Author: sjct

I am having a contrary reaction to the recent revelations that we might live in a pervasive, invasive surveillance state. My first reaction was: Why is anyone surprised? What did you think the Patriot Act meant? It legalized activities that the government actively pursued covertly since WWII at the latest. Spying on US citizens is nothing new. And why be outraged about it? What did you expect the N.S.A. to do? To look for terrorists, they MUST look at EVERYONE. And really, didn’t you KNOW your phone calls were being scanned for keyword clusters? Didn’t you realize you were putting your life on display for retailers on the Web? Haven’t you noticed how Google Ads respond to keywords in your emails? Or watched the ads on the right side of your Facebook News Feed reflect your demographic data? If Amazon & Netflix tracking cookies can follow your browsing, why shouldn’t the government have the same access? I heard the argument that we didn’t click “I agree” on the TOS agreement w/ the N.S.A. Perhaps not personally, but a majority of voters re-elected G. W. Bush and the Congress Critters who made us give up our 4th Amendment rights at airports. We have COMPLIED implicitly if not explicitly. I say we KNEW we gave away our privacy & shouldn’t boohoo too loudly. We darn well know there are men being held in Gitmo indefinitely w/o due process. Oh but that’s THEM, not us, you say. Well, we’re not STARTING to slide down a slippery slope. We’re snowballing downhill ALREADY.

My second reaction was: They aren’t doing a very good job of compiling & sorting all that data. Those two losers still blew up people at the Boston Marathon AFTER they reportedly looked up bomb making instructions ONLINE… along w/ at least half a million other idle slackers that week alone I would guess. I’m not sure I would mind if they had the ability to intercept those boys BEFORE they set off their bombs. It would have been nice if the movie theater mass murderer had been arrested in the parking lot & taken off for a psyche eval. One of those mass murder TERRORISTS exercising his 2nd Amendment rights–I forget which one–made a number of suspicious ONLINE purchases of ammo. Why didn’t that throw up a red flag? So there’s that. Big Brother appears to be incompetent. His all-seeing eye blinks.

My third reaction was: Why is this big news NOW? WHY is this shiny bauble of outrage being dangled? WHERE are we being lead? All over the Web, people were saying how this was a non-partisan issue. Left & right should unite to roll back this gross invasion of our privacy. Then the leaker was revealed & my mind reeled over his totally unbelievable life story. While others were hailing him as a courageous hero, I was saying to myself this dude is NOT REAL. I saw contradictions in his narrative. You cannot BE epileptic AND accepted into Army Special Forces Training. After breaking BOTH legs in a training exercise & taking a couple of computer classes at a community college to get his GED, how in hell does someone end up being a C.I.A. employee in Switzerland? To then be transferred to the N.S.A. & spend the last four years working for subcontractors tasked w/ super-duper top-secret operations… This is the stuff of wild fiction! And you cannot BE PATRIOTIC & tell the Guardian–a news outlet that is notoriously anti-American–you melodramatically fear for your life while you sit in gawd-damn evil CHINA!

PLUS, Big Brother is beyond incompetent & well into negligence IF this “sys admin ASSISTANT” was given access to their powerfully pervasive, invasive PRISM. I considered the only way ANY part of Snowden’s tale could be true is if he had a connection that pulled strings to put him where he was. Many unqualified people were given overpaid do-nothing admin jobs related to Iraq because they had connections. It was part of a Republican patronage system that rewarded young people related to contributors or who had done grunt campaign work. The only part of Snowden’s past that has been confirmed is that he worked the last 3 months for a subcontractor in Hawaii. SERIOUSLY! He wasn’t even out of a probationary period of employment before they handed him the keys to unlock damaging documents! THIS is MORE outrageous to me than the SPYING! I DON’T BELIEVE IT!

I thought to myself it was far more likely someone handed him whatever evidence he claims to have. He’s a photogenic geek type & draws out sympathy w/ his romantic idealism. I devoured the continuing interviews w/ him and THERE IT WAS! The creep VOTED for RON PAUL! He’s “disappointed” that Obama has not changed the course of the massive ship of the surveillance state. Pah-lease! Obama can’t even get his judicial appointments or cabinet positions approved & he’s to blame for operations that were started before he was elected and continue to be funded by Congressional subcommittees!

I smell A RAT! If Breitbart were still alive, I would suspect him of this trickery. It has been suggested this will be an issue for Rand Paul to fly if he seeks the presidency in the next election. Indeed, many of my liberal friends are finding themselves in common cause with reactionary retards. How many Democratic votes might be peeled away by this overblown issue? Could it be enough to tip the balance & put a mad dog Republican in the White House? Are you willing to trade away the New Deal for the promise of private emails? I know the adage about trading liberty for security and having neither. But we can’t have ANY liberties WITHOUT security and a functioning central government.

I don’t care if the ominous They ARE scanning my phone calls or emails. The government started spying on me in 1964. I know this for A FACT & the Thought Police haven’t shown up yet. I DO care VERY MUCH that the N.S.A. is INCOMPETENT! We seem to be wasting billions of dollars on a system that doesn’t protect us from outbursts of semi-automatic gunfire almost every frigging week! Do their defining parameters on what constitutes terrorism need to be adjusted? Should they hire Google to tweak their algorithms to better anticipate when nut jobs are about to go postal & kill innocent children? AND WTF! HOW did a dweeb like Edward Snowden get hired & handed access in under 3 months? There’s THE scandal!

Also, anyone who voted for Ron Paul or encourages voting for Rand Paul needs to WAKE THE FUCK UP!

Way back during the primaries one of the deciding factors for me in choosing between Hillary and Barack was mandates being required to provide affordable medical care. She was in favor and he wasn’t. It was an issue for me. I felt if someone offered me a medical plan I could afford, I’d take it and wouldn’t need to be coerced.

Like many others, I wanted Medicare for All^TM. I wanted the single-payer “Public Option”. As the legislative process in Congress proceeded to create the Affordable Care Act, I was appalled by what I saw as Obama caving into the insurance industry and his 180 on mandates. I felt betrayed and abused–yet again–by a politician.

But, guess what? Holy Tao! Obama-Care WORKS!
Every couple of years for grimaces, guffaws and a dose of outrage, my husband and I hit the rate estimator on the Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina website. In exchange for their “free quote” they do exact payment in the form of your name, email address and phone number. Without knowing more than our ages (63) and the fact that we had unspecified preexisting conditions, it tossed up a rate that was more than half of our income.

As we shouted, “Blood-sucking Bastards,” yet again, the page we were viewing blinked over to a website for a couple of BCBSNC agents in Raleigh AND that page promised an alternative. Say what? Then it got a little spooky as one of them promptly dispatched an email into our inbox and followed it five minutes later with a phone call! Meta sales techniques in the 21st Century–O.M.G.

I got over gasping at the invasive transfer of data from one hand to another fairly quickly because the agent smoothly told me we probably qualified for the High Risk Insurance Pool the State of North Carolina had created in compliance with the Affordable Healthcare Act. I was also pretty darn impressed by how on-the-spot responsive he was.

I gushed, “What do you do? Sit in front of your computer, get alerts and launch a stock email then punch in the phone number?”

“Yep,” he admitted. “Nine to five. You hit the rate estimator during business hours and I wasn’t on another call when your data came up. Cool, huh?”

“Creepy actually.” I told him but didn’t hang up because he proceeded to state the obvious, “The rate you just got quoted is outrageous and you would still be declined if your preexisting conditions are serious. But thanks to the Affordable Care Act, you now have an alternative. How long have you been without insurance?”

I’ll skip the personal tale of woe and the details of how damn sick we both are and get to the pertinent information. Different states have set up different criteria and many of them are foot-dragging but in North Carolina they’ve set it up and it’s called “Inclusive Health Federal Option”. Here are the rules:

1. You must have gone without insurance coverage for at least six months.
2. You must have current diseases or conditions that will cause your application for regular insurance to be declined.
3. If your application IS accepted BUT the cost of the policy exceeds the amount you would pay for similar coverage under Inclusive Health then you STILL qualify.

The program offers several “packages” with options and deductible variations. Naturally, the higher the deductible the lower your monthly payment. It’s a typical insurance Chinese menu and he emailed it to us. We studied it and went into shock. Good Lord! We could afford it!

Sure the plan we picked has a deductible of $3500 but, heck, that’s the cost of one of my husband’s recent ER visits that we’ve been self-paying in full with no end in sight but bankruptcy. After meeting the deductible, ER goes down to a mere $150 out of pocket. The plan includes a complete annual physical at NO CHARGE. The medication he’s been paying $280 per month to get goes down to 40 bucks; generic meds will be $10. Visiting the doctor will cost a whooping $20 instead of $125.

Here let me cut to the bottom line: The same policy with BCBSNC–if they would accept us–costs $1400 each. Under Inclusive Health, the cost drops to $500! The whole process, applying and being declined by BCBS, applying and being accepted by Inclusive Health took two weeks. As of May 1st, we will be insured. The shiny membership cards are already in our hands. We’ll get medical services as often as needed, seeking answers to all those “little complaints” we couldn’t afford to investigate out-of-pocket. My husband will take medications we haven’t been able to afford that might improve his condition and friggin’ prolong his life!

So, yeah, I’m gonna work to re-elect Barack Obama and I’m telling everyone I meet locally, “You CAN afford insurance thanks to Obama and the Democrats!” Inclusive Health has discounts off their rates for people in lower income brackets. It’s not my ideal national health care solution but, golly gee whiz, it’s the best compromise we were going to get at this time and it’s AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE!

Once upon a time, I had a Bank of America Visa account with a credit limit of $11K. During a period of hardship, I ran it up to around $10K before paying it down to zero. My reward for paying it off was having my credit limit lowered to $6,600 and my interest rate raised from 12% to 19%. A year or so later, another stretch of hardship ran my debt up to a little over $5K before I could stop using it and start paying 300% of the minimum payment amount to slowly whittle it down.

After a few months of not using the card and always paying more than the minimum on time, I got a letter warning me that my interest rate was going to jump from 19% to 24% if I didn’t “opt out” by sending a letter stating that I would never, ever use the card again. The letter gave me less than a week to get this letter delivered to them so I sent it via Certified Mail. I put the card in a box so that I would not even accidentally ever use it again.

The next month a mysterious charge for a mere $9.95 appeared on my bill along with my rate jumping to 28%. I tracked down the company that had made this charge to my account and called them up. They claimed to be a web service provider in another state, quickly agreed that there had been a mistake and said they would rescind their payment and notify BOA of the error. I never did get a straight answer on what service they might have provided for less than $10. I began to suspect that their service was given to BOA when BOA refused to lower my interest rate. I, after all, had not used the credit card and had, therefore, not violated my opt-out agreement. The conversation worked its way up to a supervisor level and pretty much ended with me screaming, “Close my account!”

My husband’s Capital One Visa interest rate was still at 12% and he had the available credit so we used one of those “checks” credit card companies provide and transferred the debt from BOA to C1. Of course, the following month, BOA sent me a bill for less than $40 for the interest that had accrued during the interval between my last statement and the day they processed my payment. I called them up and asked them to provide me with the exact amount I would need to pay to zero out my account, considering that once again there would be a delay between our conversation and the moment they finally posted my payment. I wrote the check and mailed it that day.

The next month, the BOA statement showed that they had underestimated the speed of the USPS and put a 50-cent CREDIT on my account. For this generous act, they charged me a $1.50 service fee, which meant I owed them one last dollar. I called and got one of the friendliest customer service reps I’ve ever encountered. When he brought my account up on his screen, he could not stop laughing. The tale of my one-dollar debt was going to make him the king of the break-room that day. He didn’t even need his supervisor’s permission to zero out my account. I told him, I wanted it printed out; I wanted that final statement with the big fat zero balance on it. He said I would have it and so I did. For all I know “forgiving” this dollar debt probably knocked a couple hundred points off of my credit score.

All of this occurred a few months back. Since then my husband stopped using his C1 card and started paying more than the minimum every month with the goal of us both being credit card debt-free. Last month, he ordered something over the internet and used the credit card since he was well under his limit and had no reason to suspect anything had changed. His bill this month revealed that his interest rate has doubled from 12% to 24%.

He called them up and demanded to know the explanation for this radical change in his credit-worthiness. He was told that he should have received a letter explaining that he could have “opted out” of this rate increase but since he didn’t reply there was nothing that could be done about it. He was yelling, “I got no such letter…” when the rep hung up on him. I’ll add that he’s never missed a payment, been late with a payment or paid less than the minimum. And since I’m the one who checks our mail, I’m pretty sure he didn’t get an “opt-out” letter because I would have brought it to his attention.

So the point of my sharing all of this is to open the floor to discussion. Feel free to share your stories about credit card company rip-off tactics. Or just vent your frustration with being on the hamster-wheel of endlessly escalating interest rates. If you know of legal ways to deal with these kinds of situations, I’d like to hear them. And, maybe, we should discuss starting a protest movement of some kind. How many people would be willing to take the credit score hit and the interest rate hike to just not pay their credit card bills in, say, December? Or, perhaps, we draft an “opt-out” letter to send to the credit card companies: Something along the lines of lower my rate to 12% or never see another dime from me as of January 1st, 2010… I dunno, what do you think?

Update: I realize that I wasn’t clear about the difference between the opt-out letter I received and the one that was supposedly sent to my husband. With mine, the deal was to promise, in writing, that you would never use your card again. (I still think that’s a very odd business stategy.) But, his was even stranger: He was required to promise that he would use the card again in order to maintain his interest rate. His failure to reply was then taken as a commitment to not use the card! As soon as he did use it, that set off the rate increase.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=mother+14+children&btnG=Search+New
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Let’s review the known facts, so far, of this matter:

In 1999, Nadya was injured on the job, whacked in the back by a thrown desk, likely confined to bed and sunk into deep depression. By 2001, her husband walked away or she pushed him away. She got a lump sum of backdated payments and knew she would continue to get monthly support from a Worker’s Comp settlement.

Her back had recovered enough that she was physically able to attend classes and expand her education, I guess. Looking at that lump sum she thought, “Now, I can have the babies I’ve always wanted.” Her mother supported this decision, no doubt. Someone had to agree to help her because she could not physically care for a child by herself.

I have had personal experience with problem pregnancies and back injuries so I can speak with some authority when I say that combining these two conditions is a choice no one can make without an enabler. Nadya should have been entirely dependant upon her mother to buy groceries, cook meals and bring them to her. During the last months, she needed help going to the bathroom and bathing. Carry around a 10-pound+ weight in your belly pulls on the lumbar region of the back and causes pain in women who have never had back injuries. So Nadya would have spent most of her life since 2001 lying down. I’m guessing she continued her education thru correspondence courses and/or the internet. I can’t imagine she could do it any other way without being on powerful pain medication which would have endangered the fetus.

So, after that first baby, her Mama is the one who got up and changed its diapers, gave it baths, changed its clothes and carted it back and forth to Nadya’s waiting arms. Nadya got all the comforting parts of motherhood and someone else did the hard crap work. Understandably, she thought, “Being a mother is wonderful! Why don’t I do this again?”

Something else was happening beside the ease of getting only the good parts of mothering. By nine months of age, that first child no longer lay docilely in her arms, cooing and looking up with adoring eyes. It squirmed. It pushed and pulled, bucked and flailed. It kicked without malice. In all of my speculation, I am presuming that Nayda’s back injury is real, permanent and disabling. The gyrations of a normal child can hurt healthy, uninjured mothers. She cannot pick up a toddler and carry it on her hip. She can’t lift up a one-year old and put it in a highchair. She can’t carry the kid to the car, lean over, put it in a car seat and strap it in. She can’t even lift one out of its crib. Her parents did all of that!

The decision to do it again had to have been accompanied by significantly dramatic scenes. There was hysterical crying and wailing for “a baby in my arms.” There were tantrums with accusations “You never loved me enough. You never made me feel good about myself! Daddy was gone. You were busy. I was all alone!” There was blatant emotional blackmail, “If I don’t have another baby, I’m going to get depressed again. I won’t have any reason to live. Nothing to comfort me in my pain and misery…”

Maybe these scenes didn’t happen before the second baby. The first one hadn’t entered the “Terrible Twos” yet and her parents’ memories of toddler hood were probably vague. It might not have seemed like too much trouble to help with a second child… or the third. But, at some time before the fourth pregnancy, there had to have been a showdown, a point at which her parents realized that something was very wrong.

Nadya should not be able to cope with a toddler. She loves babies but she may not especially like children. By age five, the oldest one may have been trained to treat her like a fragile flower and allowed to gently cuddle up beside her for story time. But, healthy, normal children do not stay still for long and their natural energy bursts out into squirming, hopping and jumping, bouncing on the bed and causing Nadya pain. “Get off the bed,” she might cry out while gasping with agony, “Get away from me and go run around the yard!”

During the fourth pregnancy that resulted in twins, Nadya got a second layer of injuries. This car accident brought in more compensation but it wasn’t enough. Nadya’s mother filed for bankruptcy and the family moved into a smaller house. As soon as the twins were out of her arms, Nadya needed “one more baby.” Someone — mother, father, or sperm donor friend — drove her to the appointment with the fertility clinic. Unless her injuries are a total fraud, she could not have driven herself. She was aided and abetted in the commission of yet another pregnancy when she already had six children that she could not financially, emotionally or physically support. Everyone involved had to know this before the last six embryos were implanted in her womb.

Had Nadya become a monstrous tyrant who controlled and manipulated everyone around her? Was her emotional blackmail so powerful, her pathetic compulsion so pitiful? At this point in the saga, the situation had already gone far beyond irresponsible and was heading into willful negligence. When she decided to keep all of the viable fetuses in her most recent pregnancy, she decided to seek the financial salvation of fame? If she had just had six more babies for a dozen total, she could be assured of making the front page of the tabloids. There is no way this decision wasn’t intentional and calculating. There were already successful reality shows about families with too many children. This was The Plan. Of course, she was “delighted” when she actually got eight babies and made headlines around the world. How disheartening it must be for her to realize that not all of us are impressed by her “accomplishment”?

Let’s not discuss the issue of freedom of choice in this regard. Brad and Angelina don’t have money issues and are fabulously fit and healthy; they can choose to have as many children as they want and I don’t mind. A child on welfare can choose to have a baby and I’m not terribly outraged by my tax dollars supporting her. Thinking about all welfare babies, lumped together, bothers me a little more and I’d like to see the government make some effort toward supplying birth control and encouraging people to use it. On an individual basis, self-validating thru motherhood is understandable and acceptable because it’s attained in a natural, gawd-given way. We won’t want to legislate that.

Altho Nadya had the money to pay for her IVF treatments, it’s unclear who’s going to pay the current Bellflower Kaiser Permanante bill. She may say she’s never gotten and will never ask for taxpayer assistance so it’s none of our business, right? Hey, she’s getting a Masters in counseling; she’s going to earn a million dollars a year working for Social Services, right? Not. It’s going to take more than a multi-million dollar book/movie deal to get these 14 kids all the way to self-sufficient adulthood.  Some of them aren’t going to ever get there. One of them is already known to be autistic. Among the octuplets, there will most likely be other long-term ailments and disabilities. So her assurances that my children aren’t going to be paying for her children are ridiculously false. Recklessly inflicting her progeny on society is our business. We do get to judge whether her decision-making was wise, wily or purely insane.

What about her dreams of fortune thru infamy? Would you buy her book? Um, why? I might read a book by her mother in which the true horror and insanity of the situation is revealed…

I might watch the movie if it’s a portrayal of a manipulative, selfish sociopath played by Angelina Jolie. But if it’s a glowing Lifetime movie tribute about overcoming obstacles to impossible dreams, I’ll pass. Purposefully having fourteen children you can’t support financially, emotionally and physically should not be encouraged.

Should a posse of case workers go ahead and jump in now? Or should we wait to see how damaged the children are in a few years?

Tell me something: Why did Kerry fold so fast? Why, after collecting millions for legal ammo, after promising to make sure every vote was counted, after the shit that went down in Ohio and Florida, did Kerry concede so damned fast?

Right after the Democrats got control of Congress, why did Nancy Pelosi re-assure the media that impeaching the worst president ever was not a primary goal for the new leadership? Why after angry voters had spoken were they told that there were more important issues to be dealt with first? Raising the minimum wage is good but is it really more important than getting out of Iraq? Re-writing ethics rules is good but is that more important than stopping the neo-cons from bombing Iran? What basement has John Conyers been hidden in now and why has he gone quietly?

Why are they eating up time debating about debating over a toothless resolution to slap the president’s wrist instead of censure, instead of Articles of Impeachment? Why are they waffling and posing while the clock on the preparations to bomb Iran tick, tick, ticks?

And why was Dennis Kucinach – supposedly one of the most “liberal” members of Congress – grinning and clapping after Bush’s State of the Union? Why did he lean over, shake hands, back slap and keep on grinning into the face of the worst president ever?

My answer: Because they are all members of the same club. They’re all minions, puppets, courtiers to Those Who Rule, to the greedy, planet-destroying, uber-rich, fucking Legions of Satan who control this planet! It’s fucking theater! A dumb show to distract those who might, just might get so agitated that they would riot in the streets and overturn some bulletproof limousines! They lead us on with HOPE! The next election will turn the tide, the next candidate will give us back our country, the next, the next, the next…

It’s an orchestrated two-year cycle. Win or lose, we keep looking ahead, keep believing that if we work within The System we can change it. If “our” guys win, we get a rush, a honeymoon of expecting change and when it doesn’t happen tension builds, the in-fighting starts. If “our” guy loses, we sulk and rage in defeat and the in-fighting starts immediately. The same answer always rises to the top, like shit in a septic tank, that if we all just bond together and work real hard next time change will happen, next time. So people donate money and time and energy to believing, to hoping, contrary voices are told to STFU. And everyone is occupied for another cycle.

The biggest fracture line in the “lefty” blogosphere is between those who still believe in The System and the few remaining voices who have to courage to say The System is fucked. You can’t beat The System by crashing into it because once you’re inside, you’re IT! You can’t sit around “Drinking Liberally,” imagining that you’re part of some “progressive movement” because that’s intellectual masturbation; you’re just diddled with your dick, throwing words and postures at a System that is laughing at you! Laughing at your impotence!

You can’t look at that. You have to hold onto your hope, your beliefs. You want “your country back” when it never belonged to you in the first place… or to your father… or his father’s father. The very idea that it ever belonged to you is a delusion, an ideal like a carrot used to lead your dumb ass along on the road of life. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the stick – fire hoses and billy clubs and snarling German Shepherds and bullets fired by frightened young National Guardsmen. If your voice did make a difference, if your words and romantic aspirations for being part of a “movement” did start to have an effect, they’d just snuff you. A lone gunman, some nut would step out of the shadows and blast you away. And the next guy and the next guy until the discontented got the message to put their heads down and fall back into the futile cycle of hope.

It’s not simply clinging to hope that keeps you in line. It’s FEAR! And not just fear of being beaten or jailed or killed. The first fear is that you’ll have to actually DO SOMETHING other than hope in the comfort of your own home. Get away from your keyboard and physically DO SOMETHING! You might have to put yourself on the front line of political protest like DammitJanet does. You might have to go out there and risk getting beaten, jailed, and/or killed. God bless her, Janet is throwing herself like a moth against a flame. She won’t win anything but possible martyrdom but she has integrity! She is living her principles!

Fuck! I don’t have The Answers. I don’t think revolution solves the problem. The old elite gets beheaded and the new elite takes their place. New boss same as the old boss, same as it ever was. The transition is bloody anarchy and mostly innocent people suffer and die. Those Who Rule lose some members; let in new members. The System is bigger than our government, bigger than putting on a new philosophical costume and going on with the play. It’s the hierarchy, the pyramid of human social interaction that seems to be hard-wired into every collective endeavor. Some people take charge, get on top and lord it over the rest. And the vast majority — the very foundation of the pyramid — wants it that way! They want someone to tell them what to do. They actually like having a tough guy boss them around.

It’s just us fringe mavericks out on the edge of the herd who see the open spaces and think it should be different. We’re friggin’ mutants! Something is missing in our genetic code that messes with our docility! I’m sure Big Pharma is working on that…

So fight doesn’t work. That leaves flight. Flight means giving up the Hope Cycle, the participation in that cycle, the illusion of making a difference. It means walking away from the drama on stage and going outside of The System. It’s the old hippie message: Tune In, Drop Out, go back to the land and prepare to survive the larger Historical Cycle, the one where governments fall and new ones arise after a period of chaos. I think we’re there. The whole edifice of The American Empire is crumbling under our feet. The “unwashed others” are already invading. Those Who Rule are learning how to speak Chinese. Within 20 years… or maybe even tomorrow… the Hope Cycle is going to crash against the Historical Cycle and the once proud and “exceptional” people of North American will find themselves in a newly re-arranged Third World.

So I live out in the middle of nowhere and grow my own food. If I could just stop watching the Drama and restraining myself from heckling the actors on stage I’d be happier, I think…

Just to let everyone know what a bored (and boring) person I am… I’m actually excited about the start of the new fall tv season. At the end of the day, I need to lay my tired old body down in my comfy recliner, take the remote in hand and seek diversion.

Among the early starters, I’ve watched “Justice,” “Men in Trees” and the CBS Monday night comedy line-up that starts with “The Class.” Last night I stayed up late for the return of “Boston Legal” and there are a slew of shows I’m looking forward to seeing.
“Justice” is about a high-profile, La-la-land law firm that handles media circus-type cases. The twist at the end of each show is a reveal of what really happened. So far, the murders have gone down pretty much the way the partners supposed in planning their defense. <yawn> I see a pattern here. It would be somewhat more stimulating if the person that they just got off turned out to be guilty as sin. About the best thing going in the show is a wicked depiction of a Nancy Grace clone. This show loses my viewing next week when “Lost” returns. But, if “Lost” continues to irritate the hell of me, it will be good to have a fall-back.

The first two episodes of “Men in Trees” were pleasant enough; I always liked “Northern Exposure.” Ellen Degeneres’ former girlfriend is cutely hetero as a “dating coach” guru who suddenly realizes she’s full of bullshit. She finds herself in the town of Elmo, Alaska, with a goodly supply of mildly quirky characters and one hunky lust object. I might have kept watching this show if it didn’t land in its regular Friday slot in competition with the start of the new “Doctor Who” series on SciFi.

For want of anything better to watch, Hubby and I settled into the CBS Monday night line-up that started with “The Class” went to something I don’t remember followed by Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer being depressing in “Two and A Half Men” and then concluded with a show with Seinfeld’s friend girl. I didn’t make it all the way to 10pm because I was lulled into a senseless stupor and went to bed.

Next Monday, I get to check out “Heroes” and force myself to stay awake for the return of “What About Brian.” W.A.B. was supposed to be a between-season filler but it caught my attention and generated web forums of devotees. I can’t honestly identify why this show hooked me. It’s basically a soap opera about a group of freinds but the characters made me care about what happens to them. So I’ll tune in to see if Brian gets the gorgeous doctor and betrays his childhood friend.

Tuesday nights are looking very good: “Eureka” is on SciFi followed by “Boston Legal” on ABC.

“Eureka” has got the quirky town/eccentric characters formula down pat and the theme music stays in my head for days. The spin lies in the fact that instead of being stupid bumpkins, the townfolk are brilliant scientists who invent stupid stuff.

“Boston Legal” continues to be outstanding. I mean, it’s a laugh-out-loud show about decidedly messed-up, perverted people. In the midst of the hilarity it drives home a couple of messages a week that promote the dreaded Hollywood liberal agenda.

Tonight, I’m anticipating “Jericho.” Yes, indeed, what happens to a small town when the rest of the country is blown up by A-bombs? I really want to see what the townfolk do when they run out of toilet paper and toothpaste. The pilot episode was surely already written by Rod Sterling but I’ll give them a chance to do something different with it. <not holding my breath>

Thursday night, I’ll be watching “Ugly Betty” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” The former looks interesting and the later will hopefully answer the question, “Who will she choose? The hot but married doctor or the yummy and available vet?” I’m guessing she’s a doormat and will go for the doctor.

So what have you been watching? What shows are you determined to watch?

Talk about a glass half-full exaggeration. Check out the spin in this article, Consumer Confidence Near Four Year High. You have to scroll down to the last paragraphs to get the full effect.

In the report, the research group said that those who deem current economic circumstances as “good” moved up to 28.3% of those survey in March, versus 26.4 who said the same thing last month. Those who saw conditions as bad fell to 14.7%, versus 15.4% who held that view in February.

Consumers’ assessment of hiring also gained ground. Survey respondents who say jobs are “plentiful” stood at 28.4%, up from 27.4% the prior month. Respondents who believe jobs are “hard to get” were nearly flat, at 20.7%, from 20.2% in February. Consumers’ jobs outlook also gained ground, although those anticipating a rising income was steady at 18.8% of the survey.

Now I’m not an economics expert or particularly good at math but, when I turn to my calculator and subtract those who thought the economy was “good,” I get 71.7% who must have answered “fair,” “poor” or “bad.” Even if there weren’t that many multiple-choice answers, that leaves 57% who must have said something like “the same” or “I dunno, I’m too busy paying bills to think about it.”

Same with the jobs outlook: I wonder what the other 50.9% had to say about employment prospects. I also ponder exactly what kinds of jobs are “plentiful.”

Now, maybe I’m an idiot and don’t understand how these things are calculated or measured. If so, will someone more knowledgeable please explain how this works?

I don’t know about the rest of you but Hubby and I are barely treading water and he makes a better than average salary.

I haven’t done much in the garden this past week. I reconsidered staggered plantings of peas and put in the whole 12-foot rows on Thursday afternoon. The more I thought about it the more I felt a three-foot row of plants might not give me enough for a single serving and peas store in the freezer really well.  I was also looking toward the future and decided it was better to take them all out together to make way for the pole beans that will follow in their space.

I also put in seed for collards, spinach and Raab broccoli. With all these seeds in the ground I grew nervous about the murder of crows watching me from the pecan tree. I have a rather artful water sprinkler on a four-foot high copper-tube pole. It’s round and has a lovely blue-glass crescent moon in the center of circular copper-tube rings. When a hose is hooked up to it and water pumped thru, it spins around and throws the water out in lovely arcs. So, I fetched it from the workshop in the barn, placed it in the center of the garden and hammered its supports into the ground. I then dug out a roll of iridescent mylar tape, the kind used for party streamers, and taped some lengths of it around the outer copper ring of the sprinkler. The nearly unceasing winds here hit the moon center and spin it around; the streamers flash and flap. The crows took off with a racket of complaint. This contraption is a great deal prettier than a scarecrow and is doing its job.

The weekend blew in frigid winds and even a light dusting of snow. At least once every morning, I bundled up and went out to see how the garden was doing. Since I already have cabbage and broccoli plants in the ground, I wanted to check on them. Both of these vegetables are highly frost-tolerant but if they started to look droopy, I was prepared to cover them with plastic milk jugs. Seriously. I’ve been saving up gallon milk jugs for a couple of months now and when you cut off the bottoms they make perfect cloches.  They allow in light while keeping out cold and, if they get too warm, the caps come off to let in some air.

I am mainly concerned about critters treating my garden like a salad bar. I’ve seen rabbit droppings in the yard and the footprints of raccoons. When we first moved here I noted that none of my neighbors had put up fences around their row gardens and I wondered about that. Perhaps, I thought, there is so much abundant vegetation available that the wild creatures don’t feel the need to venture near human territory.

But, Monday morning there were footprints in my brassica bed. Something four-legged with small paws jumped into the end of the bed, walked among the cabbage and broccoli plants and peed on two of them! Then jumped out and went on its way. The leaves that had been sprayed had turned yellow and there was no sign of nibbling. So I thought it must have been a neighbor’s cat and giggled about how the cat piss would keep the rabbits away for a goodly time.

When DH came home that evening, he logically asked and I had to admit that I have not seen one free-roaming cat since we moved here. So, out he goes to inspect the footprints. Ah, the spacing of the prints, the depth in the soil that indicated the weight of the creature, the size of the paws — he was in high, former Scout Master heaven! After a great deal of this, he declared that it was a cat after all, maybe a small bobcat from the nearby swampland. If the wind hadn’t been blowing so fiercely for days, I think he might have done a CSI and looked for hairs. I was pleased to have gotten the general species right and consider wild bobcat piss might be even more threatening to bunnies than house cat piss.

It’s been raining since the snow blew away but it’s supposed to clear tomorrow and allow me to go out and put in turnip seeds and pop onion sets into the ground. And if the sun shines this weekend, we’ll fill in another bed with horse manure and get our early potatoes slips underground. The seed potatoes have been hanging in the cold pantry and instead of budding eyes, they’ve got six-inch long stems sticking up out of them. So it’s past time for them to have snug dirt beds.  

I think back on the panic attacks I had last summer while I was stuck in a little apartment in Lynchburg, feeling like I was running out of time to prepare for whichever of the many possible disasters that may befall us.  I feel so much calmer now with seeds germinating and starter plants spreading their roots. In hard, dark times food is more valuable than gold. When I have peas and spinach in the freezer, mason jars full with stewed tomatoes, crocks of dried beans and a barrel of salted carrots, I should feel serenely secure.

I hope, too, those of you reading who do not have a garden now, or even a yard to put one in, may be stocking away valuable information for future use whether for pleasure or by necessity. Real life is basic — it requires food, water, and shelter; all else is embellishment. I sincerely hope we aren’t reduced to basic survival but it’s always good to know how to do it if you must.

I want to thank the few of you who voted for me to continue this series but the deciding factor was my son telling me how much he is enjoying it. Maybe one of these days, he’ll register and enter the Pond instead of lurking around the shore.

This week I finally got to put some stuff in the ground! My asparagus “crowns” arrived and, in case you’ve never seen one, they look like creepy alien spiders with too many swollen legs. They also looked quite dead. I’ve planted dried-up rhizomes before so I know I should not be too disturbed by this.  But, there is always the niggling suspicion that the nursery has suckered you and a little anxiety until the first bits of green poke thru the soil.

I had harsh words with Burpee regarding my asparagus order: At the same time I ordered the crowns, I also ordered various seed packets. The seeds came at the end of January but the crowns did not. I also noticed they had charged the full amount on my credit card. I called them up and was told that I would receive my crowns at the “appropriate planting time for my location, which will be mid-March.” I told the customer service rep that my country extension office felt I should be planting them in February and that I was much closer to being in zone 8 than zone 7a so would they please send my crowns now.

She then stated that the “real reason” the crowns could not be sent was their being frozen in the ground. This was during our exceptionally mild January so I asked if the crowns were in Canada because no where on the East Coast (Burpee is in PA) was the ground frozen.

Then, she admitted that the really real reason was they always harvest the crowns in March no matter what the weather was doing or their customers required. So that brought me to the matter of charging the whole amount when I had only received a partial shipment. We always do that, was her first attempt at an answer. So I then informed her doing so was a violation of Federal mail order regulations; I should not be charged until the goods were shipped. Ah but, she explained patiently, the money is reserving my share of the nursery stock and is therefore a service rendered. I should pass this gambit for back orders on to the mail order company where I used to work.  

It was hard not to cancel the order right there and then. In my previous internet research, all the suppliers were either in Canada and couldn’t sell to me or they had minimum orders of 150 crowns. A week later, DH was googling around, looking for something else entirely, when he discovered Rose Gin, a web site so new that its Counter shows fewer than 3000 visitors. They are a store in Henderson, NC selling seeds and plants grown in Garner, NC by a company called Wyatt-Quarles. I always prefer doing business with homies.

 I called them up and a regular human being, not a customer service drone, answered the phone on the second ring. I ordered the asparagus crowns for $10 less than Burpee and a ½ pound of Trucker’s Favorite Corn seed for $1.50! The fellow said, you know this corn seed isn’t treated or a hybrid? Yep, I told him, it’s what my husband’s Daddy used to plant and he wants it. Yes indeed, he agreed, it’s the same corn that’s been grown hereabouts for the last hundred years. I like that.

I received the order the very next day and then had the added pleasure of canceling the Burpee order. Of course, we’ll see how I feel in a couple of months if the Rose Gin crowns don’t sprout.

This week, I also transplanted some red cabbage and broccoli because the 9-paks at the Southern States Farm Cooperative were so cheap we couldn’t resist getting a head start. When I add up spending $2 for a Jiffy 12-pak and $1.79 or more for seed and compare it to buying a 9-pak for $3.50 it doesn’t make sense to start my own seed.  Except for wanting varieties that the cooperative doesn’t sell.

 I also put in the seed for rows of Dwarf Knight and Sugar Snap peas. Right now the rows are only three feet long. Every ten days I will add another three feet until I reach the end of the bed. There are a couple of reasons to stagger plantings: the main reason is harvesting small amounts at a time but it is also insurance against disaster. If a hard freeze or an ice storm settles in and kills the first three or six feet of peas, I won’t have wasted my entire stock of seed and can start again.

Planting seeds and transplants is like working out a geometry problem by drawing in the dirt — literally. Some seeds want to be three inches apart, others need six or twelve inches between them. In the case of peas you need to keep them in fairly straight rows because they’ll need a fence between them when they start to climb.  Back in Georgia, I had a plastic part from a furnace filter that was 24 by 36 inches, molded into a grid of one-inch squares. Somehow it got tossed out instead of being packed with the valuable gardening tools. It was a real time-saver. I would lay it on the ground and count the squares for perfect seed placement. Without it, I had to put down rulers in two directions and lay string to mark the pea rows. I miss it so much I feel like buying a filter just for its grid.

When I plant seeds, I always fill the holes over them with vermiculite and pat them down. Besides giving the seed an excellent medium for germination, it also marks the spot where the seed is. If the seed doesn’t germinate, for whatever reason, I know to put another one there. Also, if some tiny green head comes up outside of a vermiculite circle, I know it’s uninvited. It is so much easier to pluck a weed when it’s a sprout instead of waiting to see what it is and having to yank it out.

Covering the beds with tarps finally dried them out enough to till and dry weather is predicted thru the weekend. So perversely, now that I’ve got seeds and crowns and transplants in the soil I have to turn on a faucet to get water on them.  This weekend we’ll be making another trip for horse manure and building a frame with hardware cloth to shift the topsoil we already have.  That should fill another two beds. Tomorrow I will be putting in seed for collards and spinach.

On the dark of the moon at the end of the month, I’ll put in potatoes, turnips and onions.  The moon phases really do seem to matter in the vegetable kingdom. When the moon is waxing or still within three days of full, it’s a good time to plant leafy, above ground plants. When the moon goes dark, that’s the time to plant roots. If I preferred the tops on my turnips, I’d plant them tomorrow but I think I want those purple-topped globes to add to soups and stews so I’ll wait.

One last riff about garden architecture: The hardest work I did this week was justifying the wooden frames around our beds. No matter that I measured and measured again when hammering in stakes and looping twine. Somehow it all wandered — badly. We put in the long boards first, leaving off the ends until after the tilling. So when it came time to put in the ends – surprise! Some of the beds were too narrow and some of them were too wide. I spent a sweaty afternoon yanking up rebar and repositioning boards. A 2″ by 12″ by 12′ board is not easy to move especially when 48 cubic feet of dirt is pressing against one side of it. In every case, I had to pull back the dirt from the side and trench a new channel for the board to be able to re-position it. All the while trying to maintain 24″ walkways between the beds and a 48″ aisle down the center.

I now feel we would have been better off using screwed-in L-brackets at the corners, putting the frames together, tilting them out of the way when we tilled and then throwing them back into position afterwards. I especially feel this way looking at one of the boards that has warped into a bow shape that turns one of the beds into a parabola instead of a rectangle. And somehow, it all didn’t turn out level. It was probably the weight of the digger that settled one end of the garden and tilted the beds downhill. I’m so AR or OC that it seriously bothers me that everything is not lined up dead-on and level. But, at this point, I’m so happy to be growing stuff that I’m like Scarlet, La-de-da, I’ll think about that tomorrow or next year…

I don’t do this for my ego. I look forward to participation, to comments and questions and they have fallen off dramatically in the last couple of weeks.  Please participate in this poll…

On the first day of my first planting period, February 7th, NOAA predicted snow.  It didn’t snow — there was just another torrential downpour. After a weekend of high winds and partly cloudy skies, the beds had only dried out to a depth of 3-4 inches by Monday afternoon.  So we pulled out moldy tarps and covered them that evening in hopes that someday they might be dry enough to till in the manure and topsoil that now look like twin pyramids at the entrance to the garden. <heavy sigh>

One year, it rained for 40 days in a row and I never did plant beans. There’s an old saying, “Beans planted in mud/ Taste like wood.” You have to use a Scottish accent to make that rhyme which kind of tips off the saying’s origin. I lived there for a while and can attest to the fact that it rains a lot in Scotland.

All my research, Excel files and graphic layouts — not to mention, the back-aching labor — mean nothing when the weather doesn’t cooperate. As it stands now, we have one bed ready and waiting for asparagus. We have five other beds, partly framed, and waiting for additional topsoil and manure to be tilled into them. All that great effort and renting the digger did not get us ready after all. <another heavy sigh>

In the meantime, we have been obsessing over the pecan tree and adding a staggered row of Leyland Cypress as a wind brake. Would the shadow of the tree really impact the garden once the sun is higher in the sky during the summer months? Would the cypress become a shade problem in five years when they are twenty feet high? DH had me running outside at various hours of the day to measure the shadow cast by a twelve-inch stake. By arcane mathematical formulas, he would then be able to determine the answers to these questions. My mission was thwarted by partly cloudy skies that always covered the sun just as I was attempting to perform my task.

So I googled “landscape shadow calculator” to see if there wasn’t some online source that could give answers when the sun would not. I found a very odd Dutch site concerned with determining the shadow patterns cast by wind turbines. It seems the flickering shadows of the blades can have a detrimental effect on neighbors. This made me look up our exact latitude and longitude but the resulting declination, solar azimuth and altitude measurements didn’t fulfill my need for visual information.

Back to google I went and was surprised to find a listing for a software program, LandDesigner 3D. Good Grief! I had it already! I got it about five years ago when we were planning our gardens at the house back in Georgia. It was in a $9.99 bin at CompUSA and had some wonderful features like showing how big a shrub will be in 5, 10 or 20 years. It’s very clunky and difficult to use so after becoming increasingly frustrated with it, I uninstalled it and tossed it into a box of computer games I no longer play. Since we had recently moved, I actually knew where this box was.

It’s still a tedious program and it took the better part of an afternoon to set up a simple layout showing the gardens beds, the pecan tree and the intended cypress hedge. But, once done, using the Shadow Simulator is almost hypnotic. You can watch the shadows move thru the course of a particular day, watch them change over the course of year, grow the plants by years and play it all again.

The good news is the pecan tree only impacts the garden beds for 2 hours during the early spring and late fall. It casts no shade on the beds between the first of May and the last of October. Yay! We don’t have to cut it down and the cypress hedge doesn’t intrude for 30 years.

As I wrote this on Wednesday afternoon, NOAA was predicting partly cloudy days and no showers thru the weekend. Weather.com, however, was predicting a 30% chance of snow on Saturday. This morning they are both predicting a 30% chance of snow in the middle of today.  So, after posting this, I’m on standby to drag those tarps over the beds again. DH hopes to come home after work today and till at least one bed, another on Friday evening and one more on Saturday. Hopefully, I’ll have a partly cloudy day next week to actually put some seeds in the ground.

So, tell me, what weather-related garden disasters, frustrations and/or mishaps have you suffered?