Fragments From Floyd

The World Comes to Floyd #2

Pack up and fetch yourselves to the Second Annual FloydFest World Music Festival August 15, 16, and 17. This Jambase article is a good place to see it at a glance. Then swing over the Festival site for all the details. We'll see you there!

Dog Gone, I Miss Him

We walked along with our berry buckets tied at our waists. Ann reminded me how Buster used to love to go with us on these trips. While we were picking the high ones, he would be eating the lower ones right off the canes. Silly vegetarian dog. He gagged on bones and we had to throw them away, but he stood salivating while we fixed a salad, waiting for pieces of carrot or the big, thick stem of the broccoli. I still catch myself setting such favorite things aside for him. When I get out a new stick of butter, I half expect to see his ears perk up because he knew he would get to lick off the wrapper. Buster is still very much with us in our daily routine, not to mention his reminders in the eternal black hair that still turns up in our socks and lodges between the pavers out the back door. We'll get another dog soon, but there'll never be another Buster.

Trees and Place

Or rewording the topic "How have vegetation, forests, and plant life of all forms contributed to your sense of place during your life?"

That's the subject this week at the Ecotone where writers about place congregate to explore the subject of WHERE.

Please consider writing on this biweekly topic, then submitting a link to your own blog on the Ecotone biweekly topic page for August 1.

It's really simple to do, though the format of the page, called a 'wiki' is a bit out of the mainstream. Anyone can participate without 'joining' or signing up or asking, just come over and jump in. Here's how. From the "Trees and Place" page, go to "edit the text of this page" at the bottom. Then in the edit window, enter your permalink and essay title. It will look something like this.

[http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/archives/001382.html Roadside Weeds]

Note the link and title are within straight brackets with a space or more between the link and the title. After that, outside the right hand bracket, include the first paragraph from your essay or a similar short text introduction to the post, and if you're new to Ecotone, maybe a word about where you live, et cetera. If you don't get your post done by August 1, just add it to "Trees and Place" as soon as you get it completed on your journal or weblog. Look forward to meeting some new folks this time around!

Software Sort-out

Thanks, all, for your advice recently. Per your suggestions and recommendations I have...

• decided to revert back to Ecco for my PIM, avoiding Outlook for yet a few more years. Seems like this is another case where MS tried and missed. I'll go back to good ol' trusty Ecco Pro and hope the new OS can get along with it. Just in case, I do have my contacts exported to Outlook in case I ever needed another copy... although I was thinking about uninstalling Outlook at the same time I dump MS Money that came installed and I will never use.
• installed the trial version of Zone Alarm, and been appalled at how many visitations one gets these days from all sorts of hidden intruders. I think my version said I had a 30 day trial; some of you seem to be talking about a "free" (and presumably untimed?) version. Is this right?
• not persued the "internet speedup software" but instead managed to tweak a few safe things and have what I think is about as good a dialup speed as I'm likely to get. I've tested the connection with a few of the online "speed tests" and get "GOOD" results.
• considered using an email program other than the hacker-prone Outlook Express, but it's simple interface is one that doesn't put off the Luddite wife. My needs are simple and pockets empty. Any good, simple, FREE email programs out there worth looking at?

Puzzled Managerie

My wife thinks it's time to start deciding what to get who for Christmas. I, on the other hand, have four and a half more months to procrastinate before mid-December. But should you want to start collecting ideas toward late December, let me offer you a consideration for 'that special person' who loves animals and loves things wooden.

Meet our friend, Peter. Peter is a master craftsman who created the most amazing designs for three-dimensional, interlocking animal puzzles. You really must see them to appreciate their intricacy and beauty, and Peter and Jenny now have the studio and staff and most importantly-- the growing zoo of puzzle creatures-- ready for you to visit. There's even a demo so you can see how the pieces fit together.

One of several strokes of creative genius you must know about in these puzzles: each has eaten something, and deep inside, you'll find a surprise. Can you guess what you might find inside the Iguana? the whale? or my favorite, the Piranha?

You'd be proud to give or delighted to receive one of these life-time creations,
and Santa would get major bonus points for such a discerning choice this holiday season. Order now. Or do what I do. Wait until the night before Christmas, when all through the house...

Organic Coca-Cola?

It seemed like a great idea, says Michael Pollan in this Orion article. "But once we had an official federal organic standard, small farmers lost control of the niche".

He is discussing the lamentable gap between the intention and the reality of the current word "organic". As he describes...

"There were three legs to the original organic dream. One was growing food in harmony with nature -- a non-industrial way of farming that treated animals humanely and did not use chemical pesticides. The second leg was that our system of food distribution should be different; food co-ops, farmer's markets, and community supported agriculture could replace the national agricultural system. And the third leg was the food itself. We shouldn't be eating red delicious apples; we should be eating ten different kinds of apples because biodiversity in the apple tart means biodiversity in the orchard".

Via the loopholes of language and bureaucracy, we now have such irrational choices as "an organic transcontinental strawberry: 5 calories of food energy that use 435 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get to a supermarket near you. This is organic food forced through the industrial system, shorn of its holism. What has been lost is that one key insight about organic: that everything is connected. The organic dream has been reduced to a farming method".

A way we can circumvent this good idea gone bad and strike a blow against the increasingly unwholesome and un-holistic agri-business way of doing things: buy food grown locally, shorten the food chain, and retain the good parts of the organic concept.

Zoned and Alarmed

Okay. So far, a lot of astintions, and one vote NO to Outlook. I still can't find much in the way of unbiased discussion of the program as a PIM, except "use it mostly for the email and it's a yawner for everything else".

So what about Zone Alarm? How necessary, over and above what Norton System Works can do? And how prone to screw other things up will I be if I install the Preview version of Zone Alarm? Any experience?

Losing my Mind

Well, not exactly. More like transferring it from one PIM to another.

I have used EccoPro since 1994. It contains all my passwords, registration codes, addresses, tech support histories, brilliant ideas, urgent reminders and a partridge in a pear tree. Since starting to use WinXP, Ecco has shown some scary inconsistencies. It is a 32 bit program, and I've tried it default and in "compatibility mode" but still the idea of depending on this legacy software sort of has me spooked.

Until now, I've avoided Outlook... it has been too enormous a drain on RAM (which for present purposes I now have an adequate chunk of) and I have not needed it since Ecco has reliably provided almost all of the functionality of Outlook; and then there was the general Microsoftophobia, of course. But how stable can I expect Outlook to be? Will I transfer all my phonebook info etc only to have it become corrupt after a few months? If anyone can say why this man and this PIM should not be married, speak now. Or forever hold his peas.

Honey, I Shrunk the Hummingbird

They even make a similar whirring sound, since their wings beat at a rate and in a figure-8 manner necessary for hovering. No, this is not a genetically-reduced hummer but a "clearwing moth" or "hummingbird moth" that is visiting our butterfly bush just outside my window here. If you could get close enough, you'd notice the scales and antennae... even though the scales fall off the wings during the moth's first flight.

The most numerous visitor to the bush this year are several species of fast-flying skippers... a unique group of butterfly relatives that hold their wings together up over their back (so you can easily see both wings as in these examples) and they have clubbed antennae. They have relatively small, hard wings, and they lack the lazy flap-flap loopy flight of the much larger winged swallowtails... hence, perhaps the "skipping" that they do from flower to flower.

If you're just dying now to be able to amaze your friends and tell the difference between moths, butterflies and skippers, go here. And since I have you hyperventilating in an arthropodial frenzy, check out the Butterfly Flash Cards from eNature. Notice that when you click on one of these, it brings up the critter with a nice description, and also at the bottom, you can click on "Find species in your region" and get a very well done eNature list of all kinds of plants and animals specific to where you live. Learn just one new fellow-creature today; give it a name; know a new thing about the world.

People Who Could Change Your Life

Well I'll be danged. Didn't find my name in the list anywhere.

I looked for Utne Visionaries more recent than 1995, but Google didn't do it for me. I was hoping maybe I'd know more if of these folks if the list were more current, when probably the truth of it is that I'd recognise more if the list were ten years older instead.

How do you do at recognition meaning: "Yeah, I heard of him/her".

I knew 10 in the first group, 6 in the second and 3-4 in each of the rest of the groups of 20. Anybody here we really need to be aware of that you can point out?

DO NOT CALL

What took me so long? We are now officially registered and soon will be able to sit completely through dinner without unsolicited marketing callers. Buh-Bye.

Insult to Injury

Sitting here in the cool stillness with my first cup of morning coffee, you may understand how hard it was not to spew it all over my monitor. Here's why:

I just now opened the umpteenth invoice I've received from Dell during the recent debacle of component replacements and final CPU death and exchange. First as I peruse the familiar invoice, I notice with some alarm that the total bottom line price for the system is almost a thousand dollars more than the price I was quoted when I tallied my components on the system I ordered in early July. Then-- even more interesting-- I scan down the itemized list that shows two rather suspicious charges that will bear yet one more agitated phone call to Sri Lanka for billing questions. It shows the following:

Microsoft Money 2002 OEM ...................$1,000
Microsoft Office Small Business ............. $1,000

No wonder Mr. Gates is doing so well. Mr. Dell, on the other hand, may need to find another line of work as his attention to detail seems to be wandering of late.

First PLACE Prize

I'll share a story I found and have passed along to the Ecotone group; thought one or two of you might also be interested.

LONDON - Financier Chistopher Ondaatje announced he's funding a new Commonwealth literary award open to all genres of books.

The Sri-Lankan born philanthropist - and brother of Canadian author Michael Ondaatje - has given a $450,000 endowment to the Royal Society of Literature for the annual $22,000 prize.

The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize will reward writing that "evokes the spirit of a place".

You can put this interesting development in broader context by listening to a 7/24/03 "Connections" broadcast from WBUR Boston called "Honoring Place" (via RealMedia) in which host Michael Goldfarb interviews two writers... Michael Holroyd and Sven Birkerts... for whom place is central in their writing... and discusses at length the role of "place" in present and past literature.

Roadside Weeds

Where has the summer gone! Soon, there will be signs that we have begun the transition into Autumn, and I am making a point to appreciate the floral accessories of summer now, just before they pack to leave us again. The roadside wildflowers that are so abundant that they might be easily taken for granted are at the peak of diversity now, with the early fall occupants already standing in the wings, waiting their turn for just another week or two. Very soon they will steal all the attention and the earlier tenants will move on, leaving behind spreading roots and a million seeds to insure another too-short seasonal visit about ten months from now.

Queen Anne's Lace (or Wild Carrot) is perhaps the dominant summer resident by both number, visibility and height until the towering Joe Pye Weed with its whorled leaves and mauve flowertops takes over the meadows. Chickory's sky blue almost always shows up in the understory of the white lace, and there are here and there vast fallow hillside pastures carpeted with blue and white that move in summer Hozannas under cathedrals of cumulus. Soon, the white and blue asters, purple Ironweed, and yellow or orange Spotted Jewelweed will constitute the pallette. They too will in their turn peak, pale and pass on in the grand procession of the unplanted garden of county roads.

I set out yesterday to commit these roadside boquets to digital record so that I could look back on them in a few months when winter drains the world of motion, color and roadside embellishment. There could hardly be a better place for photographing these 'weeds' than the quiet back roads of Floyd County on a sleepy Saturday morning, I thought. But I discovered that it is one thing to admire the blur of form and color at 35 or even 20 miles an hour from a moving car, and quite another matter to stop, find a place to pull safely off the road, and walk back conspicously a tenth of a mile to photograph a well-lit composition of sweetpea and milkweed growing pleasantly next to someone's mailbox or pasture gate. And there is another problem: the eyes take in the scene in panorama and in general form while the camera unforgivingly captures the particular, in all its busy-ness and clutter and depth of field. The mind does a much better job of vignetting the beauty of roadside gardens than the camera.

Need for Speed

Has anybody used any of these purported "Internet Speed Boosters" with Windows XP? Do they make any appreciable difference; are they safe? reliable? Maybe XP has maximized MTU and all those registry settings that Win98 left at the slower default settings, I dunno. I'm not gonna mess with anything at this point that will set me back to reinstalling the OS for the FOURTH TIME in two weeks! (BTW I am using an external USR modem).

Here is a page of FREE tips to increase dialup speeds. I set hardware flow control and increased max speed to the next notch up from 115K and it seems to have made an noticable difference. YMMV.

Psychological Wartfare

In my traditional Friday morning chat with my Maternal Unit, somehow the conversation took one of those quirky sideroads and we ended up discussing "warts we have known". Mom says she had them on her hands before I was born, but after birth, hers went away. I know where they went.

Mine were surgically excised and frozen off with liquid nitrogen in elementary school years.

If I'd had the choice, I think I might have preferred the more successful and way less traumatic means of Duct Tape Wart Removal instead. It worked 85% of the time, and within 28 days, the warts were gone... better than cryotherapy, and for the cost of a few inches of tape... and the stigma of having a silver patch on your forehead for a month. Around here, nobody would even notice.

Of course, you also could rub a new penny on your favorite wart; or rub an old rag on it and bury the rag during a full moon. In either case, they typically disappear more often than not after all manner of autosuggestive "treatments". There's an awfully lot we don't understand going on between the human psyche and the soma, and the late Dr. Lewis Thomas (in the Medusa and the Snail) declared we should declare a national War on Warts, and thereby come to understand the world better perhaps than by putting a man on the moon (my phraseology, not his).

Etcetera Etcetera

The new computer transition that started on July 14 is finally ... knock on wood... complete, and the computer system and all its peripheral parts seem to be working as I expected they were going to almost two weeks of anguish ago. And yes, next time I will consider a Macintosh.

Today I am looking forward to getting some roadside wildflower pictures before they are gone by. I've been doing a lot of botanical rubbernecking for a couple of weeks now as I drive through the countyside (much to the consternation of poor passengers who'd rather I watch asphalt than asters) and will set out this morning around 9:00 while there is likely to be some nice backlighting, perhaps a bit of fog and dew as well. I'll combine photography with the obligatory run to the Post Office to deliver a package. We receive and send our mail from the P.O. in Check, VA (which always brings to my mind the phrase "the Check's in the mail".) If I get any keeper images, of course, I'll share in the next few days.

The new computer really zips in Photoshop (where my old system used to groan) and XP's display and printing and other photo functions are a real plus to a FoTog like me. And of course, now I have (what seems at this point to be) oodles more storage space for images, and have the luxury of setting my default image size up a notch. Speaking of which... I cannot understand why the vast majority of publications still do not even consider accepting high-resolution digital images for their magazines, etc. The resolution of a 2+ megapixel image is going to exceed the dpi of their printers at most image sizes, so why the resistance to accepting digital images? Not to mention the convenience, vs keeping up with a submitted print.

So. I am feeling a bit more connected today than I have for a few weeks, with all the pet woes, house guests and technical problems that have floated under the bridge on troubled waters recently. Maybe, he said in his blissful ignorance, there will be a period of calm before the next crisis. At any rate, my threshold for posting to the blog here is obviously quite low this morning. Anything goes. Obviously.

Sweet Home, Alabama

...where a family reunion is a good place to find a bride. (via Cut on the Bias)

And, via Rebecca's Pocket, the daily goings-on at the World Summit of Sustainable Development (they were all out to lunch when I checked in there earlier. Or, maybe in the third day of a two week meeting, they've already packed and gone home?)

And Fran at Northwest Notes has a graphic-rich journal of a bike trip across town in Seattle.

The Return from Dell

Imagine: you've just blown your budget on the car of your dreams, a purchase necessitated when your former ol' reliable buggy fell apart unexpectedly one day on the freeway. And so after much deliberation, you're on your way home from the dealership with your new purchase, beaming proudly, when a wheel comes off and bumps off into the median strip. You fix it and start home again, somewhat subdued but still happy about the new machine, overall. A few minutes later, the electrical system fails. After considerable kicking and cussing, it miraculously begins to work again. By this point you are having some serious concerns, but nevertheless, you're getting closer to home and continue on the way. Finally, just blocks before turning proudly into your driveway with what at least looks like a new, flawless machine, you barely escape as it bursts into flames and becomes a molten mass of plastic and metal as you watch helplessly.

The dealership, after your fifty-seventh phonecall, agrees to totally replace your purchase... exact same machine that failed so miserably on you the first time. Your drive from the dealership to the house on the second time around is simply a matter of recovering your losses and getting on with life. The newness and novelty and joy of ownership went up in flames with the first lemon you brought home.

I am up and running again on the Dell CPU replacement (the shipping of which was expedited... from "3 to 6 weeks" to overnight delivery) after insisting in an uncharacteristically forceful way that OH YES I was going to talk to a manager!) And so, joyless, I seem to be up and running again on my last Machine from the Pit of Dell.

Print Path

I have had two 'authorities' advise me in identical paths toward finding a format, layout, font, paper, graphics to text relationship, and general feel for the little book I'd like to put together.

These two experts have recommended that I go to a big bookstore and browse within books that might have one or more of these characteristics I'm looking for, and buy them to show as examples to help hone my focus on a finished product that will be what I want the book to look and feel like, not some combination that a disinterested typesetter might cobble together for me.

My first attempt to do this was not terribly successful and I'm having doubts about the use of color (up to 4" x 6" images, banners, faint-image color in margins, possibly spilling a theme that would wrap across two pages, etc) in a book that is 5 1/2 x 8 (which is one of the default sizes that doesn't waste paper, which in this case would need to be a finished surface that would do justice to the images). Of course, most books that want to show off color images to good effect are large format, with heavy high-finish paper, and the cost is out of sight. I may have to give up the idea of incorporating images entirely, but so much of what I would include in the text is visually focused, the pictures would be a nice element to include. We'll see.

I'm open for suggestions.

Meanwhile, I return from time to time to the other possible forms of self-publication, and CafePress is a new player. If nothing else, check out the free pdf converter they lead a potential publisher to. The price is right.

Toward the Syncytium

Call me sheltered. I admit it. It takes little to amaze me, less perhaps to weird me out. And too, I think I am ready for my membership ceremony to induct me officially into "the other generation" now playing the back nine of the technological turf. My occasional encounters with 'civilization' alway incite at least one or two minor rants.

Standing pensively in the "computer media" aisle at Office Monster last week, I was trying to decide if I really needed a five-pack of DVD-RW disks, or would I be getting them just to say I had them? A staff person walked past me, and said something. I turned to reply, but she was obviously not speaking to me, although she continued the conversation, looking through me. I had a question about my intended purchase, but she was not in my personal space after all, though I could have reached out and touched her. This identical experience repeated over in Pens and Markers. I began to feel invisible.

It was only when I got to checkout that I could see the very tiny earpiece, and finally spotted the weeny mouthpiece that hung on a thin wire at the side of the clerk's jaw. As I walked back with a Airborne package a few minutes later, I made a point to look, and every one of the staff could talk at any instant to any other of the staff and management via these headsets. Not a shocking bit of technological discovery, granted. But my mind zoomed ahead maybe 10 years, and I imagined a time when the hardware was microscopic, perhaps implanted. And humanity had become a single technological organism, a syncytium... a merged colony of social insects bound together cordlessly across the planet. Just one of my little daydreams....

From there I drove a short way to the Express Lube, where I had been once or twice, the lastest visit several oil chnages ago. As I got out of the car, the young man called me by name in a cheery voice. The second asked "How is life out on Goose Creek?"

There is no way these guys, especially two of them, could have remembered me from those distant visits. Do they have a license plate recognition camera at the entrance that instantly pulls up my name and address as I drive onto their lot, so they can seem 'up close and personal'? After encountering the ant colony in Office Monster, the familiarity of the Lube Brothers took on somewhat sinister overtones, in a Twilight Zone sort of way.

This Fragile Voice

Dave Trowbridge of Redwood Dragon relates new details (from Information Week) of what we already know... only Dave understands the 'how'...about the fine line we walk each day when we boot up our computers, expecting to connect to the world... a world that unfortunately contains more than a few who would love to bring down the World Trade Center called the internet. It sounds rather too easy, don't you think?

Floyd's Blogger Population Doubles!

The rarity of the event second only to the Grand Alignment of the Planets, today an actual living three-dimensional protoplasmic blogger will be driving down our state-maintained pothole pathway (with grass growing in the middle of the single lane without turnouts). If he is an uncommonly skilled navigator, finds our road, then does not become fainthearted and turn back after the second or third impulse to do so, Chaz Hill of Oklahoma's Dustbury will become the fourth Real Live Blogger to visit Goose Creek.

As some of you may know, Chaz is now about midway in his third World Tour, which he narrates day by day along his summer sojourns. He'll be driving down today from Beckley, West Virginia. I was first introduced to Chaz last summer by Susanna Cornett, and if I'm remembering correctly, Chaz and Susanna met in Jersey for a meal (Susanna, Meryl Yourish and Kurt Brobeck of what is now known as "the Coffee Sutras" are the first three corporeal bloggers to honor us with a visit).

If you're not familiar with Dustbury, there may be civil penalties in your state, but it's not too late to set the situation right. In addition to his wideranging daily tongue-in-check observations, opinions and insights, don't miss the alternative world that resides in his sidebar, including Vital Features.

If he gets here in time, we'll DO FLOYD. Buddies, that'll set his head t'spinnin'. Dazzled is what he'll be. Not sure what all we'll get into, but for sure, I'll point out The Traffic Light that we're so proud of in the county. We may wonder up onto the Parkway, tour the Chatteau Morrisette Winery. Heck, we may hear the "Route 66" theme song and just head for the open road and lives of reckless adventure, throw the top down on the Dakota pickup, and cruise the East Coast for a few months. Chaz has his laptop, so we'll check in from time to time. We are two wild and crazy guys.

Dog Bit

Yesterday, we drove sixty miles in a driving rainstorm to a place that makes Goose Creek seem absolutely suburban. The point: chose one from among eleven yellow lab puppies. They are only four weeks old, and Virginia law requires them to be at least seven before they leave their siblings and momma-dog, so we couldn't pick one up yet; nor could we pick one out. They are too young yet to show a great deal of difference in coat color, size or personality. They were all about equally clumsy, cute and cocky; all were alternately ferocious, affectionate or simple sat for brief seconds wondering what this world was all about. There are seven males; we get second pick.

Dr. Science, Where does Shellac Come From?

Answer: Bobby, shellac is formed by thousands and thousands of little insects called Lac who live on "lac host trees" and produce a sticky secretion called "lac resin". Shellac has been utilised in the manufacture of many products over the years. In fact 78rpm records were made from it and this was formerly the largest single outlet for shellac. It used to colour Indian solders' uniforms and is still used to dye oriental carpets. Today shellac is used in paint and varnish, as a hat stiffener, a glaze for fruit, coffee beans and nuts, a coating for tablets, as a leather dressing, as a component in rubber compounds, as a sealing wax, to make gasket cement, as a mould for dental plates, as printing ink, in cosmetics such as hair lacquer, in confectionery such as chocolate, as a food colouring, as a sealant or as a glossy silky finish on superior quality playing cards. In America large quantities of bleached shellac are used for floor polishes especially the No-Rub polishes.

This time Dr. Science is telling is straight! Read this interesting page and be the star at your next cocktail party conversation. Guaranteed!

Lucid Dreams

I am sitting on the front porch and my mind wanders. I have the power over time and by an act of will, I call on the century-old maple tree to repeat before my eyes in five minutes in reverse history a hundred years of growth, stopping at the moment it entered the ground as a winged seed. Then in the next five minutes, grow from seed to shade tree again. Repeat until saturated with the details of how a tree twists and lurches and spreads as it grows old, and the converse as it grows young. Repeat on a variety of tree species up the valley noting differences in the choreography.

Fireflies, in addition to emitting pulses of light, also give out tiny throbs of percussive sound, each a barely perceptible drum beat, and collectively their language reverberates between indigo hillsides at midnight. Is there a rhythm there? Can I hear a pattern that my eyes cannot see?

The soil in our pasture and woods becomes at once transparent, while it continues to provide shelter and substance for myriad insects and burrowing creatures visible, suspended underfoot. Each kind of creature has a characteristic bioluminescence, and I walk spellbound on the surface of invisible ground, suspended above countless thousands of subterranean beings I have never known that swim or float, visible as if under depth of water.

Walking in the Nameless Creek across the road, I bend and pick up one rock, then another-- rounded gray granite or pink quartz; angular shale or or sheety slate-- and for each stone I can see it in its context, can go back to its life within it's parent rock at any point back til the Very Beginning. I can trace it to its source that may have been many thousand miles and millions of millions of years from here, and I would know if you can teach a stone to talk, as Ms. Dillard has hinted.

Sap rising in every living plant emits a pulsating hum as it ebbs and flows in thin columns from the tips of rootlets to the tips of the tops of trees; creek noise slowed down and filtered produces intelligible and wise words, and laughter; I can become any insect I chose and have their senses of sight and orientation and thought, and change between a honeybee and a bush cricket at will, and go where they go, and I see this bizarre appendaged creature that is me sitting on the front porch through an insect's vision.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Indeed. And more than in our dreams.

To Slip the Surly Bonds of Earth

I first visited Gatlinburg in the mid fifties, about the time the famous SkyLift was first constructed. It took an awful lot of prodding to get my granny on the thing, because she warned us that this infernal contraption could get stuck with folks stranded hanging in a puny little chair where they would starve to death and be picked apart by crows and ravens.

Well sir, she was right. Witness sixty folks hanging in the air for several hours. Hope they all had big bladders. Go see. Via Jane at Daily Rant from Fletch at Smokey Mt Journal who has a great picture of the debacle.

Summer Light

Early morning berry picking, east ridge, July 2003

Click-a-Rama

Lots of interesting pointers over at Gospel According to Mark. Go to the main page and scroll down to Historical Artwork & UFOs; also via BeneDiction, I was going to post the Blue Marble this morning, so taking the lazy way out, you can read about it at GAM in his entry called Our Planet Rules. I'm dial-up impaired, so the full Earth images are a bit rich for my blood, but you can tell me about them. 'kay?

Yes, We Carry Smoked Turkey Collards

I get letters. Read this entry from last July where IT IS OBVIOUS I have nothing at all to do with the company, I just like eating the company's food and was trying to tell readers about it. I musta done too good a job.

Now be sure and read the comments. Where are these people from? Did they read my silly entry and somehow jump to the conclusion I was on the Board of Directors?

I've toyed with putting in a bold disclaimer, or deleting the entry entirely. But it's been too much fun being the CEO, writing personal letters of response to my satisfied customers. I may even want to start a few new products-- like maybe Savory Possum Gravy or Pickled Rubard Chutney and see how they do. This may be the new career I've been looking for! Stay tuned. And BUY G____ FOODS, y'all.

Here's Your Sign

The search goes on. We've been picking up local newspapers, asking friends and coworkers, exploring any source that might help us find our next pup-dog. And whaddaya know: right in our own back yard, a PIT BULL FARM. They have dogs for sale here if you're brave enough to back in there; I think they are free-range / pick-your-own, and certified bad-to-the-bone.

Just kidding (although the sign did show up last year on the side of the road, not far from here. I grabbed the picture and got outta there!) We are going Tuesday to look at some yellow lab pups that will be ready the middle of August. If one of them calls out to us with it's sad puppy eyes and expectant smile (and what do you think the odds of that are?) we will probably choose one to bring home in a few weeks.

Where the Wx Suits My Clothes

Favorite Things About Summer...

Getting out of bed wearing boxer shorts, period. Not two pair of socks, silk longjohns, sweatpants, T-shirt, sweatshirt and fleece sweater...the typical Winter straight-out-of-bed garb.

Getting out of bed and going straight to the coffee pot. I don't have to go out on the porch where it is obscenely dark and obscenely cold in all the garb mentioned above to get kindling to start the fire. No crumpling newspaper, wiping soot off the sleeve of my fleece sweater. In summer I don't bang my knuckles on the woodstove door pulling singed digits back from a smouldering fire that all of a sudden leaps into a conflagration, the July sun, up close and personal.

Sitting on the front porch in my boxers with a cup of coffee in the mornings. Maybe two cups.

Listening to the quiet sounds not made by man, while sitting in my boxer shorts, on my front porch, with a cup of coffee, straight out of bed.

The warmth of the morning sun on my bare legs, while sitting on the front porch, listening to the quiet sounds of nature, holding a good book in my hands which are not covered in soot.

The warmth of the morning sun on a vine-ripened tomato eaten whole in the garden, just after my first cup of morning coffee.

The smells that rise from the warm earth, wafting on the morning sun, the smell of pollen and petals, lilacs, yellow sweet clover, spearmint along the creek, damp loam...the smell of coffee and of ripe tomatos.

Seeing the orderly rows of stacked firewood seasoning behind the house, waiting for a time when the sun's scorching heat is only a uncomfortable memory, its pleasant warmth a fleeting rarity; in the heat, the sour smell of oak, the medicinal smell of walnut, and the sweet smell of cherry. Each piece in the stack from woodlot to face cord has been handled over and over by these hands that will in a few long months crumple newspaper and offer each piece into the stove like an sacrament, while my mind thinks back on how nice it was to be warm, to smell the earth, to live in my skin alone, to have experienced Summer.

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This entry shamelessly borrowed from last year (July 9 Fragments), since the topic of boxers had materialized recently. And yes, these are the very pair that traumatized me!

The Sky is Falling!

At the risk of being Chicken Little, I think it's safe to say we are very close to telling Mr. Dell that his little empire is falling apart one XPS at a time, and there may very soon be one on its way back home to Austin from Goose Creek. The latest hoop (and the very last) that I am jumping through is going to Creative and downloading drivers to reinstall. Uh, hello. Does this system not ship with the latest drivers, or have they changed since I started juicing this lemon on Monday morning?

And so dear hearts... if not Dell, then WHO should I trust to put a reliable system on my desk in the PDQ? I am truly at a loss... of five days of my life, to name one... and a loss of confidence in this particular machine and it's vendor as well. However, the monitor is very nice and the Great Gumball of Technical Support has been kind, and Jason is a nice, knowledgeable and sympathetic guy who just happens to work for a Monolith of Technology.

And dang it all, I had a half dozen things I wanted to tell you about today, not to mention a buncha pix I'm dying to post. Well, they way things are is the way things are, as the little mice would say to Babe, the pig. Can't argue with that wisdom.

I'm assuming I'll be able to access the net during this transitional phase (that seems to go on and on and on...) so let me hear if you have hot tips about trusty computers you have known. See ya 'round.

Transience

"Consider the lily of the fields; they toil not, neither do they spin. But Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these".

It has been a difficult month. We have lost a good friend in the passing of Buster. (And I am realizing what a good listener he was to me). Lightning blasted our television receiver. My computer died. The new, expensive replacement computer died. My joints are not happy.

In every earthly beauty and good, there is the possibility... the inevitability... of their opposite. We live in a world where things fall apart and any human goodness or joy is not destined to be pure. Only God is Good.

The hillsides during this trying month have been cloaked in dazzling display of Rhododendrons, adding color and light to the dark summer forest. Now, the ground is littered with fallen petals, their glory past for another year. I find myself lamenting the loss more than celebrating their brief beauty. I need an attitude adjustment:

Philipians 4:8 "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."

World Tour Begins

The Dustbunny from Dustbury, Chaz Hill, has struck out (poor choice of words?) on his Third World Tour, blogging as he goes. Today is his first solo part of the trip. Go over and wish him light traffic, open eyelids at all times while hands are on steering wheel, roach-free motel rooms, good digestive processes notwithstanding the fastness of the food, pretty waitresses, fast internet connections and lots of new friends and great memories, and finally, home sweet home back in Oklahoma in another couple of weeks and after, oh, about 4800 miles.

The Shining

I was savoring that delicious surrender that comes when you finally slip in under cool sheets after rough day, finally relinguishing control, letting go the tensions of the day-- feeling stress flow out my toes and ears and fingertips. I settled down in the lilypads, floating towards sleep. Ann had been sleeping blissfully for at least an hour; the room was dark and still, with only the sound of the creek filling the room through the open windows.

But something made me come back up from under the lilypads. I can't say what-- maybe I had seen something below the level of consciousness before my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and just at that moment realized I should be concerned about it, I don't know. But I sat up aware of some strangeness. Nothing out of the ordinary, except there was moonlight coming into the room. Now this is odd, I thought, since the moon won't be up for another couple of hours. And yet, there was a glow of pale dappled light falling across a small patch on my side of the bed. It appeared as if it was coming through trees, shining through the window behind me. Except that there was no window behind me. I returned immediately to full consciousness with overtones of uneasiness.

The mysterious light fell in just one place in the room, and when I moved the light moved with me. Granted I had just ended a zinger of a day, including at least three hours on the phone with Dell Tech Support. But my mind should have been clear even if exhausted, and this definitely was not a hallucination I was having. This was a real perception without an explanation. Until...

I turned on the closet light next to the bed and discovered the source of this mystery. The otherworldly light emanated from my underwear. Yep. Joe Boxer Smiley Face Glow in the Dark Boxer Shorts, a Happy Birthday present from Ann a few months back and I guess in cold winter bedtimes, there wasn't much opportunity for exposure between doffing drawers and pulling up covers. This was a sight only likely seen in the warmer months.

I had to wonder: what if I had come into the dark room last night, and Ann had opened her eyes just in time to see a disembodied pair of glowing underwear coming toward the bed? Guess if one of us was going to have a life-altering close encounter with phosphorescent skivvies, it was better me than her. I'm already in therapy for computer-related PTSD, we'll just add this little neurosis to the things I'm working through.

"Now, Mr. First. Just lie back and tell me how it was that you came to be afraid of boxer shorts".

BioHazards and Birding

Officer, I think I may have poisoned somebody. But I'm innocent of intent. Really.

Last week, with company milling about the yard, it wouldn't do to leave that hornets nest under the lip of the front porch. Somehow, it had become reinhabited after a thorough soaking a few weeks earlier (and thanks to Scott Chaffin for his logical observation that the hive still contains growing and maturing baby hornets and the smart thing to do would be to remove the hive immediately after spraying it). I didn't do the smart thing, never got around to scraping the melon-sized hive out from under the porch after emptying a can of Raid into it.

Yesterday evening I walked out the front door and noticed pieces of the hive strewn about the yard. "I see you got brave and scraped that hive away" I told Ann.

"I didn't do it. I thought you had. It was there this morning when I left for work".

Apparently what were pests to us was dinner to somebody else. I hate it that those delicious little hornet larvae were marinated in toxic broth. And some coon (I guess?) is off in our woods in GI distress thinking he needs to pay more attention to his GERDS and lay off the pupae from now on.

Also in Nature Notes:

Tell me if I'm wrong: not one in fifty of you have even heard of an "ovenbird" much less seen one. Suffice it to say they are nice to have around (and especially to hear in the early morning coolness) but they tend to be very secretive, and seeing one is a rarity. And so the other day, having one perch on a branch within six feet of me was amazing. And I was beaming with pride since I had "pssssshed" him in (that's a birder's buzzy call that sometimes stirs up the birds, makes them curious so they pop up to be identified. It doesn't always work, but I have had warblers come so close I thought they were going to perch on my sunglasses!).

What was odd about this was that 1) this ovenbird was not at all shy; 2) it was flitting about 5-10 feet off the ground while ovenbirds spend most of their time on the ground; and 3) this one was bobbing his tail in an uncharacteristic way I had never seen before.

And I stand corrected, while not being too hard on myself. Turns out it is another bird (in the same genus) called the waterthrush... identified in part by it's characteristic tail-bobbing. I later saw my new friend feeding two young over behind the woodpile. I'll have to see if I can follow them to a nest, which will be immensely easier to find than the ovenbird's camouflaged 'igloo' hidden on the ground. My guess is, if there were ovenbirds that close to the house, the darn cat would have already discovered them, and had them over for dinner.

Seventies Sub-Urbs

Check out the classic image of the backyards of the 'burbs over at Wikipedia.

I'm itching to post some images, but afraid to reload my former FTP software (SmartFTP). I'm spooked now, since apparently something I loaded yesterday or Monday gave the new computer a terrible case of nausea.

Tip for future Dell-raisers: When you FIRST boot up to your OS, go to Accessories/System Tools/System Restore to put a marker there at your fresh start. Although it says that this utility regularly marks your configuration, when I needed it, there were no 'landmarks' saved to go back to. Tough lesson, and one that ought to come with the system. The USER information has continued to shrink with every successive computer, and caveat emptor, bubba.

Things Fall Apart ~ Part Two

My father-in-law who was visiting us last week will soon celebrate his eighty-somethingth birthday, and so we packed up Birthday Cake and ice cream and lawn chairs while our company was with us, and carried it all up the valley to the Fortress of Solitude for a shady little creekside party inbetween thundershowers.

As we broke camp, I went ahead with a few odd items, including the leftover cake with the pale green 7-minute frosting in a tupperware cake container, while the rest of the crew stayed behind. As they walked along the path a short time later, they discovered that, as I was carrying the container along, the bottom had suddenly fallen out of the thing and half a cake and several quarts of green mint icing went kersplat in the middle of the trail. Luckily by the time the cooks discovered the disaster, I was safely back home and out of earshot.

Then along came wife and sister, the cakebakers. I could here some kind of caterwalling as they approached. They were singing something at the top of their lungs, and it seemed to have a certain edge to it, as if it might carry ominous overtones. Wait... what is that awful melody. NOOOO! The horrible lyrics! The HORROR....

MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark All the sweet, green icing flowing down... Someone left the cake out in the rain I don't think that I can take it 'cause it took so long to bake it and I'll never have that recipe again....

OHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I'll never hear the end of this one, you can count on that. It will just go on, and on, and on, and.... just like Richard Harris.

And yes, Part One is hanging tight the morning after a complete nervous breakdown of my zippy new hard drive. Dude! I'm getting a DELL!

Things Fall Apart

All is not well in DellVille. The last in this debacle is that it is looking like there are fatal flaws in this newly loaded and wonderfully stable Windows XP Professional I've been hearing so much about. The nice lady who was practicing her English while pretending to be technically supportive finally threw her hands up and said (in English words here, not as heard over the phone, so as to be intelligible) to just keep on mucking around and if it totally falls apart again we will have to wipe the hard drive I have been working on furiously for two solid days and start over again from scratch. Not a happy camper. So if (when?) I disappear for some time (actually I can go back to my limp-along if necessary) or seem unusually surly, you'll know why. Sigh.

Marginal Land: Suburbs and Place

Ms. Dickenson may have been on to something with her prairie consisting of only one flower and a bee. Where I grew up, a quarter acre vacant wooded lot and a small boy was enough to make a wilderness. Like so many kids in the boomer generation, my early years were spent in the suburbs on the edges of an expanding metropolis and I learned about life from the midst of a pseudopodial subdivision sprawled out beyond the old city center, up out of Jones Valley and onto the low mountainsides of the far southern Appalachian ridges around Birmingham, Alabama.

I grew up in city limits but was happiest when I imagined myself to be in the 'country'. From the relative wildness of vacant lots and wooded neighborhood margins I was able to pretend to be a pioneer... like the very popular Davy Crockett of the times... and lived in wilderness. It was here rather than in the ball parks and community pools that I first felt an attachment to place, in the larger sense of living not in just a neighborhood or city but in 'a place with trees like these, mountains, rocks, creeks that look just so'. Playing in the woods (even though that was only a fraction of an acre in some of my favorite wild places) I sensed that here I was closer to 'native land', and so I was closer to being a native myself; and of course playing 'cowboys and Indians' in those tiny woods was part of that connection to an earlier time when men were closer to 'the soil' than any of our white-collared fathers were.

Just what there was about those suburban woodlots that fascinated me so I suppose is not too hard to say. Surely important was the fact that it was 'unimproved' and there, the way things were is the way things were, everything was in the place it should be and managed to get along quite nicely on its own without man's help in any way. There was an authenticity about that I liked. I remember being fascinated by nature as an economy, a 'sacred grove' in a sense where God spoke it into being and so it was. Then too, there was in these quiet groves a strangeness and mystery in the darkness and stillness; there was a Presence there. And in a child's imagination, anything might crawl, fly or slither from behind any random tree. And sometimes they did... snakes, birds, coons and possums. I picked blackberries there in the spring, shot my BB gun, throw rocks at cans, whittled a slingshot, and lay on my back and watched clouds for the first time in those woody patches of suburbia. And as I grew older, I required more of the unspoken nutrient that this remote and natural kind of place offered me.

Summer camp figures into this longing for open natural space. From an early age, I was exported well beyond the limits of the city to a rough and beautiful pine forest to summer camp. I went as a camper at age ten, and found my woodlot magnified a thousand-fold, living in a cabin named after an Indian tribe, smelling nature, hearing the rush of the falls, riding horses in woods, paddling canoes under arching branches where snakes basked in the sun, swimming in the warm brown creek water, being an indigenous person. I came back to this same camp as a junior leader, then leader, and finally for two years was on the staff of upper class high school kids who were life guards, tended the horses, lead games and hikes and music, and got to come all summer for free plus a few dollars pay. This experience was an extension of those joys and necessities I first experienced at the edges of suburbia. The more I got of it, the more I wanted.

Along the way, I had become fascinated with fishing, which possesses its own isolation, otherness and wildness. Mostly I fished alone and from the shore, and more often than not, I'd find myself thoroughly distracted by some little thing in the woods along the lake and forget fishing entirely. When I was old enough for a BB gun and then a small caliber rifle, I thought maybe I'd find satisfaction in hunting, but killing things was not the manly adventure it seemed to be when Davy killed him a 'bar' and so I never became a hunter after all. In high school and early college, many of my friends followed their fathers onto the golf courses that spread into the countryside with the expanding city where they went to find relative solitude, wildness, otherness, hoping to discover it by chasing behind a little white ball. I worked on a golf course one summer, but this sport seemed to miss the point and left me empty, and I'd wander off into the rough turning logs for salamanders, out of the way from humming projectiles hit with sticks by grown men who paid large sums to have an excuse to get out under the sky. I ultimately accepted that, for me, I needed no excuse, that being there was the point, and guns, rods and reels, clubs and other toys were merely tangible justifications for immersion in natural places in a society that seems to expect 'a reason' for grown men to be happily outdoors.

All of the wild places I explored as an older boy with my rifle or fishing pole, out on the edges of human habitat south of Birmingham, are every one of them under asphalt now, covered with condos and shopping 'mauls', nicely landscaped, tamed, private or unwelcoming public places. Even the rocky cliffs I climbed south of town... the very southern teminus of the ancient Appalachians, I later discovered... are now covered with expensive homes, gated mountainside communities, and in the valleys, private fishing lakes and golf courses. To return to these places of memory and discover the transformation is like finding that a favorite wild, free creature has been broken and harnessed to servitude and does not recognise me any more. Even the edges from youth were not far enough away for lasting wildness, and perhaps it is this experience in some sense that has compelled me to find remoter places, not just to visit, but in which to make my home.

And so today, we live every day well beyond the edges of a town so small there are no suburbs. I have a vast woodlot around me, two creeks full of bright fish and sunlight, tranquility by the skyfull, and no neighbors to disturb in my rambling walks. This perhaps is the 'place' I felt I belonged to long ago. I have to wonder if I did not start moving here while picking berries with small hands, behind my suburban house in a secret patch of woods.

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Read other posts about "Suburbs" or Edges and how they impact our sense of place at this week's Ecotone BiWeekly Topic.

The Eagle Has Landed

...sort of. Got the new Dell System yesterday and went through the exhilirating and terrifying process of putting it all together. Much to my chagrin, there are even more wires sprouting out the back of my desk than ever before (the flat screen with DVSomethingOrOther cable and addition of the subwoofer (way SUB) account for new dust-collecting cords unknown before. The 19" monitor is superb, not to mention light, and the system really hums compared to the 450MHz machine it replaces. Windows XP is going to take some getting used to; it's like trying to cook a familiar dish in someone else's kitchen. Sigh.

And of course, there are always those problems that make a new computer owner break into a cold sweat. Short story: the sound card was not recognized and I got to experience the sweet ease of opening the new case to reseat the sound card in another slot (also a breeze, done without tools... and how nice to open a case that is not full of spidery dustdevils!) And then that subwoofer is way too 'sub' to accept, and I will be receiving a replacement in a day or two.

As I was shutting down the limp-along Win95 sytem expecting the Airborne Express guy at any minute, my last task was to copy some critical recently updated files to a floppy. And the floppy drive seems at that moment to have failed. Today is "Write about Suburbs and Place" day at the Ecotone, and that essay is on the old hard drive sans floppy. Only thing I know to do (and will have to decide if it is worth the effort) is plug the whole system in again, connect to the net, and email the document to myself to post at the Ecotone and here. Or maybe I'll just be a reader this time around.

More Local Color

The "town characters" continue to show up here on Goose Creek, and the account of Marcia from One Pot Meal of LobsterLand is a notable addition. Do go read, and there may be a pop quiz later.

I will compile links to all these 'characters' stories in one convenient spot here after another month or so, and please consider adding yours to this growing group of oddfellows and different drummers.

I was born a poor black chile

If you're not happy with your color, or ever wanted to be Brazilian-colored, Hawaiian-hued, or Tahitian-toned for a few days, now you can chose your favorite ethnic pigment and have it airbrushed on in a matter of minutes. So far, it seems to be mostly for instant 'tans' but can SKINS OF THE WORLD be far behind? Soon you'll be visiting your local SunSpraySalon, asking "Can you show me something in Abbysinian, please."

Mind Wanderings...

Since we've been entertaining house guests for a week concurrent with my using this limp-along Win95 monotasking computer after the crash of '03, I've done more reading than writing to the blog, so here are a few pointers to blogs of interest at the moment, and some other snippets...

** Rana of Notes from an Eclectic Mind has told us about a 'character' at least somewhat in response to my call a few weeks back for you folks there in reader-land to tell us about your local oddfellows. Rana had a hard time deciding which characters to tell about, as she grew up among all sorts in "Little Town" Texas. An excerpt...

If anyone knew a real diagnosis of his problems I never heard it. Most locals, my Mother among them, were content to say Boy “wasn’t right.” I assume he was mentally retarded. I know he was an alcoholic thanks to the barflies in honky tonks like the Bloody Bucket who gave him beer. Boy spent far too much of his time drunk but even sober he’d roll down the street engaged in an a