Gin & Guavas

I Think I'm Going to Move to Tumblr

2012-01-14T11:28:00.003-05:00

You can find me there. I've tentatively named it "A Bad Idea Poorly Executed." Or just search for, as always, thehappysmith.

Muffins!

2011-11-05T10:42:00.003-04:00

I'm trying to get a good "tropical" muffin recipe together. I have lots of crushed pineapple and dried coconut and I finally went out and bought a one dollar beat-up muffin pan from Goodwill, and this morning I made my first attempt.

This isn't quite the right recipe. I can't put my finger on exactly what needs to be changed, but no question I need more pineapple, less coconut, and probably something other than guava juice (really? On a blog called "Gin & Guavas" I'm posting a recipe that I need to cut the guava juice out of). But they are tasty.

I use the following recipe for my dry muffin mix:
1/3 c white whole wheat flour
1/3 c teff flour
1/3 c flax meal
1/3 c + 1 tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Mix together and combine with 1 egg and 1/4 c applesauce, and you have a basic muffin mix. Of course I use teff and flax instead of just wheat flour because they have more fiber, more vitamins and minerals, and quite frankly more flavor. I think everyone should add flax meal to their recipes; the teff flour is harder to come by. But of course you could just use 1 cup of regular flour. And most people would probably use closer to a full cup of sugar (but I was adding pineapple, and that's plenty sweet).

What I added for the tropical part of it was:
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almond extract
1/3 c crushed pineapple
3 tbsp guava nectar
3 tbsp chopped coconut (rehydrated)
1 tbsp chopped rehydrated banana chips (I'd prefer a banana, but I didn't have any).
fresh grated nutmeg (maybe about 1/4 tsp?)

This made six muffins. I'm single; I don't need to be making a dozen muffins at a shot.

Next time around I think I'll try mango or maybe passionfruit juice instead of guava, and less almond extract (perhaps none at all), and a little more pineapple, and maybe one less tbsp of the coconut. Still, a good first effort.

Four Random Photographs

2011-11-05T10:05:00.005-04:00

I haven't posted any pictures in a while. Well, I haven't done much with the blog in a while, but, more to the point, I have some pictures I took over the last couple months that I guess I intended to blog, but never did. And I also have two I took this morning.

My okra has succumbed to frost, and I don't think the tomato is long for the world (it's still ripening tomatoes, at about 1/3 normal speed, but we've had three frosts so far and it has managed to survive. I don't expect it make it to Thanksgiving but I'm also not going to complain if it does).But with the end of one season comes the start of another, and I have Brussels sprouts and arugula and fun things like that. And, this amusing little seedling. This is a red buckeye (Aesculus pavia), not a tree I even had on my list of trees to try to grow, mainly because my list is a couple years old and I don't know of any red buckeyes around here. But I collected this seed from a buckeye tree up at Biltmore, in Asheville, about six weeks ago. I brought it home. It sat on the kitchen counter for about three weeks. According to my notes the seeds need to be kept moist and planted immediately; if they dry out at all, they die. Very finicky seeds apparently.
Or not. I soaked it overnight and stuck it in a pot and figured there was no way it would grow. But here we are! I have no idea what this is going to turn into--I can't even tell if those are leaves or what. But it's sort of exciting. (The plant next to it is New Jersey Tea (Ceanothus americanus), which has been growing for about two months. I have several of them sprouted now and I'm looking forward to actually trying the tea from them next winter.)

Back in the summer I made several ratatouilles. They were all delicious. I should post a recipe sometime. But it's a lot easier to just post this picture of the stew in the pot. So colorful. Of course summer is over; now it's gumbo season, so I'll have to blog the next time I make one of those.

I grew a lot of vegetables this summer and enjoyed them (the tomatoes and tabasco peppers were particularly great), but nothing was as exciting as this.I have three grape vines in pots here; some year soon they'll go into the ground but grape vines can live for 100 years or more so they'll be fine in pots for a few. How exciting to harvest my own grapes off my own vines... while living in an apartment. They were really good, too--although they were sold to me as "seedless," and they are anything but. But these are Concord grapes, the native Vitis labrusca, the ones Alton Brown talks about in the tv commercials for Welch's. Maybe some year the vines will be big enough to get enough grapes to try a few bottles of homemade wine. Not any time soon, though.

I've mentioned Schrodinger before. He needs a picture. Like all black cats he is very difficult to photograph. Most of my pictures of him are a black smudge with glowing green eyes. I have not yet managed to get a picture that matches up with the best picture ever taken of his mother, Batgirl, but eventually.

Thoughts on Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-04T12:32:00.001-04:00

This is the first essay-length philosophical thing I've written in four years. It took two hours to get everything right and do the cost research. It felt wonderful.

I was going to title this “What the Occupy opponents don’t get” but then I realized, heck, this is Occupy we’re talking about, and most of the protesters don’t get it, either. So instead it’s just some thoughts.

So, you’re a member of the non-struggling middle class. Perhaps you’re just an intelligent and reasonable person who knows what you want and doesn’t spend your time desperately trying to live a life well beyond your means. Lord knows that a real middle class salary can buy you a very nice life without credit, but if you’re constantly striving for more you’re going to always be unhappy and always be struggling.

Or, more likely (since there aren’t so many reasonable and intelligent people out there who live within their means), you’re actually part of the upper middle class or even the upper class but refuse to admit that to yourself or anyone else.

In either case perhaps you’re happy, satisfied, and not afraid, and you could care less about the Occupy protesters or the Occupy movement. Great! Good for you. You can stop reading now because I’m not talking to you. You don’t need a talking-to. You need to put a little money aside for a nice vacation and go pick up the kids from school.

But maybe you spend an inordinate amount of your time thinking about why the Occupy movement is wrong, why the protesters are boneheads or hypocrites or worse. Maybe you think that in reality if you just work hard and keep your expectations attainable you can live a perfectly happy life and shouldn’t be asking for handouts. Ha! You’re funny. You need to keep reading.

And maybe you think of yourself as just smarter than those idiot protesters, and you like to laugh at how they turn down job applications or refuse to offer their tents to the homeless. You, my friend, you are afraid of them. (And I haven't noticed you offering your living room to the homeless, either.) You don’t want to hear it—in fact, I just lost ALL of my readers who fit into this category because I’m not part of their preferred echo chamber—but the truth is, you are afraid of them. You are afraid because although you are comfortable now, you lack the requisite faith in yourself, your religion, or your society that, were things to change, and change meaningfully, you might not be able to make it. You are afraid that you could become one of the people Occupy is protesting for (or wants to think they’re protesting for; I suspect the majority of them are protesting to annoy Mom & Dad, who, ironically, were hippies themselves and protested mainly to annoy Mom & Dad. Who, of course, fought World War II and built the greatest nation-state the world has ever seen.)

The truth is, you’re afraid of something the protesters symbolize for you. It might be that you simply are afraid of anything that’s different; xenophobia is so third-millenium America, after all. Or it might be that, on some level, the bastards are actually right about something. But it’s too big of a problem or too difficult to really wrap your mind around and frankly life is so much easier and better if you don’t actually have to think about it. After all, the reason the echo chamber that is the modern opinionews industry (like that one? Infotainment is not the right word, since modern news doesn’t rely on information) is so successful is that frankly we all, all humans, want nothing more than to be justified, to have our feelings and opinions and attitudes reflected and justified by society (and Mommy and Daddy) to prove our own self-worth.

For people in subsistence societies this isn’t a problem—if you can help put food on the table in any way you’re justified. You’re all right. But for late modern humans in consumer cultures—and that’s about two or three of the seven billion of us—what we get from society every single day is that we aren’t good enough, that we need to buy more, have more, do more, see more or we aren’t worthy. We aren’t justified. Three generations have been raised now in this country and most of what we refer to as “The West” (Greece used to be a part of it, but not any more) under the guiding consumerist principle that your self-worth is entirely dependent upon your net worth.

(Aside: That WWII generation that was the last generation before this consumer culture spread its poison? Yeah, let’s not let them off the hook for their hand in creating said culture, okay? They were great. But when they came home they invented the American Dream, and that’s where it all started.)

If you conflate your self-worth with your net worth, some interesting things happen. First of all, you are never satisfied. Now, there’s something to be said (a lot, actually) for not being satisfied with where you are. But somehow not being satisfied with who and where you are no longer means that you need to learn more, or give more, or try to get better at your work, your hobby, or your life; it has instead come to mean that you aren’t satisfied with the income you have, the stuff you have, the material trappings of the life that you live. You strive to improve your position at work not because you want to be better for your own purposes, but because you need to get a raise to buy that cool new 3-D TV (hey, 3-D movie makers: you still haven’t improved on real life! How about just trying to write a good story for God’s sake? Damned sequel factory), the latest model-year car, and those seven dozen kitchen gadgets and new gas range from Williams-Sonoma you don’t actually know how to use. (Ever been through a model home in an upper-class development and seen the kitchen with the six-burner gas stove and commercial size fridge? Give me a damn break, more than half of the people who live in those homes don’t know how to cook anything more complex Spaghetti-o’s. But they have to have the best appliances!)

And so we come back to the anti-Occupy crowd (the ones who aren’t actually 1%-ers or investment bankers and actually have good reason to be scared). After three generations of self-worth/net-worth entanglement, these folks are, to be blunt, just scared that if society were in fact to change and we did in fact learn to separate our fiscal value from our human value, they’d have nothing to go on. They’d be unable to determine a self-worth, unable to find it, or, perhaps—and this is truly terrifying if you’re part of the crowd—that they might take a step back in relation to their fellow citizens.

This leads us, at last (hey, only two pages, that qualifies as brevity for me), to the original point, what the Occupy crowd (those who are protesting but also especially those who delight in making fun of the protesters) don’t get. We no longer live in a country where if you just work hard and do your best you’ll be rewarded and be able to afford the things you need and some of the things you want.

No, I’m not a communist. Hear me out. Now, the math for the pronouncement I’m about to make will be available after I tidy it up a bit because right now it’s scratch on paper. But let’s say we have somebody who is making minimum wage, works a 40-hour week every week without any vacation (52 weeks a year) and some occasional overtime, has an average commute and no car payment and lives in the cheapest safe apartment complex around, has a basic cell phone plan with a parasite company, eats hamburger and tuna helper and store-brand bologna sandwiches every single day except when ordering some stuff off the dollar menu at Burger King, never drinks any alcohol, doesn’t have health insurance and basically doesn’t go to the doctor, never goes out in the evenings to restaurants or clubs, and doesn’t have internet access or cable or satellite television. This person manages to spend $13,764 every year just for the bare minimums to sustain the above described existence in this country (and this is in a cheap part of the country). That’s before the poor soul has to purchase any clothing, or put any money aside for savings, or experience any sort of emergency from a car accident to an unexpected sickness to the need to replace something broken. And God forbid this person has children or other dependents. $13,764 is covering the basic needs for a safe but wholly uninteresting existence.

And how much does our safe dullard earn? Well, assuming he gets a bit of overtime here and there, we’ll give him a whopping $14,970 a year, after FICA but assuming no income taxes. So he’s got $1,206 at the end of the year he could put toward savings, pay for basic cable (which isn’t worth it; maybe he’ll get Netflix instead), or, given the way life goes, have to spend on some emergency (I had a $1400 unexpected medical bill this year. I sure as hell didn’t plan for that. That would break our poor hypothetical person).

Now, it’s all well and good for you to say, okay, but if this guy works harder, tries to better himself, earn a raise or a promotion, go to night school (which costs money he doesn’t have), get a better job, then he can rise out of that boring and meaningless existence and make something of himself. He doesn’t need the government’s (or my) help, and it’s just more evidence that everybody but me wants to get everything without working for it that anybody would complain about such a situation.

Fine. So our hypothetical man does get out of this job and makes a better life for himself. Good for him. But here is the key point: somebody else has to take his place. There will always be people who can’t make it, because there will always be a need in this country for people to do the minimum-wage scut work that the rest of us don’t want to do. Somebody is always going to have to be on the bottom of the pole. Somebody is always going to be barely getting by, if at all, and our economy demands that. You cannot take Homo economicus as an individual and say, he should get a better job, because the economy demands a H.economicus to work every necessary position, including the guy who cleans the toilets at Wal-Mart, and the guy who picks the tomatoes in Florida. Those guys cannot afford to live a decent life in America, and yet those of us who live better do so on the backs of those people. We aren’t standing on the shoulders of giants; we’re resting on the backs of midgets. And the last thing anybody wants is for the midgets to stand up and throw us off. That’s why Occupy is threatening, and why you feel a need to make fun of it. You rely on poor people to live even a moderately comfortable existence.

And here’s the kicker. If we decide, okay, those folks need to make $10 an hour. Everybody should earn a minimum wage that allows them to live decently, not just barely scrape by. Sounds good. I’m pretty sure I’m hearing that from Occupy types, some of them (some of them are just waiting for law and order to break down so they can get to looting, but that’s a tiny minority). So then what happens? Well, Wal-Mart’s salary expenditures go up by 50%, so their prices go up by a similar margin. Those of us who were previously comfortable now find that everything is more expensive, and we’re a lot less comfortable. Those tomato-pickers in Florida, the illegal immigrants you hate so much? Let’s let them earn a living wage, too, or, if you don’t like that, let’s throw them all out and hire unemployed Americans at the same living wage attested before; people would pick tomatoes for $10 an hour. But now your tomatoes cost $8.99 a pound (and that's for the nasty flavorless hothouse tomatoes bequeathed to us by Big Agriculture). A bag of lettuce costs $10. And because corn is doubling in price a whole roasting chicken now costs $3.99 a pound instead of 89 cents. But everybody’s earning a living wage! Except that wage has to keep rising because the cost of business keeps rising.

Know what doesn’t change in this scenario? How much money the 1% make. How much profit the corporations make. See, Wal-Mart will happily pay a higher wage, and raise their prices, whatever it takes to keep the profit margins where they are now so none of the high-rollers running the show have to take a pay cut and the stock price doesn’t fall. The richest, the ones with the power to change things, what the fuck possible reason do any of them have to change anything? The only way to create real change, change that doesn’t result in the endless inflationary cycle described above, is to fundamentally reevaluate how we value the wealthiest and most powerful people. And that is never going to happen.

That’s what Occupy should be protesting. And you can go home and listen to your echo chambers and make fun of the protesters, but bear in mind the echo chamber is owned by part of that 1%. You’re hearing what you want to hear because you’ve been told it’s what you want to hear by wealthy and powerful people who want you to think that way. As long as we continue to be lined up on opposing sides, we 99%, the 1% don’t have to worry. We’ll fight each other tooth and nail and let them keep the spoils.

H.L. Mencken once said that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” I might add that this is also the whole aim of modern capitalism. Capitalism is not bad (it's the best thing we've got, although no society has yet actually tried distributivism and nobody these days has even heard of the philosophy). The way capitalism is practiced in 2011, on the other hand, is not good. The protesters have a point. Their opponents have a point, too. But we’re all missing the bigger picture, and that’s exactly the way the power wants it to be.

Hey, Asshole!

2011-11-02T17:12:00.003-04:00

Yeah, you! The asshole who lives at 331 Shadowmere Dr., Pelzer, SC, 29669. You.

You know that fucking piece of shit dog of yours is going to attack anybody who comes onto the property. You know that.

You know somebody from FedEx (and probably somebody from UPS, too) is going to come to your house every single day, because you are constantly getting shit shipped to you for some sort of home-based cosmetics related business.

So you know a delivery person is coming to your house every day. And you know that fuckstick dog of yours is going to attack.

And you leave said fuckstick dog out, unchained, every. Mother. Fucking. Day.

You, sir, are the fucking lowest form of human life present on this Earth. I sincerely hope that your dog will die, your business will fail, your home will be reposessed, your wife and family will leave you, and you will die miserable and alone.

Soon.

Fuck you.

Sincerely,
Your (ex) FedEx man

Lunch Break

2011-10-25T13:13:00.002-04:00

This morning Schrodinger (the cat) brought a squirrel in the house. He brings animals in from time to time, though I always cuss at him and squirt him with the water bottle when I catch him doing it. Which I usually don't. At least one morning a week I wake up and find a dead mole in the herbarium (the rental company calls it a "dining room," but as I have no dining table and eat on the porch or standing at the counter I don't use it for that; it's where I keep my seedlings and tender plants and seeds I'm trying to sprout), and earlier this week there was bird a loving left for me on the edge of the couch. The brand new clean couch.

I can't get too upset at him for this. First of all I rarely actually catch him bringing an animal in, and you can't discipline an animal after the fact. But I know he's doing his part for the household, and after all, he is a once and future barn cat; I don't want him not hunting at all.

But it would be nice if he would at least kill things before he brings them in the house (he comes and goes through a window in the herbarium). About a month ago I came home from work and there was this odd sound coming from the laundry room, which I eventually determined was a baby squirrel, hiding in the utility closet. He was okay; tail was a bit mussed and bloody but Schrodinger had clearly brought the squirrel in as a toy and hadn't actually hurt it much. But the thing was little and terrified. I put on an old flight suit and gloves and collected the squirrel, put him in a box with water and food, and let him calm down, then deposited him in a pine tree outside about two hours later.

But this morning takes the cake so far. This morning as I was making breakfast--in fact, just as I was finishing up and looking forward to eating--Schrodinger bounds through the window with a live and squealing squirrel in his mouth. I cussed at him and squirted him with the water bottle, which was the wrong thing to do. He drops the squirrel and ducks back out the window, but does the squirrel follow? No. Squirrel goes nuts. Runs in circles around the room, through the kitchen, into and around the living room, then back into the herbarium where he takes up residence behind the bakers rack.

And then the cat comes back in.

You've seen Christmas Vacation. You know what happens when Snots the dog gets scent of the squirrel. This is what it felt like in my house this morning. I opened all the doors in the vain hope the squirrel would run outside, but no. Eventually he hid behind the entertainment center, so I jabbed an old tv antenna down there to flush him out. Didn't work. So I pulled it away from the wall far enough for Schrodinger to get back there, which he did. The squirrel disappeared. I didn't ever actually see it leave from behind the television. It could have gone outside but if it did, it gave the slip to both me and the cat. It's not under any of the furniture or in the dvd rack, and I had the bedroom and bathroom doors closed. So I assume it's gone.

I had a massage scheduled for this morning. This was a good morning for it. Now I'm having lunch, and I assume the squirrel is gone. But I have a lot of cleaning up to do this afternoon...

BMW Interview Process: Physical

2011-10-18T15:12:00.005-04:00

Okay, so, we're on to step four in the process of getting hired on at the BMW plant in Greer (Spartanburg County). Incidentally, so far not one person has come to this blog after searching for information about what's the BMW interview process like. I'm almost insulted, except that being insulted about something that stupid is a waste of time.

Step four is the physical. Assuming you make in through the first three steps and get your conditional offer of employment, this physical represents the condition. Now, I don't know exactly what they're looking for. I am neither a doctor nor an HR person at BMW. But here's what the physical consisted of.

First, a ten-page booklet of questions for you to fill out the night before the physical. Not hard questions, mostly "have you ever been treated for X." When you arrive at the clinic (there are two, one in Spartanburg and one in Pelham village (which needs to incorporate already so it doesn't just get absorbed by Greer)), you'll have four or five more pages of things to fill out. You should arrive early, although I managed to scrape in just one minute before my appointment time and didn't get tossed out.

A nurse or technician will call your name. First thing she'll do is take your blood pressure and pulse (with an electronic monitor, which I maintain are vastly less accurate than the old-fashioned kind), weight, and height. Then you'll go through a series of little exams in whatever order the stations are free. You'll have an eye exam (I was evidently the fastest eye exam any of the techs had ever done), a hearing exam (I passed and I have lousy hearing, so you should be fine), and a breath test. This is a weird test; you blow into a tube as hard as you can. I have no idea what the purpose of this test was. Per the description of the exam I failed; however the doc later said I did fine.

You'll also have your samples taken for drug testing, urine and hair both (not mixed together). Finally you'll go to a little exam room and have an EKG. Last time I had one of these (ten years ago) it took 15 or 20 minutes. This one took about one minute, maybe less.

Then you get to stay in the exam room and change into a hospital gown and await the doctor. The doctor will come in and ask you a few generic questions, test reflexes, check for a hernia, that sort of thing, standard exam stuff. Then he'll go through your medical history that you wrote out on all those pages and ask any questions that seem significant. I have a history of lower back problems and depression. I was very concerned about the history of depression, for which I've actually been hospitalized (it was voluntary, at least). But I'm used to flight physicals. He didn't ask one question about that and didn't seem to think it would make any difference at all (I asked).

About the back, he had lots of questions. So you get an idea of what BMW is mainly concerned about. The only medical records I have relating to it (apart from some chiropractic adjustments) are from the Air Force; doc said, well, I don't know how long it will take you to get military medical records... to which I was able to respond that I had a copy of all my records. This made things much easier; he said BMW would want to look over the records pertaining to my back, and if I could just make copies and bring them by that would speed things up a great deal.

The book of paperwork I'd brought home last night mentioned getting all your medical records and having to sign papers to allow them to be shared with BMW. I'm touchy about that (the hospitalization), but doc said just get the ones related to the back problems and that was all they'd really be interested in. This is a tremendous time-saver for you; if you can get access to your own medical records before the physical so much the better; if not, it appears you may not need to get them unless you have back or joint problems (repetititive stress injuries, too). That said, if you do have a history of such problems and you can get copies of those records yourself before you start the interview process you'll probably save yourself a bunch of time.

The doctor will sign a note to the effect that he sees no medical reason you can't perform the job. But that is not the final word; BMW has the final word, whether that's through an HR officer or an in-housel doctor I don't know.

If the doctor signs that note and you're cleared to proceed, you'll do a fitness test. This is an odd test. It consists of a couple of static strength exercises--grip strength, forearm strength, push and pull--followed by lifting a 25-lb weight four or five times. Then you get to play a sort of electronic Wack-A-Mole game, where you have to use hand-held wands to touch buttons that display a red or green light. Seems really easy, but the four tests are tougher than you think: the first is just on a board in front of you, and is simple. The second is somewhat over your head, at an angle, and you have to play this Wack-A-Mole game for about three or four minutes. The wands aren't heavy but having your hands up over your head for that long is tiresome. The third is the worst--you have to play on two separate boards, the lower one of which is at the floor. You can't bend at the knees to reach that board, so you're constantly bending up and down at the hips, and this one lasts even longer than the previous one. The fourth one is easy if you're 5'9" or below, because it's a board at a generic "waist height." I could reach all the buttons without actually bending at all. If you were any taller than me you'd have to bend to reach the bottom row and that would be a much tougher test.

Finally you'll do a step test: step up and down on a stool continuously (at I must admit a rather slow pace) for five minutes. Throughout all the tests you'll have your heartrate checked.

I found the fit test unusual but not difficult. Even if you're in lousy shape (and I am at the moment) it's not going to be real tough, and doesn't require any sort of herculean strength.

So. At the end of it all, do I know whether I passed? No. The folks in the clinic don't make the decisions, as I said. The doctor's assessment is probably of significant importance in BMW's decision-making but clearly it is not the whole story. No matter how bad you do on any part of it, they're not going to chuck you out; you will complete the physical. I got the impression that if there were any red flags they'd send your info off to BMW before putting you through the fit test, but that was just an impression. The tech who ran the fit test said she didn't have any idea what BMW was looking for in terms of a minimum standard on those tests.

My advice, just relax and have fun with it.

Now, I've been told repeatedly that this is the longest part of the process: the wait, after the physical. Drug testing can be done locally now (though not in the office) so the wait on those results should be two or three days, max. If they decide to request medical records and they have to get them from your doctor's office it could take weeks. How long it takes BMW to look over your records and make a decision is anybody's guess. Like the Supreme Court it seems they take their decisions on their own time and in their own way. So now we wait. And tomorrow it's back to work at my regular job.

Guava Buttermilk Biscuits?

2011-10-18T15:12:00.002-04:00

To the person who landed at this blog after doing a google search for "Guava Buttermilk Biscuits:" did you find a recipe? Were they any good? Will you share the recipe with me?

BMW Interview III

2011-10-17T13:41:00.002-04:00

Okay, so, time for the update on BMW's interview process for production associate jobs in Greer (or Greenville or Spartanburg) through MAU.

This morning I went in for the second assessment. Show time was 7:15, although I know some folks from our group Friday ended up in a later sitting. The individual who conducted this assessment was very ex-military--and perfect for the job. He is a very nice guy--but he's also scary serious through the entire process. He cracked a smile about 10:45, three hours and change into the assessment, and then only because he was talking to the remaining people who'd passed the assessment. So don't be frightened of him; just echo his personality and take it all as seriously as he does. BMW is taking it seriously. And if I remember right, seems I said to take yourself seriously in each of the last two posts...

What to wear: jeans. Shorts if you must (below the knee, per the dress code). Comfortable shoes. I wore a polo; lots of people wore T-shirts. Worth pointing out a lot of the production jobs the uniform is a T-shirt, so at this point in the process if you're more comfy in a T go ahead. I wore tennis shoes. You could get away with anything comfortable but I wouldn't go in work boots; even though you'll ultimately have to get some, why not wear lightweight tennies for this? They recommend it. Worth noting, the first assessment, one girl wore glittery pink ballet shoes. She wore serious shoes today, though. And she passed this assessment.

There are two exercises in this assessment. Used to just be a single one, called the "rim mount," at least to judge by old commentary on the internets. In any event, now half the group will do a "bolting" exercise first, half will do a "mounting" exercise. Then you'll switch.

There is no bathroom break. Let me stress that. There is no bathroom break. If you can get by without your morning coffee or tea, this would be the morning. As it was three of the 12 of us snuck off (with permission of course) after the demonstration video for the second exercise, but the trainer did not (could not, given the tight scheduling) wait for us to do the actual demonstration, meaning we missed that.

Each exercise consists of thirty minutes of doing the same actions multiple times--just like factory work. Each includes multiple variations of "customer orders," so you're doing slightly different things each time, or maybe the same thing in a different order. Without getting into extreme detail (which I don't think they'd appreciate, although there's no commentary on not sharing information), the two exercises are as follows:

Bolting: you have to pick up bolts and washers, do a quality check, then assemble the bolts into a receptacle according to the customer order you're given. You hand-tighten the bolts for a couple turns, then use a battery-powered electric drill. After you finish the assembly, you disassemble the whole thing, then call up a new order and start again. You need to make sure you're putting bolts into holes in the correct order. Meanwhile you have to watch a display screen that contains temperature and pressure information, and if any indicator goes out of limits you have to press a button to fix it.

Sounds very complex, and in a way it is. That said, you don't need to know anything about how to do the job; it's all explained in the video you'll watch, and then the demo the trainer will go through. Additionally, you get a ten-minute practice session, during which you'll get error messages if you do something wrong. Make note of these: it's not necessarily immediately obvious what you've done wrong, and it's worth taking the time to figure it out instead of plowing ahead; it's called a practice session.

For this exercise the main thing you need is a good cross check--you need to be able to watch the gauges, check the bolts, check the order, all at the same time--oh, and there's a (virtual) forklift running around, and if you step into the forklift's path, you're dead. One forklift accident won't get you thrown out (I got smooshed twice at the end of the second exercise), but the trainer specifically said before the first exercise that getting nailed by the forklift multiple times was one of the most common reasons people failed the assessment overall.

Mounting: you have a bin of "spacers," two "wheels" (actually 10- and 25-pound barbell weights), and assorted other components, and a "mount." You have to mount three spacers and one wheel in the order specified in the customer order. Then you insert a locking pin, which must go into one of three positions again based on the customer order. Then you take the whole shebang apart and start over with a new customer order. You must scan each part before you mount it using a basic barcode scanner, and scan each part again as you disassemble. You have a little clock going the whole time telling you whether you moving too slow. And of course there's the forklift.

This one is less about having a good crosscheck and more about doing things in the proper order each time (the only thing you're really checking for is the forklift; this makes it a less mental job than the bolting, but it's easier to lose track of the forklift). During the practice session it seems I put a lot of things on in the wrong order, probably because I was reading the wrong line on the customer order chart.

I don't think either exercise is necessarily easier than the other. And, worth noting, you can't exactly practice for either one. Your best preparation would be to get a good night's sleep, wake up with plenty of time, and have a good breakfast. If you're hungry, sleepy, or you have to pee, you probably aren't concentrating on what you're doing (this is true in all areas of life), and you're probably going to fail.

Three-fourths of the people who were in the assessment this morning with me passed. Not all of us who did thought we were going to; the girl sitting behind me's heart stopped when the trainer told those of who were left that we'd all passed. I wasn't too confident myself (those two forklift accidents). Which is not to say it's easy; only that you shouldn't write yourself off mentally. Or maybe you should; maybe the surprise of having passed when you thought you didn't is better than the shock of failing when you didn't think you would. (For the record, at least two of the people who failed weren't surprised.)

Having passed, we were all given a "conditional offer of employment," contigent on our passing a physical and drug screening. They take the drug screening seriously: both urinalysis and a hair sample. If you wouldn't pass a hair sample test you may want to just skip the entire process and find another job.

So far this process has been very quick. I can't say how long that will continue; I've been led to understand that the physical and drug test results can take some time to come back. So we shall see. I'll update on the physical after I've done that.

BMW Interview II

2011-10-14T17:37:00.002-04:00

So this morning I went to BMW to take Assessment I. Again, there wasn't a whole lot of info about this on the web, either, but it was better than the first interview.

There's a bit more dress code info given to you, although once again there was at least one guy there in ratty shoes and a T-shirt, and again I say to you, please, take yourself seriously. Just because they don't say you can't dress like you're homeless doesn't mean you should, it's a job interview for God's sake. People.

Anyway, you'll have to present your ID to a security guard to get into the building. Then you'll sit in a holding pen for about fifteen minutes or so staring vacantly at all the other people there. If you're lucky one of them might actually attempt to make conversation. If you're really lucky that person might be you. We were herded into the testing room exactly one minute early. They try to be timely.

The test is 100 questions long. The first 24 questions are sort of problem-solving questions, like what should you do if you're late for a meeting and running through the factory you see oil dripping out of a machine onto the floor. These are the sort of questions that have an ideal answer and some acceptable ones, and at least one that's clearly wrong. But they aren't hard. There's scratch paper provided but there are at most five questions that require any math at all and none requiring anything more complex than simple multiplication.

The next set are personality questions. There is a section of questions asking whether a given action would be likely to make safety and efficiency better or worse. And then finally are a handful of questions about work situations.

The test is not difficult. You cannot study for it. That said, a sixth of the people who took it failed and were not invited to continue the hiring process. One of them struggled to understand the concept of putting the test answer sheet into the test answer booklet to hand it in, repeatedly trying to put the answer sheet into the question booklet. She also stole the pen and pencil we were given. She didn't strike me as the sort of person I'd want to work with anyway. One of the others was the guy wearing the ratty T-shirt, so, again, I say, take yourself seriously or don't bother.

Afterward we were all told when we'd need to come back for the second assessment. I can't tell you anything about that one, since I haven't had it yet.

BMW Interview I

2011-10-14T16:09:00.002-04:00

So, I'm interviewing for a production position with BMW, which is just up the road a ways in Greer. They're hiring bunches of people. I'm hoping I get to be one of them, since it's certainly better than what I'm doing now, and pays better, and has benefits (not better benefits; it just plain has benefits, where what I'm doing now has nothing). But I wanted to get some inside scoop on the interview and the assessments and such and it was very very difficult to find anything on this here interweb about the BMW interview process.
So I thought I'd mention a few things about the BMW interview process in Greer (which is near Spartanburg and Greenville). And yes, I'm deliberately repeating myself so this will actually show up on search engines in case somebody else is looking.

Anywho.
So, they've got this system now where you apply on line through MAU; they have a separate section of the website just for BMW stuff, which is cool. I evidently filled out an application with them long enough ago that I don't remember, but it doesn't consist of much, mostly just basic work history and contact info. Then you get to schedule your own interview. This is quite awesome, especially if like me you currently have a job and can't skip work to do it. Earliest interview times are 8:30.

They have about 150 slots available for interviews but they aren't actually interviewing anywhere near that many people each day, so you'll probably be able to get the interview for the day after you apply and since there are at least four interviewers you should be able to get the timeslot you want without hassle.

What to wear? It would have been nice to find information about what to wear to the BMW interview with MAU (sorry, but this is how search engines work these days), so I figured, okay, it's a factory-floor job I'm going for here, I'm not going to do the coat and tie thing. But it's still an interview, and you should always overdress for a job interview. I wore my good black slacks and a long-sleeve dress shirt. I considered a tie but I just hate the things so much, so I skipped it.

I was far and away the most overdressed applicant in the office when I got there. Actually, I would say I was the most professionally dressed person in the office period; MAU is not a coat-and-tie sort of place. There were people there in jeans and t-shirts and ratty tennis shoes, no kidding. They may have been applying for positions with other companies, of course (MAU handles contracts other than just BMW, though I'd guess BMW probably provides about 60% of their business), but regardless, this was still an interview place, not a day-labor shop. (Ugh. I remember working at Labor Ready one summer when I was home from college. What a rotten job. I think there's actually a Labor Ready branch office here in Greenville, up in (surprise surprise) the hispanic section of town. I don't miss that.)

I would say you should probably wear khakis and a collared shirt. You want to look nicer than the real slobs there, but I was definitely overdressed. Clearly you could wear jeans and still pass the interview, but please. Take yourself seriously.

So the interview itself (the initial interview for a BMW production job with MAU in Greenville, Greer, or Spartanburg) is the easiest interview you'll ever go through. First they have you fill out a work history and contact information (including SSN) while you're waiting in the lobby. You'll take that paperwork in with you to the interview.

The interviewer will ask you if you'd be able to work any shift, any day of the week. The correct answer is yes. If you can't agree to that BMW doesn't want you and you don't want them. She'll ask if you have any scheduled time off in the next couple of months that you'll have to take--surgeries, weddings, that sort of thing. I mentioned that I hoped I'd get to take some vacation time at Christmas. This didn't seem to matter. She'll ask how many days you've missed from work without permission in the last three months. I misinterpreted this question and tried to account for sick days and the day I had to go to court, but of course I had permission for both of those. So I ended up saying two, which of course sounds like an awful lot to me, really; missing work without permission, that's Dollar General-cashier grade stuff. But obviously it wasn't bad enough to get me kicked out.

She also asked if I'd ever been convicted of any misdemeanors or felonies. To which of course I must answer yes because of the swimming incident in 2003. She started to write down what I was saying, got as far as the word "swimming," and then stopped me and said, "But you don't have anything major going on now, right?" So obviously a goofy misdemeanor several years old won't get you tossed out, either. I don't know how far you could push this; I doubt a single misdemeanor would knock you out, or even two or three if they were old. If you have a string of them maybe. I'm pretty sure you can get on there with a felony conviction if it was old and you haven't had any other issues.

And that was it. The very next question after the criminal history one was, can you attend the first assessment today at 11:30? Which I couldn't, I had to work, but I signed up for this morning instead. She seemed fine to push it until late next week if I had to, but if you're able to take a day off work and schedule an interview early you might be able to get interview and assessment out of the way in one shot.

Arab Spring

2011-09-01T20:20:00.002-04:00

The recent momentous events in Libya and Syria, as well as Egypt and Tunisia, have had me thinking of late. The Arab Spring seemed to have petered out there for a while, but now it looks as though Qaddafi is as good as done in Libya, and I get the feeling Bashar Assad cannot stay on long in Syria. But I got to thinking: why the long, dramatic pause?

And, having spent time in that part of the world in every season, I had a thought: what about the climate?

Winter in the Middle East can actually be very pleasant: highs are in the 80s, lows in the 70s, there's a constant breeze. It's not quite so awfully humid in those places that are awfully humid. During the summertime, on the other hand, it's horrendous. The Arabian Peninsula is completely unbearable, and most of north Africa is basically intolerable. During the day the wind blows constantly, like someone's holding a hairdryer in front of your face. At night, when the wind doesn't blow, it's like an oven. And within 10 miles of the coast there's 99% humidity any time the wind doesn't blow, or all night long, so even at night when the temperature is only in the 90s it's too awful to be outside. Given this reality, that the protests petered out as spring became summer doesn't surprise me at all.

What to make of the recent demonstrations in Syria and the rebel successes in Libya? This comes down to Ramadan. Now, Ramadan doesn't always occur in the summer (the Islamic calendar is lunar-based, so the months appear to precess compared to the Christian calendar), but it does always involve fasting and, at least in my experience, people react to this in one of two ways. Some seem to spend the entire day loafing and doing nothing but waiting to break the fast at sundown. Others seem to be extra-energetic, as if doing more will make them forget being hungry. In either case, and again this is just my experience, but during Ramadan regular work hours seem to fall by the wayside. I don't know if employers cut hours or what, but it's like a month-long siesta in some places. Why not go protest in the streets? Of course much protesting and fighting is being done at night in Syria, when the weather sucks less.

Ramadan, too, is the Muslim equivalent of Christmas, in the sense that it is a time of heightened spiritual awareness and attendance at religious services. Sure, those Muslims who attend a mosque where the imams preach the notion that good Muslims don't concern themselves with secular government probably aren't the one ones out in the streets; but there are probably many more who are going to the mosque and praying, thinking, and hearing about revolution. It makes sense to me that the holy month would see a greater awakening.

If my theory holds, then we might expect the Syrian demonstrations either to quiet down somewhat or hold steady--although they may also have developed uncheckable momentum, which would be no bad thing. And I would not expect any sudden new developments in new countries, including Algeria and Yemen and Bahrain, not yet. But, again if my theory holds, I do expect a fresh round of upheaval this winter, maybe starting as early as November. And I wouldn't be surprised to see it Algeria, in Yemen, again in Bahrain. I wouldn't be all that surprised to see it in Sudan. I would be surprised to see it in Qatar, or the UAE, or Oman, but Saudi Arabia, that remains the real question. If another three or four countries see successful revolutions this winter, it becomes a lot easier to look at Saudi Arabia--even at Iran--and wonder just how short those regimes' time remains.

Homemade Buttermilk

2011-08-21T09:46:00.003-04:00

If you're anything like me (and if you are, there are medications that can help), you love buttermilk in pancakes and biscuits, but find it absolutely vile by itself. Indeed, even if you've never used buttermilk in your baked goods because you find it vile by itself, then this is for you. Why? Simple: buttermilk pancakes are wonderful. Buttermilk biscuits are divine. Buttermilk makes quick breads better, that's all there is to say--you can use it in almost any quickbread recipe that calls for milk, although I don't know how it do in chocolate chip cookies.

But buttermilk doesn't last all that long in the fridge and, if you don't use it up, it just sits there and gets chunky and eventually turns into a cross between bad sour cream and rotten pumpkin, at which point you simply have to take it up to the police department and have the bomb disposal squad get rid of it because you can't open the bottle or it will kill you. And unless you bake biscuits every morning (and you don't, I know this), you can't use up the buttermilk.

But I have the solution for you! I learned this trick from Smitty-ex, The Former Lepidopterist (hereinafter TFL), who figured it out a couple years ago after a bomb-disposal situation with the buttermilk.

TFL is lactose-intolerant, like in fact the majority of humans (just not the majority of European-descended humans). But yogurt has no lactose (nor do aged hard cheeses, but that's another matter), and we found that a tub of plain fat-free yogurt was a good thing to keep in the house. You can substitute it almost one-for-one for sour cream and, except on quesadillas, you can't tell(we made stroganoff that way, and even though sour cream is supposedly what makes stroganoff stroganoff, I swear you would never know the difference). Well, she thought to herself one morning, why not try making biscuits with yogurt instead of buttermilk?

It worked beautifully. You get that same hint of sharpness the wonderful moist texture, but not only do you not have to keep buttermilk in the fridge, you can also avoid most of the fat by purchasing fat-free yogurt. They even make fat-free Greek yogurt now, which is what I used this morning for these biscuits.

Yes, that's right. I'm a straight bachelor and I bake biscuits. I never did this before I got married, but having got used to TFL's biscuits I find I can't go without them. So I had to learn to make the darn things myself. Of course I don't do it from scratch; I use Southern Biscuit premade biscuit mix, with yogurt-buttermilk (use about a 3:1 fat-free Greek yogurt to milk ratio, mixed together to a buttermilk consistency; regular plain yogurt (non-Greek) use about 7:1 yogurt:milk for consistency) and a couple tablespoons of flax meal*.

And there you have it. With homade jams and preserves (strawberry, apple butter, and Rainier cherry pictured here), you have a wonderful breakfast.

Of course keeping a tub of Greek yogurt in the fridge just to make buttermilk is kind of silly, although it does last substantially longer than buttermilk. But you can add a dollop or three of yogurt to almost any thin sauce once you bring it off the stove and you have a nice creamy sauce (I do this all the time with tomato sauces that seem thin; don't do it while it's still cooking though). It's wonderful stirred in to ratatouille, and you can make a quick raita with some chopped cucumber and mint (try this on the side next time you make a spicy dish; nothing cools the fire better). And honestly, it's a good mayonnaise alternative on sandwiches, especially if you're not real fond of mayo. (I haven't tried making tuna salad with it but now that I've thought about it I'll give it a go.)

*Flax meal is a great all-purpose baking ingredient to make unhealthy things seem a bit healthier. Basically it's ground up flax seed. Flax has all sorts of good things in it, particularly vitamin B1 and Omega-3 fats. It's relatively high in protein but not complete. Flax meal stores for several months at room temperature; just keep in a cupboard out of the light. A few tablespoons at a time mixed into any baked good provides no signicant textural or taste effects while significantly improving nutrition. I put it in everything: pancakes, waffles, cookies, biscuits, banana bread. I haven't baked yeast bread with it, mainly because I haven't baked yeast bread at all, but I intend to try.

NCAA Conference Realignment

2011-08-13T00:21:00.001-04:00

Recent talk of Texas A&M departing the Big XII for the SEC has me thinking. If they go, the SEC will have to invite another school, presumably one that could slip into the eastern division without violating sense. But then there's word that the SEC might want Oklahoma--the assumption being, obviously, that Texas is heading for independence, at least in football. I've heard FSU, Clemson, Louisville (really?) and Miami bandied about as possibilities to be A&M's doppelganger. Personally, I believe there's no way the SEC would be satisfied at 14 teams; for whatever reason the theory always seems to be that ultimately we'll have four 16-team "superconferences." I don't know why that should be so, why not 18? Why not 14? But that's the conventional wisdom. And it's got me to thinking. What would four 16-team superconferences look like? Which conferences would be the four?
Hypothetically...
The Big XII is done for. If A&M leaves, it's down to 9 teams; A&M only wants to leave because they suspect Texas is going to follow Notre Dame's lead and go independent. Then you'd be left with 7 teams that are only occasionally relevant nationally, and Oklahoma. So the Big XII is going to die.
That would leave either the Big East or the ACC as a conference that will either dissolve or become one of the four afterthought conferences (which would be made up of teams from the Mountain West, Sun Belt, MAC, WAC, and C-USA as well). I am a Clemson fan and therefore an ACC apologist, so it's easy for me to say the ACC would accrete four good teams and stay relevant and the Big East would dissolve or, more likely, take on some teams from C-USA or the Sun Belt.
But... the ACC does not impress me as being particularly forward-thinking. Last summer when we all thought the great realignment was about to begin, ACC commish John Swofford specifically said there were no plans to expand, nor any contingency for expansion. Which means, if A&M joins the SEC and the Big XII dissolves, the ACC is apparently planning to get caught on the outside while other conferences scramble to be among the Big Four. This would be disastrous for college basketball, but also for the teams that remain in the ACC. I hope very sincerely that there are more progressive voices in the ACC looking at how expansion to a 16-team conference could best be handled; indeed I hope there is a list of at least six schools that would be on the “immediate invitation” list should a major realignment kick off. But I doubt that’s the case.
Still, would the Big East really be able to poach teams from the ACC? It doesn’t seem likely, but say the SEC grabs (as examples) Clemson and FSU. Now the ACC is down to 10 teams. Either both the ACC and the Big East are going to poke along as conferences with too few teams to host a conference championship and with gradually decreasing relevance in the college football landscape, or one of the conferences poaches the other and joins the ranks of the superconferences. Would the ACC be willing to be progressive? Would the major basketball schools in the ACC be willing to move en masse to the Big East? Neither of those things seems particularly likely to me. The Big East is said to have had contingencies aplenty should major realignment have occurred last summer, so clearly they want to stay relevant. The ACC seems to simply think they can remain relevant because they’re just so damn awesome. That’s not a good place to be.
I really love the ACC, I do. But I’m a Clemson fan first, and an ACC homer second (actually I’m an Air Force fan second, and an ACC fan third, if we want to get down to it). If major realignment suddenly heaves into view this year, I sincerely hope the SEC asks Clemson to switch allegiances. As long as we can play NC State every year I’ll be satisfied; I’ll take Georgia over Georgia Tech, and I wouldn’t miss most of the other schools as rivals. I’d rather stay in an expanded ACC, make no mistake, but I have very little faith that the ACC would be quick enough to expand before the landscape changed so significantly we’d have to accept the likes of Texas State and Florida Atlantic to get to 16.
That said I’ve been wrong before and will be again. I hope I’m wrong now.
This brings me back to my original point, which was what four superconferences might look like. Why does being wrong bring me back to that point? Because I simply cannot conceive of four superconferences that include all the nationally relevant schools and make any sort of geographic sense. Four superconferences would include 64 schools. When I look out over the landscape I see 70 schools that could be relevant nationally in football (not that I’m saying they are or will be, but they could be) or are in any event not going to be left out of a realignment (such as Duke, Washington State, or Vanderbilt). Even if I assume Texas and Notre Dame remain/become independent, and add BYU to that list, I’m left with at least three decent schools on the outside looking in (maybe more depending on how generous you want to be), and a Pac-10/12/16 that is geographically unwieldy at best, unless they dumb down their admission requirements (the same is true for the Big Ten, but I see their additions as so obvious that they’d almost have to offer more wiggle room on academic standards).
Of course I’m mainly taking into account football here. If there is a quick realignment (when it comes I do think it will be quick), the NCAA will simply have to let things go until they can call a national conference to figure out how to handle the other sports—can a team be in a superconference for football but another conference for other sports? Can a team be part of a superconference for other sports but not for football? The answer, it seems to me, is that schools can realign into football-specific conferences, leaving the other conferences more or less untouched or, perhaps more realistically, allowing for some significant and probably geographically-based realignment for other sports in the aftermath.
This could, for example, allow us to leave Duke out of the superconferences for football, but have them remain in a somewhat reconstituted ACC for other sports. That said, it won’t happen that way; that would require advance planning, and when this realignment occurs it won’t be done with any advance planning. Existing conferences will conclude they must either go super or become irrelevant, and they’ll make a mad grab for whatever schools they can get.
What this means is that we’ll have a situation where some schools that are never relevant in football, such as Duke, or indeed ever relevant in any sport, such as Mississippi State, are going to be in superconferences, and other schools that simply couldn’t convince one of the majors to let them in, like Boise State, will be left on the outside. Which means we’ll be left with exactly the same situation we have now with the BCS—several relevant programs that can’t get the time of day, and a bunch of programs with no business being in automatic-bid conferences.
So, frankly, I’m not exactly looking forward to superconferences. They’re just a different form of the same sort of bad that we have now.
Anyway.
So we assume the SEC is going to kick this off, and that they’ll do so with Texas A&M. Okay. I’ll take that as my starting point. I’ve heard from Tallahassee that the SEC isn’t interested in FSU; I’ve also heard that they are interested in Oklahoma. Why would they want Oklahoma but not FSU? Market share is the only possible reason, and if market share is all that matters, they’ll be adding OU, Oklahoma State (like in VA, the governor won’t let the schools split up), and probably Missouri along with A&M. That said, Larry Scott over in the Pac-12 has said he’s interested in inviting Oklahoma if the Big XII starts to dissolve, and Oklahoma might be more interested in the Pac-12 than the SEC for competitiveness reasons. Larry Scott is the smartest conference commish out there, and he won’t be caught on the backpedal when this starts to break.
I figure, if the SEC is starting this, and they’re more interested in markets and money than anything else, then that will be what defines how the realignment occurs. And so on that basis I came up with the following:
SEC:
Florida
Georgia
South Carolina
Tennessee
Kentucky
Vanderbilt
Alabama
Auburn
Mississippi
Mississippi State
Louisiana State
Arkansas
Texas A&M
Missouri
Louisville
West Virginia

No, it’s not anybody’s ideal picture, but I look at it this way. A&M is first. Larry Scott swoops in and picks up Oklahoma and Ok State. If they don’t want FSU, they wouldn’t want Clemson, either, and Clemson may not be so eager to dash to the SEC—the pro-academic slant of the ACC is important here, as this is a school that wants to be one of the top-rated public schools in the country. Since the president has to approve a move, not the AD, is Jim Barker going to be more interested in hanging out with the likes of Duke, UVA, UNC, and Boston College, or with Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi State?
So, Clemson stays in the ACC. With the Oklahoma schools gone, the SEC has to look either farther west (Texas Tech, which is in Lubbock (a city of 250,000) and has no national following), or somewhere to the north. Louisville is at least in a bigger city and locks in the entire state of Kentucky (WKU is a blip, economically). West Virginia doesn’t embarrass anybody academically (either way) and is the only relevant school in the state since Randy Moss left Marshall; plus the fans travel well. That leaves an opening in the west, and Missouri is the obvious choice. They’ve been spurned once by the Big Ten, so they’ll be happy to take an invite from the SEC (well, why wouldn’t they?), and the SEC gets to add Missouri to its empire. Works out well all around, I’d say.

This leaves us with a Pac-14 that includes Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, and is looking for two more schools. In the past, the Pac-10 made a point of only being willing to talk to schools with high academic ratings. This is nonsense. Oregon State and Arizona State compare academically with Mississippi and Mississippi State, and Oregon, Arizona, and Washington State aren’t on any top 10 lists. Plus, the Pac-10 went out and grabbed Utah, ranked 129th, but spurned BYU, ranked 75th. Why? Because BYU isn’t exactly West Coast when it comes to mentality, if you know what I mean.
And anyway, they’re getting Oklahoma and Ok State, which rank higher than Arizona State but don’t exactly help the conference average. Still, they want to get some good academic schools, but we’ve seen they don’t care for BYU. Let’s help them out. In the entire rest of the western United States, the only schools academically in the top 100 (per US News, which is an awful ranking but also the only credible one) are Baylor, TCU (99), Southern Methodist, the Air Force Academy, and (get this) Tulsa, which is ranked higher academically than either of the other Oklahoma schools.
What to do, what to do. Tulsa is at least near the Oklahomas; the Academy is near Colorado, which might be nice. The Academy probably wouldn’t pass muster as far as being a research university goes, though it would be worth investigating. Can’t be sure they’d accept the invitation, either, though they’d be the highest ranked academically of the bunch. Larry Scott likes the idea of picking the Oklahoma schools, which add nothing academically but raise the national profile athletically and stretch the conference geographically. If it was me, I’d invite Air Force and Tulsa, but I suspect the Pac-14 takes a look at their options and decides to go for academic value. That would be Southern Methodist (56) and Baylor (79). As it happens, those schools are nearby one another but stretch the conference again. Thus we have the new Pac-16:
Washington
Washington State
Oregon
Oregon State
Cal
Stanford
UCLA
USC
Arizona
Arizona State
Colorado
Utah
Oklahoma
Oklahoma State
Southern Methodist
Baylor

Of course, it may be another year after this before the eastern conferences decide it’s a matter of expand or die. As it happens, these conferences consider academics very important, too—in fact, the average ranking of the schools in these conferences is significantly better—by 20 points or more—than the ranking of the current Pac-12, and the ACC is ahead of the Big Ten.
By this point, the old Big XII is down to four schools, three of them in the Midwest. You can bet Kansas, Kansas State, and Iowa State will be desperate to join the Big Sixteen. The governor of Iowa will probably get involved. Academically these schools do not help the Big Ten, but it’s worth pointing out that the Big Ten decided not to invite Missouri, ranked 94th, but did invite Nebraska, ranked 104th. Well, Kansas is also 104; Iowa State is also 94. Might as well bring them both, and K State should come along for the ride. At this point they need an academic school. They could beg and plead with Notre Dame, but I’ll assume Notre Dame will be staying independent. They could try for Connecticut, say, but there are two better-ranked schools closer by: Pittsburgh and Syracuse. (For that matter, Miami of Ohio ranks well, but Buckeye Nation would never tolerate a second Ohio school in the conference.) That said, Connecticut is a big get for whatever conference gets it—and if the Big Ten moves faster than the ACC, we’d have this Big Midwest conference:
Kansas
Kansas State
Nebraska
Iowa
Iowa State
Minnesota
Wisconsin
Northwestern
Illinois
Michigan
Michigan State
Purdue
Indiana
Ohio State
Penn State
Connecticut

This leaves us with the ACC, which I have to hope will have started to move before the Big Midwest consolidates. Academic standards are key here, and a good basketball program is probably at least as important as football, if not moreso. Several of the choices are obvious. Also, since the ACC would be the slowest conference to move, my revised and updated ACC looks like this:
Boston College
Pittsburgh
Syracuse
Rutgers
Maryland
Virginia
Virginia Tech
Wake Forest
Duke
UNC
NC State
Clemson
Georgia Tech
Florida State
USF
Miami

The only real trip here is USF, which has a rather bad ranking in US News. But they do bring the Tampa Bay area along, and the school’s athletic teams have been improving markedly over the last decade. Alternatives could include U Mass, which will be just joining FBS and is a second school in Boston; Navy, which brings a national audience and good academics but erratic athletic performance and may not take the invitation; Villanova, which would have to upgrade their football program but at least brings good basketball and stellar academics; and perhaps Tulane or Rice, both of which would be good academic fits but lousy geographic ones and don’t have huge fan bases in their cities. (Not that Houston would be a bad market to have.)

This leaves a number of schools on the outside looking in. Notre Dame, BYU, and Texas I assume would be independent, along with the military academies. I suspect Boise State might try independence as well, rather than join a revamped Mountain West with the likes of Idaho, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Texas Tech, too, loses out in this design—as would USF, if they were left on the sidelines while Rice joined the ACC. Cincinnati, too, has no home.
I don’t know. It’s quite possible that none of this will happen, that Texas A&M is just using the SEC to extract concessions from Texas, and this will all peter out and we’ll keep the status quo for some years yet. I have my doubts, though. The theory goes that superconferences are more or less inevitable. This is what I suspect it would look like when the dust settled, but it’s by no means what I think would be the best solution.

Comments, anyone?

Technique?

2011-07-05T18:49:00.003-04:00

I have purchased a new braising pot, primarily for the purpose of making things like ratatouille and gumbo, for which neither non-stick nor cast iron are appropriate. It's a very nice flameware ceramic pan (pictures will probably follow, once I make something in it worth photographing). Made in France, and the booklet was translated amusingly from French. So I'm not 100% certain I'm doing this right, but the instructions for seasoning it before use are to boil a small amount of milk in it for 3 minutes.

What?

A perfect meal

2011-06-14T21:09:00.002-04:00

Leaving work this evening I was thinking about how I didn’t want to cook dinner. I thought I’d just be lazy and grab some Chinese on the way home, but as it turns out the only Chinese restaurant on the way home is a regular sit-down type of place, not takeout.

I was going to try to find another one, but instead I just made the turn to come home to the apartment complex. I came in, had no idea what to do for dinner; the only meat I have thawed is some chicken I already have plans for (which require a day sitting with a spice rub, which I forgot to do this morning), and I can’t open a can of chickpeas or black beans to do vegetarian because I still haven’t bought a can opener.

I opened the freezer. There’s shrimp in there. Shrimp thaw fast. I got some out and put them in the strainer basket, sprayed warm water on them for a moment, then hopped in the shower. When I got out, I decided I could use up the mushrooms, and the last of that bottle of Chilean chenin blanc I’ve been enjoying, and have it over pasta.

I also took note of the capers and parmesan cheese in the fridge. I shelled the shrimp (Schrodinger ate one of the shells; the rest went into a sack in the freezer marked “seafood scraps for stock”), cut up the mushrooms and the rest of an onion, and time slowed down and I just dropped into the moment. I enjoy cooking a great deal, the smells, the activity, it’s wonderful. But I do like to have someone to cook for. It’s one of the many things I miss.

I used to cook for her a lot, almost every night. Sometimes I’d ruin a meal but, early on, that wasn’t a big deal. I enjoyed cooking for her that much more simply because I was doing it for her.

And gradually, gradually, it started to drop off. I didn’t cook as often. We’d both come home late and neither one of us feel like cooking (just like I didn’t “feel like cooking” tonight, but enjoyed it anyway once I started). I started to feel worse about occasionally flubbing a meal or just not making the right one. Portions became a concern. Mornings would go by and I would forget to set anything out to thaw.

She kept saying we needed to plan meals, and we occasionally succeeded at that, but it was the marital ‘we’ and I’ve never really been good at that kind of thing, so I never got into meal planning. It was one of many ways I felt I disappointed her. She suggested we didn’t even need to really plan every single week, just come up with a general idea—pizza on Thursday, fish on Friday—to at least make things easier. That would be simple enough, but again, we never followed through.

Towards the end it felt like we cooked at best half our meals. I know it was more than that but between leftovers and eating out I probably only cooked two or three dinners a week. It was just one of many things that stopped when the marriage started to fall apart—well, when the falling apart accelerated there in last few months.

When we separated I hadn’t made two of my most consistent and popular dishes (chicken marsala, and gumbo) in months. It seemed like dinner—and every meal on the weekends—was just another problem, not a chance to be creative, to have fun, to do something for my wife. Just another problem. By the end, everything felt like that.

I wasn’t willing to admit it, but I guess she was right: I was miserable. She didn’t make me that way, though (she says otherwise); I think it’s just something I do. I won’t ever acknowledge when I am because I don’t want to burden anyone—and I especially don’t want to burden her when I've already disappointed her by failing to plan for or make dinner.

I managed to have all these thoughts before the shrimp were cooked. Dinner was delicious. I wish I had someone to share it with—but I also wonder if I can ever be as happy sharing it as I am eating it alone. To me, it was fun to make and wonderful to eat (and the half-glass of wine I didn't use to cook went with it very nicely). I want to share those emotions with her. But what happens is that instead of enjoying the process of making it, and enjoying eating it, and enjoying sharing it, I share it, and worry about whether or not it’s good enough. I lose my own enjoyment in my fear of disappointing the person I want to share with.

Of course early in the relationship that wasn’t a problem—I was excited enough by the prospect of having someone to share my life with that I wasn’t nearly so concerned about disappointing her, so if I flubbed a meal or said something stupid, I didn’t fixate on it. But it didn’t take very long, just a few years, for that joy of sharing life to become a burden of trying to make sure everything I did for her was perfect.

She never asked me to be perfect. She didn’t need me to be perfect. But because I could not be perfect, I assumed I was a disappointment, and drifted farther and farther from the goal.

Phase III

2011-05-31T10:00:00.003-04:00

This blog is now entering the third phase of its existence, as I am entering the third phase of my own existence (at least since starting the blog). I do not know what the third phase of the blog will entail, if indeed it entails anything at all. Perhaps I will make regular posts. Perhaps I will not. It will become obvious in a couple months, I should think.

Previous posts to this one constitute the first two phases, which, if I can figure out how to do it, I will eventually condense into single archives. If I can. If not then I guess the archive list over there on the sidebar just gets really really long. So be it.

Things have changed, as in life they will, for both good and ill, largely through our own actions (regardless of how it feels at the time). I am about as dissatisfied as I ever was, because life is dissatisfying. At this specific time of my life I find that piyehi vippayogo dukkho, separation from the beloved is dissatisfying. But as I said things happen largely through our doing, because all that we control in life is our reaction to external events, and it is our reactions--not the external events--that determine the course of our life. External events force us to change, and change, as much as dukkha, is the fundamental nature of existence. So has change been thrust upon me; I do not yet know what course I will take in response. But this was something that was important to me at one time, and perhaps would be beneficial now.

The foregoing was supposed to be a brief statement of, things have changed, but I'm not going to go through the litany. If you know me you know, if you don't, you'll discover it over time.

2011-02-04T15:51:00.001-05:00

Recalculating...

23 July

2010-07-23T10:01:00.000-04:00

Today I brought in our first figs. Which seems quite late, to me, although I only really have one season to go by. Seems to me the fig harvest had come and gone by this time last year, but I can't remember. Regardless of how early or late they are, the trees are full, and we should have fresh figs for a couple of weeks now. I never much cared for Fig Newtons or similar things, but a fresh fig and a dried one are about as similar as a grape and a raisin. Fresh off the tree, they're tender, sweet, and oddly cool in the middle, and as they don't keep well fresh off the tree is the best way to eat them.

It's a particularly hot and relatively dry summer so far, and although the beginning of next week now looks to have some chance for rain, showers have skirted us just about every chance they've had. In July we've received not quite half an inch of rain; combined with daily highs that have never been below 92 and often near 100, everything on the farm is dry. The "lawn" such as it is is quite brown; the vegetable beds get watered every day (way too often, frankly) so they don't dry out, but even at that our cucumbers and melons are showing the signs of water stress--fat on one end, misshapen and lumpy on the other. The cukes make fine pickles whatever they look like, but it would be nice to get consistent rain. Something about rain manages to keep everything watered and happy so much better than water from the hose.

Unfortunately with the heat and drought (a very localised drought; the airport up the road and the high school in town both have received over two inches of rain this month) the young trees are suffering, too. We lost the magnolia this month, and the Halesia (I can't recall what the common name is anymore, silverbell or snowbell or something) has died back to the ground--although it still has two live shoots at ground level so I'm holding out hope. I've built little earthen dams around the trees that are out of range of the hose (baldcypress and red maple), and both seem fine for now. The dogwood up by the driveway has been showing serious signs of stress but I water it most days now and it's looking better. To my great joy the two weeping cherries I put in for Smittywife both look happy.

A larger problem is the orchard. I can reach every tree in the orchard with the hose and water them every other day, which is acceptable but in the long run (that is to say, after this season) I need irrigation. Irrigation is expensive, and I'll have to do the work myself. I just need someone to donate some pvc pipe and maybe a well pump. I'd apply for a USDA grant... if I could figure out whether they even offer such things. Their website is a total nightmare. Perhaps I should just call the local office, if there is one. Or perhaps I should just stay out of the USDA's way; last thing I need is someone tramping by to look over the chicken coop and decree my eggs not clean enough to sell. (Good thing we give them away.)

Now it's off to cut back the flower garden (the cosmos have mostly flowered and died, leaving a forest of four foot tall sticks amid a riot of crabgrass) and try to find a long enough piece of 2x4 to finish the railing on the back stoop. Late shift tonight at work.

A thought

2010-06-25T13:08:00.000-04:00

I want to have a blog. But I clearly have not been blogging (despite having one). I don't know why that is, or whether it matters. It's not that I want to be "a blogger," which I don't think carries any special cachet. It's more a case of, I want some place to dump comments about life, and maybe provide a public forum to motivate myself. If I say I want to do X, and I'm going to write about it on the blog by Y date, then I have that hanging over me. I can't let myself be embarrassed, right?

Then again, maybe motivation should be more readily available within than that. But if it isn't there's no sense throwing away an opportunity.

But I've also started writing again on two fiction projects, and I spend little enough time on that already. Part of my problem with blogging is that I spend so much time on a typical post it eats up time I could use more productively on other writing projects. This is all worth pondering. Fortunately I have a wonderful vacation with Smittywife coming up (starts tomorrow!), during which I can ponder all I like. And there will be pictures to post when I get back, so I can do that, and then see where it goes.

Lettuce!

2010-04-18T10:55:00.000-04:00

Gardening is an activity requiring at times extraordinary patience. Really, growing anything requires patience, but sometimes it' tough to wait. We've had the pea plants in the bed outside since early March and only in the last two days have we finally gotten a flower. We'll probably be swimming in peas before too long, but it's already the latter half of April. We wanted peas last month. But we must wait.

That makes lettuce maybe the easiest and most fun thing to grow. Leaf lettuce in particular you can harvest a month after planting, sometimes sooner. Here is our first major haul.

We have three lettuce blends (they sell lettuce mixes in packets these days, which is nice, since there are about 100 kinds and you don't want to buy dozens of seed packets and try to mix them). One is still out in the pea bed awaiting harvesting (the arugula bolted to seed already, it's barely been out there five weeks), and this is our master chef blend. We don't know what's in it, but it's tasty. Made salad last night with a selection of leaves, and today, in order to resow our hot-season lettuce blend, we went ahead and pulled all of these out. Rinsed and stored in a plastic bag in the fridge they'll last as long as any salad mix from the store, but this here represents about a dime's worth of lettuce seed instead of two or three $3.79 bags of lettuce. Sweet!

Spring!

2010-04-17T17:02:00.000-04:00

Spring is, apart from the clouds highly allergenic pollen, a glorious time of the year. Though my favorite season has always been autumn, it's tough to find much bad to say about spring. This year we've had some lovely flowers--including the forsythia that has become the new top image. I thought I'd just go post a whole bunch of flower pictures, because who couldn't use some color?

Early in the spring we get these little flowers in the yard. All over the yard. What they are I can't say, as it's difficult to even identify the plant they're coming out of. But they are rather charming.

Most years, daffodils (and jonquils, which I cannot tell apart) are one of the harbingers of spring. These here grow in the ditch down by the road, oddly enough, though some folks have them all over the yard. This year everything bloomed almost simultaneously, so the daffodils had to share the spotlight.

Last year I dug up a wild violet that was growing in area I wanted to till up for the garden. I planted it in our flower bed by the house. This spring it was one of the first plants to flower, and what do you know, it's a white violet. How cool! It's one of only a couple in the yard.

Most violets are, of course, violet. These are growing on the hillside between the fig tree and the car ramps. There are violets all over the yard, as they like the shade, but last spring (2008 was very dry) most of them didn't bloom. This year we were treated to a real show.

We bought some native blueberries this year, and--hooray!--they've bloomed. Such cute little flowers, though I do wonder how they get pollinated.

Parts of the yard are full of wild strawberries. They have very cute little flowers, but I have no idea whether we'll get fruit from them. Still, it's nice to have the chance.

In a normal year, these crocusses (or whatever they are) would bloom earlier than most other flowers. This year, they're one of the latest things to start blooming. Early or late it hardly matters when you get these little stars coming up in the yard for free.

This is a native columbine Smittywife planted last year. We got a bloom or two out of it, but wow is it happy this year.

This is a wallflower. We put two or three of these plants in the flower garden last year. They were nice--the flowers open creamy yellow, and as they age they go through peach and pink to lavender. That in and of itself is fun enough, but the plants just took hold and grew all year, and the one of them, this year, is huge, and covered in blooms. We keep meaning to buy more of these because they clearly like it here. We bought two of the multicolored one here, and they've been blooming for almost a solid month now--and should continue right through summer. We also bought one bright orange one, which I like, but which isn't as healthy. However, through some quirk of genetics, there is one bright orange flower on this plant.

Right now, the stars of the yard are our azaleas, which ring an old oak stump next to the driveway. And of course, the two happy dogs, they're stars, too.

The pink azaleas bloom a week before the white ones. Who knows why? But it does mean that there's only a matter of a few days when you get both in bloom at once. Aren't they nice?

What more is there to say? I'm tragically allergic to azaleas--I mean, really bad. But even I would gladly take more of these.

I close with this close-up of the flowers. Such beauty in such profusion--and for such a short time. Part of why spring and fall are such wonderful seasons is their fleeting nature. Just for a couple of weeks we get display, but it's worth waiting the entire rest of the year for.

A Period of Time

2010-04-13T07:55:00.000-04:00

Okay, let's see here.
I got sick and wasn't able to go to a checkride.
I decided I needed to take time off to figure out what was going wrong viz flying.
I dived into garden/farm work, building vegetable beds, sprouting seeds, tilling the orchard by hand, planting roses, all sorts of things.
I realized that was really all I wanted to do anyway, but you can't earn a living doing it.
Then spring came.
We put all the seeds out, and I spent the next week trying to save them from the hottest spring on record (highs approached 90 in the days after the seedlings went into the ground). Nonetheless many of them scorched badly, and we lost several, although those have since been replaced and the ones that survived seem to be doing well enough.
I continued building additional vegetable beds until I ran out of compost and topsoil, and we still have several plants that I haven't put in the ground yet for lack of a place to put them. (More work is required here.)
I sought help for my self-sabotaging ways.
We acquired several baby chicks (mostly Ameraucanas) and continue raising them.
I agreed to re-interview for a job I was offered two years ago; the interview in a couple of weeks.
We went to the zoo on a day off and had a lovely time.
We joined friends for a fun night out ruined by incompetent restaurant management.
We watched some people on Spring Break decide to slide down a waterfall, nearly break bones, and then try to avoid getting arrested (only unlike when something similar happened to me several years ago, the signs prohibiting this were clearly posted).
We reveled in the beauty of Spring.

There. I blogged about it. Now, apart from the spring flower pictures, we can move into the present.

Spring has Sprung!

2010-03-31T14:30:00.000-04:00

So much has been going on lately on the farm I haven't actually had time to blog! What kind of a farm blog is this, huh? But I have pictures and stuff, finally, and perhaps tomorrow or this afternoon I'll actually get some posts written. I promise!

Health Care Overhaul Passes; Glum Republicans Note Failure of World to End

2010-03-22T12:11:00.000-04:00

Film at eleven.
I'm not exactly thrilled with the legislation, but it's a starting point. The next administration, perhaps, will take a better approach to reform, namely, fixing problems one at a time instead of trying to cobble together a massive bill that requires satisfying everyone in order to pass. We shall see.

This morning I went to purchase a monitor cable at my local electronics store. The sales clerk and a customer were having an agreement discussion. Both were clearly birthers. The customer even seemed to think the president was in fact the antichrist, though he was a bit confused about what all this meant. Clearly Obama was attempting to destroy the United States (really?), but he seemed to believe his election had been bought--by George W. Bush. Huh? To make himself look good, perhaps, but these people, sometimes they think Bush is Christ in the second coming, so maybe he funded the election of the antichrist in order to hasten armageddon. I don't know.

I love my farm. I like the area we live in, the neighborhood and the region. But there are some people here who I just wish would stay indoors, or better yet join together in a cult-commune and leave everyone else alone. It isn't that I don't like people who disagree with me; that would be most people. Disagreement is healthy. It's the people who are so full of hate and so desperate to justify themselves that they'll grasp at any ridiculous straw to validate their hatred. There seem to be more such people about these days than I'm used to, so I suppose the cult-commune would would have to be very large, but there are large tracts of open land in Kansas and Nebraska that are almost entirely depopulated. Loving County, Texas, has less than 50 people, that would be a great place for the commune. They could even secede, if they wanted. There are already buildings and stuff there, unoccupied. It could be the New Israel.

I think I'm going to go print up some brochures.

VI - Ain't That America

2010-03-22T10:58:00.000-04:00

The foregoing fears aside, this is still America. We beat the Nazis. We beat the communists. People have been predicting the imminent doom of America’s global leadership at least since 1989, and certainly all through the Cold War before that. America is, as I said, an entrepreneurial society. We are terrifically well-educated (even if it is sometimes rational for voters to remain ignorant of policy) and creative, and we have solved a tremendous number of large, intractable problems in our nation’s history. If any country can get out of the mess I think we’re in, it’s us.

I don’t know how it’s going to happen. I expect to be surprised by it when it does. And I expect that it will involve sacrifice from all sectors of society, from everyone equally. I may take a dim view of the Baby Boom’s self-absorption, but I don’t think it’s a lost cause.

Still, I feel fairly specific about what’s wrong and what could happen if we do nothing. I have no specifics about why I still ought to have hope. But without hope we have nothing at all, a society around us full of sound and fury and empty of any definable meaning. And like I said, this is America. I hope we will be able to fix our problems—after all, it’s just debt. It’s just money, money we don’t have to spend, really. We can handle this one. But it’s going to require a lot of people to grow up. We need to find rational reasons for voters to pay more attention. We need to remind people that the stakes are very high for our government. And we have to get people to try to work together to solve this one overarching problem. And then, when it’s done, we can offer ourselves congratulations, slap each other the back, and go right back to yelling at each other on television. It shouldn’t be too hard.

Bok Choy! Garden beans!

2010-03-21T14:00:00.001-04:00

That's it! I'm tired of waiting. The low Tuesday morning is predicted for 37, coldest day on the extended forecast. So once it warms up above 40 that morning, I'm setting the bok choy out in the garden beds. I don't know which bed, but I'm setting it out I say. And since it will be ready in about a month, I plan to enjoy delicious bok choy starting in May. It will be among the first things we get out of the garden (lettuce, and perhaps peas, will beat it to the table).

We are now looking into some shallot and garlic sets, because we can't find shallots anywhere in the entire upstate any more. If they do well, next year I'll plant a quarter acre of the things and sell them!

V - Fear of Inertia

2010-03-21T10:55:00.000-04:00

What concerns me most is that on the small things, Congress seems able to pull together and pass legislation, but on major initiatives there are simply too many political points to be scored, and too many people will claim to be motivated by the pureness of their ideals which prevent them from supporting any form of compromise. And the things that matter right now for this country—the thing that matters—is so big, we’ll never find the collective political will to get it done.

We must reform the entitlement system. We have to, because if don’t, it will bankrupt us. And if it doesn’t bankrupt us, it will be because the few remaining workers in this country—my generation and the next one—are being taxed at 80% of their incomes to pay for them. Neither of these options is acceptable.

If the United States defaulted on its sovereign debt, it would plunge the globe into complete economic chaos. If we decide that we’re just going to pay out social security as planned to every baby boomer starting when they turn 65—and they’re all going to live into their 80s—we simply can’t come up with that money. I’m fairly certain global financial entities would prevent an actual sovereign default, but at severe cost both to the United States and to the global economic system. And who would stump up, anyway? Europe has the same pension and health care funding problems we do, and China already funds much of our sovereign debt. They may not want a default but at what point are the Chinese (and others) going to decide, okay, we’ll bail you out, but you have to do give us something in return? What would that something be? That’s what I fear.

I often think the nation-state model of global political organization is going to fall by the wayside during my lifetime—by the time I’m retiring I suspect the notion of a “distributed republic” won’t be a cyberpunk fantasy. The collapse of the U.S. government over failure to meet pension- and health care-related debt obligations would probably help push the nation-state model over the edge. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, but for me personally and my family and friends, who live here, that’s a bit of a concern.

I just don’t know where the political will is going to come from to confront legions of social security and medicare recipients who grew up in a country that assured them they’d have a golden retirement parachute and tell them, you know what, we screwed up and we can’t pay you what we said we would. But it’s what we have to do. Social Security was supposed to be a safety net to prevent indigence among the elderly, particularly those elderly without other family who could support them. Instead it has become a guaranteed income—an income that most recipients think should be bigger, not smaller. The notion of families supporting elderly relatives has fallen entirely by the wayside, except in those cases where an ailing parent needs full-time care. Time was old folks lived with a child or other relative. Of course, people also didn’t live to the age of 85, either. But then, when Social Security was enacted, it was assumed that most people wouldn’t actually cash out of it—most workers would pass on by the age of 70, and those few who lived beyond that age would be balanced out by those who didn’t live to collect anything. The system no longer works that way, but then again, the system doesn’t work.

But this demographic time bomb has been ticking for thirty years, and the generation that stands both to benefit most from, and bankrupt the country from, the entitlement system has been in control of the levers of power since at least 1994. Not only has nothing been done to reform the system, the one time an attempt was made it was by a president who had no political capital to spend and couldn’t even get his own party to put a reform idea on the table, much less vote for one. (It’s the only thing I respect George W. Bush for, floating the idea of entitlement reform in 2005. It took guts, but he had very little to lose at that point; when he took office his popularity was already below 50% and voters were suffering buyers’ remorse.) If any one group deserves significant blame it’s the late 1990’s Clinton administration and GOP Congress, who had the best of times to work in—fat corporate profits, rising GDP and wages, the appearance of being able to accomplish major political action—and did less than nothing, didn’t even discuss the notion of entitlement reform. If we couldn’t find the will to start talking about it then, why would anyone think we’ll be able to deal with the problem in harder times?

I fear generational conflict—not so much armed conflict, though criminal conflict is possible, but a genuine political division between those benefiting from the entitlement system and those paying for it at tremendous cost to themselves. Any reform of the entitlement system is going to mean significantly less benefits for my generation and those to follow; that’s a given and one most of my generation accepts. So, since we know what the problem is, and we know we’ll have to sacrifice to fix it, the question is, will we be able to convince the baby boomers to accept any sacrifices themselves. Because if not, we’re doomed to fail. If the baby boomers won’t let us reform social security and medicare and cut their entitlements and the benefits they’ll receive, we will not solve this problem. The government may not fall—forces around the world would work to stop that—but that list of things I said I think government should be doing? Those will all fall by the wayside. Every dime spent will have to go to pensions and health care, and then, when my generation finally retires to a lower standard of living than our parents, the country will still be so mired in debt it will take at least another generation before we can start spending money on actual appropriate government activities again.

The entitlement system may not actually bankrupt the United States. But it will cause the U.S. to lose its position as the leading power in the world. I for one think we need to be fighting to keep that position, for our own good as well as the world’s; that means we have to fix our debt problem; and that means, like it or not, we have to cut middle class entitlements, cut them now, and cut them deep. And that, my friends, I don’t believe will ever happen.

191

2010-03-20T08:40:00.000-04:00

I counted this morning. There are 191 seedlings in the house. Of course that includes some flowers and herbs, not just vegetables, but still, that's a lot of plants. And there are seeds, too--carrots, parsnips, and beans--that will be sown into the ground directly.
I'm targeting next Saturday as planting day. Smittywife will be home, the weather should be nice, and the extended forecasts will go through April 5. If there's no frost on the horizon then I think we'll be ready to plant. These poor seedlings, they're so ready to go outside! All 191 of them!

Hard Work

2010-03-19T17:53:00.000-04:00

My goodness I'm going to be sore for the next few days.
So we have an orchard, out back behind the garage. I call it an orchard; right now it's actually only seven trees, five apples and two peaches. I call it an orchard as a sort of inspiration; in three or four years' time I see twenty plus trees extending down the hillside from the current orchard. But there's a lot of work between now and then.
When we bought the property, the land that is now the orchard was completely overgrown. A large nearby pecan tree had spread pecan saplings throughout the area, and those were mixed in with an assortment of small junipers and scrubby deciduous trees, one large old Bradford Pear (aka the Chinese Stinking Pear, Pyrus calleryana), vast stands of pokeweed, and a dense collection of broadleaved weeds, and the whole thing was overgrown with vines of all kinds: honeysuckle, poison ivy, greenbriar, and some sort of bramble that doesn't seem to produce actual blackberries. Last spring I rented a huge brushmower and, together with some friends, we cut all this crap down. There was a black willow back there, the only willow on the property, and we cut down trees and mowed weeds and hacked through brush until we reached the willow tree. This gave me about enough room to plant seven trees.
Of course we didn't cut down all the pecans, because we weren't sure what to do with the area yet. And those we did cut down sprouted from the stumps--as did the horrible pear, which was covered in half-inch thorns, more like spikes than thorns. I tried to keep the area mowed down to a reasonable level with my brushcutter, but it was a war of gradual attrition and I was never going to get ahead of the vines. The weeds and such I could handle; the vines I wanted gone, but a brushcutter won't cure that problem.
Then this December Smittywife and I broke down and bought six fruit trees: two peaches (an Elberta and a Belle of Georgia), two Yates apples, and two Arkansas Black apples (my favorite variety, although the Yates are terrific). They were five bucks each so it was tough to resist (we bought two blueberries at the same time, but they're in a different part of the yard). I planted all six trees in what I've begun calling the orchard (later we picked up a seventh, an Ein Shemer apple, which is an Israeli variety bred for drier weather), and mowed the area down with the brushcutter. But all those vines were still there.
Now it's getting to be time for us to set vegetables out, and despite having built six garden beds I've realized we don't have enough space to set out all our seedlings and sow some vegetables from seed, in particular bush beans (which I would like to have a lot of). I thought, why not till up the soil in the orchard and plant the beans in between the trees? Beans are good for the soil, and there's no soil in this yard that couldn't use some help. But oh, the vines. As soon as it warms sufficiently (it's already started), the honeysuckle will take over back there, and the poison ivy and bramble won't be far behind. Then there'll be the late-summer explosion of Sida rhombifolia, a weed which wouldn't be that bad if there wasn't so damn much of it.
The only way to handle this is to get rid of all the vines, which means pulling them out by the roots. This is hard under any circumstances (especially with bramble), but even tougher in heavy clay soils like we have here. And no matter how hard I tried I wouldn't get all of it. The only thing to do is till.
A tiller, however, is not something I own. Nor is it something I care to rent for the price they charge, and buying one, at over $500 (it has to be a rear-tine tiller or it will just skip off the clay), is out of the question. I have a pickaxe, though, and I've used it to plant most of the trees in the yard, and some of the roses, and to dig up the flowerbeds we put in last year. The flat blade of the pickaxe really breaks up the clay, and cuts through any roots or vines in the way.
And it only weighs about four pounds, so it's not heavy.
Until you've swung it for an hour straight into heavy clay and tree roots. I'm finally getting through all the roots from those pecans (and the evil pear) we cut down, so maybe they won't sprout again this year, but that takes some doing. And being sure I've cut through all the vines down to the roots, that takes some doing as well.
In three days I've managed to get about a quarter of the orchard tilled, maybe a third. It will be next week before I'm done. I may need more Aleve.
But you know, there's something wonderful about wearing yourself out doing physical labor. I feel so much better at the end of the day, even though I also feel worse. Either way, I'm not sure there's anything I'd rather be doing.

IV - What I Think the Government Should Actually Do

2010-03-19T10:54:00.000-04:00

I’m not a libertarian. I look at the libertarians and I see people who probably have some good ideas but are so in thrall to their own philosophy that they take it to its (il)logical conclusion. I’m not a conservative either, by any definition common in America. I think of myself as a liberal in the classical or European sense but even that definition is incomplete. Like nearly all thoughtful people I can’t fit myself into any of the established boxes. The established boxes were established so people wouldn’t have to be thoughtful any more.

I don’t pretend to be consistent, either. But here goes.

This is a very big country, and infrastructure is absurdly important. Privatizing the national road and rail network is a fool’s errand, but so is letting the existing infrastructure fall apart because we lack the funding to actually get stuff repaired, replaced, and properly constructed in the first place. Roads and bridges are over capacity and showing their age; maintaining a functioning and world-class infrastructure system is vital to maintaining any sort of economic edge on a shrinking planet. The United States should be doubling or tripling spending on infrastructure for the next decade or so, and then leaving such spending at higher general levels, to maintain a safe and efficient transportation and utility network nationwide.

Energy is probably the most expensive single commodity on Earth and is likely to remain that way, and while Americans need to reduce their energy consumption individually, that’s only going to take us part of the way. The government needs to be funding research into alternative and renewable energy sources. I’d like to stop having to care about what happens in the Middle East, and every other basketcase country ruled by oil, but we’re not going to manage that by drilling off the coast of Florida. What’s more, the government needs to be encouraging private enterprise to develop and implement energy alternatives as well, through R&D grants, tax breaks, and loans. We can spend the money on this now, or we can fight Iran later. European countries would be wise to do the same thing, with Russia as their bogeyman instead of Iran, and just think how nice it would be to combine the scientific and business minds of America and Europe and Japan together on this project. We can certainly make huge strides in clean energy technology but not without spending some money to do it and making it a priority.

The government needs to be spending more money on research and development in general, focusing especially on university-level research via direct grants, but also by supporting corporate R&D through tax breaks and credits. Advances in learning will keep the American economy buoyant, and leadership in technological innovation will always trump cheap labor in the global economy. American companies will always be inclined to ship manufacturing jobs overseas to find cheaper labor (there will always be poor countries; today China, tomorrow southeast Asia, then Africa—it will be centuries before there is a worldwide convergence of personal incomes), but R&D will always be done here, if we make it a priority.

I am a green, I’ll admit it, and it may make my libertarian friends howl, but the United States needs to stay in the business of protecting the land and the environment. You may argue that infrastructure spending should be privatized, the post office, all sorts of things, and I’ll listen politely and may even change my mind if you’re persuasive enough. But the environment is a common resource, and the tragedy of the commons holds sway. It is always more profitable to pollute than not to pollute, unless nearly all other actors decide to stop polluting. It is always more profitable to develop land than to leave it pristine. You may think privatizing Yosemite National Park is fine, but I will tell you, there will be a hotel on Half Dome if you do that. It will destroy the beauty of the valley forever, but somebody will make a profit, and if there’s a profit to be made, someone will damn the public outcry and make it. The federal government may not need to hold 80% of the land area of Nevada or whatever it is, but the national parks, monuments, and forests need to be held on to. Let private property owners do what they need to with their property, it’s their right, but much federal land should remain off limits, or we’ll find there’s no place left that’s natural. Similarly pollution standards need to be upheld, perhaps tightened, but definitely need to be treated to rigorous scientific analysis so that we can be sure we’ve got the best anti-pollution program, not merely the strictest or the simplest. I consider global climate change a fact, not an opinion, but I don’t think a flat quota is a good way to reduce carbon emissions. Instead the government needs to be finding a way to make it worthwhile for companies to reduce their carbon footprints, and for individuals to reduce their as well, with a stairstepped series of taxes and rebates.

I do believe there is a need for a social safety net. There will always be people who lose their jobs, who can’t work for a period of time, children left orphaned, elderly folks left without family to care for them, poor families who need help climbing the ladder to prosperity. I can’t imagine an America that doesn’t care for these people. Unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, unemployment payments for jobseekers, student loans, tax-free education savings accounts, a well-funded and strictly monitored foster care system, payments to landlords who offer below-market-rate housing (that meets minimum quality requirements), pension payments to the elderly who lack a family to support them… we need these things. We do. But they should never be a dominant percentage of the budget; they are meant to be a safety net, not a way of life.

I’m all for a strong national defense, and a strong volunteer military. The troops should be well housed, fed, and paid, and they should have the best equipment. We have to be able to project force abroad and win a traditional war, but we also need to be ready and able to manage a long-term occupation, peacekeeping activities, and counter-insurgency, things we haven’t really built our military to do. Reforming some aspects of the service will be expensive but is necessary. I don’t feel we spend too much on defense now, but it isn’t always spent well.

There are lots of other smaller things the government should do, too, things that aren’t terribly expensive or invasive. Farm loans, especially to small farmers. Intelligence—especially if it’s actually intelligent—and domestic security (though civil liberties should outweigh domestic security); the judiciary; diplomacy and foreign aid (which needs to be significantly reformed but is a tiny, tiny proportion of our budget and should not be cut); and heck, I even still believe the post office performs a necessary and important role.

And if we could eliminate the two biggest drains on our budget, we could spend the money paying down our debt, and then give fat tax breaks to companies for maintaining strong pension systems for their employees, and to families for caring for elderly relatives, and offer everyone an annual payment to help defray the cost of health insurance. And with lower overall taxes, health insurance wouldn’t be so unaffordable. And with less debt, the country as a whole could revisit the idea of a more expansive health care system—something I’m open to—that wouldn’t force the nation to go broke.

That’s what I think government should be doing. But that, all of the above that I’ve mentioned, is about a quarter of what we actually spend our money on.

Viva Mexico!

2010-03-18T11:59:00.000-04:00

This is an outline map of Mexico, with each state outlined against a white background (click on it for the full size image). I use maps like this a lot, usually of counties in U.S. states, because I am a data junkie. The Census is my favorite thing the government does (well, apart from the National Park Service, and maybe NASA), and I like to analyze raw data and generate maps from it. I am aware that that this is an absurd hobby, but I would be a weirdo anyway even if I didn’t do it. I’m okay with that.

In any event, reading up on the Mexican town of Zihuatenejo (which I know of as a huge fan of the movie The Shawshank Redemption but only recently discovered was in fact a real place) I became curious about the comparative development indexes (not the UN-created HDI, but Smitty’s Quality of Life Index, a value I use to rank relative quality of life among nations using CIA data (another absurdly dorky hobby) and whose formula I derived myself) of different Mexican states. I looked everywhere online for a blank map of Mexico’s states, but found the only ones were in unusual file formats and were not actually blank, having colors and faded lines and thus being useless.

So I downloaded a map from the Perry-Castaneda Map Library at the University of Texas, erased all the text and darkened the lines. Having spent twenty minutes on this, I lost interest in the project. But I thought, some teachers might like a blank map of Mexican states so they could teach Mexican geography in school, and who knows, there’s probably like a half percent chance somebody else out there has the same idiot hobbies I have and would like such a map. So here it is: an outline map of Mexico. It’s a jpeg; feel free to download it and use it for classes or make maps as you see fit. Just don’t copy it unchanged onto your own website and claim it’s yours.

III - The Twelve Trillion Pound Gorilla

2010-03-18T11:48:00.000-04:00

America seems to have a lot of problems: health care, unemployment, education, homelessness, poverty, the list goes on and on. We talk about many of these problems, and sometimes somebody even tries to solve one of them. We call these people idiots.

But there is a much larger problem we refuse to acknowledge, and it is the one that will destroy us in the end. It’s called debt, and if we’ve learned nothing as individuals from this recent economic turmoil, it’s that debt can really mess you up.
The United States is extremely deep in debt—the federal debt, the sum total of money we owe to creditors (in the form of Treasury notes and bills, and Treasury bonds), was over $12 trillion, an amount the human mind is not capable of comprehending. It is roughly 85% of our total gross domestic product.

Of this debt, roughly 3/5 is held by the public, in the form of notes and bills and treasury bonds, but mostly notes and bills. Of this, about 55% is held by American citizens and corporations, while the remaining 45% is held by foreign investors (2/3 by foreign governments, particularly Japan and China, the rest by foreign companies and individuals). China’s central bank holds about $900 billion of U.S. debt—about 8% of the total.

The remain 2/5 of the debt is held by agencies within the government itself. The Social Security Administration, for example, has thus far spent its annual surplus (there are still more workers paying in than recipients, though that will reverse in the next five years) on buying government debt; it will then collect on that debt as it matures to continue paying recipients. This, of course, will force the government to sell more debt securities, since Social Security will no longer have a surplus and will not be buying new securities to replace those it collects on; finding investors for this new debt is not guaranteed.

In 1950, at the end of World War II, the national debt stood at 94% of GDP (then a much smaller figure). By 1980, it was 33% of GDP, although in gross terms it was quite a lot larger (still under a trillion dollars, though). By 1990, after a decade of that great conservative government-shrinker Ronald Reagan’s influence, the debt had risen to 56% of GDP and $3.2 trillion. In 2000, after (most of) a decade of prosperity and high tax receipts, it stood at 58% of GDP, $5.6 trillion. At the end of 2008 as our great Republican leader was leaving office it stood at 70.2% of GDP and over $10 trillion. The records of Reagan and Bush are clear, and this is why when Republicans say they care reducing the debt, I know they are full of shit. The same tends to be true of Democrats, and certainly the debt has increased substantially since the change of administrations—though that being said, government spending is appropriate and desirable during economic downturns. The problem is that we justify our spending to stimulate the economy when it’s weak (“prime the pump” was the phrase during the Depression), then fail to cut back when the economy is strong. So the debt continues to grow. Congressional Budget Office estimates indicate that by 2012 the total federal debt will exceed GDP.

This should concern you. Not because China might come to us tomorrow and demand all their money back—-treasury securities are time-delimited—-but because once we as a government owe more than we as a people produce in a year, our debt begins to look risky to investors. Investors may begin to demand higher interest rates on our sovereign debt, and higher interest rates means our total interest payment goes up, and we have to sell more debt.

There is no reason to assume American sovereign debt is inviolable, although that tends to be the assumption worldwide. Partly, however, this is because America has always been seen as a responsible debtor, able and willing to pay its debts on time without devaluing the currency or inflating the debt away as other countries are prone to do. Before the inception of the Euro, Italy had a habit of devaluing the lira every decade or so; this meant that an investor who spent $50,000 on a 100,000 lira bond would, after devaluation, get back 100,000 lira that were worth only $5,000. Back in the days when most currencies were on a gold standard, devaluations occurred against the price of gold, but with the same effect. The United States, however, didn’t resort to such trickery, partly because we always had enough wealth in the country to find buyers for all of our public debt. When the international financial system was set up, the dollar was accepted as a standard of value because the U.S. government had a long history of maintaining that value. We were the good guys, the responsible managers of money, and as a result our money became the standard of value worldwide. The dollar is still far and away the world’s primary reserve currency, and although that status seems less certain than it once was, an obvious successor is not yet on the horizon.

But now we’re not being responsible any more. We just run larger and larger deficits, and not since 2000 has any administration even discussed the issue of spending less and returning to responsible monetary practices. We still aren’t printing money to try to cover our debts (that would result in hyperinflation, most recently seen in Zimbabwe but best known for bringing interwar Germany to its knees and leading to the rise of the Nazis), and the chance of a sovereign default seems remote (right now, but that can change with remarkable quickness; witness Greece), but financially we are on rather thin ice.

By 2030 (approximately), it is likely that total payouts on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will exceed total tax revenues for entire country. That means absolutely everything else the government does, from national defense to keep toilet paper in bathrooms at national parks, will have to be financed by debt. And beyond 2030 things simply continue to get worse.

The problem comes not from the debt itself, but from the need to finance it. Debt rotates—every so many years, an individual debt security like a treasury bill reaches maturity. The holder can then ask for the money from the government, or roll it over into another treasury instrument. When debt rolls over, it is on new terms. Presently most of our debt is at very low interest rates, but creditors may begin to fret that the risk of a sovereign default is actually real, and thus ask for a higher interest rate to cover that potential loss. Higher interest rates mean higher debt service payments, and higher payments means we have to sell more debt.

As entitlement spending increases, the total quantity of debt we will have to sell will increase, so our interest payments will rise on their own. It only takes a handful of creditors to begin worrying about the possibility of default for interest rates to start rising to unsustainable levels.

This is exactly what has just happened in Greece. Creditors began to worry that Greece, which showed no intention of bringing its spending under control, was going to become unable to make its debt payments. Thus they started asking for higher and higher interest rates. The Greek government had to sell debt at unsustainably high interest rates, and the situation snowballed.

America is not Greece. But America in 2010 is also not America in 1950, and it will take very little nervousness on the part of creditors to start a Greek-style collapse.

Outside the Euro, Greece could have responded to the crisis by devaluing the currency or defaulting on its sovereign debt, things it cannot do within the Euro. The United States has no such restrictions.

Russia defaulted in 1998—-essentially declared bankruptcy and said they wouldn’t pay the debt they owed. Russia’s government then had to sell its debt at junk grade, mostly to Russian citizens (especially the oligarchs), and severely cut services, until the Russian economy began to grow. Through the 2000s Russia’s debt grade gradually improved as the Russian government began running a surplus, and appeared likely to be able to pay off future debts. (In the last year Russian debt has been downgraded again as the economy shrank, but it is still considered investment grade, though just barely.) Russia still pays a lot of interest on its sovereign debt, though; a BBB rating will do that. You pay higher credit card and mortgage rates if you have a history of bankruptcy or missed payments; countries are the same way.

If America found itself unable to sell enough to finance its government obligations-—something that is certain to happen by 2030 if projections hold and nothing is changed—-we would likely default rather than devalue the dollar, because it would cause less global shock (though both options are decidedly unattractive). But unlike Russia, we would not start running a surplus in the next couple of years. Instead we would have to make do with much less government spending, and much higher interest rates. Inflation would no doubt rise, affecting the average American’s pocketbook (including most especially those on Social Security). And certainly, American prestige in the world would never recover.

There’s no reason why it will take until 2030 for this to happen. Entitlement spending may exceed tax revenue by that year, but creditors are unlikely to let the country go that long without taking some form of action against ballooning deficits.

I for one prefer not contemplate a post-default America or a devalued dollar, and I doubt seriously anyone else does, either. But the debt remains a concern only for those outside the government—-the tea party, the minority party, anyone looking to score political points against those in power. But once in power, things change; American politicians, like Americans, are addicted to spending money they don’t have. This will change, and it will do so in my lifetime. But will it be gradual and in a way of our own choosing, or will it be catastrophic? It’s up to us, but so far, we don’t seem interested in talking about it.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

2010-03-16T09:49:00.000-04:00

I recently finished Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book I never read in school despite growing up in Florida, and which I’d always felt I should read. Also, it has a hurricane in it, and I’m a sucker for hurricanes.

The book has long been considered a great empowering piece of literature for women, though I don’t like to think of it as proto-chick-lit. Hurston paints a picture of turn-of-the-century Florida that is lacking from much of the rest of literature; that’s largely why I wanted to read it, and why I enjoyed it. Yes, Hurston’s use of dialect can be distracting at times, but I’ve never really been bothered by the use of dialect in fiction and don’t really understand why some people hate it so much. Not being an author from the Harlem Renaissance myself, I don’t really sympathize with the contemporary criticism of the book. If anything, since most of the critical Harlem Renaissance writers were men, perhaps they were concerned about Hurston’s critical depiction of the divisions between men and women in black society at the time, and just needed an excuse to complain.

If, instead of trying to be a sensitive critic, one reads the book for its narrative and historical interest, it’s a very good read. Janie’s struggles to find love are convincingly depicted, and the men she meets are all real enough. The way Janie is criticized for settling down with Tea Cake, a no-account drifter, seems very true—she finally found love, and it may not have been in the life people expected her to live, but a mature person (actual maturity being something everyone really wants and hardly anyone actually has) knows other peoples’ expectations are useless if one’s heart is happy and mind is free. We all really want to be Janie, in a way.

Right up until the hurricane.

Unlike most books I’ve read because I felt I should read them, I actually enjoyed this one.

Mysterious Visitor

2010-03-15T20:19:00.000-04:00

We have six chickens. This is not one of them. Where did she come from? Why is she roosting on my porch chairs? Are chickens rising spontaneously out of the Earth?

In any event, when a mystery chicken appears on the porch, Winky and Bobby Cat are both very interested. (Too bad they don't realize they don't realize they could just eat Vortex; that rooster would feed them for a week.)

Schrodinger wasn't just interested, he wanted to try a taste. The cats and chickens grew up together, and when the chickens are out in the yard they don't seem bothered by the cats, and the cats don't seem to care much about them. But this, this is a mystery chicken! Schrodinger later managed to get a good swipe in at this chicken, from behind, and then poor Winky jumped up on the chair and got a beak in the face for his trouble.
Smittywife got hold of mystery chicken, and we put her in the coop. When I had gone out to close the door to the coop (our chickens always come home when the sun goes down) the main rooster, Buffy, was in there squawking away, and being answered by another chicken coming from the front of the house. I closed the door and headed up to the front yard to see where the bucking was coming from, and here was this chicken sitting on the porch. Since she'd been talking to our rooster I figure they'll all do okay. And what's wrong with one more egg a day?

Spring!!

2010-03-15T20:17:00.000-04:00

It's finally here! This is Blitzen's Daffodil. It's not quite open, but I couldn't wait until tomorrow to take the picture and declare it officially, finally, spring. Yaay!

II - What's Wrong With America

2010-03-15T10:47:00.000-04:00

America’s current problems in government stem, ultimately, from America’s somewhat twisted society. Puritanical about sex, overtly religious, in thrall to entertainment in all forms, and bored by anything deeper than a wading pool, we have created a society where it actually makes rational sense for politicians to engage in heated shouting matches that only interest their core supporters and fringes, for news organizations to televise the shouting and leave it at that, for everyone to wear their beliefs (religious and otherwise) on their sleeves and take offence at anyone who would question them, and for voters to remain ignorant of the issues and learn only superficial facts about their candidates. Then these candidates get into office and quite rationally refuse to compromise on anything or get anything done. We get the government we deserve; the best and worst thing about democracy.

It’s not fair to claim that our government does absolutely nothing, though. Even in 2009 and 2010, government has actually done significant things that have had serious implications for America, some good and some bad. And here are some of them, passed during supposedly the most bitterly divided Congress in memory. TARP—the bank bailout—a $700 billion item that probably forestalled a much deeper recession, passed at the end of 2008. A $787 billion stimulus package was passed with surprisingly little fight. SCHIP was extended and improved, mortage and securities fraud penalties were tightened, payments to veterans for service-connected disabilities were increased, programs to help families avoid foreclosure were created, enacted a new land conservation law, among other things. The stimulus bill alone contained so many provisions—tax breaks and credits for college tuition, home-buying, energy conservation, renewable-energy production, among other things, expansion of the broadband network, development of smart electric grids, money to encourage computerization of health information to ease sharing of data, money to test new health treatments… this was all in one bill. If this had been all separate bills no one would be saying Congress was paralyzed. So let’s not go overboard.

America is not ungovernable, but it is very hard to accomplish major reform. And the quality of our leadership is shockingly poor. Actually, that’s not true; the quality is poor, but it shouldn’t come as a shock. Is Eric Massa a particularly horrible person who somehow got in office, or is he merely a reflection of society? If we picked someone at random from each Congressional district, how many Eric Massa’s would we get? How many Evan Bayh’s? How many Rod Blagojevich’s?

You can believe one of three things, as I see it: either power corrupts people, and once they get into office they turn corrupt; or power attracts corrupt and corruptible people, so it’s likely that anyone who runs for office is prone to bad behavior; or the people in office are no better or worse than the rest of us, and society as a whole is reflected in its government. I tend to favor the third view, although Lord Acton’s aphorism is still correct and power definitely does corrupt. Let’s say this: you and I may not do the sorts of things that get people like Tom DeLay and Rod Blagojevich in trouble, but we do things that get us in trouble in other ways. We just aren’t on TV. Perhaps it isn’t that power corrupts, but rather that power exacerbates corruption.

In any event, I think fundamentally what’s wrong with our government is that it makes sense for politicians to cater to a base or even to the fringe, and there is no pressure on them to compromise and fix problems because any fix is going to be unpopular with some people and leave the politicians open to attack. It’s not even about compromise; sometimes it’s better to do nothing than to do something that might be unpopular with some people. These are rational choices in the short-term. The problem is nobody’s thinking long-term. And neither are we as a society; we are obsessed with the short term, and turn our brains off when anyone starts talking about the big picture or big ideas. Give me what I want now, and we’ll talk about the future when it gets here. Changing that philosophy will fix what ails American government, but can it be changed?

Lost in a Good Book

2010-03-13T10:36:00.000-05:00

Casting about for examples of literary farce, I was recently directed to Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. I borrowed the second book in the series, Lost in a Good Book, from a friend and read it.

I missed quite a few things, not having read the first book in the series. To Fforde’s credit, despite his having created an absurd and sometimes unrecognizable world for this series, I didn’t feel at any point as though I was in fact Lost in the book. That’s a good thing. The narrative is snappy, the alternate reality terrifically odd, and the writing light.

Whether it qualified as farce is difficult to say; it wasn’t straight satire, and calling it a ‘comedy’ misses some important aspects of the storytelling. At the same time, creating an alternate (and absurd) reality changes the rules of farce somewhat. A character in a farce behaves absurdly and thinks nothing of it, and therein lies much of farce’s inherent humor. Here the characters think nothing of their absurd world, and simply react rationally within it. The setting itself is the farce; the characters are in fact acting rationally. That said, I can’t say that it is definitely not farce, and since farce is generally created for the stage or screen things will be different in a novel anyway. So perhaps what we have is something that is not not farce, but also not farce. Close enough for me. I once wrote the beginning of a story about superheroes inhabiting a world as absurd and off-kilter as Thursday Next’s. I didn’t try to categorize it at the time, but it would certainly fit into the same not-farce-but-not-not-farce category. That’s annoying and difficult to say and type.

So I read this farce, called Lost in a Good Book. I was not lost. But it was a good book. I look forward to reading the others in the series.

I - Political History

2010-03-12T10:45:00.000-05:00

When I was young, I wanted to go into politics. I even wanted to be President; I started a campaign for the 2024 election, in fact, and I think I was more serious about it than I want to admit now. I intended to be a politician, to start running for office probably by the age I am now, if not sooner. I thought I’d be an architect for a few years first, so I could have a “real job,” but I wanted to be in politics and naught else.

Of course, when I was younger still, about four or five, I wanted to grow up to be a tiger. I didn’t know then that I couldn’t actually do that.

These days the two ideas seem equally ridiculous.

Which is not to say that I’m not still interested in politics. As the years have gone by I’ve retreated to mainly being interested in the horse races and changes of power; predicting elections is more fun than other forms of gambling, and the great thing is I can pay attention to the British and Canadian and Mexican and Brazilian and every other election for the exact same reason. There are hundreds of horse races around the world and I follow several of them. In some countries, who wins even actually still matters, something I’m not convinced is true any longer here.

Lately I’ve gotten more and more depressed and ornery about the state of American governance, both at the state and national levels. It’s been almost ten years since I actually worked in politics, and while that initial experience was key in changing my mind about ever being a politician, if every subsequent year hadn’t reinforced the idea I might still be considering it. As it is I feel prematurely old, already convinced it was all better back in the day, that today’s pols don’t care about fixing things, and that somehow that’s new.

Some days I feel like it’s hopeless, like there’s virtually no chance the United States can avoid default or crippling taxes in the medium term, right when I should be hitting middle age and in the prime of my career, in the middle of raising a family—in other words, at the worst possible time. Did previous generations have the same worry? I don’t know.

Smittywife and I agree on some things: we can’t count on Social Security, for example, and are better off actually assuming it won’t exist by the time we reach retirement age. The same goes for Medicare. Politicians do seem more divided, more combative and more resistant to compromise than I remember, but how accurate is my memory? Twelve years ago the government ground to a halt so some GOP hacks could smear a Democratic president over his sexual peccadilloes, while nine years earlier the same thing happened so some Democratic hacks could grill a Republican court nominee over trumped-up sexual charges; it’s not as if the preference for grandstanding and scoring political points over actual accomplishment is something new this decade. Yet in 1998 the economy was riding high and the government was running an apparent (though not in fact a real) surplus. That’s hardly the case now; I think it’s almost impossible to argue that 2010 is not a much more difficult environment for leadership than was 1998, or even 1989. At least this time we’re not arguing exclusively about sex; both parties may have decamped to their fringes but at least they’re taking potshots at each other over actual issues (Eric Massa, Eliot Spitzer, and others notwithstanding). Still, I often feel fairly despondent about the future of American governance and wonder whether our leaders still have the stones to fix our largest current problem (debt) or whether we are doomed to an eventual default.

It is my general intent to avoid too much politics talk on this blog. I had a previous blog that I talked politics on a lot, though not exclusively, and in one memorable instance it got me into rather a bit of hot water. That’s unlikely now, but it seems like one can either discuss politics to the exclusion of much else, or talk about it very little. But I don’t have enough followers to risk alienating anyone (and I’m not writing this as a job or for pay anyway) and sometimes when I’m feeling confused or put out I find the best way to figure out my mind is to sit down and write. And why not post my thoughts? Knowing they’ll be publicly consumed, even if only by a very small sample of the public, forces me to be more organized in my writing, and thus in my thought process. That’s a good thing. I’ve already written the next few posts and so I plan to post them over a few days, maybe one a day, maybe every other day, something like that. This, then, is just a warning post.

John Glenn, A Memoir

2010-03-12T09:13:00.000-05:00

At the beginning of this year I finished reading John Glenn’s memoir. I’ve owned it for years, my copy is a first paperback edition. I love reading the memoirs of the early astronauts and other key players in the space program; at some level I wish I’d been alive then so I could have been involved in something so meaningful and involved. The race to the moon was the last great national epic cause. But Glenn’s memoir…

John Glenn was one of the few, and certainly the first, of the early astronauts to parlay his fame into a political career, and said career included some less-than-stellar moments. I always felt like Glenn took advantage of his career as an astronaut in a way few others did, a more public and more unseemly way, so he’s always been my least favorite of the Mercury group (like they’re the seven dwarves or something; we sometimes forget famous people are also real people).

And so his memoir sat on my shelf, until I belatedly decided I should save money and read the books I already own but haven’t read instead of buying new ones, at least for a while. I will happily admit that the book was both an enjoyable read, and left me with a much more positive image of John Glenn. Most memoirs try to do the latter, but few succeed at both.

Glenn prominently acknowledges the help of his ghostwriter, Nick Taylor, who surely had a great deal to do with how readable the book is. But it is I think an even greater credit to Taylor that the book sounds like the simple Midwesterner John Glenn is; Taylor didn’t fancy up Glenn’s words, he just made them sing. That’s skill. And it makes the book—which runs an indulgent 500+ pages—-surprisingly fun reading.

John Glenn did so many things in his time that we forget—-or never learned-—about half of them. Raised in Depression-era Ohio, he was one of only two astronauts to serve in World War II (the other was Deke Slayton; they served in opposite theaters). Glenn also fought in Korea with both a Marine flying unit and an Air Force unit, with which he recorded three kills. As a test pilot, he flew nonstop across the country to set a transcontinental speed record (the first transcontinental supersonic flight), which made him famous enough that he was later asked to be on Name That Tune. He made that flight at 36, then an age considered near the top limit for a functional flying career (a laughable notion these days), and yet was selected for the Mercury program two years later. He wouldn’t make his famous Mercury flight until the age of 40. Glenn is a real hero for people who think they’re getting old-—and he would continue to be so, as at the end of his political career (he spent 24 years in the U.S. Senate) he returned to space on the shuttle and proved that at 77 the body could handle the rigors of spaceflight with remarkable success. This is a full life for one man, and I suppose 500 pages isn’t a long time to tell it.

There were other parts of Glenn’s life less savory, and apart from one example he doesn’t shy away from them. He was one of the Keating Five, senators implicated in a particularly flagrant Savings and Loan debacle, though he (along with John McCain) was fully exonerated after an investigation. Glenn discusses the affair, sticking close to the record but clearly not feeling any need to justify an association that proved insignificant; he doesn’t seem to have an axe to grind. He ran for president in 1984 and made rather a hash of it (had he won the nomination he would surely have done better than Walter Mondale), ending up with $20 million in campaign debt that took years and an FEC forgiveness to pay back. He admits his and the campaign’s failures gracefully.

His 1998 shuttle flight was often considered a boondoggle, one last hurrah for a retiring Senator, a viewpoint I generally agreed with at the time. But Glenn spends many pages discussing the science and value behind the mission—-and freely admits to how long he worked and how many people he had to talk to before he got the mission approved. Clearly it was something he wanted, and the science, though valuable, was what allowed him to justify chasing that dream. But the science was good, and that’s what NASA should be about; and his yearning for a return to space is hardly something anyone should blame him for.

Glenn discusses his 1962 testimony before Congress about various aspects of NASA and spaceflight, but glosses over his remarks in favor of restricting women from becoming astronauts. It’s easy to guess at what might have been, but if Glenn—-then perhaps the most famous man in America-—had said before Congress that women should be allowed into the astronaut corps, it is almost inconceivable that a woman would not have gone to the moon. As it was, 30 years passed before the first American woman went to space (Sally Ride in 1983). Glenn doesn’t mention this; perhaps he doesn’t care to speculate about the past, but I do think his insistence that women should not be astronauts had much to do with the delay in broadening the astronaut corps. I’m sure he said only what he believed at the time, and believed in good faith; but if only he’d said nothing at all…

On balance, however, the memoir is largely positive, and while there are dark corners of all our lives we would prefer not to put into print, one can’t put the book down without thinking John Glenn really was a great American. It’s an enjoyable read, and a nice look back to an era when politics was less venal and patriotism more pure.

Climate scheduling

2010-03-12T08:40:00.000-05:00

The ten day forecast has no temperatures on it below 40. The average date of last frost in Pelzer is 5 April. The ten day forecast goes through March 21. At what point do we go ahead and decide to put the plants out? I could do it now and be comfortable through March 21—but the probably of a freeze between the 21st and the 5th is historically somewhat better than 50%. I feel like we’re losing good growing days here, but at the same time, I don’t want to set out 100+ plants now and lose them all fifteen days later.

We just sowed okra, parsley, borage, and bok choy, all here indoors. I figure there’s no sense setting anything out until those are sprouted and healthy, and that’s at least ten days away. Maybe by March 26th, when the 10-day forecast goes through April 5, then we can make a decision.

Growing tender vegetables is tougher in a seasonal climate than it is in Florida, where I grew up. Huh. Who’d have thought?

Ready for Spring

2010-03-11T08:43:00.000-05:00

Spring is likely to be upon us soon. At long last, after months where temperatures dipped into the low 20s on a nightly basis, we have had four consecutive above-freezing nights, including two where nighttime temperatures hovered around 50. This is expected to continue at least for the next week. This will certainly have the expected effect of causing every tree in the Upstate to burst forth in wondrous springtime beauty (although this has not happened as of today), so that when we have a late-season hard freeze at the end of the month everything will die. Hooray climate change (Global Climate Chaos, as Smittywife and I have dubbed it).

Nonetheless we are proceeding apace with plans to set the vegetables out in the garden in the near future. It’s expected to rain all the rest of this week, but next week I will start hardening off the vegetable seedlings. I sowed peas, swiss chard, and lettuce directly into our Pea Bed ten days ago, and with the warmer temperatures all have now sprouted and are growing happily. Sweet onions we planted at the same time are also showing signs of life.

I set out strawberries on Monday; 11 of them so far, spread around the yard so we can figure out what the best place is for them. I planted our blueberries as well. These came bareroot from the Jockey Lot back in December, when I bought the peach and apple trees. Unlike the trees, which are fully budded and ready to go, the blueberries have no detectable signs of life. I did exactly what the university extension told me to, namely, planted them into pots and kept the pots indoors and away from any chance of the pots freezing through, so I’m hoping now that they’re outside we’ll see something. But where I planted them in the yard, there’s easily room for a dozen or so more plants, so whether these come to life or not I’ll probably be getting more.

Last years’ pear trees are buddy, but look like they’re going to take their time coming out. I’ll be patient with them; I would be thrilled with even two or three pears this year. Likewise the figs look ready to go, and with another wet season I expect to get a lot of figs this year. I pruned the loquat tree and the pomegranate yesterday, the loquat to a single trunk, the pomegranate to multiple trunks with limited branches.

Elsewhere the surest sign of a change is from the forsythia bush in the front yard, which looks like it could be blooming by Saturday. The baldcypress (my baby, which I grew from seed and is now five years old) looks like it survived the winter. The witch hazel has nice fat buds, and the fringetree has smaller ones. The dogwood has no flower buds but looks like it’s survived the winter in fine shape. I am less certain about the redbud, which should be one of the first trees to flower but still looks utterly bare. I’ve never watched a redbud up close, though, so I don’t know what to expect. The serviceberry was split in half by a romping hound dog last fall, so although it appears to have some live buds at the base of what’s left of the trunk, I’m not sure what to expect. The elderberry already has leaves. And of course the dozen oak trees around the area are all getting the filamenty look at the tops as they prepare to greet the year.

We had snow last year on March 1st, which took some days to melt, but was quickly followed by spring flowers and leaves. It’s still only March 11th, but it seems as though winter has been longer this year. Everyone at Smitty’s Farm is ready for it to be over.

Chill

2010-03-05T13:19:00.000-05:00

This has been an absurdly cold spring. I am more than ready for temperatures to return to the normal range. This week every night has dropped to 25 or thereabouts. We put lettuce, peas, and swiss chard out in the first garden bed over a week ago and only just now is the lettuce starting to sprout; one pea has sprouted. Indoors, the peas sprouted in two days. It's getting warm enough during the day (relatively speaking; mid fifties is still cool for the time of year) but that 25 degrees at night is just keeping everything inert. This weekend it should warm into the 60s finally, and Sunday night it's only supposed to be in the mid-30s. Then the rest of the week should be lows in the forties--of course, it's also supposed to rain every single day.
We have many, many seedlings now. Over a hundred I think, and a few more yet to plant (parsley, another cucumber or two...). We don't quite have an ideal setup for them here in the house; they live in the dining room by the window, which I've taped interfacing to so the seedlings don't dry out in the direct sun. It's the best I can do until we can actually set them out, but it's still too cold. Granted the average date of last freeze is late this month, so we weren't planning to set them out until the beginning of April anyway.
The other thing about the cold, the plants are all just sitting on their buds, waiting. The peaches and oaks are about ready to burst, tuliptrees, too, and my baldcypress is clearly wondering what's going on. The forsythia down at the street looks like it could be in bloom tomorrow. Next week, with the warmer weather, should actually be the start of spring. I hope so. I'm ready.

Assorted Sunny Afternoon Pictures

2010-02-19T17:17:00.000-05:00

I don't like the way the "new" blogger deals with images. I can never get things to line up with the text any more. Nonetheless, here are some pictures I took this afternoon after doing some chores. It was a beautiful day, and I'm looking forward to a weekend with more such days.

It's a beautiful afternoon here on the farm. Filled up a garden bed, put dirt in flowerboxes for lettuce, and did a couple other chores. It's just a pretty day.

Those look suspiciously like peach blossoms in the making.

I have transplanted the first plants outside! This is a wee little pea plant; it has three friends nearby. The remaining eight will go out tomorrow (and we'll seed some lettuce, too).

This is an action shot of one of the chickens throwing dirt in my garden bed.

On a warm afternoon like this there's always a welcoming committee waiting at the front door.

Chickens Being Chickens

2010-02-19T17:14:00.000-05:00

I mentioned earlier that the chickens feel the need to nest and peck around in my freshly prepared garden beds, which I guess is fine since there aren't any plants in the beds yet (except for one of them), and anyway I can't exactly keep them out.
I don't really know much about chickens. I can take care of them, but that's about it. Why do they want to nest in this dirt? Why do they throw it the way they do? Are they just trying to dig holes, or are they using the dirt (which they get all over themselves) to warm up, cool down, absorb oil...? I have no idea. Anyway, they've been out there lounging in this garden bed doing exactly this for half an hour now.

A week for the books

2010-02-19T10:54:00.000-05:00

It has been an interesting week here on Smitty's Farm, the kind of week that doesn't allow for much writing of any sort. But it's also been an instructive week, and in some ways a good week (albeit in other ways a rather bad one). And it is also, after all, just a week. There have been many others before, and there are still more to come.

Snow!

2010-02-13T14:43:00.000-05:00

It snowed yesterday at the farm. It's almost all melted now, but that's what makes snow around here so nice. It never wears out its welcome. So here are some pictures of Smitty's Farm in the snow.

My little airplane windvane just as the snow was starting, and then this morning after three inches.

The first picture I took this morning; the sun hadn't yet burned off the mist. Snow is terrifically quiet.

Vixen does not like snow. She followed me around all morning meowing at me to make it go away.

Witch Hazels are fun because they don't bloom until winter, so you get these crazy blossoms in the snow.

Bobbie Cat spies her own shadow. She's no groundhog; she looks somewhat surprised to see it.

I did not let the chickens out to romp in the snow, but their coop was almost photogenic with a light dusting against a bright blue sky.

Roswell is a funny-looking cat under any circumstances, but she really had some trouble walking in the snow with any amount of grace.

This is Raggety Cat, posed so sweetly in the black willow, where she spent several minutes knocking clumps of snow out of the branches and watching them fall. They always seemed to get the slip on her.

Nitro has never seen or even imagined snow before, but he seemed quite satisified with it. Until his paws got chilly.

Entitled "Still Life with Barney." Barney is the neighbors' hound dog.

Mama Cita, of course, has seen all this before, and is not impressed.

Seedling Update

2010-02-12T08:43:00.000-05:00

We have moved all of the sprouts out of their little greenhouse to a nice warm spot on the dining room table. On the left you have a row of sweet peppers, a row of cilantro, and two rows of wallflowers. In the middle is a row of eggplants, a row of poblanos, and two rows of sweet peppers. And on the right are many of the tomatoes, the four varieties I planted on the 1st or 2nd of the month. In the greenhouse now (by “greenhouse” I mean a little flat plastic job with a clear lid that we can sprout seeds in, about one foot by two by four inches high) are ten more tomatoes (a fifth variety, Tomande, our slicing tomato), along with rows of swiss chard and early peas. The chard and peas could be sown directly into the ground (both are frost resistant), but I haven’t built the bed for them yet. We’ll sprout them now, and between today and tomorrow I expect I’ll get their bed built (I have three beds left to build and fill), provided it doesn’t snow as they’re now predicting (actually, they’re predicting “record” snow, but they’ve predicted snow for us four separate times this season and we have had nary a flake here at the farm). We need to put some herb seeds (basil is particularly slow to get started) in the greenhouse, and I need to clean out a couple window boxes so we can start lettuce. Park Seed has shipped our final batch of seeds to us, so we should receive those shortly. This weekend we will be sowing about 70 plants, including some of those coming in this final shipment. It may not be spring outside yet, but it’s starting to look that way in here.

Stuff 'n Junk

2010-02-12T08:41:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I took a trip down to Atlanta to visit with some friends and enjoy the Superbowl and my friend T’s cooking. And while there I helped clean out the house. T’s house is similar to the homestead here at Smitty’s Farm, though we have essentially an extra room here. But both houses needed a lot of work and updating when purchased and both have come a long way since initial purchase.

T’s house also has too much stuff in it, much like ours. We spent a good part of the weekend cleaning out, organizing, and in some cases getting rid of that stuff-—so much stuff that at times it was tough to get through the house. Yet by the time of the Superbowl—-in fact several hours before-—the house was clean, tidy, and ready for a big group of guests. Nice to watch that transformation, and proof that it can be done with a reasonable work crew (four or five people are a lot more effective than one).

But it really got me to thinking. We put a lot of stuff in the crawlspace under the house. In our house, such things go in the attic (our crawlspace is low and filthy and not appropriate for storage; T’s attic is nigh inaccessible). And we have designated March as “Attic and Garage Month.”

We designated several months this year for specific projects. Officially January was yard and garden month, although that has bled over into this month and will continue for a few more weeks yet; this was supposed to be Paint and Trim month, but we’ve set that back until April or May. But March is now the month I’m really looking forward to.

I hauled a lot of stuff into a crawlspace over the weekend, much of it stuff I would have kept three or four years ago but now would sell, freecycle, donate, or throw away. I feel more mature because of that (or at any rate I feel like I've changed), and yet, I know what the attic looks like (I know, in other words, why we designated an Attic and Garage month). And now I’m really looking forward to March. I organized the Christmas stuff when we put it up this year, and the Christmas section of the attic is tidy and free of unwanted junk (except for a few ornaments we mean to be rid of). I can’t wait for the rest of the attic to be a) organized and b) free of unwanted junk. I go up there frequently enough, and I know there’s stuff up there that we put there when we moved in 18 months ago and have not seen or used since—art that’s not on the walls (though we have almost no art on the walls yet), clothes we haven’t worn (old uniforms in particular), a kayak paddle (I sold my kayak two years ago), cabinet doors that don’t fit our cabinets, two boxes of assorted crap I retrieved from my old desk before we sold it and which I haven’t look at since the move or before… the list goes on.

Until very recently I was the sort of person who kept almost everything. I don’t need it now, but I might need it later (when I can’t say, or for what purpose, but I might!). I can’t throw that away, it was given to me seventeen years ago by someone, I don’t recall who, and they probably don’t even remember it, but it was a gift! I don’t fit into those clothes now, but I might someday (or in my case, that shirt is looking ragged and worn but I’ve had it for sixteen years and I can’t bear to part with it!). Or, the most common reason of all, I haven’t gotten rid of that because I don’t want to throw it out and I’m too lazy to take it to Goodwill or put it on craigslist.

I still have that gene in my makeup but I’m getting much better about hanging on to stuff. Smittywife comes from a family with the same gene, so we have an uphill battle. We both tend to set stuff down on any handy flat surface and forget about it, so tables and desks are always cluttered, but we don’t have stuff in piles in the corners for the most part (okay, well, in a couple of places, but nothing like we had in Tampa) and we don’t have an entire 10x10 storage unit full to the ceiling of stuff we plan to use at some point but can’t even see (we did that in Tampa, too).

And now I feel particularly empowered to clean out the attic. We can reduce what’s up there by half at least, maybe two-thirds or more (there is Christmas stuff to consider), and although it won’t really reduce our crap level down here in the house, it will mean that the attic is clean, organized, and relatively empty, so it will provide us with a more appropriate storage area for things like seldom-used linens (extra sheets for the convertible sofa don’t need to be in my dresser, for example), fabric awaiting a sewing project (Smittywife has lots of fabric that we don’t quite know how or where to organize) and seasonal items. So cleaning out the attic will help us clean up the house. The project I’ve been dreading for a year and a half no longer looks so dreadful. How nice.

First fruits? Or last?

2010-02-06T10:01:00.000-05:00

Why look, it's fresh broccoli! I just cut this out of last year's garden. We planted this in the ground last April, so it's been almost a year in coming; the bed evidently was in too much shade, and with the summer heat cabbage plants don't do so much. I thought we might get some broccoli this autumn, but no dice. There's cauliflower plants out there, too, but no actual cauliflower yet. And there is more broccoli.

It's not that this is a huge haul or anything, I mean, I didn't even use a quarter for size comparison because it would have been embarrassing. But hey, it's fresh home-grown broccoli, in the middle of winter. Pretty neat.

Strictly speaking I guess, we've been getting stuff out of the garden all winter, since we have parsley, chervil, rosemary, thyme, and (to my surprise) oregano that are all surviving the winter months just fine. The thyme has all turned deep purple and the oregano red, but they still taste like thyme and oregano.

February

2010-02-04T08:31:00.000-05:00

"February is an interesting month here, in the sense that nothing at all interesting happens. It's the last month of winter; come March, things will start to flower and leaf out, the last frost date will pass and we'll start transplanting our seedlings into the garden. But it's definitely still winter for now; more dreary days than clear ones, all the trees are just bare sticks, and for the most part all the work that needs to be done is just prep work, not the most exciting stuff.
January is the same way, I guess, but February, by virtue of coming after January, seems longer. You get to the end of the month and you're wondering, really? It's still winter? I have issues with spring (allergies), but winter, like summer, always seems to wear out its welcome by the end.
This month I have at least three more garden beds to build and prep for planting, and I really need to try to burn off the brush on top of the septic field. We'd like to get a railing installed on the back stoop, too. But that's about it.
Well, that and, there's a checkride to be taken and passed later this month. I still have plenty of studying to do for that, but these dreary days are perfect for such things."

I wrote that yesterday (and thought I had posted it; oops). Then this afternoon I was cleaning the kitchen, and looked out the window and saw half a dozen robins hopping around in the driveway. So maybe spring is closer than we think. The elderberry bush in front of the kitchen window has tiny little green buds on it now; it may be the first tree out this spring. Looks like I need to get cracking on finishing those beds...

Seedling Update

2010-02-03T17:09:00.000-05:00

There are eggplants! Yaay!
We planted Fairy Tale eggplants this year, which are supposed to have very pretty flowers and good looking eggplants, so I'm looking forward to them.
We now have eight or ten sweet pepper plants with actual leaves on them; all but one of the remaining pots has a sprout in it but most of them haven't escaped their seed yet. The wallflowers and cilantro are doing nicely.
I have planted 20 tomato seeds: eight sauce tomatoes (Viva Italia), four hybrid slicing tomatoes (Razzleberry), and eight cherries (four Chocolate Cherry and four Tumbling Tom). We still have a fifth variety coming in the mail. It will be tomato heaven here this summer if these all grow, and I'm looking forward to it. Nothing beats a fresh tomato and cucumber salad in the summer.

Cloud Pools

2010-02-03T12:11:00.000-05:00

Last week I scheduled a flight for this morning. That's always a risk, since I never know what the weather's going to be like if I schedule more than a couple days out. I've had four cancelled checkrides due to weather, maybe five, in the last couple of months.
This morning I woke to a little fog and chilly temperatures, but by nine here at the farm it was clear and sunny. I moved the tropical plants outside and headed up to the airport, which is about 19 miles away.
Halfway between here and the airport I entered a dense fog bank, and stayed in it all the way through the town of Liberty. The airport sits atop a low hill just north of the town, so I thought it might be clear, but no such luck. I was disappointed. I wrote up some paperwork and as I headed back out to the car, I looked up, and the sky cleared--a long, narrow strip of blue directly over the airport. Who am I to turn down such a sign from above? I ran back to the plane, got it started and taxied through fog to the end of the runway.
The fog was still dense on the ground, but right at the airport I could see blue above. Visibility was shot but only on the ground. I was above the fog bank within seconds of takeoff. Climbed up to about three thousand feet (two thousand above the ground), and took a look around.
To the north was a line of low clouds, clearly rising fog that was burning off as I watched. Ahead, to the east, it was clear. But just to my south, over Liberty and for several miles around and west, the ground was obscured by a layer of fog. From above, fog on the ground just looks like clouds, and as you fly directly over them, you can see the ground through the fog.
The fog was burning off, and broke up in patches as I was flying. As I was finishing up in the airport pattern at the end of the flight, I noticed the quarry that's about a mile south of the field. It's two big deep holes in the ground, not much more. Today the fog lingered in those holes, so that they were just two big cloud pools on the ground, slowly dissolving into the sky above. Gorgeous.
What a day for a flight.

Seedling Update

2010-01-31T19:57:00.000-05:00

Today we moved the sweet pepper seedlings out of the little starting greenhouse and into an uncovered tray. Still waiting on anything to happen with the eggplant and poblano seeds we planted this weekend. And tonight we'll be putting four kinds of tomatoes in the dirt. We have a fifth on order. It's going to be good eats at our house this summer, I can tell you that.

Most of the ice melted today; it got warmer than the weather service was predicting, not that I'm complaining. I'll be back out in the yard again tomorrow.

Random Old Photos

2010-01-30T17:30:00.000-05:00

Well, the promised snow didn't exactly happen, but we got plenty of sleet and ice, and are homebound because of the ice right now. Tomorrow when it's sunny I'll take a picture. I was going to post a little fiction I've been working on, but didn't really do any work on it as I'd intended. Instead Smittywife and I went through some old pictures to see which ones we might blow up to put on the walls in the living room. This here is one of them.

We have a nice painting of an acacia tree on the mantle and were hoping to add more, since I have all these photos from my trip to Africa a few years ago. We picked five or six we like. I'm particularly fond of this one.

While I was going through old pictures I came across this one from several years ago, a winter in Kyrgyzstan when I was deployed with the Air Force. You never see snowflakes like this. We certainly don't get them here in South Carolina. It was cold enough that winter, too, that the snowflakes didn't really melt, so for several days the top inch or two of snow was these perfect little snowflakes. It was fascinating.

That's all for today. Maybe I'll do some writing this evening to post tomorrow.

Seedling Update

2010-01-29T17:47:00.000-05:00

I was going to post updates on our little seedlings for the garden. I love germinating seeds, it's so much fun to watch them. On my way to the mud room to take the picture, I stopped and grabbed a snack. I had pie. It occurred to me that I had a picture of this pie on my camera. Smittywife made it this past weekend, cherry-cheesecake pie. She made fat free cheesecake, and we canned the cherries ourselves over the summer. This is good pie. I've had it for breakfast a couple times this week...

And while I'm posting pictures, take a look at the flowers on our little calamansi tree. We have to keep it indoors this time of year (this summer I'm building a greenhouse, I swear) along with the key lime and... all of the other tropical plants we moved up here with from Florida. Oy. Mangoes, avocados, plumerias, jasmines, they're great but they take up a lot of space in the back of the house. But then one of them goes and bursts into flower like this here. They smell like a mix of jasmine and orange blossoms, and there are six times as many buds on the tree as there are open flowers right now. We won't need air freshener in the living room for a week.

Okay, here are the actual seedlings! On the right are five cilantro plants. The ten plants on the left are lemon wallflowers. Side note: am I the only person who remembers that there was a Batman villain called The Wallflower? I mean, it's not like I was even alive during the Adam West era, which is when that villain came up, but there are zero references to it on the web apart from commentary on a Venture Bros. episode. Weird. I'd have thought, the Adam West Batman series being such a cult thing, there'd be pages devoted to every one-off character that ever appeared, like how every Pokemon in existence has a full page on Wikipedia longer than most biographies of the kings of England.
Anyway, some of the sweet peppers are sprouting at last. Took them two weeks; this is why you start things indoors. We have a tray of poblano peppers and eggplants going, too, but no activity there yet. This weekend we should be planting a whole bunch of stuff.

Snow?

2010-01-29T16:21:00.000-05:00

The picture at the top of this blog is my winter picture. It was taken on March 1st of last year, which is only winter technically; I think March is spring. But we had five inches of snowfall last year overnight between the 28th and 1st and so that's when I took that picture. I may get to update it if the weather forecasts come true.

Living here, the possibility--even if remote--of snow always means lines at the store. I don't know what people are thinking. I went in there to buy some almond milk, which we were out of. They had like nine cashiers working plus the self-checkout lines and there were four or five people in each one of the lines. Buying bread, milk, eggs, giant bags of dog food, tortilla chips, soda... what are these people thinking is going to happen? I realize it's a Friday, but it was ten o'clock in the morning! Nobody had gotten their paycheck yet. This was just panic buying.

I love the people who buy milk and eggs and such. Aren't you afraid the power's going to go out? That's what usually happens here, because snow becomes ice, ice makes trees fall down, and power lines get cut. So all that milk you bought to stock up is going to sour in the fridge anyway. (Yes, I bought milk too, but I would have bought it regardless of the weather forecast because we needed it.) And how long are people expecting this to last? We're talking two days, max; by Sunday it's supposed to be sunny and warm again.

In any event I used the weather--which by the way hasn't actually arrived yet--as an excuse to mostly stay inside and work on a couple of writing projects. Yep, I'm a real farmer; when it's below 42 I don't do outdoor work.

Vegetable Beds are for Vegetables

2010-01-28T18:09:00.000-05:00

I built the second bed today, but there is much more dirt to put in it. I would have finished it but I decided it was time to go through the stack of old lumber in our shed and figure out how many boards and what sizes we actually had so I knew how many beds I could build. Yesterday I was looking at an amorphous pile of wood and thinking there was no way I had enough to build all the beds we'd planned. Once organized it turned out the pile was in fact much larger.

Now of course I'm rethinking where I want to put all the beds. Last year I dug a bed at the edge of our parking area (a large gravel patch in front of the house) where I thought at the time everything would get enough sun to be productive without getting so much sun that it would all dry out.

Then last year went on to be the wettest one of the decade, and the shade level was much too high. Gardeners will appreciate this: despite having three healthy plants, we never got one single zucchini. Really! This year I tried to pick sunnier sites, but I find myself doubting a few of my selections. The bed I built today is just under 2/3 the size of what I had planned to put in that location--eleven feet long instead of the planned 16. What do you know, I had no 16 foot boards. Do they even cut 16 foot lumber any more? Anyway, I shifted it to the sunnier side of the 16 feet, so I think I've got a good bed. But I wonder about the other three, the Oak Beds on the other side of the yard. The one in front of the woodpile should be fine, but the rest... I don't know. I have to call in Smittywife for an opinion.

I also continued mucking out the chicken coops, which is as disgusting as you assume it is. I had the wheelbarrow about 3/4 full of shit when it got unbalanced and tipped over. I was inside the coop at the time so it didn't get all over me at least, but it meant I had to scoop the same shit twice. Oy.

The real problem is this: vegetable beds are for vegetables. I noticed this afternoon when I went to add the last few scoops of dirt to yesterday's bed that the barn cats had explored the bed last night. At least they didn't do anything in it, but it was full of paw prints. Then I go around the side of the garage to count boards, come back, and the dogs are both in the bed, digging, eating chicken poop (a canine delicacy to judge by their attitudes), having a high old time. They got chased out and I relocated their tie-down farther away. Then I let the chickens out of the coop to roam while I was counting lumber. Again I come back around the garage and there are five chickens in my vegetable bed. The hens had made themselves little nests in there. It was ridiculous. Of course it smells like their coop so I can't blame them, and a little extra fertilizer never hurts, but they shouldn't be nesting in there. Sheesh.

Someday I'll Finish

2010-01-28T11:34:00.000-05:00

This morning I painted the edge of the ceiling in the bathroom again, a second coat. Didn't take terribly long, although painting the edge of a ceiling when there's furniture and plumbing fixtures to work around--I have to put the ladder in the bathtub to finish the job--isn't exactly child's play. Nonetheless, it felt like an accomplishment, like I'd finally finished something in this house after a year and a half.

Of course then I remembered we still have plinth blocks and corner moulding to put around the door. Granted, that's another half-hour job, but the knowledge that it needed to be done--when I remembered around ten-thirty or so--rained out my mental tickertape parade. Oh well. I guess the truth is when you set out to renovate a house you're never really done.

First Bed Finished

2010-01-27T20:41:00.000-05:00

Today I finally built the first raised bed, and mucked the first full wheelbarrow-full of, well, muck, out of the chicken coops. Farm work is definitely work. I wish I could call this a farm, but I think I need livestock, and poultry doesn’t count. Perhaps I could get the barn cats rated as a herd.

We were planning… well, I drew out five raised beds, scraped the earth clean of grass and weeds and marked them out. Most of them were much too large; I think the biggest was nine feet by twelve. How are you supposed to pick tomatoes growing in the middle of a 9x12 bed if you aren’t supposed to walk in the bed? I don’t know if I was thinking about that. Sometimes with menial work like scraping the weed layer, you just go forth and scrape and stop thinking about it much, or think about other things entirely. I haven’t yet arrived at that point where I can truly be mindful in all menial tasks. I’m good at it with dishes, and okay with laundry (especially folding), but yardwork still gets my mind wandering. I suppose that’s okay.

Anyway, we planned five raised beds. One of them had a lot of large tree roots, and while they’re raised, so the roots would be a problem, with so many beds we just decided to eliminate that fifth one. I split the 9x12 bed in two, so there are still technically five. There are two Fig Beds, and three Oak Beds. Granted, the Fig Beds are near an oak tree, too, but the Oak Beds are not near a fig tree. Everything in the yard is near an oak tree.

I think the Fig Beds are in the more fertile area so I’m building those first. The one I finished today is four by eleven or so. I put eight barrowsfull of dirt in there and one of chicken crap and it still needs about three or four more, but that’s what tomorrow is for. But it looks nice! I’ll build the other Fig Bed tomorrow, and maybe take a before picture. If it gets above freezing before ten-thirty, that is.

So this morning I finally finished painting the bathroom ceiling, since I sure wasn’t going out to work in sub-freezing temperatures. Frankly sub-40 is too cold. I still have Florida blood, can’t help that. That bathroom has been a work in progress since we moved in, but since getting the vent fan installed this autumn the little things that remain to be done have been more obvious. Painted the door and door trim just before Christmas, and today I finally got the line at the edge of ceiling done. The whole ceiling is now the same color! Yaay! And having filled in the two holes remaining from the fan installation it actually feels like it might be done.

Holy crap! The bathroom’s done! (Pause for comments about what still needs to be done.)

So all in all a productive day. Welcome to Smitty’s Farm.

Who is Smitty?

2010-01-27T20:40:00.000-05:00

Smitty is a man. Yes! Has all the requisite parts and everything.

Smitty does not have a job, however, which makes him feel like less of a man. This has been going on for some time. From the government’s perspective, Smitty has withdrawn from the labor force and is no longer included in economic statistics. He is among the Long-Term Unemployed, something he never thought he’d be.
Smitty is a college graduate, and a former Air Force officer. He is qualified to fly airplanes, but for most other jobs he is either over- or under-qualified, and, as a long-term unemployed non-statistic has trouble finding employers who will take him seriously. This is a primary source of frustration. He has trouble getting his value across on paper and prefers the interview.

Smitty is in his 30s. He is healthy but not in good shape and misses regular exercise.

Smitty lives in South Carolina, in a rural part of the upstate, but within shopping distance of two of the region’s four major cities.

Smitty has two acres, of which he is in full command of at most four-fifths of one. He hopes to acquire more land, and dreams of adding a breeding pair of sheep to the current farmstead/menagerie.

Smitty is very happily married and has no children.

Smitty wants you to know that if he met you, he’d buy you a beer and share an hour’s conversation with you. And if he already knows you, the offer is open.

Piling On

2010-01-25T09:09:00.000-05:00

I’ve been sitting on this all season.
In the last couple of weeks, particularly over the last week, leading up to the NFC Championship game, we’ve had to endure the premature canonization of Brett Favre. The arguments about how winning another Super Bowl with a different team at age 40 would be just about the most amazing thing the football universe has ever seen never stopped; every show, every hour, there was discussion about where Brett would rank on the list of best quarterbacks if he could pull off what, to every commentator I heard, already seemed to be a foregone conclusion.
And now, the morning after his second interception in his final play of an NFC Championship game in three years, what discussion do we already have to endure? What question occupied the minds of the football chattering class from March on in 2009?
Will Brett come back for another year?
And if so, where?

Give it a rest, already. And give Favre a rest, too.
I’m certainly not going to claim the man can’t play the game, or that he isn’t one of the top quarterbacks in history (and even at present). He is a stellar talent, a remarkable player, exciting to watch.
He is absolutely NOT Christ in His second coming. Why do we have to put up with this characterization?
It is only too perfect that in the game that the football media told us could prove Favre one of the greatest of all time, he instead proved the truth behind the old complaint about him: he’s high reward, but high risk. Who but Brett Favre, on a play where he needed to toss a three yard screen to keep possession and get into field goal range to put the game away, would toss a long lob and have it intercepted by the NFL’s oldest punch line? Brett Favre literally threw that game away. There’s no other way to say.
He’s great. Yeah, he is. But sometimes, the most remarkable thing about Brett Favre is the way he throws things away.
Like the way he threw away the love and adulation of an entire state, the way he turned his back not just on a team (a team that was ready to move forward and not get jerked around by a guy who literally does not know when to quit) but on a city and legions of fans, just to stick it to a couple guys he didn’t like and didn’t agree with.
That was what bothered me the most in lead-up to Farve’s latest pick of infamy—the lionization of his potentially leading two different teams to the Super Bowl. Some folks get traded, that happens. But I’m an old-school Cal Ripken guy: I like a player who stays in one place, or at least isn’t in control of his trading. I realize that’s not the world we live in any more, but shoot, Favre played a full and successful career in one city, so clearly it can be done. It’s this second career of his that he’s started, first expecting his old team to put their entire future on hold while he dithered about whether to retire, then spurning them for a Jets team who he clearly didn’t really want to play for and weren’t able to protect him, and then moving to his Packers’ arch-rivals just to have the chance to beat them and prove his point.
You know who Brett Favre reminds me of? Not the everyman, Wrangler-wearing joe-sixpack his marketing agents want us to see him as. No. Brett Favre is Michael Jordan. All he really wants to do is get back at everybody who ever said anything bad about him. When he’s inducted into the hall of fame—as there is no doubt he deserves to be—Favre is going to stand up there and call out the guys in the Packers organization who he’ll still be carrying a grudge against. And we’ll all say, what a shame it is.

Only in South Carolina

2009-12-16T19:50:00.000-05:00

Yes, that is what it looks like: it's an airplane up on blocks.

Mascot Madness!!!

2009-12-10T11:43:00.006-05:00

Every year I play the ESPN College Bowl Mania game with a group of friends. This year I'm trying to pick teams based on how the mascots would fare in single combat. It's tougher than I thought it would be. I also made picks in a different entry based on what I think is likely to actually happen on the field. Given my history, I expect the Mascot Battle entry to beat my actual picks. Here's how I made the mascot picks, but I still have ten days to make changes if you think I should.

New Mexico Bowl
Fresno State Bulldogs v Wyoming Cowboys
A cowboy could take a bulldog out of the fight with one good kick. Those spurs are sharp. Wyoming wins.

St. Petersburg Bowl
UCF Knights v Rutgers Scarlet Knights
How do you choose between two knights? Presumably it would be a pitched battle, but looking at the actual mascots themselves, UCF's Knightro looks way tougher than the Scarlet Knight of Rutgers. Also, our puppy's name is Nitro. UCF wins.

New Orleans Bowl
Southern Miss Golden Eagles v Middle Tennessee State Blue Raiders
This was one of the tougher picks. How to put an eagle against a raider? What is a raider? I know my high school mascot was the Raiders, and our mascot was basically a Barbary Pirate. But these raiders are blue. They're depressed. Not really in the mood to fight. And the eagles are made of gold, so they're extremely heavy. If a golden eagle falls from the sky and hits one of the depressed raiders, it could knock him out, possibly kill him, but definitely demoralize him enough to make him leave the field. Southern Miss wins.

Las Vegas Bowl
Oregon State Beavers v BYU Cougars
A cougar could eat a beaver for lunch. Or even brunch. And that's all I'm going to say about Cougars and Beavers, or I'll get myself in trouble. BYU wins.

Poinsettia Bowl
Utah Utes v California Golden Bears
A Golden Bear was a legendary gold-colored brown bear occasionally sighted in the American West. Legendary or not, I suspect a bear would have been able to kill a Ute in single combat. A band of Utes, sure, especially with horses and arrows. Even one Ute with some arrows, sure, but weaponry aside a Ute is after all just a human, and bears v humans in the wilderness usually only has one ending. California wins.

Hawai'i Bowl
Nevada Wolf Pack v Southern Methodist Mustangs
Much as I'd like to pick SMU in their return to postseason play, Nevada has the edge here. The key to mascot battles in single combat clearly is to make your mascot an inherent plural--not just the wolves, but a whole pack of them. Mustangs are fast and all, but I think a whole pack of wolves would have the edge here. Nevada wins.

Little Caesar's Bowl
Marshall Thundering Herd v Ohio Bobcats
As in the above, Marshall has chosen an inherent plural. And a bobcat is small. Fundamentally it doesn't matter what the Herd is made of, if there are enough of them to thunder, and the bobcat is in their path, he's toast. Marshall wins.

Meineke Car Care Bowl
Pittsburgh Panthers v North Carolina Tar Heels
Pitt wins this one walking away. UNC has one of two possibilities here--either it's a turpentine worker who's stepped in tar, and thus is easy pickings for any wandering panther, or it's a ram (technically a Dorset Sheep). The sort of thing panthers have evolved eating. Pitt wins.

Emerald Bowl
Boston College Eagles v USC Trojans
Although an eagle could certainly harry a Trojan warrior, unless the eagle was really large it's unlikely it could carry him off or kill him. Trojans had at least some sort of armor, and although with a spear or sword it's going to be a while before he gets in a killing blow on a flying raptor, I think in the end the Trojan will prevail. Tough call though. USC wins.

Music City Bowl
Kentucky Wildcats v Clemson Tigers
Cat-on-cat action here. A tiger is larger, heavier, and generally less well dispositioned than a wildcat/panther/puma/cougar etc. It would be an epic battle but I have to give it to the tiger. Also, it's Clemson. Clemson wins.

Independence Bowl
Texas A&M Aggies v Georgia Bulldogs
I had a tough time with this. An Aggie is, I would assume, an agriculturalist. A bulldog is not very big. I would think the Aggie would have the advantage but it's apples to oranges here. Texas A&M's on-field mascot, Reveille, is a collie. I like bulldogs, but collies are just way cooler. Texas A&M wins.

Eagle Bank Bowl
Army Golden Knights or UCLA Bruins v Temple Owls
We may not know who they'll face, but unless they're facing a team called the Field Mice or something, the Owls are going to lose. Army or UCLA wins.

Champs Sports Bowl
Miami Hurricanes v Wisconsin Badgers
I am assuming here that the Badger doesn't get to just burrow into a hole and ride out the storm. Sure, they're mean, but I just don't see how a badger stands a chance against one of nature's most destructive forces. Miami wins.

Humanitarian Bowl
Bowling Green Falcons v Idaho Vandals
This is not an easy one. They're not called the Vandals after the Germanic tribe that sacked Rome, except indirectly; the name comes from a 1920s-era sportswriter's florid pen. Think of them more as mere vandals, without the capital. But a vandal's goal in a fight is not to kill, merely to mess stuff up. Could a vandal mess up a falcon before the falcon killed him? Probably--given enough spray paint I'm sure he could produce a reasonable tag on even the flightiest falcon before he got his eyes pecked out. This is a close call, but Idaho wins.

Holiday Bowl
Arizona Wildcats v Nebraska Cornhuskers
What exactly is a Cornhusker? One who husks corn... but "husking" as a verb basically means to pull the husks off the ears of corn (shucking, in the dialect I grew up in). Nebraska's actual mascot, Herbie Husker, looks about like a cowboy, without his six-shooter, spurs, or much of anything else. I think if he came upon a hungry wildcat, Herbie would be toast. Arizona wins.

Armed Forces Bowl
Houston Cougars v Air Force Falcons.
The outcome is already decided; I just had to think of a way to get there. See, we're talking Air Force here, so we're not talking about a mere falcon. This is a Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon we're talking about. And therefore, to make it fair, we'll give Houston a Grumman F9F Cougar. The F-16 has better visibility and maneuverability and more armament, as well as being an overall more technologically advanced aircraft (it entered service the year the Cougar left it). So obviously, Air Force wins.

Sun Bowl
Oklahoma Sooners v Stanford Cardinal.
This is a strange matchup. A Sooner, technically, is a guy who cheats in a government land sale. And Stanford's "Cardinal" officially refers to the color, and nothing else. So we have a cheater facing a color. Indeed, a legitimate land rush participant might have turned a shade similar to cardinal upon finding a sooner already on the choicest piece of land during the rush, implying that a Sooner had won (although the courts, and eventually the Dept of the Interior, would have the final say on that). But cheaters never prosper. In this case, the tiebreaker goes to the team with one band member who dresses up like a tree at every game. Stanford wins.

Texas Bowl
Navy Midshipmen v Missouri Tigers
A lone midshipman, stranded in the Sundarbans against a ravenous tiger, is not likely to prevail; British naval history will back us up on this. But if the middie has a radio, and he calls in a ship-to-shore strike from a battleship or an airstrike from an F-18, then the tiger's going to have a rough go of it. But in this case, what with Navy beating Air Force earlier this year, I think the midshipman left his radio in his other pants. Uh-oh. Missouri wins.

Insight Bowl
Minnesota Golden Gophers v Iowa State Cyclones
This is the year of fierce windstorms battling small, ground-dwelling mammals. Gopher may beat Bill Murray, but Gopher ain't gonna beat a cyclone. Iowa State wins.

Peach Bowl (Yes, dammit, that's what it's called)
Virginia Tech Hokies v Tennessee Volunteers
A Hokie is a turkey. More or less; actually, despite the story that it's a castrated turkey, the word is just nonsense, gibberish, cooked up by a student in the 19-teens for use in a chant. The turkey as a mascot had been around for a while before that; whether the turkey was castrated is unknown. I have a passing familiarity with poultry, and I have to say, I'm not sure how one would go about castrating a turkey. Ultimately I don't know why you'd bother, either, since it would have no practical benefit. Turkeys don't live very long in factory farming, less than a year usually, and the few toms who last are bred to be so heavy they can't mate naturally anyway. Workers have to collect semen from them (there's a job for Mike Rowe) and artificially inseminate the hens. Really. Honestly, I don't really what care the guy from Tennessee is volunteering for (war, actually), no turkey is going to prevail in this fight. Tennessee wins.

Outback Bowl
Northwestern Wildcats v Auburn Tigers
This exact matchup occurs two other times this bowl season, and the outcome is going to be the same. Auburn wins.

Gator Bowl
West Wirginia Mountaineers v Florida State Seminoles
The way I see it, the Seminoles actually won the Seminole Wars. They're still there. And now they own multiple casinos, the Hard Rock Cafe chain, and governor Charlie Crist, so they've got enough money and power to complete the reconquista and return Florida to what it should be--a primitive wild paradise for a few thousand hardy souls. Not that they'll do that; there's no money in it. Anyway, the U.S. Army of the 1820-1840s likely included a goodly number of mountaineers, who never quite figured out how to fight in the swamps of Florida. So I'm calling this one for Florida State.

Capital One Bowl Penn State Nittany Lions v LSU Tigers
Tigers beat cougars, wildcats, pumas, and mountain lions. We've been over this. LSU wins
.
Rose Bowl
Ohio State Buckeyes v Oregon Ducks
Although buckeyes are poisonous to humans and cattle, they are not to birds. Although a duck probably wouldn't have much interest in eating a buckeye, it could without ill effect. And a buckeye being merely a small, round nut, there's not much it could do to the duck. Oregon wins.

Sugar Bowl
Florida Gators v Cincinnati Bearcats
A bearcat is neither a bear nor a cat, but a tree-dwelling civet-like creature of southeast Asia. It eats primarily fruit. I'm fairly sure the alligator would have no trouble here. Of course, if it was a Grumman F8F Bearcat... nah. Florida wins (although I really hope I'm wrong here).

International Bowl
South Florida Bulls v Northern Illinois Huskies
A husky is a tough dog and all, but bulls are awfully big and ill-tempered. Unless the fight is in the tundra somewhere, South Florida wins.

Papajohns.com Bowl
South Carolina Gamecocks v Connecticut Huskies
How amusing that the worst-named bowl has one of the worst-named teams. You can call it a "gamecock," you can dress it up, you can put spurs on its feet, but at the end of the day, it's still a chicken, and a tasty meal for a hungry dog. Connecticut wins.

Cotton Bowl
Oklahoma State Cowboys v Mississippi Rebels
An interesting matchup here, a late-1800s roper against a mid-1800s citizen soldier. As an American icon, the cowboy is tough to beat; the rebels got beat. Badly. Oklahoma State wins.

Liberty Bowl
Arkansas Razorbacks v East Carolina Pirates
Another interesting matchup, a large, angry, feral pig, versus a pirate, probably drunk on rum. Pigs are mean. But pirates have guns. East Carolina wins.

Alamo Bowl
Michigan State Spartans v Texas Tech Red Raiders
Texas Tech has one of the coolest on-field mascots. If you've never seen the Red Raider you should watch this game and look for him. He's basically Zorro. On a horse. Zorro! Sorry Sparty, you can't win this one. Zorro and Texas Tech conquer all.

Fiesta Bowl
Boise State Broncos v TCU Horned Frogs
A horned frog is a smallish, pointy lizard of desert areas. A bronco is a large, fast, unshod, greenbroke horse. Although it will probably hurt when he does so, I assume the bronco would just step on the Horned Frog and squash it flat. Boise State wins. (Not really though. I would have loved to see TCU in the national championship game, but so it goes. Some year.)

Orange Bowl
Iowa Hawkeyes v Georgia Tech Yellowjackets
I looked this up. A Hawkeye... it's not anything. I mean, it could be just the disembodied eye of a hawk I guess. It's a reference to a keen-sighted person, but, what does that mean? Is a Hawkeye just an Iowan? Their on-field mascot is Herky the Hawk, so I'm inclined to think they're going with the hawk theme. But it's still just the eyes. So, we have a tiny insect with a painful sting and a reputation for working in groups, against some disembodied eyes. Just, you know, sitting there. Georgia Tech wins.

GMAC Bowl
Central Michigan Chippewas v Troy Trojans
I don't really recall any stories about the Chippewa (or Ojibwe) being particularly fearsome warriors. Obviously the Trojans weren't any great shakes themselves, but they probably were much better armed than the Chippewa, who could not smelt bronze or iron for swords or shields. So although I don't know what they'd have to fight about, I think the Trojan, and thus Troy, would win.

BCS "National Championship" (or so they call it)
Texas Longhorns v Alabama Crimson Tide
It's difficult to match a discrete object, such as a cow, against a large amorphous one, such as a wave. Or the tide, which isn't an object at all but a natural phenomenon. There's the Red Tide in Florida along the gulf, caused by algae blooms. Crimson is a kind of red. So perhaps we're dealing with a cow versus some algae. Hmm. Now on the one hand, it's tough to argue that the tide could ever be defeated by anything, since the moon isn't going anywhere (ditto the sun) and the tides are unceasing. But every creature on the planet, including the plants, knows about the tide. Some things like clams have evolved based on the tide. So could you say the tide is winning anything? It really just exists. It seems undefeatable, but then again it doesn't exactly seem like it's fighting anybody. Now, I know Alabama's on-field mascot is an elephant, and I think an elephant would easily defeat a cow, even a very large and pointy one such as a longhorn. But, and this is key, Alabama's elephant is a guy in an elephant suit, whereas the Longhorns have an actual longhorn. Those things are quite large, and, locked in a coliseum with a guy in an elephant suit, I think the longhorn would eventually trample the elephant. So, we're either putting a cow against the tide, some algae, or a guy in an elephant suit. So much for a "national championship." Texas wins.

The Move-In

2009-12-10T10:28:00.002-05:00

Sometime this September, after the house had sat vacant for almost a year, we noticed somebody new over there taking care of the place--mowing the lawn (which hadn't been done since July), picking up some of the random garbage in the yard, cleaning out the house a bit. It was in bad shape, as I said, and it needed some help. We wondered whether by chance this was a new owner/landlord (since the property recently changed hands from a private individual to a rental company--though still probably the same private individual), but no, this was our new neighbor. Yaay!

Well, sort of. The man who was taking care of the place, his child was going to be living there, and the child's mother would be there as well. The man, the father, he lives elsewhere. He clearly cares for his kid, though. (We think he should have custody, but that's another story).

Then came the move-in, and not long thereafter I met the new neighbor.

Right away I should have known something was up. I am not a person prone to superstition or who believes in, well, much. I don't believe in ghosts or psychics or ESP or the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot or the conspiracies of the Knights Templar and the Council on Foreign Relations. Conspiracies are another matter, but as a rule I just don't believe in things that don't have rational explanations. I also hate it when people feel the need to embellish the truth about something in an email, when frequently the truth is quite nice by itself. But that's another rant. (I do believe in UFOs, but mainly I believe in what I think is self-evident, that intelligent life has clearly evolved elsewhere in the universe and eventually we'll meet it--but most (not all) UFO reports (and all abductions) I tend to think are crap.)

In any event, she was convinced that the house was haunted. She had been told that there'd been a murder in there, six people were killed, there were ghosts... and of course she bought it all. And her child did, too, but the kid's nine, and the man who told the kid these things ought to be strung up and poked repeatedly with a pointy stick until he promises never to tell such lies to a child again. Ugh. (It doesn't help that he's a lecherous old man, either.)

She claimed that within a few days of moving in she began to feel depressed, the house felt oppressive all the time, like the ceiling was coming down on her, and one evening her child was running through the yard and ran smack into an obstruction that wasn't there. Nee nee nee nee nee nee nee nee...

Later, Smittywife and I were walking to the neighbor's house and stumbled over a large steel plate in the yard, hidden by tall grass, but raised enough above the surface of the ground to very easily trip someone (Smitty, for example), and to make a small child fall as if having run into a large object that wasn't really there. We removed said plate, which wasn't covering anything. It was just trash (left there by the landlord I'm sure).

She said she'd been obsessively cleaning since she moved in, because there was blood all over the walls and ceiling and cabinets in the kitchen, and it kept seeping out of the walls.

Okay, that's creepy, right? But we've been here longer than that house has been vacant. We knew the previous tenants. There's no history in the public records of any incident at that address--and a sextuple homicide would almost surely generate a police report. At least a newspaper article. Some obituaries, perhaps? No such evidence exists, and the neighbors, though one neighbor I know claims a previous tenant was beaten in there during a dispute, can't think of anything like that that's ever happened here. We'd know. This is a small neighborhood. Indeed, most of the neighbors simply note that we never had any problems here until the current tenant moved in. Hmm.

You know what does continue to leach out of the walls no matter how many times you've cleaned? Tobacco stains! And I know the previous tenants smoked in there. A lot. And probably didn't bother cleaning at all (what's the point if you're just going to have another cigarette after you're done?).

Also, and I know I've said bad things about the landlord/property manager, but really, would you just leave bloodstains on the cabinetry if you were trying to rent the place? Really? I mean, come on. Let's not forget that since the last tenants were not slaughtered in there (there were six of them, though, and when they moved out they stole the fridge and some other stuff, so no doubt the landlord wishes they were dead) they would have had to have lived there for three or four years without once bothering to clean off the blood stains.

If that seems plausible to you please lay down the crack pipe and check yourself in to the clinic.

Still, although she was flighty and given to fears about ghosts and murders in her home, she didn't seem like a bad neighbor. As a rule, most any neighbor is better than a vacant house. I used to believe that was a general truth of the world. Oh well; live and learn.

Trespassing!

2009-12-10T09:43:00.002-05:00

Oh my! So much goes on with this neighbor I can't keep up. I'm going to jump to yesterday's excitement before I back up. Yesterday, Code Enforcement was out to cite her and her live-in for A)storing their household trash outdoors on their property (yes, Virginia, that is illegal) and then for burning said household trash (which they did Monday, pictures coming!). Moments after Code Enforcement left, shock of shocks!, she called the police and complained that I had trespassed on her property!

She claimed I just "walked right in" to her house on Tuesday. I knocked on her kitchen door. The kitchen door is immediately inside the laundry room, the door to which she always leaves open (as you can see in this picture here), even when she goes away during the day (to buy her crack or whatever it is that she does; I assure you she's not working in any legally recognized sense). You don't actually have to step inside the house to knock on the kitchen door, but she used this as a pretense to claim I was trespassing on "her" "property" (which she doesn't own, of course).

Oy. The officer who came out was very nice and suggested I at least try to "keep the peace a little" between us, but that was all. They talk to a lot of drug users. They know. After all the last thing I want is them breaking into my house to steal things to support themselves.

Before I go I'd like to mention that this has been a full week for the county's law enforcement agencies, with visits from three different ones to the same address--code enforcement, followed by the sherriff's office, and then animal control today. And since these people moved in, there's been a call to some such agency or another on about a bi-weekly basis. Before that--in all the time we lived here before she moved in--nobody on this street ever called out anybody. It's a good, safe, friendly neighborhood; the people are friendly, the dogs are friendly, we all respect one another's property but don't fear crossing through a yard or knocking on a door. It's life in rural America. Then the drug addicts move in, and it all goes to shit. Smittywife noted yesterday that she's sick of that woman (our neighbor) ruining her days off, and I agree.

Part I

The House Next Door

2009-11-30T10:33:00.005-05:00

This is a picture of the house next door. It seems pretty benign from this far away. But it is drab and grey. And you might some things that seem a bit awry. For example, the giant pile of garbage by the back door. At the left edge of the picture you'll note the sawhorses with the pile of windows, doors, and lumber that the landlord is too damn lazy to remove.

Here is the awful garage. Note the old fridge peeking out from behind my tree, on the right. The old galvanized washtub sitting beside the garage is a nice touch. I'm waiting to confirm the location of our property lines on this, because we think our property line might actually be right along the wall of that garage. And that's kind of a nice galvanized tub there. It hasn't rusted through yet. In the back you can see the moldy old doghouse and way behind the old blue tarp that's just mouldering away and collecting rainwater and mosquito larvae. I can't blame the neighbor for this since it's the landlord's crap.

While trying to sneak pictures out the windows, Batgirl, one our four thousand barn cats, leapt up on the sill to admonish me for prying. Batgirl is unimpressed by our vendetta against the neighbor, because she enjoys picking through the garbage pile for snacks.

The Neighbor, Part I

2009-11-30T08:28:00.004-05:00

I've decided to start blogging about my neighbor. Since I have no regular readers any more this should be an amusing restart to the blog. Reviewing the laundry list of books I've read since I ceased regular updates was just daunting. This will be more fun.

Today I'll tell you about the house next door absent the neighbor. I should definitely take some pictures.
In this area of the country, property is cheap (it's part of why we moved here). Rental property prices would make Florida readers' eyes bug out: you often see two-bedroom houses for under $500/mo with most utilities included. These are often on large lots in relatively rural areas; right now on craigslist there's a 3/2 for rent on 3/4 of an acre with a garage and central heat and air for $450. Seriously.

So the house next door is a rental property, too. It rents at $450 as well. It has a garage, one half of which is behind a locked door that the residents don't have a key to, and the other half of which is so chock-a-block with old junk that you can't even open the front door, so putting a car in there is a bad joke. It has one tiny little bathroom, and one bedroom. It has a kitchen with appliances, which is nice, but no central heat or air. In fact so far as I know there's no a/c of any kind unless there's a window unit in one of the two front rooms that's hidden behind the porch rail. The fireplace is almost certainly not rated for use so I assume we're talking kerosene for winter heat. Always nice to have a major fire risk next door.

It has a total of five rooms if you count the bathroom or the trashy laundry room. If not, there's a small kitchen, a small bedroom, and two front rooms. There are no doors in the house, apart from at the bathroom--no door between the bedroom and kitchen, or between any of the other rooms. This is weird to me.

The back door doesn't seal. The steps up to the front door are cracked. Cats live under the house and use it as their disposal area. In the back yard, next to the garage, is an old dog pen with bent fencing and a rotting doghouse, and generations of dogs have dug holes out from the pen so that it wouldn't contain anything smaller than a bull mastiff--and the chain link wouldn't hold that kind of dog in for long. Immediately behind the house, there are sawhorses set up with some assorted old windows and doors and other trash lumber. In front of the dog pen, some old tires are slowly decomposing into the soil surrounded by broken windows and assorted metal trash. In front of the garage there's an old refrigerator, just sitting there in the driveway. Behind the garage, old rotten lumber, a broken-down doghouse, and parts to a former chicken coop gradually dissolve into the weeds. One side of the garage is covered in poison ivy. The landlord comes by once every three months to mow.

This is what the place looks like when there's not anyone living in it.
And this rents for $450 a month. You'd think the assorted trash lying in the yard and the junked-up garage might be due to the current awful tenant, but you'd be wrong. All this trash is just lying in the yard while the landlord is trying to rent the place.

The house was occupied when we moved in last September, but the residents shortly moved out and purchased a home. They'd been living in there with three kids--five people in a four-room house with one bathroom. Much of the junk in the garage is evidently theirs. When they moved out, they stole the refrigerator out of the house and left part of the garage packed floor to ceiling with bags of kitchen trash. Really. The landlord had purchased parts to build a carport (evidently admitting that the garage is not intended for use as, you know, a garage), which they also stole. He recovered the refrigerator from them but couldn't prove that they had the carport pieces (which I assume they fenced). When they moved out they left the house a complete wreck. The landlord assured me he was going to refinish all the floors and the cabinets and clean the place top to bottom.

It sat vacant until early September. Given the shape the property is in, the size of the house, and the amenities it offers, Smittywife and I think a fair rental price for the place would be $250. You could maybe squeeze $300 out of it, if you bothered to clean up the yard. That would be fair. The market would support that. Instead the house sat vacant for ten months. As irritating as it can be to live next to a vacant dump of a house, I look back on those months now with fondness.

Smittywife and I would love to buy this property. We would fix it up--actually, now that we know more about the house, we'd burn it down--and rent it for a while, and perhaps in the future just combine our two properties and build a house farther back on the lot. We'd love to do this. We asked the current landlord what he'd consider selling it for.
Bear in mind this house is half the size of ours and in much worse shape. It's also on half as much property and the garage is in much worse shape than ours.
He wants for this dump more than twice what we paid for our house.
So the landlord, you understand, is insane.

Dutch Bank Bankrupt As Sale Fails

2009-10-19T09:27:00.003-04:00

Who exactly is writing headlines for the BBC these days? Though the article itself is given a different head, links to it from elsewhere on the BBC have the amusing tongue-twister above. Is this deliberate or are they just not paying their algorithms enough?

Not What It Was Intended To Do

2009-10-16T08:54:00.003-04:00

I saw one of those faux-inspirational posters on line today, on Facebook (one of my very very Republican friends), a picture of George W. Bush waving as he steps out of Marine One, with the caption, "Miss me yet?"

And I thought, oh my goodness no! Wow. Nothing like a little perspective. I'm not exactly thrilled with the direction of government right now--I knew I wouldn't be at this point, but that would've been true with McCain in office too--but there is absolutely no way I would ever willingly go back to the Bush regime. Oh my.

Changes

2009-09-04T12:57:00.002-04:00

Changes are afoot in Smitty-blog-land. I'm going to ditch the Library blog, which was in retrospect not a very good move in the first place. Since all the reviews that were here are there I'll have to port most of those back.
I have a huge list of books I've read recently that need reviews, but they'll just be capsule reviews for now; I may go back and write longer reviews if I want.
I have a job offer that, more than likely, is the best job offer I'm ever going to get. Many questions remain to be answered, but I have a meeting next Tuesday that will answer the lot of them.

What I don't have right now is a workable computer, which is a problem; I'm using Smittywife's old monitor with my old laptop as my keyboard and hard drive. Soon I will switch to using Smittywife's old desktop, but that may still be a week away or more.

The remains as ever a ton of work to do at our house, but things are looking up. I intend to start blogging regularly again, because I no longer feel so depressed about my shitty job--which soon enough won't be my shitty job anyway. I have lots of training to do, and will probably need a loan or grant to do it, but I'm happy to do it. I have Smittywife's health insurance I can use to go to the dermatologist and even the dentist (yaay! Never thought I'd say that). We have a fully livable house that is still a bit too cluttered but we're getting better about that. I don't want to say everything is peachy keen, but the horizon is brighter and brighter. The only thing left for me now is to get back to writing--and this blog is going to be the first stop. I'm not going to blog on Facebook any more, it just doesn't work.

So, what should you expect? Well, certainly some posts about flying, I think that's going to become a significant part of this blog. And book reviews, and notes about writing as I get back to that. I hope to post lots of pictures of the yard as it develops, and news of an agricultural sort. And of course I can't lay off the politics. But I think that I may reserve my political postings for longer, more thoughtful pieces, rather than quick hits. There are plenty of quick hits out there.

So. I'm not promising daily posts yet. We'll get there, but I'm not promising it yet. What might be nice would be if I could convince Smittywife to combine her blog with mine, so we could both post here... hmm...

Morning Glories

2009-08-26T16:16:00.002-04:00

I know they're just weeds, really, but who can complain about these weeds? These morning glories are growing wild in the back yard. I have to weedwhack later today but I don't plan to cut these. Why should I? How many weeds are this pretty?

Menagerie Redux

2009-05-24T09:35:00.007-04:00

Per request by Rambling Speech, I am uploading a few pictures from yet another addition to the Smitty Petting Zoo and Animal Shelter (admission free, parking $2). These would be the Smittychix. They don't have names yet but of course they need them if you have suggestions. In this picture is a three-day-old hatchling in front, and her larger sister, maybe ten to twelve days old, in the back.

Here is a picture of the larger chick shielding her younger sister from the paparazzi.

And this I think is the best picture of them. Aren't they cute? Tribble has been far, far too interested in them, and while I was making breakfast this morning she perched on the dining chair and just stared into the chicken cage. She claimed she was watching to make sure they didn't go anywhere, since I couldn't see them from the kitchen, but I'm not so sure...

Puppy Pictures

2009-05-22T08:11:00.009-04:00

Well. The Smitty household has a new member, and some pictures are in order for those of you who haven't already met her. Her name is Lily. She came from Laurens County Animal Rescue. And here she is. Isn't she a cutie?

Here's another picture. Lily is about three months old. Don't ask what breed; a mix of pit bull and... um... I think of her as a Whatsit, maybe with a little Canttell thrown in.

And here is Jackson, doing his best to look absolutely as pathetic as he possibly can so you won't know he actually likes having Lily around. This is the day we brought her home, I think, and he actually was a little annoyed at first, but now they get along great and play together. She even gives him things! Like kennel cough!

While we're looking for an appropriate crate for her to sleep in, we've been keeping Lily in the half bath attached to our bedroom. She gets a wee mite bored in there during the day while we're at work, but seems to find ways to fill her time...

Nobody knows...

2009-05-14T12:36:00.002-04:00

...the trouble our septic system has seen. But I have some ideas.

First of all, and you can consider this a public service announcement: if you have a septic tank, do not flush condoms down the toilet! I mean, really. They should cover this in sex ed. They clog up the drain line.

And yes, they clog up the drain line. I mean, like... like, dozens. Dozens of condoms in my drain line. Old, too. They had turned black. It was vile; visions of it will keep me up tonight. It's barely 1230 and I'm drinking already.

So at any rate we know that our septic system has not been suffering from simple neglect; this is a case of serious, long-term abuse. The gravel into which the old drain field supposedly drained was basically identical to the driveway gravel, and perhaps came off the same truck. Tough to say.

If you'll recall, the previous septic company to come out here, Carolina Septic of Simpsonville, replaced ten feet of the drain line out the back of our septic tank. Apparently they did this without digging up the entire tank because the lid at the back of the tank is cracked and sagging--sagging by about an inch, and this is concrete. Not supposed to sag. You'd think if they'd dug that up and seen that--and I don't know how they replaced ten feet of drain line without doing so--they would have at least kindly informed the homeowner that the lid needed replacing. The plumbing company we've had problems with in the past at least was kind enough to tell me to replace the other lid.

Fortunately the tank itself seems in good enough shape to last for a while more, but I am going to rebuild that lid next week. Oh, and lest I forget to mention, the ten feet of new drain line they put in connected to about two more feet of the same old brittle drain line they replaced... and there wasn't anything else beyond that, to speak of, just a pile of gravel. Seriously. Drain field? What drain field? Isn't a gravel pit good enough? Makes me wonder if that was the established method for installing a septic tank in the early 1940s.

Carolina Septic screwed us.

What we're getting now to replace the former setup is an actual drain field, with pipes with holes and gravel and recycled tire bits (which actually makes sense to use for this purpose), and it's going pretty much from the property line to the garage, a good sixty feet wide, and probably twenty feet down the hill from the tank. This is going to be a big damn septic field. That said, when the contractor came out here to quote me a price, he said when he was done we wouldn't have any more problems. Here's hoping.

... And Then the Sky Fell In

2009-05-13T08:06:00.004-04:00

No, really, I had the best intentions of posting here Monday and yesterday. Monday I worked, but it wasn't an insane day. However, Monday night the septic tank backed up into the house.

Yeah. Thank goodness our plumber (thank you Josh!) installed a relief point outside. Smittywife took a bath Monday night, and when she pulled the plug to drain the tub, the water didn't go anywhere. Then the toilets started to bubble. Then water started to fill into the sinks. She put the plug back in real fast, and I went outside and opened the relief pipe, and water poured out of that thing. The pipe is just outside the house, and is an upward-pointing pipe attached to the septic line. It's lower than any part of the water system elsewhere in the house so it can be opened any time there's a potential backup--and it's a convenient point to add septic treatment and such.

So this pipe points up. I unscrew the lid, and water shoots up about a foot high. This is 2.5" diameter pipe here so a vertical foot of water is nothing to scoff at. This was a potential disaster.

I was supposed to work yesterday but of course I stayed home to have septic tank people come out and look at the system. Now, since we moved in here we've had some issues. It's an old system--the house was built in at least 1938, possibly earlier, and the septic tank, which is hand-built, dates from that time. So we're talking about a 70 year old septic system. Lord knows how well it's been cared for in the past (probably not so well, at least under certain owners). Occasionally we'd find that when one toilet was flushed, another would bubble. Several months ago we had the tank pumped and the septic line snaked; the snake revealed a significant belly in the line, where over time the cast-iron pipe had sagged enough to restrict water flow to perhaps half the pipe.

About six weeks ago we went ahead and had a new septic line installed by Carolina Septic. They also pumped the tank again (not a good sign that it needed it) and replaced about ten feet of drain line out the back of the tank into the drain field; the previous line had been crushed at some point in the past. They said to us then that the system looked fine and shouldn't give us any more problems for several years (a tank should be pumped every five years or so, even though you can go much longer without having to; pumping that often helps prevent solids from clogging your drain field lines). They said that when they replaced the drain field line, it "soaked up [the water in the tank] like a sponge." Like a sponge, direct quote there. System was in good shape and wouldn't give us an more problems.

Uh-huh. Until Monday night, of course. (We did get a small warning shot; a couple days before the toilets bubbled as the last of another of Smittywife's baths drained out, but we had a busy weekend and didn't think much more about it.)
So Carolina Septic came out again. Both guys who came out asserted that it was probably the drain field, that the drain field was probably clogged, and that they had known that would be the case after the last time they were here. I said, no no, you told us the system was in good shape. No, they said, we knew the drain field was bad. I said, you told my wife it soaked up the water like a sponge. They turned their heads like confused puppies.

So Carolina Septic lied to us. Either they lied when they said the system was in great shape six weeks ago, or they lied yesterday to make themselves seem smarter. Regardless, we insisted they check the septic line for a clog. Which they found. But after removing said clog, the tank just filled up. Didn't drain. So, indeed, the drain field is shot.

Crap.

That's not exactly cheap. Of course Carolina offered to fix the field for us, at a cost of about five grand, not money we have or plan to have any time soon. We got another estimate (I'd list his name here but I can't remember it) for less than half that--and of course as soon as I started talking to him about the system, he said, now who'd you have out here to do this? Carolina Septic, says I. Oh. I don't like to tell you this, but you're dealing with the wrong folks there. You know he's not even licensed to do this work, all he's licensed for is to pump tanks.

Really? I need to check into that, but... really?

This guy is probably sixty and says he's been doing this work for forty years. I'd like to check references but his comment was, I'll come in here, do all this work in one day, and when it's done you won't have any more problems with it at all. Period. I don't like coming back to a job.

Of course there's also the possibility of getting hooked into the sewer utility. I'm awaiting a callback on that. Could be as cheap as twenty-five hundred, or it could be worse. We'll see. Given the amount we'll be spending, it may be worthwhile--or not. If the sewer system backs up into your house, well, there's usually no relief valve for that. There are good points to having septic.

Anyway. So that's been the continuing excitement in Smitty's World the last couple of days. I was able to clean the kitchen top to bottom yesterday--although, mysteriously, this morning the milk jug had leaked half its contents into its little compartment in the door. I don't remember poking a hole in it yesterday, and it's been in the fridge for a week without leaking. At least its designated compartment is water-tight so I didn't have to clean the whole fridge.

Now I'm not at work again, and have plans for the day--digging up part of the front yard for a vegetable bed, cleaning the living room, doing a big load of laundry, and putting a screen in the bathroom window. With luck I'll get another post written, too!

Rambling

2009-05-07T21:06:00.002-04:00

I have a lot of time to think at work. In a ten hour workday, at least four hours of the FedEx Ground driver's time is spent behind the wheel. The truck has no radio. Even when I ride with somebody, oftentimes the truck is so loud you have to shout to hear one another anyway (I wear earplugs when I drive alone). In a sense it's a lot like flying an uninsulated airplane (say, a KC-135) without an interphone.

Actually, flying a driving have a great deal in common, with the exception that one is far superior to the other. I'm currently doing the other for a living, and if you don't think that gives me great pause you haven't thought about it much. This would occupy my mind all day, every day (with probably negative side effects for my mental health) if I didn't aggressively come up with other things to think about.

Lately I've been spending some of my time trying to determine whether or not I have a cohesive political philosophy, or just a collection of opinions. I'm not sure whether one is preferable to the other, but when reaching for topics to ponder during a long day this one does present itself. (Smittywife just appeared over my shoulder and noted, "You don't have a coherent philosophy." And there you have it.)

The question has some relevance, though not to anyone but myself. I'm reading this book about Thomas Jefferson (American Sphinx, by Joseph Ellis) and he notes repeatedly (paraphrasing) that Jefferson maintained a strict political philosophy that was, in many ways, almost irrationally pure and assumed things about human nature that aren't true; and yet throughout his life he took various actions that clearly ran counter to the philosophy he held (and wrote from). He did this by, in Ellis' view, keeping two halves of himself separated--literally having a philosophical side that knew not what the pragmatic side did. Exactly how he managed this... well, I haven't finished the book yet.

And I'm reminded of our friend Switters (from Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates) who embraced and celebrated his inner contradictions--possibly a way out, a denial of denial if you will, but food for thought. Can one have a core political philosophy and deviate from that on certain issues without being a callous opportunist or thoughtless pragmatist?

Anyway, over the next couple of days I've been thinking I'll write a little about how I've been trying to fit my collection of opinions into a complete arc. This will at least give me something to write about here to get back into the swing of things.

A New Attempt To Blog Daily Begins... Now!

2009-05-07T07:56:00.003-04:00

Whether it will last remains to be seen. Theoretically I should be leaving for work in about four minutes but I haven't even had breakfast yet, haven't packed a lunch, don't even have my boots on.
But I did throw the puppy blanket in the wash on the "sanitize" setting with bleach. She... well, she's a puppy. Puppies can't really make it through the night without pooping, I guess. I don't actually know for sure, but ours certainly doesn't try. She made a mess in her little house last night, got poo all over her blanket, the sides of the house, and herself. Smittywife had to give her a bath this morning before rushing out the door, and I cleaned out the doghouse and put the blanket in the wash.
And what I wanted to say, really, was this: why do all bleach bottles seem to share the same incompetent design? Who thought that up, anyway? I need to put a small amount of bleach into the washing machine's bleach dispenser, and all I have to do that is an open neck that clearly wasn't designed for pouring and all the weight of the bleach in the bottom of the jug. Of course it's going to glug out and splash. And it's bleach, for goodness sake, when it splashes everywhere it's going to cause problems. I just don't understand it. There has to be a better way to package that, but clearly no one has even tried. Grr.

Neglected but not forgotten

2009-04-22T21:20:00.002-04:00

I've been working a lot of 11 hour days lately, and when you come home after eleven hours--twelve with commuting, roughly--you don't want to sit down at the computer and blog. That's all there is to say about that, really, the days are just very long, and unfortunately you don't do much when you get home.

But I'm not working five days a week at this, at least. Not yet; not a move I'd want to make, to be honest. The bigger problem is I haven't been doing any regular writing of any sort, here or on Lauderdale. This bothers me, but at some level, too, I don't want to come home and sit at the desk and do anything at all. I'm saving for a laptop, but it'll be a few months.

Anyway. I know I've been neglecting the blog. I want to write again, regularly, and at some point here I will. But it will be a bit yet.

The Inferno

2009-03-11T07:55:00.000-04:00

It took a bit of time to read through Dante's Inferno, but mainly because I was keeping busy at other things. This is a translation by John Ciardi, not the more famous one by Longfellow, but neither makes pretense of following Dante's rhyme scheme (which I've been told ruins any translation by requiring a fight for the rhyme). I found the translation very readable and enjoyable.

This book is only the Inferno, not the other two parts of the Divine Comedy. It was 99 cents at a thrift store if you're wondering why I didn't try to get all three in one volume.

I do not believe in hell. (I do believe in giving hell to people, such as in "Give 'Em Hell, Harry," but not in a specific place or even non-place to which the souls of the condemned are, well, condemned.) I found this poem fascinating for quite other reasons. I don't know anyone, even the Catholic Church, who abides by Dante's description of hell; that wasn't Dante's point, either. He writes as though he took a literal trip through the three layers of the afterlife, but certainly he didn't claim the trip literally took place or that his descriptions were literal and real. Dante was a papist and a good Catholic, and certainly he wanted to evoke the perfect justice of the afterlife; but to a large degree the Comedy was a forum for Dante to condemn (or praise) people he knew--some of whom weren't even dead yet when he was writing--for their actions. Dante found a way to use Christian allegory to write large the political and ecumenical debates that had riven Florence during his lifetime and were not yet settled at the writing (Dante died in exile from Florence). It is in that sense a very personal work, and a rather scathing political commentary.

That is not to take anything away from the work as a piece of literature; there hasn't been political (or religious) commentary like this since. As creative allegory the Inferno is a masterpiece; the way Dante punishes the damned in hell, each sin begetting its own perfect and perfectly just eternal punishment, is a feat few writers since have managed as convincingly and as beautifully.

I can't compare Ciardi's translation with others, since I haven't read any others (though at least Longfellow's is available on the web). I've been told that any translator who attempts to keep Dante's rhyme scheme and meter intact in the English is doing a massive disservice to the work, and that's probably true; Ciardi manages to keep an aba cdc fgf hih type of rhyme scheme throughout, which no doubt affected his word choice a great deal but the translation was still very readable (Longfellow's translation abandons rhyme for meter; I'd like to see a side-by-side comparison of the two, just for curiosity's sake).

What sets Ciardi apart is his voluminous notes at the end of every canto. You could read through the whole thing in an afternoon if you didn't bother to look at the notes, but the notes illuminate much of the allegory and much of the historical setting of the work to which any typical modern reader would be ignorant (this reviewer included). Setting the work in the Florence of c. 1310 helps understand much of what Dante is doing, who the wraiths are that he speaks to, and what their relationship to Dante was in life. I found it fun to read through all the notes, and I certainly discovered elements of Dante's genius I never would have seen without them. His assembly of this poem was as much a triumph of mechanics as of literature; he put the thing together almost as a watchmaker assembles a watch, and while a simple reading of the thing would be enjoyable, getting the nitty gritty of the notes really leaves the reader impressed at Dante's skill.

I am no Dante Alighieri. Neither, sadly, is anyone else I've read.

Animal Husbands

2009-03-11T07:43:00.004-04:00

From the Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Smitty's former employer, comes this little piece this morning. Seems Florida is one of 16 states that does not outlaw bestiality (which raises the following two questions: 1) what are the other 15, and 2) why not?), and one of our state senators feels now is the appropriate time to do so, what with economic collapse looming on the sunny Florida horizon. While I question the timing I won't argue about the decision to outlaw it.

But the bill had to include certain items so that, for example, artificially inseminating a cow (Florida has a large cattle industry) doesn't fall afoul of the law. Fair enough. In committee the clauses relating to such things were described as referring to "veterinary practices" and "animal husbandry." Nothing wrong with that.

Unless you're Senator Larcenia Bullard of Miami, who clearly never spent a weekend on the farm growing up.

Upon hearing that the law designed to prevent bestiality made allowance for the practices of animal husbandry, Bullard asked, "People are taking animals as their husbands?"

Your elected officials. Saving you from... um... we'll get back to you on that.

Something Old

2009-03-05T17:54:00.004-05:00

I was digging through my Giant File O' Crap (it's like a File-o-fax except not) for something specific today relating to Lauderdale. I did not find what I was looking for (did it ever exist? Good question), but as usually happens when I dig into the File O' Crap I found something amusing.

One of the great things about being a "writer" is that you have a tendency, because you think you can write, to write a lot. And save everything you write. Computers make this much easier than I'm sure it used to be. In any event from time to time it's fun to dig through the old files and look at what I was writing--and thus often what I was thinking--a few years ago. I thought I'd post one of those old bits here.

This came out of a larger project that was never finished--and that almost certainly never will be--called This Fucking Town (I was probably going to change that title), subtitled "Observations on Life NOT in America." I wrote several pieces and stuck them in there under this heading, including a lengthy and philosophically contorted introduction that was actually difficult for me to follow and which I probably wrote while drunk. We'll skip that.

In any event, this piece would have been written in the summer of 2004, almost certainly in August. I enjoyed rereading and thought some reader somewhere might get a kick out of it.

I wonder how Burger King feels about themselves. At 0830 in the morning at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the only food available on base to the hungry young airman is a Whopper at the Burger King. The picture above the order window—and it is just a window, a window into what looks like a single-wide trailer—has an animated drill sergeant admonishing us to “Have a burger for breakfast!”

What the hell kind of dietary advice is that? Exactly why does the Air Force (and the Army) allow Burger King to propagate that kind of disinformation to all their young soldiers and airmen who may not know much about healthy eating and living? And why does Burger King feel it’s a good idea?

Certainly we all enjoy a fatty fast food burger now and then; they taste good after all. They taste good because they’re loaded with saturated fat in the form of beef fat, mayonnaise, ketchup, cheese, and the like. I love Whoppers. I also love KFC fried boneless chicken breasts, but I can eat one of those without having to pay penance for my sins. A Whopper is not the same.

I don’t blame fast food restaurants for making us all fat. For starters, although it may look that way when we go to Wal-Mart or Disney World, we aren’t all fat. Most of us feel fat. Hell, I’m definitely not fat, but when I look down I can see that I’m carrying a little bit of all that beer and vodka I drink around the midsection, enough to cover up the abs that I know used to be there. But I’m not fat. And neither are fully a third of the rest of us Americans. The ones who are fat, well, they can’t blame fast food either. Often, they can blame themselves.

Not that this will stop fat people from suing McDonald’s. At least the judge threw that case out. But if people would just not eat crap all the time, they wouldn’t have problems with their weight. Weight management is easy, at least if you’re reasonably smart. I blame fat people for ignorance more than anything else; it's not even laziness half the time. And they can’t possibly all be that stupid; the problem is, we don’t teach anything approaching healthy living in schools, and if we did, I can guarantee you we’d screw it up. It would all be government mandated and based on that stupid 7-level pyramid scheme they created to bolster the prices Midwestern farmers can get for their grain crops. And it wouldn’t work anyway. All Americans do not fit into the same peghole, though that is exactly what national health education in high school would try to do.

So we produce a bunch of 18-year-olds every year who join the military and go out to their friendly BX one morning and see a perky animated drill sergeant ordering them to have burgers for breakfast. Well shoot, the Army wouldn't tell me to do it if it wasn’t good. And then we wonder why we’re having problems with overweight troops.

This is of course a bigger problem in the Air Force than in the Army, since Army people stay more active with daily unit PT and the like. The Air Force has tried this in the past, but it always fails. I’ll admit that I’m part of the problem. I haven’t been to a unit PT day since December of 2003. I’m hoping to avoid them until I PCS in 2006. If I wanted to get up every morning at the ass crack of dawn and run myself silly and destroy my knees, by God I’d join the Army. I joined the Air Force because we take a more reasonable approach to such things—or at least we used to.

The Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. John Jumper, who is himself an avid runner (like many insane people), recently revamped our yearly physical fitness test. Now, instead of sitting on a bicycle peddling slowly until our hearts and lungs reach a certain mythical point of capacity defined by pencil-necked geeks in a laboratory in Washington, we actually have to go out and run, and do pushups and situps. I hate running and situps, but I still think the General has the right idea and support it. If you’re going to measure my fitness, why not do it by measuring what I can do? Lung capacity, which is what the bike test measured, was always four fifths genetic anyway.

But then there is that pesky fourth part of the equation, the tape test. Now, as a skinny little white boy, I don’t fear the tape test. The test is worth 30 points, and to get all 30 your waist measurement has to be under 32 ½ inches. Even when I was a drunk I had never had a waist that big. No problemo.

But I’m also all of 5’9” or so. A guy who’s as skinny as me but 6’3”, by nature he’s going to have about a 33 inch waist. Ergo he can’t max out the test, even if he’s in better shape than everybody else in his squadron. (Never mind that if your goal is to max out the annual fitness test, you need bigger goals.) Once again, it seems we’re trying force everybody in the Air Force into the same peghole. No problem for me, since I’m small and can fit most anywhere, but it’s a big problem for many of my colleagues. And what’s to say a person can’t be in decent shape and still carry a little bit extra around the gut? Hell, half the generals and chiefs in the AF today can balance their coffee cups on their beer guts. That’s just the way the Air Force is. I think Jumper doesn’t really like those guys and wants to be rid of them, which soon enough he will be.

But what does the Air Force do to help you out if you’re not passing the test? They tell you to figure it out yourself. You go on a mandatory visit to the health and wellness center, and they put you on a program, and hopefully it works. Meanwhile, there’s a Burger King on every Air Force base in the country, where people are being ordered to have burgers for breakfast.

I have nothing against Burger King. As I said, I enjoy a Whopper now and then because it tastes good. But I also exercise and ensure that 90% of my meals are prepared in my home with healthy fresh ingredients. Few if any of my colleagues can say that, and many of them will argue that it’s because they don’t have time. Well, maybe not, but if I have time I wonder how other young officers without much more responsibility don’t. It can’t be because I’m single; if anything, I have less spare time because I have to do everything myself (this of course only applies to the married and childless, since children really do take up all your time). Yet I’m capable of a reasonably healthy (barring the drinking and the high-stress job) lifestyle. The simple fact that I can do this makes me assume pretty much everyone else can, whether they do or not.

But I also know that most people don’t live healthy. Many may try, but they don’t succeed. This is a big part of why Gen. Jumper wanted to revamp the fitness program. He encouraged wing and squadron-level fitness activities, and ordered that all supervisors were to ensure that their people had an hour every workday for exercise—and he didn’t mean an hour before or after work or instead of lunch break, he meant one hour at any point during the workday. Jumper’s no fool; he doesn’t want his people working 9 and 10 hour days at home and then deploying for 179 days out of every year. Whether that’s what our squadron commander wants or not, it wasn’t Jumper’s intent, and he’d tell you that if you asked him. Jumper may work those kinds of hours, and I’ve no doubt that he does far more, but that’s the price of command and any intelligent commander accepts it as his burden. (This is also why I don’t seek any command.)

Still, that hour per day is hardly mandatory. One can argue that perhaps it should be, but I’d balk at the suggestion that I need to go to the gym every day for an hour. What would I do there? I’m trying to gain weight, not lose it; you can’t lift weights every day and get any results. But at least Jumper is trying, as few before him have. He’s made some rather questionable decisions, but this isn’t one of them.

So why then is there no place anywhere at Al Udeid to get a decent meal at 0830 in the morning, except at the Burger King, where all you can have is a Burger For Breakfast? How on Earth did the idea of promoting a new healthier lifestyle for Air Force personnel result in this situation?

I don’t like sounding provincial, but at least at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, where I’m supposed to be right now, the chow hall is open 24/7. They aren’t serving all 24 hours, just during the posted meal times, and the food is beyond awful. But if I wake up at 0800 and put some clothes on and go take a pee and then want something to eat, I can walk over to the chow hall and grab a bowl of Wheaties and some orange juice and canned pears and make a peanut-butter and banana sandwich, and now at least I’ve had a good breakfast. Here at Al Udeid, I have no choice but to eat a Burger for Breakfast. And I have to pay for that, which brings to mind the missed meals problem. But that’s another issue entirely.

Lauderdale Update

2009-03-04T11:31:00.000-05:00

I've been spending some time each day the last couple weeks working at Lauderdale. I say working at, not working on, because I haven't actually written any words for it. Shoot, half the thing is written, I figure, by the time I root through and take the good parts from the existing draft.

There were at least two directions I could take that book, and I've settled on the direction it's going--crime novel--which means I need to reorganize and perfect the crimes themselves, how they fit together, Hank's role in solving them, and what the more significant background crime is. Funny, but a simple murder or assault is not an independent crime in these books; the crime is some underlying (or overarching) conspiracy, and murders simply happen as the conspirators attempt to keep things hidden. This is almost universal in crime novels--bodies pile up, but that isn't the real crime. Which is, in a sense, a real crime.

Bodies piled up aplenty in the previous version of Lauderdale but, partly because I wasn't sure what the book actually was, they didn't do so to any pattern or for any larger purpose other than to offend and sicken the narrator. Who deserved it, frankly, but that wasn't the point. The question was, is this the narrator's coming-of-age story, or is it a crime novel? Of course there was far too much autobiographical content in the book as it stood to easily change things around to focus on the coming-of-age aspect, and I think I made the right call--certainly the easy call--in deciding to proceed with it as a crime novel. Our narrator, Hank Lauderdale, is a somewhat different man than he was in the earlier version, but he is a unique protagonist for this sort of book, and I don't want to change that. Of course he's still a reporter, which is more or less the opposite of unique (ubiquitous?) in crime stories, but he's not a real reporter, and more importantly he doesn't actually want to solve this puzzle. He really just wants to get paid to support his partying habit. And how many crime novels feature a half-drunk grad student as the protagonist?

Plus, keeping the setting in South Florida gives me an excuse to reread a few Florida crime novels I have (I'm going to reread a few; I have rather more than a few) with an eye to maintaining some of the main aspects of that genre (yes, Florida Crime is an established subgenre... at least in my opinion. And dammit if I don't care about my own opinions why should anyone else? Come to think of it, why should anyone else anyway?). So I've changed up the "up next" listing on the right there, but I may not necessarily review those books, at least not in-depth, not here anyway. I don't think.

How to Meditate

2009-03-01T13:27:00.000-05:00

This book is what it says: a guide on how to meditate. Starting from the absolute basics and moving into the more esoteric (and difficult) meditations, Kathleen McDonald leads readers step-by-step through what exactly meditation is, and how it's done.

The book is not meant to be read at a sitting and put back on the shelf. I went ahead and read the whole thing, but I'm still working at the most basic meditations, on the breath and on the clarity of the mind. It will take me some time be able to move past those meditations.

McDonald is a practicing Buddhist, and the book is written from the Mahayana perspective (Tibetan Buddhism). That doesn't mean it isn't accessible to anyone; McDonald even notes in later chapters describing meditation upon a particular Buddha that it's perfectly to meditate on Christ, for example. The point is not the specific belief structure behind meditation; the point is to meditate it all, to clarify the mind and permit the practitioner to live in the present and be more thoughtful and positive all the time, and one needn't be a Buddhist to benefit from meditation.

For myself, I would consider the book nearly indispensible, and it will be on my bookshelf to be reread, piece by piece, for a very long time.

Nature Girl

2009-02-22T14:29:00.000-05:00

It took all of three days for me to read this book. I point that out in case the following review seems at all negative (which it will).

I love Carl Hiaasen's work. I've read all of his adult books, to include his collections of columns and his polemic against the Disney company (which was somewhat frightening, actually), with the sole exception of Strip Tease (it's on my list; also I think I've missed one other one, Skinny Dip maybe.) I have enjoyed them all, some more than others. Nature Girl is no exception.

Nature Girl is set in the Ten Thousand Islands, near the Everglades coast south of Naples. I love the area; I've written my own essay about the area and it is frankly a natural (no pun intended... well, maybe a little) setting for fiction of all sorts. This is a good story that makes good use of the setting. But something was missing here.

I can't put my finger on what was missing. I finished the book a week and a half ago and have been trying to do so since then; but I'm tired of waiting to write this review. Part of what I like about Hiaasen is how nicely he skewers Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and the rest of South Florida. It's urban, and realistically that's what I thought was missing here. About the only "skewering" to be done of Everglades City is of the tendency of the local leadership to get involved in the drugs trade, a point made but not belabored here (it would get dull quickly). Instead the... um... quirkiness of small backwater towns is on the skewers here, and to be perfectly frank, that's been done a thousand times by a hundred people. The only special thing here is the setting, and Randy Wayne White's made a whole career out of setting crime novels in the Ten Thousand Islands. In other words... what makes Nature Girl special?

As a part of the Hiaasen library, the setting is unique. Beyond that, honestly, nothing makes it special. This is not to say that the book reads like a Doc Ford mystery (Randy Wayne Wright's protagonist) or could have been written by anyone. It bears several of Hiaasen's stylistic marks and there are familiar characters here; it's a Hiaasen novel. And like I said I enjoyed it and think it's totally worth your time to read. What really bothers me is that the last two Hiaasen novels I've read--this one and Basket Case--have both been, shall we say, subpar among his efforts. Is the well running dry? Like I said, I haven't read Skinny Dip yet, which was published just before this one, so I can't judge. It's just a feeling I have--and maybe not fair. How many books can I expect the man to write about Miami? This one at least is set in a real place (which was the problem with Basket Case and perhaps I should be happy simple that Hiaasen is branching out and will be able to continue writing novels I can enjoy reading without being stuck in the same setting all the time. Hell, the man lives part time in Montana, and what's wrong with a Montana setting? Perhaps that's coming next. It won't be Miami, but that won't make it bad.

The Book of General Ignorance

2009-02-22T14:18:00.000-05:00

This book is plenty of fun. The only problem with it--as, apparently, with all trivia books--is that you can't be 100% sure it's all accurate. Right? Is everything in there correct? After all, if so much of the trivia here contradicts the conventional wisdom... well, where did the conventional wisdom come from?

Probably best not to get an answer to that question. But it probably is best to keep a copy of this book at your desk or nightstand or wherever you can read a bit of it when you have a couple minutes to kill.

Living the Simple Life

2009-02-20T08:08:00.000-05:00

I read most of Elaine St. James' Living the Simple Life aloud to Smittywife while we were on vacation over Presidents' Day weekend; she has since been rereading it over the past week, in case you were wondering whether we thought it was a worthwhile read.

Simplifying--the Thoreauvian Imperative I like to call it--has been on our minds a lot recently, since the wedding and move certainly if not before that. We have too much stuff. We both would like to make better use of our leisure time (no wisecracks about my level of leisure time right now, please), and spend our money more wisely. Elaine St. James has written three books about the topic, and though they are more than a decade old now (and occasionally show their age) the tips and techniques she shares for finding more time in the day and overcoming our materialism and inability to keep our time scheduled the way we'd like are timeless.

It's worth pointing out here that Mrs. St. James and her husband are not sell-everything-and-move-to-a-cabin-in-the-woods people. They live in a condominium near a major city, and both work. They're not Unabomber freaks, anti-technology Luddites, or zero-carbon hippies. They're just normal people, living their lives more simply than most of us. And most of us, if we ever took the time to sit and think instead of filling every waking hour with activity, would agree a bit more simplicity would be a good thing. Smittywife and I agree wholeheartedly. We're always looking for help in the matter, and this book was very good for that. Enjoyably written, not particularly preachy. The only problem I have with it is that several parts of the book are clearly meant for people who are much, much busier and more stressed than we currently are. That's actually rather comforting, though.

I will admit, also, that over the last couple days as I've been unpacking the last of the book boxes, I've been able to put far books in the sell/donate pile than I would have thought possible before I read this book; reading about how another book freak managed to make the decision not to own every book in the world has been helpful. I recommend this book for anyone looking to simplify their own life (even parents), but if you don't at least partially buy into the notion that you may need to simplify, this won't convince you otherwise.

Bail Me Out!

2009-02-19T09:11:00.002-05:00

I read a few articles in Florida newspapers this morning about the mortgage bailout plan and how it will affect Florida homebuyers. I don't claim to be an expert here, but I did buy a home in Florida just a few years short of the top of the housing price bubble, in autumn 2003. I did four things correctly: I bought as much home as I needed, not 1000 sf more because my realtor* talked me into it; I paid less than I could afford to for a home instead of maxing out my available financing and then some because my mortgage underwriter said I could; I paid less than my home appraised for instead of getting into a bidding war with other buyers and paying grossly over what the home was worth in the hopes that it would appreciate; and I made paying down the principle on my home a priority with my extra money instead of spending it on $10,000 overpriced home entertainment systems and $3200 overpriced Ethan Allen sofas to go with my overpriced home.

Now some of my tax money is going to be spent bailing out people who did NOT do those smart things I did. But you know what? I'm okay with that (especially considering that this year at any rate I didn't pay any taxes (apart from a few bucks to the state of South Carolina, not even enough for them to change a light bulb in a traffic signal). Our government encouraged people to become homeowners, but failed to regulate the people writing the mortgages to prevent what was already clearly by 2003 an unsustainable asset-price bubble in the real estate market (in Florida, certainly; maybe not here in SC) from developing into the situation we have now. I'd love to blame mortgage companies for this but many of mortgage underwriters and realtors who misbehaved over the past five years are out of jobs now so they're getting theirs.

I do think we need to bail out certain homeowners, but let's not go overboard here. I made smart decisions when I bought a home and I bought during the bubble; making smart decisions meant that when I sold my home, after the bubble had burst, I actually still made money on the deal, enough to pay of my mortgage and pay down some of our other debt. Thus I will never see a dime of bailout money even though, frankly, smart people like me are the ones the government should be helping. People who got caught in the bubble are not the same as people who played a part in the bubble.

So let's be honest here. Let's say you bought a home on an interest-only mortgage. Ouch. That was stupid. I mean, that was really stupid. I have a lot of trouble saying any interest-only mortgages should be refinanced by the government, because, frankly, you shouldn't have bought one. What annoys me is that I know people who have such mortgages, and I know they knew better. But let's go ahead and say if you meet other requirements below and are in danger of losing your home to foreclosure we might consider bailing you out after the other people who were smarter about their loans get their money first.

Let's say you bought a home for more than it appraised for at the time you bought it. Nowadays of course no responsible lender (that is to say, credit unions or USAA) would give you a mortgage for more than the appraised value of the home, but during the bubble such mortgages were being written right and left because the people who should have known better decided to count on continued 20+% annual home price inflation, leaving it up to the consumer to back off and be the intelligent one. This annoys me; I dislike stupid people, but finance and real estate are complex fields and when the so-called experts in those fields are telling you to go for it, I can't really blame people for doing so. As long as they didn't overdo it; finance may be complex but I'm not going to absolve you of failing to budget your own money. Anyway, so if you bought a house that appraised for less than you paid for it at the time you bought it, I have no interest in helping you at all. But if the appraisal came in higher or equal to what you paid, okay. You certainly can't be faulted for paying what something was worth.

Unless, of course, you paid what the home was worth but it was way outside any rational budget of yours. Realtors and mortgage brokers definitely are guilty of trying to put people into more home than they could really afford, and mortgages were written that would stretch peoples' budgets simply because people let themselves be convinced that they were making an investment whose value would grow at a ridiculous rate so that the 40+% of their gross income they were paying to service their mortgage wouldn't seem so bad when they sold it at immense profit a few years later.
Oops.
We don't teach basic financial literacy in schools. Didn't when I went to school, or when Smittywife went to school, and we don't do it now. Maybe if your kid's lucky they'll get one financial literacy assembly taught by a friendly credit union employee during 11th grade or something, but that's hardly enough; and the fact is, since most people are financially illiterate, their kids end up that way, too.

But I'm not going to blame the schools. I'm going to blame us. We need to be smarter about our finances, all of us, every American; if we were we might not be so impressed by the willingness of our government to rack up a debt that will be close to 100% of our annual GDP by the time this recession is over (this is the point at which your government's sovereign debt becomes a "bad risk," barring 3+% annual GDP growth (which we don't have right now). We're heading that way quickly. I leave it to your imagination what the results of this will be; but I don't support GOP efforts to paint the stimulus package as a budget-buster, since they had six years of untrammeled power to do something about the debt and what they did was make it significantly bigger; you can't claim a "principled stand" when you clearly only have those principles when out of power)

Anyway. People need to understand their budget, where and how they spend their money, and how much of anything they can afford. It takes little more than basic math skills to do this; you know how big your paycheck is each month, and you know how much your bills are. You can buy a calculator at the dollar store that will do the subtraction for you if you're not good at math, and that's all it takes. Subtract what you know you pay from what you know you make, and see what's left. Figure out how much house you can afford, then buy less. It's not hard. But most people failed to even consider this. So let's face it. If when you bought your house, you were paying 40% or more of your gross income on housing, you bought too much house. The fact is that your house may now be worth little enough that, with a government bailout and refinance, you could actually afford the payments.

Let me be clear: if that's the case, I want bail you out. I want you to stay in your home, I want the mortgage to be refinanced so it's no longer "toxic," no longer a negative on a bank's balance sheet and a cause of potential bankruptcy to either you or the bank. The more foreclosures that go on the deeper and longer the house price slump will continue to be, and that's not going to help the economy. Throwing you out of your home and forcing your bank to take a loss--thousands of such losses--are not good for the economy. They're not what we should be doing in this country.

But I don't like the idea. We're rewarding your stupidity and the bank's greed and lack of concern for your ability to pay your debts. I don't want to reward your stupidity. I don't want to reward the bank's venality. No one learns any lessons that way and the next asset-price bubble will be just as bad. Yet I feel that for the health of the economy, for the sake of recovery, we need to do it. And that's what they're going to do, that's what this bailout will do (although I understand it's only for mortgages written by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which while helpful doesn't seem to be enough to really fix the damage in the credit market).

But dammit let's have some regulation! Let's require that everyone who gets a bailout must attend a six-week financial literacy course at their local community college (and yes, let's fund that; it won't cost very much and the benefits will be enormous). And let's put it into law right now: in future, the U.S. government will not bail out homeowners who purchased homes that were too expensive for them to afford. Live within your means, in other words; don't look to the nanny state for help. And let's regulate the hell out of the mortgage industry: no interest-only loans for owner-occupied housing; no adjustable-rate mortgages that will adjust by more than a certain percentage of the monthly payment; no sub-prime lending at all without requiring the borrowers to attend credit counseling and financial literacy courses and limit their payment to 30% or less of their monthly income; and so on. I'm sure people who are actually qualified to come up with such regulations could do better than me, but clearly such people either A) don't exist, or B) were MIA during the housing bubble, which is a serious concern. As soon as there's a buck to be made the responsible people vanished, it seems, if they were ever there.

Anyway. I felt like rambling about that. We do need to bail out some mortgages, but I'm going to reiterate that it's smart people who did the four things I did when I bought my house who really deserve government help, not stupid people. It's cruel to say it, but people don't learn from getting government bailouts (well, they do, but they learn the wrong things); they learn from screwing up and getting foreclosed on. Sucks to be them. The key is to ensure that the ones who did at least some things right don't lose everything because of other peoples' greed.

* Why is realtor supposed to be capitalized? We don't capitalize real estate; nor do we capitalize property developer, or lawyer, or mortgage broker, or high school teacher, or military officer, or fireman, or soldier, or astrophysicist. What makes realtors so damned special? I refuse to capitalize it. The NAR says Realtor implies a member of their organization, who must be licensed, and is more than simply someone selling a house; but since in most states you must be licensed to sell a house (and to practice law or medicine or education), all realtors must legally be Realtors. Lawyers are just about the most self-important career group I can think of and even they don't argue that simply because they pass the bar exam and join the state Bar organization they should be called Lawyers. It's a sales gimmick, nothing more, and a pretty stupid one at that. Besides, no group who had as direct a hand in creating the current economy as realtors did deserves any sort of special grammatical treatment.

Three Things

2009-02-13T17:53:00.002-05:00

I checked this book out of the library when I lived in Valdosta. I don't remember the name of it but it was something along the lines of Finding Happiness in America or some such (editor's note: he has no idea, he just made that title up). Some years later I read a book called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, and the two books had similar purposes and frankly similar messages; I suspect both were written by Jungians.

Anyway. One of the points in that book--not the focus of it, but about the only real point I remember--was that an adult needs to have some things that are personally important that he or she does every day (or tries to). The notion is that you find three things (that's the number I remember, but it may have just been a suggestion) that matter a lot to you and you find a few minutes every day to do those things.

The point was that the things should not be spending time with your kids, or with your spouse, or networking, or anything like that; they should be things that are purely for you, for yourself. Me time, in other words. Seems part of the problem with people not being happy is fear or guilt about self-indulgence. The point was not to become a hedonistic jerk, but simply to remember that mature adults are not purely creatures of their society, work, or relationships, but that to be complete they also need to have things they do just for themselves.

I mentioned Finding Meaning etc above because the message was similar, and I actually remember more about that book, but a couple days ago the notion of "three things" returned to me. Now that I think about it, it may have been that you should find time every day to do at least one of the three things, or something. And of course I assume the three things are changeable, I mean, one of your three things may become less important to you. And I don't think the point was to set aside two hours a day, I think the point was that if you spent even five minutes on your three things you'd feel more complete and, importantly, be better able to project yourself positively in all the other areas of your life.

It sucks that I can't remember any more about this book because I'd like to look it up again. Anyway. I've decided what my three things are, at least for the time being. It's not that I feel the need to shout about what they are, but one of them of course is writing, and I was initially saying that I wanted my writing time to be spent necessarily on one of two projects I'm toying with. But some days, today being one, I only have a few minutes (I'm six minutes into this post so far and so should be wrapping it up, actually), and I think blogging is a perfectly good substitute for more substantive writing. Perhaps that is what this blog can be good for. Or, maybe I'll come up with something else. Anyway. So this was my writing me time today.

I think having three things is good. For someone in my position it actually is working opposite to the way it's intended; I figure I should spend my personal time--there's rather a lot of it--on these three things only, and spend the rest of the day working for other people--for my wife, say, or at Habitat for Humanity. Or being serious about job searching. And since writing is the only one of the three things likely to take longer than twenty minutes by itself I can spend a lot of time doing that on days where it makes sense to. Hey, wow. Organization for my structureless life.

This is why I read. You never when something you read eons ago in a book you can't even remember may come back to you and actually be worthwhile.

Patriots

2009-02-11T15:53:00.000-05:00

A.J. Langguth's Patriots was published in 1989, and I've had it on my bookshelf almost that long (not really, but it's been at least five years). The great thing about history is that it really doesn't change much and a well-written popular history, barring new scholarship, is still going to be interesting 20 or 50 or 100 years after publishing. Patriots is well-written popular history.

Which is not say everyone will fall in love with it or that it's the greatest book ever on the subject. For starters not everyone enjoys reading history (I blame teachers for that. I have a theory that there is nothing inherent in anyone's personality that will make them like or dislike history; instead it's the teachers you have the first couple years you have to take history in school. Doesn't matter what age, whether you first take history in fourth grade or seventh grade. If at least one of your first two teachers makes history interesting you stand a chance, but if they both suck you'll never be able to get into it, no chance. Anyway), although this at least is fun history. Really, what American can't at least sorta get into a story about the Revolution?

Langguth frankly admits in the acknowledgements that Revolutionary history suffers from a lack of, shall we say, academic agreement on what actually happened. To some degree all the writer of history can do is pick the least unlikely of the available options. We know Washington didn't chop down a cherry tree; what we don't know beyond a shadow of a doubt is what he did do. At least he left a lot of letters.

I've read a bit about the Revolution. Founding Brothers was great. One of the things I liked about this was Langguth's decision to cover James Otis and Samuel Adams as heavily as he did. Unfortunately the focus on Massachussetts meant I kept wanting to know more about what was going in the South. I'm sure there's a book out there like that, but the thing is, going in, I had heard the name James Otis once, but knew nothing about him, and all I knew about Samuel Adams was that he was a brewer (it turns he was not, in fact, a brewer. He made malt, but never actually brewed beer; also, he didn't really make much malt, either, and was usually broke). Following them was great; I had no idea how important Samuel Adams actually was to the early movement for independence.

It's a really big book, about 600 pages. If that's not daunting it's worth your time.

Dark Star Safari

2009-02-05T15:01:00.000-05:00

This is the first time I've read Theroux. It will not be the last.

I think the sheer audacity of the trip Theroux proposes--from Cairo to Cape Town over land--is the most attractive aspect of the book, to me. I'd love to do something that foolhardy, that crazy, but I couldn't possibly leave my wife and family and go off to do that and not feel guilty about it every single day. Theroux has been doing it for decades.

After reading, what stays with me though is not just the fact of this absurd journey, but the imagery Theroux uses. I was completely taken with his writing, his use of the language, and throughout regardless of how I felt about his commentaries on various things the writing was just wonderful.

The trip is certainly worth taking. Theroux visits parts of Africa few Westerners ever visit, and does so via means rarely if ever taken by outsiders; I was reminded of Jeffery Tayler's canoe trip down the Congo when Theroux decided to take a boat downriver from Malawi into Mozambique; who does these things? I want to talk to these people; where do they get such a crazy notion and why is there no one around to talk them out of it?

The book, perhaps the traveller himself, is strongest when he is able to be with someone strong enough to strike up an actual relationship, however brief. In Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi, and elsewhere Theroux spends several days with one person or a group of people and it is here that we get the best insight into Africans themselves; other conversations with former political prisoners--Theroux notes that a great many men of a certain age in Africa have been in prison, often for a fairly long time, a comment I'd heard in Djibouti but never considered--are equally illuminating. Theroux by himself tends to fall into a Brysonesque tendency to pick on people, though in fairness in Egypt he's picking on people who probably deserve it.

The book has received some press coverage and commentary for Theroux's strong comments about the international aid effort in Africa. Some of his complaints are petty and I think personal--he consistently complains that aid workers in their shiny new Land Rovers never stop to pick him up when he's looking for a ride; yet at the same time he knows full well how dangerous the areas he's going through are, and why should an aid worker believe his story and give him a ride when there are no doubt dozens of Africans who'd like the same favor? Theroux never considers that or, if he does, he doesn't write about it. Seems petty and I was a little annoyed with it by the sixth or seventh time he complained about it.

Theroux's main argument about aid is that the Aid For Africa industry--and it is an industry--has done nothing to improve the lives of everyday Africans, employs no Africans, involves no Africans in its decision-making, and works almost entirely to further the goals of other nations and the careers of the aid agencies themselves. Some of those criticisms are certainly fair, not the least of which is that all the millions or billions of dollars spent in Africa by aid agencies over the years has led to precisely zero improvement in the lives of Africans; things are indeed worse than ever. And a lot of aid programs are tied to requirements from the home country--the project must use a certain contractor or purchase materials from certain places, instead of everything being done in Africa by African suppliers and companies. Part of the reason there's no corporate infrastructure in Africa to speak of is that most government budgets are aid, and most aid requires projects to use international contractors, so local contractors can't even get work from their own governments and thus cannot build local wealth.

But a lot of aid work is done by Africans, and there is a glaring problem with Theroux's anti-aid bias: he never talks to an aid agency. He talks to a couple of Catholic nuns, and a handful of teachers, but not to anyone in a leadership capacity; indeed, he'd rather sneer at the people driving the Land Rovers than try to engage them, although in fairness they don't seem interested in engaging him.
There are people more learned than I about the topic who have criticized Theroux's statements, and I'll let you look those up if you're interested; a good bit of the criticism seems to be picking nits, though, and most impartial observers are coming to agree that there is something fundamentally wrong with the international aid is handled in Africa. Whether he's right in all the details, Theroux's complaints about aid are not unique and certainly should be food for thought.

Controversy aside, the book is a wonderful read, and there's just not anything else out there like it. Travel writing about Africa tends to be either limited in scope or of poor quality in general; this book is certainly neither of those. Now if there was just something of this quality about west Africa...

Romantic Dinner?

2009-02-05T14:03:00.002-05:00

I just had an ad pop on gmail while I was reading a message from Smittywife. It said

Live Maine Lobsters
Romantic dinner for two delivered right to your front door!

Seriously? Live Maine lobsters? Is lobster romantic? More to the point, is boiling a live invertebrate to death romantic? I mean, I like lobster; we might even make some lobster bisque here soon, but I would never consider whole lobster a romantic dish. Would you?

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

2009-02-04T12:47:00.000-05:00

I admit, I'll pick just about any book about Africa, and perhaps such books don't thrill the general audience (see, for example, A History of Post-Colonial Lusophone Africa). I don't really care. When a book is this good it doesn't matter. Peter Godwin's When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is without question the most deeply felt book I've read in a long time.

That does not mean it made me weep openly, or laugh out loud (certainly not that). When I picked it up, I was looking for something about the recent crisis in Zimbabwe, maybe some background on what might have changed in Robert Mugabe that he no longer about his country and only himself, and perhaps maybe a look inside the country at what it's like for the ordinary folks there. I was, I will admit, a bit disappointed that Mr. Godwin, whose picture appears on the back, is white. For shame, Smitty, for shame.

This is not a backgrounder on the crisis or even on the country, although Godwin includes good doses of history. This is a personal memoir, and, as those go, it is remarkable. During the years covered in this memoir, Mr. Godwin settled down and married and had children outside his home country, set up house in Manhattan, lived through 9/11, saw his mother become impoverished and his homeland destroyed, learned a long-held family secret and was forced to reconsider his own history, and lost his father. This was certainly an intensely emotional time, and writing about must have been difficult. Layered over these personal issues is the unyielding decline in his home, Zimbabwe, the country of his birth. Watching the rule of law dissolve in the place you grew up in and still cherish as home, watching the people there slide into poverty, crime, and open conflict, must be a terrible thing. To be able to do nothing about, that's even worse.

When I put the book down I was casting about for exactly what it was about it that made it so good. This is not like any other memoir I've read. It isn't just the combination of events Godwin relates, or his smooth writing style. There's something more, and I can't say exactly what it is. But after I'd thought about it, it occurred to me that at some level this book is simply filled with emotion, moreso than anything else I've read recently. The book just makes you feel. It's generally sad, but there are moments of joy and happiness. It is so well-crafted, though, it's not that reading the sad parts make you feel sad; it's that the full weight of the sadness Godwin feels is there, on the page, and instead of trying to manipulate your emotions he's simply writing his own. He's just doing it better than anyone I can remember reading. That's remarkable.

This is not always an easy book to read, but it is worth it. If you are interested in Zimbabwe at all, don't miss it.

Backlink

2009-02-04T11:55:00.000-05:00

If you came here having read the previous note on Smitty's World about that blog shutting down, and were for some reason disappointed to read that... don't delete that bookmark just yet. The shutdown announcement may have been premature.

A bit premature, perhaps

2009-02-04T09:47:00.003-05:00

Maybe the previous post was a bit premature. Smitty's Library is up and running, but perhaps it was too early to give up on this blog just yet.

Smittywife and I had a come to Jesus talk last night. (Actually, she did the talking and I did the listening, and Jesus wasn't part of it at all. There must be a similar phrase in use in non-Christian countries, but I don't know what it would be; a come to Vishnu talk doesn't really make sense.) I won't go into it. She did make mention of the fact that there must be something wrong with me if I can't even think of anything to do with the blog anymore. A fair point, certainly.

After such a talk I would have expected that I'd spend most of the night awake in bed, thinking. But I didn't. Instead I got a really solid night's sleep, which was odd but a pleasant surprise. And I thought, when I got up, that maybe a good way to keep myself motivated on other things is to use the blog as a kind of daily journal of what I've done each day to be... useful. To get out of the house and do something, to spend time out, in the community, and not just here at the house.

And if I'm in the habit of blogging about that it should keep me motivated to do it; otherwise what would I have to do?

I would like to say, maybe, I could post in the morning about the previous day or at night about that day, depending. And maybe as time goes on I'll feel more like posting about other stuff, too. So maybe this blog isn't dead quite yet. I'm not dead yet, after all.

The American Home Front

2009-02-03T10:38:00.000-05:00

This is one of many books I've had in the house for a while but never bothered to read. It's a shame I let it sit so long.

I have a number of books by people who've attempted to travel the entire breadth of the United States to... I don't know. Find America, usually. Sometimes there's a conceit--in the case of The Cannibal Queen, it was that the traveling was done in a 1941 Stearman biplane (my kind of conceit). In Lost Continent, the conceit was the in the author's attitude to everyone he came into contact with. In other cases, there's a specific reason driving the journey, as in Haynes Johnson's Divided We Fall, a tour of America during our last (real) recession in the early 1990s (a depressing but relevant book). I enjoy the genre, but I find that there's not usually anything terribly new in it from one book to the next, once you get past the conceit or the reason. You might go to a different place, but America is America, and as Bill Bryson pointed out just about everywhere has become Anytown USA.

That makes Alistair Cooke's The American Home Front: 1941-1942 rather interesting, as he made his journey before Levittown was built, and before the rest of the country started to look like it. Cooke was a Brit sent to America by the BBC to report on America to the British. He earned his citizenship in 1941, just before the war, and embarked on this journey primarily to give the good folks back home a look at America on the brink of war. The places he visits, even those that are intimately familiar (Jacksonville and Tampa, for example), are hardly recognizable, the America of Yesteryear, yet presented without nostalgia because the book was written in Yesteryear.

Needless to say I enjoyed it immensely, because I do like the genre. But like almost every book in said genre, it was a bit too long. America is very big. You can travel around America and notice things for about 200 pages before you need to wrap it up. Really. And you can't possibly see the whole country in that time, so you have to limit yourself... or not, as no one respects the 200-pages notion. So the books always drag by the last quarter. It's not that the writing isn't as good nor the insights as fresh, it's just that, well, nothing new is happening. Change in setting is not enough to maintain interest when everything else remains more or less the same. I can't think of a book I've read of this sort that wasn't too long; even On the Road was too long. It's a shame, because either you get sick of the book and the writer, or, as in this case, you're tempted to skim parts of the last quarter, and those areas of the country last on the itinerary you're less interested in reading about.

So. I like this genre, and anything well-written in it is going to be appealing. And the greatest fault of this book is the same as that for any other in the genre, namely, it runs a bit too long. Why read this one instead of any other? I could go on about Cooke's writing, which is very nice, or his observational abilities, which are excellent as one would hope for a journalist. The truth is, though, this is an America you can not go back to. And not only that, anyone today who tries to tell you what America was like in the 1940s, even from personal experience, is going to get a lot of things wrong. We are nostalgic creatures, and nostalgia colors our view of the past. You can't change that. The only way to get a sense of a historical place is to read a contemporary writer who was deliberately trying to write about the here and now. And that is exactly what Cooke was doing.

Some travel-across-America books do not wear well, for various reasons; the writing may be substandard, the conceit may hinder readers' interest. Others will still be read decades from now. I hope The American Home Front is in the latter category. It deserves an audience, and before long there will be few people left who can even offer clouded remembrances of the era. As a historical document then, as much as anything, this is a great book. How nice that it's also such an enjoyable read.

Blog Movement

2009-01-31T12:38:00.001-05:00

I haven't posted to this blog in quite some time. Probably will not continue with it, either. Sorry. It's just... I don't know, I guess I lost interest, or at any rate I haven't felt like writing here in so long I don't know that the desire is going to come back.

Those of you who are on facebook and know my name, I have a profile there, and like to make use of the Notes feature. Those who don't have a facebook... what are you waiting for? I mean, apart from time during the day to waste on facebook. Seriously, though, join facebook. Be sure to use my middle name when searching for me, and of course limit your search to the Greenville network. Otherwise you'll be looking forever through a stack of people with my name.

I have started another blog, however. The one thing I would like to carry on from this blog is book reviews and commentary, so I've started up Smitty's Library for that purpose. At present that blog is a mirror of this one, but I'm going to cut out all the non-book-related posts and redesign it. I hope you'll look in on that from time to time.

I will not be deleting this blog.

Thanks to all my readers.

Oi

2008-12-22T18:04:00.002-05:00

vey.

I don't know what to say but I can't let a whole month go by without a post. Truth is, I get this way sometimes. I want to write, I feel better when I do, but I'm unsure how I feel about... almost everything. And therefore I don't know what to say. I don't even know if I'm happy. I think I am, though, and therefore I assume if I'm happy I must have reason to be, and if I have a reason to be happy, then it would be a foolish thing indeed not to be happy. So I'm happy.

But I don't know if I actually am or if it just logically makes sense that I should be.

And that's pretty much how I feel about everything of late. Goodness me I hope there are jobs out there come January. I'm driving temp for FedEx, which I sort of like, but don't. There's actually nothing about the job I dislike apart from the amount of sitting involved, but it's sitting broken up by frequent short walks, which is good, and better than many other jobs that involve a lot of sitting. So I like the job. Except that it's temporary and amounts to underemployment. So I shouldn't be that happy about it, or, at any rate, I'm not, even though I actually like it. See? I'm confused. Mainly that's what it is, I'm confused.

I need to meditate more. I also need to row more. There are dozens of things I want to do more of, but somehow I don't do them. Am I sitting listlessly in front of the computer all day, or dozing on the couch? No, I don't think so. But I feel like I have enough time in a day to do much more than I do.

Buddha said, life is dissatisfaction. We are always dissatisfied because we are not enlightened and freed from craving. Is productivity a normal craving to have? Perhaps only in America. I feel more released from material craving than I have in the past, which I would like to take for a sign of maturity but is really a result of simply not having the money to spend on things. I've gotten used to saying, well yes I'd like to have one of those, but I'm not going to buy one because I can't. It's actually rather refreshing. I need to apply the same feeling to food, though, because we eat out too often and spend too much when we do eat out. We could really get by with simply eating out less often, or with being more conscientious when we do eat out. Do I need a beer? No. I want one. Well, wants are grand and all, but not financially responsible.

Anyway. Just some rambling. I'll try to drop by and ramble more often, how's that?

Well, shit

2008-11-12T12:18:00.002-05:00

The kittens have entered estrus (that is to say, they're in heat). Orange Pop does not appear to be bothering them, which I find remarkable and, probably, not actually the case. But a neighbor cat across the street has been coming around and they are fighting back. Thing is, I'm pretty sure neighbor cat is dad... which means if he does get any of them preggo, hey, we've got inbred kittens. Great.

I would like to do something; I would like to have already done something but I'm too broke to get four female cats fixed. I'm not even sure I could get Mama in the car; the kittens I could handle, and I've figured out Orange Pop (put food in there. No problem), but regardless we are too broke to pay to get all these cats spayed and/or neutered and get them their shots. And yes, if I had a goddamn job we wouldn't be that broke so please feel free to blame me for that because it helps a lot, really, it does, really solves the fucking problem.

My neighbors can't be bothered to get their cats fixed, so our feral colony is going to grow. Yaay! No, not yay. If kittens appear they WILL go to the human society as soon as I can get rid of them. We are not starting a club here.

There used to be a Trap-Neuter-Release organization here in town, Greenville Concerned Citizens for Animals, but they can't afford to help any more because of lack of donations, so anybody from Greenville who wishes to criticize us for not getting the cats spayed or neutered already can go pound salt as far as I'm concerned; I can't afford to do it.

We could just take them all up to the humane society, all five, and leave them there. Let them take care of the lot of them. We wouldn't have to deal with so many cats, and Tribble, who is spayed, could be an indoor-outdoor without having to run the gauntlet on the porch. I think she would appreciate that. Is that appropriate? Is it what we should do? What's to say the feral colony down the road would end up on our doorstep because we don't drown stray cats? Then the problem just reasserts itself.

Jackson is going to the vet this afternoon and I'm going to discuss it with them, but they're not running a charity either. Who's going to spay four cats and neuter a fifth for no recompense? And really, does taking them all up to the humane society fix anything? Mama is not fit to be a housecat, she's to skittish around people. Orange Pop would probably get adopted out because he's pretty friendly, but this is his home; he lived next door for most of his life, I'm sure, and I suspect he'd try to come back. The kittens are another matter, they're pretty friendly, and I suppose they could be adopted out, but I doubt it... and I hate to think they'll just end up getting euthanized, but really, at any shelter, that's more likely than not, sorry to say.

Well. Not that anybody here has any suggestions, I just needed to vent after chasing Real Pop off the porch for the third time. Can't wait to get a bunch of inbred kittens. Ooh boy.

Predictions Follow-up 1

2008-11-07T10:27:00.002-05:00

Well, some races are yet to be decided still, so I won't have a full scorecard available for a while... though I'll post one sooner than that. But I think I can generally say that I did pretty bad. Obama won, at least, which means that on the whole I think the country did all right, better than me certainly. But most of the close races I managed to pick incorrectly. I'll be running through the actual list here shortly.