Tag Archives: #RealLife

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Saturday morning

Polar Bear, a 125 to 150 lb male Great Pyrenees tried to move in with us this past spring, but he had a human of his own who lived ¾ mile away. We have two other dogs, and Bear just loved to come and visit them.

We first met Bear when our younger daughter was taking our two for a walk through the fields, down toward the river, and Bear, who was wandering through the fields himself, saw them and trotted up to join them. He’s so big that you don’t have to bend down to pet him; his head is high enough that it’s right at your hand when he’s walking beside you.

He also leans against your hip when he’s walking with you!

Sadly, Bear was killed when he was hit by a car. He usually walked back to his own home, because his human didn’t want us to feed him, or he’d stay with us forever, through the fields, but for whatever reason he had, he chose to walk down the road and was struck. But Polar Bear quickly made us love Great Pyrenees dogs!

Cotton Bear

A lady in Boston, Kentucky, is selling her farm, and she has to rehome her Great Pyrenees, Cotton. We met Cotton a month and a half ago, and committed to take him, but we had to wait until now, because we were already fostering another dog. That dog has now returned to his human, so SSG Pico and I are driving to Boston Saturday morning to pick up Cotton Bear. He’s 5¾ years old, a neutered male, and he seems great, but it might be difficult rehoming a dog that old.

Pamela, his human, was having to keep him in a kennel on her farm, and in her house, because she has a neighbor who might well be described as the slang term for the rectum, so it’s good that we’re getting him out of there. Pamela told me that she just sold her farm, so we’re heading there at just the right time; I just wish we could have brought him home earlier.

We have a fenced-in yard of maybe half an acre, plus 7½ acres more in which he can roam and play, though we’ll keep him inside the fence until he learns that this is his new home. Wish us luck!

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I make a confession

Robert Stacy McCain’s article Math Teacher Goes Berserk brought to mind some silliness in which I engaged as a seventh grader.

Just a typical day in a Wisconsin school:

Brenda Poulos remembers working in Kenosha last Friday when she received a series of texts from her son.

“I know he’s not supposed to use his phone in school, so the fact that he texted me was already, something’s up right,” Poulos said. “He said, ‘Mom, something’s going on at school. They fired our teacher and something bad is going on.”

Poulos’ son, Ethan, is a seventh-grade student at John Long Elementary. He told WISN 12 News he was in math class on Friday [May 12] when his teacher became upset and started making threats after discovering a swastika drawn in a notebook.

“Five seconds later, he went on this ramble about how this was a disgrace to his people and how he wanted to scorch Earth on us and how he was apparently going to cause pain on all our families,” Ethan said. “How he’d send his daughter to our house with a baseball bat and that he had 17 guns and he wasn’t afraid to use them.”

The teacher in question, David Schroeder, 46, of Grafton, Wisconsin, was charged with making terroristic threats. Under Wisconsin §947.019, if that is with what the distinguished Mr Schroeder has been charged, it is a Class I felony. Under §939.50, a Class I felony carries a penalty of a maximum $10,000 fine and up to 42 moths imprisonment.

If this is Mr Schroeder’s first offense, he would probably not get the maximum, but would be offered a plea deal: three years probation, and a $5,000 fine. The most important part of that would be that the felony conviction would mean the revocation of his teaching certificate, and the felony conviction would bar him from ever owning a firearm.

According to the complaint, Schroeder told the students that he was Jewish, that “all Jews have guns and that he had 17 guns in his basement and that he would ‘F’ them up.”

At that point, Mr McCain started talking about what middle school boys sometimes do:

(I)f drawing swastikas in your notebook was some kind of human-rights violation, basically every kid in my childhood schools would have been under investigation. Our fathers’ generation had fought World War II, which was a subject of lots of TV shows (e.g., Combat!) and movies (e.g., The Longest Day) that we watched as kids, so we were fairly saturated with that stuff about fighting the “Krauts” (as the Germans were habitually referred to in the G.I. slang dialogue of those old movies). Because a swastika is a simple thing to draw (as opposed to say, a Stuka dive bomber or a Tiger tank), basically every schoolboy drew them, in notebooks, on desks, etc. It had no deeper meaning in our minds. Certainly the boys who drew swastikas — and I mean, literally every boy did, back in the 1960s and ’70s — did not intend it as signifying support for totalitarianism, or sympathy toward Germany, least of all Jew-hating. It was like drawing Batman (another favorite schoolboy doodle) or hot rods, just stuff that boys did, without any political intent. But that was long ago, in what may now be viewed as a Golden Age of political incorrectness, when a popular comedy on TV was Hogan Heroes, with the Nazis played for laughs.

Swastika on apartment building at corner of Rose Street and Lyndhurst Place, in Lexington, Kentucky. This building predates the Nazis. Photo by DRP, click to enlarge.

As far as I can recall — and my memory is pretty good — I never drew swastikas in my notebooks or anywhere else; that just wasn’t my thing, and World War II really wasn’t my interest. But here is where I need to confess my very unintentional sin.

Between late August of 1965 and early June of 1967, I attended the seventh and eight grades at Mt Sterling, Kentucky, Junior High School, in what was then the Harrison Avenue Building. Built sometime around 1900, it was a two-story brick building with somewhere around 12-foot high ceilings and big, tall windows. With no air conditioning, Southern school buildings used the trick of tall windows, in which the upper sash could be lowered a bit, and the lower sash raised, to get natural air circulation, with the warmer air escaping through the upper opening and — hopefully! — cooler air entering.

I had Mrs McCarren for English, and Mr Hawkins for history back then. Mrs McCarren was forever assigning some of the other boys, and me, sentences, to write “I won’t talk” 200 times for talking out of turn in class, something I tried to amuse myself with by including an occasional “I’ll shut up” and, with a very sharp pencil, I could get all 200 of them in the blank area at the top of otherwise blue-ruled notebook paper.

But there was something else. Those very tall windows also had very tall, buff-colored roll-down shades, and as tall as the shades were, they also had very long thin, white draw cords. Being a typical 12-to-14-year-old boy, my hands did keep busy, and, seated next to the windows, I frequently made them into hangman’s nooses.

Today? OMG, it would be straight to the principal’s office, but, in the seventh and eights grades, nobody cared, or at least I didn’t think that anybody cared.

The Mt Sterling school system had recently integrated, during my sixth-grade year, after the segregated, black school, DuBois, mysteriously burned to the ground just before school started that year. An integration plan was already in the works, moving four, non-consecutive grades per year over three years, to the regular school system, but the fire forced immediate, total integration. Maybe some of it escaped me, but I really don’t recall any problems with integration. Then again, I wasn’t the most popular kid around, and maybe some other families did have more problems with it, but if so, I was unaware of them.

And there was one other thing of which I was unaware. To me, a hangman’s noose was just something I saw on television, in the Westerns which made up so much of the evening fare. I was unaware that a hangman’s noose might somehow symbolize lynchings.

Did Mr Hawkins, who was black, take offense at those nooses? He had come over from the DuBois school, where (I think) he had been the principal, but if anyone took offense, I never heard about it, nor did anyone ever mention to me what those nooses could mean. The nooses were frequently undone the following school day, but I do not know by whom.

Mr Schroeder, however, did get upset, over things done by kids mostly meaninglessly. Will the kids continue, as a form of rebellion, something junior high and high school boys do? I have no way of knowing, but I do know one thing: MR Schroeder’s overreaction has cost him his job, at the very least, and might well cost him his profession and his right to keep and bear arms.

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I love a green lawn!

This might be a post more suited for The Pirate’s Cove, and I did notify William Teach about the article, but with my nice, brilliantly green lawn, and the whole farm, I just had to write something!

The Suburban Lawn Will Never Be the Same

Homeowners from Las Vegas to Sydney are swapping real grass for artificial turf as climate change forever alters what a normal yard looks and smells like.

By Brian Eckhouse and Siobhan Wagner | Friday, July 8, 2022

The lawn part of the farm. I planted all of the trees myself, and did the brick sidewalk as well.

Judy Dunn moved to her home in the Las Vegas suburbs from Washington state in late 1998, when there was little concern about water levels at nearby lakes. Dunn could nurture the verdant lawn of her dreams in a valley of cacti and sand that developers had recast as an oasis. But then a drought arrived and never left, and now local agencies are fining more residents for wasting water.

For Dunn, the final straw arrived last summer. Lake Mead, historically America’s largest reservoir, plunged to its lowest level since 1937 and the first-ever water cuts were ordered on a Colorado River system that benefits about 40 million people including Dunn. “If we don’t start saving water, we’re not going to have any,” says the 76-year-old.

So, Dunn opted to install an artificial lawn, a choice being made by more and more residents of Southern Nevada—one of the many places that’s getting drier as the planet warms. For some, it’s the cash-for-grass rebates being offered by local water agencies. For others, it’s the realization that the classic lawn is increasingly unsustainable in a time of megadrought. And then there are the residents coaxed into the shift by the water notices or fines.

Well, Las Vegas is in, you know, the desert, with average daily high temperatures reaching 95º F from June 3rd through September 16th, and 105º on July 13th. You move to Vegas, and you get the desert, and desert weather, and desert rainfall.

Beyond the drainage ditch and its too-high weeds is the corn field, another brilliant green part of the farm

For water suppliers worldwide, climate change is raising the stakes. Italy in July declared a state of emergency as water levels in its largest river dropped to the lowest in 70 years. The US Southwest is suffering through the worst drought in over a century. Within the next 30 years, droughts may impact three quarters of the world’s population. While plastic turf poses its own climate challenges, it’s increasingly seen as a viable alternative to real green yards that devour precious water. . . . .

A couple of decades ago, artificial turf was often a thin carpet atop a hard surface—rough on the knees as well as the eyes. Athletes playing on it complained that it wore their legs out. But as the product improved, so did homeowners’ interest. From the US to the UK, artificial grass retailers have seen sales tick up during pandemic lockdowns, when housebound property owners put their money toward home improvements. Indeed, Google Trends shows a worldwide surge in searches for “artificial grass” during the middle of 2020.

I don’t know if it’s still there, because the last time I saw it was the late 1980s, but Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company had, outside their public office, which was not inside the shipyard’s gates, some integrally-colored green concrete where grass would have been expected, by their normal sidewalks! Of course, Newport News got plenty of rain, but this way, the shipyard didn’t have to maintain the grass!

Me? I live in the Bluegrass State, and I’ve got to love all of the rain we get!

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The left just don’t think you live or want to live properly Me? I think that we live the best way possible!

Our farm in winter. Click to enlarge.

In the 51 years since I left my mother’s house, I have lived in apartments, rented single family homes, an owned half-duplex, an owned single family home, and now, finally, an owned farmhouse on actual farmland. We have exactly one neighboring home, about 100 yards away, as our houses are the only two on a country road down which the Post Office will not deliver, and let me tell you: this is the best way to live. My real neighbors are the deer and opossums, our dogs and cats and chickens, and the unspoiled vista that is our view from our northwest facing screened-in porch.

So it was with some amusement that I read how Jason Peasley thinks we ought to all live in apartment buildings: Continue reading →

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Morbid math

The flood waters are finally starting to drop. The crest was 30.15 feet, which did not bring it close to our house, so we’re fine, if still stranded; the only road out is still underwater.

The highest water ever recorded, the 41.00 feet (guesstimated, since the river gauge failed), got into the crawlspace of our home last March, and into the garage, but did not get into our house itself.

As of 9:10 AM EST, the Philadelphia Police Department has not updated its Current Crime Statistics page; the image to the left, on which you can click to enlarge, is a screen capture. Since the page is supposed to be updated “during normal business hours, Monday through Friday,” I have to wonder what has happened. Perhaps the responsible person is taking his New Year’s Day holiday today?

The homicide number for 2021 is still stuck on 559, even though The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that “at least 560 people in Philadelphia were murdered, a bigger tally than in more heavily populated cities including New York and Los Angeles”. If the homicide total is 560, using Philly’s 2020 census figure of 1,603,797, the homicide rate works out to 34.92 per 100,000 population, and a couple more increase it only marginally.

The Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, which claims to be accurate through the end of the year, stated that there had been 2,327 recorded shootings in the City of Brotherly Love, 486 of which were fatal, and 1,841 in which the victim survived. That means that the gang bangers are pretty poor shots, given that only 20.89% of attempted murders by gunfire were successful, but that’s an ‘improvement’ on the 18.44% success rate in 2020.[1]414 homicides by shooting, out of 2,245 total shootings. Yeah, I know: my math is kind of morbid sometimes.

We have previously reported that KSDK, Channel 5, the NBC affiliate station in St Louis, crowed about the Gateway City having reduced its homicide numbers back to “pre-pandemic levels.”

Experts said the 2020 spike in violence was driven largely by the pandemic and high tensions following civil unrest. More lock downs, people losing jobs and strained relationships between communities and law enforcement all led to more murders University of Missouri – St. Louis Criminology Professor Richard Rosenfeld said.

Yet, if it was the COVID-19 pandemic — and I hate the word pandemic — and the killing of George Floyd, then why did shootings increase in Philadelphia by 3.65%, and total homicides by 12.22%?

We noted that the homicide numbers in Philly had increased by 15.61% since it became apparent that Joe Biden had defeated President Trump in the election. Why, it’s almost as though the evil reich wing Mr Trump had nothing to do with the homicide rates!

Philadelphia is still plagued by the same government, of Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, District Attorney Larry Krasner, a George Soros-funded stooge more interested in slapping down the police than prosecuting criminals, and the appropriately-named Police Commissioner, Danielle Outlaw, a bureaucrat appointee of Mr Kenney’s, who couldn’t lead a two-car parade. Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office on January 7, 1952, when Harry Truman was President, and George VI was still King of England. It has been three generations since Philly was led by a Republican!

George Floyd died a year and a half ago, and Donald Trump left the White House 348 days ago. The city leadership surrendered to the mob, and the coronavirus panic and shutdowns did not slow down the rate of violent crime in the city.

That was almost two years ago, and since then we’ve had vaccines, no cost vaccines, against the virus, and many — certainly not all in Philly — of the pandemic restrictions lifted, yet the rate of killing in Philly has only increased. At some point, maybe even leftists ought to be asking why the policies of an unbroken for generations Democratic leadership in Philadelphia haven’t worked.
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Updated: 11:55 AM EST

It looks like someone has been trying to update the Current Crime Statistics page, but just isn’t very good at it. It now shows 562 homicides for 2021, which puts the homicide rate above 35, at 35.04 per 100,000 population.

References

References
↑1 414 homicides by shooting, out of 2,245 total shootings.
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High water!

SSG Pico bought tickets for her and me to see the Oakland — never Las Vegas! — Raiders play the Baltimore Indianapolis Colts today, but the one road in or out from our farm is underwater. Our place isn’t in any danger; even the record flood of a guesstimated 41.00-foot crest didn’t get in the house, though it did get in the garage and crawlspace.

But we have sparktricity, propane, food, water and internet, so life is still good.

There has been some flooding damage in Madison County, but we don’t live in Madison.

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Thank the Lord for fossil fuels!

During our first winter back in the Bluegrass State, we had only electric heat. When what the Weather Channel called Winter Storm Hunter hit, we lost sparktricity . . . for 4½ days. My wife went to stay with our daughter, in Lexington, but I had to stay on the farm to take care of the critters.

The coldest it got in the house was 38º F!

But it sure wasn’t pleasant. While the water was still on, there was no hot water. There was just enough warm water that first morning to take a quick, sort-of OK shower, but that was it.

Our house is an eastern Kentucky fixer-upper, and the kitchen was the first thing to be redone. Mrs Pico wanted a gas range, and that was planned all along. We knew our electric water heater was near the end of its service life, so we planned on replacing that with gas as well. Then, remembering the unheated house, we decided to add a gas fireplace as well. The fan won’t work without electricity, and while the range top will work, the oven will not.

So, will we lose power again?

It’s a little hard to see the county lines, in the red area, but that’s where we are, kind of in between the Berea and Jackson city names.

At any rate, what my, sadly, late, best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal is telling me that we’re due for another ice storm. The forecast is a bit iffy: we could get snow as well as freezing rain, probably light tomorrow morning but getting worst Wednesday afternoon.

Alas! Mrs Pico has to work Thursday and Friday, and as a hospital nurse there’s no ‘work from home’ for her. My F-150 does have four-wheel drive, but four-wheel drive works far better in snow than it does on ice; nothing works well on ice. The county has pretreated the road, and while we live in relatively flat river-bottom farmland, there are a couple of not-nice places on the way to the hospital.

At any rate, I have asked William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove to watch this site, in case I’m out of communication for a few days.

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He’s out of office now, but #TrumpDerangementSyndrome still rules the minds of so many

Me, snowblowing the front sidewalk in Jim Thorpe, PA, December 29, 2012. Click to enlarge.

When I lived in the Keystone State, my neighbor, Pete, and I used to clear the snow from sidewalks down the entire block. Why? Well, the home to my right was unoccupied for a couple years, and the next two down were occupied by people far more elderly than me. (I was 63 when we moved away.; Pete was in his fifties.)

If it was only a couple of inches of snow, I’d shovel. More than that, and I’d use the snowblower.

I do not know for whom my block neighbors voted. President Trump carried Carbon County in both elections, 65.13% to 31.05% in 2016, and 65.37% to 33.34% in 2020, so the odds are that they voted the right way, but I have no way of knowing for certain. All that I knew, at the time, was that the snow needed to be removed, even though I’m an evil reich-wing conservative, and President Trump was in office my last winter there!.

“Journalist” Virginia Hefferman, however, had a problem with supporters of President Trump being kind to her. Hat tip to William Teach for the article.

Column: What can you do about the Trumpites next door?

By Virginia Heffernan | February 5, 2021 | 3:00 AM PST

Virginia Heffernan

Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.

How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?

Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks — and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro — but how much thanks?

These neighbors are staunch partisans of blue lives, and there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in neighborhood.

This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing.

Well, maybe that’s the problem: perhaps Miss Heffernan is so used to the discourtesies of city life, that she just can’t comprehend that life in a small town or rural area is different. One of the verses in Rocky Top goes:

I’ve had years of cramped-up city life
Trapped like a duck in a pen
All I know is it’s a pity life
Can’t be simple again.

When Pete and I took care of our neighbors’ sidewalks, we weren’t asking for money. We just did it because it needed to be done, and we were in better shape than some of the other people living there.

Maybe it’s like what Eddie Murphy discovered in that old “Saturday Night Live” sketch “White Like Me.” He goes undercover in white makeup and finds that when white people are among their own, they pop free champagne and live the high life. As Murphy puts it: “Slowly I began to realize that when white people are alone, they give things to each other. For free.”

Well, one thing about Miss Heffernan’s paragraph is correct: the people for whom we cleaned the sidewalks were all white. Jim Thorpe is 95.7% non-Hispanic white, with another 2.35% Hispanic white. But had any of my neighbors been black, I wouldn’t have somehow just skipped doing their sidewalks and driveways.

Miss Heffernan continues with a few paragraphs about how ‘nice’ Hezbollah are to the people they like, and even how ‘polite’ the Nazis were to people they liked in Occupied France.

So when I accept generosity from my pandemic neighbors, acknowledging the legitimate kindness with a wave or a plate of cookies, am I also sealing us in as fellow travelers who are very polis to each other but not so much to “them”?

Loving your neighbor is evidently much easier when your neighborhood is full of people just like you.

Donald Trump lives on, living rent free in the heads of the left

Really? Her statement assumes that we wouldn’t be polite to neighbors who weren’t just like us.

The other side of my duplex had a sort of checkered history. In 2010, it was bought by a young lesbian couple from Philadelphia, as a vacation home. People who know me know that I strongly believe the Biblical law concerning homosexuality, but, shockingly enough, I didn’t picket their house, I didn’t give them the stink-eye when I saw them, didn’t treat them anything other than politely.[1]On July 4, 2010, I needed to paint the fence between our two yards, something which involved me going into their back yard. When I knocked on the door, to ask permission, with white paint obvious on … Continue reading

What do we do about the Trumpites around us? Like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who spoke eloquently this week about her terrifying experience during the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Americans are expected to forgive and forget before we’ve even stitched up our wounds. Or gotten our vaccines against the pandemic that former President Trump utterly failed to mitigate.

Did she mean the “terrifying experience” about which Miss Ocasio-Cortez lied? The one in which she was in an entirely different building?

My neighbors supported a man who showed near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans. They kept him in business with their support.

But the plowing.

On Jan. 6, after the insurrection, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) issued an aw-shucks plea for all Americans to love their neighbors. The United States, he said, “isn’t Hatfields and McCoys, this blood feud forever.” And, he added, “You can’t hate someone who shovels your driveway.”

At the time, I seethed; the Capitol had just been desecrated. But maybe my neighbor heard Sasse and was determined to make a bid for reconciliation.

Well, who knows if her neighbors heard what Senator Sasse said? It seems that Miss Heffernan heard it, but really, really, really wants to ignore it.

So here’s my response to my plowed driveway, for now. Politely, but not profusely, I’ll acknowledge the Sassian move. With a wave and a thanks, a minimal start on building back trust. I’m not ready to knock on the door with a covered dish yet.

I also can’t give my neighbors absolution; it’s not mine to give. Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth. To pretend it is would be to lie, and they probably aren’t looking for absolution anyway.

Bitter much? Miss Heffernan’s article was published on February 5th, after President Trump lost his bid for re-election, and after he left office, yet she is still tremendously pissed off that her neighbors supported, and presumably voted for, Mr Trump, so bitter than she cannot just accept a neighborly act as being, well, neighborly!

But I can offer a standing invitation to make amends. Not with a snowplow but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed. Only when we work shoulder to shoulder to repair the damage of the last four years will we even begin to dig out of this storm.

So, she is considering ‘thanking’ her neighbors by lecturing to them that they were oh-so-wrong to have supported President Trump, and she thinks that will somehow get them to see everything her way, and move into sweetness and light?

It never seems to occur to her that her Trump-supporting neighbors might see the next four years as what will lead to damage, not the previous four.

Her neighbors do something nice for her, and her proposed response is to piss on their legs, but then politely tell them that it’s just raining. Her neighbors just did something nice for her, and she thinks she should take them some nice brownies . . . made with Ex-lax.

Conservatives have called it #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, and Miss Heffernan certainly seems to have it. Donald Trump is gone now, out of office, and unlikely to ever return; even if he wants to run again in 2024, he’ll be 78 years old.

But Mr Trump lives on, living rent free in the heads of the left. The Democrats have gone ahead and impeached a President who is already out of office, and pushing ahead even while knowing that there will not be enough votes to convict him. The Democrats are calling him the first twice-impeached President; it won’t be long before he will be the first twice acquitted President.

References

References
↑1 On July 4, 2010, I needed to paint the fence between our two yards, something which involved me going into their back yard. When I knocked on the door, to ask permission, with white paint obvious on me, one of them answered, herself holding a roller with red paint. She said, “Well, you have white, I have red, maybe we can go paint Jen blue.” I knew she was joking, as they were but half my age, but I was so surprised that I mumbled something that essentially said no.