here’s life

Last night I was driving with a friend, and it was a clear, chilly night, about midnight. We were in the north east part of town, it happened. I think I saw the sky glow blue for a second, but Jeff didn’t notice, but we both saw the lights and signs go black—the power went out for a second or two. We were approaching a stoplight, and when it came back on, it was yellow—is that part of the failsafe? Immediately, I thought that maybe it was an EMP or nuke or something. But it only seemed to effect things connected to the grid–other cars continued to drive. Of course, my car was unaffected, since it runs on heat and vacuum, not electricity. So, it must have been a power outage. If it had been a bomb or something, how would I have known? Maybe I should start carrying a dosimeter so that I know if we’ve gotten hit by radiation. Not that there is much one can do about it. But since I get all my news from webcomics, I wouldn’t know that the rest of the town was dead or had superpowers or anything until someone started poking fun at it. Or I show up to work on Monday,,,and no one is there.
Oh, that’s assuming I survived. So far, so good. That brownout didn’t even faze me!

Yesterday, you could say I spent most of my time in my apartment…
Or, you could say that I searched my town’s stores for latex spray foam.
I followed a guy who has wandered from the Dorlish Wood. He’s not sure what’s going on, but I think he’ll survive. He’s setting up the world for someone else to complete.
I had a snap of inspiration in church this morning. I realized that God is bigger than the emotional difficulties I find from working with imperfect people at my job. I can’t care yet not be hurt when I am failed—-unless I realize that it has nothing to do with the logic of the my feelings, and they are washed over by God’s over-arching plan and and Nature which can be flowing through me and is no longer limited by me. eh, something like that—you had to be there.
I visited the magnetosphere, and learned how radiation from space attacks earth when we let our guard down.
I watched some normal guys in California build spacecraft out of fabric, that they send to the edge of space. Oh, and they mentioned this, which was sent to Venus—yeah, that place where solder melts. You don’t want to live there. But this balloon’s twin made the trip and survived to do its mission.
Based on something I read Saturday, I was inspired to develop a new kind of lightswitch—one that wasn’t there. I’d use this. I got it sketched out as I tried to fall asleep—usually I go instantaneously, but I had drunk some coffee hours before. That was at evening church, which morphed into having some friends over to eat chili. We discussed making houses out of concrete domes. Also, I talked to a friend about finding wifes. I also traveled to the good old days and met Mel, A Real Programmer. Oh and I climbed 800 something feet on a stairs machine while Clive Staples chatted to me, all the way from the early ’40’s–talking about Christianity being more than more than just merely being a nice person. The earlier chapters about pretending to be Jesus gave useful insight I used in the evening church bible study on 1 John 1~2.
I straightened up my house a little. Made some bread. And went to church instead of going and eating with a friend from work. I don’t like when my religion get in the way of my relationships.
Today, I barely visited my apartment. And now it’s about time to float off to some other world. Maybe the future, which is here whenever I close my eyes..

Sorry for the delay. I didn’t feel like writing.
If you don’t already, I suggest subscribing to my RSS feed—get an RSS Reader, or use the Google Reader. But if you’ve been checking back everyday for the last months, you are more patient than I!

Anyway.
So, where was I? Oh, so this evening I was eating supper with a family from church, and afterwards, we were going to play a game or something. But, they didn’t have Pictionary, so I suggested they come over to my garage and help me take apart my car. They had been stuck in the house for a week because the youngest had chicken pox, and it was expected to spread. The youngest stayed with mom, and the rest came over. A week or so ago, I finally started to disassemble my old Mazda (poor Cecil!). I had spent about an hour, and taken off the two driver’s doors, some of the interiors, the driver seat, the back seats. So this evening they took out some more interiors–removed the glove compartment, the right mirror, the card that controls the blinker, the passenger’s seat. That was mostly the little kids. Meanwhile, there was a group working on the front. Took the hood off, and started to dig into the engine. The battery came out, the valve cover came off, the rocker arms out, part of the intake, some of the lights. I mostly struggled with the radiator. The car was mashed in the front, which pushed it all together a little more. I didn’t get it out until after they had all gone home. I’ve got the distributor off and the injector rail. There is an intake box that seems to be bolted from the bottom, so I think I need to take off the manifold and then I can get it apart more easily. I need to drain the oil before I get too deep into the engine, but that requires climbing under the car. Maybe I should have sent a little kid under there.
They seemed to enjoy it a lot, despite the cold. I think it is a pretty good evening activity. So, kids, find some screwdrivers, and 10 and 12 millimeter wrenches and sockets, and go to work! Until you get to a bolt that you can’t get started by yourself, you don’t even need to tell Mom and Dad!

To live your life
You’ve got to lose it
All the losers get a crown…

So, this evening, I lost. I lost at a couple different card games. Hand after hand. I’d make a few points, and my opponent would make more—even if I went out, forcing him to subtract his hand. Ok, a few hands I did well, good deal, good draw…but mostly, it was maybe this time, maybe this time…maybe a four of clubs…failure. I got the game figured out, I got my brain into a mode that intuitionaly sought out the right cards, right way of thinking. And then lost another hand. And I failed even at being a good conversationalist while playing. Then I played Clue. I’ve played this a couple times, and I know the basic idea…and it’s just a simple matter of deduction. Yeah, but I was clue-less. It’s like MasterMind—gaining information about specifics, by evaluating them in groups. I tried to write everything down, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. So, I failed.

I’m not used to failing. Usually, everything I do either works, or if it doesn’t, the circumstances hardly warranted hope that it would. Or, I just redefine success to match something that was accomplished. But I know people who’s lives are characterized by failure. Maybe not catastrophe, but chronic failure. And I thought, wow, if I feel this bummed about losing, at some games, for just an evening, imagine how I would feel after years of repeatedly failing at life. You get up, and get dressed (but there is the nagging suspicion that you wore the wrong thing), and then you brush your teeth, and fail, spilling toothpaste on the floor. You fail at cooking an egg, at making toast. At getting your car to run right. At missing traffic, at getting to work on time…and this continues all day. Everyday. For as long as you can remember. Just a string of things that didn’t quite work out for you. I’d be pretty unhappy. Probably not very friendly. Hard to deal with. Dull. Maybe even a hint of trying to fail, so at least I succeed at something.

I am glad that my life has been successful. Maybe not always as totally challenge-free as I could imagine, and in my weaker moments, wish for. But it’s been good, and it’s not all because Tobias is so awesome. God has given me this life. And since it is a gift, I should not look down on those who do not measure up to my standards. We soften the recoil against people by saying “maybe they are just having a bad day”—well, what about the people who have a bad week, month, years—so long they have given up hope of hope? Can I use the gift of things-working-out-for-me to help encourage those for whom things don’t work? Rather than thinking “maybe things would work better if you weren’t such an idiot” or “maybe if you were nice to be around, more people would like you”. I’ve had a glimpse of what that life would be like, and now I have a glint of empathy for those for whom the morning comes to herald in another day of unmitigated FAILURE.

Oh, and no, I don’t get a crown for losing a card game.

I may have messed up. Used someone’s trust of me to push them in over their head. Or, I gave them a great opportunity for learning.
So, there is this family from church, who want to grow stuff. A couple months ago, I helped them dig up some flower beds, and plant some stuff. We had a few leaves of spinach, and the onions seem to be growing well. The tomatoes are green, and the cucumbers and some of the squash are blooming. It might actually work. The strawberries have made a few berries. I think they need straw to help them stay dry and away from the ants.

Anyway, that’s not hard, plants grow themselves. But Sunday, I was talking to one of the kids and suggested that they grow some chickens in their backyard. Monday, the dad called me, with questions. Tuesday, I did some research on cost and such, and today is Wednesday, and they have ordered chickens, and partially planned out how it will work. The day-old chicks should be here in about a month. Probably long enough to find a light, some sawdust, and a cardboard box. And then three cardboard boxes, and then a place in the shed, or a little house in the yard, and then it will be on. There will be a couple dozen squawking chickens in their backyard, and they will have to be feeding them piles of feed and finding them new bedding, and it will be crazy. Well, maybe kinda crazy. Maybe 25 were too many. Maybe the neighbors will call the city. Maybe they will get tired of watering them. Maybe they will not be able to handle butchering them in the backyard (how do we dispose of the …”leftovers”? )

Or maybe it’s not a big deal. They will find out what chickens are like, decide if that’s how they want to make their own meat, and go on. I hope it works out.

It appears that we can get rid of all the carbon that we have put in the air by just caring for the soil in our farmland. If we spread 1/2 of an inch of charcoal on all the farmland in the US, it would offset all the carbon humans released into the the atmosphere in 2006. Of course, in that form, it probably would not help our plants much, but if it were spread through the top couple inches of soil as humus, it would be very beneficial, increasing resistance to flooding and drought, as well as making the soil more fertile. Then we could drive all the SUV’s we wanted, and still not cause global warming. But, in order to do this to the farmland, we would need to shift how we farm—growing the soil, so it grows us food, instead of just making field factories crank out carbohydrate and protein nutrient paste. And this shift in philosophy would probably result in better health and wellness and less dependence on SUV’s anyway. We need to change something, because adding half an inch of carbon to the soil each year may be difficult.

Here is the math and sources behind my claim:
8.4 gigatonnes in 2006:
divided by
938 million acres of US farmland
divided by
208 kg/cu. meter: density of charcoal
divided by
90% carbon in charcoal
equals:
0.47 in deep

Of course, if the whole world helped out, instead of just the US farmland, we wouldn’t have to make our soil quite so much better each year.

The moralists have defined “words you aren’t suppose to use”. And in doing so, [we] create ways for people to purposefully violate rules about what is right, pure, and appropriate. We all know the words we aren’t supposed to know—at least by the time we are young adults—and they are “adult words”, words that kids aren’t supposed to be corrupted with, kids aren’t supposed to use or hear, which helps to spread them. Because all kids want to grow up and become adults. And using bad language, while we know it’s not “right”, it’s mature, and gratifying to finally be able to do things that only big people are allowed to do. Well, really they aren’t even allowed, but only adults are allowed to break the rules of what can be said. And the rules are pretty arbitrary.

Let’s take the word “snot”. Snot is gross, and sure, everybody has it (you swallow something like a pint a day), but it’s not usually something discussed in polite company. But it’s not a “bad word”. Just has it’s place, like any other word. But it is just a word, with a meaning (which may vary from state to state). But what if, we decided that sn*t was bad to say? If we defined it as something that “good people” didn’t say in front of kids, and the FCC didn’t let people say it on tv during the day. And you had to use other words to describe what happens when you blow your nose. It would take a while for people to catch on, but eventually, people would start using more. When they want to express their displeasure, or just rebel against being good, they would start sprinkling the sn__ word into their speech. Maybe quite liberally. “What the sn*t? That sn*t-faced sn*t and his sn*tty sn*tting can just sn*t off!” Yay, yet another amoral word made worthless by simply banning it, therefore increasing it’s misuse.

Now, this example was the corruption of a word that already existed, but the same would happen if you coined a new word, and gave it forbidden status as part of it’s definition:

iofdl: (ē-ō’fĭd-l) noun, something kinda bad, but this word has it in the worst connotation imaginable.
*DO NOT USE THIS WORD* However, you can use this similar word “eiffel”, to mean the same thing.
tr.v iofdling, iofdl
intr.v: iofdling, iofdled
adjective: iofdl, iofdlly

So, I don’t think I should use “foul language” (one exception: I quack at ducks, but they rarely respond so I’m probably doing it wrong). However, I don’t think forbidding certain arbitrary words is really helpful–it just gives people yet another rule to break when they feel like lashing out against all that morals stand for and the oppression they imagine moral standards bring.

…but while we argue about what words are good for children, they are dying from other things. The number one cause of death for children under 5 is fumes from inside cooking fires. Snot!

Watched Charlie Wilson’s War: Made me want to go kill some commies—or at least help war-torn countries build their school systems.
Watched Gone Baby Gone: Made me mad at parents who neglect their kids and made me want to help the kids grow up to be functioning adults instead of losers like their folks.
Watched Life Aquatic: Made me want to get better at making snide remarks—or at least better at dry and absurdist humour.

So, it was friday, and I hurried out of work, and jumped on the turnpike, heading for KC. My flight was leaving about 4 and a half hours, just enough time to get there. I got a call from my mom. My destination in Ohio was getting snow, and flights were being canceled. My dad was in one airport. My grandfather was stuck in Atlanta. Well, I figured I’d just keep driving, and see what I could make of it. But when I got off the phone with my Mom, I had a voicemail, saying that my flight was canceled. Ok, so I dropped off the next exit, paid my 30 cents, and headed for home. I could go back to work. I could try to find a flight from somewhere that would get me there. Sometime, maybe tomorrow….or…
I called up Aduma. “What are you doing this weekend?” “I’m on a mountain, snowboarding. Tomorrow we might go climb a 14er”. An hour later, I had more warm clothes packed, and was heading west instead of east. I drove. And drove. Western Kansas is pretty, but it is long. At dusk I passed a wind farm—fifty turbines spinning slowly. Then it got dark, and all I saw were the white lines. And then, suddenly, I was there, and found a bed, and went to sleep. Well, it wasn’t sudden, but I did have some meaningful times of prayer and singing while riding in my radio-free car.
We got up early, and headed for the mountain. Not quite early enough, it would seem. There was lots of traffic. Well, alot compared to my little big city. And when the right lane ended, all the selfish jerks were driving past everyone on the right, and then merging in, slowing the whole thing to a crawl. I didn’t have the nerve to be a jerk back, so didn’t pull into the right lane and stop. I did try to run over some people who merged in because I wasn’t fast enough to close the gap. Yeah, about that. My car does ok in Kansas, where there is lot of air, and not much hill. But, you get out to the mountains, and it has a hard time. It may have been trying to skip 1st gear, but it would take a while to get going. On the interstate it just annoyed the other drivers. But once we got onto the mountain trails, it became difficult to manage. It was too curvy and slick to go fast enough to keep the turbo pressure up to give the engine enough power to get up the hills. At one point we had to get out and push because the road was too slick and steep, and full throttle just made smoke. Eventually, we got to the parking lot—well, it was where we parked, since the road was blocked with a ten-foot pile of snow. We were a couple miles from the trailhead, and we gave up on climbing the mountain. Instead, we walked up the road (and railing on the road that was level with the snow) and the followed a snow-shoe path to a hill where we did dive-rolls until we were worn out and covered with snow. The trip down was much easier. Except that the car in front of us almost slid sideways into an oncoming car. They both stopped in time, and I was able to run into the drift at the edge of the cliff and stop before running into them. We passed a hydro electric plant with lots of wires, and not much water or drop. Not sure how they managed it. We got milkshakes at the bottom of the hill, in the little town. The lady who ran the milkshake place wasn’t as good at it as the normal lady. Even if she had been doing it all her life, she’d only have gotten a few dozen shakes done. But not to worry because Becky had some spaghetti for us that evening. We had a good time hanging out, and Discussing Important Stuff. Like a name for my car. It earned the title “The Bloviator”. It blows alot of black smoke. But also, in a more sophisticated sense, it looks like an impressive luxury car, and it says alot about driving, but when it come down to it, it didn’t go anywhere. So, it is pretentiously contentless. About that time, we decided to watch UHF. “oh, yeah…they really hate it when you do this!” Shake, Shake, shake.
Sunday we went to church, and heard another excellent message—that makes two out of two. We went for a walk in the afternoon, in the “Impressive Backyard”. I needed to leave, but stopped to get icecream with the others on the way out. But, it was late, and I’d be driving tired, and we wanted to climb another hill in the morning…so I didn’t leave after all. I called a coworker and said I wouldn’t be in. We spent a while wandering around downtown, while part of our party waited for the train. Then aduma and I got supper, and talked about Life. Now I know what to do with my future! I’m going to go live in the woods and eat squirrels. Maybe some rabbits, after the first frost.
Monday started out like another other day. Getting up before sunrise, and heading off—oh, wait, not to work, but to 10732 ft. ASL and then hiking up a snow packed path, and picking our way through unmarked drifts and boulders, and finally summiting at 11722 ft. The view, like all weekend, was excellent. I mean, Kansas is great. It has some nice flat stuff, and some good grass-covered hills. But, it’s not quite like looking down on angled slopes covered with snow-covered trees, and looking over and seeing peaks that are coated with snow. And gazing off the cliff, resisting the urge to jump, hoping that this time, I’ll learn to fly. It sometimes takes a little bit to get the hang of it. Then, it was back down into town, more of the perfect weather we’d had all weekend, and this time I really left. Once aduma got my car started, cranking while I pumped the primer pump. The Bloviator was off and running! I took a scenic route across eastern Colorado, on a two lane that flew past farms and paused in little towns. It was good to see the heart of the communities along the way. It was also a pretty lonely road. I think I went about a half hour without meeting another car. And I drove and I drove. With my sunroof open. And I thought, and I tried to stay awake, and I troubleshooted a kludge of two wireless routers that a friend uses to steal wireless from the neighbors and re-broadcast it. (unplug them both, and then plug them in in cascading order, Does it work now?)
It was dark by the time I got to the windmills this time. They each had a red light on top, and nearly all of them blinked in unison. There was one light that was about half a blink slow. I was driving in the dark and I looked up at the bright stars–so much brighter than in the city, and I inhaled, and smelled…snow. What’s that? Why do I smell snow when I look at the sky? It doesn’t smell like snow in my car if I look out the windshield, but the sky looks like snow smells. It made me think of this page which I read about 4 years ago. It suggest that humans can sense infrared, with lets us see the temperature of an object at a distance. Well, we all know we can tell if some thing is hot or cold without touching it—your skin can easily say “I am in the sun” or “I am in the shade”. But, no, this is something different—or at least feels different to me. That smell of rain or snow. I think it was that I was “seeing” the deep cold of space. Space doesn’t radiate much at all—-sure there are stars, but they are really small compared to the coldness of the nothingness of space. And why do I sense it most when I inhale through my nose? It could be that I am in the habit of associating smells with inhaling through my nose, or it could be it gives me a sample of ambient air to use as a reference. Suppose I have sensors in the skin below my eyes that can tell th e temp of an object straight ahead by checking for heat radiating from it. Now, it might get confused because there is also heat conducting out of the air, throwing off the sensor reading. But if I knew what temp the ambient air was, then I could calibrate the sensor to accurately see how much heat is radiating off the object I’m looking at. And since that is the only way that we ever notice this sense, we think of it as a smell. Maybe we all have special superhuman powers…but we don’t know it. I guess if we all have it, then it’s not superhuman. Oh well.
Well, gotta get to sleep so I can get up and save the world! There are a bunch of planes in a file at work that have my name on them.

So, I went to a retreat for a class at church (the introductory class that I hadn’t taken for the 2 years I’ve been going). We sang and prayed together and read from God’s own Word. It was a beautiful location down near Oklahoma, by the Ar-Kansas River. I didn’t come away with some huge breakthrough, or maybe I did. It’s the Self thing—everything is about me, and that attitude makes me compare mySelf to others. There is a nearly constant dialog in my head, comparing my actions to those of others, usually slanted so I’m the better one. This is unhelpful, and kinda shoots down the whole thing of being justified by Jesus’s righteousness. And it all stems from my Self being alive and well. Die, die, die!!! Can I let it die, so it’s not about “what’s in it for me”? Am I even a Christian if my core loyalty is to my Self?

Well, while my self is off dying, I went sledding this evening, With some friends. On the highway embankment. It was fun. The snow came this afternoon, and since it’s just about freezing, it won’t stay long. On the way home, I was reflecting on my future, and I had this crazy idea. Hanging out with a couple guys who run an ebay business can give you this sort of inspiration. We were together most of the retreat, and the trip there and back. Anyway. So, I could go back to raising chickens on pasture like we did back when. But from talking to one guy who is into natural food, it sounds like the market is kinda saturated. At the health food stores you can buy “free-range” chicken, and at Walmart you can get “No Antibiotics, No Hormones* Chicken” (*actually, as they note on the package, it’s against FDA regs to give chickens hormones anyway—but the No Antibiotics thing is real.) So. if people want meat with a healthy label, they don’t need me. Of course my chicken would taste better, and be “Fresh Range(tm)”–a phrase my dad coined. Sure the health-food-store-chicken is “free range” but that is accomplished much different from how my chickens would be raised. My chickens would be moved to new grass everyday—-they would have to stand in the grass, with the bugs. The “free-range” that I have seen raised commercially, while a step in the right direction, left something to be desired. They had a chicken house with LOTS of chickens in it (in the thousands) and then little doors in the sides where the chickens could come out and walk around in the sun—sometimes they had little fences up to keep the chickens in, sometimes they just let them wander. But, that’s kinda different from my chicken—but how would you tell from the package?
But some people would make the distinction. Those people might not be in my 1 hour radius. Which is where the crazyness comes in: I sell these chickens on ebay, pack them up and ship them to wherever people are who want chicken that “tastes like chicken.” To help show people how great these chickens are, I could video parts of their lives and put it on the internet. People could come watch “helmet cam” footage from my daily care of these chickens. I could even put the butchering process up–with a “graphic content” warning. Then people could feel like they know what these chickens are, and why they should get them shipped a thousand miles to their door. “Chickens raised in the Big Blue Room”. But, they would almost be raised on the internet. So, I’m not really shipping un-inspected meat across state lines! These chickens were raised in the youtube-o-sphere as much as anywhere else!

Yup, so that’s it! My niche is selling chickens to people like you, whether you live between here and the nearest Starbucks, or you live in Maine, you can login, order some chickens, and the UPS guy will bring them to you a couple days later.