Farm News 01-14-07
Sunday morning, after chores, cold
Ad Astra
Stephen Hawking was born 300 years after Galileo's death, and Monday was the 365th anniversary of Galileo's death and the 65th of Hawking's birth. The sky didn't fall nor were there any other celestial spasms that I noticed. Thursday the moon went through its Last Quarter, changing from a gibbous waning moon to a crescent waning moon. Half the stars in the sky might have blown up this week but it will be many years before the news will reach us. The universe continues, as far as I can tell.
Weather
It is COLD!!! Keeping water available for the goats, geese, rabbits, chickens, ducks, cats, and dog is a real problem. This morning I glanced out the window at breakfast to the porch, where we have a heated dog water bowl, and saw the Mockingbird having a drink. At night a good deal of the water disappears, so I assume that I am keeping some wild animals watered, also.
This is the ragged northern edge of Mockingbird territory, but every winter for the past four years there has been a Mockingbird here. I'm fairly sure she is a female because I have never heard her make a sound, and male mockingbirds tend to sing all day and half the night most of the year. What is she doing here in January? Mockingbirds eat insects, mostly, so there is no good food source. I have never seen her at the woodpecker feeder, which is the closest thing we have to insect meat on the place. Nor have I ever seen her in the summer. Interesting.
Lucy the goat and Sally, her daughter, are both pregnant. Goats seem to like to have their babies on the coldest nights of the year, so I am watching for baby goats. I never saw either of them bred, but I thought, based upon their behavior, that the babies would appear in February. Does that mean that we will have even colder weather in February? We probably will, but, contrary to popular opinion, animals aren't any better at predicting the weather than are humans.
A Trip to Lyndon
Young people: the stronger their hormones roar, the more stupid they act. I remember being that age (barely, I'm happy to say) and try as I might I don't think I could recall a moment of my life between the ages of 15 and 25 when I wasn't walking into walls and lamp-posts because I was too busy thinking about sex to watch where I was going. It was worse when I tried to talk, but I spent a great deal of time talking anyway, because I thought it would help me get closer to a female of my age. My chatter was the social equivalent of walking into a wall. The female, awash in her own hormones, would giggle, then sniff, walk away (into a wall), and giggle again, a display meant to convey, “Yes, you are male, but not the male I choose, so I will insult you.”
Calvin is now nineteen, almost twenty, and has been experiencing his own variety of testosterone toxicity. His version of walking into a lamp-post was to be caught walking down the street with a shotgun under his coat, a situation that could possibly lead to a felony conviction. If you don't understand country boys, you need to know that owning a pickup truck with a gun rack in the rear window, with a gun, is, for a country boy, an essential element in his mating displays. I have been busy most of this week trying to keep Calvin's stupid butt out of jail, where adolescent mating displays can be downright dangerous.
Thursday morning I sat down in the car at 7:30 am and started off for Lyndon. He had a court appearance on Thursday at which I gave a letter I had written to the County Attorney and Calvin's attorney. In the letter I promised to keep Calvin on a short lead and make him take GED classes for two years or until he obtained a GED if the court would agree on a guilty plea to a misdemeanor and probation with no jail time or fines. I had already paid the bail bondsman to bail him out of jail, so Calvin owes me a chunk of money and I won't get it back if he's in jail; I was acting out of self-interest. Justice moves slowly: the next appearance is over a month away. Lawyers aren't slow readers, it's that once a piece of paper is part of the mess they call a desktop it will be a month or more before they can find it again.
Of even more importance to my self-interest, it will give me more Calvin stories to write for Farm News. For those of you who are new readers, it should be sufficient introduction to say that Calvin, then 18 and acting as the representative of The Farm, attended the National Turkey Testicle Festival in Illinois. It made an excellent story, his younger sister said.
Calvin, who has been living in another county, will soon return to Jefferson County to live, work on his GED, find a job, and establish a residence independent of parental support. By doing this successfully for two years he will supposedly prove to the court that he wants to be a good citizen and shouldn't be in jail. Also, if I'm lucky, he will pay back the money he owes me. Then he can return to full time mating displays.
Neighborhood Networks
At the Consumer Electronics Show last week in Las Vegas, Bill Gates announced the Home Server, a server for a household network. Hah! I'm out in front of the richest man in America (and one of the smartest). I have been working on the concept of a neighborhood server, a system that provides internet services and more for 5 to 500 households. The Neighborhood Server provides backup, system restore points, lots of games, chat, messenger, morning wakeup, photo albums, etc. It can also be configured to filter web sites for households that wish to self-censor their reading. All this, plus broadband internet access out in the country.
Perry Lake is a few miles from where I live, you can find it on Google Earth by looking for a trident shaped lake, the middle fork the longest, about 50 miles west of KC. Twenty years ago I was in Chicago at the planetarium where they had a composite satellite photo of the US. I immediately spotted Perry Lake by its shape.
The lake is surrounded by small communities: Lakeside Village, Lakeshore Estates, Lakewood Hills, etc. Those folks need high speed internet access and the only practical way to provide it is by wireless links. Neighborhood Networks are designed around wireless links. I have added the concept of local groups owning their server, domain, and local network. That way, the residents of Lakeshore Estates could have email addresses like JohnAndMary@LakeshoreEstates.com. Brilliant, no? (By the way, if you click on the John and Mary link, it will send an email to me.)
So far, most of the interest in my bright idea has come from some architects. Anyone who has seen a school in the midwest with a flat roof over the library knows that architects aren't always real bright. A few years ago every high school in this county had a library with a flat roof that leaked. I was on the local school board at the time, and our library had a leaky roof. Architects must not know how much it costs to replace 500 water damaged books.
Ad Astra
Stephen Hawking was born 300 years after Galileo's death, and Monday was the 365th anniversary of Galileo's death and the 65th of Hawking's birth. The sky didn't fall nor were there any other celestial spasms that I noticed. Thursday the moon went through its Last Quarter, changing from a gibbous waning moon to a crescent waning moon. Half the stars in the sky might have blown up this week but it will be many years before the news will reach us. The universe continues, as far as I can tell.
Weather
It is COLD!!! Keeping water available for the goats, geese, rabbits, chickens, ducks, cats, and dog is a real problem. This morning I glanced out the window at breakfast to the porch, where we have a heated dog water bowl, and saw the Mockingbird having a drink. At night a good deal of the water disappears, so I assume that I am keeping some wild animals watered, also.
This is the ragged northern edge of Mockingbird territory, but every winter for the past four years there has been a Mockingbird here. I'm fairly sure she is a female because I have never heard her make a sound, and male mockingbirds tend to sing all day and half the night most of the year. What is she doing here in January? Mockingbirds eat insects, mostly, so there is no good food source. I have never seen her at the woodpecker feeder, which is the closest thing we have to insect meat on the place. Nor have I ever seen her in the summer. Interesting.
Lucy the goat and Sally, her daughter, are both pregnant. Goats seem to like to have their babies on the coldest nights of the year, so I am watching for baby goats. I never saw either of them bred, but I thought, based upon their behavior, that the babies would appear in February. Does that mean that we will have even colder weather in February? We probably will, but, contrary to popular opinion, animals aren't any better at predicting the weather than are humans.
A Trip to Lyndon
Young people: the stronger their hormones roar, the more stupid they act. I remember being that age (barely, I'm happy to say) and try as I might I don't think I could recall a moment of my life between the ages of 15 and 25 when I wasn't walking into walls and lamp-posts because I was too busy thinking about sex to watch where I was going. It was worse when I tried to talk, but I spent a great deal of time talking anyway, because I thought it would help me get closer to a female of my age. My chatter was the social equivalent of walking into a wall. The female, awash in her own hormones, would giggle, then sniff, walk away (into a wall), and giggle again, a display meant to convey, “Yes, you are male, but not the male I choose, so I will insult you.”
Calvin is now nineteen, almost twenty, and has been experiencing his own variety of testosterone toxicity. His version of walking into a lamp-post was to be caught walking down the street with a shotgun under his coat, a situation that could possibly lead to a felony conviction. If you don't understand country boys, you need to know that owning a pickup truck with a gun rack in the rear window, with a gun, is, for a country boy, an essential element in his mating displays. I have been busy most of this week trying to keep Calvin's stupid butt out of jail, where adolescent mating displays can be downright dangerous.
Thursday morning I sat down in the car at 7:30 am and started off for Lyndon. He had a court appearance on Thursday at which I gave a letter I had written to the County Attorney and Calvin's attorney. In the letter I promised to keep Calvin on a short lead and make him take GED classes for two years or until he obtained a GED if the court would agree on a guilty plea to a misdemeanor and probation with no jail time or fines. I had already paid the bail bondsman to bail him out of jail, so Calvin owes me a chunk of money and I won't get it back if he's in jail; I was acting out of self-interest. Justice moves slowly: the next appearance is over a month away. Lawyers aren't slow readers, it's that once a piece of paper is part of the mess they call a desktop it will be a month or more before they can find it again.
Of even more importance to my self-interest, it will give me more Calvin stories to write for Farm News. For those of you who are new readers, it should be sufficient introduction to say that Calvin, then 18 and acting as the representative of The Farm, attended the National Turkey Testicle Festival in Illinois. It made an excellent story, his younger sister said.
Calvin, who has been living in another county, will soon return to Jefferson County to live, work on his GED, find a job, and establish a residence independent of parental support. By doing this successfully for two years he will supposedly prove to the court that he wants to be a good citizen and shouldn't be in jail. Also, if I'm lucky, he will pay back the money he owes me. Then he can return to full time mating displays.
Neighborhood Networks
At the Consumer Electronics Show last week in Las Vegas, Bill Gates announced the Home Server, a server for a household network. Hah! I'm out in front of the richest man in America (and one of the smartest). I have been working on the concept of a neighborhood server, a system that provides internet services and more for 5 to 500 households. The Neighborhood Server provides backup, system restore points, lots of games, chat, messenger, morning wakeup, photo albums, etc. It can also be configured to filter web sites for households that wish to self-censor their reading. All this, plus broadband internet access out in the country.
Perry Lake is a few miles from where I live, you can find it on Google Earth by looking for a trident shaped lake, the middle fork the longest, about 50 miles west of KC. Twenty years ago I was in Chicago at the planetarium where they had a composite satellite photo of the US. I immediately spotted Perry Lake by its shape.
The lake is surrounded by small communities: Lakeside Village, Lakeshore Estates, Lakewood Hills, etc. Those folks need high speed internet access and the only practical way to provide it is by wireless links. Neighborhood Networks are designed around wireless links. I have added the concept of local groups owning their server, domain, and local network. That way, the residents of Lakeshore Estates could have email addresses like JohnAndMary@LakeshoreEstates.com. Brilliant, no? (By the way, if you click on the John and Mary link, it will send an email to me.)
So far, most of the interest in my bright idea has come from some architects. Anyone who has seen a school in the midwest with a flat roof over the library knows that architects aren't always real bright. A few years ago every high school in this county had a library with a flat roof that leaked. I was on the local school board at the time, and our library had a leaky roof. Architects must not know how much it costs to replace 500 water damaged books.
posted by The Geezer at 9:31 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home