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I Must Go Down to the Seas Again...
25 September 2023
John Masefield's, "Sea Fever"
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
Masefield the poet reads aloud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLXNyhG4CGk
Texas heat-delirium has clearly taken me to the edge. I can smell, hear and indeed dream of waves crashing on a coast I'm not likely to walk again. I have even visited New England wintry scenes, in holiday cards of snowy fir trees on the village green, a single decorated balsam fir, in a dory moored close in to shore...
What of life in the Rocky Mountains? Do I remember hauling piñon logs and stoking the woodstove at 2AM, mountain time? Do I remember sleeping under all my bedding, wearing my winter coat? Any recall of pneumonia? Well yes, in my right mind, but aspens are turning gold in the high country.
Am lonely for friends, and the pleasure of sipping elderberry/chaga chai together, or big mugs of rich hot spicy cacao. Pleasant then to throw a log on the fire while it's still wintry dusk, before things go bump in the night. Which included bears, till they headed up into even higher country to hibernate in woodland burrows and caves.
Flowers here in South Texas are blooming! Really, true reporting, Am grateful in the now-you-see-it/now-you-dont autumn break in the weather. Bougainvillea and Heavenly Blues, and maybe even night-blooming jasmine before Arctic winds blast the Great Plains... Blue Northers out of Novo Sibirsk.
So, me bod remembers prepping for winter just fine, despite sweat-drenching for the next little while.
More of us are muttering about food as the days grow shorter. Spoke with folks while doing weekly shopping 30 miles distant. I chatted with managers and customers. Bit of Angst out there in the Zeitgeist. Prices do not lie about actual rate of inflation, but tv-blather-mouths do.
A lot of stressed out Mamas of big families were buying for the week.
One woman looked up as she set down a big tray of ground hamburger meat. She blinked. "Beans and rice," her conclusion.
"Yeah," said I, "and a good thing our grandmothers taught us how to cook."
Millipede Shoes Dropping
Madness of Crowds
20 September 2023
Let's posit for a moment that our upheavals of the last couple years include a societal shock of hierarchies corrupted by profiteering. Separation of Powers? You jest. Bill of Rights? Ours, plebeians, not yours.
Pandora, oh me dear.
What voter fraud?... you domestic terrorist, you. How dare you hazard Freedom of Speech.
Red Line Alert: Calling all control-freaks.
And all shall be punish-ed.
Yet in our current re-examination of frauds past, there is more open discussion of JFK having won the US Presidency by fraud, with the help of his somewhat creepy papa. What of Nixon, who apparently did win? He is alleged to have declined contesting the results in the midst of the Cold War, saying, "I know JFK; I worked with him in the Senate. The country is safe in his hands."
Decades later we are living a Clown-car Coup d'état, with not much appearing safe from wrecking ball entitlement. Particularly poignant, or is that apocalyptic, the triumph of the old Madison Avenue meme: "Better Life through Chemistry."
Big Tobacco, that juggernaut, met its class action lawsuits. Enter RoundUp et al, and BigAg's revolving door with alphabet, ahem, regulatory agencies.
Enter in more recent memory, the Goddess of Destruction, BigPharma, many-armed Kali of the Deep State. We are living aftermath compliance to "wiser" heads in a citizen mayhem gone savagely wrong. Emerging from New Age platitudes of Light and Love, of unicorns, rainbows and, "Clap, if you believe in Fairies..." (More lawsuits accruing re child and teen sexual mutilations, btw; stay tuned.)
We believed in "science" un-moored from data and due diligence. We trusted medical pros and institutions who were paid handsomely to obfuscate, do outright harm, becoming liars who lie. We trusted nightly news.
"Died Suddenly" became our euphemism du jour. Long covid, don'tcha know... As world class athletes kept their jobs by offering well-muscled arms to unlawful mandate. In order to remain employed, dropping dead on the playing fields.
Ditto nurses; ditto pilots, military and commercial. Pay no attention to cockpit cardiac arrests, nor unceratin airplane maintenance, or under-staffed, exhausted air traffic controllers.
All blindsides massing to our trust in status quo and leadership.
MSM has not spent much blather-speak on the pandemic being Bioweapon-Based. With potential for immediate anaphylaxis, and long-term immune/neurologic/venous/organ system chaos. Nor the outrage of force-jabbing children down to 6 months and of course, pregnant mothers.
Making mention here also, of the mounting horror of "turbo-cancers."
Rumor has it that the bioweapon perps opted for saline injections... Leaving us with the phoniness-forever assurance that health agencies and professionals are all about protecting health.
Those of us among the formerly branded "Pandemic of the Unvaxxed"... ruminate and grieve. (Though some long since walked away in disgust.) No joy in mudville about globalist triumphs of food industry control and depopulation targets. By all means, inject protein sources, porcine, bovine...with mRNA shots to get at the "vaccine-hesitant."
Actuarial tables in the insurance industry show rises in all-cause deaths post-good-citizenship-manipulation, to join the crowd.
More shoes are dropping among friends, family and colleagues, yea even hollyweird.
At the onset of our global derangements, an altnews fellow opined that 19 out of 20 democrats had bellied up to the jab-squads, and most of the antifa/blm enthusiasts.
Ringside seats, God help us.
Tooth, Fang, Snout and Wings
Life in the Country
14 September 2023
I have lived near bears in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico, stomped and hooted and raised my arms, while backing away. I loved seeing them galumphing through the elderberries and under the apple and apricot trees. Splashing in the river for brown trout. Hot diggity,
A previous resident of the adobe I called home, my chimney sweep informed me, had given the bears names, and shooed them out of the garden with a broom...
Uh huh. As PT Barnum remarked, "There's one born every minute." Moi, I never thought them "cute."
Currently online there's a photo of a guy allegedly with his head in a huge bear's mouth. In actuality, a guy out hiking was recently surprised and attacked so swiftly that bear spray, etc. did not come between him and losing his lower jaw to the bear's maw. He'll be sipping turkey broth through a straw come Thanksgiving, if God willing he's still alive.
Which brings me to varmint-rich Texas, including the insect kingdom, and thank you for the flutter-byes. Also, fire ants, chiggers, skeeters and ticks, for which my antipathy remains large. I don't venture out without tucking bibs into socks, as though ready for the links at St. Andrews.
And our local Biblical plague of cutter ants? My cousins stalk them pre-dawn when the creatures are marching along holding green leaf sails aloft, having stripped plants, shrubs, small trees overnight. I changed my tune on poison when they stripped a star jasmine, gardenia, honeysuckle, heavenly blue morning glories, a big investment in a border hedge, a redbud.
In the snout arena, prehistory lumbers through, armor-plated, rooting up horticulture. Yesterday's Ka-Boom brought me onto the front stoop. Saw hubby cuz standing by the pool flower bed with a rifle, having nailed the latest armadillo. He's also taken out prairie rattlers. So, I stomp before opening the door to the front stoop, where I've found garden of eden reps sunning themselves.
And yesterday, my cousin peaked out the window to check on the nectar level of the hummingbird feeder, usually mobbed, oddly still. And what was hanging down, roof to nectar ports? Why a snake, which the man armed and dangerous dealt with.
Back when I had a farm dog, name of Teddy Bear, who grew into a formidable Norwegian elkhound? He reached doggy puberty and I got to learn how strong he was. We entered a time of rigor while I impressed on him an incipient NDE, if he ever jumped up on a little old lady, a child, on ANYone. My dad happened to visit the farm when I was roaring at the dog outside. Pater opined, "Good thing you didn't name him Fang, if you're ever taken to Court"... Bear learned quickly, a working dog breed, and dealt with deer, groundhogs, 'coons, rabbits and squirrels. Folks loved him. A gentleman in a furry coat.
Currently watching orioles and hummingbirds, and we should be so lucky.
Just dashed outside to spill sunnies for an angel-wing dove pair, who are frustrated by the squirrel-proof feeder..
Again remembering Pater who watched whales and giant rays from the conning tower of a Navy sub, far far from land. He'd read Jack London as a boy:
Nature in the raw is seldom mild.
You Cain't Git Thar from Here
13 September 2023
Otherwise known as, Mercury Retrograde.
Have been blocked from many cyber nooks since the start of Mercury Retrograde's danse macabre three weeks ago. No firefox; lost passwords, staccato equanimity.
Today am watching hummingbirds and orioles and counting blessings, harrumph, when I chanced to mention the difficulties to my geek-cousin...
Oh by the way, oh by the way, if you meet somebuddy today...
She's got me beaconed in.
Bookmarks remain a non-sanctified maze, but even Luddites have Guardian Angels.
More soon; backson.
Displaced Natives of Lahaina
17 August 2023
I spent a gift-month on Maui, years ago.
A friend's broker had put her divorce settlement, from an a-hole, into tech stocks.
I was trading then and attentive, and went ballistic.
She closed out the account before the Tech-Wreck and put it all into eagles of the yaller stuff.
Her family mocked her, including her kids who had listened to their ruthless businessman dad..
They lost everything.
Under the hearth stones of her wood stove, however, my friend and her heirs were quietly well-to-do.
It's an old phrase, "generational wealth.".
As a thank you gift, she rented a cottage in Hana, Maui, bought my plane ticket from Virginia, and took me to old Hawaii.. I'll never forget the wonder of it.
I've been fairly even-tempered since the lockdowns, mandates, and vile general behavior, but am close to speechless with rage about this Lahaina sleight-of-hand... by local govt and federal agencies.. Robbing natives who've held out against the land speculators, including hollywood billionaires... with the moral compass of a skunk cabbage.
Fleeing USofA with 2nd Passport
Fantasia?
11 August 2023
Gated Gringo/Armed Guards enclave in the Highlands?
Or flop house in Tijuana?
After getting past the cartels, that is.
Years ago I did a bust my b*tt adventure with a guy who had been USArmy Special Forces in Nam. We hiked up vertiginous trails crossing the Continental Divide, in August when the Rocky Mt. wildflowers bloom. Heaviest mountaineering pack I've ever carried on the two week trip. And spectacular Perseid Meteor viewing from the crest of the Wind River Range in Wyoming.
At one point I was so furious with the guy, who never rested, that I grabbed the topo map and headed out. He could outpace me, no joke, and eventually caught up, and got me redirected up the many thousands of feet.
Anyhoo, backgrounder on a don't-mess-with-me Alpha Male. We (I) stumbled down to Jackson, past the Grand Tetons, and engulfed food; I flew home, and treated the giardia I'd picked up from exhausted sipping of spring water in the palm of my hand.
He went back to leading white water rafting trips, and rock climbs in the Andes. Next word I had of him? Guy was multilingual and decided to ride his Harley down to Tierra del Fuego, unconcerned about cartels, snakes, skeeters, or Sendero Luminoso in Peru.
We planned to rendezvous on his return. No way I'd miss out on that raconteur storytelling. He told vivid anecdotes of growing up in Africa, where his dad was a missionary; go figure.
I received a couple of postcards on his journey south, then absolute silence.
In some Amazonian jungle, the Altiplano or the Atacama, he dropped off the face of the earth.
RIP, bold ess-oh-be.
Rots of Ruck to those who imagine second passport nirvana in a gated Gringo paradise in the Mexican highlands. Even getting there, and then staying there, safe.
Meanwhile, interesting times in the once, and we hope, future, Constitutional Republic.
It's hot as blue blazes.
Texans Talk
8 August 2923
"It's one hundred and three."
"Is that all? Can you soft boil an egg in the pool yet?..."
I had just stumbled back in from the torrid zone, where I'd draped and pegged bedding on the clothes lines. Peeling out of my sweat-drenched clothes, I stood under the shower as though incapable of speech. Am told by people who grew up in South Texas that we're having unusual conditions, and had commiserated earlier with a tiny little old lady...
"It's the most terrible," she said, "that I have ever seen. So many people are getting sick from having to work, out in the sun."
She is an ancient Latina, and will have more data than I, about grunt labor in triple-digit temps and extreme UV Index of 11. Brutal heat was a new explanation for me, on our mostly silent health crisis of sudden disabilities and deaths.
Did I blurt out anything about BigPharma, mandates and vax-injuries?
No, dear God, I was raised to respect my elders, and the info would only confuse and alarm her.
"Yes, ma'am." I nodded.
We were talking outside the supermarket in the plant sale area, which would give you a clue: crepe myrtle, oleander, bougainvillea, in blazing magenta, purple, hot pink, orange, just inferno-throbbing colors. But, Toto, we're not in Mexico, with climbers tumbling over adobe walls and perfume of night-bloomers saturating the abrupt onset of dusk... Tuberoses, be still oh my heart, and night-blooming jasmine.
I'd arrived for shopping at 7AM, the open, when clerks were still restocking. Had brushed against a precarious array which came cascading down around my feet. Well phoo. Bending down to tidy up the mess, I saw a male hand enter my field of vision and make quick work of it. Well now, I stood up: a young guy. I laughed and thanked him for the help and the larger aha:
"You know what? It's small stuff like this, that gives me hope for America, for our country. We're going to be alright."
He looked down at his cowboy boots, and spoke the classic male reply:
"Not a problem."
Season of Dappled Fawns,
Second Nesting of Birds
1 August 2023
Birds are strong-winging one another for me-first access to black oil sunflower seed in the feeders, as wild sunflowers do their seasonal bit, setting timely seed.
A brief pause, for obligatory triple-digit temperature-whine. At least the cardinals, chickadees, titmice and nuthatches build their nests in the shade. Not much else moving in the heat of the day.
Adapting to the summer, which locals describe as unusual (their mouths to God's ear).... I leave at 6AM for the 30 mile trip for health food sort of shopping. Walking from the front stoop to the car last week, I went back inside for a flashlight.
Hullo, Sun the seasonal, angling toward Autumn Equinox. A Maine friend would call it "dork out." I needed the light to sidestep varmints, snakes, armadillos, ant hills. Arrival then at destination for 7AM open, there and back again, before I start gasping as though deliquescing on a hot rock.
Do I believe climate change fear-mongering, courtesy of the doubtfully honest? Am listening... I also read history re climate cycles, having nothing whatever to do with putting Swiss dairy cows in diapers, or euthanizing dairy and beef herds, forcing a diaspora of farmers from ancestral lands, mandating crop failures..... All, on instructions from strangers in Davos.
We'll soon have a better understanding of our coming winter, with time measured in centuries, not sound-bites... Volcanism cycles, Colonial America's Little Ice Age, the 19th century's Year Without Summer.
What can we do, those of us trying to live this present time? Any good news out there?! Please bring it on.... Money talks... Could we get to know our Local Heroes? Maybe support our local farmers and ranchers. Big corrupted bucks have all but buried solution folks.
Am still listening, for a pony neighing under the pile of manure.
Climate Hysteria,
Bastille Day
14 July 2023
Some climate brouhaha thoughts for a friend in the NM rotisserie, who may be considering a move to Maine or the Canadian Maritimes. (I do resemble that thought in the midst of triple digits.)
1) Pathological whomevers may be geo-engineering the caca out of the SW. Crop-failures-R-us. Induced drought, violent storms, dust-blighted ranches and farmland, again. Across a wide swath of a particular demographic, Don't-Tread-on-Me folks...
2) Longer view meanwhile is watching volcanoes pop off, a known component of blocking sunlight. Year Without Summer and so forth. Tambora and Krakatoa aftermaths.
3) Now shifting to my decade in Maine.
[Aside to friend... are you out of your mind?]
One of my winters on MDI, I get to experience a lake effect, as well as Nor'easters.
My shoveled pathway from lower entry to upper parking became a tunnel.
Heaving heavy snow up over my shoulder.
Ice storms were common with loss of power, freezing of many tails.
Black ice on the roads.
Fuel oil ever more expensive....
Despite the much augmented climate histrionics (Carbon credits, etc., so very profiteer-worthy)... I suspicion that geo-eng plus volcanism are setting us up for a brutal winter and perhaps a Mini Ice Age, as occurred in colonial America.
Thus croaks the Texas friend..
As to Bastille Day, it is not widely understood that King Louis the profligate, in order to discomfit Britain, bankrupted France, assisting the American Revolution... The Marquis de Lafayette delivered...uniforms, muskets, caskets of coin, and was highly esteemed by General Washington.
The Aristocratic make-believe of the French elites of that era finally segued into regicide, and the Terror of the Guillotine.
Which brings me to Jessye Norman, massively impressive, and what a set of pipes!... It's night, outdoors. She begins sola; is joined by a fab chorus. Draped in the French Tricolor on Bastille Day, she sings La Marseillaise:
Allons enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !...
Which later surfaces in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, and rousingly in the film, Casablanca, amongst refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe.
Near Death Experiences
9 July 2023
In-hospital resuscitation and flat on the ground CPR have brought more of the dying back, from an apparent burst into light. Some remember. Interesting body of research, as it were, continues to accrue.
A personal gift generally for those who return, but also a societal one, in an age promoting wasteland. NDE-ers seem to experience commonalities, including a thinning of the veil, to use an archaic term:
Kinder, better listeners, less ME-ME--centric
Less fear.
Less obsessive, e.g., latest gadget.
Funny bone engaged.
Others may mention luminosity.
Plants, animals, kids, people might sense a healing surround.
A counter-intuitive effect of heart-opening, but possibly more isolation, if it's met as freaky.
(Love and light aside, some may return as ornery as ever!)
In a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet...
Mentoring Self-Defense
29 June 2023
My frontier kin in Texas and our family fathers ever since have taught the kids gun safety and marksmanship. (That's both genders, two)... Why?
Well, food on the table, not to put too fine a point on it. Wildlife hazards of rattlesnakes, copperheads, wild boar, etc. Two-legged varmints in a vast wild country.
One ancestor, as Texas chose statehood, having been a Republic, became a US Marshall. His brother was a famous criminal lawyer, who had studied for the Bar with law books in his saddle bags, working as a cowboy.
Making it through a rough pioneer season was not a given. Stealing food was right up there with horse-thievery, and punishable... Well, right after a decent harvest, thieves made off with a wagon load of corn, dried on the cob, which meant that family had poor chances of living through the winter.
Our US Marshall kin tracked them. He took down several before they shot him dead. Wagon load of corn and a heap of bodies. Not a soy-boy era. His lawyer brother tracked the sonsabitches up into Oklahoma Territory, but they got away. Not a soy-boy era.
I was hither and yon on world travels and missed out on the family gun safety training. When I visited my uncle, en route from Maine to the Rockies, he asked if I had concealed carry? That's as I was flailing around trying to set up the new tent. He has no shame, and laughed. I glared at him.
"No, smart*ss, am not armed. No concealed carry, but I may be dangerous."
He got quiet, said, "just a minute," and came back with my great uncle's hammer, handle held together with tape. I slept with it beside me through red rock, saguaro and canyon country. Walked as if I knew my bidness, even when scared.
Reading about a cop in Allen, Texas who ran TOWARD mass shooter gunfire, reminds me that we mock First Responders at our peril. He ran alone, without backup and took down the perp committing mass murder.
Yeah, you betcha... Gun-free zones; defund the police.
And Her Hair Hung Down in Ring-a-Lets...
In Texas, Hot-Muggy-Buggy
27 June 2023
Am making it some sort of dharma to not whine about the enervating triple-digit, suffocating heat in the Great State. Or trying to. It's decades since I fled my sweaty college travels on a 10-speed, and walks under a parasol. Way distant from dharma serenity, I do try to count my blessings:
Tropical flowers!... tuberose, gardenia, bougainvillea, and water lilies on the pond. I water at oh-dark-thirty, and am still perspiring-drenched within moments.
My Texas kin have lived their whole lives here. They mostly like it torrid. I wonder if it's a thyroid issue? I remember pulling on shorts, radiating body heat, while folks around me grabbed sweaters and coats. I headed to northern seas and mountains everywhere!
It's hot, but it's also big sky country with wild lightning and galaxies of night light. And folks, who generally take the time to say, hey.
Muscadines are ripening in the thickets, purple-blue and seeded and marvelous for jelly. But mea maxima culpa, my canning zeal is at nadir with the heat. We may return to separate kitchens for canning and summer cooking. When I lived in the Blue Ridge Mts., old farmhouses had a cooler kitchen down cellar, with just that in mind.
Grocery shopping here means 30 miles in various directions. Fortunately the supermarkets open at 7AM. Am there poised like a prairie dog at open, and outta there quick as can be. It's meant I've been blest by stunner sunrises. Huge, red-orange, dawns seem to be colored by the volcanoes popping off.
An old family saying: Oh, I've seen a thang...
All in all, pretty good to be alive.
Titanic End of Life
@ $250,000 per Tourist
I once ventured into a funeral home, thinking to write a piece about that industry. I wondered about pricing; saw the mahogany, velvet-lined casket and the still stunningly priced economy models. Adding in the funeral service held in the attached chapel, I began to get a clue.
Next asked about the tidier choice, cremation. It can cost several thou, and as natgas prices fluctuate, the industry may economize by stacking bodies in like cord wood (My descriptor, not that of the funeral director.)
The mingled ashes are then raked out into the Ming urns, locally made pottery, or coffee cans provided. For those who then scatter the ashes on mountaintop or at sea, or bless into a Columbarium, it's not a sure thing, the identity of the ash and bone fragments. But finally, love is love.
As to elite-priced death by submersible... to view a flawed design of the Gilded Age on the ocean floor, if that's what is playing out... I once asked my Skipper dad...
"Has an accurate film been made of being at depth in a submarine, outcome gone iffy?"
I liked the title, 'Run Silent, Run Deep'...
He gave me a level look.
"No, Das Boot."
Lord have mercy.
Bless the First Responders.
Pole Star
6 June 2023
I knew an elderly Dane, who had lived during WW2. He told me a story about the Nazi occupation of his country...The German hierarchy mandated that all Danish Jews must wear a yellow Star of David by a certain date. On that date, in a quiet up-yours, nearly all Danes wore them.
For three years in the western world we have lived abuses of power, and mandates which have threatened health, life, schooling, freedom of worship and ability to remain employed. We were advised by pathological liars, yet most of us believed the sincerity of the threat. We were frightened, and complied with violations to Rule of Law and to basic humanity.
I study, a particular and omnivore delight of mine. So in this case, I had read extensively about the history of pandemics, the safety of vaccines, and the Pharmaceutical Industry's record of harm, with token fines paid. Noted also with keen interest that BigPharma had secured protection from lawsuits, fancy that... from the US Congress.
My neighbors, either scared or dutiful, queued up for their jabs and boosters. They also believed the experts, that we were confronted with a "Pandemic of the Unvaccinated." Clearly selfish citizens, putting others at risk. Masks became an emblem of good citizenship.
Those who suspected hysteria, as well as bad manners, were insulted and shunned. Returning to reality in the valley where I lived, if neighbors did speak to me, it was at considerable remove. Lockdown became an exercise in solitary confinement.
Some months into this, an inherently tactile neighbor was delivering messages from 10 feet away. She made a snort of disgust, marched on over, and threw her arms around me in a bone-crusher hug. I burst into tears.
My neighbors, still believing that I put them at risk, began a period of heroics, of inviting me for tea and such. The did not know that I was learning about the shedding phenom in their company. I fell ill, after being around them, ultimately landing in the hospital. But I honored the Zeitgeist shift, of their finding the pole star of their humanity.
Before I was hustled down to AMA-land, we celebrated Christmas. I gave each of my neighbors a bottle of NAC, to help them weather any Cytokine Storm, or so I hoped. Never returning to the adobe casita and the valley, or the New Mexico Sangre de Cristo mountains, I wish us well: Lord have mercy.
And the profiteers? Beyond my ken, but I still listen for a pony neighing, under the pile of manure.
Volcanoes & Earth Changes
Artists Paint Eruption Skies
Temps Drop, Crops Fail
27 May 2023
Astonishing dawn. Huge red orange sun, rising from fiery clouds.
You betcha... Sailor takes warning, red-sky-at-morning.
Looked to me as though volcanoes popping off are beginning to give us Krakatoa sky extravaganzas. A global phenom...
Popocatepetl is belching ash outside of Mexico City, Etna in Sicily, a syncopation in Kamchatka. Japan... The Cascadia Subduction Zone seems to be rumbling. A PNW native American said to watch for Rainier blowing itself into present awareness for the launch of Earth Changes. Moi, I have my antennae quivering re New Zealand and its supervolcano which may convulse Oz and NZ into land bridge linkage.
Krakatoa's monster 1883 blast was the first heard round the world... via the new whiz-bang called, the telegraph with both land telegraph lines and undersea cables. Europe, the often subdued in coloration, suddenly poured Latin-esque crimson, cerise, gold, green and purple into sunsets and dawns... via tons of volcanic ash.
Artists were stunned into action. (Apologies that I lack the savvy on inserting imges.) Do you recall the terror-figure on a bridge, and the lurid sky of Edvard Munch's, 'The Scream?'
"In the painting, a distorted figure seems to be petrified as it screams in pain, and the red background reinforces this haunting impression. When discussing the paining, Munch noted:
I was walking along the road with two friends - then the Sun set - all at once the sky became blood red - and I felt overcome with melancholy. I stood still and leaned against the railing, dead tired - clouds like blood and tongues of fire hung above the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends went on, and I stood alone, trembling with anxiety. I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature."
Gainsborough in England and artists of the US Hudson River School also grabbed brush and palette.
So, with strange skies, is it going to get warmer? Well, maybe the warmth of ill-got gains. People flying their private jets to photo op's are making money on the global warming meme, carbon credits and all that.
Anything else in the offing? Increased volcanism marks a feature of Grand Solar Minimum. There are historical events of ash so occluding the skies that it caused a season of crop failures, as in the 19th century "Year without Summer" when Mt. Tambora blew.
Woke climate-change activists, and the Swedish Saint of the Terrible Two's, may be bull-horning a misperception. Thongs and sunscreen?! Popcorn, please...
Stock in those pink pussy hats, folks, with lavender and cedar for your warm woollies.
Calm in Chaos,
Or So We Hope
24 May 2023
Self-Mastery and the Woke appear to mock one another. In all the off-kilter entitlements of the age in which we live, bad manners do seem to dominate.
People do not have conversations or debates, they "destroy" one another, as though tabloid wannabe's. Oh, we luvs gossip; we titter.
Not an easy time. How do we rein in abusive behavior when it approaches accepted norm? Certain choices might give us a clue. Those with a prayer life, those who meditate, gardeners, artists. those who hike in nature... May know something about grounding out agitation.
I used to have a health care private practice. The word, Quiet, figured in the name. Life experience had made some clients violently/verbally abusive. I tried to breathe and reframe it... as a meditative exercise... which sometimes worked!
I was paid well, but am retired now to a rural setting..
What'll it be, close to home and out and about? Frenzy unto road rage?
Trying to find our way.
Blooming Where Planted
20 May 2023
Reply to Zanzibar, below...
I walked my talk. Penny gold stocks funded my 6 months Downunder. Am attentive to my expat friends south of the border and in Yurp. I see the strong pull to emigrate. But it's Made-in-America for me.
Partly it's remembering my dad standing at attention in the snow in full dress uniform by the East German border. He was sheltering me from the machine gun guard in the watch tower. I peeked around Dad's shoulder.
He told me to note all that I saw, including my school days with classmates who were E. German refugees. But most of all he spoke quietly about honor and service, and the sacrifices of the Founding Fathers.
He was concerned that I might become expat...
Read history; learn our history; do not turn your back on our country...
I returned to the US because my father was dying.
I made my choice and make it again, when I am stupefied at events.
Lord have mercy.
Sailing to Zanzibar
20 May 2023
A declarative statement, of having reached utter capacity...
I blink, gather up my whatnots, and croak: "I am sailing to Zanzibar."
Point of origin: Academia's grad student serfdom, and summer-job time clocks.
Long ago and mercifully far away, but in our current wrecker-ball insanities, am listening to a poor-Johnny-one-note solution:
"KEEP YOUR PASSPORTS CURRENT." Anything askew here?
1) An emanation from possibly delusional Gringos.
2) Flying to a "safe" gated community in a plane piloted by unknown jab-myocarditis status.
3) Cartels? Not a problem.
4) Entrenched baksheesh financial transactions?
5) Language vulnerabilities to being scammed...?
I performed my own Downunder version of geographic-fix twenty years ago... Land of Sir Edmund Hillary, NZ the splendid... True. And then I passed through its supervolcano black cinder wasteland, and knew body-terror. Hong Kong began disgorging wealthy Chinese mafia to Auckland... Since those WWOOFing days, Kiwis elected a socialist dominatrix who imposed monstrous lockdowns and injection mandates.
Had also pondered Costa Rica. Friends in CR send on the ground report from the eco-paradise, God help us... Beauty all around, plus draconian mandates, land theft and decades' long litigation.
I thank my stars that family illness sent me winging home from NZ to the USofA. I did Ron Paul write-in's. Friends and I stood in the Maine snows in felt-lined boots with pithy placards decrying the Iraq war. Engaged, and ineffectual.
Now? Older and a modicum wiser, I returned to muggy, buggy, snakey, bloody-hot Texas after being felled by jab-shedders. Tropical flowers offset some of that, but nothing mitigates the DC swamp till perps face repercussions.
Too early for jigs and cartwheels, but truth-tellers the many are emerging and the Legislative Branch? Oh puhleaze.... Dementocrats and Rethuglicons...
Show us the money. Cease & desist your spending from the nothing-there ledger! And for our grandchildren's sake, STOP it already, your enriching of sociopaths, here and abroad. Which comes rather close to home, oh ye money-launderers.
I have no idea what will refocus our national priorites, but archival photos come to mind: Group-Gallows for the President Abraham Lincoln assassins, and the Nazi hotshots who were "just following orders."
Deloogie at 6:00
9 May 2023
Thunderclap, downpour and heart-stopper lightning... woo-ee... and a levitation of my sleeping self... 6AM and all's well.
Deloogie being a wordplay corruption of deluge, by a sardonic Downeast friend. His odd-play feels more like the event, as does my-zulled, Mama's childhood attempt to sound out: misled.
The San Antonio River is flooding. Hubby cuz is mowing each time the rain lets up. Last year this time, drought and horrid-torrid temps clamped down. Ranchers were reduced to selling breeder stock cattle for want of pasture and hay.
Once a week I go a-shopping-ho at some distance to find organic produce. Very rewarding... through cattle country on a back country road. The pastures and hay meadows are healing and cute as a button new calves are frolicking, wee Ferdinands in the wildflowers.
A wren pair may be scoping out the cute birdhouse my cousin roofed with the old turquoise and gold NM license plate. "Land of Enchantment" lives on. Wrens fussed at me this morning when I peeked out the door. Also met by the redbird call: Am purtty, am purtty, am sweet, am sweet.
The Man Who Would Not Be King
6 May 2023
George Washington refused a Crown.
Congress even during the Revolutionary War focused on posturing and war profiteering. They failed General Washington and his ragtag army, not paying wages, not supplying warm clothes, bedding, boots or shelter at Valley Forge.
Washington held things barely together by sheer force of integrity.
Against all reasonable expectations, certainly of the Tories who fled north to Canada, the General and his farmers, merchants, booksellers and frontiersmen defeated the world's super power. Meaning what?... The Royal Navy when Britannia ruled the waves, Hessian mercenaries, Cornwallis and highly trained regiments of Redcoats.
The Continental Army had on their side, improvisation, guerilla warfare, hunters who fed their families by their tracking & weaponry skills, and sharpshooters, snipers hidden at distance. Precious little actually, and they infuriated the Brits by not following the rules of combat.
The Continentals also had the Marquis de Lafayette and the French monarch, persuaded to tweak the nose of England, their ancient enemy. France sent uniforms, munitions and gold. So depleting the Royal Treasury that they ultimately set the stage for the Guillotine and Reign of Terror. Not a milquetoast era.
Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were sent to France to negotiate the details of American Independence. General Washington longed to return to quiet life in Mount Vernon, which evoked huge clamor from army veterans and sensible citizens. He was offered a Coronation as leader of the Constitutional Republic! He utterly and absolutely refused, having just spent miserable years defeating a King.
He did accept the US Presidency with its limit of an 8 year term. King George of England is reputed to have opined, "that if George Washington relinquished the presidency after his second term (versus becoming a dictator/monarch) he would be the greatest character of the age.” Our first President did return to Mount Vernon.
Which brings me to today's Coronation in Westminster Abbey. A lot of unsavory water under the bridge in intervening centuries. Will Brits conclude the poop and pomp, gold, diamonds and ermine were worth the millions spent? I have Royalist friends and I defer to their honoring of tradition and continuity. That said, I had a tilted moment of seeming to ogle a costumed Gilbert & Sullivan production, with modern over-fed faces.
The scheduling of the event I found stupefying. Elizabeth Regina, the first of that name, consulted an astrologer, including at the time of the Spanish Armada. She was by no means considered an idiot. There may have been a bureaucrat fulfilling the idiot descriptor for today's event.
Eclipses have been regarded as fraught, problematic to outright inauspicious by rulers down the centuries. Day before the Charles Rex festivities, earth doings passed through a Lunar Eclipse.
Cyber folks are familiar with Mercury Retrograde and its danse macabre re Murphy's Law... Computers crash, mail is lost, conversations can become torturous. Decisions set in motion are often regretted at leisure.
Our current "Merc Ret" is in the money sign of Taurus. On the off chance that there might be something to it, caution regarding expenditures might be advised. Trickster Mercury periods also tend to churn up old stuff, say, a murdered Princess.
Coming in for a landing in podunk, sans tiara, it is the time of hummingbirds. Have recently set out the feeder and the wee beasties have already figured out that I am the Lady Bountiful of hummingbird nectar. It needed to be refreshed today. While I dawdled, a hummer flew to my office window, other side of the house from the feeder, and hovered meaningfully.
Eventually hummers will weave flight patterns around one's head, in a jeweled nimbus. Or as my grandmother phrased kindness, "You will have stars in your crown."
Small Town Texas
3 May 2023
Curious, I stopped by my local small bank, wondering if they got beady-eyed when a customer strolls in, wanting to withdraw cash money...
"Oh hey, hon. Am hearing about regional bank failures... Are we okay?"
"Yes, ma'am. We're invested in land and cattle... Not derivatives... or cryptos!"
I grinned; she grinned. I told her about New England friends who'd been about to bust their buttons when their scholarship son was hired By Goldman Sachs, soon as he'd hurled his mortarboard in the air. 6-figures and life in the imagined glamor of NYC. I ask in every correspondence if the boy is doing alright? No reply. He may be waiting tables for summer people and soon, the leaf-peepers.
While heading to the bank and library a dash warning light came on: Check the battery. I asked the librarian where to go; got directions. A customer said, and maybe check the Ford dealership. I headed out the door, on a mission, when a powerfully built Latino, with a braid down his neck from under his Stetson, slid down his sunglasses. He and his wife had heard me ask what to do.
Realizing my female confuzzlement, he pointed up the road. "You see the light there? Turn right. New guy has opened a place back of the church." So I did.
A young guy backed out of a work area on a big tractor...
"You the owner?"
"Yes. ma'am."
While he checked battery and alternator, a woman came out and said the roof had blown off their barn. WHAT? That being huge; we're expecting rain. They had a tornadic wind come through and are going to do an emergency temporary fix of beams where they must and staple gun to affix greenhouse-type plastic. This evening. Then she added, we're the only place open in town and it's by appointment only. Maybe call before you bring it back in?
The owner hadn't found anything wrong and wouldn't take payment. We shook hands. He had no way of knowing that I wanted to throw myself at his feet.
I Will Not Let Thee Go...
1 May 2023
Jacob wrestled with an angel in his lucid dream.
And [the angel] said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And [Jacob] said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
In our current personal and planetary kerfuffles, we've been coming out of stupefaction, into cursing of malefactors. Not a bad start, maybe, as we stumble toward their reckoning. And on a parallel track, many of us are wading into family detritus, praying for resolution while still on earth.
There's much talk of the Grim Reaper and Riders of the Apocalypse, as though our bloviating might control the day of comeuppance. And so I remember the young Hildegard von Blingen awakening in a bitterly cold chapel, the first of January in the Year of our Lord 1,000 AD. Flagellants and penitents were sprawled about. The world had not ended. Still mess to sort out, and somehow, life to live.
In our 21st Century wrestling with Powers and Principalities, with fallen angels, if you will, led by once beauteous, now hideous, Lucifer... Is there somewhere, in the angst of annihilation, a hopeful dream?
This is hugely bigger than my ken, but in our thrashing and cursing, could we hypothetically forgive betrayals by friends, family, by colleagues?. Might we even forgive the demonic?...
Many of us are heart-sick at the global "vaccine" catastrophe uproiling: Rapid death by anaphylactic shock, by cardiac arrest, by turbo-cancers. And slower countless miseries. Many have passed on.
Wiser than I predict deaths accruing. What if we are in fact facing mass Near Death Experiences, NDE's?... Some returning to report, and many gone. Might the eugenicist-wish, for savaged population, carry Unintended Consequences?...
The Rite of Passage called death, its luminosity of forgiveness and welcome, of transformation and peace at the last.
Eccentricity of Being Human
13 April 2023
Gardeners are inherently peculiar. Many imagine that plants are sentient; they may even talk to them... I was clucking through my morning project of hummingbird garden-enhancement. Had just planted a blooming Costa Rican scarlet honeysuckle in the pot with only a stick remaining of the Mandevilla blasted by Blue Norther.
I stepped back, admiring the bloom cluster and apparently heard a turned-earth-squeak. Twisted round to look behind me. My right Welly was standing on a Good Friday planted and sprouting Calendula seed. I jumped back, and apologized for being a barbarian. Gave her a quick sip from the copper watering can and fluffed the air a bit over the inadvertently squashed orange gold beauty.
A dear gardener friend, who alas is no longer a geographic neighbor, seemed to get feathers ruffled by my oh-Jerusalem Easter observations.
I have walked the Holy City in its post-Balfour Declaration reality, even circumambulated the Templar crenelated wall, peering down into the Arab Quarter. I read and visit history. She is my elder, however; I do listen.
"Why are you stressing doom and gloom? Snap out of it. Why can't you be grateful and joyful?"
Well, that set me back. It may not be obvious, as I croak out unwelcome questions, that I truth-sleuth my way through utterly dismal happenings. yet retain a sense of humor... But my friend is spot on correct, from the experience of her own quite wonderful life. She is centered by and surrounded with satisfactory answers.
She has not crawled hand and knee to the battlements periodically, eyed the clown-cars and blurted out:
You've got to be kidding.
Other friends, longer ago and even further away, whom I will never see again still remember my... laugh. What if anything might that mean?
I who have breathed in night blooming jasmine and the sandalwood-sewage "truth" of India will leave behind precious little: no child, no farm, no patents, a few scribbles, many gardens, and maybe, just maybe, a belly laugh. Rollicking through the ethers.
!! RAIN !!
11 April 2023
We've had gully-washers, to general rejoicing. Pastures recovering, and cattle are looking fat. Wild black persimmons are setting fruit. Maybe enough for jam. We had drought-fruit last year. Noble try, but mostly skin, seed and a lot of spitting.
Wild pecans are in young leaf. Dunno yet about cracking nuts this fall, but am hopeful. Maybe the wild muscadine will produce their fragrant grapes; be still oh my heart. In short, wildflowers eased us out of Blue Norther funk, and gardeners, ever certifiable, are feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
Hummers have arrived! Found their trail before I saw or heard them... Petunia trumpets torn by wee ravenous beasties were my clue I made nectar. Territorial activity beginning around the feeder. Will plant more blossoms they like.
I'm trying electroculture this year, which allegedly helps smooth out drought, frost, improving plant health and productivity. We loves simple... You twine copper wire around a branch, broomstick, or chopstick for a potted plant. Hammer a starter hole, tuck in your Rube-Goldberg-bornagain widget, firm soil with your boot, and walk away.
So far, we've had some scary-cool nights. Tomatoes did not miss a beat. There's a feeling of exuberant vigah. Said to attract pollinators as well. We're blest with butterflies. Will report results if any at a later date.
Chrushtianity,
Easter in the Holy Sepulcher
9 April 2023
Oh Lamb of God and huge Good Friday bonfire before the Templar church with the eerie echoes, at the Pool of Bethsaida. And Easter in the wild crush of zeolots in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
The first Sepulcher visual which struck my senses?... Elaborate Medieval Ft. Knox gold encrusted with joo-ells. The second, being the embarrassment of holy RE defended in territorial rage by the Orthodox, each sect allotted their very own, and fiercely defended square footage.
I actually watched a gold processional crucifix being slammed around against interlopers... The crucifer, heavily weighted by gold-embroidered robes. I did my duty to sole opportunity and squeezed my way round the magnificence. Humble carpenter, oh aye.
I waited in the Jerusalem sunlight for friends to drift out. Tried to tap memory for the Beatitudes... Blessed be the pure in heart for they shall see God.
Meanwhile late teens with Uzis, in blue and white uniforms on every street corner, and the Ashkenazim shoving aside the Bedu, the Goyim and other scum. Ancient paths and ancient savagery. The wailing Wall is apparently the last bit standing from the Roman Antonia Fortress. But why quibble?
Holy, holy, holy...
Lord God of Hosts
Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of thy glory,
Hosanna in the highest...
While ogling the vast artistry in the church, sobering to remind self that various lamps, symbols, reliquaries, etc. were regarded as pious investments in immortality, the forgiveness of sins... and deep pockets of the Princes of the Church. That fabulous wealth, the hubris of the hierarchy, ensured the emergence of Martin Luther and the French Huguenots.
Nonetheless, Happy Easter to us all in the Year of our Lord 2023.
Alpha Males in Strange Times
5 April 2023
He moved fast to open the door before I did.
I passed through giving his arm a little pat, beaming,
"Gallantry is not wasted on me. Thank you!"
He grinned; we both nodded.
And to be further appreciative as I walked on...
That was no soy-boy arm. Looks like he got brawny messing with cattle.
Ruddy guy, not cubicle-pale.
My cousins extracted me like an impacted wisdom tooth from a more invasive setting in the Rockies. They brought me back to the Lone Star State. At my next stop this morning in small town Texas, I walked behind a parked truck. The license plate frame read:
"Distressed Veteran
Leave Me Alone"
No, Don't Tread on Me, flag but you get the drift.
Couple years ago, an apparent panhandler accosted me outside my NM PO... It was snow on the north side of everything winter, getting on toward dusk. We were starting to see MS-13 tatts and erratic behavior at the time. Asked for money, I instead offered the guy a can of beans, as drug need was nearly palpable. He got huffy.
I reported him to the physically-big guy in the PO, whose nostrils flared, and I headed on home. Apparently big guy had an attitude problem about the situation, and the panhandler did not return.
Small doings from that time, but we're living in a Big Ugly context of brain-addled and casual violence. People getting flash mob pounded, being shoved onto subway tracks, smacked in passing and so forth. Some of this is homeless encampments and easy sourcing of zombie drugs. Some, God help us, may be brain damage from the mandatory jabs. Some may be breakup of families and no father mentoring or steady discipline. Not an ambience of Beaver Cleaver front porch neighborhoods.
Those trained in situational awareness and appropriate response are beginning to do videos to help folks walking alone, or in defunded-police communities, to get their smarts on.
In the NM Post Office small encounter, I had lurched into a nanosecond of being afraid, though I am tall, and ran a farm. When next I went to the mail pickup counter, the big guy, a Latino grandfather, called me over; leaned down toward my ear: "I took care of it; it's alright."
Let's hear it for Alpha Males and First Responders.
Palms, Cloaks & Adoration
2 April 2023
Even as a child, the wild fawning and hosannas slouching toward Jerusalem sent me into inchoate horror. Yes I had spent my life attentive to the greatest story ever told, the spoiler alerts. I knew the blink of an eye betrayals ahead... Cock's crow abandonment, robed in purple and spat upon, flogged and crowned with thorns. I have sung through gut-rending passages in Messiah... He was despis-ed, despis-ed and rejected... A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief...
He tried to pray in Gethsemane, where ancient olive trees still grow, as the dearest disciples nodded off into oblivion, as we might into cyber-entrainment. I who only listened agonized over the pivot from worship to betrayal. Be not beguiled by impassioned rushes of love or harm. Stay steady, grounded; heart-centered; steady as she goes.
How could anyone, who had listened to the resonant voice reaching out to everyone on the Mount of Beatitudes, so glitter into nothingness? Peter wept; Judas hanged himself, the blood money slipping from his grasp.
When I sang Hospice with singer friends in Maine, we were invited into homes and hospital rooms of the dying. In the stainless steel and fluorescent light of ICU's, an ancient rite of passage opens. Some easing away still had twinkling eyes and welcomed adventure. We were asked to sing, Good Night, Irene, Good Night!
We also sang softly in 4-part harmony, There are Angels Hovering 'Round. I had wondered all my life if the angels of Christ's birth were again visible at his death. Before he startled those walking on the road to Emmaus.
Wooden Spoons
28 March 2023
Strange disorienting feeling of being bi-locational, either within a locked ward, or in its anteroom, peering through the wire mesh reinforced window of the padded door.
Are we living a never-enough era, now sputtering a bit? Have been watching wonderful come-hither vids of adored munchkins surrounded/immersed in bounce-able play arrays, with not a natural material in sight... music, lights, camera!!... Nod to the prescient film, The Graduate: The future is plastic.
I remember Mama making derisive noises about the early flood of china-cr*p, and its irresistible meme: intellectual enrichment for the perfect kid. She pointed out, open a lower cabinet door with pots. Hand the kid a wooden spoon... happy as can be.
Tediously attentive to manic consumption, I wonder in the dark of the night if we have a clue about sudden infrastructure loss, about being hungry, cold, frightened. Certainly there are historical precedents, but most of the Great Depression generation have passed on.
Will the USofA have a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving this year? Still occasionally in my dreams, and maybe in Flyover Country. The fires and explosions in food processing plants and savage crop-destroying weather will cease... when? When useless-eater morale aligns more exactly with Davos freakozoids.
Preppers are suddenly looking less certifiable, as shelves empty and cooler doors are padlocked against blithe shoplifting. The little 8 year old here has laid seige to her parents for help with planting and fencing a garden. She may yet feed her family! (Opening bars, please: It is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius...)
Will we find our way back to simple pleasures? Well, we may: family nights of playing checkers, chess, monopoly, reading aloud, and wooden spoons!
Mandates Were Us
24 March 2023
During corona-hysteria, when not adhering to pharma partyline could be unpleasant.... A friend was urging his readers to get maximally injected. (Any subscribers follow that advice, I wonder. Any with 2nd thoughts? Spoiler alert; he's not around to sue.)
He became indignant, reading my Constitutional and Hippocratic Oath concerns about the lockdowns, mandates and jab contents. He actually cursed me, cast me into outer darkness for raising any misgivings about the op. That I was stoopidly causing deaths, and had made myself worthy of damnation.
How do we navigate the aftermath, the died-suddenly phenom? The we've-been-had-genocide? His wife has had a stroke; he has died.
I have a pragmatic friend disgusted at monstrous compliance who might get in my face: They got what they deserved... Really? Enter Schadenfreude? That may be as sick as the mask-nazis, getting fired for refusing, and the perps who have yet to perp-walk.
Those who did not comply cannot save the maelstrom drowning.
RIP and Lord have mercy.
It's Easier to Be Angry
Than Afraid
20 March 2023
The Vernal Equinox
Not a cozy time to be alive, with so much slip-sliding, that we had hoped would be sound and enduring. Just a lot of overwhelm, and it's frightening. We humans don't live well with fear. We often instead lash out, with anger serving as catharsis and a welcome release of panic.
On the world stage we see corruption, and the natiives have just about had it.
Banks have done money laundering and elites have executed rotten mismanagement. They have been protected from having to pay the piper, or the hangman.
In France the Rothschild banker, Macron, has disregarded Parliament and citizenry. Protestors begin to carry guillotine placards. NATO heads of state may lose office. Joe Biden and family have all the charm of carnival barker hustlers. Our elections have gone awry, and the guiltless have been harmed.
Nonetheless good men and women are not idle, nor do whistleblowers lack courage. It is the first day of Spring.
Bless Me, Father,
For I Am Still Sane
15 March 2023
A Luddite emerged from
Phone trees most foul...
Paypal, won't someone please bless them, voided my access a year ago. Their system demanded a mobile phone number. I lack one; I will never have one, due to the canary aftermath of being lightning-jangled.
Which means, in the hierarchy of locked ward, that it was not possible to change my banking info. An annual auto-payment could not go through.
But yes, my dear Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Am freed, free at last, from paypal the obnoxious. Who tried to penalize customers with a usurious slurping of wherewithal.
As paypal could not/would not accommodate a lightning strike, I cancelled the account. Despite all come-hithers by the phone rep whom I had finally, improbably reached.
Not a heel-clicking morning, but Lord God Almighty... free at last.
When Does Falsehood Reach the 2x4 of...
We've Been Had?
4 March 2023
When Mama was a little girl and reading to herself, she called to her own mother:
Mama, what is my-zulled?
Spell it for me.
M. i. s. l. e. d...
My-zulled has the mouth-feel for me of our societal gaack-ing on across the board betrayals. No-moral-compass has been enriching for those who fantasize enslavement of their lessers, in this Constitutional Republic.
Am not sure that's playing well, among people of good sense and good heart. Just a whole lot of disregarded folks who do not deduce, all appearances to the contrary, that honesty has gone quaint and archaic.
Interesting times... May we live.
Reluctance to Visit Dioxin Ground-Zero
24 February 2023
Terrible optics despite the obligatory lie-a-thon and sociopathic smiles with subtext of: I'm adorable... or... I'm actually the victim.
E. Palestine has not been evacuated. The asinine igniting of the train's vinyl chloride has executed Dioxin fallout across once fertile Heartland, and spanning what distances? Mike Adams warns of coming cancer clusters.
Who in their right minds would enter poisoned E. Palestine on foot?
President Donald Trump
US Senator from Ohio, JD Vance.
Butthead scuttled through when finally shamed by the POTUS visit.
Pretendident has no plans to show up.
Do we have any medical precedent for Dioxin exposure after-effects? Well yes.
Nam Vets came home. Their wives at the time reported burning semen. Children born suffered birth defects, and it's still happening, unto the generations. Veteran Affairs lives on in denial-infamy:
From areas carpet bombed with Agent Orange, deformed and un-adoptable children are still being born. Viet Cong who survived have produced them, including by now, younger fathers not present in the war: The US sent over a few millions. Caregivers report that it is not enough.
In E. Palestine environs, tens of thousands of animals are dying, with fish belly up in the creeks and rivers. Water is oil-slick iridescent. Not to put too fine a point on it, we humans are animals, structurally, biochemically.
Are we animals, ethically? History will tell that tale.
Making Sense of Current Events
22 February 2023
With news reports so much like kicked fire ant hills, it may be hard to come in for a landing and grok the co-inky-dinks playing out, which are affecting food supply.
Not many of us are eager to factor in sociopathic leadership, but branches of govt are all but waving pom-poms. Questions may be apt, overdue, and not deranged imaginings. Not enough of us down and out from the biowepp? Pile on "natural" disasters.
As an aside, am not sure Dr. Shiva's pedagogue approach is presidential material. Americans navigating overwhelm, may not be energized by a treatise on the scientific method.
Wind howled here the last 36 hours. So wild last night that I rolled out of bed between midnight and 3AM. Read, thought about corporate/goobermint outrages and long history of slaps on the wrist.
E. Palestine winds devouring Amish country? Dear God in heaven. Wondered if Mordor-laden wind patterns will affect Chaga sourced in upstate NY? Certainly Amish products out of Ohio. Alas the Reading, PA farmers market of fond childhood memory.
Someone(s) are destroying food processing plants, which appear to be ops executed by pros... Fertile land and crop production dead to us for centuries?
Problem/Solutio, yes siree. Cricket and mealy bug burgers coming right up.
Our neighbors across the way are running a few cattle, 4-H for the kids, inc. goats, sheep, mini-donkeys... But also beef on the hoof. With weirdness on the uptick, they keep stadium lights on by barns and corrals. Thieves are coming to ranches dead of night and loading up cattle. SouthernPrepper1 has also reported slaughter in the field and hauling off cuts and sides of beef.
Not that easy a grab and run in this area with heavy farm gates e-locked, and neighbors otherwise locked and loaded.
I think about urban megalopolis, welfare recipients, elevators immobile, subways and social services gone belly up, sewage and garbage accruing.... Friends remain generally blithe. A few canned beans and take out will surely tide us over.
Dioxin, My Pretties,
OH/PA and Points East
21 February 2023
Poisoned by Power Co. 2,4-D at my Blue Ridge organic farm... Gross dark orange jaundice, kidney pain/brown pee, ascites, headache from hades, dead in the water... How to fend off a morgue toe-tag?... Could no longer withstand spray drift from non-organic neighbors. (Indeed and in fact, 70 acres were not sufficient buffer.)
I ultimately went down for the count and had to sell the farm. Spent a year under the care of an enviro-med MD and a chinee Dr. of Oriental Medicine. It meant moving to the SFBay area.
What was recovery like?
Dropped to less than 4% body fat; am female.
Went in for 2x weekly 50g Vit C IV's.
Did photo-luminescence where a portion of my blood was drawn and run through UV light, and re-infused, activating immune aggression against damaged cells.
Self-administered daily German-sourced B-Complex injections.
Decocted potent chinee herbs, inc. ginseng, 1 liter/day.
2x weekly acupuncture. Points of insertion turned crimson, fever-hot to the touch.
Sickest I've ever been. Had to crawl up the stairs after IV-C infusions. I stopped being a fountain of joie-de-vivre and so-called Bay Area friends went poof.
Do I have any fellow feeling for those downwind of E. Palestine, including the Amish farmers?
Seven Papa Redbirds Sitting in a Tree
17 February 2023
Staring in the window,
What? Who, me?
Put the book down, Lady.
You forget your avi-ree?
I've been bossed by hummingbirds.
They chitter at the window, mob me with a whirry-bird nimbus if I enter the garden. Refill the syrup, silly. So I do.
But a flying wing of cardinals? A whole new level of step-to-it.
Black oil sunflower seed, on the double, Toots!
At least they don't need herding like yesterday's escaped Brahma, wild to munch the green, glorious green new pasture.
My elderly Blue Ridge neighbor used to chuckle when I leaned on the weed chopping hoe, thinking now would be a grand time for international travel. Uh huh.
"It's HOT; am done." She'd laugh.
"It'll be here when we're gone."
And for another aggravating aside, my cousin asks the munchkin:
"How do you get a job done?"
Reply:
"You DO it!"
I've filled the squirrel-proof feeders, and tonight we'll leave faucets dripping for another Semi-Tropical incursion of glubbal warming. But so far, no snow.
Winter Storm Warnings
15 February 2023
Friends in various mountains are hunkering down. Days are lengthening, a mercy, but weather is about to roar, and block the passes. Winter is neither a Hallmark greeting card, nor blithe for those who must do work outdoors.
Toward the end of my time at the Blue Ridge Mountain organic farm, temperature dropped to 38 degrees below zero. The arctic temps held for 10 days with gale force winds (Not in a Hundred Year.. old timers opined.)
Before my country store neighbor/mentor died, she had asked her younger cousin to look after me. I had maybe forgotten the stout-heartedness, of those who do not make idle promises.
My tractor wouldn't crank; I was hauling hay through the snow in a big wheeled cart. Busting ice on the creek twice a day. Lungs felt wind-burnt and diminishing. The cousin came by to check on me. Found me outside feeding out hay, bent double coughing, with a roaring fever. He put his arm around my shoulder, and we stumbled to a spot out of the wind.
"Young'un, I gave my word to Grace that I would try to see you safe after that no-good walked out on you. This is hard, Honey, and I know it, but your pretty pregnant cows are going to have to go to cattle market. You're done or you're a goner. You've hauled all the hay you can. I'll be here tomorrow at first light with my cattle truck and my boy to help load them. Will you let me do right by you and Grace?"
"Oh dear God... Yes, Sir. I'll be ready."
So we sold the cattle, with each cow coming below me on the bleachers, looking me in the eye and bellowing. When the cousin brought me home, I was quiet enough to stop disregarding breathing difficulties.
Snows were deep; I was out of kindling; couldn't get the woodstove to catch. Piled all the blankets and comforters on the bed, and lay there doing chills and sweats. By then it was sleeting, and my dad, the Cap'n called on the phone he'd insisted I have installed by the bed. He heard the pneumonia.
He started up the mountain. Set faucets dripping. Rolled me in a quilt and tossed me over his shoulder, his nearly 6 ft. tall daughter, and drove through the storm to Mama, hot soup and warmth. They're gone now; I bless them.
Am remembering this in South Texas and TBTG no longer struggling with a woodstove, an ergonomic snow shovel, and the lure of Rocky Mountain hypothermia. Winter storms are hitting the high country. I pray for those sleeping rough, rough and hungry, here and in the UK and Europe.
It may be balmy near the equator, and there's one born every minute, but Global Warming carbon credits have enriched the usual suspects. We may be entering a time of volcanism, occluding cloud cover and shorter to no growing season. It's a cyclical thing, The Dalton and Maunder Minimum chills preceded current events. Ready or not, we've reached the end of an era.
It may sound fatuous when sociopathy has ruled the day, but skill sets, community and good hearts are trudging along. Dad used to say, "You pays your money; you makes your choice." He was a light sleeper all his life. A ship's skipper knows the buck stops at the Captain's Quarters.
More Than We Know,
Soul Memory?
13 February 2023
There's an uptick in Net discussions of the asymmetric warfare response of EMP to our clown car administration's poking of the Bear and the Dragon.
A colleague tells of speaking 20 years ago with a Japanese woman who had survived Nagasaki. American pilots at risk to self had been dropping leaflets for two weeks, warning people to get out of the city. Her father decided to act, and gathered up the family, taking them to the country. Couple days later the bomb was released. Her family lived.
I thanked the fellow:
Used to was we learned wisdom lineage in storytelling, a quietude dear to my heart. This anecdote is a gift.
Years ago I did volunteering at a California sort of medical clinic. People dropped in to be seen, hoping for insight and relief from intractable distress. A woman sits down in the wooden chair in front of me... kind, sad eyes.
Slow-breathing, eyes closed, I wait for colors, thought forms and such.
Tell her she is showing me an image of a little Japanese girl and her smaller brother, in school uniforms. Appears to be Hiroshima. She is holding his hand, but in the blast which comes she is unable to protect her sibling or herself. They stand solid; poof, they are vaporized.
I open my eyes to the sound of sobbing. She asks if I know what work she does in the world?... No, ma'am, I do not.
She is about the agency/bureaucratic business of securing compensation for survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth
11 February 2023
A chilly blustery day, with a morning of cheering on the family Golden Girl, in a peewee team, dribbling and slam-dunking, morphing into octopi when guarding! She's star material and is learning the grace and satisfaction of being a team player.
I've remembered a lesson long ago about remaining kind and hopeful, ear always tuned to the pony, surely nickering under that pile of manure!
My childhood was blest by parents who read aloud, not only children's books but the great books of world literature. I may have remained optimistic into adulthood despite abundant data to the contrary, from my father's reading aloud of James Hilton's, Lost Horizon...
Certainly mountains have resonated as deep experience all my life. When visiting friends in Mumbai, we prepared for a great journey. I was given the option of south to Sri Lanka... or North to the Himalaya, be still oh my heart.. We headed north by train and tiny buses on terrifying roads, with distant avalanches glinting in the sun, sound following. There I witnessed an Alpenglow Christmas in Srinagar...
Pater was especially moved by Sam Jaffe as High Lama in Frank Capra's film of Lost Horizon, of Shangri La, the treasures of a Himalayan sanctuary.
High Lama text excerpt:
"We have reason. It is the entire meaning and purpose of Shangri-La. It came to me in a vision long, long ago. I saw all the nations strengthening, not in wisdom, but in the vulgar passions and the will to destroy. I saw their machine power multiplying until a single weaponed man might match a whole army. I foresaw a time when man exulting in the technique of murder, would rage so hotly over the world, that every book, every treasure would be doomed to destruction. This vision was so vivid and so moving that I determined to gather together all things of beauty and culture that I could and preserve them here against the doom toward which the world is rushing. Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! What unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong against each other, compelled by an orgy of greed and brutality. The time must come, my friend, when this orgy will spend itself, when brutality and the lust for power must perish by its own sword. Against that time is why I avoided death and am here and why you were brought here. For when that day comes, the world must begin to look for a new life. And it is our hope that they may find it here. For here, we shall be with their books and their music and the way of life based on one simple rule: Be kind. When that day comes, it is our hope that the brotherly love of Shangri-La will spread throughout the world. Yes, my son, when the strong have devoured each other, the Christian ethic may at last be fulfilled, and the meek shall inherit the Earth."
Wildflowers & Gardener
Spring to Life
5 Feb 2023
My South Texas gardening efforts, repeatedly obliterated, by blast furnace heat, cutter ants, drought and a rip-roaring Blue Norther, am thrice shy. I woke this morning to sparkling light and stomped awake, chopped weeds, rummaged for gardening infrastructure, out of my funk.
The sun is suddenly intense, glittering on the water lily pond. First golden wildflowers in bloom. Meadows green as the Emerald Isle...
A dear Southern New Mexico amiga, she of southern Italian roots, has sent me saved seed of a luscious heirloom tomato, a Christmas gift, a shout for joy. Last year at some aggravation, she had sent a plant. Not even shade cloth would protect it from the high UV Index (11) and Grim Reaper heat.
As though planting gold nuggets, have tucked the wonder-seeds into 4" pots. Will send the balance to family nursery greenhouses nearby, hedging my bets. Have already all but begged him to plant some. Going out in tomorrow's mail.
Meanwhile nights are too chilly for Mediterranean fruit. Will bring them in and out this month. Currently have tomato starts and Heavenly Blue morning glories on a piece of scrap lumber, the pots covered with parchment paper. Why? To keep the aviary mob scene of cardinals and goldfinches from scratching around, and to hold warmth and moisture.
A crap-shoot, but gardeners may not be entirely sane.
Am in Texas Now
30 January 2023
The state of Texas is generally a world apart, though Austin/Dallas/Houston have had an influx of Californians, a big demographic shift, bringing with them what they left.
Austin, where I went to University, is hosting Drag Queen shows of minor-attracted-persons.
Even encouraging gender-affirming surgeries, a diversity an Admiral-in-drag earnestly hopes we'll embrace.
In down-home Texas, however, it's not remotely akin to the Beltway or the San Francisco Bay.
After the Uvalde school massacre, our local Constitutional Sheriff mobilized.
Next morning, each school had deputies and fathers, seeing the kids into and out of the school day.
My cousin stands as one of the volunteers.
Once a week he patrols school grounds all day watching for anyone weird, or anything threatening.
When the US began removing the Ten Commandments from Court and State Houses, this little town with the French chateau-esque County Court House had an especially large set incised and bolted to the rock entry wall.
The State has not forgotten, though Washington may have, that we began as a Republic.
Here in working ranch and farming country, plenty of bowed legs from folks who grew up, riding horses and helping out.
You still see men long and lean, in Stetsons and cowboy boots.
My cousins moved here from a spread in north Texas.
Their town got word that antifa was busing in for local mayhem.
Well, ranchers began ambling in on horseback. They were armed.
The bus turned in; its mob saw the watchers awaiting them, and scuttled back out.
Dunno how shortages and outages will play out in the coastal congestion of big cities and suburbia.
The "mostly peaceful" Molotov cocktails, we've already witnessed, are concerning.
Nine missed meals, and then what?
All over the US, little country towns of church goers with intact families are made up of neighbors.
Flyover Country, often held in contempt, may prove to be livable in hard times, and well-rooted.
As my cousin reminds me,
"They don't know us."
Vaxx-Shedders?
Don't Be Silly
22 January 2023
So, I got trapped in a long PO line, waiting to mail packages.
The place was mobbed, in a community with radical jab-mandate compliance.
By the time I slogged through the snow, safe, thought I, at home, I felt ill.
Big massed vaax-shedder exposure, in my small world, lead to:
Face plant in the snow
Couple weeks in horsepital among mandated health care worker vaxx-shedders.
Told not to move, due to pulmonary embolism.
Electrodes on chest connected to computers in Allbecukoo.
Lived on their gray glop food in max-EMF surround.
Emerged barely able to walk; serious pain.
Have not been idle on returning to human delights.
Nonetheless, had still been doing halt and lame impersonations.
This body, my own, which had enjoyed rock-climbing in the Alps.
The following is NOT, repeat not, medical advice.
I started on the Bromelain/NAC protocol, w/ in vitro evidence of spike protein destruction.
Had a couple shaky days of detox, more pain.
Still early days, but am returning to life.
Pain-free, full of piss and vinegar.
God help us.
Chickenfeed, Iconic for Cheap...
Oopsie, No Eggs for Sale
10 January 2023
Chickenfeed cost is skying, slamming the small producers for a loop.
Also feed stores offer a Wizard's Apprentice sack of GMO's with chemical fertilizer contaminants and many AgPoisons.
Feels like 2 x 4 up the side of the head.
Feels like shot-self-in-the-foot destruction of food processing plants and chicken slaughter.
On my Blue Ridge Mountain farm, I planted and tended organic feed.
It takes water, good soil and adequate land for field crops, pasturage and hay meadows.
Am stupefied at set-ups which require buying in of hay and feed.
Can be managed when hay, sweet feed and chicken scratch are cheap...
"Qouth the Raven, Nevermore."
For the chickens, I grew heirloom dent corn, buckwheat, millet.
They gorged on die-die beasties from the Japanese beetle traps.
They got veggie scraps, and a little trough, nailed to the chicken house wall, of kelp meal.
Plenty of pasture grass, clover and wild herbs.
The spherical bright orange yolks all but stood up and saluted.
Those who bellied up to the table sat astonished and briefly speechless.
The eggs were of such high flavor/mineral content, they needed no salt.
The good news, potentially, about monster-monoculture, BigAg failures, will be resurgence of smaller family farms.
In a context, in fact, of resurgence of families.
Worth paying attention... Milagros massing.
Ipad and Sock Doll
6 January 2023
It's Epiphany. Twelfth Night, when the Wise Men come.
Being blest with friends who send wee treasure chests of thoughtful, useful, and exquisite surprises, I've been celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas, opening one or two gifties each day.
I learned in one of those presents, a book about St Nicholas, St Nick or Santa Claus, that western Christianity settled on 25 December, with its Yule association, as the holy day. Eastern Orthodoxy celebrates 6 January as the Birth of Christ.
The Twelve Days of Christmas bridge that geography.
In the holiday gifting maelstrom, I had no idea the intensity and expenses involved in current child rearing.
Nor the entrainment power of ipads and smart phones.
I may in fact have blundered into old fart territory, when pleased to see a sock doll.
Long ago and far away, a child's beloved and only toy.
Years ago, I had clients who'd grown up with their own Platinum Cards, an interesting demographic.
All will be provided by career-track parents and Big Daddy gubbermint.
Whine, pout, charm and wheedle, and you shall receive.
Is the following experience "better?"
Doubtful.
But I think about things like mentoring and useful skill sets.
How are broken families doing, at filling in for missing grandparents?
As a kid, I had wanted a tire swing; Pater said, NO.
I'd make the house look like a trailer park.
What?
We lived at the end of a gravel road in the country, middle of a Connecticut forest in an old converted 19th century barn.
No one would see my swing, which I planned to secure behind the house in any case..
Father had returned to his newspaper.
I'll do it myself... said to the back of the New York Times.
I marched out of the house.
Came back a couple hours later rolling a used truck tire, stout hemp rope coiled around my shoulders, from a marine supply place, all free.
At which point, father bestirred himself and hung it in an old russet-apple tree.
A submarine skipper, he knew knots.
I had learned about unknotting, of a barrier.
Bleak Mid-Winter Solstice
21 December 2022
Overcast, Mateys, and turbulent. It's cold.
Am well inland but as though the earth were liquefying, we seem to rise on billows and sink into troughs with oe'er-topping waves... Sight lost of horizon and shore birds.
Have lit a beeswax votive candle to mark the Solstice. A Charlie Brown Christmas tree at the end of my sewing table gives me quiet guffaws. My cousin's mom found it at an antique shop ages ago.
And a soft light in the dark of the year, salt from ancient seas now risen to snow peaks at the top of the world, weighty and golden, have been carved into lamps.
Ding dong merrily on high.
In heaven the bells are ringing.
Ding dong merrily the sky
Is riven with angel singing...
Merry Christmas, Mateys.
A Toe-Tag Flick
3 November 2022
We are living current events, in the midst of Pravda-news reportage.
The "Died Suddenly" documentary asserts that, We Don't Want to Know.
We still accept... Blank vial inserts... We don't want to know.
An opening statement:
"If people UNDERSTOOD what was in the jabs, they'd go ape-sh*t."
1) Insurance industry Actuarial Tables, a just-the-facts source, deem excess deaths since injection mandates, as a 12-Sigma Event.
2) Morticians, beginning in England, have exposed death-inducing, what-the-inferno, rubbery blood clots.
3) "Died Suddenly"... As a google search item churns up weekly videos of bizarro deaths, of young people, athletes, TV personalities, medical personnel...
The 21/11 release of the flick, is scheduled for just after the 11/11 historical ending of the WW1 trench-warfare abattoir.
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow...
Known as "The Great War" in the UK.
A generation dead, maimed and/or shell-shocked.
Many young women lost fiancés, or any hope of marrying.
A prequel perhaps, to jab-deaths, maiming, and infertility.
If that experience becomes visceral, familial, societal...
Someone(s) have some splainin' to do.
https://rumble.com/v1q1u1m-died-suddenly-official-trailer-streaming-november-21st.html
Flowers Aplenty,
All Hallow's Eve
31 October 2022
Home to Texas, land of my roots, with down home storytellers everywhere you turn...
At the small biz plant nursery, I ran into the lady from our local organic farm.
Her fall garden's doing cornucopia.
She beamed at the owner, saying, I've come for some dirt.
He grinned: "At $20 a sack, it's called, soil."
I asked them about diesel running out and shipping going up?
Owner of the nursery gave us a world-weary sigh.
He's been ordering a load of potting soil for several years at a cost of $1200 delivery.
The latest shipment cost FOUR THOUSAND.
That was Sunday.
Monday I stopped by the nursery in town for a Talavera pot.
That owner got wild-eyed when I asked her about supply chain (constricted) and shipping (crushing.)
"They do nuttin, not a darn thing, to help out small business."
I stopped to talk to the gal watering things, saying we might get weather tonight, with some places having had zero rain.
She looked up with luminous eyes.
"We're so blest in Texas.
Every time we do get rain, I think of the moisture as drops of love."
She was not being cute, nor saccharine.
She lit up the nursery.
The flower pot search was to finish out the St. Francis Garden.
My cousin helped me complete the grunt work.
Our lyrical Talavera St. Francis, with bird on wrist and shoulder, stands in memory of my friend in the high country.
She passed this month, a healer and artist.
Her daughter called to tell me that family and friends converged at the crematorium and did a celebration there.
They all went outside, when she entered the-end-flame, and watched vapor rising from the chimney.
Centered with a golden yellow butterfly, which they all saw.
As I watered in the St. Francis lavender, mandevilla, geraniums, cyclamens and herbs, the first golden yellow butterfly I'd seen went browsing among the flowers.
Which brought me to my last winter in the Rockies, this very year.
That cold early morning I did a face plant into a snow drift, which seemed to settle around me with warmth.
I couldn't move my body; could barely breathe.
Without any fear at all, I turned to the hush of hypothermia and was slipping free, when....
Our Family Matriarch, my cousin's mom, we recently lost...
A fiery Leo, retired Head RN, and in-yo-face at need...
I heard her voice, clear as bells.
Whoa there, Little Missy. Hold your horses.
Meanwhile she was giving my cousin the word:
"You go and get her; you bring her home."
Season of Heavenly Blues
4 October 2022
No, not startled by cherubini on fluffy pink clouds, but by blossoms, after a savagely torrid summer.
I had planted morning glory seed upon arrival in Texas, land of profligate wildflowers in Spring.
For months now, we've admired bowers of heart-shaped leaves, with nary a bloom!
In the cool of the morning today, the first flower all but trumpeted its cerulean beauty.
The Morning Glories would not bloom in triple digit temps.
Nor, truth be told, did I.
I whined often at hot/muggy/buggy.
The flowers bided their time to a more welcoming season.
I can only hope to emulate their grace.
Had spent the last couple decades in mountainous Downeast, and in the Rockies, hawk-eyed to June and Sept. frosts.
Indeed, it has dropped below freezing in a Maine friend's garden.
Somewhat stupefied, am following an aunt's guidance about fall veggie planting in Texas!
Across the North Atlantic...
Germans, living an industrial powerhouse, and used to natgas central heat, are cutting down forest and scavenging for coal.
The British Isles and Northern Europe will be frigid this winter, and perhaps hungry.
The US & Canada may not be far behind.
Victory Gardens come to mind, weather permitting.
Though UK & EU greenhouse growers cannot afford heat with hellacious rise in electricity costs.
Adieu greenhouse cukes, tomatoes and sweet peppers of winters past.
Am sufficiently antediluvian to have listened to elders who had known rationing, stock market suicides, and Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl... to then golden Californ-i-ay.
Toto, dear Toto of us all, we lack ruby slippers, and recent experience of nose to grindstone, and saving string.
Wildlife
13 September 2022
Hubby Cuz heard wails, snuffles, and a stomping hissy fit.
He surveyed the mayhem and came back with outdoor glue...
For my Cuz who works so hard to create beauty...
He also set up a motion-activated camera.
I wandered out into the garden, "What barbarian did this?"
"Dunno," she all but bellowed... "A squirrel maybe?"
She had found a three-tier pottery bird bath at a garden store.
The heavy tiers stacked, for ease of set-up.
After the toppling, she glued them together firmly and called it a day.
By morning, the whole kit and caboodle lay shattered.
She wept; hubby calmly rewound the camera.
FOUR fully-grown masked bandits with clever paws had cavorted for an hour till they trashed her whimsy.
They'd used the birdbath as a step stool to poke their hands into an abandoned bird feeder with still a scattering of seed.
I asked the man of the house if he had any sentimental reservations about removal of 'coons from the local gene pool?
He gave me a level look. "Fish food," he said.
We live above a big bend in the river, rich in catfish.
He'll have to catch the 'coons, one at a time, and then pop them.
My cousins have tried capture and release, but raccoons react apparently like homing pigeons, and come galloping back.
Seventeen miles is one estimate of sufficient distance!
At least none of the masked thieves crept into our houses like a dervish.
Though sort of cute, they make short work of kitchen cabinets and drawers, papers, jars, organization....
And that's not all.
Since a friend in Costa Rica warned me about rooting armadillos carrying leprosy on their skins, Cuz modified the m.o.
He pops one bumbling in the trap, and hauls the cage down to the river on his Mule ATV.
Varmints galore, we have in the back of the beyond...
Our near neighbors set up a small cattle feed lot, fattening steers for lean times, if that's our future.
Some miscellanies out there as well, for the kids' 4-H projects.
A couple donkeys, goats, sheep, a porker or two.
They have dogs, but are concerned about two-legged desperadoes who wander the night without moral compass.
Neighbors have taken to shining big lights, dusk to dawn, on the animal corrals.
This coming winter, with so many warnings, will hunger stalk our land, the former Bread Basket of the World?
Lord have mercy.
Funeral Frou-Frou
5 September 2022
Mama scouted ahead and came back, bug-eyed, her eyebrows nearly to her hairline.
We'd joined in my first funeral home event, her first cousin.
Mama whispered:
'Open casket...'
Then all but hissed:
'Not a word out of you.'
Cousin had spent a life of elaborate cognitive-dissonance in Podunk, Texas.
A dinghy income, and a trans-Atlantic ocean liner imagination.
She'd gotten in her last licks, at death, with a Cecil B. DeMille send off...
In a mauve cut-velvet-lined, mahogany casket, with sterling silver fittings.
Her aesthetician daughter had agreed to her mother's last wishes.
Cousin lay there with bouffant hair freshly dyed blond, astonishing false eyelashes along her rouged and powdered cheeks.
As pièce de résistance, she was draped in a silk charmeuse negligé and peignoir, with lavish old lace...
Have since given some thought to the funeral industry, and much more lately.
"Died suddenly... Sudden Adult Death Syndrome..."
Applied to kids and world class athletes, who keel over on track and field.
What in God's green earth is going on?
Will we steady into understanding of inflammatory, clotshot-harm?
Dunno, but in the last couple years as I grew older, I looked into funeral expenses.
Cremation seemed a no-brainer till I saw the $2-3k price tag, then.
God knows, now, as propane hyper-inflates.
Already feeling the propane-pinch, crematoria were loading bodies in like cordwood.
When ashes and wee bone bits had been achieved, the miscellanea was raked into urns and coffee cans provided.
So, Great Aunt Tilly, Rufus, and Atticus... no knowing.
I live way off in the boonies now, in wild and woolly Texas, with loving kin...
When my time comes,
Luminous, off and away...
Roll what's left in a quilt?
Crank up the backhoe.
Plant me, and maybe a flowering tree.
...All wrapped in white linen and cold as the grave...
Student Loan Freebies
Taxpayers hi ho
27 August 2022
In the midst of fear-induction distractions, of hide-the-pea under the walnut shell...
Am thinking about the parents who saved and scrimped to pay for what may have been a "Gender Studies" degree, encompassing absolute-zero, of useful life skills.
Thinking about those of us who busted butt, working three jobs and earning top grades for any scholarship help.
Not feeling entitled, or truth be told eager, for Big-Daddy-Gubmint intervention.
"Smash & Grab" may appear to have supplanted the original Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island
American Story.
The dream of assimilating into a great nation.
Of can-do entrepreneurship, and better life for our children.
(What children?)
We're living an engineered-globalist-anarchy, smacking many of us blind-sided.
Nonetheless, I have never, nevuh, discounted the American gene pool of contrarians.
One notable iconoclast calls the psychopathic intrusions by unelected bureaucrats, the let's-pretend of the "mutha-WEFers."
As Grim Reaper, vaax-mandate-harm lurches into greater awareness, the sane, the adults among us, tally outrages.
The Beltway-creatures from the black lagoon, will not dredge their own hold on power.
Au contraire, beware the lying cavalcade and globalist urgency to generate a False Flag.
No jail time or gallows for the self-styled elite.
No precedent for it... Get real.
Constitutional Republic rumblings, be advised, are massing from the hinterland.
Buckle up.
Rough weather dead ahead.
Seat tables in the locked and upright position.
Segmented Pre-Historic Beastie
10 August 2022
My cousin is very competent at traditional predator solutions, and has nailed Señor Armadillo, numero dos.
Cuz is also a techie, so had installed a motion-activated camera by an area of nocturnal depredation.
Time as well as image provided; Cuz was ready.
Now for a centuries-leap segue.
Late 1700's thinkers were clear that a country, wishing autonomy, must protect itself against predatory government.
At that time Britannia Ruled, RULED the Waves...
The outraged American Colonies were preparing to fight, and maybe break some monarch rules.
Their well-armed Militia of hunters, who put food on the table, became woodland and swamp guerilla fighters, snipers.
Also, in the horrid barefoot winter conditions of Valley Forge, a Prussian appeared.
He had fought under Friedrich the Great and Empress Catherine of Russia.
General Washington allowed him to train the Colonial farm boys and shopkeepers.
He trained them to stand their ground, and win....
So, having experienced despotic brutality, and seen Militia Irregulars in action, we have a Second Amendment.
Tyrants, Tyrannosaurus Rex's, cannot abide an armed citizenry.
Consider Pol Pot mountains of skulls, Stalin's Mother Russia gulags... the Warsaw Ghetto.
Am writing this from Texas, returned to the land of my birth.
I was the firstborn grandchild.
Our Granddaddy took me into the front hall where his hunting rifles leaned against the wall by the stairs.
He squatted down so we were eye-to-eye.
"Honey, I use these rifles to hunt game for the family table.
You've seen me make squirrel stew, and pluck doves and quail.
There's more that I want you to understand:
I shot the mean dogs that killed our hunting dog you loved.
I will protect the family.
But I ask you to give me your word that you will never touch the guns.
You hear me, Punkin?"
"Yes, Sir. I promise."
He taught my Texas kin gun safety and marksmanship.
I lived far away, but never forgot...
The Uvalde stand-down massacre of children and teachers hit this ranching community hard.
We're blest with a Constitutional Sheriff.
He had Law Enforcement at all the schools the next morning.
Many carry-permit Daddy's also showed up to protect our kids.
This is not a "Gun-Free Zone"... the preferred stomping ground of the mentally deranged.
It's August and HOT, but the school year is starting up again this week.
Schools, churches and parents have not been idle.
Volunteers have been sought and organized.
Individual community members will stand as security detail at the schools, one day per month.
Lord have mercy on the no-bail cities which "defund" and attack their police, their First Responders.
White Water Lily, White Egret
4 August 2022
A pond brings surreal beauty to land cracked with drought.
The surrounding land is green green and this morning blazed with a white egret strutting and bobbing in the shallows.
Minnows and frogs, oh my.
Looks like the female; they arrived in a pair, the male mighty in wing span.
Am guessing they're nesting down along the San Antone River.
In a recent rancher vid... pastures Emerald Isle green, his 4 remaining horses grazed in equine heaven.
He's more east than the SW Drought, but he had already been forced to sell his cattle at market.
No pasture then and hay through the roof in price.
He asked us to "pray for Texas."
I drove 30 miles this week on a shopping jaunt through gorgeous ranching country. Beautifully maintained (lots of Germanic place names!) but drought-afflicted.
Live oaks and rolling pasture land and hay meadows, suddenly empty of Black Angus.
Little pasturage. No hope of 2nd cutting hay.
Ranchers are having to sell breeding stock, not just culled steers.
We'll see a temporary market glut, then Katie bar the empty door.
Burgers on the grill? Soon, a luxe item.
Ignore the following, but I do not:
For decades, I've watched chemcrud planes roar in with apparent dessicant in advance of weather front.
The anticipated rain dissipates to nothing.
It's also technically possible, by the boasters of "owning the weather" to induce flood, and apparently activate seismicity via huge arrays, as in Alaska.
Example:
Remember the La Palma volcano, the Canary Islands excitement?
Daily breathless reportage of lava flows... any moment now...
Be verra afraid; will the East Coast be destroyed by tsunami...?
Some politico there announced two things:
The quake was over (say what?) and as an aside...
An array out of Norway was winding down, blast done.
I had a friend years ago, an organic farmer who became a Bhai.
That faith holds farmers in respect, as the most valued profession, the bedrock.
We let sociopath-control-freaks dictate to farmers at our peril.
Don't plant; plow under...
Food processing plants mysteriously bursting into flame.
European farmers, more constricted by Brussels bureaucrats, are barricading roads and spewing liquid manure.
Am entertained, but will it alter policy?
And just supposin'...
Weather warfare may be in play, aka geo-engineering, loved by the likes of BillyGoatGates.
Meteors & the Moon
31 July 2022
"So, I bought some sheep shears....
"What?
I was walking by the market stall of an organic farmer friend.
He grinned as I came to a halt.
"What are you talking about?
You don't have sheep. You buy a doodle-dog?"
"Human clippers, actually."
He looked off in the distance, as though posing for Profile Rock.
"I just got so aggravated, at a barbershop visit costing me beauty parlor bucks."
"You telling me you're doing your own trims?
Rotate so I can see... Well, hm."
"Not only that..." he chuckled, knowing he had me good.
"Don't want it to grow fast, like at the New Moon."
I gave him the beady eye.
"You showing off?"
"The heck I am.
You know I plant by the moon.
I wondered if Dark of the Moon would slow hair growth.
Well, that may be.
Am buzzing around less with those clippers than before.
Bet I'd be saving on barber bills... If I went to one.
You won't see me pushing a wheelbarrow of paper money, to get my sideburns trimmed!"
He's in NM, where it's raining.
I'm in Texas, where it's not.
Meteors would be a clear-sky consolation prize.
Aquarids and Perseids whooshing together till 5 August.
At dead of night this morning, I surfaced at a meteor hour.
Puttered around for a flashlight, Wellies, by the soft ambient light of salt lamps...
In which I stubbed a toe, and came fully awake!
Is this the night I want to get skunked?
Step on a rattlesnake?
Or let's see, fall over an armadillo?
I went fuddy-duddy; talked myself out of it.
Maybe tonight.
Varmints & Blessed Events
25 July 2022
We don't have Darwin Awards for dogs, but going after a white-striped critter, MORE THAN ONCE, might qualify...
Frenzied barking rolls me out of bed.
I grab a parka and open the door; cousin's running this way with a flashlight.
We both bellow at the dog.
Cousin hollers, SKUNK... mercifully, sort of, in my fenced yard.
When skunk spews out methyl mercaptan, the doodle-dawg is outside the fence, being hauled away in disgrace.
Cousin, and boy-howdy is he ever fast on his feet, comes roaring back with a rifle, but sweet-petunia has escaped.
For now.
We do vivid on this homestead.
Simultaneous with rural uproar, a first great grandson is being born!
A cutie, already looking larger than life.
Cousin puts up the varmint armament, and starts loading the car.
I peek around the corner, thinking...
Circus choo-choo...
Heffalumps, giraffes, a king of the beasts roaring, just because.
Or is that our lion-maned golden girl, seven years old with all her beach paraphernalia?!!!
Moi, am waiting for cool autumn breezes.
Here's a minimalist whine: It's HOT.
And happy day.
WHO-hoo-hoo-hoo
23 July 2022
The owl called WHO's name?
World Health Organization, Code Red:
A new, be-hysterical pandemic, from chimps or something.
How do you get it?...
Pride Month for gayguys/trannies.
Big attendance at orgiastic events staged in Europe, NYC... say what?
Male to male demographic, and wowie-kazowie... It's called a pandemic?
Millions of vials of monkeypox vaccine at the ready, fancy that.
Down among the rainbow glitterati, tatts, body piercing, green hair make-believe.
Trannies and alt lifestyles live there, zig-zagging the glamor.
And there's a wannabe-woman in uniform, yet another vaunted medical authority.
A photo of his/her kids is revelatory: Obese, dyed, metal-studded, diverse...
The Admiral MD insists we've got professional consensus.
(Tell that to Frontline Doctors and Medical Pro whistleblowers.)
According to the Admiral, we need to honor the "empowering" of children, with puberty blockers and genital surgery.
How's that playing in Peoria?
Drag Queens-R-us?!
A Chronicle: I Was There.
Is "Shedding" Real?
21 July 2022
I smelled malice-a-forethought, from the plandemic launch, and monstrous harm.
Color me whatever; I pay attention.
Have also been observing with my own body.
Thanks to FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, we now see Pfizer documents, detailing their new whizbang inoculation op.
How to get around "vaccine hesitancy" they wondered?...
Eureka, the vaxxed are to be made into vaccine vectors.
Those cautious about vaccines in general, but much more so with an experimental jab, posing no liability to BigPharma...
Those annoyingly cautious nay-sayers are exposed to jab contents via the vax-compliant.
Through skin contact and inhalation, aka "shedding."
Any "clot-shot" correlation?...
"Sudden deaths", auto-immune disability, miscarriages, infertility, male & female?
Pfizer had tried to conceal vax-injury info, for several generations.
Enter, FOIA and a Judge.
Christmas 2021:
Two, triple-jabbed, neighbors invite me to come over that morning, after nearly 2 years of shunning me, as though a leper.
They sit me between them, sardine fashion.
They may consider themselves heroic.
("Pandemic of the Unvaxxed" is still featured on Goebbels-News.)
I return home unwell, and for days after.
Early Jan. 2022:
Trapped in a long line at the post office, with the aggressively vaxxed.
Come home to 10 days of tar black diarrhea, with no solid food intake, only liquids.
Yuk-yuk, a weight-loss program.
Deep fatigue, breathing difficulty.
1. Feb:
Face plant into snow drift.
1 Feb- 15 Feb:
Hospitalization for pulmonary embolism.
Held to a 6 ft radius, up only to pee.
With vaxxed staff, appalling food, harsh meds, EKG's, no visitors, no nutritionist anything.
15 Feb- 12 Mar:
Rehab, appalling food, vaxxed staff, not permitted to drive.
12. Mar:
Cousins, unjabbed, extract me from the Rockies, on physicians' recommendation.
Indeed, am able to get off oxygen when we reach lower elevation.
To present time:
Local D.O. gets me samples of the $500/mo. blood thinner; outlines tapering protocol.
Difficulty walking due to paresthesia, edema, arthralgia/myalgia, horrid fatigue.
Tapering the meds triggers detox, unpleasant, but also gradual loss of symptoms.
In addition, am restoring bod to better nutritional status.
Seven months after Christmas onset, ahoy, sailing into better health.
Medical bills pending in the tens of thousands.
Do I suspect shedding to be real?
Was the Pope (once) Catholic?
Culling
18 July 2022
Blast furnace temps and wind are scorching pasture.
Second cutting hay is not going to happen.
Many SW farmers cannot feed their livestock.
It means having to cull the herds.
Closer to home, no feed/no pasture translates as exploding cost of "normal" food, inc. burgers on the grill, and fast food meals on the go.
Not to worry. Trudeau's Canada is building a food processing plant.
Human food to be confabulated out of crickets.
You vill eat bugs, and you vill be happy.
Farmers and ranchers are experiencing a unique bereavement, as they face bankruptcy.
Generations may have bred and raised ever finer critters.
They will retain breeding stock for as long as they can, the equivalent of "not eating the seed corn."
They know their livestock.
On small family farms, the critters live as extensions of the family.
Before I had to sell my cattle at market years ago, I lay on the ground, face in the timothy and clover.
Arms outstretched I sobbed my failing stewardship, as though the rich soil were indeed and in fact, God's own.
A horrible winter and double pneumonia soon followed.
I could not run the farm sola through snow drifts and temps of 38 below.
A reckoning, a finis, a culling of animals and their warm sweet breath.
North of us a cousin grew up on a cattle ranch with working horses.
She's an animal-whisperer, gifted with critters, and a natural on horseback.
Her horse pasture is burnt dead-brown under the no-rain/blistering high UV sun.
For now, her parents will bring her round bales, though they cost the earth, from a better watered part of the state.
Not sustainable, God knows, but a deep family gesture.
Moving from no rain to, perhaps, no mercy...
If we live to tell the tale, what will history make of mandates, of BigPharma buying off media, politicians, hospitals, schools, alphabet agencies, military brass...?
And what of their silence, formerly known as a "sin of omission."
Jab-injury wheelchairs, and toe-tags are piling up.
We call them vaguely, "adverse events."
They began in nursing homes, and now include athletes, children, family, co-workers & neighbors.
When do adverse events slip-slide... into culling?
Green New Deal
12 July 2022
Color me stunned; color me gray.
I returned, to the state of my birth and higher edyoukayshun, to a landscape disfigured.
An ugliness which kills bald eagles, and does not deliver on promised xyz.
Ridge lines and plains blighted with monster propellers.
Couple years ago an ice storm froze into uselessness, the massive Texas investment in energy-independence aka wind turbines.
Plants froze; pipes froze. People huddled...
Who knew?
Sweden... Where the same thing happened.
Now in residence, beneath a heat dome, the power grid is teetering on overload.
You gotta be kidding, How can that be?
We've saluted climate change and bovine flatulence as ultimate peril.
But, but there's little to no wind.
Wind turbines are operating at 10% capacity.
Chapter deux, in the world according to unicorns.
It's too, too damn hot, but winter will come, after brisk autumn days and glory leaf color.
Winter will come to Europe where I still have friends.
Germany is preparing to further embrace freedom from natgas and oil.
Landlords will control thermostats, and turn down overnight heat in apartments.
Hot water use becomes fraught: Bathe less and wash clothes less.
Municipalities are advised to create "warm spaces" in arenas, stadiums.
What about wood stoves and firewood, as a sensible Plan B?
Assuming firewood availability, installers, and friendly regulatory agencies...
No wood stoves left.
Last winter when I still was trying to heat with wood in the Rocky Mts., the price of firewood, ahem, doubled.
Deliveries never happened, but angst did.
A snugly wool blanket not needed in triple-digit Texas, I've sent to a friend in Maine.
Cool nights by the North Atlantic, she's already using it in July.
...The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'...
Celebrating Independence
4 July 2022
Mornings in heat-drenched Texas, peepers sing by the pond, the water luminous at first light.
And Lord God almighty, I "saw a thing."
Leading into Fourth of July, two great white egrets, hauntingly lovely, enjoying pond frogs!
I tried to alert kin, but the elegant birds spread wing toward a loop of the river.
Goofy doodle-dawg would send them soaring in any case, but I have hope they've found nook along the wooded loop.
Frogs galore there and catfish.
I've celebrated dawn by reading aloud our US Declaration of Independence.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary...
My cousin has helped me with our national anthem, often screechy in performance, and why so bellicose?...
In the context of the War of 1812, when Great Britain burned down the White House and tried to exact retribution for loss of the American Colonies...
A poem was written by a man who had been on board a prisoner of war ship with Americans below decks, in cages and filth.
Francis Scott Key, a Baltimore attorney, was negotiating with the British Admiral to do prisoner exchange.
It seemed a go.
Key descended into the bowels of the ship and reported same.
The Admiral of the entire British War Fleet instead, upped the ante:
Set the impudent American flag at half mast on the ramparts of Fort McHenry, and submit to the British Crown.
If not?
The Fort, its patriots and many civilians would be bombarded by the fleet into utter oblivion.
Key reported this to the prisoners.
The flag was not lowered.
The British Admiral pronounced this American stupidity, as insane.
Key quoted General George Washington:
"Better to die on our feet, than live on our knees."
The massive Royal Navy bombardment of Fort McHenry, in Baltimore Harbor, launched.
Key hustled down the ladder all through the night, cannon booming from the wooden warships of the line, and reported to the prisoners.
They repeatedly asked, "Is the flag still there?"
At dawn, the flagpole hung askew; the flag in tatters, but not collapsed.
The factoid I had not understood, stupid, insane or what-have-you?...
The pole had taken many direct hits, by the most powerful navy in the world.
The pole was not vertical, lodged against the bodies of men.
Waves of patriots had replaced the dead again and again, holding the independence flag aloft through the bombardment.
Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave?
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave...
Flaunting Pride Bods,
Oh Spare Us
27 June 2022
With children in the crowd; kids charmed at school by Drag Queen story hours?
Flashers okay in demento enclaves?
And what are they thinking?
During the anorexia mania, a mirror did not reveal a skeletal form to the person in control by self-starving.
We're living an attempt at new-normal.
A whole different perception in a land of multi-personality pronouns.
As Hollyweird/Disney/MSM and bizarro politicos attempt to normalize pedophilia.
Bodies best left covered now strutting as though irresistible/adorable/foxy?
With bondage leather, tatts and body piercing.
Men with boob jobs, ball gowns, pink wigs and streetwalker makeup wiggle their backsides and danglies.
Does it play in Peoria, in the American Heartland?
Dunno, but locally in podunk SW, a new school superintendent has axed CRT and Drag Queen grooming of kids.
After Uvalde's gun-free outrages, local licensed-to-carry dads showed up to see kids safely though their last days of the school year.
Sheriff, Deputies and retired LEO's out in force.
And the area elected Mayra Flores in the run-off, who reminded everyone that the demographic is characterized by love of family, community, God and country.
Hopelessly antiquated?... Or a heartbeat, steady as she goes?
Stagger Back Inside,
Chug-a-lug Water
23 June 2023
In town magenta crepe myrtle, a heat indicator, comes shimmering into bloom.
Very pretty, and Lord have mercy.
Would eggs fry on the sidewalk?
Quite possibly, but it's so hot, hens are barely laying.
Will not waste the egg.
Sahara dust is airborne and due to reach here this evening.
Dust, dust... sepia images from long ago...
My mama was a child in the Great Depression; they all walked to school.
Mothers tied damp bandannas across the kids' faces to block some of the Dust Bowl incursion.
In a time of no air conditioning, windows were kept tightly closed with rolled up towels along the base.
Think 100+ degrees morphing to bake oven.
Some days angel of mercy intervention by the Principal sent the kids home---to cannon-balling into creeks and dousing each other with garden hose spray.
School Marms, still bound into corsets, let that bit of Victoriana go.
They wore loose blouses and went quietly molten with everyone else.
Kids went barefoot once set free, and wore shorts with no tops.
So did I, my first grade in Texas.
Evenings, our family and friends sat on the front porch, rocking and sipping sweet iced tea with fresh mint.
We were cooling off and waiting on the light show, the wild summer lightning.
We told stories around the thunder, boom-ba-boom.
Little kids fell asleep on laps and were carried into bed like sacks of potatoes.
Soap & Gardens
12 June 2022
As grocery and hardware store shelves grow meager, as they empty, what may be missing from ordinary life?
I looked out on blooming yucca, remembering that pioneers heading west made soap solution from the roots. We could do that, I guess, those few of us with wild plant access.
Settlers also made a harsh lye soap from pig fat and wood ashes.
They bathed and washed clothes infrequently.
Once a week in a well-run household; bachelors maybe not at all.
Currently hot in the southern US; it feels like August.
Clothes are soon drenched with sweat doing outdoor chores.
Multiple showers/day or even one for the homeless may not be possible.
What about soap?
I thought to order laundry soap on line.
Still a can-do, but with supply chains crimped, delivery may take six weeks.
Whatever normal is becoming, it may be unfamiliar, a terra incognita.
I've remembered an elderly babysitter.
When my parents traveled, I was fortunate to stay with her, a kind lady.
She put slivers of soap in a wire rectangle with handle and would swish it in water to wash dishes or hand wash clothes.
She was poor and had known a rough Great Depression.
We picked supper from her garden, fresh lettuce, tomatoes, beans, greens, beets, squash, raspberries. She saved the delicious canning juice from pickled beets and set hard boiled eggs to marinate, for a marvelous treat.
A widow with fruit trees, she let me climb and settle in the high branches while she pinned sheets to the clothes line. We talked about her childhood, about horse and buggy time, long skirts and high button shoes. I nibbled apples and pears, warm from the sun.
Trust the Science
Trust BigPharma's BigBucks
6 June 2022
With the exception of you've-got-to-be-kidding friends and a few relatives, nearly everyone I know lined up for the clotshot. In the midst of general compliance, we lived Lockdown isolation, mask-Nazis, crushing of small local business, and neighbors suddenly afraid of neighbors.
One friend turned verbally abusive and cursed me to hell, if anyone did NOT get vaxxed after noting my medical malpractice concerns. Refusing, they would imperil everyone.
My Do-No-Harm questions regarded mystery injection ingredients/no insert, directives given by those profiting from vaxx patents, unlawful mandates, and under-reporting of so-called "adverse events."
Now we are embarked on the further societal confusion of illnesses distorting actuarial tables, and called covid by the BigPharma pom-pom squads.
Medical professionals, facing virulent attacks by aligned interests, are reporting post-vaxx heart inflammation, aggressive cancers, neurological harm, auto-immune diseases, fatal clots, miscarriages and perhaps infertility.
Data are accruing which suggest that lying, pathological lying, has been the great underpinning of our global covid convulsion.
And then what?
Are there antidotes to apparent injection harm?
Concerned physicians, bound by their Hippocratic Oath, are working on short and long-term interventions.
Will they succeed after organ damage has occurred?
Will those complicit in harm be frogmarched?
Any precedent for that?
Milagro, Life Anew
16 May 2022
Am emerging from the NM/TX road trip cyclone, still eyeing boxes, dear gawd, and one, of things otherwise paired.
An improbable journey of stranger-angels all along the way, and ones I knew who rallied to help in the mountains.
They arrived for Dr. Zhivago-land packing in appalling blizzard conditions,
Friendship beyond imagining.
May they dwell in paradise.
Temporarily useless, I was tottery, on oxygen. and confined to quarters.
They slogged through the mess to deliver reports.
Terrible phone service; we reverted to people, who show up.
In the Murphy's Law of Moving, bird feeders got left behind.
Now in the Lone Star State, land of my deep roots, am hugely entertained at nesting cardinals, crimson flashes around the TinyHaus.
And all good things come to those who wait.
Sho nuff, a good squirrel-proof feeder had been reduced 30% in price; I pounced.
Shipping still likely in advance of diesel shortfall.
(As "we" send US diesel to Europe to ace Putin.)
So solly, truckers, farmers, babies on formula, and grocery store managers.
Will tuck the bird feeder away till autumn.
With Schadenfreude glee, I plan to watch red-furry-tailed piglets falling ka-thunk to the ground, snickering at crazed acrobatics.
Their rapacious consumption of black oil sunflower seeds soon exceeds budget, harrumph.
Be stifled, beasties; eat acorns.
Plenty of entertainment in slower-paced country days, and nights without street lights.
We set out chairs and did a family viewing of the darkly terracotta Blood Moon last night.
Seven year old watched upside down on two chairs pushed together.
Dawg sat on my foot, and in the wild darkness, stars emerged.
We "have seen a thang." Along with millions of earthlings.
Hard not to to wonder about cave time when light at night was moon, stone-rimmed fire pit and torches... in the visceral, terrifying spectre of eclipse.
Cousins currently at work installing lattice, aka "lettuce", around the base of the Tiny dwelling.
Flower beds will soon follow.
And that's the news from the back of the beyond.
Shedding
Friday 13 May 2022
Have just listened to a board-certified Acupuncturist and Doctor of Oriental Medicine report her experience among the vaxxed, in a Stew Peters interview. She had to close her practice after passing alarming blood clots while treating vaxxed patients.
This transmission phenom is called, "shedding" and apparently, according to Pharma docs, was designed into the jabs. As a way of imposing "herd-immunity" on those refusing the shots, aka the vaxx-hesitant
I experienced "shedding", trapped in a 1.5 hr. PO line, in a heavily inoculated community...
Came home ill.
Ate nothing for the next 10 days while passing copious tar-black diarrhea.
(The WuFlu weight loss program.)
Drank water to fend off gently dying by dehydration.
Two weeks later, not able to breathe, fainted and did a face plant into a snow drift.
MD neighbor hauled me to hospital.
Two dreadful weeks of pulmonary embolism, etc.
Family rescued me to lower elevation on physician advice; could breathe freely again.
Do I consider the op demonic, and true-believers, at risk?... Friendships have cratered over differing conclusions.
The appellation of the non-vaaxed as "pure bloods", may not be helpful, evoking Nazi Aryan pretensions.
Simplicity
2 May 2022
My cousins rescued me from the land of hypothermia and raging wildfires. They brought me home to Texas where I was born, to lower elevation. I can breathe.
It's ranching country. People meet your eye, and extend a firm handshake, not the least bit shy about belly laughs.
Stetsons and cowboy boots? You betcha.
Did I mention, keen perception?
We live way rural, the back of the beyond, but remain nonetheless attentive to the state of the nation, and global control freaks metastasized into leadership. Both the moronic and the pathological.
If we muddle into overwhelm, we find our way back to the quietly transformative:
We talk and plant flowers.
Not all are in agreement about the imposition of absolutes.
My Cuz tells the story of a gray eminence visiting and sitting in a congregation. A renowned biblical scholar, an elder, and quite an honor to have him present.
The Pastor asked him to come up and teach everyone the distillate of his lifetime of study. From the pulpit, the scholar looked out at everyone, and said:
Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
And returned to his seat.
Small Doings in Partnership
13 April 2022
"That goofball Dawg just drank out of your coffee cup."
"Oh?"
I had set the pottery cup down on a low stone wall while watering in flower seed, Heavenly Blue Morning Glories, and Empress of India Nasturtiums. My cousin who pays attention had just saved me from (fill in the blank) for the nth time. I would not be taking the next sip.
Dawg, meanwhile, had fortified herself with chaga coffee, dandelion root, maca, cacao and cayenne. Seemed to like it fine.
It's HOT in South Texas, relative to snow on the ground till June. My cousins, and friends who packed the U-Haul, scooped me up on a lightning trip south after my face plant and horsepital stay.
Am slowly grokking that my green thumb Hill Country aunt has talked winter garden for years, while I shoveled snow. Now I, moi, am talking autumn/winter garden with nursery folks.
Am in the midst of spading forks and watering cans, planting tropical fragrance... Tuberoses, gardenia, star jasmine! An olfactory topography which wafts me back to Panama and Key West of childhood.
Joy of joys, have settled in with kin who found a TinyHaus for me and live a partnership marriage. Am now part of the scene and we do things together, including the humongous hedge, the hedge planting, to block visuals on a neighbors' feedlot enterprise.
A huge heartfelt change after being a Lockdown Leper Colony of one, among the Triple-jabbed, in an area increasingly infested with Kalifornika refugees.
It's Holy Week.
Much to be thankful for, all appearances to the contrary.
The Lord is risen (and hope is rising.)
The Lord is risen indeed.
Far-fetched in North America?
5 April 2022
We haven't known famine in the USofA for generations.
Those who lived it, and could warn us, have died out.
A context from my teens, still concerns me.
I attended German Gymnasium in 1960.
We had a couple classes of E. German refugees who lived in a tent city outside the metro one.
It snowed and the wind blew.
Kids had chilblains and reddened hands.
My classmates looked shell-shocked from post-war hardships and the horror of parents as former Nazis.
Their lunches consisted of thin black bread slices, smeared with thick lard.
I had to ask my mother to eliminate my well-fed conspicuous consumption.
An orange excited staring and longing.
Lettuce on a sandwich?
fugettaboutit.
PB&J also stirred hunger pangs among the Schmalz-eaters.
It was an ambient agony I could not fix; could only try to to be kind & unobtrusive.
My classmates also stank due to pig fat diet and utilities being barely affordable.
One bath a week and no deo...
Can't happen here, in the midst of World Economic Forum planned destruction?
With governments here and the EU, blocking farmers from planting needed crops?
Refer back to "mostly-peaceful" Molotov cocktails of recent memory.
Can grains and beans sustain a family?
Sure, but herbs, spices and creative cooking help.
Takeout and ready-meals may not see us through.
I embarked on this rumination when a smart-ass colleague announced that his Victory Garden would consist of densely-planted cannabis.
His plan?
To dry his crop and barter it for freeze-dried camping meals.
Just a laugh a minute.
Hedgerow Diversity
29 March 2022
Now strolling among bluebonnets, and not shoveling snow, my cousin and I are eying the line fence with a young neighbor. Dollar signs revolving in his head, he decided to build a cattle feedlot, up against our common fence, the one installed by my cousins, with never a by-your-leave.
Hubby cousin is lining up an earth auger for the tractor, to dig planting holes. Gal cuz has lain awake at night plotting a hedge to blot out the eyesore, feed birds, fill the land with fragrance.
Hubby eyed our Tigger-like enthusiasm dubiously, and the order of thirty substantial plants, but is a Honey-Do-Hero from way back...
Before Britain decided to follow the US monoculture model, and bulldozed their hedgerows, they were marvelous food sources and wildlife habitat.
When Germany blockaded the British Isles in WW2, and Brits no longer had access to Mediterranean citrus, they sent school kids in their cute uniforms into the hedgerows to collect wild rose hips. Still a country of cottage-remedy savvy, the hips were dried for tea, made into jam and syrups as Vit C sources.
Hedgerows also contained wild plum, crabapple and currants, hawthorn, bramble berries, medicinal plants, etc. They blocked desiccating winds and held winter snows in place to melt into the land gradually.
A realm of birds, critters, imaginative children... and elders who knew herbs and country wines...
Cuz and I are already planning to "net" some of the hedge fruit (of the yet un-planted bounty!) to save back some for jam-making. And the little girl? If lineage holds, I'll hope to teach her as our grandmother taught me.
The woodland yields pecans and wild persimmons. I was blest with a copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons, while on grad student short rations. Have walked, with an eye to local and plentiful, ever since.
Not an Easy Time
26 February 2022
Help us to forgive one another... has become a refrain, dead of night and when our internal compasses seem to slip.
The rapid-fire speed of the internet helps us to blurt out harm, which might have been ruminated and let go.
I do wonder about the strange under reporting of adverse events relative to the mandates.
And how may the weird jab ingredients be affecting long term health, and even mental clarity?
Old friends are fading away as though on voyages we no longer share.
I had to call the County Sheriff's office recently about some poor boundary behavior.
Nothing like an LEO on the front stoop to focus the mind.
All the confusions, post-lockdown, I hope will pass.
God willing, before war offers full and horrid diversion
Meanwhile have had life blown to bits, and am tumbling out of the tornado, not in Munchkinland, but into a different, lower elevation US state.
My Texas grandmother, who was friend to everyone, told Mama as she headed off to college, that if she had one true friend in life, to count herself blest.
It's cold in the mountains, with fresh snow.
Tulip leaves are sprouting.
Lord have mercy on courageous truckers, farmers, and tone-deaf "rulers."
Murphy's Law of Winter
29 January 2022
Am waiting for the clown car to roar through the casita.
1:30 AM, piled with bedding, I come flailing out, to smoke alarm shrieking.
I had no fire lit; a high decibel, technical malfunction..
Since then have stomped up and down the step ladder many times.
After initial struggles to release the battery, I learned that w/o battery, it still could shriek.
I pushed buttons; I prayed.
I considered the Nuremberg category of Crimes against Humanity.
Have currently reduced this convenience item to intermittent beeps, but it may lunge into screams at any moment.
The need-to-know people have been notified.
Do electricians leap with joy at electrical messes on a snowy Saturday morning?
As a side note, which many think silly, Mercury is currently Retrograde.
So what?
Electrical- and electronics-what.
Typical: A friend's hard drive bit the dust.
My smoke alarm follies also a contender.
Have been down with their-name-is-legion crud, so my appreciation of slapstick may be at ebb tide.
Nonetheless, Goldfinches, in winter-drab mode, are at the feeders,
Got a fire started.
Am under roof.
A friend brought real chicken soup from her own flock.
Many tender mercies.
Wonder What the Poor Folks are Having Tonight?
17 January 2022
https://canadafreepress.com/article/i-wonder-what-the-poor-folks-are-having-tonight
[When my grandparents died, the side of the family characterized by city life, and high achievement in military and govt... I found WW2 ration cards.
They relied on the cards and most especially Black Market.
The other side of the family was small town, also professional, but folks in that whole surround had BIG gardens, a milk cow, chickens, hogs and a smoke house.
I learned canning from the Grandmother, and gardening from the Grandfather.
Their lifestyle was still intact in my childhood until the Mother/Grandmother died young.
She was truly the gravitational center of hearth and home, and a gourmet cook in a little town.
Have lived and dined in many places, but their groaning boards were the best meals I've ever eaten in my life.
And around that table, the best storytelling!
Am watching the growing market niche of locally grown food, and "Slow Food."
Also the farmers taking on growing season apprentices.
I'd call this a Paradigm Shift from the huge-Ag-Monsanto era, though not always obvious.
Earth doings are more slo-mo than many news cycles. Am hopeful.]
Warm Hearth, Cold Showers
24 December 2021
A friend and I hatched the university era wild-assed idea to spend August in the Scottish Highlands.
I wanted to see and smell the heather, roll in it, shout to the heavens that I knew this land.
Um. August in Scotland can be cold, with cold slanting rain.
Hostel "parents" tended to be dour.
We were shooed out from under roof for the whole day into wild nowhere, seabirds keening, wind off the northern waters.
On return at suppertime, we were allowed to cook a meal and have a COLD shower.
No wasting of fripperies on pampered students.
But I was able to stand among the boulders at Culloden, where the Clans were crushed and many survivors fled to the New World... the Smokey Mountains, near my long ago farm.
Highland Games and tribal memory live on even now, on Grandfather Mountain.
In those Scottish gale force winds, we took ferry to the Isle of Skye for stunning glimpses of ancient warrior genes; heard haunting bagpipers facing out to sea, skirling on a promontory at their Highland Games.
We also split for two days at a cozy B&B, warm at last, Lord God almighty, warm at last.
Hot water bottles pre-warming the duvet-mounded bed, and a room with roses everywhere, carpet, wallpaper, bedding.
We stuffed ourselves with porridge, kippers, farm eggs, scones, clotted cream, homemade marmalade, grilled tomato and mushrooms.
The grandmotherly inn keeper (more roses!) clucked around us and beamed, as we decimated her groaning board. Bless her forever.
Was it worth cold hostels and cold showers?
Oh you betcha, but I was young and stoopid.
Have since tented way too long and pretended a tepid solar shower held steady the hope of hearth and home.
Lord have mercy on those sleeping rough this Christmas Eve, with rain morphing to deep falling snow...
In the bleak mid-winter...
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child...
The holly and the ivy..
Ding dong merrily on high...
Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green...
Once in Royal David's city...
Lo, how a rose e'er blooming...
Joy to the world, the Lord is come... Let heaven and nature sing...
Does zoom church feed the soul?
Dunno; I refuse.
As a singer who has performed in the great Oratorios, Requiems and ancient chants, with organ all but vibrating bone marrow and heart, I await the return of community, of hugs, and especially laughter.
White Christmas is coming, and a New Year.
Neighbors and I will stroll down to the roaring river on Christmas Day, mountain springs cascading, after last night's pounding rain.
With a BIG Great Pyrenees, as the bears haven't gotten the word about hibernation.
They are leaving fresh scat nudges, that in farming country, in the USofA, nature is still wild.
Flyover Country Christmas
17 December 2021
My Texas cuz, with the well-developed funny bone and sniffer for phoniness, did the family storytelling gig, to reassure me about 'murrica....
They live in farm and ranch country around a pretty little town still taking care of their old architecture, old people, and high holy places of family and generational skills.
Children are treasured.
Men are not shamed for "testosterone-poisoning."
Some walk bow-legged from a lifetime in the saddle.
Their little town Christmas Fair/Food Fair, was thronged with mask-less celebrants, jugglers and holy fools, hooting laughter, and meetings of old friends.
For the Christmas Tree Lighting, their Santa rode in on a dappled, long horn steer!
A gentle beast, he let kids climb aboard for a holiday photo.
These are kids who live around livestock, working dogs & wild critters, who muck out barns.
Not toy poodle country, and "each to his own bad taste."
It's a grand country yet, and we're lucky to live here.
Enter Tiny Tim:
God bless us, every one.
Where Once We Sang
12 December 2021
In town yesterday early, I savored a lemon-ginger mousse at the artisan chocolaterie.
Was hot to trot for the annual bonfires and carols in the pedestrian-only delights of Old Town.
Lovely sunlight on the terrace, though brisk after a sub-zero dawn.
Different ambience this year, however, hard not to note, with fear-spacing of celebrants.
One shop has a green & a red light above the door.
Green permits limited entry.
Another shopkeeper tells me she's just gotten her booster, and her arm is bothering her.
Oh? Unwitting super-spreader, aye.
Told I have to wear a mask.
You have one?
Yup... I hook the elastic over my ears, under my Dr. Zhivago hat.
Nutritionist voice, muffled by cute cotton:
"A lot we didn't know early on about the injections, taken to feel safe.
Now concerning ingredients have been identified.
Three things show promise, and might help moderate the concerning contents:
NAC
Chaga
Vitamin D..."
Maybe she'll remember.
Probably not, as she has no curiosity about the government's obviously benign mandates.
Her craft shop had been a joyful community gathering place, until epizoodic onset.
Perhaps again one day.
Had done my carol-singing that morning in anticipation of joining other singers,
We used to do impromptu gathering on the long upper balcony in the midst of trees' twinkly lights.
Bright sound, and below us piñon fires, luminarias, pets in silly outfits, friends embracing, laughter.
Hark how the bells, sweet silver bells,
All seem to say, throw cares away.
Christmas is here, bringing good cheer
To young and old, meek and the bold...
Mandata,
What Will It Take?...
Divided Berlin Postscript
8 December 2021
In divided Germany, I learned to dread the Stasi.
In reunified Deutschland, Brown-Shirt-wannabes are being unleashed to force-inject the populace.
In one state, those who refuse to be jabbed are being denied entry to grocery stores, if they lack a "passport" aka, Papiere, bitte.
Accept medical outrage or starve.
The EU bureaucrats are trying to weasel their way out of repercussions.
We don't need no stinkin' Nuremberg Trials 2.
A German husband forged a passport for his wife.
Her employer discovered it, meaning their children could be taken by the state.
Five deaths followed, the entire family
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10284389/German-husband-kills-wife-three-young-girls-faked-jab-certificate.html
An Aussie football (soccer) coach has quit, decrying the harm of the mandates, after a crack player came down with pericarditis.
In Europe, soccer players are dropping dead of cardiac arrest on camera, during games.
Yet I know people, uncomfortably less like friends, who feel "safe" fully jabbed.
Bring on the boosters... on the word of profiteer psychopaths.
My jaunts, into the spikethingie-shedders in town, become a slip-slide into bizarroland.
The non-compliant marked as latter-day lepers, by sick governance and MSM-designation.
New Zealand, where thank goodness I did not emigrate, is being run by an apparent twisted creature.
The whacks will never end, her promise to constituents.
Little kids, now "eligible" for jabs, are dying of heart failure.
A Mom learns her kid was jabbed, w/o parental consent, after being promised pizza.
And what of long term mandate quibbles?
For those who did not immediately keel over from anaphylactic shock?
Oncologists enter, stage left.
Patients in remission, with immune systems jab-gutted, are suddenly metastasizing.
God in heaven, help us.
P.S.
My USN dad had a business trip to Berlin.
My mother and I were surprisingly invited.
I leaped at the chance.
Pater was not allowed through Checkpoint Charlie.
Mama and I, however, were allowed into the splendors of E. Germany.
The platitude-addled tour guide did not interest me.
Food kiosks did.
I eyed limp carrots, scabby potatoes and runt cabbage.
Juxtaposed with glitzy store fronts of luxe goods.
We were on foot and approached a side street.
I took off, fleet of foot.
Much shouting behind me.
I came loping back after ascertaining the faux-store fronts and bombed out structures behind.
Hotdemm, 15 years old and my first Potempkin Village.
The tour guide was apoplectic and verbally abusive.
My mother, smiling as though all were well, hissed,
"Don't ever do that again. You could have been shot."
Chaga & Ginseng Wildcrafters,
Trucker Ingenuity
2 December 2021
Sitting outside, transferring bulk cacao powder to jars (saving $7/lb.) I glanced up when the FedEx guy started down the drive.
Perched behind the wheel, of a soccer mom's van?!!
Also looked like a story, with a magnetic FedEx sign on the side.
"Cute rig," I offered as an opener.
He's driving a rental.
A part gave out on his big truck, while he was making deliveries.
"You having any supply chain issues?"
"Oh yeah, starter went, and we're having trouble finding a replacement."
(Apparently truckers are plundering old abandoned trucks, huge and small, for parts.
Which otherwise once arrived from off-shored manufacture in China.
And, let's get real, if we can't truck food to markets, cities won't eat.)
Angst also lurks in the plant kingdom.
The medicinal mushroom, Chaga, has burst on the healing, and supply & demand scene.
There's hope that it may be a component of a wellness protocol regarding Wuhan corona in its variations, and assist the injected to detox from taking the jab.
The birch tree myco-medicinal is stunningly high on the ORAC scale as an antioxidant, leaving blueberries in the dust.
Chaga is weird looking, a hard black and russet fungus.
Much of it is too high to reach from the ground.
As it costs the earth, I gathered accessible bits in my life on a Maine island.
It erupts through the papery bark of trees in our far northern arc of birch forests... from Alaska across Canada, upper NY state and Maine, Eastern Europe to Siberia.
Clif High's ever alert sleuthing, notes folk report of Chaga tea-drinker tribes in Siberia protected from gnarly disease, while neighboring non-Chaga-drinkers fell ill.
It can be enjoyed in chaga coffee (1/2 tsp to liter French Press carafe) or most conveniently in a wildcrafted Adirondacks tincture: https://birchboys.com/products/chaga-tincture
It grows remotely and also grows ever more expensive, in precarious times, with a risk of greed harvesting and no care given to years beyond this one.
There's precedent for that, a history-rhyme.
In the already poor Appalachia of America's Great Depression people held little cash money.
Corn didn't bring in much, so it was fermented in illegal stills into moonshine liquor.
The locals also knew the wild medicinal plants.
In a 1930's prequel to China's tentacles everywhere, China fastened on valuable American Ginseng, as a more yin version of the Oriental species.
Folks lost the good sense their grandparents had given them, desperate for income.
In sane times, Ginseng roots are dug in the fall after the red berries set, which are scattered to ensure future bounty.
Frantic wildcrafters began harvesting whenever they could locate a stand, at any time in the green months.
Ginseng came close to extinction, nearly all of it sailing away to China.
And it happened in living memory.
That we had any left at all, was thanks to inaccessible topography.
Starting up my Blue Ridge farm years ago, I couldn't do a thing about long lost Passenger Pigeons, or the imported blight which took our chestnut trees.
But I could plant Ginseng seed, and did, first thing, in rich loamy soil, and the north slope shade of oaks and sugar maples.
A similar over-harvest extinction could happen with valuable Chaga.
Am hopeful we will not "achieve" wipe-out, given the difficulty of harvest--climbing tall trees with an ax, bitten by mosquitoes, slogging through marsh.
We have wildcrafters of integrity, and others who storm the birch forests like a rampaging Godzilla.
A certain monster retailer, a jungle river, hosts purveyors who harvest badly and process woody Chaga at rapid grind and damaging high temperature.
For a fast buck.
Could we speak as adults for a moment?
About entering another Great, or Greater, Depression?
At a shaky time of "adverse events", among the vaccinated.
The Old Farmers Almanac predicts a cold, long and overcast winter.
(Which means less Vitamin-D production.)
Those with diminishing immune function are vulnerable to harsh experiences of winter colds & flu.
Holistic physicians offer well-documented concerns, that fewer of us may emerge.
But what if, however many of us, were to come out of this global disarray as stewards, as innovators?
With, please God, more finesse than wrecking balls and Molotov cocktails.
It's not a sure thing.
Thanksgiving Tales
28 November 2021
An old friend, she was struggling with her covid mask while aggravated, and stopped when she heard me laugh. Without preamble, she ripped off the mask.
"I had a terrible Thanksgiving!"
She's really good at drama du jour, so I settled my grocery satchel to hear what had ticked her off..
"All my guests sat at the dinner table and argued politics and mandates, interrupting the whole time.... You know [...] ?"
"Sure, the monologue-maestro who doesn't realize one person's intensity, does not a conversation make?"
"Humph. He finally realized that I'd grown cold, and went winding down into some sort of puzzlement, not understanding there might be problem. I got up to bring in some more sweet potatoes; he came along to help, and face the music. I hissed at him: 'You piss me off, an activism hog. Just stop it. But I still love you.'
Her eyes narrowed as though scanning for a target. I laughed again:
"Yeah, aggravation and affection, there's a cognitive dissonance we can handle!"
I was off and away on 10,000 errands--get a new car battery installed before dire weather. Dropped into a thrift. Found two European Christmas ornaments for a song. Seemed a good omen: both clowns.
Stopped to chat with a scruffy fellow lugging around a fat, sort of portable propane tank, needing help on getting it filled. He's living in an RV; ran out and it's getting cold. Couldn't cook or shower or get warm. A very thin line from barely making it, to tangible fear.
People were buying Christmas wreaths and little trees. We were spared Frosty the Snowman and Jingle Bells. No sign of the Salvation Army yet. Wonderful work in the world, but burdened with corporate idiots this year. I've heard many folks say the SA can go pound sand with their CRT demand that we own up to racial thought crimes.
I volunteered one blustery December day years ago and spoke to the kind and otherwise people who donated. A big counter-intuitive for me: The poor with little to spare donated and taught their children to do so, in Spanish, Tewa or English. The full shopping carts with plenty liquor surged on past.
Anyhoo, Salvation Army can ring the darn bell to the Last Trumpet for all I care. I donate nothing further, till corporate poohbahs remember that we're Americans, and we're all in this together.
As I was about to head out of a parking lot, heading home, a pretty young woman stood up from a squat. I opened the window, asked how she was getting along? Handed across some food and a buck, She said Thanksgiving was hard; it was lonely and cold. How was mine?
"Well different, after all the lockdowns and fear of one another. Lonesome for sure. I did quiet stuff, stacked firewood. And one plus on being alone? No arguments!"
Living with Bears
18 Oct 2021
In this verdant valley, down the road a bit stands an orchard, where it's windfall apple time. Several of us have encountered a yearling roly-poly crossing the road. I just stopped the car and admired his passing, as he looked over his shoulder, and hustled up the mountainside. Bears roll forward, on one massive foreleg, then the other, a little like skunks.
A young woman happened to be strolling up the road, and spotted the bear. Bear stood his ground and watched what she'd do, not budging. Bears are chancy, though this one had just stuffed himself with fallen apples and might or might not be mellow.
Don't turn and run, silly. They're faster. Don't try to climb a tree, their natural habitat. She stood there, immobilized. Finally a truck approached; she squeaked out a cry for help. The driver opened the passenger door. She leaped in and hitched a 1/4 mile ride, beyond the roadblock bear!
Stars grow more brilliant, hint of piñon wood smoke, and down by the river the neighborhood tabby cats are doing clown routines, rolling in wild catnip. We watch for bears along the river banks, when the cats, who go for walks, join in.
I've been out with loppers starting on garden cleanup, cutting back lily stalks and such in the golden Indian Summer light. The lopper tool was stout enough to manage some diameter, so I cut back an aspen branch apparently which gave way under a larger bear. The monster male, I'm guessing, who also wallowed his way through a large Rugosa rose bush. This year he fancied the big rose hips. Who knew?
Wildlife have feasted on bounty this year, not lean pickings at all. So what's up with robbing my rose hip jam makings? We wonder, we do. Old Man Winter is on many minds, and it may be critters know way before we two-footeds. When I lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains, old timers would ponder heavy acorn set and squirrels packing away stashes. From time out of mind, it presaged a hard winter.
As to global warming, Antarctica has been the coldest since 1957, when recording first began in the Geophysical Year. Big increase in ice as well. Meanwhile volcanoes are popping off, and in the cycles which span centuries, not sound bites, am reminded of flamboyant sunsets and cold after Krakatoa, and the Year without Summer, when Mt.Tambora blew.
As we head into lower sunlight and overcast of winter, our traditional flu season, recall that Vitamin-D Insufficiency seems to be the keystone to immune system resiliency. This was noted early on in the pandemic. Ample plasma Vit-D levels never checked into hospital; those with meager Vit-D were unlikely to ever depart on their own two feet.
Loved Ones & Lemmings
15 Oct. 2021
In my teens we lived in divided Germany. Some of my classmates were E. German Refugees who spoke Russian amongst themselves, and at our Christmas Pageant, performed Slavic dances, the squat and kick sort.
I found them intriguing. Their families had fled, after lives under Swastika and the USSR's Hammer and Sickle. Courage in evidence, my goodness yes, but the kids gave off frissons of terror they'd known. They seemed to have adapted by becoming obedient and colorless, almost cement-gray.
In this time frame my Naval Officer dad, that's USN, took me on a jaunt, or so I'd imagined. He surprised me by arriving for the drive in full dress uniform. I'd figured on a hike, maybe lunch at an inn? Well, not exactly.
He took me to the East German border, to a scene out of a 1930's noir film. It was snowy, overcast and cold. Organizing me to stand to the side and slightly behind him, away from the machine gun goon in the watchtower, he settled in.
Pater stood at ease but very much with full attention on the soldier manning the gun, pointed in our direction. About all I could manage was my breathing... I stopped hyperventilating.
Then Popilein spoke to me, though not looking at me, and morphed the dismal setting to gold. He taught me about the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War. By hardscrabble grit and guerilla warfare, they defeated the Superpower of the era. But at monstrous hazard to themselves, their families and all they held dear.
They risked everything for freedom, as had my classmates' families.
With regret, I have been reminded of the Stasi since the onslaught of global lockdowns, fear-induction and now, mandate violations of the Nuremberg Code.
Initially I woke in the night grieving as friends and family acquiesced to those profiteering from vaccine patents, meanwhile blocking access to inexpensive meds of short effective protocol.
People I hold in high esteem, and know to be intelligent let themselves be herded by pathological liars. It's still going on.
No need to belabor the toxins in the shots; we're living them. As immune systems go auto-immune, some will enter the rite of passage of dying, by stroke, cardiac arrest, organ failure, paralysis, cancers and whatnot.
Godspeed to us all and good journey as we learn, by doing.
Pet Food, New
& Skill Sets, Old
4 October 2021
Walking down the supermarket miles of food industry inedibles, I reach a gourmet aisle.
Honest to God: For the family pussycat and Golden Doodle... Wild salmon, wild elk, and buffalo!
For years this has had unsustainable stamped all over it, and at some point, becomes too costly.
Or unobtainable: Salmon fishing has been banned on the Yukon River, including fishing and alderwood-smoking, by the salmon-reliant Native Americans.
Salmon stocks are so low, spawning is in doubt.
Thinking back, the poor and elderly got by, eating cheap dog food, in the Great Depression, but will we, if things get dicey?
Ingredients have changed, to feed lot offal with Glyphosate, hormones & antibiotics, downer cattle, euthanized pets...
All attractively presented to pet Daddies and Mommies in cute little cans, and feed sacks of dyed crunchettes and fishies.
Homeless signs include requests for pet food for the rescue guard-dog.
Some food banks cater to feeding the pet companions of those in need.
When cost of pet foods hyper-inflate, however, we enter a societal s**tstorm.
Pets have become family to the isolated.
A segment of populations may grieve death of pets more than of humans.
We're a bit turned around, texting.
And what's in store, if not in groceries?
We may not know it yet, that we are embarked on a journey away from trust in Big Brother, as ultimate truth and provider.
We may not acknowledge it yet, that our country has gone from delusional, to broke.
Many of us are about the business of rediscovering a stolid, not glamorous, but abiding resource.
Folks you can count on--Farmers, wood-cutters, handymen and women, those who work round the clock and the seasons, to keep things running.
Let's hear it for Flyover Country, for America's still beating heart, and its people.
Our Atlantic and Pacific mega-cities give one pause.
Much of the populace has grown out-of-touch, bizarre, and may not weather coming events.
Kids will hopefully land on their feet, and begin learning useful/marketable skill sets, as gender studies fail to deliver.
We can prepare simple foods again at home.
Beans and rice, mighty nice, and still affordable.
Take-out and trucker deliveries may soon be, so then.
Who knows? We gutted shop and domestic arts from woke schools.
We might yet find our way to the very old working system of Master, Journeyman, (Journey-person, if you will) and Apprentice.
We're about the business of America--to rebuild competence, health, and our country.
Weather Incoming,
Country Chores
30 September 2021
My old-timer Hispanic neighbor is a better change of seasons, weather-master than I.
If he bothers to tell me anything, I try to pay attention.
His family has been farming and ranching in this fertile valley for hundreds of years.
And, ahem, it's still fertile; AgBiz eat your heart out.
I had just read about the Flash Flood alert and was pulling on heavy socks and garden clogs, when he knocked on the window.
"Where do you want it?"
"It?"
His grandson stood behind him, a big box of seasoned kindling in his arms.
"Oooh, the sunroom?"
The boy brought in four boxes, a cold morning treasure.
Then my neighbor wanted to see the firewood that had been delivered.
He nodded, and was silent...
"He brought you a woman's cord, and he overcharged you.
Figured, a woman wouldn't know, and wouldn't want to complain."
Dad blast it; he had that nailed.
Had looked scant to me, but it's hard to get wood this year.
"Tonight we'll get snow on the peaks," he continued, "and rain here.
You better cover that pile."
I was still deflating about the wood and said, "Okay," vaguely.
Good country man that he is, he rooted on the spot and gave me the beady eye.
His wife watches me puttering in the upper flower garden from their front porch.
He has my number.
"Do it now."
"What?...Oh, you mean, before collecting nasturtium seed."
He kind of snorted.
Mama didn't raise no stupid child.
"Yes, Sir."
After tarping the piles, I potted up rosemary, noshed on everbearing raspberries, picked 2nd crop lavender, tidied up prunings, and realized I was not imagining berries and herbs from a fluorescent-lit cubicle.
Soon I'll be gathering high-flavor apples, in this hidden valley full of life.
Cedar Chests & Evening Fires
16 September 2021
With nights decidedly nippy, we begin thinking, warm woollies and fixings for wintertime soups.
As to cozy fires, firewood became an angst-source this summer with demand exceeding supply. I call it an unnatural event. Never underestimate bureaucratic stoopidity in the greater scheme of things.
During last year's Lockdown absolutes, the state's goobernor also blocked access to national forest woodcutting permits, creating shortfall now. Pretty good local family businesses in harvesting deadwood, reducing wildfire risk, and providing living wage and public service.
Lots of folks here heat with wood. We're watching the price per cord hyper-inflating. Some friends are settling for later delivery of green wood, which won't burn, for a little context.
Beginning to see some leaf color at higher elevations. At this elevation, hummingbirds are mobbing the nectar feeders, tanking up before their migration south. The bronze-colored Rufous hummers seem to have already headed out. Bossy critters, it's quieter among the flowers without dive-bomber Rufous-Ruffians driving away competition.
The wild sunflowers, brawny and tall with good summer rains, now tilt downward, the heads heavy with seed... and upside-down chickadees pecking out bounty! A speckled ground squirrel is trying to re-establish a winter burrow up against the house. I tap on the window and roar. Squirrel scuttles; I pile on more rock to block the new opening. Not suburban sort of pastimes, but am richly entertained.
Bears oh my are still dropping seasonal scat-alerts to fruit ripening--Apricots, cherries, chokecherries, elderberries, alpine currants, and windfall apples. The valley is hosting a Mama bear with two cubs, and a huge galumphing male. Never forgetting, when out and about, that they were here first.
At Farmers' Market, where small is outrageously beautiful, it's the golden time of year. Welcome to cornucopia--pumpkins and winter squash, heirloom varieties of spuds, cream, purple and yellow, heavy bouquets of ornamental sunflowers, charantais and watermelons, dried beans from the Spanish Land Grant era, pozole, roasting green chiles, kale, collards and chokecherry jam.
Leashed dogs of all descriptions snuffle and tangle us in their leashes--chihuahua, greyhound, mastiff, King Charles Spaniel, a Great Dane, Bernese mountain dogs, Australian blue-heelers, and Rescue mutts with big grins and lolling tongues. Little children ride on their daddy's shoulders. Next month, the vendors, families and kids will arrive in Halloween face paint and costumes...
Good harvest to us all.
Skeptics & True-Believers
21 August 2021
"Do you trust the CDC?"
I laughed.
"Well, I do. I trust our government to look after us."
I blinked... "God love ya."
She turned on her heel.
She's bright and funny, and we used to be friends.
Those of us who trusted in govt. experts may be feeling unease & testiness.
The shot, which is not a vaccine, which protects no one, is generating "adverse events."
Those countries with the highest vaxx rates have ER's and ICU's of fully-vaxxed & gravely ill.
Someone, but who?... has got some 'splainin' to do.
Some now call it, the "clot-shot."
We acted on good faith.
How many of us knew that BigPharma is protected from liability, in the event of Murphy's Law?
Nectar & Tropical Perfume
9 August 2021
Bright golden orioles kept coming to the hummingbird feeders.
Keen on the syrup, but stifled, their beaks not slender enough.
So, as an experiment, I snapped off one of the plastic "flowers."
Took them a day or so to get a clue, and now they've found the larger entry and are nectar-happy.
As to a magical, horticultural gift from a friend...
I was 4 or 5 when I first met a Night Blooming Cereus.
My parents were visiting friends with a conservatory full of winter-time flowers.
I saw and barely heard anything else, a gravitational field for moi.
Wife seemed to realize she could trust me and tucked me into the space with a plate of treats.
Said: Be patient; watch the flower buds.
I settled in, silent, not moving, not wanting to startle the buds!
Dusk came on, buds unfurled.
Huge white tropical blossoms opened and spilled the most exquisite fragrance.
Haven't been near a Cereus since.
But I have had a luminous wish list, 70 years in the waiting!
A dear friend decided to move and I went into grief.
While still shocked and trying to put a bright face on her going, she bequeathed her Cereus to me.
I all but threw myself at her feet.
It's huge and growing, with other hefty plants, a west windows forest primeval.
Liking it here, she's sending out improbable shoots/leaves, a Dr. Zeuss visitation!
Have already promised gardener friends:
I'll have them over hopefully, some autumnal twilight, when she's poised to open a bloom.
Under the Apricot Trees
28 July 2021
Two huge trees out back, planted generations ago. Their branches are bigger than many tree trunks, reminiscent of old Southern live oaks, but without the Spanish Moss.
I had made peace with the late, wet snow on trees full of blossom. We're in high mountains after all, the Sangre de Cristo.
The branches, however, have surprised me with fruit. Trees which live to fruit again after snow and frost, hardy trees, don't lavish all their bloom at once. It would be like a gambler, titillated by risk, blowing his wad on one spin of the roulette wheel.
Random blossoms appeared after the snow. No great shakes, I thought, but the trees cheer me with abundance. At first light, I gather windfalls in my harvest basket, leaving bruised, cracked and squished ones for the local wildlife, who'll tidy up overnight--mule deer, bear, skunk and raccoon. Maybe a fox. Haven't seen one yet this year, but I'll bet the neighbor, with the new chicken coop, has!
Over winter, field mice crack open their stash of apricot pits for the kernels. Not all mice remain confined to their cold weather quarters.They try to slip indoors. I found an empty drawer in the sun room lined with cracked apricot kernels, and was not amused.
Sweet Hunza Apricot Kernels are considered a premier food in Tibet, and can be found in health food stores. Some consider them helpful with oncology challenges.
Many of the trees in this area are wildings, sprouted in bear scat. But long, long ago, hundreds of years ago, Franciscan Friars brought seed and orchard cuttings to the New Wold. They sailed in the old wooden ships with high prows and sterns, like the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria of Columbus' voyage. The Friars cradled their orchard treasures, traveling on foot or burro-back. Those first trees they tended, fed two-footeds and eventually wildlife, which did Johnny Appleseed droppings into the back of the beyond.
We are living a bountiful year, rain aplenty, and we know it's a blessing. Wild sunflowers stand eye-level-tall and will soon feed chickadees in the time of aspen gold. Am already noting the sun's angle, slanting toward autumn.
Deluge
24 July 2021
Yesterday we had a second Flash Flood alert.
It rained buckets, bathtubs, with wild thunder and lightning..
One boom, seemingly right overhead, lifted me all but airborne.
For parts of it, I listened to unhinged nature, reading in the sun room.
Downpour pounded the tin roof.
I hunkered down, grateful to be sheltered
Still enough light to read, with random flashes of lightning.
Began delving, One Second After, oops EMP, to honor Ride of the Valkyrie sound effects,
Haven't been down to the river yet; the ground being squishy, water-logged.
Too soon to summon the winter's firewood delivery
Very strange these last weeks of 100% humidity in the high country of NM.
I do acknowledge the blessing of rain, relative to desert, fires and wells going dry.
Wildflowers in beautiful bloom; aspen gold will likely blaze up the mountains, come fall.
As to the angst of transformation, it may not be tidy.
Despite the rupture of control-freaks, through the world's social fabric.
An awkward time, for those who read history.
Rockets and Sat's,
Oh My, the Thrill
20 July 2021
Some wits in the UK have suggested Bezos, the retail Leviathan, not be granted earth re-entry as a planetary act of mercy. His phallic rocket is launching from wild Texas country I used to know. Great night skies, back-of-the-beyond.
I used to go on field botany trips, camping in that wild arid country, collecting seed, etc. Rattle snakes, road runners, sunburn, oh my. We had to pack in lots of water. It was so bloody hot. I remember riding shotgun in my prof's truck, getting ditzy from the heat and pouring a liter of water over my head and down my front. Which soon dried.
I was the only traveler of the fair sex who wore a sun bonnet, to much mockery. And am the only one without leather-skin into later life. Can't imagine doing those adventures now, but I don't regret them. One pre-dawn I got up to snoop around, and standing still, a roadrunner, beep beep, knee-high, stopped two feet form me. I went still.
The wildly improbable bird suddenly went into a blur and attacked a coiled rattler by the old coral fence. As my Texas kin might say, tongue-in-cheek, "Lord gawd almighty, I seed a thang."
Have had rockets and satellites on the brain this last year. Elon Musk has gone all but berzerker with his sat-launches, 5G whether or not, if us mere earthlings agree. There's the EMF-angle with reports reaching Dr. Firstenberg from all over the world of human health disturbances. Birds are falling dead out of the sky, en masse, in a year of co-inky-dinks
Last year, a neighbor and I were out at dusk doing last minute chores when she shouted, LOOK. To the south, a bright light traveled westward ho. Holy cowflop, soon followed by dozens in a line. Neighbor went into geek-ecstasy. Satellites!
Hi ho, hi ho. It's off to work we go...
I went into Luddite silence, and premonition of unintended consequences.
Those of us in the boonies are glad to be out of the light pollution of urban centers. At dark of the moon and new moon, we all but swoon into the vastness of the Milky Way. Turns out, the hundreds and thousands of satellites are actually affecting, not just earth's energy field, but the equanimity of astronomers.
I have friends at similar elevation, but high desert. Their airBnB, off-grid yurt had become a mecca for astronomers, who booked way ahead of time, bringing telescopes to the awesome night skies... Quoth the raven, nevermore...
Satellite light-pollution rules.
And beneath the ocean, blasts of sonar disorient cetaceans who beach and die.
As above, so below, and we've barely a clue.
In praise of night skies, firelight and stillness.
I may not live to see it, but there's hope for us yet.
Sun Looked over the Mountain's Rim
11 July 2021
A Robert Browning line of poetry, but also, that's my "Mountain Time" morning clock. To the east, mountains delay the blazing sun and its high UV Index.
At barely light I roll out of bed and start garden chores--pick dewy salad greens for the day, deadhead flowers, schlepp watering cans to a couple gardens...
And breathe in Regale lily, lavender and evening-scented stock perfume. Rub a tabby tum and get the kitties out from underfoot. Listen to water music of acequia and river.
Then the fiery-white sun all but screams over the mountain rim, and I scuttle indoors. I try not to venture out till the golden hour toward evening.
Meanwhile, what a marvelous show. Hummingbirds visit the nectar spur flowers: columbine, nasturtium and larkspur. Hummers are also partial to, and territorially protective of their nectar feeders. I no longer fret about when to refill them. If I go outside the hummers click and buzz around me. If inside at my desk, they hover just outside the window glass in a blur of wings, and stare, till I make more nectar! Am trainable.
Pollinators seem diminished in the last year or two. I wonder about earth's Schumann Resonance, and our fascination with ever more EMF. And the flashing joy of goldfinches... lost, fallen? Where are they?
In any case, I plant for the bees and butterflies, both nectar sources and the daisy family pollen producers. I look out on wild cut flowers, great splashes of soft English flower garden and flamboyant south-of-the-border color.
There's a scene in the film, "A Man for all Seasons"... Imprisoned in the Tower of London, for refusing to bow to Henry the VIII's will, Sir Thomas More pushes a stool over to the small un-glazed window. Seasons change.. A tree by the River Thames flows from spring flowers to summer leaves, autumn russet, and a bare tree on snowy ground.
Flower pots on a windowsill have encompassed nature for me in the past. What a glory dances now, of crimson. gold, regal purple, orange, fluffy white, lilac and rose-pink, with jewel-winged butterflies and hummers flitting about.
Parting at Morning
By Robert Browning
Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.
Let's Pretend
18 June 2021
An aunt, our Texas family Matriarch, spent her career as Head Nurse in ER and Nursing Home settings.
She was a spitfire about medical malpractice, and liars, including everyone.
"Up and dressed for breakfast," became a family saying
My aunt reported in to the NH at the crack of dawn, and read reports of the night shift and the early staff who oversaw breakfast and tidying of the incontinent, etc
She checked in on each patient, and found that the lady in Room xxx had been dead for hours.
"Up and dressed for breakfast,." a negligent staff member had noted, in writing.
The staffer was blow-torched and fired on the spot.
Aunt was married to a Marine
Our beady-eyed Matriarch, oh I can just hear her... scathingly vocal about...
57 Genders.:
Normality of surgical removal of adolescent balls and breasts.
Fear-induction to make us avid for an experimental injection..
Hiding of adverse events.
A Nursing Home candidate as Commander-in-Chief...
.
Lord, I miss her.
