Salmon Berries

The first salmon berries of the season are ripening around our place! La Regina Bella and I have been snacking them right off the bushes and last night, I picked a bowl we ate with dinner.



In contrast to the infested apple tree we had at our last place, our new place seems lush and full of vibrance. It makes me happy.

Death is Back from Holiday

I've been driving for 25 years now, and I've never killed anything other than insects. In this last month, however, I've hit and killed two birds, a snake and a raccoon, and I'm actually driving more carefully now than I ever have before. I'm not changing my routes, nor am I doing anything particularly different that would necessitate me being in more wildlife-prone areas. Maybe less-so even.

I don't know why this is, but it makes me sad.

To all the insects, the birds, the snake and the raccoon, I am truly sorry. I did my best to avoid hitting you and I never meant to harm any of you.

iWon't

I want to be someone who loves their iPhone, but every time I consider what I'd be getting, I can't bring myself to like them. I know everyone I talk to loves theirs and says they can't live without them, but when I ask them why, they say "The apps - it's all about playing games, viewing my photos on the go, and shopping for iTunes."

When did it stop being a phone? I'm not sure, but really, the features I want in a phone are, well, a phone, good battery life (my current phone lasts a 4-5 days between charges - I know people whose iPhones need recharging every night), text messaging, European reception, remote email connectivity, and a decent phone directory of my friends and business contacts.

An address book would be handy as would that cool Google "where am I" thing La Regina Bella has in her Blackberry. A camera in my phone is nice, but hardly necessary. I don't look at my pictures remotely, I don't listen to that much music, I don't play games... I can't actually think of another application I need to carry with me at all times. Okay, that's not true. There are several things I could see being useful - a metronome, a guitar tuner, a note pad.

The touchscreen is clever, but seems gimmicky, and impossible to use by touch. Image quality is nice, though only marginally sharper than my PSP.

Web browsing is great on the iPhone, and that's one thing I would be giving up if I go a different route, but how much extra time would I waste if I could surf all the time? Way too much, I'm sure.

So the net result is that no matter how much I want to understand what I'm missing, I just can't. I can't say I'm missing anything with it, other than the status of a cool new toy that I don't want to have to pay for.

Maybe it makes me a bad person, or at least a bad consumer, but I just can't do it. I'll keep an eye on them, and maybe get a demo at an Apple store, but I just can't seem to muster the necessary enthusiasm to spend that much money on a worse phone than the one I have now.

La Nuova Update

Okay, my fears were mostly unfounded. La Nuova is fitting in fairly well now. Il Secondo and she have mostly made friends, and just La Prima is still kind of in adjustment. But La Prima didn't ever really get used to Il Secondo either, so it's back to an uneasy truce. Still not a peaceful dynamic, but certainly not as dire as I'd thought a few days ago.

Here's a picture of La Nuova to complete the trio...

La Nuova

Welcome to La Nuova! She is a 1 year old, 6 1/2 pound mixture of sweetie and holy terror. The third of our cats, we adopted her this last Thursday.

Her Background
La Nuova is a shelter cat. She was dropped off after having had her second of two litters in her short one year of life because the people who had her before couldn't keep that many cats in their apartment. She was shy, but apparently, that's a ruse. She's tall, very slender, and we think has some Siamese in her lineage. She's sometimes chatty, but mostly just kind of slinks around. She's very cat-like.

The Good
She's very sweet, purrs easily, and loves her pets. She seems pretty sharp, though not as sharp as La Prima. That's not surprising; I've never met a cat as smart as La Prima is. She doesn't like being carried around, but she will curl up next to La Regina Bella, and there's some small hope she'll become a lap cat eventually. Right now, she's just getting used to her new environment.

The Bad
Oh, the dynamics of cat hierarchy. The tension between La Prima and Il Secondo was finally mellowing out, with an almost uneasy truce taking place. La Nuova has shaken that all up again, and with pretty disastrous results. It's only been a few days, but so far, La Nuova has bitten the others each once, and they're running scared. Poor Prima lost the tip of her tail fur to the wee one - a huge grey chunk taken out. Il Secondo faired slightly better, having only lost a little patch from his shoulder. La Prima and Il Secondo are both taking a wide berth around La Nuova - so much so, that La Prima pretty much won't come out of my office at all now. She made one quick foray, saw La Nuova, and headed back in.

I'm slightly fearful that our new little friend has permanently screwed up the dynamic of our household, and that from here on out, it's going to be a constant cat fight everywhere we go. I was hoping she would be a unifying force - someone to come in and provide a little sideways tension that would remove the back and forth between La Prima and Il Secondo, but so far, she's jumped into the alpha slot and left our old friends scrambling to find hiding places. Now, rather than more kitties getting pets, none of the kitties are getting pets, and I'm spending my time crawling under desks and behind dressers to console La Prima.

I hope this evens out soon, but so far, I'm not happy about how this is playing out. I love little Nuova, but I am thinking it might have been a mistake to introduce her into this already fragile environment.

The Las Vegas Black Box

La Regina Bella and I recently returned from a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate my birthday. We had a great time and enjoyed our visit, but I once again came away with the feeling that Las Vegas is a black box to me.

All of my friends who travel to Las Vegas speak of entertainment, gambling, excitement, and whenever I visit, I find myself unable to find these things as readily as they do. There are all sorts of secrets and insider information about how to make your stay in Las Vegas nice, but I find myself continually in the dark about these, not knowing what to ask, where to go, how to get what I need without continually feeling a little bit ripped off.

I want to experience the Las Vegas that my friends see, but for now anyway, that Vegas has been too elusive. They reach in and know what to get and from where; I reach in, and it's all just a mystery, from which I can never quite pull the great experience for which I keep going back.

The W in WTF?!

From Harpers archives, April 2008:

"No individual president can compare to the second Bush," wrote one [historian]. "Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large."

Good Riddance
So. The Bush era is finally coming to an end. I can't say it's happened soon enough. But what about his legacy? What body parts and charred remains are left in the smoking hole he's made of America?

For the last eight years, the greatest threat to the Constitution, both foreign and domestic, has been George W. Bush. The terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 were horrible attrocities, but the actual damage began the day Bush took office.

In the days following September 11th, America had the choice to bind our wounds, stand united and reasoned against our foe, seek swift and decisive justice, and show the world that terrorist aggression against any people will not be tolerated nor left unprosecuted by a moral and just populace.

Instead, Bush quickly distracted the nation and full of hubris, lies, and a misguided personal agenda, he let the one criminal we know was responsible get away.

He then continued the terrorists' work of undermining the foundations of our society. He bankrupted our nation. He set the population of the US against itself, and just in case that wasn't enough, set the world against us as a whole. In Iraq, he took a horrible, but self-contained situation and made it so much worse that the terrorists flocked in droves to the new playground he created for them. He manufactured a war based on lies that killed tens of thousands more people than the original terrorist attacks did. The world's agents of terror should send George W. Bush a fruit basket a year for the rest of his life for the work he did to further their cause.

Domestically, a nation looking to its president for unity and a guiding vision found contempt, hatred, and ignorance, and everyone was made to choose sides and defend what they had left. With the nation stalemated and paranoid, he looted and raped our citizens so he could bestow great favors on his precious few elites, tearing holes in the fabric of society and our Constitution along the way. He eroded the laws meant to protect us, he stood fast to the laws in need of modernization. He imposed his bankrupt morals upon the world, regardless of our faiths or own codes of conduct. He made half the nation believe that facts were optional and that they were entitled to take whatever they wanted by force if necessary, and vilified the other half of the nation with cries of anti-patriotism and media bias.

The master of lies so divided the nation and fractured the political process that he somehow managed to steal a second term and another four years to continue his reign of crime. Every day that a single person still thinks he is a good man or made a good president is another triumph of the deception he's made of the office.

So for our future, what hope do we have? We have lost our reputation, lost our empire, lost our money, our values, and our way. As president, Obama will need to build our nation back one family at a time, and I don't think we will ever regain the stature with which we once stood.

The best we can hope for is a swift return to stability and a chance to apologize to everyone. If ever a man needed to be prosecuted for the crimes he perpetrated upon his own society, that man is George W. Bush. To George, I can honestly say, without a hint of respect or kindness, that I hope justice will ultimately be served against the crimes you have committed against this nation and its people.

None of this is a surprise to the majority of the world. Most of it's been said before, and by more informed and more well-spoken writers, but now that I have a reason to be optimistic for our nation's future, I felt it time to write my political rant and take cathartic pleasure in the fact that long after his reign of terror has ended, people like me can still enjoy the remains of our democratic free-speech nation and write diatribes like this against the man who can only be described as the worst president ever to disgrace our nation's history.

Explore Your World

I've been meaning to do this for quite some time now, but Douwe Osinga's blog did the legwork for me. Where have I been? Find out now...

visited 22 states (9.77%)
Create your own visited map of the world

visited 38 states (76%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

Balancing the Inevitable

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. - Alcoholics Anonymous, as adapted from the original serenity prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr ~1934

The Things I Cannot Change
I just returned from a foreign country for not-so-fun reasons. Il Padre Nomade was traveling and was hospitalized with a sudden serious illness. Il Capocuoco and I rushed out there, and were able to spend a very short amount of time with him before he died. The remainder of our trip was spent making arrangements and contacting various governments and organizations, and spending some very good quality time with our relatives in that country who provided much comfort and family-ness, as well as logistical assistance since they live there and speak the language.

We were raised by scientists and the foundation of our personalities lies somewhere in the cold regions of reason. That's not to say that we're without emotion, but it does mean that we have a strong sense of how things work, including the part of life where things die. It's normal, it's natural, and it's inevitable.

That doesn't make it fun or something to which I look forward, but it does make it easier to accept when it happens to someone I love.

Change Doesn't Have To Be A Struggle
As when my mother died, I am finding many different reactions from people to our loss. Some simply express sincere condolences and offer to be there if I need it. Those are the people who I think truly understand me. Others tip into a self-righteous tone if I don't exhibit the same wailing and gnashing of teeth that they expect.

Pop culture has taught us that unless we shake our fists at the sky and shout "NOOOOOOO!" to the heavens, we're suppressing our emotions and that will dangerously cause us to become unstable and lash out in irrational ways, undergoing intense personality changes at some later date to become either sociopathic or suicidal. "He just snapped," the news reports will say.

People have told me things like, "All men hide their emotions, so you need to let it out and take some time to come to grips with your loss," and "Allow yourself to mourn and don't hold it in." These two statements are inaccurate and ill-informed.

For my part, I'm blunt and forthcoming to a fault, but I don't feel the need to share all my thoughts with everyone around me. It's not to keep my guard up or present some social mask - it's that I'm very self-consoling and I have almost 40 years of experience understanding the workings of my own mind.

I am by far the most qualified to judge my needs and fulfill them and I don't really need to allow myself anything, since my ego is plenty strong enough to let me think and feel whatever I want.

Sometimes, calm on the outside really does mean calm on the inside.

I do thank all of you who have understood that I am fine and have offered support rather than advice. To those who have offered advice, I realize that you mean well, but really, I'm still fine. You'll do me a bigger service to worry about something else.

The Difference
I don't know if it's courage, wisdom, a well-balanced psyche, or just arrogance, but I don't have any problems coming to grips with my father's death. He was born, he lived, and he has died, just as all of us will. That's as much a part of life as life itself, and I see no reason to fear it, be angry about it, or let it otherwise affect my life right now.

I do miss him. He lived a long full life, filled with joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, successes and failures. I'll keep my memories of him as long as I can.

Life, however, is the province of the living, and I'll continue to live my life as well as I can, share as much of it with those who also still live, and maybe, depending on what happens after death, I might see him on the other side. That, too, is one of those things I cannot change, though, so I'm content to let it be until there's something I can actually do.

Maybe that's the wisdom of knowing the difference.

Three Bins of Decomposing Goodness

My latest project has been to make a three-bin composter in our yard so we can turn yard waste into rich soil for next year's garden.

The Bins
The composter is made of rough-hewn cedar boards and cedar posts. All the wood has been treated with waterseal (mostly linseed oil) so it would offer some rot protection without the poisonous chemicals of treated lumber. I used brass screws for durability and to make future repairs easier.

What I learned building this:

* Dig post holes, don't pound in the posts like my gardening book recommends. The first post deflected on several small rocks, so eventually, I had to pull out the post and dig out the hole anyway. I dug the remaining holes, which was fortunate, because the left-of-center hole hit a boulder about six inches down. Since the posts are all connected to the side dividers and rails, I just cut those posts off flush with the boulder and set them on top of it. The rest of the structure is holding it up just fine.

* Spend as much time as you need leveling the area, or assume your bins will slope. We took our time preparing the site, and even though there's a good slope to the space, the bins are level because of our work, which suits our over-developed senses of aesthetic and should avoid placing undue stress on any part of the composter.

* Make sure to dry all the lumber thoroughly before you start working. Since I wasn't being too picky about the lumber I grabbed for this project, I just grabbed the right amount from the local Home Depot stacks. I didn't check for seasoning though, and the middle half of the boards were still wet from being cut. I lost two weekends waiting for the boards to dry and hoping they didn't check too badly or warp in the process. I got lucky, but next time, I'll get them and make sure they're stickered and not stacked.

Vehicle Plants / Hugelkultur
After the bins were built, I've been doing more research on what can go in the bins and what can't. Most of the wild areas of our property are overrun with blackberries, and those are one of those "can't" plants. Rather, you can, but the canes take a very long time to break down, and the thorns get into your soil and poke you.

A better option is through using other plants as vehicles to reclaim the nutrients. I'm just learning about it, but the general gist of it seems to be that by planting other plants on top of the canes, you can pull the nutrients from the decomposing canes, and then compost the top plants to return the nutrients to your mainstream compost.

I'm not quite to the "planting other plants" stage, but I've already got a nice pile of canes set aside.

I'm basing my work on this article I found searching for "composting blackberries."

Taming the Overgrowth
There are several areas of our yard that are getting more overgrown with blackberries than we want, so I'm forming my plan to start a blackberry conveyor through our compost bins.

Behind the bins off in the woods, there's a large area maybe 20' in diameter that I've cleared out. It's kind of hidden, but the dense thicket of blackberries that was there is gone now (well, mashed flat to the forest floor), so I have a staging area.

My plan starts with taking the four-to-six inches of rich compost that's there, mixed in canes and all, and pile it for later. Once I'm down to bare earth, I'll lay down some paper mulch (probably newspaper at this point), and then start clearing out the other areas that I care about. As I pull canes from the other areas, I'll pile them in the clearing until it doesn't hold any more, and then I'll let the whole pile start decomposing on its own timeframe out in the woods.

Meanwhile, I'm going to try and build a sifter from some wide-gauge screen and some boards, and then start sifting out the compost I recovered from the site. If the sifting is successful in removing the canes from the compost, I'll pour the sifted compost into bin two to get a head start. If it's still too filled with cane parts, I'll leave it piled somewhere in the woods to keep cooking.

The parts that sift out should be mostly sticks, rocks, and other not-yet-decomposed canes. I'll pile these back up somewhere in the woods too, or scatter them on my staging pile to help speed things along there.

Looking Ahead
Looking at the bins and how full the first one already is, I'm likely going to build another set of three behind this one, and use two bins at a time to cycle compost through. I don't want to waste it, and I certainly don't want to get rid of it some other way (burning or county yard waste pickup). If my plan works out, we should have several cubic yards of compost ready for next year's planting season. Combine that with the grass we'll till under this fall some time, and we should have some nice rich soil to start our garden off well.