ruminations on an average life (destroyed)

Well, after a week’s worth of work, I’m still employed, but wondering if I’ll be able to bring enough of my “A game” to really feel like I’m doing all I can. My co-workers are great, but there are times I wonder if I’m helping or just along for the ride. Not too strangely, I hate that latter idea. Guess it’s time to start paying attention and focusing on getting my mind into my new job.

Something odd happened to me today: I met someone I once knew. This is someone who I was in school with from grade school all the way through high school, and I didn’t know who the hell they were. This individual walked up to me in a store and addressed me by name, asking if I remembered them. I was at least honest enough to admit I was drawing a complete blank, and they told me who they were. Even with that, my mind couldn’t match the person standing in front of me with the person I remembered from all those years ago. The time may have dimmed my memories, or perhaps it has changed them, I don’t honestly know. We didn’t speak too long, but this person said something that disturbed me deeply: they said I looked just like I did when we were in school together. Time hasn’t been terrible to me, but to think I look like that child who knew next-to-nothing of the world worries me more than I can say.

A sad news story came my way just a short time ago: during the annual Reno Air Races, a P-51 crashed into the spectators. No details about a possible cause are available, and the initial report only spoke of 75 people injured. Outside of the pilot, there were no reports of fatalities, but given what happened, it is hard to believe that no one on the ground was killed. Reno is the last bastion of a long tradition of air racing, and it draws some of the most extreme piston-powered prop planes in the world. That accidents will happen in such a situation, where pilots are pushing their machines to the absolute limit at an extremely low altitude (around 50′ above ground level), is to be expected. Hopefully, this incident will not spell the end for Reno, and equally hopefully, those who were injured will recover fully.

Yes, that’s right! In about an hour, I’ll be working again. How well (or poorly) I’ll do, I haven’t a clue, but I’ll find out shortly.

This year has been a tough one for the US. We’ve seen tornadoes plow through population centers with devastating results. Snow falls that set records both for their totals and for the cost of cleaning up after them gave rise to floods that cause a great deal of damage. Large swathes of the Southwest, already hit hard by drought, saw huge and uncontrolled fires scorch tens of thousands of acres. Now, large areas of the East Coast have been hammered by Hurricane Irene. These disasters effect not just the areas that were immediately hit, but also the nation at large. So the federal government, largely in the form of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has stepped in to help those who have, in many cases, lost everything. The task of helping out has been huge, as has the cost, and therein lies the problem. With so many major event to respond to, FEMA has seen it’s emergency funds drain away quickly, and those funds are not infinite. The most recent figures give FEMA somewhere around $800 million left in its budget. That’s not pocket change, but when you look at the damage Irene has left in it’s wake, it’s an almost pitiful amount, because even current rough estimates run into the $3-4 billion range. Given the fact that many of these estimates are based only on what has been directly observed, and the fact that in many spots, officials haven’t even been able to get in and find out just how bad things really are, it is unlikely that those figures are going to go down.

There has been an effort to get FEMA supplemental funds, and that story is what I write about. The funding itself is nearly insignificant given the damage we already know of, roughly $1 billion. If the small size of the increase in funding weren’t enough (and given that this year still has four months yet to go, part of which is the peak for the hurricane season) that small amount finds itself tied up in Washington’s current fixation of “balanced” budgets. You see, the current increase comes from the House, where the “Tea Party” has written language into the bill demanding that, in order to fund this increase in emergency funding, offsetting cuts must be made in other federal programs first. Which programs, they are unwilling to commit themselves to for fear (I think) of facing a backlash from the victims of these natural disasters.

That their feet should be held firmly to the fire for even suggesting such an insane act goes without saying. Conservatives love to liken the federal budget to a family budget, but I doubt they’ll use that particular simile in this case. After all, how many families would worry about where to find the money to pay for a sick child before deciding to seek treatment? There are some things you pay for, then figure out how to find the money, that’s why we call them “emergencies”.

Holding help to people who have suffered through a natural disaster hostage to ideological ideals is just plain wrong, and the “Tea Party”, plus it’s allies in Congress, should be ashamed of themselves for doing so. This is a nation that looks out for it’s own, or it should be. By demanding cuts before any funds go out to help people who are often without even the basics of life, these people show themselves to be not only heartless, but blind to anything but their own agenda. Hopefully people will remember these shameful actions come 2012.

(addendum: as of tonight, estimates are that Hurricane Irene has caused over $12 billion in damages, lifting it into the ranks of the most destructive storms in history. Thanks for watching our backs on the economic front, Eric Cantor, nice to know money and ideology come before people.)

Last year, a small college in Indiana made a decision to change it’s traditions. You see, through it’s history, Goshen College, a small college founded by the Mennonites, had never played the national anthem at it’s sporting events. So when they decided to start playing an instrumental version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, it was something of a shift for them, a shift that, it turned out, did not go down well. After a year’s worth of playing, the school had heard from many sources. The student body spoke up and gave it’s opinion. The alumni of the school also voiced their opinion. The input wasn’t unanimous, but the voices saying that the school should not have changed it’s traditions were much louder than those who thought the playing of the national anthem was something the school should be doing. The objections to “The Star-Spangled Banner” was simple and specific: it describes a battle, and the Mennonite faith is one based on pacifism. By playing a song that glorified a battle, it was felt the school was going against it’s deepest religious traditions. The school did feel that a song that spoke of pride in our nation was not out of place before sports events, so the decision was made to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” with “America the Beautiful”.

All of this would amount to pretty much next-to-nothing in a world where reason prevailed. Unfortunately, we live in modern America, and as soon as the decision was announced, the conservative wing of American politics cranked up it’s venom machinery. I first read of this whole story in a story (which I didn’t bookmark and can no long find) on Yahoo. Like most online outlets, the story had an attached comments section, and the pure hatred and malice that was expressed by people on the Right was a shock even to myself, who’d seen it many times. All the traditional insults, “traitors” “anti-American”, “PC ‘liberals’”, you name it, it was there, along with much far worse. In their minds, this was an assault on “American values” and another sign of “what’s wrong with this country”.

But how is that so?

A group listened to it’s members, and the majority’s opinion was heard. That opinion was that the group’s religious beliefs should not be shunted aside to please others. So democracy, the will of the majority, standing up for one’s principles and beliefs, all these things are now “un-American”?

When a group can condemn another group for upholding the ideals it professes to hold dear, what does that say of us? Have we, as a nation, become so polarized, so set in our ideas of “Right” and “Wrong” that we can’t see when opinion leads people to stray into the absurd? If it has, then democracy, that most basic of our tenets, is dead, and it will have been killed by those who claim to hold it most dear.

Does anyone else see the irony in all this?

A while back, I wrote about my latest experiment in gardening, using bags of compost as containers. As of yesterday, the pepper plant had one fair-sized pepper on it and was going through another burst of flowering. The tomato, after a very long period of time during which I was sure it would never do more than flower, now proudly boasts two small (as in smaller than a quarter across) tomatoes. It too is flowering, but not nearly as intensely as the pepper plant.
As for the garlic I planted, it’s done already, having produced no new bulbs and having shown no signs of flowering either.
So, how much will I get off of my plants? Guess you’ll know when I do!

Back in the heyday of the Cold War, Ray Bradbury wrote a short story that he later incorporated into his marvelous “The Martian Chronicles”. The story, “There will come soft rains”, is one of the more haunting tales to come from those dark times. It describes what might best be described as a “smart house”, the only one left standing in a city devastated by a nuclear exchange, and how it attempts to function without the family that once lived in it. In the end, events in the wider world, a storm, causes a fire to start in the house, which destroys it. That story came back to me today, because of something I saw.

People who live in or grew up in the Midwest have seen what I like to think of as the prototypical “Midwest farm house”. Many of them still dot the landscape, even as the days of the small farmer become the stuff of myth. There isn’t a set layout or floor plan. There’s no prescribed style, color or even a required square footage. Some of them are single-story affairs with wings and additions that sprout in every direction. Some are two and even three story buildings that would not be out of place in a town. There is one thing they all have in common: they set, often surrounded by the outbuildings that support the workings of the farm, in the midst of the fields that make up the family farm. They stand, proud and alone, telling the world this place is home to people who work the land.

Sadly, as the size of farms has grown, so the number of farm houses has decreased. Some of them end up being bought by people from town who think they want to live the “real country life”, and don’t, in reality, know Thing One about what country life is like. While the folks may not know anything, the houses continue to do what they were built for: provide a family with a place to live, a spot to call Home.

In that way, they’re the lucky ones. Other houses, though, aren’t that lucky.

One of the routes I drive regularly has one such house. A big box of a house, two full floors with a third made out of an attic with dormers added and a nice big front porch. A large barn, corn crib, garage and the odd couple of extra buildings surrounded it, all standing on maybe a couple of acres of land festooned with mature trees made up the rest of the scene. A nice-looking house, it’s square lines and well-maintained appearance speaking to passersby of a place cared for, a family with a place.

Then there didn’t seem to be any vehicles there anymore. The lights were never on in the house at night. Then the yard began to go without being mowed for long periods of time. Then the paint began to peel and flake off. Suddenly, one of the windows was gone, broken, but someone came to cover the ugly gap up quickly, showing that at least the house wasn’t completely forgotten. It didn’t last. Shortly after the window was broken, the line connecting the house to the electric power lines was down, then coiled up and hanging on the side of the house.

The end was nigh, but you could still hope for the house, that this was just a temporary state of affairs, perhaps to keep someone from squatting in the house. It wasn’t. One day, the trees that had stood so proud were all down, not cut down, simple uprooted by heavy machinery and drug into an huge, ugly heap. Then a backhoe came and tore the porch off. Then it tore the house down and treated it with all the dignity of a pile of garbage. Why? I don’t know. I honestly don’t think I could walk up to the person running the backhoe and speak to them civilly, what with the blatant destruction they did to that house. No effort to save anything, not any flooring, windows, not even the plumbing and electrical wiring. All just shredded, shoved into a pile, then loaded into a dumpster. Will the barn and the other buildings meet a similar fate? Will another house rise on the site, one more in tune with “modern” sensibilities of how a house should look? Will the whole plot be cleared, all the buildings torn down, the foundations removed and the land turned back into farm land?

In some ways, that might be the kinder fate, for even if the family that once lived in the house, that farmed the land it stood watch over, at least then the land will continue to be farmed. Even without the house and it’s family, a farm is still a farm, even if it’s a soulless monster of a farm.

(Postscript: I passed the site again today. The house, the barn, corn crib, everything, is now just a pile of shattered wood  standing in what was once the basement to the house. The dumpster is still there, but it appears more likely that it will be used to take away whatever does not burn in what is looking increasingly like a prepared fire scene. So far, the foundations of the buildings have not been touched, though the heavy equipment needed to remove them is still on site. So dies a house, a farm, and a way of life.)

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There are times when it seems the only thing some politicians can do in the face of a crisis is find something else to think about. This was brought home very strongly to me recently by the actions of the House of Representatives.

The House is the source of much of the sound (and more than a little fury) over our budget deficit. Republicans there have all but demanded that Something Be Done, and soon! Their “something” has revolved exclusively around cutting spending on “wasteful” programs (read any program they don’t like), and, to an extent, the White House has agreed with them. Multiple meetings have been held, without any positive developments, but this isn’t what drew my attention. No, what caught my eye was how, while they cry out about how the ‘national edifice’ is in danger, they’ve been occupying their time with…….amending HR-6, the Energy Independence and Security Act.

HR-6 was originally passed in 2007. When it was originally voted out of the House and passed onto the Senate for their consideration, it garnered 264 votes in favor and 163 votes against, with 8 members not voting. 36 Republicans voted with 228 Democrats to pass the bill, and when the Senate had made it’s changes and sent the bill back to the House for final approval, 95 Republicans were part of the 314 members who voted for passage. Then-President George W. Bush signed the bill into law, and it was heralded as a major step on the road to making America more energy independent.

Like every bill these days, HR-6 had many provisions in it. One of these was a requirement that all light bulbs be at least 30% efficient, that is, that they waste no more than 70% of the power the consume in the form of heat. Given the amount of power that’s used in America to simply light things up, that makes a ton of sense. It also means the death of the “traditional” incandescent light bulb.

When he invented it, Thomas Edison was breaking new ground with his light bulb. Before then, if you wanted light, you either worked outside in sunlight, or you burned something, be it oil, kerosene, tallow, beeswax, or whatever; and used the light given off by that burning to light your work. Edison came up with the simple but brilliant idea that, if he could put a metal filament into a clear glass bulb, then suck the air out of it and apply an electrical current to it, the filament would reach a white-hot state. In that “incandescent” state, it would give off a bright white light that could be used for illumination. The problem was, what it was really doing was generating a lot of heat in order to produce a little light, with the most efficient incandescent bulbs never getting above 10% efficiency. So, if you want to cut the amount of electricity used to light things up, one of the simplest ways to do it would be to replace incandescent lights with newer, more efficient lighting technology. Simple, right?

Well, it’s simple if you’re not engaged in a bit of political posturing.

You see, in their ‘anti-Washington’ fervour, the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party decided that trying to cut the amount of energy wasted on lighting things up amounted to “government interference” in Our Daily Lives. So they decided, with the government on the brink of defaulting, that the best use of the House’s time would be to debate a repeal of the provision of HR-6 setting a minimum efficiency standard for light bulbs. The provision failed to pass, but there is already talk of trying to amend a bill currently making it’s way through the House to include much the same language.

No one engaged in this asinine effort is claiming that there is no need to cut our energy consumption. Nor, for that matter, is there anyone claiming that America shouldn’t be doing everything it can to make itself more energy independent. And no one is claiming that incandescent light bulbs are somehow vital to American ‘national interests’. No, we get the same tired ‘keep government out of our private decisions’ talk we hear from the same folks who want to ban abortions, outlaw same-sex marriages, and tell us all to believe America is a “Christian nation”.

So, here’s what I wish I could say (preferably in a loud voice, from about half-an-inch from their noses) is this:

“There are more important things to worry about! So get your head out of your butts and get to them!”

I’ve written several times about my adventures in black raspberry growing. This last year, I gave away some of my harvest, but kept a fair amount for myself, planning (or I guess I should say hoping) to put it to use. Well, so far, it’s still were I put it at in my freezer. Which brings me to this year.

It’s been warm here where I live for several weeks now. Temperature wise, we jumped over Spring and went straight into Summer. Ninety degrees was passed early last month, which isn’t quite a record, but close enough. One sure thing about warmer weather: it gets raspberries to ripening quickly. Right about now would be what I’d consider the “normal” start to my harvest, usually a small bowl-full of berries from the ‘early’ plants. This year, that first bowl of berries came off the canes over a week ago, which means that right now is well into the peak of the harvest. Which comes back to that freezer full of frozen raspberries……

So what do you do when you’ve got berries coming off the canes, no space to store them for yourself, and you know that you never, ever want to eat too many berries at one time? You start scrounging around for folks to give them to, that’s what!

The neighbors (outside of a couple that are on vacation) have already had me at their door, bowl in hand, offering them a portion of my current bounty. The extended family is slowly but surely being worked through. After them, though, I think I might be in trouble. There are a few friends I have who live near enough to me to make the trip to give berries away not too big a drain on my gas tank, but a lot more of them live long distances from me. I’d love to see these berries enjoyed by someone, but I don’t have the money to spend to drive out as far as some of these folks live and give them away. As many of them are in a similar boat as far as I am on spending money, it’s not likely they’ll be driving here to get some free raspberries, no matter how good they are.

So, what do I do?

I’ll have to figure that one out, but sometimes, an embarrassment of riches is a hell of a thing to have!

Last year, I launched into an experimental garden with my potato crop derived from a few sprouted spuds. If you read this blog, you’ll know the results were somewhat less than great. With that in mind, when I got the urge to garden again this year, I decided it might be a good idea if I gave my small garden plot a rest to (hopefully) regain some of it’s fertility.

So, with that decision out of the way, I was left with two possible courses of action:

Find a section of the lawn I could turn and use for planting, or

Find some sort of containerized gardening solution.

Having past experience with going from lawn to garden, I knew this meant a lot of work and the problem of a bare spot after I decided to move my garden. So, container gardening it is!

I know some folks who have used those hanging plant containers, and they all report that while they look odd (and are occasionally cumbersome to get planted), they’re very effective at producing healthy plants and fairly good harvests. The problem, of course, is cost. Most of the hanging planters come without any dirt, so you have to pay for both the planter, plus whatever you use to fill them, be it bagged topsoil, compost or anything else. On my budget, cost is Factor #1, so the less costly a solution is, the better I like it. This lead me back to the tried-and-true system of planting garden plants directly in a bag of whatever soil/medium I was going to use. A bit of shopping around turned up the cheapest bags of suitable planting medium, specifically composted cow manure, at the local Wal-Marts (yes, I know, I’m no big fan of theirs either). Given the space I was going to have available to me (the corner of the same porch last year’s potatoes had grown next to), I figured that I would have room for two, perhaps three bags. Rather than try to squeeze the maximum number of plants into the space and risk them shading each other too much, I opted for only two bags. What to grow was a lot easier: tomatoes and bell peppers. Here I caught a break: the local grocery store was selling garden plants, and not only did theirs look better than those on offer at Wal-Marts, but they were offering heirloom plants that were priced cheaper than the Wal-Marts ’specials’ too.

In the end, I chose an heirloom tomato plant, a “Brandywine”, and a more modern “Valencia Orange” hybrid pepper plant. As with a lot of things, once the decisions were made, Fate stepped in to have it’s say. In this case, it happened that while I was unloading the bagged compost, I managed to snag one of the bags along the edge and tear it. The usual approach when doing this sort of approach is to lay the bags down flat, just as they were stacked where you bought them, and open the upper surface to allow the plant to be planted. With an opening already in the bag, it wasn’t a hard decision to make to turn the torn bag on it’s side and just expand the opening already there. Well, that was the theory at least. You see, what with being stacked up and all, the compost inside the bags gets pretty well compressed. That, in turn, means that what you’ve got inside the bag is sometimes less like garden soil and more like cheaply-made concrete. In my case, it wasn’t quite that extreme, but it definitely took a good deal of work to break up the compost into something that could be planted in without leaving it in huge chunks. The resulting bag was much thicker than it would have been, and seeing as how tomatoes like a good, deep bed to grow into, the place to plant my “Brandywine” was decided. After it was in, the other bag for the “Valencia Orange” was slit open and the compost inside it broken up in the immediate area under the opening. Getting it planted took even less time than the tomato had (the bag wasn’t nearly as neatly opened or controllable on the tomato bag) and I was done. Plants planted, garden ready to start growing.

Or so I thought.

Like last year, things happened that gave me options I hadn’t thought of before. In this case, it was some garlic I’d bought. I needed some fresh to season a dish, but I didn’t need the whole clove. So I put the rest aside, thinking that it would be safe to leave it lying around. No, it wasn’t. In this case, the weather took a hand in making the decision for me. After a couple of says when the local temps shot suddenly into the mid-80’s, I happened to look at my left-over garlic and found that almost all of it was sprouting. When I took the clove apart, I found six segments had sprouted. I knew these would not last long, and with nothing to use them in, I decided to do what I did last year: plant them. As a general rule, garlic like to be planted in cooler weather, but with the only other choice being throwing the sprouted segments out, I figured I had nothing to loose. Because of the way the bags were lying, the bag holding the pepper plant had more space, so it drew one segment at each corner of the bag. The tomato bag took the other two, one at each end. That was about three weeks ago.

Right now, the garlic is growing like a proverbial weed, with the tops already six or more inches tall. Whether they’ll form cloves or just go to seed is something I’ll find out in the next month or so. Both of the ‘non-volunteer’ plants are doing well, with strong growth on both plants. The pepper has already flowered twice without showing any signs of fruit forming, but it’s early in the season, so I’m not discouraged. One thing I had not thought of, and that I’ll have to tackle soon, is how to support the tomato plant. “Brandywine”, like many other heirloom tomatoes, has a tendency to grow big and grow fast. Mine is already showing signs of wanting to take off in it’s own direction, so some sort of support to keep it upright is going to be a necessity soon. What that support will be, well, I guess you’ll find out shortly after I do.

I hope anyone who reads this will give serious thought to growing something for themselves. It’s getting a bit late to be planting things like tomatoes and peppers, but not too late if you have a long warm season. There’s also plenty of time, even in the shortest of warm seasons, to grow things like lettuce and other salad greens. A bag container is a good solution for these sorts of crops too, and between the satisfaction of ‘growing your own’, the savings on your grocery bill and the generally better quality of crops you grow yourself, it’s a good thing to do. So give it a whirl.

Officially, summer arrives on June 21. I think someone forgot to tell summer that.

Already this year, the area I live in has seen multiple days with the temperature over 90, and the actual day summer should start is forecast to be at or around that temperature. Now I know the Earth isn’t a climate-controlled environment where every day dawns the same, the temperature never exceeds a specified range, and it only rains when it’s supposed to (like at night or when I feel like setting inside and watching it). I’m actually glad for that fact, because the very idea of such a world seems very distasteful to me. That said, I really, really do not like hot, humid weather. It’s like you can never get comfortable, and no matter what you do, you always end up sweat-covered and feeling like you’re carrying around a couple of pounds of general crud stuck to your body. Around here, if that weren’t enough to make your life miserable, you’ve also got the mosquitoes. I have never, ever been able to close a house up tight enough to keep those little blood-sucking buggers completely out of it. Admittedly, I don’t have a house with central AC, so some of the rooms are left with windows and doors that are usually open (abet, with screens over them) to the outside. I don’t know if they manage to squeeze through the screen openings, or through small gaps around the doors, or if they just await their chance to steal in whenever you have to go out, but somehow, they always manage to get in. Then, the real fun begins!

MOSQUITO HUNTING!!!!!!

It’s the moments when you’re least able to do a lot that they seem to strike. It could be that you’re “occupied” on the toilet, or paying attention to a show on TV, or some other similar instance. Then, out of nowhere, you hear that irritating little buzz that tells you a mosquito is stalking you. If your house has any darker-colored walls, and the mosquito is between you and one, they can almost seem to vanish into the background, unseen until a chance movement draws your attention. Even in rooms where the walls don’t help them to ‘blend in’, they can often be hard to spot, frequently approaching from behind as if they know which way your attention is focused. If you don’t spot it, your only hint that you’re about to give of your blood to further their species is the sudden quiet that tells you they’ve landed. Then it’s the frantic search of your exposed body parts, trying to find the culprit before you’re bitten. Now is the real fun, because a mosquito can sometimes just alight on any convenient surface, like it’s in need of rest, or like it’s watching you to see how fast you can move. If you’re lucky, and you spot it while it’s resting/scouting you, you have a chance to swat it before it can get to you. What you use is more a question of what you have at hand, rather than a planned defense. I usually try to use my hands, even though when I succeed in catching my potential attacker unaware, the resulting debris leave a nasty mess on them. Nothing to reach out and grab, no hesitation, just swing and (hopefully) SMACK!, one dead bug. If you spot it on yourself, the mess is compounded, but if you can get your lick in before it has a chance to get you, the satisfaction factor is not to be ignored.

If, on the other hand, you either don’t spot that the malefactor someplace nearby, or it has managed to land on you someplace you can’t see, it’s time to wait for the bite. Some of them seem to have barbs on their snouts, given the level of pain they can sometimes inflict when biting. Others, you never feel them until you start to itch. I’ve tried all manner of creams, sprays, lotions, you name it, to control that desire to scratch a mosquito bite. Some of them aren’t half bad, but none I’ve ever run into really does a good job of it. That wouldn’t be bad if it only lasted a day, but I’ve had bites that continued to itch for two, three and even more days. After a while, it’s just maddening, trying to fight the desire to just start scratching away.

How I sometimes wish they would just vanish, that they’d suddenly go extinct and be nothing but a bad memory. The reasoning part of me knows that this is never, ever going to happen, but it’s a nice fantasy, isn’t it? Kind of like winning a big Lotto jackpot or something like that, it’s a dream more to be take your mind off what’s going on around you than one you expect to happen. Still, it’s a nice dream, and if I can find that little buzzer who’d been bothering me all morning, I just might let my mind stay there.

If you’ve got mosquitoes where you live, and it’s summer, good luck and good hunting! Winter comes soon!