Little beauty bits

On the last day of May, 2020, nature serves up some little beauty bits.

Of course she does so every day. I just don't always take time to appreciate.

Here are a boy and girl Pronghorn. Note the dark jaw patch on the male, as well as his stature and conformation in comparison to the female.

Check out the ants on the western wallflower.

Yesterday after counting cows...



Stemless hymenoxys (Tetraneuris acaulis) in a distribution and location I haven't seen before. This is a sign of actual climate variability -- the stuff that happens when the climate shifts around within it's natural and homeostatic bounds. You don't see this stuff when it's dry and hot, but you do when it's wet and cool.



A little look around...



And a little cow walk...



Western wallflowers, bumble bee, antz.



Wish I had more time to write and comment, but I don't. Hope you enjoyed the sights and sounds of the prairie in late May.

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

The Dude Abides

Not sure I like the idea of booger deciding to change the blog interface. Cosmetic bullshit on a poorly maintained and marginally functional system. I guess I'll try to work with it for a bit but I may migrate my shit somewhere else. We'll see.

Also not sure why I chose the above title for this post, other than it's a line I like from the movie (for some reason) and the fact that the Pronghorn harem(s) have kicked the males loose while they're having and nurturing babies. When this happens the males take up a solitary existence, not wanting to be knifed in their sleep.

You can quickly (?) tell males from females (both sexes having prominent pronged horns) by the black stripe on the face at the back of the jaw. You can also more closely examine the horn shape and stature and compare behavior. The males act more male than the females do, guarding and guiding their harem. But the females also stand sentry and the difference in behavior is often subtle. It's something you have to learn over time.

Here's a too-long and too-shaky cow tour video.



A chicken video...



Western Salsify (Tragopogon dubius). A favorite spring flower of mine. Of course nearly all spring flowers are favorites of mine.



Goldfinches! Shaky video again. It's hard to see the phone screen sometimes in bright sunlight. Plus I was in a hurry for some reason.



Work hardening and finally caused the brass connector for the positive battery terminal on my Ranger to crack through. It still works but also slips off, requiring reattachment. Usually when it's raining.

The tornado in repose...

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

Never enough bloody time

Let me see if I can sneak this brief post in while I'm waiting for a rendezvous with physical labor. I can't write much because not enough bloody time.

I've got a "too much food" hangover from yesterday's Memorial Day repast. I've been at 1,000 calories daily intake for two months now and I've recalibrated my metabolism to burn lard and make muscle. It's been far easier than I thought it would be. I've also done a lot of 24-48 hour fasts. It's been an adventure and it's paying off big time in how I look and feel. So all good.

But I snarfed down about 6k in one meal; yesterday, and today I feel like I poisoned myself or something. Interesting stuff.

Chicken cam...



Chickopinion...



Gathering eggs...



Pretty morning...



Long video of a cow walk with Red and with off the cuff cow-stuff commentary...



Now I've got a rendezvous with physical labor!

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

A beautiful life and other concepts

Today is Memorial Day and no one reading this needs me to tell you about the concept of the holiday.

In my family there is a vague understanding that the day is intended to mark the sacrifice of those Americans who fell while defending the Constitution of the United States of America. The practice in my family is to mark the passing of family members. On Memorial Day we place flowers on the graves of parents and grandparents, and we usually have some kind of a barbecue meal to do the "beginning of summer" thing. When I say we In mean we, including myself, because that's what we do as a family.

My Dad's cairn

It's a beautiful thing that we remember family dead and grill hamburgers on Memorial Day. The fact that the sacrifice of America's Defenders never comes up is perfectly okay. It's not wrong. It's simply what is. Our family never knew or met a single soldier who subsequently fell. The real death in service of real American fighting men and women is intellectually real to my family but it is not viscerally or emotionally real.

That's okay.

I believe and I've said before that I believe the fallen would want their sacrifice to help ensure the kind of societal landscape where Americans could have a chance at living beautiful lives, the kind of lives that the fallen freely gave up in support and defense of the Constitution. I don't believe that the fallen would place a high priority on ensuring that Americans celebrate Memorial Day a certain way. I do believe they would be and are satisfied that Americans in 2020 have the opportunity to embrace the blessings of Liberty. That's enough. It's what the founders wrote and believed, what the Constitution implies in framing our shared societal contract, and it's what is right and proper.

As for myself, I knew many of the Fallen. This is a day I think of David Wayne Cornell, whose living heart I held in my hands when it beat for the last time. I recognize the reality of the real sacrifice of the fallen. I have and I embrace the blessings of Liberty. That feels right and it feels beautiful. I have and live a beautiful life. As I walk my path the Fallen are ever near. Not in a maudlin way, but in a joyous and satisfied way. I feel like the Fallen embrace the imperfect Liberty we Americans practice and that they are pleased. I don't think they are overly concerned about imperfections in the America of 2020. I think that they understand the long game of ape-lizard civilization. I think they see that their sacrifice was not in vain.







Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

Full spring

Busy with pretty much zero attention paid to the world outside my own little patch of paradise.



So we're 32 days from the first day of summer and it's finally become full spring here. Delightful. overnight air temps are falling only into the 50's while daytime highs are touching 80 or better.

Bull snake

Yesterday was quite warm and sunny. The air temperature touched 85 in mid-afternoon before a stout south wind blew moisture laden clouds up from Oklahoma or Texas or some place. The clouds were accompanied by cooler air. The product of this meteorological admixture was cooler air and less sun -- go figure. No rainfall at all, which is disappointing, but nature delivers what she delivers.



Yesterday was also filled with good solid physical labor as I deconstructed much of an old corral to harvest railroad ties for the fencing project.



The ties are far from pristine or perfect. They've been in the ground for 50 years at least, and many of them were entirely rotten below the soil level. They'll still work for what I'm doing and have the advantage of being "free" rather than $20 per tie at the farm supply place. Free in the sense that I have to expend diesel fuel and muscle power to harvest the things.

The mental and physical labor of this kind of ranch work is very important to me. The mental aspect of thinking and planning and executing is a challenge. As with everything else, ideas and plans must be constantly tweaked and altered to fit into nature's reality. The brain work is good for me, and helps keep the cognitive agility going. The physical stuff is a blast. It's good solid muscle building work with lots of sweat and scratches. It makes me tired and makes me feel weak by the end of the day but in the morning my body is ready to hit it again. Stupendously wonderful. My ape-lizard machine is a bit fucked up with this nerve stuff, and the pain is a challenge to bear. Still, bear it I can, bear it I do.

Working out in nature's prairie springtime is a delight.

I transplanted a hackberry a couple of weeks ago. It had grown naturally from seed and was kinds-sorta well established after 4 years. However, it was growing in thin soil over a concrete slab and there's simply no future in that. I was reasonably sure that transplanting it would kill it, but I decided to try anyway.

new growth!

And nature came through.



Springtime sunset.



And morning drive bullshit.



Sights and sounds of a lovely May morning in Kimball County.



And now it's off to do life stuff.

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

more cool and more busy

Beautifully busy.

My plate runneth over, as does my cup.



In addition to the usual ranch labor stuff, my life has been loaded with a new and unanticipated dimension. New and lovely ape-lizards have magically appeared. Some are friends shading toward family, some are acquaintances shading toward friends.



It's quite a lovely thing. Living is about living, It's always a choice; to live or to merely exist.

Working in my town shop the other day and a 5/8" socket popped off my driver. Operator error. It made five bounces toward the only hole in the floor of the joint.

Firetrucking hole-in-one.

Sunday Mother's Day plants.

Too cold to set them out yet though.

Cold overnite, down to 31 degrees. A bit of drizzle and light rain. Air temps already warming this morning. Forecast high is 59 degrees. Cows and calves are enjoying the green, green grass.

##########

Twenty-four hour air temps over the last week ran about 9.5 degrees cooler than the 127 year average for this neck of the treeless woods. Daily highs averaged about 57 (-11.42) and daily lows averaged 32.85 (-7.72).



So yeah, it's a man-made global warming ice age catastrophe.

Just like last year when it was colder a week later. And all the years before when it got cold in May. The only time it doesn't get cold in May here is when we have a drought. Every 20-30 years on average. Freaky, eh?

Well, on the tee-vee and interwebs May cold is a disaster. It's horrible there in virtual boolsheet reality! Disaster and nothing else! Just like a new flu strain is a man-made global warming ice age catastrophe, even though the best morbidity/mortality numbers show global all-influenza deaths lower than the 50+ year average. My goodness, can you believe that some people died of influenza? Hasn't happened since the Blaque Deathe! Which was Yersinia pestis. Imagine that, a bacteria that people turned into a virus to ravage and savage the planet in 2020!

Statistics and averages are funny things. People who are paid hugely well with our collective tax dollars to manage data and information for the rest of us routinely fudge and fuck with the numbers. Some of those people are just massive lying dickheads intentionally trying to nudge themselves toward a more fuller rice bowl, no-belle peas prizes, fame and glory, and less work. There are a lot of them, and they intentionally lie, cheat and steal because that's their foundational principle. Others simply think that they have a good "for the children" reason to fix the numbers that they know won't drive child saving. Or tree saving. Or polar bear saving. Or whatever.

Yeah, lots of dickheads in the data manipulation industry. In the manipulated data information dissemination industry too.

The biggest problem by far, though, is with the free and functional lizard-apes who never check the numbers against reality, never apply scale, context, and perspective to their reasoning and life-navigation. Too smart to be fooled, certain that they can just "know" right information and that anything promulgated by "their side" is boiler-plate correct while the stuff invented by "those people" is garbage misinformation.

That's dickhead behavior.

It's also nothing new. It's what lazy and over-content lizard-apes do with their guilt. They invent attacking disasters to be oppressed and victimized by. And like crabs in a bucket, they do everything in their power to drag potential escapees back down into the communal olio of shame and loathing.

The beautiful thing about life as an ape-lizard though is that the crabs can only control an ape-lizard mind that wishes to be controlled.

The dickhead ape-lizards cannot have my mind and they cannot leverage me into being a dickhead and destroying my soul.

So there.

##########

If the above section seems to be an anger-filled rant, it's not. It's simply an incomplete summation of the 2020 global Zeitgeist. I love my fellow ape-lizards unashamedly and without reservation. Because I do, I can see perhaps more clearly through the lens of philos than through the lens of raging intersectionalism. It's kinda cool.

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

May busy

Spring is cool so far. April 24-hour average temperatures were 3 degrees cooler than the 127 year average, and thus far May is about the same. This is the corrupt thing about the climate change industry -- they publish graphs and studies proving how the temperature is skyrocketing and if they don't get their way (power and control) the world will burn to a crisp. The information they publish is absolutely true in the artificial realm of their computer models, which are designed to take the false data they enter and produce a result showing out-of-control temperature increases. Meanwhile in reality, the climate is doing exactly what it's been doing for the last 15,000 years. It's variable within a certain range of conditions but making no excursions outside that established range regardless of what the corrupt industry publishes.

The corrupt climate industry is behaving in a baldly corrupt fashion, and that's wrong. But they couldn't do it without the love and support of nearly all the ape-lizards on the planet. Ape-lizards who are far too smart to be fooled and know everything because tee-vee. Just as with most of the narrative of the stupid virus, most of the world's ape-lizard population is utterly brainwashed on climate. And know without question that they are not. They have tee-vee after all.

So be it.

The busy monster has taken over my life completely. Between building fence, receiving cattle, moving domiciles, and a raft of other less spectacular activities, I'm charging they days from sunrise to very late. It's a good thing. My nerve pain is not fun but it's what I've got.

I am blessed beyond measure to be a thinking ape-lizard navigating an actual life in the realm of reality. I bless the day I threw my tee-vee in the dumpster in disgust. Reality is the correct place for an ape-lizard to exist.

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

Livin'

"It ain't dyin' I'm talkin' about. It's livin!"

Agustus McCrae

##########

My days have unexpectedly become filled with livin', and as I reflect on the last year or so I realize that I've been mainly existing. Which is fine; sometimes all you can do is hold on by the fingernails and endure. But livin' is much more better than existing.

Here's a glimpse of how they install fence posts in faraway Herefordshire. Boggles the mind!



The prairie is exploding into spring!

All velocity, no vector

Exploring

Yucca and Nuttall's violet

Mourning dove nest

Searching for the Torg Monument

Found it

Thunderstorm driving in the Ranger which continues to feature a busted windshield.



##########

All across the land the people who live in this nation are convinced that the murder-death-kill flu is a horrible scourge and "we" must bend every effort to defeating it in mortal combat. And by "we" they mean somebody else, prolly the gubmint doodes. They base their certain knowledge on the authoritative statements of talking suits and dresses. For all intents and purposes almost none of the vast array of my friends and neighbors have looked at any numbers or data, thought about how viral disease works, and attempted to put factual data into a reasonable scale, context, and perspective. Why would they? They know with absolute certainty that they know all there is to know. They look at the tee-vee and they know. Period.

Americans have abdicated their sovereignty and ceded their liberty.

Our contract as spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America stipulates that each of us have unalienable rights which derive from god. As a consequence, each of us have non-negotiable responsibilities attending our status as individual monarchs. To do it right, one must exercise the responsibility of our sovereignty and of our liberty and behave like the individual emperors we are.

Or not.

Shirk, or do not shirk.

It's not 'the gubmint's" fault. The job of the sovereign is incredibly hard. The easy button approach leads only to death of the soul.

Do or do not. There is no try.

Suck it up and drive on.

##########

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.