I hate August on the homestead. There, I’ve admitted it. I can’t stand pretending. Sitting at the kitchen table looking at the last of about 250 pounds of pears, I could almost cry.
I’d like to sell it all right now and move to Fiji. I imagine moving permanently into a rented beach hut complete with pool boy serving me colorful fruity cocktails all day. Not processing pears. Not plucking dozens of ducks. Not gaping helplessly at the crops becoming engulfed, scorched, withering to their deaths.
Handy Hubby could even join me there if he wanted to, it’s not his fault after all. The bugs, the heat, my aching hands, the better part of an entire nation on vacation, as if that weren’t bad enough.
Because then on top of it all is the garden. Every year, the garden horror show, unrecognizable from a month ago, my annually recurring failure at keeping nature mildly tamed.
In anticipation of my August mood, this year I planted loads of flowers at the garden entrance. Flowers and puppies are just about all that’s keeping depression at bay. Some are miserable in the dead of winter; I am miserable in the dead of summer.
Mowing stopped mid-way for stabbing arthritic pain in my wrists and fingers. I don’t care anymore. I can’t care anymore. There are plenty of cow peas and a few ripe melons in that mess, if you dare. After weeks at work, this is what Hubby must come home to, and rescue me from, furthering my shameful failure.
Okra successfully outmaneuvering the pernicious grasses, but I don’t like okra.
The pigs still have their wee escape, and I have mine.
Puppy love.
Puppy pics are way more fun than chemtrail pics.
I could be taking photos of the regular assault in our skies with the disgusting aerosols of climate engineering, as I was for a number of months. Another failure it seems, because I can’t bare it, it doesn’t seem to be helping anything at all, except for normalizing abhorrent “science”.
I simply have no more capacity or patience for folks who don’t, can’t or won’t see, or who don’t care, or who like, the whole-scale rape, murder and pillage of our planet. When will it stop? When will the madness heal? When will a mass of mankind have had enough of bowing to their masters as they crack the whip on the laws of nature?
I’m on vacation alright, just like the bulk of a nation, it’s just a vacation on my window seat, directly under the a/c unit, where I’m grateful to continue my climate engineering research thanks to these more tireless and consistent deeply concerned citizens.
Cheeses currently in our aging fridge, which is nothing more than a cheap beverage model sadly impersonating a cave in Switzerland: Swiss (of course), Tomme (another Alpine cheese), Munster, Camembert (wrapped in fig leaves), Pepper Jack, Farmhouse Cheddar (cloth-wrapped), Gouda, Dill Havarti, Mozzarella (the old-fashioned way), Ricotta. Plus, in the kitchen fridge: yogurt, kefir, Mexican queso, and chocolate ice cream–all homemade with the freshest Grade A, raw milk from small farm, grass-fed cows available for purchase in East Texas.
These are the kind of cheeses one has a tough time finding where to legally buy, or sell, not only in America, but in quite a few other Western countries as well. In most of the countries who consider themselves ‘free’ as far as I’m aware, acquiring licensing for everything dairy under the Federal sun will still not grant you the right to sell such cheeses. Big Brother is so very worried about our health, after all. http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/30/some-like-it-raw-the-state-of-unpasteurized-cheese-in-the-u-s/
Some of these are cheeses the way our ancestors made them–even using fig sap as rennet and kefir as starter culture. Others of them have been made possible only with the help of modern science–freeze-dried cultures in order to create the holes and flavor of Swiss, for example, or the orange-rinded stinky varieties like Munster or Limburger, or the blue veins of the pungent Roquefort, the reliable white mold of a Camembert–which make it possible to imitate, with a reasonable degree of success, the most famous of region-specific cheeses we’ve come to know and love over the generations.
The first time I tasted cheese that did not come wrapped in plastic I was a teenager in France. It was also the first time I tasted milk straight from the cow. I was stunned to realize these products, considered the same from my own home to my host family’s home, had almost nothing in common. To the eye they appeared congruent, but to the other senses they were not even distant cousins.
But it’s one thing to harness an appreciation for the depth and subtitles of a finely- crafted cheese, it’s quite another to think you can make one. In Texas. In an ‘aging fridge’ from Wal-mart. With $7/gallon milk you drive 3 hours to acquire and sometimes using cultures manufactured in a lab.
Is it just for the love of cheese? It’s true, while doubtless they can’t compete with their cave-aged predecessors, still available in their natural state to only a precious few, I’ve made some of the best cheeses I’ve tasted available in this neck of the Piney Woods.
Handy Hubby appreciates my rather expensive and quite time-consuming hobby, but that’s just a bonus. I think these old skills and crafts are crucial to maintain and pass along to future generations, that’s for sure. But none of these good reasons would be enough, even all together, if it weren’t for the pleasure of the process.
The sensuality of cheese-making cannot be over-stated and to describe it would take poetry far superior than is my capacity to create. This is a hobby that touches, demands, cultivates every one of our senses and a fair amount of intellect as well. A whole-minded approach is crucial for success, because process alone will only get you so far.
You may scoff and think a cheese is a cheese, it’s a matter of taste alone, and they mostly taste the same. If so, you poor, poor dear.
“Those . . . from whom nature has withheld the legacy of taste, have long faces, and long eyes and noses, whatever their height there is something elongated in their proportions. Their hair is dark and unglossy, and they are never plump, it was they who invented trousers.”
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin The Physiology of Tastequoted in A Natural History of the Sensesby Diane Ackerman
You may laugh and say . . . “sound?” If cheese-making requires a subtle practice of every sense than that includes sound . . . how silly.
Someday I will make the case for sound in good cheese-making, because I think there’s a case to be made. In addition to my own experimentation, I suspect I need search no further than the many monasteries made famous for their cheeses for more supporting evidence.
Cheese is still more pleasure than exudes the senses in the thrill of retrieving and treasuring a fading art, and in marrying the inevitable couple of progress and tradition.
“We are all served more and more by factory machines, maybe inevitably, and by schedules, even our own, and in time, as has often been pointed out, we come to serve them. Some of us are becoming chafed by it all. We seek to reaffirm ourselves, to do and make for ourselves, to find new ways to do so–many of them admittedly old ways, but new and revitalizing ones to us and our friends. We want to find out how the basic components of our lives are made and come to us to use. We seek to become part once more of the processes, and possessors once more of the details of our own existence.”
The Cheeses and Wines of England and France, with Notes on Irish Whiskey by John Ehle
A few favorite references and a favorite resource:
Living is easy, with eyes closed. Misunderstanding all you see.
Always, no sometimes, think it’s me.
But you know when it’s a dream.
THE OA
I think I know it means a “Yes” but it’s all wrong.
That is I think I disagree.
Married to illusion. What sort of glam-golem are we-they creating?
You get to see the pretty pictures. But not the shit, literal shoveling shit, that went in to creating them. A Walt Disney dream. For every success, a dozen failures you don’t see. I don’t talk about.
This is what I really think, after many months of research into Geoengineering.
We are all now ruled by the cartoonish mentality of the technocracy. They are trying to force upon us a reality based on illusion.
I want to thank the following folk for their work, which has helped me tremendously to navigate this fool’s path. This particular journey may be over, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to move on too far.
I was pleased to be able to predict we’d have a spray day on Thursday after seeing the forecast on the local news several days before: Rising heat, rising wind gusts, little rain chance except for isolated severe storm potential on the weekend. “Ah,” I said to Hubby, “they will spray Wednesday afternoon or Thursday.” Inwardly this does give me a bit of comfort, despite how much it annoys me to know we are all guinea pigs to these vampires. At least I’ll know why I have an ear ache, head ache, joint pain and/or severe allergies.
To what do I owe my newly-found powers of prediction? Psychic abilities? Nope! Thanks to a YouTube channel called 1PacificRedwood.
Not normal clouds! Stop pretending or pay attention!
We have an innate reflex defined as disgust. When we find something repellant, something repulsive and ugly, most likely, thanks to evolution, we can surmise it is not healthy. I see ridiculous comments and memes trying to push this geoengineering acting as if it’s the better of two evils–it’s severe climate change, or it’s this unsavory alternative to cover the atmosphere in heavy metal micro and nano-particulates.
Where do we get to choose? To opt-out? I’ll take my chances that the SUV drivers of the world won’t ruin the climate if the weather terrorists just stop with their toxic wizardry, thanks anyway.
No rain, as I expected, only man-made clouds. According to some idiots on Youtube we are supposed to admire these Frankenclouds and find them fascinating and their creators marvels of science and engineering. Whatever. Where’s the rain?!
Chemtrail spray day once again over our area of East Texas. I was not able to get good photos because I was too busy. As has been the typical pattern so far after the spraying our temperatures increase, the wind gusts pick up and our rain chances are reduced. The sky becomes a whitish opaque and I get severe allergies.
You can tell the result of the spreading contrails are not normal cirrus clouds by the color and the ‘cobweb’ effect they create in the sky before leaving it a hazy silvery bluish-white.
Update: 5.16.17 The jets continue overhead over the cumulus clouds which should be giving us rain chances by the afternoon. According to the local weather forecast it will become clear by the afternoon instead. There are rain chances given for tomorrow, but I expect we will not have rain here.
Here is the only meteorologist I know of who is daily telling the truth about how our weather is being manipulated.
Lots of color to encourage bees and butterflies and me to enter.
I am selectively NOT weeding the Queen Anne’s lace (wild carrot) and cilantro from the garlic patch.
I’m intentionally doing that! Beans with onions and select weeds, quel horreur!
Broccoli and lettuces and tomatoes in the same bed? What madness is this?!
According to modern science pigs should not eat table scraps and farm species should not intermingle due to cross-contaminating disease potential. Someone should really be informing the critters of these hazards.
There is a science underworld that borders with pseudoscience where mavericks and rascals believe the world, indeed the entire universe, is holistic, not mechanistic. I’m fascinated by these courageous thinkers who have ventured into unconventional territory. I recognize the strength of character and conviction such a journey requires. Whether or not they are correct is, to me ,secondary, though I believe they are on the right path.
What I admire is that they strayed from the consensus, they escaped the group-think and the brainwashing of scientism, all while holding fast to a theory of a collective unconscious. At what point, I keep wondering, did they choose to deviate from the accepted experts in their fields and trust their own knowing? I’m so curious, because I seem to have arrived at that crossroad myself.
I’ve read many books by seasoned gardeners and farmers with great interest; I was a Master Gardner for a couple of years until politics got in the way; I’ve taken many classes, watched loads of videos and have now about six solid years of practical successes and failures under my belt. I can say with relative assurance that close to half of what I learned was wrong, or useless for me, or this particular region. In hindsight some of it was just a waste of time. Of course, there was much essential learning happening too, but I’m making my own rules in the garden now, based on little other than intuition.
I might be completely wrong, I’m sure I’ll be called totally crazy, but we will see how it goes. Considering the weather whiplash of this year, we are off to a pretty good start so far.
What’s calling me has many names that seem vaguely similar: companion planting, permaculture, biodynamic agriculture—it’s basically like organic farming on (natural) steroids. 🙂
Snap peas with a backdrop of Texas squaw-weed, thriving even in the weather whiplash.
There is a growing amount of literature on the subject and I will continue to peruse through it, for ideas and inspiration of what to experiment with myself. I get the very strong sense that what this field needs is more explorers, more rascals and mavericks, more little devils tinkering with the science-status-quo. I begin with one overarching position—the answer is not to be bought. The answer exists in the nature right around us. I need only slow down, focus, and really listen.
I had a lesson just today on how I am certainly lacking in that level of detail and attention. I was marveling for a moment on a butterfly that landed in the grass as I was walking back from feeding the pigs. How marvelous, I thought, and I squatted down slowly and got closer.
An Anise swallowtail. I did not know it at the time, but looked very closely so I could remember just what it looked like to later find its name in an internet search.
I thought how lucky and clever I was in that moment– Lucky that I had such time and appreciation of beauty to take extended notice and so clever that I thought to consciously memorize its details so I could later look it up.
I was so intent on it, I nearly missed the smaller, paler, but on closer examination equally exquisite butterfly laying still in the grass not even a foot away from his showy cousin. A very tiny creature, brownish and so more camouflaged on the just greening grass, but with perfect miniscule polka-dots in varied shades of blue along the base of its wings–but I could not find his likeness on any search.
Most certainly they were enjoying a tour of our garden. Did they also think it too wild and untamed? Weeds and crops growing side-by-side, on purpose?! Were they as incredulous as most modern avid gardeners would be of my methods in madness?
I’m sensing the butterflies saw it more like this.
But the weeds! They are choking and starving your crops! Are they? All of them? How do you know this, I now question. You see, the jumping jacks are delicious and gorgeous in a salad and they want to grow next to the onions. And the lady slippers and carrots growing side-by-side not only looked lovely, but produced the best crop yet.
The most unexpected, and it would seem magical, transformation I’ve experienced since beginning our rural life is my sense of smell has gotten very keen. So much so it’s become a disadvantage when trying to engage in the outside world. What I consider a heightened sense, a new level of sensitivity that serves me very well in my immediate environment, is called by modern scientists as a symptom of a brain disorder. It’s in the ballpark with phantosmia– I ‘hallucinate’ smells and over-register the strength of them, it seems. I bet they’ve manufactured the ideal medication to rid me of my new superpower. 🙂
This week’s bread crumbs:
Yogic Science ‘one consciousness’ = high consciousness? Not sure about that, but found this one interesting enough to include it. He made me wonder, when did the goal of spirituality become happiness? Somehow, I missed that memo.
“The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is at the root of all true science. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, is my idea of God.” Einstein
Our Muscove flock–fertile and ferocious mothers that keep us in delicious meals all year. Yesterday one ventured into the chicken coop and was attacked by the rooster and his harem and the ducks came across the yard to her rescue. So loyal, and it would appear, terribly racist . . . or I guess species-ist?“Is somebody messin’ with my bitches?” Nature is so very un-egalitarian, yet still manages to not slaughter one another–such a magical mystery our own social engineers might learn from!
I’ve asked a number of folks what they think of my ‘gravity-free icicles’ photos from November, when the temperature dropped by 50 degrees in a few hours.
I’ve sent it to strangers with Youtube channels who I thought might be interested in this sort of phenomenon. I’ve had no replies from them. I did hear back from one friend whose simple comment has made the most sense so far. “It’s like the world turned upside-down,” he said.
It certainly is. It’s 85 degrees right now here on the wee homestead, yesterday I got stung by a wasp on the knee in the house. Ouch! Not only are wasps circling in this unseasonable warmth, we’ve been vacuuming up lady bugs by the thousands. I once thought lady bugs were kinda cute, now they are on par in my view with ticks and fleas.
“It’s great! I’m in my summer clothes,” chirps the choir, parroted across social media. Strawberry fields forever! Nothing to get hung about!
Adapt2030 says there’s a Grand Solar Minimum reeking havoc in the world, and it’s going to get much worse over the next years. A new Ice Age, it seems. Then there’s the Pole shift to consider. And Planet X, or is it Nibiru? Lots of speculation on all the weather craziness, obviously. And folks love to talk the weather, and I love to talk the weather with folks, until I say, “What are all those lines in the sky?”
What about the weather modification? What about the chemtrails?
When I look up this is what I see. I don’t like it!
What the hell is going on up there? This is considered “sunny” by the local weather man. All is normal, just a bit unseasonable. Why can’t we get any straight answers?
Oh, but the weather, look, it’s beautiful! 85 degrees in February! The pear trees are blooming so the bees are happy! Just get happy too!
Daffodils in January, stop complaining, what could be wrong with that?!
The pigs don’t seem to mind, look how they’ve grown!
What if life was just a game? Nothing is real . . .
Bingo! I knew it was just a matter of time and determination before I’d find someone who could explain what the hell is going on with the manipulated weather in layman’s terms. Scalar technology, ELF Waves, creating vortices with lasers, creating updrafts, manipulating storms with microwaves, directing and intensifying hurricanes, yup, it’s all there and it’s all happening and has been for years now.
In this must-see video Dutchsinse explains not only how the technologies work, but also why as well as debunking a few of the skeptics and disinfo agents.
I am one giant leap closer to understanding the photos I’ve been taking from recent weather fronts. I knew it had to do with something other than cloud-seeding for the simple reason that after heavy spray periods we are still not getting rain. We have however been overcast, hot and nearly rainless for months, except for the periodic and engineered severe and sudden temperature drops.
On social media a woman expressed her enthusiasm for the great scientists who are creating perfect weather for us all. Wow! The ignorance and naiveté apparently knows no bounds.
This week’s breadcrumbs. The list is long I know, but finally we’re hitting it with full steam!
Mowing stopped mid-way for stabbing arthritic pain in my wrists and fingers. I don’t care anymore. I can’t care anymore. There are plenty of cow peas and a few ripe melons in that mess, if you dare. After weeks at work, this is what Hubby must come home to, and rescue me from, furthering my shameful failure.
The pigs still have their wee escape, and I have mine.
