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.
14 October 2011
01 September 2011
Arab Spring
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.
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.
21 August 2011
Homemade Buttermilk
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.
13 August 2011
NCAA Conference Realignment
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?
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?
05 July 2011
Technique?
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?
What?
14 June 2011
A perfect meal
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.
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.
31 May 2011
Phase III
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.
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.
04 February 2011
23 July 2010
23 July
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.
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.
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