Trying to take care of my little piece of the planet
As penance for recent serious posts, and in a shameless attempt to lure you to the site with a new post without investing any time of my own, I give you two of our eight house pets. As a point of reference, the smaller of the two weighs about eighteen pounds. Fortunately, all sweetness.
The spot in front of the woodstove is quite popular. Better get your seat early.
Posted on March 9th, 2010 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Family Life | No Comments »
Like many Americans, my wife and I spent several evenings last week (and the week before) watching the Winter Olympics. It was enjoyable, and frankly one of the few commercial television programs that the two of us spend time watching together. Some ice dancing, some downhill. Then some luge, bobsled , etc. The places that heroes and icons are made. Frankly, I took it at face value and didn’t over analyze after having spent repeated kick-butt days at work. I just watched and smiled and cheered.
Yesterday morning I spent my usual half hour driving into work, and as usual, I was listening to NPR. Halfway through the drive, there was a ten minute segment in which Renee Montagne interviews reporter Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, who had recently been embedded with Marines attempting to re-take Taliban controlled areas in Afghanistan. As I’m driving in on pastoral rural roads, I hear:
SARHADDI NELSON: You have to picture when this happened, the patrol, it had been three hours of really intense pressure. We were constantly under fire. I think at that point the platoon officials or leaders had decided that they were going to stop for the night. It was just not safe to push forward anymore. And so we started to approach this field, and it was at that point that these gunmen, you know, jumped up and started firing – or at least it was described as three gunmen to me. I never saw them, I just heard the bullets.
And so everybody dropped down, squatted down, but we were exposed. We were all just behind these mounds of dirt. And Lance Corporal Yazzie, who I’d gotten to know over the last previous days – I didn’t realize where he was standing – and I just, I mean, I saw him get hit, and certainly the captain next to him realized that he’d been killed. And it was just, there was nothing anybody could do, because at that stage the gunfire was so heavy.
I mean, I just put my tape recorders where I knew I could capture what was going on. But then I just sort of curled up as much as I could under my vest and just prayed – I mean, ’cause I really thought this might be it. And I kept thinking is this worth it? And then at some point when, I guess, the gunfire died down a little bit, they carried Corporal Yazzie to – sorry, give me a second here.
(Soundbite of sniffling)
SARHADDI NELSON: Anyway, there was just nothing they could do. I mean, you know, it was that fast.
MONTAGNE: If everyone had a job to do at that moment, and your job was recording it, did it hit you right then or was it…
SARHADDI NELSON: No, it hit me pretty fast, especially when I saw who it was. And the Marines – I mean, at that point they didn’t know. There were people crying and – I mean, I really wanted to portray this. I felt it was very important to chronicle what sacrifices these guys make. I mean, I felt it was part of this story of this patrol that had such a hard time just taking less than a half mile of land.
MONTAGNE: Lance Corporal Yazzie was laid to rest over the weekend. He’s from the Navajo Nation, so the flags of the U.S., the Marines and the Navajo Nation were flown. How much of that did you know in those days you spent with him in this offensive?
SARHADDI NELSON: I didn’t know what his ethnic background was, but what I can say is I thought he had the coolest name of the guys that I was with. And one evening, sort of part of the comic relief, I was telling Yazzie, I said, you know what, Yazzie? I said, you have got the coolest name.
And there was another – what I’m assuming is a Native American, just based on his name, his name was Corporal Birdchief, and he’s like, hey, wait a minute, what about my name, Birdchief? You know, and Lance Corporal Yazzie was like, no, she said it was my name, sorry. That’s my title or whatever.
And so what struck me about him, unlike the others, he was a little quieter, he was a little shyer, but very sincere, very nice, and just – I could tell when he would just mention that he wanted to talk to his wife, his eyes would just light up in a way that I knew he was very much in love with her. And I know he was trying to call her on Valentine’s Day on my phone and couldn’t reach her and he had planned to call her that night again. But he definitely was thinking about her and their unborn child.
MONTAGNE: Are you okay?
SARHADDI NELSON: Yeah, I’m fine.
Yes, there is a lump in my throat. Yes, there are tears in my eyes. I grew up as the son of a career Army man. A Sergeant Major. A veteran of two wars. A Bronze Star recipient. This hits home.
The day that followed was ten more hours of my droid job. Better paid than my father could dream of. After a long day, I’m back in my car for the drive home to my rural sanctuary. A twist of the wrist and it’s NPR for the drive home, but by this time of the day it’s “Fresh Air”. The interview is with journalist and former soldier, Kelly Kennedy, describing her time with the “Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq” in 2007. I’m driving home, trying to clear the drudge of the day, but I’m drawn in and in awe of the sacrifice and angered by the waste of it all:
Ross McGinnis was 19 years old. He had big, brown eyes and this huge grin, and he was silly, just kept the guys in giggles all the time.
And about a week before December 4th, they’d been out on patrol, and someone threw a grenade into a truck, and everyone jumped out, and it turned out to be a dud. So everyone was safe. And then Ross kind of made jokes about it, like no way, man, I’d be jumping out. I’d be the first one out of the truck.
So they spent the next week kind of practicing, you know, throwing tennis balls into the trucks and then diving out. And then on December 4th, they’re out on patrol, and the grenade came right in through Ross’ turret, and he was the gunner. And he sees it. He tries to catch it. He’s chasing it around the turret, and he’s yelling grenade, trying to get the guys out of the truck.
And no one really understood what was happening, and they didn’t have time to react, but Ross knew what was going on. So he chased it all the way back down into the truck. And then one of the other guys, Ian Newland, saw the grenade and watched as Ross McGinnis threw himself against it and took the brunt of the force of the grenade and died instantly, but saved four of his friends.
And later in the interview:
So on the morning of June 21st, we were actually sitting out on some picnic tables talking to the guys about combat stress when we heard an explosion. And what had happened was a Bradley, a 30-ton vehicle, had rolled over a massive, deep-buried bomb, and it was so big that it flipped the Bradley over and left a hole the size of a Humvee in the road.
And an interpreter, an Iraqi interpreter, and four of the guys died instantly, and then a fifth guy was caught underneath the Bradley and couldn’t get away as it was burning.
And back at the aid station, all the guys knew was that this Bradley had been hit. They didn’t know who was in it; they didn’t know how bad it was. They knew it was on fire and that the guys were trapped inside, but they weren’t hearing any more information than that.
And we sat there for about an hour, just waiting. It was the worst hour ever, waiting to hear what had happened. And then one of the guys heard over the radio that they’d all died. And then as they were as another unit, the 630th MPs were responding to June 21st, to that Bradley explosion, one of their female MPs was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and it decapitated her in front of four of her teammates in a Humvee.
I arrive at home in the same shape as I drove in twelve hours earlier: safe and well-paid, but with a lump in my throat and tear in my eye. After dinner and an evening of mindless TV, it was probably no surprise that I awoke at four AM on Friday from the midst of a really bad dream. An illogical dream in which I watched a large military chopper attempt a rescue at a local highway overpass, only to look on helplessly as a Humvee full of troops plunged into a large, water-filled culvert, drowning all aboard as we civilians stood around waving our hands.
Yeah, I woke up. And started thinking. We are so off track.
Never, ever honor war. But honor warriors, who deserve far more than medallions of gold or silver. Or bronze. And only ask of them the ultimate sacrifice when it is truly a moral request; a just sacrifice.
Posted on March 6th, 2010 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Rants and Musings | 6 Comments »
Apologies for another five minute pass-it-along post, but I just read this eye opener about the power of the web while eating lunch. You may have heard the rumor yesterday that Chief Justice John Roberts was resigning for health reasons. The rumor first went public in a post at Radar Online at 9:10AM EST. It was retracted later that morning, but by then it was off and running. It now turns out that the rumor began with a law school classroom exercise in the importance of credible sources. At 9:00AM, a professor at Georgetown started the rumor by telling a ’secret’ to his class of first year students, purely to illustrate a point. Thirty minutes later, at 9:30AM, he revealed to them that it was purely an exercise. Too late. By then it had been texted and Tweeted to the world. Scary.
Posted on March 5th, 2010 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Rants and Musings | 2 Comments »
I came across a reference to this conservative website tonight. From the reference, I expected that I wouldn’t find much in common, but I was curious. After a quick look (I warned you that this spring’s posts will be quick) I was stunned to find absolute, unequivocal, 100% discordance! We’re talking polar opposites! Night and day! Yin and yang! Apples and oranges! Or, as that great American philosopher, Bill Murray opined: “Dogs and cats living together!”
Yeah, America needs saving. But FROM, not BY folks like this.
Posted on March 2nd, 2010 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
OK, work is kicking my butt right now, and will for the foreseeable future (or at least until the end of May). So my posts will be few and sketchy (like this one). But the good news is that I’m busy because we’re doing a more thorough job than we have in years past, and that is satisfying. Though I confess that starting work at the computer this morning at 4:45 because I woke up ‘working’ is not my goal in life.
Anyway, I heard a piece of an interview on the drive home that really hit a responsive chord. It was with the founder of “Free Range Kids“. Check out the site.
Posted on March 2nd, 2010 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Rants and Musings | 2 Comments »
I saw the video below, which started me reminiscing about a symbolic name that’s been part of my vocabulary for as long as I can remember: “Rube Goldberg”. In my rural ‘keep ‘er running’ world, a Rube Goldberg solution involves slapping together a complicated thing made up of available, but improbably connected moving parts that actually does something. But as for the man himself, I vaguely thought that I remembered that he was a guy from the sixties who drew such things ridiculous machines that inspired creations like the game “Mousetrap“. However, in putting this post together, I discovered that he was a real man, and a complicated one at that. Goldberg was the winner of a Pulitzer prize for example. In addition, during World War II, he gave his children the last name of George, rather than Goldberg, to spare them the persecution he himself suffered as a result of his politically unpopular cartoons. And though probably not considered for an Oscar, he did write a screen play for a movie starring more memorable names from childhood: The Three Stooges.
But anyway, enjoy this three minute break. It is pretty incredible.
Posted on February 23rd, 2010 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Apologies up front for the frivolous title to this post. But it reflects the fact that for the second time in my life, I learned something from a funeral.
If you’ve read more than a couple of ‘Rants and Musings’ on this site, you may have figured out that I missed out on the spiritual gene so many years ago. If that makes me less worthy of the moments invested in reading this, so be it. You’re now officially warned. Perhaps as a result of that deficiency on my part, religious ceremony has never held much sway with me, including funerals.
That changed about fifteen years ago, when I finally had a glimpse of WHY funerals persist; why we need them. (Yeah, I’m a slow learner.) The occasion was the loss of a high school student of mine in a car accident. Actually, two students within a day of each other. Two funerals on the same afternoon. In two churches, a couple of miles and hours apart. It was awful. I knew both of them. I can still see them in my mind. Molly and Coy. Sweet kids, full of promise. Tragic losses. But on that day, for the first time in my life I understood the sheer utility of a funeral service. It was Funeral 1.0 for me, as dozens of young people I cared about sobbed and shook; overwhelmed by the wrongness of it. But at least the services gave them an outlet. A socially sanctioned chance to grieve. I sort of got it. Even if I wasn’t able to join in (probably part of that same genetic deficiency).
Fast forward to today. A very different situation. A funeral for a fifty-eight year-old colleague. We were on friendly terms and I respected him, but it would be presumptuous of me to claim him as my friend. He was the only person I know of in the Medical School teaching faculty, whose first name was not ‘Doctor’. Yet despite his blue-collar pedigree, at his funeral today I was lucky to get a seat in the balcony of an AME church in downtown Raleigh, a church filled to capacity as this man was eulogized again and again. On one eulogy alone, given by the Dean of the School of Medicine, I would have lost two bets. One that I would have EVER heard this particular Dean cry. Second, that anyone EVER (much less routinely) greeted the Dean in life with a bear hug, as apparently did the departed. He was that special.
What was special about him? What brought people from all over the country to his funeral? The same thing that offered me my Funeral 2.0 upgrade – another reason why funerals matter. As the memorial service played out, an atypically mixed race congregation bowed, wept, and laughed but mostly listened as the life story of the deceased played out. His life’s mission was there for all to see. It was the reason that half of the people in attendance were African Americans under forty. Yet unlike the deceased, a child of the South in the fifties, these hundreds of people who followed his lead in the 80s and beyond all now wear the title of “Doctor”. They survived against the odds (especially in the early years) thanks to his guidance. To his support. To his drive and determination that they would not fail. Year after year, he almost single-handedly increased the percentage of minorities in our medical and dental schools by cross-country recruiting, by nurturing fledgling students, by fund-raising and anything else it took.
And today, they came from time zones away to say thank you. I recognized face after face, and many (but not enough) of their names. An obstetrician in Atlanta. An emergency medicine specialist in Virginia. But today, unlike my earlier funeral, there were fewer tears, less need to grieve. These were adults. Physicians who understood that their mentor of years earlier had been in much pain and young adults who appreciated that there is a positive side to death even in loss. But today, like my earlier story, I realized an obvious purpose to funerals that had escaped me. For these young people had not only put busy professional lives on hold to catch a plane in order to pay final respects to the man who had served as their tutor, confidant, father-figure, etc, so many years ago.
Beyond that, they had come to pick up the flag as it fell. To carry it forward. To affirm that his work was worthwhile and that they would not see it die with him. It was so obvious. How could I have missed it before?
Posted on February 22nd, 2010 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Rants and Musings | 5 Comments »
Last Sunday, I took this photo.
Any resemblance to the author is deliberate, though pipe-smoking is ancient history.
But, fast forward until February 21st. This is just a quick post at bedtime after a drive back from the coast; a weekend that included a dress-up affair with my wife and some tree-felling with my friend Mark. Both were accomplished with minimal injury.
The weather was superb, finally breaking the sixties. The weekend away was also a success because the modified chicken coop “predator proof” door again lived up to its name over the weekend: all thirteen birds were just fine when we returned this evening. (Such was not the case on a couple of other weekends away in recent months, which necessitated the “modifications”.)
Normally, when we’re home, the chickens are securely closed up after dark by raising their wooden ‘drawbridge style’ door and enclosing them safely within the coop. However, on weekends when we’re away, the drawbridge door remains open through the night by default. The solution? This is the basic set-up (courtesy of Robert’s Roost and described in earlier posts) in which the platform is electrified, so that chickens, which hop, never touch the hot platform and the ground at the same time, and so avoid being shocked (unlike creeping predators). However, because I was using a pulsing solar-powered electric fence charger, either the battery was insufficiently charged or the pulse was too infrequent, and I lost a couple of birds. Sadness.
So, my twofold solution: a continuous charger (a little risky for poultry) but tempered by a solar-powered on/off switch, so that the unit doesn’t power up until after dark, when the chickens are safely inside, and it shuts down after sunrise.
Unit seen here with the solar activated switch on the outside. First run was flawless.
Posted on February 22nd, 2010 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Meat, Eggs, etc. | 4 Comments »
I can’t guarantee that this news story is accurate, but if so (and I assume that it is since a lawsuit has been filed), I am experiencing a rare moment of speechlessness.
One thing is certainly true; like many other public school systems, the Lower Merion school district in Pennsylvania issued 1800 laptops to its students to be used on site and off campus. Another certainty; these laptops had built in webcams. The yet-to-be proven allegation put forth in the class action lawsuit: school officials operated said webcams remotely, observing students and their families in the privacy of their homes and without their knowledge and consent.
The Toronto Star broke the story here.
The lawsuit against the school system states:
“On November 11, 2009, plaintiffs were for the first time informed of the above-mentioned capability and practice by the school district when Lindy Matsko (‘Matsko’), an assistant principal at Harriton High School, informed minor plaintiff that the school district was of the belief that minor plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the school district.
“Michael Robbins thereafter verified, through Ms. Matsko, that the school district in fact has the ability to remotely activate the webcam contained in a student’s personal laptop computer issued by the school district at any time it chose and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam, all without the knowledge, permission or authorization of any persons then and there using the laptop computer.
“Additionally, by virtue of the fact that the webcam can be remotely activated at any time by the school district, the webcam will capture anything happening in the room in which the laptop computer is located, regardless of whether the student is sitting at the computer and using it.
“Defendants have never disclosed either to the plaintiffs or to the class members that the school district has the ability to capture webcam images from any location in which the personal laptop computer was kept.”
1984 anyone?
Posted on February 18th, 2010 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Rants and Musings | 5 Comments »
When I started all this a couple of years ago, I came clean with the concept that one purpose of this blog was simply to help me keep track of stuff. So after it took me a couple of hours this past snowy weekend to track down some orchard records of what varieties I planted where, I decided to translate my handwritten scribbles onto a file and upload it here. I’m sure there are more elegant and efficient ways, but I’m just too lazy to learn them, especially at this hour. And yes, such techniques include learning how to ‘insert a thumbnail’, which I’m now convinced was named after some nifty little trick developed during the Spanish Inquisition. I’ve now realized that my own unique version of thumbnails works in reverse. If you click on one of them, you are rewarded with a smaller image. Suggestions are welcome.
And so, filed under: “Move along. Nothing to see here….” Here’s the orchard layout, with a handful of new entries that I ordered during the snow already in their little imaginary boxes, without my even breaking a sweat.
The chicken yard/coop design, with its multiple pop-out doors allowing seasonal rotation through the vegetable garden has been yammered about here.
C’mon people. Move along. Nothing to see here….
Posted on February 2nd, 2010 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Gardening | 3 Comments »
