Listics

For my friends waiting out the Whiskeytown / Lime complex fires out 299 near Douglas City…

…and some banjo picking for my eponymous pal out east…

… and because there’s never enoough dobro music in this life…

Technorati Tags: iris dement, earl scruggs, emmy lou, nitty gritty, et al, good old al, what would we do without him, social software, communities

Bucolic, ain’t it.

Technorati Tags: you’re it

It’s that time of year again, time to knock back the weeds. I’m a month later this year than last, and a week later than 2006, but the thistles haven’t gone to seed yet. Wet spring and cool early summer seem to have held everything down a bit.

So there I was before lunch, driving the tractor back and forth, knocking down thistles and burdock and surrounded by a flock of swallows swooping all around me, eating all the insects I kicked into the air. Sitting on the telephone line across the road were a couple dozen swallows, looking like the second seating at the barnyard buffet.

I better get back to work. My customers need me. The birds’ menu for this afternoon: grasshoppers, mosquitoes, flies, beetles, and oodles of unnamed but delicious bugs! As for me, I’m gorging on mulberries whenever I drive under a mulberry tree.

Technorati Tags: winston used to enjoy these midsummer posts

Here’s a pointer to Ben Paynter’s brief article in Wired 16.07 about using high tech to forecast seasonal crop production.

…the company sorts 100 gigs of intel every day, adding to a database of 50 terabytes and counting. It’s also moving into world production-prediction — wheat fields in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine are already in the data set, as are corn and soy plots in Brazil and Argentina. The firm expects to reach petabyte scale in five years.

Technorati Tags: ben paynter, Lanworth

My mom’s brother Don died this week. He was 76, and in a lot of pain for the last year or so. The funeral was today in a Methodist Church out in the country near the eponymous town of Black Earth. He’ll be buried not far from where he was born, at home on the farm, in 1931. After the funeral, we drove out through those green hills and fertile valleys, crossing trout streams and exploring the winding blacktop roads. We happened upon the Aldo Leopold Nature Center, and eventually found ourselves on top of a hill in Vermont township at the Vermont Lutheran Church. For me, as well as being the church where I was baptized long ago, this is an ancestral resting place. My great-grandparents, my grandparents, and many of their relatives are buried there. We walked through the cemetery and I told Beth the same stories I’ve told her before when we’ve visited. We marveled at the tenacity of those old Norwegians who settled the place, the commitment it must have taken to hitch the horse to the buggy in the nineteenth century to go to church. People came from miles around on unpaved roads to the top of that hill for church services whether it was a snowy winter Sunday or a sunny summer day.

We saw people we only seem to see at weddings and funerals. Some of the relationships are so tenuous (third cousin once removed, I’m not making this up) that we might as well be playing that Kevin Bacon game. Dad was on his best behavior and it wasn’t my day to watch out for him. The older and more demented he becomes, the more he is given to improprieties.

Just a week ago uncle Don was still alive and Beth, dad, and I visited mom’s grave at another Norwegian Lutheran church in a different part of the county. There’s a bronze marker there next to hers with his birth date and a blank spot for his date of death.

Technorati Tags: tombstones

We’ve topped 100 inches of snowfall this year in the Madison area. The previous record snowfall was 76+ inches, set in 1978-79. The average snowfall is just over 49 inches. It’s snowing again today, but it’s Spring already, so to hell with it. I changed my header graphic in anticipation of April. (Flowers to report so far? Four snowdrops and a single lonely crocus. yesterday the crocuses looked just about ready to pop, but with today’s snow I’m thinking it will be another day or two before they appear en masse.

Technorati Tags: icky white stuff, climate change

It’s miss Molly’s fourth birthday. Happy birthday Molly Bloom.

Technorati Tags: molly bloom, so well groomed, still wiggly after all these years

Harbinger of spring
Red breast reflecting sunlight
Lies dead in the road

* * *

This is a true story. Really. A few days ago I chatted with a clerk about the warming weather. We agreed the robins weren’t back yet, but with cranes on the marsh and geese flying north it wouldn’t be long now. Yesterday I saw a flock of blackbirds wheeling over the field, but no robins.

Today, as I headed west on a country road, I saw my first robin — dead. Several others were on the south-facing slope, hopping about, looking for the early worms.

I guess nobody told it to beware.