Farm News 02-03-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 38°
Weight 211 lbs., off to a terrible start, I gained three pounds

Barn News

It was a computer error, that's all, but I've still been bombarded with comments:

I am astonished that you only weigh 118 -- I would have guessed that you were more like 138! More power to you! I am envious.

You've lost way too much, way too fast.

You weigh 118 pounds? Not possible! did you mismatch a number ... 811? no 181? Too much..??

I'll join your diet group and have started a couple days ago with an assist from the stomach flu. Already lost 2 pounds!

How tall are you ? As I recall, I’d put you at about 5’10.” If that’s anywhere NEAR correct, I’d say you need to GAIN some weight, not lose it ! Of course you don’t want to just gain FAT, but mostly muscle – more a matter of TONE, probably, but it sounds like you get enough activity to be in reasonable ‘tone.’ We can’t keep someone alive by just making them thinner and thinner, or ALL the “supermodels” would still be around. But then, I’m not a physician, just a physicians assistant. Best of luck !

Okay, okay, the number should have been 208.

Dr. M. was the only one who was reassuring:

Well, if your MD doesn't make it for another 43 years to keep you alive, I'll step in!

When I reach 110 a DVM would probably be a better choice for health care than an MD. By the way, for those of you who have been wondering what happened to Dr. M.'s occasional commentaries, she's pregnant. You'd think a Vet would know what causes that, but maybe she likes being that way.

Nothing of interest is happening in the barn. I borrowed a buck goat to breed Lucy, but I think I was too late. Lucy is showing no signs of coming into standing heat, it's too late in the year.

Several strange tomcats have been hanging around, so we might be preparing to start a new crop of kittens.

There are only five hens in the chicken house, but they are laying five eggs most days. What excellent chickens!

Tripping to Chicago – part 3

Illinois Beach State Park is an almost 3,000 acre strip along the west side of Lake Michigan running south from the Wisconsin border, bounded on the west by the city of Zion. We stopped there to rest after we fled from Chicago. Zion was founded in 1901 as a utopian community built around the Zion Tabernacle of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church. After Chicago, a garbage dump would have felt utopian, but Illinois Beach State Park and Zion were both quite pleasant without being compared to their noisome neighbor.

The only thing we lacked was pot. How can you be good hippies on a road trip without pot? We all put flowers in our hair (I had hair, then), smiled a lot, and, sure enough, a nice young man with long hair showed up and offered to share a joint with us. Peace, Love, and Brotherhood meant something real in those days.

Peter, the nice young man, was the younger son of an Israeli mother and a Palestinian father who had fled from the Middle East to find peace in Zion. He was a senior in high school, very mellow, and an altogether delightful person. He invited us to his home, where we met John, his older brother, who was a student at Shimer College, very mellow, and a delightful person. John was the author of a wonderful book, Edifying Tautologies, which occupied twenty or so four inch square pages. I don't remember a single word of it, but I distinctly remember the effect it produced, especially when one smoked a good joint before reading it.

Shimer College was, and is, an excellent Liberal Arts college. Their students graduate with degrees in Liberal Arts, there are no majors or electives. Shimer had another characteristic, the student body consisted of people who were seeking both academic and spiritual growth. In the yearbooks of that time there are no pictures of a football team, but there are many pictures of students sitting outside on the lawn, smiling at each other, and discussing the meaning of Peace, Love, and Brotherhood.

Peter and John had created a great little trip room in their house. Their bedrooms were in the attic, with vertical walls about four feet high on the sides. The trip room was in the little triangular space left under the roof outside the bedroom sidewall. It had oriental rugs on the floor and the ceiling and walls were covered with India prints. It was cozy, comfortable, and an excellent environment for getting high.

Our second day at Illinois Beach we decided to express our disdain for Chicago by attacking the city from the air. We went to Zion and purchased some colored tissue wrapping paper, a small bottle of Elmer's glue, and we scrounged up a few feet of wire from somewhere. We glued eight sheets of the tissue together to form a square tube, about two feet on each side and six feet high. We cut triangular pieces to make a peaked top to the tube, and another set to make a peaked bottom, but we left the center of the bottom unglued. With the wire, we made a ring about eighteen inches in diameter, with a few spokes radiating toward the center. The ring of wire was then glued to the bottom peak to form a round opening. We tore a strip of old tee shirt about two inches wide and two feet long, soaked it in melted candle wax and then rolled it into a tight cylinder. Using the spokes of wire, we secured the cylinder of waxed fabric in the center of the wire circle.

That evening there was no moon, and a very gentle breeze blowing toward Chicago. Two people held the tissue paper balloon, for that is what it was, upright, while another lit the wax wick. The flaming wick quickly filled the balloon with hot air, and, after a few minutes, we released it. It floated into the air and out over the lake, glowing in different colors as it turned. It was a beautiful thing, and it slowly drifted away toward Chicago. It finally drifted out of sight. If the power had gone off in Chicago that multicolored thing in the sky probably would have created a panic. The power didn't go off, but we were happy, for we had expressed our feelings in an appropriate manner for hippies who believed in Peace, Love, and Brotherhood.

Book: Touchstone by Laurie R. King

The 1920's were not one of my favorite eras. That is the decade in which gangsters became a part of the society, thanks to prohibition. The people who wanted to force us to follow their standard of morality ended up producing something even worse. The whole decade seemed to be shallow and without ideals. Then Laurie King writes a book about idealists in the 1920's.

Her idealists are the union sympathizers, socialists, communists, anarchists, and similar weirdos, whose ideals lead them to throwing bombs (actually, the bomber hides them in various places). On the other side is an American FBI agent who both hates and sympathizes with them. And, the whole thing takes place in the English countryside.

Once, in Kansas City, I received an anonymous phone call, and the caller said, “Be sitting outside at around 7:00 pm.” I forgot to go outside, so I missed hearing the bomb go off, but I did understand why he set off the bomb. Touchstone reminded me of those days. It's far from being her best book, but it's worth reading.

Music

Have you heard Daft Punk's Technologic? It's interesting, but the video is creepy.

Farm News 05-13-07

Sunday morning, after chores


Grandson

Grandson Julian Alexander DeWolfe arrived Monday, quietly and purposefully, according to my daughter. She claims he's cute. He definitely looks like the sort of baby that will make women warble out, “Oooooohhh,” the universal call made by a human female when she sees a cute infant. Quite a few men will make a similar sound, but from males there is a briefer call with less warbling.

Julian was born with the ability to utter a call that attracts the attention of all adult females within hearing and leads them to display behaviors indicating anxiety if it continues for any length of time. Within twenty four hours of birth he will have trained an adult female to be completely devoted to his well-being and general happiness. That's a hell of a good trick that might help him get through life as an adult male.

I haven't met Julian, yet, but I'm sure he smells funny, all infants do. Women generally think that infants smell wonderful and are able to distinguish their own infants from others by smell alone. Men, if they have any sense, don't mention that the baby smells funny. Several times every day the baby will develop a very strong stench, meaning it is time for a diaper change. Women use the occasion to engage in even more cooing and warbling while they clean up the mess and put fresh diapers on the baby.

Sometime close to the end of this month I hope to travel to Boulder to inspect Julian and make certain he is suitable as a family member. Although my standards are less strict than those of Leviticus, still, a family needs some sort of standards. Generally, I like to check to see that he has hair instead of scales and that his pupils are round. My daughter has assured me that he meets these qualifications but I know better than to believe everything a new mother says about her baby.

Julian developed a slight jaundice shortly after birth, but he has recovered and is now ready to grow up. I'm looking forward to when he becomes a teenager.

Bostonians

A reader writes:

Hopefully I'm not jinxing anything by saying this early, but everything has gone so according to plan so far that I think (hope!) it's safe--huge congratulations on the impending arrival of your latest addition to the farm! (I know his parents will insist he really lives in Colorado, but that's just a technicality, really.)

Meanwhile, to distract you from the suspense of waiting, I will tell you of my observation of a few weeks ago. You have both been to Boston, so you know that Bostonians are very friendly people who will cheerfully help a complete stranger of questionable intelligence, say, load a free kitchen table into the back of a Toyota (not that I would know anything about this personally), or attempt to give you directions to wherever you are trying to go, even though the phrase "You can't get there from here" most likely originated here. (The original would have been something more along the lines of, "You really shouldn't try to get there from here, because if by some miracle you don't end up in Rhode Island, some piece of tunnel or overpass will probably fall on you on the way.")

Despite what I believe is genuine native good-heartedness, there are two instances where Bostonians cannot seem to help becoming homicidal, and those are: a) If you are wearing a Yankees hat or any other item of Yankees apparel, and b) When they are behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. One Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was on Memorial Drive, which as you may know runs along the river in Cambridge. Traffic there normally travels at least 20 mph over the speed limit, but in this instance it suddenly came to a screeching halt. I assumed there'd been an accident or perhaps a pothole had suddenly evolved into a sinkhole (quite possible, local road "maintenance" being what it is), since I couldn't think of anything else that would stop traffic so dramatically. What it turned out to be, though, was...a family of ducks. A whole group of Bostonians who would never stop for pedestrians to cross, not even if they were blind and in wheelchairs, waited patiently for the whole duck family to waddle across three lanes without even a tap on the horn from anyone. I remembered then that Boston is, of course, the town of Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings, and the man clearly knew his setting. In the book, a policeman stops traffic for the Mallard family, but I now know this was unnecessary--everyone would have stopped anyway.

What was especially strange about the whole experience is that I realized I have now been in Boston long enough for this to actually make sense to me, although I couldn't explain it to someone who doesn't live here--stopping for ducks when you would never pause for a pedestrian, I mean. I would like to think that I'd still stop for at least the folks in wheelchairs, but I also know I would definitely check my rearview mirror first to be sure that wouldn't get me killed.

Success, Finally

There are two computers in my office, a two year old Dell, running Windows XP, on which I do most of my work, and an old Micron, upgraded several times with new drives, memory, and, once, a motherboard and CPU, and now running Linux. The old Micron is becoming my server, and I will be moving both Geezernet.com and Geezernet.us to it.

Linux is the operating system which most servers use. Apache is a web server, a program that sends web pages out to people who want to look at them, and I now have it installed and working on the Micron. Last week, I finally successfully installed MYSQL server, a database program for servers. Next will be XOOPs, and then the web sites. Geezernet.com will by my personal web site and Geezernet.us will hold the web sites of the Neighborhood Network project.

It feels very gratifying to have learned so much that I didn't particularly care to know. Linux is a pain in the butt to install and configure but, once it is running properly, it is fast and flexible.


To subscribe, unsubscribe, contribute stories, complain or send a gift subscription, send an email to FarmNews@GeezerNet.com . The editor reserves the right to steal ideas submitted, rewrite submissions, and sign false names to them whenever it strikes his fancy to do so.