Archive for February, 2010

Brrrrrrrrr,

Now the chickens don't actually say this, but one can tell that there is a certain discontent and disconnect with standard chicken reality patterns. There's the random feather loss giving one the sense of being around poultry that should not, under any circumstances be touched, as well as the dreaded slow down in egg production that accompanies the time of molt. There are eight species of chooks of varying ages on board  at the moment and they all display slightly different patterns. As of now, the Speckled Sussex have already put on their winter feather coat (with the exception of Smarty Pantz) and are all puffed up and struttin' around like Snoop Dog pimpin' 0n the strip. The young leghorns look the most mottled but continue to squeeze out an egg or two as though compelled through genetics to deny their instinct to just stop for awhile. Sound familiar?

The book on this stuff is all about photo period. In natural settings these little feathered freak shows heave a cluck of relief, feel the weight of laying being lifted and praise whatever chicken deity that particular species praises for the fact that the painful ritual of expanding their egg holes to a hundred times their intended width has ceased, (the leghorns made a puja with photos of Foghorn Leghorn surrounded by egg maker, incense, Kentucky bourbon and mongoose toes, the rhode island reds scratched out a picture of Colonel Sanders under their roosts so they can shit on it every morning. The Americaunas just stand around complaining to each other that they are discriminated against for laying blue eggs.

And of course there's the anxiety. The anxiety of wondering whether or not the little fuckers will ever start laying again. Day after day of hardly any eggs. Weeks drifting by without any sign of increase. People at the farmers market seriously spazzing over the fact that we've sold out of eggs in the first half hour. It is, of course, about as rational as the caveman wondering whether the warm weather will ever come back when winter has settled in. I know this, and yet........................

Mzzzsss. Faloley is now in Bangkok giving the girls of Nana District lessons in the art of manhandling. She'll be cruising Asia for a couple of months causing as much trouble as possible and can likely be seen jumping fences and climbing fruit trees for exotic stash.  Look for the devaluation of the dollar to begin soon.  She's threatened to return to Maui and stay with us for awhile on her way back to Portland where she will be applying for work as a lifeguard at a car wash. We look forward to seeing her and hearing her tales of travel. Nurse Natalie arrived a couple of weeks back to fill the void, and fill it she has with her solid work ethic, soft spoken ways and Venusian charm. Her two week "hows it goin" orientation has ended and she has decided to stay on for a spell. So, along with Caley Nightingaley and Josh "too tall" Green, the farm is humming.  I am indeed a fortunate fella.

Got a new banana, papaya, edible hibiscus patch going in. This is a minor major project and the kind that the wwoofs always enjoy because its something different and requires a group effort and altered mindset. It will be modeled on the one in existence for the past year and a half which has proven to be a bigtime source of  fruit and vegies. Main thing with bananas is to know how tall the varieties you're planting get and to plant them far enough apart. After that its a matter of trimming leaves, mulching, regular watering and keeping the clumps to no more than about five to seven plants each.

We'll be using the dwarf apple, cavendish and Williams varieties as well as both pure Thai and Thai Solo cross papayas which seem to be fairly resistant to the ten bajillion diseases that feast on papaya leaf, skin and flesh. These areas provide good food production, grow out into wind breaks and privacy barriers and when mature, act as perfect hideouts for wwoofs who want to ditch work and burn some herb.

Is there any point in following  politics anymore. Isn't it a little like watching re runs of re runs which because of the fact that you know whats coming, disappoint you even more?  The voice know as reason has been systematically replaced by one slogan after another touting a future of green hope and legalized dope. I've got a shirt that I wear to the farmers market from time to time. It says GROW SOMETHING. Not a bad place to start.

So the other day I was surfing the web and decided that it was time to re enter the world of first person shooters and I figured that I would go with the original Quake because even though the graphics are crude compared to the today's games, it is still arguably the best pure shooter ever made, weighing in at a mere eight megabytes of disk space. So I googled my way to a bit torrent site which offered a free download and promptly invited a nasty little worm into my garden.

Since then, my little Shuttle has been acting like a paranoid schizophrenic, balking at every command and taking painfully long to decide to load a program or even which program to load. Then there's the freeze up which has been happening almost every time I'd get on the web. Finally the much dreaded blue screen message telling you that you better make arrangements with the nearest mortuary. Not good. Now I'm no slouch when it comes to tweaking a brain dead computer back to life, but I had to consult genius boy to make sure that i'd covered all the bases. His diagnosis, get what you need off it and bail.

So, after beating back the penny pinching scrooge bot that usually rides herd over my impulses to spend, I picked up a spiffy little laptop and went through the time honored tradition of transferring data from a dying piece of modern technology to a shiny new recipient with so much hard drive space that the pictures and documents transferred felt as though they had just been catapulted into outer space. I felt a little like a Tibetan monk coaxing the silicon soul of a terminal hard drive out into the light to free itself of its virus riddled prison with the constant sound of a c.p.u. grinding out redundant commands and gumming up the works a little bit more each and every day . As of this writing, I still haven't figured out how to migrate the address book  on my email program, so this blog may take awhile to get out.)-:{

The point of this little tale of woe is that my new computer came with a remote control. That's right, a remote control. I thought, you're kidding. But then I realized that if you're watching a movie or listening to music with your laptop sitting five inches too far away to tweak manually you can pick the teeny thing up, point and press and soak in the feeling of radical laziness. But the insight into laziness isn't the point. The point is that I now have five remote control devices (not counting my car key). There's the dish, the tube, the dvd player, the Bose and the computer. I feel so debauched. Its as though my remote control footprint has crossed the border of good taste and necessity. For penance I intend to fast for 32 days focusing primarily on that part of the brain which is capable of transmitting energy patterns adequate to the task of  controlling electronic devices.

Can one claim sustainability without such skills? I am my remote. My remote is me.

"Are you really gonna fast for thirty two days unky jp?"

"That's right little fella, that's right."

"Can I have your junk if you croak?'

"I'll get back to you on that little fella."

The more you show, the more we'll grow. Peace, Jp