A visit with the Pretty Proselyte

Had a couple Jehovah's Witness stop by this morning. Normally I'd just politely wait out their spiel and then throw away the tract after they leave.

But today for a change I honestly told the lady I wasn't going to read it and to keep it for someone else. It was at that moment I noticed, what a cute blond she was. Just a few streaks of gray in her hair, probably a couple years younger than me. A couple inches shorter than me and wearing a simple denim dress. She sounded disappointed when I told her I didn't want the tract. But I made up for it, apparently, when I told her I had a copy of the bible.

Sparky dashed out the door behind me and she laughed and said "Now he'll smell my little dog on me!" Sure enough. As we talked a little longer about the farm and gardening, I noticed she didn't once mention her husband or boyfriend. Hmmmmm....

Before she left, I made sure she knew we'd be opening the produce stand in late spring. Hope's eternal motion. I suppose a proficient stalker would have pretended interest in her religion to inveigle his way into her presence, but I wouldn't base any sort of friendship on such a dishonest manipulation. Better to let the universe unfold in its own good time.

Y'all have a fine spring day and don't get twitter-pated.

Cold Week

I've had a pretty bad head and chest cold since last Wednesday. Uhg! I hate this stuff. Finally starting to feel a bit better today.

It's April 21st, a full month after the equinox and guess what? It's spitting snow out there. Had almost an inch on the ground yesterday. Global warming is a big fat, fat, freakin' LIE !! And anyone who says different is either a big dumby or else they've got a political agenda AND they're a big dumby. You saw what I wrote, ya big lying "climatologists" you.

Mom and dad went to Medford to buy drip-tape today. I'm hunkering down on my first day of recovery.

Y'all take care.

Desperately seeking tomato stakes

We used to buy our tomato stakes from a mill on Redwood Highway outside of Grants Pass but their land got bought up by Albertsons and I suppose they just closed up. We were able to use the stakes we had for about 5 years but they've all finally rotted away or been broken. Plus we are doing many thousands of more tomatoes this year.

So now we've either got to build our own mill or find someone who still cuts 6 foot 1-by-2s for stakes. They've got to come from within a hundred miles or so of Grants Pass or the gas to pick them up will make them cost too much. So of course the search engines are no help at all.

So if anyone knows anyone who knows someone who cuts tomato stakes in Oregon or northern California, please hook me up!

Gotta get back to filling pony-paks. Y'all have fun.

Celebrate your weak links

I've been reading books on the science and study of networks. Not so much the technological aspect as the social, ecological and general aspects. One book called "Linked" by Albert Lazlo Barabasi and the other "Nexus" by Mark Buchanan. I'm about half way through each.

One very interesting observations I've noted is that in social networks the most functional links are also the weaker links. Put it in terms of looking for a job. Most of your friends would already know that you were looking for a job and would've already exhausted any effort they could provide in that direction. Your friends all know each other so the information would travel only a short ways. However, if you run into that classmate you haven't seen in 10 years he or she might suddenly connect you to 10s or 100s of new people who didn't already know you were looking for work.

So celebrate your weak links. Hook up with those people you haven't written in a long time, heck go out of your way to see someone you don't even particularly care for. Or just be extra nice to someone at the store or gas station. It'll make the world hook up in new and delightful ways.

A lovely spring day of growth and renewal to you all.

Earth, wind and rain

Dad disced and ripped land the last couple days while I was working in the greenhouse. Today his back was sore so I took over the tractor work while he watered plants. I dragged the bottom two fields below our grapes.

Quite a bit of blustery wind as I finished my last few turns. Rain showers came and went throughout the bottom most field. It was exhilarating. Even now the barn quivers and rattles with the gusts of wind but I notice a bright patch of sun outside my window.

Hope you're having a fine spring day.

Spring with snow

A little light snow around noon today. Lots of frost this morning, 28 degrees F.

The almonds, peaches and plums are all in bloom but no serious sign of damage from the frost. No idea why. The frost seems to mostly have been at ground level so maybe higher up there it just didn't freeze.

Cherries, apples and pears are hanging back and waiting. Cherries will open next hopefully the frosts will be gone by then.

Loads and loads of plants sprouting in the big greenhouse. Many thousands. 5 kinds of tomatoes, 6 types of eggplants, artichokes, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, 4 kinds of summer squash, cantaloupe, crenshaw melons, 5 kinds of watermelon and an assortment of Asian and European melons.

On top of planting and pruning I've been doing some web page design/repair work for my friend Mark. So blog time has been limited, sorry blogosphere.

The web page design stuff has been pretty frustrating but also challenging and interesting. It's been a couple years since I worked with javascript, CSS, Perl and PHP. Thinking in meta-layers is something I used to enjoy and it's neat to get back into that level of code and the mental abstraction exercise that goes with it. Unfortunately having to fix and redesign someone else's work is quite irritating.

Y'all feel good and be happy.

Otherside

Of the earth that is. I used Google's "drill a hole through the earth" function to find this small volcanic island on the opposite side of the earth (approximately) from Oregon. It looks really cool.

Check it out

Happy Easter

Rejoice in springs renewal.

It's ham and pancake breakfast here this fine Sunday. No egg coloring, thank goodness. But you parents out there better enjoy the ritual, only a few years and they won't be interested anymore.

Don't know what's planned for today yet (beyond the pancakes) probably mostly take it easy, I've got a lots of reading to do for some web design stuff I'm doing. Good day for that. It was supposed to rain today but no sign of it so far.

Y'all have fun and enjoy the sugar rush.

Change Congress

Lawrence Lessig has always impressed me with his insight. Check out this latest endeavor from the man who championed the Creative Commons license.

These are common sense ideas that anyone of sound mind can agree with.

Busy in the greenhouse

Well, not at the moment. But the last couple days we've been scrambling trying to get back on schedule. First couple thousand assorted plants/seedlings/seeded trays are hunkered down in the big greenhouse and making their strides towards spring planting.

First day of spring starts in just a couple hours. So hard to believe. Back in August I would've bet just about anything that I wouldn't be getting ready to plant another crop right now. But here we are again, figuring how late we can buy fertilizer and how much plastic mulch we can afford. With the big new contract for tomatoes our capital overhead has expanded quite a bit.

Rain has been really picturesque the last few days but I've been too busy to wield the camera. Really nice to stand warm and dry in the greenhouse filling pony-trays with seeds while the wind and rain whip overhead.

Y'all have a fine night.

David Mamet blows my mind

This article by David Mamet at the Village Voice is one of the best pieces on being open-minded that I've ever read. You will totally enjoy it, if you keep an open mind.

My favorite bit:

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

Busy catching up

Finally got the air-inflated greenhouse up this morning. Dad took off to help bro with a gate job. I've been busy trying to get some more pruning done quite behind schedule on that. Will go out to spray the peaches shortly.

Lots of interesting stuff happening in the world it looks like in the news feeds. Glad I'm too busy to concern myself.

Hope y'all have a fine day.

Weirdness Sunday

What a lovely day we had today! Stupid remnants of the flu kept us all just weak enough to barely be able to do anything with it. I got some cleaning done anyways. I suppose it's best to make this a day of rest anyways.

Been cruising a bunch of the transhumanist blogs this evening. What a fascinating group of people. Not exactly the most level-headed bunch but you've got to hand it to them for their optimism. Here's the last one I visited: betterhumans.com They also tend to make some really clean looking blogs. So you gotta give 'em that for style too.

What they've got me thinking about is how far our technology has come since I started in computers in high school. I remember arguing once back then with my dad that there'd never be enough storage space to make a list of every human on earth. That'd still take a lot of memory but a couple of half-terabyte drives at oh, 200$ each could do the job nowadays. It blows my mind that a gigabyte of flash is about what, 12$ or so? That's nuts.

And yet with all this memory and huge increases in processor power in the last 30 years or so the world really isn't that much different. You can still get a flame-broiled whopper at burger king. You'd think there'd be some sort of dramatic shift, but no the world is still largely a mystery; life is fleeting and precious.

Be happy!

Rainy Saturday

Mighty nice showery day out there. Glad I'm still recovering from the flu, I don't have to feel guilty about being slack.

Sure can feel spring moving our way though. I'm getting stir crazy, wanna run the plow and blow up the greenhouse. Won't be long and my blog posts will start to thin out. Dad's busy planting a 288 tray of tomatoes.

My stupid black cat is trying to get in on the typing here.

Y'all have a super day.

Bloggers Unite!

The call must go out! Round up the troops and ring the bells!

Blogger Brian C Ledbetter has been issued a restraining order by the AP for criticizing their use of doctored images. They claim he is violating their copyright despite the fact that his usage was a clear and obvious case of fair-use. This sort of strong arm tactic could be used on any of us, of any persuasion, if we so much as criticize any news agency for poor conduct or shoddy reporting. Even if they don't win the case the AP and other big news agencies can use the scare of being hauled into court to suppress free speech.

More details here.

Definition of a hero

If anyone is unsure just look at Kurt Westergaard to see a hero:

Sick and tired

Of the 2008 election!

Recovering nicely from the flu though. We are all getting better rapidly. Still not ready to run that marathon yet but I'm itchin' to get out and put up the greenhouse.

Being stuck indoors is no fun especially with TV having degraded so far. I don't have and can't afford a DVR, tivo or whatever so just keep your suggestion about that. Television used to be Ok, but nowadays so many rotten ads. And the news channels really suck. I get ten times better news and information off the web, blogs and assorted info streams here.

Today I'm gonna order seeds and hopefully feel good enough to make a foray outside.

Y'all keep on truckin'.

Terrorists in the pentagon?

Our U.S. government continues its program of ineptitude proving not only that power corrupts but that it apparently corrupts higher brain functions.

It makes me wonder how many incidents of espionage and subversion need to be exposed before the body politic's autoimmune system kicks.

You gotta wonder too, in a year when media outlets such as CNN and the democrats are hell-bent on reminding us of George Bush's failings (in preparation for the November election perhaps) why are they willingly overlooking such a scandalous story?

Recovery

Been down mighty sick with the influenza for about 5 days now, finally starting to get a little better. This has to have been the worst case I've ever had. Uhg! Mom, dad and the Bro all got it too. Bro and mom are furthest along in getting well, dad and I are still a little symptomy.

To celebrate our fevers and chills, here's an article on global warming (can you guess what it says?)

Quick! burn some coal

We're all gonna freeze to death! Call Al Gore and John Travolta, tell them to fly someplace or we're gonna lose all the bananas to polar bears.