Good morning readers. I’m grateful you came by. Lots of important stuff bogging down my fingertips this morning and I doubt I’ll get it all in here. But the sooner begun, the sooner left unfinished, I reckons.
I’m not going to insult you by offering an explanation for this. Undoubtedly you know the explanation already.
Later this morning I’ve got an emergency meeting with the feline and poultry astrophysicists here to kick around whatever needs kicking around about it.
He took a cheap shot, not only at us, but at Mars. But that ain’t the half of it.
“INCREASING SOLAR ACTIVITY CLEANS UP SAT-DEBRIS: Earth’s atmosphere has been puffing up in response to increasing levels of UV radiation from sunspots. This is good news for satellite operators, because a puffed up atmosphere helps clean up low-Earth orbit. “The number of cataloged debris in Earth orbit actually decreased during 2011,” reports Nick Johnson in NASA’s Orbital Debris Quarterly newsletter. “[The figure below] illustrates how the rate of debris reentries from the Fengyun-1C anti-satellite test of January 2007 increased during the past year.” http://spaceweather.com/
So, we’ve got two issues here. First, Old Sol’s got the planet Earth [that’s US] all puffed up, which is to say, even though he might be too convoluted and subtle to come out in the open and say it, Earth has it figured out. If Earth’s puffed up about it, we can be assured we should be puffed up about it too.
Secondly, he’s screwing around with our space debris, shamelessly knocking it out of orbit. Which really has the people who put it up there in a ring-tailed tizzy. Humanity spent a lot of money and effort getting that stuff up there. Then, in one year, Old Sol takes it upon himself to knock-it-the-hell out of the sky.
This puts a serious burr under my saddle and it should put one under yours, as well. Just who the hell does he think he is, anyway? We’re not talking committee decision here. We’re talking unilateral usurpation of the Rights of Man to stick garbage in orbit and keep it the hell there as long as it suits our fancy.
But this has gotten longish. I’m going to have to get into the other fingertip pile stuff in another post. Maybe later today, maybe not.
Morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
There was a long email in inbox this morning wanting me to join some protest by ‘blacking out’ this blog. The idea is for me to go to the settings and do something or other to cause the blog to look different, which will result in my having somehow sent as message to someone in the US government that I’m opposed to them doing something or other. In this case, passing something or other limiting ‘freedom’ on the web.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m as much a proponent of empty meaningless gestures as the next person. But I don’t want to go to a lot of trouble changing settings and possibly not being able to get them back the way they were before.
So, I’m going to take a more direct approach:
TO ALL YOU SENATORS, CONGRESSMEN AND PRESIDENTS OF THE US WHO READ THIS BLOG:
I’M OPPOSED TO WHATEVER THE HELL YOU’RE DOING.
There. If that doesn’t set them straight, nothing will.
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.
If I were prone to regrets of things done and undone I’d regret not being more observant when something was going on around me worth observing.
I was on a business trip in a New Mexico State vehicle meeting city officials in Portales, the town where I grew up. I visited with my old friend and classmate Fred Stevens and, we ate out together the previous night at a local restaurant.
Next morning hanging around City Hall I chatted with my 6th grade teacher, Bill Walman, then Parks and Recreation Director, and Mack Tucker, director of something else, with whom Kurtiss Jackson and I had worked for Skeeter Jenkens on the ranch ‘way back when [ A Sobering View of Y2K].
If I’d been paying attention I might have noticed something at the meeting. Or maybe during one of the chats with friends I mentioned the route I’d be taking home. Maybe I’d have examined the car for something attached to it. Years of hindsight would have been helpful. Some of the details of the following sequence of events might be out of order, might be inaccurate by having dimmed with the years. But it’s a fairly close portrayal of something that I still don’t understand with whatever’s been gained by the passage of time.
After the meeting I left late-morning and headed west to go home to Socorro. Probably there was a lot I could have noticed if I’d had my senses tuned. But I was on autopilot.
The road between Portales and Roswell seems a long one to motorists and I probably was exceeding the speed limit. There was almost no traffic, and I didn’t notice whom I passed and what they might have been driving.
I’d consumed a lot of coffee that morning and somewhere out beyond Elida I stopped and walked to a tree along the fenceline to relieve myself. A battered old truck pulled up behind the state car and stopped with the engine idling. When I finished I went to his window.
“Anything I can do to help you?”
The guy was dressed in a shabby bodyshop shirt, bad teeth, nasal twang accent of a local. “Ah was just wondering why someone in a government car passed me going 80 miles an hour.”
“What makes you think I was going 80 miles an hour? The speed limit’s 55. If I passed you going 55 I might have been speeding to go past just to get around you.”
“What gumment agency you working for going that fast? I jest want to know why you’re driving so fast in a state car!”
I told him to take the tag number and call it in if he had a complaint, but he went on and on with a nasal, makes-no-sense questioning.
I got back into the car and drove on, but stopped again at Kenna. The village had become a ghost town, but it had a lot of memories for me because Skeeter’s ranch was outside Kenna, and when Portales was ‘dry’ most Portales teenagers used to drive here to buy beer because the Portales bootleggers wouldn’t sell to them.
I’d begun to awaken a bit, though, and was wondering about the guy in the truck. I watched as he drove past on the highway and probably considered the fact he was now ahead of me again. A few miles out of town I passed him again, this time carefully not exceeding the speed limit by much.
Once he was out of sight far behind me the coffee was working on me again, and I pulled down a side road and behind an abandoned schoolhouse for another bladder call.
I paused and poked around the old school yard waiting for him to go past, figuring I’d wait until he went by, let him get out of sight in front of me, then drive on to Roswell with him well ahead of me. I don’t recall why I did this precisely. I wasn’t alarmed yet at this point. Maybe I was just enjoying the bits and pieces of school yard litter from so long ago. Even the old outhouse was still standing.
I drove on, taking my time now. But when I arrived at the intersection north of Roswell where traffic goes north toward Santa Fe, south into Roswell, or west into the mountains, there he was, pulled off and waiting. He somehow knew, I suddenly realized, I’d gotten behind him. So instead of going on I drove into Roswell and got some lunch, figuring he’d be out of my life by the time I headed west.
But a few miles west of Roswell, there he was again. He let me go past, so up the road a way I pulled off and parked behind a convenience store, went inside to let him go by while I had an ice cream bar. He did go by, and I finished my ice cream and headed west again. But at the intersection going to Ruidoso into the mountains, or Lincoln and westward to Carrizoso there he was again.
I drove on by, pretending to be going to Ruidoso. I pulled over again a couple of miles up the road, out of sight of the highway and waited for him to go past for half-hour, but he didn’t. So I figured I’d lost him, headed back through Lincoln, and there he sat in front of a museum, engine running. I pulled in behind him, determined to confront him.
I drove out of town behind him and a few miles up the road he turned into a picnic/camping area and turned around, stopped at the entrance facing the highway. By now I was pissed, but also damned confused and slightly alarmed. I couldn’t understand how he could be doing this.
I was armed and I walked up behind his car so he could see me in the rearview, but with the firearm behind me out of sight.
“Why are you following me?”
“Ahhhm not following yew. I just stopped here to take me a rest.”
“You waited back there at the intersection. You waited again in Lincoln. Why are you following me?”
“I’m not follering yew. But I still want to know why a person in a gumment car passed me going 80 miles an hour.” And so on.
“I’m warning you. Don’t follow me anymore.” I shrugged it off, curious how far he’d go with this.
We played cat-and-mouse, me in a busy parking lot in Capitan during a thunderstorm as he went by, him waiting for me in Carrizoso. He wanted me to know he had a fix on me.
I was convinced by the time I passed him on the hood of his truck west of Valley of the Fires that he was a cop… couldn’t see any way a private citizen could have the equipment it would take to do what he was doing.
It’s a long drive through that desert between Carrizozo and Socorro and my mind was working 90 miles an hour. As I approached Socorro I became convinced I was about to be arrested for something.
I called a friend with the City of Socorro and asked him to go look at my house to see if there were a bunch of cops waiting there. There weren’t, and I didn’t see the follower until several years later in Albuquerque during a much later phase of what came to be a decade of that sort of crap.
A week later I described it to my Bureau Chief in Santa Fe. When I’d finished telling it I asked, “Do you know of anything I ought to know? Could this be Internal Affairs following me around for some reason?”
He thought about it frowning. “No, I don’t think it could possibly be that. I’d know it if any questions were being asked about you. They’d have asked me.” Then he looked me in the eye. “You need to be careful about that speeding, though. If you get stopped for speeding in a State car working for DPS it’s no questions asked. They’ll fire you.”
What began that day lasted almost a decade. Long after I’d left DPS and through several post-Y2K years.
But back in the beginning, all manner of other mysterious happenings intruded into the lives of those who climbed that mountain with me, and to me. I don’t know to this day whether the two parallel sets of happenings were connected.
Maybe if I’d been paying more attention from the beginning.
If you went outdoors with a clear sky last night early evening and craned your neck to look directly overhead you might have seen Altair. Around the time the light that met your eye was leaving Altair I was a young man approaching the age of 50.
I was beginning a new career, male hormones raging, severely involved in a tempestuous relationship with the lady described if you clicked the ROMANCE [https://sofarfromheaven.com/romance/ ] tab above. [When the light reaching your eye from Cassiopia is as old as the light last night from Altair]
When that last night Altair light was leaving home on the way to a rendezvous with your eye my old friend Keith and I were doing a different kind of time travel. We were stomping up and down mountains exploring the country around Santa Fe, discovering the ruins of numerous hippie communes begun and abandoned around the time the Altair-light was leaving on the journey to meet our then-eyes.
We were also searching the Zuni Mountains for a lost gold mine from a time when the orange giant in Scorpio was headed on its voyage to our eyes as we sat around our night camps gazing at the sky.
I was going to do a lot longer post about this, but I’m having a connection problem slowing things down. Probably moisture getting into the repaired phone line:
The light leaving Old Sol at the time I hit SAVE DRAFT will reach the earth about the time this furshlugginer computer finishes doing it. Roughly 8.5 minutes. I’m going to have to do more on this sometime when the connection’s not taking much longer than the light from moon-to-earth, start to finish.
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a visit. Yesterday the online comp spent most of the day doing its own thing. It all began with some pesky notices in the lower-right part of the screen I’d been getting about updates something someone somewhere thought I needed to turn the computer off to install.
I don’t like strangers telling me what I need to do, so I always just clicked the little X and made it go away. But the comp was going so skitzy and all the usual suspects didn’t speed it up, nor help anything load right. As a last resort, I let the nagging signboard do what it wanted. And it turned out what it wanted was to download umpty-ump megabytes of something-or-other most of the day.
Which actually, eventually helped. Made me wonder whether it would be advisable to download this browser upgrade websites had been pestering me about all through 2011, claiming their sites wouldn’t support the version I was using after 2011. Which I naturally responded to by clicking the handy X.
I don’t let any website tell me whether my browser’s going to be supported or not. But since I was already letting strangers push me around and tell me what to do, I figured what-the-hell.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you upgrading a browser on a slow connection is some easy, fast thing to do. Hours upon hours, it took.
But don’t ever let them tell you it doesn’t make a difference on the way the comp behaves itself, either.
But, I’ve digressed.
Just before beginning this post I clicked my young consciousness over to http://spaceweather.com/ to get updated on all the important news and make certain Old Sol didn’t need any help getting up over the horizon. He didn’t, but I came across this:
DOOMED MARS PROBE PHOTOGRAPHED: Russia’s Mars probe, Phobos-Grunt, has been stranded in Earth orbit since a main engine failure in early November. The spacecraft is now sinking back into Earth’s atmosphere, with re-entry expected in mid-January. “On New Year’s Day, I traveled to the French Riviera (850km from home) to record Phobos-Grunt’s last passage over France,” says astrophotographer Thierry Legault. This is the picture he took through a 14-inch telescope.
“It appears that the satellite is moving backwards with its solar panels deployed but not receiving the sunlight,” notes Legault. “This may explain why Phobos-Grunt had no energy to communicate with Earth.” An 80-second video shows the probe soaring almost directly above Legault’s observing site on the Plateau de Calern. “At the scale of the video the satellite would cross your screen in about 1/30s,” he says.
While a telescope is required to see the outlines of the spacecraft, the human eye alone is sufficient to see Phobos-Grunt as a speck of light in the night sky. On high passes, it glows almost as brightly as a first magnitude star. Check SpaceWeather’s online Satellite Tracker or your smartphone for flyby times.
That Russian Grunt bears a striking visual similarity to the Toyota Grunt sitting across the meadow, when you look under the hood. Yeah, on the Russian Grunt the bell housing’s out front and the radiator’s behind, trying to catch up. But otherwise, there’s a lot of kinship between the two.
Both have a lot of miles on them, and neither one’s running the way it was designed to do. If the Russians don’t want the thing I’d sort of like for it to come down out in the meadow here to see if I could rob some parts off it for the Toyota.
But this has all gotten longer than I intended it to be. I’ll save the cat matters for some other post, except to say they all send their regards to you people hanging around in the non-hereabouts parts of the world.
A few years ago my friend Rich asked me if I’d be interested in talking with an older guy in his late 70s who was experimenting with hydrogen generators for retrofitting onto his vehicle. I wasn’t looking into hydrogen generating, but I’m a curious sort of fellow. I didn’t require any persuading. I just told Rich to give Bryce my phone number. About a week later he called me.
Turned out Bryce had spent his career as chief mechanic for the Ford and General Motors Speed Teams, or Racing Teams, some such thing. He was part of the group that put together the hydrogen powered vehicle that established a record for the highest speed ever recorded for an internal combustion engine driven automobile.
Using what he learned from all that, Bryce had created a series of hydrogen generators for his own vehicle, trying to maximize efficiency and deal with other shortcomings with the system. He did it all from salvaged materials. Heck of an interesting guy the first few times we talked. I wish I’d taken notes and drawn sketches of what he told me.
At first during our acquaintance Bryce and I had conversations. Two people brainstorming things he was doing, and I was doing. But gradually the hydrogen generating conversational possibilities ran down. Bryce was calling me every day or so, telling me all manner of things I didn’t want to hear, such as what the waitress in the cafe where he took coffee and meals said to him, what he said back, what she said back. Or what other customers said to him and what he said back. Or his brother.
Bryce would call, ask how I was, not wait for an answer, and talk non-stop for an hour, two hours. I could put the phone down, go feed the chickens or make a cup of coffee and come back to the phone without him noticing. Sometimes I’d tie a bandanna around my head attaching the phone to my ear and read a book waiting for him to wind down.
This went on for months. I didn’t know what to do about it, except straight-on explaining to him that this wasn’t conversation and wasn’t a source of joy to me. I mentioned it to Rich, and it turned out Bryce was doing the same thing to him.
Finally, as gently as I could manage, I interrupted one of his monologues and explained the problem, as I viewed it. I told him I liked him, that I’d enjoy conversations with him, but that I didn’t want to hear the same stories over and over about people at the restaurant, his brother, etc. That if we were going to continue having communications there’d need to be exchanges and some level of concern as to the amount of interest the other person had in hearing it.
Despite my attempt to soften the words, Bryce got his feelers hurt badly by this. He never called again, which I preferred to the alternative of things continuing as they were.
Sometime a few months later Rich finally got his fill of it and tried the same tactic on Bryce, with the same result. He was more reluctant to do it than I’d been, because he felt sorrier for Bryce than I was willing to allow myself to indulge.
Bryce came up in conversation between us a couple of days ago. Turns out it’s been almost exactly a year since Rich has heard from him, and a few months more than that for me. We wondered aloud how he was doing.
But neither of us is willing to bite the bullet and call him to find out, on pain of maybe starting the whole mess again.
I began this post figuring on saying some things about hydrogen generators but drifted off into Bryce and his problems. Maybe some other time, the hydrogen generators.
If you’re interested in giving things you were otherwise going to toss to someone who can use them, or if you’re interested in finding something you’d have otherwise bought as one more Chinese imported product to help destroy our economy and improve theirs, you might have a look at what sort of Freecycle group activity is going on where you are.
For example, someone just gave away 28 chickens on Kerrville Freecycle and the traffic’s picking up with people giving away appliances, exercize equipment, all manner of things still working but now redundant because of Christmas gifting.
There are 10609 Freecycle groups on Yahoo, so there’s probably one in your area.
Freecycle instructional Video Click here to enlarge. Changing the world one gift at a … . If you are outside of Portland, please join and support your local Freecycle group. All Freecycle groups, worldwide, can be found at Freecycle.org …
Sheffield City Freecycle is open to all who want to recycle … link below: This group is part of The Freecycle Network, an international and UK charity …
Welcome to Bristol Freecycle (UK) Please note – a message will be … this in order to join the group The worldwide Freecycle Network is made up of individual …
Welcome to Hackney Freecycle. You are welcome to join, if like us … in the correct format. Click the link:- Hackney_Freecycle MessageMaker Need a van? Use the Common Resource …
The Freecycle Network (R) is open to all who want to … constraint: everything posted must be free. The Freecycle Network is a nonprofit organization and a …
…Freecycle Network (AFN), the first Freecycle group in Texas. WINNER 2005 Keep Austin Beautiful … please join the Austin Freecycle Café group. Copyright …
… or improvement ideas about the Humble – Kingwood Freecycle Group! Freecycle Group Information Group Name: Humble – Kingwood Location: US – Texas More info: Freecycle.org
Welcome To Lake Jackson Freecycle (TM) OUR PURPOSE: The goal of Freecycle(TM … READ IT.) We encourage you to go to www.freecycle.org to read the history of freecycle and …
Not to suggest you shouldn’t run down to WalMart to buy a new toaster from Asia, or put that old XP computer out by the garbage barrel to go to the landfill. Just depends on what sort of person you are, I suppose. And what sort of person you want to be.
Things have slowed down here a bit, but exciting things are still happening.
The freezer compartment never had a natural door, so it frosts up somewhat rapidly.
You’ve probably been through this, too. Defrosting it’s a challenge. Two days so far with it turned off and the door open. Slow going because the ambient temperature’s not getting much above freezing.
Someone in south Texas cut down a Texas Ebony tree and Gale managed to lay claim to part of it. He’s itching to begin working on it, but the bearings, both on his lathe and the sawmill went out suddenly and simultaneously.
He decided it’s time to upgrade his lathe anyway, so the old one’s got to be dissassembled and moved out and the new one assembled and installed.
We’re still waiting for the sawmill bearings to arrive from China or somewhere.
Meanwhile, the wobblyhead extensions still aren’t going to do the job on the Commie Toyota starter. I think the 4-Runner’s down for the count until I can pull that engine out of there and get to it. The nut-head rounded off more every time I applied torque. I dassn’t do anything to round it off more.
Otherwise it’s business as usual here. The cats and chickens send their regards.
I’ll leave it to you to decide what’s strange about it. Cob-webs around here are the norm. Maybe it has something to do with the nuclear waste part of things. Old Jules
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 