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Dawn in Texas
Dawn arrives with a humid 78° this preparation day. It is felt that the day should be devoted to preparing for the Shabbat, so that one does not labor on that day. The sages are all over the map on what constitutes ‘labor’, with the most rigid believing that writing is labor, therefore not allowed. I belong to the only religion that has figured out how to work at resting.
Snooks hasn’t risen yet, but soon the house will be redolent with baking challah bread, and whatever she decides to prepare for this and tomorrow evenings meal. In our family, we make heavy use of the crock pot for Shabbat. It bothers us not one whit that some poor soul has to shovel coal into the fiery maw of a power plant maw so that we can rest by not turning a switch on or off.
Yeah, it can get very weird, and serves as a reminder of why human logic is a seriously flawed process. Even my atheists friends don’t escape this sort of weird logic of humans, and fail to see it in the so-called scientific method. All it takes to be a fool is one poorly understood element when coming to a conclusion. Seems like the enviro-scientists are the worst of the lot in believing that their science is settled. Even cosmologists don’t have the arrogance to make that claim, and it above all science really is fact driven, carefully denoting theory from fact.
But I don’t want to go into a full-blown rant with the eco-brownshirts today. This morning I just want to sip my coffee, put a few bits in my chronicles, put on my ugly shoes and water the plants, and sip some more coffee.
And how ‘bout them EPA polluters! In all their vast concerns with the environment, they release toxic sludge into the Colorado River. I hope the States do not listen to their mia culpa’s and sue the EPA out of business like the EPA carelessly does to business. It would be poetic justice. But … I rant at eco-brownshirts.
I am very pleased with my beginning container garden, though it hasn’t yielded the disease free environment plants that I had hoped. But there is always next year. Everything else goes into a billiard table flat expanse of ground cover that is mower friendly. Speaking of which, I need to repair one.
I am feeling good after my doctors visit yesterday. A1C came in at a bit under 6%, which while a tad high, but very low for me. And my loss of 20lbs is holding over the last six months.
And the day has moved into the second hour after sunrise, and I must be off.
Good morning!
50 Shades of MzMuse
I had settled in after fixing a huge country breakfast of eggs, sausage, biscuits and hash browns to write. I have had a tale on my mind for some time, but it does lay on the fringes of propriety, so I have been very discreet in the telling of it, so the tale just dried up. I do write for an audience, and many of my audience frankly do not appreciate frankness on some topics. Especially sex and submission.
So I hit the [Delete] key and sat back in my $49 Office Depot “Executive Chair” and watched the blinking curser for a bit. I almost missed her sitting up against the desk lap, knees drawn up to her chest and hands clasped around them. She seemed so … submissive, sitting in that huddled pose as she looked up at me like I might strike her if she said the wrong thing.
“Yeesh! Hard night at the rest home? The guilt caught up to you I see!”
“Yes sir.” She replied, not raising her eyes.
“I have been trying to write this vignette on submissive women for some time now, and it just isn’t working. You are just going to have to do better, and I know you can.” I said, sternly. I hate being a taskmaster, but I can and will be if necessary.
“I will sir!” she plead earnestly.
I continued. “I just can’t let this lapse go, however. Rules are rules, and you broke one. That calls for a severe punishment.”
“Oh sir! Please! Not the whip!” she begged.
“I am sorry, but you will just have to accept the punishment.” I could not waver on this.
“Yes sir!” she replied meekly.
“I want you to dress in tight lime green stretch pants and that pink Rayon™ blouse, and go lingerie shopping at Walmart. Pick out a thong, the flimsier the better, and pay for it with a check. Then return home and put it on. That is all you are allowed to wear in the house while I am gone.”
“Please sir! The whip! I much prefer the whip!” she cried.
“Enough!” I roared.
“Yes sir.”
Organic Living vs The Tick Tock Machine
Living by the tick tock machine.
For some unexplained reason, I wanted to spend one year living by the sunrise and sunset, and not be troubled by a digital or analogue display telling me what to do. I began a study in time, or horology as it is called by the experts. Man time as I like to call it.
Universal time is not synced to any sort of organic activity. It is all a part of the human brick making machinery. A sage once told me that God builds with stones, and man builds with bricks. Though masons have very unique skills that can be hard to master, at its foundation, bricks are a relatively easy medium to build with. Stack ‘em nice and pretty, and find something to keep them stuck together, be it mud and straw or lime and cement.
Today’s time is like that, and man has to keep tinkering with it to keep it sort of synced with solar time. Or God time as I like to call it. The ancients didn’t need to know about the precession of the earth orbit around the sun, nor the equation of time to explain why the sundial only tells the ‘correct’ time twice a year.
Ancient Hebrews divided the hours between sunrise and sunset into eight equal periods called hours, and the night into four equal periods called watches. The Romans had 12 equal periods from sunrise to sunset and three equal periods from sunset to sunrise that were also called hours and watches. This little discrepancy has confused Biblical Scholars greatly over the years, but that is another topic for another time. The net result on the average Roman or Jew in ancient Israel was nil. You rose at daybreak, and slept after twilight ended.
So back to the waking at dawn, and going to bed at the end of twilight. I had no comprehension how difficult that was going to be in this world where everyone else lived by the tick-tock machine. Special events at churches and synagogues, such as a Wednesday Bible study, start at 7:00 pm, whether it is light or dark outside.
Even my beloved Snookums is geared to the ticktocking. Brunch at 10 am. Dinner at 5 pm. TV at 8 o’clock. Bedtime at 10:30. Lights out at 11. And we don’t need no steeeeeking sun to tell us what to do.
*sigh!*
So quietly, I try to adjust my body to God’s time, yet pay some obeisance man’s time. It is sort of like trying to serve two masters. Still, it does seem to fit me a bit better now that I have started that primitive rhythm and do not depend on artificial suns to extend my evening hours. It will be an interesting experiment this winter, with the longer nights and shorter days.
So goes the days in the autumn of my years. Whether it be tempus fugit or time flies, the days pass, and I watch, sans a watch on my wrist.
Good morning!
Cooking a frog in August
Friday. Preparation day. The smell of challah wafts through the house, and the slow cooker is hot and full of mystery. Talk radio fills the silence, Kippur da Budgie has finished yet another moult and is fussing because I rearranged her cage. I do that ever so often just to give her something to be cranky over.
I am on hiatus from blogging on WordPress® and Blogster,® but I get the itchy finger. I so wish to do something other than sit at the PC all day. Well, really I don’t, but I would like to accomplish more worthy things and not fritter my life away playing.
I always wanted to be a railroader, but that never quite worked out for me. But with the miracle of modern day graphics and server sharing, I now belong to a rail sim. It is not a game, but a sim. It runs in real time over real rail routes, and requires much of the same skills in starting massive tonnages and keeping them under control. And there is a dispatcher raggin’ on your butt for over speeding and poor train handling skills. One route is from Bakersfield, California to Barstow, California. It is an eight-hour run both in real-time and virtual time. So I have had to limit myself to one full run a week.
But it did get me out of the blogosphere for a time. I like the social sites, but like real life, collectively they are a major ache in the tuchas and I need to get away from the infighting from time to time. Nothing is more inane than a blog war. Not that I am all that innocent. I have been known to woof up a fight from time to time myself.
Shabbat begins at sundown, and I am working at not laboring during that 24 hours. I don’t know what it is, but I can look at a chore all week long and ignore it, but tell me I can’t do that chore on one day out of the week, and it becomes the most important thing in my life on that day of rest.
And Sunday, I am running up to Waco, Texas to pick up Aggie, a two year old male heeler/border collie mix, and deliver her to another transporter in Round Rock, Texas. Aggie is going to a K9 trainer in San Antonio from a rescue up north. Apparently, he has mild behavior problems when cornered, but his foster said she had no problems with aggression from him.
So that will get me out of two days of chores. But sooner or later, I am going to have to rebuild the mower deck on one of the riding mowers and put up the awning over the front porch.
We are still without a congregation, and that troubles me a bit. I am not certain what I am going to do at this point. I can only be true to the light that I am given. Others may or may not be on the right path, but I am unable to sit in a congregation and be taught things that are completely at war with my understanding. So I keep my eyes and ears open. And I also have said enough on the topic.
And the summer slips into its last month, and I am well into Autumn. Life goes on. Evil continues in evil, and the righteous continue in righteousness. The spring rains have come and gone, the latter rains are yet to come. Mankind follows its new God of rationalism. Knowledge is considered as wisdom. The temperature rises one more degree in the proverbial kettle with the frog, and we happily bask in the warmth.
Ribbbbittttt!
Rusty runs off the rails …
The road not taken …
… And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. …
Robert Frost, the Road not Taken.
A reflective morning descended on me as I read and re-read this poem of Frosts. Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I usually don’t talk about the voices in my head. Bat-kol is the term for the types of voices I occasionally hear. They are often full of portent. Around 1999, I was startled by the clang of a metal door being slammed shut, and a male voice saying, “We will not pass this way again”.
Normally, when I get one of these bat-kols, it is a woman’s voice I hear. However, three times in my life it was a mans voice I heard. Frequently when that happens, it appears to signify an immediate event. Yet, this one appeared to be more of a bad omen than one denoting a specific event.
The years following that omen we had a number of startling earth events. Huge hurricanes, typhoons, tsunami’s, bitter freezes and such. Not that they are infrequent in terms of geologic time, and if that were all that it was, I would dismiss the weather driven events as better world reportage.
But coupled to those events is a more subtle worry. Nations are losing their anchors, again. Once again, civilization rises up against civilization. Corruption in our own (US) government at the highest levels is systemic and incurable. A new wave of Muslim aggression has arisen. It will only be quelled by a xenophobic reaction, and the vast majority of today’s effete non-Muslims have no stomach for the fight and prefer vapid platitudes to actually having to do something right. The jihadists got it right, and we deserve what we are going to receive from their hands.
The only bright spot in all this is that history shows that the effete academic intellectuals are the first ones to be decapitated after a revolution. Tyrants know who the confused troublemakers are. I wish I could live long enough to stand in the crowd and cheer Allah’s little executioners on with each swing of the axe. Nevertheless, I suspect that the proverbial frog in the slowly simmering pot, it is going to take a decade or better to slowly cook itself to death, and I doubt that I have that many miles left on life’s odometer. Pity.
Bring on the Ragnarok!
Another nun slaughtered for Allah!
A range by any other name is just a range …
A web friend posted this on her facebook page. Wow! Talk about nostalgia! I remember when a very wealthy woman in New Mexico bought one of these in the 50’s for her mansion’s kitchen. They assembled it in the freight house when it arrived, then six men lifted it onto the back of a small truck and took it to the house to install it. People drove miles just to see this miracle of modern cookery while it sat in the freight house.
It had two ovens, a broiler, a warming oven, six burners and a removable griddle that sat on two of the burners. The cook quickly learned all the quirks of it and began turning out meals for Hollywood glitterati and New York novelists.
Sometimes I did small chores around the house, painting and such. When I was there, she fed all the workmen lunch in a special dining room off to the side of the kitchen. Usually she made an appearance and thanked everyone for their efforts. She was much loved in the community, and now a hospital, a school, a highway and a hotel are named after her. But I’ll keep her name a secret.
Checking my retired privelege
Tuesday dawns a comfortable but humid and dewy 73°. Just right for morning stoop sitting with the mutts. Mr.Cottontail has become a fixture out in the field, and is still watched closely by the mutts, but they no longer howl and bark at him.
This year sort of makes up for the five-year drought. The fields are green, the bermudagrass is thriving, and nature slowly heals the land she struck. It is all a part of a grand plan of a universal audience participation play, I muse. OK … low grade Zen and I move on.
*sip*
A quick run through the newsfeeds. Politics are all atwitter at Walker’s announcement that he is running for President. The care more than thee, feel more than thee coalition is still trying to get me to check my white privilege. One tired old politician defends Sanctuary Cities. A beach back east blows up and no one knows why. The military is preparing to accept trans-gendered GI’s. And the Boy Scouts prepare to accept gay leaders.
*sip*
Blogs of photos abound, and politics, of course.
*sip*
Nothing in the mailbox ‘cept the internet bill.
*refill*
The mutt have successfully roused Snooks and are enjoying breakfast. Kippur da budgie is molting again and is pretty cranky about it, and she chitters and scolds Linda when she comes in to replenish her food and water.
*sip*
Time to put new blades in the mower. Not looking forward to that one. And I still need to get the awning up over the porch. And a minor amount of weed eating is needed. Both Snooks and I are stalling to see who will grab up the weed eater and finish the trimming.
So unfolds the day out here in the semi-wilds of the Texas prairie.
Good morning!
The Tongs of Death. Binding in the fields. Anthracnose Rot.
Life is so often unfair. I retired down in the warm
country so that I could have a real garden instead of a four month growing season. The problem is that bugs like warm climates too, and they have really presented brand new challenges to me.
I have taken most of my plants out of the ground and put them in pots, because the soil is so virulent with funguses and wiggly bugs that destroy plants. But that was not the best solution. I was looking forward to some really succulent tomatoes this year, then they developed discolored circles with a black dot in the center. Tomato anthracnose the garden tomes said. Never heard of it ‘til now.
So … down to the Feed Store, and get some fungicide. There were an assortement of organic remedies, but they all required common household items and a plastic bucket. For eight bucks, I got a quart of tomato rot medicine in a spray bottle. No mix, no mess.
And I built a new set of the “Tongs of Death!” … a pair of salad tongs with the ends tightly wound with old cotton sweat socks. I use them mostly on field bindweed, but I have a persistent chinaberry tree growing up in the middle of a crape myrtle that is going to get the tongs applied to them. Heh heh heh …
You dip the socks into vegetation killer, the stronger, the better. Then clamp the tongs onto those little succulent green leaves, count to ten and move on. You don’t need to do more than five leaves per plant.
See … I told you the further away from morning I get when I blog, the more sinister and macabre I become.
Morning death and destruction on the macro and micro scale
Shabbat dawns to the melodious tones of a beagle baying at a cat free ranging outside the fence. It is dewy and humid outside, exposing the myriad of spider webs that surround my porch. It seems that every year, a new species of spider takes up residence there. This year it is black and yellow garden spiders.
It is a bit macabre watching them. They have strong webs that snare large beetles, and finer spirals that trap mosquitos. They quickly spin a cocoon around the body of hapless beetle leaving the legs outside the cocoon moving in a dance of death. Then, one by one, the spider wraps the legs and the beetle ceases struggling. I am not a big fan of beetles, and I resist the temptation to free him. I don’t believe that beetles have much of a sense of gratitude anyway.
Kipper da budgie helps me awaken the day with soft chirps and burbles. There is a narrow dew free area on the windows around the stiles, and she must bob and weave around her cage to see the world outside. Often, a sparrow will lite on the handrail outside, and she will scold it until it leaves. But she is a bit silent with the larger cardinals and mockingbirds, saving the sassing until they fly off.
Made a quick pass through the news feeds. A very quick one. Nothing happened overnight that holds much interest for me. A Muslim horror here, a Muslim horror there. The religion of peace is bathing in blood throughout the Middle East, Africa and Mediterranean.
But I sit here quietly in the semi wildlands of Texas with my coffee, listening to Snooks gentle clatter in the kitchen as she feeds the pets, and listening to the birds calling outside.
Good Morning!
The new conspiracists …
A sunny but humid morning greeted me today as my bladder made my nice soft bed such a living hell of discomfort. I hate getting up before Snookums, because the first one up staggers bleary eyed into the kitchen to flip on Mr. Coffee. Snooks always makes the pot up the night before because she wants her coffee brewed just how she likes it. Mere mortals such as I can’t seem to measure properly. It needs an experts touch.
Near as I can figure, she has made 12,640 pots of morning coffee in our marriage. We have worn out two commercial makers, and untold numbers of the little cheap home style makers. She has made many more pots, but I am just counting the eye opening pot in the morning.
At one time we drank copious amounts of coffee … four or five pots a day. But we have settled down to one pot for the most part, with maybe one more on a cold rainy day.
Flipped thru the newsfeed headlines today. Nothing particularly caught my eye. Lots of humma humma humma about the Confederate Battle Flag. I never cared much one way or the other about it, before. My southern friends had them and flew them at picnics and rallies. They were kinda like the Lone Star of Texas that people here affix to their houses and gates. Interesting local customs, but quickly dismissed when the barbeque is served.
But with all the mewling of the PC crowd over the flag, I have had to read up on its history. The leftists loons are just as full of bullpucky in their description of the Battle Flag as UFO people talking about aliens stealing their ovaries. One poster who usually gets his skewed facts at least straight, told me how the white on the Battle Flag was a symbol of the white race. Yeesh. Maybe it was simply because white fabric in the 1800’s was less expensive than dyed fabric. Flags weren’t cheap.
Some southern Generals needed a battle flag that didn’t look so much like the stars and stripes. In the chaos of a battlefield, it was easy to get lost and not know were the lines were. So they made up a flag that was easy to identify. Not all southern armies used that particular flag, however.
So now I am thinking of flying the flag just to piss off the flippin’ easily offended control nannies. Gawd am I am so tired of their weeping.
Not sure what project I’ll start today. I have so many that need attention. So maybe I’ll just refill my cup and meditate on the job jar this morning, along with the gray the South wore to battle. Was it because of a muddled sense of their role in the Union, or merely because gray wool best illustrateded their homophobic tendencies? Deep, deep mysteries here … it is probably more suited for some academic deep thinker than a retired geezer, anyway.
Rusty's Armory 