More pics and Scattershooting

11/25/06 - 6th Day - After Lunch. Preparation of the Sabbath. We stayed pretty busy this week, even though Paypal's malfeasance has left us perilously short of funds. We should finish the east wall of the root cellar in concrete today. I also built an ugly, but utilitarian wood grill for heating water (and other things) in the morning for the chickens:



As you can see, it isn't pretty, but it will work. I used field stone I pulled out of our pasture, and some left over mortar mix from the root cellar work. I am trying to be less "catty" in my descriptions, but here is the description I was going to put on the above picture:

"Here you see a very dense and homely creature... his name is Robert and he is standing in my new hot water heating grill."

We have to heat up water during the cold weather to give to the chickens to keep their egg production up. This little grill will allow us to do it for free.

Ok, here is a picture of our pig. I call him "Mr. Pig":



We almost lost Mr. Pig a week ago or so. We think he got poisoned somehow, probably by laying and sleeping in the Johnson Grass hay we put in the pig pen to keep him warm. Johnson Grass is notorious because it turns toxic (cyanide) after a freeze, and remains that way for 7 days or until it is dead. We thought all the Johnson Grass we put in his pen was dead, but somehow he might have gotten poisoned by it. The first day he was breathing but couldn't get up. The next day we got him up, but he was very shaky. After a few days we could get him to leave the pen and root around a bit, and he seems to get better every day, though his legs are still very slow and shaky. So, in keeping with my new desire not to use my satiric wit ALL the time, I did not put this caption under the pig:

"This is our pig. I call him Alexander Litvinenko. Apparently our pig is hated for exposing the evil Putin and his rejuvenated KGB."

Here are some scattershooting thoughts:

My children know nothing of football or baseball. They have no idea as to the rules, or what those people might be doing running around like that. They do, however, read at a very young age, and are very creative in their play, and are well-spoken and intelligent. A friend put a comment on my last blog (with pictures of the children) pointing out that people think we are evil and cruel to raise our children away from the corruptions of the world. Here was my response if you didn't read it:

Hey Bryan, yes it is very interesting. You know, it always used to shock us when people would say... "You have the best behaved children I have ever seen", followed by, "you must be lucky!". Then, later we would hear that they would attack us (always behind our backs) by saying "they must beat them", or "isn't it horrible that they don't get to do Christmas or go to malls". I can tell you that it is a rare time that we go to a restaurant and somebody doesn't interrupt our meal to tell us how shocked they are at watching our family. This isn't an 'every once in awhile' thing, but virtually every time we go out. The last time we went to eat in Santa Anna, a man kept looking over at us, and finally he came over to me and said, "I can see by the way your children act and how they are happy that they have a mommy and daddy who love them and who properly train then, and that you are a true family"... Yet our own families treat us like Koresh and the Manson Family. Strange?

Michael

Today we started marking out a 12 x 20 milking shed. It will use some antique construction techniques and should be very inexpensive to build. I am going to use the rock and mortar for a foundation wall (hopefully I will improve at it!) and then build with timbers cut from the land.

I am very amused and a bit angry about the whole uproar over the Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld) "racism" thing. If you haven't read about this (good on you!), Richards blew up at some black hecklers during a comedy routine and called them "niggers" (I refuse to say, or type, "n-word"). There is no excuse for being stupid and reacting to hecklers by ruining your own act and maybe your career, but if you have watched the video, these idiots repeatedly call the Jew Richards a "cracker" during the whole confrontation. The word Nigger is bad. The word Cracker is good. Is anyone calling for these hecklers to publicly apologize, kiss the ring of David Duke and promise to attend a KKK rally? Besides, Richards is a Jew... is anyone surprised that a Jew might be a racist? Jesse Jackson wants the word "nigger" to be stricken from the language and declared "hate speech" (supposedly for everyone, though I doubt we will see blacks arrested and charged for greeting their niggas). Just another reason that all Christians everywhere should separate themselves from this society and culture. As opposed to some anonymous internet vomiters, I am proposing a solution to the problem and not just repeated and useless bouts of moral outrage. Sell your possessions, get out of debt, buy some rural land in a place where this type of goofiness doesn't even make the news (preferably with like-minded believers), and begin a life of cultural separateness and holiness. Grow your own food, and provide for yourself and your family from the ground like the Bible says for you to do. Don't sit there as a part of this corrupt and wicked industrial system and complain about the little part of it you don't like. If you live and work in this system then you are a part of it. Your votes will not change it. You will not make a difference by being a voice of moral outtrage towards a system you support and nourish every day of your working life. It is ridiculous for one hand to protest that the other hand is feeding the body poison...

"Stop it you hand! I am outraged! outraged! I will alert the feet and toes to your wickedness!"

...but what can you expect from anonymous people who have nothing better to do than to accuse southern, Agrarian, Christian men of making up questions to ask themselves?

So, how are y'all doing?

Michael Bunker