Some days I don’t leave the Lake Macbride watershed while exercising. What we do here flows to the Iowa River and then downstream to the Gulf of Mexico.
Our personal goal is to contribute as few pollutants as possible to the watershed. We’re not the only ones who live, play and work here though.
The lake is polluted with nutrients from runoff. Evidence of surface algae and beach closings because of e. coli. contamination are standard. It didn’t used to be this way. Locals continue to use the lake for fishing, boating and other recreational activities. I stay out of the water and use the extensive trail system for bicycling, jogging, walking and soaking up Vitamin D.
Over the weekend I worked with the county Democratic party in a campaign sign distribution activity. Our home was one of five sign pick up locations throughout the county. Activity was slow. Most people continue to deal with the aftermath of the Aug. 10 derecho and with this week’s resumption of K-12 school. People are aware of the Nov. 3 election, and mostly know for whom they will vote for president, but not engaged in politics at any significant level.
I have a back up bicycle I will dig out and get ready to ride while I figure out what to do with the blown tire of my main one. The goal of exercise is to find four activities that produce a good sweat after 25-30 minutes and can be done easily from home. Bicycling and jogging I’ve written about. There is also a ski machine which serves for indoor and winter exercise. Need to come up with one more type with the ultimate goal of rotating exercise daily. I’m monitoring the condition of my feet, knees, hips and lungs as I venture into jogging for the first time since 2014. As I age I’m monitoring a lot more than that.
Next week I return to the clinic to review the newest panel of blood tests. Since my last one I’ve been exercising more, gave up beer and alcoholic drinks, and started a prescription to address elevated LDL cholesterol. I feel I’ve been doing the work. We’ll see if the results show it.
Life could be worse than living in the Macbride watershed. Whatever concerns we have about living here at least we don’t live in the COVID-infected metropolis. While I provided easy access to yard signs I wore my mask. I’ll be using my masks for a while.
I spent a couple of hours reading in a shaded folding chair in the garage. That will be the extent of our vacation this summer.
The weather was exceptionally nice on Saturday after the heat wave. I could hear chainsaws in the distance where neighbors were continuing derecho clean up. Mid afternoon a pickup truck pulling a trailer laden with logs drove by. There was fishing at the lake, including a raptor flying with its prey during my morning jog.
The reason I was jogging is my bicycle blew an inner tube on Thursday. I had a spare but it won’t take air. I also had spare tires but the bead is cracking on all of them. I plan to upgrade the quality of my tires but that will take a while because of an order backlog. That is, because I don’t want to travel to the COVID hot spot in the county seat, mail orders are backlogged until October.
I haven’t adjusted to retirement forced on me by the coronavirus pandemic. Maybe vacation no longer exists.
A breeze blew off the lake as I walked the mail to the box on the road. It didn’t rain last night and we really needed it.
The garden is getting close to the end although I’d like to get more peppers, tomatoes and greens before the drought destroys it. I water daily, yet a good soaking rain would be better.
There is almost no chance of precipitation in the next 24 hours although the cold front moved in as forecast. The path of hurricane Laura, now a depression, turned east at Cairo then is following the Ohio River valley across West Virginia and Virginia to the Atlantic coast. We missed any rain from that system.
It will be a day to catch up on outside work.
A couple from the COVID ravaged metropolis around the county seat stopped by our house to deliver campaign materials. We all wore masks. I gave them garden tomatoes. Progress toward the Nov. 3 election continues.
Our county has a high COVID-19 infection rate, the highest in the state. Iowa leads the United States in infection, which leads the world. Our local epidemiologist said what we are seeing “is unchecked spread without a statewide prevention plan.” The governor reiterated yesterday, “I’ve been very clear on that.” There will be no statewide mask-wearing mandate and only selected restrictions based on criteria that targets certain counties. The state universities brought students back this week. It was an unmitigated disaster at all three of them.
Our family had a chance to catch up on video conference yesterday. We noted that Florida has given up its position as worst in the coronavirus pandemic to Iowa. Not really good news for any of us. The government’s handling of the pandemic has been bad at the state and federal levels. Florida’s economy relies on tourism which the pandemic hit squarely. Just as I refrain from visiting the county metropolis, people are avoiding trips to Florida for vacation. I don’t know how the tourism and entertainment industry finds it way out of the pandemic despite the fact smart people are working to figure it out.
Except for my daily exercise I don’t plan to leave the property today. What I’m hearing is the pandemic will continue until at least Easter and maybe longer. We have five homemade masks and should make more.
I got my interest in politics from my late father. He canvassed our Davenport neighborhood for John F. Kennedy. Kennedy lost Iowa yet won the general election.
My first campaign was for Lyndon Johnson when I was 12. I delivered newspapers after school and one Saturday after paying my bill at the newspaper office I volunteered for the Democrats stuffing envelopes. They gave me a campaign button for my time. When Johnson won in the historic landslide I figured Democrats would win every future election like that.
I’m no longer 12.
In 2020 I’m voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominees for president and vice president. Prominent national Republicans announced they are planning to vote for Biden-Harris too. I have little idea who will win the election in Iowa or nationwide. To an extent what matters more than the Nov. 3 vote is what we as a nation will do about it.
Presently people can’t agree what our most pressing problems are. If we can’t agree on that, we will never solve any of them. Some days it seems difficult to have a reasonable discussion about things that matter in this country. Nevertheless, we must persist.
If people were more like we are in the Solon area we’d have a better chance at solving problems. I look back on my time on the Solon Senior Advocates board and believe we got good things done. It didn’t have a thing to do with our politics. As a society we need more of that.
I hope readers will vote on or before Nov. 3. Biden is building an inclusive tent where all are welcome. I invite you to join us. We are stronger together as a society when we participate in our democracy, regardless of for whom we vote.
~ Published in the Sept. 3, 2020 edition of the Solon Economist.
When Andrew Yang visited Iowa during the run up to the 2020 Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses he talked about Universal Basic Income and a Freedom Dividend. I thought he must be on crack.
What other politician would go for free money? Yang anticipated my response.
“You may be thinking, This will never happen,” he wrote in his campaign book The War on Normal People: The Truth about America’s Disappearing Jobs and why Universal Basic Income is our Future.“And if it did, wouldn’t it cause runaway inflation? Enable generations of wastrels?”
“In a future without jobs, people will need to be able to provide for themselves and their basic needs,” Yang wrote. “Eventually, the government will need to intervene in order to prevent widespread squalor, despair, and violence. The sooner the government acts, the more high-functioning our society will be.”
Along came the coronavirus.
The coronavirus pandemic brings into focus what scientists and others have been pointing out for a while: humanity is due for a new way of life. Any job or profession that interacts directly with people was devastated by the economic downturn as the virus spread throughout the world. People in the arts were hit particularly hard: live theatrical performers, dancers, musicians, amusement park operators, and people who support the arts were suddenly without work. Large corporations were hit as people used less shampoo and deodorant, less gasoline and diesel fuel, and reduced restaurant meals dramatically. When we add the impact of technology, automation and robotics to the mix, the number of jobs is expected to contract as global population increases. It seems unlikely these kinds of jobs will return to the way they were prior to the pandemic.
Much has been written about the global explosion of population and its consequences. This from Wikipedia is typical:
“The United Nations Population Division expects world population, currently at 7.8 billion, to level out at or soon after the end of the 21st Century at 10.9 billion, assuming a continuing decrease in the global average fertility rate from 2.5 births per woman during the 2015–2020 period to 1.9 in 2095–2100.”
How will all these people live? The society we adopted during the rise of agriculture and industrialization provided for humanity. It is also wrecking the planet to the extent we have entered a new geological era.
In their book The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, authors Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin suggest coping with human-made changes in society and our environment will lead us to a new way of life. How we will work in the near future is an open question highlighted by the massive unemployment resulting from the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Longer term, things have to change.
This has implications for capitalism particularly. Owners of capital have been on a consistent pursuit of investment opportunities that serve to increase capital. Where labor is part of the business, it serves the profitability of the owners.
When I worked in transportation and logistics I knew some Pennsylvania-based capitalists who sold gasoline at truck stops and convenience stores. When a new housing development appeared, they noticed, and believed if they built a nearby convenience store it would be successful. “A lot of rooftops there,” they would say. Their analysis was not wrong. They had facilities all over the northeast United States. At issue was creating a return on investment based on assumptions about cost of gasoline, labor, environmental compliance and consumer habits. Creating jobs wasn’t the priority and whatever they paid, it was at or slightly above the market labor rates.
“Most people don’t own very much,” wrote Lewis and Maslin. “In today’s world they are required to sell their labor in order to obtain what they need to live.” This has given rise to labor unions, structured pay and benefits packages, and working conditions conducive to profitability. “The owners of resources live on the profits they extract from the labor-sellers, and reinvest some of those profits in order to further increase productivity to produce more goods and services.” It’s a simple expression of the capitalism.
I don’t know what the future holds although some form of Universal Basic Income would address how we might get along with many more people and fewer of the kind of jobs to which we have become accustomed. Yang wasn’t wrong. Whatever today’s politics are, they must adapt to a future where human needs are cared for and wealth is more equitably distributed.
Hand Carding Wool – Image Public Domain from Wikimedia Commons
Every farm kid knows you should card wool before spinning it into yarn.
Joni Ernst’s campaign has spun some yarns about Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield and it’s clear they didn’t get things straightened out beforehand.
They don’t intend on getting the story right. They cast aspersions on their opponent’s character with disregard for facts and reasonable discourse.
“The American Dream is to own a home, which is why it’s so sad that while she was the President of Rottlund Homes, real estate executive Theresa Greenfield’s company was sued in Polk County for fraud, negligence and reneging on property purchase agreements,” said Joni Ernst spokesperson Melissa Deatsch. “For Greenfield, it’s always about looking out for herself. Once Rottlund Homes went bankrupt, Greenfield quickly jumped to Colby Interests and continued to put herself before others.”
Deatsch is saying: 1. Greenfield “quickly jumped” from Rottlund Homes to Colby Interests, and 2. she is implicitly guilty because Rottlund Homes was sued.
That’s a lot to swallow. Let straighten this the way we would card wool.
Let’s start with the LinkedIn profile Ernst wrote they accessed May 14, 2019. Here is the relevant part:
Greenfield LinkedIn Screen Print Aug. 26, 2020
Greenfield wrote she was unemployed from December 2011 until March 2012. She has been quite open about her experience with Rottlund Homes and how she lost her job during the real estate crash of the Great Recession. She told me earlier this year,
“From there I went into home building and eventually became the president of a small home building company in Iowa. That was fun through the recession, until it wasn’t any more fun. We sold the assets at the end of 2011. I became unemployed like a lot of people in the recession, then hired on with a commercial real estate company.”
For Deatsch to say Greenfield “quickly jumped” from job to job simply isn’t true. It was a recession caused in part by turbulence in the real estate business for Pete’s sake. With 100,000 Iowans out of work during the coronavirus pandemic Ernst is criticizing Greenfield for being laid off almost ten years ago? Now that Ernst is a U.S. Senator what is she doing for Iowans who are unemployed? That’s not a rhetorical question.
Let’s talk about the three lawsuits Ernst raised. It is part of business life that companies get sued. How responsible was Greenfield for these lawsuits? Ernst mentions people sued Rottlund Homes but says little else. The plaintiff is not always right and regular people know that. If you look at what happened, much of the basis for the lawsuits was out of Greenfield’s control and all three were resolved through legal process. What’s the beef?
James and Sheryl Moon: A deal between the Moons and Rottlund occurred in 2005, before Greenfield joined Rottlund Homes of Iowa in 2007. The Moons dismissed their case against Rottlund with prejudice and both parties waived claims for attorney fees.
The Villas at Berkshire Hills: The Villas at Berkshire Hills were built in the 1990s, well before Theresa Greenfield joined Rottlund Homes of Iowa in 2007. The Villas at Berkshire Hills Home Owners Association and Rottlund Homes of Iowa settled and the case was dismissed.
The Reserve Homeowners Association: The Reserve was built around 2005, and the neighborhood started to experience water pooling problems in 2006. Both occurred before Greenfield joined Rottlund Homes of Iowa in 2007. The Reserve Home Owners Association trial against Rottlund was cancelled because Rottlund was put into receivership in Minnesota to liquidate their assets and all pending litigation was stayed. The lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice after both parties agreed to dismiss the case.
Did Theresa Greenfield become president of Rottlund Homes of Iowa? Yes, she did, in 2007. Were there lawsuits? Yes, there were. Are those lawsuits long resolved? Yes, they are. How about we quit changing the subject by casting aspersions on Theresa Greenfield’s character and do something for the thousands of Iowans who are jobless because of the coronavirus pandemic?
While Joni Ernst claims to be fighting for Iowans, Monday’s attack shows how out-of-touch she is during the current and greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. The Ernst campaign is criticizing and casting aspersions on Theresa Greenfield’s character at a time when: over 100,000 Iowans are unemployed, Iowa had record unemployment of over 10 percent in April, the GOP-led Senate, where Ernst as part of leadership, failed to renew needed extended unemployment benefits, and earlier this year, Ernst sought lower unemployment payments in COVID relief.
A person can spin from the lock but who would want to wear the garment, all lumpy and itchy? While Joni Ernst remains a Senator she should quit distracting, get to work for Iowans, and quit trying to persuade us her lockspun is cashmere.
This week includes days where the heat index is forecast to be over 100 degrees. Combine that with an extended lack of rain and we’re entering a drought.
After experiencing the drought of 2012 it’s easier to gauge things. This drought hasn’t reached an epic level yet.
I water the garden sparingly seeking to increase the yield of tomatoes, hot peppers and kale. The plot damaged by the derecho still has the trunk of a locust tree laying across it. During a cooler spell I’ll remove the dead wood but for now the project is on hold.
The coronavirus pandemic is far from over. University students returned to the county seat over the weekend. By Monday afternoon a noted local epidemiologist declared, “We have a COVID-19 outbreak in Iowa City.” I’m glad I paid my property taxes last week so I have no reason to return to the county seat until the outbreak has resolved. If the outbreak continues until spring I’ll pay my taxes electronically. Yesterday’s official count of U.S. deaths from the pandemic was 176,809 humans.
As if these things are not enough, yesterday chief actuary of the Social Security Administration Stephen Goss wrote a letter to Senate Democrats in which he said if payroll taxes were eliminated Jan. 1, 2021 as the administration has proposed, “We estimate that Old Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund reserves would become permanently depleted by the middle of calendar year 2023,with no ability to pay benefits thereafter.” We knew Social Security had enough revenue and reserves in the current model to be viable until 2034. The disruption in the economy is impacting everyone including us. If Social Security ends I’d better start looking for a new financial model to sustain our lives.
Last night I viewed 30 minutes of the Republican National Convention. I made a point to find and view South Carolina Senator Tim Scott’s 11-minute speech this morning. Republicans have a narrative, one that’s rooted in a different reality than what I know. Republicans and Democrats don’t agree when it comes to defining our national life. That makes it nearly impossible to address any of the issues that confront us today.
The county studied the Silurian Aquifer a few years back and determined there was plenty of water to meet our long-term needs. As long as there is water we’ll be able to grow a garden and we’ll have enough to eat.
We paid off our home mortgage a while back so the only housing expenses are utilities, upkeep and taxes. We’ll have a place to live and equity against which to borrow.
As far as transportation, clothing, communications equipment, and other necessities go, we’ll be fine. This assumes there will be social stability, although that comes into question as the rich get richer leaving less for the rest of us. Social upheaval is not only possible, it’s more likely the further apart Republican and Democratic views of society become.
What different can be said about pizza? It’s ubiquitous.
In Iowa even convenience stores make and sell it in substantial quantities. Few foods are as personal and varied as this combination of crust, sauce and toppings.
In our kitchen we’ve gone through different iterations of pizza making and consumption. We began with home delivery or take out pizza made at a restaurant specializing in the pie. Pizza night was when we didn’t have to cook. After we joined the wholesale club we began buying frozen cheese pizzas, or “pizza blanks” as I called them. To these we added our own toppings, typically kalamata olives, diced onions and bell peppers in season. This method was less expensive than buying take out. The latest iteration is making our own, which is easy for a seasoned cook. Each of the three main elements has its variations.
Crust is hardest to get right and I’m not fully there. My bread-making recipe for a 12-inch pizza pie is basic: one cup of warm water, one teaspoon of active dry yeast, a tablespoon of granulated sugar and a dash of salt. Some oil or fat would add flavor and texture but we are trying to reduce the amount of fat in our diet so I leave it out.
Flour is important. Our pantry standard is 100 percent organic all purpose wheat flour. Before I try other flour types I want to get this one right. I don’t use a specific measurement but gauge the wetness and elasticity of the dough while I’m making it to determine when I’ve added enough flour. It took a while to gain this skill without making too dry a dough.
The dough-making process is to add the water to a mixing bowl then stir in the yeast, sugar and salt. Add a quarter cup of flour and mix together. Prepare a bowl in which to let the dough rise in the oven. We use a cooking spray to make it easier to get the dough out of the bowl after it has risen. Once the raising bowl is ready, add flour until the dough is workable but neither too wet nor too dry. Turn it out on a floured counter and knead it, adding more flour until the texture and dampness is just right. Place it in the raising bowl and cover it with a towel in a warm oven. To reach desired oven temperature I turn it on at the lowest setting then turn it off before I put the dough in to rise. I let it rise for about an hour or until it has doubled in size. When it’s ready I knead it to bring it together then shape the crust on a pizza paddle lined with parchment paper sprayed with cooking spray. It is optional to brush on extra virgin olive oil as a moisture barrier.
I make two kinds of pizza sauce: tomato sauce and cheese sauce. The photo above shows a pizza made with cheese sauce. I have been experimenting with this and haven’t found the right combination of ingredients. This one used ricotta cheese mixed with sliced fresh basil and diced garlic scapes. If the ricotta is too dry to mix or spread, add a tablespoon of milk or cream to make it more pliable. Then spread it evenly on the crust.
Few things are better for pizza sauce than a couple of peeled Roma tomatoes crushed with a fork and drained, mixed with fresh basil and minced garlic. That’s the sauce. When tomatoes are not in season a prepared tomato sauce, or drained, canned tomatoes whizzed in a blender with garlic and basil will serve. The key here is to get as much moisture out of the tomatoes before spreading the sauce on the pizza crust.
Toppings are more about philosophy than ingredients. Depending on what kind of sauce you have, you don’t need a lot of toppings. You want to be able to see and taste the toppings so I use a couple with a final dusting of Parmesan cheese. Spend some time evenly spacing toppings on the pizza. Don’t use too many. It adds eye-appeal which enhances the overall experience.
Most times I top pizza with mozzarella cheese when it is a tomato sauce. I like fresh mozzarella best, although grated hard mozzarella provides a similar flavor and texture after baking. We almost always add diced onions, sliced kalamata olives or bell peppers. If there are fresh tomatoes we slice them thinly and let them drain before adding them to the pizza. Caramelized onions are a great topping. If one can tolerate hot peppers, thinly sliced jalapeno or Serrano peppers are great. Because our pantry has many kinds of dried chili peppers I add them before baking if diners can tolerate the heat. If they can’t, red pepper flakes can be shaken on before serving.
To bake the pizza I place four unglazed floor tiles on a rack at the lowest setting. I heat the oven as hot as it will get using the 500 degree setting. When the oven reaches temperature or close to it, I slide the pizza on the parchment paper on the tiles and close the door. I set my timer for ten minutes and don’t open the oven until then. It’s usually done at ten minutes.
I leave the pizza on a cooling rack for a couple of minutes before cutting and serving to enable it to come together.
Would love to hear your comments about pizza making in your kitchen. Thanks for reading.
Vice President Joe Biden in Cedar Rapids, May 2010.
In 1964 I had thoughts about politics.
One Saturday morning, after riding the city bus downtown to pay my newspaper bill, a friend and I stopped at the Democratic office to stuff envelopes in exchange for an LBJ campaign button. The same day, on a lark, we went to the nearby Republican office and did the same for a Goldwater button. Our family was Democratic yet I must have felt there was a choice about politics.
When Johnson won the election in a landslide I figured Democrats would prevail in all future elections. I was 12 years old.
Being a newspaper carrier was a formative experience. It taught me a lot about people, that some were honest and others would try to bilk me out of the cost of their subscription. When I threatened to stop deliveries for non-payment people would blame me when they pleaded with my supervisor to continue the paper.
People were mostly home when I made collections. When they weren’t I made a special trip later in the week. I got to know everyone on my route: who had a barking dog, who kept their yard tidy, who rented and who didn’t. Women were easier to deal with than men. A majority of households took the newspaper.
The street in front of our house dead-ended at a woods near the end of my route. Collecting from that house meant avoiding a dog and finding my way down a long driveway to the old farm house where it was hit or miss someone would be around. Collections taught me a lot about margins in a small business. If you didn’t collect, every penny came out of the margin. Today the street runs through and the farmhouse is long gone.
The years, especially the Ronald Reagan administration, removed any doubt I’m a Democrat. I’m proud to be a Democrat. Our days of landslide victories like 1964 are over so there is work to do in the remaining days before the Nov. 3 election. I plan to vote for the Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They are good people. It requires good people to effectively govern.
I’ve been in enough political campaigns to know time slips away if one doesn’t have a plan to support the election. I made a list of 12 things to do. It ranges from easy — like wearing a campaign button or t-shirt in public and installing an auto bumper sticker — to working with the campaigns to contact voters. We’re on a fixed budget yet we’ll find a way to spare a few dollars for our candidates. I’ve already been working the plan.
Why Biden – Harris? They are our party’s nominees. In addition to being good people, they have a coherent plan to address the coronavirus pandemic and the economic collapse it brought. There’s plenty more but unless we get through the pandemic and have a chance at restoring some of our previous life, our lives will become a worsening hellscape. Already it is clear there is no going back to how it used to be before the pandemic.
My life has been about people: getting to know them, working with them in a business environment, and doing things together because it is fun and rewarding. All that is on the line in the election because of the pandemic.
Yesterday CNN reported there is an asteroid heading toward Earth to arrive at the time of the election. The scientists at NASA say the chance of it hitting us is just 0.41 percent. The incumbent president has more chance of being re-elected than that. It’s time to get to work to reduce his chances to closer to zero.
The election will be here before we know it, the results known. In the meanwhile I’ll continue living — cleaning up after the derecho, conserving financial resources, learning how to cook from a kitchen garden, and doing things with people how and when I can. I’ll continue to strive to be a better writer and a decent human being. In 2020 preserving those abilities means supporting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for president and vice president. That’s what I plan to do.
Journey Home 
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