The City Mouse in the Country

Hi. As the writer of the post and feel that I need to clarify something. I do not advocate the planting of invasive species. The point that I'm trying to make, and clearly didn't, is that perhaps we should be thinking about an invasive species in a different light. Apples, figs and other crops are clearly non native to America and Europe but are widely cultivated because they have use to humans as a food source, animal feed, etc. Kudzu is an edible plant and although it is clearly harmful can it be used someway by humans? It's a food source, it's been used as a cloth and is showing some use as a building material. All I'm trying to do is to create discussion on how we can use invasive plants in new ways.   It's mid April here in Western Pennsylvania and so far it's been warm and wet.  The buzz of lawnmowers fill the air as I gallivant through my back yard collecting dandelions to make some tea and bread with them.  I had always known that they w...

These last few days have convinced me that I need to get off my proverbial ass and find a work from home position, or failing that; one that only needs me in the office two or three days out of the week. My 2012 Kia Soul (stock photo) The reason is that recently I "threw a rod" in my car.   This is basically the worst type of engine failure possible.  My starter also died at roughly the same time, which means that they can't even turn over the car to try to determine the extent of the damage or what exactly failed.  A new starter won't be in for a week.   Now this type of engine disaster can be fixed but it's going to take anywhere between two to three weeks at minimum even if I can get the parts in a timely manner. Living out in the "boondocks" requires that my wife and I have two cars.  We work in two different parts of the county and two different schedules, so it is just a requirement. There is no public transportation, no car sharing services...

Without getting into much detail, I was sitting in a doctor's office  recently waiting on my appointment browsing through "Bon Appetit" magazine.  There was a recipe that caught my eye, which at the time of this writing; I have not tried.   I'll be sure to include the recipe for Tomato Roasted Onions with Paprika on the recipe links page of this blog.  What caught my attention was not only were they using onion as the main dish, but the ease and simplicity of it as well.  It also feeds into something that I've been thinking about recently (pun intended).  That is the very real threat of food scarcity in the near future due to climate change. We are only a super storm or a drought away from disaster and a few years ago some food and other items disappeared off the shelves due to COVID.  Costs for other foods skyrocketed and came down slowly over time.   This food scarcity issue was mostly a temporary one, but it did serve as a wake up call f...

Recently I learned that nearly two out of every three Americans have been affected in some way by climate change.  That 62% of Americans think climate change is currently having some sort of effect on their local community and economy. I mention this because climate change is one of the several reasons we moved from Tampa, Florida to Northwestern Pennsylvania a few years ago.   My wife, Susan, likes to tell the story of when it was 90 degrees (32 C) on New Year's day, which is an exaggeration but the point remains.  It was hot and humid on a day that really should not have been. It got so bad that even the natives were saying "It's to hot." Migration is defined as " The movement of a person or people from one country, locality, place of residence, etc., to settle in another ."  Thus Sue and myself became, without even realizing it "Climate migrant's." Now I want to make it perfectly clear that I'm not comparing Susan and myself to any...

  I am not that creative of a person.  Yes, I write and have written some fiction and such but I have more of an analytic mind.  I like to deal with facts, numbers and hard data.  The conclusions that I've reached are driven by columns of pluses and minuses. I'm not going to lie, much of my belief system and philosophical views are based on rational and scientific thinking.   Most, if not all of the the work that I've done all my life was driven by data and information.  When you understand what the data tells you, it affects your world view in a lot of different ways. For example, data from the FBI and other sources state that the most violent city in America is not Chicago or New York; but the tiny city of Bessemer, Alabama.  For a city of only 26,000 people, the chance of you being a victim of a violent crime is 1 in 30.    In a place like New York city, the chances of you being a victim of a violent crime is only 1 in 192. ...

Even though we are nearly two weeks away from the New Year, I've decided to try and write what has traditionally been the last post of the year now.  For me it's always been a brief review of what I've covered, accomplished and achieved in the past year.   Like the above meme says....I made it through. Maybe it's due to seasonal depression, maybe it's due to my writing this blog for slightly over three years and my audience is still in the hundreds, not the thousands like previous blogs have been but I think this blog may be coming to an end. Although the low readership that I have could be due to the blogging platform I use, which is neither supported by nor promoted by Google anymore.  However I love the ease and simplicity of this particular platform and see no reason to change it at this time. This lack of comments and low readership are making me wonder if it's worth it.  Plus, if I'm being honest with myself, this blog has lacked focus as I seem to be ...

 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...

 Recently there was a study about carbon sequestration in farm land.  The idea - say it with me now, is a simple one.   We remove carbon dioxide out of the air and store it in plants.  That's what plants do right?  It's called the Carbon cycle . Well...yes.  It actually does work.  All we really need to do is stop plowing.  We grow low growing plants - like milkweed; which by the way butterfly's love so bonus points - which have been showing to store carbon right after the harvest, we then increase the amount of permanent grassland.  We start to practice agroforestry and lot more and restore the wetlands!   CRISIS PREVENTED!!!   Wow!  That was simple.  Good job everyone; see you next Tuesday at the Vegan BBQ and bowling night. On a small scale it really is a simple solution and I'm doing a bit of that myself.  I've let part of my yard go wild and it will, one day, be absorbed back into the forest from w...

Hope is the poor man's bread. Somehow I started watching a video about "Poor Man's bread" that was bread made from various flours in the 1700's and early 1800's.  This popularity of this type of bread has waxed and waned in popularity at times when wheat production faltered for whatever reason. The history of bread is an interesting one and their have been lots of substitutes for wheat bread throughout times of drought or diseases; or when other issues like poor soil and wheat diseases affected production.  Wheat has always been the preferred crop when it came to bread. While wheat farming practices and yields have certainly increased since the late 1700's this most important of crops face new problems in a ever heating world. I started to wonder....could some of these substitutes make sense in today's world?  Or better yet, what about the world of tomorrow?  What would replace wheat bread if the crops failed today? Quick searches for things lik...