Firewood take 2

First, on an unrelated note: I enjoyed telling my wife and kids that I am under house arrest. It happened when they asked what that thing on my ankle is for. The truth is that I'm a control in a study of how stroke victims my age move about. I have to wear a pedometer for four days, and mark a checklist of my activities. I'm pretty sure I'll be the only participant who marks "taking care of chickens," and "gathering and splitting firewood" under "other." I wonder if the pedometer detects (ahem) other activities.

Here's a picture of how I left the tree last week, about half cut up. Yo might recall that I wore down my newly sharpened chain doing this much. I'm not aware of hitting dirt, but it got to be a lot of work making the saw cut. The dividing line between bogging down the chain to a stop and levering down hard enough to cut got harder and harder to stay on, and it required more and more pressure. Those of you familiar with chainsaws know exactly what I'm talking about. Another thing a dull saw usually does, is cut crooked, particularly on large logs. When you cut a log whose diameter is nearly twice your saw blade's length, this is a critical failing. Yes, you can cut a log up to twice the length of your bar if you know what you're doing. Think about it.

So here's what happens when you cut with a saw that doesn't cut straight—a lot of extra cutting; the cut doesn't line up as you work your way around the log. Remember, it's harder to cut, too. Note, however, that I am a safe operator. My ear protectors are visible next to the saw. I wear gloves and steel-toed shoes out here, too.

Here are some nice clean cuts from the second session's (yesterday's) work. The small black area on the right-hand log is the top of the cavity carved out by ants, which was the reason for the tree's fall and consequent demise last year. The ants were still happily holed up in the log (no pun intended)—until I divided their apartment complex into fourths. You'll see a more damaged log in the next post.

The woods wasn't still during the week. One of the pieces I had cut last week had rolled away and fallen on its side (you can just see it behind the log in the top picture.). Two spiders had woven large webs on it, and when I noticed them, they were nicely sprinkled with wood chips from today's cutting. Would have made a nice photo, perhaps, but I had a chainsaw in my hand. I was careful to leave them undisturbed for the time being. They'll probably be gone by the time I get that piece harvested.

The area is full of Jack-in-the-Pulpits, and I went to a fair amount of effort to avoid stepping on them. This time of year about all you see is their seed clusters, which are still pretty interesting. I think these were the fattest J-i-t-P seeds I have ever seen.
Next post: what happens when I get this stuff home.

Firewood take 3

Last Saturday was a beautiful early fall day—highs in the low 80's instead of the upper 90's. Sunshine, slight breeze. I had gone to a friend's place in Exton, PA, to pick up some firewood he had. I borrowed a neighbor's trailer (he's a friend, too) and loaded up some pretty big pieces of oak and walnut. He used his front-end loader. Fortunately, I was able to roll them off when I got home.

Then I went to work on that tree in the woods (see the previous two posts). I finished cutting up the tree except for one fork, which was just plain too big to cut. It is a fork, so I might experiment with cutting it into three pieces to see if I can do it. But that's for another day. Managed the whole task without getting the chain too dull to use. Now to get the pieces home. These babies are Heavy. Even though the tree had fallen a year ago, it's oak, and it retained most of its bark, so it also retained most of its moisture.

I called my boy, Josh Jr., down to help. He's a strapping, athletic 17-year old who does Civil Air Patrol and wrestling. He's inexperienced at working, but he follows directions well. I couldn't have done the job without him. I backed the pickup down a logging trail to within a few yards of the area, then we set a couple pieces of wood to make a ramp, and rolled the discs onto the truck bed. Sorry—no photo. We had our hands full of wood. The truck could hold maybe three pieces before it sat on whatever it sits on when the springs are fully compressed. We made two or three trips, I forget. Several pieces remain in the woods, including the one with the spider webs, and we'll get them on another day.

Here's what our wood yard looks like at the house. That small cart is holding the pieces of a small and a large chunk of wood that I split Sunday afternoon. The pack rat container holds some tools and model trains we don't have room for in the house or the sheds. It's replacing the canopy that came down last winter under the snow. Remember that snow? More is on the way. On the far left you can see a white shapeless white object. That's Tyvek vapor barrier, exposed because the contractor abandoned our addition halfway through. The state Attorney General's office is proving about as diligent prosecuting him as he was in working on the project. Both he and the AG office kept coming up with good-sounding excuses for inaction. But I digress.

I split the wood by hand. With a splitting maul, sometimes wedges. Hnngh. Good exercise. Make strong. Val took a picture or two of me swinging the maul for your edification and amusement. It turned out the best picture doesn't show me swinging the maul. It blurred and didn't fit in the picture—I get a pretty good swing in. Sorry, ladies—I have a loose T-shirt on, so you can't see my bulging muscles. However you can see my pedometer, which Val still calls my house arrest anklet.

That black thing on the end of the handle is a rubber cushion to protect the wooden handle from breaking should I happen to overshoot a swing or the wood splits crooked, with the same effect of catching on the handle. That device has save me dozens of handles. Don't buy a splitting maul without also getting one of those.

So there you have it. Maybe one of these days I'll show you my pile of split wood. It's almost all green. I'm still looking for a good pile of dry wood to start the heating season with. Got any firewood you want to get rid of?

Weekend activity

As you might know, we heat with wood. A friend in my motorcycle club has a pile already cut that I plan to pick up this Saturday. I think it's seasoned and ready to burn. Last Saturday I carried out a promise I made to a neighbor to clear a downed oak out of his woods. Well, I started to. My freshly-sharpened saw became dull after about six hours of work, so I quit. Here's a picture of the tree. It had been down almost a year, and they had removed the branches some time ago. Click to enlarge. Val took the pictures, by the way.

 Professional cross-cut teams can slice through something like this in seconds. Of course, they get to work on a uniform log in a sawbuck. They have plenty of room to swing their arms, and there are two of them. And they're showing off. Me, I'm an old guy on a sweltering day working on a tree whose preferred disposition is unknown and only slightly guessable. I know gravity is pulling straight down, but it's pretty hard to estimate the torque and center of gravity.

Consequently these things frequently don't go smoothly, and this activity was no exception. The problem arises from the unknown stresses on the tree and from working with only one saw. You get most of the way through a cut, and without warning the tree shifts and you have a firmly trapped saw. The saw isn't hurt (the bar is solid steel) but it isn't going anywhere. Sometimes a second saw can make (very careful) cuts and free up your stuck one.

Well, I had a second saw once, but I sold it to a professional tree trimmer, who never paid for it, by the way, and I lost his "business" card, so I can't even try to get it back. I actually do hope he's getting good use out of it—it was a good saw. Bigger than my 25-year old farm boss, and brand new. My current one, by the way, according to the guy at the implement dealer, is still worth what I paid for it on ebay. It's a really good saw.

I wanted to shorten the supporting branch so the log would be a safer cutting height. And sure enough, on my first major cut, I cut a little too deep, and the tree settled on my saw.

Sometimes, if you have wedges and a sledge hammer, and the bar is in deep enough, you can wedge the cut open. Not this time. (Actually, you're supposed to wedge the cut open before it binds up, so you can finish the cut. Just be careful not to let the top of the bar hit the wedge. Good way to dull your chain really fast.)

Sometimes you can lever the tree to the side a bit and work the saw loose that way. If you have something better that rotten sticks for levers.

And sometimes you can rock the tree and open the cut enough to let the saw come loose. Rocking can weaken the uncut wood, too, so if you hear crunching, it's good to rock a couple more times. Makes things looser.

This is me trying to rock the tree. It did actually move a bit. And levering with a board I found moved it somewhat, too. I dickered around with it, trying several angles and some more rocking. It was harder work than cutting.

I got lucky. The tree collapsed and the saw escaped uninjured.

Now to finish those six hours. Next post I'll have a few pictures of the cut-up tree.

You can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them. The picture of the stuck saw is fuzzy because Val was laughing. They say say only the truest of friends will laugh at you when you're in a predicament.

Val is the truest of friends.

My relationship with goats

When I was a kid, my brother and I had a pet goat, Coco.

When I lived in Lewistown, IL, I bought a goat to raise for milking. She turned out to be a hermaphrodite, and we sold her when we moved to Pekin.

In Delaware, I raised three Boers to eat, and the BBQ we had that fall is still talked about. Goats make wonderful eating, and if poor Val hadn't had to deal with goat escapees while I was in Minnesota, we might have repeated the effort the next year. Still might, when I retire. If I retire. For now, the fence has been moved, and now confines only the chickens.

Then a couple months ago I ran into the book Goat Song, by Brad Kessler. After reading the preface, I had to read it to my wife and we could hardly put it down. Kessler is a fairly well-known novelist, and his wife is a professional photographer. Both are from NYC. They pulled up stakes, moved to Vermont, and started a goat farm, planning to sell cheese. The book is the story of their transition from the city to the farm. In the book I learned about chèvre, a basic, soft-ripened goat cheese, so of course we had to try it. The author waxed especially about cheese made from raw goat's milk as opposed to the pasteurized stuff.

Back in the early part of the 20th century, when farmers had a problem with Brucellosis (milk fever), the FDA made regulations against selling raw milk products. Of course even now, with good sanitary practices on the farm, they haven't changed the regulations, so you won't find anything but pasteurized cheese and milk in your local grocery store. Which we tried, and it was okay.

Here's the reason raw milk and raw milk cheese is better: bacteria. Yes. You have more than ten times as many bacterial cells in your body than you have somatic (body) cells. If you got rid of your bacteria, you would die. Know how antibiotics can give you diarrhea? The medicine is killing your intestinal microflora and you can't digest properly. Non-pasteurized dairy products contain symbiotic bacteria that you don't get in the store-bought stuff. So I wanted to try some of the cheese that hadn't been sterilized.

Well. Recently I met a goat farmer! Who makes goat cheese! And he agreed to give me some chèvre that they make for their own consumption. Last Sunday I got a pint tub of creamy white soft cheese, not even ripened yet. It has a very mild flavor (read bland) that lends itself to having things added to it. You can mix local honey into it, or dill, or parsley, or even Old Bay, I suppose.

I had my first taste on some whole wheat bread with a slice of tomato on it. Wonderful. Subtly different from the grocery store stuff.

If you stop by before it's gone, I'll share some with you.

Two more non-moto non-mushroom adventures

At least the post includes a goat, maybe several.
Let's go chronological.

I bought a bicycle. A nice Trek mountain-type (no drop bard, slightly knobby tires) with 24 gear ratios (I had a 12-speed Schwinn when I was in HS and thought it was the cat's pajamas.). It's pretty comfortable to ride if you don't sit too far forward on the seat, and it's easy to adjust—Hannah rides it when I'm not using it. I ride it to work, just less than two miles, mostly downhill on the way to work, and I pack a fresh shirt because the wind tends to promote perspiration. I'm too old to wear one of those goofy helmets. Besides, it's a straight shot with only one intersection that contains cars. It uses no gasoline and I get to work in about as long as it takes to ride the bike or take the truck. I got a carrier for it, and a bag to hook on the carrier, so I could take my laptop with me to work. Why on earth did I buy a bicycle? Five reasons.

Jack Riepe

1. I just finished Eaarth by Bill Mckibben. See the review in my previous post, but the gist of the purchase is that I decided to reduce my dependence on petroleum. Yeah, the bike was built in China, and was shipped here and all that, but commerce has not yet collapsed, so I took advantage of it. The bike should last me a good long time, and will use only a few drops of oil for the chain. I suppose I could eventually resort to bacon (or, ahem, chicken) grease if it came to that. Get the book and read it. 
2. I want to get the exercise. I'm 65, and have a wife 26 years my junior. So far I'm in better health than she is, and I want to keep it that way, and not by hurting her health, either. Splitting wood and mowing the grass (hand-powered reel mower) do a pretty good job for my upper body, but not a whole lot for my legs. I can get a pretty good workout going uphill on the way home. 
3. I also want to participate in Jack Riepe's diet. Exercising raises my metabolic rate, (which does more for weight loss than the exercise itself). For those of you who don't know, Jack is a friend in a motorcycle club I belong to, and he's on a personal campaign to lose weight. Several of have joined  him. So far I'm down a couple pounds. Sorry, Jack, Blogspot won't let me put your picture nest to this paragraph.
4. Hnngh. I'm tough. I plan to score points by riding this winter, too, except when there's ice on the road. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid.
5. I can share the bike with my kids.

Yoiks! This has gotten long enough. I'll describe the goat-related non-mushroom adventure in two days.

Some book reviews

NB: The pictures of the books in this post are links to Amazon. They pay me a pittance if you buy a book, but my motive is to make it easy for you to get the book or books, and to have some kind of pictures in the post. I also think it's a good idea to check these books out at the library. That's free.

Lately I've been reading some thought-provoking books. I mentioned The Vegetarian Myth a couple posts back. In one sentence, the book says our bodies are not built to be vegetarian, and we should eat meat. The book says carnivory is the natural order of things, factory farms are not good but local farms are, and we will be improperly nourished if we don't consume meat.

One of the books in Vegetarian Myth's extensive bibliography was written in the 1930's by a dentist who noticed the deterioration of children's teeth over the course of his practice. He and his wife took an around-the-world research trip examining a variety of primitive peoples' teeth, general health, and diet. And the same for their countrymen who had lots of contact with western civilization. The book is Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston A. Price.

One sentence summary: If you and your parents eat white flour and sugar, you will have bad teeth, hindered jaw development, and might get arthritis and tuberculosis, but if you stick with the traditional tribal diet you will be healthy and have perfect teeth. I kind of knew this, but the book is disconcertingly persuasive, and I have pretty much quit eating anything with containing flour or sugar. Took me about three weeks to get over the craving for carbs, but now I'm fine, and I've lost several pounds and feel even better than I usually do, which has been mostly pretty good anyway.

Another book in Myth's bibliography is Endgame, by Derrick Jensen. The author says you should stop reading Vegetarian Myth and go read Endgame if you haven't already. This well-researched and footnoted—and highly readable book is a wide-ranging treatise against civilization, beginning with the advent of agriculture several thousand years back. The book has so much background, facts, and detail that it's pretty hard to summarize in one sentence. But here's my take: We have been living unsustainably, and we're about at the end of what the planet can provide. He's pretty polemical, and advocates a harder line than I'm ready to adopt, but the info he supports his position with not only has the ring of truth, but his points are disconcerting in the extreme. It looks like our grandkids are in for a tough time of it. Remember—all you're getting  here is a really brief summary, so you probably will take what I say with more than a hint of skepticism, and well you ought. But if what he says turns out to be even partly true, you will serve yourself well to have read this book.

You might already have heard of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. You ought to read it if you haven't. (His other books, Blink, and Outliers are also worth reading.) I read Tipping Point some time ago, but its central premise fits well with the next book, Eaarth, by Bill McKibbin.

Tipping point says that under certain circumstances things absorb change apparently without effect, until all of a sudden, everything goes boom.

Eaarth is the shortest of these books I've just read. You might want to read it first. McKibben's thesis is that the change (tipping point) has already happened—we are living on a different planet now than the one we've been living on for millennia, and the "eaarth" is a harsher place to live than the earth was. He backs this up with a large array of statistics and other data (also well biblographied and footnoted) that are pretty persuasive.

I'm only halfway through the book, so I've just started his chapter on what he thinks we should do about it. It looks like he's going to suggest some hard albeit realistic things to do. No, he doesn't advocate stocking up on ammo in the basement, but he is convinced that by the middle of the century things will collapse disastrously if we don't make some changes, one of which is to eliminate dependence on oil. Another is to decentralize almost everything, it looks like—energy generation and food production, for two. His suggestions, as I've read so far, seem to be realistic and doable.

I'm not doing any of these books justice in these short summaries. Read them, especially Endgame and Eaarth. Then let's get together and talk about what we think about this. I'm also interested in your comments.

A quick trip to Philly

I had to run to Philadelphia today on business. It took all day. Well, it took half the morning and half the afternoon, which left me with a nice hole in the middle of the day to go exploring Old City.

I mentioned on my travel blog once that you won't starve in Paris, because of all the restaurants. You won't starve in Philly, either. Seems like a third of the storefronts are eating establishments or taverns.

I walked by several cheesesteak places and picked a place called FarmiCiA. I have no idea why the goofy capitalization. They've been there the better part of a decade in a nicely cleaned up old industrial building. To my motorcycling friends: Young, attractive, friendly, competent staff. The food was great. I got to sit inside the window you see in the picture. I had an exotic goat cheese appetizer and a huge grass-fed beef cheeseburger with a slab of Amish cheddar on it and plenty of trimmings, plus liquid refreshment, and escaped for less than twenty bucks. The place filled up nicely at noon with what looked a lot like regulars, always a good sign. The background music was unobtrusive, which I like. Nice place to take your wife for lunch or dinner.

Also to my biker friends: I didn't check out the bar, but they have one that looks comfortable. They have a smallish beverage menu, with several microbrews and only one "common" beer, if I remember. However, a few doors down is a place (Called Rascals, I think) that advertised it had more types of beer on tap than any other place in Philly, and ridiculously low prices. They weren't open.

So anyway, I visited a few places while I killed the midday. A little more about that on the travel blog on Saturday, July 31.

Quick report about the MS ride

If you read the last post, you know that the local chapter of the national SM society held a bicycle ride this weekend. Actually, two chapters got together to hold it. About two dozen of us motorcyclists were marshals. Everyone was repeatedly appreciative of our work.
Davis and I rode up Friday afternoon, riding the route backwards to check the signage and familiarize ourselves a bit more with the terrain, so to speak. We fixed a few corners that were easy to miss. Got to the friend's place about dusk, showered and crashed.
We arose about 4AM Saturday, found a gas station that was open and snarfed down some breakfast. The park was already active when we arrived. We gathered up our gear—safety vest, signal flag, detailed route sheets, first aid kit, and a couple inner tubes. We got our instructions and headed out. I've marshaled events like this several times, so they paired me with a new marshal, who rides what has to be the most uncomfortable-looking Motorcycle I've ever seen. One of those Italian crotch rockets. —Now I remember, a Ducati. The idea was for us all to take turns riding along the line of cyclists checking on their health ("Feeling ok? Got water?") and managing traffic at troublesome intersections.
600 people on bicycles (I saw one reclining bike, one tandem) makes for a long line, and they certainly didn't stay together. Besides that, the event had four routes, depending on how far you wanted to ride (one was 100 miles, each way). Population density ranged from several bikes at once to one rider every ten or fifteen minutes. We spent a lot of time in the sun (did I mention it was in the high 90's?) chatting, waiting for someone to come along.
But I got to ride all over rural eastern PA. The scenery varied from vistas of hundreds of farms to deep woods. It was deep Amish country, so you had to watch out for horse exhaust. The stuff is slippery. Roads were mostly pretty good, but in a couple places the driveways were nicer than the patched stretch that called itself a road.
We arrived at Millersville University tired and hungry. The hospitality was great. The food (and it was good) was free, and the dorm rooms included linens.
At supper I sat across from a young lady, one of the marshals, whom I had figured was one of the lady Mac-Pac members, because I recognized her, but didn't know her name, and she said she had seen me around. She is from VA, rode up for the event. Later we figured out that we had apparently met in Jacksonville FL, where we had both qualified for our Iron Butt Association membership. That was three or four years ago, and neither of us remember meeting, but we were both there, so we must have. The mind is a funny thing.
Sunday was about like Saturday, except the very end of the ride got rained out, and I rode home through the tail end of a big thunderstorm. Not being made of sugar, I didn't melt. But I'm tired, so goodnight.

Motorcycle content!

The Delaware Valley chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society is holding a 100-mile bicycle ride this weekend. Here's a link to the event. Lots of people will pay a registration fee (and collect a bunch of donations), hop on their bicycles (well, I suppose they'll transport their bikes to the starting point), and ride all day Saturday the 24th and Sunday the 25th. Of July, 2010. Even though they'll be riding through some pretty rural parts of PA, they'll have intersections to cross and traffic to deal with. For some of the participants the event will be a race. Bicycles and intersections aren't a very good mix, let alone racing bicycles.



Enter the marshals. These folks are volunteer motorcyclists armed with spare inner tubes, water, cell phones, a bit of first aid, and traffic control training. They ride the route ahead of and alongside the cyclists to provide safe crossing of intersections and a modicum of protection from other road hazards. For some reason, this year marshals have been hard to come by—as far as I know only two from my club are participating. Those two are a guy who goes by his last name, Davis, and me. He's a crusty old sailor with a heart of gold, I'm his conscript.

Weather is forecast to be sunny and beastly hot. As in record-breaking. I think I'll carry all the water I can manage.

We are taking off work at noon Friday—we plan to ride most of the route backwards (the Sunday direction) to make sure all the signs are still in place and easy to see. We'll spend the night at a home only ten miles from the starting point. The guy's wife has MS.

We show up at the park in Green Lane, PA at 5:30 Saturday morning, ride all day, and spend the night at Millersville University. Sunday we do the whole thing in reverse. Gotta keep an eye on those Amish buggies, y'know.

Thoughtful review of a thought-provoking book

Regular readers know I'm somewhat of the green/healthy/peacable bent (though I draw the line at certain predators—I prefer to do my own predating). You also know I'm an academic sort, what with my predilection for correct grammar, large library, affinity for researching the facts, enjoyment of science in general, and fund of abstruse information. (Did you know yesterday was Hank Thoreau's birthday? And that he invented raisin bread?)

I just finished a book that I must recommend. Although some of what the author offers in the solution department is simplistic (otoh, how much can you fit into a single book. I'm pretty sure there's more content than what's in the book), The main content is not only well presented and persuasive, but it's copiously footnoted and bibliographied—my kind of book.

The book is The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Keith, and you ought to read it. (Lierre rhymes with Pierre)

Much of the book aligns with what I already know, and adds details that tie a lot of things together for me. It delves into anthropology, history, chemistry, nutrition, biology--practically every science that deals with the earth and things living on it. The melange is fascinating; I could hardly put it down.

The book's position is that the philosophy of vegetarianism is flawed. Not in goals, but in its tactics. If I may be simplistic: the goal of vegetarianism is to work toward a better earth, and better health. Vegetarianism's tactic is to not eat meat. The book shows in convincing detail that vegetarianism accomplishes neither of these goals.

I don't want to spoil things by telling you too much—I'd rather you give the book a read. For one thing, if I summarize, you won't get the background and supporting information that's in the book, and what I say might not be so convincing. The book is addressed to vegetarians, but the information certainly applies to all of us. For my part, I'm glad that I'm doing so many things right already. The other stuff, I'll have to think about, but I have already changed my eating.

Mayhem and execution-style killing in Mayberry

For all the gruesome titles of posts in this blog, they actually fit, innocuous though this site may be.

First the mayhem, another sad chicken tale. A raccoon got the five small chickens—the two polish and the three bantams. We had been keeping them in a separate cage because the big hens were picking on them, and the other night I didn't notice that their cage door was ajar. I found the bodies, well, three of them, the next morning. As I've said before, predation is part of raising chickens. I baited the live traps with two of the bodies, but as of yesterday afternoon nothing had taken the bait, so to speak.

Now the execution. It's a fact of chicken life that you need only about one rooster for every 20 or so hens. Good life for the surviving rooster, eh? Well, roosters will kill each other if you let them all live in the same compound, and the traditional solution to the problem is to invite all but one of the roosters to dinner. It was time last week (they have started crowing, but haven't started fighting), but Val's grandparents came down and filled the freezer to overflowing, so we had no place for our "guests" to await dinner. Yesterday was the day. We segregated the three loudest (This is easy to do. You let the hens out in the morning, but not the roosters. The coop is small enough that I could select whomever I wanted, then open the door so the hens could return to lay their eggs) and put them in the now vacant bantam cage.

Chickens tend to be fairly cooperative about being handled, once you catch them. I can tuck one under an arm, confining her wings, and they ride along pretty contentedly. That's how we carry the hens. Or we let them perch on our fist, falconry style. The hens are pretty tame.

I wasn't so concerned about the feelings of the roosters, so I carried them upside down, by their feet. For some reason, chickens don't seem to mind this mode of transportation, either. It's like they're captivated by everything being upside down.

I got to do all the work myself. The lady staying with us right now is a City Girl. She brags about collecting eggs and tossing out scratch. Her idea of outdoor work is to work on a tan. Don't even mention snakes in her hearing. (No lie. Don't.) So Val had to take her out shopping so she wouldn't be around to watch or hear me prepare chicken dinner. I used the kosher method of dispatching them. Takes about 25 minutes per bird.

We have three remaining roosters. Two will have to join humans for dinner. If anyone wants to assist me, I'll give them one.

And if anything sets foot in one of those traps, there'll be another execution-style slaying.
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Not that I forgot, but I couldn't fit it into the title: Sunday I got to do a nice 190-mile bike ride. Our boy is at a 2-week Civil Air Patrol camp at McDaniel college in Westminster, MD. 2/3 of the way down there he realized he had forgotten his dress uniform. I made the delivery Sunday morning. The road after you get past Baltimore is pretty nice, and the map looks like it would make a nice cross-country trip next time.

For all you foul-mouthed folks out there

Most people who know me have figured out that I never use profanity or obsceneties of any sort. But let's not say I'm not open minded.
I subscribe to a newsletter called A Word a Day; have for more than a decade. (The site is not nearly as impressive as the newsletter.) This week's theme is ways to use four-letter words without using four-letter words. Here's the gist of Monday's entire article.
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It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it. This week we do it, by showcasing words related to -- well, if the English language made any sense (as in words include/exclude) -- the opposite of increment.
It may sound like a frivolous topic, but it can be a serious business. Besides the common usage of excrement as fertilizer and fuel, it plays a critical role in the making of a very expensive coffee. At least one war has been fought over it.
We've put together five words to engage in some dirty talk, though in some cases you may have to look closer to see the connection. Use the words of this week to say what you have to, without using any four-letter words.

coprolalia

PRONUNCIATION:

(kop-ruh-LAY-lee-uh)

MEANING:

noun: An uncontrollable or obsessive use of obscene language.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek copro- (dung) + -lalia (chatter, babbling), from lalein (to talk). [Technically, "lalia" is Koine Greek for "talk." The classical Greek word for "talk" is "legein." "Lalien" was classical for "babble." -reg] A related word is coprolite.

NOTES:

Involuntary coprolalia is found in approximately 15% of the people who suffer from Tourette's syndrome. It has even been observed in deaf people who use sign language -- they swear in sign language.

USAGE:

"That the brain's executive overseer is ablaze in an outburst of coprolalia, Dr. Silbersweig said, demonstrates how complex an act the urge to speak the unspeakable may be."
Natalie Angier; Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore; The New York Times; Sep 20, 2005.
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So there you have it. My wife (an expert on aging) says one symptom of Alzheimers is that you start using language you have repressed all your life. I have no wish to become senile, so I told her if I ever start indulging in profanity, she can take me out behind the barn and shoot me.

On a completely unrelated note: Happy Birthday, Bill!

working weekend

The temps set records last weekend, but, as an old friend said to me once, I'm extremely goal oriented, and I had set a goal to mow the lawn, so that's what I did on Saturday. A word about my lawn-mowing style. I do it for the exercise, so I use a hand-powered reel mower. And I mow one-handed, standing sideways to the mower and pushing it with one hand to my right. Or left, wherever the uncut grass is. If you mix up the direction (right or left) and arm (also right or left, duh), and which way your knuckles face on the handlebar, you get eight different exercises, not to mention taking the occasional break of pushing the mower ahead of you in more or less the traditional way. I've done it this way since high school.
It happens I lock the dog in the house and let the chickens run loose in the yard so they can pick bugs and eat the grass while I mow. Naturally the dogs needed to be let out to relieve himself, so I take him out on the leash. He likes to walk out to the far end of the property (I mow only the yard around the house, not the pasture). When I got to the far fence line, I discovered a neighbor's tree had come down in the last storm! The trunk had broken off about five feet above the ground and the tree fell across two fence lines and the thicket of vines, thorn bushes, and honeysuckle between them.
Guess what I did on Sunday.

Click to enlarge. If you look closely, in the exact center of the picture you can see the end of the trunk where I finally stopped, a foot or so this side of the neighbor's fence and a couple feet in the air. You should also be able to make out our fence, across the lower half of the photo. And there's firewood scattered around that I haven't brought up to the house yet. A guy can only do so much.