Still here

The contractors packed up for the day at 4:00 PM.

They were a mile ahead of me as I drove to Hammond Farms Landscaping Supplies to pick up fill-sand to contour the outdoor area they had been fiddling with. They very graciously agreed to pause their work in that area so I could do that.

While driving to Dimondale, I noticed that the goldenrod is starting to bloom. According to Michigan Flora, there are 23 species of goldenrod that are native to Michigan: Tall, White, Bluestem, Canadian, Zigzag, Late, Hairy, Houghton's, Early, Missouri, Gray, Ohio, Rough-leaved, Upland White, Riddell's, Stiff,  Rough-leaved, Seaside, Gillman's, Showy, Bog, Elm-leaved and Voss's. They are all the same to me. They are all pretty and the bees love them. They are a marker of the passing seasons.

The extent of my gardening yesterday was to pick an eggplant fruit and to dig three hills of potatoes. As reported earlier, I did not add any fertilizer to the potato patch this year, I relied on the nutrients released by the heavy over-layer of vegetation that I tilled into the soil in the spring. The vines did not aggressively canopy over the tilled areas. The tops also stopped growing sooner and died back sooner. The upshot is that I can start harvesting them now because they are not going to be adding any more mass.

The contractors come back today AND I get to watch Quicksilver. The upside is that Mrs ERJ doesn't have any commitments so I will be able to run some errands.

Bonus political meme

 

Two long quotes that might be worth reading

"It has been said that everyone has one secret. This is not true.

Everyone has many secrets, many faces, many masks. All humans...are the sum of their masks.

It is what you do in life, not what torments you in your soul that matters." 

"It is not what you feel that makes you evil. Feelings are natural...It is what you do with them that decides if you are a villain or a hero."  -John Ringo in There Will Be Dragons

"Utopia is the imaginary society in which humankind's deepest yearnings, noblest dreams and highest aspirations come to fulfillment, where all physical, social and spiritual forces work together, in harmony, to permit the attainment of everything people find necessary and desirable. In the imagined utopia, people work and live together closely and cooperatively, in a social order that is self-created and self-chosen rather than externally imposed, yet one that also operates according to a higher order of natural and spiritual laws. Utopia is held together by commitment rather than coercion, for in utopia what people want to do is the same thing as what they have to do; the interests of the individuals are congruent with the interests of the group; and personal growth and freedom entail responsibility for others. Underlying the vision of utopia is the assumption that harmony, cooperation and mutuality of interests are natural to human existence rather than conflict, competition and exploitation, which arise only in imperfect societies. By providing material and psychological safety and security, the utopian social order eliminates the need for divisive competition or self-serving actions which elevate some people to the disadvantage of others; it ensures instead the flowering of mutual responsibility and trust to the advantage of all."  -Rosabeth Moss Kanter in her book Commitment and Community which examined Utopian societies from the 1800s.

Growing up, most two-parent families with kids below age 12 came pretty close those the Utopian Ideals. 

 

NUDES!!!!

 

Seriously, what did you think I was going to post?

Today's work-tickets

Stay out of the way of the contractors.

Be available to the contractors.

Don't distract the contractors with conversation. 

Maybe I will make a chicken-rice-zucchini casserole.  

Fine Art Tuesday

 

"Angels of Holy Hill". Do you see the angels?

Don Kloetzke was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1951 and died in 2023.

His father was in the military and he lived in many different locations throughout his childhood but retained a special affection for Wisconsin's outdoors and the Green Bay Packers.

His paintings are notable for their detail and highly believable backgrounds. 

P.S. The angels in the first image are "Snow Angels" left by children in the snow, right-foreground.
 

Running, moving furniture, mowing and burning brush

Running notes

My first half-mile was slow. I clocked it at 7:30 (15 minute miles).

The two-mile mark was 26:22 and the 2.6 mile time was 33:35. 

My plan is to run the 2.6 miles and walk the last 0.4 miles as a cool-down. While 2.6 miles looks like an arbitrary number, it isn't. From the end of my driveway, up the center of the road and around the block to a very large White Oak on the top of a hill is precisely 2.58 miles. Rounding gives me 2.6 miles.

The time it takes to run 2.6 miles at a 12 minutes/mile pace is 31 minutes. If you take out my very slow first half-mile, I was running at a 12:25 minutes/mile clip.

Moving furniture

Two hours by the clock. One hour of actual hands-on furniture.

Pulling weeds and lifting weights

Neither happened.

I pushed a lawn mower for 89 minutes. I was shooting for two hours but I felt a sudden sharp pain in my left, Achilles' tendon.

An academic would have puzzled over the phenomena. He would have opened up scholar.google.com and performed multiple queries. He would have posted rambling essays on his Facebook page. If he noticed many insects boiling out of the ground at his feet, he might have been inclined to snap photos and use an app to determine the species. If his degrees were in the social-sciences, he might have asked them if their aggression was due to childhood trauma while lecturing them on the evils of systemic humanistic biases.

I, on the other hand, am a redneck and this isn't my first rodeo. I SPRINTED out of the area pushing the mower ahead of me. Yellow-jackets are assholes and run in gangs. It is a good day, relatively speaking, when you only get stung by one of them.

After popping into the house to down two Diphenhydramine (Benedryl), I dragged a hose and flopped the end of it down by the hole that the Yellow Jackets were buzzing around. Then I turned the hose on.

Everybody has their favorite method for eradicating ground-nesting bees. Mine is to drown them. I flood the hole for half an hour and then I back off on the rate of flow. I will turn it off completely in the morning. 

Plan B

B is for burning

I burned brush for two hours. My enthusiasm for pushing a lawn mower  or pulling weeds had evaporated.

The branches from the Honey Locust tree that have been drying for three weeks needed to go away. They burned but it was with all of the enthusiasm of a kid going to the dentist.

Two adult beverages were consumed while watching the fire and contemplating the wickedness in the universe. 

German Engineering

 

Weed processing facility liquidation

Short notice Liquidation sale. Ends this evening.

Cash-flow issues are probably the #1 cause of businesses failing. Buying items in bulk because of the huge discount and "I will use them someday" bites a lot of business owners. Part of the issue is that if you need to generate cash, you get pennies back on what you originally paid when you try to resell them on secondary markets.