I am a dirt-person

Yesterday was a productive day.

I put in three hours wrapping trunks of young fruit trees with news paper (Epoch Times) to protect them against rabbits.

Picture showing roots of MM106 whip that is going into the new stool-bed. Click on the image to embiggen it.

 

Stool-bed after the transplants were heavily watered to settle the dirt. The whips are supported with bamboo stakes. A branch from a Golden Russet is photo-bombing from the row on the right.

I transplanted seven of the MM106 rootstock to create a stool bed to produce rootstock in the future. If the academic literature can be trusted, one, rooted "whip" for every 50mm or 2" of stool-bed row is a good working number for MM106. The fifty or sixty whips I might get from ten feet of row (per year) should be enough to scratch my itch to propagate trees. It may take a few years to get to that level of production, but I can wait.

I am happiest when I can get my hands dirty. 

Chrony results

The first shot over the screens produced an error.

I finessed the alignment of the setup. The next three shots read 2621fps, 2591fps and 2616fps. 

Accuracy is relative. Accuracy that is not good enough to hit prairie-dogs in the head at 400 yards can be adequate for larger targets that are closer. The numbers posted in the earlier paragraph are plenty-good-enough (at first blush) for ranges of less than 200 yards against animals with heart-lung areas that are larger than a paper plate.

Perhaps shots over 200 yards are common "out west", but here in the crowded eastern states, parcels are small and longish shots run the risk of having the animal run off the property and potentially across land you don't have permission to cross. It is very rare for me to consider attempting a shot longer than 120 yards.

How much ammo?

James Wesley Rawles suggests that 600 rounds per centerfire rifle and six magazines is a good starting point. It should be disclosed that JWR is a hard-core prepper and coined the phrase "Golden Horde" to describe the wave of angry, hungry, violent people that might sweep across rural areas if/when the SHTF. Likely, his recommendations are among the higher ones.

Of course, there are those who claim you only need a can of pepper-spray to deter a home-invasion so you don't need any ammo. Others will state that unless you are on-fire or swimming, it is impossible to have too much ammo.

One consideration that should be talked about is that significant amounts of ammo must be consumed to make your firearm a seamless extension of your will. How many repetitions does a fisherman make casting with his lure? How many times does a batter have to swing at a curve-ball? You want to be able to handle your weapon with as little conscious thought (regarding the mechanics) as you use to scratch your nose. You want to reserve all of your brain-power for THREAT/NOTHREAT, downrange damages, where-are-all-the-kids questions.

The manual-of-arms matters. I cut my teeth on a single-shot shotgun. The hammer was the safety. To shoot, I raised the shotgun to my shoulder while pulling the hammer back. When I had the "picture" I desired, I pulled the trigger.

The next step up for me was a Mossberg 500 shotgun. The safety is in exactly the same place as the hammer (on the tang) and it is released to make the weapon fireable by pushing the safety FORWARD. I report with absolutely no embarrassment that it took me a long time to stop instinctively putting that Mossy pump gun on "safe" as I raised it to my shoulder by pulling it back just like I pulled back the hammer.

There are several lessons here. If you are fortunate enough to have several weapons, it is desirable that they share a common manual-of-arms. Then practice from "pull it out of the scabbard/holster" to "reload" often enough so you can do it while half-asleep. If you live in a place that tolerates it, hunting chipmunks is a good way to get the repetitions. You will get lots of high-quality repetitions and you can use a .22 which is inexpensive ammo.

Another consideration that is particularly relevant to semi-automatic handguns is that you need to run enough rounds of your defensive ammo through it to ensure that it feeds and ejects flawlessly. Some writers recommend 200 rounds without a bobble. 

Why are handguns more sensitive to ammo than long-guns? Because the geometry in handguns is more compressed. The angles are more oblique. The rounds they fire are smaller and consequently the amount of energy/momentum is less and needs to be budgeted. The platform is gripped by hands rather than backstopped by the shoulder. They get carried more and pick up more grit and dust. The reasons are many. Semi-auto handguns are inherently fussier about ammo than virtually any other platform. 

So there you have it, you probably don't need 600 rounds of centerfire ammo per weapon and can get by with much less. 

Videos that I am watching

Wartime Kitchen and Garden videos. 

Today's docket

I will have lunch with an old friend whose wife has dementia.

I have been avoiding social engagements due to my dental issue but I will make an exception for him.

He is an Extrovert (with a capital "E") and is energized by contact with people.

Caring for an ailing spouse makes contacting people much, much more difficult. Furthermore, the person you are closest to, your spouse, is not able to interact with you in the same kinds of ways.

The diagnosis and progression of his wife's disease has been very, very hard on him. It is emotionally devastating and he is wilting because contact with people is his oxygen and he isn't getting enough.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

William Edward deGarthe was born in Kaskö, Sweden in 1907 and first studied in art in Finnishing school in Helsinki. deGarthe emigrated to Canada after finishing his military duty. His first work as an artist commanded $7 a week in pay.

In 1930 he made a quest to discover the most beautiful spot in the world. He settled in Nova Scotia. 

Treading water

The chances of Progressive states allowing conservative, rural areas to form new states is about zero. The chance of them being allowed to detach themselves and join adjacent states is only slightly higher.

The reason is that a new state creates two more Senators. It seems probable that the two Senators from the state that is dominated by Progressives are already "blue". The two Senators from the splinter state would be "red" and that would tip the balance of the U.S. Senate.

The reason that is important is that the Federal Judiciary has been one of the pivot points, i.e. high leverage institutions, in the lefts' march toward full-on Communism. Twenty years of conservative dominance in the Senate would be required to tip it back toward a strictly Constitutional basis. In turn, that would gut the wall at the Progressive's back that prevents their creeping encroachment on Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms from unraveling. 

General notes

I got very little done yesterday. It was a treading-water kind of day.

I bought a bag of rolled oats. A fifty pound bag costs $34 dollars from HERE. They write the date the bag was put on the shelf. Mine was 7/15. They were manufactured by La Crosse Milling Company of Cochrane, Wisconsin which I erroneously reported was in Indiana.

I pulled out my vacuum sealer. The tubing was kaput and the oil reservoir on the vacuum pump was right at the "needs oil" mark. Sigh! I sent an order off to Amazon for replacement pieces-parts and a quart of vacuum oil. I am 90% sure Automatic Transmission Fluid would have worked but I am not in that big of a hurry. Incidentally, the problem with using regular motor oil like 0W-20 is that motor oil will often cause rubber seals to swell while ATF will not. A light-weight motor oil is fine for electric motors that don't run under water but are not the best choice for motors that are "sealed" or share a housing with a device that might rely on rubber seals.

I got another 30 yards of fence cleared of vines and vegetation.

I went for a 40 minute walk with Mrs ERJ.

I reloaded five rounds of the .223 with 69 grain Tipped Sierra Gameking bullets to shoot over a chronograph. I rarely mention the number of rounds I reload, primarily because everybody has a passionately held opinion regarding the optimum amount of ammo to have and that number ranges from 0 to infinity.

There is a very high chance that most of Eaton County will enter November without having had a "killing frost". There have been some superficial frosts but no prolonged, below 32F air temperature frosts, yet. 

WNBA 

The Women's National Basketball Association continues to impress with their "Look at me" behaviors. They are making a show of leaving the court and are not there during the National Anthem, presumably to demonstrate their political purity and to protest how they have been discriminated against.

The WNBA is financially subsidized by the NBA. That means that the NBA is subsidizing their behaviors. By association, it makes the brands that advertise heavily during NBA events (a major source of revenue) complicit. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Michelob, Google, T-Mobile, Duracell, Red Lobster, BlueChew might want to lean on the NBA to sever their support of the WNBA. One rotten piece of meat or fish in the grocery section is enough to taint the perception of quality in a very large store. The behaviors of the spoiled children in the WNBA are tainting basketball.

Bonus meme

 

Presented without comment

 

I will match your 20 

and raise you five

A few pictures and "code talkers"

 

A persimmon tree with an unusual-for-species tree form.

I detected a whiff of decaying meat while working on the fence, so I took a walk through the woods behind it to investigate.

Most of the trees had dropped their leaves, otherwise I never would have noticed this tree. 

Close-up of the trunk. Sometimes raccoons and possum will "prune" persimmon branches by climbing on them to harvest fruit, only to have them snap off at the base. I suspect that is what happened to this tree.

Squirrels moved these walnuts (and many more) to this location. They did not explain their reasoning to me.

Fences

Work continues on the fence. Realistically, I need about three more hours of time-on-task to get it ready to receive animals. Then I need a couple large, round-bales of hay for emergency feed, water and salt.

Buzz-word salad (and hiding in the open)

"Convening, curating, & facilitating generative inter-movement"

"Growing a community"

"Connecting key in-person convenings for greater alignment"

"Incubating high leverage & impact synergy action projects between diverse movement fields and unlikely allies"

"Build a Broad-based, Multistranded, Movement around a Positive Vision Concretized in Locally Rooted Action" 

All very worthy of mockery because of the vague and pretentious language, but what does it mean?

"Incubating high leverage & impact synergy action projects..." could mean fomenting decapitation-strikes against institutions, smear campaigns against businesses and violence (impact) in a coordinated efforts to maximize disruption.

Those daffy-sounding phrases are all from the "Mission Statement" of one of the shadowy organizations that has been accused of coordinating Antifa from behind the scenes. Think of them as a computer Operating System that support and coordinate a diverse universe of "gadgets" and host hundreds of apps.

Antifa has been identified as one of the main instigators of the French riots

Just because they sound stupid does not mean that they are not dangerous.

News to me

Good luck!

Fixing fences

There is a sequence of scenes in the movie Facing the Giants where a man walks into the high school football coach's office unannounced and quotes a bit of scripture at him. The man who walked into the office works at the (Christian) high school and prayed over each student's locker, asking for God's intercession. We will call him The Chaplain even though the movie never really defines his role.

The coach thinks for a few seconds and then pursues The Chaplain and asks for clarification. Not only is the coach's team struggling, he is facing problems in his marriage.

The last 45 seconds of the clip, starting at 1:15, The Chaplain explains why praying isn't enough.

"There two farmers who desperately needed rain for their crops to grow. Although both farmers prayed for rain, only one of them went out and prepared his fields to receive it.  

The Chaplain asked, "Which one trusted God to send the rain?" 

The Coach responded, "The one who prepared," 

"God will send the rain when He's ready. You need to prepare your fields to receive it," says Mr. Bridges.

Fixing fences

In my case, preparing the fields means getting the fence ready to receive calves.

As an example of high-speed karma, the trailer I repaired is sometimes borrowed by a local cattle farmer to transport calves to market.  Obviously, with a hole in the floor it was not going to be much use to him.

He received word that A.) The trailer was fixed, B.) I was the guy who did it, C.) I was in the market for two calves. 

Information also flowed in the opposite direction. I was given his phone number and informed that he might have a (one) calf to sell me.

I was walking in my pasture with tools in hand when I got a text from him that started "I'm fixing to get busy so now would be the best time to call me"

We talked for a bit. Yes, he does have one calf that is not spoken for. He told me the breeding (mostly Angus), the weight and the price. I verbally committed to buy it.

The dominoes are falling in a very good way.

"El-Sayed will Protect Healthcare"

I picked up the anvil on Wednesday. That involved driving from Eaton Rapids to Mount Pleasant, Michigan. That is a drive of about 90 miles.

Interstate 27 had been carpet-bombed with el-Sayed billboards.

Because they were on a rotation of three, basic signs, I had time to read the small print as I passed each one, a few words at a time.

"El-Sayed will Protect Healthcare"

The fine print elaborated that he will, specifically, protect Medicaid.

Upon returning home, I learned that Medicaid eligibility will have some strings attached staring in 2027. The able-bodied slacker living in his mother's basement will have to work at a job (a requirement that will not impact the working-poor) -or- show up for 80 hours of volunteer work a month or be a full time student of training.

These requirements do not apply to parents of young children or a few other, narrow carve-outs.

So the implication is that he will support the people who think that they are too good or too delicate to work (or too proud to volunteer) at the expense of the guy/gal who is working his ass off, paying taxes and paying rent or making a house payment.

Implications 

The practical implication of the new Medicaid requirements for many of my readers is that starting January 1, 2027 there will be a vast increase in the number of people who will be motivated to volunteer. 

Many of you are affiliated with a church, a food-pantry or a school. Rather than be caught flat-footed when people start asking to volunteer, you can put some thought into the "problem" ahead of time and skim the cream-of-the-crop as they show up by already having your volunteer-work configured to match up to the applicants' requirements.

By my reckoning, the first people to show up will be the choicest workers. The organizations that are not prepared to use them in January will lose them to organizations that had more foresight.

Consequently, you might want to spend the next couple of months thinking about how you can productively engage a volunteer(s) for 20 hours a week*. Perhaps they can be "Reading Buddies" for young students. Perhaps they can do basic lawn-mowing and grounds maintenance. Perhaps they can team-up with an elderly driver and make food deliveries.

A couple of the details of the requirements come into play. 

One is that hours from several different organizations can be blended to hit the 80 hours-a-month requirement so several churches (for instance) can pool their needs to provide the required number of hours. 

Another consideration for the "Reading Buddies" is that the position becomes more attractive if it is year-round gig rather than just during the school year, otherwise, the volunteer must scramble to find another gig through the summer.

* Volunteers who are not engaged in productive work become behavior issues. Better to engage them for ten hours a week of always-have-something-to-do than to engage them for twenty hours with ten hours of stand-around time. 

Woodpiles and apple varieties

Woodpile report

The slab the wood is resting on is 12' wide and the stack is a freckle shorter than 48" tall.

We got about 1-1/2 face-cords of firewood split to kindling size* and stacked yesterday.

Quicksilver helped with the restacking. It was getting pretty close to her nap-time and I suggested that we could finish later.

She was adamant. She wanted to keep working until the job was done. So, we finished stacking everything that had been split. If she maintains that stick-to-it attitude then she will go places. 

I am even more impressed with using an old tire to hold the chunks to be split upright. Not only does hold them upright and keep them from scattering, it slows down the head of the maul as it approaches the bottom which reduces the wear-and-tear on the handle when I have to "reach over" other chunks to hit a piece on the interior of the bundle. 

* The fireplace insert we have is unforgiving about the size of the wood we put into it. Mrs ERJ informed me that 16" of length and 4" in the widest dimension is about the limit. It also prefers at least one edge to not be covered with bark.

Fortunately, I still have a fair amount of ash which is a wood that splits very easily. My supply will eventually run out and I will be switching to Black Locust, walnut, poplar and random softwoods.

So far, the insert has not been very fond of running 100% Black Locust. It really wants a bit of gopher-wood to help it to ignite.

"Success" will be claimed by a hundred fathers while you will own 100% of your failures

Perhaps that is why we can learn more from our failures than our successes, the cause-and-effect is not diluted.

That assumes, of course, that you do have some successes. If all you have in your life is an unending string of failures, it is difficult to learn anything.

Photo from ARS GRIN website

Consider the apple variety Reinette Simirenko. According to Grokipedia 

"The Reinette Simirenko apple underwent rapid adoption in Soviet horticulture during the early to mid-20th century, following its official inclusion in the USSR State Register of Breeding Achievements in 1947. Valued for its reliable yields, early ripening, and superior storage capabilities, the variety quickly became a staple in commercial production, with trees capable of producing up to 100 kg of fruit from 10-year-old specimens on vigorous rootstocks."

The variety's cultural prominence was further highlighted by its use in Soviet space missions, where cosmonauts consumed Reinette Simirenko apples during flights, including a notable instance in 1978 that symbolized national pride in domestic horticulture. 

The Soviets proudly claimed that Reinette Simirenko was a native variety that originated in an obscure province in the southern part of the Soviet Union (Ukraine) in 1895. That is what the politicians said, anyway.

The personal notes of the horticulturist who introduced the variety was less specific. He left the possibility open that it might have been a graft that had lost its label. Yes, Virginia, that happens to every fruit grower. I, too, have mystery varieties growing in my orchard(s).

In the west, it is now nearly-universally believed that Reinette Simirenko is identical to Wood's Greening, an apple that was first recorded as being widely grown in northern New Jersey around 1860 which predates the Soviet claim by 35 years. The speculation is that Platon Simirenko may have obtained scion from a fellow fruit growing enthusiast in the U.K. who was trialing varieties that originated in "the colonies". Not to be out-shown by the Soviets, the British also claim it as Wood's Greening say they developed it and the Italians claim it came from Italy and call it Renetta Walder.

A look at DNA is not particularly helpful. Simirenko is slightly more similar to "Alexander" apple (a Ukrainian apple) than to "Winesap" a variety from New Jersey, but neither of them is a very close match to Simirenko sharing 5-of-18 and 4-of-18 SSR data points.

Afanasy's brother Timothy is the pragmatist. If an apple variety is a "dog" in their orchard, or if it does not keep well in their root cellar or if nobody who lives there likes how it tastes, the tree gets grafted over to varieties that work better for them. The name on the tag is almost meaningless.

Bonus images

Excessive use of the word "should" is a verbal cue that somebody lives in a fantasy-world. That person is likely to be perpetually angry because the observed reality rarely conform to their fantasy. 

 

Works for sleep apnea, too. Mrs ERJ informs me that my snoring now sounds like the gentle purr of a small-displacement, two-stroke engine trolling along.