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The Long Watch

Posted on December 27, 2011 by | 12 comments

 

Lot’s of high-powered rifle ammunition flying around the surrounding ranches this morning. But I don’t think it’s a government SWAT team come all the way out here to shoot my face off between breaths this fine morning.

In fact, I think it’s deer hunters out trying to squeeze in a last-minute set of antlers on an umpty-ump-point-buck to take home and put on the wall.

I only mention this because a few of you readers and a particular slice of the population of preparedness blogs I read are taking the “Come in and get me coppers!” approach to reflecting on what the US Congress has been doing lately.  There’s a high-anxiety factor leading people to say things on blogs suggesting they think if the government wants them it’s going to have a tough job on its hands getting them. 

Anyone who stops to think about this concept a moment ought to be able to figure out that’s not how it’s going to play out.  Even if they’re correct in thinking someone thinks they’re important enough to send in the cavalry to get them. 

No matter how good you guys who’ve been collecting a thousand different great knives and 200 each calibers of weaponry and ammunition anticipating what you believe is happening, if they want you, they’re going to get you.  If you’ve been shouting challenges at them from your blogs, they’ll most likely do it to your face between two breaths from a distance of a quarter-mile while you take an outdoor leak.

This isn’t the best moment in history to be talking about going to war with the US government.  Even in a whisper.  They’ve spent the last decade developing tactics, strategies, surveillance gear and weaponry intended to deal with people a lot uglier, smarter, sneakier and more highly motivated than any US citizen is likely to be.

I’m not saying what the US Congress did over the past couple of weeks won’t change a lot of things in ways you’ve come to see as your ‘rights’.  I believe it probably will.  I’m just saying you might be well advised to think things through more carefully than you’ve been doing.  You’re all dressed up to play checkers but the game has changed to chess.

Thinks I. 

Old Jules

 

12 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Country Life, Politics, Survival, The Lone Psychiatrist

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Wheat Flour for Pie Crust

Posted on December 26, 2011 by | 11 comments

About 55-60 years ago I had an experience with cherry pie I thought had ruined it for me for life.  The rodeo in my town was a community affair, had events such as greased pigs for the kids to chase around the arena with a prize for the one caught it, a calf with a bull durham bag containing a dollar tied to its tail, and a pie eating contest.

Might have been the year I was twelve we kids chased the pig, and were covered with grease and manure, then topped it off with the calf and more manure before we lined up either side of a table full of cherry pies.  We were to feed that pie to the kid across the table who concurrently fed us pie.

Across from me was a kid named Jerry Haynes, who’d been out front with the pig and calf, so his hands weren’t a pleasure to look at holding a piece of pie intended to be consumed.  But I gave it my old junior-high try.

And from that day until yesterday I’ve never since enjoyed the sight of, the taste of a cherry pie.

But yesterday Gale and Kay invited me up to share Christmas dinner with them.  Kay had made a pie, but had discovered she was out of white flour.  She’d never heard of anyone using wheat flour, but it was all she had, so she tried it, expecting it to be less-than-hoped for.  A cherry pie.

My heart sank a little when I saw that pie, not because of the crust.  But I took a piece of it prepared to do my best to enjoy it.   But instead of it being forced I was surprised with a crust with a nutty flavor and among the most enjoyable pie experiences of my entire life.  Absolutely delicious.

I’m thinking now it might have broken the cherry pie curse Jerry Haynes handed me all those decades ago.

So if you’re scared of wheat flour for pie crust you might be glad afterward if you take a shot at it.

Old Jules

 

11 Comments

Posted in 2011, Country Life, Senior Citizens, Solitude

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Shame and a Confession About Inter-Species Sex

Posted on December 26, 2011 by | 13 comments

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came for a visit this morning.  In case you’re experiencing post-Christmas letdown this morning I’m going to indulge in a couple of guilt-ridden confessions to provide you a measuring stick so’s you’ll realize whatever troubles you have aren’t all that bad.

First I’m going to tell you something dawned on me about the Communist Americauna hen.  All my life I’ve known about clucks.  Everyone who’s ever been around chickens knows about them.  Every flock of any size has a cluck.

Farmers and town folks who’d lived on farms when I grew up had an expression, “Dumber than clucksh*t” as a means of describing me, frequently, and others of my ilk, and everyone knew the exact reference in the comparison.  A cluck is a chicken that’s crosswise with the world, with humanity, out-of-step with the flock. 

I raised these chickens around here except for the Great Speckled Bird, either from hatchery chicks, or from eggs hatched by brooding hens.  I’ve always taken a great deal of pride in the fact I don’t have any clucks.  My flock is comprised of all good chickens.

But over the past few weeks something sinister’s been creeping into my mind.  I’m being forced to acknowledge the Communist Americauna’s a cluck, right here in MY flock.  Always has been.

So if you think you have troubles, if you had a war with your relatives over Christmas, if you bankrupted yourself buying doodads, if your dad didn’t like the gloves or socks you gave him, forget it.  Forgive yourself.  At least you probably haven’t raised up a cluck and had it right there in your life all this time without knowing it.

But as if that weren’t bad enough:

Now the inter-species sex confession.  That silky rooster’s always been a source of amusement to me.  Back when I had silky hens he fathered the other bachelor rooster here and was always good to the hens when he could catch them.

But now the Communist Americauna’s moved in nights with the two bachelor roosters this one’s become odd-man-out.  His filial son got the Commie.  When I turn them out he’s spending his time lying constantly claiming he found something good but the Commie and other hens aren’t paying him any mind. 

The same people who used the word ‘cluck’ to describe me had another in their arsenal they used on me a little later, and it applies to this poor old rooster, too, same as it once did to me.  “Hornier than a three-peckered billy goat” crept into the language as I reached young-adulthood, and here it is again referring to this silky rooster.  I, at least, stuck to my own species and the opposite gender.

The guineas here came from the hatchery with a rooster chick for every four keets, the reason being guineas are braindead stupid and the only way they can learn to survive until they have a chance is having roosters to teach them the basic tricks like breathing, drinking water and eating.  All but two of those guineas got picked off by predators over time, but the two remaining still venerate the Great Speckled Bird and these two bachelors.  They listen to the rooster lies about what they’ve found and come running.  And when the roosters fight the guineas try to be peacemakers, interfering any way they can.

The other day I was outdoors and noticed the silky lying to the two guineas, which he’ll do, but then he started doing his rooster-dance and quicker than I can tell it spang mounted one of them.  And she cooperated.  An unsettling sight.

But then, somewhat later, Shiva the Cow Cat was down in the meadow digging one of her holes to relieve herself in when I saw the silky approach her, dance a couple of steps and he was on her so fast it took her a second to react.  She couldn’t believe what had happened, and neither could I.

Next thing I know he’ll be trying to mount my leg like some poodle dog.

So whatever problems you think you’ve got in your life this morning, console yourself.  It ain’t that bad, most likely.

Old Jules

13 Comments

Posted in 2011, Animals, Chickens, Country Life, Homesteading, Nature, Outdoors, Relationships, Solitude, Texas

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Jeanne’s Christmas Gift to Visitors and a Few Non-Gifted Words

Posted on December 25, 2011 by | 39 comments


Jeanne does Christmas but she has a gift worth giving.  I mostly don’t do Christmas so I tips my hat in gratitude she’s here to give it.

Note from Jeanne: This is one of the largest gel pen drawings I’ve ever made. It’s 24 x 24 inches square. I did that size as an experiment for a contest entry for a casino, but when I didn’t win, I re-worked it quite a lot and decided to show it in other exhibits.  I hope you enjoy looking at it!

Morning Readers,

Hope all of you are getting the cobwebs out of your punkin heads sufficiently to maximize whatever joy a person gets out of sitting around a Christmas tree unwrapping packages.

I overslept here, didn’t wake until dawn.  Maybe some of this Christmas spirit thing rubbed off on me and disrupted my routines.  Nice morning.  Quiet outside, cool, but not a shock to hit you when you climb out from under the covers or hit you in the face when you venture outside.

A red dawn.  Sailorman would be concerned about that, I expect.

Last night the cats refused to keep me entertained, so I began reading H. D. F. Kitto’s, The Greeks.  It’s a book I’ve read before, but I occasionally read it again as a refresher course.  Kitto’s work is a fairly expansive treatise on life in Greece during the Classical Period, but he constantly jumps backward so’s to demonstrate how they got where they were and why.

Those Classical Greeks are worth the effort of remembering about.  They’re as much how we got where we are as Homer, the Dorians, the Minoans are how they came to be what they were.  We owe our ability to think in particularly organized ways to them, mathmatics, philosophy, their practical use of democracy, even our concept of drama to some extent.

But we in the West also owe the curse of the Utopian Ideal to their pointy little heads.

That Utopian Ideal has haunted us every since, even though the Greeks, themselves never actually believed in it.  They knew perfectly well that human beings are fundamentally flawed in ways that assure they’ll poison their own watering holes, then run them dry.  They knew that wherever human weakness fails to do the trick, fate, or the gods will step in to lend a hand.

Those Greeks studied Homer much the way really devout Christians study the Old Testament.  And Homer, whatever else it might be, is a refined catalog of human strengths and weaknesses.  Of the drumbeat repetition of human experience.

In their own way, the Greeks were experts on a few thousand years of history in ways we aren’t.  They learned from it, not as we believe we’ve learned from it, but haven’t, but rather as an assurance that human beings make the same mistakes over and over.  That they’ll go on making them as long as there’s a human being left to do the job.

The Greeks derived a wisdom from their knowledge of history, but the wisdom was an oblique one that provided a separate wisdom….. one that included the certainty there’ll never be any Utopia.  Never be any meek inheriting much of anything and holding onto it.

But that’s my premise, not Kitto’s.

I hope you’ll spend a bit of time remembering what Christmas was supposed to be the anniversary of the beginning of.  Not baby-Jesuses or Santa Clauses, readers, but a beginning of a spiritual commitment to peace, love, understanding.

An ideal for breaking the endless cycle of power struggles, killing, worship of gluttony and greed.  A beginning for human beings to take responsibility for their own behavior, attitudes and lives.

Christmas.  Jesus.  A beginning of not being so frightened of everything.  So angry.  So aggressive and downright rattlesnake ugly mean you want to kill strangers a long way from here who are no threat to you if you’ll leave them alone, and take joy from doing it.

A beginning of having the faith that death is part of human experience, and that isn’t something you have to be so damned cowardly scared of it keeps you furious and wanting to look away at anything at all to take your thoughts away from having to do it.

I hope you’ll remember that for a few moments, readers, but I know you won’t.

I ain’t a Utopian.

Old Jules

39 Comments

Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Country Life, Education, History

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Winter Garlic! Hot Diggidy Damn!

Posted on December 24, 2011 by | 24 comments

I figure most of you readers really wish you could be me, and I regret you can’t.  The Universe only allows one at a time.  But I’m obliged to all of you for not saying so.  I’d be forever having to work my mind around in ways so’s I don’t feel sorry for you because I recognize you don’t visit here looking for sympathy and pity.

Part of the reason you probably wish you were me is that the Universe is always dumping surprise blessings on me just for the hell of it.  Same as It does you, the difference being I tag and number them so’s they don’t go unnoticed.

It’s a low-overcast day out there and on the cold, wet side.  I just went out to make sure Tabby and Shiva the Cow Cat were staying warm and dry, took them out some old clothing and wadded it into the cat houses just to provide an edge. 

But while I was folding a Mexican rug into Tabby’s hideyhole I glanced across the meadow at the garden, which fared poorly past summer because I was hauling water and it was a drought.  ” Something green over there,” thinks I, and proceeded to soak my footwear mucking over for a looksee.

The moisture’s brought back the garlic I put out year-before-last!  Just look at that stuff enjoying life it thought had spang passed it by.

Law law law!  I don’t blame you for wishing you were me.  If I weren’t so would I.

Old Jules

24 Comments

Posted in 2011, Country Life, Human Behavior, Nature, Solitude, Survival, Texas

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Old Sol’s Christmas Tortilla -Second Harvest – 4th Movement

Posted on December 24, 2011 by | 8 comments

http://spaceweather.com/

Amusing himself as only he can do.  Strutting his stuff for Alpha Centauri, most likely.

I saw something that rhymed with this on a tortilla in New Mexico once, but they charged money to see it.  This one’s gratis.

Off to the right there’s this, for the eclectic tastes in the audience.

Perspective.

Old Jules

 

8 Comments

Posted in 2011, Astronomy, Nature, Science

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Christmas Eve for a Hermit and Cats in a Mountain Village

Posted on December 24, 2011 by | 20 comments

I wrote this several years ago in a previous lifetime before Social Security kicked in when I was trying to make a living playing blackjack.

Casino’s Shut Down for Christmas!

Went back down there for some more blackjack and didn’t get in more than a few hands before a pit boss announced they were shutting down the tables, the casino, and sending everyone home to spend time with their families.

Surprised me, but a worthy cause I wouldn’t have expected of them.

Fact is, all those gamblers who aren’t aware that blackjack’s a spiritual experience needed to be off somewhere else, anyway.  Which is to say, pretty much all of them except me.

So, I smiled to meself with a warm red glow that a casino would let the employees go home to be with their kinfolks instead of staying there making a lot of money for the mafia.  Swung over by Taco Bell on the way back out of Bernalillo and picked up three bean burritos and three crispy tacos to celebrate a victory for those employees over casino management.

Brung those tacos and burritos back up to the village and capped the hill looking down into Placitas…. looked as though something awful had happened here….. flashing emergency lights copcar style all down on the main road.  Sheriff with a flashlight was waving me to take a back road.  I rolled down my window, “Accident?”

“No.  Most of the roads are shut down.  People in groups in the middle of the roads singing carols.  You’ll have to take this road.  Be careful.”

Happened ‘this road’ was the very selfsame road I needed to take to trip my young arse home as fast as safety allowed to lock the front gates and turn off the outside lights before any carol singers could catch me unawares and make me listen to Christmas carols.

I don’t so much mind people singing carols.  I think it’s kind of cool, actually, especially if they were to go a step further and listen to the words they’re singing.

On the other hand, I honestly don’t want to listen to the words, the music, nuthun do do with Christmas carols.

I figure if I can go through an entire presidential term without knowing who’s president, and go through Thanksgiving to New Year without hearing a single Christmas carol (most especially ones involving Santy and reindeers), it will be okay to die.  I’ll know I’ve lived right, at least one period of my life.

Anyway readers, if you’re reading this blog you need to get your young arse off the computer and go spend some time with the family.

But if you don’t have somewhere else to be, don’t have someone else, why heck, amigos, rejoice.  Luxuriate in the beauty of being alone with yourself and any cats you might have.

If you don’t have any cats, nor any particular self you can bring yourself to rejoice about, heck.  As Sonny and Cher used to say back when everything was supposed to be pretty well straightened out by now,

You got me, babe.

Old Jules

20 Comments

Posted in 2000's, America, Country Life, Gambling, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM

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Wobblehead Extensions, Crowfoots and Mayan Ruins in Georgia

Posted on December 23, 2011 by | 22 comments

Good morning readers. I’m grateful you’re here reading this cold morning.

Every time we think we’ve got things figured out and can make pronouncements to one another without fear of someone making a counter-pronouncement back at us with any danger of validity this seems to happen.  Some smarty-pants academian digs around where he’s got no business being and spang finds something to cut us off at the knees.

In this instance it’s fairly solid physical evidence a Mayan city once thrived in the otherwise non-Mayan and feet-implanted-in-the-ground US state of Georgia.  The offending pointee-headed guy with the cheek to find it doesn’t even have the courtesy to be a US academian who can be bludgeoned by grant money and sneers from his peers to shut the hell up about it and not go around shaking and rattling previous pronouncements.

1,100-year-old Mayan ruins found in North Georgia http://tinyurl.com/d5gwjpq

When evidence began to turn up of Mayan connections to the Georgia site, South African archeologist Johannes Loubser brought teams to the site who took soil samples and analyzed pottery shards which dated the site and indicated that it had been inhabited for many decades approximately 1000 years ago. The people who settled there were known as Itza Maya, a word that carried over into the Cherokee language of the region.

The city that is being uncovered there is believed to have been called Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto searched for unsuccessfully in 1540. So far, archeologists have unearthed “at least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system and ruins of several other stone structures.” Much more may still be hidden underground.

A good level-headed other good US scholar took a more level-headed approach to the finds:

UPDATE: Raw Story contacted another UGA Scientist, Dr. B. T. Thomas of the Department of Environmental Science, who indicated that, while it is unlikely that the Mayan people migrated en masse from Central America to settle in what is now the United States, he refused to characterize Thornton’s conclusions as “wrong,” stating that it is entirely possible that some Mayans and their descendants migrated north, bringing Mayan building and agricultural techniques to the Southeastern U.S. as they integrated with the existing indigenous people there.

He didn’t go on to say what needs saying.  Namely that the South African guy needs to go home and  tend his own affairs.  There’s plenty of digging to be done in Africa and plenty of good US academians capable of handling any digging needs doing here.  And most especially the South African guy needs to be kept away from the copper artifacts found in Florida and Georgia in other mounds that bear a strong similarity to Aztec artifacts in Mexico.

We don’t need any guys running around in pickup trucks drinking beer and talking about Mayan calendars.  Things are already complicated enough.

Which brings me to crowfoots and wobblehead extensions.  I borrowed Little Red yesterday and went into Kerrville.  I spent a goodly while hanging around in the AutoZone store picking the brains of guys in bib overalls with grease under their fingernails.

Those wobblehead extensions offer a new lease on life for the hope of getting the starter off the Communist Toyota.  The crowfoots might be helpful getting the new one back on.  Not pictured here, but also new to  the anti-Japanese engineering arsenal is a mirror that swivels at the end of a telescoping handle for looking into places nobody ever intended them to be looked into.

Old Jules

22 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Country Life, Current Issues, History, Kerrville, Native American, Native Americans, Solitude, Survival, Texas

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The New Truck Resurrection

Posted on December 21, 2011 by | 27 comments

Got me a new truck!

Now that Gale and Kay have finished up their last craft shows for the year and the marathon of preparing for the next ones is over for a couple of months I talked to Gale about this again.  The critical path to me getting transportation appears to involve dragging this one in where a real mechanic can work on it, or dragging  The Communist Toyota 4-Runner in for that purpose.  I’m completely stumped with moving forward repairing either of them.  Time to bring in the heavy artillery.

It’s been a year now, and I’ve been hoarding and pinching pennies and dollars all of 2011 to be certain I’d have the money to get one or the other a license tag, safety inspection sticker, and when I eventually decided I didn’t have the skill to fix either of them, a real mechanic.  I’m more-or-less there now, or close to it.

It’s a toss-up and gives me a case of the fantods choosing one as the better bet, but I’ve settled on the New Truck over the Toyota.  It has the potential capability of pulling some sort of dwelling on wheels, which the Toyota doesn’t.  [Unrequited Love – I Coveted This, Fiddle-Footed Naggings and Songs of the Highway, Cat houses and such, Thursday morning meanderings]

So Gale and I agreed sometime during the week after Christmas we’ll figure out how to get that New Truck on a trailer and haul it to a place where people know what the hell they’re talking about, truck-wise.

Makes my hard pound louder just thinking of having transportation again. 

Old Jules

27 Comments

Posted in 2011, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Texas, Transportation, Trucks

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Got A Holiday Greeting From The Time Department

Posted on December 19, 2011 by | 10 comments

Hawaii Konate, the people who keep me posted on what time it wasn’t over the past while, what time they think it probably isn’t now, and what time they’re middling sure it won’t be in the future sent me a nice greeting by email.

The card arrived in my hotmail email box at 3:25 AM someone’s time, maybe mine, maybe theirs, maybe hotmail’s.   I’m not sure whether that picture is of something at the Hawaii site, or whether it’s wherever they speak the language at the top of the circular they send out:  BUREAU INTERNATIONAL DES POIDS ET MESURES, ORGANISATION INTERGOUVERNEMENTALE DE LA CONVENTION DU METRE. [Muddy muddy muddy etcetera]

But even if I knew what time it wasn’t in that city where the place on the card isn’t, I still wouldn’t know what that thing is they sent me a picture of wishing me a Merry Christmas.

I generally don’t like people telling me what kind of Christmas to have, but especially I don’t like them telling me how to have a whole year.    But in this instance, they did let themselves be nailed down on the thorny issue 0f 2012.  2012, unless they’re being cunningly sarcastic, isn’t a time that won’t happen.

The card didn’t come with one of the circulars they send out telling what time it hasn’t been all over the place, what time they don’t think it is now, and what time they don’t think it will be in the future.  That would be unsettling if they hadn’t gone ahead and mentioned 2012 in the card.

So maybe there was no authoritarian motive behind telling me what kinds of Christmas and 2012 to have.  Maybe they were being subtly reassuring.

I suppose it’s probably best not to try to second-guess them.

Old Jules

10 Comments

Posted in 2011, Communication, Current Issues, Science

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