Sunday, June 19th, 2022. Week number 24

Good morning. It’s about 8:15 a.m. and I’m sort of up. It’s going to be a hot day today. A lot going on. I don’t feel very good though. I don’t feel very good at all.

I’m going to get up and muscle through this. Today is going to be the hottest day of the week according to the weather report. We are supposed to get some water tomorrow and possibly the next day. Wet days are lazy days now.

It’s a very interesting place to be right now. Everything in the boxes is up and full of life. The potato box is all green and all of the cabbage boxes and now basically shaded. And sweet potatoes are coming in kind of slowly but all the legumes are coming in well. I’m surprised that the zucchini has taken so long but even they are heading into super growth. They are going to be huge pretty soon.

Among the things that need to get done this week our trellises and maybe a compost bin. Compost is one of these things you definitely need if you’re going to do garden boxes. Probably any kind of gardening calls for compost. I am actually thinking of getting an electric weed wacker. Call me a hypocrite if you want. The grass is growing very tall in the back part of my property where basically we have a path leading to the barn. I’ve had deliveries come through the gate there and it’s not a prime growing place because the house casts a shadow there. But the grass that’s out there would be a good starter for composting. Some people say grass is all you need. Double entender intended.

We are also getting our deliveries today. A new water pump which we will try out at the end of the day. A few other things I think are also coming in. I think we’re going to try a bag or two of mulch that they were selling for not much money. Our original plan was to get wood chips from the local sawmill but unfortunately, we couldn’t get our stories together as far as working with the locals. I don’t drive a car and they don’t seem to want to be very helpful. So much for staying local. If my neighbors are too dramatic to move, the Russians are happy to make money off of them. Should be a lesson in life but I’m sure it isn’t.

I am going to make a trip to town this week. I have a couple of small things to do. Also, I believe I can go this week to check out the steel place. I don’t really want to trust all the grapes with wood. 

My plan for the pickle Garden is to use a couple of boards to make a free-standing trestle that will be braced and strung by nylon string. I bought three spools of it and I think I’ll just sink a few screws in the side of the box and lash everything together. I’ll start over there and see what it looks like. If it goes together easily enough, I might do the same thing for the beans and the peas. And of course, everything can be taken apart and stored in the barn until next year.

I’m also thinking of putting some hoops on my boxes. Probably greenhousing them will add to things. This year, everything is just growing beautifully. There is a lot of really good dirt in those boxes and I am extremely pleased with how everything is coming along. Again, we didn’t do anything the way it is “supposed to be done” according to all that good time tested local knowledge. But our genius neighbors refuse to understand that climate change is real and refuse to be helpful for Americans or Jews or other lowly creatures. I’m just not abusive enough for their tastes.

We’ve also got a sprayer coming. I think we’re going with Valerian extract. We’re probably going to get cats showing up on our property which is not a bad thing. I have a few mice that come looking for whatever they can find. I’m pretty good about keeping the food away from them but they come in and look. I still don’t really want to get a cat. I am probably allergic to fur and though the last time I tried having a cat, it did wonders to keep the mice out of the house, the little bastard made my skin crawl.

Other than this, it feels like I’m falling into a really easy rhythm. I checked the calendar this morning and I have completed one half of this project. This week right now, coinciding with the solstice by the way, is now the back half of everything. We are just riding out the string.

There is still a lot of stuff to learn. I have done some food saving before. I’ve massaged cabbage and done some pickling. I’m not anything close to an expert. But I’m looking forward to this part of things as well. I have a perfect place to store food. I think I’m going to build a box to keep the mice away from cabbage that we do not pickle. I don’t know, I’m just not worried about it.

I am a little worried about not feeling good though. I don’t want to get too lazy. It’s just that overdoing things seems to hurt me more than under-doing them. Last week I ended up with some skin abrasions from the extra day of cycling. Being diabetic, I need to be extra careful of these sorts of things. 

I also need to make sure that I don’t let myself get so worked up or angry. This morning I got a fresh reminder from my neighbor as to how horrific their automobiles are. It’s been the same problem since I moved here. 23 hours and 45 minutes a day we have clean air and quiet. And yet every time they go in or go out because they cannot even make the slightest effort to park in a way that does not throw their auto emissions directly into my house, there is that moment of Poison every single day.

Who do you talk to about this? Can we start here? Is global warming real?

The answer to the question, “Is global warming real?” is yes: Nothing other than the rapid rise of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity can fully explain the dramatic and relatively recent rise in global average temperatures.Jan 31, 2019

Human activity means we don’t get out of our cars, we don’t purchase locally, we demand that the oil business continue despite evidence of political malfeasance and ecological destruction to go along with the greed and cultural destruction. People just don’t want to listen because they are told by propaganda to remain as hysterical as possible. Only money means anything and nothing else. Get that money or you’re a loser and it doesn’t matter who you hurt along the way.

Me? I’m in my third year of daily writing. Maybe in a different world, I’d rather be riding plays for theater or screenplays. I’m not really sure if I’m a prose writer. I used to like doing these writing projects. I enjoyed several of them with students. I think we put together some really interesting literature between us. Maybe I would rather be doing that than writing this.

The point of it though is that once you do start writing, you can’t help but think more. This is a lesson I learned at the University of Minnesota. One of my favorite teachers of all time taught me the truth about the act of writing. Simply by trying to formulate the words to illustrate what you are thinking of, you are obligated to spend more time on each thought and therefore you go deeper into it than you normally would. People who don’t write, tend to be more emotional and reactive in their thinking. This of course is great for the economy but horrific for ecology. Every snap judgment and emotional decision we make probably contributes to this global warming problem that’s going to be the end of everything. I vote for wisdom and thinking.

I vote for literacy and idealism. I vote for going slower and staying local. I voted ecology over economy. I vote cooperation more than competition or conflict. I vote for keeping things nice and easy and peaceful. I vote for staying alive. I vote against chasing dragons to our death.

I had a thought about this this weekend. I got to thinking about the lack of idealism or idealists that we seem to have. I know we have them but because there is no market for idealism, there is no job that one can take as an idealist, it gets forgotten as a lifestyle. Shame that.

Socrates told us that the unexamined life is not worth living. What this means is that without genuine idealism or at least a moderate quest for real intelligence, we do not reach our full potential as people. I understand that we replace this thought of personal growth with competition and economic growth. We measure ourselves by the money we accumulate rather than the quality of our lives or the quality of our character. Another shame here.

When I was a teenager, it was hard to tell whether I was an idealist or just lazy. I certainly read a lot. I engaged in a lot of media. But I had an opportunity to grow up without very much want or need. I wasn’t hungry and my parents seemed to think that they were doing enough for me simply by giving me a roof over my head and certainly enough food to eat. I could say now that their lack of understanding of nutrition probably was not helpful. Also, the Hysteria was definitely not a plus nor was the violence.

But I did grow up reading and so the idea of being an idealist was very much a part of me. I have always been driven by particular ideas rather than reacting to immediate stimuli. This doesn’t mean that I did not get addicted to fast food. I did not have any dietary training growing up and to me, food was just something to enjoy and it didn’t matter what package it came in. The faster the better.

Nevertheless, I did find myself gravitating towards socialism. This did not put me in good favor with my parents. I graduated towards socialism because it seemed to make more sense to be cooperative with each other rather than making war against each other. If two people get into a fight, both sides get injured, possibly both sides die and resources are wasted in the effort. I understand that some people say that war Sparks innovation but 99% of that is simply innovation towards killing. That is not creativity.

Cooperation uses less resources and unless there is an unfortunate accident, both sides end up healthy at the end. Possibly even healthier if the endeavor is profitable.

I mentioned that I came up with several screenplays via collaborations with students. Would I have these pieces of literature lying around if I had challenged them to writing contests? Would I have had the experiences of working together with them for the months that we were engaged in this and the memories of all that if it had just been an assignment or a demand that they do this work for me? Absolutely not. And for each and every one of these people that I did these collabs with, to this day, we have rather extremely warm feelings together. It’s funny what happens when people cooperate with each other. It’s also very unfunny what happens when people specifically create conflicts.

I can go back a year and a half ago when I first arrived here and think of communicating with my neighbors. I’m not saying we would have had a great relationship. I don’t have anything in common with them and truthfully, I don’t like the noises they make very much or the pollution and the stench of it. But I’m sure everybody would have been happier if we had just been friends instead of adversarial to each other. Nothing good came from it. I know for a fact that they got absolutely nothing for their little games except more paranoia and hatred. 

Me? I don’t have to be nice to them. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. I don’t even like them. Why should I put myself out?

The point is though that life would be a little easier if everyone was friends. It’s a shame we’re not. But then again, it’s a world full of shame if you’re an idealist.

One more point that got stuck in my head this weekend was the connection between idealism and veganism. It occurs to me that quite a large percentage of the genuine idealists in the world have chosen vegetarian or vegan lifestyles. Certainly, genuine idealists think very deeply about their diet. You can’t be an idealist and not think very carefully about the food you eat. The issue is how deep will you go into where your food comes from. This is Shakespeare’s rub. This is the place where things get dicey.

The answer of course is that you have to make a choice. If you are going to live by a set of genuine ideals, you have to go all the way in. I’m not talking about things that you are told by other people that you must believe or that are arbitrarily right and wrong based upon popularity. I’m not talking about mysticism or ideas that strike you simply because they titillate you this early or selfishly. I’m talking about genuine ideas of how to live personally and ethically and in terms of how we relate to each other. Once you seriously start thinking about what is correct and incorrect according to your own personal set of mathematical beliefs of what is genuinely right and wrong, you have to go all the way in.

Of course, it helps to have a genuine understanding of who you are. You can’t really rely on the color of your skin as meaning you are better than someone because they have a different color of skin. That’s absolutely ridiculous when you think about it. It’s also probably not correct to think that your sex immediately dictates your intelligence. I will admit to being slightly more adept at finding sustainable things then most of my female friends have ever been. This is not to say that female intelligence is an oxymoron. I’m just saying that I’m probably a little bit more pragmatic and less emotional. I’m sure women think the same way.

But the point is that you need to believe what is right and wrong. I have put a lot of thought into why I do what I do. I know how I got here. I know how I got into this bit of idealism that is now probably something like two and a half for 3 million words deep. I know the process that got me to the place in my thinking where I stand right now. And I want to say that I believe in what I’m saying as being true. I am not ashamed to share these words because I believe what I say and I believe what I am saying is for the health and benefit of mankind and all living things on the planet Earth. I’m not for sale. I’m doing my job.

Perhaps it would be nice if this spread a little bit. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. If I die in obscurity, so be it. My conscience is clear. I haven’t sold out. I’ve certainly made stupid compromises in my life. But as far as this goes and as far as the lifestyle I am currently living, I am unashamed. I’m doing the right thing. By far, I am doing the right thing.

Yes of course, I probably should have built my water retention pools out of masonry instead of using plastic barrels. They would last longer and serve the exact same purpose. Perhaps I will do that project somewhere in the future when I feel a little bit more stable and have a little bit more functional movement. Or, you never know, maybe some money will come in one day and I’ll just call some experts and let them do the work.

But everything is growing. Everything I wanted to do was happening and right here in mid june, the place is frighteningly green. Maybe in a few years when all of the ivy fills in, it’ll be a giant green bowl absolutely bursting with life. Maybe in a few years, the spring time will be an explosion of color and the hottest parts of the summer will never touch me because of the shade of all of the trees.

In the meantime though, it’s just me and my ex partner. I got to get going now because I probably should clean up a little bit and get some materials ready. She’ll be here by about 10:00. We have five new berry bushes that need to go in together. We’ve got some trellises to build. And we will water in the evening hopefully with our new pump.

And in case you wanted to know, the statistics for rain collection are as follows: We had three brief rains during the day on Friday. We collected about 800 L of water in about 1 hour of rainfall. As of the moment, I have about 2,000 L of water reserved and I don’t see any leakage.

This is all to the positive. On the negative, even after the rains, the water in my well is at 210 cm. This is 30 cm less than at the end of the winter and we are still not in the hottest part of the summer. From the original assessment of 640 l, the truth is we only have about 450 l available. 

What this really means is that the water table is very low. This explains why the bog is drying up and it explains why the trees are drying up as well. Blah blah blah you don’t believe in global warming, but the forest here that my land butts up against has been here for hundreds of years and it is here because normal global weather systems and temperatures allow these trees to grow. If we, as a species, cannot control ourselves for making emotional decisions and chasing after things that are only going to become garbage in a short period of time, apparently our efforts are drying out the world. The results are desertification, global warming and eventually this Forest will burn. That’s not dread or worry, that’s a scientific absolute mathematical fact. And there’s nobody to blame but ourselves.

But yeah, get that money. Boy oh boy, let’s just burst into flames. Let’s just up and at them and go after it. Today is our only day to work and by golly we need to drive somewhere and work really hard. We got to make that money. Make that money like there’s no tomorrow.

***

It’s 4:20. I don’t care what you’re thinking, there is no joy in mudville. It was a hot day today and my ex partner and I are crashed on the couch. She went down with a bloody nose. I am being a friend and I am holding back any feelings of the fact that she’s crashed on a white couch with a bloody nose. That’s not true. I actually said something about that. She smiled and bled a little more.

We’ve had a reasonably successful day but not one that came from perfect or professional work. We have five new berry bushes in a new location. I cleared the grass with an old fashioned Scythe. If I have even considered buying an electrical one and wasting 200 more rubles, I might just be good with a handheld model. My new love for cutting grass has to do with compost. We have found a place that will be our new compost bin and probably all the tall grass in the back side of the house or at least as much as I care to cut and haul over there by wheelbarrow will be our starter.

I have a place where I have been throwing kitchen scraps for a while. This is very Belarusian fashion. You just dig a hole and throw your organic garbage in there and it decomposes and goes into the land that way. The more holes you dig the better. This is common knowledge. I’m looking for a place though that I can let decompose into really good organic matter to toss into my boxes next year. True, we already have access to excellent soil and as much as we care to dig and haul. Still, I have a jungle out there and at least 200 kilos of grass. This will make very nice compost and feed our plants for years to come.

The biggest addition today was the pickle trellis. This is where we were a little less than professional. It took two tries to get the design right.

My original plan had two boards crossed into a v pattern but I tossed that aside to simply bury a board in the ground. The moment I did that and looked at it, I didn’t like it. There was no real way to hang a top beam on it as it was. So I picked it up and attached it to the back of the pickle box. 

The second original plan called for using nylon string for support and suspending a blue cable between the two posts. This is some junk electric cable that I pulled up out of the ground. I don’t know why it was buried except as garbage but it’s still holding together enough. But I didn’t like the tension we were able to get out of it so we unwrapped everything and started again.

The third original plan was to suspend a birch tree that has been lying around since I moved here between the two posts, tie it down with some nylon string and then use that blue electrical cable to tie the posts and the tree Cross beam into place onto two stakes in the ground. This gave us enough tension on both sides not to worry about the structure falling over in the wind. After that we just drilled some screws halfway into both sides of the box and used two spools of nylon thread for the runners to grab hold of when they appear.

The structure looks pretty smart actually. It’s a nice piece of engineering. Zero cost of course which makes it the very best kind of engineering. But I do not think it’ll collapse in the wind. It’s being held together well from too many angles. I think it’ll make it through the end of the year. The best part of course is that we can simply unleash it and back the screws out and so everything eventually is reusable.

Unfortunately, we’re not done. If I was here alone I would also not be done. It was very warm today. My ex partner says that the ground is still plenty wet but the new weather report says we’re not getting any rain until even the end of this week.

Okay, let me take that back. The rain is expected on Tuesday, not Thursday.

Many years ago when I was stuck in Poland and was still in a nice relationship with my daughter’s mother, she made plans to come to Poland to visit me. At the time, communication was very primitive. I don’t think her family had a computer at all and she had to go to the telephone office and use one of the public computers there to talk to me. Forget about smartphones. They were a decade  in the future.

The problem was that I knew she was coming but I just didn’t know when. I also had to go to a public place to use the internet and when I checked in and checked my email, I found out that she was going to be here on Thuesday.

That’s right, I didn’t misspell it. Thuesday.

What the hell day could that possibly be? At the time I read the letter it was Wednesday. This meant that she was either coming in the next day or she had been sitting in the railroad station for 24 hours already. I burned up a phone card finding out the truth.

Do you remember that scene in The Godfather when they asked the girl if she speaks English and she answers of course, man they Tuesday Thursday Wednesday Saturday.

My ex partner told me rain was coming on Thursday. Maybe it was a matter of translation.

Anyway, we still have to water regardless of bloody noses or tired legs. There’s only two real chores to do, three if we count bringing everything home from the field. We have one more plant that needs to go in the ground and then some team watering to throw a bucket on the field.

About that, yes, we did get our new water pump. It’s big and beautiful, probably more powerful than we need. But of course it came without any fittings. I was afraid of this. I didn’t get any when I went to the market on Tuesday and I was in too much of a hurry to think about it when I had to go back on Wednesday. So for today we’ll use the old pump one more time and when I go into town this week, I will make one more trip back to my now very good friends in the water pumping section of the market and I will get the last of the things I need.

What else? Nothing else. I mean, the treachery of a bloody nose is a bad thing. Feeling a little too pressured to do things you don’t understand or working harder than you want to in warmer weather than you’re comfortable with is the truth. It hurts. It makes you want to stop. But to take a step back or to fly up into the air like a drone and look down, we don’t really have a lot of work to do. 

The gardens are already well enough grown to start shading out the weeds. I stuck a hoe in the ground for about an hour and went through the middle gardens without too much problem. I took out about 80% and fluffed up the land a little bit. Some of the things that we didn’t get absolutely perfect in the springtime are hurting us a little but nothing horrible. The cabbage ears are growing without any help or any spraying so far. A few of the cabbages have a few holes in them but nothing is showing any sign of infestation. I found exactly one potato beetle. He didn’t last long and I didn’t really listen if he wanted to make a protest.

Other than the temperature, it’s just easy living right now.

And as a bonus, it looks like this year we’re going to have three roses in the Rose bush that we planted last year and even the one lavender plant that we have is showing signs of flowering. And without any sarcasm whatsoever, there are more than a thousand wildflowers coming up from what God planted including marigolds, daisies, yellow, White and purple flowers. Even that flower that nobody would ever want growing on their land except me, the one that is beloved by butterflies, is starting to make their appearance with vigor.

The ex partner gets fairly violent thinking about it. She wants to kill it so bad she can taste it. She has no love for butterflies. I think I’m going to have a conversation with her about life and death.

***

Well, that was a heck of the day. Truth be told, it was bloody painful for me. I wish I could tell you everything that I’m going through these days but let’s just leave it at saying that this was a physically painful day.

My ex partner managed to finish up all of her work. The last thing she did was do a very thorough watering of the field and to collect some greens to take home. She even brought some up to me including a baby daikon radish and some of our tiny beats and they’re delicious leaves. Everything ended up in my dinner tonight along with some fresh garlic greens. Very tasty.

I guess it was hot today but truthfully, I didn’t feel it as much as my ex partner did. I don’t really understand why she completely cracked up in the afternoon weather. I really seem to have adapted. I guess the human body adapts to pretty much anything if you give it a chance. And of course I’m here every day so it’s not an event to get out in the weather and play with the plants.

We do have the new pump but of course there are no fittings so I didn’t get a chance to try it out. I have an idea of perhaps getting another length of hose, perhaps 20 m or so. This would allow me to set the pump up in one place and 20 m of hose would be enough to reach any buckets I may have. It’s not that big of a difference. It’s not really a portable unit but I think I can attach a base to it and perhaps put a handle on top without too much problem. Either way, it’s going to be a lot more powerful than the pump we have now.

I’ve asked my ex partner to see if she can find one of those apps that allow you to turn on and off electricity via your phone. This would definitely make watering our garden easier if we didn’t have to walk over and unplug the unit when we wanted it to stop. I know what this is in English and I’ve seen it for sale in many different places and under many different names. The problem is only that I don’t know how to translate this thing to Russian and my ex partner has never thought about finding such a thing. Maybe within a day or two we will have this under control and we will really have a well-working watering system.

Tomorrow though, I think I’m going to take it easy. I always think something like this. I don’t really have a lot to do. I could trestle the lower gardens. My ex partner said that our pickle Garden looks like the Brooklyn bridge now. I agree that it is a pretty cool piece of engineering. 

But other than that, everything’s in tip top shape. I have no worries. I’ve got plenty to eat, I’m not in any particular debt, none of the markets work on Monday so I have no reason to go to town. I also I’m not a wage slave so I’m not obligated like my ex partner to get up in the morning, get dressed and go to work. Perhaps I should be thankful for such small favors. In any case, tomorrow is Monday. I know I’ll be here. I’ll try to think of something interesting to say.