Well, this is a fine kettle of fish!

What kinds of work can old people do?

Pension funds, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid going broke is a foregone conclusion. So is inflation withering of purchasing power of the assets you might have saved. Furthermore, taxes will rise as governments become desperate to feed the ravening beast.

It seems inevitable that I will have to work to put bread on the table at some point in the next 15 years. In 15 years I will be 81 years-old. 

What kinds of work can a 65 year-old do? What about 70 year-olds? 80 year-olds?

Work vs Job

Notice I used the word "Work".

"Job" implies some degree of permanence. It is an artifact of the Industrial Revolution and the transition of the economy to consumer debt. Nobody was going to loan you enough money to buy a car if you didn't have a "job", that is, a guarantee of future income.

In the United States, the majority of the economy transitioned from "work based" to "job based" sometime in the 1920s and 1930s. Before that, the only people with "jobs" worked for the railroad or in steel mills or the new automobile plants.

Limitations of being older

• Vision is often an issue.
• Reaction times get slower
• Physical strength and stamina are limited
• Hearing is often less acute

Most of us will not be capable of doing 40-hours-a-week of concrete work in our seventies. Long-haul, OTR, transcontinental trucking is also not in the cards nor is delivering 50 pound bags of dog-food to apartment blocks.

Going door-to-door selling garden produce is a possibility. Mrs ERJ does that now when she gives away her surplus of cherry tomatoes and sweet peppers.

My dad was canning tomatoes into his mid-80s and mowing grass with a garden tractor until he was 90.

Watching young kids...say up to 5th grade, is an option.

Repairing clothing is an option if you have bright light, magnifying glasses and (perhaps) easy to thread needles.

Being a waiter, bus-boy or bartender for a few hours (lunch rush) is a possibility although wet floors are not our friend. 

If you had to go back to work as a 75, 80 or 85 year-old, what would you do? 

Hand Grenades, Canaries and Christmas Carols

Today I introduced Quicksilver to the joys of The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons.

Growing up and watching these cartoons, I somehow came to the conclusion that hand-grenades were a regular item of commerce and were a commodity that would be easy to obtain as an adult. Alas, if only it were so.

Most of the segments we watched were from the 1960-to-1964 time-frame.

In 1960 there were still cats and dogs alive that had been born while WWII was raging. Everybody who was over the age of six and not in a coma knew what a "Stuka" was, for instance.

1960 was seven years after the Korean Conflict went from HOT to SIMMER.

In retrospect, there were probably a lot of "off-books" devices floating around in 1960. If you were a trustworthy sort of fellow and were known to be able to keep your mouth shut, you could probably shoot grease-guns and toss pineapples and potato-mashers and play with det-cord, perf-caps and Serious Putty.

Canaries in Coal Mines

I know that I have at least one reader who is a young lad of less then fifty so please humor me if I tell you things that you already know.

Coal miners were known to take canaries into coal mines because the small birds were exquisitely sensitive to toxic and explosive gasses. A miner might attribute a headache to the home-brew he drank the night before, but if the canary went Tango-Uniform, they all hauled anatomy out of the mine and did not go back into it until after it was thoroughly ventilated.

In real-life (whatever that is) there is a dramatic tension between wanting systems that perform without providing irritating or distracting feedback .AND. the need to know when a system approaching massive failure.

Idiot lights are one solution to the problem. In biological systems like streams, orchards and fields we use indicator species.

In a stream there is a hierarchy of species that will tell you much about water quality. Grayling are the most demanding of oxygen and water quality. When they die off you know that the system is slipping.

In an approximate and descending order you might have Brook Trout, Rainbow Trout, Brown Trout, Walleye, Smallmouth Bass, Northern Pike, Channel Catfish, Suckers, Common Carp, Gar, Bowfin, African Walking Catfish.

In the orchard, apple trees are very sensitive to the toxins produced by Black Walnuts. Apple trees are expensive at $20-to-$60 a tree. A rational person would find a less expensive, highly-sensitive plant (i.e. Canary in the Coal Mine) if he were to trench around the orchard and wanted some assurance that all of the roots had been cut or if he wanted to visualize the leaching and decay of the toxic compounds.

Stated another way, why would I risk killing a $20 tree when I can test the soil with a tomato or marigold plant that cost me a nickel and a delay of a year?

Christmas Carols

 I am 60% certain this is in Spanish

Handsome Hombre picked up Quicksilver this afternoon.

Quicksilver is of an age where language is absorbed with lightning speed. It does not seem like that because she hasn't figured out how to make all of the consonant sounds. You need a keen ear to decode when she asks "Please close the door" for instance. But all of the signs are there that it is all going into memory.

I asked HH what some of his favorite Christmas Carols are. HH grew up in a very religious family in a country where everybody speaks Spanish. Of COURSE they sang Christmas Carols.

I shared that this is an outstanding time to teach those songs to his daughter. Looking at his face, it was clear that the idea had never crossed his mind.

"Gimme a list. We can listen to Christmas Carols sung in Spanish just as easily as we can watch Roadrunner cartoons." Melody, meter and rhyme are all mechanisms that help our brains retain information. Song and verse are how information was passed down before the written word. It is hardwired into our brains. Not exploiting what God put there is to be a wastrel of the basest sort.

Resilience vs. Efficiency: Grains

 

 20 minute run-time

This video is interesting because it explores the tension between "Resilience" and "Efficiency".

Before you get super-excited...the narration (perhaps AI generated) takes liberties with technical concepts like "hybrids" and "clones". So take everything else in this video with a grain of salt.

Humans are in a race with fungi, bacteria, virus and chaos. For a while the winds and tides were with us and we have thrived. Pendulums swing. Things change. Even if the earth was filled with oil there is a finite amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. At some point we will have spent our way back into a pay-as-we-go thermodynamic relationship.

Life is "interesting" in the corners

One "hack" in optimization software is to examine the values in the vertices (corners) of the allowable universe. Interesting genes are found on sky-islands in Arizona, cracks in sidewalks, Peru, Spitzbergen Island, Mount Tahat, Orkney Islands, Hillsdale College and Fort Dapp. 

Genetic trajectories are not anchored by regression-to-the-mean when they evolve in isolation.

While novel and useful genetic packages can be found in random individuals in the great, thundering herds of conformity, it is not economical to search for them in such places. It seems unlikely that one would find a land-race that can deal with toxic soils in the fertile fields of Indiana where it is not an issue.

Let's raise a toast to those of us who refuse to bow to the cast-pewter gods of conformity! 

Source of heirloom grain seeds 

Random thought

I look at all of the water-containment run-off swales that the EPA requires of newly paved areas. I understand the concept. Unbuffered rain run-off and snow-melt can be "acid" or thermally hot. Channeling the runoff into a containment area and then having it percolate through the ground buffers the pH and stabilizes the temperature.

A random set of containment ponds in an un-named suburb in a midwestern state.

How hard would it be to toss a couple of handfuls of viable Wild-Rice seeds into every detention pond in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, and North and South Dakota during the month of October?

Native range of the genus Zizania at the granularity of "county". Source

If the Wild Rice is happy it will establish and become repatriated and ducks (and humans) will rejoice. If not, nothing ventured-nothing gained.

Hat-tip to the tireless Lucas Machias

 

Planning notes for fertilizing the orchard(s)

Pruning trees is a good time to look them over and think through management plans for the coming growing season.

I did not fertilize most of the trees that I pruned last winter. Removing 1/2-to-2/3 of their canopies nearly always causes rampant new growth the following year. Adding fertilizer exacerbates the problem. Lush, rampant growth makes the trees susceptible to fire blight and makes the next year's pruning (which is this year's) more work.

Commercial orchards send leaf-stems (petioles in botany-speak) to laboratories for chemical analysis. They use the results to fine-tune their fertilizer applications, sometimes on a month-by-month basis.

I use more primitive methods because those lab tests are not cheap and I don't need to squeeze out every last 40 pound box of apples to make payroll.

I tweak my fertilizer plan to produce a target amount of shoot growth each growing season. I aim for a minimum of 24" of growth on dominant side-shoots while I am growing the tree to fill its allotted space and 12" of growth after they have fill their "place".

Most of the heavily pruned trees gave me 18" or so of shoot growth and will produce substantially less next year unless I add fertilizer. Those trees are now carrying a lot more vegetative and fruiting buds. More shoots means fewer nutrients per shoot. More fruit means more carbs being pumped into the fruit.

Always be suspicious of round-numbers

One rule-of-thumb for fertilizing apple orchards is to broadcast 100 pounds of Nitrogen-per-acre at the beginning of the growing season. It is hard to think of a number that is "rounder" than 100lb/acre.

One detail that gets glossed over is "Do you also fertilize the grassy aisle-ways?" 

My inclination is to NOT fertilize them. More aggressive grass growth means more competition for moisture and if you cannot irrigate it means fewer pounds of apples. 

The trees in the Upper Orchard are planted 15' between trees in the row and 25' between rows. That is low-density by modern standards but I am not running a modern orchard.

Beneath the trees, the area sprayed with herbicide varies between 6' and 10' in width. If I split the difference (i.e. 8' wide by 15' per tree) and go with the 100lb/acre that means I need to apply about 0.6 pounds of urea per tree. Key point, the fertilizer must be scattered evenly over the 120 square-feet per tree.

The more vigorous trees like the Empire on MM-106 I might use a bit less than a half-pound. 

The less vigorous trees like GoldRush will get the full 0.6 pounds because they are struggling to fill their allotted space. 

Trees that were planted last year will get a half-pound of urea over the a circle with a 10' diameter centered around them and will get extra weed control.

Newly planted trees will get hand-watered with 300PPM Nitrogen water.

Very early May is a good time to broadcast fertilizer in Michigan. In many years we go into a period of low rainfall starting in late-May through most of  June and I want the fertilizer dissolved and carried down to where the roots are BEFORE that happens. 

Weed control

Weeds compete with your trees for nutrients and moisture.

A fertilizer-plan is only half of the game just like the offensive game is only half of the football game. Weed control will be a composite of herbicides (primarily glyphosate but it may include a pre-emergent like Simizine) and mowing. Most grass that is mowed short has much shorter roots than grass that is not mowed. That is why a lawn that is "scalped" is the first lawn on the block to brown-out in the summer.

Orchard floors do not need to be groomed to city-park standards but I do have to stay on top of mowing if I intend to reap the benefits of the fertilizer I apply. 

A few more pictures from yesterday

 

The temperatures went above freezing yesterday

The rabbits were eating the branches I had trimmed from the fruit trees the last time I was in the Upper Orchard

I spread wood ashes in the Hill Orchard. Clover loves potassium and wood ashes are a good source

The snow is stressing the deer for food. They are having to dig for it. There were a few volunteer turnips growing between these trees

The sill of the shooting port is tilted slightly so water runs out. If memory serves, the slope is 0.5" in 3-1/2"

Even though the roof projects past the sill, the wind was blowing the water droplets in enough to hit it. The splatter made the thighs of my pants damp and I got chilly.

Eventually, I got smart enough to realize that if I didn't lean back in my chair that I could cover more of my thighs with my parka. Slightly later, I figured out that I could put my gloves on top of the exposed parts of my thighs and keep my hands in my pockets.

Those two changes made a significant improvement in my comfort level.

When it is cold, I do not rest my weapon on my thighs. I lose a lot of heat as that big, iron bar sucks out the heat and efficiently transfers it to the atmosphere. It is essentially an antenna that emits heat. 

A random "artsy" picture of the orchard taken near the top of the Hill Orchard and looking west.

As a side note, the number of dead mice in the small bucket trap is up to four.

The view from the office

 

I saw the four deer this afternoon.

The first was forty minutes before the end of legal-light. It was 300 yards away and running.

The second was 120 yards away and I could only see the top half of its body due to cover. It did not look like a very large deer and it didn't move very much.

The last two deer were 5 minutes before the end of legal light and they were in dense brush and near the edge of the property. I don't have written permission to track deer onto the neighbor's property.

No shots were fired.

Pruning

I know it looks like I was able to prune the tree in about 45 seconds, but the contrails were left by two separate planes. The orchard was beneath the approach for the Grand Rapids Gerald R. Ford International Airport

The "J" stenciled on the trunk of the tree is because the fruit keyed-out as (probably) Jonafree based on fruit characteristics and the records of what was planted in the orchard. 

The good news is that my expectation was to get five trees pruned and I was able to prune seven!  I have another fifteen to prune at that location and then I will start pruning the trees in Eaton Rapids.

Nick Reiner. Drugs are bad

At the time of this writing, it is generally believed the a man named Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle were tied to chairs and their throats were slit by their son, Nick Reiner.

My first thought had been that they had been killed by thugs who were trying to steal their crypto assets. That seems to be their mode of operation. Take the crypto owners hostage and torture them until they cough-up the account number and password.

I am still slightly skeptical. How does one man tie two, active healthy people to chairs against their consent? We may find out that this was a shake-down gone wrong and that Nick Reiner helped the crew gain access and then things went south.

The current reports are that Nick Reiner had problems with drugs. My assumption is that he was also mentally ill, if not before his heavy use of drugs then afterwards as he spiraled into psychosis. 

 The story is getting plastered all over the place because the male victim "made a difference". The male victim was "famous" and he was "somebody who mattered".

In the end, it will not matter as long as people can afford to kill their brains with drugs and as long as we avoid addressing to our country's systemic failures regarding mental health issues. In many ways the two issues are joined at the hip.

In the long run, it seems highly unlikely that Rob Reiner will make any difference at all. 

A bit of Scripture to wash the taint out of my mouth

For then will I remove from your midst
    the proud braggarts,
And you shall no longer exalt yourself
    on my holy mountain.
But I will leave as a remnant in your midst
    a people humble and lowly,
Who shall take refuge in the name of the LORD:
    the remnant of Israel.
They shall do no wrong
    and speak no lies;
Nor shall there be found in their mouths
    a deceitful tongue;
They shall pasture and couch their flocks
    with none to disturb them.   -From Zephaniah Chapter 3

Regarding the circle-jamboree of Data Centers and AI

---Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. I don't have any "Certificates". This blog post is offered for entertainment purposes.---

Background on AI's foundational technology (numerical methods)

In numerical methods, "integral based algorithms" are forgiving and robust while "differential methods" are rife with instabilities. Rates of change (X,t) tend to multiply measurement error. Acceleration of rate of change (X,,t) is even filthier. "Jerk", the rate of change of acceleration (X,,,t) is even filthier than acceleration.

Also from numerical methods, interpolation (estimating values that are bounded by measured data) is pretty safe while extrapolation (estimating values that are outside the cloud of measured data i.e., future predictions) get squirrelly very quickly. The farther into the future the prediction, the squirrellier the number.

This is important for two reasons. My AI expert informs me that LLM are basically "Auto-complete on steroids". They are guessing what the next word will be. At some point that runs out of gas. The other way it comes into play is that the astronomical valuations and ability to pull financing is based on speculation about how AI will fundamentally transform the economy like petroleum, semiconductors and the internet did. 

Can any of the proponents of AI offer a credible guess as to when the venture will be profitable, covering both the costs of the sunk investment and the variable cost of the energy to run them?

Frankly, I think they are barking up the wrong tree. The AI that will be profitable will be tiny chips embedded in drones (unmanned, aerial vehicles) and will parse out potential targets and communicate with other drones in its cloud. Survival on the battle field will involve keeping your IFF helmet fully charged and the antenna undamaged and transmitting.

"But you HAVE to be investing in AI because that is where the stock-prices are exploding!!!" 

I sort of am. 30% of my retirement fund (calm your beating heart...it isn't that much money) is invested in various equity index funds. Since NVIDIA, Oracle, MS and Alphabet are a substantial slice of the S&P 500, I am invested in them.

I am fine missing out on "beating the market". The exquisite agony of being "left behind" combines the two major forces in the market. It combines both Fear and Greed all in one package. It is fog-of-war and blindness-from-testosterone combined into one package and is virtually guaranteed to result in risky bets. 

Errors AI seems to be prone to

"Nothing is better than God.
Warm beer is better than nothing."
***apply transitive property***
"Warm beer is better than God." 
Words can have very different meanings depending on context. 

"You are a sight for sore eyes"
Oscar Wilde's original intention was "...a sight to cause sore eyes..." 

"You look like the first breath of spring!"
The only survivable way to tell a woman that she looks like the end of a long, hard winter.

(From an AI generated Youtube video) "Alvin York charged the trench filled with 126 German soldiers armed only with his Springfield model 1903 and his 1911 Colt handgun" 

While the "Standard" rifle for the U.S. Army was the Springfield model 1903, there were not enough in inventory to issue to the troops who were sent to Europe in 1917. Rather, they were issued the Enfield M-17 chambered in 30-06. In this case, "standard" and boots-on-ground reality were different.

Mountains of money are being sunk into "Data centers" and AI. I am humble enough to acknowledge that I may be very wrong. But I fear that the results will be more dystopian than empowering.

Snow is a storybook that we write in with our feet

We have had snow on the ground for a couple of weeks now and it is a good time to see the natural traffic patterns in our yard.

I see deer and rabbit highways.

I see where I go, at least in the winter.

That is useful information from the standpoint of planning "zones" as defined by "permaculture".

Practitioners of permaculture suggest that it is rational to place enterprises that are high-maintenance and high-output close to the paths you walk daily. For example, you might put everbearing berry bushes long the path between your kitchen door and the mailbox or the hen-house. Gathering enough berries to dress up your breakfast or lunch does not require any additional steps and consequently are more likely to get picked than if your berry patch was a 100 yards away.

Gardens and chickens both thrive with daily attention so it makes sense to put them close together from the standpoint of labor. They offer symbiotic opportunities in terms of nutrient cycling, especially if you have a station for cleaning your vegetables next to the chicken run. Toss the "seconds" over the fence and "BOOM!", recycled with no composting required.

Everybody is going to do things a little bit differently because we start with different property. Some are loath to cut down mature trees. Others are ruthless.

Rough guidelines 

Zone 0: Inside of your house: Looms, spinning wheels, work benches, kitchen, pantry, herbs on window sill. 

Zone 1: Several times-a-day to daily visits: Inside the "yard". Porches, gazebo, kitchen/salad garden, everbearing berry bushes/trees, BBQ pit, swings, arbors, sandbox, flowers, barns, dog-kennel, hen-house, driveways, garages, water spigots

There will be blurring of zones. The milk cow is staked out in the pasture every day but the pear tree on the left side of the frame might only be harvested once a year.

Zone 2: Daily visits to 3X week: Garden with crops that require less care (potatoes, sweet corn, winter squash). Orchards. Pastures grazed by milk-animals.

Zone 3: 2X a week-to-every 10 days: Pasture grazed by meat animals, some kinds of orchards, intensive coppice.

Zone 4: Every 10 days to every 2 months: Hedgerows for seasonal fruit and mushrooms, a spot for fishing.

Zone 5: Less frequently than once very 2 months: Forest crops like poles, firewood, nuts. Places to trap. Marshland hay-field.

Another flexibility involves NEED. In times of famine you will be walking the pasture of your meat animals collecting dandelions, chicory, and other greens every few days to take pressure off of your garden. You will be bird-dogging the hedgerows to beat the birds and squirrels to the edibles. When you have high needs, what was Zone 2 is promoted to Zone 1-1/2 and Zone 3 is promoted to Zone 2. 

Redecorating tip

Mrs ERJ hinted that she wanted to have one of the bedrooms repainted with Seafoam.

I did not know that there is a color called "Seafoam" but I know that now.

Most men will look at this and shrug. I look at it and think "That means that girls need 25 bottles of "blue" fingernail polish. Think of the profit potential

Any clue on how long it will take for the smell to disappear? 

Another Ukrainian Grandmother video dropped

Three of her daughters (or daughter-in-laws) and two grandsons spent the day with her. (Link)

I thought the video was spliced together over several days due to changing hat colors

But, no. I was wrong. Three different women, same day. Rewatching the video, the different colored hats was useful to see how tasks were divided up. I think the woman wearing the plum-colored hat is the take-charge, oldest sister. 

The ladder circled in red has been in every video and seems out of place. All of their other tools are stored inside or underneath eaves to keep them out of the rain. Why would they haphazardly leave this ladder in the weather where it will rapidly age and become unsafe?

Perhaps it is the only way to get to the items stored in the attic. Items like winter clothing and such.

They visited a neighbor to have oats dehulled and to collect wood-shavings.

Their neighbor's house has the same architectural feature.

Reapplying grout to the outdoor stove at the 10:30 mark.
 

The profile and spine of this knife looks a lot like a knife used to fillet fish.

 

Small details like that make me wonder if fish is a large part of their diet.

Random note: I think there must be a steady market for small luxuries like fingernail polish even when war is raging in the middle and on the other end of the country.

Family Party After-Action-Report

Yesterday was when my sister hosted the extended-family Christmas party.

Mom died two years ago and Dad died in 2019. Last two Christmases were not particularly festive as the family regrouped. 

Five siblings and our spouses attended. 

Seven of the next generation + five of their spouses attended.

Eleven "little ones" were in attendance. 

I got to hold a couple of babies and feed one a bottle.

White Elephant gifts were exchanged by random-lot and then the gift stealing followed.

The older geezers talked about our new knees, hips and issues with vision and spines. We also talked about the exceptional mobility of athletes in college sports and how that impacted recruiting, talent retention and program success/failures. In many ways it mirrors the issues on the productive side of the economy.

The oldest man sported hearing-aids and he turned them off when it got loud. Then he smiled. 

The mature women talked about family matters.

The young guys talked about jobs, the complications of home-repairs in hold houses, wood stoves and the cost-of-living. 

The girls (about third-grade) retired to the bedroom where we had left our coats and talked about "boys". 

We watched a couple walk across the frozen lake from north-to-south. It has been several years since December was cold in southern Michigan to where anybody dared attempt that in December (much less in the first half of December). They made the crossing without going swimming.

They were not walking side-by-side. The man was walking about 7 paces in front of the woman. Maybe the ice had started hissing-and-cracking. Ice will usually "tell you" when you are being stupid and spreading out reduces the risk of falling through. If you are alone and you hear that, spread out your feet and shift only part of your weight as you move rather than lifting them. Slide each foot in-turn. Oh...and head back to shore.

Or maybe it was just a case of the man was in a hurry. 

I ate too much and moved too little and we stayed too long. It was a magnificent party and it had a splendid turn-out. The crowd is a testament to what a great hostess my sister and her husband are. I am sure there are tens-of-millions of parties across the US that are nearly identical, but this is the party I attended.

Clever way to deliver gifts to your "friends"

 

"Just drop them off"

The address is a trailer park.

Free food or free alarm-clocks? 

I am not the brightest guy in the world but there is a pretty good chance this is a prank. Either that, or somebody is starting a cock-fighting ring. 

Bonus image

Second Bonus Image

If Charlie Brown had lived in West Texas

Grab bag

Quote of the day

"Pain is proof that we are still alive.

I have never felt so alive!"

The lifting is going OK. I think I completed my third of fourth session yesterday. I felt strong enough to add 10 pounds for the last set of six reps.

AND...I am more than just a little bit and pleasantly sore.

Sourdough

Does anybody have any opinions? King Arthur Flour has very precise instructions in how to create your starter.

Is there any benefit in helping it along with a yeast and/or a lactic bacteria culture? The picture in my head is to "help" the culture along with a yeast like SafAle T-58 and low temperature lactic bacteria culture like kefir or skyr.

CB 22 Shorts

Unfortunately, they have a much lower point-of-impact than the .22LR that I usually use. I plan to count the clicks to get it where I want it and then tape a card to the stock so I can "recover" the .22LR setting if/when I switch back to that ammo.

The .22 CB Shorts are no louder than a pellet gun and (supposedly) send a 29 grain, round-nosed, lead bullet down-range at 710 feet-per-second. That compares with a .177 "springer" tossing an 8 grain pellet between 850-and-1000 feet-per-second.

The .22 CB Shorts are not energetic enough to cycle a semi-automatic but they feed through a Savage Mark II bolt-action just fine. 

Rabbits are not hard to kill nor are squirrels. I just have to be able to hit them in the head or heart-lung area.

Blackberries

I ordered my blackberry bushes for next spring. I ordered from Ison's Nursery of Brooks, Georgia. I opted for 10 Ouachita (approximately pronounced as "Wichita") and 5 "Apache".

The temperature at which 50% of the flower buds are killed. Source.

Ouachita is slightly more cold-hardy than Apache. Apache has significantly larger fruit. Both varieties are from Arkansas breeding program. Both are thornless and upright. Both have good quality and very good disease resistance.

My experience with the cold-hardiness ratings on blackberries is that most of them are optimistic. If I get a good crop 2 years out of five I will be thrilled.

Rabbit hutches

Southern Belle has some rabbits arriving next week.

The previous two are no longer with us. The first one to become deceased  was dispatched by her sister. They went from best friends to best enemies.

The second one may have died from over-eating snacks.

Raising livestock isn't something you learn from a book. Books are helpful...but not the final word.

I spent a couple of hours "winterizing" the three-apartment hutch that was built around a truck-cap. I put doors on both ends of each apartment and it is very well ventilated since I built it in August. I threw cardboard into the bottom to cover about 2/3 of the floor and threw in some bedding.

I covered the west side of the "apartment building" to block one door on each apartment to reduce cross-ventilation. 

Finally, I added a "bolt" to lock the doors shut to reduce losses to predators.

Stanford University identifies one causal chain for Sudden Onset Cardiac death after getting the Clot Shot

The Mainstream Media told us that sudden heart attacks after the clot-shot were all in our imagination.

Stanford is a first-tier University. So far, I have not seen this reported in the Mainstream Media.

Link 

Stanford Medicine investigators have unearthed the biological process by which mRNA-based vaccines for COVID-19 can cause heart damage in some young men and adolescents.

...the researchers identified a two-step sequence in which these vaccines activate a certain type of immune cell, in turn riling up another type of immune cell. The resulting inflammatory activity directly injures heart muscle cells, while triggering further inflammatory damage.

One rare but real risk of the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines is myocarditis, or inflammation of heart tissue. Symptoms — chest pain, shortness of breath, fever and palpitations — appear in the absence of any viral infection. And they happen quickly: within one to three days after a shot.

(Not all who have these symptoms die) 

Vaccine-associated myocarditis occurs in about one in every 140,000 vaccinees after a first dose and rises to one in 32,000 after a second dose. For reasons that aren’t clear, incidence peaks among male vaccinees age 30 or below, at one in 16,750 vaccinees.

Translated, approximately 1/3 of the men have a 6/100k chance of developing cardiac disease after taking the shot. I used cases-per-100k because that is the standard unit for reporting mortality data. 

Pruning notes, mice and a Christmas toy idea

 

A pear tree after pruning on the left. An unpruned apple tree on the right.

I grafted four branches last spring into the pear tree and this year I pruned out nearly all of the growth that was NOT from those grafts.

The down-sized bucket-o-mice.

It is in a pole-barn that is cat-proof but not mouse proof. I wanted to prove that the smaller size could still work and that the mice could not hop out.

The peanut butter bait flaked off in the cold weather. I will spread the peanut butter on a strip of gauze and wrap that around spinner-bottle.

A new toy for Quicksilver

Quicksilver really likes Grandma's "Bissell".

She will be getting her very own this Christmas.

That is a lot of money for a 3 year-old's toy but I am willing to spend extra for tools that get used.
 

Priorities, priorities, priorities.

 

Kudos to University of Michigan for doing "the right thing" even when it is painful and inconvenient.

The University of Michigan fired their head football coach after an internal investigation revealed that he was having "an inappropriate relationship" with a staff member. It comes at an inconvenient time as the team prepares for a highly anticipated bowl game. 

Having a sexual relationship with somebody underneath you in the organization chart is considered de facto sexual discrimination for two reasons.

Due to the imbalance of power, the partner who is lower on the org-chart is under some level of coercion to accept sexual advances.

The other reason is that all of the other people...the one's not in the relationship...are now at a disadvantage for any kind of promotion or when giving advice.

Football and basketball bring a lot of money into major universities and create a lot of awareness among potential students. Unfortunately, too many schools turned a blind-eye to behaviors by team members and coaching staff that would not be tolerated in others.

Assuming that the investigation was thorough and even-handed, good job U-of-Michigan! 

Side story

I worked in an auto factory where one of the other supervisors was a young man who was a "Hi-Po" or High Potential employee. His folder had been tagged. He was given choice "developmental" assignments. Even though he was only 25(ish) years old, management had already decided that he was going places.

He had a temporary employee who was making about half of what the regular employees were making. The Hi-Po supervisor over-rode her pay-code in the computer to give her the highest pay-rate he was authorized for. He bumped her pay up to Team Leader pay, a dollar-an-hour more than what most of the regular employees were paid.

HR investigated. It quickly came to light that they were having sex.

The Hi-Po supervisor was directed to break off the relationship and a letter was put in his file (typically to be purged after one year).

The next pay-cycle the Hi-Po supervisor over-rode her pay code again.

He was released, with-cause, the next business day.

Yes, he was that stupid and so sure of the protection being a Hi-Po. 

Don't assume that this was the U-of-M coach's first transgression. 

Just for fun

This is a short video of about 2-1/2 minutes. I did not expect the voices that came out of these singers, nor did I expect the joy in their facial expressions.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed it. Turn up the speakers and watch their facial expressions.

Who is your customer?

I heard this story in (Juran) Quality Training in 1985. It was presented as a true story that happened in the 1948-1950 timeframe.

The setting was post-war Japan in a textile mill that spun yarn and thread and knit them into consumer products. The United States paid for automated equipment to lift Japan's economy out of the basement. The equipment was not placed in a purpose-built building but was shoe-horned into a multistory factory.

The problem was that every so often, a skein or spool would come into a station that fed into one of the automated looms and loom would lock-up into a giant rat's nest that took an hour to disassemble and clear out.

The problem was traced back to an operator on a lower floor who removed skeins from a winder and placed them on spindles on a roller-rack. When the rack was full she had a minute to stretch her back before the next rack replaced it.

She was not using the knot that she had been trained to use because she had found a quicker, "better" way to knot them. When the loom operator tied the tag-end of one of her skeins onto the tag of the skein that was almost used up, it did not untie the knot but, instead, resulted in the entire hank being gobbled up by the machine in one big chunk.

Rather than summarily firing the operator, the Quality Manager waited for the next train-wreck and then he directed the repairmen to not touch the machine until he returned.

He plucked the prideful worker out of her downstairs job and escorted her up to the behemoth (compared to the stature of a typical Japanese woman of the time) loom and then directed the repairmen to begin.

She knew that they knew that she was the cause of the problem. The entire factory ground to a halt as material backed up behind the loom. An hour later, they were able to restart the loom at low speed and it took another hour before the loom's timing was dialed in enough that they could run at full speed.

The woman burst into tears "I had no idea!" she gasped, sure that she was about to be fired.

The Quality Manager shook his head "No".

"Go back to your department and tell them that the roller-rack is not your customer. Everybody down-line of your station is. The rack, the shunter (who moved the racks from one floor to the next), the loom operator, the repairmen, the store that buys our sweaters and even the customer who ultimately purchases our products." 

"Tell them to follow their written instructions exactly they way they are trained...even if it seems stupid or like it is make-work."

"Gleece"

I was watching Townsend's Youtube channel and he was talking about "Hasty Puddings".

That brought back a memory that I thought was worth recording.

Background

My father's father's people were from just north of the Balkans and his mother's people were from just east of the Baltic. In spite of his origins, he tanned very, very quickly and was short and stocky.

His mother never heard a word of English until she went to school at the age of five in Allegan County, Michigan.

His mother was widowed when he was nine or ten and she was 33. That was in 1936. Times were tough. 

When Dad was 18, he went to Detroit to register for the draft. It was during WWII and gas and tires were scarce. He hitchhiked since nobody in the family had a car.

A young man stopped and gave him a ride. That man was also going to register for the draft. They were both deferred (my dad because he was the sole support of a widow and Adam because he was born in Canada).

They became friends. Adam had a business and hired Dad. In time, Adam offered Dad the chance to purchase some swampland in Michigan that had a 12'-by-20' shack on it.

Fast-forward 25 years...

The shack was expanded as finances allowed. Cabinets and indoor plumbing was installed. It graduated from a "shack" to a "cottage".

Early one spring, I (and a spare brother or two) assisted Dad in opening up the "cottage" for the season. Time got away from us and there was nothing to eat. Dad solved the problem by dredging up memories of when he was a kid and the cupboard was bare. He made us something he called "Gleece".

An image from the internet.

He mixed flour and eggs and maybe some water together to the consistency of pancake batter. Then he loaded up a large spoon with the batter and holding the bowl of the spoon just above the boiling water, he dribbled-and-drooled a stream of it into a pan of boiling water.

Half-hearted attempts to find a recipe met a stone-wall. I assumed it was just something he made up on-the-spot or it was something that only his family did.

God Bless the Internet

Guess what, "Gleece" is real. 

Gleece/Glace

Ingredients for One Generous Serving

1 egg beaten
1/2 cup all purpose flour (not self rising)
1/4 cup (scant) water

Start with boiling salted water in a pot. Beat together ingredients and drop by small spoonfuls into the boiling salted water. Gleece are done when they rise to the top of the water. They do expand in size. Let them boil for an additional minute or two and then drain off the water.

Gleece can be used in chicken broth or green bean soup. They can also be fried with sliced potatoes (or boil your potatoes ahead of time and fry the boiled potato slices with the gleece). Season to your taste. They can be added to mashed potatoes and a little butter or put sour cream, butter and onion slivers on the boiled gleece.

Dad's versions were more icicle/round-noodle shaped than than dumpling-like. But the name is identical and the provenance matches.

Cheap. Quick. Simple. Easy. Very filling. Cheap.

Presented without comment

 

Link

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Hasui Kawase

Today you get a grab-bag of artists. All suggested by the indefatigable Lucas Machias. "Trees" are the theme.

 

Antonio Fabrés

Berndt Lindholm

Oscar Törnå

Hippolyte Boulenger

Ivan Shiskin

Follow-up on Hungry Times post

Based on the volume of comments, the post on "The Hungry Times" struck a nerve.

From the comments:

Anon 7:55 PM wrote "...it appears having a large pond or small river nearby will be able to provide some extra food or attractant options for foragers."

Anon 11:10 PM responded "A 30’ gill or trammel net suitable for suckers, carp catfish etc might be a lifesaver."

...then...

Anon 10:16 PM independently stated "I wonder how the Indians did so well. Granted, they ...had fewer people per acre." 

How did the Native Americans survive the winters?

Population density was a big part of it. Population estimates for pre-Columbus continental United States and Canada vary by a a factor of ten but anumber of four-million is commonly used.

The current population of that same area is almost one-hundred times greater.

As can be expected over such six-million square-miles, strategies differed.

The Native-American Mound Culture cities were almost all near rivers. The largest NAMC city is called Cahokia and it is very close to East Saint Louis, Illinois. 

Link to maps

Along the Eastern seaboard, tribes were often migratory and followed the resources. Estuaries...that is bays that are flushed by the tides, are enormously productive since multiple ecosystems converge and the flushing of the tides creates a mixing effect that combines oxygen and nutrients.

In both locations...rivers and estuaries...clams/mussels/oysters were easy pickings.

The West-coast tribes had a cultural innovation called "Potlatch" which functioned as a form of welfare.

Individual clans gained status by throwing parties and giving gifts of preserved foods (nearly always dried salmon). Due to the vagary of the salmon runs on the hundreds of streams that drain into the Pacific any one family could be randomly left without enough food to make it until the next salmon run. 

Potlatch allowed that family to survive at a cost of loss of status. However, that status could be repurchased by hosting several, very generous Potlatch parties in the future.

Native-Americans in California's Central Valley were blessed by thousands of square miles of oak-orchards. Acorns (and pine nuts) which could be harvested with brooms were easily dried and cached in simple structures and stayed edible for years.

White settlers had a very dim view of those Native-Americans because they assumed that they had not even progressed to the level of simple agriculture. That assessment may have been a bit harsh. Those Native-Americans did not engage in any kind of agriculture that the plow-field-annual-grains based Europeans recognized.

Random factoids

The mesh size is critical for gill-nets and varies by the target fish. The issue is muddied-up because some people specify by "stretched-mesh" size and others specify by distance between knots "square-mesh" size.

Depending on the primary species of sucker that you are targeting, a square-mesh size in the 1-1/2" to 2" range is probably about right.

Common carp are highly variable in size. The younger ones that are more desirable for food according to my Polish neighbor are best caught with a 4" square-mesh while the most mass is caught with a 5" square-mesh. As a side-note, if you are going for mass, then a trammel net is the best choice because a heavy load of fish can trash a simple gill-net.

Bonus Link1 Academic paper discussing net selection that targets common carp

Bonus Link2 Youtube video of a trammel net set catching carp. Long video.

Unemployed new college graduates

What happened to "academic advisors"?

Back-in-the-day they were the link between "the market" for graduates and the classes students took and the academic tracks they followed.

There is a huge amount of angst as new college graduates cannot find jobs. Not only that but recent graduates are among the first to lose their jobs as A.I. starts doing the least complex tasks; tasks that are typically assigned to less experienced employees.

Even in the 1980s it was understood that the "degree" you graduated with was not a guarantee nor was there any promise that "your" profession would exist unchanged for any meaningful amount of time. 

Ergo, the better academic counselors told their students that they should not just be preparing themselves for a single profession but should be thinking in terms of having a tool-box filled with transferable skill-sets.

It is my perception that students are locking-onto a single goal. They decide as freshmen that they are going to be "an actress" or something similar and then never consider any other possibilities. They refuse to consider any other job that would make substantial use of their learned skill-sets and their innate talents. They would rather be an "actress" working at Starbucks than a salesperson making $99k a year. 

They are INSULTED if you "kill their dream" by suggesting that the odds of actually making a living as an actress is a very long shot. After all, magical thinking is entirely dependent on "Believing it intensely enough" and casting any doubt on that belief poisons the magic.

Discipline

I suspect that the reason that many academic advisors are missing-in-action is that they have an improper view of discipline. They think that offering honest guidance to a student is disrespectful even though it is what they are paid to do.

Consider these words from Hebrews Chapter 12:

For the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God.  Consider how he (Jesus) endured such opposition from sinners, in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood.  

You have also forgotten the exhortation addressed to you as sons:

“My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord or lose heart when reproved by him; for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he acknowledges.”

Endure your trials as “discipline”; God treats you as sons. For what “son” is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are without discipline, in which all have shared, you are not sons but bastards.

Sharing harsh truths in a loving way is a form of discipline. Failing to do so is to program your student to fail in life.

 

That time when I was mistaken for one of the homeless

I got a call from a friend who needed a ride to Sparrow Hospital in Lansing to have some tests done. The only sticky point is that his tests were scheduled for 1:00 in the morning.

Friends do what friends do. I gave him a ride and waited for him in the waiting area just outside of the Emergency Room and on the "hot" side of the metal detectors.

The sandwiches had been pitched into the trash at the stroke of midnight, 12/08/25. He gave them to me at 1:15 a.m. on 12/08/25

As I was sitting there a man approached me and gave me a bag of food. Then he noticed the hole in the toe of my shoe and started asking staff as they passed "Do you need them shoes" as he pointed at their Hokas.

Frankly, I was filled with gratitude.

He was either a homeless dude or somebody who was doing outreach for The City Mission...being as it was 10F actual in Downtown Lansing and -3 in outlying areas. 

It could go either way. He was dressed in a newish, puffy coat that went below mid-thigh which is a good setup for a cold night. He was about 45 and skinny. On the flip-side, he talked to himself pretty much the whole time he was near me and he asked if I had a pack of smokes twice.

Maybe he was both. I think you need to be a little touched in the head to do mission work in an inner city. 

View from the office

150 yards west and 40 yards north of yesterday

Ten minutes of legal light left...

...and...no deer were injured in the production of this blog post.

I did get another three trees pruned. That counts for something.