Monday, April 18, 2016

Life's observations

When I was young, I had a lot of great ideas that I had enough sense to run by my dad before putting into action. It would irritate me to no end when he would sometimes say, "you can try it , but it's not going to work". What irritated me so much was that he was almost always right. When I got older and less prideful, I asked him how he knew so many bright ideas of mine were destined to fail. He replied that if you live long enough, history repeats itself. Pop further informed me that if you were too dumb to learn the lessons from history, you were really just wasting oxygen by breathing his air. Patience never was his long suit.

I say all of that because I have been telling all of our folks that we were going to experience a cold April in South Georgia which we certainly have. Why did I think that? Because I've observed over the years that an unusually warm fall is almost always followed by an unusually cool spring. Weather tends to average out both in terms of temperatures and rainfall. I also believe that it will get drier than a powdered popcorn poot here before the summer ends because we had monsoonal rains in the fall and winter. El Nino will shift to La Nina which brings drought to great regions of the US.

The cool spring has been great for us for controlled burning, and continuing to work our young English Cockers. We had a great burn, and the cool, damp weather already has our cover returning. Meanwhile, we have been able to devote many more hours and people per day to dog training because it is not getting too hot to work our puppies all day. However, this weather has been very detrimental to our sweet corn plantings and crop. The soil has been too wet on many days to plant, and the corn that is up looks anemic. We all know that sweet corn does not really begin growing good or picking up the nutrients in the soil until our night time temps are in the 60's. It was 46 degrees here this morning.

I want to close this blog by completely switching subjects to politics. I guess that I need to thank Donald Trump for educating me on the confusing process of delegates and the electoral college. I know that I took Civics in high school and political science in college, but I think that the rules have changed a lot since the dark ages. Somehow, I no longer feel like my vote counts, and as in everything else involving politics, delegates can be bought with money although it has to be done subtly. The most interesting take away from all of this to me is wouldn't you think that the man who wrote the book, " The Art of The Deal", would have understood the ground rules going in?

I sure didn't understand them until lately, but then again, I wasn't running for the job. I'm still waiting to be appointed Dictator of the USA. Just let me have that title for one four year term, and I promise we can right the good ship of state.

Friday, April 1, 2016

Is it just me?

I grew up in an age where there was only one national news segment, and it came on at 6:30 pm. Since we only got two networks at the time, we either watched Walter Cronkite or Huntley & Brinkley. We got all of the news we needed to get in 30 minutes, and trusted the guys who read it to us.

Now we have so many 24 hour news channels inundating us with bad news that it's no wonder we have become a paranoid society. I wonder if the drug companies who sell anti-depressant and ant-anxiety drugs might be behind the proliferation of these networks. Have you ever truly listened to any of these news networks for more than an hour? They run out of things to say, and then start with their theories and thoughts. Liberals have their favorite networks as do conservatives. As for me, I'm sick of all of them.

It's gotten so bad that some of my neighbors are even worried about an ISIS attack in Southwest Georgia. Now I realize that most of the ISIS folks aren't rocket scientists, but even they should realize that we would be a very low profile victory for them if( and that's a big IF) they got out of here alive. Our population density is quite low. If they hit the Hopeful store at lunch time, they might take out 15 farmers, all of whom would be armed.

Even my wife has a concealed carry permit, and is packing a pistol these days. Martha has come a long way from when I took her out of the city to live in the country. The first year we were married, a big rattlesnake crawled up in our yard. There were no cell phones back in those days, and I was on a tractor. After emptying both of my pistols at the snake, she frantically called my dad on our land line. He drove over to our house and inspected the empty shells and the crawl track and said, " Don't worry, honey, that old snake crawled off in the weeds and died laughing". That snake would not be so lucky today because Martha can place at least five out of six shots in a pie plate at 25 yards. That also gives me more incentive to be nice to her.

I guess that the main point of this blog is to wonder if ignorance is bliss ? We certainly do not need to bury our heads in the sand, but we also do not need to look for buggers that are not there. However, should said bugger ever show up down here, he will be leaking fluids from a lot of places.