Mephistos

A short blog to apologize to the few regular readers for the site having been down that last week. It was my fault. I forgot to pay an invoice to the ISP. Well, more like, I forgot to transfer the ISP(*) automatic billing over to the newly issued debit card. Now I am sure some of you are saying that shouldn’t take a week to process.

You are correct. Once I transferred the account, with the automatic debit occuring and due to to some additional expenses with horse supplies (additional moveable electric fence, some regular shots, medicine and supplies for an injured horse) I just didn’t have the funds to cover the $30.00 bucks.

Why didn’t I just put it on a credit card? Well, bottom line is I don’t have one of those. I have a debit card and try to avoid credit as much as possible. The exceptions I have made to that in the last few years was purchase the farm – which I of course no longer own, the car that I had to get last fall when my truck quit and I really needed something a LOT easier on gas, and a vet bill from over a year back for a colic surgery on a miniature horse.

So – bottom line here is I got to be more organized about making sure all my ducks are in a row in the future. Again though, my sincere apologies to anyone who missed things when they got some page about the account being suspended or something.

I will also note that in about 2 weeks there may be a slight outage again – though hopefully not. I went with the current ISP in a moment of weakness to save a little money for some grandiose plans that an associate and myself had. Those things have mostly fallen through and I don’t have the need for such the grandiose plans, though I do still have a few of those. Anyway, this ISP is located in the former eastern block of Europe, truly showing we are a global ecomony. However, I would prefer to support an American company and turns out with out the grandiose plans I can actually do so a bit cheaper – which is an even better deal. Also there is the bonus of not having to send a message 3 times to tech support to get someone who understands enough English to do things correctly.

This means that at some point I will move this blog (along with other sites) to the new host. Hopefully it will all go smooth and silk and there will not even be a blink, but a warning just in case.

* – Thought it a good idea to note that ISP stands for Internet Service Provrider. This typically refers to the companies bring internet service to your home or business for you to have access. However, in this case I am refering to a company that offers hosting services for me to place websites onto. The fees are usually very reasonable and include some structure for the actual storage space and hardware as well as the bandwidth (traffic to and from the website) that is being used. Probably the more correct terminology would be Web Hosting Provider or Web Hosting Services, but WHP just doesn’t have the recognition that ISP has. Further, it is still an Internet Service Provider in the fullest meaning of the words.

So I am still drinking stiff bourbon and cokes (recall the last post – just enough to color them) and I am thinking of some good old memories. One that comes to mind is of me, my brother, bikes, and a couple of tobacco sticks.

No, for those not aware, a tobacco stick is what burley tobacco here in Kentucky is speared onto (the stalk and leaves) and hung in the barn for curing. The sticks are made of oak most typically, more modern ones being sawed and old ones were split (like a rail for a fence). They are usually getting close to one inch, roughly square, though the split ones were often a little thicker in one direction. Oh, and between three and four foot long.

Another thing for those not aware, I do jousting and sword fighting on horses today, waxing nostalgic for time period well over 600 years ago. It is no wonder considering the how often me and my younger brother did sword fighting. Often with a tobacco stalk, which is not so bad, as they give. However, often time with a tobacco stick. In case you are wondering that is one heck of a smarting blow on the fingers.

When doing this kind of thing as a eight to ten year old, there were a few rules. Don’t hit the hands, as that hurts like heck.

Take this one step forward. We didn’t have horses at the time, but we did have bikes and a long down hill slope so you didn’t have to work to hard. We were knights on a iron steads sword fighting over our heads over and over again. Imagine a fall day, with the smell of wood smoke in the eye, damp ground, leaves already on the ground, you can also smell the horses and hear the ping of metal on metal.

What ends up happening is at some point my brother hit my fingers, hard. In anger I retaliated, by yelling, “I will get you – I will slay your horse.” And with that I stabbed the front, em, er, legs(?) of his mount.

Immediately I learned a lot of physics regarding what happens when you stop a wheel in motion by jabbing something into and how a bicycle seat suddenly resembles a catapult as my brother flew through the air like a boulder to land with a horrible sounding thud flat on his back a number of feet in front of the mount I had caught up on the end of my sword.

Thankfully my brother was only winded. The funny thing was my freaking immediately after him landing. I was at his side saying, “You gotta get up and be okay – Mom will kill us both if you are hurt – come on, get up.”

I find myself sitting here at the computer, a few good bourbons with just enough coke to give it a darker shade, and I am cleaning out some old files, moving some to an archive, and generally looking at things I have not seen in three to five years minimum. Anyway, it was with a tinge of sadness that I came across the picture that follows. That ugly dog, and yes, I fully agree he was ugly, as that is what you get when a Australian Shepard is crossed with a Terrier. Anyway, his name was Walker. Walker Dog to be specific. He had a funny step that reminded me of my Tennessee Walker Horse at the time (another blog deserved to be posted about Special Dark, aka SD).

Anyway to make a long story short, Walker came from a horse sale back when I lived in Virginia. I paid a heck of a fee of $5.00 for him. He was very hungry and probably destined to a worse fate if I hadn’t picked him up at the last moment as a little pup. It just happened that I had a cheeseburger from McDonald’s that had not been eaten yet with me. So that is why Bitzer (the current dog was taught that those are good), as he got that as a treat when I had him sitting there during the rest of the horse sale.

Longer story – Walker was my buddy and just as well behaved as Bitzer. He would stay inside at night during the cold of the winter and never even thought about peeing inside, much less anything else. He always wanted to be very pleasing and though not as much of a truck dog as Bitzer, he did like to go with me to places.

He did have a hard lesson with the horses though – as he got a good kicking when just a pup and went end over end looking much like a brown soccer ball. That taught him the lesson though as he generally didn’t ever bother the horses after that.

After a few years, and one move that he adjust okay with in Virginia, we moved to Kentucky. He was happy with that once he settled. The farm that we bought when we moved had two barns, one a tobacco barn and one built specifically for pigs. Rather then trying to convert the low roof to anything, after a few months I saw some weanling piglets for sale for pretty cheap. I bought about four or five of them for between $15-$30 a piece, one of which was particularly runt.

Now hindsight says that all those smoked pig ears in the past was just too much for Walker. But anyone in one night he got a hold of one pig and just ripped it apart, the runt if I remember right. I put him up and locked up the pig barn (with the knobs mind you – not a physical lock). Early the next morning I told Walker to leave the pigs alone, as I had paid good money for them. Well it took him all of about an hour to get in the barn and run them out through a crack. By the time I saw him, he had killed one more and had another injured beyond help.

I was extremely mad at this point. I thought about it for a few minutes. Weighed both Walker having to be tied or chained up versus running free like had always done and the cost of him -  $5.00 versus the over $60 something the pigs had cost that would have long term been worth $900 or so.

I will not say more on that other then to say when I came across the picture of him I sure had a pang of regret about my actions that day. Anyway, I raise my glass one last time to salute his memory!

News flash (maybe not so much)… Monsoto is increasing capacity in order to produce more Roundup.

Read that in a week old RSS feed relating to agriculture current events this morning. Kind of scary when you think about it. Genetically manipulated and modified crops that withstand the application of the herbicide (weed killer for those that think like me) to the crop without harming the crop itself. It has been going on for awhile now which is scary in its own right. Now add to that the increased usage of such practices and it is even more scary. What is there to be scared about?

Read more…

So I am currently re-reading parts of the book entitled The Complete Agrarian Reader, a collection of essays by Agrarians and their opinions on things. Probably the book that first introduced me to the idea. Actually, I should say, that made me realize it was not necessarily a some romantic notion that I alone had, that there were other people with similar thoughts on things.

Anyway, there is an introduction to the book by Barbara Kingsolver. In it she talks about her days in college and in the world at large where she in as many words hesitant or even almost ashamed of her background of having grown up on a Kentucky tobacco farm. Both the tobacco and the farm were considered less then desirable things to bring up in her circles of associations in a positive light so instead she stayed quiet. I have been there with her. I knew exactly what she was talking about. I would never deny, but there were times when I tried to distance myself from my own personal history.

Just as Kingsolver notes, the views and smells, and even the accents take me back every time. My favorites are the deep loamy smells of the freshly deeply turned field, completely with seeing the earthworms that do there own little work to big effect, the sight of a young calf loping and being frisky in the green spring, and the just like Barbara, the smell of a tobacco at harvest and again in a barn during the curing process – just heavenly. It really takes me back.

I admit that I am an information technology guru by trade, but my heart is down on the farm. I spent a few summers not to long ago doing historical interpretation on the farm at Shaker Village. I will admit the pay was less then desirable, but working on the farm with 19th century technology and more importantly teaching a youngster (and even, sadly, adults) where their food comes from was just a wonderful experience.

Guess that a friend of mine, that resides in Tennessee now, kind of sums up how I feel about it. He grew up in a similar way, though not on a tobacco farm, but a family ran farm. His thought goes something like this: Once you have the dirt under your nails of a family farm, at least for people like us, it is hard to get it out of your blood.