I dig dirt

Tomorrow's plan is to make multiple trips to Fill's Emporium of Dirt and start building up the grade that was underneath the deck that I demolished this year.

The geniuses who built our house built a deck over the septic tank, and since the ground was covered with a deck, they didn't bother bring up the grade. Consequently, water has little incentive to flow away from our house on that side.

I made a test run today. A round trip to Fill's that involved a 1/2 yard of "sand-fill", emptying the bed of the truck and wheel-barrowing the 1300 lbs of dirt (105 feet one-way) to the depression took 51 minutes.

My goal is to make four round-trips to Fill's Emporium of Dirt tomorrow with a stretch goal of six trips.

Blogging may be light. 

Chip-budding grapes

Chip-budding grapes.

My intention is to increase my stocks of Rombough Seedless grape.

I don't have a lot of wood on the RS vine because it is not in a great place, it is shaded for half the day by a pear tree. I have lots of buds but not much length of cane. 

One of the quirks about cutting the length of wood that contained the bud is that I could not make the same kinds of cuts I did with apples and pears. The shape of the grape stem was like a knee with the bud on the knee-cap. There is also a diaphragm at the bud which deflects the blade. The "trick" was to use my loppers to cut the stem off about an inch below the bud I was going to transfer and then whittle wood away from the backside of the stem. Then to roll the stem over and make the angled cut at the bottom of the chip. As a final step, to reverse the stem and make the angled cut at the top of the stem. Best do this where you can find the chip if it misbehaves and falls to the ground.

One possible solution is to move some of those bud and put them on grapes that are growing on a good site and are easy to root. In my case, that would be wild Riverbank Grape (Vitis riparia).

It may be a lost cause. It is pretty late in the season. On fruit trees I target late-June for my chip-budding. But if all goes well, I will collect my cuttings with the buds intact and store them in a sheltered place. Then I will "stick" them in pots.

Vitis riparia and its hybrids are eager and prolific rooters.

I was able to make about 10 bud transplants and have enough buds cut for about ten more. 

How big of a foot-print to feed rabbits?

 

A stretch of road. The verge is about 15' wide and it was about 100' to the next tree. It was mowed once this year.

At 2000 pounds of standing dry-matter per acre, that equals about 70 pounds of dry-matter.

The dominant species of grass is Smooth Brome (Bromus inermis). The blue flowers in the top picture are chicory.

 

For ruminants like cows and sheep, the rule of thumb was to budget 4% of body-weight for daily dry-matter intake. I am not saying that is a good rule for rabbits, but it is what I have to work with.

Four, mature, New Zealand doe rabbits at 12 pounds apiece will weigh about 50 pounds. That pencils out to 2 pounds of dry-matter per day and that 70 pounds of dry matter would last them a month...longer if you add a little bit of corn. If they have litters, though, the feed bill goes way up.

Three, 100' lengths of that verge would quite handily get those does (sans kits) from May 15-through-November 15 in my climate.

This is what a 1/4 mile of that verge looks like.

 

The farmers consider mowing roadsides a burdensome chore. It has to be done to keep it from coming up in trees that rob water and nutrients from the cash-crop. In this case, the farmer cannot farm to the road's edge due to utility poles.

Yes, it was a hot and muggy run this morning.

Planning

The roadside grass is a bonus and you might not be able to get it. You might have to plant and harvest your own patch.

According to the Wisconsin Team Forage website, the average yearly dry-matter yield by species:

• Timothy: 10,600lb/acre
• Tall Fescue: 13,200lb/acre (excellent choice for wetter soils. Less palatable than many other kinds of grass)
• Smooth Brome: 11,800lb/acre (very palatable)
• Orchardgrass: 12,800lb/acre
• Perennial Ryegrass: 9,400lb/acre (winter kill issues in Wisconsin. Very palatable)) 
• Red Clover: 6500/lb/acre (four-year life with only 1000lb harvested the first year)

Normally, you would plant the Red Clover with your grass since they play well together. The Red Clover can supply nitrogen and the grass "fluffs-up" the Red Clover and helps it dry when it is cut for hay.

You want to take those yield values with a grain of salt because you will have a steep learning curve.

Noted for future reference

According to Raindrop website, the Hill and Upper Orchards received about 1" of rain last night. If confirmed by the raingauge, that pushes the next watering exercise to August 20. 

"Cui bono", Public Transfers in France

Social Groups Reliance on Direct and Indirect Public Transfers (France)

Source of base image I added red iso-benefit lines to make apples-to-apples comparisons easier

France
Recent data from Insee suggest that the heavy reliance on direct transfers by certain social groups, particularly pensioners, combined with their growing electoral heft, may be a key constraint

This chart is unique to France and cannot be directly applied to any other country.

What is notable

Contrary to what the Communists claim, Business Owners, Self-Employed and Managers have the very lowest level of public transfers.

The loonie-Left screams at the top of their lungs about businesses benefiting from public roads and the internet, but those roads also benefit the employees who work in those factories and the customers who order from on-line businesses.

Green dots are family structure. The red lines are on 10% increments

Couples with one-or-two children are the least subsidized. Families that are single-parent, single-adult or couples without children receive about 25% more transfers than couples with one-or-two children.

The "Couple without children" transfers are puzzling until you consider than many of those couples are pensioners and might more accurately be described as "Couples whose children moved out".

The families with three or more children are more likely to be migrant-families who qualify for transfers not related to the number of children they have at home. 

"Single adult, no children" households are also likely to have an over-representation of migrant, working-age men.

The outliers in the other direct have a lot of overlap or "confounding"

Nearly every pensioner is over-65. Also, nearly all younger people have the equivalent of an UPPER secondary diploma. Ergo, most people with Lower-secondary (9th grade) diploma or lower are also over-65.

Raising Rabbits on a budget

I like watching "village life" videos because the people living in those places have to use their brains and native materials to achieve their goals. They usually don't have the means to whip out their credit card and order "gear" from Amazon.

Raising rabbits, a pragmatic approach.

The hutches are made from the equivalent of recycled pallet wood and hardware cloth. By modern standards, they are over-crowded. Based on how gnawed the door frames are, he has been doing this for a long time.

They have a tin roof but are beneath an apple tree for shade. 

The water bottles are fill-from-top, repurposed pop bottles. Similar item here but still more expensive than what the owner paid. He does not waste a lot of time as he rakes out the old hay and reloads the feeders and water.

The owner feeds them green-chop, wheat and unshelled corn. Based on what I saw, he was feeding them cut oat-plants when the video was recorded. The greenery he feeds them probably changes through the year based on availability.

Fine Art Tuesday

A perfect mid-1800s, Chesapeake Bay lunch: arsters and beer.

Andrew John Henry Way was born in Washington D.C. in 1826 and died in Baltimore, Maryland in 1888.

One of his patrons was William Thompson Walters, a wealthy banking, rail and steel magnet (I could not resist the pun). Walters was also a grape-grower and a collector of European-style, fine art. That is, pictures that was not solely focused on portraits, i.e. vanity; images that had "artistic" interest.

Consequently, many of A.J.H. Way's pictures are still-lifes with grapes in them.

 

Making Zucchini Disappear

I may have made a tactical error this spring.

Mrs ERJ very clearly stated that she only wanted ONE plant of zucchini (called "marrows" in parts of Europe). So, naturally, I planted eight seeds in two hills.

I had no problem reducing them to two plants that were 4 feet apart but then I hesitated.

Mrs ERJ was dubious about leaving a second plant, "But you don't even LIKE zucchini that much!" she reminded me.

I assured her that I would somehow make all of the extra zucchini disappear.

That wasn't very hard to do for a while but then people started locking the doors of their vehicles, even the people attending services at the Assembly of God. They have great faith in the Spirit but they draw the line when there is a miscreant known to be abandoning zucchini in unattended vehicles.

Then the Department of Natural Resources started patrolling the river after folks who lived down-river started reporting bright, yellow logs washing up on their shores and capsizing their pontoon boats.

Mrs ERJ looked at me with pity in her eyes. She knew. She had known this was going to happen. This morning we had about 1/3 of a face-cord of zucchini stacked up on the counter and it threatened to avalanche every time we slammed a door.

Soup base

We use most of our canned tomatoes in our Sunday soup-pot. 

Today seemed like a good day to make all of that zucchini disappear.

I stirred it into the tomatoes as they were stewing. You can click on the images to embiggen them.

I added 2.5 grams of citric acid for every quart I expected based on how close the mix was to the top of the 16 quart stock-pot.

I also threw in some of these.

 

We have pretty much migrated to growing only yellow zucchini because it is so easy to see. I tried Yellowfin but had a lot of blossom-end rot issues at my location. Then we tried Easypick Gold II and it was a home-run.

Bonus orchard picture

This shows four of the apple trees I grafted to Liberty apple. It also shows my poor weed control. The welded wire fence is 60" tall and the poultry netting extends another 12" vertically. It is what I have to do to protect the trees from the deer.

I took this picture while I was watering the trees this morning. I averaged right about 2 minutes per tree. Some of that time was spent pulling weeds.

As awesome as these trees look, the pears are really struggling. They didn't have the quality of roots that these trees had and they were planted in poorer soil.
 

I had some help in the orchard today

I had some help in the orchard today. It was a fellow whose wife is spending the weekend with "the girls".

I had him lugging buckets of water in the orchard and moving the trickle-buckets. He was talkative.

I learned that "Sitting is the new Smoking". He also shared that his wife was enchanted with the idea of Enneagrams, a method of categorizing personalities.

We watered about 24 trees and I will finish the job tomorrow. Most of the time was spent in the shade waiting for the water tubs to fill.

As we were knocking off due to the heat, this is what came over the horizon

The Hill Orchard in the foreground.

The view from a slightly higher elevation

I don't expect it to hit the orchard. It is a fairly narrow pop-up T-storm.

---Update: The orchards got 0.15" of rain. I will be carrying water today--- 

Family Reunions

Family Reunion 2025 is in-the-bag

I was very pleasantly surprised that we had representation from all four branches of the family. I lost two cousins in June, one from the Macomb County branch and one from the East Coast branch. Both cousins were in their early 60s. One death was expected. One death was not. That cast a pall over reunion.

Cousin Stephanie pointed out that many of the next generation are "Counter Culture". There have families with 4, 3, 1, 1, 2 and 2 kids. Others are newly-wed and are busy looking under cabbage leaves for their first.

I didn't get to talk with everybody.

Crazy fact: My youngest sister hosted the reunion. She put her home-of-the-last 25 years on the market yesterday. Meanwhile, the home where she hosted the reunion is a 1400 square-foot summer cottage that is mid-remodel to make it weather-tight for 365 days of the year. She took it all in stride with the grace and aplomb of one born to royalty. It is not about "flexing" status. Reunions are about people and conversations. 

I learned that one of my favorite nieces put a bid on a property a scant 3.8 miles (as the crow flies) from where I live. It looks like it is only 1.5 miles from where Southern Belle lives. I am thrilled to see her move out of Lansing. She lives in 48910 which isn't as high-crime as 48911 but it does have issues. For instance, somebody torched the motorcycle she had parked next to her very flammable house one night several summers ago.

The heat-index was in the upper 90s all afternoon. I took a dip in the lake and the young ladies who were already swimming decided that I needed to be plastered with clay. The rest of the story is that the "young ladies" were all under 5 years-old and they somehow got it into their heads that the clay was to be applied to my back and massaged in. The clay was "marl", a calcium carbonate rich material that forms domes that bubble up through the beach-sand.

Mostly, I tried to keep my mouth still and listen to other people's stories. I was partially successful. 

Does the Bible have anything to say about "Retirement"?

This is not going to be a deep-dive. Many of you can run circles around me in terms of Biblical knowledge. Please feel free to point out my errors.

The Bible is mostly silent on the concept of "Retirement"

The idea of hitting a certain birthday, moving to sugar-sand beaches, then playing endless rounds of golf, playing bridge, making quilts and drinking Brandy Old Fashioned and Mai Tais starting at 10:30am is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible.

Luke 

Luke 12:16-31 is a story of a man who anticipates a harvest that exceeds his ability to consume it all. He plans to tear down his small barns and build large barns to hold the huge harvest. His plan is to live the early Iron-Age equivalent of "retirement". Alas, he dies before his plans can come to fruition. 

Historically, this reading is often paired with Ecclesiastes Chapter One, "...vanity of vanities! All things are vanity! What profit have we from all the toil...One generation departs and another generation comes, but the world forever stays."

2 Thessalonians

For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat. 

Psalms

Many of the Psalms were authored by David, presumably well after he slayed Goliath. Many of them are retrospective in nature. In Psalm 92 it is written;

"..Planted in the house of the LORD, they shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall bear fruit even in old age, they will stay fresh and green, To proclaim: “The LORD is just;my rock, in whom there is no wrong.”

My take on that is that we are expected, from a Biblical perspective, to be productive in our old age.

Timothy 

The books of Timothy were letters Paul wrote near the end of his life to his protégé, the very young Timothy.

From 1 Timothy, Chapter 5 "...anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." Notice that Paul does not write that this is the responsibility of the king, village or NGO. Of course this works both ways. Fathers are to provide for their young children and when those fathers are feeble and of weak-mind. Later those children are to care for their old and feeble parents.

Titus

Titus, a very short letter near the back of the Canon, has this to say about the role of senior citizens:

Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. 

Sirach

Sirach is part of the Catholic Canon but is relegated to the Apocrypha by Protestant traditions. That is, Sirach is considered Divinely inspired by the Catholics while most Protestants consider it interesting and worth reading but not Divinely inspired.

Chapter 3 is very focused on end-of-life of the family patriarch and matriarch.

Even if his mind fails, be considerate of him; do not revile him because you are in your prime. Kindness to a father will not be forgotten; it will serve as a sin offering—it will take lasting root. In time of trouble it will be recalled to your advantage, like warmth upon frost it will melt away your sins. Those who neglect their father are like blasphemers; those who provoke their mother are accursed by their Creator

That was then, this is now

Recent history

Consider "making hay" circa 1930-1980. An old-timer looked at the maturity of the grass and alfalfa and made a judgement about the next 4 day's weather. He cut the hay mid-day after the dew dried. Then he turned it over the next day so the shaded portion of the hay could dry. If necessary, he repeated the flipping over. Then he raked it into windrows. Perhaps on the third day he ran the baler to make small (40 pound) square bales that were scattered across the hayfield.

At that point the hay is very sensitive to damage from rain.

The exercise becomes an all-hands-on-deck evolution. Granny and Grandpa drive the two tractors. Teen-agers walk behind the tractor in the field and carry the bales to the slowly moving tractor. An adult stands on the wagon and stacks the bales so they don't fall (shooting for 115 bales per wagon, if I remember correctly).

Once full, the adult hops off and Granny drives the tractor+wagon to the barn where another crew unloads the wagon and a mature adults stacks the bales. 

Everybody had a role that was within their capabilities. Even Granny.

In "Union" shops, jobs were "bid on" based on seniority. Older employees with more seniority had jobs that were less physically demanding. That was another mechanism that helped align workers with jobs that were within their capability.

Current situation 

Two things happened that changed that. Automation eliminated many of the less physical jobs like turning a thermostat dial on a heat-treat oven or charging batteries for fork-trucks. Decades of Equal Employment Opportunity litigation resulted in jobs being re-designed to accommodate 5% women but then job-rotation was mandated so everybody got their share of the dirty-end-of-the-stick jobs.

Mandated benefits like health insurance increased the fixed-cost portion of full time employees. That resulted in many jobs being rescheduled as multiple part-time employees (which is senior friendly) but the full-time jobs became 50 hour-a-week jobs to amortize the fix-costs. Since many of the full-time jobs were knowledge based or supervision jobs, that impacted the older workers who wanted to taper their work lives down.

Still contributing

Many grandparents provide day-care to their grandchildren.

We provide rides and collect kids when they get sick at school or summer camp.

One woman I know drove neighbors to the airport and back. She also rented out "parking spots" on her property while snowbirds were migrating. 

We volunteer.

We provide training when asked. I am 99% sure that fellow bloggers like Old NFO, True Blue and Pawpaw are still teaching young people shooting skills while Mostly Cajun teaches electricians about Arc Flash and Lockout. Many older people are reading-buddies for students learning to read.

Some of us have an extra or less-used vehicle that we loan to others when their vehicle is in the shop. 

I dink around with property and increase its ability to produce food and forest products.

Fake News Friday: Entertainment Edition

Markle has herself cast to play the part of "Monica" the hot-young-angel and Hillary Clinton as "Tess" who is Monica's supervisor.
 

Fake News Friday

 

The following restaurant establishments are not covered by the new (California minimum wage of $20/hr) law:

1. Restaurants that operate a bakery that "produces" and sells "bread" as a stand-alone menu item as of September 15, 2023, and continue to do so are exempt from the new law.

“Bread” is defined as a single unit item that weighs at least ½ pound after cooling and must be sold as a stand-alone item. The one-half pound weight requirement applies to the weight of the single item (e.g., a single loaf of bread that may or may not be sliced after baking), not the weight of multiple items packaged together for sale that were not one unit when baked.

Language with exactly matches Panera's and only Panera's outlets, quite coincidentally owned by Gavin Newsom's friend and campaign donor.

Small Lot Processing

Small lot processing is one of the cornerstones of "lean manufacturing".

Traditional manufacturing economics used to focus on "minimizing labor and set-up costs" per run by maximizing the length of the production run. It might take four days to "set-up" the dies in a press line. Then the factory might run that set-up for two weeks and fill hundreds of bins or thousands of racks with parts before switching to the next part.

Sometimes the set-up was so arduous that they just left the die sets in the press line and the presses were dedicated to making just that one part.

"Lean manufacturing" stood things on their heads. Proponents saw the loss of eight shifts worth of production to set-up the dies as a monumental waste. They saw the number of specialized racks and bins needed to support production runs of that length as a waste of money and floor-space. They saw the huge inventory as a waste of liquid capital. They saw the potential for quality spills and the resulting cost of containing those spills as wasteful.

Link to video showing a quick die-change.

Once all of the costs of those huge inventories were tallied up, the goal became seamless, zero-time die changes. They never got to zero-time, but nearly all press lines can change out as many as 20 die-sets in single-digit minute times. The incoming dies are staged on roller-tables on one side of the line while empty roller table are staged on the other side of the line. 

After the last part clears the line, the presses lower the upper dies onto the lower die and release them. The die-sets for the run that just finished are pushed out one side of the press line while the new die-sets are rolled in from the other side.

Everything is locked into place. A final verification is made to ensure everything is in alignment and locked into place and then the press line restarts. 

Small lot canning

Small lot canning involves lots of small batches of jars as the produce comes in. It might be three jars of pickles or 5 jars of stewed tomatoes. Or it might be knocking out 7 quarts of applesauce.

I have kettles of various sizes depending on how many jars I need to process. I know how many pounds of apples I need to process to make 7 quarts (a full canner load).

This year I am messing around with pickles. I found it was very helpful to premake the pickle juice and store it in a gallon jug. Then I can add it to the jar(s) as needed.

• 1/2 gallon water (I use unchlorinated, well water)
• 3/4 cup plain, not-iodized salt
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 28 grams of food-grade calcium chloride 
• Fill the remainder of the gallon jug with 5% acetic acid vinegar (i.e., a little bit less than a 1/2 gallon)

I can't say this makes great pickles because the pickles need 6 to 8 weeks in a jar for the flavor to stabilize. I won't taste the first pickles until the cucumber season is over.

But I can say that it has been very streamlined to make dill pickles. Either fresh dill or dill seed gets measured into the bottom of a jar. Sliced spears of pickling cucumber goes in. Fill to within an inch with the pickle juice.

Bonus image

Quicksilver is pretty interested in our canning activity. In this picture, she is teaching her "baby" how to brush her teeth. I wonder how many toddlers carry around over-ripe cucumbers as dolls? Quicksilver is very maternal.

Boomers Explained: Digital Wisdom

One of the more interesting sources of conflict between Boomers and Millennials and younger involves "Technology".

For starters, the two groups have very different definitions of "Technology".

If you have a conversation about "Technology" with most Boomers, you are likely to hear about nuclear reactors, airplane wings, internal combustion engines, alloys and manufacturing methods.

If you have a conversation about "Technology" with most Millennials and younger, you are likely to only discuss various, highly developed, digital technologies. For the most part, they consider all of the items in the previous paragraph to be "Settled Science" akin to pouring concrete or grading drain-fields to 1" of drop in 100'. BORING!

Source of image

Even when we are explicitly discussing "Digital Technology", the two groups often have very different visions of what they are talking about.

A Boomer might be visualizing Excel macros, solver add-ins and statistical tools while the Millennial visualizes "filters" that can be used to manipulate selfies, social media and Discord rings. The Boomer might be thinking about Fortran or P-I-D PLC controllers while the Millennial are thinking about ChatGPT.

"Digital Natives"

What Millennials see when Boomers try to talk about technology. "Just die already, so we can take over."

Millennials and younger tend to be dismissive of Boomers because the are not "Digital Natives".

The origins term "Digital Native" are worth investigating. According to Wikipedia:

The specific terms digital native and digital immigrant were popularized by education consultant Marc Prensky in his 2001 article entitled Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, in which he relates the contemporary decline in American education to educators' failure to understand the needs of modern students.

..."the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decade of the 20th century" had changed the way students think and process information, making it difficult for them to excel academically...children raised in a digital, media-saturated world, require a media-rich learning environment to hold their attention, and Prensky dubbed these children "digital natives". 

The idea became popular among educators and parents whose children fell within Prensky's definition of a digital native, and has since been embraced as an effective marketing tool.

If you dissect the Wikipedia entry, the term "Digital Native" is actually grandiose and flattering language to 'splain away the fact that a distressing number of the Millennials and younger have the attention span of gnats.

Apps

Push comes to shove over Boomer reluctance to embrace every new "App". Millennials and younger become VERY frustrated over that reluctance.

Some of Boomer reluctance is humorous. We don't need any more passwords to forget. We have plenty.

A day doesn't go by without some "story" of leaked, digital information.

 

And frankly, Boomers have a better appreciation of the evil that lurks in men's hearts than Millennials. If twenty people have access to some form of data, there is a 50% chance that one of them bootlegged a copy of the data "just in case".*

 

Consider that an AI company that markets to law-enforcement recently signed a deal with Ring to access images in real-time. A person-of-interest image (say a person wearing an orange hat who just robbed a bank) can be tracked from camera-to-camera using just AI image recognition software and pulling real-time images from all cameras within, say, 200 meters of the last verified image.

Not planning on robbing a bank? Who is to say that the touch-screen kiosk at McDeath isn't pulling your finger-prints and communicating your orders with your health insurance company (or the next, nanny-state Administration, or Novo Nordisk)? You know that the bean-counters at McDeath would do it in a New York minute if they could get a penny per transaction.

 

Sometimes the corporate bean-counters step on their Richard. Most blood donors tend to be older with retirees heavily represented in Red Cross donations. Recently, the Red Cross made a big push to become more efficient and to not take "walk-ins" because that "causes" staffing inefficiencies. You can only give blood if you have a reservation and the only way to make a reservation is to have the Red Cross app. That is a classic case of not knowing your "customer"...or supplier, in this case. 

Digital Wisdom

The blow-back on "Digital Native" resulted in the originators attempting to salvage the narrative with the idea of "Digital Wisdom". It never gained traction. The appeal of being able to dismiss old people as "stupid and doomed" was just too appealing to many people born after 1980.

Wisdom is timeless. Intelligence is perishable. It is "wisdom" to know that some, hopefully small percentage, of men are evil.

Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is "doing the right things".

As we age, we gravitate toward valuing "wisdom" over "intelligence" and valuing "effectiveness" over "efficiency". 

*A number I pulled out of the air based on when I was a supervisor. 19-out-of-20 people had a good grasp of how to work smoothly in groups. 1-in-20 were wired differently and were drama-driven or enjoyed making other people miserable. 

Today was a recovery day

I went for a run this morning. It was a repeat of the last run: 2.5 miles with the last half mile alternating 75 yard sprints with 75 yards of recovery-by-walking. While waiting for MF-ing (Massey-Ferguson to the city folks) traffic to pass during one of my walking-recoveries, I saw a mature Bald Eagle. What a treat!

P2.5 pollution from the Justin Trudeau forest fires in Canada. Image taken at about 8:00am local time. The far end of the road that is visible is 1/4 mile away.

Otherwise, today was a recovery day.

7 quarts of stewed tomatoes through the canner and 3 quarts of dill pickles today.

Fun video

Pawpaw, one of the bloggers I list on my blog-roll, recently wrote a post about the  Parmesan Fried Chicken that he made for lunch. I was unable to leave a comment so I am linking to it here.

For the record, I had TWO Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwiches for lunch. 

A slice through an Ace 55 tomato. Ace 55 is open pollinated and is true-to-type from seed.

Social Security insolvency projected for 2034

Primary Effect 

The primary effect of Social Security insolvency (when the program is taking in less money than it pays out) is that benefits will be reduced.  The first reduction is likely to be on the order of 25%. That will be a huge issue for the oldest retirees whose benefits have been subjected to artificially low Cost of Living Adjustments for the longest time.

Medicare benefits are also likely to be reduced. 

Secondary Effects

Contrary to the blathering of politicians, the "excess" funding collected by the Federal Government through the FICA taxes (which funds both Social Security and Medicare) was never put into a "lock box" under Fort Knox. Both programs have been a pay-as-you-go and the Feds skimmed the excess and folded it into the General Fund. That money is gone.

As the demographic pig-in-the-python moves closer to the tail, the wage-based tax revenue will shrink as the percentage of people working shrinks. With less money to skim from FICA overages, the increasing shortfalls in the budget are covered by borrowing larger amounts of money. Since every Developed Nation is in the same pickle, the increased demand for credit (which is purchased via auction-like sales of bonds) causes the credit interest rates to climb.

Soon, private enterprises cannot compete with governments (who can print money) and those enterprises collapse. Customers cannot afford their products without credit and minor glitches in cash-flow force the enterprises into bankruptcy.

Federal attempts to remedy the problem by printing more money has always resulted in accelerating inflation.

Tertiary effects

"Can't afford to fix the old girl. Am selling her for parts."

If the "promised" benefits cannot be paid for, then they will break their promises. It is not like they have a choice.

That will also impact people who are still working as consumption collapses. If old-farts' lose purchasing power then our consumption will fall and businesses will suffer.

In the public-sector side of the economy, everything will be turned into a blame-game as the tide starts to flow out. The work-place will become cut-throat and more times and energy will be spent on gossiping and paranoia than on providing services.

Degrading standard-of-living will be a constant

Rational people have become increasingly aware of this issue and will take action BEFORE 2034. The psychology of inflation amplifies inflation. Once awake, people rush to buy assets before their money's purchasing power diminishes even more.

We are not going to wake up one morning in 2034 and notice "Hey, the economy turned to crap over-night". Nope. It is not going to be like that. I think we are going to be worn away by the relentless drip-drip-drip of bad news and economic dislocations, and it will happen regardless of who holds political office.

Lion in Winter

The old dude who lives across the road from the Hill Orchard shuffled over to talk with me as I was mowing.

His personal doomsday-clock shows a few months, maybe, until it hits midnight. He figures it will be sometime after the daytime lows drop below freezing.

He is disenchanted with the medical establishment. Not because he is dying. He knows that we all die. He is disenchanted because of three of bait-and-switches where he believed that he had been promised a transplant after the algorithm already disqualified him. Two different hospitals jerked him along for years. If they had been straight-up with him, he would not have been driving two hours and staying overnight in hotels to make early morning appointments. He would have patronized the closest hospital and received the same "monitoring" care.

The latest help they offered him (a hospital in Chicago) was a Ventricular Assist Device. They made it sound like a pacemaker in terms of mobility. He did his own research and decided that there were too many restrictions for him to be interested. For instance, it is his belief that he would be placed in an assisted living environment to minimize germs and to make it easier for the doctors in Chicago to monitor him.

That means he would die in Chicago and his financial assets would be depleted. His wife would become an impoverished widow and that is not acceptable to him.

He talked my ear off. Maybe it was his way of saying "Good-bye".  He still has a firm handshake.

Busy day planned for today. Reptile pron

A big work day is planned for today.

Mrs ERJ's minivan is back. It suffered from a split heater-hose. Wilder's Automotive was awesome. They slid it into their work-stack and got it done.

Southern Belle is collecting goats. I have been tasked with extending the enclosure to absorb the additional animals. Her vision is that the goats will kill the brush that chokes her property. My count of tree rings suggests that the property has been in free-fall for 13 years. 

My job will be to drive fence posts and then hang the panels (2 hours). Southern Belle's job will be to add ties in the middle and bottom of the T post.

I also need to get out to the Hill Orchard and the Upper Orchard and carry water to the baby trees (2 hours). Then I need to mow (2 hours). Then I need to start breaking down some downed trees into 8' long bolts (maybe, depending on fatigue level). If I am smart, I will do the chainsaw work first while I am fresh. I can ride on a mower even if I am tired.

Random maps

While the chances of being attacked by an alligator in Oklahoma is low, it is not zero

 

Another map. Maybe historic range?

OK, not a map. So sue me.

Michigan is a good place to be if you don't care for Timber Rattlesnakes

Deinosuchus, prehistoric beast. The skull is 6' long. From Texas, of course.

 

Enjoy the water all you folks in Illinois and points south of there.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Carl Gustaf Hellqvist was born in Sweden in 1851 and died in 1890.

1886 Hellqvist suffered from severe headaches and he stopped painting. He was admitted into a mental hospital in March of 1889 and died twenty months later at the age of 38.

Monk in Garden. Painted when he lived in Munich.

 

Several of Hellqvist's paintings has such excellent detail that snips of them are sold as reproductions