Rainy Days

It’s been raining a lot recently. Today we’ve actually got a bit of sunshine. I took the dogs out for a walk a little while ago. We still have basil going on the porch but I don’t know that it’ll last much longer. Our last CSA delivery was on Saturday. The highlight was a bunch of garlic which will be nice. Between that and the basil I should be able to whip up some nice pesto. There’s also some swiss chard doing well.

This morning I tried a new biscuit recipe.
The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion: The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook
p. 110, Cheddar and Black Pepper biscuits. Very good.

This month is National Novel Writing Month. Most of my time is focused on getting my novel written these days. So far it has been going well.

Wrong, Mom says.

Turns out I have been to Millersylvania State Park before – back on August 24th, 1979! I came up with my folks on a vacation from California and we spent a day there and camped overnight. Right now I don’t really remember the trip but one of these days I’ll get back to my folks at take a look at the pictures, maybe that’ll jog things.

Millersylvania State Park

Last weekend we decided to take a quick trip to a the nearby Millersylvania State Park. Neither of us have been to the park before but now with the car we could make the quick trip out, have a picnic, and walk around the park. It was cloudy, but not raining.

Millersylvania State Park is an 842-acre camping park with 3,300 feet of freshwater shoreline on Deep Lake. The park, filled with trails, is abundant in old-growth cedar and fir trees. Millersylvania was constructed almost entirely by hand in 1935 by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

We managed the drive out fine and located the park. Once there we drove around and found the place largely deserted. When we were going to park we discovered that the ‘pay here’ box with the envelops didn’t have a pen. We hadn’t brought a pen either. Eventually we discovered one at the first box when you enter the park.

That obstacle crossed we parked near Kitchen 1, down by the lake.
Millersylvania lake

We had our choice of picnic tables since there wasn’t anyone else around.
Picnic table

After lunch we went for a walk. We didn’t see much wildlife beyond a frog, some squirrels and birds but there are lots of nice plants and trees.
Mushrooms

Path

We followed the paths around, crossed a couple bridges over streams leading to the lake and eventually climbed up the hill. Although the area has been logged at some point in the past there are some big trees.
Big tree

At the top of the hill we took the path that led back down towards the lake.
Path down

But then as we followed the path along the lake we ran into a problem – it was flooded.
Flooded

The first part looked like we could walk alongside the path but around the corner we discovered a longer stretch of the path also flooded. Only one thing to do.
Wet feet

After wading through the water the path we were on led to a drier path which eventually connected back to our start point and we headed back to the car.
Car

Looking at the map of the park it’s obvious that we only saw a tiny bit of the park. We’ll have to go back sometime when the weather’s nice and explore more.

OilPoster.org

OilPoster.org

Colorful and authoritative, this poster traces the history of the Oil Age from its beginnings in the hills of western Pennsylvania in 1859 to its rise as the engine of global industrial economies. The poster’s main chart features a year-by-year rendering of worldwide oil production from 1859 to 2050 with projections of future production based on Colin Campbell’s Oil Depletion Model. Historical annotations as well as detailed data on production, trade and reserves make this poster a versatile tool for presenting the realities and implications of global oil production and its impending peak.

Looks like an interesting project to increase awareness of the Peak Oil issues. They are providing posters free to educators, schools, and non-profit institutions.

Garden wrap-up

Our 2005 garden has mostly come to a close. I took out our Thai tomatoes today. We didn’t get nearly as many this year – the plants got some disease or something and didn’t perform well. The only thing left now is some Swiss Chard – good producer – and the basil which has done very well. Lots of basil in a few varieties. Next year, assuming we’re still here, I’m going to try to do the containers a bit different. I want to build up some good soil in them and do away with the mulch covers in favor of standard mulch. I plan to read more about containers as well. There’s not much I can do about the light but I can try to make the Earthboxes more effective for organic gardening.

FSO Transcription – James Howard Kuntsler

FSO Transcription – James Howard Kunstler “The Long Emergency” October 1, 2005

An interview with Kunstler about peak oil, hurricane impacts and the future.

I don’t believe any combination of alternative fuels, or systems for running them, will allow us to run things the way we’re accustomed to running them in America, or even a substantial fraction of them. All of them share the same central liability, which is that it takes more energy to get these things in play – whether it’s biodiesel, or hydrogen, or solar, or wind – than you get from the energy that these things produce.

When I go and give a college lecture, people get up in the audience, during the question and answer period, and they say things like, “Oh, you’re so pessimistic, you don’t have any solutions.” And it’s true, I don’t have any magic bullets myself. I don’t offer any magic bullets, but I think that there are intelligent responses to what we’re faced with, and they’re pretty straight forward. There’s nothing really that abstruse about them. For instance, we are probably going to have to downscale everything we do in everyday life. We’re probably going to have to resize, and right size, and rescale all of our activities, from farming, to the way we do schooling, to the distances that we live from things, to the way we conduct retail trade, from the way we conduct manufacturing. And we can do these things. But we’re not prepared to think about them.

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