Chainsaws, UPS, lost knives and arcane hardware (pop-quiz)

Somebody wanted to borrow my chainsaw

I asked "Why?" 

They replied "My friend had a couple of trees come down in his yard during the recent storms."

I told him "If I loan you my chainsaw I come with it."

Handing a random person a tool that can whack off an arm in less than one second is not prudent.

Consequently, part of my morning was spent cutting up a down Wild Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) and Box Elder (Acer negundo). Both of those species are considered "invasive aliens" in Europe. Of the two, P. serotina is the more attractive tree.

Shipping something via UPS

A person in another state wanted a few pieces of bud-wood from one of my trees.

He shipped me a box, an expanded, polystyrene cooler and two ice-packs. He also included a return label to put on the box for the return trip.

About an hour-and-a-half of my morning was spent preparing the bud-wood, boxing it up and transporting it to a UPS Store.

Time-on-task/Clock-time

According to my stop-watch, I spent 4:38 on the two separate tasks. By my reckoning, maybe 90 minutes of it was actual time-on-task.

That is not a great ratio, only about 30% of the time was actually spent running the chainsaw or cutting scion. Time in the truck doesn't put food in the pantry.

Pop-quiz

This story start with a lost paring knife.

Mrs ERJ is quite fond of our Old Hickory paring knife. We have had it for decades. And then, earlier this week, it disappeared.

While looking through my inventory of cutting tools, I happened across two items made of steel that I had been looking for. On two different occasions I had a need to add a degree-of-separation between these artifacts and their "mothers" thereby rendering their mother inop whilst still keeping the capability something I could restore in a timely manner.

Timely, that is, if I had remembered the "safe place" I had stored these items. 

Bonus points for any readers who can identify the mothers of these artifacts. More photos can be provided if needed.

Closure on the paring knife

I ordered another paring knife. It now costs $23 rather than the $5 they cost in 2010. By my calculus, it is a bargain if you can make your wife happy for the cost of three cups of foo-foo coffee.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Roman Kochanowski was born in Krakow, Poland in 1857 and died in 1945. He spent most of his professional life in Munich.

 

Weight-lifting slippers, Big Two-Hearted River and random pictures

 

Shamelessly stolen borrowed from Midwest Chick.

I recently learned that elite weight-lifters like TB wear special weight-lifter slippers while working out.

Say no more. I was on it like a duck-on-a-Junebug or like flies-on-'tater-salad. 

I was undoubtedly the envy of every other weight-lifter at the gym.

It was a LOT faster to get changed into my gym-togs. I slipped out of my sandals and slid my feet into these fox-fur (faux-fur) lined bad-boys. Camo shorts and a torn tee-shirt completed my redneck-chic ensemble...which coincidentally is the same redneck chic I sport outside of the gym.

I may have a future as a fashion "influencer". 

Sadly, I was unable to find the Tahini at the local grocery store so I had to make do without it.

Count me as a skeptic regarding most "ethnic" cooking. Folks made-do with what was in-season and what was abundant. It was an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of flavors that changed week-by-week...sometimes day-by-day.

I have to confess that I really like the way even a few plants of dill make the garden smell. 

A fun video

It amazes some people that places like this still exist in the United States east of the Mississippi River. The Big Two-Hearted River was the title of an Ernest Hemingway short-story. It is a real river in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. It is not big.

This is reader CoyoteKen's stomping grounds. 

Bonus images

Chinese Cabbage seedlings cv. "Citrus". Surprisingly, unmolested by the ducks.

A cucumber in a wheelbarrow. I ran out of hands and parked the cuke in the wheelbarrow. Then, I realized it was photogenic, returned and snapped the photo. 

The tomatoes on the right side of the frame were sold to me as Rose de Bern. RdB is an 80 day tomato that is very large, round an pink. I was deceived! That cannot be RdB.

On the other hand, the seeds I saved from a winter squash I purchased last fall is over-performing.

Speaking of over-performing...

It is an article of faith in the prepper community that "you never want to become a refugee".

The backstory is that this man, a software engineer from San Francisco, Ca, convinced himself that he was in mortal danger in "Trump's America". Because emigrating in the ordinary fashion requires paperwork and takes many months to execute, he opted to emigrate to the Netherlands (a bastion of Progressive ideals) as a political refugee because it was expedient.

He was distressed to find himself interred with hundreds of other undocumented refugees who had also chosen the most expeditious path. Many of his fellow refugees were from Islamic countries where the norm is to stone LGBT+ people, throw them off of buildings or to glue random body orifices shut with super-glue.

The fine Progressive of the Netherlands understand this and he is safe as long as he stays within his room but he cannot safely venture outside of the building to buy groceries or travel to the US embassy. 

In retrospect, he determined that he was poorly calibrated when he decided that he was oppressed when he lived in San Francisco, California (a notoriously conservative metro region) making +$150k per year and he wants to come back to the United States.

Preview of the day

Today's work-tickets

• Pick up the yard. We have contractors scheduled to come over on Wednesday
• Run impulse sprinkler on west end of potato patch until 1:30
• Tidy up front porch
• Pick tomatoes
• Pick cucumbers 
• Pick broccoli 
• Tie up tomato vines
• Go to the gym
• Walk with Mrs ERJ 
• Buy whole-wheat pita bread, hummas, tahini and a bottle of red wine
• Sharpen the chain on the chainsaw (small job tomorrow) 
• Pull some weeds
• Throw bottles of water into freezer to make ice
• Cut bud-wood from a pear tree 

Last night, the weather-guessers were saying 0.8" of rain today. Now they are down to 0.5" 

A warning to my readers in the mid-West, be sure to lock your vehicle doors when you leave it unattended. It is zucchini season.

 

Organized Religion

From the comments, Old Grump wrote:

Wish I could be as comfortable with organized religion as most of you here that share Joe's acceptance. I, unfortunately have many bad experiences with the individuals and organizations that purport to serve God. Every thing from demanding people living in abject poverty to give a significant portion of any income to them while living in lavish homes, committing adultery with vulnerable members and just being accepted as Gods messenger a-la Jim Jones and the Bakers. I can't say I am totally comfortable in my stance but that's where the preponderance of evidence leads me.

It is undeniable that many horrible things have been done by people flying the banner of organized religion. Is that a failing of the people who did the horrible things, organized religion or do they share in the culpability?

The first time something happens the perpetrator is the only one who is culpable.

After the first time, or if members of the religion/church learn about the sin while it is happening and don't address it...then the church is also culpable.

God has imperfect tools to work with. He once called Peter "Satan" (literally, stumbling-block). He betrayed by Judas, one of his apostles. He was abandoned and denied by ten others and the only apostle who is recorded to have stuck with him through the crucifixion is John. 

Then, prior to Pentecost, the apostles huddled like scared rabbits trying to figure out what to do next.

I scratch my head at people who reject organized religion solely because of imperfect people when the imperfect apostles were good enough for Jesus. 

The church has always been made of, and for, broken and sinful people. And yes, I consider myself to be in that group.

Only slightly related

The church exists to serve people's needs. Different people have different needs for "connection".

Foxes and leopards hunt alone. Wolves and lions hunt in groups. There is nothing wrong with foxes or leopards or wolves or lions. They are what they are.

Before interrupting a church service in Minnesota, Don Lemon was going to disrupt a church service in the deep south. That was before he learned that every man wearing a suit-coat and every woman carrying a handbag was "packing heat".

Some people are most at peace and can talk-to-Jesus best when they are alone or with just a few like-minded people. Other people feel out-of-place when they are not in a crowd. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with either type of person. The fishers of men take us all.

Fire in the orchard, fire in hell

Typhoid Mary

Yesterday's helper showed up and worked for five hours with 10 minute breaks on-the-hour.

His job was to make the branches that were on the ground in the weeds beneath the trees disappear. They are a slip-trip hazard and make it more difficult to maintain the orchard.

He kept two burn barrels going

 

The yellow barrel was retired. The black barrel has venting cut in the side rather than holes in the bottom and proved superior.

I dragged hose and humped water for the first three hours, coasted the fourth hour doing random chores and then sat in a chair and watched the fires burn down the fifth hour. Then we dowsed the fires with copious amounts of water.

This is the second time I hired this young man to burn orchard trash. We are done for the season until we get some rain and the grass greens up.

Char from the burn we did two weeks ago, dumped out and scattered

There were some branches in a couple of the trees that had died, probably from some form of canker. I cut the dead branches out of the tree and added them to one of the piles he had staged.

Then I asked my helper if had ever heard of "Typhoid Mary".

He had not. I was overjoyed at the chance to enhance his education. He had never even heard of "Typhoid". Public schools do a poor job of teaching public health.

Cutting diseased wood out of the canopy of an apple tree is a concrete lesson in public health. 

Gospel reading cycle

The Catholic Church follows a prescribed cycle of scriptural readings that cycles through three years. The intent is to ensure that the priests don't selectively skip material that they are uncomfortable "preaching". 

July and August are harvest season for wheat in the Northern Hemisphere and we get to hear parables about harvests during those months.

I want to present three concepts from those readings:

• Fidelity of interpreting Sacred Scripture is paramount. Nothing shall be added. Nothing shall be deleted.
• Hell exists. Many souls will go there. 
• And here is the hardest one, some of our beloved family members will go to Hell.

How many people our age have become "comfortable" with LGBT relationships or out-of-marriage babies or abortion because their child(ren) or close friends are fully immersed in those choices?

 

The distorting effect of "Feelz" criteria results in words like "brave" and "heroic" coming out of their mouths when discussing those kids and they become incredibly hostile if you dare to suggest that maybe those choices are sub-optimal. If you think calling somebody's baby "ugly" gets a reaction, wait until you suggest their baby might go to hell!

 

The most pernicious effect of the "Feelz" criteria is that it results in our replacing God and God's word with our own, fleeting emotional reactions to a "narrative". And may I be so bold as to point out that when we do that we are violating the very FIRST Commandment "Thou shall have no other gods before me".

 

The great falling-away

It is no secret that people have been leaving formal Christianity in large numbers for decades. 

I think that is largely because most people figure "I don't need God because I can handle whatever the future will throw my way."

 

This argument is sensitive to the question "Can you write down a list everything the future might hold?"

 

Of course, they have to answer "No" if only because they cannot live long enough to compile such a list.

 

But then they will weasel and say, "I can handle the things that are likely to happen."

 

The counterpoint is "How can you have any confidence that your sketchy knowledge of history is a solid basis for calculating future probabilities?"

 

The kill-shot is to ask them about "combinations" like "You decided that the risk of flash-floods or wild-fires is zero but have you considered the possibility that business or pleasure might take you to Texas, Utah, California, Greece or Spain?"

 

The goal is not to paralyze them with anxiety but to help them see that they need a little bit of room for God in their life so He can carry part of their load. 

Another tangent

"I will get religion when I really need it." 

 

That statement is the equivalent of saying "I will only buy gas after my call stalls out while driving somewhere" or "I will only buy new tires after I have to pay a wrecker to come and pull my car out of a ditch".

 

Why subject yourself to the pain of having to hit "rock bottom" when you know how to avoid that pain? Is the pain of having to admit that you, personally, are not all-powerful and not all-knowing (facts that are readily apparent to everybody around you) more painful than the pain of hitting rock-bottom?

Presented without comment