Today's Walk-about is still a "GO"

The plan to go on a walk-about is still a "GO"

There is a 50% chance of rain by 5 PM. Temperatures will hover in the upper-60s (F).

I drove the route yesterday. There are seven corn fields scattered along the 6.5 mile route. Five of the 13 miles will be paved and the rest will be on dirt roads. I will cross two, sort-of-busy, paved roads in each direction.

I will wear my everyday clothing with the exception of compression shorts (underwear) and compression socks beneath my regular socks. I will also smear SPF on the exposed parts of my face and ears even though the cloud cover will be almost 100%.

Applesauce

I got another 16 quarts canned yesterday.

I think we are at our target number in the pantry. 

I was very sedentary yesterday and ate poorly, so it is good that I will be moving today.

Pictures

Stylin', country-girl style. I did a double-take when I saw her "bracelets". Quicksilver on the way to play-date sporting some "drip". 

Winter squash curing on top of the woodpile. The stems, aka "handles", have to dry out and the shells have to harden.

Real Men protect their women from all hazards. To protect my woman, I ate this before she even knew it was in the house.

Cutting it close. I cook up enough apples to make 7 quarts of apple sauce per batch. A little bit over is OK. This is how much that was left after the first batch of 7.

One minor complication is that the stem broke off of the chute of Mrs ERJ's SqueezO-II strainer. She has owned it longer than she has known me. I riveted it back together and it should be good for another 40 years.

I did not have the correct length of pop-rivets in stock. The ones I had were too long. I cut them to the correct length with a hacksaw but could not use the pop-rivet tool. I clamped a maul in my vice to use as an anvil and tapped the other end with a hammer. The mandrel fell out and left a hole. I plugged the holes with a bit of wooden match.

Improvise, adapt, overcome. 

Bonus Dad-joke

Frogs never weld metal together. They prefer "Rivet"s 

Tuesday grab-bag

Coffee emergency

The coffee grinder at Southern Belle's house broke down. I had some ground coffee in the freezer. I expect a report from her with regard to whether it was still drinkable.

Handsome Hombre was born in Central America and coffee in the morning is mandatory.

Applesauce

God willing, today will be another applesauce day. Maybe I will even get some potatoes dug.

Winter Squash

We had a night when the temperature dropped below 50F. This is probably a good time to start harvesting the winter squash. 

Rumblings

Exotic materials have exotic failure modes. They also have pedestrian failure modes. Availability of the elements required to make those exotic alloys is one of those pedestrian failure modes.

The magical materials that allow Mach 3 SAMs to swat hypersonic missiles out of the sky require elements that are currently Unobtainum. Slow-and-stupid wins when there are enough slow-and-stupid weapons/targets. The assumption that nobody could ever launch a strike on US refineries and our power-grid because "we have the best defensive weapons" is no longer a great assumption.

Shopping list 

Reminder to self: Buy a manual meat grinder, ginseng seeds, Pheasant Eye Narcissis, coffee and vinegar.

In a Captain Obvious moment, it occurred to me that the primary value of sugar is that it is far more compact to store than vinegar but it can be converted to 5% concentration at a 10:1 ratio. That is, one pound of sugar can be converted to 10 pounds of 5% acetic acid vinegar. In turn, that amount of vinegar is sufficient to pickle about 30 pounds of cucumbers or other vegetables. 

A modest proposal: The new "Picture of your medicine cabinet"

There is a meme that says:

"Don't send me any pictures of your body parts. I already know what boobs look like."

"Send me pictures of the medicine bottles in your bathroom cabinet. I need to see the kind-of-crazy I am getting into" 

In all fairness, it seems like a man or a woman ought to be able to scrape the last three months of their new romance interest's social media history "...to see the kind of crazy they are getting into".

Not only that, but they ought to be able to read the posting history of the three content creators who get her highest "engagement". That is, the content creators that she comments on the most frequently. 

 

It is the equivalent of "meeting her family". You aren't just dating her. You are also dating her on-line tribe. You could be dating an entire coven of harpies or they might be the sweetest people imaginable. She might play her cards close to her chest or she turn out to be a cyber blabber-mouth after downing a couple of Long Island Iced Teas.

Better to get a handle on the-kind-of-crazy before you become emotionally invested in her.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Girl pealing a potato. Yes, I find this painting "appealing".

Albert Anker was born in 1831 in Ins, Switzerland and died in 1910. Ins is in the northwest corner of Switzerland and is in a fertile, valley between Lake Neuchâtel and Lake Bie.

He is famous for painting people, often pre-teen girls, doing the everyday chores of living.

Grandfather with two children

Girl holding kittens

Older girl knitting

A very young child, knitting

Board-and-batten construction behind the young lady

Mending or altering a coat

Tea

Girl braiding her hair

 

Girl caring for a younger sibling. She appears to be less-than-thrilled.

Bernie Sanders directing other children at play

Titled "The Quack". No plaster in that room. It is a fire trap.

A still life. No oranges, figs, grapes or vino. Just coffee, bread, salt and potatoes.

Second-hand chicken

 

Quicksilver expressed an interest in eating raccoon meat.

Her flock of chickens suffered at the hands of them and her Papa catches and kills them. They are down to their last chicken. To date, they haven't eaten one. That would be "one chicken" or "one raccoon".

It seems only fair to eat the raccoons. Quicksilver, Southern Belle and Handsome Hombre can still eat their chickens but it will be second-hand chicken.

So...we looked for videos on catching and preparing raccoons for the table. The video at the top isn't about that but it is still interesting in the sense that the parents of this young family are very focused and intentional in how they are raising their children.

This video is a short tutorial on how to find and remove the scent glands from a raccoon before cooking it.

He is adamant about removing as much fat as possible but in a grid-down situation you will want every calorie you can find. Fat is flavor and according to Rod Couling of Dansville, Michigan, nothing makes better meat-loaf than a fat, young raccoon. 

Running report

I had no enthusiasm for running this morning.

I promised myself that I only needed to cover the distance.

My first half-mile felt slow. The temperature was markedly cooler than any of the other days I ran.

I wasn't doing anything special. I was just running.

My time was within five seconds of the last time I ran. That is a variance of two-parts-in-a-thousand.

I find it a little bit freaky that my times are so repeatable. It doesn't FEEL like the runs are that similar. I start running. I slow down when I start feeling a bit of discomfort. I speed up when the discomfort fades away. Over and over and over again.

Step-counter

I carried the step-counter in my left, rear pants pocket. That gave me a very plausible 2060 steps per mile. My phone got demoted to the left sammich pocket on my cargo shorts.

Walk-about

I am thinking of going for a 13 mile (20km) walk this week, just to see if I still have it in me. 20km is a typical distance for a stage on the Camino de Santiago.

Wednesday is the first day that I have open. Cloudy weather with a high of 71 is predicted.  

My rehydration budget is 20 ounces every hour (or three miles or 5km) so I will need a bit more than three bottles. I can only fit two bottles of Gatorade in my fanny-pack, so I will be wearing a day-pack. Four bottles will give me an ample surplus. That and a few baggies of trail-mix and it should be a walk in the park.

Where does the education dollar go and Emergency Room visits

From the annual budgets of a local school district. The average over the last three budget years. Expressed on a per-pupil basis.

It is interesting that the cost of fringe benefits are about 70% of the cost of salaries.

Emergency Room visits

Source

The image shown above has a great deal of information in it. The headers are "Primary Reason" for going to the Emergency Room and they are numbered 1-through-16 which is their rank-order of in terms of frequency. The number in parenthesis in the headers is the "Coding number" and not the number of times it occurred.

The horizontal axis is broken into age groups and the squiggle-line is the percentage of ER visits with that primary cause that results in a hospital admission.

The text in the paper informs us that some admissions (especially for older patients) are because there is nobody at home who can care for them. Vertigo is a good example. They need somebody to help toilet them and if there is nobody there, then they get admitted. A higher percentage of seniors get admitted for vertigo than younger people not because it is more severe but because they are less likely to have support at home and because falling is a higher probability event and the consequences of falling is more severe.

In general, there is a bit of a knee in the curve at age 50 where the likelihood of being hospitalized from an ER visit ramps up more rapidly than between 1-and-50 years of age.

From anecdotal information, constipation is the "high runner" for abdominal pain (the most common "primary reason" given by patients). Women are between 1.5X and 4.0X more likely to suffer from constipation than men.

Studies with more than 10,000 subjects are highlighted. Source

 Controllable factors that contribute to constipation include

• Inadequate water intake
• Inadequate fiber
• Inadequate moving around
• Resisting the urge to defecate when our body tells us it is time 

It is easy to see that the corporate office work-model contributed to the gender disparity. The first study listed (1.82:1 disparity) was in the mid-1960s when fewer women were in the paid workforce and more of the jobs involved physical movement. Later studies, like the Harari, NHIS study (3.77:1 disparity) were conduced in the mid-1990s when more women were working office jobs and sat at computer monitors or answered phone-calls all day long. Many women strongly dislike using public restrooms.

Sidenote: I stumbled across several peer-reviewed papers about "gender equity in healthcare". The authors were criticizing Emergency Room personnel because they were much less likely to give women opioid's for abdominal pain then men. Clearly, these were Gender Study majors rather than Healthcare professionals. Morphine and other opioids are strongly counter-indicated for constipation because they reduce gut motility, i.e. they paralyze the gut.

Opioids should not be administered before a diagnosis has been done because it can make the underlying issue worse or make diagnosis more difficult. 

Applesauce

Yesterday was an "applesauce" day. Sixteen quarts were canned and now sitting on shelves in the pantry.

Running notes, VO2MAX and Portfolio approach to orchard planning

Running notes

3.2 miles. It was below 70F when I ran and I was less thermally-limited than on other days. My legs felt strong right from the beginning and my first, 1/2 mile split (typically my slowest) was 6:38.

I made two, short stops to rehydrate and breath. Less than sixty seconds each.

That is a solid 1:30 minute faster than my two previous runs of the same course, same protocol. I am not leaning hard into the discomfort zone. I am mostly trying to accumulate miles and get my body used to the idea of running. As John Blutarsky observed, Rome was not burned in a day.

One difference between this run and earlier runs is that I am taking a vacation from lifting until after the 5k and increased the frequency of running to every-other-day. 

Some thoughts on VO2MAX

VO2MAX is a measure of how much oxygen your body can absorb and convert to energy. It is expressed on a per-kg basis so it washes out differences in body-weight.

Picture a runner who weighs 200 pounds and is carrying 60 pounds of body-fat. Now, picture that same runner, exact same lung capacity, heart capacity, same muscles all with the same absorb and use the same amount of oxygen...but only carrying 30 pounds of fat. He now weighs 170 pounds. The gross amount of oxygen the runner can process did not change but the LOAD that the runner must move over the ground diminished. 

The upper number in the fraction did not change but the bottom number did. That runner's VO2MAX changed. His VO2MAX increased by about 18%.

Conventional thinking is that for distance runners, speed scales with VO2MAX and inversely with time.

So...if 200 pound me can run a 5k in 40 minutes, a 170 pound me should be able to run it in 34 minutes.

But wait, there's more...

Let's consider the biological factors that limit VO2MAX.

• Lung volume capacity
• Heart efficiency
• Mitochondria activity
• Lung perfusion capacity 

Lung volume

Less belly fat, especially internal belly fat, means your diaphragm can drop lower into your abdomen and you now have the ability to inhale a larger volume of air (21% oxygen) with each breath. 

Heart efficiency

Regular exercise, over time, has the potential to increase the strength of the heart muscle and the volume of blood your heart can move with each contraction. This comes with about a half-dozen qualifying statements. If you have heart disease, then your exercise program needs medical supervision.

A stronger, more efficient heart means more blood is available to transfer CO2 to the lungs and can absorb more O2.

Mitochondria activity

Mitochondria are structures within your cells, including your muscle cells, that convert sugar and oxygen into ATP, the actual chemical that makes the protein fibers in your muscles contract. 

My understanding is that intense exercise incentivizes the cells' eliminating old, broken mitochondria and replacing them with younger mitochondria that function at a higher level. Intense exercise might also increase the number of active mitochondria within your muscle cells.

Lung perfusion

Everything else is great news. Lung perfusion, as a stand-alone metric, isn't. Age, ozone, smoke, reactive air pollution all damage lung cells and reduce their ability to pass CO2 out and O2 into the blood stream. Exercise has a minimal effect on that loss of porosity. 

Your net ability to absorb O2 can be enhanced by exercise as described above, but it cannot (fully) rejuvenate damaged lung tissue. 

Planning an orchard, a portfolio approach

If you have been following my blog, you know that I am hip-deep in planning orchards right now.

One strategy that I lean on is to spread out the harvest seasons.

Labor is always at a premium on a homestead or dacha. Spreading out the harvest season levels the work-load and minimizes the impact of an unexpected hiccup in labor availability. It also minimizes the need to process the crop since you have smaller amounts showing up at shorter intervals.

Cherry ripening sequence. The vertical line on the left is July 1. Graphic from Grandpa's Orchard

To make this concrete, suppose you are looking at cherry variety to plant in your homestead orchard and you only have room for two varieties. You thoroughly investigate the plusses and minuses of the different varieties and you determine that you want WhiteGold sweet cherries because birds are less likely to bother them than most other sweet cherries and you want Jubileum tart (pie) cherries because they have extremely high amounts of anti-inflammatory compounds and make outstanding pies.

One reason you might want to rethink that combination is because their harvest seasons almost completely overlap.

Suppose you reconsider your priorities and decide that the anti-inflammatory properties of the tart cherry are more important to you than the bird resistance. You tell yourself, "I will have to put nets over the sour cherry anyway, it isn't that much of a big deal to put it over the sweet cherry, too. In that case, maybe Jubileum and Lapins is a more serviceable combination.

On the other hand, maybe you tasted WhiteGold and its inclusion is not negotiable for you. In that case, perhaps Mesabi or Bali/Evans will better meet your needs for a tart/pie cherry. 

A pretty good video

10 useful skills to have when the supply-chain craps-out 

According to the narrator, most of the skills that will keep you alive are not the dramatic ones that they make movies about. They are boring and pedestrian.

Random stuff

Quicksilver attended the year's first play-date about 8 days ago. Yesterday she had a runny nose, a cough but no fever. She took a three hour nap and would have slept longer if her mother hadn't shown up.

I am firmly convinced that one of the reasons that senior citizens were monkey-hammered by Covid-19 is because most of us avoid contact with snot-nosed kids. We allow our subscription to the-virus-of-the-month club to lapse and our portfolio of antibody production tools becomes obsolete.

Viruses are like music. The coat of different strains of virus are all composed of the same musical notes but they are arranged in different patterns. New virus evolve with modest rearrangements of the coating; the part of the virus that is exposed to our bloodstream/immune system. If your body has been exposed to the new virus's most recent ancestors then your immune system will recognize most of the patterns and start churning out antibodies which will be successful in slowing down the new challenge.

My mental image is that of three defenders getting a piece of Billy Sims (a runner) and slowing him down enough so that the rest of the team can show up and help tackle him.

Wood-splitter

I bought a used wood-splitter yesterday.

The seller's father recently died and he had inherited his father's larger, newer wood-splitter. He didn't need two of them.

He started it up and split a gnarly piece of Black Locust log I brought for demonstration purposes. 

He sold it for a fair price. Fair for him. Fair for me. If taken care of, the unit still had 2/3 of its life ahead of it. It could last much longer if I (or whoever I bequeath it to upon my death) has access to a replacement motor.

He wanted 2/3 the price of new. Knowing that it would not wear out within my life-time, it presented no less value to me than a new one would.

It is now parked in the barn at the Upper/Hill Orchard site. 

Step counters

I have been wearing it more days than not. I am skeptical about its accuracy. I haven't done a test, but I think it logs steps when I am driving somewhere in the truck. It sees acceleration and the truck has a bumpy ride.

I didn't do much yesterday. I drove an hour, total, in the truck to pick up the wood-splitter. I walked 40 minutes with Mrs ERJ. I pushed a lawn mower for 20 minutes and the step counter credited me with 14k steps.

I will have to test the "truck hypothesis" one of these days. That is, write down the number of steps when I get into the truck and then after the drive to the Orchards.

Michigan is all centerfire for firearm deer-season

Michigan historically was divided into three zones. The most southern zone was "shotgun only" for deer season. Then exceptions were added. Black-powder and certain types of handguns were allowed.

Michigan was the last state in the nation to allow elevated deer blinds for firearm deer season.

Shotgun technology evolved. Rifled barrels, sabot ammo, "Rifle" platforms with stiff stocks and good triggers were chambered in shotgun cartridges.

Michigan then allowed certain rifle cartridges in the southern zone. They had to be within a certain size...not too long and not too short. They had to be more than 0.354" in diameter. They had to have straight walls. Those constraints limited the amount of smokeless powder they held and limited their power.

While all of this was happening, fewer young people became hunters. The average age is now about 64 years of age for deer hunters. The deer kept multiplying and now infectious diseases are an emerging concern.

2026 marks the first year that hunters in southern Michigan can use virtually any rifle cartridge to hunt deer.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.... I am sure this topic will be revisited on this blog.

Random meme

The meme may have mutated in the time between when I stole it from Midwest Chick and when I posted it here. IDK.

I watch the WOKE movement do exactly what the commentor suggests. They keep changing the location of the "Most Oppressed" sign. 

Friday grab-bag

It is rumored, at least among some groups, that young members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints can be identified by their luminous complexion.

The rumor (supposedly) got started when a group of young people were watching a game show (Jeopardy?) on television and one of the group blurted out "She is a Saint!" about one of the contestants. When asked how she knew, she claimed that the contestant had "The LDS glow".

It turned out that the impulsive TV watcher was correct. Then it became a game for the group, "Find the Saints".

If the missionaries who stopped their Toyota to talk with me are good examples, I can affirm that at least some LDS members do, indeed, have luminous skin.

Clean living, simple diets, exercise in the great outdoors: It is amazing what that can do for a person.

More backstory

During our conversation, the driver claimed to have mistaken me for somebody else who runs on the back-roads of Eaton County. I suppose it that was possible. Perhaps she saw my lumpy gait and assumed I was pulling up lame and needed help.

Most missionaries are not going to be in their late 60s, so this friend of hers who exercises is obviously not one of them.

I guess fat, old, shaggy guys all look the same to young people.

Side story

The passenger revealed that there were not a lot of single, young, local LDS men asking the young, women missionaries out to ice cream socials. Alas, MGTOW is seeping into every crevice of society.

I tried to cheer her up. I told her that "when she was ready" she would get lots of attention, that it would be like a light-switch flipping. In retrospect, I wish I had told her that she needs to get clear on "her mission" in life and dump the parts that dilute that mission. Once she had that squared away, she would be transmitting down a single channel and the-right-kind-of-guys will be pulled in like moths to a candle. 

ERJ Diet Program (10 pound weight loss guaranteed)

 The package comes with a complementary, weighed, sleep-shirt.

Running notes

Running notes:

3.2 miles in 42 minutes.

I was on the second-to-last stretch when an SUV that was traveling in the opposite direction that I was running slowed down and stopped. The window opened. There were two wholesome, modestly clad, young women in the SUV. They were wearing name tags.

I paused my stop-watch. 

I asked "Are you with the Latter Day Saints?"

"Yes we are" the driver replied.

"You've heard of us?" the passenger exclaimed, surprised. 

We chatted for more than ten minutes. They are a credit to their church. 

I changed the oil in the truck today

That was a work-ticket that kept sinking to the bottom of the stack for a week.

Inspection

The inspector for the construction work is scheduled to show up some time today.

We will see if it happens. I am holding off on the major repair to the landscaping until after that happens.

Quicksilver is growing by leaps and bounds

There were some new three year-olds at play-date today. They are tiny!

QS was that small and timid not that long ago.

Catbirds and small fruits

I was in the bathroom and looking out the window when I saw one of the grape vines shaking. Having nothing better to do, I watched until I could see what was doing it.

It was the catbird that had been nesting by the raspberries beneath the persimmon tree.

Suddenly, it clicked in my head. SHE was why the grapes and raspberries and even many of the mulberries were disappearing as soon as they started to show color. 

Mushrooms

Southern Belle gifted us with a big box of mushrooms. I don't know how they fell into her hands, but they were commercially grown mushrooms.

So, part of my day was spent sauteing them in butter and putting them into small, snap-top plastic containers for freezing.

I will be making applesauce in the near future. 

Conformity

Sigma personalities

The "Sigma" personality is the honey-badger personality. "He doesn't care". 

Seth Capehart is a doctor who practices Emergency Medicine in Sarasota, Florida. He also has a Youtube channel.

Sarasota is an attractive community for retirees. Given his location and his profession, he gets to interact with more people who are over the age of 100 than most of us.

He said they all have one thing in common.

"They dance every chance they get." *

Beyond the physical benefits of dancing, Capehart points to one of the underlying enablers: They are immune to the opinions of the wallflowers. They do what they want to do, what they feel is "right".

The wallflowers do a lot of "crab-bucketing" and try to drag down the outliers. They actively discourage people with curious minds from exploring new information and new skills. They mock and ridicule people who work-out. 

The wallflowers are frightened by Sigmas and call strong-minded people "lone-wolves". They are outraged by the dissonance that Sigmas create in their conformity-based world.

One of the divides between women and men is that most women have a greater need for belonging and conformity than men do. It is a generality and there are exceptions. The discussion of whether it is due to socializing (nurture) or biological (nature) is beyond the scope of this essay.

The oppressive hand of conformity clamps down in about 7th grade. At one time, it loosened during the early 20s when kids left their parental homes and experimented with a vast diversity of sub-cultures like The Society for Creative Anachronisms. A few fell into cults but that seemed to be a small price to pay to let the majority of kids flower into full adulthood.

For our purposes I will define a cult as a rigid system of beliefs where the dogma is absolute and questions are not tolerated. The control structure is authoritarian and top-down. People outside of the cult are less than human.

Unfortunately, the college experience metastasized into a cult. Divergence is not tolerated. A very large number of kids are exiting college owing a metric shit-ton of money and with petrified brains.

One of the cult's articles of faith is that "feelings" are a superior form of "thinking", that is, "Emotions" are a truer and more pure than logic.

If that is so, then from a purely economic standpoint it would be far cheaper to put three-year-olds into corporate and government positions than to spend another half-million dollars** and 20 years teaching them how to throw peer-reviewed tantrums. Even the STEM fields (Sub-stack, Twitter, Ello, Meta) are not immune.

ERJ to start marketing a diet program

Guaranteed to produce a 10 pound weight loss in the first week. Much cheaper than GLP drugs. Deals with healthcare insurance companies are pending.

Sign up now and get a discount and the tee-shirt.

 

---Image of tee-shirt not postin

*Mrs ERJ was delighted to learn that dancing is mandatory. She likes to dance. I do not. We met dancing. I figured dances were a target-rich-environment.

**In Michigan, we now spend an average of $17k per year, per student between K and Grade 12. That is $221k for 13 years. Then add another +$200k for the 4-year college experience + graduate degree and and you are well over a half million per moron.

My Two-Cents on the Clancy hung-jury

Would the jury have convicted Lindsay Clancy of First Degree Murder if she had methodically killed anybody else's three children? I suspect that there is a 99.9% chance that the jury would have turned in a unanimous "Guilty" verdict for Murder in the First Degree after 10 minutes of deliberation if she had killed her next-door neighbor's kids (for instance) and no other circumstance had been changed.

Why is viciously killing her own children not murder? Weren't they unlawfully deprived of their futures? Why is she held to a much lower standard for caring for her own children than for the children of random strangers?

The law is not based on Empathy. It is based on facts that can be generated. 

DARVO as a style of "communication"

One of my commentors used the acronym "DARVO". Being a curious person, I looked into it.

DARVO stands for a style of argument:

Deny: Deny everything even when it is a demonstrable, provable fact. "I never said that." "I did not do that."

Attack:  Attack the other party. It does not matter WHAT you attack him with. If it is not related to the argument then it will take him off-balance. "You are such a slob, leaving your things everywhere". "You are always imagining things". "You are stupid and can't keep facts straight".

Reverse Victim and Oppressor*: Suppose you were shoplifting and were just detained by "Loss Control". After Denial and Attack, switch to "You followed me because I am an Old, White, cis-Hetero Man and you are oppressing me!!!" That deflects the attention back onto the other person and makes something that was objective, clear and cut-and-dried into a situation that is framed in relative terms which makes it ambiguous and emotional.

Why do people use this tactic?

The tactic works great for short-term gains but comes with very high mid-term and long-term costs. 

If you are a psychopath or a sociopath or a narcissist, then the cost those tactics will have in your relationship are (essentially) invisible to you. You just don't care. 

If you are ADHD and/or extremely stupid, then you are time-blind and "long term" does not exist, so the tactic appears to be essentially free.

If you grew up in a household, perhaps a single-parent one, and your mother used this tactic then this method is your "normal". You might not be a narcissist or have ADHD or be time-blind or be as dumb as a rock, buy you have seen this tactic work over-and-over-and-over again and because of your family-culture, you think it is an appropriate way to get what you want.

In theory, the last category can be trained to not use DARVO as their go-to preference for interpersonal relationships. That is the good news.

The bad news is that more kids are being raised in family environments where DARVO is the default mode of arguing, i.e. communicating. 

DARVO is particularly attractive to people who feel relatively powerless and have little to lose by going scorched-earth. It is also attractive to people whose inner-lives are littered with mental chaos. DARVO levels the playing field for them. An example would be a single-parent who has serial relationships and is struggling economically and is facing food and housing insecurity. 

*Original text erroneously used the word "Oppressed" rather than "Oppressor". A kind reader pointed out my error in comments.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Nicolai Alexandrovich Sergeev was born in Russia in 1855 and died in 1919.

 Hat-tip to:

 

Another new neighbor and work-tickets

We have a feral cat in the area. This is what he looks like. I don't know if he has mange around his mouth or if he just had breakfast.

Work-ticket report

 

My volunteer actually showed up. He picked four boxes of apples. I paid him a tiny sum to make up for the fact that he was battling wasps, bald-faced hornets and yellow-jackets the entire time. 

No, he did not get stung. I suggested that he not wrap his hand around the apple when picking them but to grip the silhouette with his finger-tips, touching the apple only where he could see. We are usually stung by the wasps we did not see.

I also told him to not reach out for apples. It is time to move the ladder when you find yourself stretching to get the last few apples. The apple that makes us fall out of the tree is the one we can ALMOST reach. 

On my side of the work-tickets, I bought 12 more T-posts and carried them from the road to the satellite orchards, I finished framing in the deer-blind on the south side, I mowed for an hour on a riding mower and I pushed a mower for another hour. Not exactly what was on the work-ticket list, but close.

Lifting

Yesterday was supposed to be a lifting day but the grass was dry and needed cutting. The apples needed picking and I had a volunteer. I was moping around about missing the lifting-day when Mrs ERJ reminded me that the gym was closed yesterday, anyway.

Today is supposed to be a running day. Yippie (in sarcastic font). 

I intend to go on another news-fast

Passive infanticide of baby girls is common in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and China. The culture of those countries place a very high premium on boys; the first three because "Dowry" is a crippling expense for aging parents and the last because of the desire to continue the family name.

Canada has seen a huge influx of immigrants from all four countries. I have to wonder if their lenient penalties are a concession to "diversity" even though it comes at a very high price to women.

I want to write this down before I forget

One of the best things about cooler weather is the fact that nobody really cares if your socks don't match when you are wearing long slacks.

It needed to be said. 

Work proceeds apace

Yesterday, I was pounding posts into the ground.

The goldenrod is in full bloom. It was filled with pollinating insects gorging themselves on the nectar. I did not get stung. The bugs were too intent on filling their gullets and hives.

As Old NFO commented on the previous post, no plan survives the first encounter. My first issue was that the farm store ran out of 6' T-posts. On Friday, somebody bought 300 fence posts and nearly wiped out their inventory. The clerk and I poked around the corners and behind the racks and found 13. At home, I found another 5 in "inventory". That left me 12 short of the thirty I would need for the two satellite orchards I want to plant.

Approximate locations of the two orchard sites. Standard NESW orientation. Road to the east. The lower site is the first one I put in, the upper is the second.

 The second reality check is that the first site is constrained by a steep valley and trees in the east-west direction. There was only room for two rows of trees. Right off the bat, I had to change three-rows-of-five to two-rows-of-seven.

Other minor inconveniences included dense thickets of blackberries and the compass on my smartphone giving me wonky direction. There are also some small Black Walnut trees at the first location that I will need to deal with.

In spite of the difficulties, I got 18 T-posts slammed into the ground. I left out every-other post so I defined the full foot-prints of the two orchards. I sprayed 6' diameter patches where the trees will go, pacing to estimate the locations where I did not have T-posts. With a 6' diameter patch I don't need sub-millimeter precision.

I used my best judgement to NOT put them on the prime building sites on the parcels. The first site is a wee-bit north of the prime location and the second site is a wee-bit south of that parcel's prime location.

Both footprints start a tiny bit more than 100 feet from the edge of the road.

Apple crop report

Generally, very disappointing.

There are some Liberty still hanging in the Upper Orchard. There is a good crop of what keys out as Jonafree. One tree of Gloster 69 overcropped on one side so those apples are runted. It has almost no apples on the other side. There was almost no fruit-set on the Empire trees.

The two Melrose trees have over 80 pounds each but they will not be ready to pick until Oct 1. 

Today's work-ticket

Pick apples. My goal is to pick 80 pounds. That is enough for 28 quarts of apple sauce. I have a volunteer to help me so that is a blessing.

Work on the deer stand

Buy 12 more T-posts.

Install the belt that powers the mower-deck on the Eaton Rapids riding mower. 

Some thoughts on Contingency Plans

Running notes

3.2 miles in 42 minutes.

Some pictures

Dinner. Frozen pizza embellished with home-grown onions and sweet pepper slices.

First egg from our new Khaki Campbells.

"Charlotte, is that you?"

It is a big year for puffball mushrooms. Deer trail running from bottom of photo to top slightly to the left of center.

 

Satellite Orchards

A million years ago, I attended a weekend seminar on Project Management. The instructor was a professor from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and he understood the attraction rabbit-holes hold for the engineering mind.

Some of his pearls-of-wisdom were:

"Don't measure a pile of shit with a micrometer"

"Field-orders are a reality, budget 25% for it unless you have historical data"

"You need contingency plans for events along the critical path, but you only need ONE plan for each node." 

He elaborated on each point, of course, but the one I want to write about is the last one.

He told a story from his own past. He was the head of a team designing and building a working model of an alternate energy propulsion vehicle. Seeing this as a way to demonstrate their engineering skills, the team embarked on an ambitious project involving a custom-built, carbon-fiber body, solar panel covered electric vehicle with custom high-pressure-low-rolling-resistance motorcycle tires.

The winner of the competition, which was held at a Big-Three proving grounds was a five-year-old, carburated, Ford Pinto pulling a trailer that carried a 100 pound LP pig.

Bottomline: Your backup plan must be dirt-simple, quick-to-execute and extremely robust. That almost always means grabbing off-the-shelf solutions (when they exist) even when they are overkill or "wrong" or grossly inelegant. One of those kinds of plans is worth more than 100 complex, slow-to-execute "elegant" plans.

Dacha orchards

The property that the Upper and Hill Orchards is located on is also managed for field crops (which takes care of itself) and conservation. 

The portion that is being managed for conservation could, conceivably, be broken into parcels for "dachas" or economic lifeboats.

Ukraine and Russia have already been there and done that. Their economies were in a steep, downward glide-path through the mid-1970s until about ten years after the break-up of the USSR. Now they are struggling again due to the Uke-Rus war.

The dacha, their gardens and orchards are prime infrastructure keeping millions of them alive. So are the "commons" where they can graze farm animals and gather firewood, mushrooms, wild fruit and game.

If I were forced to parachute into an undeveloped property with the clothes-on-my-back, finding a small, producing orchard and berry patch already there could be a life-saver. Even if the varieties were not ones I would choose.

Given that the implosion of the US economy at the magnitude of the Great Depression or the dissolution of the USSR is probably a low probability event*, I don't want to throw money at these orchards.

However, I have a small nursery that I can move trees from and suckers from existing berry bushes. It is not that these are the BEST choices. It is that these choices are the ones that are off-the-shelf.

At this snap-shot-in-time

Three rows of five trees planted 16' within the rows and 24' between rows. Trees on semi-dwarf type roots. 15 trees. Seven species. Four genus.

I am not saying this is a great plan. I am saying this is a functional orchard that I can execute with a minimal outlay of additional money. I can buy peach and cherry rootstocks (about $6 each). I can purchase plum and cherry scionwood (I have sources of peach scion/budwood)

---Added after posting: Apparently St Julien plum rootstock is also compatible with peaches. That will save me a few dollars--- 

Ripening sequence

Mulberry: Late-June-through-mid-August

Cherries: Late-June-through-mid-July (Danube and WhiteGold cv)

Peaches: August (Contender or Cresthaven)

Plum: Late-August...Brooks European plum for canning and drying

Pear: HS, early-mid Sept. KG October

Apples: October. Tolman Sweet, Golden Russet, King David

Obviously, if somebody had the skills they could graft the trees over to the varieties they wanted. If they pruned judiciously, the trees would keep producing modest amounts of fruit as they switched the trees over.

The next step

Pound "T" posts into the ground to mark where each tree goes. Then spray 8' diameter patches of herbicide to kill the current vegetation.

 

*The real reason I do this kind of thing is because I enjoy it. Do I think it will happen? I hope not. For the time being, planting trees is a more productive and cheaper way to spend my time than drinking beer and chasing floozies in bars. I might never eat a single apple or cherry from these orchards but I find it is a great way to reduce my stress levels.