Some light, enjoyable videos

 

First day of Rural Medicine

These are fun videos. He keeps them short (about two minutes) and light. They tie in with the blog posts about rural areas, life expectancy and heart attacks.

This is actually satire about the state of rural medicine and how people are shaped by it.

Farmer pain scale

Pathologist goes to Therapy

Generational differences

I was listening a pleasant, young lady (in her early 50s) talk about how weird it was that our parent's generation had so many women put their careers on hold to have children.

It struck my that a watershed was crossed during my generation when women worked as a matter of necessity until they got married. Then the man was expected to bring home enough money to cover the basic necessities of raising a family.

The women rejoined the workforce out of economic necessity or because they found fulfillment in it, but in general women did not have a career, they had jobs.

Thinking back even farther, there was a watershed crossing in my parent's generation when the vast majority of all workers had "jobs". The guy tightening Lug-Nut #3 at the Ford factory didn't think of it as a "career" with possibilities of advancement.

And before that, the vast majority of workers had...work. It was seasonal in nature and you had a series of "gigs". Cutting timber might last most of the winter. Planting might last a couple of months. Haying a couple of weeks. Picking berries might only last a few days.

In many ways, this is not much different than the birds of the field whose diets change in blocks of half-weeks based on what is ripe, the weather (rain brings worms closer to the surface) and the needs of their nestlings.

TB over at .45 blog is showing giving us lessons on resiliency.

We are reminded in Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 that there is a time for everything; that the sun rises every morning and that there is always work...some kind of work...that needs to be done.

Dance with the one that brung-ya

I finished the last two rows of potatoes. I planted about 60 hills of Red Pontiacs, just because.

It seemed like they had a distinctive, pleasant to me, fragrance as I cut the seed.

I also planted seven fruit trees over at the house of the woman who provided day-care for Belladonna and Kubota. She always dreamed of having an orchard but her children were into goats. Goats and fruit-trees do not mix well. Her last goat is now 18 years old and on his last legs.

She gave me her list of intended uses (canning, canning and more canning) and asked me to select the varieties. She got 2 Liberty/Bud-9 apple. 1 Enterprise/G.890, 2 Bluebyrd plums/Myro, 2 Cresthaven peach/Lovell. I need to graft a second variety into the Bluebyrd plums because that variety is not self-fertile. I am leaning toward Seneca as the second variety.

It makes a lot of sense to combine orders and make a wholesale order. With shipping, the trees cost $20 each while trees ordered retail currently run $60 a stem and the shipping is on top of that. 

She was tickled to pay for six trees and I threw in an extra Liberty/Bud-9 because I like her and because apples on Bud-9 run "small" in size.

Bully pulpit

There was a side-discussion on carrots in one of my earlier posts.

MR Tumnus weighed in on the discussion. He has been spectacularly successful in growing carrot. HE would not say that because he is modest.

My small addition to the discussion was to suggest the use boiling water to sterilize the soil where the carrot seeds were to be planted. The motivation for doing that is that carrot seeds are puny, fragile things and newly sprouted carrot seedlings are spindly, unassuming shreds of green easily mistaken for grass or weeds.

By sterilizing the soil in a very local fashion, there is a darned good chance that the green that sprouts will, indeed, be carrots and not weeds. And since carrot seedlings are so enfeebled, not having to duke it out with weeds is a major benefit and they can size up and capture sunlight without much competition. 

Using boiling hot water is pretty straight forward. Till the soil. Make a "ditch" with a hoe where you intend to plant your carrot seeds. Fill the ditch with water heated to boiling in a stock pot (typically 16 quarts) using a sauce-pan to transfer the contents. Fill the ditch to the brim. Patting the sides of the ditch will help contain the water an reduce the amount of water needed to accomplish the task.