Moving day report

You can say whatever you want about the older Gen-Z, but their "minimalist" approach to life makes them easy to move.

Two round trips and it was mostly done.

I got to tour the new house. They paid roughly $130 per square-foot. They shopped long-and-hard and figured out what was important to each party. One wanted a man-cave. One wanted a window for their plants...

I like the neighborhood it is in. It is a very good fit for their socio-economic and stage-of-life. It isn't so spendy that they will feel like bumpkins. It isn't so distressed that they will be afraid to go out at night. There were a couple of kids with a stand selling cookies beside the road...it was that kind of neighborhood.

The lot looks like it is perched on top of a feeder moraine. The longer moraine stretched from Lansing's Groesbeck/Post Oak neighborhood-to-Mason, Michigan and was mined out for gravel. It is now a series of spring-fed lakes. One of those lakes is a half-mile west of the lot.

The lot's boundaries are still a mystery. The lot to the west belongs to somebody who is "into" landscaping. They have switchgrass and pipevine and lots of interesting specimens, including an apple tree near the northwest corner of their house.

The lot to the south was more conventional.

Two of the (likely) boundary lines are defined by rows of Colorado Blue Spruce, a species that struggles with the mid-West's heat and humidity. They might have another ten years left in them...but maybe only five. There is also an ash tree that looks to be in astonishingly good health, perhaps due to woodpeckers. There is a Mountain Ash aka Rowan Tree that is near death's door. There were also two mulberry trees that were probably planted by birds.

In the yard-proper, there are Burning Bush specimens, a Flowering Dogwood, a Variegated leafed Beech tree. Oh, and a glider shaded by a grapevine. All very charming.

The herbaceous landscaping is heavy planted to deer resistant plants: Hostas, daylilies, mint, lemon-balm and so on. 

I applaud couple for seizing the day and moving earlier rather than later. They had the warm bodies. They had the vehicles. They had a beautiful day for moving. 

Presented with minimal comment

 

We had a short power outage yesterday.

Look at what is left of his whiskers and the toes on his left, hind foot.

Bonus meme

 

How many peppers in a pint of pickled peppers?

How many peppers in the pint of pickled peppers that Peter Piper preserved?

Three, if they were Stocky Red Roasters. I love the colors!

I recall reading an article about a man who had been tossed into prison in eastern-Europe (Hungary, Bulgaria or maybe Romania) and pretty much forgotten. The cell was whitewashed and the only window was so high that he could not see outside.

One day, he was given a ripe pepper (perhaps from a visitor). It was a brilliant red. He could not bring himself to eat it. He craved the color because he had been starved of visual stimuli. Day-by-day, week-by-week it dried into a shriveled, wrinkled nugget. The color became muted. 

He never ate that pepper. It was one of the anchors that helped him stay sane. 

Duck eggs. The one on the right is from a mature duck. The one on the left is a young ducks first egg.

Rabbit traps?

I heard Mrs ERJ say that she had found a large number of "rabbit traps" in the barn.

That piqued my interest. I was eager to see what she had found.

France is burning

 The Daily Mail is reporting extensive riots in France

Rioter attacking a woman at an ATM using an improvised "flame-thrower"; an aerosol can of flammable liquid like hair-spray or WD-40 that is ignited with a cigarette lighter.

Leftists and "students" are beating teachers and school administrators, burning schools and assaulting random people.

The rioters, in general, do not appear to be Gallic.

It must come as an immense surprise to the unionized, leftist teachers and the school administrators who are also employees of the Leftist State that they are the raw-meat being fed to the thugs.

Napoleon's solution 225 years ago was "a whiff of grape-shot".

It comes down to a matter of political will

A densely packed group of combatants might be optimal for one class of weapons and related tactics but are extremely suboptimal in the face of other weapons and tactics. The high death-toll of the American Civil War was caused, in part, by tactics that were optimal for inaccurate long-guns ignited by flint-and-steel but which were a walking death-trap in the face of relatively accurate, longer-range weapons ignited by percussion caps and fired from prepared positions.

Besides Napoleon's grape-shot, fire-hoses dispersing high-pressure water loaded with a dye or foul smelling chemical is one response. Another response is to simply turn-off the cell phones that were recorded as being within a geo-fence at a specific time, that would decapitate the command-and-control structure. There is no hurry to turn them back on, either.

Or, if the phone shows up at multiple events, they can be removed from the dole and evicted from their apartment and/or tossed out of Europe...after all, people in France don't have the protections that we enjoy in the US.

All of those alternatives pale in the face of what can be done with drones and robo-lawnmowers. 

Presented without comment

 

Several of you predicted this was going to happen

 

Stretching my hamstrings. Don't tell Quicksilver that I am using her chair.

I experienced mid-back pain today. I am not sure what caused it.

I did the Special High Intensity Training on Monday. I dug 100 feet of potato row on Tuesday and Wednesday. I woke up fine on Thursday...and then I sneezed at about 10:30 AM.

My back hurt. Not kidney-stone level of pain but it was a constant toll when I moved.

The show must go on

17 quarts of applesauce. Nearly all of the apples were Liberty. The white residue on the lids is from hard-water deposits.

Mrs ERJ suggested that I make more applesauce. That would be in excess of our target of 52 quarts for the year. "There is no telling what next year's crop will be like and Quicksilver eats it at her house". So, some of these are likely to be given to family members with QS being first on the list.

Ibuprofen and Vitamin C and hamstring stretches and a long nap were how I dealt with the back pain.  

The biomechanics of digging

 In normal digging, the digger can adjust the weight of the clod on the end of the shovel to match his fitness and the level of his fatigue. When the soil is hard and heavy, he can shave it off of the cut-face in 2" thick "chips". With clay weighing about 150 pounds per cubic-foot, that "book" weighs about 10 pounds and it is very manageable.

That changes when digging potatoes. Digging the dirt that holds the potatoes in 2" thick books guarantees that you will cut most of the potatoes and they will be very vulnerable to rotting in storage. 

So, the stupid 67 year-old lifts great shovelfuls of dirt and drops them from a height to shatter the clod and expose the golden nuggets held within. The weight on the blade of the shovel might be offset 2' from the the idiot's spine and must be reacted with his core-strength.

I timed how long it took me to dig 100 feet on Wednesday. From walking out the door until I returned, it took 1:46. That included collecting tools and returning them to the barn afterward.

I can dig much more quickly when Mrs ERJ is helping but it is much more aerobic. The time I spend bending over and picking up potatoes and tossing them behind me is time I can catch my breath.

Yes, I have a potato digger. No, I did not use it. I am one of those quaint people who uses muscle power because it is less complicated, sometimes, to grab a shovel and go. A further complication involves lining up a working tractor with enough gumption to pull the potato digger through the ground. 

Saturday's adventure

I get to help somebody move on Saturday. They are moving out of a second story apartment into a house in suburbia. Both locations are congested with the apartment complex being much worse than the house.

I hope my back issue is just a tiny blip. 

I wasn't expecting this

Woman says reason she will never have a child is because it might be a boy.

This is a five-second clip buried in a larger video. So only watch the five seconds or so. 

I think she is being honest. She knows how to navigate girl-world but is not sure she can "control" a boy. She might dress it up as "I refuse to contribute to the Patriarchy, blah, blah, blah..." but it is more likely driven by fear and uncertainty. 

Presented without comment