An email from a friend and a reality-check video

 

I got an email from one of my friends in an unnamed state west of the Mississippi. Springtime hits sooner out there than it does here in Michigan.

He wrote about replanting orchards, potting plants, picking mushrooms and trapping pests. I think he was trying to cheer me up. It worked.

The video at the top of this post is a good reality check. We start molding our property with a lot of ideas in our heads. And then reality hits us upside the head with a two-by-four.

Some people can deal with reality. They improvise, adapt and overcome. They adjust their expectations. Others fold. 

"Active" aging: What does it mean?

A friend emailed me one of those "maps that makes you think". It purported to show which states were most favorable for "active seniors". It listed the average age for each state that seniors remained "active".

It looked to me like they took the median life expectancy and subtracted ten years from that number, but it got me to thinking, "How would you measure that? Is there a standard for what defines an active-adult?"

It turns out that Occupational Therapists and people who study senior citizens do have a measure and it has little to do with how physically fit you are. 

The Basic Activities of Daily Living

• The ability to move yourself from one location to the next (usually in your home) as you go about your daily routine
• Personal hygiene, brushing your teeth
• Showering and bathing (which combines novel movements and slippery surfaces with hygiene
• Toileting and cleaning up afterward
• Dressing, including selecting appropriate clothing for the day
• Self-feeding 

Instrumental/Intellectual Activities of Daily Living

• Housekeeping, laundry, and other home chores
• Money management
• Meal Preparation
• Moving or changing residents
• Managing your medications (including arranging doctor visits)
• Using the telephone or computer to communicate and get information 

A sad reality

It is a sad reality that many people feel righteous in ripping-off old people.

If they bother to rationalize their actions, they say that the only reason an old person can afford something is because "they exploited others" during their working years.

A million years ago, an older people had no problems finding a neighborhood "kid" to mow the grass with a push mower, rake the leaves,  shovel the snow or clean the gutters on the roof.

Now you have to hire a business to do those chores on an annual basis. They show up driving $50k trucks and pulling another $15k in high-speed equipment. The only way they will do anything extra (like not mow down your prize peonies) is if you pay the EXTRA money.

And the entire "money management" issue has become a goat-festival. We are being pushed into "Apps" that come and go at a bewildering rate. We get messages "We discontinued this app here at the Doctors office and you have to sign up for this new one".

Oh, and data breaches happen daily. So how do we discern if the message is real or bogus?

It is no longer safe to put checks (in envelops) into your mailbox for the mailman to pick up. Scammers pull outgoing mail and "wash" the checks to create a signed but otherwise-blank-check on YOUR account. Note: Uniball 207 pens are more resistant to "washing" than most other pens. 

At least the thief has to put some effort into stealing your money when you use paper checks. He can't do it from the other side of the globe with the push of a mouse-button.

And don't get me started on inflation and the heat-death of Social Security. 

Yes, modern technology has advantages. Ride-share apps are a life-saver for my blind sister-in-law. Home delivery of groceries can take the sting out of the inevitable restrictions on driving.

It doesn't mean that I have to like it. 

Rejuvenating a pollard willow tree

Before

After

From a different angle

Before

After (close up)

The electric pole saw is a good tool for this job.

I was able to be off to the side of where the limbs dropped. The larger limbs are about 6" in diameter. Willow wood has a nasty tendency to "barber-chair" when they fall.

I planted this tree beside the gully that drains my property. My thinking was that the tree gave me one last chance to capture nutrients before they left the property.

Nutrient runoff is a real issue with livestock operations. The animals poop on the frozen ground and then it is leached by rain or washed downstream. That is not good for the surface water quality nor is it good for the long-term fertility of your soil.

The logical fallacy of this concept is that the tree does not have any leaves when the ground is icy. It cannot absorb those nutrients unless you have some kind of swale or settling pond to slow the water before it leaves the property. Then the particles can settle out of the stream and your tree can harvest them as they decay in the spring and early summer. 

Speaking truth to power

Black podcasters responding to the "Chicago" Bears possibly moving out of Chicago.

Savage.

Winning quote "I know the people who are living in Indiana. They are quite happy and quite fine. Thank-you very much." at the 7:14 mark.

Thinking about willow trees

The image above is an elevation slice along the property line that will be getting a windbreak.

What is notable is that more than half of the distance the elevation is at or only slightly above the water-table.

Joe, the fruit and nut grower instantly sees the elevated areas with good drainage. The soggy parts are much harder to populate.

At this point, in a rare moment of practicality, the initial plantings in those areas will almost certainly be various types of willow trees. There are other species that would work, Bald Cypress, Tamarack, American Elm, Silver Maple and a few others...but it is tough to beat the ease of propagating willow cuttings.

This clone was collected along Peppermint Creek and is typical for the species. It is currently trained as "pollard" and needs a haircut.

Several of the clones I will be using were collected "in the wild". Michigan grew a lot of vegetables on "muck fields" before most of that moved to Mexico. Muck is not a "mineral" soil. It is mostly grass that grew in marshes and the old roots and blades of grass fell into the water and did not decay due to lack of oxygen. It is organic. It burns when dry. It also blows away when it is drained. So, most muck fields had windbreaks of...willow trees (or spruce). The farmers used White Willow (Salix alba) or Crack Willow (Salix × fragilis) which are European species. They have more vigor than our native Black Willow (Salix nigra).

Some of the selections have twigs with brown bark. Some have yellow bark. Some of the selections have better "tree" form (called "apical dominance" in the biz). I even have some selections with "curly" twigs which don't get as tall and have denser branching than the standard forms.

Schools, then-and-now

I counted the number of students who were in the same 3rd grade class I was in back in 1969-1970.

There were 38 students and the picture-frame had 15 blank spaces. That suggests that somewhere there were classes with  53 students in them.

Preposterous?

It was a different era. There were lots of kids. High schools in the Cleveland, Ohio area were running two-shifts because they could not build new ones quickly enough.

Most families were two-parent families. I only knew of one kid who "didn't have a dad" in my class of 38. That number was skewed because it was a Catholic school and Catholics believed, at the time, that divorce was as shameful as getting caught with hookers (Matt 5:32).

The teachers had standards and they expected you to toe-the-line. 

If you caused a problem in school, the teacher had a great deal of authority to "handle it" right then-and-there.

And if word got back to your parents that you had been disruptive, dad would-and-did whip your butt as soon as he came home from work. For one thing, your parents paid MONEY to send you to a Catholic school. While $200 dollars a year might not sound like a lot of money today, you could buy a brand-new, VW Beetle for $1995 dollars in 1969 so sending one kid to Catholic school was 10% of the cost of a new car.

There were fights on the playground but there were no knives pulled or tire-chains employed, at least at the grade-school level. I think the teachers were practical enough to realize that boys have a different way of establishing pecking-order than girls and they let us sort it out.

Today

Today, there is EXTREME pressure to not touch a child. God forbid that you should paddle them.

Today, there is EXTREME pressure for schools to not suspend kids. The thinking is that the SCHOOL is endangering the child by suspending them if they live in a single-parent home. If mom is working, then kid will be unsupervised and, somehow, that is the school's fault.

One principal told me that they were forbidden by the school board to suspend a kid for more than 10 days in a single school year. FORBIDDEN!!

The kid could bring a weapon to school and the principal could not drop-kick them out if they had already hit their ten days. They could assault a teacher. They could sexually assault another student in the rest-room. They could do drugs on school property...and the teacher and the administration's hands were tied. Oh...and don't even think about reporting it to the police.

In many places, class-loads are restricted to 25 kids or fewer per classroom. And it doesn't make any difference. 

The kids have this all figured out. The good ones still learn. The bad ones...well, without guard-rails they go flying off into bad places. 

Losing weight, tendons and an artful Info-mercial

I stepped on the scale yesterday and saw that I weighed 198 pounds. This morning it was 200. I was under the impression that I wasn't losing weight but that some of my fat was changing to muscle. It appears that I was wrong. Either wrong, or I need to replace the battery in the scale.

Tendons

A physical therapist talks about strengthening tendons in ===>THIS VIDEO<=== I skipped over the biology lesson to get you to the important stuff. The more detail-oriented readers may want to skip back to the beginning.

When Info-mercials are artwork

The Info-mercial. 

Some of the back story 

Niles Kinerk is the real-deal.

He started a business called Gardens Alive in the mid-1980s selling organic gardening "biologicals". That is, lady-bugs, praying mantis, nematodes, milky-spore, mycorrhizal dips for roots and so on. 

He grew the company by aggressively promoting his vision and by shipping high-quality products. By high-quality, I mean the product arrived in the customers' mailboxes alive and viable. Remember, living critters are perishable.

Around the year 2000 he bid on a raft of bankrupt nursery (trees, plants, seeds) companies. A venture capital company had collected the companies like so many Beanie-Babies earlier in the 1990s, borrowed a bunch of money through their businesses and passed the assets through a firewall to the parent company. Then they divested the soiled-doves with the debt but kept the assets.

The soiled-doves quickly face-planted and filed for bankruptcy. The judge required that they be auctioned-off.

One of the bunch put together an employee buy-back offer which the judge accepted.

Most of the rest were scooped up by Mr Kinerk.

At the time, I assumed it was so he could get their customer lists so he could send them Gardens Alive! literature and so he could have Gardens Alive! literature blown into their catalogs.

I was wrong.

Mr Kinerk hired a fellow Indiana nurseryman who was famous for his blunt manner of speaking and for being a leader in organic gardening. That was Ed Fackler.

I was not in the room, but I think it went something like this.

"Niles, they went bankrupt because they deserved to go bankrupt. The pictures in their catalogs look like they were drawn by third-graders with dull crayons and they were shipping crap to their customers" Ed might have said.

Then Ed explained that while that sounds harsh, they never would have fallen into the clutches of the vampire capital firms if they had been thriving. 

"What is it going to take to fix it?" Kinert might have asked.

"It is going to cost a lot of money..." Ed said.

"That is my problem. Figure out what it will take to fix it and fix it fast." Kinert responded.

Ed reached out through his network of contacts and collected horror stories. He made a plan and constructed a detailed list of what needed to be done.

Kinert found the money and made it happen.