Writing about writing, autobiography, cross posting selected work from other places.
The smell of garlic pulled from the ground is unique. It marks the beginning of high summer.
We continue to pick leafy greens, herbs, zucchini, summer squash, and cucumbers while we wait for tomatoes to form and ripen. Our best gardening days are right in front of us.
Hope everyone is having a great summer!
Happy Independence Day from Journey Home.
This is one of my favorite explanations about Independence Day from National Geographic Kids: “Also called the Fourth of July, Independence Day marks the historic date in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress. The written declaration stated that the American colonies were tired of being ruled by Great Britain.” That word “tired” really hits home.
Have a happy Independence Day! Cut back on the fireworks, moderate consumption of stuff you know you should, and rest up for the campaign of a lifetime as we head into the November election!
Using the rough reckoning of my life, I am about three weeks behind in the garden this summer. I did finish the tomato plot Friday, and while there are a couple items left in the greenhouse, planting can be called done. I picked the first zucchini, and cucumbers won’t be far behind. As mentioned previously, two plots will remain fallow this year. As soon as I clear the greenhouse, I’ll put it into storage and focus on other yard work besides gardening. It has been something of a slog to bring the garden in.
Trail walk conversation
Sometimes I meet someone with whom I have a long history on the state park trail, as I did this week. The conversation covered these topics: The rain/hot temperatures were good for the garden, tomatoes especially. How the Iowa political climate changed since 1993 when I moved here. Prospects for Christina Bohannan, candidate for U.S. Congress, and for our state senate candidate Ed Chabal, and house candidate Jay Gorsh. How did education fall from its pedestal in Iowa? No answers. Need for septuagenarians to get out of the heat and humidity. It’s not the heat but the humidity.
Hand cramps and tomato patch.
Friday was a big day in the garden. Mainly, I finished putting in the tomato plot. That involved laying the rest of the ground cover, attaching the outside row tomato cages to their stakes, and installing deer fence around the rows. After an unsuccessful experiment in growing tomatoes last year, I returned to the method I had previously developed. It took about four hours to get that done. I cooled down and then took a nap. When I woke, both hands and my right leg cramped, causing some pain. I worked through it, yet I don’t recall that kind of work creating such cramping before. By the next morning cramping subsided.
Saturday was a lost day
On Saturday I drove to Williamsburg for a political meeting at 8 a.m., went grocery shopping for the soon to be arriving house guests, lay down, and slept a solid several hours. I ended up skipping dinner and went back to bed, having a more normal night’s sleep. Missing days like that is not the best. I finally feel rested, yet I’ll never get the day back.
This week I felt moments of creativity coupled with moments of physical exhaustion. It was not the worst of weeks. It was a time of pushing my limits and acknowledging they exist. Something as the male of the species I am not enthusiastic about doing.
In the first place, it is difficult to recognize this gathering of large rocks in the photo as Stonehenge. Mostly, the significance of an act of vandalism may have been more prominent in the minds of two vandals than in anyone else. I get it. Summer was about to begin. That’s a big day for some. Just Stop Oil, the organization behind the vandalism, said their motivation was to demand the next UK government end extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030. Whatever. Apparently it took an oversized hair dryer to blow the powder paint from the rock surfaces without harming colonies of lichen that developed there. If people know about the incident, it’s been forgotten by now.
Having done my tour of duty on the Salisbury Plain, my memories are scant. I stayed at a youth hostel, and made visits to Salisbury, Bath and Stonehenge. Another traveler, who spent the previous few weeks wandering about the moorland of southwest England, invited me to accompany him. I declined. It sounded too much like Iowa, and a bit dreary. I bought a post card at the Stonehenge gift shop and worked my way from the chalky plateau to the chalk cliffs of Dover and then to Calais, where my journal of Salisbury and England was pinched with my backpack after crossing the channel in a hovercraft.
I never looked back on England, and don’t understand the fascination with Stonehenge at solstice. It is an old thing, shrouded in lost history. I’m more thankful the days start getting shorter, and planning for autumn can begin in earnest.
One surviving account of my visit to Stonehenge remains.
Very sunny here today near Stonehenge, and other ancient ruins. Stonehenge yesterday brought to attention the very tourist like notions of seeing something only to tell your friends about it when you get back. It may be that these days this is the notion you should have or at least most common, but it is also a notion of which I refuse to partake. It is only a very insensitive person who will go look and come back in one hour as the tour bus takes, but then there’s hours and barb wire fence to keep you from doing it any other way. Yet here too comes the notion that since there are so many books and pictures and articles about Stonehenge why even bother the few minutes to even see the thing.
On the way from the rocks to the return bus, the drivers were talking and one said to another, “It’s too bad it started to rain. It spoiled their trip.”
Here it seems that there is such a “holiday” preconception among these drivers (and all Britons as well) that it prevents them from seeing what is really, actually there: some rocks with barb wire about them with people crowded within these premises. At any rate, I was no different from the others when I paid my 65p and walked, took some photographs, and bought some postcards which I today mailed to the states.
Journals, Winston Churchill Gardens, Salisbury, England, 11:45 a.m. on Aug. 27, 1974
In the 5,000-year history of Stonehenge, Wednesday’s protest is less enduring than the lichen that over millennia colonized the massive stones. I don’t wish ill on the two vandals. I just hope they receive their just desserts. I’m sure the ancient druids could care less about this week’s events.
This week was one of existential errands: meeting a technician at home for washing machine repairs, getting the automobile oil changed, a planning meeting for our upcoming high school class reunion, grocery shopping at the wholesale club, and chauffeuring my spouse to an appointment. It is the stuff that keeps our operation going.
I spent time in the garden to finish the tomato patch. There are squash and cucumber blossoms in rows I planted. What I managed to plant seems to be taking as expected. Nothing very exciting happened this week in the garden or elsewhere in my life.
Working with My Cohort
Two meetings remain for the planning committee of our 50th-ish high school class reunion. The six people on our regular video call are no-malarkey do-gooders committed to bringing this thing in on time and on budget. I’ve known them all since high school which ended in 1970. Our long, if intermittent acquaintance makes working together easy and enjoyable. Among the topics I raised:
The reunion happens in a month.
Gardening Reached Apogee
This year I couldn’t get caught up with the garden. A few days remain before summer begins, and at least two plots will lie fallow this year. That’s not all bad, yet I envision a future with a much smaller garden. It’s complicated, yet it’s not. We simply don’t eat as much food as I can grow. I made a very large plot by combining two of the older plots. It has been impossible to keep critters who enjoy the garden as much as I do out of that growing space.
Once I clear out the greenhouse, I will prepare the two plots to lie fallow the rest of this year. Last year’s garden is likely as good as it gets and an apogee in the arc of a gardener’s life.
Quick Bean Soup
I made a “quick bean” soup for dinner of all organic ingredients. That means I used canned beans — a prepared 3-bean mix plus canellini — medium dice of carrot, celery and Vidalia onion, bay leaf, Herbes de Provence, salt, and sliced pac choi, stem and all. For liquid I used home made vegetable broth. When the vegetables were tender, I blitzed about a third with a stick blender, stirred, and there was supper.
I’ve been feeling kind of punk the last few days. My blood pressure has been elevated above normal and I’m having trouble sleeping. I spent much of Saturday in bed. I’m reading Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario which is likely contributing to difficulties in sleeping. I have been free of headaches, chest pain and difficulty breathing, so I’ll ride it out for a few more days and hope for the best. If I didn’t take my blood pressure at home, I may not have noticed anything different. Information can be both a blessing and a curse. (Update: My blood pressure returned to normal range by Monday morning. The spell passed).
And that was my week. Cheers!
On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Food and Drug Administration, et. al., vs. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, et.al., a case about use of the drug mifepristone in terminating pregnancies up to seven weeks. The high court found unanimously the plaintiffs lacked standing. They did have other things to say.
Is the Supreme Court calling balls and strikes in this decision? No, they are not.
Politico journalist Alice Miranda Ollstein identified four anti-abortion wins buried in the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling against them. Read Ollstein’s entire article on Politico’s free website here and give her a follow. My short summary of the pitfalls she identified is as follows:
What may seem like a clean win for proponents of use of the drug mifepristone for ending pregnancies is not clean at all. I recommend reading Ollstein’s entire article here. It seems easy to predict this issue will return to the Supreme Court soon.
What will we humans do when we’ve found everything we once lost? If Sir John Franklin’s 1845 voyage of HMS Erebus and Terror to find a Northwest Passage is an indication, we will continue singing the same songs events raised up, even as more of the actual history becomes known. Lord Franklin is a classic folk song and hard to release from repertories. John Renbourn discussed new discoveries about the fate of Franklin’s crew found in 2014 and 2016. He said it ruined the song forever. When he sings it, Renbourn does not change the lyrics. Click here to hear the whole story and listen to his version of Lord Franklin.
Enter the June 9, 2024 discovery by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society of the last vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton found in the Labrador Sea. The wreck of Quest lay upright and intact on the seabed at a depth of 390 meters. Rediscovery occurred this week and next steps, I feel certain, will be forthcoming.
My point is we are going to run out of historical artifacts to find. What then?
As the Bill Anders photograph from Apollo 8 confirms, Earth is a finite place. Humans are polluting our air, water, and land at an unprecedented pace. The population of humans is growing. What we haven’t found is a way to live without dire consequences for our planet and the people and other wildlife who inhabit it. Isn’t it time we made that discovery?
I spent my Wednesday outdoor time repairing pallets and re-building my garden compost bin. I’m not sure how many more years these boards will last. In many cases, they are so deteriorated they wouldn’t take a nail. It is literally held together with bailing wire rescued from hay bales used to mulch garlic. Anyway it is back up and will quickly fill up with weeds and vegetation from the garden. I won’t harvest compost from this bin for two years. As regular readers may recall, I’m running way behind in the garden. I usually put this bin together in mid April.
Ambient temperatures were at 86 degrees by 11 a.m. when it was too hot to continue working outdoors. A younger me would have persisted all day. I am able to recognize the signs that heat is affecting me and can call it quits.
Soil around garden plants was still wet at 11 a.m. Once the worst of the heat is over, I’ll shut off the soft water and water them again. I encountered the small rabbit that has been dining on the garden. The cayenne pepper deterred it somewhat, yet not enough. Something broke into the covered row and ate a head of lettuce. It looks like the work of a deer. I had another piece of fabric and did a make shift repair. It held over night.
I’m having doubts about attending the state Democratic convention on Saturday. I’m receiving the usual emails regarding the convention, including one from someone wanting to be elected as a delegate to the national convention, and one from the rural caucus. The rural caucus made this request:
There are three amendments we’d like to share our thoughts on; we encourage delegates to vote with us in support of rural Democrats:
- We support the amendment requiring a 3 delegate minimum per county.
- We oppose the amendment removing term limits for members of the State Central Committee.
- We oppose the amendment adding the State Central Committee Steering Committee to the constitution, making the Committee a permanent decision-making body of the Iowa Democratic Party.
If these are things most important to Democrats who live in rural areas, then it is a sign the state party has lost its way. While these three issues may be important to some, they indicate a kind of tinkering around the edges of party structure that will hobble us from regaining control of the legislature and statewide offices. This is not a strong case to attend the convention.
I’m undecided. If they were having the convention in downtown Des Moines, I would have used it as an opportunity to drop off my spouse to visit her sister while I was at the convention. Instead, we are in Altoona, which while not a terrible distance, would add another hour of driving to my day should we do a sister-in-law visit. Another check mark in the no column of decision-making.
Thing is, there weren’t enough people to fill the state convention slots at the county convention. The pool of alternates to pass on these responsibilities is pretty shallow. Democrats can likely do good on this without me. There remain two days to decide.
There are better things to do than get moody about politics. I think I’ll schedule this post and get after them. Thanks for reading!
I managed to get outdoors and garden every day this week. The cruciferous vegetable patch is coming along. One row of cabbage and I’m calling it done. I plan to sprinkle cayenne pepper around the plants to deter animals from nibbling on the tender shoots. That and some Dipel®, which contains a naturally-occurring bacterium found in soil and plants, and I should be good. This is the latest in the season I planted brassicas. Luckily I’ve been cooking with over-wintered collards, this spring’s pac choi and tatsoi, and frozen leafy green vegetables from last year. It has been good to get into the garden.
Writing – Prep for Printing
I created a new file of part one of my autobiography for publication formatting and began work. It takes a lot to make it suitable for printing: font selection, margins, chapter setup, line spacing, ISBN, and maybe a copyright. I researched printing prices for a self-published book and I should be able to get 25 copies for a few hundred dollars. This book was never intended for trade publication.
150 Days Until the Election
We are less than 150 days until the Nov. 5 general election. I offered my political help to my state representative and senate candidates. We’ll see how they take me up on it. Both are first time candidates, so I’m not sure my 60 years experience on political campaigns will be relevant to them. The races will be tough. As long as I can work something out with the campaigns, that is how I’ll spend my political time this cycle.
On the State Park Trail
Six of the last seven days I walked 30 minutes on the state park trail. Everything is greening up. White flowers appeared and can be found everywhere. This transitional time — before everything gets eaten by bugs, or trampled by wildlife — is a favorite. There have been plenty of photo opportunities. The day I did not walk was a long, sweaty one in the garden.
Israel Is Using AI Targeting
An increasing number of news stories assert the Israel Defense Forces have been using artificial intelligence-enabled decision-support systems (AI-DSS) to target and kill Hamas operatives. All is fair in love and war, they say. Or is it? What if I told you AI finds Hamas targets most frequently at home with family. As bombs fly, they take out non-combatant women and children along with Hamas operatives. Shouldn’t that be a war crime?
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point hosts the Lieber Institute. “In today’s complicated battle spaces, the continued effectiveness and enforceability of the law is highly dependent on whether the expressed rules remain definitive, understood, and accepted,” it says on their website. “Yet contentious topics highlight a troubling lack of unanimity in the international community concerning the law.” Since the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel has used unconventional tactics to achieve battlefield superiority. While they have been innovative, any targeting method that indiscriminately includes women and children is morally bankrupt. Let’s hope the peace plan I mentioned last week takes root.
Summer begins in 11 days. Hopefully the main garden planting will be done by then and I can focus on weed maintenance, harvest, and the rest of my household projects.
The Democratic ballot was simple this election. Vote for all the Democrats, except pick three of five candidates in the supervisor race. The primary winners for supervisor were Rod Sullivan, Lisa Green-Douglass, and Mandi Remington. No surprises there.
On the Republican side, there were two races of interest. Incumbent Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks defeated prayer breakfast organizer David Pautsch with 55.9 percent of the vote. In House District 91, Oxford attorney Judd Lawler defeated second-time candidate and Williamsburg Mayor Adam Grier with 78.9 percent of the vote. Lawler trounced Grier in Johnson County where he got 502 of 554 votes cast.
The common theme for these elections is voter turnout was pathetic.
Miller-Meeks’ 16,446 vote win was a comment on the state of the Republican Party in the First District. Division within the party runs deep is how I read it. It was surprisingly low for someone who first ran for this seat in 2008, and won her last election by seven points. Such division will keep her tilting toward the extremist wing of her party. In the general election this represents no change in her match-up with Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan.
In an election night email, winning supervisor candidate Rod Sullivan summarized the situation like this: “I sincerely hope Democrats are ready to work this fall, because Dems did not turn out Tuesday! Hopefully they care more about Congress than local races.” We shall see.
Journey Home
You must be logged in to post a comment.