Okay!

I got back to the property safe last night, and was met in the driveway by W's two girl dogs. Everybody else waited patiently for rescue from Gitmo by friendly forces, but Beauty and Redgirl apparently made an early break for freedom. Judging by the rubble they made of my carefully-stacked line of rocks, I at least made them work for it but they found one big rock they could roll away to expose a narrow space between concrete blocks. Note to self - no more round rocks.

Before leaving on his trip, W had cleaned out his refrigerator and apparently left some aromatic goodies in the garbage that had been much on Little Bear's mind all day. While I was sorting out W's dogs for the night, LB disappeared and would not respond to repeated calls. All black, he can be hard to see at night when he doesn't want to be. I didn't think (dumb me) to check the garbage area, and when LB finally came back he was carrying half a brick of cream cheese in the apparent wan hope that I'd let him keep it. ("It followed me home!")

So all's well. I'm hoping all the upset won't inspire the dogs to new flights of ... flight, but only time will tell. Right now, since I took care of my shit-shoveling duties on Tuesday before all hell broke loose, I've got two days to get the combined packs in some sort of order, prepare for Landlady's arrival on Friday night or Saturday, and generally unwind. W left me some things I need to finish in the barn, but that's a couple hours' work at most.

Ah, home.

The downside of being a hermit...

I've posted this lament before. Once in a while (as seldom as I can arrange) I need to leave my quiet desert home and go to a city. And I always find it terrifying. Today's one of those days.

Since I'm currently responsible for my dogs and W's, I can't stay overnight. It gets damned cold here overnight. Also, the two girls have demonstrated surprising willingness and ability to dig under the Gitmo fence no matter how many big stones I pile around the base. They seem to consider it a 'damage-acceptable' situation, and while I sympathize it does put them in greater danger while all the humans are gone.

So I can't stay overnight, which is both a trial and a relief. A trial because it gives me about twelve hours on the road plus time on target, and I'm not as young as I used to be. I'm unlikely to get home much before midnight, and that thought gave me considerable pause as I was nodding off around eight yesterday evening. A relief because ... well, I really did want an excuse not to overnight in the city. When I leave home, all I want is to go home.

I've often written about the infantilizing effect of on-grid living, how it encourages you to rely on the "big boys" for the necessities of life, how taking on those challenges for yourself allows you to grow up in ways many people can't imagine. I stand by that. But hermitage has its limiting influences as well. I used to navigate the hazards and hassles of city life as casually as most people do. But now they frighten me. I spend too much time in the quiet and solitude of the desert to be comfortable leaving it. What if I get lost? What if the dogs get out and/or get hurt? What if I don't have enough money to cover contingencies? What about traffic cops? What about traffic?

None of that's going to stop me, of course, but it does amuse and dismay me that the questions even arise. In many ways, a hermit's life has expanded and improved me. In a few others, I'm curiously diminished by it.

Dispatch from Stupid Nation

"There are so many wrongs/To right with tedious songs..."

Johnny Cougar for Senator?

What do you say to that?

Mr. Policeman is not not NOT...

...Your friend.

It was a scene straight from a parent's worst nightmare: A critically injured son trapped in a vehicle draped with live wires, an anxious father and two police officers described by witnesses as having an "attitude."

The result: A man described by acquaintances as a pillar in his community, a volunteer and foster father known for his parenting abilities, now faces felony criminal charges for allegedly assaulting one of the officers.

Remember the lessons of the Prophet Cartman!

Addendum to the below:

That photo represents a landmark in my Linux use and more time spent than I care to confess to. But this old beardo did get her done.

Paranoid Recluse Checklist:

Item #178: Backup backup caches.



I don't fret much over "bug-out bags" and such, because I'm already where I want to be at The End Of The World As We Know It. Howsomever, in the quiet paranoid reveries of the night one does occasionally break into cold, mucky sweats over what would happen should one's quiet desert home suddenly and without notice become untenable.

Up till now I've done little about this question; small emergency water caches are as far as I ever took it. What if I really needed enough to Get The Hell Hence? These old ammo cases should finally put the question to rest, once I get them placed and stocked.

There's lots and lots of space to stash stuff out there. The question arises as to how one goes about finding it again, since within that vast expanse every bush and rock looks exactly like every other bush and rock. GPS geocaching is no solution, of course, because documentation is not the paranoid recluse's friend. But I flatter myself that after years of extensive walkies with the dogs, there are few people at most who know this area as well as I do. If I can't find my landmarks, my landmarks can't be found.

Hey, you! Citizen!

Get in line!

And now for something completely different.

This MP3 is distinctly NSFW. Also, it's really weird. Dan Rather sued the "creators" over it, which should tell you something about its merits right there. Scroll down the page for the audio.

"But 'states rights' is racist!"

Derek Sheriff has written a wonderful essay on Lew Rockwell titled "The Untold History of Nullification: Resisting Slavery". I highly recommend you read the whole thing.

Public School civics courses, when they mention Nullification at all, invariably tie it to the shameful conduct of the so-called "States' Rights" movement in the '50's and '60's, in which segregationists wanted to use Nullification to turn back civil rights legislation. That happened, and there's no point in denying it. I suspect a number of those segregationists also wore blue jeans, which does not in itself make jeans racist in nature.

Sheriff details the actions of Wisconsin abolitionists, who used Nullification effectively to fight fugitive slave laws prior to the War Between the States. It also mentions Nullification's origins in the Federalist Papers and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions during the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts. It's a wonderful read.

I don't know what the future holds for the 10th Amendment movement. But I will note here that the efforts of the movement's opponents to tie State Nullification to racism, ignoring or denying its long and honorable history in this country, is very telling against them.

Seriously, RTWT.

You need to work on your impulse control, Rep. Jorgensen.

There's a bill in the Wyoming legislature that would remove the license requirement for (some) Wyoming residents to carry concealed weapons. That's a good thing, no doubt. I understand there's a similar bill in Arizona that might pass. Good thing, too. That's not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is an "argument" against the bill, similar to hoplophobic statements I've heard for years and years.

Rep. Pete Jorgensen, D-Jackson, went further, saying that loosening gun control regulations, except for hunting, would be dangerous to everyone.

"I've been in situations in other countries working where I'm glad I didn't have a gun," said Jorgensen, who served overseas in the U.S. Army. "I've not sure I would've controlled myself."

The (I'm looking for a word other than "argument," because this isn't an argument, it's an admission of personal weakness) goes, "I don't want other people to carry guns, because I can imagine times in my past when, if I'd been carrying a gun, I'd have used it on people who annoyed or frightened me."

Huh. Y'know, I am by no means a paragon of human virtue. But I can't think of a single time I'd ever have shot someone just because of a momentary reflection that the world would be a cleaner/safer/better place without that person. Oh, I've had that thought in the past - plenty. In fact, I can think of a few people I still have that belief about. But they're all still above-ground and likely to stay that way, at least where actions of mine are concerned. And I do carry a gun.

There have been several times when I wanted to knock somebody down for annoying or frightening me, and a few times when I did. Looking back, some of those people didn't really need to get knocked down; I could have just left. But I never shot any of them. I was never (okay, seriously) tempted to shoot any of them. And my impulse control isn't as great as I'd like it to be.

I'm trying to make two points here: First, people don't really do this. Not as a rule. Normal, sane people do not draw guns on one another at every little disagreement. It's a canard that used to get raised every time someone suggested that their fellow creatures be "privileged" to act like non-declawed adults, and reality has shot it down (sorry) every time. Blood does not flow in the gutters when people carry the means of self-defense. It's a lie, and not a very credible one.

Second, whenever someone makes this claim they're talking about themselves, not about me. But the topic is always something they want to do to me. Except for conscription, nobody in the history of this country has ever passed a law forcing other people to carry a gun.* But there sure have been a lot of laws purporting to prevent it, and at the heart of a lot of them have been "arguments" made by sad, fearful little creatures with no impulse control, and who instead of growing up and developing some impulse control, just want to defang all their fellow creatures so that they don't have to fear getting what they deserve. Contemptible.

It seems that one of those pusillanimous creatures has gone and gotten himself elected to the Wyoming legislature.



*There have been a few tongue-in-cheek local laws forcing residents to own guns, but that's not the same thing. Also, I doubt those laws have ever been enforced, but I still think they're bad laws.

End of an era!

A bad, bad era.

I pay as little attention to electoral politics on this blog as possible, but some things can't be escaped or at least - as in this case - deserve a good swift kick in passing.

This week the last Kennedy in public office announced that he's hanging up his top hat. The newsies can't get enough of the story.

Guy's 42 years old. His daddy bought him a seat in the Rhode Island HoR as a college graduation present, got him into Congress six years later, where the only thing he was good at was bulldozing metric shit-tons of pork to Rhode Island. He's a drunk, a drug addict, a mentally-ill woman-abuser. Any decent politician - if you'll forgive the oxymoron - with his personal deficits would have been quietly shuffled off by his party ten years ago. But he's a Kennedy, so bring on the crocodile tears. How ever will we get along?

What I do find a little sad - to the extent that I can muster any feeling for the guy at all - is that he apparently never wanted to be there in the first place. His dad's barely cold in the grave, and his first public statement in, like, ever is that he's not going to run for re-election. Imagine a person so empty of self-worth that the top priority of his life is keeping Ted fergoshsake Kennedy happy with him. Yeah, that's sad.

I liked Tam's take...

...on the Girard raid in Taxachusetts:

"It's very important to me that when [the po-po] do my junk-on-the-bunk display, folks on internet gun forums will say "Okay, that is an arsenal."

Now pay attention, people...

THIS is how to snark.

The bigger problem, of course, is practical. Regulating precipitation - or even banning it entirely - won't actually stop snow from falling. Virtually all meteorologists agree that, given certain atmospheric conditions, snow will continue to fall from the sky regardless of federal law.

To address this, Congress should appoint a blue-ribbon panel of experts (with at least one labor representative) to study the problem and submit recommendations in four years, at which time a more effective law would be passed.

The committee would be funded by a penny-per-shovel tax. Some might argue that this tax would exacerbate the snow problem by discouraging Americans from buying shovels, but that can also be fixed with legislation. Congress should simply mandate that all Americans purchase shovels.

Yes, there would have to be a Medicaid-style program for those who cannot afford shovels, and perhaps a carve-out for Nebraskans who already own shovels to get Ben Nelson's vote. But those minor details could be worked out in conference committee.

Wow. Just...wow.

I prostrate myself in chastened servility, Your PeaceOfficeriness. Truly, I writhe blinded by the splendor of your special niche in society.

PS: Please stop protecting me, shithead.

Nothing new here, but still...

Get a load of this.

Since it is unacceptable for people to believe that government agents will carry out paramilitary raids to confiscate firearms, a paramilitary force was sent to Girard’s home to confiscate his firearms.

Now, that's just stupid.

I told you I might drop off the air because of pure cluelessness. When said affliction showed up, it turned out to be so stupid and so simple I don't know whether to be mad at myself or the fools who designed this box.

After W loaded the software on this new pooter, he warned me about an unobtrusive little switch on one of the front corners of the box. "My advice," he said, "is never flip this switch."

You have to look closely to even see it; it's small and black-on-black. If you really squint, you can see that one side is marked "on" and the other side "off". It also happens to be located riiiight where a person might grip the box while taking it on or off the docking port. What it does, for reasons surpassing my poor understanding, is completely disable any possibility of network connection.

I, of course, completely forgot about the senseless little switch until I went crying to W for aid this morning.

It's the little things...

...that threaten to send you screaming into the street. It's fortunate at the moment that I have no street to scream in.

Wanna really screw somebody up? Just transpose the "OK" and "CANCEL" buttons, as Mint has perversely done. I keep thinking I've revised a setting or saved a bookmark or any of a dozen other little setting-up-house chores, then go back to find it undone because I blankly clicked the first button when I needed to click the second one.

And talk about the little things...how the hell do you open a new file folder? Can any management issue be more elementary? Yet I cannot figure it out.

Not drinking yet. Contemplating, yes, but not drinking.

Gotta go shovel shit now, which for once will be a break.

Here's an interesting viewpoint...

From LRC, Mark Crovelli's article "What Has 'The Union" Ever Done for Colorado?" It's a (biased, granted) history of the many ways and times the Federal government has gotten Coloradoans killed in the name of "protecting" them from threats that, in hindsight, don't seem terribly threatening - to Coloradoans, anyway.

He sums it up thus:

Enough time has passed, and enough Coloradoan blood has been spilled on foreign soil, for Coloradoans to realize that the federal government has not, and never will, protect Colorado from foreign threats. For, the tragic history of the relationship between Coloradoans and the federal government reveals no foreign threats to Colorado except those provoked or imagined by the federal government. The historical record reveals, in other words, a federal government that is itself bathed in the blood of Coloradoans.

He ends his essay with a suggestion that, if we accept his logic, seems perfectly logical:

The time has come for Coloradoans to tell the federal government to go to hell if it thinks it is going to send more Coloradoans off to die in the name of "protecting" them.

The time has come for Coloradoans to secede from the bloodthirsty federal government in order to defend their very lives from their supposed "protector."

Yay! New Pooter!

And it's a zippy thing! Plus I can actually see the screen.

Unca W spent about four hours loading Linux Mint and associated apps on it, moved all my email archives (a good thing since buried in there are a number of long-forgotten usernames and passwords) and even GPG works!

Mint seems close enough in operation to Windoze that I get more cognitive dissonance from a Mac than from this puppy. I'm having more trouble with the different keyboard action and having to keep my right thumb away from the slightly-differently-placed whatchacallit that you accidentally bump your thumb on and suddenly you're typing four lines up from where you wanted to be. Took my months to learn how to avoid that with the Dell, but today I'm remembering the many curses I cursed.

It'll even play commercial DVDs! I may marry it!

Wow, it's a target-rich morning.

If you can watch this video without fondling your AK47, it's possible you don't understand the situation.



H/T to The Smallest Minority

EDIT: Best Comment Ever - "New lyrics, 'The Green Police...are buried under my shed...'"

Have you ever misplaced a building?

I know...It happens to me all the time. I put it down for just a second, thinking about something else, you know, and then just can't seem to remember...

Hey, but I'm a piker. The state of Florida can't find 18,000 of them.

Where do you get the form?

Attention, South Carolinians! Ever feel like controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, of South Carolina or of any political subdivision thereof? Better pay the 5$ registration fee.

H/T to WOG.

A New! Global! Crisis! YAY!

Global warming er...Climate Change isn't selling so well has been solved by our beloved masters, so but a New Global Crisis Looms! Know Fear!

...world soil, including European and British soils, could vanish within about 60 years if drastic action was not taken.

We need Drastic Action, people! Drastic! Now! Tremble! After all...

"It is not an exaggeration to say that soil is the most precious resource we have got, and... (we) are not up to the task of securing it for our children never mind our grand children."

Seriously, it just never gets old.

What do you do with a giant pile of horseshit?

No, no. Literal horseshit.

My neighbors that I shovel goat shit for are planning to reduce their goat flock, possibly getting out of the business entirely, and concentrate on horses. They're buying two more mares, so rather than a quick rake-out of one big stall I'll be required to shovel a lot more horseshit in the future. I've no philosophical problem with this, but there's a practical difficulty in that the corrals are quite far from the shitpile and it would take several trips with the little tilt-tub wagon I haul the shit and bedding with. I've only got one leg and it's no great shakes; for me the only part of the job I find hard is pulling that wagon.

I had this idea: what if instead of filling the wagon over and over, I brought the Jeep's trailer and filled it just once? I'd rather fork horseshit twice than have to deal with that wagon. Then I had another idea: I'm already planning to bring composted horseshit home for the garden and the fruit trees, so what if once I loaded the horseshit into the trailer I brought it home rather than emptying it into the neighbor's manure pile? I'm pretty sure the neighbors wouldn't object. It needs to cook for a year or so before it's good fertilizer, but then it's great fertilizer.

I mentioned it to W and he was all in favor, but there is this nagging little question - where do you put a giant steaming pile of horseshit, where it's not so close you have to look at it and smell it but not uselessly far away? It's something I'll need to discuss with Landlady; I've a feeling she might shoot the idea down entirely. She might be right to. After all, I can always get more from the neighbors; they've got mountains of the shit.

Little Bear strikes again

Despite rotten weather, the boys and I took a really long walky this morning. They were deprived yesterday because I had to work, and then I was feeling kind of puny all afternoon so the late walky was pretty short.

I don't know how he does it, but LB is getting good at catching rabbits. Today he scored a big cottontail, too big for even him to eat in one sitting, which caused him severe logistical trouble because we were a good mile from home and he was not letting it go. He kept running ahead so he could lie down and work on it, so the whole trip home he carried a steadily diminishing rabbit with him. When we got back to the property he kept trying to slink off, apparently convinced I'd take it away when we got to the lair. In fact I ended up having to leash him for the last part (he's gotten much better about leashes), then tied him outside until he finished it. Poor guy was soaked by the time I let him inside, because it's been coming down a wet, melty snow all morning, and now the whole lair smells like wet dog. Click was shocked - shocked! - at his condition, and after I toweled him off she made a mighty effort to clean him all over. She hasn't got nearly enough tongue for that, so she eventually gave up and now they're curled up together on my no-doubt very damp bed.

The wind started coming up by the time we got home, and now it's just a really good day to sit and read indoors. The boys are crashed, so maybe they'll leave me alone for a while. They were pretty disgruntled with my mismanagement earlier, but now they've had their fix and all they want is sleep.

How odd.

Courtesy of David (Don't call me Dave) Codrea's Gun Rights Examiner, this oddity:



Setting aside the unlikelihood of Walt Whitman being happy to find his poem used to sell blue jeans, we have the further incongruity of Levi Strauss, a company whose management has been well-known for many years to be virulently anti-gun rights, should use a poem that reads, in part,

Come, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? Have you your sharp edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers!

David points out that more recent inquiry confirms the company is still a big booster of Oxfam, which in turn is still a big booster of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), which is welcome to burn in hell while waiting for one dime from me.

Nice poem, though.

Walkies and chores

Moved this morning's walky time up a bit, though it was still pretty cold for poor old Uncle Joel. We've been getting quite a bit of snow, most of which melted yesterday, which means your choices are to walk on frozen clay or melted clay. The first one's 'way better. It's a reasonably nice day and supposed to get into the fifties, so maybe we'll lose some moisture by the afternoon walky.

The boys have been putting up with their increased detention better than I really expected them to. I let Ghost out in the yard for a while only semi-supervised and didn't get any calls from people in Minnesota wanting me to come pick up my dog. They'll be going into Gitmo pretty quick, because W and I are going into town for laundry and the month's gasoline. I went to collect gas cans and found only two empty for all last month, after filling the generator's tank! That's phenomenal! We've needed the generator so little after the solar system's upgrade that we have to remember to use it to fill the cistern. But we're resolved to keep all the gas cans full every month anyway, so to town the empties go. Seriously, though, at this rate of use we could store six months' gas without even increasing the storage capacity. Used to be fifty gallons wasn't enough for two months.

It would be cool if we could go back in time and set up this well the way M did with his last summer. In that case the generator would be nothing but an emergency back-up. But at least for the present that ship has sailed.

It's also gonna be nice when winter ends so we can turn the barn water back on and do our laundry at home (not to mention hot showers). But this winter has been so mild compared to a year ago, I've got no room for complaints on that score.

Whoa! Cool!

So the boys woke me up a little early, hydraulic pressure painfully squeezing them against the lair's door. I let them out, watched them bullet toward the slope, and settled down to the construction of coffee & ciggie. Boot up my poor doomed ol' 'pooter and check the email and blog stats.

Holy crap, something happened late yesterday to suddenly drive traffic here. That usually means I offended somebody, which is always fun. Check the references, and there's a whole bunch of:

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/ClaireWolfe

Claire What? She's my hero! No way I'm not clicking on that link!

Turns out she wrote a nice plug for TUAK! How'd she even know it existed? Nice! Thanks, Claire, long time no speak!

And welcome to new guests. C'mon in and set a spell. Look around, make yourselves at home! Mi blog es su blog.

This is a test...

On the subject of my question from a couple of days back about how to compress .avi files from a digital camera.

Regular reader The Grey Lady contacted a friend who goes by "Andy The Chicken" ... no, I didn't ask. He contacted me. I sent him the shortest video clip I could contrive from the camera, shot at its lowest resolution. The size of that file was just under one Meg, as big as I can safely email with my poky satellite connection.

He promptly returned it to me in a different format, now sized 156K. I just got around to finding out if I can upload it to Blogger direct from my poor suffering old 'pooter. It took roughly forever, but it did go. And the result is...


...one whole second of grainy video, and that's straining the hardware to the max. Probably I could do it with useably-long clips if I loaded it to a sharing site, but I don't have the compression software and won't worry about it now. We're gonna put this experiment aside until I get the new machine up and running, and learn the quirks of Linux. Then maybe I'll find out how to compress files myself, and we'll try it again harder.

But thanks, all! This is an education. It turns out (Per Andy) that the reason the files coming out of the camera are so big is that there's no compression at all - the file is saving every single frame with no use of the similarity between frames to keep the file size reasonable. So I'll set this aside and play with it later.

Can you tell Little Bear really doesn't like having his picture taken?

Perspectives on armed adults

I'm sorry - the more I think about it, the less I'm done pontificating on the subject. Bear with me, or just skip over this one.

Maybe ten years ago, in the course of a Usenet (that's "proto-internet," for you youngsters) argument over gun rights, I received the following message. I copied and saved it because...well, because I thought it was hilarious, if you must know.

"You are infringing on the rights of the unarmed people of the US to live a peaceful existence without fear of being gunned down by a citizen carrying a concealed weapon. You are interfering with their right to openly express their frustration if they feel so inclined. Always in their minds is the thought, 'He might have a gun'!"

A few years ago, a friend said to me (paraphrased, since I didn't save a transcript),

It makes me feel safer when you're armed.

So the first commenter did not know one single thing about me other than that I claimed to often carry a gun. Yet she was filled with terror at the mere thought that I or someone like me might be out there somewhere, just waiting to go postal at some carelessly 'open expression of her frustration.' The second knew as much about me as almost anyone knows, and actually felt safer at the sight of a loaded pistol on my belt. I should also point out that my friend is an occasional shooter, while my Usenet correspondent claimed only rarely to have ever seen a gun in her life.

So...(just repeating for emphasis here) a person with knowledge of guns and of me not only didn't get her knickers in a twist, but actually felt safer. The person who practically had a nervous breakdown at the thought, had no knowledge of either subject.

Uh huh.

What the hell does that say about the fearful one? Granting the possibility that my friend was dangerously delusional, it still seems more likely to me that it's my anonymous usenet correspondent who's got her worldview out of whack.

Forgive me, but it's just awfully hard to take people like that seriously. But when they're the ones screaming for laws against what I take as a natural right, I not only have to take them seriously, but in fact I react to them in pretty much the same way they react to me. Only in my case, it isn't driven by propaganda and ignorance. It comes from sad experience.

An interesting experience...

A few days ago W and I went into town. I stepped into the market for some sandwich stuff, noticing as I entered that there was this older (IE, about my age) guy I didn't recognize standing around the checkout lanes, chatting up the register ladies.

W was waiting, so I ran around filling up a little basket and hustled to the checkout. As I approached, the guy threw his hands in the air and loudly said something like, "Don't shoot! I'll marry her!" It took a second to register that he was talking to me, and another to figure out what he was talking about. I finally decided he was referring to my holstered pistol. I didn't say anything, just smiled a little uncertainly. Then, more quietly, he said, "I don't think we need..." he seemed to change his mind at that point - I was no longer smiling - and wandered off toward the deli counter.

The two ladies working the registers looked kind of embarrassed. When he was out of earshot the younger one said, "He sure likes to talk a lot." And that was where we left the incident.

Open carry around town is fairly unusual, but in years of doing it I've never been hassled by anyone or even - before this week - received a negative comment. On the rare occasion anyone brings it up at all it's likely to be a discussion of models and calibers. Most people who carry pistols get concealment licenses, but open carry isn't illegal or so unusual you're leaving yourself open to a "disturbing the peace" charge by doing it.

Truth is, living out in the boonies I carry a pistol almost every waking moment. Some walkies when I don't feel like strapping on a holster, or in winter when a heavy coat makes a holster less practical, I carry a rifle. I don't come to town very often, but when I do I don't take off the pistol. I guess if you do it enough, the whole "gun" thing just loses all its mystique and emotional freight. It's just something you put on in the morning, like your boots or your multitool. It's been that way so long that running into someone who felt strongly enough about it to even comment came as a bit of a shock.

It's done!

Gods help me now. The new 'pooter's on its way.

Micron Transport T2400 - Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 1.66 GHz - 2 GB RAM - 80 GB HDD - 15.4" Display - DVD / CD-RW - WiFi - Dock - No Operating System Installed

Gotta go shovel goat shit now, to help pay for it.

Tam's right, too!

This is some first-rate snark right here.

When “cry like a little girl” becomes an inappropriate expression because the little girls are handling it better than you are, you know you really do need to put on your big-boy britches.

Huh. W's right.

My sentences do get kind of long and convoluted at times.

I have always depended...

...on the kindness of people who know what the hell they're doing.

At least in computer-related matters. My own competence in such matters has never risen to the level of the abacus, and I'd rather be tortured in a secret Yemeni interrogation cell than reconfigure a new computer. Yet, every now and then...

Well, this time we're jumping out of the plane blindfolded, and that weight on my back might be a parachute or an Acme-labeled anvil.

For the past several years I've been tapping away on a venerable Dell laptop, bought cheap from someone who refurbished a bunch of corporate cast-offs. It's been a faithful friend, but sometimes even the most dependable of friends just dies of old age. It's past time for a replacement, and inertia and finances may have caused me to wait too long. I'm a little surprised every time this old horse successfully boots up.

Also, though I've never been one of those who just hates hates hates Micro$oft on philosophical grounds, I have grown to loath its practices - especially since it decided the copy on my computer wasn't sufficiently "genuine" (no fault of mine) and forced me to work around a "genuine advantage" virus it planted on my machine some months ago and slowed everything to a crawl.

So - and you'd have to know my fear and loathing of new computer stuff to fully appreciate how radical this is for me - I'm kissing Micro$oft goodbye and going Linux. I've been assured this will be utterly painless, an assurance I take with as much salt as every other "this won't hurt a bit" I ever heard in a hospital.

The transition will take several days at least, possibly a couple of weeks. I don't have the "new" computer yet, so there'll be no immediate change. If I disappear entirely, bear with me - it's just my cluelessness at work.

And if there's a computer god out there somewhere, I'd like to state for the record right now I never meant all those horrible things I may have occasionally muttered against him and would appreciate his not holding them against me.

Bohemian Rhapsody as Bluegrass?

WTF?



But you know...it kind of almost works. It's probably a good thing Freddy Mercury is dead, or this would kill him.

Or...maybe he'd approve. Never met the man.

H/T to WRSA.

Does anybody know...

...an affordable (free) way to reduce the size of an .avi file?

I've been playing with the video feature of this cool digital camera, but even a second or two of video goes ten meg and I can't upload or post it. A video of any length is many times that size. But YouTube videos can run 30 minutes or more. Unless they've got some compression I can't figure out, they must be immense!

I can't even pretend...

...to pay attention to anything as distasteful and patently phony as the SOTU until the editorial remixes start showing up on YouTube.



And after they do my thinking for me, praise the lord I don't have to think about it anymore!

Geez, gotta go back to blankets!

When it got cold a couple of months ago, I was changing my sheets when it came to me that it might be more efficient to just get my cold-weather sleeping bag down from the loft. I generally sleep with no heat on, 'cause why waste propane on the unconscious? But when I get cold, I'm not unconscious anymore. With my mummy bag, I figured, there was no way I'd wake up cold. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Mostly it works fine. Except sometimes, like last night, I wake up in a shock from some nightmare where I'm trapped and suffocating. I flail out, except I can't because my arms can't move. Instant panic, a wild thrashing as I try to get the damned bag unzipped. Click the cat, who was comfortably curled against my belly, goes flying. The boys, seeing Uncle Joel awake now, decide it's time to go outside even though it's probably only eleven at night. So I've got to convince them to go back to bed before I can compose myself.

Last night was particularly bad; I didn't think I was ever getting back to sleep and was afraid to zip the bag back up lest I slip right back into the nightmare. Usually I don't remember my dreams at all, but I had a terribly vivid memory of being waterboarded by Joni Mitchell. Weird and incongruous on top of the unpleasantness.

Enough already - I remember, every morning after a night like that, why I never really liked that bag. But then it all goes away and by the following evening I stuff myself back into the suffocating fartsack. This morning I'm digging out the sheets and blankets again. Just have to remember to wear a hoody to bed so my poor bald head doesn't keep me awake with cold.

Daddy's not in his happy place...

Nice day today. The boys and I had an epic walky around the big ridge not far from home - took about 2 hours. I had a bit of a rest and then put the boys in Gitmo so I could go get some work done without worrying about them running off, which they've lately been too prone to do. Beauty came with the boys into the enclosure, because it was time for Little Bear's pill and there was cheese. Of course, Beauty can get out through the holes she'd dug under the fence - holes that Ghost and LB had ignored until then. Ghost promptly followed her out, so I figured...well, I'd been meaning to haul some rocks and fill those holes, and this seemed like a good time to do it.

Put Beauty and Ghost into the Jeep. Ignore LB screaming to be allowed to come along. Drive the Jeep into the wash and fill it with big rocks. Drive back. Notice that LB no longer seems to be in Gitmo. Call LB. Notice W standing on the porch of his lair, waving a cell phone and yelling something about D&L...

...Drive to D&L's place to collect Little Bear.

Yeah, Daddy's not in his happy place. Now I'm leaving the boys locked in the lair while I get more rocks and repair Gitmo. !@#$%^! :(

hey, remember when...

401(k) mutual funds crashed in 2000?

I sure do. I'd just been laid off from my one and only "safe" corporate job, just gotten divorced, just...well, just had my life fall apart. Then everything I had left from 17 years of marriage disappeared overnight.

wellll...mutual funds have recovered since then, it seems. Enough that Unca Sugar wants to pull the money out and replace it with IOUs.

Of course, that's not the spin. Instead of a lump-sum payment of your own money, you'd get government-guaranteed lifetime annuities.

Suuuuure.

The stupid! It's getting deeper!

Fresh from its victories in balancing the federal budget and reforming the American auto, banking and health industries, the US government's executive branch has cleared some time in its schedule to deal with the scandalous college football championship system.

I am not making this up.

The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday to a senator who had asked for an antitrust review.

Of course, there's a serious reason for this. (still!) It's (not!) For (making!) The (this!) Children. (up!):

"The current system runs counter to basic fairness that every family tries to instill in their children from the day they are born."

When Orrin (why do people keep voting for me) Hatch makes a big deal about the BCS every year his favorite team doesn't get a coveted bowl game slot, which is to say every year since at least 2003, that's not really news because "US Senator Acts Like An Ass" isn't exactly headline material. But now the "Justice" Department is taking this heartworm seriously, with serious extorted taxpayer money? Pass the Xanax, mother.

I totally missed this...

I've just learned that Claire Wolfe, my all-time favorite freedom writer, has a new blog at Backwoods Home.

Claire is awesome. I lost a small part of my every day when she shut down her old blog. Glad to see her doing it again.

Sadly True

From the "What were they thinking?" department...

Culled from the puzzling files of ilovelocalcommercials.com.

More snow

It rained yesterday afternoon, turning to snow sometime overnight. Never got cold enough to freeze the ground, and this last installment has soaked the clay enough that the roads are getting really slick. Probably be impassible in 2-wheel-drive after the melt. Landlady's due tomorrow night or Saturday, and I think we may have to leave her car at the county road and shuttle her in with the Jeep.

During our morning Walky, LB finally answered my speculations about whether he's capable of catching rabbits. He wasn't happy about being called away before he had time to snuff up the last of the bloody snow, and snuck back while I was on the powerhouse roof cleaning off the solar panels. But the scene of the crime was only across the meadow, and he obediently came back when I called so treats all around. It looks as though worming him is just going to have to be a monthly thing from now on.

Speaking of treats - That growth on LB's paw has been diagnosed as a fungal infection of some sort, probably from a small wound I couldn't see through all the fur. Vet says it isn't dangerous, but I have to treat him with ointment and give him antibiotic pills three times a day. This is cutting severely into my cheese stash. This morning he spat the pill out of the cheese, then went back to it and apparently figured, "It's vile, but what the hell - he said it was a doggy treat" and ate it down anyway. He's dumb as a box of rocks and even more useless than that, but I love him.

On Doggie Bribes...

With the passing of Fritz, our five o'clock Snacky Time tradition came to an end as having no further practical use. (I only started doing it because it made dispensing meds easier.) Also since I'm down to two relatively young dogs I'm suddenly having behavior issues I rarely had to deal with before, like running away. I've found a jerky-like substance cheap at the dollar store that both dogs like, and have taken to carrying some in my pockets so I can reward them like performing dolphins whenever they get something right.

Just to show that I've probably been anthropomorphizing the dogs far too much, I resisted taking this tack because it seemed rather demeaning to them. I know I'd resent that kind of treatment. The dogs' reaction, of course, has been "Demean us! Demean us!" And it's been getting good results.

I really do need to find more human friends.

Unusual Rules for Happy Living

Never give Mama Goat a happy scratch until you have finished cleaning out her stall. She will decide you are her best friend, follow you into the stall, and refuse to leave.

Addendum: Shooting Mama Goat in the head is a career move. Resisting strong temptation is good for the character.

Dogs. Can't live without 'em...

...Can't shoot them in the head.

So it's Sunday evening and things are settling down in the lair. Ghost can't settle down with them, a sign I should have interpreted more carefully than I did even if I got it wrong. He wants to go outside, nothing unusual, just wants to bark at the coyotes. So I let him out. I hear him barking in the meadow, I hear him barking on the slope. All perfectly normal for that time of the day.

Then I stop hearing him bark. I stick my head out and call, wait, no Ghost. Not perfectly normal, certainly not optimal, but not so unusual I'm ready to summon the Marines. Wait a while, call, no Ghost. Repeat. Nothing.

I'm starting to think in terms of mounting a futile search when there's a knock on my door. The shades are down and LB, my totally f*cking useless single remaining watchdog, doesn't alert at all so I figure it's W. W is the only person who could conceivably be knocking on my door after six in the evening unless the caller is carrying a warrant and backed by tacticops in the bushes, and I'm not expecting that guy right now. Must be W, so I just open the door.

It isn't W. It's D, my neighbor from a few miles down the road. He raises his hand, looks embarrassed, and says, "I've got Ghost in the truck." Ghost has reached a new milestone in his budding career as a pain in my ass - now he isn't waiting to be led astray by the more irresponsible dogs in the pack, he's just going off and doing it himself. At night.

Ghost! The one I thought I could (sort of) depend on to stick around - if not the yard, at least the property. Gyarr!

See, I'm just winging this whole "dog nanny" thing. All my experience is empirical and all my predictions are based on assumptions which often prove unfounded. In this matter I've been working on the assumption that dogs are creatures of habit, that the thing they're used to is the thing they like, that if you can trust them to do a thing you will be able to continue to trust them to do that thing. Now I'm starting to think that Magnus and Fritz were creatures of habit because they were older dogs and never all that adventurous in the first place. Ghost, when he was young, was a wanderer. For the past two years he stopped doing that. Now I'm thinking maybe he was restrained in his behavior by the older dogs, now both gone. His behavior is increasingly not so restrained.

This morning dawned the coldest I've seen in weeks. Per routine, as soon as Uncle Joel begins to stir it's time to go outside and take care of some long-delayed business. I hop to the door, which is frozen shut, pry it open and the dogs shoot out like cannonballs. All according to routine. Ghost normally stays out only a few minutes and then wants back in - LB sometimes takes a little longer but never goes far first thing in the morning. This morning, of course, they both vanish.

Time passes. Call and call. More time passes. No dogs. I suit up like an astronaut, figuring that if a few minutes of calling bears no results I'll be taking the Jeep to D&L's, making my second apology in less than twelve hours for not restraining my wayward dogs. As soon as I step outside, Ghost comes around the corner of the lair like everything's fine and wants inside. No LB materializes at my call. I start to move away and Ghost pops out of the lair. "No!" At the tone of the command, I assume, Ghost rotates mid-air on his own axis and disappears into the lair. One down.

Just about that time I hear W's dogs raising hell inside his nice warm lair. LB's on their porch inviting them out to play. Did I mention it's frickin' cold? I'm swaddled like Nanook of the frickin' North and still slowly freezing solid, and he's trying to get a stickball game started or something and doesn't come at my call. I offer slow dismemberment as an option, and he trots on home as if that sounds like a good idea. Now they're both curled up inside like nothing's wrong.

What the hell am I going to do with these guys? I'm actually getting into a situation where two dogs are more trouble than four were. Arithmetic shouldn't work like that.

In an hour or so I have to call the vet and make an appointment for LB who's got some sort of growth on his paw. I don't know what it is - at first I thought it was just a random wound, then maybe a festering spot around a cactus spine or something. It doesn't seem to bother him at all, he barely licks at it, but it's getting bigger and more pronounced so to the vet we go ASAP. Unless I disembowel him first, which would moot the whole vet thing.

Quote of the day, again

"I am a sinner, who does not expect forgiveness. But I am not a government official."
- Mr. Wolcott, serial killer. Deadwood

Quote of the Day

Seen at Tam's place, where it did not originate:

Cows are more afraid of a barking dog than a booming gun, which explains their position on the food chain.

I can testify that this is true. I have fired pistols and rifles in an attempt to drive off cattle before the dogs got involved and received nothing for my expense and effort but a stupid look. (Well, technically a cow is incapable of looking at anything any other way, but let that go.) Introduce a barking dog, which by itself couldn't actually hurt the cow, and the result is either fight or flight depending on the mood of the cow. Just saying. Even rabbits are smarter than cattle, and they're food too. I assume this is the result of selective breeding, because I cannot imagine how any species that stupid could have survived in the wild long enough to be domesticated.

I understand the logic of open range laws, but live every day with their disadvantages.

Finally got a respectable snowfall

It was six inches at seven this morning, and three hours later it's still coming down hard. I just got my satellite connection back, and may lose it again before I finish this post.

Little Bear loves the snow, and he's in heaven at the moment. Despite my (and Ghost's) inclination I'll probably have to trudge out for a Walky just so he can get his tunneling-in-the-snow fix. For Ghost, a little of the white stuff goes a long way. He and I are in agreement on that, though at the moment he might add a codicil about staking LB out in the hills for the coyotes 'cause he's being a real pain in the ass when all the adults want is to watch the snow through the window of our nice warm lair.

Now THIS is funny.

Courtesy of The Grey Lady, The Day ObamaCare Died!



While I was waiting for my slow connection to load the whole thing I thought, "Wow, this is almost as good as a Paul Shanklin parody." Turns out it is Paul Shanklin, so there you go.

Nostalgia doesn't get prettier than this.

I can't indulge in a fit of sixties folk-music nostalgia without at least one nod to the high priestess of cool hippy songs. Gad, how this lady made me wish I was ten years older in the mid-sixties.

And speaking of unpleasant political figures...

Huh! Did we just dodge a bullet?

Because if we did, I've gotta admit it surprises the hell out of me.

A (rare) word about politics

Okay; I don't generally talk about electoral politics here, because ... well, damn. I only mention steaming piles of dog poo on the blog because they're a regular part of my life here. Electoral politics is far more distasteful and I've gone to some lengths to make it not a part of my life.

And yet as a spectator sport it's better than pro wrestling, and right now the two opposing teams have got themselves in a bit of a bind. The Dems are tanking in the mercurial public perception far too early for the disasters of the late GOP dominance to have been forgotten. The American attention span isn't quite that short. Normally when one party's numbers crash, the other party's numbers corresponding rise. Not happening at the moment.

Matt Welch over at Reason said yesterday,

[T]he tragicomedy of American politics is that each party looks pretty freaking awesome when compared to its counterpart. As bad as Bush was, Obama may well be worse. As rotten as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are, just remember Trent Lott and Dennis Hastert. Now reverse the party affiliations and repeat.

It's been that way for decades at least and always seemed to work for the parties. But at the moment the pendulum seems to have stopped swinging.

Obama's campaign motto wasn't "We can do all the same things, even more expensively!" but that's the way he's governed, with the enthusiastic backing of Congress. There's nothing very unusual about that, but the bad consequences usually take at least two years to kick in, permitting the forgetful electorate to convince itself that the New Bastards are somehow different from the Old (current) Bastards. In this case the consequences just sort of carried on, and the Parties are revealed as nothing more than a muddled bunch of entrenched bastards with nothing to choose between them. That's not supposed to happen. There's no savior waiting in the wings.

If there were a third party this could get interesting. But there isn't, and most congressional (and virtually all senatorial) voting districts have long been structured as so safe for one party or another that the two-party paradigm may as well be etched in steel. At least that's the way it's supposed to work. That undistinguished oaf who ran for Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts was so sure the dems had a lock on it that she didn't even bother to run, and the voters handed her an unthinkable outcome - they gave it to the other undistinguished oaf. That was so not supposed to happen that the dems didn't even seem to notice it happening until a day before the election. That was fun to watch, in a gruesome sort of way.

The only positive outcome I can imagine from all this would be if a much larger part of the electorate shook off the programming and realized that the left wing and the right wing are both attached to the same stinking carrion bird and stopped encouraging the bastards. That's so unlikely as to be incontheivable. The misconception that elections (between the same entrenched parties, world without end) are the only way to affect the course of the country is as unchangeable in most people as the respiration of oxygen - it'll never go away until something truly monumental happens to change it, and I can't imagine what that could be.

EDIT: Speaking of reactions to the Massachusetts election, W clued me in to this last evening:

I've died and gone to Kentucky.

My new part-time shit-shoveling gig is working out well so far. My neighbors have tried various ways of making money from goats. The original plan was meat and milk. This was reduced to milk only when it turned out they couldn't bring themselves to slaughter goat kids. Then the "milk" part went away when selling goat milk turned out to be more work than the money was worth. Now they just raise boer goats and sell them to other people who want boer goats. Exactly why there's a market for that, I don't know. But there is.


This guy has the Best Job Ever. He gets paid to lay around and occasionally screw a lady goat. Why can't my species be like this?

Oh, yeah. Because most of his siblings ended up between pita slices. Never mind.

Baby goats actually manage to be cuter than kittens, IMO. It's a shame that they grow up to be...well, goats. Also that they're so damned tasty.

The lady goats also have a pretty easy time of it, given that (again, unlike my species) they seem to regard childbirth as just another day in the life.

This is Luna, a five-month-old puppy who's feeling very put-upon right now. She's a Pyrenees mix, definitely going to be extremely large and advertised to be extremely aggressive with strange animals that come around to molest the flock. She's supposed to identify with the goats as her charges, and maybe when she's grown she will. But right now she's just a puppy who doesn't understand why all the other dogs get to live in the house, sleep on the furniture and get hugs and cuddles while she has to live with the goats. Since my principal programming is "dog nanny," I seem to be unable to leave this situation alone which means she gets a good wrestle after I've cleaned up whatever goat pen she's in. It also means that after TSHTF, I'll be the only outsider she'll actually assist in stealing goats. Heh.

The neighbors have three horses, a Stallion From Hell who's currently away for some sort of training, and two mares. The mares are sweethearts; I actually wish they were less friendly so I could get my job done without them carrying off the rake. But I confess I'm not looking forward to the return of the stallion. He's an unmanageable bastard.

The Song in my Head...

W and I spent most of the day traveling today, and he practically begged me not to blog about today's Song In My Head because...well...

Introducing the white, white sound of the Seekers, circa 1968!


I don't know why this happens. I wake up with a melody in my head, often something I couldn't possibly have been thinking of because there's just no context. I didn't remember the title, or any of the words, or anything. Just this thing rattling around from my childhood. It's really frustrating. If I'm having weird, Seeker-related dreams, I wish I'd at least have the decency to remember what the hell they are.

On a more enigmatic tone, my YouTube crawling reminded me of a one-hit folk combo from the same period that recorded a song I never understood though it resonated with me at that age. Er...also, that smile at the very end definitely factored in my dreams at the time.

I'd be thinking, "Whoo Hoo! Free Gun!"

I mean, y'know, considering that technically I paid for it and all...

Since the customs enforcer apparently didn't want it any more, and all...

Oh, I know. Leave other people's stuff alone, or turn it in at the Principal's desk.

But still, this gets under my skin. First we have this emanation from the flock:

“I can’t even express how that makes me feel,” [the lady who discovered the pistol] said. “They are supposed to be here to protect us.”

Yeah - lady? They're not here to protect you. They're here to protect Uncle Sugar's cashflow. A customs agent is the moral equivalent of an IRS agent, which is not the moral equivalent of a tapeworm because the tapeworm doesn't have a choice about being a parasite. 'Kay? Also, I don't give a damn how anything 'makes you feel,' but you really should get over your irrational fear of simple machines.

Then the brief article finishes with this howler:

So far, customs officials have not explained how a highly trained agent could commit such a serious security breach.

It is vitally important, citizens, that you remember at all times that the thugs employed by selfless agents of our beloved protectors are virtually superhuman in their talents, their vigilance, their dedication to your safety and security. They are ninjas in business suits, and they think of nothing all day long but of keeping you in your place making you ever more safe and secure.

In fact they are ordinary people, if on an evil path, and sometimes they leave common items in bathrooms. As someone who wears a handgun most waking hours, I am aware that when you try to use the throne without unholstering your pistol it has an unpleasant habit of dragging your pants to the floor with an unsettling thud. Therefore I unholster it before dropping trou, and therefore I sometimes forget and walk out of the WC without it. I generally don't go far without noticing that it's missing, and so far this has never happened in a public washroom, but still. Wear a pistol every day, and you will forget it's there. Or not there. Or whatever.

"Highly trained agent," my ass.

Yes, I know...

I haven't been around here much lately. I just knew the day would come when I'd find myself apologizing for that, which is one reason I hesitated to even start blogging just over a year ago.

When I started TUAK I'd been living completely alone for a little less than five months. Winter was coming on and it promised to be a dark, cold, lonely time. TUAK was my way of sending out a 'voice from the wilderness' - a voice I felt free to speak because I really didn't think anyone would hear it. Paradoxically, the very fact that TUAK has found a loyal audience has both obligated me to go on writing when I didn't feel like it, and constrained the things I felt free to say. Some of you have become real friends of the blog, and to feel like real friends to me. But a person doesn't become a hermit because of his great people skills, you know? The more I get to liking someone as a person, the more I care what he or she thinks of me and so the more I become afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing - which causes me to edit every word and action, which in turn generally screws up the relationship. And so the very thought that I feel friends out there has caused me to put a muzzle on it.

So, you see, it's all your fault. Heh. Yeah - marriages have foundered on that thought.

There's also that small matter of having a life, which by any meaningful measure I didn't a year ago but really do now. I'm not hugely busier than I was then, but the things I'm busy with really do take a lot more of my mental time and leave less for sitting in my quiet lair and rambling on a keyboard.

I hate it when a blog I enjoy goes silent because the writer runs out of things to say, but it happens and it's no one's fault. I have things to say, but I've been having trouble overcoming the desire to not say it. Lately I've been depending on "linky no thinky" posts, and that's no way to do it but it's what I'm reduced to. It's the easy way out. I've spent too much of my life depending on the easy way, and it offends me now.

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense. I'm just trying to explain where I've been that's been keeping me away from the keyboard.

"A good crisis"

I've been doing some freelancing, and while researching a different matter came upon this golden oldy from our Good Shepherd, Rahm Emanuel...

Your morning dose of overbearing nanny

Via Tam, this bit of incredible horseshit:

NEW YORK – City health officials have battled trans fat and high-calorie fast food. Now, they're taking on salt.

The health department planned to release on Monday draft guidelines suggesting the maximum amount of salt that should be in a wide variety of manufactured and packaged foods.

The recommendations call for sizable reductions in the sodium content of many products, from a 20 percent drop in peanut butter to a 40 percent decline in canned vegetables.

Not just in NYC, you understand. These clowns want to tell General Foods how much salt they can put in frickin' Cheerios.

And why have they decided that Nanny needs to be so overreaching? Simple!

...simply asking the public to be more careful about what they eat hasn't worked...

Remember how we all laughed when the crazy "slippery slope" theorists said smoking bans would lead to this? Naw, we said. People have more sense than that.

Uh huh.

Sigh...

This has been an incredibly mild winter so far. Very cold overnight, but day after day of sunshine and afternoons in the high forties - even scraping the belly of fifty. This has severely disrupted my plans to cocoon the winter away, since you can maybe sit and read through one glorious day but a whole series of them? Blasphemy.

So yesterday, as soon as the carbon dioxide had melted back into the atmosphere I took the new tarpaulin I'd bought at the hardware store and went to the cabin site. Pulled up a big table and hauled out all the interior siding I'd neatly stacked inside. This took maybe twenty minutes, after which I'd planned to get to work on the insulation for the front wall. Trouble is, about halfway through the process I noticed that I didn't seem to have any dogs.

All last summer, whenever we worked on my cabin or M's dome, the dogs would just find shady trees to lay under and keep us company. They didn't run off even once, and that will sort of lull you into carelessness. So yesterday I called and called, and nobody came back.

I had a sad notion as to where they'd gone. They've been a bit pissed with me mornings, because Walky Time has been pushed back every day until such time as the lakes of frozen ammonia dissipate. Yesterday they were particularly militant about it, and so when we went to the cabin they apparently decided that just wasn't walky enough and took matters into their own paws. Ghost in particular has been going through some changes this winter; he used to be by far the most peripatetic of the dogs but since Magnus and Fritz got older and just wanted to sit around he had started to act much...older. It wasn't just that he stopped wandering off: He became dour and grouchy. But now his only full-time canine companion is Little Bear, who is to say the least neither of those things. Ghost was a long time warming up to Little Bear, but now they've become quite close and that has had one unfortunate side effect. Ghost now has a friend he can go on walkabout with. This wasn't the first time, though it is the first time they've disappeared from a build site.

So I (rather angrily) laid down my work and hiked back to the property to get the Jeep. I figured they'd probably gone to D&L's place to play with their puppy, but in case I was wrong about that I'd drive through the wash and see if I could flush them out. They can't resist the Jeep, and as I've said this wasn't the first time. As soon as I climbed the ridge my cell phone caught a signal and buzzed at me. The voicemail confirmed that Ghost and LB had, in fact, arrived at D&L's. Sigh.

I've been more draconian about putting them in Gitmo when I can't directly supervise them, and LB has become much more philosophical about being tied out rather than allowed to wander free, so it's been a while since they've pulled this stunt but they keep finding new venues for mischief. In a way I'm not sorry to see Ghost lightening up, 'cause he's just way too young to act like an old dog. But right now he's acting like an irresponsible puppy. Here there be monsters, and it's my job to protect the boys from them. Sometimes they make it harder than it needs to be.

Adrift, we are adrift in languid, lapping wavelets of stupid

Good news! The "goodbye kiss" terrorist has been apprehended! No federal agents were kissed in the tense showdown preceding his arrest.

Bad news! Nobody can find any really heinous crime that he committed.

According to a statement from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Mr. Jiang would be charged with defiant trespass. He was issued with a summons and told to appear in Newark Municipal Court.

It is a “petty disorderly persons offense,” said Paul M. Loriquet, a spokesman for the Essex County district attorney’s office, explaining that such an offense did not qualify to be prosecuted in federal court and only carries a maximum sentence of 30 days in jail.

Good news! Given the enormous disruption that TSA's absurd over-reaction to Mr Jiang's innocent action caused, our brave and concerned masters have determined that he must be punished! Punished, I say!

In an interview on Saturday, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, of New Jersey, said he was hoping that the United States attorney’s office would consider bringing federal charges because the penalty Mr. Jiang is facing, “is hardly noteworthy and would not discourage people who want to break through the perimeter.”

The senator said the trouble the security breach caused far outweighed the punishment: 1,600 people stuck in the airport for six hours; flights delayed and an “incalculable” loss of money. And then for five days after the incident, New Jersey law enforcement officials searched exhaustively for the man caught on a grainy surveillance video, one which Sen. Lautenberg had released on Thursday.

Bad news! In a truly shocking development, logic and proportionality have left the building and nobody of any consequence has noticed their absence.

Actually, you insufferable moron er, Senator Lautenberg, sir, thirty days in the slam for ducking a cattle-chute barrier to kiss your girlfriend seems kind of excessive, and would certainly at least give me pause - but then I've never been that romantic. Granted that, if Jiang had been a crazed jihadi with a Semtex waistcoat, the penalty might not have been much of a deterrent - but then neither would the prospect of becoming a rapidly-expanding pink mist, so maybe your [redacted] guard should have stayed at his [redacted] post, no? Well, no of course not! We must concentrate on keeping the herd in line, so since there's no law on any books to punish this unruly fellow to the extent you think appropriate, let's just make something up. Is it because there are no lampposts in Mordor-by-the-Potomac that this guy still has a key to the Senatorial washroom?

And speaking of disproportionate penalties, what has become of the one person here who actually committed an offense that could have resulted in harm?

Mr. Jiang was able to step past security last Sunday when a guard, identified by a law enforcement official as Ruben Hernandez, left his post. The guard has been on administrative leave since Tuesday, and he faces disciplinary action...

So they gave him a paid vacation. Well, that's all right then.

Well, it was a nice day for it.

Uncle Joel has a new gig. Since come spring my tenure as paid nanny will come to an end, I've been dropping words in ears that I'm looking for more work. A couple of freelance writing jobs have resulted and it would be nice if that grew into something bigger, but writing isn't a dependable income. A couple of neighbors with livestock have found the more menial chores getting away from them and asked if I'd like a twice-weekly job shoveling goat and horse shit. It's close, so it sounded good to me.

Today was my first day on that job, and they failed to mention that by "getting away from them" they meant there were several large goat pens that hadn't had a detailed cleaning in something like a month. So my 1-2 hour job stretched to five. Oy.

Mucking stalls isn't completely new to me; I shoveled up after horses and sheep when I was a kid and never found it completely unpleasant. Goats are a novelty, though: Goats seem to consider their horns an integral part of their daily interactions. The one male they keep isn't an unpleasant soul, for a goat, but he was a little difficult to work around. When we were getting acquainted he reared up and wanted to butt heads with me, a privilege I politely refused. He kept trying to get involved in my duties, and when I attempted to dissuade him he taught me a trick I didn't know boer goats had in their repertoire. With a cunning twist of the head they can hook you with those backward-pointing horns, and from there they pretty much get their way. The horns don't look terribly formidable, but I learned to respect his and after that we got along better - which is to say I was more likely to get my way. They're strong, but suckers for a twist of the collar. One thing a few years with a pack of desert dogs has taught me down to the bone is the need to stay on top. Never let'em see you sweat. It works with horses, too, (not the collar thing, but the attitude) but I already knew that. I just wasn't always very good at it.

Anyway, I'll be raking up after the animals twice a week so it should never be as bad as today. But right now Uncle Joel is very tired and sore. At least the weather was nice.

It never fails...

Most winter mornings are pretty laid-back affairs, especially since the electrical system grew up and stopped needing to be changed, fed and burped first thing. I get up, let the dogs out, dress in a leisurely fashion, let the dogs in, and then sit and read with my coffee and ciggies until it seems warm enough for walky time.

But let there be an actual schedule, let there be something I actually have to do or somewhere I have to be at a particular time, and every possible manner of hell breaks out simultaneously. The water line from the cistern freezes, which causes the pressure pump to run continuously, which causes the power to shut down while I'm attempting to satisfy a jones for pancakes instead of my usual quick-n-easy fried egg on toast. The generator doesn't want to start (COLD!) and when it does the noise alerts W who wants to discuss why we've no power after a week of sunny days. The phone rings twice, which is more than the quota for a week. All the unnatural activity stirs up the dogs, who want to go out/come in/go out/come in/to infinity and beyond. And can I find my hat? I can not.

Dammit.

"Little did he know what awaited him..."

"...when he called 911 that day."

"What convinced us is that he admitted he took the police to the guns," said juror Darci Baker-Spicer of Bremerton.

So 20 years ago, when he was a teenager, Luke T. Groves committed an act of burglary at a local school. His felony conviction for that crime carried a lifetime ban on possessing or "controlling" any firearm, but state law did not require that he be informed of that prohibition. The state never denied that he was not, in fact informed.

In November of last year, he came home to find a broken window in his house. He called 911. First mistake.

In response to a question from one of the "responding" police officers, he said that his wife had a pistol and a rifle. Second mistake.

In response to a request from the police, he led them into the bedroom and showed them the guns - a .380 pistol and a .22 rifle. Third and last mistake.

He did all this in the wide-eyed trust that, since he had done nothing wrong, he had nothing to fear. His trust didn't save him from being led away in handcuffs. Oh, yeah, the cops never did learn (or even try to learn) who broke the window. But they got their man, all right. Hooah!

Groves was charged with being a felon in possession of firearms. In his trial, his defense was forbidden to enter certain facts into evidence, such as that the guns belonged to his wife who had owned them before they were married over seven years ago, that he was never informed that he wasn't allowed to even be in a house that contained firearms, and that he was a firefighter certified in the use of high explosives. None of that was relevant.

To convict Groves, jurors had to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of three things: that he knowingly had possession or control of a firearm; that he is a convicted felon, and that the crime occurred in Kitsap County.

As is so often the case in our world-class "justice" system, the charge was narrowly tailored to fit only things that were beyond contestation, whether or not the "crimes" were actually a danger to any person or property. The jury being so hamstrung, and kept so ignorant of any other facts, the verdict was predetermined.

"What convinced us is that he admitted he took the police to the guns," said juror Darci Baker-Spicer of Bremerton.

I must say that Groves' wife, now a single mother, is an understanding soul.

"They did exactly what they were told to do," she said.

But she still can't understand her husband is in jail because of guns she owned before they even met.

"I did not become a felon by marrying him," she said.

But hey! All's well that ends well, right?

She'll soon head to the local Department of Social and Health Services office to apply for benefits on behalf of their 4-year-old daughter, Sophim. As a child of an incarcerated parent, the state will pay for housing, Besherse believes.

RTWT

If you're in a really masochistic mood, check out the comments below the story and learn why this sort of madness will never, ever end:

Well, gee, maybe this criminal should have considered the ramifications for his actions, and the fact that he'd face life long consequences of his actions. Why the surprise at being held accountable?

What part of 'no guns' is confusing? No guns means no guns. Dude gave up that right when he chose to become a criminal. Those of us who don't commit crimes and get convicted of them are good to go.

His wife's decision to marry and associate with known felons has consequences. If you want to bring that into your home, well, you brought it into your home, no one forced her to sleep with a thief.

I've said it before, and no doubt I'll say it again: Mr. Policeman Is Not Your Friend. And neither are the idiots who support him.

Beam me up, Scotty...

...there's no intelligent life down here.

Goodbye kiss provoked Newark airport scare

The security scare that shut Newark airport for hours and delayed thousands of passengers was caused by a man who slipped into a secure area to give a woman one last goodbye kiss, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

H/T to W

From the land of our new insect overlords...

Huh. Man, those alien probe things really sting. But I've been beamed back down to the planet now, and normal broadcasting should recommence.

Actually I blame my landlady - she lent me a set of all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica, most of which I'd never seen, and I've been on a sleep-deprived marathon ever since.

From the Sad but True Department...

What a year!

This entry was supposed to be told all in photos, but there are just too many. Last night and this morning I spent hours going over photos taken over the past year, and there were...well, a lot. I added a lot of memories this year, good and bad. I lost Butch the tomcat, Fritz the kopkruncher and Magnus the magnificent. I gained Little Bear the...large. Two old friends, M and W, moved in. I somehow managed not to completely alienate Landlady. We got M's well working and built the subway station. We built M's pantry/powerhouse and got his dome up. We finished the shell for the Secret Lair. We (well, W, but I helped) got the electrical system actually working. We smoked a generator and added a better one. Newer friendships were consolidated, with D&L, S&L, J&H and others.

All in all we made quite a lot of progress this year, through frustrations and triumphs, arguments and agreements. Not all of it shows: I find myself sitting in the same place as when I started this blog over a year ago, looking out through the same ice on the same windows. Sometimes it seems like we could have done more, and I suppose we could have but who's to say?

It's been an interesting year, and not always in the sense of the old proverb. I miss my missing boys, but that's karma I suppose. Two steps forward and one step back, but we're still on track. It's proving to be a hell of a ride. Thanks for being along on it with me.