David Milano

Tap rooted plants attract worms. I can’t say why with certainty—probably nutrients brought up to the surface by deep roots creating a worm-friendly environment. Congenial food sources, and perhaps also some welcome loosening of compacted soil. The correlation first became evident to me when I got tired of being poked by bull thistles in our barnyard, and decided to dig out the ones that were in sensitive locations (they're potent soil improvers so wholesale removal would be unwise). I found worms, often fat ones, tied into each root ball. Curiosity got me digging up other tap root plants and sure enough, the more developed the root mass, the more earthworms.

The old, “abandoned” (ownership is never abandoned) buildings in my neck of the woods are mostly  dairy barns. They tell a sad story of lost economies and, at least in my opinion, lives changed for the worse.

We were once a very active dairy farming region. Just a couple or three generations ago, small family farms were very common, and very solvent with 20-40 cows plus some other farm endeavors—cropping and beef/pork/chickens/goats for home use plus whatever bits of commerce they could bring in. Nowadays though, the story is vastly different. Now if you need, say, a gallon of milk, and drive from the countryside to the grocery store to get it, you’re unlikely to pass an active dairy farm, but will certainly pass several former dairy farms, pastures overgrown, barns empty and gradually collapsing to the ground. Arrive at the store and buy… what exactly? Fractionated, reconstituted, “fortified,” pulverized, overheated milk that came from hundreds of miles away. One can’t help but wonder how we could have gotten here.

I included the pictured barn because when I saw it, hope arose that it would not require a miracle to salvage. But like they say, don’t judge a book by its cover. This barn is actually close to ruin. Close enough that a good windstorm will probably finish it.

The interior photo of the old Ford parked inside the better-preserved end of the barn (the other end is not safe to be in) tells its own sub-story. By all appearances it was simply driven into the barn one miserable day when it could no longer justify its existence on the farm and promptly forgotten. I looked it over pretty well, and figured it could probably be started and driven with a bit of tinkering. (I once resurrected a long—30 years long—abandoned field truck that the farmer gave to a friend and myself for free, just for the effort of getting it out of his hedgerow. The rugged old flathead V8 coughed up and the leaky tires held enough air to get it out of the field and into a trailer.) But this truck revival wasn’t to be. The owner (two generations along from the truck’s use-by date) wasn’t interested, and really neither was I, being already overloaded with projects.

I guess the old Ford sits there still. The very likely outcome? Falling timbers will one day finish it off for good.

In their small way, the barn and the truck tell the story of the rise of colossal, centralized systems, and the fall of tiny local ones.

Used to be amazed at the “problem” of kids having to travel to school in the dark… I mean, really, is it so hard to simply adapt by changing school day start and end times?? But then I realized, yes, it’s extremely hard to adapt, because the school schedule is tied to the parents’ work schedules, which are in turn tied to the entirety of commerce/business/production/etc. cycles. A one-hour change in the school schedule can throw a massive wrench into the machinery, especially when both parents work outside the home (which seems to be the current norm). So many competitive interests, so many schedules embedded into non-natural cycles.

Jay Angler wrote:

“I'm told that anyone with cows will find that they don't pay *any* attention to clocks.”

That statement gave me a rather wan smile. When we kept a family cow I was forced to integrate farm duties with my day job at the local hospital, and man oh man, what a pain! The interplay of human and animal diurnal cycles, job work schedules, and the necessity of routine for both health and predictable behaviors (animal and human!) was burden enough… the biannual imposition of a time change seemed a cruel and unusual punishment.

There’s no diplomatic solution. Far too many tangles. I guess I’ve become hopeful of a miracle. Interestingly I said as much recently and was told that government force is the miracle I’m waiting for. What a sorry insight.

By the way, there are various ways to add dynamic when playing the ukulele… in addition to vibrato there’s “tremolo” (rapid, slight increases and decreases in volume), hard stops (cutting off the ringing strings for a moment), and trills (rapid up and down across a fret—like vibrato) come to mind.

Here’s a video of me playing “Dream A Little Dream Of Me” that has examples of all three. They can go by quickly so you may have to pay closer attention than the rendition deserves!

"Why do some people wiggle their fretting hand like this guy when he just has his pinky on the strings?”

I’s called “vibrato” and is done to make a note more dynamic, to give it, I guess you could say, some emotion, and also because it somehow sounds more natural. Singers do it all the time.

Vibrato can be overused of course. It can become annoying, or redundant so that its effect is diluted, but well-placed vibrato is generally a welcome addition.

Fretted instrument intonation is a subject worthy of textbook level analysis, which has of course been done, some might say done ad nauseum. So there’s plenty of informal and formal data out there for the fascinated. Here’s a representative web page for those wishing to take a deeper dive: https://guitargearfinder.com/guides/guitar-intonation/

It’s a funny thing… as a player of fretted instruments and the owner of an OCD set of ears, various intonation “faults” have plagued me forever. Notably, the effect of imperfect intonation in the mandolin, banjo, and ukulele is easily ignorable (for me) but on the guitar, it’s a continual, annoying, mini-problem. I manage it somewhat by making subtle tuning changes for different keys and while playing with a capo, but it never goes away entirely, even on my few very-high-quality instruments.

So... when “true temperament” guitars (they have wiggly frets to compensate for intonation faults) showed up a couple years ago, I thought, “Finally! A solution!” Found a true temperament guitar at a music store and gave it a good go. Turned out to be no bueno for me. Hard to explain why… Short on texture?? Loss of valuable overtones?? Basically it was too perfect. Not natural. Like an AI supermodel, with not even a tiny flaw to prove she’s human.

There’s a permaculture moral to this little tale, having to do with how adapting to nature tends to put controls on the demand side of the equation...

A competent psychologist could make a good living off my coffee habits.

Most of my life I was “okay” with coffee, though gravitated more toward teas, herbal and otherwise. Then the big bang—a seriously expensive, fresh espresso from a high-end cafe. Clearly not coffee, or what I thought was coffee. A revelation! Fast forward several decades, and the household formula is full-on obsession: Buy green beans, roast once or twice a week, brew with a variety of methods. There’s a lot of management packed in there…

Beans have regional characteristics, weather characteristics, processing characteristics, and travel through fair-trade or other channels.

Roasting fetches a nuanced mix of science and art and is a process necessarily tuned, configured and reconfigured over time by experience and product variety.

Now we deal with a mixed bag of biological effects like decomposition, rancidity, off-gassing...

Grinding connects the roast with the brewing method and no surprise carries its own vagaries. It's the part of the process most influenced by money—high quality grinders cost a lot. The poor home coffee nut tends to search out the best he can, which happily opens the door to more fascinations.

If all that isn’t a deep enough rabbit hole, brewing, from espresso to mocha latte, can be so absorbing it can lead one to barista school. I have narrowed down to five different methods.

May I say, and you must believe me that I don’t judge others on this, I make a pretty darn good cup of coffee, and own a well earned reputation for it. Nevertheless (and this is crystal clear) the time and effort I’ve put into coffee cannot be justified by a daily cup or two of high quality beverage. It is, however, justified by the process itself. The old adage applies: The journey is the destination.  

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. If a good psychologist wants to pipe in, I’m all ears...

In our region of occasional heavy snow, our home’s little road system (I calculated our snow-removal areas to be about a half acre total) necessitates using a diesel tractor. Mine is a 50hp, 4-wheel drive utility tractor with a front end loader and a rear-mounted snow blower. The snow blower is old and rather rugged. I bought it used and had to rebuild its gearbox and also had to rig thick rubber “swipes” onto the fan to make it functional. At this point all I can say is that it works, but I really don’t like using it because it’s rear-mounted so necessitates going backward, and because my tractor has no cab, the blowing snow is punishing. Most of the time I do my best with the front loader, which is a mixed bag. It makes a terrible plow (once full the snow mostly just spills around the sides) but it’s really good at picking snow up and depositing it where I want. By the end of winter I usually have at least one 8-foot tall snow pile, and many more smaller piles accumulated here and there (which the grandkids think is awesome!).

Once, after a substantial snowfall the weatherman predicted that temps would rise above freezing in a few days, so I decided to save the human and fossil fuel energy and skip the plowing. It was a terrible idea. We had above-freezing temps alright, but just for a partial day, which wasn’t enough to cause significant melting, but did manage to turn the snow surface to slip-and-fall-inducing, tractor-obstructing ice.

These days I just buckle down, bundle up, and get out there when I need to. Am I complaining? No, not really. For some unknown but undoubtedly biological reason, I enjoy operating machinery, and being productive is of course satisfying.  

To reclaim a crudded up iron pan without chemicals (and without a lot of elbow grease) put it into the woodstove. That will effectively burn off the deposits, but you must remember… DO NOT COOL THE PAN QUICKLY! It will crack! Instead let the stove and pan cool to room temperature slowly and naturally. Remove the cooled pan from the now finished fire, scrub it with soap, water and a relatively non-aggressive abrasive pad (e.g. #0000 steel wool) then begin the seasoning process. I’ve successfully reconditioned many pans this way. Pictured is the latest—a #3 Griswold. As you can  see in the second pic, it performs perfectly (after seasoning of course). That egg was fried in a relatively small bit of lard.

By the way… nothing can fix the pits and scratches in a severely misused pan except a grinder/sander. When scoping out pans to purchase, in addition to going for a good name (Griswold or Wagner), I try my best to determine if the surface hasn’t been too damaged. Pans can be ground flat and smooth, but it’s a job, and of course it thins out the pan a bit, often not evenly. Notably the pictured pan had a wee bit of pitting in the cooking surface, but this one turned out to be good enough, which is to say the pitting was pretty minimal. Nevertheless, it’s best to stay away from a gouged pan.

Noting the number of ukulele videos posted on this thread is all the evidence one needs to see that a portable, (relatively) simple, 4-string instrument is a pretty popular item. The potential for creating a satisfying result simply is truly one of the ukulele’s biggest appeals.

I once taught an adult, group ukulele class that covered no theory, no note-reading, no nothing at all technical. The goal was to play nice stuff without having to become a “real musician” (as a couple of the participants noted). It went over real well. In a few short weeks everyone was singing and strumming and, clearly, enjoying themselves.

I attached a link to a (little-viewed) video of myself playing a Joni Mitchell tune. It was posted for the adult class to help  a couple of the more advanced beginners transition from strumming to finger-picking. The song is pared down to minimize complexities. If you look at the YouTube description you’ll see that I also posted sheet music for it in tablature form, which the students thoroughly ignored. Fun is so much more pleasant than the technicals, especially when one is getting older and not sopping up new ideas and skills like a hungry child might!