Homebody

While waiting for the coals last night I walked around
my house and this is what I saw.
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Still have a few minutes to kill.

Snow on the mountain is taking nicely.

Bleeding heart, offering up some late-season blooms.

The planter has grown a beard.

I never knew...
That plants can smile.



Meanwhile, in the garage...
My collection of retired ice fishing utilities. I used an old tobaggan as a wall hanging and attached the various items that I have collected over the years, including a swedish spoon (That actually was what I used for drilling holes for my first two winters), an old Jon-E handwarmer with vintage fuel can, various jigsticks and an old single-mantle lantern (needs a new generator and pump seal)

My Bike.
An old Trek Elance 400 that just turned 20 this year.

The child's bike.
Garage sale special, 2 whopping dollars. SCORE!

The wife's bike.
Even cheaper: Free from a friend, including the brain bucket.

It wasn't Fair

It's not that I have anything against the Minnesota State Fair. It's just that when I thought about going this year I could not think for the life of me of any reason why (Except for end-of-summer tradition) I would want to go there. Plus when you like to eat like I do, it's a good place to stay away from.

So this past weekend we did not:

• Get lost in a crowd
• Eat anything that came on a stick
• Consume unthinkable amounts of grease & carbs
• Go to any concerts featuring washed-up '80's hair bands
• Look at any ponds containing large fish, swimming around in confused, aimless circles
  
• Collect shopping bags full of brochures for products that we will never purchase
  

This is what we did do:
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1.) Both Friday night and Saturday night I listened to two nail-biter baseball games, the way that God intended: On a thirty year-old AM radio while tinkering in the garage.

2.) Saturday night we ate a ridiculously large amount of barbequed ribs. This Fred Flintstone-sized rack also gave us lunches for two days.

3.) After we ate part of a pig (Like pigs), we read about pigs.

4.) On Sunday afternoon we went on a bike ride.

The Spice of Life

Summer blooms continue unabated:

My spice garden looks like a sheep that has been sheared:

This past weekend I tried my hand at dehydrating lemon peel:

Here is that lemon peel being used on the tuna steak that I cooked for us last night. It imparted a zestiness to the fish that was not overpowering. High five to me!

What can the matter be?

Space.com put out an article about dark matter this week in which astronomers admit that what we can see with our own eyes makes up only a small portion of the universe.

My favorite part of the article:

A preposterous proposition

The normal matter in the cosmos - atoms that make up stars, planets, air and life - accounts for only a small fraction of what must exist, based on the fact that without an additional source of gravity, galaxies would fly apart and galaxy clusters could not hold together as they do. Nobody knows where all that gravity comes from, so scientists say there must be some invisible stuff out there, which they call dark matter. Its presence is indirectly supported by many observations. Given what's known, this is the makeup of the universe:

* 5 percent normal matter
* 25 percent dark matter
* 70 percent dark energy

So in a nutshell, 95% of the universe is an invisible, unknowable force that keeps the other 5% of the universe (That's us and the billions of other galaxies) from falling apart.

...Does that sound like anyone you know?

Link:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060821_dark_matter.html

The Stork strikes again

My friend Johnna had her son on August 14:

"..He squealed in at 4lbs 6.7oz with a whopping height of 17 1/4 inches. His Apgar Scores were 9/9 and he has been able to breathe on his own without any assistance. He was transferred from the NICU to the Continuing Care Nursery in just 3 days. We just need him to stay awake long enough to eat so he can gain weight."

Speeding Ticket

Note to all Twin Cities motorists who travel 694:
Watch your speed, because the 5-0 are using lasers.

This morning:
78 in a 60, first ticket in nearly 7 years. Unexpected expense, conflict within the household and now my budget for the fall trip is otherwise spoken for, as in there isn't going to be one for me this year.

Crap.

Hobgoblins of the mind

For the last two nights the same dream:

The wife, child and I are in some type of industrial building that has been converted into residential lofts. We are being pursued by four hellhounds, large sinister dogs that look like a cross between a great dane and a german shepherd with charcoal grey teeth and red glowing eyes. They stalk us slowly with hackles raised, letting out gutteral growls, woofs and howls. As they systematically block our escape routes without attacking, they force us through corridors that we do not wish to travel. It is clear that they are making sport of us and positioning us for the kill.

We finally panic and bolt into one of the lofts with the hounds in pursuit. The two exit points are an elevator and a doorway at the top of a long flight of metal stairs where we came in. The wife and child take shelter behind the door to the loo and I find myself perched on a timber jutting out from the brick wall, twenty feet or more above the hardwood floor. We are trapped.

I take stock of my situation. The wife and child are safe behind the door for the moment. One of the hellhounds guards the doorway to my family and another sits on the landing, staring me down with a continuous growl. The other two hounds pace back and forth below me, waiting for me to fall. Normal science not applying (This being a dream after all) I am able to maintain my position forever and the scenario is effectively a stalemate.

The two hellhounds below me manage to trap themselves in the elevator. Seeing no alternative, I jump over to the staircase to confront the hound that is guarding me.

As my feet come down on the landing I see that The hellhound is actually a Lhasa Apso. It does not so much charge as it does waddle up to me. I promptly boot the thing like an NFL placekicker, into the brick wall on the far side of the loft. It lands behind a credenza (I have no idea whose place this is) with a thump.

The last hellhound covers the distance in a flash. It has also changed, this one still carrying the german shepherd traits but now looking more like a black lab mix. His teeth are white and his eyes are a puzzled brown. He is a juvenile pup and unsure of himself or my authority. I command him to SIT and he obeys sheepishly, as though he expects to hear a terse word over the slipper that he has been chewing on while I was out.

I call my family out and we pass by the pup unmolested, and the dream ends with us letting ourselves out of the building.

Aside from the fact that I had the same dream two nights in a row, it was hardly remarkable. And what I thought about as I shaved this morning no more so, but nevertheless here it is: That when confronted straight-on rather than surrendered to or evaded, the Hobgoblins of the mind tend to undo themselves on their own, be far weaker than they appear and are subservient to the authority of reason.

So Now What?

My first reactions to this my "Oh Crap" moment were guilt and shame, followed up with an anger chaser. Yes, I have been told that we are running out of oil, just as I have been told that the hydrocarbon emissions are wreaking serious havoc on our atmosphere - It's one thing to know these things and quite another to know these things, if you follow. The problem is that these impending crises are treated more as a footnote rather than as a main subject, because the notion of radically changing our materialistic American lifestyle is not a popular topic in most circles (Why, now that's Commie-talk!).

To hear Bush tell us that we are addicted to oil and then not offer any leadership (Much less a tangible plan) for solving the problem is not for our own benefit. It is positioning for himself to be able to say "I told you so" later without having to deal with the problem now. He's protecting his legacy instead of us.

In my adulthood I have journeyed across the American political spectrums, and my passions have ranged from a "Just leave me alone" brand of ignorance to a "Somebody (other than me) should do something" type of caring to "A pox on both your houses" attitude of political withdrawl.

If you think about politics in America long enough you're bound to have an "Oh Crap" moment there too. It's all about popularity. Not a lot of Americans are going to vote for someone who tells them that they need to stop driving, to stop buying junk from overseas and to begin preparing to live a lot more localized sustainable existence. To survive in American politics you need to be a good whistler, because there are a lot of graveyards out there. Or, to paraphrase Richard Dreyfuss from the movie "Jaws," "We are going to ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bites us on the ass."

All this talk brings to mind 1 Corinthians 2:
"your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God."

I don't know what type of insight I will be able to offer on the subjects of Peak oil and the inevitable decline in American lifestyle that will result from it. Right now I am calmly trying to dispel the knee-jerk reaction of thinking that the sky is going to fall tomorrow, so that when I do write about it I won't sound like a raving lunatic.

"Oh Crap" moment

Do you know what an "Oh Crap!" moment is?

For me the most illustrative example I can take from my childhood is when I would find myself on a roller coaster, right before hitting the peak on that first big hill. The point where I would come to my senses and realize that I was moments away from taking a seriously scary-ass plunge down the other side of the hill.

It is a moment of clarity, where you realize that you are totally dependant on a whole slew of people that you don't know - The engineer who designed the coaster, the greasemonkey who takes care of it, the administrator in charge of paying the greasemonkey, et al - The point is, you got yourself into this mess and now you are going to have to ride it out and pray that everybody else has done their jobs.

"America is addicted to oil"
-George W. Bush

Who, me?

Pretty much everything I consume is procured by oil, and a startling amount of the crap I buy is made from the stuff. And such is the case with pretty much everyone I know personally. Most people who care to think about such things agree that oil is a finite resource. But if it's going to run out someday, how much do we have left and why isn't that information being talked about or made readily available?

The answer could lay in the notion that the earth, if farmed in a pre-industrial (Read: non-mechanized) capacity, can yield enough crops to feed about a billion people. With modern agribusiness, using mechanization and chemicals, we are straining to feed 6 billion people now, with the population growth showing no signs of slowing. Without trying to sound like a black helicopter lunatic from the fringe, I would submit to the four people who read this blog that there is the makings of a global crisis - If not within my own lifetime at least within my son's. Not talking about a global crisis that could wipe out 5 billion people is probably only partially a lunatic fringe conspiracy. I would say moreover it's not talked about because such an event is unspeakable.

Now my thoughts turn to home, where my heart is. My house is a suburban McMansion (It is quite modest by suburban McMansion standards, but nevertheless a palace compared to a homestead in rural Kentucky). It is heated with gas, depends on electricity for cooking & food storage and is serviced by city water & sewer. What this translates to (On the other side of the hill) is a dwelling that is isolated by great distance from my place of work, completely dependant on the grid. There are no alternatives in terms of heat, water, or waste removal. The real kick in the nuts is that my neighborhood is built on an old sod farm. The builders put about two inches of topsoil down on top of a bed of sand and laid sod. So in effect it is still a sod farm, one with houses. One that is costly in terms of the amount of water needed to keep the grass alive due to the poor water retention of the soil. I only bring this up because as attractive the thought of subsistence farming on my own land in order to augment my food supply, the simple fact is that as it is right now my land could not grow much besides a bumper crop of tumbleweed if it came right down to it.

Oh Crap.

I'll be posting more on this vein in the months to come. I feel as though I have been awakened, to the sound of something rattling around downstairs. I cannot in good conscience go back to sleep without investigating the sound that has brought me out of my dreaming. I sense that it is most likely that I will never go back to sleep again.