Today will be spent watching Quicksilver, digging potatoes, picking tomatoes and minor carpentry.
There is a possibility of frost early Sunday due to cold ambient and low windspeed. Low-lying areas that experience breaks in the cloud-cover in the early morning are most at-risk. Cold air flows downhill and forms "puddles" when there is no wind to mix it with upper-level air that is not chilled by the radiant cooling of surfaces.
Trump's Tariffs are choking the construction of skyscrapers due to an unexpected shortage: The specialty alloy used to make heavy lifting equipment.
Imported primarily from China, this alloy was first devised by Tamerlane, leader of one of the Mongol hordes that swept Asia from east-to-west, laying siege to cities and disseminating technology and DNA during the early-mid Misanthropocene era.
Obviously enough, this specialty alloy is called "Cranium". Uyghurs everywhere breath a sigh of relief!
I was not very motivated today.
We watched Quicksilver today. She was very low-energy. She sat in my lap and watched cartoons and Shaun the Sheep for the first hour-and-a-half that she was here.
I lose motivation if I stop moving.
Rocks
I did get one item crossed off the Honey-Do list.
Over the decades that we have lived here the road-bed has been dropping as rain kept eroding the surface of the road and the highway department kept grading the gullies out of it. That resulted in our driveway ramping down to the road ever-more-steeply which in turn has exposed rocks.
Mrs ERJ first mentioned the growing rocks about five years ago.
This year she gently reminded me that they annoyed her and that the oil-pan of her minivan is much closer to the ground than the oil-pan of my truck.
This week she observed that the rocks resulted in the coffee spilling out of my cup if I didn't first slurp a couple of inches out of them.
Getting started can be difficult
When you look at a rock sticking out of the ground, there is no way for a flat-lander like me to know how big it is. I was intimidated by the possibility of making the driveway unusable while I attempted to dig out the rocks.
Today was a good day to find out just how big the rocks were. We had rain last night so the gravel was softer than when it is dry.
I started digging.
Obligatory pictures of my trophies
 |
| Standard-sized pick for size reference. You can tell by the area that is still damp how much of the rock had been in the ground. |
 |
| This is the first rock I dug up. If you click on the image to embiggen it, it becomes clear which part of the rock was exposed. |
 |
| According to the Raindrop website, Eaton County got between 0.6" and 1.2" of rain last night. |
I am off-the-hook for carrying trees until September 11. That will probably be the last time I water as I let the trees harden-off. I may even pinch-out the growing tips because they act as carbohydrate sinks. Removing them will make more carbs available for the roots and trunk to harden-off.
Sick kids
School started back up a week or two ago, depending on which school district you look at. All of the Petri dishes were dumped in a blender and then sent back home. They mix with their parents and the parents take the plague to work and mingle with their coworkers.
Kubota is sick. Handsome Hombre is sick. Southern Belle is sick. Quicksilver is sick.
Seasonal flu vaccine
I skipped the seasonal flu vaccine last year because research since the mid 20-teens shows that multiple vaccinations for the same strain reduces our body's immune response to variations to the flu as it hyper-focuses on the exact strain that was in the shot.
And, as luck would have it, the CDC/WHO typically recommends the same strains for vaccinations for three years in a row.
It turns out that two of the three strains in the "Mammalian Cell Culture" vaccines are different strains than the "Egg Culture" strains.
2025/26 Cell Culture
2025/26 Egg Culture
I know that many of my readers don't get seasonal flu vaccinations for various reasons, but if you are one of the ones who does, alternating "Egg-based" and "Cell-based" vaccines will give you a wider range of coverage and reduce the risk of "blunted hemagglutinin antibody response".
Antibody levels and speed-of-response
I think it is worth pointing out that the antibody level in our blood is only part of what needs to be considered when thinking about resistance to disease. Our lymph nodes retain cells that produced disease-specific antibodies. The cells might be dormant but they are there, waiting to be reactivated. When our bodies are challenged again, they spring into action much like industries that were idled during the Great Depression sprang into production during WWII.
The size of our exposure is a critical factor. Did somebody sneeze in our face or did we walk 40 yards downwind of that sneeze? Lower exposures are a signal to our lymph nodes to reactivate those dormant cells and our body can stay ahead of the disease pressure. The very highest exposures overwhelm the reactivation process and that is when having a high level of specific antibodies is important.
 |
| The 8' step ladder with about 15' of plastic drain-tile tied to one upright continues to be an awesome productivity aid. Climbing up-and-down the ladder is non-value added work. I have the top of the drain-tile sticking about 18" above the top of the ladder. |
 |
| The black bucket is a 7 gallon nursery planter. Two "sets" of the ladder filled the bucket to the level you see. The third "set" produced the scatter of apples on that you see on the ground. |
 |
| Somebody wanted to give me some fertilizer. I gratefully accepted 175 pounds of this and 220 pounds of high-nitrogen fertilizer. At current prices the water-soluble "plug" fertilizer costs about $250 and 220 pounds of high nitrogen fertilizer would run about $150. |
 |
| The gentleman is moving to Florida. He also has a bunch of metal halide lighting to give away if anybody is interested. Obviously, it has been a while since he grew whatever he had been growing. |
Sanitizing seed-nuts
Unfortunately, acorns and chestnuts are likely to be harboring various kinds of weevils. The protocol for sanitizing the nuts is to soak them in 120 degree F water for 20 or 30 minutes.
The literature says that 20 minutes only kills 85% of the weevils, so I would go with the 30 minutes.
 |
| Quite the bargain at approximately $40 |
It occurred to me that a sous vide cooker would be the cat's meow for taking care of business.
It is my belief that Jesus frequently used recent local events as the springboard for many of his parables. It is a very reliable "hook" to engage listeners.
Perhaps the return of a shamed son had everybody's tongues wagging and that Jesus tweaked that event into the parable of the Prodigal Son to illustrate the benevolence of our heavenly Father. Perhaps there was a recent flash-flood in a local wadi that had washed indigent housing off of sandbars and that became the parable of building on rock.
Sometimes the parables may have been prompted by something as trivial as a songbird nesting in a tall weed growing beside a field or road.
In many cases, those moral stories were likely to have had their origins in concrete events that the listeners were aware of and triggered visceral reactions within them.
The workers in the vineyard
One parable that seems contrary-to-logic is the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt 20:1-16)
In the story, the owner of the vineyard goes to the village square and hires day-laborers to harvest his fruit. Then he goes again at lunch and hires more. Then again in mid-afternoon. At the end of the day he pays them all the same wages
What kind of situation would make that seem logical to the listeners?
Osmosis
Osmosis is a phenomena where water will permeate through a membrane and dilute the side with the more concentrated solution.
Suppose you had a membrane with pure water on one side and a solution with 25% sugar and 75% water on the other. The volume of the sugar-water will increase as water molecules migrate from the pure-water side to the sugar-water side.
That is why ripe cherries, tomatoes and grapes split after a rain. Once split, the crop is spoiled.
A storm is coming
It is almost a certainty that the people listening to Jesus knew of somebody who had lost their entire crop of grapes due to an untimely rainstorm.
If the owner of the vineyard had a sense that the weather was shifting, he would hire every day-laborer available. Since day-laborers might finish up a job mid-day a few might trickle back to the hiring place throughout the day.
Now suppose that the weather becomes increasingly threatening as the day progresses. The original laborers have been cutting the bunches of grapes and filling baskets which are scattered about the vineyard. Those grapes are just as vulnerable to splitting as the ones hanging on the vines. The owner tells the laborers to keep cutting bunches as he goes back to the village to get more laborers to carry the baskets to the pressing room.
Still, the thunderheads tower higher.
The owner goes back to the village to get even more workers, perhaps to run the presses and fill the fermentation vessels.
At the end of the day, the absence of any of the workers would have resulted in the loss of the crop. They would have rotted on the vine if they had not been picked. They would have rotted in the baskets within the vineyard if they had not been carried to the pressing house. They would have rotted in the pressing house if they had not immediately been pressed. In that sense, every worker was worth the same wages.
Harvest equals anxiety
Crops are usually increasingly vulnerable to losses as they approach harvest. Bugs, animals, humans, war, weather...they can all destroy next year's larder in a short period of time with weather like hail or heavy downpours being able to destroy ripe grapes in a matter of minutes.
Yes, I feel anxiety during harvest season. There are two ways to respond to anxiety: Double your efforts or go comatose. Of the two, increased effort is the more functional response.
If I were a betting man, I would bet that a local grape-grower had recently lost a bumper crop of grapes due to an untimely rainstorm or hailstorm a few weeks before Jesus shared the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard.
And one of the unspoken undercurrents would be unknowable of sudden storms and other catastrophes. No man knows the day nor hour.
*Potatoes are the exception.
 |
| 1 pound chubs of ground beef at Walmart. 73% lean, 27% fat. |
Cull apple trees
 |
| Picture taken while mowing the grass. You can see the white "C" I sprayed with cheap, white primer. Also note that there are VERY few apples on these trees. |
 |
| This is "Empire". It is a cross of McIntosh and Red Delicious. I don't know how visible the dark red apples are, but there is a good number of them. Also note how healthy the leaves look. |
 |
| The tall, gangly tree in the foreground is "Melrose". It is a Jonathan X Red Delicious cross. Note the fruit load. |
Empire and Melrose trees are paying their rent. They are earning the right to live in their spots.
The Ozark Gold and Jerseymac, not so much.
It was a real treat to have Mrs ERJ accompany me while I worked in the Upper Orchard yesterday. Not only is she excellent company and industrious, she is also pretty!
She moved the dripper buckets while I carried the water buckets. I believe that she cut my best time in half. While moving dripper buckets isn't heavy work, it takes time to dump any excess water on the target tree, find the next baby tree and then to position the bucket so it is secure and the holes are pointed in the right direction.
After watering the new apple trees in the Upper Orchard and the pears on the Hill Orchard, we found three spots where first year pears had died and marked them with stakes.
Then we marked six trees in the Upper Orchard for removal. Now that they are fruiting we can start assessing which are worth keeping. According to the scanty records available, it looks like we might have marked two Ozark Gold, two Jerseymac, one Liberty and one unknown pear variety. The Liberty tree was dying and may have been infected with Carpenter Ants which are recognizable by the fact that they whistle and carry a pencil behind their right ear. The Ozark Gold fruit is insipid and the Jerseymac season-of-ripening competes with peaches and pears...and the Jerseymac quality pales in comparison to a well-ripened, mid-season peach.
I started mowing but broke a belt five minutes later. Mrs ERJ and I made the strategic decision to end the mission and to pick up a replacement belt on the way home. We made it to the farm-store 40 minutes before they closed and they had one 1/2"-by-68" belt in stock.
Odds-and-ends
.jpeg) |
| I completed the bottom of the rabbit jail and delivered it to Southern Belle. |
 |
| I was gifted some free lumber. |
.jpeg) |
| I will see if a week of togetherness will improve the situation. I am not in a hurry to use this wood. |
Genocide combines the Greek "Genos" for race and the Latin "...cide" for killing. The original meaning was very clearly restricted to the extinction of "family lines" or genetics by killing all members of that race or unique combination of genes. Examples include the Ottoman (Turkish) genocide of Armenians in the 19-teens, the Soviet genocide of Ukrainian peasants in the 1930, the Nazi genocide of Jews and Gypsies in the 1940.
Those who throw around terms like "Trans Genocide" are brazenly fanning the fires of outrage and violence. The term is an Orwellian twisting of the language. There is no "genetic" component to "trans". It is nonsensical to combine the terms.
Transgender people are "born" when they kill their old gender (as in "Don't dead-name me") and they are born under the scalpel. Their fear is that health insurance companies will not be forced to pay for the transexual's ongoing mental healthcare, hormone treatments and cosmetic procedures. Because without that ongoing support, they partially revert back to their birth gender. In their warped world-view, that is "killing them".
 |
| Perfect weather for working outside |
The jail will be divided into three parts that can be separated to facilitate moving and cleaning.
Apples
 |
| This is "Liberty" grafted on MARK, an obsolete apple rootstock of the M26 size class. |
 |
| A branch |
 |
| What I picked while standing on the ground. |
Tomatoes
 |
| A row of Stupice tomatoes. 95% of our canned tomatoes are Stupice because they ripen early and they keep pumping out tomatoes. The losses due to snails and other wildlife were much lower on Stupice than on the Ace 55. |
.jpeg) |
| The row of Ace 55. Still producing. I will plant two plants of it next year. That will be enough to keep us in BLT sandwiches with a few extra to give away. |
Coffee-break is over
Time to go back to work.
I am not going to encourage anybody to break the law. And, at this time, Cannabis production/possession is still a Federal crime in the United States.
That said, there are "windows" where cannabis can be legally grown for fiber or CBD oil. There are also states, like Michigan, where cannabis has been decriminalized and state law allows individuals to grow a limited number of plants for personal use*. Those states which have decriminalized cannabis probably do not have any language that would prevent a person from growing that same limited number of plants for fiber or seeds.
If the Feds were to decriminalize "weed", this is how you might approach the issue.
Latitude
Cannabis plants are a bit like onions, latitude matters. Some seed-lines do well in the tropics. Some seed-lines might do well between latitudes 30th (Austin, Texas) and 40th (Indianapolis). Other seed-lines might do well north of the 40th parallel. Daylength is a clock that triggers many important biological processes like the binding of fibers (lignification) within the stem and daylength varies by latitude.
Scholar.google.com is a good resource for field-trials and yield information. For example, if you were to search "cannabis fiber yield data" you might learn that Kompolti was the top cultivar for fiber but worst for seed production in Alberta, Canada field trials. or you might learn that Ferimon performed well in Quebec. Han-NE seems to perform well through a wide range of latitudes but it is a "bushy" plant and the hank of fiber is more of wad-like than the long, non-tapering strips from Ferimon.
Pollination
Most fiber cultivars are sold as "non-feminized" seed. Some cultivars have both male and female flower and are self pollinating. If you grow any quantity of either, they will put pollen in the air that will cause THC or CBD producing plants to set seed and stop flowering. The people growing those plants will be very, very angry.
Timing harvest
The fiber is strongest and easiest to extract when the male plants first start to pollinate. That forces you into a decision: Are you growing for seeds/oil or are you growing for fiber? Additionally, planting to maximize fiber production involves planting the seeds much more closely together while seed production has much lower seeding rates per acre.
Growing fiber plants "legally"
There is a lot of red-tape involved and, at least in Michigan, you must grow at least an acre and you can expect to be visited by state officials at least twice during the growing season.
*In Michigan it is legal to grow up to 12 plants of cannabis for personal use. My wife could grow an additional 12. The plants must be enclosed and the entrance must be locked. The plants must not be visible from the road or adjacent driveways. I was told by a semi-reliable source that you can rent out part of your enclosure to other adult, Michigan residents who wish to grow cannabis but it behooves you to have paperwork clearly identifying the extra plants as somebody else's property. My semi-reliable source suggested that "share-cropping" was a common method of compensation via the minor quantities gift provisions of the Michigan cannabis laws.
Personally, it would be such a pain in the behind that it would not be worth my time, and the fact that it is still a Federal crime.
 |
| Twenty-three minutes including walking out to and back from the orchard. |
 |
| Calibrating my expectations. It takes a little more than 20 pounds of apples to make a 7-quart canner load of applesauce. One laundry basket full to the handle-holes = two, 7 quart canner loads. |
 |
| I still jump when one of these cold, clammy tree frogs wraps around my thumb. |
A decent way to beat the yellowjackets is to pick early in the morning while it is still cool and dewy. It is currently 55F outside. However, that slows down the reaction times of the tree frogs and they will wrap around a finger if you dislodge one.
Bonus picture
 |
| Pear tree in the foreground-right. Grape trellis in the midfield. Apple tree in the background. |
As I hammer the Eaton Rapids back into shape, it occurred to me that I need to get rid of the rows of grape vines between the fruit trees. The vines make it hard to use automation. They make it hard to maintain the orchard floor.
I liked the idea of grape vines more than the actual fact. I liked growing them but don't have time to use the fruit to make wine. Additionally, we are not big users of sweet products like jams and jellies. I no longer have time for the additional demands on my time.
So...they gotta go. I will probably not remove the trellis for a while. Maybe somebody will come along who will be all excited about wine grapes.
Rows
At various times in my life I have been told that "Math is racist" and "White men didn't invent anything".
The two statements contradict each other to some degree. Nearly all inventions involve the use of geometry and calculations and statistics-based testing.
The "Math is racist" screed goes to extremes. There were claims that "White men plant seeds in rows and that proves they are pathologically driven to control nature."
As a simple point of fact, planting in rows makes it easier to nurture and care for plants. Planting seeds within the row at exact intervals gives each plant the same resources to grow. Planting in rows and making fields rectangular or on a contour means more food which means fewer hungry people.
I think both statements "Math is racist" and "White men didn't invent anything" are frantic attempts to win an argument at any cost.
 |
| Picture of farm fields in Rwanda |
 |
| Picture of farm fields in Burundi |
Some people become so enraged when arguing that the don't stop and ask themselves "Is this worth arguing about? Is it worth burning down the house?"
Snip of Yellow Jacket attack video
Bonus Bible quote:
"...aspire to live a tranquil life, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your [own] hands, as we instructed you, that you may conduct yourselves properly toward outsiders and not depend on anyone." 1 Thessalonians 4:11,12
Most of today was spent in the Eaton Rapids orchard belatedly dealing with weeds. I am between 1/4 and 1/3 done with getting it whipped back into shape.
 |
| One of the sub-tasks was to rip vines out of trees. |
 |
| I actually used a scythe to drop the weeds. I will let them dry for a few days and then I will shred them with the push mower. |
God willing, I will be picking apples tomorrow
The Liberty apples are dropping like crazy. Time to pick them and it isn't even September. 2600GDD b50 since January 1.
Turnips
 |
| A large patch of Wood Sorrel (Oxalis species) where a thicket of Multiflora Rose had been removed. Old-timers will tell you that Wood and Sheep Sorrel grow best where the soil is acid (low pH). |
 |
| A close-up of the plant (not my photo). As kids, we called these plants "Shamrocks". |
I have very, very little clover growing on the bottom half of the Hill Orchard but it composes about 10% of the sward in the top quarter is White Clover.
The bottom half is dominated by Crabgrass and Redtop grass. Both of those species indicate low soil fertility, in particular a shortage of nitrogen.
If I manage the soil fertility to grow White Clover, better species of grass will follow. The greater annual biomass will feed the worms and the deeper roots will pump organic matter deep into the soil profile as they grow and slough-off feeder roots through the growth and mowing cycles.
Mowing
I "found" a yellowjacket nest while mowing. By some miracle, I didn't get stung even though I mowed right over the top of the nest with the 22 hp garden tractor. Discretion is the better part of valor. I beat a hasty retreat.
I didn't stop mowing. I moved over a couple of rows. And yes, one of the yellowjackets whacked me on my ankle while I was mowing directly across from their nest and two rows over. Maybe there is another nest. Maybe it was a yellowjacket from the nest I disturbed.
I decided that I was done mowing and I made a trip to town to buy a sprayer, insecticide and surfactant. I hosed the nest from 12 feet away.
Planning for 2026
I am leaning toward planting Galarina/MM111 into the "holes" in the Upper Orchard and some spots in the Hill Orchard. At this point, I have four trees identified for culling and two holes already earmarked for a peach and a plum tree in the Upper Orchard.
Galarina ripens about ten days after Liberty and Crimson Crisp. The fruit hangs on the tree very well even after it is ripe, something that cannot be said about Liberty.
Unlike Gala, one of Galarina's parents, Galarina retains crispness and aroma well in storage. The tree is also more disease resistant than Gala and it withstands winter cold better. The downside of Galarina is that the apple run small-to-medium in size.
MM111 rootstock produces a large, deeply-rooted, drought resistant tree that is not particularly precocious. It may be just the ticket for the lower part of the Hill Orchard where the soil is poor and end-trees of rows that get wind-whipped.
.png) |
| A fifteen minute video about her |
On a scale of 1-to-10 where 1 is the difficulty of surviving in the Garden of Eden and 10 is the north-slope of the Brooks Range, Miss Lykova survived into her old age with almost no outside technology in an environment that is a solid 9 for difficulty.
Her family moved to the remote location in 1936 to escape the repressive, godless, Soviet regime. The family was discovered by geologists in 1978. Exposed to diseases that they had no antibodies for, several of the family members died shortly afterward.
She grows her own food and saves her own seeds. She grows her own fiber (hemp) that she uses to make fishnets*, rope and weaves it into a burlap that she uses for rough outer clothing. She presses hemp seeds for oil. She harvests wild game and milks goats.
Outside inputs include a few metal buckets, an ax and some soft clothing.
What does she do with her spare time? She praises God.
"Survival" doesn't always look like our preconceptions. You don't have to look like Rambo and have three CONEX containers filled with "gear".
*She now uses a monofilament net and her target catch is Grayling.
Surface area
The farm pond as first excavated had a surface area of about 11,000 square-feet or 1/4 acre.
The farm pond specified in the contract was supposed to have a surface area of 22,000 square-feet or 1/2 acre or TWICE as large in area as what was delivered.
Weed-free area
 |
| Curlyleaf Pondweed (Potamogeton crispus) |
As a rule-of-thumb, submerged vegetation does not break the surface when the bottom is 6' or more below the surface of the water.
 |
| It is not fun to swim when seaweed wraps around your legs. |
The area of the pond as first excavated where the bottom was 6' or more below the surface was essentially zero. For most pond owners, that means that the pond as first excavated would have no usable area after June 15 (in Michigan) for boating, swimming or fishing. It would also be subject to winter die-off due to excessive vegetation dying and decaying which would gobble up all of the oxygen dissolved in the water.
The area of the pond specified in the contract would have approximately 10,000 square-feet where the bottom was 6' or more below the surface. The "weeds" would only extend from the shoreline to 18' out. In fact, the area of usable pond that would be deeper than 6' would be almost as large as the entire pond as-built.
Volume of pond
The volume of the pond is a first-order approximation of the amount of fill that had to be moved and is directly related to the contractor's cost to dig the pond.
The pond as first excavated displaced about 940 cubic-yards.
The pond as specified in the contract would have displaced about 3200 cubic-yards.
In other words, the contractor's cost to dig and move the fill was understated by a factor of three relative to what an "honest" quote would have been based on.
The comparisons underestimate the costs because more fill that is removed must be carted farther away from the nominal water's edge.
Summary:
Yeah, my buddy had every right to go after them. What he paid for would have been an asset. What the contractor delivered was a liability.
I ran into an old friend and co-worker outside of a store in Charlotte the other day.
He is at a stage in his life where it will be a real challenge to spend all of the money he and his wife saved for retirement. One of the things they did this year was to have a farm pond dug on their property. The good news is that they had a very specific contract written. The bad news is that the firm that was the counterparty did not come close to meeting the specifications that were in the contract:
Due to the amount of rain we had this spring and summer, the pond quickly filled to the overflow outlet.
My friend is a numbers guy and in his professional life he dealt with suppliers who tried to shave the deliverables. It was not in his nature to accept that the pond met the specs.
He went out and measured the depth of the pond and the very deepest spot he could find was about 7'6" deep. He purchased a laser measuring tool and calibrated it at the high school football field. The pond measured 150' by 75' instead of 220' by 110'. He measured the slope of the side of the pond and the distance of the water's edge to the spoils pile. The "Best practice" slope is 3 feet of run for 1 foot of drop. He measured 8-to-1. I forget what the "Best practice" for the spoils pile was but it was already washing back into the basin.
My friend called his lawyer to let him know there was a "situation" and then he called the firm.
The firm's representative showed up and pooh-poohed my friend's allegations. "We dug nearly a hundred ponds like this and you are the first customer to complain."
"I don't care about your other customers. This is the contract you signed and you are in breech of the contract." my friend informed him.
And then he proceeded to rub the representative's nose in every gory detail. He made the representative wrap tape around a kayak paddle at 1' increments and then paddled around the pond with him and let the rep look for the deepest spot. The deepest the rep could find was 6'-6".
The rep waved his hands and said it was because fill had washed back into the excavation. "That may be so, but it does not let you off the hook" my friend hammered him with. My friend pulled out the contract and made him read the paragraphs about distances, spoil piles and stabilizing erosion IN THE CONTRACT.
Then my friend used wood construction shims, a cinder block and a 48" bubble level to determine the amount of slope by measuring the distance from each end to the ground. "Three-to-one is "Best practice" and that means the distances should be different by 16 inches" my friend informed him. My friend let the rep lug the cinder block around to find any place where the slope was correct. Nearly all of the measurements were between 5" and 6". The rep could not find any place where it measured more than 8".
Then my friend had the rep use the laser measure to shoot distances across the pond with my friend standing on one bank and the rep standing on the other.
The firm came back FOUR TIMES before they threw in the towel. They did not have the equipment required to deliver a pond that conformed to the specifications that were in the contract they signed. What that means, of course, is that the other hundred they had already dug could not possibly be to specification.
They made a cash settlement rather than go to court. My friend is using the settlement to hire a guy with a drag-line and a bulldozer to push the spoils bank to the Best-practice distance.
"Read the lowest line that you can make out clearly" the young woman in the colorful, silk blouse directed me.
"L-A-M-B E-R-T I-N-D-U T-R-I-E S-C-O-M" I read off.
I had taken advantage of her short absence to read the equipment plate on the bottom of the monitor. It read Lambertindustries.com in 10 point font.
One warm sunny day in March does not make it summer.
With that in mind, I am not holding my breath after getting a good night's sleep.
I had been bothered with spasms in muscles in my left calf. I could ignore the pain during the day but it was interfering with falling asleep.
Yesterday I was working in the Eaton Rapids orchard my legs were brushed with nettles.
Last night while laying in bed I felt the familiar tingle of the nettles but no muscle spasms, no muscle pain. It may have been a quirk of small-numbers or the placebo effect in action but the solid night of sleep was appreciated. There is anecdotal evidence that Native-Americans used nettles to offset delayed onset muscle soreness.
Weird things sometimes happen in our body. If I recall correctly, bee stings are sometimes used to reduce the pain and swelling of arthritis in hands. Maybe the nettle-stings are similar.
I will add that to my bag-of-tricks.
As always, I write to provide entertainment. I am not a doctor. If you try nettles for therapeutic reasons then you are on your own.
"Write something every day" they told me.
Two young guys crossing an item off their bucket list. I propose you stop at the 23:30 mark. After that there is wind, rain and words that should have been BLEEPED out.
For those of you who come from crowded places, it may be disorienting to know that there are rivers where you can boat for 45 miles and not see more than five or ten buildings from the water.
Good walleye and Brown Trout and Smallmouth fishing. Above the dam there is good Northern Pike action and at the mouth of the river and at the base of the dam there are Channel and Flathead Catfish. Much of the river is sandy-bottomed and the fish hang out in the snags, brush and stumps that washed into the river.
I want to push back on the chain-of-logic that contends
IQ is predetermined at birth and does not change
It is my personal belief that the human brain is very plastic. It rewires to optimize itself for changing environments.
A quick "proof": If I read off or showed 3, seven-digit numbers to a Boomer and a Gen Z, I am confident that the Boomer will almost always be able to repeat back the numbers five minutes later with greater fidelity than the Gen Z person.
The reason is that Boomers remembered the land-line numbers of their friends and family. I can still tell you the land-line number of my grandparents and the home number where I grew up. Phone numbers, back in the day, were seven digits long. Our brains rewired to optimize the retrieval of seven-digit strings of numbers.
Second piece of evidence: There as a very large, longitudinal health study in Britain. One of the pieces of data they tracked was I.Q.
A group of people who shared one attribute scored significantly higher than the group of people who did NOT share that attribute. More interesting, the gap in test scores steadily increased over the years. It did not stay constant.
The attribute? The group that scored higher on the IQ tests were readers. Educators tell us that the single best predictor of whether a child will be a reader is if the family demonstrates the culture of readers. There are books and magazines in the home. The parents read. The parents read to the children.
How many of you who insist that IQ is entirely genetic would actually expect Ben Carson's mother to score within 5 IQ points as Ben? His mother, Sonya Carson, was functionally illiterate.
Third piece of evidence: Trauma rewires brains.
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is just "twitchy feelings". It has been widely recognized since the the year 2000 that "Neuroimaglng studies in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have revealed changes in brain structure and function..."
People who are in combat are focused on second-to-second survival and "appropriately discounting the long term costs of behaviors" is a distraction that can get you killed. Ergo, many soldiers take up smoking while down-range.
Fourth piece of evidence: Drugs change brains
Smoking weed kills one's give-a-golly. Since the mid-twenty-teens the literature is full of peer reviewed studies with conclusions like "...regular cannabis use is associated with gray matter volume reduction in the medial temporal cortex, temporal pole, parahippcampal gyrus, insula and orbitofrontal cortex..."
Those areas are critical for longterm memory and processing emotions.
Harder drugs kill every desire that gets in the way of the next fix.
Fifth piece of evidence: Elites from the Caribbean and Africa
Mrs ERJ's uncle was a chaplain at Southern University. SU is a traditionally-Black University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
According to him, the US born students HATED the students from the Caribbean and Africa who had been schooled using the traditional, legacy UK system.
The professors graded on a curve. The Caribbean and African students invariably earned 100% on their tests. They mastered all of the assigned material. A single student from either of those place was enough to "spike" the curve and turn it into straight-scale.
The irony is that most of the Caribbean and African students were much darker than the US born students.
The "Race" to "IQ" link is highly confounded
The "Black Culture" that is enabled by WOKE Progressives sabotages most Black students on every count mentioned above.
Demographically, Blacks are younger than white people.
Pro-union, WOKE cities insist that education is the province of the education industry and unionized teachers.
Culturally, Black people are exposed to more random, capricious violence and WOKE jurisdictions do nothing to suppress that violence.
Culturally, Black people are more likely to be heavy users of cannabis in their adolescence and as young adults than every other ethnic group other than Native American. That is the period when brains are developing.
WOKE culture enables mediocre performance from Black people. It is the soft racism of low expectations.
ERGO, it is nearly impossible to untangle cultural and genetic factors.
A high IQ is like a powerful motor
A high IQ is like a powerful motor. But to be a useful truck or a fast race car, that engine needs appropriate tires and a transmission and a suspension and operator controls to be useful. It needs a road. It needs an operator to work the steering wheel, brakes and throttle.
People WANT IQ to mean more than it does. Just because you desperately want something to be true does not make it so.
I don't expect this post to change anybody's mind. I just want to go on-record for where I stand on the topic.
 |
| This $330k property's drain assessment was $20k. The GIS Hydrology viewer lists the "area" as about 6000 square-feet. |
The property owners on the east side of Delta Township are losing their minds over the size of the assessment to upgrade the water drain that serves their area.
The assessment is (supposedly) based on the square-feet of "impermeable" surface on their property. That is, the square-feet of roof + square-feet of pavement + square-feet of swimming pool and other improvements.
 |
| Example of how the drain zigs-and-zags. |
The drain runs about 2 miles from south-to-north (direction of water flow) but it swerves and snakes so its linear length is significantly longer. It was built and added onto as subdivisions were added and the area developed. Consequently, the oldest and now most congested areas are served with 14" and 16" drains (circa 1900-ish) while newer areas farther from the river are served with 48" drains. Needless to say, the drain backs up when there is a heavy rain.
The cost of the project and the associated assessments were announced about two months ago. The cost is about $60 million which is exacerbated by the fact that most of those drains are now beneath paved roads.
The 1900 property owners who are being charged for the work are outraged. There is no appeal process for the assessments. The process for calculating impermeable surface is opaque and seems to have been done with a ouija board.
 |
| 15 acres, almost entirely paved. Listed as 110k square-feet in the GIS Hydrology viewer. My 10 acres with 4000 square-feet of buildings and 1000 square-feet of gravel driveway is listed as having 70k square-feet. |
Once again, I am happy that I don't live in the city.
Property owners in very liberal voting Delta Township are outraged when told to "pay their fair share". It has even generated disputes about who should pay for the square-footage of the sidewalks. The property owners? They didn't install them. The county? While they "own" some of the roads they didn't install the sidewalks. Delta Township? Most of the sidewalks were installed by Delta Township but they don't have budget to pay the assessment. On the other hand, why should residents of Bellevue Township pay for sidewalks in Delta Township which is what would happen if the assessment was assigned to the county?
While it may seem to be petty, the square-footage of the sidewalks adds up to a substantial amount of square-feet of impermeable surface. And if you live on a corner lot, could almost double your assessment.
