Last Fire of the Season

Gollum and Velcro

We're all enjoying one last fire in the woodstove this morning. We may have some more cool mornings, but I'm through hauling wood into the house, everyone will just have to wear a sweater.

Velcro is fat, but she's not really a big cat. Gollie is a runt, only 4 pounds. Even her tail is thin.

Hope it's cozy where you are. I'm sure the weather will be perfect in Blogland.

I can see clearly now

Some of you know how it is when you get older. At 40 you need glasses to read, and it's all downhill from there.

I got my first pair of glasses when I was 8. I was nearsighted and had an astigmatism. By the time I was 15, one of my eyes was no longer correctable to 20/20. The other was a bit better, but not much. At 25 my glasses were thick as Coke bottle bottoms.

From 25 to 60 I seldom needed a new prescription for lenses. I mostly went to the optometrist because the frames were broken or worn out. I was very thankful when thin plastic lenses were invented. Those old, heavy glasses would slide down my inadequate nose and my prescription was so strong that if I wasn't seeing out of the middle of the lens, I couldn't see much.

And then at 60 my eyes started to change. Every year I've had to go back and get new lenses because the old ones didn't work anymore. My eyes keep getting better and the old prescriptions are too strong.

I saw the optometrist on Friday and, once again, I need new lenses. I left my frames there to have new lenses installed. In the meantime, I'm wearing a pair of glasses from two years ago. They were my computer glasses then. Now I can use them to drive.

In 5 years my prescription is less than half as strong as it once was. That means I'm nowhere near as nearsighted as I've been all my life. The astigmatism is also mostly gone. I don't need glasses to read. I wouldn't need computer glasses except I keep the screen about 3 feet from my face and that's just barely out of my clear reading range right now.

At this rate I might not even need glasses in another 5 years. Thank you, God.

The only other explanation is the low carb way of eating I've followed for the past 5 years. I did it to keep my Type 2 diabetes under control, and it does that very, very well. I don't take the cholesterol and blood pressure pills all diabetics are supposed to need because, even though I eat a dozen eggs a week, and as much fat (butter, olive oil, fattier cuts of meat, nuts) as I can stand, my cholesterol is between 125-140.

I have never heard of anyone claiming that avoiding carbs helped their eyesight. I don't know if that's the reason mine is improving, either. But I don't know what else to tell you. The optometrist was baffled, too.

Crane Terrorism

Thank you Ken, for today's blog title.

I've been offline for a couple of days. Sloughhouse has been like a war zone.

Sometime in the past week or two, someone sneaked into the fields, cut the locks, and stole fuel from one of Davis Ranch's field tanks. LOTS of fuel. Probably in the same time period, someone sneaked into the fields and took the copper wire from two pumps. Do hard times force people to resort to these crimes? I doubt it, honest people seem to find ways to survive. I think greed is the motivating force.

Just yesterday Sacramento police arrested six recycling plant workers who were caught buying undocumented copper wire. It's not just farm pumps that were being decimated, thieves were stealing copper wire out of street lights in the city, which causes blackouts.

And then we had our own spectacular blackout.

Wednesday night after midnight, Bob was up late playing computer games and I was in bed, reading, when suddenly the electricity went off. The weather was perfectly clear, so we surmised someone had hit a pole. This usually happens on the turn near our house, but we usually hear it. We had heard nothing. About 10 minutes later, though, we heard snapping and popping, and the sound of metal being twisted. It sounded like the "Jaws of Life" were being used to extricate someone from a smashed car. There were sirens in the background and a helicopter overhead. It seemed like a really, really fast response time. We didn't go out. Usually if there's a helicopter the police are looking for a bad guy. OK, bad "person," it's possible it's not always a guy.

Then it was quiet.

I had chicks in brooders. It was a chilly night. I got up and started a fire in the wood stove. I put all the chicks into one box and put it near the stove.

Gollum: "What's in the box, Velcro, a late-night snack?"

Velcro: "Nope, just a bunch of smelly chickens. They're no good until they're cooked."

I texted Katherine, who lives a few miles away in Wilton. She had an incubator and a hatcher going, with chicks due to hatch the next day. She got up and started emergency measures, but her power was only off for about an hour.

The next morning the electricity was still off in Sloughhouse. Jim at the corn stand said it could be off for a few days, and told me the story. Some idiot had stolen a construction crane a few miles west of us and drove it in our direction with the lights off. It only goes 20 mph. This is a huge a piece of equipment that is not meant to be driven on the highway. People who were driving saw him and reported it. When the police caught up with him he raised the boom on the crane and kept driving down the road, knocking out traffic lights, tree limbs, and every single electric and telephone wire that crossed overhead for 5 miles. Lots of poles were snapped off. The electricity went off immediately, he passed here a few minutes later with the cops hot on his tail. The sound of twisting metal was the breaker box being torn off the side of Jim's house.

The idiot finally stopped and surrendered just east of here. It's good he was stopped before he got very far on Dillard Road. It's a narrower rural road. I counted the overhead lines between my house and Katherine's when I took the chicks there for her to babysit. There are 155.

The pole by the corn stand.

The tops of all the phone poles were broken off.

Lots of utility trucks.

In a rural area, you get accustomed to having no power a few times a year. The first thing I do is fill every container I can find with water.

I also fill the bath tub. We get water from our own well. If there's no electricity, the pump doesn't work. There's a big storage tank, though, and enough pressure to fill some containers.

When Bob finally woke up on Thursday morning, I'd already done the emergency chores. He said, "Oh good, this is like a dry run for the zombie apocalypse. I hate to tell you, though, zombies aren't like the witch in Wizard of Oz, they don't melt if you throw water on them."

The electricity was only out for about 24 hours. Our local electricity provider, SMUD was right on the job with lots of trucks and repairmen. It took the phone people a couple more days. Things have calmed down, but if I was a thief or an idiot, I think I'd stay away from Sloughhouse for a long while.

Spring is Happening

After a long, dry winter, we have been getting some rain for the past two weeks. Yesterday it was sunny for a while, so I ran out and snapped some "spring is here" photos. Then I realized that spring flowers are pretty much the same from one year to the next, and maybe people get bored with them.

If so, you can skip the rest of my post today.

Bleeding Heart. It took several years to get this to grow and bloom.

A camellia I grew from seed.

A really bright camellia, not shy.

Lots of flowers on this camellia.

Plain old chard. I planted some in the flower garden just for fun.

A late variety of daffodil.

Daisies and pansies

The Frog Castle. Named by little Jack.

Totally brazen tulip.

Back yard tulips that survived the chickens.

Red tulips are best.

No, yellow tulips are best.

I'm glad I took these yesterday. Today it is storming. If the rain gets too heavy, it will knock all the tulips down, as it does about half the time. That's okay, I've got a season's enjoyment out of them already. Next: the lilacs are starting to bloom!

More Plans that Fizzle

If we are destined to live until we learn all the lessons we're here to learn, I'll evidently be here quite a while longer.

The lesson I cannot seem to learn is: Do NOT make plans.

I like to make plans because, frankly, I'm a bit of a control freak. I've been worse since I had health problems and can't just run around and make up time. When I have things to accomplish, I make plans at least a day ahead of time.

This week I got a card from my doctor and also a call from her nurse. "You're overdue for blood tests, get in this week and have that taken care of." I'm okay with that, my test scores are always good, I don't even have to obsess about them. But there was a lot to do this week and I didn't get around to going for the tests until today, Friday.

I had water aerobics at 9. The gym is not too far from Kaiser, but their lab doesn't open until 8. I planned ahead by putting on my bathing suit and packing all my gym stuff the night before. This morning I grabbed everything at the door and left in plenty of time.

When I got to the lab, it was crowded with people, spilling out into the chairs in the hall. I had to take a number. When I finally got to the desk I asked, "What's up? I've never seen it like this." Evidently several doctors had sent out cards to their patients at the same time, suggesting they get blood tests this week. The blood department had to borrow personnel from elsewhere to handle all the business. I didn't get blood drawn until 9:15.

But FIRST, when I got to the desk, I was handed a pee cup. Well, that was sure fun since I was wearing a bathing suit under my clothes. A tight bathing suit that's really hard to squeeze into. Hope there were no hidden cameras.

While sitting in the waiting room I had noticed there were only 2 blood suckers on duty. A fairly old lady and a very young guy. I decided I wanted the older lady. So of course I got the young guy. I think blood suckers should have a minimum age of 35, the younger ones don't have the same touch. Actually they don't have ANY touch, in my experience.

By the time I finally got to water aerobics it was 9:30 and the class was half over. But it was a warm, sunny morning so I got an unplanned half hour after class to just float in the pool and mellow out.

I still haven't learned the control freak lesson. I have to go back for an optometrist's appointment this afternoon and I'm already trying to figure out what I should wear and when I have to leave here to be there in plenty of time, and what do I need to bring up to make sure it all gets handled properly. Probably should have just stayed there this morning and slept in a chair.

How Does He Doooo That?

Son Bob is studying (to me) some of the most boring stuff on the face of the earth. He's working for a 2-year certificate in HVAC. That has to do with heating, air conditioning, refrigeration (like the cold boxes at the grocery store) and the computer controls it takes to operate and monitor them.

As I've mentioned before, Bob has always been a strange kind of student, the kind that drove his teachers crazy. He's very social. While a teacher was talking, he could carry on conversations with two or three other kids and still - when the teacher stopped and said "Bob, what did I just say!" he could repeat probably the last 3 minutes word for word and the general gist of everything else.

Bob is dyslexic. He can read fairly well now, but he doesn't retain visual information well. Auditory information, however, goes directly to his brain and stays there.

On Thursdays he often asks me to read a chapter or two from one of his Refrigeration books aloud to him. Gaaaaaah! Gag me with a spoon. But I do it. I just plug my eyes directly to my mouth and read away, avoiding any engagement by my brain. I read really, really fast to get it over with. When I get to the end of a chapter I ask Bob the questions, thinking there's no way he could have retained any of that information, but he always does.

Today he had 30 "homework" questions that require written short answers, they weren't multiple-choice. He asked me to read a chapter to him while he did his homework. Just the thought of how that would work put me in brain freeze. I asked him to please clarify, sure I'd misunderstood the request. Nope.

So I read the chapter while Bob sat at the counter with his back turned to me. By the time I got to the chapter questions and hour later, he had finished the homework. He answered every single chapter question with no hesitation. And then he packed up and took off for class.

I'm still sitting here in a daze, waiting for enough brain cells to recharge so I can remember what I need to do with the rest of my afternoon. Take a nap? Yeah, that sounds good.

Bureaucratic Doublespeak

For those who don't have your own EIR to read, I thought you might enjoy this sample of bureaucratic literature from Sacramento County. It's from the Aesthetics section, page 5-5.

"At build-out in 2072 the mass of the landfill will be more prominent on the horizon. From east and west views the landfill will nearly triple its mass horizontally and increase its vertical massing from approximately 280 in elevation feet to 325 feet. The 1994 Environmental Impact Report (94-0319) identified this massing as a significant and unavoidable impact. However, its significance is in part derived from the horizontal and vertical massing relative to the low relief of the surrounding landscape. Furthermore, this increased massing will occur over six decades, providing years for those within sight of the landfill to slowly adjust to the slow-growing silhouette."

What does it actually say? That the landfill is a big stinking eyesore. That it will become an even bigger eyesore. The county does not plan to do anything about that (therefore it is unavoidable).  It just LOOKS so big, though, because the land around it is low and flat. And anyway, it's going to grow slowly enough that people might not notice.

There is no truth in the land of bureaucracy. 

I should try thinking like they do…My butt isn't really so big, it just looks that way because of the skinny people I'm standing next to. And besides, it greq so slowly no one will notice.