Isn't it too early for breakfast?

April Showers

Do April snow showers bring May flowers? Or make us sour. I've put in my order for sunshine and warmth. Snow is moisture. So, even though it's a bit of a downer when snow shows up in April, we know summer will come eventually. I do remember another April, April 20th to be exact. My husband was gone, staying with his mom who had had an operation, and my son and I were handling the lambing. We had a much larger flock then, about 150 ewes, all crammed into the shed barn, and overnight the thermometer dropped to -20, the wind kicked up and snow was blowing in. Snow showers that melt quickly? I'll take them any time.

 

Bummed Out Over the 4R's

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. We've left Iraq to the Iraqis, but it seems as though it's still a mess. We've left Afghanistan to the Afghanis, but it seems as though it's still a mess. And now Russia and the US are rattling sabres over Crimea, both sides strutting armed forces around its borders, threatening dire consequences.

And in the midst of all this rhetoric the world is in turmoil - civil wars, religious wars, territorial wars, ethnic wars, drought, starvation, weather disasters, nuclear meltdowns, over-population, unemployment. Many people are unable to obtain the basic necessities of life - food, shelter, clothing, potable water. And then there's global warming....

This is an overwhelming picture in which to remain hopeful and positive about the future of our planet.

We hear about the tipping point, the point of no return, the point in time at which we are essentially doomed. We must act now say the pundits of global warming, before it's too late! On the other side of the coin there are an astonishing number of people in the world who deny the science. Global warming is not real, they say, or if it is real it's just a natural cycle and humankind has no culpability.

There are those who are doing everything they can on a personal level in order to lessen their environmental footprint. There are responsible industries attempting to clean-up their act. There are new technologies being developed that help to lessen emissions and reduce our dependance on oil. Great. But there are millions, perhaps billions, who are doing nothing at all. And then there is the institution of war.

Humankind has always been at war and we've gotten very good at it. We have all the usual weapons of war - planes, ships, guns, bombs, IED's, soldiers - add to this list missiles, drones, satellite imagery, sophisticated secret services and spy networks, the internet.... Will the human race ever realize that nothing is solved by war? Or do we even care about solving anything? Do we choose sides in a conflicts for ideology or for economy?

Why is this titled "Bummed Out About the 4R's"? Here's just a few bits of info from a web site I happened upon called Environmentalists against War - Stop the war against the planet and all it's peoples.  If you're interested in the site, though it's a bit of a reality check and a downer, you can find it at http://www.envirosagainstwar.org/index.php.

GPM — Gallons per Mile. Because the military’s tanks, planes and ships burn fuel at such intense rates, it becomes impractical to talk about consumption in "miles per gallon." Military fuel use is, instead, tabulated in "gallons-per-mile," "gallons-per-minute," and "barrels-per-hour."

A B-52 bomber gulps down 86 barrels per hour. F-4 Phantom fighter/bombers devour 40 barrels per hour. At peak thrust, F-15 fighters burn 25 gallons per minute. An F-16 jet on a training mission ignites more fuel in a single hour than the average car owner consumes in two years.

The biggest gas-hogs in the Pentagon’s arsenal are the Navy’s non-nuclear aircraft carriers that burn 134 barrels per hour and battleships which consume 68 barrels per hour. At its top speed of 25 knots, the USS Independence (a 1070-foot-long aircraft carrier with 4.1 acres of flight deck and a crew of 2300) consumes 150,000 gallons of fuel a day ... Simply "'standing by' in the Gulf, the carrier must still consume oil at a voracious pace in order to purify 380,000 gallons of fresh water daily and produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of a city of 40,000 people.

Under standard conditions the Army’s M-1 Abrams tank gets eight gallons per mile. In the heat of battle, however, the M-1 Abrams tank can eat up seven barrels — 252 gallons (based on 36 British Imperial gallons per barrel) — per hour.


As long as we continue to have wars, how can we hope to make even a dent in the process of cleaning up our environment, of slowing global warming rather than accelerating it?

And here I am - faithfully recycling, reusing, reducing, rethinking. How can such small gestures begin to address such a huge problem? No wonder I feel bummed out.

Jill of All Trades

Jill of all Trades

I got married a long time ago and soon realized the white picket fence and two and a half kids was not likely to be my route in life. But, never in all of my thoughts of a possible future, never did I even conceive of the idea that one of my wifely duties would include fly sucking!

Having moved from Vancouver to a homestead in central Alberta, I learned to do a myriad of tasks I had never done before - things like hauling water, gardening, canning, chopping wood, butchering rabbits, even picking maggots from a wounded ewe. And I took these new life lessons more or less in stride as each surfaced into my sphere of existence. But fly sucking! Nope, not taking that in stride at all.

I just plain hate flies. In the fall of every year they slither into the house and make their home in every crack and cranny, then decorate all the windows with copious quantities of fly snot. Now I would never have thought of flies as the slithering type, but how else could you describe a critter that can apparently flatten itself paper thin and crawl around both screen and window frames seeking the household's interior warmth? I swear there are at least 100 of them buzzing away on every window each and every time I get out my fly sucking machine (known to most folks as a vacuum cleaner). Sometimes as often as three times a day I drag out my weapon of choice and suck away one window at a time till they're gone, at least for awhile. Then, like black magic, they reappear, buzzing, gliding, crapping! Filthy little beasts! Arrrggggh!

So ladies, beware of what your future may bring? If you live in the country, especially if your barnyard is close by and your house is not super air-tight, you had best be prepared to go on the attack every fall until freeze-up and every time the thermometer rises above freezing all winter long.

Maybe when the kids are out of school and you decide to go out to work to help out with their college fees, well, along with all the other skills you've acquired over the years, fly elimination technician may complete the education portion of your résumé! No doubt about it, you are most definitely a "Jill of all Trades"!

Islands of Plastic

​ Islands of Plastic

The search for the missing Malaysian plane, which we are hearing very little about now that the black box has quit pinging, has generated some disturbing photographs bringing to light a completely different reality - huge islands of plastic debris floating like enormous man-made lily pads on the ocean's surface. Then, just a few days ago I saw a video on Facebook that was equally disturbing, dead birds on Midway Island, far from any land mass, which, when dissected, revealed that a large part of their diet consisted of plastic bottle caps and other small bits of plastic junk. What in the world are we doing... to our oceans, to our wildlife, to our environment? When will we take responsibility for our overuse of non-biodegradable materials? Will we ever trade our conveniences for good stewardship of our only planet?

   

I have long been appalled at the amount of over-packaging we in North America seem to be hooked on. We can't buy a bag of cookies, we must have each cookie in a separate baggy and, along with an individual fruit cup, we pop them into a lunch box for the kids. Simple - no mess, no bother, no clean-up. Plastic cartons are now used for baked goods, lunch meats, fruit and vegetable trays, salads, sandwiches, even pre-cooked chickens. We buy a small number of tablets in a plastic bottle that would hold three times as many attached to a heavy piece of cardboard by an impermeable and nearly impossible to open plastic casing. What used to be packaged in cellophane is now packaged in lightweight but very strong plastic, requiring much strength or a scissors to open. Christmas toys now require a side cutter to release them from their molded plastic casings, the debris sending mountains of plastic garbage bags to the land fills. And then there's the new kids on the block, the one cup at a time coffee makers. These convenient appliances provide perfectly tuned to the individual single cups of java, at nearly the cost of a restaurant coffee, brewed through a tiny pre-filled plastic cuplet which could be recyclable but is cast aside due to difficulty of cleaning, both by individuals and by recycling companies. They do market reusable filters which we could fill with our own fresh ground coffee, but how many of us take the time to do that?

These are small things, but put small things in a pile and small begins to encircle the globe! Then to this add larger indestructible items. What can we do with all of this? Bury, dump, burn and release noxious gasses? - - - Recycling is better when it actually happens, but how about boycott? Sure, there are reasons for some of this packaging - breakage, loss of tiny parts, shipping, safety from tampering. But I think over-packaging is for the most part consumer driven and accepted, and because of this, it is our responsibility to become more discerning consumers. Instead, with our buying habits, we are saying we love the convenience. We may gripe about the difficulty of opening some of this packaging, but we gripe to ourselves, to our spouse. We may shake our heads and think about over-packaging, but we still buy the item and we never take the time to complain to the source. Discriminate buying is easier than recycling. We need to go out of our way to purchase goods that are responsibly packaged, and barring our ability to do that (not available, too expensive for our budget), we must accept the responsibility to recycle everything we possibly can, and we need to teach our children so that their future won't be buried in junk! An e-mail to companies who are the worst abusers of common sense in the packaging domain could help as well. If a sufficient number of people cared enough to do this, good marketers should listen and begin to produce biodegradable packaging. They could, after all, advertise what good, caring companies they really are, and might boost product sales as a result.

   

Don't just think, it's time to act. We are the ones that need to stop these practices. We are the ones who need to act, not the other guy - you know that guy who isn't as busy as we are? Not that other guy - ME and YOU!

What Goes Around

What Goes Around, Comes Around

The philosophic statement "What goes around, comes around" is frequently expressed among the folks I know, quite often with a knowing look and nod of the head and a "Did you know that so-and-so has done you-know-what to what's-his-name?" It's sort of a folksy warning for those who refuse to heed the wisdom of the golden rule. The golden rule, if there's anyone (young enough or from another culture) groping in the dark wondering what it is, states that you should do onto others that which you would want done onto you. And, if you follow this rule you hope good will come back your way. I suppose this is mostly a truism, at least I'd prefer to think so.

But this is a story of "Coming and Going Around" without the moral attachment, kind of the other side of the coin, and not about that so-and-so at all; it is more about good fortune as a result of coming and going around. There are several places in my world that feed that gleeful thrill of finding a bargain. One is a thrift shop in a fairly transient nearby community that receives many exceptionally desirable donations and sells them at quite reasonable prices. The other is the Happy Shack at our local transfer station (politically correct name for the dump). Second hand goods of possible value are deposited in the Happy Shack and picked up for free by the first person who sees and wants them. The good fortune that came my way was a "new" set of dishes, a complete service for 8 minus 2 large plates, purchased for $20at the thrift store, beautiful dishes, very earthy and to my style, a real score! But, because my cupboard space is limited, this meant that my old set had to go. So I boxed up my old set and off to the Happy Shack it went.

Two days later my friend Jannelle pushed the wrong speed dial button on her phone and was surprised that it was me answering, prepared as she was for Lora's voice and not mine. But she recovered quickly and naturally we got to talking for a bit. I was effusing about my fabulous find, asked if she'd seen the pic of my new dishes posted on Facebook and patting myself on the back for my efficient disposal of my old set. "Oh," said Jannelle, "you took dishes to the Happy Shack... they weren't blue were they? Oh my God!  I picked them up yesterday! Blue is my mom-in-law's favourite colour so I gave them to her!" So my old set made someone else as pleased as I was about my new old set, and Jannelle and I had a good laugh about those dishes. Like they say, one woman's garbage is another woman's treasure, and it's certainly nice when one treasure comes around and another goes around. 

My new bottle lamb

This little ewe lamb is one from a set of triplets. Her mother doesn't have sufficient milk for three, so she has become a bottle lamb. She's in the house so that I can teach her how to suck on a bottle. She's learning but hasn't quite got the knack of it yet.

The $8 Ham

The $8 Ham Heading through the grocery store a few weeks ago there it was, the non-passable deal, large hams for only $1/lb. Hmmmm, says my mind, always nice to have a ham on hand, never know when you might want it for company, and besides, there's so many things you can do with leftover ham..... So into the cart, the car, the freezer it went. On Saturday I decided that the ham would make a good Sunday supper so I set it out to thaw. I consulted my 47 year old, as old as my marriage, Fanny Farmer cookbook for bake times and discovered there's lots of different hams, some cooked, some not, tried to figure out what I had - it simply said smoked picnic ham on the label. Finally I decided that a couple of hours bake time should do it - that is until I flipped it over and read the cooking instructions on the label. Instructions said stove top, cover with water, bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer for 4 or 5 hours until a meat thermometer read 170F. "BOIL! Get real, nobody boils a ham," says my husband, the man who's cooked maybe 50 meals out of 47 years. "It's smoked isn't it? That means it's pre-cooked." "It seems to me," says I, "that if it says boil on the package that that is how it should be cooked. If baking was an option surely it would also be on the label. This ham must not be pre-cooked." This circular conversation went on all morning until I just said to hell with it, it says boil, I'll boil. Luckily I had a pot large enough to cover it with water. It took nearly 45 minutes just to start to boil before I could turn it down to simmer! A friend we had invited arrived around 4:00, said he'd never heard of boiling a ham either, so the conversation renewed once again. At 6:00, amazingly in sinc with the potatoes, the thermometer said ready. The ham was delicious! The meal a resounding success. (Insert smirking smiley face here.) The $8 ham provided my husband and I two more suppers and three breakfasts. The fat we put away for the dogs, but the resulting ham stock, lots of it, stared back at us and almost dared us to throw it away. All that good soup stock, hesitate, hesitate. Go on, do it! You can't save everything! Well, we did save it. 22 cups went into bean soup, the rest got poured over the dog's supper for the next few days. The bean soup recipe came from the internet. 3 lbs of dried white beans, 1 1/2 lbs of carrots, onions, garlic, herbs, spices, and of course the ham stock and some ham. It took all Monday morning to make, all day to cook slowly on the wood stove. We had a bowl of it Tuesday for lunch and I canned the rest - 7 quarts, 10 lbs pressure, 50 minutes. Value per quart? Well, you can never put a true dollar value on home-made soups, can you? So, value? Priceless.

Spring has sprung

The 37 Cent Whammy