The Smell of Fresh Dirt – Matt Addington Creative

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The Smell of Fresh Dirt – Matt Addington Creative

More than anything, this is just a gallery of images telling the story of getting the seeds into the ground. I love this time of year when you can smell freshly turned dirt in the air and see the tractor lights in the fields at dusk. Farmers putting that seed down with the hopes of a great return in the fall. Though grain prices are at catastrophic lows, farmers never waiver. This is their conception point. They only get a chance to do this once a year and maybe 40 some times in a lifetime. Put the seed down and pray for the perfect rain, heat and sunshine over the summer.

Land Without Bread | Catherine Tumber

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Land Without Bread | Catherine Tumber

The loosely defined proposal for a Green New Deal hits the panic button, American-style, but it does not exactly lay a cornerstone. Which is to say that it avoids prickly issues of land use—generally reserved for states and localities that regularly do battle with sacrosanct private property rights. Yet the choices we make about our land are foundational to any future we construct, low-carbon or otherwise. It has always been so. Just ask the pre-Columbian indigenous peoples, the slaveholders and their human property, the “settlers,” the railroad barons, and the policy architects of postwar suburbanization and urban disinvestment. And consider the fact that sprawling suburban development devoured nearly 31 million acres of agricultural land—cropland, woodlands, pasture, and range land—between 1992 and 2012 alone, according to a 2018 report by American Farmland Trust (AFT). That is an area almost as large as New York State. More than a third of that conversion, 11 million acres, took place on prime farmland blessed with the world’s richest soil. That is an area roughly the size of California’s Central Valley. Protecting such land, and doing so in an equitable manner, is critical not only to our future food supply but also to mitigating and adapting to climate change.

A few others have pointed out the land-use blind spot in the Green New Deal, but they have focused almost entirely on urban land use, practices promoted by the New Urbanist and Smart Growth movements in the 1990s that aim for greater urban density, compact mixed-use, transit-oriented development, and walkability as antidotes to greenhouse-gas-pluming, car-centered suburban expansion. These urbanist measures are important in offering up an alternative to sprawl, of course, and are very much au courant in view of our newfound love affair with cities. But somehow, the inverse—protecting agricultural lands from development—has receded from public discourse in recent years, a casualty, perhaps, of the growing urban-rural divide that birthed the 2016 presidential election results. So has use of the word sprawl itself, that thing going on out there past the decrepit, empty shopping malls, far from the thrum of the metropolis.

Temple Grandin on problem-solving, research and life under coronavirus

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Temple Grandin on problem-solving, research and life under coronavirus

Dr. Temple Grandin pictures her immune system as a military base with soldiers who defend the base and fight off invaders. “Unfortunately, some of the soldiers are stupid,” she says, “and when they get overwhelmed, they go crazy and start to burn down the barracks and trash the base.”

She goes on to explain how some drugs are designed to stop the invaders and others to put out the fires.

“I am extreme visual thinker,” she says, “and all my thoughts are in photo-realistic pictures. To think about a concept, I have to convert it to a pictorial analogy.”

Analogies are among the techniques she uses to make sense of abstract concepts and solve complex problems.

Temple Grandin is a very interesting thinker and expert on all things livestock handling and autism. She has some interesting incites into the virus too. 

Xubuntu

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Xubuntu

Xubuntu 20.04 LTSwas released in April 2020. The LTS release is supported until April 2023 and is the recommended version for all environments that require stability.

So the new version of Ubuntu Linux with the XFCE window manager is out. I'm going to hold off upgrading for a few weeks just for the first bug fix release to come out, although I definitely will upgrade as 18.04 is getting a bit long in the tooth.

As Coronavirus Reached the U.S., Trump Admin Tapped Ex-Labradoodle Breeder to Lead Task Force | Democracy Now!

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As Coronavirus Reached the U.S., Trump Admin Tapped Ex-Labradoodle Breeder to Lead Task Force | Democracy Now!

Reuters reports Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar tapped Brian Harrison, a longtime dog breeder with minimal public health experience, to head the U.S. coronavirus task force just as the first case of COVID-19 was detected in the U.S. in late January. Before he joined HHS in 2018, Harrison ran a company called Dallas Labradoodles. 

April 24, 2020 Morning

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Good morning! Yeah, it’s Friday! Next Friday is May 1st. Been such a cold spring it’s hard to imagine that next week is May. It’s only just starting to green up in Albany. 🌸 Rain and 41 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☔ There is a north breeze at 6 mph. 🍃. 0.14 inches of rain is expected before it ends around 4 pm. Not a lot of rain predicted and Saturday will be nice.

Coffee ☕ and wild berry muffins this morning for breakfast. Also cream cheese. It was a pretty decent breakfast not as heavy or labor intensive as making eggs 🍳 like I did yesterday. No birds 🐦 out the window to give the middle finger too. I do get a laugh 😂 out of giving the bird to the birds. I’m sure my neighbors think I’m nuts.

Wish it was nicer out but I really shouldn’t complain much 🌻– I am sure hot and humid days are right around the corner. It will kind of suck this year if state park swimming 🏊 pools are closed because of Coronavirus.

Today will rain likely, mainly before noon. Cloudy 🌧, with a high of 53 degrees at 4pm. Nine degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around April 4th. North wind around 7 mph. Chance of precipitation is 70%. New precipitation amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch possible. A year ago, we had cloudy skies. The high last year was 61 degrees. The record high of 81 was set in 2001. 1.2 inches of snow fell back in 1967.❄

Kind of a dreary day for sure. 💦 April Showers bring May flowers although they’ll be no tulip festival 🌷 this year not that I ever went to that except for tabling for Save the Pine Bush a few years ago. But it’s nice when things green up except of course for the black flies.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:54 pm with sun having an altitude of 60.4° from the due south horizon (-10.4° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 3.4 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 7:10 pm with the sun in the west-northwest (282°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-northwest (289°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 7:48 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 4 seconds with dusk around 8:18 pm, which is one minute and 9 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the Waxing Crescent 🌒 Moon in the west-northwest (282°) at an altitude of 11° from the horizon, 247,483 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 8:55 pm. At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies 🌃 and temperatures around 49 degrees. There will be a north-northwest breeze at 6 mph. Today will have 13 hours and 49 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 38 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 36 degrees at 4am. Five degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around April 12th. Northwest wind 3 to 5 mph. In 2019, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 38 degrees. The record low of 23 occurred back in 1965.

Tomorrow will be mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 63 degrees at 4pm. Typical for tomorrow. Light and variable wind. A year ago, we had cloudy skies. The high last year was 66 degrees. The record high of 89 was set in 2009. 0.3 inches of snow fell back in 1928.❄

Sounds like a remarkably nice spring day. ☀ I have to get early up tomorrow but I should have most of the day to enjoy spending in the woods. 🌿 I’m thinking about hiking in the afternoon and maybe hammock camping ⛺ in a state forest, although it might be a bit chilly and wet by morning. I think the rain is coming early come Sunday.

Looking ahead to Sunday, rain likely. Cloudy, with a high near 52. East wind 3 to 8 mph. Chance of precipitation is 70%. New precipitation amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible. Typical average high for the weekend is 63 degrees. 💦 Definitely going to be a real dreary day. I’m going to have to get some more videos to watch from the library Wi-Fi and some more data to make up maps.

Paid my rent or actually the bank did 🏦 as next week is May. Hopefully enough of my neighbors are too and my landlord isn’t going bankrupt. 🏡 He does have a nice house over the river but who knows what his cash flow situation is like. I know a lot of out of work people aren’t paying rent. I also had to cancel the double bill for my car insurance – they kindly sent me a second bill for the time period with a later deadline and a reduced payment – but it meant that I cancel that from auto bill pay as I had already paid my bill for the next six months. 💵

I am still waiting on my stimulus check to arrive 💰 but because I didn’t owe or get anything refunded from the federal government this year, I don’t think they have my information on file and the last I checked their website wasn’t working. I was hoping it would come sooner rather than later so I could use it partially to buy index 📇 funds when the market is still cheap. I’m young I’m not phased much about the sluggish performance of the market lately. I do think at some point Coronavirus will kill who it’s going to kill (hopefully not me or loved ones) and then we’ll move forward. Ten years from now I expect the markets to be a lot stronger and then I can buy land. 🚜

As previously noted, next Friday is May 1st 🕊 when the sun will be setting at 7:55 pm with dusk at 8:26 pm. On that day in 2019, we had cloudy, rain showers and temperatures between 56 and 42 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 65 degrees. We hit a record high of 86 back in 2001.

Cat Tails