Fragments From Floyd

New Vaccine Against Bird Flu

Miles to go before we sleep, but if this method pans out, it could save millions of lives.

The new vaccine can be grown in cell culture, so it can be mass produced faster. The current vaccine is made in eggs--a time consuming process taking at least three to four months--and the world capacity for vaccine production in eggs is limited, particularly if the chickens are infected.

It will require just one dose and will give coverage within a day of administration. The inactive vaccines in development require two shots three weeks apart and then take two weeks to give protection.

The new vaccine would also be administered as a nasal spray, allowing fast distribution and no needles.

BBC: Transfusions May Cut Flu Death

It might have worked to some degree in 1918. It's practice was limited and not well documented. But it may be that transfusion of the antibody-containing serum of avian flu survivors may confer some immunity to those who suffer from the disease.

There are the problems with other nasties in blood products, and the science remains to be established. Revere, at Effect Measure sees limited use for this method once the pandemic is full blown, but it might be helpful in isolated cases, and NOW is the time to determine just how helpful it might be.

This is one of those ideas that sounds good on paper until one thinks of bodies stacked up like cordwood outside of emergency rooms. As a strategy, except in exceptional circumstances, this seems like a pretty weak reed to lean on. The time to investigate it and try it is now, when cases are few and this method might be used in resource scarce Indonesia, Thailand or China. In these instances, if effective, it might save someone's little girl or big brother. It should be tried.

But if this virus becomes easily transmissible, this isn't a treatment that's going to make much difference.

Posted by fred1st at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's true with a meal (though it gets scant attention at our house) and it's true with sales: part of the appeal is how it's presented.

This little wire book display is hardly elegant, but it is highly functional for the price, and I wish I had bought at least a dozen of them at Hobby Lobby when we were in South Dakota. I can't find them in the HL catalog, and have not had any luck locating anything similar using every search term I can conjure. The beauty of this little easel is that it is adjustable for one to three of my 5.5" x 8.5" books, and then collapses when not in use.

I can't be the only person peddling books to need this very item. I just can't seem to lay my hands (or my browser) on it. If anybody has a source for this item, please send it along. Laying the book flat on a checkout counter or display table in a shop or store is better than it not being there at all, but I think the presentation needs a dash of seasoning and some sprigs of parlsely for color.

Posted by fred1st at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

There are head nods, and there are head nods. As a speaker, one needs to distinguish between the two kinds as a gauge of where, if anywhere, their words are ending up. In the first case, the Type 1 nod, the speaker's words are flowers blooming unseen, mere air waves bouncing off the walls. Here, the head droops as the assumed consciousness of the would-be listener (a freshman more often than not) gives up control of cervical muscle tension and the weight of the skull brings it arching toward the sternum. In mid-fall there may be a sudden jolt back to semi-consciousness, though not infrequently, I've had students spend the whole of my impassioned soliloquy on cell respiration with chin on chest.

I once had a student come by my office at Radford to pick up some lab papers he'd not received because he missed several labs. "And who are you?" I asked, knowing he was a Type 1 head-on-chester. "I don't recognize you in that upright posture. Perhaps I'd know you better if you'd show me what the top of your head looks like because I think that's the part I see on those occasions when you chose to come to class." (Why yes, I CAN be sarcastic. Just ask my poor wife!)

But I digress. This, actually, is not the head nod type of focus here this morning. It is Type 2 of which I speak.

So after an uncommonly ample meal yesterday, and following the pledge of allegiance to the flag, the Rotary Code of Ethics and the singing of My Country Tis, I rambled on at break-neck speed about the book, about finding Floyd, and about writing and self-publishing for exactly 14 minutes yesterday at the Floyd County Rotary club luncheon at Rays. Meanwhile, In my peripheral vision, I could see several Type Two head nodders and took this as a sign of encouragement. I understand this body language well.

T2 nods come automatically to me when I am a listener, perhaps because I've suffered so many T1 nods in my lifetime in the classroom. I want the speaker to know I AM hearing him or her. And so I always assume when as a speaker I see this nod, it is one of fellow-feeling, a kind of body-language YES! that suggests the listener has felt those convictions, had those thoughts, or reached a similar conclusion as the speaker. Having just one Type 2 in a classroom of 50 or more students, getting that eye and mind contact with even ONE member of the audience makes up for the ten T1 nodders and droolers scattered about the auditorium and the remaining verticals who are actually grocery shopping in their minds or instant-messaging their girlfriends. And so I was most grateful for the physical signs that I was not alone and my words weren't falling in the forest. It was a very gracious and attentive group, and I much appreciated the opportunity to take a little of their time.

As I would have imagined, among those few who stopped by afterwards to chat, the T2 nodders were disproportionately well represented. Two exchanged business cards, and shared a long list of ideas about marketing and promoting the book out of their experiences, Elaine as Graphic Designer and Jared as "distributor, retailer and Organic Processor" at the new and growing Sweetwater Market taking shape just next to Ray's on 221. I expect to make a trip there soon, camera and pen in hand, so I can tell you more about this new Floyd enterprise and great addition to our local economy and community. And thanks to all who were gracious and receptive listeners yesterday. Being heard sure makes my mission seem worth doing and way more personally rewarding.

Now, it would be nice if I could sell some books and move closer to that second printing. (We're two-thirds the way there.) Anyone? Birthdays coming up? Got a friend or relative in the hospital or a nursing home? Maybe you know somebody who misses living in the Blue Ridge who could use a little taste of home. Or maybe you live in the Southern Appalachians and want to share with someone who lives elsewhere what it is that you love about these rolling hills of home. Then visit slowroadhome.com and order several copies today!

Posted by fred1st at 6:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There won't be many more mild evenings when we can take our meals out back and sit in the white plastic chairs in the curve of the driveway behind the house. It's a little more private there than on the front porch, where, should a vehicle pass at dinner time, we feel compelled to stop our conversation, balance our plates on our laps so at least one hand will be free to wave should anyone look up our way. Behind the house, we eat in anonymity and with a loftier perch and better view of the evening sky.

But last night, we both remarked how much worse the gnats had become in the past few days. There had been one of those mass hatchings we've come to expect this time of year when the dew-wet metal roof will literally be covered, hundreds to the square inch, with black gnats til the next rain comes to wash them away. We wear our wide-brimmed straw hats to try to discourage those that invade our eyes and ears, and I splash on a little repellent if I'll be out working for any time. They are sure a nuisance, but at least they don't carry diseases like the mosquitoes we both grew up with in Alabama and Mississippi.

It wasn't long into our meal before we noticed scores of nighthawks coursing like arrows over the house, back and forth in sweeping circles. Odd. That's the first time we've seen them in this kind of numbers, and especially flying so close. Usually, they form the highest circle in the spheres of crepuscular feeders--dragonflies, bats, chimney swifts--in the column of space over Goose Creek.

But of course, I finally understood: the nighthawks have come because the gnats have come. For them, the hatching is a feast. Dinner is served. Please eat long and well, insectivorous friends.

And soon, both flying dinner and diner will be gone with the coming of cold weather. We'll take our meals indoors and the white chairs will be stacked over in the barn until May. It is a rhythm we know well now, and even the gnats are a part of the dance.

Posted by fred1st at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I feel as if I lived through the Wonder Years of Play, growing through my childhood in the fifties. In that regard, it was perhaps the best of times.

Unlike children in the times of our distant ancestors, we had no fear of disease, hunger or prowling animals or human invaders. We had few difficult or time consuming chores beyond a little yard work in the summers. We lived close enough to friends to have a ship-full of pirates or a half dozen each of cowboys and indians ('scuse please, I mean range technicians and native Americans.) We were fortunate enough to have a ball or two, a pair of skates (and a sidewalk!)and a wagon. We lived near a patch of woods on a vacant lot that was our wilderness where we built forts of sticks and climbed every tree we could manage safely, and a few others to boot. We threw rocks at pop bottles in the powerline clearing, flew Junebugs on a string, and stayed out past dark in the summer with a jar with the lid poked full of holes for lightning bugs. We were outside every minute we were allowed to be, and our scuffed knees and elbows usually showed it.

I was happy to see Abby stay with us for four physically-active days without one minute of TV or video or thumb-powered electronic toy and be perfectly content. And I bet she'll be the only five year old girl in her kindergarten class this year who has shot a home-made bow and arrow. (This was the kind contribution of our neighbors, whose son visited with his, and the next day he brought one for Abby!)

It has come up several times in recent conversations: the imagination and play outdoors are blessings whose nurture and most precious use comes in childhood. (If it doesn't grow strong then, does that impact and impoverish one's adult imagination and sense of play?)

But not every childhood in every age gets the play of the mind and body that nurtures both. So much of today's play puts everything a child could have imagined right there on some kind of screen and he or she runs, jumps, and becomes king or queen of the mountain by wiggling one or more fingers while munching some of those tasty artificial foods I was talking about yesterday. I would wish for them the good memories of open spaces, tree forts, barn lofts, of woodlots and creeks, and the wind in their faces--to indulge the mind and hands and heart in play.

(Just file this post under "maudlin moments" of a dirt-road curmudgeon.) Larger image is here.

Posted by fred1st at 4:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

...a piece about the seasonal transition that is in the air this time of year--from Slow Road Home.

The standing corn browns and curls and our deep valley grows colder in the shadows of the shortening September days. The canning is laid by, and we celebrate the end of long months of kneeling servitude to the trowel and the watering can. We look forward at last to reclaiming our days from the tyranny of the garden. But our glimpse of freedom is a false and short-lived interlude of recovery; our responsible guardianship only changes in the fall from gardening to the unending care and feeding of the woodstove.

We decided many years ago to heat the house with wood as many winters as we are able. Every fall I have to explain this logic to myself one more time, just as I find myself standing in garden mud in the humid heat of early August when I blow the gnats away from my eyes, and question the economy of being a grower of vegetables. It would be so much easier just to pay and be a consumer. But we garden; then we gather wood--two self-inflicted but mostly joyous burdens in our year, not all that different in their end products or purpose, or in their impact on our lives for good.

Neither heating with wood nor growing a year's worth of garden vegetables is the path of least resistance, greatest convenience, or efficiency of our finite personal energies. In both these labor-intensive endeavors there is the illusion of control over our lives in at least these small ways. I feel very much like the omnipotent dictator as I plan my attack on woodlot or corn rows, at every step. But when I am honest with myself, I have to acknowledge my utter dependence on the workings of sun-heat, rain-sap, and soil-plus-time.

I carry the heavy, dirty pieces of wood one by one from forest to the truck to woodpile to stove; I stoop, bend, tug, water, hoe, weed, lift, and harvest each of a dozen varieties of prolific root and fruit. And in the end, I must confess that in all this, I am just the middleman, a facilitator standing by with relatively little control and little to do with the process but collect what nature makes of her own secret raw materials.

Our comfort over winter that comes from filled canning jars and wood's warmth depends on the internal wisdom of roots, trunks and leaves. It relies, too, on the integrity of our woodcutter's tools and gardening utensils and the strength of these bodies of ours. All must work, together-nature, tool and human hands. Our woodpile and the yellow, green and gold canning jars lined up like functional art in the dark vault of the cellar are testimony that-for one more year-we have lived in a blessed harmony with our wits, our own bones and with the land that somehow sustains us. The warmth we will feel is not all measured in degrees, just as the nourishment from gardening is not measured merely in calories.

Now, the garden of the year is past. Lessons in the cold months ahead won't come from the fenced domain of the garden but from open, wooded hillsides of Goose Creek; from the splitting and stacking and stoking that will keep fires throwing flickers of flame through the glass door of the wood stove into this warm room from late September until mid-April. Then, as the days lengthen in the spring and the soil thaws through mud to crumbling dark loam once more, the garden's needs will become the focus of our labors. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And so it goes.

In these shorter days of autumn, as we move our energies from garden soil to open forest, we have come to a changing of the guard. Our garden is hibernating, and it is time to go hunt the bare bones of walnuts, locusts and oaks. It is hard work. It is good work. It is our economy, what we do, and in my ledger, there is no better pay for a day's work than this.

Posted by fred1st at 4:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, I did try the peanut butter and tomato sandwich like I said I would.

But I confess: halfway through, I pulled out the tomato and ate it by itself. We've just been too deprived of "real food" this summer with our failed garden to be tempted by anything but the pure taste of vegetables direct from the earth--even if, this year, they are not our own.

Very little of the American diet consists of things that have flavor in their own right, like an ear of corn does right out of the husk or a melon straight from the vine. A fresh tomato plucked warm from the garden is genuine food, with authentic flavor, unprocessed for texture or appearance. We've grown accustomed in our times, sadly, to chemical foods. Most of the year, Ann and I are as dependent as the next family on what the food alchemists and engineers feed us. So in the summer, when we can get it, I'll take the tomato without the peanut butter.

Ah what we've given away with "processing" of our foods. Consider these few excerpts from "Why McDonalds Fries Taste So Good."

People usually buy a food item the first time because of its packaging or appearance. Taste usually determines whether they buy it again. About 90 percent of the money that Americans now spend on food goes to buy processed food. The canning, freezing, and dehydrating techniques used in processing destroy most of food's flavor -- and so a vast industry has arisen in the United States to make processed food palatable. Without this flavor industry today's fast food would not exist.

...A number of companies sell sophisticated devices that attempt to measure mouthfeel. The TA.XT2i Texture Analyzer, produced by the Texture Technologies Corporation, of Scarsdale, New York, performs calculations based on data derived from as many as 250 separate probes. It is essentially a mechanical mouth. It gauges the most-important rheological properties of a food -- bounce, creep, breaking point, density, crunchiness, chewiness, gumminess, lumpiness, rubberiness, springiness, slipperiness, smoothness, softness, wetness, juiciness, spreadability, springback, and tackiness.

Next time you sit munching on your favorite chips, crackers or dip, compare its artifice and history to the workings of sunlight and rain in the tomato you eat right from your garden. You'll want the real McCoy--with salt, maybe some pepper, but probably not any peanut butter.

Posted by fred1st at 7:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Ann said this morning as she rushed to fling herself back into the week of emails and other responsibilities at work: I think I like Abby's world better.

We took Abby back to the Charlotte airport to meet her mom yesterday afternoon, so the place will be strangely quiet today--no little footsteps creeping down the stairs at first light later this morning as I'd almost grown accustomed to.

Not that minding out for and entertaining a five year old is not constant, high-energy and demanding work. Her visit was four days of non-stop walking, climbing, running, splashing and hearing the W-words: what, when, why, where, who? With only an occasional whimper, Abby was in her element here in the country and will carry some clear and lasting memories of chasing butterflies and falling on purpose into cold creek water, and of course, of her constant pal, Tsuga.

One of her most permanent recollections, unfortunately, will be reinforced by the olfactory memories. While I was at the Roanoke Bookfest and Ann and Abby were expecting noontime guests (a playmate) Tsuga took the opportunity with the humans distracted to find his own entertainment: a recently-dead fawn just down the road from the house. And he did what dogs do when they find a cache of reeking, fly-infested eau-de-ungulate: he rolled gleefully in it to become redolent in the stench of the kill (ostensibly his own). Company was expected in less than a half hour, so T-dog became the sudden center of attention again, and got a bath.

The dead deer, however, remains (pun intended). The buzzards have made it somewhat less an ordeal for me later this morning (oh joy!). Armed with pitchfork and rubber gloves, I'll include the carcass pick-up in my run to the greenbox, along the way tossing the remains off into the woods where the buzzards can do their work, but Tsuga won't be tempted to follow the instinct to stink.

Posted by fred1st at 5:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I just went back and reviewed the video clips from last week's brief television appearance at Channel 7. I've seen myself in mercifully few still images over the years, though moreso in the new age of digital pocket cameras and cameraphones in a county swarming with photographer-bloggers. It has been several decades, almost five actually, since I've seen myself "in the movies" and that real-life imagery is even more humbling than still pictures. Seeing myself in video here, my self-image of robust-and-youthful has been thoroughly dispelled, supplanted by wizened, worn and gaunt. The camera doesn't lie. It isn't biased by our delusions of perpetual youth and vitality. What it sees is what you get.

Funny. I certainly don't think of myself as thin anymore, though I was underweight at least through most of high school. Truth of the matter is, if you take my height of 6'2" and weight of 180 pounds, according to the Body Mass Index calculations, I'm toward the top of NORMAL (and heart-safe) range and approaching OVERWEIGHT. I sure don't look it on TV. By other measures (electrical impedance body fat measurements taken in the PT clinic six months ago) I'm lean at 12% body fat. For folks more toward the mesomorphic, muscular side, BMI isn't a very good yardstick of healthy weight. Even folks like Densel Washington and Arnold Schwarzenegger are "overweight" using BMI.

Still, if you haven't recently, you can easily calculate your own body mass and see where you fall in the "at risk" categories. You should do the same for your children and set goals for getting high BMIs down into safer ranges before they are beyond control.

By design, I have lost five pounds since I started working in the clinic last December and had a good set of scales to weigh myself on a couple of times a week. I was gaining girth around the middle and too cheap to buy new pants. I'm happy to say that today, I have a few pair of pants that don't require me to hold my breath while wearing them anymore. How? From my long-traditional breakfast duo of cereal-and-toast, I cut out the two pieces of toast (and usually jelly) and that change alone, over time, has brought me back a bit into the heart-safe BMI range. I just wish I hadn't lost weight in my face. And while I'm wishing, I'll just add back a little pepper to the increasingly salt-colored beard.

Posted by fred1st at 7:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Ann anguished about keeping Abby occupied. Piffle, I said. She has butterflies to chase, the creeks to play in and the dog to keep her company. What more could a little girl ask?

We expected her to hop around on the rocks with her rubber boots keeping her feet dry and warm. Right. She is perfectly happy soaked to the bone in spring-fed creek water. This image is from the first of many intentional dunkings.

Abby is not the least bit squeamish or dainty. I think what we have here is her mother remade--a tomboy if there ever was one.

Posted by fred1st at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Why is it when there's a child around, the days seem so much busier and fuller? Memories of yesterday look like one of those old Family Circle cartoons of the dotted-line tracks behind a little kid that scribble back and forth in curlycues across the page, up trees, across creeks, accompanied by dogs, jumping here, lying down in the creek there. The entire page of memory is filled with no empty space.

Maybe that's why I'm so tired this morning, and so behind. I gotta go.

Posted by fred1st at 4:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

That's right. This is what I'm suggesting we have for lunch today while granddaughter Abby is with us for a few days: a PB and Tomato sandwich. She'll never forget it. We'll all try something new for the first time, the recommendation of this personal favorite coming from the same benefactor who fetched us a sack full of 'maters and a "care package" of beans, squash and such from his abundant garden cross-county. Peanut butter and tomato was one of his childhood favorites he told us, and there are anecdotal reports on the message boards and such that he isn't alone in this praise for this seemingly bizarre combination. Heck, we eat PB on celery and raisins and pineapple on PB so I'm game for trying it.

I'm living on borrowed time here. Already there are stirrings upstairs. By all rights, Abby should sleep til 9:00 or so on this first morning at Goose Creek if her Central Time internal alarm clock will only keep her asleep to her usual hour. But then, we have this dog alarm clock who sees things out the window in the mornings between 5 and 6 and he's already done his very vocal part to roust a five year old far too early for me to get done the things I need to do without "help", including deciding what I want to say on Saturday.

The Roanoke Valley Bookfest seems to be well organized, and I'd imagine, well publicized so I'm hoping it will be well attended. It will be a full day, from an author's breakfast at 8:00 til the book signing around 5:00 that afternoon and home by maybe 7:00.

I have an idea there will be pictures ahead at Fragments today or tomorrow featuring one little girl and one big yeller dog, and likely too, a report on one odd-sounding sandwich. And I'll bet I will be the only one to try it. Wait and see.

Well sure 'nuff, I hear the patter of little socked feet coming down the steps in the dark and the dog is about to wag his tail off; he'll get enough attention today for sure! The Dumpster is on duty and he's about to put on his grampa hat for the day. It's a small world, after all.

Posted by fred1st at 6:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently read "How shooting digitally changes acting." Interesting observation. And of course, it is also photographers that who are freed from the bonds of the cost of film. This image of a hillside of fall flowers with the camera in motion is an experiment I never would have bothered with in the days when I would only have seen the image as a transparency or tiny print after days or weeks.

I have the freedom with digital film to experiment knowing ahead of time that I will delete 99 out of 100 such shots. Yes, digital is very liberating. Some would say the unbounded freedom of digital imagery cheapens art and the value of expertise if you can try a thousand times to get one right instead of producing desirable results by virtue of true gift. (Larger image here.)

Video Clips from WDBJ Uploaded

And speaking of images and actors: the video clips of my three little segments on the Monday Morning News on Channel 7 are now posted. I'd have been happier with a taped show you could extract some usable minutes from, but what you see is what you get. All three bits are here, listed in inverse order with the first part at the bottom of the list.

Posted by fred1st at 5:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

...from Slow Road Home ~ A Blue Ridge Book of Days

It is August at last. True, there may not yet be much difference in day or nighttime temperatures to say we've moved into a new season. But here in the mountains, we can typically expect a tantalizing preview of fall during the first half of this month. There are signs of it already, if you know what to look for.

Many of autumn's wildflowers have emerged, though they are small and inconspicuous and most haven't blossomed yet. It will be another few weeks before you'll notice them as you drive along the back roads. But it is part of the pattern of things that the goldenrod, Joe Pye weed, and ironweed will become the dominant vegetation soon, adding rich deep yellow, dusky mauve and royal purple to the palette of color in every meadow and pasture border.

Soon, the starlings will grow restless. They'll congregate nervously in a few trees here and there, as if both attracted and repulsed by each other in a mob of squawking voices. Not one among them knows where they are headed or why--only that something big is about to happen. The instinct to migrate must be a powerful itch.

It won't be long before an occasional Monarch butterfly shows up on Goose Creek, passing by in loops and glides. In ones and twos, they will lift on the rising heat, winged wisps of will, bound at first in no particular direction and free of hurry. Then, later in the month and unfailingly west, they will glide resolutely toward winter roosts in central Mexico-a pilgrimage in such numbers that their combined weight will break the branches out of their roosting trees.

We should be looking for woolybear caterpillars to turn up in the next week or two. They'll be crossing the roads of Floyd County in large numbers in their brown and black three piece suits. I've given up trying to divine the harshness of winter from the ratio of the wooly worm's two colors. The message I carry away from their thick furry wool is simply that it will be more or less cold by and by. A thick black and brown coat like theirs will come in mighty handy then, though it's hard to imagine that in August's heat.

This month, the locusts and walnuts, last to put on their spring leaves, will be first to take them off. Harbingers of fall, the feather-pinnate leaves of sumac will be among the first to go orange along the wooded roadsides, followed soon by Virginia creeper's five-fingered leaves that carry red up the trunks of trees along the edges of our woods. Both these chameleon color changes will happen well ahead of the colors will appear higher overhead later on in the poplars, hickories and maples.

Some of the fallness that I will feel this week or next has nothing to do with changes in the visible signs of fall. It will come perhaps from an imperceptible sense of the loss of mere moments each day. Like our inner alarms that awaken us promptly every morning, my seasonal alarm sounds the call of fall this week. I'm confident that if you blindfolded me, spun me around ten times, and placed me anywhere on the calendar, I could tell you "this is early August" by the feel of it alone. But then, there are also the smells of the coming season in the air that give us clues.

On such a day as this in early autumn, I breathe in the new aromas that August alone can give--the scent of sweet clover and hay, of corn stalks going but not quite gone by--a potpourri of plant matter in profusion, baked dry by the summer sun. The aromas of monarda and pennyroyal, spicebush and sassafras were overpowered by the sweet smell of pasture pollen in mid July, but not so in August as the pasture winds down. I will be sniffing out faint traces of fall today and will stop often in the garden for deep drafts of autumn-flavored air.

This week, or the next, I will look up and declare "that is a fall sky!" when round piled and billowed clouds of summer for a day or two give way to clouds streaked and smeared, thin, high and pulled thin with the ends turned up, against a turquoise sky.

Fall will make a few short sorties in August, then retreat, and return again to stay longer each visit. "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven." It is time for fall, even though the season has not yet quite arrived.

Posted by fred1st at 5:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

AppLit Upper Tier Speakers

I think I'll try to get down for the Friday programs at the Emory & Henry Literary Festival. Take a look at the events and speakers. If you're at all interested in Appalachian Literature, it might be worth your time. I'm particularly interested in hearing "Nature, Place, and the Appalachian Writer" Panelists: Maggie Anderson, Jeff Daniel Marion, Robert Morgan, Ron Rash

One Thing to Another

When I was doing the taping of the Studio Virginia interview at WVTF back in June, I mentioned to Gene Marrano that he really should come interview David St. Lawrence at the Jacksonville Center. He did, and this is one nice thing that came out of that: an article in Blue Ridge Business Journal called Green Floyd.

Culturally-embedded Character Flaws

Weight gain, says Dr Michael Booth, is a physical portrait of consumerism, an externalisation of our value system. "We do need to do something about 'I will give myself pleasure whenever and however I please and not think about the consequences'" he says. "It's a problem that comes with greater and greater wealth. We see the world as the range of things available to us. Virtually anything is there for the taking. We've lost the notion that we should be denied anything." Our Cities Are Killing Us

Threesome:Come to the Blog Side, Luke

Saturday at the Franklin BookFest in Rocky Mount, Colleen and I tried to lure Jim Minick into the Blogosphere and he would have none of it. Yet. We're still working on him. Resistance is futile.

Burning the Beans

Global Warming Could Slam Food Supply ~ Suppose the dinner on your table last night had cost 20 times what it did? Or 50 times as much? Scientists say global warming very likely has something like that in store in the coming decades. ABC News

Bad Guy Nabbed

They captured the young killer in Blacksburg yesterday afternoon, only a few hundred yards from where he had killed his second victim earlier in the day. The whole region breathes a sigh of relief, with the exception of those children and wives who were without a father and husband at the end of the day for having met this violent, doomed gunman.

Posted by fred1st at 5:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Roanoke is a pussycat of a city at 5:00 in the morning, purring peacefully. It sleeps with the lights on.

I reached the station early and napped a couple of minutes, mine the only car in the parking lot. Beside the sleek, modern building, an array of a dozen large, curved antennae were aimed at an invisible point to the southwest, giving credence to the signage beside the front door: "Digital Broadcast Center".

Strange, I thought, to have a TV station in the middle of town. When I grew up, the tall antennas of Channel 6 and 7 bristled along the top of Birmingham's Red Mountain, up by Vulcan, red lights blinking and visible from anywhere in town.

The main floor, the command center of the station, is high-tech-equipped for three dozen staff, but at that hour, all of the ergonomically-correct workstations were empty. The WDBJ Morning Show host, Bob Grebe, seated me at one of them and we waiting for a commercial break to slip the lapel mic under my shirt to clip on my collar.

Bob and I would be situated at a tiny round table, and to my dismay (and a poor fit for my lanky torso) sitting on high metal-tubing stools. No back support. Couldn't find a comfortable place for my arms. I felt off-balance. Yikes! I wasn't sure where to look--at one of several cameras? at the host? Doesn't matter. Too late now.

The cameras where rolling (except there are no reels to ROLL any more, of course--it's all digital) and I'd have about 90 seconds out of each of three two-minute spots to try to go someplace worth going. That's not very many sentences. Mere soundbites. My mind plans conversation in paragraphs. This was not going to be a walk in the park. But then, I came in with no expectations beyond getting the name and cover and author's smiling face before potential readers. (I don't think I managed to smile much, actually. We'll see.)

And in the end, that expectation of visibility was certainly met. They even displayed some photographs from Fragments Galleries during the segments, which I had not expected. Great! Give "face and cover time" a grade of "A".

However, in the "creating reader interest in the book" I'll give myself a medium grade, a "C". If readers want to read it, it will be in spite of, not because of anything I was able to articulate about the book. Doh! And in the "making them care about the author" category, another "C".

No home run here, but then again, not a strike out. And I suppose a base-on-balls can score runs, too, right?

Thanks, Linda, for the promo that gained me the opportunity, and Bob Grebe for making me feel at home under the bright lights.

News at 6. (I'll take a look at the video clips when they come on line here in a bit. If they're not too frightful to watch, I'll post links that should be active for a week or so. If they are wretched, you'll just have to use your vivid blogger imaginations.)

BULLETIN: the video clips availability has been pre-empted by the breaking news regarding the convict who killed a security guard in the hospital where my wife works. I've just received word he has just shot a sherrif's deputy on the Virginia Tech campus and a full-out manhunt is underway. This is no small deal, folks: a desparate killer with nothing to lose on the very crowded, very exposed university campus. It seems a hostage-taking opportunity we will all hope this man doesn't have a chance to take.

UPDATE 11:00: Virginia Tech campus has been shut down. Dorms are in lockdown. Squires Student Center was evacuated and searched. This continues to be a tense situation. Three people have been shot already. It this guy gets out of Montomery County, he's likely to head to more remote places--like Giles County to the north. Or Floyd County to the south.

Posted by fred1st at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning I get a second chance to take the most direct indirect route between home and Rocky Mount. Last night's google route took me the two long legs of the triangle and I was hoping for the hypotenuse. Knowing how famously confusing roads in this ultra-rural part of the Piedmont can be, I left an hour and a half before the event expecting a 45 minute drive. Turned out more like a 75 minute drive, but I still arrived a bit early, and as these things usually do, this coffeehouse reading event started only approximately on time. I was slated to read first. Gulp.

I relied once more on the Muses of Road Hum, those meditative ladies who put things into my head while I'm driving someplace where I have to have my act together by the end of the journey. Those gossamer divas stitch the concepts, paragraphs and themes together for me while my corpus is involved in following the pitch and turn of the road, and voila! By the time I reach my biology class or physical therapy patient or book reading, I have a plan, an outline, a bolt of golden cloth. But last night, with all the wrong turns and angst of being both lost and late, those cowardly muses dared not intrude on my funk. I arrived in Rocky Mount without an opening tactic. All I gleaned from my drive over was a single silly metaphor: my book was like my dinner last night.

Thirty-two bean soup. Nutritious, my body somehow knows without being able to divine exactly which nutrients are working in which cells, tissues or organs. It satisfies a basic need. Flavorful. And it is not the taste of lentil, red, white or October beans I taste, not any one single bean that defines what this soup is like. It is the medley of all the beans and ingredients taken together that create the rich sensation of flavor that comes from each bite. Texture. The fact that some beans feel large in the mouth, some are slightly crunchy, and others have a resilience that is almost meaty--these characteristics, too, contribute to the experience. (Yes, I am going somewhere with this I think. Just let me keep driving here.)

Slow Road Home is like a 32-bean soup, the muses told me, and then vanished somewhere along Ferrum Mountain road and I chewed on this small morsel until I found my way. There are 108 beans in SRH. Small wonder it is hard for me to tell someone who asks what the book is like, what it is about, what flavor they should expect from reading it. And herein, the risk of a browser picking up the book from a shelf, sampling a few bites, and getting the beans they like least. With such a variety of ingredients, it takes more than a small, random sampling to know what the book tastes like. And when I have to decide which THREE pieces to read in any given setting, I know when I start that my selections will not represent the whole any more than picking out three of the 32 beans last night would have given me the taste of the soup. If a reader wants the full experience of flavor, texture and nutrition from Slow Road, well, they'll just have to take it home and consume it. And by the time I had milked this metaphor dry, I had fumbled my way to the Hungry Vibe Coffee House. Coffee houses, I remembered too late, are dangerous place to read one's work if you hope to have each word heard. Dangerous.

Out of the corner of my eye, in the middle of delivering one sampled bean, in walks blogger buddy Sean Pecor from nearby Boones Mill. I am reading the piece called Insect Epistemology about Monarch butterflies and just getting to the meat of the piece, nuancing every word with great expression, building to the crux of the piece when suddenly, I can't hear my own voice. I know the audience is faring no better. Mr. Pecor has ordered a Cappuccino. WHRRRR FRZZZZZ WHRRRRR . . .born with Heaven in their wiring and in their wings. Thank you very much.

And so it goes. Franklin County bookfest in Rocky Mount today. Y'all come.

Posted by fred1st at 6:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I seem to be getting lots of Google visits from this post from August 2002. I'm happy to say that our garden has not been the least bit bothered by tomato hornworms this summer, but unfortunately, the deer had to destroy the village to save it. And once again, the image has not a thing to do with this mornings ruminations, which are very much as per recent usual, book focused.

This morning I've been writing a blurb for the October 13 Sierra Club meeting when I'll be one of the Earth Friendly Friday presenters--offering not just the usual book readings, but giving the photomemoir program I have only done twice before, first for the Appalachian Studies Association annual meeting in March 2004 and then again for the Friends of the Library in Floyd some months later.

Seems I ought to be able to come up with a one-size-fits-all descriptor, but every audience is a little bit different. So I'm getting good experience fine-tuning program descriptions and book descriptions to suit the occasion, using just the prescribed number of words. This morning's limit was 400. I ended up with 399. I've gotten better at distilling the giant pot of words down into a single vial of essential oils, but you know, there are times I'd be happy to go the other way. I find I get uneasy with too many sound-bite occasions. The mere signing of the book last week in Blacksburg made me feel like a book, er, lady of the night. The most satisfying and rare events are those where I don't feel rushed, don't feel the need to boil off everything but what will shoehorn into a 10 or 20 minute slot.

And I've been thinking the past few days of how much I owe to other folks for the chances I have had and will have to promote the book. The networking has been gratifying, and I hope some day to be able to return the favor. Tonight, thanks go to Becky Mushko for getting my name in the hat to read at the Edible Vibes coffeehouse (near the library) in Rocky Mount the night before the Franklin Bookfest. Credit for next Saturday's appearance for the Roanoke Valley Bookfest goes to Colleen Redman, who will also be on the panel of "local voices" there. And most recently, many thanks to Linda Childress for literally putting Slow Road Home in the face of the Channel 7 folks during her appearance there last week, resulting in my little spots coming up on the morning news on Monday. Another benefactor has offered to carry my books to the first Decatur Book Festival and display them on his press's book table. Thanks awfully for that kindness.

So. Enough of this. I tilled the would-be garden under a few days ago, to get the shame of this year's failure out of my face. And now, after another cup of coffee, I need to go sow mustard, kale and collard green seeds, patch the fence, resume doing the guy thing around the perimeter every time the urge arises, and hope for garden produce in what remains of this year's blighted growing season. I'm outta here.

Posted by fred1st at 6:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This. I want to remember this, I find myself saying of some fleeting combination of setting and internal state, some uncommonly memorable and simply ordinary moment that would otherwise be forgotten. Drop a buoy out here, now, I tell myself. Set a pile of stones on the trail exactly there. No one else will come back to find them, but you might, someday when you need to remember.

It comes from knowing there will not be many more of them, now that summer days have become a rhythm that only seems to go on forever. We take our evening meals on the front porch almost every night during the warm months. We fix our plates from the pots on the stove, just the two of us jostling for position at the big bowl of salad greens (some years, our own, but not this one). We spear a chop or chicken leg from the cast iron skillet, scoop up the vegetable of the day and toss a couple of cups of dry kibble in the dog bowl to throw him off our trail long enough to get situated on the front porch love seat facing the barn, the garden and the high road that disappears around the bend, west toward Daniels Run.

Last night, the butterfly bush was the meal's visual feature, teeming with swallowtails. Most now are without their swallowtails, tattered like loved books, lethargic, going through the motions, and motion left largely to some thirty skipper moths, that are always in a hurry. Surely they use as much energy as they gain from the nectar they take from the same white tubular flower just visited by the previous skipper not a half minute before. But nature knows best, I think, and before the dog came 'round from his quick meal on the back porch, I dug into mine: fried chicken, cranberry dressing, rice and gray, quartered tomatoes (little yellow plums) with Annie's Green Goddess dressing, and a medley of beans and peas, about which there is a story.

Our garden failed this year--totally failed--the greater disappointment since it started out like one for the record books. First came the hail storms and winds; then more than 10 inches of rain in three days brought a blight to the tomatoes. The moles and finally the deer laid waste to what was left. Only a dozen sunflowers survived. I lamented our losses here on the blog and someone was listening--someone I did not know a year ago, who knows this place far better than we do, their family place. She and her brother offered us an afternoon of bean-picking over at their family farm in a part of the county where we lived before we moved to Goose Creek.

Ann and I climbed in the truck one late afternoon this week, rising into the slanting sunlight that had left Goose Creek in shadow more than an hour earlier. We followed a familiar road between 221 and the Parkway, and turned into the long drive up to the brick house set well back from the road. We followed our friends up the four-wheel pasture that rose gently back and forth across the contour lines, climbing two hundred feet to the garden at the top of the ridge-a fenced fortress that had successfully kept out both the deer and the grazing cattle. In a half hour, we had the bucketsful of four varieties of beans and peas it would take to fill the canner twice. But here, I'll confess, I was thinking more about where I was than about our purpose there. While three bent figures picked, I pondered, taking in one more small moment, a geographic mental snapshot to hold for a rainy day when we cannot climb mountains.

In my ten years of driving the county roads, I've imagined myself transported magically to the peaks of so many Floyd County ridge tops where I'll never go. Beam me up there, Scotty, so I can see what this valley road looks like to the hawks and buzzards. Lift me higher to gain perspective, to put our tiny house and valley, our busy spinning lives into the larger context of county, country, planet and cosmos. I won't see the view from most, but I was blessed by the perspective from this one hilltop garden, looking down for a short moment on wooded ridges of summer leafery, on emerald greens of pasture corn and cut hay and the lines of lazy county roads winding in and out of view, a thin piping across an upholstered tapestry of blue ridges.

This. I want to remember this: the kindness of friends, the sweet air of summer front porch meals, the failed garden, the butterfly bush and the heron that fed in the creek over by the barn while in our deep valley we enjoyed the bounty from a high and beautiful place. It is so little, and it is so much, and I don't think now that I will forget.

Posted by fred1st at 6:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I still can't hear thunder. Never mind that it isn't thundering. And praise be, I'll be hearing again before the day is over. How do you measure the strength of a friendship? By the fact that one of them (professionally qualified) is willing to see you in their home with a turkey-baster-sized syringe to give you back your hearing. However, this remedy comes only after paying the price (per gallon) for temporary deafness.

The "new" Subaru needed its first fill up on Monday as I passed from Christiansburg toward my final patient close to home. I just happened to be at the intersection where Mud Pike intersects Route 8 when I realized I needed gas, so crossed over to the Citgo station. I'd never stopped there before, but it was convenient and I had the time. I unlocked the gas cap, pushed the low-octane button, and clicked the nozzle on pump, and commenced to daydream for the minute it would take for a half-tank of regular unleaded. I stood gazing off south, toward Floyd, watching the clouds drift across the late afternoon sun.

Next thing I knew, the young man at the pump opposite mine was nudging my right shoulder. "You'd better check that" he said, as I turned to see gasoline was and had been gushing down the side of the car, pooling underneath, spattering on the asphalt in all directions. Crap! I leaned to avoid the splatter and clicked the nozzle off. My socks were soaked. The left leg of my pants were speckled with oily spots. I suppose it could have been worse, had not a person with good hearing heard the geyser. I didn't hear a blessed thing.

I held my gaseous hands far to my side as I walked into the station, waiting my turn behind some day laborer buying raffle tickets.

"Hi. I need some help deciding how much gas is on the ground that I don't intend to pay for. Your pump did not shut off and my car is soaked, my socks are soaked and my slacks will have to be professionally dry-cleaned." The young man behind the counter was accommodating, offering me a place to wash my hands and had me drive around back to wash off the car. I can't fault him. But he couldn't tell me how my bill would be adjusted for the gas on the ground that was the fault of their pump nozzle. "You'll have to see the manager" he said, pointing to a non-descript closed door in the back corner of the building.

"We expect our customers to be able to pump gas right" said the man who looked like you'd expect. "And ain't no way I can tell you how much gas is on the ground. Not much. Coupla quarts maybe. You shoulda been watching it."

"Hello? I've been pumping gas for more than forty years and this is the first time a pump has failed to shut off when the tank was full. Your nozzle had the clip so it would pump continuously and unlike every other pump I've ever used in a dozen states, this one just kept on pumping continuously when the tank was full. The fault is with your pump. I have work yet to do today, and unless I drive with my pants strapped to the roof of my car, the smell of gasoline will be so strong it will make me swimmy-headed. I'm asking you what you think needs to be done to set this right."

More blame, no culpability or responsibility accepted.

Moral: Citgo in Christiansburg on Route 8: Don't Go there.

Posted by fred1st at 7:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

So finally, I had a chance to go get a closer look at the hillside mushrooms. I'm pretty certain they are indeed chanterelles. I guess it's a statement about how out of touch with the season and my surroundings I am--I didn't even bother to crush and sniff these 'shrooms to see if I could detect the aroma of apricots that is one of the characteristics of this fungus. Alas, they were past eating stage by the time I got up close and personal, but there would have been a mess of them in their prime. I'll be watching for another overnight crop if we get some rain in the next few days.

Here's a Flickr image of one little cluster of the fungus in situ, on a very steep bank above Nameless Creek.

Also in images: I turned the pages back to August 2004 as I was fishing around this morning for a topic for the next Floyd Press piece that will print the first week of September. And what I discovered is that tomorrow marks the three year anniversary of Tsuga's life on Goose Creek. Can it possibly be three years? Is there anyone out there in the gravitational pull of Fragments who's been around since Buster was the Dog of the House? We swore we'd not get another dog when he died, and less than two months later, we were dog owners again. Or rather, Tsuga was a people-owner. You might enjoy taking a peek at the Pet Shots Gallery, sadly neglected after puppyhood passed.

Posted by fred1st at 6:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm a morning blogger, that's all there is to it. By this time (almost lunch) I'm too scattered to see a post through, start to finish, and especially if like this late morning, I'm not writing from my desk. I'm at the town library in Floyd, after meeting with the Roanoke Valley Rotary Club for breakfast this morning. How'd it go, you ask?

Well, let's put it this way: I planned to keep it loose and informal for a breakfast meeting, to pick what to read and how to direct the time (up to 30 minutes) as the occasion dictated. Every one of these events is different, and being able to change directions at mid-stride is a valuable and necessary skill. I suppose those years in the classroom equipped me toward this end.

I read somewhere that, to be a successful public speaker, there must be two minds working at the podium. The first is the presenter, who is totally focused and attending to the tone, voice, rhythms and subject of the presentation. His face and voice are the focus of those in attendance.

The second mind is the director, who must be constantly looking OUT, aware of audience reaction, tuned into the energy flow, the eye contact and body language of the consumer, and of course, with one eye to the clock and to what comes next after the current sentence, paragraph and page is done.

I went in with 50 minutes worth of program, and with each sentence finished, i culled, transposed and modified what would come next, paring it down to somewhat less than 15 worth of program since this was the space I ended up with. in all the condensing, I don't think I did fatal damage to the heart of the story about the book. I enjoyed it and the smallish audience seemed to as well--not to mention the seriously hi-test breakfast of gravy and biscuits, eggs, fruit and lots of coffee!

A week from tomorrow, I will be meeting with the new Floyd County Rotary, not breakfast this time, but lunch at Ray's--another seriously hi-test meal. If I keep this up, I'll need to burn more calories than I do by blogging, that's for certain!

Posted by fred1st at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Can't Hear Thunder

The ear plugs on the flights to South Dakota started the problem. My "fixing it" yesterday with carbamide peroxide ear drops finished it off. I can't hear thunder out of my right ear this morning. The partial blockage is complete and it is maddening. I have several occasions at which I'll need to be able to both hear/listen and speak in the coming days (a rotary breakfast tomorrow morning, for instance) and I feel like I'm walking around with my head in a bucket. And I'll have eight hours of muffled conversation with patients all day long today. How we take these "little things" like normal hearing for granted.

And Other Little Things

...like short term memory. Ronni questions if she's suffering anything more than stress-related interference or task overload. But we all have lapses in memory and invert words at times. In my work, it's important to remember whether a patient's shoulder pain was on the left or right, and most times, I can visualize which side we worked on at the last visit. But sometimes I mask the fact that I can't remember (and don't want to conspicuously stop and check their chart) so I'll get them show me without confessing I've forgotten. "Show me where you're feeling most of the pain this morning" I tell them, and they point to the offending joint, problem solved. What kinds of forgetting are you willing to confess to so Ronni knows she's not alone?

A Hillside of Edibles?

Ann took me on a side trip in our walk along the pasture yesterday to show me her "find"...vast colonies of a shaggy-tattered orange mushroom. I'm pretty sure they are chanterelles, but I didn't have time to photograph or collect them. I'll try to do that tomorrow, if they're still in good shape. Anybody have any experience eating members of the genus Cantharellus?

A Bark With Some Bite

Thieves are debarking slippery elms for their purported medicinal uses. A feed sack full of dry bark can bring a pretty good dollar when the mills have moved to Mexico and there's no work to be found. Doesn't do much for the tree, however. But as I learned the hard way, elms aren't much good even for firewood. Even so, it's a shame that some see national forest as a great shopping cart of commodities for sale. Herbal remedies are big business, but extinction is forever, boys. Think of your ginseng and morels and ramps and slippery elm bark as renewable resources and leave some to make more down the road.

Missing the Water--in China

Unusually hot, dry conditions are causing serious problems for tens of millions in China. Seems we all share the same summer miseries this year on both sides of the beleagered globe.

In central Sichuan province, China's grain basket, millions of acres of crops have withered. Across the country, more than six million acres have been ruined--an area 21 per cent larger than in previous years.

Water levels along the mighty Yangtze river, China's longest river, have dropped dramatically (and this in July and August, the months when flooding is usually expected) falling by more than ten metres in a matter of weeks. Where the river flows through the huge city of Chongqing, the water level is just 3.5 metres (11.5 feet)--its lowest in a century.

Seventeen million people across southwest China no longer have access to clean drinking water as a result of the drought. link

Posted by fred1st at 6:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

How many boring aphoristic, bromidic, cliched graduation addresses must I have sat through back when I was teaching and attendance in my disposable paper black robe and square beanie was required? Dozens, anyway. And I don't remember a word from any of them. But if I was in the graduating class at William and Mary (nestled up close to colonial Williamsburg across the other side of the commonwealth from us) and Jon Stewart was the speaker, well, I might have actually stayed awake and paid attention. Here's an excerpt:

"I'm sure my fellow doctoral graduates--who have spent so long toiling in academia, sinking into debt, sacrificing God knows how many years of what, in truth, is a piece of parchment that in truth has been so devalued by our instant gratification culture as to have been rendered meaningless--will join in congratulating me. Thank you.

...Lets talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and I...I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don't really know to put this, so I'll be blunt. We broke it.

Please don't be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry."

I don't know if you've been following the news lately, but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard a kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the damn thing just died on us. So I apologize.

Posted by fred1st at 7:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I can't say we think nothing of it--the cross-county driving we have to do to see friends, get to town for groceries, to travel across two counties later this morning for church. But at present, we're willing, grudgingly, to pay nearly $3 a gallon to connect us with the needs, necessities and niceties of life.

But in the back of my mind, it lurks: the uncertainties of the costs we would bear should the "tipping point" in any one of a number of precarious balances be reached such that there were shorter- or longer-term lapses in availability (not to mention the possibility of astronomical costs) of gasoline.

Ann and I have, by our choice of lifestyle and location, painted ourselves into a very beautiful, very remote corner and paradoxically, should these hypothetical but not impossible conditions come about, we'd be worse off than many who can walk or bicycle to work, to see friends and family. But then we'd be better off--for water without power, for firewood, for our garden and the deer meat we would harvest from it (this is a perverse joke after this year's deer-trodden garden. Ha.)

I'm not the only one wondering about how immensely and suddenly our lives could change. Andy Borrows also has read and has comments on Rob Paterson's informed musings to some future but not distant year when our fragile and artificial house of cards has collapsed. It makes for sobering reading, a wake-up call for any who haven't done the imagining for themselves. I encourage you to put your family into this possible fiction of Rob's. It might influence you to think, act, shop, travel and vote with different priorities.

Posted by fred1st at 5:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Americans require some 15 percent of our carbon fuels to create cooler living spaces during hotter and hotter summers. The problem of too much heat comes to some significant degree from too much atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from the burning of fossil fuel. Air conditioning, our solution to maintaining comfort and summer health, helps us locally and individually to survive the hot months, but collectively, our summer cooling only exacerbates the problem in the global commons.

All over the country, power consumption is breaking records, and air conditioning is a huge reason why. We use about one-sixth of our electricity to cool ourselves. That's more than the total electricity consumption of India, a country whose population exceeds 1 billion. To get the electricity, we burn oil and coal. We also run air conditioners in our cars, which reduces urban fuel efficiency by up to four miles per gallon, at an annual cost of 7 billion gallons of gasoline.

air-conditioning the average U.S. home requires 3,400 pounds of carbon-dioxide production per year. The effects of this are particularly bad at night. Over the last five summers, very high minimum daily temperatures--those that score in the top 10 percent historically--have been far more widespread in this country than during any other five-year period. This is what's killing people. Outdoor air used to cool at night, allowing us to recover from the day's heat. Now it doesn't. To fuel our own air conditioning, we're destroying nature's. Slate

So, we require a source of cleaner energy to reduce the excess planetary heat burden that necessitates our retreat to artificially conditioned indoor spaces while the external world becomes increasingly hostile to us. And we are dependent on electrical power not just for cooling but also for light, for business and commerce communications, home computers, for life as we know it. We can all find ways individually to use less electricity, but where will a clean future source of it come from?

Hey! What about wind? It produces no carbon dioxide (once you get past the fossil fuels needed to construct the towers, get them in place and maintain them, that is.) We object to the visibility, to the aesthetic costs, to habitat alteration. NIMBY. I understand those objections, but we face a damned-if-we-do-or-don't future in this regard. Consider the case of Maine's Redington Pond project which could be part of a state-wide system generating up to 800 megawatts of electricity:

"We think it is a good thing for Maine to become a leader within the region in developing clean power," he said. But at the same time, Didisheim said the Redington project would be built in an area prized for its beauty and isolation. "It is a competition of two goods, two things that society needs more of and doesn't have enough of and that is wilderness and clean power," he said. It is an ambitious project considered by some to be "a grand experiment in the wrong place." link

I'd be among the first to argue that pristine skylines, quiet panoramas and unaltered wilderness should be given very high value when assessing the costs and quality of our existence. We give up these amenities at great cost. But we've made past energy decisions in this country, large scale and far reaching choices decades ago, that seem to have brought us to a very hard place and we don't like either of the horns of our dilemma.

In a gross oversimplification, it seems to me like this: we can chose coal, a finite and very dirty source of lots of electricity and suffer for hundreds of years into the future the (relatively) isolated horror of decapitated Kentucky and West Virginia mountains, hundreds of miles of toxic creeks, and share across the country and the globe the ill effects of far more atmospheric CO2 than we have today; or we can have the more widely distributed and locally dispersed electricity generated by highly visible functional ugliness of wind turbines that violate our sense of natural aesthetics, costs us intrusion into our personal sanctuaries of forest and ridge, and just don't sit well in our expectations of what mountaintop or sandy beach vistas should look like. Wind, of course, is not a lone solution but one of many we must explore and try to work into our vision of what lies ahead.

But we must chose our poison. The choice is forced upon us by our times, by our historical habits and addictions and the lifestyles we've built around them. The time has come that we must consider the costs of our AC "solutions" to the rising burden of heat in coming summers. Our politicians might make better decisions in this regard if they were forced to work in the naturally-conditioned chambers of Washington DC in July and August. This personal confrontation with climatic reality might go a long way toward changing their "let them eat cake" approach to summer heat deaths, past and future. It might make them more inclined to vote "green" and for the sustainable long-term when energy futures are discussed in sweltering chambers on an unconditioned DC August afternoon.

NOTE: Closer to home--Wind Energy in Virginia

Posted by fred1st at 7:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a new blog born every half-second, a total of some 50 million of us now. There were 50 thousand when I started Fragments four-plus years ago, and I worried then about the dilution factor if the number doubled. Who would listen if everybody was talking? Who would read if everybody was writing, I wondered? And I still wonder where this is leading, this solitary morning writing, this verbose beacon from rural Erewhon.

The old-timer bloggers of my early years are dropping like flies, calling it quits, finding other more rewarding things to do with their time and keystrokes. The center doesn't seem to hold, unless you're a war-blogger, in which case you will be a high-hits talking head in our culture for the long haul. Congratulations.

I'm in too deep to quit, too habituated to the morning stream of consciousness and coffee, too used to the idea that somebody is out there in the dark listening as I type whatever comes to mind and heart and hands. I have to keep before my mind that this started out being a selfish effort, and it still is, I suppose. The time will come when I will have to rely on my words and images to revisit the places and moments I talk about in these morning pages. I write so that I can be a reader a bit farther down this slow and slower road.

I write to remember what it feels like sitting here in the quiet, what I see out the window just beyond my right arm's reach past the butterfly bush, through the storied pine that hides the mailbox, to the barn whose red roof, faded from its first painting six years ago, still shows through the green needles. By my words I want to remember the thick air of mid-August that carries that last sweet ferment of summer through the screen and I want to hear the sound of crickets, katydids and a lone screech owl above the twitter of the creek, risen from last night's quick storm. My blog is a time capsule that I add to every day--trivia, people, events, thoughts, fears and hopes, scraps of the ordinary, and a few peak moments. I'll be glad I did someday.

The writing as connecting with others, well, that seems to have suffered from the earlier years by the very large pond that the blogosphere has become. We've less time to dwell in any one place, less energy to become part of each other's conversations. There are too many channels to decide which ones to click to, so many distractions and attractions. And yet, even with that, the occasional comment or email these days will make me think the blog still has some purpose at cross-pollination of ideas, that we touch each others lives simply by being authentic and open and shamelessly human. And so, I hit PUBLISH and now it is time to step into the current of another day. Have a good one, y'all.

Posted by fred1st at 6:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm out of sorts this morning, strangely co-morbid with this blogger who also could not sleep. Funny I should have read this at Common Dreams, first thing, on a morning when I can't focus on the here and now because of what's going on out there, and possibly then, in this sad-chaotic wonderful-terrible world. I feel her pain, I reach her self-prescribed solution:

Once in a while, one particular thing/observation/idea/event will come along and grab my attention and focus and I am compelled to write. And suddenly I feel totally absorbed, connected, fluid, coherent. And the end result feels meaningful and useful.

But lately/usually I feel overwhelmed by everything going on in the world. There is SO much that needs our attention and focus. So damn much. Where to begin? And what have I been writing about? Dreams, soccer, making silly audioblogs, doing the laundry...

...Maybe the only way to work through it at the moment, is to take decompression stops along the way. Little writes here and there. Go to the dark places and witness what's there. And once back on the surface -- out of the dark otherworld of fear -- work more diligently at a world I can imagine.

And so instead of writing, I chose to time-travel to better memories than last night's dreams, back two years in the image archives for anything to reaffirm my hope in the goodness of man, in the resilience of a besieged planet at the end of a long, hot summer when our garden failed completely, a sad metaphor of the bad soil this world seems to have become. And from my nostalgic browse to better times comes this image of year-old Tsuga leaping at a handful of creekwater I tossed overhead. It makes me smile, makes me forget international news for a moment, remember Goose Creek current events, thankfully.

This shot is almost exactly from the place on the creek where, a year earlier, Tsuga and I had our first "male bonding" when, as a three week old pup, he learned the wonders of cold water. If you have Slow Road, you've read the passage that ends like this:

...The cosmic consciousness of all Labradors had found him, heart racing, chin down on his paws. Then, creeping on his belly, he approached the water's edge, and in he plunged once more, running around wildly in the widest part of the stream. Again and again with growing confidence he tested the waters, and each time, he returned to me for sanctuary.

It was the funniest, dearest-doggiest thing I had seen since Buster left us less so recently, and I laughed until I cried. This is not a figure of speech. I cried: for the beauty of that moment, for the pure goodness of the sunshine; for crows and ravens and goldfinches all around on a clear, crisp autumn day. The tears were for the innocence of a young life that I was allowing to fill the place of one I still remembered and missed so much. Tears were for the rightness and goodness of this new bonding with another intelligent spirit and for the transience of it all. There is a goodness in these rare moments that is beyond words and overwhelming. Thank you, little buddy, I needed that.

When the sun comes up, or perhaps even before, I'll shut this thing down--maybe for the rest of the day--and detoxify. I think the dog here is still a great ally for this kind of regrounding in the things that matter. We'll see you all later.

ENDNOTE: Don't forget to put your lawn chairs outside tonight for the Perseid Meteor Shower Aug 11-13. There's another show of larger reality that should take our minds off the small meanness of mankind's matters.

Posted by fred1st at 6:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the draft of a piece for an upcoming installment in my biweekly newspaper space. I appreciated input on the past one on "social capital" which did go to print in last week's paper. If you have comments for amending or correcting this one, I have a few days before deadline. The topic of pollination is important and of longstanding interest to me. The decline of pollinators is one of many "canaries" that suggest we have a lot of changes to make in the way we relate to nature.

Almost four hundred years ago, the first settlers established a permanent colony at Jamestown on our eastern shore. They brought with them their tools and their customs, their values and faith. And they brought their bees.

What we think of as "the" honeybee is not a native species on this continent but the European bee that lived in close association with mankind for seven thousand years before America was discovered. It made better honey and more of it than the bees the first Virginia settlers found already living here. The industrious insect spread west across the New World, providing a taste of sweetness to those often bitter lives on a new continent.

What the pioneers knew too about the honeybee was that if these insects were abundant in their fields, yields of many fruits and vegetables were high and food was plentiful. The honeybee has served an important role in the pollination of over ninety major food crops and provides a fourteen billion dollar service for American agriculture every year. One third of the food we eat comes from plants that must be pollinated by butterflies, beetles, birds or bees. Sadly, in recent decades, many of these pollinators--including both honeybees and native bees--are in a dangerous state of decline and some food crop and native plant futures are at risk.

The causes for this decline are several. First, social hive-forming bees like the honeybee have been victims of imported mites that cause high mortality in naturally-occurring wild hives. These hive diseases have reached such high incidence that natural bee colonies in trees or cavities are practically non-existent. Pesticides (like the widely-used Sevin) have caused millions of dollars of loss in bee colonies near prime agricultural land. Farmers now pay high rates for commercial hives to be brought to their crops just when the flowers open for pollination, so they will yield full, edible, marketable fruits.

But perhaps the greatest loss of pollinators may have come from the spread of cities and, paradoxically, modern farms whose creation has cleared away forest, hedgerows and flowering "weeds" which provided both cover and food for the agents of pollination. The intimate relationship between pollinators and their host plants is such that most cannot simply choose an alternate food source when their preferred plant species has been eliminated from the landscape and replaced by a monoculture of human or animal food crops. Plants disappear, bees starve.

As honeybees disappear, the good news is that native bees are better pollinators of some crops than European honeybees who, after all, did not evolve to take pollen or nectar from American flowers. Native insect pollination saves an estimated 3.1 billion dollars annually through natural crop production--an "environmental service" not typically factored into the credits column of our agricultural ledgers. But the numbers of these mostly solitary ground nesting bees is also in decline, in some cases in the southern states, wiped out by invasive fire ants and also subject to the effects of insecticides and habitat destruction. In several European countries, as bees decline, as you might expect, so do the plants they pollinate, in a chicken-and-egg cause-and-effect downward spiral.

The loss of pollinators is both a cause for concern for its potential impact on future food production, and as a symptom of larger problems facing us in the coming years. Our hope to solve these problems lies in cultivating a genuine understanding and respect for the little things we've disregarded-things as small as bees and soil microbes and songbirds-that if healthy, provide priceless environmental services we take for granted to our peril.

It seems to me that the foundation of our health and viability as a species may lie more in the efforts we take to insure diversity and viability of these small players than in the grossness of our national products or the strength of our armies. To do right by the world our children will inherit, we will need to work in harmony with natural systems-oceans, prairies, forests, deserts and tundra-that have been self-sustaining communities since long before mankind's numbers, power and insatiable demands exerted pressures on a resilient but not indestructible natural world.

We'll need to consider the value of healthy homes for birds and bees, to see them as our teachers, our charges as good stewards, and as our fellow residents on a healthy planet. Let us get our ducks in a row: they can go on, the better perhaps for our absence, but we can't live here without them.

Posted by fred1st at 6:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

From the LA Times July 24 2006:

In 1988, the World Meteorological Association and the United Nations Environment Program joined forces to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action. The panel has issued three assessments (1990, 1995, 2001), representing the combined expertise of 2,000 scientists from more than 100 countries, and a fourth report is due out shortly. Its conclusions — global warming is occurring, humans have a major role in it — have been ratified by scientists around the world in published scientific papers, in statements issued by professional scientific societies and in reports of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society and many other national and royal academies of science worldwide."

You should not think that the jury is STILL OUT on this issue. The "Oh yeah?" era of evidence-gathering is past. Now, we enter the critical "so what?" period. How will we respond, now that we know what we're up against? Are we capable of acting today on the basis of consequences that extend beyond a four year political regime? Can we, individually and collectively, make lifestyle and resource-use changes and sacrifices today to avoid despoiling the future world our children will inherit?

Frankly, I am not at all certain we will change--any or enough or quickly enough. And I can see a time some several hundred years hence, when historians will cast a well-deserved blame on our generation for our resource lust and paralyzed, pernicious guardianship of the earth, for our failure to care, even when the verdict was known. Global warming notwithstanding, our sheer numbers are pushing planetary systems beyond the tipping point. Let's not oversimplify what we must do in the near future to the single issue of carbon dioxide. Meanwhile and sadly, we'll continue to put the health of corporate economies before the health of ecosystems and short-term profitability before long-term sustainability.

And yet, we'll hold the secret hope that some technological fix will come along to bail us out, just in the nick of time, just like in the movies. Alas, we are writing our own script, and so far, we've written no hero and no happy ending into the storyline.

Posted by fred1st at 6:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

'A basic rule of punctuation' "It could be the most costly piece of punctuation in Canada."

Read how a misplaced comma (oh had they only employed one of Garrison Keillor's English Majors!) made the bill go up by over two million dollars!

And Also on Language. . .

Take a look at Seth Godin's advice for writers. Looking back on this accidental process that lead to Slow Road, I think I've conformed pretty well to Seth's advice.

• I'm still exploring to find my niche market.
• I think my expectations are reasonably placed.
• I'm doing the hard part (marketing and promoting) with some joy and success, now that the "easy" part (getting it between covers) is three months past.
• Turns out, I even followed his rule #2 (which he repeats twice) about the three year building of a constituency and network before the book came out.

I really appreciated all the blog mentions back in the first month which Godin says are more important than blurbs. I may ask some of you bloggers for a repeat mention closer to Christmas as the PayPal and direct orders dropped to a trickle once the book was off the web radar. But I am glad he ended his list with this point:

Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking. It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every day to deliver your message with authority. You should write one.

Idea spreading, delivering your message with authority. That's it.

I got back a tentative yes from a civic organization who wants me to come speak, provided my talk is more than "a shameless plug for your book." And that kind of presentation will be easy to provide.

It seems that now with the book finally printed and in hand, I want to talk less about the book itself and more about the process of coming to have it, and about having it behind me. I want now to talk as much about the themes that powered the discipline and emotion and connectedness in those pages.

I want to tell about the value of looking carefully and about traveling slowly and indulging the senses we use too casually. I could speak about the utter strangeness of the commonplace and the importance of curiosity, awe and respect for nature; about the once-ness of every experience we have and about our neglected role as caretakers of the planet. I could encourage listeners to think about the importance of finding their own story, their voice, and passing that story to family and community. There are so many things to talk about now, and promoting the book only to sell a few is not what it's about after all.

How do we know what we think until we see what we say? I certainly can talk about how this experience has enriched my self-knowledge, my sense of belonging in this house and this community and this living world. I'm only now starting to know what I think about all that, now that I am carrying this little book around as a means to be able to speak to groups of people.

What is your book about? What will you come to know that you didn't know you didn't know, once your book is written? And what are you waiting for?

Posted by fred1st at 5:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

One question I'm asked at these little book events of late is "what do you plan to do/write next?"

I'm searching for an answer to that question. If I write another book, I think it is more likely to be something, unlike Slow Road Home, that I think of as a book from the beginning, and I will just have to be patient and see if anything book-worthy comes along. I seem to be stuck by habit and history at the length of short essays in developing a thought or idea. Of course, longer, chapter-length essays of the Barbara Kingsolver kind can be thought of as a half dozen nested essays that are held together by some narrative thread. I think I'm capable of that. But I can't say I have the vision for what the over-arching theme or objective of such a future book from Goose Creek might be. When I find it, I'll know it. And after that, the writing, I hope, will come easily. Until then . . .

By the end of September, I should have the complete book in studio-quality digital file format. I will be reading the book for the visually impaired and have asked for the unabridged audio files that come from those sessions. But that is just the beginning towards what I hope will (before Christmas) become an audiobook.

Sounds easy, but many questions and decisions remain.

• Will I do the whole book (spanning multiple CDs) or abridge it to ONE CD? (probably abridged, as the sales price factor plays in here) If something is left out, what parts? SRH should lend itself better to being abridged, as it is not a linear storyline or plot that might become a far lesser thing by deletions. Still, what to delete?
• What format is best for the widest audience of "readers"? Or should I create more than one format?
• Will I also create a downloadable audio file for sale, with give-away excerpts?
• Do I want to add musical or ambient-sound bullets or transitions or leave dead air between each part?
• Should I put a couple of images on the disk (if there's room) as screen-savers?
• How much should I charge? (This will depend on as-yet-unknown cost of production.)
• Will I have a jewel case? If yes, I'll need to design a liner (extra cost)
• Do I want an image/label printed onto the CD top surface? probably
• Who should I have help me with the audio file and with duplication and packaging? Look locally or work by web out of state?
• Do I use one of my ISBN numbers for such a product?
• Who and where is my market, and how will promoting this product be different from and how will it be complimentary to the marketing of the book?

So there's a list of early questions and issues and I'm looking for answers and solutions. If you have experience or ideas or know somebody who does with whom you can connect me, I'd be beholding.

Posted by fred1st at 8:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, not exactly last, but well past the long hot sighs of the middle of the season. And I regret to say it has been a miserable few months judged by the harvest missing from our canning shelves. Empty. Not one jar of anything. First the storms with wind and hail, then weekend deluge that brought 12 inches of rain, then the deer. And that about does it.

I should bring the tiller over and turn the whole thing under so that I don't have to see the testimony to our failure at self-provision. But that same deluge washed out my smooth, shallow crossover by the barn. The banks are so deeply eroded I'm not sure, even with a ramp of 2 x 10s, that I can get the tiller down into and then back out of the creek and over to the garden.

You'll always lose part of one planting or another in any given gardening season. But I've never lost the whole blessed thing. Some sunflowers still stand; most have no leaves or flowers, stripped bare by the deer. What are we going to do different next year? We can't move the garden any place that is not far more rocky than where it is. We can't build the fortress against the deer that some do, because the garden is over the septic field and we can't sink posts deep enough to support an 8 foot fence without buggering up the drainage lines that are about a foot below the surface.

Ah well. There will be some beauty left even so. The fall dominants--Joe Pye Weed, Iron Weed, Goldenrod, Touch-me-not, and others--are coming up along the roadsides. Those first crisp fall days are not far off. And life goes on.

The pollinator in the picture above is a clearwing moth. They perform very much like tiny hummingbirds, hovering near but never landing on their favored food plants. I've never seen one but on this butterfly bush that I can almost touch, just outside the window by my desk.

Posted by fred1st at 4:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by fred1st at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ScienceNewsBlog.com: Severe California Heatwave Kills People, Livestock and Crops

The heat wave that struck California last week was unprecedented in California's history. Here are some highlights that show the serious impact the severe heat wave had on humans, animals and crops in the region.

This article gives links to many examples of the impact of the recent heat "wave". I'm especially interested in learning more about the physiology of heat death, and failure of nights to cool off is high on the list of contributing causes for deaths in humans.

Heat wave takes toll on livestock, crops : Indybay

...losses to the state's dairy sector could exceed $1 billion. The organization has contacted state and federal government officials to request disaster assistance for dairy producers.

Poultry producers also took an incredible hit from the heat. Bill Mattos, California Poultry Federation president, confirmed that losses to poultry are well over 1 million pounds of birds.

"This is the hottest season really that we've got on record at least in the processing tomato industry," said California Tomato Growers Association President Ross Siragusa. "We've seen yields in fields that are currently being harvested drop by roughly 10 percent, but I'm not saying the entire state's yields are going to drop 10 percent, just the fields that are currently being harvested (southern Fresno and Kings counties)."

FOXNews.com - Scientists: Killer Heat Waves Tied to Global Warming - Natural Science

"You can't tie global warming into one single event," he said.

But what global warming has done is make the nights warmer in general and the days drier, which help turn merely uncomfortably hot days into killer heat waves, Trenberth said.

Much of global warming science concentrates on average monthly and yearly temperatures, but recent studies in the past five years show that climate change is at its most dangerous during extreme events, such as high temperatures, droughts and flooding, he said.

"These [heat] events always occur. What global warming does is push it up another notch," Trenberth said.

You can see all these quotes and more on this Diigo summary page I saved after highlighting the several articles referenced here.

(Image above is from my daughter's front porch in Rapid City. You can barely see the Badlands hills just beneath the rising sun. And they were badder than usual during the heat wave.)

Posted by fred1st at 6:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

SubaRuminations

I bought the 96 Dakota in 97 with 55k miles on it. Ten years later, it is still running well, mostly, but when the AC konked out at a most inauspicious time during last week's heat wave, the balance was tipped toward replacing the deer-damaged rust bucket with something more reliable. As fate or Providence would have it, sitting on the lot at Turman Yates was the very car we were looking for at the price we could pay, and it sits in our driveway this morning--with a functioning air conditioner, I might add, and for this, I am very thankful. And we've added yet one more to the fleet of Floyd County Subarus, whose all wheel drive will be most appreciated if in this warming world we ever have snow again.

One Breath

Somebody coughed. Then somebody sneezed. I winced. Don't do that, I said under my breath to the person who contributed their personal germs to the great public lung that is the economy class cabin on the jet from O'hare to Roanoke. What a perfect bell jar environment for sharing pathogens, I thought, remembering the clip seen in a biology class long ago showing a backlit sneeze in slow motion: a nebulized aerosol of tiny droplets projected out of mouth and nose at 75 mph roiling in the air of the room. And I sucked one in to give it a home, and it has commenced to raising a family in the back of my white-patchy throat. Gargling salt water doesn't help. We have company coming later today; I have to entertain. Tomorrow, I have to greet book buyers for eight hours in a tent. I haven't got time for this, thank you very much, anonymous open-mouth airplane sneezer. Pass the tissue, will you.

Dog Days

Tsuga almost has his day yesterday: first kill of an adult groundhog. But this one was so huge that when I rounded the corner of the barn and saw where all the commotion was coming from, the whistlepig had slipped the canine pincers and was waddling toward the barn. He turned around, backing under the lowest timber, gopher-teeth snapping as the dog experienced the agony of defeat. Maybe next time, bucko. And speaking of dogs--a little bit from China, where dogs are meals on wheels. This is really disturbing. Can you imagine?

Dogs being walked were taken from their owners and beaten to death on the spot, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported. Led by the county police chief, other killing teams entered villages at night creating noise to get dogs barking, then homed in on their prey, the reports said. Owners were offered 5 yuan (33p) per animal to kill their own dogs before the teams were sent in, they said.

Imagery

I've passed so many wonderful roadside flower compositions in the past weeks--when my camera was on the fritz, when I've been rushing someplace or another, never taking time to stop and see if I could capture the essence of this wonderful fecund time of the blooming year. Yesterday, coming home with the "new" car, I had a minute and grabbed a few shots--not great, but reminders of August's profusion of flower, fruit and seed in nature's final effort to sustain its leafy members through another winter. You can see one shot of Queen Anne's lace at Flickr, here.

Posted by fred1st at 4:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Any Abingdon readers out there? I'll be spending a long day in a lawn chair under a tent somewhere on Barter Green this Saturday, feeling like the Maytag Repairman, hoping somebody will stop and chat, maybe even seem interested in the book. To pay my way down there and back (four hours on the road) I'd need to sell at least a few. The Highlands Festival in Abingdon has grown to be quite a regional arts and crafts event, so it should be a high-energy crowd, and I'm sure I'll meet some interesting folks. The weather promises to cool down a bit, thankfully.

I'll be sharing the table with a creative writer-author I met in Bristol a few weeks back--Delilah O'Haynes, whose book of poetry and creative photography, The Character of Mountains, has received outstanding pre-press reviews from prominent Appalachian writers. I'm hoping she'll draw the crowd and I can pick up the crumbs.

Also in the book events category, I got a request for two books from the Library of Virginia this week. Don't know what that means other than maybe they will shelve it somewhere in Richmond. They also have a book store in the capital there somewhere, and thanks to a contact from GR, I inquired about the possibility of them carrying Slow Road Home back the first week it was available in late April. Some seeds take a while to germinate. Oh, and just yesterday I learned that I'll have an opportunity in October to speak to a gathering of the Friends of the Library Association for the Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library. I understand they bring really good cookies and such to these events!

And thanks to Doug Thompson for printing and Billy Bell for mounting my 11 x 17 poster yesterday for upcoming book tables. I'm getting this down: spread out a nice earth-tones table cloth. Set up three books on the small walnut book holder, the poster on the larger one, with a vase of wildflowers in between. Somewhere back behind all this lurkes the author, just waiting for the hapless victim to come in too close and be seduced by the power of the book!

Posted by fred1st at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It is a method certain to completely change the course of your plans and disabuse you of the notion that you are in charge of your life for oh, a couple of hours anyway. And it's a great way to make you clean to a level previously unheard of whichever room you chose for this little exercise. It's simple, quick and inexpensive, and will produce a catharsis of all those pent up expletives and lofty intentions, and will so completely disorder your ordered to-do lists as to bring you a kind of rebirth--a starting over, cleansed, scrubbed and humbled, with your grip on the structure of your life dissolved and ready, when this purging experience has passed, to reform.

Here's all you do (thanks to Ann for this wonderful idea that she put to practice quite out of the blue yesterday morning as I was frantically packing for a day in town--perfectly timed for maximum entropy.)

Take a small can (8 oz) of a carbonated soft drink (Pepsi in this case, and it should be the REAL sugar variety, not low cal, for maximum stickiness.)

Hold the can some five to six feet from the floor (of the room you've chosen, in our case, the pantry where there are lots of things on the floor, and hundreds of individual items on the shelves, keeping in mind that this treatment can reach to the ceiling of your selected space.)

Drop the can (you may, as Ann chose to do, act as if you are dropping the can into husband's cloth lunchbag hanging on a wall hook and miss the bag) or you may simply make this a open-air ritual with no pretense of some other function.

Upon striking the floor (vinyl seems best, but carpeted floors will probably work as well) the can of sugary liquid under great pressure will be instantly compressed by the fall. It will immediately release that pressure through the blown-out pull-tab, spraying the contents with great force as it tumbles on first impact. The syrupy spray will reach all items within a ten foot radius, in our case, including the laundry hampers full of clothes (low impact as this would have been washed anyway); pantry shelves and each item on each shelve to a height of more than five feet; almost all of the six pair of boots stored against the north wall; and all the other canned drinks and delicious malt beverage stored on the floor against the south wall.

You'll be amazed how thoroughly one 8 oz can is able to distribute sticky liquid, turning it to droplets almost mist-like. The entire room will become the center of your work-meditation, blotting out all those previously-important to-do items, including phone calls, emails, bills to pay, husbands to send off, dogs to feed. You'll want to thank me for the profound re-centering this exercise will provide, but don't. Trust me. I'll feel your appreciation, and Ann, even moreso.

Posted by fred1st at 5:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It will take a while to reset my internal alarm clock after shifting it back two hours in South Dakota. I hate waking up at 5:30 feeling like the best hours of the morning are gone (perhaps some of you would not agree?) and having to rush away the remainder of my precious morning. I left paperwork from yesterday (oh how I wish I could tell patient stories) and I'll have to finish that and get those evaluations off by soon after 8:00 or I'll be getting emails asking where they are. So: do I set the alarm clock for 4 a.m. for a few days til my wake-up reflex comes back, or just let my body learn to feel its way back to my preferred cycle, using whatever cues it uses to pace the passing of time?

Mr. Muffet

Last night, Ann was working late shift, so when bedtime came, it was just T-dog and me shuffling in the dark into the bedroom. I typically would have just fallen into bed with my eyes still unaccustomed to the very-darkness, but I thought I might have shed my dress shirt there when I got home, so turned on the closet light next to my side of the bed just to be sure. There exactly where my bare shoulder blade would have pressed down the sheets was perhaps the largest wolf spider I've ever seen. I briefly heard the shower scene sound effects from Psycho. Nah, I'm not a-scared of no spider, I just freaked a tiny bit imagining the feeling of eight hairy legs scratching under my scapula in the dark. Willies. I won't tell Ann. And I simply MUST replace that threshold weather-stripping under the front door, come first light.

Book Mobile

August promises to be the busiest book month yet, and I'm looking forward to all of it. Some seeds planted early on are just now beginning to sprout, and events for next spring are already in place, but there are many open spots to fill in this fall--which I understand is the best season for authors to schedule book talks and for book sales pre-Christmas. It's been a real treat to see a few bloggers or net-met friends show up for these little book discussions, and I look forward to more of the same. And the "hand them a book" scale of this first printing is still very gratifying; I'll need to make decisions about a second printing soon, here at the half-way point or a bit beyond. I haven't counted cartons lately.

Dog Transport Team (of One)

Our young pup is growing up. He's a month past his third birthday and finally beyond the extended labrador retriever puppyhood that is sometimes a trial of tolerance for the passing of their unbounded goofiness and exuberance and inattention. In spite of the Monday night Anngst, the young lad behaved (relatively) very well on his first one-chauffer trip home from the kennel. She managed him quite well and bragged on him with a certain regret. I guess our puppy is passing into doghood (though we'll still use the prefix before all his belongings: puppy-food, puppy-bed, puppy-walk and so on. It's quite disgusting, I suppose to a non-dog person. But just like our children are always our kids, our dogs remain our puppies, fixed fondly in the memories of those first years of learning who we are to each other.

Weather Tis Nobler. . .

I brought back precious few shots from SD, even though the Nikon came back from repair the day before we left, and I toted the whole Domkey bag of toys with me all the way. We were rarely outdoors for family pictures because of the oppressive heat, and I loathe using the flash. So I have this nice image of mammatus clouds; a rainbow; a sunrise; and that's about it. There were a number of not-very-photogenic wildflowers in bloom along the edges of yards (often left in a semi-wild state, which I appreciated) but I noticed this: most of them grow very low to the ground and the flowers are reduced versus their deciduous forest kin. The reasons for this, I surmise, might have to do with two forces affecting their evolution over time: drying winds and the (former) presence of grazing herbivores. Tatonka, remember? So if you're a plant, keep your head low and don't look up. Or, as I learned from another surprisingly tall plant I attempted to pluck, be gooey and obnoxious. I learned it is called GUMWEED and I spent a half hour with my fingers glued together by its Elmers-gluey resin. It is a plant that increases under drought conditions. It ought to do well in far too many places out west then.

Posted by fred1st at 5:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Our flight out of Chicago was delayed more than three hours, so we didn't get home in time to pick Tsuga up from the vet. This has been a two-person job: one to drive, the other to sit in the back seat of the Subaru and calm the anxiously-whining dog in the rear cargo area. But we can't both go this morning to fetch the dog home. I have a new patient scheduled at 8:00 so Ann is going to try this alone.

Fred's Suggested Solution: ask the vet to give him a mild sedative that will let him walk but not be so excitable. That will protect the dog from injuring himself trying to leap to the front seat, and maybe keep you from wrecking the car on account of Goofus the Hyperactive Dog.

Ann's Inexplicable Answer: No, for some reason she didn't want to go the ambulatory sedation route. Her solution: stay awake all night (and some others along with her) worrying about how she's going to get the dog home by herself.

So this morning, with the night's rest sabotaged by the wee-hours angst (and complicated by the two hour time change from South Dakota) I slept til 6:00 and there went my blogging/writing time.

But for you weather buffs, this: after temps well into three digits for the five days we were in SD, guess what: today's high out there is in the mid-70s. Meanwhile, today in Floyd County, we're expecting near record highs. And the AC on my truck won't get fixed until Wednesday. So I'll arrive on the job in a short while with a certain wind-blown insouciance and the look of one who didn't sleep much and who later in the day will have the uncertain pleasure of telling his wife: told ya.

One final note: When we finally did get on the plane three hours late, we sat down and had the gentleman in the aisle across from us ask "Would you happen to be the First Family?" It was fellow blogger, Ron, from Roanoke, who goes back to the early days of Fragments. An unlikely blogger meet-up!

Posted by fred1st at 6:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)