small gardens & small government

 It was still cool in the fields as she came in at 2:00. The clouds meant a storm was coming for sure but Ashe needed to put her body where her mind was. She wanted to get those tickets! The field nerds would just have to manage the bots without her for a bit, tickets opened in an hour. She'd check her program once more.  The concert would be an immediate sellout if Rolling Stone had it right. Her hologram needed to be in line with proof that she wasn't a scalper and application in hand at 8:00 AM sharp New York time. She'd been up late tweaking and re-tweaking the wording trying to give herself every edge. One of the field nerds, Giorgos had months before hacked her a copy of the algorithm the promoter was using but this wasn't a simple reverse engineering piece. There were subtleties. Being Ashe Artemis Anderson might have gotten her to the front of alot of lines even at Caltech but this wasn't dodge ball and you couldn't use dogecoin!! This was platinum grade...

  I've always thought bio-dynamic gardening was just a bunch of bare-foot boulder hippy chick hooey, and it probably is. Thing is I'm not the gardener to prove or disprove it or about any theory of gardening that requires actual record keeping and comparisons of results in anything of a controlled method. Me, I'm the guy who meticulously labels the tomatoes by variety in the garden and then saves the seeds in an unlabeled container. 'cause Oh heck, I'll remember the Pink Bulls are in the little square Tupperware. - or was that the Pink Giants and the other ones were Heart of the Bull - or wait, Oh the heck, with it I'll call 'em both Trav's Hearts after Travis who gave me both seeds. I can just start two pots of each and see what grows -brilliant! Till only one type sprouts and I'm trying to decide which one to replant!!    The day is an in between day. Overcast and neither warm nor cold, snow on the grass from the last little storm but the raised b...

 A few blogs back I mentioned Galbraith's notion that free time was a type of wealth. I'd like to offer a thought on a definition of wealth that's been rattling around in my old brain, "get to" vs "got to". I think you can measure your wealth by looking at the number of things you've got to do vs the time you spend doing things that you get to do. Now part of this is simply a mind game as for one person a job is something they just gotta do and for another the same job is one they get to do. Perspective is variable and within our control and choice. There are some things that short of the Zen master do fall into the gotta do category. I won't belabor the idea right here just want to put it in your head, perhaps a future blog.  Colorado's Front Range seems to always get a week or two, around this time, of very very cold weather. Last week was cold, this morning it was minus something. It's now mid day and up to a balmy 9°. So this might be...

  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 complaini...

  I'm enjoying a Zac Brown's song Toes. One of the refrains (can a song have multiple refrains?) in the song is " Life is good today !" That had to describe the feeling last night as Deb and I sat in our backyard. Yeah, yeah plenty of things to worry about but there we were in the cool of the evening watching the robin parents bring the last worms of the day to their hatchlings in our grape arbor. They had lost one of the eggs to a raid by grackles last week but had two hungry mouths to feed this night. Our own dinner was finished with the dishes stacked in the sink, a delicious salad from the garden and a salmon burger with a side of peas also from the garden. Some like worms, for me give me fresh peas with butter and salt, a cool late June evening, and my wife at my side - yeah, life is good today!   Our June has been a collection of 90° days with very little rain. After a reasonable snow pack this winter in the mountains a good portion of the state has slipped int...

 I've got Lena Horne on the stereo. I always thought, in interviews, her personality was too snooty but I'm following her with Sarah Vaughan. I never saw an interview with Sarah but she was nicknames "sassy" so I guess who cares. Both ladies could sing. Lena's singing Stormy Weather and that's as good a place as any to start. Just finished a cool early morning walk with Cooper around a very quiet Sunday neighborhood. The clouds to the west over Green Mountain look as grey and fat as the weatherman said they would. So I'm expecting today to be a good day of rain, inside music and maybe homemade pizza, later.   The pizza won't be quite the usual thrill as Deb is in Oklahoma for her sister's 70th birthday. I've told Deb and I don't know if she gets it, I enjoy cooking but only when I have her for an 'audience'. Now mind you I'm no chef but even something simple like pizza is fun to make, if you can share the little details like ...

  In silence the grey steel hatch slowly swung up. There was a bit of rust but no squeak as the hand on the, wheel like, 'dog' pushed into the morning air. It had rained and the air was fresh and cool. "That smells good", thought our intrepid prepper. As he rose out of the hatch he could hear the faint sounds of a vehicle far off on the county road. The silence was further disturbed by the Fee-beee, Fee-beee of a chickadee proclaiming his territory. It was the greenness though that overwhelmed him as he twisted and stretched unused muscles.  Ah look, the apple tree has ripe fruit on it. I'll pick some he thought and load them into the old truck to sell at the farmers market. The market was opening he'd heard on the CB radio. Ewww the truck, he'd have to attach back up the battery and check that brake fluid that had been low back when he had sheltered in. He smiled as he thought about the bumper sticker he'd put on the truck and sell at his little stan...