Back to musing

I had a long drive this weekend - which gave me some time to sit and think. Usually a dangerous activity for me, it was actually a good time. A few things came to mind that I have been mulling over in the past few months and it all sort of came together tonight.

A very good friend of mine told me once about the act of giving - be it money, time, friendship. Everything comes back to you that you give away. I thought this to be interesting at the time. Later I read that the only thing you get to keep when you die is what you give away. Even more interesting.

The statement that "we are part of the world we live in" is something you hear spouted off from people who want a more "green planet". I've never understood that since most of our planet is covered in water which isn't green (sorry couldn't resist that one). I never really liked the way the "part of the world" part of the statement sounded. Lately I've been thinking that people ARE much more than a part of the world. Everything we do is reflected by the world around us. Look at any animal and you will see so many similarities in them compared to humans. It sort of freaked me out the one night - I was looking at different people and I couldn't help but notice that one looked like a hawk or eagle.

So back to my first statement - what we give the world is what we will get back from it. In the last 100 or so years we have given this world thousands of ways to speed things up, to try to tame nature. We have given it pollution that is unprecedented and taken it for granted.

If you see where this is headed we are in for a major crap storm in the years ahead. What people (myself included) forget is that by not being good to our neighbors, fighting wars, polluting, being bad to other people we are asking that we be repaid in kind for the above statement what we give is what we keep holds true for bad things as well.

It works for everything in this world and it is this statement that has really begun to change me. Coming from a christian background this is not something that is stressed to the degree it should be. It wasn't until I learned about the whole idea of karma that I felt any urgency to change myself. Maybe it is enough for others but for me it didn't let me see the big picture. Everything in the human world is starting to speed up - the way we work, travel and do anything. It's not surprising to me anymore that things like climate change are also speeding up.

We may be a part of this world, but it is also part of us. When we speed up the world speeds up, when we slow down the same thing happens. What I do individually may seem to the physical world to be insignificant, but it isn't. When I change the world changes with me and through me.

Honey and popcorn

To keep in the spirit of the name of this blog, I decided that I need to include a little "farming" stuff. Today I extracted some of my bees honey. It is my first time doing all of it on my own and I learned a few things. First - the kitchen is not the ideal place to remove honey from honeycomb. Second - always wash your hands before you grab a door knob or at least wipe the knob off before you decide to use it again. Third - don't touch an electric knife (who would have thought they would be hot?).

A quick lesson on how to extract honey. What I am holding here is a frame full of capped honey. Ideally all the frames in each box are supposed to look like this, but my bees don't seem to really listen to me so I only had about 60% that looked this nice. The rest of the frames were either uncapped (which means the honey is not "ripened" or dehydrated enough) or had brood in them.



The next two show how the cap is removed from the honey. As I eluded to earlier - the easiest way is to use an electric knife which gets hot and cuts off the cap. The cap falls into a bin where it is allowed to drain to get the rest of the honey off. This cap wax can then be melted and used to make whatever beeswax thing you want to make. I would like to think that at some point I will use it, would be fun to try to make a candle or some thing like that Burt Bees guy makes.





The stainless steel contraption you see in the next photo is the extractor which uses the centrifugal force (spinning) for those of you who slept through physics to remove the honey more quickly from the comb. The yellow handle you see next to the pail opens and the honey flows out into a bucket where the honey can then be strained. The bucket also has a valve to fill up whatever you want to store the honey in. This is the potentially extreme mess part of the operation - if one isn't paying attention you can suddenly have a whole lot of honey on you and everything within 5 feet of it.


The last picture is a nice closeup of a something that my little bees shouldn't be doing. The build a cross comb between the frames which the queen laid some eggs in. The little white things you see are bee larvae that haven't matured yet.


This is my "new" corn harvester. This machine is 40+ years old and is in great working order. It's really hard to describe how this machine works in a few sentences, but essentially it gobbles up the cornstalks and rips off the husks and then all the ears of whole corn go up the little ramp in the back and empty into a wagon. It is probably one of the most dangerous peices of equipment ever made. There are so many spinning gears, chains, rollers and places that a shirt or finger could get caught in a ripped off. These things are a big reason why old farmers are missing body parts. That being said, it should be fun to give this a go in October!


It wouldn't be a good blog without some sunset pictures. I took these after a rainstorm had passed and there were actually clouds coming out the opposite direction the storm was moving and they were just creepy looking. The second picture is sort of creepy and I wish I understood how to put full size pictures on this blog, because the smaller version doesn't do it much justice.

Intention

Intention to do something is an interesting thing. I was thinking about this as I was reading through the transcript of Obama's speech tonight to the Congress. From top to bottom it all sounded very good, a program that cracks down on insurance company shenanigans, is fully funded and provides a way for everyone to be covered. Pretty simple, straight forward, ideal, you pick the word. Anyone arguing with his speech is a fool as there really isn't anything to argue with.

His intention to pass this plan is noble. What happens to this plan how it all comes out is what I will be interested to see. He even eluded to all the presidents in the past that tried to get this sort of legislation passed. None of them did it and the ones that did pass something passed a very watered down version or flawed version of what they intended to happen.

Was it their fault - yes and no. No because the president doesn't write the bills and vote on them, yes because they had to sign the bill in order for it to go into effect.

Take for example the Wellstone Mental Health Parity Bill - a lot of people missed it because it went through on the coattails of the now infamous TARP bill. Mr Wellstone had noble intentions when he began to write the legislation - he wanted insurance to pay for mental health issues the same as medical problems. Something that doesn't really happen now.

What did end up passing was a very watered down version of the bill. Yes the spirit of what Wellstone wanted was in the bill, BUT there were about two or three loopholes written into the bill so that companies could opt out of payment for mental health treatment if the costs became too great.

What that says to me is that yes we will treat "those people", but only if it doesn't cost too much.

So yes I am really hoping the Presidents intentions go from being just good thoughts to a good health care plan.

Just because everyone else seems to want to argue about it I will add one disagreement with his plan. The only thing I think that he and the Congress need to do is have to use the same plan. If that was the case I KNOW we would have the best plan in the entire world without question.