The pile of firewood in the driveway is mostly ash, which is dying left and right because of a beetle. On the logs you can see the larvae's path under the bark, a tunnel they eat out of the cambium, which inadvertently kills the tree.

I'm not sure what to make of it. They are willy-nilly. Sometimes the paths seem leisurely, other times confused, ( Read more... )

At the dinner table tonight, I confessed I had some apprehensions about changes at my workplace this week.

The elder child turns to me and says: "Scout. Adapt. Crush."

I said: "There is logic behind your words."

I am reassured.

Spring is more stressful than autumn, but shouldn't be. The urgency to plant and prepare and prune is there, but it's not nearly as time-sensitive as the arrival of the first cold weather, a single-day death sentence for almost everything edible still outdoors.

Are we really going to eat this many tomatillos? (Yes, we could make salsa: but do we ( Read more... )

A lot of the newer jargon of neuroscience (e.g. "Default Mode Network", "functional hubs", etc) seems to have come out of research done in the late 90s and early 2000s, so all the terminology sounds like you're talking about computer networking.

Anyway, there's something uncivilized about it, crass, like all we're talking about is getting the ( Read more... )

Before the house I live in was built, another house stood here. And in the days of that house, trash was not brought to a dump and then shipped out of the county. Appalachia was more remote in that time, and every family burned what trash they could, and buried what they could not.

And in the days of the quarantine, the middens of this earlier ( Read more... )

The children are adapting well to lockdown. They have been building things out of scraps of wood - ladders, mostly, for climbing otherwise inaccessible trees. They've taught themselves to hammer nails in straight. I'm ashamed to say couldn't do that until my mid-20s.

They've been foraging for wild edibles - peppergrass, wild carrots, and wild ( Read more... )

One of the sheep died. She started bleeding from the nose and mouth. When we checked on her the next day, she was on the ground, and her being startled at our arrival - and being unable to get up - caused her to panic and die right there.

It was late afternoon. Thankfully the ground wasn't frozen - the unseasonable warmth may have contributed to ( Read more... )

It's New Year's eve, and I'm burning trash.

Not house-trash. Farm-trash. The remains of a half-finished structure that's been rotting in the yard from long ago. I'm not even sure if anyone here remembers what it was intended to be. The offspring had more use out of it as a fort than anything. But now it's up in flames.

Really, any excuse - or no ( Read more... )

The younger one is fond of making up, modifying, or misunderstanding words:

"Stupidious." Not sure how this is different from just "stupid", but usage implies a stupid that is more than stupid.

"Overreacted." The state of having overreacted to something. Unfortunately I'm most often the target of this one. "Don't do that or Dad will get overreacted ( Read more... )

The youngest reports: "Sometimes when I move my head, I think I see an animal out of the side of my eye, but I never really do ( Read more... )