bob day

I put up a post here many years ago, and my ideals were to never need or use doctor remedies. which I still stick with except for a 3 or 4 month period recovering from a rabid bobcat bite.  

Within minutes, after stopping the bleeding I took a big hit of Echinacea extract and goldenseal root powder, and unknown to me at the time that is exactly what Dr. Christopher says to use for rabies, with no suggestions of dosage or length of treatment, a very unspecific almost casual aside for a book dealing with serious ailments. Was the disease just too rare and he never saw a case? Was it not considered to be serious back in his day? All good questions, but I never really consulted his big book till some time after the fact. so it didn't make much difference at the time.

I just know that The Yogaville community had recently experienced a rabies death - a long time practitioner nipped by an innocent puppy in India-who didn't think about it at the time, came back and with no real diagnosis till months later and by then it was too late. so news of the attack I had experienced spread quickly and within 24 hrs there was a small squad overcrowding my living room persuading me to get the shots.

After a lot of research looking for the cheapest place, found out an emergency room was the only place they kept the serum on hand for the initial painful injections and their version of treatment of the wound and for a visit of a few hrs-most spent in waiting for treatment, maybe an hr of hands on treatment, and mostly with trainees being supervised, 10,000$ later I was back on the road, and the follow up shots in the series I was able to get at the local county clinic and they didn't charge me anything, but the nurse there was quite accommodating, and aside from the rabies, noticed the red infection line climbing my leg, and up to this point I had taken no antibiotics.

So we get to the meat of this story as far as treating cat bite wounds (with or without rabies).
This bob cat had aggressively grabbed hold of my leg and was trying to steal a hunk of meat so the wound was deep and surface applications would never reach the deeper tissue involved. So while I had a few oral antibiotics for systemic infections, I was not doing enough, I had no experience with those types of wounds and was way too casual with amounts, varieties, and frequency of dosage. The county nurse saw me three times over the next couple weeks administering the rabies follow ups, and established that the infection was not under control and warned me of septecemia (is that a real thing?  :-)

Anyway, I went to the major clinic in the county (the nurse couldn't prescribe) and the doctor there was pulling out white strands through an existing hole near my tendon. I had noticed that stuff coming out, but hesitated to remove it.

He also prescribed a specific antibiotic apart from the general one for a bacteria common to cat bites. 6 weeks later I could start to use that leg again, but during that time I saw that Dr. every week and he pulled out more of the damaged tendon each week until the infection was more under control and that hole had closed up.  I had been keeping that hole packed with Dr. C's black ointment, a drawing salve not intended to heal over like comfrey might, but rather to pull toxins, splinters, etc out of the body.

I was treating the main wound with poultices changed a couple times a day, the bandages provided by the clinic proved useful, some of the herbs were goldenseal, marshmallow root, a  little white oak bark here and there  and a little echinacea tincture. The wound itself was oozing for a while and had a fair amount of moisture any way, so i would mix the dry powders and sprinkle them over the wound and generally speaking that worked pretty well. This was more or less the middle of winter, and I'm not the most religious about keeping supplies on hand, but some dried plantain leaf would have been nice, poke rood powder (in small amounts, topical only)  but in the depth of winter (feb 6) there's not a lot fresh to be had. There are of course other possible combinations, whatever you are most familiar with.

I have learned a lot from that  experience, and it also raised lots of questions I had never considered before. It is obvious in retrospect this infection was spreading fast and eating up my body and even if I had stumbled on the right oral and topical antibiotics I would have had to be much quicker and treated it much better than I did in order to avoid "professional" help.

What you will do in an emergency situation is really up to you, my experience is just that, my experience. Draw from it what you will. There are a lot of "ifs" here - if I had better antibiotics on hand, if I had treated it more seriously.....

But in the end I did what I have written about here and I'm still alive and kicking,  The Doctors didn't kill me, quite the opposite, I'm still paying off the emergency room bill, that couple hrs back in 2022.

I did write this up on my site pictures

I like and get along with dogs well enough- all animals really, but no great passion, and they are pretty high maintenance the way most people keep them.

I suppose there are dogs that mostly take care of themselves,and actually make life easier by scaring off the deer, raccoons, etc, so I can see how they might fit into a
permaculture system.

what kind of dog(s) do you have?  what else do we have in common?

I don't know the latin name, but that picture looks pretty close. I've never actually harvested the fruits before and was told about the lemonade qualities of the fruit.

I'd be happy to send you a fruit once they ripen and start to fall, pm me with an address.

As far as using the fish, I have been amazed at the amount of  fertilizer coming from these fish, I really can't keep up with it,  I confess, koi and waterfalls, ponds in general are more an obsession than a planned addition to a permaculture system, Of course the biofilters are amazing growing "machines", the small pump sends lots of fertilizer and water on a regular basis and the plants just overwhelm everything. for the time being it's mostly just an experiment, but I have lots of alocasia which is an edible green, I think colacasia gives the roots for poi, and in the meantime I have arrowhead plants coming up everywhere, natives used them like potatoes, and my peppermint, which I dearly love has totally started to take over everything. I also have lots of different wetland type plants-cattails which are edible, pickerel weed, sweet flag, bulrushes, horsetail.

So at this point I justify the koi as an experiment, but really their primary function is the tremendous sense of well being I get from the water feature. also a lot of pride watching a dry hillside turn into a wetland. a lot of these plants have overgrown the liner ponds and are getting transplanted to the wild ponds i n the gulley, and this is probably the most permaculture type contribution the biofilters have made, acting as a nursery for some of the plants to get started. The sweet flag started as three bare roots from ebay, same with the bulrushes.  The cattails sort of volunteered, oh, and the arrowhead started as a single plant from the river but now it is ready to populate the wild ponds.

And while I would only possibly eat the fish if I was starving,  they are there as a backup, just in case.

Hi Ra, and anyone else of course who has time on their hands to read random posts,

Things slowed way down this summer- at least as far as unwanted excitement. I managed to make several trips back and forth to my brother's house, carried a bunch of stuff, some nice tools, with more to get, so I guess by slowed down I mean fewer 300 mile long trips while I wait for the extremes of heat to relax a bit. routine has been up early, set up fans open doors and get as much cool morning air inside as possible, then close everything .  

I got everything in place for the earth trench, air conditioner, but have yet to pull the trigger. Maybe after the pond and biofilter are set up I'll turn the backhoe to  trenching the earth tube.

I lost fish, almost 20 of the original butterfly koi, what a shame, overpopulation hot water, didn't turn on the aeration one night, better too much oxygen than not enough. Anyway, with all the babies and 1-2 year olds surviving, Life goes on.  The other pond with bigger regular koi escaped the summer heat with just one casualty- the biggest of course. I've read about the heartache of coming out in the morning to a bunch of floaters, but I had to experience it I guess. Warm water with lots of algae and plants will tun deadly at night when the plants go from oxygen producers to oxygen consumers, and the biggest fish are most at risk.

I finally signed a contract with a logger, he's got a couple jobs ahead of us, but ruth next door and I are  just a couple months away. I don't know if 4$/ton of chips is good or not, but that's what he's paying, he estimates 1k$ per acre.

My plan is to rent a large trackhoe, and do the swales immediately after the clear cuts. A neighbor has a hardy " orange" tree, and it's not just a great lemonade producer, but has thorns like crazy and seeds will grow in a New York Minute. I'm thinking fence hedge. I planted some a couple years ago after leaving fruit outside one winter in a plastic bag. tangled plants everywhere, a few plants with no light and strong competition still surviving/thriving, light seems to be the only limiting factor, they probably wouldn't mind a drink now and then, So I think they will survive my neglect and save a bunch on fencing. Plus the neighbor will get her orange tree harvest cleaned up

Anyway, the new liner pond is dug, but before the liner it needs manicuring, pulling sharp stones mostly, also refining the bottom-sides,   Still need to dig the biofilter, and decide whether to spend the extra money-but better solution-on aquablox for really efficient water distribution, or try and create my own out of septic pipe- again- I've learned a great deal about what not to do, but spending several hundred dollars is still tough to justify--twt.

deer have been an ongoing issue, they've taught me to get up early, stay awake at least till dark, and make frequent trips outside. Shooting the 22 now and again also helps keep them away.

good blueberries again this year, grapes doing well, figs still green although two ripened weeks ago teasing a possible early crop, but I guess most of these will ripen before the season ends and there are loads on this one producer.  Deer will eat the figs , but seem to leave the leaves alone, so they will definitely get some prime areas when I plant up after the swales next spring. blueberries and grapes seem to resist deer, at least as far as growing--harvest is always a free for all.

I'm writing now with the first full cycle  shut off at 0%SOC on the new LFP batteries. had to start the generator to keep the fridge running, and supply all other ac needs.  I've been treating the LFPs like they were a magic bullet, but seems like it's time for conservation again, especially with recent cloud cover- sometimes days on end, and of course shorter winter hrs.

Ok, time to do something-clearing the brush from the driveway edge and grading have been big on my to do list. Maybe I'll even get some work on the new pond done.  Or.......

keep having fun

I think you are totally right about all forms of connection or depth of feeling that an organic being can have, not just to the earth/ecology but also to other human beings, which is scary enough. but extrapolate to the point where the robot has so much data from feeling humans that it so closely mimics us  we can't tell the difference. and talk about scary.

Even something like Reiki or healing arts -shiatsu, all forms of massage may  be up for grabs once the programmers skill digitizes subtler forms of touch and collects enough data. This may be off in the future a ways, but mainstream science already has robots picking up eggs (without breaking them) touch receptors working both ways, robots reading x rays and diagnosing disease better than the best specialists.

Of course AI is driven by data and I have considered the idea that feeling/caring humans need to input equal or greater data than the uncaring ones to prevent creating warped mechanical children who learn their manners from people who have basically removed themselves from that eco connection. It would be a real shame if robot intelligence was based mostly on dysfunctional humans--

When I was a kid , 70 years ago +or -   I had a toy - Robbie the robot, it talked--"I Am Robbie the robot , a mechanical man, drive me and steer me wherever you can"  It was about a foot or so tall and had some sort of wire and controller and rolled along the ground. tomorrows personal robots are going to be less obvious.


Have you hugged your robot today?

sure, no sweat, it was really the apple award that alerted me to a possible misunderstanding and reaction in the general readership, like people taking sides, one Permaculture understanding better than another.

Bill really designed the propagation of Permaculture like an organism that could grow, mutate, and like all mutations, some survive and others don't.  That's why there was never supposed to be a single defining board of directors and just a simple three ethics to be understood by individuals in the way they understood it, not according to detailed instructions written in stone specifying straight jacket do's and don'ts.

I never intended my post to be an endorsement,  more an acknowledgement of what is. Solar arrays, wind turbines, all require massive disruption of more natural processes, our disruption has been in place for 10 thousand years, or more if you count putting sticks into termite mounds to eat the bugs. or starting fires to regenerate grasslands. Just to make a post here we acknowledge  our personal use of the existence of complicated disruptions beyond sticking a shovel in the ground, which is already a result of huge technology advances beyond just discovering bog iron.

Luddites didn't actually despise technology, they just wanted their level of tech and despised things beyond that. As a species we may be heading quickly to our own demise, would it be on a smoldering planet, or in a nursing home with robots catering to the last surviving humans?  Pure conjecture at this point.

I am a child of these times, although some might call me a relic of a past time, and I really make my choice every day to eat out of a refrigerator with occasional nibbles on wild plants, using store bought teeth

I would likely be dead without technology and I'm not going to apologize for enjoying my life, but i will plant another blueberry bush here and there to try and recreate a garden of eden where the only work is harvesting.

For the time being I use everything at my disposal to move toward that goal. plus, sometimes i use tech just for fun--yes, i'm guilty of having fun

This post was simply to let people know what technology is doing and what they might expect to become available to them in the near future.

I feel like it's time to update the tech that is already here, and the uses that remain quite obvious for the brave new world that is quickly approaching.Or will it be more like the star trek vision where people move freely between high tech and more earthy living, with money basically obsolete and a hardware system  that is always in surplus,basically free of waste and destruction.

So Waymo- driverless Taxis are well established in a few cities, tesla has been operating human monitored driverless cabs in Austin for employees and will open the service to the public  in June, with the idea that all teslas will have the driverless option (public and private) by 2027 give or take.  There is a bill in congress that will modernize regulations to standardize safety requirements through all 50 states for the new tech.

Tesla will start full production of electric semi trucks next year in Nevada, in a dedicated factory with a completion date by the end of this year.

Tesla has started several factories around the world producing mega batteries that replace Peaker plants basically offering a stabilizing power effect without the need for coal or natural gas to power the grid when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. This was pioneered in Australia several years ago and was so effective it is being replicated across Australia and the rest of the world. Tesla has two factories in China, one temporary factory in California and another dedicated factory close to completion in California.

The humanoid robot "optimus" is becoming more adept at different tasks (snowboarding :-)) and Tesla will be producing several thousand this year. There are already 30 or 40 being tested at jobs in their factories and robot assembly lines are hiring workers as the assembly process becomes refined. When completed this robot will not need "cloud" access for it's intelligence but uses a powerful onboard computer to allow faster response times.

After several months my  lifepo (lithium) batteries are remarkable, using fewer bats they outperform the lead acid ones 2-1.  The biggest challenge with this chemistry is cold, and the bats can be damaged when attempting to charge them below32* F They can still be discharged down to 5* or so without damage,  and some come with internal heaters provided although these are more expensive.  Recent price reductions make them cheaper than lead acid, although with new tariffs that may change since most of them come from China.  The only challenge left is lifespan, and they are predicted to last ten years under moderate use, possibly 20 years in a solar system where total draining is less frequent.

Lead Acid bats get destroyed much more easily when draining them so i anticipate lithium will be better in this respect also. I purchased unknown cheap chinese brands and cross my fingers and knock on wood they will at least last a few years.

I used a propane refrigerator for many years requiring monthly trips to town for propane, but over the last couple years since I started the electric fridge, no trips to town for gas, steady reliable-free- more cold space, and the new lead acid bats were the weakest part of the system. during the winter the fridge power system (4 solar panels and 6 100ah bats)  would need to be turned off when bats got low, since changing out the lead acid for lifepo never a shortage (only used 4 life po 100ah, biggest problem is now with increased sun, I need a controller to reduce high voltage. automatic cut offs- are built in-the bats have controllers for this, but having a secondary controller is safer.

I'm Planning on getting an electric golf cart soon, and will likely be replacing those bats with lifepo also. I'll also be setting up a larger solar system with used panels, and the golf cart will become a large mobile power supply.

after so many years struggling with minimal power suddenly my cup runneth over,

remember, if you're not having fun, you've got the design wrong.

funny how  the best plans get detoured and postponed. Well, it's official my ambitions to cut the timber on the front 15 acres and do the swaling and set up tree planting for next year are stalled, and heaven knows when they will start up in earnest again. the first step of cutting the trees was thrown off by the lack of loggers willing to relocate their machinery to cut such a small parcel.

But I did get together with a new neighbor who has about the same plan, but with a slightly larger acreage of pines to be cut for pulpwood.  And yes I know that monoculture pulpwood pines are not great as far as diverse management of the forest, but the pines were planted when I came and just trying to get a foothold took up much of my early time here.

So now I have these acres of pines that have started to die in clumps, and the beetles will be close behind, so getting the trees cut is not just a best practice, it's also least resistance with it  being illegal to try and keep this stand going without some additional inputs of energy, possibly pesticides to avoid an infestation, and still only have a monoculture of trees--like a ticking time bomb.

My lofty aims of saving erosion were countered by a forester who visited recently who spoke of the "duff" on the forest floor as a primary safeguard, and I suppose that's true to a certain extent, but rainfall here can come several inches at a time and the ratio of 12 inches of "duff" to 1 inch of rain hardly seems sufficient to get creeks to run steady rather than flooding in the heavier rains.

So the idea of demonstrating better land management than current best management practices is still viable, but when considering expense and the vast acreage of commercial pulpwood forests here in Buckingham, it will likely be quite a while before there is any radical change in tree growing here. It is true that the red clay "soil" does not easily support other tree species, so finding the trees that will grow will likely involve lots of additions and likely some heavy duty microbial transitions.

Anyway, it's probably just as well the project has been stalled,  my brother died a couple weeks ago and cleaning up the mess he left behind is paramount right now. It's not without rewards although it is a sad task, but trips back and forth (a 600 mile round trip) are both hectic and distracting to normal spring activity.

which gets back to Best laid plans oft gang aglay--or however that old saying used to go.  So the heavy schedule of spring planting, extending land management, and constructing new fish pond and biofilter have been slowed/ put off again.

I'm just hoping the difference between my brother and I are that my better lifestyle/diet will give me lots of extra time to finish, or at least move farther along my ambitions. I'm still pain free, doctor free, and the backhoe is still running (with occasional repairs)

my site in desperate need of updates

Geoff Lawton remembers a time when working in remote places required traveling distances to get to a phone or fax and how the new technologies have advanced Permaculture with instantaneous access to information and communication.

Bill talked about sending  a couple hippie chicks ahead of their crews using an a frame leveling device each morning, and following them with machines to establish contour plowing on a very broad scale, and now machines can practically do all that work of several people and many extra days just by navigating with geo satellites and automatic leveling.

Keeping up to date with AI and how it is being trained is very much going to be part of our future whether we like it or not. The question is only are we going to be aware and literate regarding these powerful new technologies, or simply pretend they don't exist and try and will them away while hoeing our gardens.

I'll only answer the Full Self Driving  question  with an observation. Tesla started this quest many years ago with thousands of " labelers " millions of miles worth of video and countless advances and setbacks Recently (in the last year or so  they got their first super computer up and running with a neural net and the video data from those million(billion) miles of tesla fleet data and without labellers or specific instructions that Artificial Intelligence started driving more like a human in a matter of months not years.. The more miles added and the more advanced the super computers become the better they drive the cars.

With Players like Musk heavily investing in expanding that "Compute" power, doubling it every 6 months or so the "intelligence" there will have safer driving vehicles than humans in the next year or so. After that the question only becomes how much safer does it have to become before NHTSA  allows it to drive, then insurance and regulations are the main issue.

We can attempt to isolate our Permaculture and not participate in these advances, but I am at least observing these things while I play in my gardens.

I do use machinery--primarily my backhoe, and have set up several swales and ponds that become better each year. I've probably planted close to a thousand trees along those swales to try and diversify the forests here with Persimmons, plums, willows, red buds, ...

The gully that used to run like a river after a heavy rain and dry out after a few days, now holds back almost all the water that falls above the swales and I even have some catfish that have managed to survives even during extended droughts. My figs finally really produced well last summer after many years of struggling, my blueberries produced well again this year and each year I put in a few new plants. The grape vines are doing quite well, but my trellises could use some help and the vines will likely get pruned this year in an attempt to get them trained on better trellises.

My koi ponds are a  joy( if not quite related to Permaculture),  And their biofilters are a great experiment in using nothing but small pumps running  on batteries and solar cells. I'm currently using the biofilters mostly for rushes, reeds, ornamentals, but experiments with herbs and tomatoes etc are ongoing.

I am playing with soil supplements to try and increase production--rock phosphate, lime, fish wastes, in other parts of some gardens, also playing with over wintering several tender varieties-- tomatoes, tumeric, ginger, cayennes, lemon grass, etc etc.

I finally decided some nectarines, a peach tree, gooseberries, blackberries, and a couple others had outlived their use, or needed relocation from a garden close to the door, and plan on another biofilter there that will hopefully be more productive with more useful and easier crops. The trees could be beautiful, but late frosts have denied me fruit, every year, and this year the peaches that survived for the first time in seven years actually all brown rotted.

They were mostly experimental anyway, still I have hesitated to reclaim the space and sun until recently. I've already taken out a japanese plum and yucca plant, and as soon as I get the backhoe back up and running I'll be taking out the other two+ yuccas, the nectarines and gooseberries. I probably won't dig up the Peach right away, although I probably should, it has already been heavily cut off, and I may still play with it keeping it to more of a minor experiment than the overwhelming sun hog it became.

Oh, and my own recent experiments with new tech has been buying some Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries to replace the lead acid banks as they  age out. The batteries are actually getting cheaper than lead, and the hope is they will be more durable with less maintenance.  And for those who haven't been keeping up with the lithium tech, yes , these batteries are just as recyclable as lead, with numerous centers already set up, and one of the biggest drawbacks is they are not failing as quickly as people thought, so there is a shortage of batteries to recycle.

I know there's other stuff I could talk about--clear cutting the pulp wood pines on the other side of the creek and using the proceeds to totally swale the area and plant a more diversified forest instead of the monocrop that was there when I started.

So much fun to have the hardest part is knowing where to start.

Remember, if you're not having fun, you've got the design wrong.