The rear tire I patched on Friday had a slow leak even after the patch, and I tried adding some fix-a-flat on Sunday but that didn’thelp though part of it is my fix-a-flat bottle is almost empty. I had to giggle a bit about the plastic recycling label on bottle, you ain’t going to clean out that fix-a-flat from that or recycle it into anything but carbon dioxide. But at least I can listen to more of Edward Abbey as I pretend to be a modern day hillbilly version of Charlie Luce as I ride my mountain bike to work down Corning’s Hill on this icy morning.
At least one of my phone apps 📱 warned it was going to be mad cold with the wind 🌬️ if I was crazy 🤪 enough to ride in on this cold winter morning, but so far in Delmar not much wind though I expect more by the time I get to Erie Boulevard, where the wind always seems to whip down into the valley, off the Cliffs above Pearl Street and down along the river through that industrial zone. Carry the smell of the sewage plant 👃 to my nose but that’s close enough to work where they’ll have that free flavored coffee ☕ to warm me up. Tomorrow, if I ride in it will be even warmer. Add some cinnamon and ginger and it will be good sipping at my desk.
Yesterday I ended up skipping the grocery store 🏬 on my bike in favor of riding out to Five Rivers. After getting up at a 5 AM 😦 I had breakfast 🥣 and then ended up reading for a while and taking another nap under the warm of my heated blanket. Read a good portion of day, finishing the library e-book on Color Theory and then Guide to Home Wiring, then digging in more to the Backyard Guide to Raising Farm Animals, finishing up the section on raising Ducks and Geese 🦆 and getting about halfway into the section about Rabbit raising. 🐰 Maybe it’s because I like carrots so much 🥕 – I’ve used up nearly 5 lb of carrots in past week – but also because rabbit meat is low in saturated fat, good feed conversion ratios, and because the ideas of butchering 🗡️ rabbits makes the penises stick up in pants of the woke women ♀️ in disgust – I’m all about eating lots of rabbit when I own land. I also have a book out from the library about home butchering that I started reading the first chapter last night.
This morning was cornmeal pancakes, 🥞 which obviously included a lot of carrots 🥕 and onions because can you have pancakes any other way? The pea soup cooked down with lots sliced carrots too, and of course tumeric as I don’t know another way to eat it. And to have pea soup you also have to have homemade bread in the oven, 🍞 and if I had the space, you know I had to use up the last of spaghetti squash I had from Shauls. That said, I’ve really gotten into acorn squash this past autumn, wish I had gotten more of that when they were still open for the autumn season.
Scenic section of Interstate 81, winding out of the flatlands of the Great Valley near Harrisburg into the Appalachian ridge country, getting stuck behind slow moving trucks.
Apparently I made the mistake at dwelling too long at an advertisement for vacations in sunny warm places like Cancun, Los Vegas, Tokyo and Europe. Now my feed is full of such advertisements no matter where I browse on the interwebs. It’s obnoxious, even if already I do hear that song, California Dreaming with a slightly different note as the long, cold dreary days of winter roll on.
Truth is though I don’t really want a canned vacation, one fake relying on others to make decisions for myself. I’d rather be in the wilderness, the woods, living my own life without the dictates of a vacation planner or time schedule beyond sunrise and sunset. If anything, I find traveling in motels to be anxiety driving – the carefree life in my mind is full of toxic foods going into my body, and toxic garbage and paper plates going into the landfill.
There are somewhat valid concerns, though the price of battery storage is coming down and the impact on solar development of agricultural and forested lands is much less then what it might appear from the view of major arterial highways. High voltage transmission lines tend to follow highways, and often highways are routed in areas with poor agricultural land and less productive wildlife habitat. If you take a deep look at solar, it's not as bad some of the critics, often bolster by fossil fuel propaganda, say it is.
