Thebes found himself standing in the line that snaked upward toward the Pearly Gates. No surprise, really. He had been old. The cause was not what he expected but how you die isn't something people have a choice about.
He hadn't been a particularly pious man. He had been a man of duty and been busy. He couldn't read but even if he could there were no scrolls in the small village he lived in. Regardless, he dutifully listened to the occasional itinerant preachers who percolated through the small, rocky valleys that made up Thebes' world. He implemented what he could understand and marveled at what seemed inconceivable.
When it was his turn to be judged, a fisherman stood at the gate and the radiant ones were arrayed behind him. It was calming to know that he was to be weighed by another laborer.
The fisherman's gnarled hands swiftly counted the knots on the recording strings. His fingers shuffled the abacus. Then he paused and then repeated the counting and calculating.
Turning to the radiant figures behind him, he said "The one named Thebes is exactly equal. How do you want me to handle it?" The brilliance of the figures obscured the details. They reminded Thebes of the snow-covered sentinel pine on the ridge above the valley, first lit by the rising sun.
The voice from the brilliant figure on Thebes' left was as sweet and soothing as warmed honey. "Ask him what he wants."
Thebes was surprised, not by the fisherman's words but by what the figure had said. He was just a man. Not "holy". Not "bad". Just a man. He had not expected to be offered a choice.
"I am nothing but a common laborer. If it should please you, Lord, I should take that bucket of water, the stool and a towel and wash the feet those coming to see you" Thebes suggested. "I will set up at the edge of the light where I won't bother anybody."
The Lord asked "Will you only wash the feet of the just?"
Thebes replied "It is not within my power to know who was just or unjust. I shall wash the feet of everybody in the line."
The Lord said "So be it".
Thebes first picked up the bucket and then put it down. He could not carry all three. He solved the problem by tying the towel around his waist before picking up the other two items and trudging back down the line.
He set them down where the light of the Lord was but a kiss on the horizon and their voices were but faint murmurs. The line had grown since he had first joined it.
The worst seat in heaven is infinitely better than the best seat in hell.
Thebes died many, many centuries ago. If you don't see him on your path to the Pearly Gates, then the position is probably open again. Something to keep in mind if the counting string with your name on it has a lot of knots on it.
Imagine it is the middle of the winter. There is no food in your house. As the bread-winner, the guy who "brings home the bacon", how far would you walk, how many hours would you invest to feed your beloved and your children for one more day?
Would you say "Screw it. If it isn't on the porch they can cry themselves to sleep?" There are some people like that.
Would you say "I will walk to the end of the driveway, but that is the limit of how much effort that I will invest in keeping my wife happy and my children fed."?
Or would you say "I would walk a mile (20 minutes) to get food"? I know that almost everybody would be willing to invest 20 minute from picking up the keys, driving, waiting in the drive-through and returning if that is what it takes to feed your family for one meal.
If you had no other choice, would you be willing to walk three miles one way (an hour) and back (another hour) if it meant you could bring back enough food to feed your entire family for a day. Sadly, I think that some "men" would fail at this, but most would step-up.
Weeding the garden
Before: Weeded row on the right. Unweeded in the center. Somebody has been falling down on his job.
After weeding. Dramatic photos are usually evidence of operator failure. The weeds should never have gotten that out-of-control.
For the sake of argument, let's say that I can hand-weed* two-feet of row a minute. That means I can weed 40' in 20 minutes, 120' in an hour or 240' in two hours...the time it takes to make a round-trip three miles away-and-back on foot.
240' of row will grow a lot of potatoes or rutabagas or tomatoes or sweet corn.
Yes, I know, there was time invested in many other activities to make that 240 feet of row happen. But if you don't stay on top of the weeds you might as well have not planted the seeds.
What weeding is not
Weeding a garden seems so pedestrian and simple that it is baffling that it can be so valuable.
But weeding isn't subject to income tax of FICA taxes. It isn't something where you have to "cover" for the sick, the lame or the lazy who expect a pay-check but don't work.
Weeding doesn't require $6 million in tools (the cost of a single robotic work-cell circa 1996).
Weeding does not require $500 wingtip shoes or a $3000 laptop with killer graphics cards.
You don't have to take out a student loan to know how to pull weeds.
What weeding requires is that you show up and do it when it is time to do it.
Time-blindness
I think people who have ADHD lack the cognitive horse-power to envision scenarios where they might have to walk some distance and bring back food.
They also lack the background.
Those of us of a certain age might remember reading The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder (no known relation to John Wilder) and how her future-husband, Almanzo, ventured forth in the blizzards to drag back two-tons of pounds of wheat on a sled to feed the village of De Smet, South Dakota.
That was back when men were men.
Pulling weeds when there is a pleasant breeze and the air temperature is tickling the upper 70s (F) is trivial compared to striking off across the trackless prairie in the middle of the winter looking for food. A veritable walk-in-the-park.
Self-talk
Thoughts like those are what loop through my mind as I pull weeds.
Bonus photo
Whole wheat tortilla, jasmine rice, Happy Rich broccoli from the garden, kielbasa. Eaten after a trip through the microwave and rolled into a burrito.
*Hand-weed: On hands-and-knees, identifying the plants that should stay and pulling everything else using one's hands.
While driving to my destination to graft, in one fifteen mile of state-highway I saw 9 (nine) utility trucks with cherry-pickers in convoys of two and three heading south. I saw one flat-bed with racks with approximately 20 utility poles going south.
The men in those trucks were not leaving their homes out of a sense of altruism. They are driving to the aid of hard-hit areas because "the market" determined what price would convince men to do so. And then, "the market" made that offer.
If you are watching a freezer full of meat starting to thaw, or if you have a family member who is starting to choke because the AC isn't running and the air is filling with allergens. Then you don't begrudge those men a penny of what they are paid.
If your basement is flooding because your sump-pump has no power or if the local gas station cannot dispense gas because there is no power to run the pumps you are overjoyed to see those guys show up.
Oddly, the only people who resent linemen are unattractive people who write poetry nobody will ever read and create art that nobody will ever look at. They are envious of people who can actually perform work that is in such high demand that they would willingly pay it out of their own pocket.
My news de-tox ends tomorrow. Many thanks to all of the meme warriors who kept me appraised of the state of the universe.
State-of-the-fleet
One of my children had his car crap-out last week. It dropped into limp-home mode during rush hour. The next day, when he tried to start it, the engine would not stay running. He had to call a wrecker to get it to the mechanic on Thursday. Not a good sign.
He was biking to work on the day it did not rain. The other four days a week he rode the bus.
I offered him the loan of my truck. He accepted.
The irony is that this particular kid is my most fastidious, persnickety, details-matter kid. My truck is not the kind of ride that immediately springs to mind when you here the words "Urban Cool". It is more the kind of truck guaranteed to get you a job the instant you turn into the driveway of a business that does landscaping.
But it starts and runs and doesn't leak when it rains. It gets 17 miles to the gallon and you can leave the doors unlocked and nobody will steal the granola bars in the center console.
And that left me without transportation.
I had been catching up on odd-jobs around the house since my wings got clipped.
Yesterday morning Mrs ERJ asked if I wanted to drive Vinnie Van Go* to The Property to do some work out there.
YOU BET!
Yesterday, all I did was graft. I am trying to empty out the refrigerator. In budgeting terms I was trying to "burn out the bank).
I grafted
The mulberries were ripening on the first tree I grafted. They are very, very small. And they are insipid. Any named variety will be a big step up.
I put two grafts on that tree. You can see the top of my six-foot tall ladder at the bottom of the frame. The deer will need stilts to get to these grafts but they are still vulnerable to woodchucks climbing and browsing.
3 Mulberry trees (more than 3" diameter trunks) to Silk Hope mulberry. They are located on the west boundary of the Upper Orchard at roughly 80' intervals.
Grand Traverse on the north tree and The Beast on the south tree. The two hazelnut bushes are monsters!
4 grafts on two mature hazelnuts, 2 Grand Traverse and 2 The Beast (undoubtedly named after the famous blogger who goes by TB). West boundary of the Upper Orchard. The hazel are side-by-side with 20' spacing.
1 apple in the Upper Orchard. I was looking for a place to park "a copy" of the late apple we found on Southern Belle's property.
One of the things that slowed me down, besides the ladder work, was having to carve away branches so the new growth will have ample sunlight.
Same as above but zoomed in to make the graft visible
Black walnuts to Howard Persian Walnut. Burnt Ridge sells Howard walnuts and claims that they are capable of surviving Zone 6. I have to admit that seems improbable, but what do I know? I consider it the gardening equivalent of buying a lottery ticket.
As you can tell by the photographs, I am a big fan of marking my grafts with surveyor's tape. I also like grafting after a substantial rain. Every grafter looks like a gifted craftsman when the rootstock is growing like crazy.
In all, 17 grafts and three hours time-on-task. While that seems slow to me, grafting on larger, established trees takes longer (pruning, dragging ladders) but gives you quite a jump on filling the allotted space for the plant. There are a lot of roots "pushing" the new graft. Six feet of new growth on a mulberry graft is within the realm of the possible.
*Not to be confused with Vinnie van Goth (wrong color) or Vinnie (Johann Wolfgang) von Goethe.
Boric acid (BOA) is currently used as a safe alternative molluscicide to
control land snails in sustainable agriculture, but the mechanisms of
toxicity have not yet been investigated.
(Boric acid) was found to be lethal against T. pisana with LC50 values of 24.7 and 8.05 mg g−1(2.5% and 0.8% respectively) after 3 and 7 days of exposure, respectively. BOA sublethal
concentrations led to a significant reduction in food consumption and
growth of snails after 14 days of exposure...lipid peroxidation level and catalase activity were elevated, whereas
acetylcholinesterase activity was inhibited in the treated snails.
Note: Many insecticides are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. Essentially, it prevents nerve impulses from stopping...muscles lock-up.
I whipped up a batch of approximately 2.5% bait and...
They were attracted to the bait but didn't want to eat it.
I am pretty sure my problem is that I didn't use boric acid but substituted the equivalent amount of borax. Borax is a sodium salt of boric acid (commercially available and dirt-cheap). However, it has a pH of about 9 it it appears that snails are sensitive to pH.
Image of the same bait-can on the second morning. It looks like more snails to me.
Another attempt using actual boric acid powder will be attempted in the near future.
Well, alrighty!
Ammonia has a pH of 11(ish) which is 100X more alkaline than borax. Ammonia is expensive and perishable.
Sodium carbonate is cheap (ten cents an ounce) and shelf-stable. A little bit of guessing suggests that a 3% solution of sodium carbonate will have a pH of about 11.8*. So I speedy-quick mixed up 120g of sodium carbonate into 3800ml of water and found some volunteers to test it on.
Solutions with high pH are caustic. Proteins are chains of amino acids that are knit together into tissue. Exposure to high pH solutions shreds those amino-acid chains and dissolves the cell walls of animals like slugs and snails. The reaction is self-limiting. The amino acids that are released lower the pH toward neutral and the reaction fizzles.
Spray that lands on the ground is quickly buffered (neutralized) by the clay-content. Spray that lands on dead grass encounters very little buffering and the dead grass becomes a no-go zone for them until the sodium carbonate is leached out by the rains.
They did not like the spray. They started falling to the ground about five seconds after getting sprayed.
***Follow-up: I have no evidence that this actually killed the snails. It may have maimed them...but not enough dead-bodies to make any claims. I did a re-spray this morning with a followup a minute later. Many of the snails turn-turtle at the first spray and expose their foot which is a much larger target.
*Lye and lime have a pH of 14 which is about 200 times more alkaline than sodium carbonate solution
She had been invited to a party at a beach. It was a hens-only party, so I was not invited.
The heat index was about 100F which is pretty warm for out part of Michigan.
She brought back pies and cakes and salads. My sweet, darling, soft-hearted wife did not want any of the other ladies to be left with the impression that their best-efforts were lacking in any way.
And since we are a team, I will manfully eat my share of the goodies and then some. My metabolism runs hotter than Mrs ERJ's and therefore I have the greater duty.
Kel-tec P-17
I had a chance to mess around with a Kel-tec P-17 while Mrs ERJ was hanging out with her girlfriends.
The Kel-tec P-17 is a .22LR handgun with a magazine capacity of 16 which is about 6 more than most .22LR handguns and is on-par with the magazine capacity of the Glock 19, 9mm handgun.
My impression is that the Kel-tec P-17 has a very nice trigger and almost cartoonishly large safety and mag-release...very useful if you are wearing gloves.
The first magazine through the firearm had two bobbles. One was a "failure to eject" and other was a "failure to extract". That may slick-up as more rounds are fired through the weapon. Time will tell.
The spent cases tumbled out of the weapon and fell just to the right of my feet. No flinging of the brass across the room with this weapon.
All .22 semi-automatics are fussy about ammo with pistols being more sensitive than rifles. It is a matter of physics. It is a combination of the simple (and economical to manufacture) blow-back designs and the limited amount of energy that must be "budgeted" for the various functions that must be executed as the action cycles through
Extract
Eject
Reset hammer
Strip new round out of magazine
Seat new round in chamber
Seat extractor over rim of round in chamber
Furthermore, the extremely light weight of the weapon, although that makes it a joy to carry, makes it even more sensitive to "limp-wristing" or a gentle-grip on the weapon.
One quirk of this firearm is that the magazine well feels like it is very long (in the direction of the barrel). This is not a gun for people with short fingers.
I have short, stubby fingers (for a guy) and I would not have wanted the magazine well to be any longer. HOWEVER...that geometry locked in the firearm and I had exceptionally low horizontal stringing.
However, the gun shot low with the ammo we tried. That might be a matter of getting used to the sight-picture required with the fiber-optic front sight but non-fiber rear. Aligning the tops of the front and rear sights doesn't work. Maybe the designers expect shooters to align the bright-spot in the front with the tops of the rear. Something to check out.
If a fellow were looking for a "bumming around in the woods" .22 handgun or a gun to carry on a trap-line or if he was exterminating vermin...I think he would be better served with a Heritage Rough Rider .22LR revolver with the 4.75 inch barrel. The Rough Rider will go "bang" regardless of the ammo and is easier to find a holster for.
If a fellow needed to navigate in places where volume-of fire and speed-of-reload were important, and low hand-strength made centerfire chamberings impossible, then this might be an option although the grip might make it a non-starter for some women. If you opt for this weapon, plan on running several hundred rounds through it to break it in. Also plan on trying several brands of ammo to see which it feeds most reliably.
What is it like to live hundreds of miles from a city?
I think this is interesting because I am becoming less enchanted by trips to "the city" to get supplies.
This family lives out in the hinter-boonies of Alaska. They have been "homesteading" for fifteen years but JUST moved to Alaska a year ago.
This is the first run they made to a Costco store from their new homestead.
While in Anchorage, they wallowed in decadence...They bought a princess dress for one of their daughters,. They ate ice cream. They drank fou-fou lattes from a coffee shop. They ate breakfasts out of disposable take-out cardboard containers. It was a venture in cultural enrichment for their seven children.
The Holy Grail: Shelf-stable dry-goods that are "nutritionally dense"
That is, they take up relatively small volume for their mass and nutritional content.
Spaghetti vs elbow macaroni. Spaghetti wins.
Dried beans vs canned refried beans. Dried beans win.
Flour vs baked goods. Flour wins. (BTW, this guys wife likes to bake. What a treasure for this kind of life!!!)
Slab bacon or even vac-packed mystery-meat hotdogs vs pre-made, frozen breakfast sandwiches. Bacon wins.
Granulated sugar vs Kaptain Krunch breakfast cereal or cans of soda pop. Granulated sugar wins.
Dried milk powder vs liquid milk. Dried milk wins.
Don't buy water. Don't pay money for air.
Bring a trailer
Day three(ish) on my news detox
I lost track on what day I am in my news detox.
I get irritated when ads pop-up on the video I am watching and the ad pummels me with "news" or politics.
June 10 is the day I remember my dad putting in the garden. I am the second oldest and have seven siblings. The next youngest is three-and-a-half years younger, so Dad leaned heavily on my older brother and me to help with the chores.
I still have some empty space in my garden, so I am not quite up-to-snuff, but I did get most of my garden planted before June first, so that counts for something.
The remaining space will probably be planted to Daikon radishes and California Giant zinnias and maybe some kale.
Random meme
"It is good to have a cousin who works in the mail-room of the local police station and to have an uncle with a fast boat." -Central American proverb
Victor K. Polk wrote:I put pieces of shingle (Or anything else you can find) on the moist
ground. In the morning you will find slugs under the pieces. Spray them
with ammonia. They instantly dissolve. Ammonia breaks down quickly and is
also a fertilizer.
Mr Polk's comment specifically mentioned "slugs" while my main issues are "snails" which are similar but not identical.
Fortunately, Mr Polk's comment is a testable-hypothesis. This wasn't included in the original post because the testing was still in-progress.
Picture taken at about 9:00 a.m. after turning over board.
A close-up to make it easier to see the population-density of the snails.
I sprayed the areas where they were the thickest with cloudy ammonia.
The snails clearly did not like the experience.
I waited two hours before revisiting the spot. I assume that all of the survivors would make a dash for the exits.
Not exactly the same spot, but within a few feet of it.
A close-up of the battlefield. Not a lot of color contrast, but there are about 40 dead snails in that picture.
Thank-you for your comment Mr. Victor K. Polk. It seems to work on snails, too.
