Some updates
My internet is now slower than the slowest thing that has ever slowed. It's usually SLOW, but the last few days not only has the wifi not been good (blinking out) the dial-up itself is being slow FOR DIAL-UP which is slow. Most pages won't even load AT ALL the first time I click on them. Needless to say this is not helping me crawl out from under my rp-tags.
IT HAS BEEN SO COLD and full of rain. The rain has actually been the warmer times. I've had to work outside with a hat on to cover my ears, that's how cold it's been. A couple times I've gone out in the drizzle, didn't get much done but I like to know what's happening. The rain is washing away the furrows over my onions! I've been trying to build them back up....silt washes away so quickly. It's the first time I tried furrowing my onions (on the advice of some fellow onion grower I met while purchasing them). I think his soil is heavier than mine, and that this is exactly why I don't try furrowing things. In other news, this is the time when onions are supposed to be having their last growth kick before starting to dry. I have no idea what this rain will mean for them, or the garlic. I already pulled up one onion that was splitting at the top.
Seed saving is another thing that I think won't be working out with this weather. I tried letting some of the chard, mustard and parsley go to seed so that I could save it, but without the heat, they just aren't drying out! Instead, it just keeps growing in a bolted form. The mustard is way up over my head, and the top of my outstretched hand now. It's at least 7-8 feet tall, and I'm tempted to take a measuring tape out there to measure it, if I could find one. The chard too, is up over my head and crazy. I'm gonna have to rip them out in a week or so without getting any seeds.
Getting past all the compost and manure everyone is putting on their stuff, the garden smells pretty good. Despite the inclement weather, the honeysuckle, jasmine and sweet peas are all blooming. The smell is more muted in the rain, and I've gotten water on my nose from smelling the flowers themselves. I clipped some roses, but in this weather, they turn into houses for all the bugs and slugs. You really feel like a part of nature, turning your roses upside down on the porch shaking them so all the earwigs go flying out, then going after the tough ones with a twig. Yup, stop and smell the roses.
Really though, what's occupied a lot of my thoughts is this BP business, and everything connected to it. I can't control it. Offshore drilling (and the part where I'm against it) has been an issue of mine for a long time. I don't really like to go on long political rants, but I'm very very angry about it, I think about it at least once a day (which is helped by it being in the news once a day, too). People are angry, but at the same time they just aren't angry enough. They aren't tar and feather angry. They aren't stones through windows angry. I have this feeling in my gut that tells me no one is really going to pay for this. No one is going to be really nailed to the wall (except maybe one scapegoat, lower down the totem pole) and nothing much is going to change. It's one of the things about being a democracy: in order to survive and have social harmony, we've had to take violence out of the picture. Well and good, but somehow we also seem to have lost the oooomph to do anything about things, such as rampant corruption, illegal things that have ended up ruining our economy, and costing us billions of dollars. The people being fucked in the ass by all this are too poor and too busy to do anything about it, and none of the elites going to be sticking up for us. This time it's not just money and jobs we've lost, though we'll be losing those things too, but land, our ocean.
I've done bird rescue stuff before so I know how much it's going to suck at least from that perspective. It's going to be terrible with the pelicans. Deep sea pelicans, the brown ones, are for some reason ever so much shier than the ones you see hanging around beaches and docks. As a defense against predators, they expel everything they've got hanging around in their pouch (so the predators go eat that, instead of them). Birds can't really 'barf' like mammals do, but nonetheless, whenever these guys get stressed the still end up upchucking all of what you were trying to get moving along down into their digestive tract. This means once you've gone through the process of cleaning them off (which takes a long time, sometimes repeated attempts, sometimes waiting till the dang things molt it off) the hard part with the pelicans is just beginning! They have to be kept in very quiet isolation and just managing to get them their next meal in a manner that's calm enough they don't expel their first is difficult. It take days after their 'bath' before they're calm enough to eat again, so if the environment they're from isn't clean enough to dump them back out there, or if their plumage is so badly damaged that they can't fly well, being stuck with an assload of wild pelicans is not going to be awesome for the rescue places on the coastal areas, especially because new volunteers, as well meaning as they be, won't be of much use dealing with the pelicans....in a way that means they'll still be alive 2 weeks later. I wish there was such a thing as prozac for pelicans, but there's not. They're just very, very anxious, all the time, until they're back out there on that nice quiet ocean. And they must have fish to eat, meaning they're expensive to keep, too.
The only minuscule spot of solace in this mess is that now my coast may not be getting this crap all over it. Our governor used to be in favor of off-shore drilling, and with Obama pushing for a lift of the ban on deep sea drilling (and not getting NEARLY enough pushback from environmentalists I might add) I was worried we would be the ones hit. It was never, ever in doubt in my mind that it would happen eventually. I don't mean to come off like a jackass, but with all the corner cutting America has allowed companies to use when drilling in our seas, I don't see how this could be a surprise. Did people seriously believe other countries had those regulations there for shits and giggles? Or just because they enjoy being anti-capitalist commie socialists or something? You can't use the safety records of other things to measure safety if you don't use the same measures. Most of these things coming up on the news about safety issues weren't secrets. Activists have been talking about them for a long time now. Sometimes I hate people. A lot. Meanwhile, the people who made money off this have made enough that they can afford to fly other places on vacation, move away from any affected areas, pay for the increased cost of seafood and still have plenty left over.
BRB building my compound/bunker in the woods now.
ETA, and now a happy thought. Why I love the internet: I just read this.
Person #1: One of the most successful off-the-grid groups I ever met were a commune of witches.
Person #2: Decades ago, I used to run a bookshop in a fairly remote tourist town. Due to some extraordinary circumstances the previous years, there was an influx of alternate religious types to the area. Among them witches.
My bookshop was mostly known for occult books and paraphernalia, but we had a nice stock of more mainstream material like romance novels, comic books, and wrestling magazines.
Witches (Back then at least) were nuts about professional wrestling. They would walk right by my musty ancient leather bound grimoires and go straight for the magazine racks. If Rick Flair or Andre the Giant were on the cover, I'd hear squeals of joy.
One day, I was invited over to their commune for dinner as thanks for keeping their magazines in stock, as well as getting them extra special collectors editions and such. After we parked and got moving towards the farmhouse, I couldn't help but notice the wrestling ring set up in the barn...
I love these little slices of life. Now I want to know more about these wresting witches. Molly, I am thinking about you for some reason.
IT HAS BEEN SO COLD and full of rain. The rain has actually been the warmer times. I've had to work outside with a hat on to cover my ears, that's how cold it's been. A couple times I've gone out in the drizzle, didn't get much done but I like to know what's happening. The rain is washing away the furrows over my onions! I've been trying to build them back up....silt washes away so quickly. It's the first time I tried furrowing my onions (on the advice of some fellow onion grower I met while purchasing them). I think his soil is heavier than mine, and that this is exactly why I don't try furrowing things. In other news, this is the time when onions are supposed to be having their last growth kick before starting to dry. I have no idea what this rain will mean for them, or the garlic. I already pulled up one onion that was splitting at the top.
Seed saving is another thing that I think won't be working out with this weather. I tried letting some of the chard, mustard and parsley go to seed so that I could save it, but without the heat, they just aren't drying out! Instead, it just keeps growing in a bolted form. The mustard is way up over my head, and the top of my outstretched hand now. It's at least 7-8 feet tall, and I'm tempted to take a measuring tape out there to measure it, if I could find one. The chard too, is up over my head and crazy. I'm gonna have to rip them out in a week or so without getting any seeds.
Getting past all the compost and manure everyone is putting on their stuff, the garden smells pretty good. Despite the inclement weather, the honeysuckle, jasmine and sweet peas are all blooming. The smell is more muted in the rain, and I've gotten water on my nose from smelling the flowers themselves. I clipped some roses, but in this weather, they turn into houses for all the bugs and slugs. You really feel like a part of nature, turning your roses upside down on the porch shaking them so all the earwigs go flying out, then going after the tough ones with a twig. Yup, stop and smell the roses.
Really though, what's occupied a lot of my thoughts is this BP business, and everything connected to it. I can't control it. Offshore drilling (and the part where I'm against it) has been an issue of mine for a long time. I don't really like to go on long political rants, but I'm very very angry about it, I think about it at least once a day (which is helped by it being in the news once a day, too). People are angry, but at the same time they just aren't angry enough. They aren't tar and feather angry. They aren't stones through windows angry. I have this feeling in my gut that tells me no one is really going to pay for this. No one is going to be really nailed to the wall (except maybe one scapegoat, lower down the totem pole) and nothing much is going to change. It's one of the things about being a democracy: in order to survive and have social harmony, we've had to take violence out of the picture. Well and good, but somehow we also seem to have lost the oooomph to do anything about things, such as rampant corruption, illegal things that have ended up ruining our economy, and costing us billions of dollars. The people being fucked in the ass by all this are too poor and too busy to do anything about it, and none of the elites going to be sticking up for us. This time it's not just money and jobs we've lost, though we'll be losing those things too, but land, our ocean.
I've done bird rescue stuff before so I know how much it's going to suck at least from that perspective. It's going to be terrible with the pelicans. Deep sea pelicans, the brown ones, are for some reason ever so much shier than the ones you see hanging around beaches and docks. As a defense against predators, they expel everything they've got hanging around in their pouch (so the predators go eat that, instead of them). Birds can't really 'barf' like mammals do, but nonetheless, whenever these guys get stressed the still end up upchucking all of what you were trying to get moving along down into their digestive tract. This means once you've gone through the process of cleaning them off (which takes a long time, sometimes repeated attempts, sometimes waiting till the dang things molt it off) the hard part with the pelicans is just beginning! They have to be kept in very quiet isolation and just managing to get them their next meal in a manner that's calm enough they don't expel their first is difficult. It take days after their 'bath' before they're calm enough to eat again, so if the environment they're from isn't clean enough to dump them back out there, or if their plumage is so badly damaged that they can't fly well, being stuck with an assload of wild pelicans is not going to be awesome for the rescue places on the coastal areas, especially because new volunteers, as well meaning as they be, won't be of much use dealing with the pelicans....in a way that means they'll still be alive 2 weeks later. I wish there was such a thing as prozac for pelicans, but there's not. They're just very, very anxious, all the time, until they're back out there on that nice quiet ocean. And they must have fish to eat, meaning they're expensive to keep, too.
The only minuscule spot of solace in this mess is that now my coast may not be getting this crap all over it. Our governor used to be in favor of off-shore drilling, and with Obama pushing for a lift of the ban on deep sea drilling (and not getting NEARLY enough pushback from environmentalists I might add) I was worried we would be the ones hit. It was never, ever in doubt in my mind that it would happen eventually. I don't mean to come off like a jackass, but with all the corner cutting America has allowed companies to use when drilling in our seas, I don't see how this could be a surprise. Did people seriously believe other countries had those regulations there for shits and giggles? Or just because they enjoy being anti-capitalist commie socialists or something? You can't use the safety records of other things to measure safety if you don't use the same measures. Most of these things coming up on the news about safety issues weren't secrets. Activists have been talking about them for a long time now. Sometimes I hate people. A lot. Meanwhile, the people who made money off this have made enough that they can afford to fly other places on vacation, move away from any affected areas, pay for the increased cost of seafood and still have plenty left over.
BRB building my compound/bunker in the woods now.
ETA, and now a happy thought. Why I love the internet: I just read this.
Person #1: One of the most successful off-the-grid groups I ever met were a commune of witches.
Person #2: Decades ago, I used to run a bookshop in a fairly remote tourist town. Due to some extraordinary circumstances the previous years, there was an influx of alternate religious types to the area. Among them witches.
My bookshop was mostly known for occult books and paraphernalia, but we had a nice stock of more mainstream material like romance novels, comic books, and wrestling magazines.
Witches (Back then at least) were nuts about professional wrestling. They would walk right by my musty ancient leather bound grimoires and go straight for the magazine racks. If Rick Flair or Andre the Giant were on the cover, I'd hear squeals of joy.
One day, I was invited over to their commune for dinner as thanks for keeping their magazines in stock, as well as getting them extra special collectors editions and such. After we parked and got moving towards the farmhouse, I couldn't help but notice the wrestling ring set up in the barn...
I love these little slices of life. Now I want to know more about these wresting witches. Molly, I am thinking about you for some reason.