Old Houses and Ghosts

My belief in the super-natural is very limited. I believe in angels and I believe Satan exists. Based on the text in Luke 16, I believe that those who slipped their mortal coil have very limited to no ability to communicate with us. I also have a (mostly) clear conscience so even if haints are a thing, they would have issues getting much traction.

But I do believe in a different kind of ghost. I believe that we leave our imprint on everything we touch. People who own and live in a house stamp the house with their personality. The older the house, the more imprints.

Some houses are Instagram, ginger-bread perfect. Their owners are meticulous, are attentive to aesthetics and clearly invest resources in keeping their finger on the pulse of what is fashionable.

Other houses have more of the "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" vibe. That doesn't mean that the houses are shabby, but floor coverings and paint are renewed after they are worn out and not because the "Color palette is dated". I would like to think that our house falls into this category.

Another kind of house is the "All hat and no cows" statement. Lots of square-feet under roof, including various outbuildings. Like Banana Republic, tin-pot dictators' public-works, the footprint vastly overshot the budget available for maintenance.

The final kind of house I want to mention is perhaps the saddest of all. It is the house of broken dreams. It is usually an older house. A young couple stretches to buy it, thinking they found a bargain. And then they discover it is a ticking time-bomb of deferred maintenance: Old plumbing, obsolete mechanical systems with no parts support, bubble-gum and scotch-tape repairs from generations of previous, overly-optimistic owners.

The house of broken dreams breaks the backs of each owner in their own turn. Some divorce because of the stress and neither cannot afford it. Others add more toothpaste fixes to the plaster and lamp-cord electrical wiring and other ad-hoc "fixes" before they dump the property on the next set of dreamers.

The only happy endings for the house of broken dreams is if the new owners had the foresight to have budget to catch-up on the worst of the deferred maintenance. You can call me a liar, but that might be as much as 20%-to-40% of the sale price. Or, if they recognize what they got themselves into, live well below their "means" and slowly, hand-over-hand invest in the property to get it back up to snuff. Many times, that involves an interim fix to buy a few more years and then a "good" fix to actually correct all of the deeply layered ugliness.

Stay away from crowds

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/reported-fatalities-bourbon-street-after-vehicle-plows-crowd-during-new-years

Ten reported as dead and over 30 reported as injured after a truck plowed into a crowd at approximately 3:15AM local time.

"The thing about experience is that you don't get it until just after you needed it." That is a quote from a different story.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

 

Alexander Nevsky, the Battle on Ice scene by Sergei Eisenstein released in 1938 amid rising tensions in Europe between Stalin, Hitler and other leaders.

Two thousand heavily armed German invaders are defeated by irregular, local forces on April 5, 1242.

Run-time about 30 minutes.

Sports-ball, lifting-straps and peaches

Sports-ball

I think "Sports" are one of Western Civilization's greatest inventions. Rather than picking up torches and pitchforks and burning the next village over, we fill a bladder with air and try to throw it through a hoop or punch it into the end-zone.

People have a need to go-to-war. Rather than slitting throats and burning huts, Western Civilization allows them to compete by wearing unnatural shades of polyester and seeing who can have the most outrageous tailgate party.

H1-B visas

H1-B sound like a new kind of influenza.

Lifting straps

I misplaced my dead-lifting straps. I stitched together another pair. 1" webbing, 27" long with one-inch of overlap. Double-thread, #69 polyester thread waxed with bullet lube (45% beeswax, 45% cottonseed oil, 10% lanolin...hey, it is what I had on hand). I sewed these without a twist in the middle and they were no better and no worse than the pair that did have the single twist. Your mileage will vary based on the size of your wrists and hands.

Möbius's Theorem

Some stories don't have two sides to them.

Peaches

Suddenly, out of nowhere (or so it seems) I am getting questions like "How hard is it to grow peaches?"

Luscious, juicy, tangy and sweet. Unbeatable for eating fresh, pies or canning. Peaches are the queen of fruit.

Peaches: Live hard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.

I have a couple of 30 year old trees and they look rough...really, really rough. A thirty year old peach tree in the mid-West is a woody Methuselah. Both are seedlings of an obsolete variety named "Madison". Somehow, perhaps by random chance, those two trees have not been leveled by canker, borers or bad-luck.

The way the winds are blowing, I will be grafting three seedlings to each of those ancient-ones and three to an old variety (1963) called Cresthaven.

Small Fruits

The best time to plant a fruit tree is five years ago. The second best time is to plant a tree today.

The reason for the "...five years ago..." is that it  takes most fruit trees five years to reach a size where they produce significant amounts of fruit.

If the economy or social-order goes into the septic-tank, it is unlikely that we will have five years to wait for our trees to reach full production.

That suggests two strategies. One strategy is to plant a few fruit trees every couple of years. That strategy falls apart if you have limited space to grow trees.

Another strategy is to find ways to compress the foot-print and to shrink five-year ramp-up time.

Small fruits might be what you are looking for!

Everbearing Strawberries treated as annuals

Huge potential yields...as much as 25 pounds per year per 32 square-feet (the size of a standard sheet of OSB or plywood). The yield is spread through the growing season requiring many pickings. The cost to establish is high. The longevity is low...it must be replanted every year.

Rhubarb

OK, not a fruit. If it bothers you then leave a comment that I will ignore.

Large potential yield of 12 pounds per SOP (sheet of plywood). It takes 24 months to really start cranking out the stalks. Cost to establish is not very high if you have a neighbor who will share divisions. Longevity is very high with fifty years being common.

High oxalate content makes this a poor choice for people susceptible to kidney stones. Often used as volume extender in pastries for more aromatic fruit like strawberries or peaches.

Grapes

10 pounds per SOP. 18 months to significant yield. Cost to establish is high since a trellis or support is required. Longevity of 30 years.

Strawberries, summer-bearing, matted row

5 pounds per SOP. 18 months to significant yield. Cost to establish is low. Longevity is three-to-seven years.

Blueberries

4 pounds per SOP. 30 months to significant yield. Demands low pH soils...low cost to establish if your soils are already low pH but very expensive if they are not. Longevity is 15 years.

Raspberries and Gooseberries and Currants

3 pounds per SOP. Some production in the first fall for some types of raspberries but typically 15 months for most plantings. Longevity is fifteen years in a favorable site.

Asparagus

2 pounds per SOP. 36 months for significant yields. Longevity is 20 years.

Minor small fruits

Aronia, blackberries, service berries, seaberries, beach plums, kiwi, autumn olive, elderberries, rose hips, daylilies....

Many of these species can survive neglect and challenging sites which makes them great choices for less intensively managed plots. Most of these species have "issues" like thorns or squishy fruit that make them non-commercial. Many of them have named cultivars that yield up to 3X times more fruit than random seedlings.

Don't feed the Trolls (reminder to self)

Is Absolute Fact more effective?

There are several "ideas" that can be demonstrated to be "False" but they still have value and should not be lightly dismissed.

The classic example is Aristotle's theory of "Spontaneous Generation" where vermin "spontaneously" arise from garbage or piles of rags. We learned in 7th grade biology that this was false. A pile of rags will remain free of mice unless a boy mouse gets "special feelings" for a girl mouse within that pile of rags.

The discussion comes full-circle if you study public health. There are ALWAYS romantic boy/girl mice and rats (and flies and mosquitoes and spirochete). That is not a "controllable" variable in urban and farm settings. Eliminating food sources and piles of rags IS a controllable variable and while it will not totally eliminate rodents, it makes a huge dent in the population.

So even though Aristotle's theory of Spontaneous Generation is easily proven to be false it still has tremendous utility in the real world.

Is Absolute Fact more cost effective?

"Pi" is not 3.14 and Pi/4* is not 0.8...but they are both less than 2% from actual and the computational efficiencies are useful for back-of-envelop doodling. (The cross-sectional area of a round bar or wire is Pi/4*(D^2).)

Is Absolute Fact tinsel for a drama queen?

Some people enjoy arguing (aka "Trolls"). They must like the attention. Maybe it makes them feel like they are alive. I don't care. I find people who love to argue to be tiresome. I subscribe to Dale Carnegie's contention that you can never WIN an argument. You may prevail in a very narrow sense of the word but it comes at a higher cost.

As part of an essay I might make the statement "The sun rises in the east" as a springboard for some point.

The drama-queen or the person with a high need for dominance will immediately launch into "That statement is demonstrably false. The sun only rises in the east two mornings a year between the Arctic and Antarctic Circles and it only rises in the south at the North Pole and in the north at the South Pole."

"Your entire essay is bullshit because I shredded one of your foundational premises."

Ok. Fine. Have it your way.

Entertainment value

I have a decided bias toward making my posts entertaining. A post that is entertaining will be remembered. Any information in the essay that is useful, even if it is not totally Factual, will be more accessible if the essay was entertaining.

If I have a reader who is 50:50 on a topic and, if after reading one of my post has three pertinent questions or if they shift to 60:40...or 40:60 then I think I did a decent job.

A few thoughts on Ukraine and the middle-East

The Spanish Civil War was fought between 1936 and 1939. It was a test-bed for the rapidly evolving science of war and all major powers had "observers" reporting to their respective powers about what technologies worked and which did not.

The Germans were able to implement the lessons more rapidly than their counterparts and caught Central Europe, France and the British flat-footed with their ability to leverage mechanized and airborne resources to rapidly deploy forces.

The wars in Ukraine and the middle-East have a similar flavor to the Spanish Civil War. Drones, in particular, are saturating the hostile space and there is much experimentation in how to use them best. Most recently, North Korean forces under the direction of Russian officers were slaughtered like so many baby chicks when they used obsolete, Soviet battlefield doctrine.

Meanwhile, in the middle-East, Israel sits like a stationary, carrier-based battle-group. Many military thinkers are predicting the demise of the carrier-based battle-group due to rapidly evolving missile, drone and image processing technologies. And yet Israel is demonstrating that there are counter-strategies that are moderately-to-very effective against those offensive technologies. Unfortunately, every effective defense informs the designers of the offensive weapons.

Pray that these two wars are not the warm-up calisthenics before The Big Game.