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Showing posts from June 10, 2007

Summer Starting to End on the Farm

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It has been good spending time on the farm. I really had forgotten how quiet and dark it is here. It can actually be a bit unnerving. The leaf doodle bug was put to work in the forest. However, it looks like the car will be going back on the road. We can say it failed field trials,but that would only be partially true. The better utility value at this point is more suited to getting a teenager back and forth from high school. The mycological aspects of the farm did not disappoint. The pics of these shrooms are not photoshopped. The coal stove (very heavy) is loaded on the truck. It will be rebuilt in Georgia if I can save it. Coal stoves are increasingly out of production. When they are gone they are gone. The small wood stove is now in its place. The pic of the red sky in morning was indeed a warning of weather. We had strong storms and tornados in Upstate NY. Although I was travelling much that day in the area, I missed the worst of it.
Probably took a while to climb to the start altitude. Just watch. Most impressive at start. Real living. These guys have some spirit.
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I watched a great show last night on PBS, "The Sidewalk Astronomer". It was basically a biographical piece on John Dobson, the extraordinary amateur astronomer. He is very well known in astronomy circles. The "Dobsonian Mount" is named after him. His specialty is building very inexpensive powerful telescopes. A Dobson construction will typically include the base mount (2-axis swivel) of his name sake and a concrete construction tube known as a sonotube (perhaps 10 or 12 inches) for the body of a reflector telescope. He is known for setting up a one of these great scopes on a sidewalk in a city and inviting people to look thru it to a celestial body. What a great thing. He has a great philosophy. I caught a great tidbit in the program last night where he said something like, "People only know the food they eat, the tree, the monkey, the grass, the cat and the dog. People only think in the extents of biology. If we could only get people thinking outside their o...
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A lot has been going on. The weather has been nice. A couple of big things happened as well. Douglas and Becky got married. The wedding was nice and it was good to see folks. Everything went pretty well. They planned well and there was a lot of attention to detail. We ended up putting Rosey down. She was not getting better. In fact, her rear legs were getting worse. She couldn't move her legs at all the last few days. The asprin helped for a while. We took a chaulk gun filled with ground-up horse aspirin and unflavored yogurt or milk and we could get a few asprins into her at a time. She was eating and alert, but she just couldn't stand up, even when we lifted her. Bob and DJ drove their backhoe over to dig the grave. That was big help. RIP Rosey. Bonnie and I both weeped. We are one of the few people who own a llama sling. We have used it on three llamas. Two llamas we lost eventually, one Bonnie saved using the sling and the TLC. I have my tractor ready for mowing. I l...