Rural entertainment
The other night we went out and sat in lawn chairs to watch the fireflies in the cornfield. Then we walked over next to the corn (about 140 acres) and listened to it grow. Seriously! It's a faint creaking and popping noise, especially after a day of rain followed by a day of sunshine. We could even hear it over the sound of the ethanol plant (about a mile away).
Garden is growing like crazy. Looks really nice after I've run the tiller up and down between the rows and Kathy has weeded in the rows. A young friend of ours helps occasionally when he's bored. Our own (sweet) corn is about waist high, inspired by the cornfield where it's more like six feet tall. Okra is coming along nicely as are the carrots and parsnips.
One of the Cates clan (the ones who work the cornfield) has a tomato field about a mile up the road. He has a sign that says "No Drift Area". (?) Well, Kathy saw several of the clan up at Mr. Lester's place (the patriarch, in his 80s) and asked about it. What the sign means is that when anyone sprays with Roundup (which the corn and soybeans are resistant to), be careful because you'll kill umpteen acres of tomatoes if the wind is blowing.
Cates' biggest grain bin is a "3/4", or 3/4 of a million bushel capacity. They're working on a new one that's a "2 1/2", pouring footers and all that, trying to get done before harvest. Y'know that's a lot of corn!
Construction
The smaller room of the "train shed" (old milkhouse) is all framed and wired, just waiting for us to put in insulation and drywall. Insulation? Yes, well, I hope to keep the temperature to about 40° minimum, with minimum expense. This room will have cupboards and shelves and we may decide to store food out there, among other things.
The building has actual cracks in places where you can see daylight, especially around the windows, so there is some work to be done there. When the temperature is below zero and the wind is over 40 MPH, it's hard to keep anything warm.
A brief escape
About the middle of May, Kathy decided that we needed to get out of town. This was not a bad idea at all.
We arranged for the puddy tats to stay at a kennel and warned Farnsworths that we were coming. We had never been to South Carolina, so we made hotel reservations in Greenville which was by coincidence the same night as a concert. We also made reservations at the Chattanooga Choo-Choo. Everything was set.
Had a short visit with Farnsworths. Granny is 93 now. Rosemary and Ellen still live there and they made room for us.
In Greenville, we had an excellent Indian dinner at the Handi Restaurant on Main Street a few blocks from the Peace Center where Jim Brickman gave a concert. Next morning we left and took U.S. 64 through the North Carolina hills. Whether that was an error could be debated either way.
The road is crooked as a snake and you would expect rusty pickup trucks and refrigerators on the front porches. Not so. More like a suburb of Atlanta. Gated neighborhoods, fancy cars and you get the idea. In one of the small towns it seemed that every other car was a Lexus. We actually found a Subway with "regular" prices so we could afford it. We have no idea who owns all these mansions sprinkled across the hillsides. ("Condos from low 100s, townehouses from low 300s")
At some point, we had to make a quick stop and almost hit the cute little red Mini-Cooper ahead of us. Brakes just didn't stop us quick. No other symptoms. Hmmm. A bit later, they acted sluggish again, but they worked fine as long as they were treated gently. (Like the wipers on the pickup -- being repaired -- that work fine except when it rains, the brakes on the car work fine until you have to stop.) We went on into Chattanooga. Drove around a bit before finding the Choo-Choo.
We highly recommend The Station House at the Choo-Choo. Singing waiters and waitresses, quite a nice show. If you get a table served by the Elvis impersonator, he will come and serenade you during the band's break. Kathy really enjoyed it, and the steak also.
Next morning, we were going to head for Dayton and the Strawberry Festival. However, there was a Midas shop three blocks from the Choo-Choo, so we took the car down there. Not much really wrong, but it cost $91.00 or so (flushed out the dirty brake fluid mostly). The mechanic recommended Lillie Mae's Restaurant for breakfast. It's on Dayton Blvd in Red Bank, which was right on our way. We knew it was a good place when we had a hard time finding a parking place. Biscuits, grits, gravy, you get the idea. Fairly cheap ($3.75 breakfast), good Southern cooking. That was about 11:00 already.
Called Lois Abel as we drove through Sale Creek. She was home, so we stopped in for an hour or so. The Strawberry Festival parade broke up at Dayton City School, right down the block from Lois, so we got to see about half the floats and decorated pickup trucks but no bands. But we had a good visit. Lois was our landlady for a number of years. After that visit, we went downtown to the courthouse square, ate shortcake (lunch?) and listened to Gospel music.
After church on Sunday at Ogden Baptist (sorry, no Web site except for the cemetery), we headed home. Got temporarily disoriented in Knoxville due to construction (we used to live there for cryin' out loud!) but found our way out of town OK. Sometime around midnight, the "shortcut" through Muncie wasn't so short, but Kathy is a good navigator even in the dark.
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Home Again
Got to work on The List. It's about a page and a half long, including stuff like "Finish wiring new bathroom" and "Move leftover drywall out to shed".
A little funeral
The old cat, Little One, finally lost so many teeth, quit eating and lost so much weight she was virtually starving to death. We had to send her to That Big Litter Box In The Sky. It's sad to lose a pet, but not nearly as sad as losing a friend or family member. We'll get over it. That's the downside of having pets.
Little One was born in a hollow tree and rescued by Rich's mother in about 1990, in Lynchburg, VA. Mom didn't have too many visitors in those days, so Little One remained fearful of strangers. Mom moved with us to Toppenish, WA, and when she went to the adult-care facility (under her own steam) she left the cat with us. Took us about two months to be able to lay a hand on her. We had a saying in those days. The other cat, Shreddie, looked just like Tinky (in the photo) and we said, "Shreddie has never met a stranger; Little One has never seen a stranger." Such were their little personalities. She was a mouser, caught a mouse about a month ago when the two other cats just sat there wondering what it was. In her day she would catch birds, which drove my mother nuts with feathers all over the place. Really hated to lose our only mouser, but Fiver, the little guy, may learn. Right now all he catches is ants. (And laser-pointer beams!)
My saying is, "Every time we move, we lose a cat." This is pretty much true.
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Geek Stuff
Got a new transmitter. Nothing wrong with the old one except it's about 10 years old and will give up one of these days. New one is about the size of a cigarette pack (remember those?), plugs into a USB port for its 5V power and broadcasts 150 feet, far enough for the Christmas display. We get streaming audio over our FM radios now and we can tell when somebody is playing games by the occasional "bwoing", or getting AOL mail ("Welcome! You've got mail!"). I can pick it up, but not well, as far as the next street East and West, about 1/4 mile. Comes in clearly all over our property but the neighbors can't get it on any side so we're legal. Sky.fm is my main online music source, but the commercials are quite repetitive. Can't get several other audio sources, reason unknown.
Still working on 80x86 Assembly Language for my fall course.
Complaint Dept.
Well, here I go again. Well, just gotta express some opinions somewhere and you don't have to read beyond here.
Is corn food or fuel? Son Jon came to visit around June 1st and we went down and prowled around Fry's Electronics. On the way back we started figuring:
- The average person requires about 1500 Calories a day, round figures.
- There are about 130,000 Calories in a bushel of corn.
- Efficent conversion yields 2.7 gallons of ethanol for 1 bushel of corn.
- It takes 12 gallons, or about 4.4 bushels to fill the tank in our little car.
- That's about 580,000 calories, or 385 days' worth.
It's also the case that after ethanol production about 1/3 of the corn is residue that can be used for livestock feed, so it's not as bad as all that.
And it turns out that corn-burning stoves (the kernels, not the cobs or stalks) are more cost-effective than any fuel except coal. (Google it!)
But the cost of corn is high enough that poor folks in Mexico have to scrimp just to have tortillas. Is something wrong here?
What got us started was an article about this, and I like to see the data myself before I believe anyone's blog. As they say, "go figure". I do.
Like Will Rogers, all I know is what I read in the papers. Well, that and TV. "You can tell when a politician is lying: his lips are moving." Nancy Pelosi sure fits that stereotype. And they upped the federal tax on assorted alcoholic products as well as placing a tax on sweetened drinks, to pay for national health care or something like that. The increase on tobacco taxes was for the SCHIP kids' health insurance, and this increase is for the adults? I think so.
OK, am I broken (could be!), or is it not true that the average hospital stay costs $700.00 or so extra so they can take care of "charity" cases? They (except maybe private hospitals) don't turn away anyone who is sick or injured based on ability to pay. They might like you to think that you have to have insurance to be treated, but it's not true. Now you may not get the treatments you see on TV (House, for example), but you will probably be treated.
OK, let's think this through: if the "charity" cases are now paid by gov't insurance, shouldn't our hospital bills drop by $700.00 average so that our health insurance rates should drop? And the pigs are fed, rested and ready for flight....
And it also occurred to me: does this new tax mean that restaurants will have to charge me extra for the sugar I put into my cup of Decaf? Probably not. However, sweetened tea on the other hand ....
Do you suppose that we're back to homebrew and speakeasies? And that's just for homemade root beer! Alcohol? Don't even go there! (Look up Whiskey Rebellion sometime.)
And while I'm on a roll, did you see the pictures of that pirate they captured? Smiling and waving like a rock star. And why? Because he went from starvation to three meals a day and a (relatively) soft bed for the next 60 years. That's the worst we will do to him, and it's anything but punishment.
