You are what you eat.

Today I have been moved to discuss life.

Scientists propose the basic building blocks of life can be made by chemical reactions between heated and electronically charged protein mixtures containing what they have deduced was the primordial soup of the early earths surface.

Yet with all their research and all their studies they have never actually created single unicellular organism; not one plant; not one animal. The spark of life remains elusive. Life surrounds us and makes us up yet we are powerless to its comings and goings.

For every thing you consume there was something that was once alive but now is dead that drew energy from the sun or other creatures or plants.

Each beat of your heart is fueled by these sacrifices. From the first flutter when you were a fertilized egg growing into a fetus till the last faltering heartbeat at the end of your life.

        So today you ate a cheeseburger and fries and a milkshake. Pay homage to the cow that was raised to make the burger the fields of grain harvested for the bun the tubers; bursting forth from the ground by a farmers plow, the milk that was borrowed from a hungry calf somewhere and the sugar from the canes growing in their fields. The pickle that was once a cucumber and the cherry  was plucked from high on its tree's branches.  You ate it mechanically tasting its familiar blend of flavors. And why not?

In todays world so many of us are so far from our food sources. :

     The beef was raised shoved in a feedlot with thousands of others, forced hormones and antibiotics to allow for such confined unhealthy living. The single burger contains meat from dozens of individual animals, some of which were sick or crippled or diseased and blind. They were old retired dairy cattle and exotic breeds like longhorns, brahmas, and zebus. There were huge aged bulls weighing over a ton each and half starved week old dairy calves. They are herded into mechanized slaughter houses where machines slaughter and ground the least valuable cuts into that 85 percent lean 15 percent fat mixture called the misnomer "hamburger" - ground beef. Then this was further blended with preservatives and is some cases soybeans and other additives to make it preserve and cook evenly. There are also dyes, sugars, salt, and chemically produced  seasonings added  for the correct color and flavor for the now compromised mix. They come to the store in frozen smashed uniform pre-shaped patties ready for the grill , untouched by human hands until they reach your mouth.

The wheat for the flour is harvested by huge combines out of huger fields of pesticide and herbicide treated grains, additional chemical fertilizer is added to spread the growth. It is then ground up and bleached with more chemicals to make it fine and white and palatable. Once again preservatives and flavoring agents are blended in. From field to oven human hands never touch the dough or the flour or the buns until they are ripped open to receive a bun.

The cheese is a blend of extruded vegetable oils and dairy byproducts, salt and waxes emulsified and colored to look like the real cheese of our ancestors. This mix is barely digestible and lacks nutritional value.

The potatoes too are a genetic hybrid harvested months before and dropped over and over again through sorters and from bin to bin. They are hauled from the mid-west and processed into frozen, crinkle-cut bland starchy shapes that are devoid of flavor until seep fried and salted and dipped in ketchup.

The dairy from which the ice-cream and milk came from for the shake is  antibiotic dependent cesspool of mismanagement that can be smelled from 3 miles away. They push for production and submit their animals to all sorts of pain and inhumanity. They cruelly separate and destroy young calves piling the dead bodies in the back filed. They euthanize sick or injured animals and sell them to the rendering plant. Their processes are industrialized. The cattle produce 7-10 gallons a day and never nurse the calves they churn out year after year.

These ingredients are combined and sold for $4.99 or $549 if you supersize the combo. They are handed in a paper bag and Styrofoam containers that outlive their ten minute usable life by 150 years or more.

We continue to buy and use these "cheap" meals. We let a clown and a redhead and a star sell them to us. Our children eat them and it changes them forever. The hormones, antibiotics and poisons leaching in from the pesticides, herbicides, and plastics are causing us all manor of cancers and unnatural growth and premature biological maturity , not to mention building up  the immunities to antibiotics of the parasites and bacteria that will one day attack us.

Life is all around us. We cannot make it but it makes us. We are responsible. You can make a difference. Take a minute and appreciate the calories you consume, Examine their source - is it sustainably raised, is it free of as many chemicals and processes as you can get it? Food that is unprocessed is healthier , more nutritious and have less of a chance of being screwed up.

Think an apple off your neighbors tree. It has spots on it and is small and not shiny. It is pure as nature put it there. Now think of the apple at the grocery store all red and shiny, sealed in wax and pesticides , it was harvested 6 weeks ago , green and ripened in transit. Now think of apple sauce its ground up apples in a machine with sugars and preservatives added , colors and flavors. It is sealed in a can and kept on a shelf until you buy it at the store. Now think of apple filling in a pie at the deli. Its mostly a gel made to look and taste like apples with a few tiny slices of highly preserved and highly seasoned apples.

Your neighbor's apples are far better and better for you. Plus if you buy his apples he will in turn maybe buy your turnips or your cucumbers or your ….
The point and purpose of this posting is to attempt o influence you all, urban rural, rich or poor to appreciate the buffet of choices that are available and weigh each meal on an ethical, and sustainability scale - because your health, your childrens' health and the health of the worlld depends on the choices we make when our stomachs tell us its time to eat.Choose wisely.

How to build a wall. framing terms defined.

     

You know, it is the neatest thing , how you can take 2x4s and plywood and create a wall. If you have never built one I strongly recommend you give it a shot. Lets make it easy, an 8x8 wall , you will need seven 8 foot 2x4s (one for top plate , one for bottom or sole plate) , and five studs to be face nailed between the two plates  inside the wall. You will also need 4 sheets of 4x8 plywood. About a pound of 16d nails and a pound of 8d nails.

If I have lost you, I will start over.

We can talk about a few things that builders know and that you can learn to make things make sense.

Plywood - this is 4 foot by 8 ft panels of wood made by sawing very thin  sheets of lumber and flattening it out and gluing it together, alternating the grain of the sheets so it makes a airtight and strong piece of material to build with.

Framing lumber- this is usually 1.5 inch thick  x 4 , 5 , 6 , 8 , 10 ,or 12 inches x 8 , 10 , 12 ,  or 16 feet long. It is made of sawn up trees, usually pine, or fir, or spruce. It is the bones of the house.

Grain -the orientation of the strands of wood fiber that make up trees, boards , and lumber. The grain runs up and down the tree.

2x4 - Lumber is cut into certain dimensions when green and then dries and is planed down to its finished size. So a pine 2x4 is a section of a tree that is cut in a sawmill into a 2'x4' block then dried in a kiln and then surfaced in a plane to a 1.5x 3.5 inch board.

Green wood is considered "green" when it is freshly cut , before it has been dried. Green wood is heavier and not as good to build with as dried wood. Its also less effecient to burn in a stove. Green wood shrinks when you dry it.

Kiln is a large heated building with fans in it that is like an oven for cooking all the excess moisture out of lumber to make it stronger and better for using to build with . Kiln dried lumber doesn't rot as quickly and it does not shrink or grow. It holds nails better and glue sticks to it better. Ideal moisture content for hardwoods is 7-9 % when used for lumber or building.

Plane - a tool that creates a flat smooth surface on a piece of lumber.

Moisture is a part of living things - in the case of lumber the amount of moisture effects strength and durability. To determine the percent of moisture in a large piece of wood you can cut a small piece, weigh it on a very exact digital scale , put it in a microwave and cook it at 30 seconds intervals until it stops losing weight. Then subtract the weight of the small piece after it s dried from its weight before you started drying it and then divide that amount by the initial weight. So if yo have a 10 gram sample and microwave it until it stops losing weight, weigh it again to see it now weighs 8 grams that means 2 grams of water has evaporated out and the initial moisture content was 20% 

Studs - these are the boards inside the wall running from the sole plate to the top plate -these are the bones of any wall or building.

Plates - these are the long boards that the studs and corners are either toe nailed or face nailed into they are marked while still together so that the studs are all run straight up and down between them.

Toe nailing - when the end of a board is nailed into the edge of another by nailing nails at an angle from the edges through he end and into the edge of the board it is to attach to.

Face nailing- nailing completely through the face of one board and into the end of another board.

Face of a board - the wide side of the board on a 2x4 it is the 3.5 inch side

Edge of a board - the narrow side of the board on a2x4 it is the 1.5  inch side.

Length of a board - boards, when purchased from the lumberyard, are usually not the exact length they are indicated for . A 8ft board is likely to be 8ft and 1/4 or 8 ft 1/2 inch. This is to allow for squaring them and because there is some shrinkage in the kilns.

End of a board- the end of the board - you should always square your framing lumber by using a carpenters square and pencil to mark a straight line near the end of the board then, with a tape measure, measure the length you need  & mark it for length, then use your square again to draw a line to show where to cut this end of the board. If you have no square your plywood sheets are precut to square, just lint the edge of the board with the  edge of the  plywood and line the end of the board up just past the perpendicular edge of the plywood and mark a line.

Carpenters square or framing square this is a tool used to mark a ninety degree angle on a board as most boards when they come from the sawmill are apt to be cut at angles slightly different than 90 degrees they are also cut at slightly different lengths

.

Squaring is the act of marking and cutting the end of a board at a 90 degree angle to its edge.

16d and   8d nails - nails are sold by the penny size. I address nails in a previous post. Penny is abbreviated d.

16" OC or 24" OC - on center -this indicates the distance between the outside of your outside studs and the center of your next stud. You go with  the center of the studs because you want your sheeting material - or what covers the wall to break on a stud so at 4ft or 8ft and you want the load evenly distributed over the wall.

Plumb -straight up and down  - not leaning in or out. left or right. a balanced weight on a string will make the string show a plumb line. A bubble level can also show plumb.

Level - a level shows a line perpendicular to plumb and a bubble level also shows level

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Wall - what you are building-- it consists of a top plate joined through studs to a sole plate and covered with sheeting.

So now to build a wall you need to square the end and cut your plates to length and mark them to nail the studs at 24"centers. Then  lay out top plate and sole plate 7'9" apart then cut the 5 studs and facenail them in with your 16d nails through the plates into the studs as marked for 24"OCs then stand the wall up where you need a wall and  nail through the sole and exterior studs into the subfloor or into the adjoining wall to keep your wall standing (make sure it is plumb). Then nail your sheeting up with it joining on the middle stud. This should be a solid wall.

Stolen from

ehowdiy.com

Occupy Tug Creek

 

      At the now worldwide Occupy Movement's core is a belief that the 1% of wealthiest people in America and in the world have far more power and political benefits than the other 99% of middle-class and poorer families. And…more importantly, is the further belief that our political systems and global financial system strongly favors the 1% in unfair taxation, unequal political representation, and unfair access to influence the mass media and with that popular opinion.

        Just as the Arab Spring has ripped through the middle east toppling dictators and bringing civil rights and democracy to the masses the Occupy movement seek to shift the control of power and influence out of the hands of corporations, banks, and the elite superrich and into the hands of the common man.

    

       

     The two party system doesn't offer any relief to the huddled masses as the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer.

"The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door. That's the only difference."

- Ralph Nader

    You don’t have to be in the urban centers across the nation that are holding highly publicized protests. The true grassroots of any protest has to be out in the country , out among the working people. In this spirit, I am advertising my farm's own protest and invite my neighbors and friends to join in.

       What can you do? It is pretty simple. Every ad you see on TV, every song on the radio, every politician spouting lies and misinformation, and every corporation you support - question where does the money go and who ultimately gains.

Some examples :

 Friends of Coal - Who benefits from all these businesses and people sporting propaganda that says they are a "friend of coal". This is a marketing scheme - why, who in West Virginia wouldn’t want to be a friend of coal.  It is a cheap power source that thousands of hard working families make a living in the production of.    Still who makes the real money, its not the miners, its not the companies that make and service the mining equipment. It is not the railroaders that truck it out to power plants and plants all over the country. Ultimately two groups of people get the lions share of the proceeds, the operators, stockholders and owners of the mines and the Politicians they choose to promote.  Who pays the costs, miners, the environment, and anyone who has the audacity to call the accountable parties to task.  Something as popular as coal should have no end of financial support throughout ehe common people all over the state but the marketting is paid for by corporate interests.  Coal is a rock that is mined and burnt for energy. It is dead. I burn coal but I am not its friend I am a friend of coal miners and of butterflies and of lizards and of topsoil all living things- but not of coal. Why aren't people sporting bumper stickers that says friend of ethanol or friend of Wal-Mart (it is a major employer in wv). I guess they don’t have as good of a lobby or marketing team.  

Marriage = one man + one woman.

Who gains from keeping homosexuals from entering marriages, I'll tell you who profits ---health insurance companies do. If the one out of every eleven  adults in the United States who are  homosexuals were allowed to marry and get the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts that would represent a significant change in the balance sheets of health insurance companies all over the country. Instead of two homosexuals out of every couple each paying the higher self only coverage they would be able to include each other as spouses and drop to lower family rates.

 Food stamps are for poor people to help purchase food.

This is an outright mistruth, food stamps actually do more to help grocery stores and agricultural companies than they do to help poor people. They initially -back in the 60's- were a neat idea where a family could buy stamps, say $50worth. These $50 in stamps could be spent for more groceries than that amount of money could purchase -say $75 worth of groceries. Food stamps are now a tool now that the government can use to create demand for agricultural commodities and bump up their prices. This is why despite the snappy title of the SNAP  (Supplimental Nutrition Assistance Program) the governemnt does not control how the funds are used. They can be spent on soda pop and candy bars, ketchup and corn chips. These less nutritional foods are never going to be regualted because most of the corparate farms all over the country grow...corn a major componant of these foods. Lobbiests are present to prevent  restricting the purchase of corn and cornbased products.

So if you want to join this movement and become a more vocal member of the cheated 99% start by thinking and questioning where does the money go - then do what you can to keep more in the local economy. Buy as much locally produced foodstuffs as you can, don’t waste resources or buy into the hype, any hype without asking where the money goes. Turn corporate and political greed on its ear. Do all you can to support the poorest in the community. Because its been said "a rising tide rises all ships, from the mightiest yacht to the smallest dinghy" - Hinton is full of dinghies.

I can blog from my kindle

Kindle usually talks me to sleep in is monotone stevenhawkingesce dialect but tonight itisflashing violenly as itype on the tiny keyboard in bed. thisistoohard gdnight.

WHAT IS IT WORTH?

       On the PBS show "The Antiques Road Show" citizens bring their collectibles and antiques to an appraiser in hopes that they are special enough and valuable enough to get them onto the show. This illustrates how different people value different objects. What antiques road show does not teach is the simple fact that something is worth - whatever you can get for it.

    For instance, tomatoes in August are worth less then they are on the first of May. Without getting into micro or macro economical theories of supply and demand,  the idea of something  being valuable due to scarcity or rarity is a fairly simple concept.
  
     The advice I can offer to readers of my blog is to look past the obvious uses and presentations to see what else things could be good for.Creative individuals are cabable of making a living off of what others throw away.


     How does this help my homestead? Lets start with the grocery store - they will often save all the bad fruits and vegetables and garnish for enterprising homesteader to collect to feed his animals. They will sell this vitamin rich foodstuffs to you for little or no money, the same goes for out of date desserts, breads, and cereals.  Now to thte feed store - major discounts can be found on feed bags that have been torn open in transport - the livestock doesnt know the difference. Now to the lumberyard - cull lumber is always returned and sold for pennies on the dollar to an enterprising farmer who asks. Even the curbs on trash day or illegal roadside dumps can offer a chance for retrieving raw materials or items that still have a useful life in front of them for free. I just put two screen doors (curb rescues) up  in a shed as windows to allow sun in from the south to warm my sheltered livestock while still cutting the biting winter's winds. A barn does not need brand new triple insulated 9 year warrenteed windows much less a shed. So many building supplies can be liberated from old buildings being torn down. Tin  roofing can be reused many, many years. The mines of the future are the landfills of today. With technological advances and the popultion demading more consumables the refuse that lays buried all over the counrty will be a place to mine for burnable energy sources and sorted into tin, glass, and precious metals.
   Examine how much work it takes to get iron ore melted down and turned into iron. Now compare this to the amount of energy it would take to grind up and separate a dumpster ful of mixed garbage into recyclable raw materials.

 

Working and Taking Care of Your Body so you can Work.

“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist." — St. Francis Of Assisi” 

  We all have dreams. Goals are dreams broken down into achievable steps. The implementation of these steps is work. We can either do all of the work ourselves or depend on others assist in doing the work. In order to get others to help you in your work, you have to line up their goals and yours. This means you have to know what their dreams are and what they want to do. If you hire someone, you give them money with which they can fund their own goals and dreams. People with addictions forget these dreams and goals -or perhaps look for shortcuts to their goals - they cut corners and break rules because they are chasing unattainable realities.

      Let’s say as a Homesteader you decide to cut firewood. You have to tools and the truck and the trees, you need labor. You can hire a wino down the road to help, you can ask your friends and family to help, or you can do it yourself.

    While the wino who works for a pittance seems cheap he is by no means a sustainable source of labor - he is likely to hurt himself or tear up your tools. He is also likely as not unhealthy and can give you diseases. He is also going to be around valuables you may own and many alcoholics are prone to steal when low on funds for booze. All in all it’s best to steer away from addicts as they end up costing more than they are worth.
    Your friends and family are always a good source of labor because, being friends and family, they should like to spend time with you.  It strengthens the ties that you feel with them and gives you opportunities to know and appreciate each other. In most cases they are sharing the benefit of your production they should be inclined to assist whole heartedly. But in some cases they are either unable physically to help with some jobs, they are otherwise occupied into their own goals and plans, or they just don't want to work with or without you. These relationships bear looking closer into to decide if they are ones you want to continue into the future. The purpose of friends and family are to help each other towards eventual dreams and goals and when you have those who are supposed to be in league with you who are not willing to help then the whole relationship needs to be examined. This being said sometimes friends and family can fall short even when their best efforts are applied. Sometimes they don’t like to work with you because you work harder and longer than they are interested in working or at too quick a pace or at too slow a pace or any number of reasons that makes their goal to get out of helping you.

   This leaves you to do all the work and cut all the wood, load all the wood, split all the wood, and stack all the wood. This is taxing physically. Your muscles will ache your hands will blister; you will twist your ankle and skin you knuckles and cuss like a sailor (which is part of why your friends and family didn't want to help you to begin with). You will push yourself to exhaustion and beyond. You will get into a zone where you press onwards with your work and ignore distractions -like the sun going down or being hungry. You will drive on as long as you are capable and collapse in the bed at night just to stir early the next morning preparing for another day of labor. In single-minded numbness to the rest of the world you are mission focused - no time to sharpen the saw, no need to stop for lunch you are better than half done now...
Till you either get done or you fall apart physically. There’s nothing wrong with work and hard work but to get too focused on one thing is most likely not conducive to your health or the eventual goal.

I have sinned against my brother the ass. Also St. Francis Of Assisi  -speaking on his deathbed about how he had abused and misused his physical body is his spiritual work.

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Grazers and browsers.

   In previous posts I think I have described the eating habits of goats, they eat mostly leaves , bark, briers and weeds and will nibble on grass when there is not much of this other food around. This is considered a Browsers diet. Goats and deer are browsers. The highly nutritious sprouts and bark and twigs require less time eating than the grass that grazers prefer.

     Horses, sheep, and cattle are grazers. The eat grass and hay and in great quantities. They can be kept with browsers and the two will not compete for the same food sources.

We just added an alpaca to our homestead - Hippie.  He is a grazer and, despite the pastures being full of goats to capacity, Hippie and trailblazer , the donkey can live in the same pasture with very minimal impact on the feed bill.

The successful integration of grazers and browsers in the homesteader's pasture rotation can improve the production and the viability of the homestead. The grazer to browser ratio willnot be the same , as you fields and woodlands are cleaned up and you pastures expand the number of browsers your lands can support will deminish while the number of grazers increase.

      There is even varibility between grazers to be capitalized on, for instance, a farm that has for years produced nothing but cattle soon becomes clotted with grasses and weeds that cattle will not eat and has to be plowed and replanted. By rotating in a flock of sheep or a drove of donkeys the fields can be stripped of several weeds that the cattle find unappealing and the work and expense of tilling and reseeding and the related topsoil loss from erosion can be averted. Donkeys just happen to like broom-sage and will eat it in abundance on pastures where cattle have allowed it to take over.

Multifloral roses and Kudzu are evasive species that can be controlled by large concentrations of browsers - they can help bring a grown-up field back into condition. They also make trails that the grazers can follow to get to different areas of vastly overgrown fields to where they can start expanding the cleared areas.  

To be brief..

It is good to be brief.

Critter feet

Question:
What do horses, bunnies, sheep, goats, and donkeys and dogs all have in common?

The homesteader has to be able to work on their feet.

Yes in order to care for each of the above animals you must become a veterinary podiatrist.
and to know what you are doing you , generally look at the young of the animal who you are working with and try to make your grown animal's hoof look like that of the baby animal only bigger.

This is accomplished through the use of sharp shears with goats and sheep and nippers and rasps in the case of equines and clippers for dogs and rabbits.

Its sad to see animals in a pasture with very overgrown hooves that curl up like elves shoes or sheep or goats whose hoofs cross and twist causing them agony with each step.

Sometimes you will buy an animal - hopefully at a deep discount - who had had foot problems and needs to be treated with a major trimming . The way to accomplish this is to take small portions at a time because hoofs that overgrown have nerves in them and just as much harm can be done by trying take too much at once as from not trimming at all.

Everyone who ever trims hooves will sometimes get a little too much of  bite with the nippers and the blood will start pouring. This is a heartbreaking moment and there is a lot of blood in a horse donkey or goat so a little bit wont hurt much. It is possible to patch a broken or overly cut hoof temporarily with autobody filler but only after cleaning the area extra well. Most instances you are ahead to let them bleed and heal on their own.

      Hoof rot or scald is a condition where mud manure and trash gets forced betweenthe toes  or up into the sole of a hooved animal and bactera grows inside the tightly compacted area. This bactera eats the goats tissues, hoof or skin and causes a terrible limp and pain and a rotten odor. There are many commercially available cures for this condition but dry pastures, clipping awa of the infected hoof and cleaning infected flesh with an antiseptic causes much relief up to completely healing the infection. I have seen peopel treat this condition in Horses by trimming the effected feet and picking out s much of the dirt and compacted material as possible and then soaking the feet in a pan of clorine bleach.

Hoof rot is somewhat contagious because the same bacteria can be spread through the pasture and all animals in similar conditions can be similarly infected.

Life: Some assembly required.

    It struck me today that building a farm, building a life, or building yourself is not unlike putting together a puzzle or building a kit. You have many pieces and many choices and only some fit together with  specific others. The problem is your kit does not come with instructions and there is no puzzle box to look at to know where the pieces go. Some people use the bible or some other religious text for instruction. Some look a their parents or a business associate or mentor and try to line their pieces up to match how that other person's pieces work together.

     Some people go through their whole lives never connecting the pieces so they live their entire existence as just a big old broken mixed up mess- lacking direction or purpose and just chugging along. Some people try to force pieces that don't go together together and similarly end up with unhappy results - never really fitting in, never really excelling at anything.

     I wonder every day how my puzzle is coming together. I think about the people I have met; walked with and lost; and those I am still sharing my life with; and those I am yet to meet. Was my purpose in being created to tip someone in a cafe last week?;maybe it was to sit with an ill friend some years back; maybe it is to someday be a grandpa and spoil some grandchildren.. If it was to leave that tip -how do I know I did it right - did I leave enough , too much perhaps and my ill friend perhaps I left too soon or didn't say the right things and will I ever be around my children again - much less grandchildren. I'm not alone - we all struggle to some degree with these self doubts and apprehensions.

     I believe in a very stretchy universe where mistakes are tolerated and the rest of the world bends to make up for them. My universe has no square corners, no perfectly straight lines, and its Okay to be left of center so long as there isn't someone coming in the other lane. I live in a world of good enough and that's just me. Your good enough and mine doesn't have to be the same. How long is a piece of string? that depends on what you measure it with. The smaller the units the longer the string. If you have a string that is about 100 feet long and measure it by stretching it across a parking lot you may find that it is 10 parking spaces long. Measure it on a tile floor to find it to be a little over 100 tiles long, measure it against a tightly stretched chain link fence you may find it to be 612 links long , measure it with a surveyor's tape measure and you will find it to be 101ft and 3 inches Measure it with a laser and it reports 101ft 3.5996 inches. Now if you were to take a single strand of silk and run it over each tiny bump, twist and turn along the top of the string and then weigh the piece of silk and compare the weight of the silk to the weight of a given length of silk you would find the string to be 101ft 4.7643219 inches.Note how the string has grown. Given infinitely smaller measurements the string would grow infinitely long.

     Now look at your life, its a series of years -good ones and bad ones; a series of months -cold, warm , working , out of work; a series of weeks- lonely or filled it people you love; a series of days-well rested or tired, depressed or upbeat; a series of hours busy or resting, driving or climbing or having fun or being miserable or not being very present at all - being distracted; a series of minutes -being rushed or being relaxed, being concerned or being obsessed or being apathetic; a series of seconds - being appreciated or being forgotten, being present or being absent. How many absent seconds slip into each day? How many distracted hours slip not each week. How much time is wasted and how much counts. Take 15 seconds and stare at a clock watch the seconds tick away and think of each breath you breath each beat of your heart, Why where you given that breath and those heartbeats. What is the reason for you to be alive those 15 seconds? Did you waste them by watching the clock--  it was just 15 seconds.

    Should I have left a bigger tip- should I have lingered longer with my friend? How do all those decisions and who I was at each moment sum up and shake down to spell who I am and what kind of life I have lived at the end? What if the universe does have straight edges and square corners and I just didn't try hard enough. Who gets to judge?  What if a man lived a pure, giving, and sin free life for 20 years and then became greedy and stole and was evil in umpteen different ways the last month before he died in an accident. Is that man condemned for eternity What if he was evil itself murdered, stole, and was a plague on the world for 20 years and found religion and sanctity in prison two weeks before his execution. Is he to be rewarded or punished? Who gets to choose the size of the yardstick? Is it  seconds, minutes, years, decades - how many times have you gone to a funeral to hear someone say " He was good man for three score and six  but then he became a Scoundrel and a cheat for seven fortnights."

     This is the kind of stuff I think about when I am working - I try to stay in the present and use each second but sometimes I use a different yardstick. That's what it takes sometimes to make the pieces fit - or at least come close enough to fitting.