I’ve been coming across the word disambiguation somewhat frequently on the web lately. It always brings a smile when I see it, gives me a momentary ambition to disambiguate something.
But the problem is that I don’t know anything much. Even inside the 21st Century where uninformed opinion is respectable, almost universal, and carries the certainty and power of positive speaking, I just don’t know anything much.
Besides, the dialup connection, or WordPress is being a pure D Communist this morning. It’s taking me forever to even load the site. I’m rolling on the floor with joy everytime it tells me it can’t find the webpage.
So instead of disambiguating you readers on some uninformed opinion I have, I think I’ll give you a quick and dirty on something I know something about because I’ve discovered it around here and watched it happen.
I’ve told you about the Great Speckled Bird and how he’s in decline because of something he did in his youth to cripple him up something awful. One side of him just doesn’t work the way it ought to, and it causes him a lot of pain and distress. I’ve expected him almost every morning to be dead when I go out to turn them out for free ranging.
But I’ve been making up orange-peel tincture and treating him with it for a longish while, and it always makes him feel better after I’ve done it. Sometimes when he’s in particular pain he actually volunteers, gimps over and sits around near where I am, hinting.
I don’t have arthritis troubling me, but if I did, the Great Speckled Bird testifies it’s the way to the truth and the light, orange peel tincture. He says it’s the difference between Chit and Shinola.
Costs almost nothing to make, too. Just put your orange or grapefruit peels into a jar of vinegar instead of throwing them away. In a while you’ll have a tincture.
I’ve been mildly curious watching myself for a considerable while. Weight was peeling off me and I was forgetting to eat. My body would notify me I hadn’t eaten anything in a day or two by a dose of the blind staggers, or just a dizzy spell to get me thinking back on when I last ate something.
Most of what I cook around here’s cheap and simple because of the fact I ran out of propane early last year and haven’t refilled the bottle, and because hauling water makes washing cookware an expense measured in hauling trips. So I was living mostly on potato combinations, yogurt combinations, fruit combinations and various bean concoctions. I was at the point of hating to look any one of them in the eye.
Then one day in the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Kerrvillle I saw that rice and veggie steamer still in the box for sale for a dollar. It didn’t appear to ever have been used. So, I bought it, thinking rice and steamed veggies would at least be different.
Sheeze, the best purchase since my High Roller back in 1972. The tow bar I bought the other day might turn out to be a better deal, but I haven’t figured out anyway to cook with it. But I’ve digressed.
What I’ve re-discovered is the absolute, euphoria-laden joy of food. I’m making better meals on that thing than I could even find in a restaurant in town, but if I could, couldn’t afford them. I’ll make up a batch of one or another Asian-like mix thinking it will last two days, then find I have to fight a war with myself to keep from eating it at a single sitting.
It does require loads of fresh onion, garlic, jalapeno, cayenne, curry and ginger. I buy bags of trail mix of various sorts, dried mango, papaya, raisins and cranberrys at the Dollar Tree and pour on top, a little of each. The food bills went up something awful last month. But I don’t forget to eat.
And the simple truth is, some of these meals turn out to be classed among the best I’m able to recall having anytime in my life.
Anyone says an old dog can’t learn new tricks is kidding himself.
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:
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 Sexand 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.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
I’m a bit out of sorts this morning. That pic above was taken for the post about hats worn backward, but if I paused and had a look in the mirror it think it would be me again, minus the backward High Roller. Hats You Can’t Wear Sideways or Backwards
The protracted computer fiasco put me fairly far behind on one of my projects, which I went a hundred miles an hour for a lot of hours yesterday playing catchup without getting there. But I think doing it must have worn my mind down along the edges and frayed my thinking processes enough to have me wondering if I’m not getting old.
If I had a vehicle and enough slack in the budget I think I’d probably forget everything for a day and just go for a road trip for a day. Try out my Texas Thumb and Finger Signsand let the projects, the chickens, and the cats fend for themselves long enough to get a recharge on my batteries.
But that’s not going to happen, and the project’s going fairly well once I reconstructed where my head was when I got distracted by computers. The roosters are singing up Old Sol and I hear cats hissing at one another on the front porch, so all I have to do is wait until my head clears, kick start myself into motion.
I’ve been fighting off urges to write long written works lately, which I’m not going to do, and one of the ways I avoid doing it and push the urges back involves typing words on this blog. Pressure release valve, more or less.
I appreciate the role you readers play in the process. If you weren’t here I think I mightn’t write the blog, and find me sneaking up on myself writing a book instead. A pure disaster.
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.
Good morning readers and thanks for coming by for a read.
Hopefully by the time you read this I’ll be strutting like a peacock, wearing my Texas Hatters Manny Gammidge High Roller tilted at a jaunty angle, certain I’m a smarty-pants extraordinaire. At least that’s how I’m planning the final chapter of this monumental butt show.
But it’s 7:56 pm Monday evening, and I’m 43 % done on a 79 mb download of a modem driver. Six hours 29 minutes from now the box says, I’ll know whether this is going to work. Except I’ll be in bed six hours and 29 minutes from now, unless I pick that as one of the times I get up to pee.
But here’s the rundown on the plot thus far.
Ed’s comment reminded me I had a weirdly shaped and sized hard drive I’d yanked out of an old Vista E Machine I bought new at WalMart a few years ago and it died after about six months and $150 spent in repair shops.
So I pulled open the Dell and voil’aismimo! The drive looked more-or-less the same as the one from the E Machine, aside from some extra parts. I worked an hour-or-so getting the extra parts off the Dell drive and onto the E Machine one, installed it, reassembled everything, clenched my teeth really hard and squeezed my eyes shut and I turned that commie pig on.
She booted spang up, showed me a screen I hadn’t seen since the E Machine died. But, the fly in the ointment was that the modem still didn’t get recognized. I ran through a flurry of downloading alleged drivers from sites all over the web, putting them on a CD, loading in the E Dell Machine and having them snubbed like clerks in camera stores used to snub a person brought in a Brownie Hawkeye for a roll of film.
Meanwhile Norton Symantic was slipping me mickeys behind the scenes, popping screens up at me threatening to keep me company if I kept downloading from non-regular free driver places.
Which I’ll keep short by saying, led me to Dell and my current act of genius downloading 79 mb on a dialup with 12/2 Romax wrapped in electrical tape between me and the power pole.
So, tomorrow morning when you read this you’ll be seeing words of a man with a modem working on an E Dell Machine running Vista, is the way I want to end this chapter. Wearing a 1972 vintage Manny Gammidge Texas Hatters High Roller. A man commanding respect, admiration and quite possibly veneration. A man you want to be like. Same as before all this crap happened.
That’s the proposal for the chapter. Assuming the editors don’t think that 79 mb download wasn’t a high enough price for our guy to pay to get a damned modem working.
I’m going to schedule this tonight before I go to bed to post at 6:00 am. Just to make sure it goes to work before the editors finish breakfast.
Old Jules
6:46 am edit: Seems prudent to get other things done before I unplug the modem here and plug it into the other machine to test the driver. The world needs coffee before it begins the kind of foolishness this day might be destined to bring. It isn’t that I’m reluctant to step boldly into the future. It’s just a minor fit of hesitation on my part to contemplate the Odyssey Homer never had to deal with. Putting a computer on my shoulder and walking inland until someone asks me what it is might be the next step, dragging the Toyota 4-Runner along behind until someone asks me what that is, too, seems a lousy day to anticipate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 