So here is the problem with the WordPress image uploads. One came out stretched to a square and looks horrible. The bottom one came out just fine, but the image is set at a max size of 600×600, which is tiny and not cool of a site that belongs to someone who loves photography. This is what I have been fighting with sine the ability to upload an image in the first place was fixed on my site.
The alarm goes off at 4AM. I have to calculate that into my eight hours of sleep. Less than eight, and I am not performing the highwire act in the circus that day. Best keep my feet on the ground and a pillow nearby. If I ge the eight hours depends on me getting back to sleep.
But my brain gets busy some mornings long before my body has recouped and is ready.
This morning my brain is curious if the two hours or so I spent on with tech support yesterday was worth it? Before bed I started having troubles uploading images to this site again. It seems to be an intermittent fault. The question is, is it the software, or the operator? Or is it the hosting platform? The setting I saw for size was at 512 megabytes. The other concerns is file permissions in the directory structure on the back end.
There are other things to occupy my mind, too. Many other things much more important than website operability have my noggin knocking nuggets around.
Next thing up is how to turn some of my firewood gathering into an occupation. Large quantities means I can sell firewood, and smaller quantities means objects made from pieces of firewood. There are tools to be had, and some of them are expensive, but profit potential rises with their acquisition. I still need to collect a full season ahead, too, just to have burning wood that is seasoned. One of those tools thus, is a tractor and grapple to handle a lot of the lifting, as I am not getting any younger. Another is a sawmill to get boards for furniture. On the cheaper end comes a planer for a first rough of board thickness, which I can finish with good hand planes which each cost nearly as much as an electric planer. Anyway, look, if I am going to have so much wood going through this little farm, I should be making the best use of it, right down to getting a chipper to make mulch with.
They say death and taxes are unavoidable. Around here it is death, taxes, disappointment, and winter…
… and lack of sleep.
(Pictures uploaded! But they are still coming up in square rather than at the proper aspect ratio, and require correcting after original posting.)
I recieved the Lie Nielsen spoke shave in the mail the other day, and no sooner I did, I was out to the firewood stack and grabbed a piece, took it to the shop, and split it with my froe. I went right to work on the thin piece I had extracted from the firewood with the spoke shave, and eventually added in my pocket knife, then a little bit of sand paper. I must have spent two hours on it, and I let the wood guide me to make what it wanted to be.
What came out was this spatula, which is about the limit for me with the cutting tools available. So, I had a look again at spoon carving knives, and settled on Deepwoods carving tools, which are hand made by a fellow at his home shop. That reflects the modern Main Street USA model that I would like to wedge into with any sales of my own, so I paid it forward to him and bought his tools. They are not even made yet as of this writing, and I look forward to recieving them when he gets a chance to work out in his shop and make up my order.
When I get the tools, I look forward to trying spoon carving for the first legitimate time. I also plan on doing some finishing work on the spatula pictured here. I’d like to cut down the length, and get it down from the 16 inches the piece of firewood was when I cleaved it out.
In addition to woodcarving, I have had a few other spring projects on my plate, such as making the back pasture accessible by vehicle. The canal is at the top of that field, and the canal company has dumped tailings from their annual cleanup along their road access, making the side too steep to get down in our truck. I had them clean up after themselves, but they still never restored any of the slope so I could actually get into the field with the truck. If one of my animals were to die in that field, it would be inaccessible, and I would end up having to let it decay there, which I am not happy about. So We got out the shovels and got to work leveling down the slope.
By “we,” I mean my eight year old and me. She is not a lot of help, but good for moral support!
‘We’ also repaired a broken slat in the bridge across the canal, which the horse fell into a couple of years back. The horse has been petrified of the bridge since, so I hope that by repairing it, she will now find her own way over it.
We put the board back as it was still long enough to span the I-beams and then put redwood pieces over it to add strength. The redwood came from an old feeder that was lay in the other end of the same field.
Of course the week has also been filled with the usual things, such as home schooling the little ones, and keeping the garbage out and taking an old chair to the dunp, and things like that.
Another big project has been working on trying to figure out everything wrong with the new webhost, and the malfunctions there. I finally called tech support today and spent well over an hour on with an agent there, before she managed to sort everything out for me. This is the test post to see if it is working properly now. Regrettably it was such a long call that by the time it was done, we had both forgot to get her to tell me what sha had changed to fix the damn thing. But if is working, and the pictures upload properly, then all the sited should work as well as this one. But there is only one way to find that out for sure. Wish me luck.
There is still plenty to do for the week to come, and I have a lot of content to produce for the websites based on the new strategy. This post is also a part of that. Looking at keeping some of the more personal stuff here, and then making the posts for the farm site and the old-time economy site relevant and not quite as personal with droning on at end about things that have been beaten to death.
When I first started using WordPress, it was a fiasco involving downloading it from WordPress, then uploading it to a host via an ftp client, setting it up and setting up a sql database, including the encryption keys, and editing an adnmin file, then getting going on it. Now, with BlueHost, a person can have it installed in a moment right from the BlueHost servers, including managing the databases. It takes nothing at all, and is much faster than the hour spent on the old installations.
Then there is the time a person gets the bright idea to move to a new hosting service, and what do you know? The DNS is pointing to the new host before a person has finished opening up all of the WordPress installations at the old host, and getting the backups from them. How does a person get their computer to point to an old place where there is no longer a domain name for it, and open a page in situ with a browser, rather than by ftp? I got to learn all of that tonight, including editing a system file on my computer, and then working through five different suppoort agents at the host I am leaving, because they are having technical difficulties and keep getting cut off, so each new agent has to read what has already been done.
The problem was, when I did the edit on the system file, and they helped me find the information I needed to edit in to open a different website than the one the DNS is pointing to, I could get everything to download from every installation of WordPress I had on the host, except for one. And that one? It was the journal kept from birth of my twelve year old daughter.
When bedtime for the kids rolled around, I told my twelve year old daughter what was wrong, and you guessed it, she was none too excited about it at all.
I worked on it with the various agents and with the tools I had, and the advice they could give me, and the settings they could change for four hours in total. I even had one agent manage to get me to where I could see the journal on a proxy server, and I opened that on my tablet and took screen shots hoping we could retype the whole journal as a last ditch effort to save it.
One agent finally gave me a new IP address to edit into the hosts file in Windows system, and then got cut off from the chat just after I told her it didn’t work. Then I realized that the file had not saved because for some reason I was no longer in the text editor as an administrator, so I sorted that out, tried again, and son-of-a-bitch! It worked!
Sraight in, got the download, put it into the new journal, launched it, and golly, I hope my dear daughter knows how much I love her! I may also love some IT people just about as much! I wish the chat did not get cut off so I could say the most profond Thank You to someone called Amitha. Amitha made it happen! Kiry, I was ready to go all night if I had to! Luckily I didn’t have to, but I had no plans to stop baby girl, till it was done.
Admittedly, the pictures are not included, but I managed to get those in the ftp download I did the other day, so we should be fine and able to upload them later. But the text is there. All of it! All as it was originally written. The pictures should be easy to include. The site has a new design. I think you will like it baby girl. It is more mature, just like you.
Right, it is just after midnight, and I need to relax then get to sleep. I think I will sleep till 8:30 tomorrow. I have earned it.
It doesn’t seem right. Fifty is pretty old, and I am just sure I am neither pretty, nor old. One of the best parts of the day apart from being with my immediate family, has been hearing from old friends wishing me a happy birthday. I love them all, and some are really special people. I wish I could gather them all up and share the day with them.
It has been so good to hear from a select few who I have known all the way back to elementary school, where we first met in grades three or five, when I moved to the same school twice during those years. It’s good to have so many years. It is good to look at their photos online and know just what they looked like and how they acted as kids. Some are great friends, some are best friends.
I have am sure that a mature man does not exist, but rather a man gets too old to get up to his old shenanigans.
I remember well a lady I met when I was just 23, and she was in her eighties, in an assisted living home in California. I don’t remember her name, but she used to enjoy my visits when I delivered her medications from the pharmacy I worked at while I was in college. We talked about life, and about aging one day, and she said that age is a funny thing, because in her mind she was still in her 20’s, but her body just wasn’t cooperating with that. I have found it strange that somewhere inside my head, I have always been every age I have ever been, and it is just my body that is getting older. Some folks out there are no doubt reading this and thinking, “Oh, you just wait.”
Another lady I met while working at the pharmacy was quite sad, and when I spoke with her, she said to me that she was eager to die. I could not understand why. When I asked, her reply was a sullen, “Because I am just so tired.” She was not litteraly tired. She was tired of life and all of the things that had happened to her during hers. She was tired of getting older and everyone she knew leaving before her. She was tired of loss and the changes in the world that made it so different to what it was when she was younger and spry, and happy.
As for me, I am just chugging along. Each day comes and goes. I am lucky to have young kids still at home, but I also am sad sometimes that I am so tired and sore that I cannot give them the play and fun I think they should have out of their father. They are the most amazing people, and I want so much for them to grow up happy and to live full lives. Their mom gives so much to make that happen. I wish I could give them more myself.
I had been really hoping to get a tractor for out little farm this year. Secretly, one of the big reasons I wanted one has been to pile snow up high for the girls to slide down, and to play on, or build ice castles out of. We have some repairs that have got to be done on the house, and it looks like those are going to wipe out that dream. I may be able to get one later, but the girls are growing up, and I am going to end up missing the older one’s childhood, and time when she would have enjoyed that. Obviously there are a hell of a lot of other reasons for a tractor, too, but that has been one reason I have been working so hard to try to make it happen this year.
Well, kids will grow up, all the same.
Fifty is a time for a bit of reflecting, I think. I mean, sure, it is just another number. But it is a pretty big number, and a round number, and a middle to late number, perhaps. I had a great-great-grandfather who lived from the late 1700’s to the early 1900’s. He wrote poetry on his hundredth birthday. Who knows, maybe this is just my midpoint reflection? Who knows how these things go? Pain is not an exciting prospect, but death doesn’t scare me. I have seen it’s face before. It’s not living that is frightening. Not living life while it is here! It is becoming the lady who is too tired to want to be here. It is giving up. That is the kind of thing that does not suit me at all.
So here we go. Thinking of old friends, thinking of kids, and also thinking of my dear wife, and how much she means to me, and how important she is in my life. Whatever happens in the next fifty years, I don’t know what to expect. One day, another, and another. “What ever happens, happens, and when it does, I’ll just happen along with it.”
I love the people in my life. I miss the old friends. I wish only to keep pressing on, and to not give up on it all, and never let the bad outweigh the good. I am tired. I am sore. I am in pain almost constantly, and really love and live during those few times when I am not. And sometimes life is just waiting time till the good times come again, and trying to keep a positive attitude. And if I am just too tired to get up to some old shenanigans, then I hope that all of what I can do is done with class. And that is where I am at now. Striving for a little class in the way I behave, and at least a little something for everyone I meet to smile. That’s is how I will continue to give them the love.
Anyway, this is rambling on and on now, and I need to stop boring you, reader. But if you are Russ, or Robin, you are still my best friends. If you are Adria, Andria, Sherly, you still amaze me. If you are someone I met through Facebook, thank you for being a part of my life, and I am glad to know you. If you are one of my siblings, good gawd, you are some of the best people I know, and the people I most want to spend time with aside from my wife and kids. If you are a new friend, I am hoping we can be old friends. If you are an old friend, I hope we can renew our friendship. Maybe you are a Wiccan, or maybe you are a scientist, or maybe I have celebrated Solstice with you at Stonehenge. Those are people who I have loved being with because you have intrigued me with your love of the Earth, and the adventurous spirit in you.
If you are nuts enough to live under the same roof as me, or you have in the past, you are the ones I live for every day. You are the ones who take my breath away. You are the ones I give my every ounce of love to. I want you to know that even though I tell you every day how much I love you, I cannot tell you enough.
Happy Birthday? Happy 50? Well, it has been a good ride so far, and I am happy to try for another 50. I am grateful for every day, anyway.
Time.
What the Devil is this tomfoolery? It was 60 degrees yesterday!
I think this may be the bset snowfall we have had since before Christmas! It’s been such a dry winter. While it’s still winter now, it is behaving like mid spring weather. The seasons have been all wrong to their normal expectations. To me, at least. Remember, this is Cache Valley. Winters here go deep and long. Tree rings here show signs that it used to be much wetter here than it has been the last twenty years. Climate change? Probably.
As of this posting, I am hosted on a new host with this site. That’s one job done, and it paid for for the next three years.
It’s a cold morning here on the farm. It got down to 20 degrees early, and set off my temperature alarm to let me know that I needed to run the water on low in the kitchen sink to prevent the pipes from freezing. That’s just part of our winter routine.
Our grandson is here right now, which is lovely. He’s a young one and just learning to talk. It’s an adventurous age of discovery, where we follow him around and discover all the things he can say and all the things he knows about. This morning he alerted me to the sight of the moon in the frosty mist of six-ish AM. Not my usual wake up time these days, so I discovered that time of day, too.
I remembered to get the garbage bins out to the side of the road last night, so there is no last minute stress to send me running in front of a heavy truck with two heavy objects in tow.
Fifty is rolling up on me faster than a garbage truck does when I forgot to put the bins out. Joy. Gonna be just another day, I guess. I remember being a kid and wonderinf if I would make thirty, and how old that seemed. Wow. Thirty was twenty years ago. Those are words that convey less feeling till saying it for self, and for real. Strange that I looked up at my grandson just now who is sat in his highchair, and was wide-eyed as can be, as though he were expressing my inner feelings.
Okay, it is getting time to finish getting ready for my day, and to get the little one ready to meet his parents when they come to pick him up. I have not got any of my images to come from the old blog site to this new one, and don’t know if I will be able to. I think this part is going to be a lot of work, especially as I cannot get into WordPress from the back end anymore at the old site. I have donwloaded the whole lot of the data. I am glad not to do a direct transfer anyhow as something unknown in the settings at the old site was preventing me making any changes at all to the appearance of the blog. Maybe now I can have full function again. WordPress is usually not a headache, but in this instance, it is certainly contributing to one.
The other day something interesting came in the mail. One of the local Jehovah’s Witnesses decided to get around Covid restrictions on door to door bullshitting, he would have to send out mailers to probably every address in the city. We got ours! The top of the front of the pamphlet included with his personalized letter was titled, “How do you view the Bible?” Under that, it gave these options: “Would you say it is… a book of human wisdom? A book of myths and legends? The word of God?” Well, I am sure glad it asked!
First of all, there are more options than just what are listed. However, if I were to keep to the options given, then let’s start with number one. shall we? If it is human wisdom, then surely it has the ability to be updated and added to, however, I have never found any subscriber of the Bible ready and willing to start slapping in new books, which itself negates it as human wisdom, because surely it would need to be updated every few years. In fact, the repulsive reaction of anyone to whom it is suggested that it needs to be updated suggests that ‘human wisdom’ is completely out of the question. I can leave this one here.
So let’s go to a book of myths and legends. Well, it starts out with a couple called Adam and Eve, who are meant to be the first two people on Earth. They have two sons. Those two sons marry. WHO??? Alright, myth and legend is starting to sound like a winner. It carries on with tales of people who live for centuries, and it tells of a worldwide flood for which there is no evidence. It talks about the guy who created the entire universe waging over how much he can torture a man before he will give up on him, and it talks about a fella who is meant to gut his own son to prove his love for this great creator. Well, that puts it along the lines of a fairy tale, because anyone who obeys the voices in their head and splits their child open should first off, be put away to die very old in a prison, and more importantly, should have refused any such voice to begin with. I am going to go with myth and legend over fairy tales, since there are no obvious morals in some of the tales, and only obvious morals in other tales, e.g.: treat others as you would want to be treated.
As for it being the word of God, see the paragraph above for the answer to that. Furthermore, there is no reason to start with the idea that there is a God to begin with. Any child born is taught about God from its parents, and those who are not do not come to the conclusion that there is one. We know this because children tend to ‘find’ the God that is prevalent in their own society. The options are normally limited, and the God they will find is seldom left to chance. Children are indoctrinated at the least, and often forced to believe in a certain view of deity.
One of the hard things to do within many modern societies is to take all the indoctrination and throw it all out and begin to look at the world anew. It often comes with layers of guilt, followed by heaps of shame. Habits are also hard to break. Even years after leaving a childhood religion, a person may find themselves singing a hymn, and their religious family or friends will be there to tell them that it is because they are longing for God, rather than remembering an old habit.
So, the closest answer I can come to is “A Book of Myths and Legends.” Mother Goose was never co-opted and bashed over people’s heads and told that it is the absolute truth and has the absolute morality by which people should live. If it were, I would easily say they are the absolute equivalent.
“Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.” -Christopher Hitchens
The Bible’s virtues can be surmised in the heap of differing religions it has, all competing to be the “true” one, and the differing beliefs they hold, and the parts of the Bible they each ignore. As it is said, ‘a book that tells you how to treat your slaves is not a moral guide. It needs to be thrown away.’
I have gone off Facebook about three years ago, with hardly a look back. One of the main reasons for doing so was the Trump Administration, and the divisiveness of President Trump, himself. He was making America into whatever the hell he thought it was, and that was not the America I was raised up in. Don’t get me wrong, the attitudes predate him, but they were brought to the fore under him, and he normalized what was once abnormal. As his Presidency progressed, the attitudes of people on Facebook got worse and worse, till “trolls” became a political party. I finally decided I had had enough of that. I wish not, because there have been so many people there that I have adored and got along with. But I always felt a pang of guilt getting rid of someone on my friend list that I could not bear to hear anymore, because I knew I was going into an echo-chamber of my own ideals and my own truth, and the lack of challenge to my point of view was a way of isolating my thoughts and limiting my own understanding. Yet, there was the assholistic nature of so many of the Trump supporters.
I tried to draw the line at decency, and I tried to keep involved with others, but eventually I decided it just was not worth it. Most of the people I know on Facebook are unlikely to show up at my funeral, even if we were to all live in the same town. But my wife, and my kids, on the other hand… I wanted to devote myself to them, to not sya to them “just a minute” when all I was doing was responding to some troll or ‘talking’ to someone who I have never personally even met. That’s when I left Facebook behind, not cling my account, but at least walking willingly away so I could be involved in my life, and I could sleep better at night, thus be even better involved in my own life.
We have a new President now, and I no longer feel that pit in my stomach when I do wake up in the middle of the night, wondering what the President is thinking up and about to Tweet while sat on the toilette devising how to stir up the country and anger half the population, in what I believe was his means of manipulating the stock market at will, and for his own personal benifit. I have no proof of that, and it is just my own suspicion. With a new man in Office, and though he is not my man for the job, I can at least sleep knowing that we finally have someone competant at governance in place, and that he worries about the American people, and not all the time himself and only himself.
So, it is time to move forward. I have broken the Facebook habit, and I am happy about that. There are new habits to form that should be made to improve my life in more ways now. I have a fair desire to rework this little bit of farm land and help Missus grow the things she wants to have for natural supplies for her crafts. That said, we will be taking this year off of some of our outdoor growing, and redesigning the place, and hopefully getting it ready for the following year and some mass production.
My next steps are to get to work on the repairs we need, the redesign we will do, and the work on making the place the way we want it. There are a lot of things that have been put off for far too long, and it is time to aggressively move forward on them. I am not getting any younger.
I do look forward to spring and wood gathering. I probably should have been going down already as there has been a drought, and no snow, but tomorrow is forecast for 2 to 5 inches of it, so that is probably out. Winter blues. It always drags me down in the middle of it. I get chomping at the bit to get to it, and have weather and frozen ground and plants preventing it.
Time to have a Guinness Extra Stout and call it an evening, I guess.
These are the Wednesdays of January. There is no other way to see this but as an historic moment in America.
The first Wednesday showed the true colors of the Trump Presidency. And a person would have to of been a damned fool to have been taken by surprise by it. He was softening the ground for this for months. He wanted this to happen, and he got it. And he lost. After meeting with the President of China he noted the lifetime Presidency Xi had acquired and gloated that maybe one day we would have that in America, too. That is when it began publicly. He also talked about how the election in 2016 was rigged, to ease his feeling about Hillary having got more votes than him. Then he dragged that one out again to suggest he could not possibly lose in 2020. He even got bold enough to say that he could not possibly lose to “Sleepy Joe, the worst Presidential candidate in US History.” Well, looky here where we are now! Then it was all about lost Trump ballots, ballots thrown in a river, and abesntee ballots being faked, and dead people voting and ballot dumps. When he took it to court, he lost on 60 out of 61 instances, and the one he won was only over a handfull of votes. And this was in front of judges appointed by virtually every President since Bush Sr.!
Impeachment came a week later, which was correct. There is no way he did not incite that crowd, even with plausible deniability, and indirect speech accounted for. He said “We are going to go down to the Capitol.” There was no business of his there. The election was over, and it was well past time for him to gracefully concede. The election wasn’t even close, and even if he was right that the ballots were dumped, we are suppsed to believe that more than seven million of them were printed up somewhere and put in envelopes and dropped into the systems without local authorities actually cottoning on to it… Utter bullshit. Impeachment? He kept saying the election was going to be stolen, and not for his lack of effort, it could have been. He tried to say it enough that it would come to pass. That is a well preacticed narcissist right there.
Inaguration of the first female in the second spot in America was a big deal a week later, but that she was a black woman and a South Asian woman was an even bigger deal, by far. Some will try to dismiss this and pretend that it doesn’t matter. Then let them not complain for the sakes of those for whome it does matter. America is a diverse country by its nature, and the elected officials need to reflect that. By the core of the nature of humanity, we are far too late to be finally electing a woman to either of the Exeutive offices. Half the damn species is female! Why the hell has this equality not been acknowledged rightfully yet? This is the stupidest thing! I know that it all roots in male inferiority that has long been enshrined in religious dogmas going back at least as far as Jesus Christ! But this needs to end. It needed to never of have begun.
We are living through one of those historic moments, and it is leaving my head spinning. I have not felt anything quite like this since 9/11.
The most exciting aspect of it all though, is that we just might make it through all of this after all. Joe Biden was never my man for office. He was never progressive enough; not even close. But one thing he has for damn sure demonstrated was the ability to keep pressing on, peacefully, quietly, and how to keep in control when things look awful. I’ll give him this, he has been dignified, and has brought the right messages to the fore. I wish him every success, and all the progress he is seeking.
