This Icelandic volcano is going to provide much needed cover for the global warming scientists and allow them to officially switch from a warming mode to a cooling mode. Last year’s mild hurricane season and the so far mild tornado season has been giving them heartburn trying to explain how a more energetic climate is consistent with obviously milder weather. With the volcano they’ll be able to crank a new factor into their models and start acknowledging that, guess what, it’s cooling off and their reputations are thus salvaged.

I had to chuckle last night when it was announced that criminal charges were either coming or being contemplated against Goldman Sachs for selling risky investments and at the same time selling insurance to protect against risky investments and even taking a position against some of the investments they were selling. First, nobody is going to jail from Goldman unless they can find some stooge willing to take the fall for a bundle later. If you take a census of big wigs in the financial management of the country – I mean inside the government – you will find loads of Goldman alumni. In fact I’m not sure you can have a senior position in Treasury or with any of the Fed financial agencies without having done time at Goldman. So expect lots of smoke and zero flame. In my opinion, the people that should be raked over the coals are not the folks selling risky investments, but those in a fiduciary position buying them; for example, the financial managers of pension funds where the really killer losses occurred. They call bonds paying ultra high interest rates Junk bonds for a reason. The most unseasoned investor knows that when you’re buying instruments paying double, triple or way higher multiples of the CD rate, you’re playing with fire. So in my mind, when a pension fund manager or someone managing public funds takes a position in risky investments, that’s bordering on criminal.

Another interesting article in the paper was that UF won the National College Bass Fishing Tournament this year – the first year for the event. The season consisted of 40 events country wide culminating in Lake Loudoun outside Knoxville. There were 25 teams in this final event including Auburn, Ohio State, and Oregon. How sweet is that. So Florida officially owns Ohio State with national wins in football, basketball, and now bass fishing. A trifecta; a hat trick; a turkey.

And while on the subject of college athletics – I heard on the tube that Rollins College took 7th place in the Playboy annual party school competition. Something fundamentally wrong with that. What next, Stetson???

Believe it or not, I’m actually ok with some of Obama’s plan for NASA. I’ve never been a big fan of NASA so getting them out of short range space travel is fine with me. But I think the only way you get private enterprise in the loop is for the gov’t to commit to wanting to use the space transporter a certain number of times over a certain time interval and willing to pay $X for that. I don’t have a clue what numbers make sense. Is it 10 trips a year for the next 10 years at $40M per trip??? Do they need to move people or just cargo? With that info, Boeing or Lockheed or whomever will turn the crank and see if it makes sense. Can the development expense be amortized over the customer’s commitment? Is there really a market outside the US Gov’t which can change priorities every couple of years with each new election cycle? Let NASA look at the big picture of putting a permanent base on Mars or something of that magnitude. A plan to land somebody on an asteroid in 2030 is a fairly lame goal unless the asteroid were made of gold or something valuable. Not that landing on an asteroid is easy, just that asteroids have no sizzle as a 20 year goal. When you think about it, we let private contractors design and build all of our military gear. There’s not any question about whether or not they’re as well equipped to do it as the military itself so why is NASA any different than DOD? My concern is that if NASA’s goals and objectives are all these 20 year out projects, nothing will ever get completed. In the high tech world, 20 years is an infinity of time and midway or a quarter of the way through project of that length, we’ve gone through a couple of generations of technology and trying to mesh new techniques with ones that were current when the project was started. Put on top of that the fact that over the course of a 20 year project the political body has turned over a couple of times with each changing wanting to put their mark on the future. The only reason we got to the moon when we did was that the timetable was set relatively short. The only reason the feds were able to pull off an interstate highway system is that it was nominally low tech and done at a fever pitch with clear, definable goals.

Last news commentary – watched a special the other night on how Detroit is collapsing. Went through all the history of how great it was and how nasty and broken it is now. Tell us something we don’t know. Detroit never recovered from the race riots in the 60’s which about burned it down. And the reason they’ve never recovered is that the UAW and other unions have such a grip on Michigan that it became a place for businesses to avoid. And they did. So when non-unionized auto manufacturing took up outside Michigan, it was all over. The new mayor, Dave Bing of basketball fame, has a plan to shrink the city. Tear down all the boarded up, blighted neighborhoods to create a giant green field for new starts. I think that might work so long as the mind set of the folks still living there can adjust or move away to Cleveland or something. I think the job of making Detroit a clean livable city without the corruption and crime it’s famous for is not too much different than remaking Afghanistan. So good luck Dave.

One thing we have in awesome quantity this year are leaves. We lived in a heavily treed area so you would normally expect we have an abundance of leaves and we do but this year is incredible. Our driveway is about 10′ wide and roughly 300′ from the road to the house. It’s been totally covered with leaves for a couple of months now and I decided to use my new mulching shop vac to convert these leaves to garden ready compost. In just 10′ of driveway I picked up 3 large loads of leaves which converted into one 50 gallon black plastic bag. I’m guessing that I actually put 36 gallons in each bag since a full 50 gallons is too heavy to handle. I now have 4 full bags and probably twice that amount left to go before I have the driveway finished. Between that and the normal compost being generated from garden waste and shredded jungle clippings, I am now in a serious overload mode.

I’ve contemplated adding a couple hundred square feet to the garden in the past but decided against it because I didn’t think I’d be able to generate enough compost to support more area. Don’t think that’s a problem now. And also because it’s a real back breaking job to till up the field. What I see now is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by using all this excess mulch to do the heavy lifting. I’m going to block off an expansion to the garden and just dump the mulched leaves and jungle clippings there over top of the field grass. I’m 100% confident that all the growth underlying will rot and die, just becoming part of the organic mix. I have in mind that it will be no problem starting out with an 18” deep topping and then add to that as the early layer decays. Then in about 6 months, till it all to create totally organic garden area. I’m also confident that this deep blanket of mulch over the summer will totally cook the underlying soil and kill off the nematodes with a combination of starving them and roasting them. The only question in my mind is do we really need a bigger garden?. We can’t consume all we generate now. The added space would maybe let me do a better job of stagger planting so the harvesting is spread out to better fit how we actually use the produce.

The garden itself is doing fantastic. Already see teeny tiny squash, itsy bitsy cucumbers and tomato blossoms. And so far, no creepy crawlies gnawing on the leaves. Even so, I’ve sprayed it all twice – once with an organic potion name Neem and once with a natural oil called Pyola oil. I don’t think either of these is potent enough to deal with a full onslaught of bugs but maybe ok to deal with the first wave of invaders. We’re going to have a nice overlap this year between the winter crops and the spring crops. Still picking peas, spinach, and cabbage for the next 2-3 weeks which is just about when the first squash and cucumbers should be ready. Even if we weren’t still harvesting, there’s enough stuff in the refrigerator to last at least another 2 weeks

The garden is just about at the halfway point in terms of winter and summer crops. Still picking peas, broccoli, Chinese cabbage, celery, spinach and onions while the recently planted tomatoes, green beans, squash, and cucumbers are getting noticeably bigger. By the end of April we’ll be 100% into summer goodies. At this point I can say this has been an excellent winter garden and I just hope that the success continues on for the next few months. Between bugs and rain, last summer was a total disaster. I’m hopeful because the soil has been enriched by as much as 12 cubic yards of compost and the row levels are perhaps a foot higher than at this same time last year. Another thing I’m going to do differently is set up a regular bug spraying schedule instead of the ad hoc approach I’ve taken in the past. I think what I’ve learned is that once you start seeing signs of critters, it’s too late – they own you.

Got something interesting going on in the compost pile. George wacked down a cedar tree and the UPS guy knocked a few branches off the big camphor tree on the driveway. I got to thinking that people use cedar wood for chests and closets because it has bug fighting properties; ditto camphor. So I got to thinking that maybe a bit of both in the mix might have some insect protection properties. Worth a try. Also tried something different on a new compost pile start. I usually use a mostly palmetto frond base run through the chipper which is a fairly course starting point but decided to this time do a double shred – run the fronds through the chipper twice. My thought is that the compost should cook up faster with the finer starting material. For sure it won’t hurt anything except it took quite a bit longer to build the pile. I’ll know is a couple of months if it shortens the cycle or results in a finer end mixture.

Aside from the garden, spring is bursting on the scene big time here at the lake. We have more than a few large azaleas in full bloom. This is the best azalea bloom we’ve had in a couple of years and it’s happening right in line with our Easter party. Ditto the citrus trees. I have a strange thing going on with the Satsuma tree. The first and worst freezing spell we had last December caused the Satsuma to lose most of it’s leaves. I wasn’t sure whether the tree was history or could recover. None of the other trees showed any signs of stress at all. Now all the trees are full of blossoms including the leafless Satsuma. I guess showing blossoms must mean the tree is ok but I sure hope it decides to add some greenery one of these days. If not, I’ll just tell folks that it’s a new leafless variety.

And just so you know that my string of mini disasters is still holding fast, got up this morning and noticed that I had a flat tire on the Toyota. Do I smell recall? What a way to start a day.

Here’s a comparison. My 1995 Ford F150 lost brakes. I crawled underneath and saw where the metal brake line had rusted through in one spot and leaked out the fluid. Went to the Pierson NAPA store and picked up a 51” brake line and a can of brake fluid for $8.58. In an hour my neighbor George replaced the line, bled the air out of the system and was out for a test drive. My 2009 MacBook and a guy designated as a Mac Genius, designated by Apple, can’t fix it. I updated to the latest version of software, latest means 6 months newer. Now my printer won’t print and the modem is still history. I sure wish Ford made computers.

George and I have this mulch thing down to a science. He has a John Deere riding mower with a bagger. So he rides around picking up all the oak leaves on his driveway and lawn area and deposits them in a designated spot where I break out my Shop Vac leaf mulcher and convert the leaves into finely chopped mulch. Between us in an hour we can fill several 50 gallon plastic bags and have enough leaf mulch to last months and months. You really can’t buy this kind of mulch but the closest to it costs about $2 for a 1CF bag. That roughly works out to maybe $50 an hour. The mulcher has already paid for itself and I can tell it’s going to add years of life to my back by eliminating hours and hours of weeding in the garden. What I don’t need is an
i-mulcher, or a windows mulcher or a droid mulcher.

I have to make a comment regarding the Health Care bill. None of the newsers seem to be mentioning the $500B cut to Medicare. That’s $B not $M. It’s a no brainer what that means – more good doctors will quit taking Medicare patients. That leads to the classic Socialized medicine problem – long waits, poor service, and limited access to anything on the leading edge. It also means that premiums for supplemental insurance will rise dramatically as the supplement picks up more and more of the total cost. Medicare becomes Medicaid. The folks that will be hit hardest are the ones now using a Medicare Advantage program. Those plans will disappear forcing the current recipients into straight Medicare or into far more costly supplementals.

Of course they’ll maybe save something by closing the prescription drug doughnut hole. I actually thought the gap was a clever idea because it drove more people to use generics instead of the higher priced proprietary drugs. But the new provision that really made me laugh was the one that now allows an annual wellness checkup. I never knew you couldn’t do that because Nancy and I have had annual checkups for the last 10 years. So when I heard that the new legislation allows that, I assumed that our supplemental must have paid for it in the past. Turns out that assumption was wrong. It all has to do with how the doctor defines the visit. If they call it a “physical”, it’s not paid for; but if they call it a “follow-up” visit or an “annual checkup”, it’s covered. Can’t imagine there are very many doctors who don’t understand how to work the labeling game.

The provision that really causes me to scratch my head is the one that will fine employers $2000 per employee if they don’t provide health insurance. As a former employer I know that it was costing us roughly $650 per employee per month for health insurance (in 1998) so I’m not sure why it still won’t make sense for a small business guy to just pay the fine – sort of a brand new tax – rather than spring for $7500 + insurance will cost.

The really great thing about our political system is that we have an election coming up in 8 months that will most likely become a referendum on the health care legislation. If the voters like the bill and how it was handled or just the opposite, we’ll get to count votes. Usually we don’t get to see such direct feedback but in this case with all the focus having been on Health care, it won’t be difficult to draw a line between that one piece of legislation and the results of the election.

Decided to take a leap of faith in the garden based on what the certified chief meteorologist on the tube said. According to him, it looks like about 10 days ahead of weather staying above 50 at night and touching 80 during the day. Based on that I took half of the summer squash that I had started in the house and transplanted it to the garden. That would be 3 plants, each a different variety. I have 3 more in reserve just in case these guys meet an early demise. For the past two years I’ve had near zero success with summer squash for several reasons but mostly nematode attacks. So this planting is designed to fix that problem. First I dug a much deeper than normal hole and sprinkled it liberally with sugar and fertilizer. Then I laid down a couple of sheets of newspaper, the WSJ to be precise, and soaked it with a mix of Miracle Gro and water. My idea is to make a barrier for the nematodes which will eventually degrade but not until the plants are firmly established. Next I filled the hole with fresh compost so none of the surrounding soil will touch the plant for a while. Supposedly one of the cures for nematodes is to use highly organic soil and this compost is 100% pure organic material. Last I set the peat pot holding the squash plant on top of the compost and surrounded it with potting soil. So the plant is sitting maybe a foot away from any of the old soil which I assume holds nematodes. I’m also hoping that this approach keeps away the feared and dreaded cutworms as well. According to the seed company, these varieties are roughly 50 days from seed to veggie so my thought is that all these precautions plus giving the plants a couple of weeks in peat pots in the house will allow them to start producing before the nematodes even know they’re there.

One of the upsides to using the library wi-fi approach to internet access is that while Nancy is picking up all the tidbits on Facebook, I check out gardening magazines. I picked up two new recipes a few weeks back and tried them both this week. We’ve taken to roasting many veggies on the Holland grill and really have loved them cooked that way. The recipes I found use that same technique with kohlrabi and with whole carrots. Generically you coat the veggie with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and maybe garlic powder and then roast at 400 degrees for a period consistent with the particular veggie. I didn’t remember that we still had a kohlrabi in the refrigerator veggie bin. I thought we had eaten the last one back in December after the crop was done. So I wasn’t sure it was still edible but figured I’d find out soon if it was spoiled inside or had turned to wood. I peeled it and cut it into French fry sized strips. Looked just fine and I guessed it would be a 20 minute roast. Perfect. Since you can eat Kohlrabi either raw or cooked, not sure cooking time makes much difference. At 20 minutes a couple of them had started to brown and look nicer but also softer. With the carrots, we had used the roasting technique on nickel cut carrots and it worked fine but had never tried a whole carrot. To peel or not to peel? I decided to try both ways since the whole thing was an experiment. I guess these at 45 minutes, about the same as a small potato, anticipating that same texture at the end. The tasted ok, not spectacular, and were not the softer texture of a potato. Maybe they will never get soft but next time I’ll try cooking for an hour or so.

I have my own version of March Madness going on. Took the truck out and learned that I had no right turn signal and no cruise control. So I bought a set of lamps and guessed that the cruise control could be a fuse that somehow was associated with the lamp problem. That all happened a week or so ago and I just today got around to making the repair. No problem with changing the lamps and verifying they worked OK. But the fuse that controlled the cruise control was not blown so there’s a deepening mystery there. But the big news was that when I went to apply the brakes to check out the brake light – no brakes, pedal right to the floor. Last time I drove it, no problem. It sits for a week and now, zero brakes. So what started out as a simple burnt out bulb has escalated into a total truck melt down. And this on top of losing my Devil’s Horse. So to summarize I now have no internet, no truck, and no Devil’s Horse. Gators lose to BYU in the first round – does life get any more stressful?

The good news is that my neighbor is a great mechanic and he owes me for splitting all those logs.

Regarding my internet woes, I’ve officially thrown in the towel. My last hope was to install the latest and greatest operating system from Apple – Snow Leopard. Making such a leap caused me great heartburn just because it’s as close to starting over as I dare to try. I held my breath when it was done to see just how many data files were no longer in existence. Couldn’t have gone smoother although it took about an hour for the software to install. My biggest concern was whether or not the new operating system would support Appleworks where I have a couple decades of spreadsheets and databases. I tried opening one of my doc’s and up popped a dialogue box telling me I had to install a program called Rosetta which just so happens to reside on the same install disk as an optional installation. I went ahead and installed Rosetta and as if my magic, my Appleworks doc’s opened just fine. So I jumped right to AOL and tried to dial up. Nope, same as before. Dials just fine, AOL answers, and the two modems start squeaking and squawking at each other but somehow they are unable to communicate. I’m done screwing with it and will limit my internet visits to wi-fi , wherever that may be. Long term, I’m going to wait to try an Ipad and see if that does what we need using ATT’s 3G network.

This just isn’t my month – First I lost the internet now I lost my last two hook Devil’s Horse. It went out in grand fashion – hooked firmly in the jaws of a big bass. I really hated losing that particular plug. It’s been a staple in my tackle box for years and years and accounted for who knows how many bass in Florida, Utah, and any other place I used it. The really bad news is that it’s irreplaceable. The lure’s manufacturer, Smithwick, decided some years ago not to make the small, two hook model any more. I can still get the larger three hook version but it won’t be the same and I just won’t have quite the confidence in the bigger plug. I’ll just have to live with an image of my lure hanging on a trophy rack underwater where bass come by and admire it and the monster who finally brought it down.

My neighbor George is a fireplace kind of guy. He goes through incredible amounts of firewood, all coming from trees on his or our property or other neighbors willing to give up their dead trees. Most are water oak and pine, neither of which are particularly long living trees. Being such a long, hard winter this year, what seemed to me enough firewood for a lifetime, dwindled to zero so he got into some serious tree cutting and log splitting this week. I always help George with heavy work because he’s the guy who fixes most anything that goes wrong with any of my equipment or appliances. He also has heart issues and I’d hate to see something bad happen when he was doing something I could have been helping with. George has for sure cut down hundreds of trees over the years and knows what he’s doing. As opposed to me, when he tells you where a felled tree is going to land, you can go to the bank on it. We had taken down a large oak and tackled a dead pine right next to it. The oak was tricky due to the way the branches were hanging but the pine looked to be a piece of cake. After quite a tussle involving ropes and trucks, we pretty much laid the oak down where planned. But just as George was making the last cut on the pine, a gust of wind came up and blew it in exactly the opposite direction as planned. It was caught by another oak but the top most branches crossed the power lines. Didn’t break the lines but had them fairly well stressed. We started lopping pieces off the bottom of the tree which caused it to start lifting up and away from the lines. With each cut the tree got a bit more upright and closer to leaving the lines. The last cut did it – the tree snapped upright and popped away from the lines without breaking them. But the lines were like bow strings and slapped together for just a second. Pop, snap, sizzle. The pop was the circuit breaker servicing the neighborhood. We quickly cleaned up the evidence and then called the power company to report an outage. It took them 2 1/2 hours to restore power since we couldn’t tell them exactly which breaker to check first. So a day that started out kind of boring ending with a bit of excitement. The funny part was that Nancy and Barbara were watching the whole thing and George had made a big deal of putting down an X where he intended the tree to drop. That was probably as big a mistake as not having a guide rope on the tree.

The internet saga continues. Sent back both modems, one to US Robotics, one to Amazon. Amazon sent me a replacement quick, quick, quick. Hooked it up and learned almost immediately that it didn’t work either. But, it didn’t work in a different fashion. The modems I returned didn’t dial the server. This modem dialed just fine but the server didn’t answer. Now I’m mentally back to an AOL problem but one hooked to the basic communication function. When I unwrapped the new modem I noticed that it was a V92 compatible modem, supposedly the latest and greatest, but I vaguely remembered that the one I sent back was a V90. I asked the AOL guy if they were V92 compatible and was told that they were not, V90 only. As of now I haven’t received the replacement for the one I sent back to the manufacturer but I have some hope that I’m closing in on it.

And I might have found out why the two other modems either failed or appeared to have failed. Not sure which. I had decided that when I installed this brand new one, I was going to hook it to a dedicated line – one with no splitter to support a voice phone – and to use only the cable that came with the modem. That cable had an RFI filter built in and the one I had always used was just a standard issue telephone line. When I got under the desk to disconnect everything, I found that somewhere along the way I had picked up a powered surge protection device for the tele line and that the cable I had been using to connect the modem went through that surge device. So if that device was bad, perhaps that was what was killing the signal out of the modem and has been the problem all along. I would certainly feel better if that turns out to be the cause. I’ll just take a sledge hammer to it and beat it until all of my frustrations have been revenged. That’s one nice thing about hardware problems vs software problems – the ability to take a hammer to the bad guy.

One good thing that has come out of this whole mess is going to the library to hit the wi-fi once in a while. Turns out that a group called Friends of the Library sells used books on the premises. They get $1 for hardbacks and $.25 for paperbacks. Each time we go I hit the used book shelves while Nancy does her Face Booking online. I read about one book per week, year round and have built up a backlog of 25 books, mostly paperbacks, as of yesterday. So even if we ever get back online at the house, I’m set for books until the next cold season comes around. When I finish the books I return them to the library for resale so I’m really renting them much cheaper than paying overdue book fines.

Late Breaking

Wrong again. The new modem(s) seem to work just fine but were unable to hook up with AOL – and of course that’s the whole objective. I spent another hour on the phone with US Robotics and they finally ended up telling me that I needed to go to Apple to solve the problem and to please call them with what fixes the problem so they will know in the future how to deal with my situation.

Called Apple and that’s when the axe fell. The service tech told me that I had the feared and dreaded software problem – a corrupt file and the only thing he knew to do was reload the operating system which could wipe out everything so I needed a good backup. And even worse, they, Apple, no longer supported dial-up so he really couldn’t help. I almost passed out and asked exactly what he meant by no longer supported dial-up. He said it means that they are no longer trained on how to deal with dial-up products and that he was surprised that my laptop ever worked. I asked him if there was anybody there in the support center that had some gray hair and remembered how to deal with old time problems. He laughed and set me up for an appointment with a service guy at the Apple Store. So here I am swept back 40 years to the feared and dreaded software problem where nobody really knows what the hell is going on. The Gates’ Curse on my Mac. No hardware to hammer; no good way to vent.

This may be my last post for the foreseeable future.

Had another big quilting event at the house – a mystery quilt airing. The 10 members of the quilt group each make a quilt using exactly the same squares – the same pattern – but using whatever combinations, colors, positioning etc that they want. Even the size of the individual squares and of the end item can be different. The only rule is that the quilt must incorporate the same 8 square patterns. The ladies have a luncheon and while they’re eating I hang up the quilts outside on the clotheslines. Then they all come out and ooooh and aaaaaah and say how pretty each one is. What amazes me is that unless you know the ground rules in advance, you’d really never pick up the fact that they all contained the same elements. By the way the patterns are positioned on the quilt and the choices of colors, each one looks totally original. The next event is already planned for September on Joey’s boat.

We’ve got an interesting, my words not Nancy’s, phenomena at the lake this time of year- the pine trees are pollinating. We have so many pine trees that it’s not something you can miss. What happens is that a fine yellow powder saturates the air and layers on every available surface. So the cars turn yellow, the deck turns yellow, and even the surface of the lake gets a powdery film on it that appears at first to be algae. If you stood still for a couple of hours I’m sure you would have a golden gilt. I feel it in my eyes but it doesn’t seem to give me any respiratory problems although I have to imagine my lungs have a fine yellow coating this time of year. It literally drives Nancy crazy – not any allergy but the dust on everything. Doesn’t seem to bother the fish which would get my attention in a heart beat. One thing for sure, after the pine comes the oak and the oak pollen really does attack me. All the rain we are having probably helps pull the pollen out of the air so that makes me feel better when the rain has me trapped inside.