Suncrisp apple. A Rutger's University release. Very late ripening. Keeps well. Some tendency to the seed cavity not fully sealing and moldy seeds.
Suncrisp is one of my later blooming apple cultivars. It is a seedling of Golden Delicious and Cox Orange Pippin. Neither of these cultivars is very hardy so this is also likely to be marginally hardy in the mid-West.
Nova Spy. This is about where my Liberty trees are. Flowers lose their petals after pollination so that is a good sign.
Lilac. I assume this is Chas Joly. It was given to me by a local gunsmith named Don Snap.
I went for a walk with the dogs (on property) last night. As often happens, the Boston Terrier chose to not keep up with the big dogs.
Coming back around the pasture about twenty minutes later I heard growling and barking. I hollered at the big dogs, "Smuggles needs help." Like a shot, they were on the way. I hustled over to the garage to get an ax to bust through the roof and retrieve my little dog.
I did not need to bother. Between the three of them they had the raccoon out in the open and had pretty much finished the job.
Smuggles did not want to share
Smuggles has been strutting around like a hero. He KNOWS he held that raccoon for twenty minutes while the big dogs were off playing. He is a little bit chewed up and is walking a little slower today. Correction, he is strutting a little bit slower today. Dogs part two
Herc likes digging. He will find a woodchuck den and start trying to dig them out. When he encounters a root he bites and tears it out.
It caught up with him today. He got a stick caught in the roof of his mouth.
This looks like a segment of grape vine. It is 0.54" in diameter (about 13.5mm). As you can see, the ends are jagged.
I can state with a high degree of certainty that a German Shepherds upper palate is slightly less than 2.6" wide.
Herc was not a happy camper when I put him on his back and used a pair of vice grips to remove the stick.
Wildlife corridors
Three strips were mowed with a hand mower. The strips are 40" wide. I sprayed herbicide on the strips and will plant Switchgrass seeds and move the Maximilian Sunflower seedlings. I needed to get this done today because we have more rain coming.
You can see how the strip on the left follows the "military crest" of the hill. I paralleled and existing deer trail for the first strip. Those deer are pretty smart. Salamander wants the deer to be biased toward the right as they travel this parcel.
Looking back the other way.
A Praying Mantis egg sack?
A mullein plant looking all fat and sassy. Mullein is a popular plant in herbal medicine. Some folks call this plant "Wild Tobacco"
Besieged by Bunnies
They seem to favor dandelions and violet leaves. We will have two or three of them in the yard at a time. This does not bode well for the garden.
I just finished talking with him on the phone. It was a typical "guy" conversation lasting about 25 seconds.
If I understand the plan, school policy allows him to submit late homework for partial credit. The counselor advised him to re-submit all of the homework to nail down all of that partial credit. If all he gets is the partial credit he is doing well enough on the tests to still pass the classes and still attend his college level classes.
I was also given to understand that somebody was working on sorting out time/date stamps although that might not be necessary.
I also heard that I did not have the entire story. Kids! I am just guessing here, but this may not have been going on for all six weeks.
I want to give the Eaton Rapids School District staff an official atta-boy. Some of the key players were out of the building today but they still responded in a very positive way. Enough other people stepped up, even though it was not their job, and took care of business in the three hours the kid was in the building.
I apologize if I made it sound like I thought folks were not doing their jobs. I would blame the computer spell check if I thought you would believe it.
The kid I transport to school in the morning was distressed.
He found out that the school computer received none of the homework assignments he turned in over the last six weeks. He is normally an A-B student, more As than Bs, and he currently has about 35% in all of his classes.
His situation is a little harder to fix than many other students. He is off-campus taking college classes for most of the day. Consequently, it is tougher to schedule time with the high school academic counselor. The fact that he has so few high school classes also reduced the number of random chances that one of his instructors would bring up his plummeting grades.
He found out about it yesterday. One of his high school instructors told him he was flunking Physics. And he was informed via email that he was going to be dropped from his college program because of his high school grades.
Normally these issues would be uncovered at parent-teacher conferences but this kid lives 12 miles away and nobody in his family drives. It is a physical hardship for them to attend conferences.
Fortunately, he has all of his homework on the hard drive of his lap top. I hope the high school has somebody capable of recovering the time/date stamps to verify the kid's story.
I am 97% sure this story will have three happy endings.
The school district will not let this train wreck derail this kid
The kid will learn to not trust computers
When it is important, the kid will always verify the that party being communicated to received and understood the information he thought he had sent.
The plant shown on the left is a native perennial called Maximilian Sunflower (Helianthus maximiliani). It is a big, sprawling plant that blooms in September and October. It spreads aggressively via rhizomes. This is one of the species we are using to quickly create side cover
across a CRP field with the intent of creating a wildlife travel
corridor.
It is one of the species that Wes Jackson chose to investigate for "perennial grain". His goal was to produce 300 pounds of sunflower seeds per acre. This document suggests that 200 pounds per acre is already being achieved on a consistent basis.
The seeds are smaller than annual sunflower seeds but the birds seem to relish them.
I found a bag of seed I had stratifying in the refrigerator. The directions from Prairie Moon Nursery suggested a thirty day cold/damp stratification period. To be honest, I forgot about these seeds and they got away from me.
I scattered them atop damp potting soil and pressed them into contact. Then I made a grocery bag burrito to keep the humidity high and temperatures reasonable.
It has been windy so I weighted down the burrito with sticks. God willing I will get twenty-to-fifty seedlings to transplant.
Bird nests
The "teepee" in the center of the frame is some fencing that was dragged down by the weight of vines. It holds a secret.
It has been a very wet spring. So far this mom seems to be doing OK. She did not go far when I took this snap.
This is admittedly a bit wonky, but the image above shows the number of dollars you would need to invest in each "internet" company to get a dollar of revenue.
Not a dollar of profit, but a dollar of revenue.
"Revenue" is worth looking at because"Profit" is much easier to manipulate. "Revenue" is a clean number that is difficult to game. The Market Cap/Annual Revenue is useful for assessing long term viability. It is hard to visualize how a company can be viable if customers are unwilling to pay for the privilege of using their products. Consider print media and network TV as prime examples.
Apple has strong revenue because you cannot have the privilege of carrying around an iPhone unless you pony up the $$$$ up-front. Apple's vulnerability is that they are in a fashion industry and fashion is notoriously fickle. It is only by the grace of God that they have not had batteries exploding or reported gargantuan data breaches. I suspect it is just a matter of time.
Intel, Amazon, Ebay and Microsoft have businesses that are simple enough to explain to a fifth grader. Intel makes great chip-sets. Amazon and Ebay have been able to leverage the internet and create huge markets for producers world-wide. Microsoft makes those Intel chip-sets usable.
Google (aka, Alphabet) is a little harder to get a grip on. They sell beau coup advertising...virtually every Youtube video has targeted advertising you have to wade through. Their Chrome and Android are much like Microsoft products.
Facebook....Facebook is weird. Their dilemma is that social media must be inclusive to function. Facebooks cache is that "everybody" is on Facebook. Charging a fee would poison Facebook's appeal in the marketplace by making it less inclusive.
It would be fascinating to learn about "elasticity" in social media. How many users would Facebook lose if they charged a $5 a month subscription? Maybe half of them? This link suggests that only 50% of users would even consider paying a monthly subscription for an app. And that does not even address multiple Facebook accounts.
A second consideration is what happens when governments start taxing social media accounts? You think it is impossible? Austria plans to slap a VAT (Value Added Tax) on Google searchs and Facebook Accounts. You can be sure that every other revenue starved government will be right behind them. Isn't a government tax indistinguishable from a subscription to the user?
If Facebook lost 50% of their user how long would it take for it to enter a death spiral? It would no longer have the functionality of "everybody is on Facebook". (Disclosure, neither I nor Mrs ERJ are on FB)
It is not like there is a shortage of social media sites.
All those really smart stock analyst love Facebook. I wonder if most of them are "millennials".
According to the 2016 Charlotte, Michigan water quality report published in one of the local paper, more than 10% of the water samples taken in Charlotte, Michigan tested above the action level for copper.
The 2016 report is not available on-line!?!? The 2015 report is on-line and shows that 90% of the samples are below the action level. Still, the 90th percentile number is 890, a number that sampling variation could easily tip into non-compliance. They could have seen this coming.
Then I drove to Grand Rapids to pick up Belladonna's mattress and box springs.
I heard this song on the way west.
A short time later I got to watch a white SUV spin-out and hit the concrete Jersey barriers as he/she was coming up to speed after entering westbound M-6 at mile marker 15. The right front and left rear quarters got smoked.
I called 9-1-1. They asked if anybody was hurt. I said I did not think so. Although upon reflection it was a weird accident. They were going too slow to have started spinning out unless somebody yanked the wheel or floored the accelerator. I hope there was not a medical emergency "in-progress".
I suspect they got response pretty quickly. Blocking the entrance ramp to a limited access highway tends to get folk's attention.
Slip planes
I once had the opportunity to ask a designer who worked on coal fired power plants how they were able to design fire boxes so they did not tear themselves apart due to thermal stresses. At the time I was thinking of welding up a wood stove out of steel plate. His answer was "slip planes".
We have probably all seen doors or furniture with wooden panels. The doors often look like this.
Those panels are usually trapped in tracks but are not glued in place. The reason is that the horizontal stringers have very little dimensional change with changes in humidity while the panel can vary a great deal. For example, Northern Red Oak shrinks by 0.2% longitudinally when drying from "green" to "Kiln dried" while it shrinks by almost 10% in the tangential direction. Gluing the panels would either cause the end joints on the horizontal stringer so pull or cause the panels to split.
I hear stories of the "Good Old Days" when the Germans attended their churches, the Irish attended theirs, the Poles, Czech, Italians, Hillbillies and Mexicans and so on all had certain churches or services that they gravitated to. In the work place you might have self-segregation by department. The "deliverables" where the departments interfaced were clearly defined. They had self-organized their society to include slip planes.
Sometimes the self-segregation was so strange it was funny. One man told me about a meat packing plant he had worked in somewhere in Kansas. One shift was an absolute disaster for productivity and safety violations. That shift was entirely Vietnamese. A little bit of sleuthing revealed that one man in the center of the floor was from the wrong village and every shift was an ongoing battle. Once the problem was recognized, the man was moved to a different area. The area ran very smoothly after that. His replacement was an African-American.
Even suggesting the idea of letting people self-organize to create natural slip planes causes some people to have a hissy fit.
