The City Mouse in the Country

This blog was started because I had lived most of my life as an urban dweller; I wanted to record my adventures as I tried my hands at different things and I never pictured this blog would become what it did. Country life suits me in some ways.   I'm at a point in my life where I can appreciate looking up into the night sky and seeing thousands of stars, just like I did as a kid.   I just love how the moonlight bathes my beautiful sleeping wife in a creme colored light.   Country life is more peaceful and a lot more hard work than I would have ever expected.  While my neighbors and I may not agree politically or philosophically, my new lifestyle has given me insights on how they view the world. This brings me to my main point.   Here in rural America we simply don't have public transportation, nor do we have a lot of manufacturing or diversity or hospitals or even great education...and if we are going to move forward with a brighter greener f...

 First off, I don't write fiction.   However it occurred to me that what I've been writing about lately is difficult to get our heads around.  Climate change is really happening in today's world, and at the risk of hyperbole, it really is end of the world type stuff. I needed to find a way to break it down to the indivdual level.   That thinking, and some natural curiosity about the New Madrid fault lin e got me thinking about how easily things could go bad for a society if a series of natural disasters hit in rapid succession.    Thanks to this writing prompt, something started to form in my head.   Please keep in mind that this is the first draft and it deals more with the themes I'm hoping to explore.   It does not have a current title. So without wasting time...here we go. The world, at least as most people understood it, ended on a rather ordinary Tuesday afternoon.    I remember it was a perfectly ordinary da...

It hasn't been reported much by the national news here in the States; that COP 28, or the 28th meeting of the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Climate Change Conference is currently being held in Dubai, a major oil producing country (more on that in a bit).  It is open to  " Business leaders, young people, climate scientists, Indigenous Peoples, journalists, and various other experts and stakeholders" in the future of our planet.   It's meeting in a variety of ways current ongoing from November 30 through the 12 of December this year.  So as I'm writing this it's still ongoing and already simplifying complex and complimented decisions, creating empty promises, possibly committing or planning to commit fraud and full of controversy. It's been a failure on the environmental front for a variety of reasons. The idea of COP28 is a simple one according to the UN ; it is to allow the major players and countries in the world to...

Years ago when I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina I was teaching 7th and 8th grade science.  One lesson in particular I remember very well.   It was on the uses of technology and I hoped to impress upon those kids one thought and one thought only.    Technology is neutral; it's what you do with it that matters. At that time there were no computers in the classroom and cell phones were still big bulky devices.  However these kids would be one of the first generations to deal with the technology we now take for granted.  So it was important that they at least an inkling of the promise of technology,  and how to deal with those consequences of technology. I still have my concerns about how we as a society approach technology and what, if anything, we have learned about it. We can learn from the past of course, but that's always jaded.   If only we had a real world example in the here and now that could serve as a guide on how t...