Category Archives: Animals

Guard Cats – In the Interest of Harmony

Posted on March 9, 2012 by | 21 comments

In the pic they’re patrolling in Placitas, New Mexico.  But it’s the same here.

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

There’s a rich-people kind of house up the hill, a quarter-mile south of me.  It sits on 90-odd acres of land, has a barn worthy of the name, and it’s been sitting vacant during all the years I’ve been here.  Vacant, but for sale.

But a couple of weeks ago a couple of strangers pulled up in front of the cabin on a four-wheeler with side-by-side seats.  It’s the first time I’ve ever had an unexpected visitor here except Gale or Gale and Kay.  Naturally I scrambled out to find out what they wanted.

Turned out he’d just bought the place and wanted to introduce himself to his nearest neighbor.  That done, he left saying they’d be moving in soon.  Friendly exchange.

Then yesterday I went up to Gale’s and he was there.  They’d just done their moving into their new home.  He and Gale were discussing things and I sat down for a quick cup of coffee before going on about my business.

“I’m hoping you won’t shoot my dog.”

“Is it a chicken killer?”  Thinking whatever danger there was to his dog probably came in the form of dead chickens.

“It’s never been around chickens.  It’s a mutt, a rescued dog, part lab, part herder, part pit-bull.  What killing it’s done was cats.  I had a lot of feral cats on the last place I lived.”  He paused.  “I know you have cats down there.”

That gave me pause for thought.  While I was thinking, he added, “If you see him, he’s gun shy.  Just fire into the air and he’ll run away.”

I’m a man who has a huge respect for how badly neighbor problems can intrude and make life a hell for both neighbors.  But I’m also aware that animals can cause neighbor problems lightning-fast.  Quicker than almost anything else.  For instance, there’s almost nothing that will piss a man off worse than killing his dog, no matter what the dog was doing at the time of demise.

“Tell you what.  I’ll make sure my cats don’t come up here killing your dog if you’ll make sure your dog doesn’t come down here killing my cats.”  Seemed a fair enough proposition to me.  I pretty much figure if my cats go up there attacking his dog, anything on his place, he’s welcome to shoot them, but it would be more fitting if he came down here and put a bullet between my eyes.

He expressed a concern that his dog might mistake me for a cat, saying that since I’m around them I’d have their scent on me, but I assured him that wasn’t a concern.  I’ve never met a dog I couldn’t stand off.  And I shouldn’t have any reason to be around this one.  During my years here I’ve only set foot on that place a couple of times.  Once because of cows, and once challenging some people who were up there loading things into a truck.  I just politely asked if they had permission, and noted the license number of the vehicle.

The man’s 74 years old, seems a nice guy.  Ex-pilot.  And if we need to talk we  probably will enjoy most things we might discuss.

I surely hope my cats don’t go up there attacking his dog, though, because I’d expect him to shoot them. 

Old Jules

 

21 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Chickens, Country Life, Current Issues, Free-ranging-chickens, Homesteading, Human Behavior

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Sunday Morning Coming Up, Down and Sideways

Posted on February 26, 2012 by | 12 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for stopping by for a read this morning.

Those of you who haven’t been getting enough magnetism in your areas will be glad to know we’ll be having a nice little geomagnetic storm today. 

CME TARGETS EARTH, MARS: A coronal mass ejection (CME) launched from the sun on Feb. 24th appears set to hit both Earth and Mars. According to analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, the cloud should reach Earth today, Feb. 26th around 1330 UT, followed by Mars two days later.

The CME was hurled into space by a filament of magnetism, which rose up from the sun’s northestern limb and erupted on Feb. 24th: SDO movie. Although much of the cloud headed north, out of the plane of the planets, the cloud’s lower edge will dip down low enough to intersect Earth, Curiosity, and Mars.

http://spaceweather.com/

It couldn’t have come at a better time here.  The ranchers have been complaining something awful about the magnetic drought.

Meanwhile, it’s mostly business as usual here.  When I went out onto the porch to say my hellos to the felines it was all present and accounted for except the invader cat.  It was out there last night, but I figure it’s commuting to whatever place it has real people somewhere, keeping them on edge, then hurrying back here where things are really happening.  But that leaves it open to the possibility of missing something both places.

I’m thinking it will carry on this game as long as it thinks it can get by with it at both ends.

Those of you who believe radio waves are messing with your heads will be gratified to know there’s a place in the US where you can get away from it.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/15/west-virginias-quiet-zone-becomes-refuge-for-those-on-the-run/

West Virginia’s ‘Quiet Zone’ becomes refuge for those on the run from wireless technology

By posted Sep 15th 2011 3:12PM
 
 There’s a 13,000-square-mile section of West Virginia known as the Quiet Zone where there’s no WiFi, no cell service, and strict regulations placed on any device that could pollute the airwaves. Those unique conditions are enforced (and aided by the surrounding mountains) to protect the radio telescopes in the area from interference, and it’s hardly anything new — as The Huffington Post notes, Wired did an extensive profile of the zone back in 2004 (the area itself was established in 1958). But as the BBC recently reported, the Quiet Zone is also now serving as something of a refuge for people who believe that wireless technology makes them sick — a condition sometimes called Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (or EHS). Those claims are, of course, in dispute by most medical professionals, but that apparently hasn’t stopped folks from calling the local real estate agent “every other week or so” to inquire about a place in the zone.
 
For those who don’t want to migrate to West Virginia, however, experts suggest a person might  just hit the switch at the power pole and see whether it results in any improvement. 
 
One body of opinion leans to the thought that radio waves have a lot more influence on the human mind when they’re allowed to enter an antenna, swoop down through some receiver to an amplifier, then out to a speaker.  Then back through the air where they encounter a human ear.
 
Making sure those radio waves don’t get passage through and convert themselves to something the human mind can interpret into pictures and words, those experts say, interrupts the damage they can do, or at least reduces it.
 
My personal opinion is that I don’t know.
 
Old Jules
 
Today on Ask Old Jules:  Life in the 1960′s?

Old Jules, what was your life like in the ’60s?

 

12 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Astronomy, Country Life, Current Issues, Science, Senior Citizens

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Trapped by Time

Posted on February 25, 2012 by | 15 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I had the vague, but mistaken notion I wouldn’t post on the blog today.  I awakened fresh and full of energy, went out onto the porch to chat with the cats and none were available for comment.  So I went back indoors, put coffee on, did my usual getting started routines and bounced around as though I’d become a young man of, say, 60 or 55 during the night.

By the time the coffee was prime, Hydrox spoke outside the front door.  But him being an old guy, when I let him in he promptly headed for the bed and crashed.  Caused me a moment of concern, because the cats here always demand a few moments of quality time, each, me talking to them, scratching them behind the ears, holding them upside down, then finally pulling their tails while they pretend anger and trying to get away.

But there he was, curled up on the bed without so much as a sidle-against-the-leg.

So I plunked down at the comp to begin the daily download ritual and glanced at the time.  3:35 AM.  Sheeze!  3:36 by the time I pulled my eyes away.  The damned computer clock must have gone wokkyjawed!  So I pulled up the sleeve of my sweatshirt far enough to show my watch, which promptly sided with the computer, despite the fact I’ve tried to treat it well.  All I demand of a watch is loyalty when it comes to a crunch, aside from occasionally telling me what time it is.

5:00 AM is when I get up.  Not sometime after 3:00.  I sometimes awaken at 4:30 and lie there a while savoring being alive, but I don’t hop out of bed like some fool and start making coffee.

So I’ve somehow hornswoggled myself.  Might just as well see what’s blogworthy, thinks I.

The NASA site reports Spitzer’s still out there dragging surprises out of the Universe:

NASA Telescope Finds Elusive Buckyballs in Space

Astronomers using NASA‘s Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered carbon molecules, known as “buckyballs,” in space for the first time. Buckyballs are soccer-ball-shaped molecules that were first observed in a laboratory 25 years ago. They are named for their resemblance to architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, which have interlocking circles on the surface of a partial sphere. Buckyballs were thought to float around in space, but had escaped detection until now.

“We found what are now the largest molecules known to exist in space,” said astronomer Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “We are particularly excited because they have unique properties that make them important players for all sorts of physical and chemical processes going on in space.” Cami has authored a paper about the discovery that will appear online Thursday in the journal Science.

But I see by the date that was 2010.  Nothing there worth blogging.  Out-of-date old news.  Sheeze.

Old Sol’s UV pics on spaceweather.com don’t get updated weekends, normally, so a person’s left looking at how it was October 25, 2005 compared to yesterday, instead freshly dressed and spiffed up for a Saturday in February, 2012. 

Any port in a storm, I reckons.

As you can observe for yourself, the drama continues.

Anyway, I see time’s moved right along and it’s 4:59 AM.  Won’t be long before the data’s posted on the various sites so I can download it.  Probably just time for another cup of coffee, another moseying around outdoors to see if any felines have discovered the world made it through the night.

5:04 AM, Yeah, Niaid’s up and around, came in and had her morning hissing/swatting match with Hydrox, rousted him off the bed and stole his place.  Now he’s wanting back outdoors to see what’s in the news.

The Invader-cat doesn’t know how things work around here yet, so it’s out there under the window meowing to itself in puzzlement, hoping I’ll be putting out some viddles.  And the various roosters must have picked up on the house activity noise enough to get them crowing, wondering what-the-hell’s going on.

About all I can tell you about what’s in store for today is a nap.  I don’t care what the Mayan calendar says.

Old Jules

————-

Today on Ask Old Jules:  Are We De-evolving?

Old Jules, are we de-evolving?
The rules of natural selection and competition don’t really exist now. Everything is pretty much given to you as long as you have money. Could this mean that humans could be different in the next hundred years?

 

15 Comments

Posted in 2000's, 2012, Animals, Astronomy, Country Life, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens, Solitude

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The Backyard Chickens Conspiracy

Posted on January 30, 2012 by | 15 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Yesterday I got an email from someone called himself Rob, AKA ‘Nifty Chicken’ of the Backyard Chickens newsletter telling me I need to re-register. 

“This is Rob, AKA “Nifty-Chicken” of www.BackYardChickens.com.   I noticed that you’re registered for our newsletter, but can’t find you in our community membership.  This quick note is to let you know of some important changes and to help you get re-registered so you can continue receiving the BYC Newsletters.”

Naturally, I’m deeply suspicious about this.  Someone’s wanting me to become a part of their ‘we’ over there without me having done anything to deserve it, other than subscribing to their newsletter for several years. 

Then I went over to the site instead of clicking the ‘register’ part of the email and the first thing I saw was:

Welcome To BYC!

Hi Peeps,   Welcome to the new & upgraded version of the BackYardChickens.com website!   There are a ton of exciting new features and areas of the site for you to explore.  To help get started we suggest you… » read more

Can you imagine that?  I go over there with more-or-less neutral intentions, other than a few suspicions about what manner of ‘we’ someone was demanding I include myself in, and the first crack out of the box he calls me a ‘Peep’?   The guy thinks people joining his ‘we’ are peeps.

Whatever the hell a peep is.   Strikes me this might be a group of ‘we’ folk who go around looking through windows trying to see naked women.  Nothing whatever to do with chickens.

Or he’s an agent provacateur for Homeland Security trying to identify all the people who’d be gratified to belong to a ‘we’ that considered itself peeps.

I’ve donealready got plenty of ‘we’ stuff in my life.  I ain’t including myself in any we bunch of peeping toms even if they’re peepers that like chickens.  Heck, maybe it’s chickens they’re sneaking around spying on.  Maybe they’re trying to find out where I am so they can come in here nights spying on the Great Speckled Bird and the hens do and talk about when I shut them up in the fortress nights.

Or more sinister yet, maybe they’re trying to see if I gather the eggs every day.  Or whether they’re doing okay on the milo feeding I’ve been doing lately to save money.   Or somebody over there read the post, Shame and a Confession About Inter-Species Sex and thinks because I have a perverted chicken I’d want to draw my circle of ‘we’ bigger and feel a part of some group of peepers. 

I think it might well be one of those government traps like the one they did in Colorado a few years ago, sending in agents to open up a taxidermy shop, putting out the word they’d buy endangered species carcasses under the table.  After a couple of years they’d bought and paid for hundreds of otherwise healthy endangered birds and animalcules and collected names dates and places of the folks killed them because there was suddenly a market.

Indicted half the community before it was over.

I ain’t joining no government plot to arrest my rooster.  As far as I know he can’t even get out nights to do any peeping.

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Chickens, Country Life, Creative Writing, Outdoors, Senior Citizens, Texas

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Upstream in Time to Wednesday Morning

Posted on January 25, 2012 by | 8 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by this morning.

That’s not my High Roller because I still have to migrate my Dropbox folder over to the spanking new E Dell Machine, and I’m typing this on the old one.  But I’m confident later today will find me pushing this guy aside, re-plugging my heavy lifter, and getting back to where I left off a few days ago.

Came a bull-goose mano daddy-longlegs thunderstorm here last night.  Sounded as though things were falling on other things to create the illusion the underneath stuff was being crushed, but I just crawled out of bed, turned off the computers and listened to the roof holding up as well as could be expected.

There’s something thought-provoking listening to an attack by the sky on a metal roof, provided the roof doesn’t distract things by letting it pour through onto the bed.  But I’ve shown you pics before of how I prevent that with sheets of black plastic stapled to the ceiling to move the water over to the downhill wall before releasing it.

So I did a lot of thinking about all manner of things while the night and the roof talked to one another about how frustrating that sheet of plastic makes things for them. 

One realization I came to involves having to go back and adjust times in the past when things didn’t happen, which is going to be a lot of work.  I’ve avoided allowing myself to consider that a need for this project because of the amount of labor intensive format manipulation required to get the data into something I can use.  Now the stress of not relying on a dying machine is reduced and the heavy lifter’s going to be back lifting I’ll probably be getting things prepared for that today.

Which beats the dickens out of stomping around in mud.  The other alternative.

The invader cat came in last night, was up on the porch chowing down on the cat food the regular army didn’t eat.  At least it ran off without any exchange of greetings.

Several other matters are begging to be brought up and typed, but my coffee cup’s empty, the temperature’s dropping and I sense I’m going to have to put on another layer of clothing.  Probably need to hunt down that pair of gloves with no fingers, too.

So thanks for reading, if you have, and maybe I’ll post something that makes more sense later if I’m feeling up to the task.

Old Jules

 

8 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Country Life

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Sunday Morning Newsiness January 22, 2012

Posted on January 22, 2012 by | 15 comments

Sometimes you can’t help being a little embarrassed for Old Sol, showing off just because he has a captive audience.

http://spaceweather.com/

But you have to admit, even the Chinese can’t do fireworks to compete.  Some things just can’t be pulled off with the combination of cheap labor and US politicians dancing for multi-national corporations and banks.

Old Sol’s got his own cheap labor, I’m guessing.

And if he does they’re not forever counting themselves up to calculate whether they could march four abreast into the sea without wearing thin on the patience of everyone else.

I’m in the doghouse with all the cats this morning, but especially with Hydrox.  The invadercat came in just at dark last night while I was feeding the can of cat food to the four belongers.  Sat there 20-30 feet off the porch just watching.

Irked the bejesus out of Hydrox, especially, because I was taking its picture and talking to it instead of running it the hell off.  This morning Hydrox is being standoffish and treating me with a disdain I rarely see in him.

But you’ve got to admit that looks like a pretty good cat, though I’m not going to let it stay around here.  I don’t need any more cats and it’s well enough groomed to argue it has a home somewhere, anyway.

Hydrox and the other can relax, once they’ve punished me a while for causing them a momentary doubt about feline population projections for 2012.

I’ve mentioned guineas a number of times here, but I suspect some of you folks might never have seen one.  They’re difficult to photograph because they’re constantly moving faster than you can realize until you try snapping a pic of them.

They look a bit like a cross between a turkey vulture and a pheasant.  Most biologists believe the species leaked over here from a parallel universe and they’ve never quite managed to get a grip on this reality.

The biologists might be correct, but my personal theory is that they escaped from a Larry Niven novel, one of the Tales of Known Space from the 1970s and 1980s.  Likely as not they were developed by the race that created the Bandersnatchi.

But what the hell do I know?

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Astronomy, Chickens, Country Life, Poultry

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Sculpting Realistic ‘We’ From the Ideal Universe

Posted on January 21, 2012 by | 16 comments

Hydrox jumped off my lap and stalked over to the bed.

“Sometimes you human beings disgust me with your pretense.”

Him being second-in-command around here, I try to keep him up-to-date on my thinkings and directions.  Seems prudent to me because he’ll have to take over if I kick.  I’d just been asking him if he thought we could get along okay living in a travel trailer.

“Just what ‘we’ are we talking about here?  You and me?  You and all the cats?”  He glared at me.  “You, the cats and the chickens?”

I shrugged, wondering where he was going with this.  I felt a tirade in the making.  “Just you cats and me.  The chickens can’t be part of it.”

“Well, that’s a relief, anyway.  But I think you need to think through this second-in-command crap and all the what-if-you-ain’t-around side of it.”  He gestured with his nose toward the porch.  “The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve.  Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do.  No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”

I thought about it a moment.  “That makes sense.  It’s why I was trying to keep you up-to-snuff on things.”

  His frustration was obvious.  “Yeah, and that’s where you’re proving how stupid you are.  For me,” He tweaked a claw under his chin, “the only ‘we’ around here is you and me.  And maybe Niaid, just a whisker.”

This rattled me, but he went on before I could say anything.  “When that coon on the porch ran at you and I jumped in, that’s ‘we’.  When you go to town and buy food for us, that’s ‘we’.  But do you see Tabby or Shiva the Cow Cat lifting a paw for me if I was starving?  Do you see either of them jumping in if a coon attacked me?”

He waited while I considered it.   “I suppose I don’t.”

“Then they’re not a part of any ‘we’ I belong to.”

The more I pondered it the more it seemed to me he’d come upon an important thread in the fabric of reality I’d been overlooking.  Not just with cats and chickens, but with every piece of human intercourse around me most of my life. 

When a person goes down to City Hall, or the County Courthouse to perform some necessary business, for instance, and the clerk begins the ritual of obstruction, a ‘we’ is in the process of being defined.  The clerk is the spear-point for a huge ‘we’ of contradictory demands on the ‘we’ you occupy. 

“Do you have proof of residence?”

“There’s my driver’s license.”

“That’s not enough.  I need a utility bill or tax return.”

“I didn’t bring that.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

The ‘we’ that clerk represents just defined a boundary excluding you from that ‘we’ and placing you inside another ‘we’ it considers an enemy.  And in a real world, that definition would be mutually recognized, rather than singularly by the human spear-point drawing the boundary.

Which is probably why representative democracy was doomed to eventual failure.  In a fantasy of wishful thinking a population created ‘we’ with a set of unrealistic boundaries.  When new ‘we’ entities developed around government centers those included in the ‘we’ tribes were those they associated with, lived near, shared a commonality with.  In Washington, D.C.  In Austin, Texas. 

And inevitably those outside that ‘we’ became an obstruction, a product, an enemy to their ‘we’.

“The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve.  Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do.  No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others within the ‘we’, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”

Sometimes it takes an outsider to the human ‘we’ constructions, a feline with a firm hold on reality, to recognize the obvious.

Old Jules

“Electing pet skunks to guard the henhouse might work for a while.  But the skunk-instincts and  chickens behind the walls they’re guarding metamorphoses the ‘we’ they live in.  The skunks become a we with a priority of digging under chicken-house walls and the we of being pet skunks fades until it no longer can call itself a we.”  Josephus Minimus

 

16 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Communication, Current Issues, Liars, Politics, Poultry, Relationships, Survival

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The Consequence of Premature Whatchallit

Posted on January 19, 2012 by | 27 comments

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a visit.

The Toothless Soothsayer was going to be my post for today, but as I was working on it yesterday I accidently hit the ‘PUBLISH’ button and it became history.

It’s going to be a busy day here.  It’s been almost a month since I’ve been to town for provisions and I’ve got a list two-pages long of things I’ve runned out of already, or that I’m down to bare bones on.  The cats have been threatening to go on strike if I don’t get some other flavors of canned food, the chickens are fighting the cats for dry cat food, and the deer are complaining about what’s available to steal from the felines and chickens.

I thought I’d stocked up enough on the old kind of cheap lightbulbs, but the cheapo ones burn out a lot faster than a person might expect.  I’m hoping I can find a few more on the shelves to snag before lightbulb-Y2K happens. 

Most of you probably haven’t noticed what’s happened to the price of feed grains, but I expect you’ll be seeing it on the grocery shelves in the form of pricetags before long.  The price of chicken scratch is up about 25 percent from sometime a while back, and layer pellets up almost that. 

The flock is free ranging a lot further than they used to because I’ve cut down of how much I put out for them.  It’s a tightrope, making sure they have enough to supplement their forage, but keeping it down to a level so’s they don’t waste it, which they’ll do.  They’ve always been spoiled, profligate, ungrateful birds.  But now they’re being driven by necessity to range out a quarter-mile, which is the idea behind free-rangers but too good for them to allow them to appreciate it.

A while back my laser mouse with a cord went out, and digging around I found a cordless one I’d never been satisfied with from several years ago.  Out of hunger I put a couple of triple-A batteries in it and found it worked okay.  Couldn’t recall why I’d abandoned it.

Then I discovered it goes through batteries something ugly.  It’s a gas hog and I don’t think my need to have a cordless mouse is worth the price of keeping it on the road.  Probably it’s going to be me tied to the comp at the end of a fiber-optic cord again.

If you’re travelling out in the vicinity of Grants, New Mexico, and you see the cat at the top of the page, tell her Hydrox, Niaid and I said hello.  I doubt you’ll see her because she vanished in 2003 and we figured she’d joined Mehitabels #1 and #2 on permanent mouse patrol.

But you never know.

Old Jules

27 Comments

Posted in Animals, Country Life, Free-ranging-chickens, Grants, New Mexico, NM, Poultry, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival, Texas

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White Doves, Rainbow Family and Esoterica

Posted on January 16, 2012 by | 20 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

WordPress is being a communist this morning. Or maybe the world came to an end last night sometime but it hasn’t gotten to me yet because I’m so far out in the country.

I was going to regale you this morning with some things I dug up online about building and retrofitting hydrogen generators to internal combustion engines yesterday but on the off chance the world ended last night, I won’t.  The whole thing might be a moot issue.   Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air

I’d also thought I’d share with you a couple of interesting things that appear to occur when the center of mass of a system of orbiting bodies changes, but if the world ended there’s no point getting into that, either.  I suppose I’ll be obliged to break my iron discipline and focus to tell you about a couple of things happened here a while back.

A while back this dove flew in here and spent a few weeks sharing the chicken feed on the ground.

I’d never seen a white dove before.  It’s forty miles to the nearest town of any size, fifteen miles to a village big enough to have a gas station/convenience store.  So I didn’t figure it was a pet.

But when I approached it on the ground it didn’t fly.  At first I thought it was injured or sick.

It had no fear at all.  Nothing seemed to be wrong with it.

A week or two after these pictures were taken it began spending more time higher in the trees and less on the ground.  Then it evidently just decided to move on to whatever was waiting for it somewhere else.

A free spirit.  Sort of reminded me of the Rainbow folk I’ve shared campsites with in remote places and occasionally picked up as hitch hikers.  Didn’t have much in common with the wild doves around here and nothing at all with birds somewhere else in houses with cages.  Marching to her own drum, not letting anything get into the way of doing it.   But not living in fear.

Which behooves me to tell you a bit about the Rainbow Family.

I first attended a Rainbow Gathering as part of a team of New Mexico Emergency Management Planning and Coordination  [EMPAC] personnel assigned to be there with the National Guard during the Taos gathering of the early 1990s.  I’d never heard of the Rainbow group prior to that, had no idea what to expect because neither did anyone else in New Mexico government.

What I observed was Woodstock without the music, a lot of folks who reminded me of my own younger times of long hair, protest, sex, drugs and rock and roll on the family side of things.

On the other side I saw National Guard troops loaded with live ammuntion and no clear instructions and rules of engagement being frequently hassled, treated with condescension alternately with re-enactments of some flower-chile ‘Come Join Us’ pleas from earlier times.  ‘Family’ members running alongside government vehicles engaging in every form of engagement except disengagement.

And  to complicate matters further,  a civilian group of Taos Hispanics who wanted nothing so much as the gathering broken up and out of those mountains they considered their own.

I spent a harrowing week or two up there trying to keep my mind from falling into a state of spacial-time disorientation.  When it was all over we drove back to Santa Fe wiping our brows in relief that nobody’d been shot, beaten to death by locals, no major incidents.   My thoughts at the time were as far from ever wanting to see another Rainbow Family member as they could get and stay on the planet Earth.

I count myself lucky to have encountered many of Family members in other settings during the two decades afterward, picking them up hitch hiking, sharing remote campsites, discovering there’s a side to some part of the Rainbow Family membership I hadn’t noticed in the Taos experience.

Gypsy-like free-spirited, thoughtful and considerate people just doing their own thing, trying their best not to leave any bigger mark where they’ve been than they absolutely must.  Good pleasant folks to spend some time with.

So long, I’d have to add, as a person stays clear of the party-animals and really cool people drawn to the mass gathering.

Old Jules

 

20 Comments

Posted in 2000's, 2011, Adventure, America, Animals, Country Life, hitch hiking, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Solitude, Survival, Texas

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Sweatsocks, Milo Maize and Microwaves

Posted on January 12, 2012 by | 21 comments

Morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read.

Some of you are too young to remember why microwave ovens and electricity were invented.  It’s a fact worth knowing.

The pioneers, when they invented this country, lived mostly in dugouts.  Dugout canoes in the summer, dugout houses in the winter.  Those winters tended to get them cold on their backsides and necks.  So they started growing wheat, milo maize, rice, to try heating up and putting in some warm container to throw around their necks to try to keep warm.

They tried all manner of containers, those cold natured ancestors of ours.  Tried skinning rabbits and sewing up grain inside the hides, but it didn’t take any time at all before the only benefit they were getting from it was the smell of burning hair.  So they invented sweat socks to put it in.

But they needed a way to heat it up without burning it, so they invented microwave ovens.  Trouble was, the microwaves sat there for generations full of sweatsox waiting for electricity to be invented.

Then along came Nicoli Tesla Edison with the solution.

So nowadays all you have to do is plug that mama in, that microwave, shove in a sweat sock full of grain, run it about five minutes, and you have a thingamabob you can drape around your neck when it’s cold, or stiff, or for when the old shoulder’s reminding you of a motorcycle that wrapped itself around a tree 40 years ago, and you can toss in another one for putting at the foot of your blankets to give the cats a place to get hacked off when you throw them off it and go to bed.

Got two of them in that microwave right this very moment.

Thankee universe for nicola tesla edison and joseph h. microwave and their yankee ingenuity inventions.  And thankee universe for joseph cotton’s development of sweatsocks.  Also Horatio Milo, the developer of Milo Maize.

We lucky to have this universe to provide such blessings.

Old Jules

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Posted in America, Animals, Country Life, History, Homesteading, Nature, Science, Texas

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