“It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see, and pursuing that vision no matter who tells you not to.”
Howard Schultz (born 1953);
Category Archives: Philosophy and Thoughts
A Pause to Go Celebrate
We have been running around like crazy the past week or so. Aaron is graduating from High School this week! Zina has been disinfecting the house, working in the garden, and shopping for graduation gifts. Jon has been trying to get both the Urban Farm planted and get some of the Farm projects completed prior to Grandma’s visit. Of course, this is all happening on the very week that is usually planting week.
The “tick-tack-toe” structure that will be used to hold up the chicken wire cover over the run is now built. I had to get that done so that I could plant the Buffalo grass in the run itself. The previous horse-tenants beat the ground hard and bare. It needs some kind of ground cover, and considering that Buffalo grass holds up in Colorado better than the water hungry Kentucky Blue, it seemed to be just the ticket.
The half acre future garden has been plowed and tilled. Gotta remember to wear ear protection out there. The tractor and the banging of the tiller can make you deaf. I am going to be planting in a bunch of Black Beans into the garden and then use the plants as green manure to compost the soil. We are also planting seed corn and sunflowers to begin growing some food for the future chicken residents.
This week though, it is a pause for the graduate. Grandma, the parents and the neighbors are all coming to cheer Aaron’s walk across the stage! We are all so proud of him. As a dad, I hope he walks into the next stage of his life and education with the drive and determination that will help him to achieve all of his hopes and dreams.
Woohoo!!! Public school is over !! I am looking forward to not having to work on english papers and physics projects! While I will miss my kid, I will not really miss that! It will be fun to Skype from time to time to get caught up and I relish to hear about the stories of adventures on campus when he comes home on break. It is all on him now. Time to step it up and keep on becoming the person he is supposed to be.
There is climate change, there isn’t climate change?
It is completely baffling to me how our country has become a nation of religious nuts and anti-science ostriches. Massive amounts of money has been spent by the big oil empire, using the same marketers the tobacco industry used to convince us that smoking hadn’t been determined to cause lung cancer, to convince the dimmest among us that climate change was some hoax being perpetrated on the public so the likes of Al Gore could get rich. Well, my pop died thanks in large part to Salem cigarettes. The rest of us are going to have a tough go of it so that a very rich few can pull ancient sunlight out of the ground and pour massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. All so that a few numbers on an Excel ledger can get bigger.
Being a financial planner I read and listen to a lot of different sources to help defend my clients from criminals. Today on CNBC (one place where you can go to hear what urban out of touch rich people say to each other) there was an article that flies in the face of ALL of this disinformation. How is it that the rich can blind the public so badly and demonize the scientists whose job it is to discover these things (I have a cousin in this gig) and then try to tell each other that the food supply is under assault from climate change? The cognitive dissonance is staggering.
BTW: Happy exceeding 400 ppm of atmospheric carbon month. May our children forgive us.
Which one is the chemical weapons criminal?
I was perusing the online paper today and came across what I thought was an interesting conundrum. We are so concerned, and rightly so, about an evil dictator using chemical weapons against those who don’t seem to dig the way he’s running things.
We on the other hand have a chemical company that gets us to do it to ourselves.
Which is worse?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/26/syria-denies-chemical-weapons_n_3161711.html
or
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/25/roundup-herbicide-health-issues-disease_n_3156575.html
I wonder….. did the same company make both? Didn’t research it but the second one was responsible for many chemical weapons. We spray it by the millions of gallons on fields, golf-courses, driveways, you name it.
Hmmmmm, me thinks farming makes lots of sense.
My Beloved Uncle Henry
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
— Henry David Thoreau[3]
It would be negligent of me not to post from one of my favorite American philosophers – Uncle Henry.
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