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August 16, 2008 Newsletter
My Sane Asylum. Plus: What's Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander: more on the "Beginning of World War III"
The smallest "political subdivision" considered to be a "nation" is 44 hectares (108 acres) large: Vatican City. Well, our piece of land is about a fourth as large. And, while it may not be a "country", it is smaller than a nation but bigger than an insane asylum. It is my "sane asylum". Let me give you a tour of the "country".
To get to the place one must travel on rocky dirt roads that are rarely maintained because every time they run the maintainer on it larger rocks and even boulders are churned up and often left lying in the middle of the road. In 1992 when we delivered our second child at home, we got the baby but not the afterbirth, so we had to get to the hospital. We barely made it out of our road without breaking an axel! Boulders were strewn everywhere, and, the following day having returned to the hospital with a one day old baby girl, I took it upon myself to remove the boulders (that I could, some were too large to pick up) from the middle of the road. We were told later the boulders were left there on purpose...the guy maintaining the road thought we were "trouble makers" because we were vocally opposed to some of the hypocritical ways of the Property Owners Association (they'd fix the roads of Board members and leave other roads with huge ditches running across them). Well, we are no longer considered "trouble makers"...thus the road is passable and we want to keep it that way! So we've told them to not work on our road!
Our driveway begins right before the "hairpin" turn in the road. the driveway leads to what is called a "box canyon" with mountain side riven by a creek that splits it in two. Because our driveway is somewhat steep uphill, it is problematic when it rains and is a somewhat back-breaking job (hauling dirt and pebbles in buckets) to keep up. Thus, in order to navigate our driveway one needs four-wheel-drive. Once you get your vehicle up the driveway there is a flat pad in front of the house and a "turn around" pad to get your vehicle facing downhill.
Right in front of the house are patches of tall and thick grass recently "weed-whacked", a stump for wood chopping, a wagon for hauling, a cement mixer covered with a tarp, and old ATV covered with a tarp that also hold various garden implements, and other items, as well as a propane powered electric generator also covered with a tarp that has served over the years as a "whelping box" for kitten litters. Our latest kitten (a single...the mother is a runt) was born there around July 1. The kitten was named "Neko" (Japanese for "cat").
The house, a plywood cabin about 1,000 square feet including the loft, may look like a typical plywood structure but is sturdier than most modern day houses because it is supported at all points by wood. Modern houses tend to be supported by wood only at the corners, with the rest of the house supported by particle board. One neighbor (since died) commented once that my husband was making our house "too strong." Yes, you heard me right--my husband built our house, nearly single-handedly (I, as well as his mother, helped raise the wall beams, and I also helped with one of our double-paned and very heavy windows, which we put in right after we had our first child). When you build your own house, you don't tend to do it fancy! The house is a 28- by 28- feet square structure with porch and loft on the celestory window side. The walls are wood and so is the flooring, which is why the majority of the floor is covered by large and small rugs. Our doors face each other (no, it's not a "shotgun" styled house) so that we easily catch breezes in the summer. No air conditioning...further, it's generally too dry for air conditioning. We do use fans, however. In the winter we heat the house with wood in a wood stove made out of a 55-gallon drum with a door from the Sotz Company, and stove pipe with flu leading to a chimney out the celestory side. The furniture, much of it recycled, is described here. Our water tank, 1,000 gallons, which gravity feeds to the house, is directly uphill from the kitchen-side back door. The pump is down below.
Out the back is the rest of our house pad, filled with storage items in plastic storage bins...I admit that because of the sun this has not been the best way to store stuff as plastic rots in the sun, but most of the important stuff is either under the house or stored in strong bags inside the bins. There are the remainder of the jars not used in the garden, an old series of small garden plots no longer used, a shower set up, and more junk. Then you walk down a narrow path to the creek area that leads to the rest of the property. You can either try walking along the creek or head uphill. Either way, you must watch where you are going! There are cacti everywhere, fallen-down tree limbs across almost any path you take, rocks hidden under tall grass, all-thorn bushes (a bummer to have to walk by but the flowers are soooo fragrant!), cat-claw and mesquite bushes, which a thorny but also fragrant. Still, it isn't hard to get up (it is much harder getting down from the mountain side). If you go up the creek, you will find yourself having to do quite a bit of climbing. Some of the rocks at or in the creek are six feet tall and six feet wide or more. And again, lots of fallen tree limbs, and live tree limbs you have to walk around or under as well. but once you get to the top of the property it is mostly flat with large rock masses overlooking the entire valley with a wonderful view of the whole subdivision.
One might wonder why we didn't build up at the top. that's because when we started building there was no road up there; now there is. However, the road leading up to the top of our property is in very bad disrepair and the POA claims they don't own the road...it is private. The road was put in by a private owner with POA permission. Though the road does cut into our property, we were at first thankful the road was put in. There is a huge amount of fire wood up there. But now, since the road is not maintained (except by the owner, who complains the POA won't maintain it), it is basically useless. It has been washed out for years, so bad that even an ATV would have difficulty navigating it. It is also very difficult to walk down and is not for the weak of foot or for those who lack endurance. Thank God we didn't build up there...we'd be maintaining our "driveway" every day!
What makes this place a "sane asylum" is the clean water pumped out of the ground (and hopefully, T. Boone Pickens's little eminent domain water rip-off project in the Texas panhandle won't drain our water supply. Our water comes off fissures leading from the Carlsbad Caverns area, which is only loosely tied to the Ogallala Aquifer Pickens is trying to control. How did he do it? He bribed the Texas legislature! And to think--I used to think Pickens was a "good" oligarch!). And clean air--except when there are wild fires, which we've had a couple of this year, but not in the subdivision. And lots and lots of trees. We are on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert and live in the most heavily tree-populated subdivisions in the area. And nature everywhere: deer, burros, wild hogs and javelinas--those notorious garden spoilers--rabbits, racoons, skunks, ringtails, foxes, small rodents, snakes (watch when you hike!), lizards, the ocassional mountain lion and the rare bear, and all sorts of birds, from hummingbirds to eagles, hawks, crows and of course turkey vultures necessary to take care of the road kill. Lots of insects, of course, as well as other invertebrates like scorpions, centipedes, spiders good and bad...last September I was bitten by a brown recluse spider, but if you take care of it early you don't have to worry about it rotting your skin tissues. When it rains it turns green in the summer, but there is color as well, from cactus flowers in April through September, morning glories, "four o'clocks," evening primroses that bring forth beautiful yellow flowers for one of two nights, then die, agave and "century" plants and other smaller succulents, and the amazing tiny purple orchid that only comes out when it rains in June (which is not every year, believe me!)...it comes out only under trees and other covered areas and is extremely hard to find. And as for humanity out here, after a couple of very controverisal lawsuits (one of which our side lost) and the Republic of Texas Standoff a mile from the house, everyone is pretty much at peace with the ocassional spat between neighbors. Prior to last summer our nearest nieghbor was half a mile away; now we have a neighbor up and across the road who is not only building his own house but dug his own driveway as well. He works in town and is still not a full time resident. If we had to have a neighbor he is ideal: he's a Ron Paul libertarian, so he won't be bugging us very often! Now, if the rest of the planet would follow suit!
What's Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander
If I had to list the top ten cliche's that have influenced my life, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander" would have to rank near the top. This is the expression my 9th grade Algebra teacher, whose name is synonymous with infamy and thus I won't mention it (and she might be reading this!), would always spew out when trying to explain how to balance an algebraic equation to solve for "x". Now, she didn't say something logical like, "what you do to one side of an equation you do to the other side." Such as in the equation, 2x - 8 = -12. Since you are subtracting 8 on the left, you have to add 8 on both the left and right, so that you now have 2x = -4. Then you divide both sides by 2 and get x = -2. But NO! This sorry excuse for a teacher would say instead, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander!" Basically, I taught myself algebra years later from an old Algebra Review Book. When I took College Algebra I aced it. Several years after that, when I decided to become a teacher, I chose Secondary Mathematics, because I knew that if I had gone through my entire high school course totally misunderstanding math, surely I wasn't the only one and was determined to teach it correctly. Naturally, your students will only "get it" if they do the work...
Sorry for the digression, but the point of using this subtitle is to comment on the utter ridiculousness of what is happening in Goergia right now (the country, not the state). I just got finished reading the umpteenth blog post claiming that the Russia-Goergia war is the "beginning of world War III". Pundits and others who issue such threats are doing nothing but "talking" to themselves, loving the sound of their own voices...er, loving the site of their own words. Edgar J. Steele is just one of them, and one whose writing style I like, with his closing comment: "New America: A Nation Whose Time Has Come." I believe--until I see otherwise, that is--that these commentators are stating the issue way out of proportion. Fearmongering. When the Bush Administration fearmongers, I denounce it, and when left-and right-wing bloggers and talking heads fearmonger, I also denounce it. But here is the rub: it is possible that WW3 might happen where otherwise it wouldn't because the mainstream media is especially drumming up the hatred within the American public as a whole, not against Iran this time, but Russia. Just the other day I was over a friend's house and she said, "What in the world is Russia doing attacking a small country?" She's smart, having just finished a year homeschooling her two oldest kids. But her problem is that she listens to the mainstream media and does not realize that it is lying to her. Now, many foreigners think all Americans are idiots (hence the popularity of the Green Day hit song, "American Idiot," which, BTW, puts the onus squarely on the mainstream media where it belongs)..."How could you elect Bush?" they ask (we didn't, he stole the election--twice). "How can you support that stupid Iraq War"? they ask (close to 70% of us don't). "What gives you the right to think you can control the world?" (I think the number of Americans who actually feel that way is close to 0) "How can you be so stupid?" (as I said in a previous post, nearly 50% think our system is broken and cannot be fixed--which would make us SMARTER than most of rest of the folks on this planet! You think Canadians are this smart? Hell no!) "Go to hell, Americans!" (and we will, thanks to the 30% who still believes in Bush and everything he stands for, and the oligarchs who rule us as well, another .10%). And I've read over the Internet all sorts of reasons the US cajoled Georgia into starting this war, from Christopher Story's line that the Georgia war is an obfuscation in order to not have to pay Putin what Bush-Clinton-Wantagate owes him and is all about money laundering through Georgia, to the line that instead of pissing off the Iranians (which Israel can take care of, no?), we are pissing off the Russians instead in Bush's "Great Game," a variation of the old Brit "Great Game" of the 19th and 20th centuries in central Asia, and fits into Obama-advisor's Zbigniew Brzezkinski's old "screw Russia" game. (See also here and here.) But until a more reliable media than the lying one we are saddled with here in the US says otherwise, while all Bush and Saakashvili have won is the propaganda war in the West, Russia has won the war in reality, which is where it counts. Finally, if you haven't read this piece from Pravda in English, click here for a resounding exposure of Bushian hypocrisy.
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