Country Life

You can eat dog food — if you can afford it!

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You can eat dog food -- if you can afford it! [Expires June 4 2024]

Even the Tom Paxton's song seems outdated these days with inflation ...
 
Quit your bellyaching, bub.
Saying you can't afford your grub,
Saying a dollar ain't a dollar no more,
Well, tell me, buddy, what's new?
You can't afford to buy bread no more,
Well, this ain't a charity store.
You say your kids are hungry too,
Well, it's good news for you.
 
You can eat dog food!
You really ought to try it!
You can fricassee it!
You can deepfry it!
Flip it on over!
Cook it any way!
Eat along with rover,
Three times a day!

 

It’s the commute 🚘

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I’ve continued to think about country living and building my off grid homestead. Commuting sucks especially in the big city, as I’ve determined in the past two days when I drove to work – one day for the Pine Bush Hike and the other for heading out to Schoharie to camp.

  • Traffic jams, traffic speeds up and slows down, you have to pay constant attention.
  • So many broke down cars and crashes necessitating difficult lane changes due to Move Over Law.
  • Cops everywhere – checking your speed, if all your tail lights are working, not using your cellphone, following the Move Over Law.
  • A complete time suck – on the bus you can read and on the bike you get exercise but time driving is wasted.
  • Expensive automobile maintenance and fuels.

And that was only one trip out of town and a trip up to the Pine Bush!

Rush Hour Traffic

It’s nice to get out of town, but I’ve come to realize that much of the nice of the really nice land is beyond sensible commuting distance. There is no reason to live in a suburban subdivision surrounded by corn fields that smells like cow shit. Commutes aren’t certainly a good reason to live out in the country.

Maybe for as long as I have to live in big city, focusing on making money, I should continue to live in the city where I can bike to work. Continue to research and plan my dream homestead, but realize it’s not compatible with living in New York or being within commuting distance of my work. It just isn’t possible to put together to incompatible views of my future.

Change in Plant Hardiness Zones, 2012 to 2023 in New York State

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Change in Plant Hardiness Zones, 2012 to 2023 in New York State

I did some raster math to compare the 2012 plant hardiness zones to the 2023 plant hardiness zones. Most of the state was bumped up one zone, though many of the higher elevation areas remained in the same zones.
 
Interestingly enough, the Western Catskills actually fell back one or two colder Plant Hardiness Zones with the latest maps while the most of the state advanced to a warmer plant hardiness zones. The Western Catskills had a handful of particularly cold mornings in recent years, though maybe it's also an artifact of how PRISM krigings the temperature data.

I am also not convinced the area around Chautauqua Lake jumping from 5B to 6B or the Southern part of the Tug going from 5A to 6A. It's possible, but I am thinking it's a kriging artifact.
 
The 2012 Plant Hardiness Zones were really old data, 1975-2006, even at the time they were released. The 2023 Plant Hardiness Zones are 1990-2020, which is much more up to date. This is very problematic as the late 1970s were an exceptionally cold winters in New York's history. Old Forge hit negative 52, on February 18, 1979 which throws everything off.
 
Minor edits to this map on 11/7. Basically rather then comparing them using raster math, I did the contours separately for each year and then joined them against and did the math on the vector. Rethinking it, the later method is more accurate then with raster method, at least in comparison of other maps. That said, either way the result is very similar, we are talking about splitting fractions of a degree, which make the categories slightly different. Like anything, it's a matter of how you ask the question and the methods used.