My Mother will be 95 next week. My Niece is expecting her 1st child within a few days. I'm not sure if you asked my Mom to name all her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren that she could, but her memory is funny and she might just pull it off.
Time itself is also funny a concept of the mind. We're all give the exact same 24 hours in a day but none of us know how many of those days we'll get. My nephew died young in a car accident with a thousand things to do in front of him. My Mother shared a rather Kilngon thought recently "Some days I have nothing left on my to do list but die!". (OK, Mom thanks, won't need any therapy on that one!) Just to complicate the thought the Celts say - "When God made time, he made plenty of it." Sure, sure, but God just did a funny job distributing that time. We all get the same 24 hours in a day but I guess nobody said life was going to be fair.
That is all a rather gran-eloquent lead in to complaining that I got up rather early this morning. It was the literal crack of dawn! I had to, it's been hot. It's been hot since June and in that same time we've had barely a day and a half of rain, hot and dry. It's was more than the discomfort of trying to sleep on a hot summer night. It's that I have the bad habits of an old guy. I get up have coffee and scan the emails, walk the dog and then and only then begin any work in the garden. Old guys don't change their schedules! That's fine and all in the spring you can get up at a decent hour and work the day in the garden at a decent temperature. With the heat I've been barely getting in a hour of watering or weeding before it's just too much. The garden will give you a little slack and the odd day off but the to do list items pile up. So up early it was. Still didn't get much done but I did get some done.
One thing that I don't have to worry about changing is it's zucchini season in the garden, so I know what's for dinner. Last night it was a cold zucchini and papaya salad (not bad but a bit bland). The night before was zucchini and tomatoes with the vegetarian version of scrambled hamburger (with a delicious caprese salad!;~). The night before that - well I don't remember but it was zucchini and something. Another week or so and I'll be pawning them off on the neighbors who bake, zucchini bread season Mmmm!
I mentioned last blog that the tomatillas had really taken off and they have. I've also noticed that of the 4 plants, the plant to the south has by far the most fruit. My theory at this point is it's the shade to sun ratio. I've always thought of tomatillos as heat loving plants and I'm sure they are. But the brain skipped over the sun piece of the equation. Most of my raised beds are oriented East West. Thus with some variations, due to an odd bit of shading, the plants in a row get the same amount of sun through the day. This bed was tucked in to fill a space next to the grape arbor it has a North South orientation. I'll have to remember that next year.
Equally but opposite I noticed the basil was a bit behind in growth. Mind you we'll have more than we can use with just two plants, so I noticed it but didn't worry much about it. Till I was watching a youtube video on plants that do well in some shade. Yup, you guessed it the fellow mention that basil likes a little shade and the leaves tend to get a bit thicker and tougher in full sun. I've always planted my basil with the tomatoes, they're good companions. In thinking about it I realized in years past I had planted the tomatoes more towards the middle of the beds. My tomato plants were started later than usual this year and were thus less leggy. To deal with the legginess in the past I've generally laid a portion of the stem in a trench to develop as a root. This trench and "root" pushes where I plant the tomatoes more towards the middle. The basil is planted later and as an after thought and fitted easily on the North-side. This year shorter plants, so no trench needed. I put the holes for the tomatoes closer to the edge of the bed. The basil got the South-side by default. North-side shaded by the tomatoes South-side sun. I'll have to remember that next year.
I don't want to drop over to politics just yet but heard a great quote from a Libertarian campaign manager talking about door to door canvassing during these interesting times. He mentioned that reactions were surprisingly varied but that one of his volunteers had had a gun pulled on 'em. Then he said "But this is Wyoming and if you don't have at least one gun pulled on you in a week, your really just not doing your job". The garden hasn't pulled a gun on me - yet, but the butternut squash is trying to befuddle me to death.
I've shared with you how I was running a little experiment between older and newer seed to see which would sprout first and produce bigger and more fruit. With worries about food availability I actually added another bed in the front yard just for a 3rd location to put butternut for winter eating. The new bed was a simple affair with two leftover bales of straw on the East and North for walls and as much unfinished compost as I had, piled in. It started off gangbusters. The heat from the compost had that bed leading the other two locations of butternut, with it even throwing up a volunteer unknown squash. It had set fruit and was way ahead, especially of the squash I'd started in the corn. About three weeks ago I realized the squash in the corn really just wasn't getting bigger. I tried more water, nothing. Happened across a video with a fellow gardener talking about getting some straw which had been tainted with some new chemical and was hurting some plants. I also caught a few comments along the same line from other blogs and websites. Since I had gotten the straw for free from a fellow who I didn't know I could only guess. The straw that I hadn't ended up using to build the temporary bed out front had been spread over all of my raised beds all winter with it just pushed aside for planting. It was under and around the squash and corn.
I really don't know the answer but in an abundance of caution I pulled the straw off the corn bed and it did start growing, so....??? Well not much to do with the straw bale bed as the bed itself was the straw and they were fruiting and vining up stakes I'd pounded into the straw. Last week all the fruit in the straw bale bed shriveled and died! So the vines are fine and plenty of flowers but back to square one. Was it some bug, water, heat, shade or did the roots start growing into bad straw and ... I don't know as I said befuddled and I'm not sure what I should remember next year on this one.
If you're wondering why I'm saying "remember next year" it's because I realized I once again have forgotten to write down in my garden journal anything for 'bout, well since it got hot. It's tough to put down the garden tools and come in and do anything garden related. Journals and hockey are winter and early spring sports, they can't take the heat.
I've been drying little bits of oregano, winter savory, mint and calendular. More than enough for our needs. Been putting aside a few seeds as the spring plants finish up and planting a few of the fall seeds as it begins to become that time of year and who knows how long we'll get for a season to grow. Mother Nature doesn't guarantee the length of the season just that we all get the same 24 hours in a day.
As with the last blog I want to skip over partisan politics and go to the root of politics, money. Politics is to a great degree about money, who gets it, how they get it, and what a society considers fair. Yeah nobody said life was going to be fair but from the time of kings through republics, democracy and every ism the mind of man could create money and fairness have played a hand in every revolution and evolution of politics. Feel free to argue in the comments to your hearts contents the merits of your favorite solution to the problem of fairness. Having a wife who is a therapist I would have to offer that the "solution" you see as most fair says more about you than a year with Freud could uncover. But I want to get under that, to the basics, the definition. Is money like time? Easy as a clock on the wall to divide into 24 discrete little units? Or is it like time in the seasons of your life?
Wikipedia describes money fairly but mostly in the way we commonly think about it. When I learned about money (oddly not in school!) I learned Money is Durable, Divisible, Fungible, Portable, Acceptable, Uniform & Limited in supply. To be money it must pass all these test not just some.
The road I went down to learn about money began as a bartender. Most of the tips I got were the usual US Currency but I had a big gallon maraschino cherry jar I'd filled at home with the weird coins that landed on the bar. Steel pennies, Canadian quarters, wooden nickels you name it and the occasional button (really, come on a button!) Working at better bars led to foreign currencies Peso, Colorful Canadian "dollars", and bills from every part of the world usually with a good story about a vacation the person had just taken and was left with a little of the local stuff they hadn't exchanged back before leaving. One in particular caught my attention the "Ithica Hour". It was from upstate NY and having a brother up that way lead to some reading about it. It was fascinating, started by some hippies as a way to improve the local economy which was hurting. They just printed their own "money", huh can you do that!
At the time I was active in the Libertarian Party and there were some libertarians promoting an alternative "real money" based on silver. I don't recall all the details simply that the silver was stored for you and you could barter with your account. The Federal Government came in took all the silver and sent people to jail. Glad I wasn't involved. Over the years I saw a number of weird "money things" but preferred US Dollars over buttons and such. Another I remember vividly was one Earl Allen showed me. Earl was the classic Libertarian computer geek and he cornered me at his house one day to show me this thing called bitcoin that was going to replace "money" with a computer :~) Ha! I was skeptical as it was "worth" only about 3 cents and there was almost nothing you could buy with it. The Federal government later tried to shut it down and, I don't recall, may have arrested the "owners" but I don't think anything ever stuck. Just glad I wasn't involved!
Just to be topical I just read about a town in Washington that created Tenino Wooden Currency to help with economic problems associated with these interesting times. Even remembering all those instances I'm not sure where I first heard about money being Durable, Divisible, etc probably from Ken Riggs. It was a slow earthquake. A slow earthquake because when you think about those good old US Dollars and that list of the qualities of money it does pretty well. Is the US dollar money? Durable - sure the bills wear out quicker than the coins but go to the bank and they'll swap a worn out bill for a new one, so check. Divisible - Yup, hundred pennies equals a dollar. Good enough, check. Fungible - well I had to look the word up but Yup, check. Portable - Yup, wallet, back pocket, boot, check. Acceptable - Big Yup world wide, check. Uniform - Yuppers, a dollar is a dollar is a dollar (just don't take those Canadian ones!), check. What's that last one - Oh yeah, limited in supply - Uh Oh! Hmm, limited by who isn't that - well, political at least since 1971. There I must digress.
In Just under a month we will pass the 49th anniversary (to borrow the phrase) of a Day that will live in infamy. August 15th 1971 President of the United States Richard Nixon "closed the gold window". In doing so he eliminated the ability of other countries to force a limit to the supply of dollars created. American's, themselves had previously lost that power under Roosevelt in another little bit of infamy. Foreign countries were the last restraint on printing unlimited Currency (currency as it was no longer "money" - not meeting all the criteria!).
I know it all sounds very weird and technical like Earl explaining bitcoin to me. You have to read and notice things and let it seep in but it is huge. If you're a visual person this website is full of very surprising charts and rather colorfully named WTF Happened In 1971. Take more than a moment (right click to open it in a new window!) to look at the one about income inequality - please seriously take a peek.
Correlation is not causation. I don't offer this site as proof of anything it might just be a series of coincidences. Yet when you see a single correlation it is often a good place to start going down the road, looking and learning. I would only offer learn about money vs currency soon, real soon.
I really won't go on further with this because it really is a conversation not a blog. Consider this though - for the last 49 years honestly those political people with the power to create, merely by typing into a computer, unlimited currency were surprisingly constrained in their action and drip by drip we have seen horrific problems (like income inequality) grow and grow that was bad. In 2008 they blew the roof off and said damn the constraints. Two months ago they did whatever is a thousand times worse than blowing the roof off. It will be a thousand times worse for you, me, our families, neighbors and friends and that's if you survive the Corona virus so wash your hands wear a mask and get resilient because money is like time nobody said it will treat you fairly. And no politician since 1971 (except a few wackos and Libertarians not worth remembering) has even expressed the slightest inclination to return to a system that offers the possibility of a fair deal.
All this talk about the 70's I've gotta end with "be cool baby" - and enjoy your garden even if it's at 5 am! Doug A.
Time itself is also funny a concept of the mind. We're all give the exact same 24 hours in a day but none of us know how many of those days we'll get. My nephew died young in a car accident with a thousand things to do in front of him. My Mother shared a rather Kilngon thought recently "Some days I have nothing left on my to do list but die!". (OK, Mom thanks, won't need any therapy on that one!) Just to complicate the thought the Celts say - "When God made time, he made plenty of it." Sure, sure, but God just did a funny job distributing that time. We all get the same 24 hours in a day but I guess nobody said life was going to be fair.
That is all a rather gran-eloquent lead in to complaining that I got up rather early this morning. It was the literal crack of dawn! I had to, it's been hot. It's been hot since June and in that same time we've had barely a day and a half of rain, hot and dry. It's was more than the discomfort of trying to sleep on a hot summer night. It's that I have the bad habits of an old guy. I get up have coffee and scan the emails, walk the dog and then and only then begin any work in the garden. Old guys don't change their schedules! That's fine and all in the spring you can get up at a decent hour and work the day in the garden at a decent temperature. With the heat I've been barely getting in a hour of watering or weeding before it's just too much. The garden will give you a little slack and the odd day off but the to do list items pile up. So up early it was. Still didn't get much done but I did get some done.
One thing that I don't have to worry about changing is it's zucchini season in the garden, so I know what's for dinner. Last night it was a cold zucchini and papaya salad (not bad but a bit bland). The night before was zucchini and tomatoes with the vegetarian version of scrambled hamburger (with a delicious caprese salad!;~). The night before that - well I don't remember but it was zucchini and something. Another week or so and I'll be pawning them off on the neighbors who bake, zucchini bread season Mmmm!
I mentioned last blog that the tomatillas had really taken off and they have. I've also noticed that of the 4 plants, the plant to the south has by far the most fruit. My theory at this point is it's the shade to sun ratio. I've always thought of tomatillos as heat loving plants and I'm sure they are. But the brain skipped over the sun piece of the equation. Most of my raised beds are oriented East West. Thus with some variations, due to an odd bit of shading, the plants in a row get the same amount of sun through the day. This bed was tucked in to fill a space next to the grape arbor it has a North South orientation. I'll have to remember that next year.
Equally but opposite I noticed the basil was a bit behind in growth. Mind you we'll have more than we can use with just two plants, so I noticed it but didn't worry much about it. Till I was watching a youtube video on plants that do well in some shade. Yup, you guessed it the fellow mention that basil likes a little shade and the leaves tend to get a bit thicker and tougher in full sun. I've always planted my basil with the tomatoes, they're good companions. In thinking about it I realized in years past I had planted the tomatoes more towards the middle of the beds. My tomato plants were started later than usual this year and were thus less leggy. To deal with the legginess in the past I've generally laid a portion of the stem in a trench to develop as a root. This trench and "root" pushes where I plant the tomatoes more towards the middle. The basil is planted later and as an after thought and fitted easily on the North-side. This year shorter plants, so no trench needed. I put the holes for the tomatoes closer to the edge of the bed. The basil got the South-side by default. North-side shaded by the tomatoes South-side sun. I'll have to remember that next year.
I don't want to drop over to politics just yet but heard a great quote from a Libertarian campaign manager talking about door to door canvassing during these interesting times. He mentioned that reactions were surprisingly varied but that one of his volunteers had had a gun pulled on 'em. Then he said "But this is Wyoming and if you don't have at least one gun pulled on you in a week, your really just not doing your job". The garden hasn't pulled a gun on me - yet, but the butternut squash is trying to befuddle me to death.
I've shared with you how I was running a little experiment between older and newer seed to see which would sprout first and produce bigger and more fruit. With worries about food availability I actually added another bed in the front yard just for a 3rd location to put butternut for winter eating. The new bed was a simple affair with two leftover bales of straw on the East and North for walls and as much unfinished compost as I had, piled in. It started off gangbusters. The heat from the compost had that bed leading the other two locations of butternut, with it even throwing up a volunteer unknown squash. It had set fruit and was way ahead, especially of the squash I'd started in the corn. About three weeks ago I realized the squash in the corn really just wasn't getting bigger. I tried more water, nothing. Happened across a video with a fellow gardener talking about getting some straw which had been tainted with some new chemical and was hurting some plants. I also caught a few comments along the same line from other blogs and websites. Since I had gotten the straw for free from a fellow who I didn't know I could only guess. The straw that I hadn't ended up using to build the temporary bed out front had been spread over all of my raised beds all winter with it just pushed aside for planting. It was under and around the squash and corn.
I really don't know the answer but in an abundance of caution I pulled the straw off the corn bed and it did start growing, so....??? Well not much to do with the straw bale bed as the bed itself was the straw and they were fruiting and vining up stakes I'd pounded into the straw. Last week all the fruit in the straw bale bed shriveled and died! So the vines are fine and plenty of flowers but back to square one. Was it some bug, water, heat, shade or did the roots start growing into bad straw and ... I don't know as I said befuddled and I'm not sure what I should remember next year on this one.
If you're wondering why I'm saying "remember next year" it's because I realized I once again have forgotten to write down in my garden journal anything for 'bout, well since it got hot. It's tough to put down the garden tools and come in and do anything garden related. Journals and hockey are winter and early spring sports, they can't take the heat.
I've been drying little bits of oregano, winter savory, mint and calendular. More than enough for our needs. Been putting aside a few seeds as the spring plants finish up and planting a few of the fall seeds as it begins to become that time of year and who knows how long we'll get for a season to grow. Mother Nature doesn't guarantee the length of the season just that we all get the same 24 hours in a day.
As with the last blog I want to skip over partisan politics and go to the root of politics, money. Politics is to a great degree about money, who gets it, how they get it, and what a society considers fair. Yeah nobody said life was going to be fair but from the time of kings through republics, democracy and every ism the mind of man could create money and fairness have played a hand in every revolution and evolution of politics. Feel free to argue in the comments to your hearts contents the merits of your favorite solution to the problem of fairness. Having a wife who is a therapist I would have to offer that the "solution" you see as most fair says more about you than a year with Freud could uncover. But I want to get under that, to the basics, the definition. Is money like time? Easy as a clock on the wall to divide into 24 discrete little units? Or is it like time in the seasons of your life?
Wikipedia describes money fairly but mostly in the way we commonly think about it. When I learned about money (oddly not in school!) I learned Money is Durable, Divisible, Fungible, Portable, Acceptable, Uniform & Limited in supply. To be money it must pass all these test not just some.
The road I went down to learn about money began as a bartender. Most of the tips I got were the usual US Currency but I had a big gallon maraschino cherry jar I'd filled at home with the weird coins that landed on the bar. Steel pennies, Canadian quarters, wooden nickels you name it and the occasional button (really, come on a button!) Working at better bars led to foreign currencies Peso, Colorful Canadian "dollars", and bills from every part of the world usually with a good story about a vacation the person had just taken and was left with a little of the local stuff they hadn't exchanged back before leaving. One in particular caught my attention the "Ithica Hour". It was from upstate NY and having a brother up that way lead to some reading about it. It was fascinating, started by some hippies as a way to improve the local economy which was hurting. They just printed their own "money", huh can you do that!
At the time I was active in the Libertarian Party and there were some libertarians promoting an alternative "real money" based on silver. I don't recall all the details simply that the silver was stored for you and you could barter with your account. The Federal Government came in took all the silver and sent people to jail. Glad I wasn't involved. Over the years I saw a number of weird "money things" but preferred US Dollars over buttons and such. Another I remember vividly was one Earl Allen showed me. Earl was the classic Libertarian computer geek and he cornered me at his house one day to show me this thing called bitcoin that was going to replace "money" with a computer :~) Ha! I was skeptical as it was "worth" only about 3 cents and there was almost nothing you could buy with it. The Federal government later tried to shut it down and, I don't recall, may have arrested the "owners" but I don't think anything ever stuck. Just glad I wasn't involved!
Just to be topical I just read about a town in Washington that created Tenino Wooden Currency to help with economic problems associated with these interesting times. Even remembering all those instances I'm not sure where I first heard about money being Durable, Divisible, etc probably from Ken Riggs. It was a slow earthquake. A slow earthquake because when you think about those good old US Dollars and that list of the qualities of money it does pretty well. Is the US dollar money? Durable - sure the bills wear out quicker than the coins but go to the bank and they'll swap a worn out bill for a new one, so check. Divisible - Yup, hundred pennies equals a dollar. Good enough, check. Fungible - well I had to look the word up but Yup, check. Portable - Yup, wallet, back pocket, boot, check. Acceptable - Big Yup world wide, check. Uniform - Yuppers, a dollar is a dollar is a dollar (just don't take those Canadian ones!), check. What's that last one - Oh yeah, limited in supply - Uh Oh! Hmm, limited by who isn't that - well, political at least since 1971. There I must digress.
In Just under a month we will pass the 49th anniversary (to borrow the phrase) of a Day that will live in infamy. August 15th 1971 President of the United States Richard Nixon "closed the gold window". In doing so he eliminated the ability of other countries to force a limit to the supply of dollars created. American's, themselves had previously lost that power under Roosevelt in another little bit of infamy. Foreign countries were the last restraint on printing unlimited Currency (currency as it was no longer "money" - not meeting all the criteria!).
I know it all sounds very weird and technical like Earl explaining bitcoin to me. You have to read and notice things and let it seep in but it is huge. If you're a visual person this website is full of very surprising charts and rather colorfully named WTF Happened In 1971. Take more than a moment (right click to open it in a new window!) to look at the one about income inequality - please seriously take a peek.
Correlation is not causation. I don't offer this site as proof of anything it might just be a series of coincidences. Yet when you see a single correlation it is often a good place to start going down the road, looking and learning. I would only offer learn about money vs currency soon, real soon.
I really won't go on further with this because it really is a conversation not a blog. Consider this though - for the last 49 years honestly those political people with the power to create, merely by typing into a computer, unlimited currency were surprisingly constrained in their action and drip by drip we have seen horrific problems (like income inequality) grow and grow that was bad. In 2008 they blew the roof off and said damn the constraints. Two months ago they did whatever is a thousand times worse than blowing the roof off. It will be a thousand times worse for you, me, our families, neighbors and friends and that's if you survive the Corona virus so wash your hands wear a mask and get resilient because money is like time nobody said it will treat you fairly. And no politician since 1971 (except a few wackos and Libertarians not worth remembering) has even expressed the slightest inclination to return to a system that offers the possibility of a fair deal.
All this talk about the 70's I've gotta end with "be cool baby" - and enjoy your garden even if it's at 5 am! Doug A.
Bitcoin, silver, gold, fungible, etc. gets over my head. But one thing I suspect is that it's not about flattening the curve, it's all about flattening the economy. I believe the direction they want to take the country is to become a cashless society and to eliminate the US$ as the world's reserve currency. The "virus" is just the excuse they're using to take us in that direction.
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