you all a productive and rewarding day.

Pat Sajak freakin' rocks

No wonder Ed Grimley liked him so much...

The Big Thaw, Part 3

The Broken Pipes Variance.

It took three days for the ground to thaw enough for water to finally flow again in my barn. Today the true consequence revealed itself in a small fountain of water in the driveway. So we shut the water off to my barn at the well and I started digging between rain showers. It's this sort of thing that taxes a guy. Instead of working on getting the last ropes across the greenhouse I'm fudging around with mud and muck.

The crows have been making fun of me all day. They must have seen this coming.

Wishing you all a day free of broken things.

Rain !?

Every forecast I could find yesterday had today just partly cloudy with the rains coming in way late today. But this morning it is just pouring down out there. So much for getting the big greenhouse back up today. Darn!

Couldn't sleep well last night so I sat up reading some "Dresden Files" the books are much better than the shows and the shows are pretty darn good. Consequence of late night reading: weird fragmented dreams. Which is sometimes better than weird coherent dreams.

Here in the basement, cocooned by the soft sussuration of rainsong, I can momentarily feel safe and warm. The world's mad dash towards god-only-knows-what is attenuated and my heart rests easy. For now.

Wishing you a warm, fuzzy and delightful day.

I like this

Hey, I found another great blog. A bit preachy and politicy but also some great clear thinking, enjoy.

Song of the wind

Today was a fine day beneath the clouds and blue sky. The sun played hide-and-seek all day. Another hawk came by a little after noon. She screamed that high pitched screech from very high in the sky. The thermals must have been great for riding around today. She wasn't a red-tail, her color was all white and gray pinions from below. Still beautiful.

The wind sang to me quite a bit today. Often I noticed her voice like some long forgotten friend. Even before the day started, right after I woke up I thought I heard someone calling my name, but I was alone.

Dad and I got the rest of the fence posts on the north side of the field driven in today and then we hooked up the terracer and dad plowed the dirt back into the greenhouse trench. If the rain holds off until tomorrow evening as it is supposed to we will finally have the big greenhouse back up and running.

Hope you all have a fine and happy day.

The voice of rain

As I was walking in the rain today I listened to the voice of rain upon my umbrella. It whispered to me of far away and secret things. The clouds swirled and mist flowed across the top of Mount Fielder. I breathed deep the faint aromas of winter. The air was clean, pure. The smells were faint ghosts, echoes of summer lawn mowing and watermelon seed spitting. Pines battered by the wind gave up a perfume of different memories.

The road had become packed by the few days of warmer weather before the rains came. After the frost it was loose and smooshy, thank goodness the rains held off a couple days. As it is, only a little sand and clay has washed to the bend in the driveway where dad and I cut a waterbar diverting the rivulet beneath the redwood trees.

We didn't get the greenhouse up before the rains returned but we got everything ready for the first good day. All we have left is to drive the tractor along the south side to bury that edge and pack it down and to tie off a few more retaining ropes. Then we will turn on the fan and return to our 140 by 35 feet of glorious artificial spring.

Yesterday morning when mom, dad and I took Sparky for a walk there was a gorgeous red tail hawk riding a thermal rising from our neighbors pasture. When we first saw him he was only about a hundred feet off the ground but in only a short while he ascended on spirals of sun and air to almost vanish in the blue sky. Then, just before he was too high to see, he dove out of the thermal and sped away to the southwest.

Free speech continues its descent

Along with Ted Kulongoski suppressing the free speech in Oregon, now 5 students have been fired from their positions on Long Island Collage campus for expressing themselves. Admittedly their video might have been in bad taste ( although the protest of muslims seems a bit ironic ) but they are still entitled to their opinion in this country.

Orblogs not so bad

I was forming the perhaps mistaken opinion that Orblogs was a liberal dominated oppressor of free speech but they've uplifted my faith in their service by highlighting Mover Mike's very interesting blog in their "popular" section.

Global worming

My state's gots worms and its name is "Ted Kulongoski"

My misuse of english in that sentence is no worse than the misuse of science which is currently going on in the Oregon state capital. It seems the King governor of Oregon, Turd Kulongoski, has decided to fire our state climatologist because he wants to be scientifically accurate and professional.

It is interesting to note that one of Canada's top climatologists had this to say on the subject of global warming. Or as the Sunday Telegram put it in yesterday's Grants Pass Daily Courier:



Now don't get me wrong, I'm totally in favor of reducing emissions and getting off the use of petroleum. But lying to the public about scientific inquiry is not the way to do it.

The Great Thaw, part 2

It's really getting nice out there. Almost all the snow is gone and the puddles have even begun to drain away. Quite a bit of the earth is still frozen but dad and I are thinking that the 2 main fields up here on the hill might actually get dry enough to run a disk over them by Tuesday. That would be so glorious, to smell fresh turned soil again. I just can't hardly wait. If all goes well I might be planting peas by this time next week. I'm getting giddy!

Hope you all are doing well and happy with life's little vicissitudes.

Mark (up) of the beast

Quite literally. I've been chilled and disgusted to find that once again our so-called government has instituted a pogrom of heinous proportions. I don't normally write about these sorts of things, but since this one directly pertains to farming I felt it appropriate.

There is a federal mandate to place RFID tags in all livestock in the United States. The program is called "NAIS" and will be paid for by the individual livestock owners. This includes you even if you just own one chicken or anything else that can be construed as livestock. This even extends to many pets due to the way the law is written.

This is another hidden law passed in the dark of night the only purpose of which is to help the government to control our food supply. Since the tag database is not available to farmers, scientists or anyone else but government officials it can serve no useful purpose. It is only to track the dollar value and location of the entire livestock supply of America.

More details here. We're one step closer to that horrible and inhuman scenario that everyone senses but refuses to think about.

The big thaw

Finally! After about a month of frozen conditions the weather has began to change. I could tell right off this morning when my wisdom teeth started to ache like someone was twisting them with a ratchet. That always means the air pressure is dropping. In most parts of the world an air pressure drop coincides with a temperature drop but around here it means a new front is moving in off the coast and that is usually accompanied with moisture and a more energetic air mass. Consequently in winter it often brings an actual increase in average temps.

The snow has started turning to slush in the driveway and is generally diminishing everywhere else although much of the surrounding soil is still hard frozen. Hopefully these conditions will sustain for enough days for the entire mass to thaw out. Then I can really get back to work.

Despite the agony of my wisdom teeth/sinuses I am overjoyed at this change. I'll see if I can find some herbal remedy to help with the transition and if nothing else is available there's always naproxen sodium.

Hope you all have as fine and more comfortable a day.

Some good reading

Charles Krauthammer is an excellent writer and makes some very thoughtful and significant points in this piece about who's to blame for the chaos in Iraq.

The Dangers of insomnia-Mooninite mania

For quite a number of years I have been struck with minor boughts of mid-night insomnia. Consequently I often sit up at 2 or 3 am in the morning and watch the Cartoon Network's AdultSwim block of "edutainment" especially the now notorious Aqua Teen Hunger Force which recently shut down Boston.

I've been checking out many other blogs this morning and laughing my butt off. I just can't help myself, I know I should be sympathetic, concerned and patriotic but I just can't get past what a bunch of asses the Boston authorities are being about this.

We live in a dangerous world wherein a drawing of muhamud can invoke riots and mooninites can bring an entire city grinding to a halt. What artwork must we fear next? Will the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo's David go on a killing spree? Are we all doomed to be memetically infected by the Andy Warhol soup can pandemic?

Let's all take a moment to laugh at ourselves; life is short and we need the exercise.

Canary in the coal mine.

Or maybe a candle in the wind.

It's official, our neighboring county of Josephine will be closing its libraries soon. And the Jackson county libraries may be following them shortly into oblivion.

These are the signs of chaos folks.

We've got a government that has flushed 500 billion dollars down the toilet of Iraq (some of which has gone to pay for weapons used to kill our own soldiers no doubt) and to add insult to injury now we have a congress dedicated to stopping our last chance to win in Iraq. The democrats are selling us out to special interests and the republicans are selling us out to big business. Neither party is interested in representing the well being of the run-of-the-mill American.

We've got enough geothermal energy to provide almost 100% of our electricity needs for 400 years but is anyone in government or business interested in pursuing that? No, just give us the status quo, never mind killing the price of oil and stopping our enemies dead in their financial tracks.

In Boston they're jumping at shadows, a couple of 1 foot square plastic placards shut down the entire city. But do any of them care that the southern boarder is more porous than cheese cloth? Heck no we need all that cheap illegal slave labor. Meanwhile millions of Americans are out of work and millions more are also homeless.

Chaos abounds. Tiamat's eye shutters open and Ctullu heaves a deep sigh of contentment while Kingu, Hubol and a thousand other bloody gods stir the cauldron of discontent. Human flesh is their favorite meat and bones burn to heat the stew.

Ok, I admit I'm being melodramatic. But come on people, does any of the stuff that's happening in this world today make sense?

Another lovely day of frustration

The sun is bright and warm, the air sweet with a gentle winter breeze. The ground is frozen hard like the heart of a vicious frost giant. Lovely crystals of ice decorate the driveway and orchards and I hate it.

The beauty is wonderful but it is just killing my ability to get done the serious jobs I have to do. And I'm sick and tired of spinning my wheels with make-work and trivial chores. It's too frozen to work on the equipment and even pruning is difficult with 2 inches of hoar-frost to contend with.

Sorry to be whiny like that, I sometimes forget how wonderful a life I have and what great luck to live in this land of freedom and choice. It is kinda funny and ironic though that things can be simultaneously so great and also so irritating.

Wishing you all a smoother and more melodious day.