Seeds! I have seeds! And I have lots of them - more than I can use this spring. So if you would like some free seeds, pipe up here and I will send you some. Most packets that I've ordered come with 100-200 seeds. Some, like the corn, beans and peas, have less.

I just ordered these from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds:

Jaune Paille Des Vertus Onion
Stuttgarter Onion
Flat of Italy Onion
Calabrese Green Sprouting Broccoli
Romanesco Italia Broccoli
Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage
Bacalan De Rennes Cabbage
St. Valery Carrot
Parisienne Carrot
Muscade Carrot
Laurentian Rutabaga
Caraway
German Chamomile

And I ordered these from Cherry Gal:
BEAN, BUSH * BLACK TURTLE
BEAN, SOY * BLACK JET SOYBEAN
BEAN, BUSH * HUTTERITE SOUP
BEAN, BUSH * FIN DE BAGNOL
PEA, SHELLING * WAVEREX PETIT POIS
BEET * BUTTER SLICER
BEAN, POLE * TRUE RED CRANBERRY BEAN

Later this week, I'm going to order lettuces, spinach, peppers, chard, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumber, melons, corn and squashes. And about 10 different herbs, to be tucked in amongst the veggies.

So. I'm off to talk to some folk about manure.

For anyone who's wondering and missed the post, I'm going to be putting in a vegetable garden back behind an abandoned house across the street from my trailer court. I talked to the neighbor of the house -- he's trying to buy the place, and doesn't mind at all if I garden there this summer since he won't be able to get it until December 2012.

There's a big pile of refuse behind the abandoned house, mostly broken up pieces of plywood, busted up furniture and plastic. Included in that is several 1X6 fencing boards. I'm going to use the boards to construct my compost bins and the raised beds. Or I might use old shipping pallets for the compost bins, since I'm going to need at least 36 boards for the raised beds.

So this month, I'm going to gather up all the supplies -- boards, pallets and nails -- to build the raised beds and compost bins. I'll start with the bins, and hopefully begin filling them right away with manure from the horses around here (there's at least 5 homes within a 2 mile radius that have 2-3 horses.)

Today, I'm having lunch with one of my ex-clients, and later I'm going in to sell my plasma. I'm also minding a couple of loads in the washer and dryer, and I've got to empty the dishwasher and fill it again. Oh, and I'm keeping a ear out for Torrin; she's sleeping on my bed so her mom and dad can get some heavy sleep.

( Here's the  )

 

SOPA and PIPA Are Only a Skirmish

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/sopa-and-pipa-are-only-a-skirmish.html#ixzz1ju4QCXN9

On Wednesday, January 18, 2012, Wikipedia initiated a 24-hour blackout of its own site, in order to protest and raise awareness about the SOPA and PIPA bills being debated in the US Congress and Senate, respectively. Though they’ve been leading the charge, the Wikipedians haven’t been alone. I visited many of my favourite sites throughout the day only to discover they, too were symbolically self-censoring. Not that I needed the reminder. I’ve lived behind the Great Firewall of China — I know how frustrating it is.

Victory in an ongoing battle

I agree these bills are bad news. But according to my most trusted source on copyright issues, this is only the beginning, not the end. While many of us were enjoying our Christmas holidays, Cory Doctorow was at the 28th Annual Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin, warning of things to come.

For those who don’t know him, Cory is an activist, journalist, and socially-conscious science fiction writer. He has spent years working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reporting on copyright, free speech, and digital rights issues, and writing excellent novels. And in a little less than an hour, he convincingly made the case that SOPA is just the opening skirmish in a much larger war.

If you don’t have an hour to spare, you can pretty much get his whole argument in an analogy he makes about halfway through:

If I turned up and said “well, everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery? Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would of course be “no”. Because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys. . . .

 

If you have an hour, I highly recommend watching Cory. He's excellent. Here's another bit:

"In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo citing research that SOPA would probably work because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argue that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too.

Don't applaud me! Applaud the MPAA!

Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copywrite and the internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copywrite. Because the copywrite wars are just the 0.9 Beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century long conflict. We tend to think of them as particularly successful; after all, here's SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, and breaking the internet on this fundamental level in the name of preserving top forty music, reality TV shows and Ashton Kutcher movies.

But the reality is that copywrite legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it is not taken seriously. Which is why, on the one hand, Canada has had parliament after parliament introduce one stupid copywrite law after another, but on the other hand, parliament after parliament has failed to actually vote on the bill.

It's why we got SOPA, a bill composed of pure, stupid, pieced-together, molecule by molecule, into a kind of stupidite-250 that is normally only found in the heart of a newborn star, and it's why this rushed through SOPA hearings had to be adjourned midway through the Christmas break so that law makers could get into a real, viscous nationally infamous debate over an important issue, unemployment insurance, it's why the World Intellectual Property Organization is goaded, time and again into enacting crazed, pig-ignorant copywrite proposals -- because when the nations of the world send their UN missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copywrite experts, they send health experts, not copywrite experts, they send agriculture experts, not copywrite experts.

Because copywrite is just not important to pretty much everyone."

I want to write up the whole thing because it's just excellent. Go Watch.

For the people new to me, I homeschool my youngest son, Luke. He's 11 years old, a bright kid, but really struggles with both reading and writing.

For the last month, we've been working pretty exclusively on algebraic word problems. And we're both getting bored, so today we're starting a new project -- History.

We're going to make a long time-line on butcher paper, the length of his room. We're going to focus on history of the Americas, but we'll throw in other bits, for perspective. I'm thinking that we'll start at around 6000 BCE.

( the plan (kinda boring unless you're me) )

I got up this morning to drive Mike into work so I can use his car (mine's broke.) I don't know if I've ever mentioned Tom, but he's a disabled fellow I lend a hand to every once in a while, and he called yesterday to ask if I could take him grocery shopping.

I drove Mike into work at 04:30 and I was supposed to pick Tom up at 10am, but Kayla had another gallbladder attack and went into the ER at 6am, and I spent the morning with Torrin and teh internets. (Kayla has an appointment with the surgeon early next week.)

Which, speaking of surgeons, Mike is giving his kidney to David on February 8, in Ann Arbor.

Kayla and Sam got home at 11am, and I threw together the brownies (recipe) for my trifle. So that should be done soon, and then I'll go pick up Tom.

Luke was invited to a play-thing (oi, parent of the year; he went somewhere with Larissa and will be back before supper)(I have Larissa's dad's cell number) and Luke's friend Aaron from down the block is playing video games in Luke's room. Aaron is 8yrs old, and is a bit of a lost boy.

I was going to have Cottage Inn Pizza for my dinner tonight, but now I'm not sure, with Kayla's gallbladder attack and all. Hmm. Maybe I'll have baked sweet and sour chicken, instead. It's pretty low fat and mellow. Here's my recipe:

( Easy Sweet and Sour Chicken Bake )

Ok -- brownies are done. I need to leave to pick Mike up in 30 min -- best call Tom and ask if he wants to go shopping after lunch. Life is so lazy when I don't have to be at work.

Mike and I went to Negaunee on Tuesday last, and came back last night. We got quite a bit done but it always seems like not enough. Dad is still working on the rewiring. He has the bathrooms mostly done. We hired Geriann's son-in-law to clean out the basement, and he's doing an excellent job.

While the house is empty, I'm paying the mortgage and my folks are paying the utilities. Dad is buying most of the materials, like the wiring and the stuff for the bathrooms. Most of the stuff he's getting, like the bathroom vanity and toilet, are from the Habitat Re-sale shop, but it's in good, solid condition.

I'm buying the windows. The house needs 17 windows replaced, and they'll cost about $200/ea. I'm getting custom vinyl replacement windows that we saw at Menards. The installation is simple, and the windows should last, well, ten or fifteen years, anyways.

I figure that it's going to take Dad until June to get the stuff done that he wants to get done before everyone moves in. In the five moths before Carl, Crystallyn, Seth, Jareth, Sam, Kayla and Torrin move in, I want to buy a window each month. After they move in and start paying the mortgage, I'll buy two windows per month for the next six months. And that should do it.

After that, we have one year to save up for the downpayment to buy the place from my parents. They're asking $70,000 -- and I figure that we'll need at least 20% down. But split three ways, that's only about $5000 each. Not too bad.

Now let's see how it goes.

saving the world from nuclear devastation

I made a few calls and found that the abandoned property across from my trailer park is in transition. It was repo'ed last year, sent to auction but nobody wanted it (at the price the credit union was asking) and now the credit union has it back.

I went over to look at the back acre this afternoon. It was so warm -- in the mid-50's at least. I'd brought over one of my Sisseton black tarps. While I was poking in the ground to see what kind of soil I might be dealing with (clay, alas), the next door neighbor came out with his dog. I went over and we had a nice talk.

His folks used to own a little store where the corner gas station and mini-mart now stands, so he's been in this neighborhood his whole life. He said that he's in the process of buying the abandoned house and when I asked him about the chance of my putting a garden in, he was cool with it.

"Go ahead! Somebody might as well get some use from the place."

He wasn't sure when his purchase would go through, and figures that he'll have to knock the house down. I offered to share my bounty, and he said that'd be fine. Now, I realize that the bank owns the property right now, so it's not all good, but damn. Close enough for jazz.

So I picked as good a spot as there was and laid the tarp down, setting a couple of pieces of scrap wood on top to keep it in place.

Now I need a ton of organic matter and a shovel. Actually, I have a shovel.

I woke up this morning feeling very failure-y.

(My inner editor cringes at that sentence, but that's the sentence that came off my fingers and I'm sticking to it.)

I'd dreamed that Sisseton called and wanted me to come back and finish my LPN. I was so happy that I burst into tears. Bastards.

Things that are going on in my life:

-- Tomorrow I'm having a colonoscopy, so today I am doing that poop-out-everything thing. Yay.

-- I'm interviewing for a couple of jobs. On Monday, I'm interviewing for a teaching job at Career Quest -- the "interview" is me giving a 15 min presentation on diabetes. I've never auditioned for a job but I'm a damn good speaker. I have hopes. Next week I have an interview for a management position at Goodwill.

-- There is an abandoned house right across the street from our trailer park entrance. I'm going to try to get a hold of the owner and ask if I can exchange a garden with monthly mowing.

-- Mike and I are buying a used Festiva off Ebay. The owner is in Raleigh, North Carolina. We're not sure exactly when we'll get it (if we get it) -- I'm hoping for late February or Early March. But the owner might want us to come get it now, or late January, anyways. We were thinking of taking I-70 (Pennsylvania Turnpike) to I-66, and then cut south through Richmond, Virginia and to Raleigh. We'll spend at least one night somewhere between Richmond and Raleigh, and maybe two. Anybody want to have dinner?

-- I want to write, but am feeling particularly fail-y about it. Oh, I can write a scene just fine. Lovely description. Very nice dialog. But is it a story? Not so much. Help.

-- I want to build a model of a steam-powered truck. Either a 1/16 or 1/32, based on the Unimog. Unfortunately, I lack essential skills. This (perhaps also unfortunately) is not a deterrent. Is anyone interested in doing this with me? I need place to start. Mike kinda has it in his head, and I have it in my head a little bit. I know that drawings should be first, but I am crap at drawings and Mike is worse. I know I should throw up my hands and yell "I can't do this!" but I'm not very good at that, either. So I am fretting, which is silly, but there you are.

-- I have not heard yet from USC. More fretting.

USDA’s November Crop Production and WASDE reports:

2011 U.S. corn crop was 137 million smaller than the 2010 crop.

The 2011 U.S. soybean crop is now (Nov.'11) forecast at 293 million bushels smaller than the 2010 crop.

Crop insurance companies have paid out more than $7.1 billion so far this year, according to the National Crop Insurance Services. The payout makes 2011 second only to 2008’s $8.6 billion in the total value of indemnities paid to farmers.

As of Nov 2011, beef prices were up 9.8% compared with the same month last year. Pork prices were up 6.9% and poultry was 3% higher. With fewer fertile hens around, egg prices were 10.2% higher; dairy was up 8.7%.

The USDA is projecting that next year will bring an overall spike of 2.5% to 3.5% in US food prices.