As viewed from the inside. Most plants are oriented outward. Toward the light. Away from this view. I'd have to hover in space 5 stories up to get a good picture of them forward. There are gaps between baskets where railing actually shows, but not much and not for much longer. The morning glories have just begun to bloom and that means they sense the end of their season. Their flowers are all about making seeds pods and there are going to be thousands upon thousands, enough to make a guy wealthy on eBay sold at $1.00 a package of 100 seeds, a veritable fortune of, say, one hunit dollars!
Makes you wonder why people even bother. But I'm glad that they do.
The thing is, by the time the vines and pods turn brown and brittle there's no way to tell which ones bloom white and which ones are blue. They're planted in separate areas in separate pots but the vines tangle together across the railing. And they really tangle. And I love the way they unify the whole thing into one complete composition of their own making, like a jungle.
This is the opposite side that gets the most shade. There are two of these lamps with large pots beneath them filled with elephant ears and caladiums, and annuals. and these vines. The vines haven't started to bloom. They're more protected. But they sure do grow tall. They would wrap around the whole doorway if I guided them with strings. Instead, they reach upward, fall back, then grow back up wrapping around itself like plies of rope. Morning glory vines use everything within reach as armature. Including you if you sat there long enough. And it grows fast too. Don't fall asleep out there or you'll wake up bound up in vines. (Possible excess of customary 12% exaggeration for dramatic effect.)
This is a picture essay with way too many pictures, but for those of you keeping score at home, this is what I did starting yesterday morning.
Drag a block of walnut out of the shed - this tree was knocked down in an ice storm and I have been drying it for a few years now. Normally I rough turn bowls from green wood within a few days of procuring it - in this case I stacked it in block form and so far it has been drying without any problems:
This is the block I selected:
I used giant calipers to scribe a circle on the largest face. Then I sawed out the round on my bandsaw:
The bandsaw was running when I took that picture - if you listen closely you can hear it. Next I drilled a 3/8" diameter hole using the center point of the scribed circle as a guide. Then I held the block up to the running lathe and the drive screw embedded itself into the blank:
You can see the growth rings and the curve of the log. Mounting it that way saves work - if you follow the natural shape of the tree you don't have to turn away quite so much wood.
Imagine if BP, Exxon, Chevron and Sunoco all moved, on the same day, at the same time, to charge $5.00/gal for gasoline at their service stations. That would be illegal collusion to take advantage of a monopolistic position. That’s essentially what happened today when Facebook, YouTube, Apple and Spotify simultaneously banned the Alex Jones broadcast from their platforms; in an effort to purge him from the internet.
Well then, it really is info war. We'll just have to skip these platforms and go there directly to keep track of all the bad things opponents get up to, all the hate speech that's brought to light there that's then characterized as hate speech and banned from hate-filled platforms, and where today we'll learn that 75 people were shot in Chicago over the weekend, and Jim Acosta whines like a baby in epic political cartoon, and neocons demand crushing sanctions on Russia, and CNN's Stelter says again that Trump is leader of hate movement, and Australian military academy bans gender specific pronouns, that antifa thugs punch counter-protester, smash Marine office, and a man was arrested for threatening Steve Scalise and had ammo, materials and guides to build bombs, and a ton more rotten things to delve into.
They have a lot of good stuff over there, scheme to use Hoover Dam and Lake Mead as giant hydro pump to satisfy California's self-inflicted water shortage, when they're not flooding, another walk away video of a gorgeous ginger this time remarking on the absolute intolerance of the left, blowout 240 a mix video of energy and climate stories from around the world, common sense with Mike Rowe, Vancouver's real estate crisis, and much more.
16 seconds of bubbles coming from pickles and sauerkraut. The jars have been burped each day so it's not explosive as it would be otherwise.
Photoshop will accept only 500 frames. That means I can crop away the back of my hands holding the jar and unscrewing the lid, captured by this lens, somewhat microscopically although not a macro lens, a gigantic eyeball designed to scoop up entire ballrooms and football fields and tall buildings in severe perspective, now looking at jars mere inches away. That means every vein and skin crackle in the skin of the back of hand is made to look shockingly like the hand of a 100 year old man. I really disgust myself sometimes. So does my vanity. I am not ready for that crap. I spared you this horror. That I felt upon seeing my own hand.
Eh, pffffft, the AVIs are better.
Tomorrow is the 4th day. That's when I eat one.
Hey!
I learned how to make homemade ginger ale this same way. From a website and now that makes me an expert.
So you read the ingredients and go, okay, okay, okay, okay, 1/2 cup homemade ginger bug what?
To make homemade ginger ale you must first make homemade ginger bug and that takes you to another page on the same site.
Now, to bother with this you'd want to make a large amount, n'est-ce pas? Because weeks of bother for one little drink isn't going to cut it.
And I threw out two large bottles such as shown that could be used for terrariums and brewing beer because I was sick and tired of having them around taking space for some bizarre unlikely future impulse such as making my own ginger ale. And now here I am in need of just such a bottle. What a bummer!
But I do have 5 more of these quart-size bottles yet unused. Just sitting there. Taking up space again. Waiting the same unlikely future impulse like making my own ginger ale.
So that gives me the idea *ding* use that big ol' honking ginger root left over from pickles to start a homemade ginger bug and get going with this second unlikely impulse of making my own ginger ale.
What the heck.
Life. It's like the whole thing is one gigantic series of experiments. Then you die.
We homemade ginger ale making types like to get started right away.
There are a lot these 'music played to cows" videos on YouTube.
First we amuse you, then we kill you, dismember you and eat you!
We sell your body in little chunks. The whole thing. Over and over to the hundreds of thousands. To the millions upon millions of cows. [cows music]
Plus this guy is such a liar with his big ol' lying pants on fire. He said he'd show us how to butcher an entire cow but he only shows us half a cow. Pffft. What a ripoff.
I get a little bit triggered watching this, a little bit ill. I feel the blood leaving my head, and my body going, "pass out already, why dontcha?" Because I cannot take my eyes off the expert deftness of his macabre craft. He's too handy with his handiwork. He leverages over the side of the table. It's when he uses words that apply to human anatomy that does it, femur, I got two of those too. Scapula, I got them too right there in my back, muscle, I got them! Fascia, that's inside me too. What this man does to this half cow he could do more easily to me and the idea of his expertness at his craft makes me nearly pass out.
It's enough to turn a guy vegetable tarian.
Then vegetables get cut up similarly, skinned, shaven, cut this way and that, chopped into chunks, diced and minced, smashed as garlic, cut into planks like potatoes, boiled, fried, microwaved, roasted, grilled, the things that we do to potatoes is unGodly.
Maybe I could be a fruit arian.
We sensitive types tend to diet ourselves to extinction. We're ridiculous. I should have been extinct millennia before I was born. How did it happen that I was even born? It's a mystery -- I must be atavistic this way.
Fish don't count.
Because Jesus ate fish. And fish eat fish given half a chance. Biblical scholars argue about this with very strong opinions with their own set of facts to back them, but the simple fact is the Last Supper occurred at that time of year when the Jews of the world traveled to Jerusalem for passover, never mind counting the days, or using specific calendars, or historic references to passover and to seder meals, Jews slaughtered lambs at their temple, the priests sold the lambs, cattle and birds, performed the slaughtering, then sold the meat back to the people. Sold the live lambs, re-sold the paschal lambs. Probably charged for the butchering in between. I don't know. It was business. Big business. Big religious business. They profited at both ends of the industry of their own making, and this sacrificial industry so remote from what what Jesus knew about God is what Jesus protested, the industry of the priesthood over its spiritual mission, when he lifted the rope loop over the gate-post and let the gate open to the pen that caused a stampede through the temple, that's come down to us through Christian teaching as Jesus overturning the money exchanger's tables, another profit activity centered within the temple. Profiting money exchangers inside the walls of the temple, cattle and other livestock inside the temple. The livestock did that table overturning rushing past. Jesus was not angry, he was simply disgusted and making a polemic philosophic spiritual point. A point that the priesthood cannot have. Because it hit them in the only place that they felt anything genuine. Their pocketbooks. Although our teaching gives us the story otherwise. And the Last Supper was actually a lamb-less meatless seder dinner.
"Where's the lamb?"
"This dinner got no lamb."
"Okay then. Fine. Just asking."
I have it on very good authority -- a drunken fallen down ne'er do well, a failure at life, speaking in a trance to his psychiatrist, channeling spiritual entities in series that have the psychiatrist's rapt attention for its excellent content and for its astonishing cohesion, in vocabulary and thought process that the man doesn't posses. For months on end it blew the psychiatrists own mind and everyone whom he shared it with through weekly readings. All written down over session after session on end and accumulating to 196 papers, each paper leading logically to the next, comprising the Book of Urantia's 2,100 pages, all that to comprehend the ending, with the story of Jesus of Nazareth taking the last 800 pages. So there. [paper 179, the last supper]
I can see why my annoying philosophical friend gave up butchering and became an even more annoying vegetarian until he blew that act too by scarfing fist fulls of rumaki.
I make the best rumaki ever. The tricks are to use fresh water chestnut for crunch, not tinned, and tiny trimmed chunks of chicken liver, not entire halves, and as much brown sugar as your half cooked bacon can hold before baking entirely to finish. It is sooooo last century. Today's hors d'oeuvres would be spiffed up tofu, figs and blanched vegetables and the like. Nothing at all so explosively flavorful and immediately satisfying as old fashion rumaki.
Allen is still on the priest presuming to write as a baron so that people will heed and not dismiss him as presumptuous priest that he is. The baron makes things happen, the priest goes along for the ride, yet here he is pretending and presuming to instruct people better than himself.
I made all that up. Allen doesn't say this. It's accepted Egyptian literature. But its introduction and its colophon say that it's something it's not. It says that it's written much earlier, by hundreds of years, while its etymological placement in its language's evolution and its usage, its word forms, and its idioms place it squarely in late Middle Egyptian. Allen doesn't say that vizier wouldn't write this. A vizier would simply show his children how to behave by example and individual correction, he would write about his exploits in Nubia, about the people he conquered, the hardships he overcame, the armies he conquered, the cataracts he got by, the dwarfs he brought back to the court who became favorites. He'd list the amounts of gold that brought back, silver and gems, and exotic animals. He be talking about his battles with Libyans and with Asians. He would not write a scroll about what he teaches his children to be better children than average.
But a priest would.
Such as Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Luther, Gregor Mendel, John Main, Binyamin Elon, Jean-Francois Revel, Thich Nhat Hanh, Thomas Aquinas, Jakob Frohschammer, Origen, Augustine of Hippo, William of Ockham, George Lemaitre, to name only a few philosophical monks and priests. They sat around all day meditating and thinking of how to better the world and they could all read and write.
This is one such. He is not a vizier writing down his instructions about how his children should behave as he says within them. So foremost he's a big fat fake out liar. And his writings were accepted and copied and used, and they lasted. Wait! Brb. The planet is doing something spectacular.
My window to the world. That lasted less than one minute.
What does the Letitia Baldridge of Thebes say this time?
If you find yourself with a pig, let him finish, if he ever does. Same thing if you find yourself with a fallen down sot. Another vizier, no doubt. Same thing with meat. Accept only what is offered and be happy with that. If you don't show any indications of gluttony then you cannot be blamed for avarice.
I failed.
I sure did like that fruit salad. That was the best thing at the party. Better even than pork bbq ribs and better than roasted whole beef tenderloin, and both of those were excellent. So I ate it then refilled, then ate that and refilled, then ate that and refilled again and ate that.
What a pig.
Then I came home and made a massive fruit salad with everything found at the grocery that day.
And ate the h-e-double fruit sticks out of the whole thing.
Then the fruit flies took over.
Good Lord, they were all over the place.
They must come on the skins of the fruit. Their little invisible fruit-fly eggs must.
I had just taken out the trash so the rinds went into an empty plastic-lined bin. The fruit flies that hatched showed me all over the kitchen where I must wipe with Clorox; the refrigerator door handle, the rim of the hood over the stove, the corner of the wall over the trash bin.
Then I prepared a trap.
The thing is, a lot of flies don't go into the trap, they stay on the rim of the bowl containing the trap. So the trap rim is trapped too and that kills them all overnight. When they rest elsewhere then shoo them away and eventually they all go to the trap.
I'll draw you a picture.
Diatomaceous earth powder around rim.
They're itty-bitty fossilized organisms. Shame to use them this way.
Carnage
The ancient priest posing as vizier says:
* If you sit down with a glutton you should eat only when his lust has passed.
* If you drink with a drunkard you should accept when his appetite is sated.
* Dont rage for meat beside one who is ravenous, you should accept only when he gives to you
* Dont reject it, then it will be something soothing.
* As for him who is free of an accusation of bread, no word can take control of him.
* He whose face is averted from feeding the appetite, the harsh man has to be kinder to him than his mother, and everyone is his dependent.
(Allen writes "dependant" and that's how they say it in the military too. It's what they called me. With emphasis on "ant".)
Being accused of bread means being accused of gluttony.
I'm guilty of that too, because really good homemade bread is not all that common in restaurants around here. I do better myself at home. So when it does show up, I'm all scarf, scarf, scarf, scarf, like that pig that I am.
I did it backward this time. First the groupings with translations, then Allen's notes, then the transliterations. Then the removal of superfluous signs. Doing it this microscopically granular shows inconsistencies in Allens transliteration. He shows a "k" sound where a "eh" sound is put, for example, so I changed it to the sound Allen needed to arrive at his translation to make sense. At this point, my translation would be a LOT goofier than his. Mine wouldn't make any sense at all.
In preparation for my cousin's wedding down in Mississippi I have been doing some research on our family history. We were from eastern Kentucky, not western, so we weren't coal miners. But I do like the way John Prine expressed the sense of loss associated with strip mining. I have seen it. It's not good.
But I am here now, we had a glorious sunrise this morning - the clouds have parted and even now I can see a bit of blue sky.
Oh yeah, that fiddle playin' reminded me - I have encountered another busker on a fairly regular basis - he plays violin, passably well, I give him some money now and then, then I request something like "Play 'Meditation' from Thais by Jules Massenet" and that son of a gun cranks it right out. That's some damn fine buskin' right there. Then I offer him more money if he won't play Ashokan Farewell, lest I go all John Belushi on his violin. Not that I would, mind you, I am not a violent man, but everyone has his breaking point, and for me it is hearing that maudlin piece of **** one more time.
So I sez to the the doctors's assistant, I sez, "had I known this smart phone would be abused so massively by global marketers using computers to create phantom numbers just to annoy me, I'd never have signed on.
That was an exaggeration. I'd still sign on. But it's the whole world doing this. A computer dials and if it is answered then the call is turned over to a phone farm in India. But they cannot do anything with you except verify and then turn you over again to another agent with better language skills on other continent, usually in Britain. So first you get Apu in India, and then you get Emma Thompson in Britain. Who would even do business that way?
"My phone." She is so annoyed. She looks at her phone, she answers it, "LOOSE THE NUMBER!"
The computer that dialed her isn't bothered. Didn't even hear her. Neither was any human given a piece of Bridget's mind. The connection hadn't gone through. "Insurance. I don't need any insurance. And if I did need insurance, I'd already have it." Odd that it happed just as I was speaking about it. "Oh, they do this fifteen times a day."
"Fifteen times? Really?
"Eight times. Certainly. Yes."
The doctor comes in. I'm regaling him with recent exploits. He really brightens up the more explicit I get. "Oh, that reminds me..." Then he tells me a similar exploit that blew his mind when it happened. We're having a great conversation. He really likes me. I'm cracking him up telling him about a previous girlfriend who carried slight body fat. I woke up and played with it. I used my own body fat to describe and show how I made her body fat jiggle while making Jello sound effects and annoying the piss out of her. She hated that but I was having fun. She was self-conscious about her extra weight and I was playing with its. "KNOCK IT OFF!"
I had never touched body fat before. I never could work any up myself. It was a matter of intense interest. I wanted to watch how it moved. "SHUT UP, I'M PLAYING."Jiggle giggle jiggle boing boing boing, brrrrrrrt. "STOP IT!" "NO."
The doctor was cracking up because my own stomach was extended, he had me lay back on his exam table, and I was making it jiggle and he carries extra weight himself, and I'm laying there playing with my own body fat. Then his phone rang.
"Goddamnit! It's a Colorado number so I have to answer it because it could be a patient in trouble. Student loan payments. I've never had any student loan. These bastards call fifteen times a day."
"Really? Fifteen times?"
"Yes. At least fifteen times every day."
Twice in the span of five minutes. I'm having a medical appointment, and even though they're not calling me, they're still interrupting intruding on my time with my medical team. The most I've received is four in one day and I considered that a major annoyance. But they're getting it lot worse than I am. It made me feel better. And worse at the same time.
We wondered, what's it going to take to have this stop?
Today I was out and I heard a busker playing flute in the park. After a few numbers he set down the flute and picked up a tenor sax. Then he played Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Poorly. Set my teeth on edge. I turned to the woman next to me and said "You know, just last night I was listening to John Coltrane playing 'Blue Train". That guy over there should not be allowed to defile that tenor like that. It's just wrong".
All morning, while I was out, I kept running into dogs. All kinds of dogs. Well trained ones, wild ones, ones that wanted to bite my face off, sweet fluffy dogs, big dogs that make you think that someone left the saddle at home, and to everyone of them I said "Hey, buddy, how are you doing today". Every single one of them. "Hey buddy". That is my way. Then, as I was heading home I ran into a great little dog - somewhere around 15 pounds, he had kind of an overgrown Chihuahua look to him - bug eyes, short fur, but he was very friendly. Of course I said "Hey, buddy!" as I petted him - he was adorable. His owner looked at me and said "You know, his name _is_ Buddy." Well, says I, "I have been calling every dog I met today that name and finally I got it right!" On that note I took my leave of socializing with humans and canines, came home, mowed the lawn, sawed some wood and wrote this story.
The sky as I was mowing:
That really happened. Right on my street. As I was mowing.
Boob not boobs. She had a nice set for a comedian back in the day. In fact she was Queen of the nerds. The comedy nerds. She used to be the dream girl of all the comics back in the 1970's. In fact supposedly she went through most of them.
She was the inspiration for a couple of the most successful characters on TV but she never had the career that some of her peers did. She had some success and is tell telling jokes today.
So the nieces and nephew came over today and we decided to go out. I wanted to cook but the wife didn't want me to work as I have been pretty tired lately. Now of course it is hard for us to go out because we have to find a place with gluten free options. Luckily there is this burger joint that has a bunch of gluten free stuff so we went there. It is called Bareburger.
Now this is a chain and it has a California vibe. Laid back. It gives you menu place mats. The kids get coloring pages and crayons. This hipster douche with a man bun grabs his kids paper and starts coloring. The shit you have to put up with when you want to give someone a slap.
Anyhoo we all look at the menus. Now it was early bird Saturday night and they had the second team in. It was only 3 and the heavy hitters start on the night shift. So they had a couple of brothers working as waiters. Not actual brothers. You know. Soul brothers.
So this kid comes over and takes our order. Got pretty much everything wrong. I am pretty easy going but they fucked up the wifes order and she don't play that. She ordered turkey bacon and guacamole on the side but the poured it over the top of her gluten free veggie burger. And the bun wasn't toasted. It was basically frozen as they must keep the gluten free buns in the freezer and they never toasted it when they corrected the order. Still they comped it so they did the right thing and I can't complain..
But that wasn't the funny part. You see after every item on the menu they have letters that denote something. They have a "V" for Vegan or a "GF" for gluten free. So my niece sees one that she doesn't understand. She asks the waiter "There's an "N" after this burger....What does the "N" stand for?" My mother in law shouts from across the table as she points at me and yells "DON'T ASK HIM WHAT THE N WORD IS."
It has been quite a while since I realized that I have stopped being Dennis the Menace and have turned into Mr. Wilson. I just want the fuckers to get off of my lawn.
I have stopped engaging intellectually with the younger generation. I am just too tired. Enough already. They just love their phones and the tweets and their instagrams. Hey I even instagram a little too these days. Still and all I don't get into political discussions anymore. It is not worth it. Now that the God Emperor is in charge I can sit back and watch these bitches light their hair on fire. It is very satisfying.
The way I connect is with my hobbies that seem to interest them. Cooking. Gardening. Reading especially sci-fi. They would much rather engage with those topics than politics.
I was recently at a party where there was a bunch of twenty somethings. The kids of my wife's friends. They were blathering on about this and that. I sat back like an elder statesman. I felt like Chief Dan George or something. But it was good. I don't have to be a raconteur anymore and dominate the conversation and tell jokes and stories. I just sit back and watch the nonsense.
I just keep watch that they stay off of my fuckin' lawn.
