❧
The reunion of my high school class happened the day after Easter on the 5th, and I thought it was today. I wrote to the class secretary to find out what time today, and that's the only way I knew that I'd missed it. It probably happened because I'm losing my memory.
For some reason that doesn't bother me so much. A lot of my memories are not all that wonderful anyway. I've only been to two reunions in the last fifty odd years. The first one I got drunk and made a complete fool of myself. I didn't intend for something like that to happen, but apparently I was supposed to feel stupid about it for a long time.
The other reunion I attended was about six months ago and I deliberately toned my behavior down to compensate for my former mistake. Not much went on anyway. There was no organized method of getting news at that meeting. I only talked to the people at the same table I sat at, and only one class member sat in the group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walpurgis_Night
Reading on a bit about Walpurgisnacht revealed a statement about one celebration in Sweden in which the witches of winter were burned atop a special hill or mountain. May Day probably serves the same purpose to farmers in the northern climes as Easter does around here. It's a sort of drop dead date for planting gardens and crops so they won't get killed by a late frost.
This piqued my interest in how witches are associated with winter. They appear to specifically arrive along with the winter solstice. Is that when they mythically ride in like plagues on their brooms to indicate that the Black Plague descended upon Europe like a bird flu pandemic... instead of from land-locked black rats?
Were such "witches" symbolically burned at the stake, when Mai arrives, in order to prevent a late killing frost? Like dragons arrive with the spring equinox and are mythically associated with electric storms that spit lightning to burn homes and winds to blow down the farm crops? Do you supposed this is associated with old age and un-im-preg-na-ble women, and/or why they're sometime called "prigs"?
I wouldn't dare cop such an attitude around either of my ex-wives, but it doesn't matter that we were married, because I can't really say that around women of any kind. Does it matter that I have to stay away from people who take insult about my ability or desire to reach for any connections associated with my attempt to use words to capture drifting thoughts?
No. I can't afford to allow other people to decide whether what I choose to say is proper or improper any more than I can take the time to deliberate in real time whether what I write down in such an attempt is true or false. That's the exact reason I changed the settings on this blog to not allow Comments. This is a speculative process, not an attempt to be truthful.
This blog is also a continuation of my palm reading interests. Palm reading is one of the most fascinating activities I ever indulged. I did it practically every chance I got for around twenty years. No quarter. "Aye, and thar's the rub...". It took that long for me to realize that every word I said was a projection or accusation that was all about who-I-think-I-am-is.
I didn't learn about projection from studying it in a psychology class. I learned about it from taking religious sacraments and having it shoved up my ass from making rude assumptions. Other people are not like what I read in their palms. They're certainly not what I think I would be if I acted like I presume they do.
Granted, employing the dynamic of projection would make me what I accuse them of being like, but even that's not true. Not only is the other not what I would be like if I behaved as I propose they behave, but neither am I. I am is not what it ideates itself as being. I am is only me, and not any of it's delusions.
I read palms for such a long time because I could re-discover use palm-reading to find out how I used the rules of conscience I adopted in order to remember to mimic the behaviors of people I wanted to be like. That's how I incrementally developed the various personalities I am uses to get what it thinks I am needs from the world around Me.
There is only One me, and each personality assumes that the One me is actually IT. How does I am deliberately pervert and distort the One Me into six billion personas? In this sense, the persona is basically a mouthpiece for a particular worldview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona
In my highly questionable opinion it's because each I am can only create personas by mimicry and imitation. The ability to do that doesn't last forever. Upon the symbolic event of one's second Saturn Return, the process reverses and the incremental process is reversed and all that has been done to be-co-me so-me-thing we're not that I am thinks into being is just as studiously undone. No blame.
❦
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
Otherly Utterings
❧
Back in the fall I bought potted plants called ornamental kale and ornamental cabbage from Lowe's. The plants grew ferociously during the winter. I only had to take them inside a few of the coldest nights. Along toward spring they started blossoming and now they're starting to bear seed.
I've never paid much attention to how these plants go to seed before. I've seen it happen in the gardens my parental family had when I was a kid, but it wasn't as noticeable as having them close at hand out on my deck and in the green house. I kept the ornamental cabbage plant in the green house part of the time because I was too lazy to move it back over here.
The fact that these plants put out seed pods surprised me. One of the kale plants was purple all through it's growing season, and the seed pods from it are purple too. I plan to watch the process all the way through, and harvest some of the seeds for to plant this fall. Presently, only the pods themselves seem to have emerged. I see a couple of what probably is seeds by the nodes that are showing up on the outside of them.
I sprouted some of the oily sunflower seeds I bought to feed the birds when it gets icy in the winter. Sunflower seeds need to be hulled before they're sprouted for food, but these were bird food and the hull is still on them. I threw some out near my compost pile for the birds, but apparently they went down into some cracks and the birds missed them. Now, I got sunflower plants growing like crazy out there. I might plant some more just to see if they'll mature. I don't know why they wouldn't.
The sunflower seeds I soaked to germinate them sprouted okay, but the black hulls were difficult to remove, so I used the same containers and potting soil we use to grow wheatgrass for juicing to put the germinated sunflower seeds in to see if they'd take root. They did, and I used scissors to snip off the green sprouts once they had developed two leaves. According to an article I read on it, if the sunflower sprouts are left to grow more than two leaves they begin to taste bitter. I let some of them go, and sure enough they did taste more bitter. They don't taste all that good to me when they ideally have two leaves.
I was watching a travel show hosted by this interesting Scottish guy who travels all over the northern tip of Canada and Alaska this morning. As travel shows go it was an interesting one because it wasn't about the dead stuff left laying around by dead creatures, including humans. I don't appear to be all that nostalgic about the early remains of civilizations and traditions like they celebrate in Europe.
Oddly, or maybe not, the thing about the show that interested me was when the guy got to the end of his journey in Vancouver, Canada. He ended it at a place called Friendly Bay. As he was walking along the Pacific Coast beach at Friendly bay I saw a bunch of seaweed laying abundantly on the shoreline.
I need an abundant supply of seaweed and kelp to make fertilizer out of. Some of you may recall that I made a trip to the Atlantic Ocean beaches near the house to see if I could find some seaweed, and got nothing. There has to be a big offshore storm for it to wash ashore.
When I saw the seaweed on the Pacific Coast up at Vancouver in that TV documentary, it reminded me of having lived, or rather home-ported, in San Diego, California for four years during my first hitch in the US Navy. When I went to the beaches there they always seemed littered with seaweed. Even to the point of it being somewhat of a nuisance.
I grew up mostly on the coastal plains of North Carolina. We never lived more than 50-60 miles from the ocean, and went there for one reason or the other year around. I've been to most every kind of beach in the continental U.S. on both the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines. Even Waikiki Beach in Hawaii. They're very different places with very different conditions that are natural to both coasts.
The Pacific Ocean drops off like a rock. Many of the beaches in California can be over a thousand feet deep just a couple of hundred meters off-shore, but the beaches I grew up loving near here might extend out for miles and miles before the depth of the water gets to be a hundred feet deep because of the Transatlantic Shelf that reaches out to the Gulf Stream.
Seaweed must like deep water, but that's not the only reason it piles up on the west coast, and needs a big storm to wash it ashore on the east coast. The other big reason is the existence of the Westerlies. The Westerlies are the wind currents that extend from the west coast to the east coast. Like when you watch the weather reports. The weather systems that affect the eastern U.S. always get here from somewhere out west. That's because of the Earth's rotation that causes the wind to blow like that in the northern hemisphere.
The Westerlies blow the storms ashore on the Pacific Coast, and with the exception of the hurricanes, they blow the storms eastwardly out into the Atlantic Ocean. Thats why there is a constant supply of seaweed on the Pacific coast, and only an intermittent supply of seaweed on the Atlantic Coast. When I win the lottery, I'm moving.
❦
Back in the fall I bought potted plants called ornamental kale and ornamental cabbage from Lowe's. The plants grew ferociously during the winter. I only had to take them inside a few of the coldest nights. Along toward spring they started blossoming and now they're starting to bear seed.
I've never paid much attention to how these plants go to seed before. I've seen it happen in the gardens my parental family had when I was a kid, but it wasn't as noticeable as having them close at hand out on my deck and in the green house. I kept the ornamental cabbage plant in the green house part of the time because I was too lazy to move it back over here.
The fact that these plants put out seed pods surprised me. One of the kale plants was purple all through it's growing season, and the seed pods from it are purple too. I plan to watch the process all the way through, and harvest some of the seeds for to plant this fall. Presently, only the pods themselves seem to have emerged. I see a couple of what probably is seeds by the nodes that are showing up on the outside of them.
I sprouted some of the oily sunflower seeds I bought to feed the birds when it gets icy in the winter. Sunflower seeds need to be hulled before they're sprouted for food, but these were bird food and the hull is still on them. I threw some out near my compost pile for the birds, but apparently they went down into some cracks and the birds missed them. Now, I got sunflower plants growing like crazy out there. I might plant some more just to see if they'll mature. I don't know why they wouldn't.
The sunflower seeds I soaked to germinate them sprouted okay, but the black hulls were difficult to remove, so I used the same containers and potting soil we use to grow wheatgrass for juicing to put the germinated sunflower seeds in to see if they'd take root. They did, and I used scissors to snip off the green sprouts once they had developed two leaves. According to an article I read on it, if the sunflower sprouts are left to grow more than two leaves they begin to taste bitter. I let some of them go, and sure enough they did taste more bitter. They don't taste all that good to me when they ideally have two leaves.
I was watching a travel show hosted by this interesting Scottish guy who travels all over the northern tip of Canada and Alaska this morning. As travel shows go it was an interesting one because it wasn't about the dead stuff left laying around by dead creatures, including humans. I don't appear to be all that nostalgic about the early remains of civilizations and traditions like they celebrate in Europe.
Oddly, or maybe not, the thing about the show that interested me was when the guy got to the end of his journey in Vancouver, Canada. He ended it at a place called Friendly Bay. As he was walking along the Pacific Coast beach at Friendly bay I saw a bunch of seaweed laying abundantly on the shoreline.
I need an abundant supply of seaweed and kelp to make fertilizer out of. Some of you may recall that I made a trip to the Atlantic Ocean beaches near the house to see if I could find some seaweed, and got nothing. There has to be a big offshore storm for it to wash ashore.
When I saw the seaweed on the Pacific Coast up at Vancouver in that TV documentary, it reminded me of having lived, or rather home-ported, in San Diego, California for four years during my first hitch in the US Navy. When I went to the beaches there they always seemed littered with seaweed. Even to the point of it being somewhat of a nuisance.
I grew up mostly on the coastal plains of North Carolina. We never lived more than 50-60 miles from the ocean, and went there for one reason or the other year around. I've been to most every kind of beach in the continental U.S. on both the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines. Even Waikiki Beach in Hawaii. They're very different places with very different conditions that are natural to both coasts.
The Pacific Ocean drops off like a rock. Many of the beaches in California can be over a thousand feet deep just a couple of hundred meters off-shore, but the beaches I grew up loving near here might extend out for miles and miles before the depth of the water gets to be a hundred feet deep because of the Transatlantic Shelf that reaches out to the Gulf Stream.
Seaweed must like deep water, but that's not the only reason it piles up on the west coast, and needs a big storm to wash it ashore on the east coast. The other big reason is the existence of the Westerlies. The Westerlies are the wind currents that extend from the west coast to the east coast. Like when you watch the weather reports. The weather systems that affect the eastern U.S. always get here from somewhere out west. That's because of the Earth's rotation that causes the wind to blow like that in the northern hemisphere.
The Westerlies blow the storms ashore on the Pacific Coast, and with the exception of the hurricanes, they blow the storms eastwardly out into the Atlantic Ocean. Thats why there is a constant supply of seaweed on the Pacific coast, and only an intermittent supply of seaweed on the Atlantic Coast. When I win the lottery, I'm moving.
❦
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Is The Tea Party's Final Solution Genocide?
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I went to a funeral last night. My older sister's adopted daughter's second husband died of cirrhosis of the liver in his mid-thirties. I went to support my sister. The rest of them were pretty much strangers to me. He was a drunk and a crack-head and not very lovable as far as I was concerned. He probably robbed most of the people's homes who went to his funeral. My guess is that the other guests were there to support his parents and siblings, and they needed it. Their world is now a safer place.
My sister and her husband couldn't have children because my sister had scarlet fever when we were children, and antibiotics like penicillin hadn't shown up yet in the rural village we lived in then. Her getting scarlet fever was a memorable event. I was six years old and in the first grade of school. The doctors quarantined our home and we couldn't leave the house for what seemed like forever to a kid, but it was only a couple of weeks.
She had repercussions from this disease her whole life. It making her sterile was just one of the symptoms. I don't know much about it. Who wants to talk about that to a blabbermouth like me. I have the deserved reputation of not being able to keep a secret. I don't wanna know any more of their stupid secrets than I can get out of. I know more about people than they know themselves, and I wanna hear the lies they tell themselves to cover up their self-ignorance?
Well, not so much my sister. I actually love her and our siblings. She's the perfect example of what love actually is to me. It's familiarity and has nothing to do with sex. While it may be true in one way that familiarity breeds contempt, it also breeds love as I understand love. I love people I've known for a long time, not because of any particular attributes associated with romantic love or sex. Sexual behavior is something more primeval and different than "love" to me.
Knowing anybody at all a long time requires me to forgive their dumb mistakes to continue to be around them. Just as they have to forgive my dumb mistakes or leave me be. It's not unusual for me to be in love with people I work with everyday for a few weeks. I suffer a little whenever I leave their presence. I mourn because I feel a real loss of some kind. The longer we're around each other the more I miss them. Much of my poetry describes the kind of love that seems too mundane to have invested emotionally in. There have been times I have felt deep shame that I could fall in love so casually over an encounter that was never meant to last long. It seems intentional that I chose to live life as a shamed man (shaman).
The pain of separation I felt from enduring both my divorces nearly killed me. I tried several times to murder myself, but I wasn't very successful or I may have been too much of a coward to actually do what it took to finalize the event. My ex-wives have grown to wish my efforts had killed me. My children probably even more so, but they never knew me well enough to hate the guy who tried to kill himself. They only hate their mother's idea of the guy who deserted them or got deserted by their mother. It's a complicated world. The children it takes a whole village to raise, leave those villages unprepared for life as their parents know it. Shit happens. Things change.
Since the advent of the television media in the Fifties and Sixties, entire villages have retreated from listening to the radio on the front porches and stoops next to the sidewalks, to the sofas and LazyBoy chairs inside of their houses. to where the village's children can't reach out to them without interrupting their favorite sitcom.
Wealthy soccer moms with their SUVs and strict schedules for extra curricular activities not withstanding. They're gonna just hate it when the Tea Party fanatics turn their precious soccer fields into the killing fields on Rush Limbaugh's rabble-rousing orders. Sig heil!! Bitch!
I'm only partially kidding. Genocide can get started with just the sort of dissatisfaction the great unwashed seem to feel these days. There was a documentary on PBS last night about the psychology behind how something like Ruwanda could happen. They had interviews with both the killers and the lucky survivors.
The conclusions from these interviews appeared to be that the conditions for genocide to occur is not enough. It takes the order of a strong man to get it started, but once started, the strong man can't make it stop. Even killing the strong man doesn't stop it once it gets started. Apparently, it becomes an act of nature until it's finally over.
I figure that's what happened to the little people in Ireland. The little people were probably just a race of people like the Bantu pygmies of Africa, the Ainu of Japan, and the Negritos of the Philippines. They were different because they were so small in stature, and eventually gained the reputation of developing magical powers to compensate. They probably accepted this magical attribute without resistance, because it gave them a sense of power over the larger races they wouldn't have without it.
Feigning they had magical powers when they didn't probably got them wiped out genocidally for their troubles. They could ran, but they couldn't hide forever, because their difference in size gave them away. They had to expose themselves to get something to eat. There are only so many places to hide for a long time on an island.
It was chilling to hear one of the Rwandan killers being interview for the documentary relate how they would wake up in the morning, and when the drums started beating, they would go out looking for the tribe members they were killing. They would hunt for them out in the jungles every day for months on end without really understanding why they were doing it. They had no mercy except for offering a quick death over a slow one.
To me, that's what the Tea Party people could become, because it's all about racial prejudice, not the government. I hope I'm wrong, but who knows? I'm human. I'm as gullible as it gets. I could get caught up in such a mob action like anybody else. I might not realize in real time what was going on because I'm always the last to know.
❦
I went to a funeral last night. My older sister's adopted daughter's second husband died of cirrhosis of the liver in his mid-thirties. I went to support my sister. The rest of them were pretty much strangers to me. He was a drunk and a crack-head and not very lovable as far as I was concerned. He probably robbed most of the people's homes who went to his funeral. My guess is that the other guests were there to support his parents and siblings, and they needed it. Their world is now a safer place.
My sister and her husband couldn't have children because my sister had scarlet fever when we were children, and antibiotics like penicillin hadn't shown up yet in the rural village we lived in then. Her getting scarlet fever was a memorable event. I was six years old and in the first grade of school. The doctors quarantined our home and we couldn't leave the house for what seemed like forever to a kid, but it was only a couple of weeks.
She had repercussions from this disease her whole life. It making her sterile was just one of the symptoms. I don't know much about it. Who wants to talk about that to a blabbermouth like me. I have the deserved reputation of not being able to keep a secret. I don't wanna know any more of their stupid secrets than I can get out of. I know more about people than they know themselves, and I wanna hear the lies they tell themselves to cover up their self-ignorance?
Well, not so much my sister. I actually love her and our siblings. She's the perfect example of what love actually is to me. It's familiarity and has nothing to do with sex. While it may be true in one way that familiarity breeds contempt, it also breeds love as I understand love. I love people I've known for a long time, not because of any particular attributes associated with romantic love or sex. Sexual behavior is something more primeval and different than "love" to me.
Knowing anybody at all a long time requires me to forgive their dumb mistakes to continue to be around them. Just as they have to forgive my dumb mistakes or leave me be. It's not unusual for me to be in love with people I work with everyday for a few weeks. I suffer a little whenever I leave their presence. I mourn because I feel a real loss of some kind. The longer we're around each other the more I miss them. Much of my poetry describes the kind of love that seems too mundane to have invested emotionally in. There have been times I have felt deep shame that I could fall in love so casually over an encounter that was never meant to last long. It seems intentional that I chose to live life as a shamed man (shaman).
The pain of separation I felt from enduring both my divorces nearly killed me. I tried several times to murder myself, but I wasn't very successful or I may have been too much of a coward to actually do what it took to finalize the event. My ex-wives have grown to wish my efforts had killed me. My children probably even more so, but they never knew me well enough to hate the guy who tried to kill himself. They only hate their mother's idea of the guy who deserted them or got deserted by their mother. It's a complicated world. The children it takes a whole village to raise, leave those villages unprepared for life as their parents know it. Shit happens. Things change.
Since the advent of the television media in the Fifties and Sixties, entire villages have retreated from listening to the radio on the front porches and stoops next to the sidewalks, to the sofas and LazyBoy chairs inside of their houses. to where the village's children can't reach out to them without interrupting their favorite sitcom.
Wealthy soccer moms with their SUVs and strict schedules for extra curricular activities not withstanding. They're gonna just hate it when the Tea Party fanatics turn their precious soccer fields into the killing fields on Rush Limbaugh's rabble-rousing orders. Sig heil!! Bitch!
I'm only partially kidding. Genocide can get started with just the sort of dissatisfaction the great unwashed seem to feel these days. There was a documentary on PBS last night about the psychology behind how something like Ruwanda could happen. They had interviews with both the killers and the lucky survivors.
The conclusions from these interviews appeared to be that the conditions for genocide to occur is not enough. It takes the order of a strong man to get it started, but once started, the strong man can't make it stop. Even killing the strong man doesn't stop it once it gets started. Apparently, it becomes an act of nature until it's finally over.
I figure that's what happened to the little people in Ireland. The little people were probably just a race of people like the Bantu pygmies of Africa, the Ainu of Japan, and the Negritos of the Philippines. They were different because they were so small in stature, and eventually gained the reputation of developing magical powers to compensate. They probably accepted this magical attribute without resistance, because it gave them a sense of power over the larger races they wouldn't have without it.
Feigning they had magical powers when they didn't probably got them wiped out genocidally for their troubles. They could ran, but they couldn't hide forever, because their difference in size gave them away. They had to expose themselves to get something to eat. There are only so many places to hide for a long time on an island.
It was chilling to hear one of the Rwandan killers being interview for the documentary relate how they would wake up in the morning, and when the drums started beating, they would go out looking for the tribe members they were killing. They would hunt for them out in the jungles every day for months on end without really understanding why they were doing it. They had no mercy except for offering a quick death over a slow one.
To me, that's what the Tea Party people could become, because it's all about racial prejudice, not the government. I hope I'm wrong, but who knows? I'm human. I'm as gullible as it gets. I could get caught up in such a mob action like anybody else. I might not realize in real time what was going on because I'm always the last to know.
❦
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Bamboo For The Masses
❧
The time of the year has come for new bamboo shoots to emerge from the root mass and grow forty feet tall. I've found three spouting out of the ground so far. There might be more, but they're hard to find in among the dead leaves and limbs on the forest floor. I'll know in a week or so. There may not be any more than three come up. That's the same number of bamboo plants I had come up last year.
Frankly, I don't know what the deal is with how bamboo propagates. When I first talked about planting them in the corner of my yard, my younger brother became truly concerned and swore that if I planted them they would take over all my property and my house. They haven't.
In fact, it took about five years for the first couple of bamboo shoots to grow at all, and in the last five years only about twenty altogether have appeared, and most of those died of their own accord or got killed by a fire forest fire I deliberately set to burn off the underbrush each winter.
It was just a small burn-off fire whose flames hardly ever reached a height of six inches, and it didn't kill much of the underbrush it was started for in order to open up the woods a little and kill off the ticks and redbugs so I could take a stroll there without getting eat up. It killed the bamboo though. Including the largest stalk yet. About 4-6 inches in diameter.
My red azalea bushes are blazing with new blossoms. The bushes were some commercial plants I put out over ten years ago. They've been very productive from the getgo. In a long row on the western side of the lawn around my house I planted some other azalea bushes that took a long time to start putting out blossoms.
This row of azaleas are mostly a pink and white variegated color and don't blossom until a couple of weeks later than the original plants with the red blossoms show up. at the northern end of that row are some miniature azalea plants that have pure white blossoms.
All the plants in that row were "rescued" from a commercial planting venture on my younger brother's property several hundred yards away that he rented out to the grower. They were potted and set under the pine trees on that property to shade them from too much sun when they're small cuttings.
The whole lot of them were killed back by a late hard frost such that they didn't have any commercial value. I asked the grower if I could have a few of them to see if they might come back over time. He told me I could have any or all of them. He was quite disgusted over his financial loss. No blame.
I took about 30-40 of them out of the pots and buried them in a row along the edge of my lawn and forgot about them for the most part. They didn't exactly die, but they didn't grow, and they only put out a few blossom over the next five years or so.
It was during the winter when a lot of the underbrush in the woods beyond the edge of my lawn had shed their leaves that I began to notice new shoots coming out of the ground of those frost-killed plants, and it was those new growth shoots that eventually began putting out blossoms. None of the original branches ever did much. Now, those plants are five foot tall bushes and seem to have more blossoms every year.
My old fig tree has completely leaved out and even has small berries growing. I've seen these early fruit happen before. It's exciting to see them and imagine having fresh figs earlier than usual. But these early fruits hardly ever mature. They turn pale green and fall off. That's when the real fruit begin to appear that will get ripe and BE delicious. '-)
The commercially grown fig bush I planted about three or maybe four seasons ago is still trying to grow up and be a real little boy. It's only been putting out a couple of leaves each summer, and then the small shoots it puts up that never get over a foot tall, have died back each winter. Then, in the spring, the plant would have to grow a new shoot even to grow leaves on.
This past fall I decided to cover the one puny little live branch the root system sent up as a token effort to reproduce itself with a pile of dead leaves to protect it from the winter frosts. The idea was that if I could at least keep that one little limb alive over the winter it wouldn't have to regrow the branch before it started growing leaves.
My ploy worked, at least to some degree. A week or so ago I raked the dead leaves away to find out if the little branch had survived the winter, and saw two tiny little green buds toward the top of the plant. It was alive. If it could get those two little buds to grow from early on in the season it might be able to grow some more branches with even more leaves, and more leaves might help the root mass grow big enough to support a strong, mature, blossoming fruit tree.
I've been checking to see if those little green buds would grow. They haven't really developed much, but now there is a third tiny green bud at the node below the other buds. I'm cautiously delighted.
❦
The time of the year has come for new bamboo shoots to emerge from the root mass and grow forty feet tall. I've found three spouting out of the ground so far. There might be more, but they're hard to find in among the dead leaves and limbs on the forest floor. I'll know in a week or so. There may not be any more than three come up. That's the same number of bamboo plants I had come up last year.
Frankly, I don't know what the deal is with how bamboo propagates. When I first talked about planting them in the corner of my yard, my younger brother became truly concerned and swore that if I planted them they would take over all my property and my house. They haven't.
In fact, it took about five years for the first couple of bamboo shoots to grow at all, and in the last five years only about twenty altogether have appeared, and most of those died of their own accord or got killed by a fire forest fire I deliberately set to burn off the underbrush each winter.
It was just a small burn-off fire whose flames hardly ever reached a height of six inches, and it didn't kill much of the underbrush it was started for in order to open up the woods a little and kill off the ticks and redbugs so I could take a stroll there without getting eat up. It killed the bamboo though. Including the largest stalk yet. About 4-6 inches in diameter.
My red azalea bushes are blazing with new blossoms. The bushes were some commercial plants I put out over ten years ago. They've been very productive from the getgo. In a long row on the western side of the lawn around my house I planted some other azalea bushes that took a long time to start putting out blossoms.
This row of azaleas are mostly a pink and white variegated color and don't blossom until a couple of weeks later than the original plants with the red blossoms show up. at the northern end of that row are some miniature azalea plants that have pure white blossoms.
All the plants in that row were "rescued" from a commercial planting venture on my younger brother's property several hundred yards away that he rented out to the grower. They were potted and set under the pine trees on that property to shade them from too much sun when they're small cuttings.
The whole lot of them were killed back by a late hard frost such that they didn't have any commercial value. I asked the grower if I could have a few of them to see if they might come back over time. He told me I could have any or all of them. He was quite disgusted over his financial loss. No blame.
I took about 30-40 of them out of the pots and buried them in a row along the edge of my lawn and forgot about them for the most part. They didn't exactly die, but they didn't grow, and they only put out a few blossom over the next five years or so.
It was during the winter when a lot of the underbrush in the woods beyond the edge of my lawn had shed their leaves that I began to notice new shoots coming out of the ground of those frost-killed plants, and it was those new growth shoots that eventually began putting out blossoms. None of the original branches ever did much. Now, those plants are five foot tall bushes and seem to have more blossoms every year.
My old fig tree has completely leaved out and even has small berries growing. I've seen these early fruit happen before. It's exciting to see them and imagine having fresh figs earlier than usual. But these early fruits hardly ever mature. They turn pale green and fall off. That's when the real fruit begin to appear that will get ripe and BE delicious. '-)
The commercially grown fig bush I planted about three or maybe four seasons ago is still trying to grow up and be a real little boy. It's only been putting out a couple of leaves each summer, and then the small shoots it puts up that never get over a foot tall, have died back each winter. Then, in the spring, the plant would have to grow a new shoot even to grow leaves on.
This past fall I decided to cover the one puny little live branch the root system sent up as a token effort to reproduce itself with a pile of dead leaves to protect it from the winter frosts. The idea was that if I could at least keep that one little limb alive over the winter it wouldn't have to regrow the branch before it started growing leaves.
My ploy worked, at least to some degree. A week or so ago I raked the dead leaves away to find out if the little branch had survived the winter, and saw two tiny little green buds toward the top of the plant. It was alive. If it could get those two little buds to grow from early on in the season it might be able to grow some more branches with even more leaves, and more leaves might help the root mass grow big enough to support a strong, mature, blossoming fruit tree.
I've been checking to see if those little green buds would grow. They haven't really developed much, but now there is a third tiny green bud at the node below the other buds. I'm cautiously delighted.
❦
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Hovering Between Old And New
❧
A friend told me about a health food cooperative down in Wilmington that she said had a large variety of sprouting seeds. I have a goodly number of seeds in my storage bin, but what I needed was an excuse to get outta town. So, I drove down to Wilmington to find this unheard of health food store.
I took the "old road" (U.S.421), the ancient road from the mountains to the coast that InterState 40 replaced. It crosses the "new bridge" that replaced the aging old bridge, and the only one that crossed the Cape Fear River at Wilmington. The new bridge is further south than the old bridge (now completely refurbished with a second bridge and four lanes), and becomes Oleander Drive on the Wilmington side of the Cape Fear River. Oleander Drive slowly replaced Market Street as the main thoroughfare that runs from historical downtown Wilmington to Wrightsville Beach.
U.S. 421 was extended from the entrance to the old bridge and stays on the other side of the Cape Fear River from historic downtown Wilmington. Using the new extension you will see the Wilmington waterfront, and it passes the entrance to the World War Two battleship, the USS North Carolina, until it reaches the new bridge. When you cross the new bridge it misses downtown Wilmington. If you keep going straight at the bottom of the bridge, it runs into Oleander Drive and the old shopping centers, and Oleander Drive continues toward Wrightsville Beach where it eventually turns in Military Cutoff Road where all the new shopping centers are, and then becomes old U.S. 17, which was replaced by InterState 95.
If you turn to the right at the foot of the new bridge it melds into old U.S. 421 which is the old road to Carolina Beach, then Kure Beach, and ends at one of the North Carolina State Aquariums. Nearby, just before you get to the Aquarium, you can take the State ferry over to Southport, a unique port entry town that received lots of immigrants and settlers from European ships that never got recorded because the United States wasn't the United States yet.
I wanted to avoid all that because the food cooperative was about half a mile west of where Oleander Drive turns into Military Cutoff Road, so I took the new, uncompleted InterState 140 cutoff that runs around the north part of Wilmington through a bunch of swamps. I thought it might put me closer to where I intended to go, but in the end game, it didn't. I know that now, but there's another way I have yet to use yet. Next time.
The reason taking I-140 from U.S. 421 instead of driving straight down Oleander Drive is that it doesn't bring me much closer to my intended goal is that it conjoins U.S. 17 lots further north than I figured. I should have turned south on I-40 over to Market Street and taken the old way toward Wrightsville Beach, and that would lead me to Military Cutoff Road just before it turns into Oleander Drive.
At that crossroad, where Market Street crosses Military Cutoff Road, is the relatively new shopping center where Lovey's Health Food Store is located. I've shopped there once before, but I didn't stop when I drove past it, because I wanted to check out the food cooperative I was told about to see what they offered as far as sprouting seeds are concerned. I finally found it, and it didn't have the variety of sprouting seeds I was told of. They did have the NAC (N-Acetyl-Cysteine) I wanted besides the seeds, and they had it on sale, so I bought two bottles of 30 caps each. Expensive crap. I gotta buy a health food store after I will the lottery. '-)
Then, I drove back to Lovey's, where I bought a bottle of 60 caps of NAC. They gave me a Senior Citizens Discount and a fancy cloth shopping bag for buying there, and then took the new way (I-40) back here to ho-me. I ended up not buying any seeds at all. I have an appointment I'm dreading at the VA Hospital in Durham, and they have three Whole Food Stores in that area where I can get all the sprouting seeds I want at a little better price, and get travel pay for my troubles.
The one geographical fact I learned about by going a different way yesterday was where Wilmington went to. Northeast. That's were the businesses migrated to. Since the federal government completed InterState 40 down to Wilmington from Raleigh it's become a thriving metropolis compared to being probably the oldest town in North Carolina.
Up until that happened it was a wonderful old town with some of the oldest houses in the state. It's been preserved pretty good and is getting mo' bettah/worse in that regard. If you've ever been entangled with the preservation types you'll realize they're a bunch of pedantic assholes nobody wants to be around, but they do... good things... maybe. I'd burn it to the ground and start over myself.
I've often thought that if I came into some sort of windfall and had the money I would buy a house in historical downtown Wilmington, but living in Key West, Florida for seven years has changed my mind about wanting to live in Wilmington or other Southern port towns like Charleston and Savannah. I really find the kind of people who work the preservation gig to be despicable, snotty prigs with no creative talents to speak of. Who wants that? Especially war re-enactment people. When I'm around them I wanna scream, "Get over it! Jesus Fucking Christ! What kind of animals celebrate war?"
❦
A friend told me about a health food cooperative down in Wilmington that she said had a large variety of sprouting seeds. I have a goodly number of seeds in my storage bin, but what I needed was an excuse to get outta town. So, I drove down to Wilmington to find this unheard of health food store.
I took the "old road" (U.S.421), the ancient road from the mountains to the coast that InterState 40 replaced. It crosses the "new bridge" that replaced the aging old bridge, and the only one that crossed the Cape Fear River at Wilmington. The new bridge is further south than the old bridge (now completely refurbished with a second bridge and four lanes), and becomes Oleander Drive on the Wilmington side of the Cape Fear River. Oleander Drive slowly replaced Market Street as the main thoroughfare that runs from historical downtown Wilmington to Wrightsville Beach.
U.S. 421 was extended from the entrance to the old bridge and stays on the other side of the Cape Fear River from historic downtown Wilmington. Using the new extension you will see the Wilmington waterfront, and it passes the entrance to the World War Two battleship, the USS North Carolina, until it reaches the new bridge. When you cross the new bridge it misses downtown Wilmington. If you keep going straight at the bottom of the bridge, it runs into Oleander Drive and the old shopping centers, and Oleander Drive continues toward Wrightsville Beach where it eventually turns in Military Cutoff Road where all the new shopping centers are, and then becomes old U.S. 17, which was replaced by InterState 95.
If you turn to the right at the foot of the new bridge it melds into old U.S. 421 which is the old road to Carolina Beach, then Kure Beach, and ends at one of the North Carolina State Aquariums. Nearby, just before you get to the Aquarium, you can take the State ferry over to Southport, a unique port entry town that received lots of immigrants and settlers from European ships that never got recorded because the United States wasn't the United States yet.
I wanted to avoid all that because the food cooperative was about half a mile west of where Oleander Drive turns into Military Cutoff Road, so I took the new, uncompleted InterState 140 cutoff that runs around the north part of Wilmington through a bunch of swamps. I thought it might put me closer to where I intended to go, but in the end game, it didn't. I know that now, but there's another way I have yet to use yet. Next time.
The reason taking I-140 from U.S. 421 instead of driving straight down Oleander Drive is that it doesn't bring me much closer to my intended goal is that it conjoins U.S. 17 lots further north than I figured. I should have turned south on I-40 over to Market Street and taken the old way toward Wrightsville Beach, and that would lead me to Military Cutoff Road just before it turns into Oleander Drive.
At that crossroad, where Market Street crosses Military Cutoff Road, is the relatively new shopping center where Lovey's Health Food Store is located. I've shopped there once before, but I didn't stop when I drove past it, because I wanted to check out the food cooperative I was told about to see what they offered as far as sprouting seeds are concerned. I finally found it, and it didn't have the variety of sprouting seeds I was told of. They did have the NAC (N-Acetyl-Cysteine) I wanted besides the seeds, and they had it on sale, so I bought two bottles of 30 caps each. Expensive crap. I gotta buy a health food store after I will the lottery. '-)
Then, I drove back to Lovey's, where I bought a bottle of 60 caps of NAC. They gave me a Senior Citizens Discount and a fancy cloth shopping bag for buying there, and then took the new way (I-40) back here to ho-me. I ended up not buying any seeds at all. I have an appointment I'm dreading at the VA Hospital in Durham, and they have three Whole Food Stores in that area where I can get all the sprouting seeds I want at a little better price, and get travel pay for my troubles.
The one geographical fact I learned about by going a different way yesterday was where Wilmington went to. Northeast. That's were the businesses migrated to. Since the federal government completed InterState 40 down to Wilmington from Raleigh it's become a thriving metropolis compared to being probably the oldest town in North Carolina.
Up until that happened it was a wonderful old town with some of the oldest houses in the state. It's been preserved pretty good and is getting mo' bettah/worse in that regard. If you've ever been entangled with the preservation types you'll realize they're a bunch of pedantic assholes nobody wants to be around, but they do... good things... maybe. I'd burn it to the ground and start over myself.
I've often thought that if I came into some sort of windfall and had the money I would buy a house in historical downtown Wilmington, but living in Key West, Florida for seven years has changed my mind about wanting to live in Wilmington or other Southern port towns like Charleston and Savannah. I really find the kind of people who work the preservation gig to be despicable, snotty prigs with no creative talents to speak of. Who wants that? Especially war re-enactment people. When I'm around them I wanna scream, "Get over it! Jesus Fucking Christ! What kind of animals celebrate war?"
❦
Monday, April 12, 2010
Getting On Regular
❧
I'm up early this morning. That's because I went to bed early last night. I lay in my bed waiting for the morning light to shine through the window on the south side of my bedroom to tell me that the day has started for the working folk. Many mornings I lie there for a while and listen to the morning traffic noises to begin. I was too antsy to do that this morning. When I did finally get up the clock on my computer said it was earlier than I thought. Four a.m.
The only thing on the television was the all-night news shows that I like. They run on for hours reviewing the past weeks news. They have the new presenters giving it their best in the hope that they'll get on regular. I used to go through that feeling a lot working in construction. Many "road whores" that work the industrial construction circuit will say they like being on the road, but given the chance to "get on regular" a great majority of them would probably say "Yes."
It's really quiet at this time of the morning. I should have been getting up this time of the day to write. There is no reason whatsoever that I shouldn't. I don't have any appointments for anything until the nineteenth when I have to go face the rheumatologist and decide whether to tell him I'm not taking his drugs. My high school class is having a reunion on the seventeenth at a pizza joint. These people got real class. I like it okay. At least they have a salad bar and non-meat spaghetti sauce.
Starting a vegetarian diet is not such an odd move for me. It started out with me thinking that the Atkin's low carb diet might be responsible for the onset of my arthritis. For a fairly long time I didn't eat much else but meat, and when I read that older people lose some of their digestive juices as they age, I figured that it was the load I put on my digestive system that caused my body to revolt. I didn't plan to go on a vegetarian diet. My intent was simply to cut back on or eliminate meat for my GI tract's sake. After a few weeks of that, the change was such an improvement I decided to go all the way with it.
I stopped eating meat on December 1, 2009. It's been colorful. My sister-in-law got me interested in the wheatgrass diet about the same time as I decided go meatless, and that has been a real influence. I bought a real expensive juicer in order to give it a whirl. Then, I had to use it or feel stupid. Using it has been a lesson unto me.
Take pineapples for instance. I used to buy cans of sliced pineapple basically to drink the juice in the can. I didn't really know that until I bought a fresh pineapple at the grocery store, brought it home, sliced it up, and fed it to my masticating juicer without peeling it. My juicer did the same thing with it that it does with the wheat grass and celery and carrots. It smashed the fresh juice out of it and vomited out the peeling as pulp that will become compost. Very tasty.
The sprouting of seeds I've been doing has been enlightening. I got all worked up about getting the wide-mouth jars and the stainless steel screens I use to germinate and sprout them. I located several fairly local places where I can find good seeds. My first efforts were actually the most successful sprouting I've done. The surprising part of it is how little it takes for one person.
I thought at first that I'd have to start a new jar of sprouts maybe every day, but it didn't take too long before I had more sprouts than I could eat before they got too old. My stomach has a time with digesting raw food. It can only process about a cup or two a day, and those two cups of sprouts plus the wheatgrass smoothies I make are as much food as it takes for me to have more than I need to stay healthy.
Raw foods may make as much trouble for my digestive system as meat. It takes a lotta gall to break those vegetables down to being useful. That's part of the reason I bought a masticating juicer instead of a centrifugal one. I don't have any upper molars left to chew food with without my partial dentures. The dentures I have don't fit now, if they ever did, and the side affects of the methotrexate causes sores in my mouth and especially my tongue, and it can be very irritating to wear the dentures. I manage to chew some with my front teeth, but it becomes very obvious that's not what they were designed to do.
The prednisone series is finished a couple of days ago, and I'm finally becoming sane again. I've had people tell me they hate using steroids because they get bold and say stuff they wouldn't usually say. That's the exact reason I like it. Sure, I get a lotta accusations of being crazy, but that's normal for me. I found out a lotta hidden stuff that's useful I wouldn't have found out otherwise.
❦
I'm up early this morning. That's because I went to bed early last night. I lay in my bed waiting for the morning light to shine through the window on the south side of my bedroom to tell me that the day has started for the working folk. Many mornings I lie there for a while and listen to the morning traffic noises to begin. I was too antsy to do that this morning. When I did finally get up the clock on my computer said it was earlier than I thought. Four a.m.
The only thing on the television was the all-night news shows that I like. They run on for hours reviewing the past weeks news. They have the new presenters giving it their best in the hope that they'll get on regular. I used to go through that feeling a lot working in construction. Many "road whores" that work the industrial construction circuit will say they like being on the road, but given the chance to "get on regular" a great majority of them would probably say "Yes."
It's really quiet at this time of the morning. I should have been getting up this time of the day to write. There is no reason whatsoever that I shouldn't. I don't have any appointments for anything until the nineteenth when I have to go face the rheumatologist and decide whether to tell him I'm not taking his drugs. My high school class is having a reunion on the seventeenth at a pizza joint. These people got real class. I like it okay. At least they have a salad bar and non-meat spaghetti sauce.
Starting a vegetarian diet is not such an odd move for me. It started out with me thinking that the Atkin's low carb diet might be responsible for the onset of my arthritis. For a fairly long time I didn't eat much else but meat, and when I read that older people lose some of their digestive juices as they age, I figured that it was the load I put on my digestive system that caused my body to revolt. I didn't plan to go on a vegetarian diet. My intent was simply to cut back on or eliminate meat for my GI tract's sake. After a few weeks of that, the change was such an improvement I decided to go all the way with it.
I stopped eating meat on December 1, 2009. It's been colorful. My sister-in-law got me interested in the wheatgrass diet about the same time as I decided go meatless, and that has been a real influence. I bought a real expensive juicer in order to give it a whirl. Then, I had to use it or feel stupid. Using it has been a lesson unto me.
Take pineapples for instance. I used to buy cans of sliced pineapple basically to drink the juice in the can. I didn't really know that until I bought a fresh pineapple at the grocery store, brought it home, sliced it up, and fed it to my masticating juicer without peeling it. My juicer did the same thing with it that it does with the wheat grass and celery and carrots. It smashed the fresh juice out of it and vomited out the peeling as pulp that will become compost. Very tasty.
The sprouting of seeds I've been doing has been enlightening. I got all worked up about getting the wide-mouth jars and the stainless steel screens I use to germinate and sprout them. I located several fairly local places where I can find good seeds. My first efforts were actually the most successful sprouting I've done. The surprising part of it is how little it takes for one person.
I thought at first that I'd have to start a new jar of sprouts maybe every day, but it didn't take too long before I had more sprouts than I could eat before they got too old. My stomach has a time with digesting raw food. It can only process about a cup or two a day, and those two cups of sprouts plus the wheatgrass smoothies I make are as much food as it takes for me to have more than I need to stay healthy.
Raw foods may make as much trouble for my digestive system as meat. It takes a lotta gall to break those vegetables down to being useful. That's part of the reason I bought a masticating juicer instead of a centrifugal one. I don't have any upper molars left to chew food with without my partial dentures. The dentures I have don't fit now, if they ever did, and the side affects of the methotrexate causes sores in my mouth and especially my tongue, and it can be very irritating to wear the dentures. I manage to chew some with my front teeth, but it becomes very obvious that's not what they were designed to do.
The prednisone series is finished a couple of days ago, and I'm finally becoming sane again. I've had people tell me they hate using steroids because they get bold and say stuff they wouldn't usually say. That's the exact reason I like it. Sure, I get a lotta accusations of being crazy, but that's normal for me. I found out a lotta hidden stuff that's useful I wouldn't have found out otherwise.
❦
Saturday, April 10, 2010
A Day To Forget
❧
Nothing happened today. It might as well not have come and gone. It's eleven o'clock at night and I feel the same grogginess I felt when I first woke up. I think it was a cool day compared to the high eighties and nineties that the temperatures have unexpectedly climbed to yesterday and the day before.
Now I remember. I spent the day researching this new supplement I've started using, and then segued to a complimentary supplement I've since gone to the store and purchased and added to the row of bottles of supplements I've been strung out on in one way or the other for a long time.
This ridiculously inane behavior obviously hasn't helped that much. I got all the diseases my natal astrology chart said I'd have thirty years ago. I didn't believe it then, but I have no choice now. It's my Saturn in the sixth house of health. My conflicted Saturn is associated with bones. Man, have I got troubles with mah bones.
Not much interested in writing tonight. Maybe later.
❦
Nothing happened today. It might as well not have come and gone. It's eleven o'clock at night and I feel the same grogginess I felt when I first woke up. I think it was a cool day compared to the high eighties and nineties that the temperatures have unexpectedly climbed to yesterday and the day before.
Now I remember. I spent the day researching this new supplement I've started using, and then segued to a complimentary supplement I've since gone to the store and purchased and added to the row of bottles of supplements I've been strung out on in one way or the other for a long time.
This ridiculously inane behavior obviously hasn't helped that much. I got all the diseases my natal astrology chart said I'd have thirty years ago. I didn't believe it then, but I have no choice now. It's my Saturn in the sixth house of health. My conflicted Saturn is associated with bones. Man, have I got troubles with mah bones.
Not much interested in writing tonight. Maybe later.
❦
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