More farming catch-up

Getting there, I guess. Went to The Farm Saturday, and I was pleased with what I saw. The corn is coming in nicely:

The leaf lettuce has bolted due to the heat:

So I pulled it all out and will put something else in this bed:

Harvested a bunch of kale:

And Swiss chard:

And green beans:

And some okra:

Not sure what to do with the okra right now -- freeze or can? -- because it is too hot for gumbo at the moment. We'll see.

Farming catch-up

Went farming a couple weeks ago and am just now getting the pictures up. Yeah, call me a slacker.

Anyway, Farmer Tom finally relented, and we put some corn in the bed where we harvested potatoes a few weeks ago. That corn is up:

The tomatoes are doing great. We just have to keep the deer away. Bambi must die:

We have four staggered bean crops in, planted a week or two apart. The first bean crop is doing well:

More been crops follow:

Against all odds, the kale and Swiss chard are enduring the summer heat and still producing:

And the okra looks good:

Lots of pods forming:

Busting it, as you can see:

The peppers are starting to produce:

We put in pole beans a bit ago, and they are getting ready to climb:

Squash seems to be getting ready:

Farmer Tom put in a number of sunflower plants, which have survived deer attacks and are approaching seed-readiness:

Did I mention the tomatoes are doing OK? Good, because they are:

Harvested some squash and zukes. Bread coming:

Also harvested some onions. Got red, white and yellow in there:

All in all, The Farm is doing well so far this summer. We'll see how things go from here.

No shit, this time I mean it

I decided last summer that I would try to up the number of rivers I have crossed without benefit of boats or bridges. Yeah, that didn't happen, as last summer devolved into a Darwinian nightmare for me. As it is, my count still stands at four. But it's going up, dammit. Soon.

Oh my God! Food Porn!

I haven't done food porn in a while, but, dammit, it's about time. So let's get started.

You will need a 3 to 4 pound whole fryer, 2 tablespoons of butter, melted, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon of pepper, 3/4 cup of honey, 2 tablespoons of tarragon, 1 cup of sliced shallots (I used green onions because I had no shallots), 1 cup of champagne or chicken broth (yeah, used the broth), plus another 1/2 cup of chicken broth, 1-1/2 cups of frozen or fresh peas -- I had fresh peas from the garden, so suck it, bitches! -- and a lemon.

Preheat your oven to 375. Just do it. Then put your chicken in a shallow roasting pan, brush it with the melted butter, salt and pepper, then slap that sucker in there for about an hour and 15 minutes.

Did I mention the salt and pepper? I thought so:

Take the chicken out, baste with half of the honey and sprinkle half of the tarragon on the chicken:

Back in the oven for 5 minutes or so. Should look something like this:

Slap the other half of the honey and tarragon on the chicken and give it another 5 minutes or so:

Take the chicken out of the pan, put it on a cutting board and cover it with foil. Add the chicken broth to the roasting pan:

Add the peas:

Toss in the shallots (or, in my case, green onions):

Simmer until the mixture thickens, 10-15 minutes at medium heat:

Serve with rice and garlic bread, or whatever:

Bon appetit, bitches.

This sounds about right

For some unknown reason, people seem to think that the Democrats don't have a message except that they don't like President Trump:


Where on Earth could people have gotten that idea?

Oh, please, God. Pleeeeeeeease

Hillary Clinton apparently is looking to play a part in the 2018 midterm elections for seats in the House of Representatives. My response to that is uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhh God, was it good for you, too, and to light a cigarette. One of the worst campaigners in the world wants to campaign for Democrat House candidates? Dear Lord, please make it so:

Hillary Clinton wants to play a role in next year’s midterm elections. It’s just not clear yet what that role will be.
Clinton has already launched a PAC aimed at helping congressional Democratic candidates in 2018, signaling the former first lady, senator and secretary of State is ready to help her party with fundraising.
She also is looking at the House districts she won in last year’s presidential contest against Donald Trump as part of an autopsy of her failed campaign, according to two sources who have spoken to the former secretary of State. t’s at least possible she’ll lend a hand on the campaign trail — particularly in the 23 districts held by Republicans where voters preferred her over Donald Trump for the White House.

You know what else happened in the 23 districts held by Republicans where voters preferred Clinton over Donald Trump? Yeah, you got it, the Republican House candidates won anyway. Why would that be? Because even fucking Democrats like their Republican House members more than they like Hillary, who is thoroughly unlikeable. She is a terrible campaigner, a blatant liar, and a felon given a pass by the former director of the FBI. She lost for a reason -- a number of reasons, really -- and none of those reasons make her an attractive campaigner for Democrat candidates.

In fact, the only reason any Democrat candidate would want to see her in his or her district would be to raise money, as she is good at that (as are most corrupt politicians). But she doesn't raise votes, at least not from people who otherwise would not vote Democrat. She provides no boost.

The Democrats' problem is they have no bench. There are no young, up-and-coming Democrats who make promising national candidates for the future. The Clintons are part of the reason for that; Barack Obama is an even bigger part of the reason for that. Which makes this kind of statement by Democrats sound really absurd:

Garry Mauro, a longtime friend of the Clintons who led Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign effort in Texas, thinks the House can be won with the help of the Longhorn state, where there are three “split” districts.
But he doesn’t want Clinton to be front and center.
“Would she be well received? Of course, she would be. But we’re not going to win these races because Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi comes to the state and campaigns,” Mauro said. “We’re going to win it because we represent new leadership and new ideas.

New leadership? Last I checked, they don't have any. And they haven't had any new ideas since Woodrow Wilson. Give me a break.

OK, that's kind of weird

As I was doing blog things tonight, I happened to notice that 8 out of the top 10 blog posts for today are from 2011 -- the first year of the blog. Most, in fact were from the first couple months of the blog. Strange traffic pattern. And the spelling of "weird" creeps me out, too.

Everytime the mainstream media denies being biased, read this

They're lying. No other way to put it. Read the whole thing.

I have a theory about bumper stickers

The more you have, the more likely you are to be either a batshit liberal or vehemently anti-abortion. I think we can agree which category this person fits into:

I am particularly fond of the juxtaposition of the "Peace" bumper sticker, consisting of various religious symbols (and yes, I include the peace sign and the ecology sign as religious icons), right below the sticker that says "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one."

First of all, the concept of supporting execution seems to be at odds with the concept of "Peace," especially when the concept of peace is framed in religious terms, as it is in this person's bumper sticker (even if 40 percent of the religious symbols used are secular religious symbols). More importantly, at least as it relates to the personhood of a corporation, the peace sign and the ecology sign are products of the last 50 years or so. The legal concept that a corporation is a "person" as a legal matter is as old as the concept of corporations, probably more than 500 years.

For those of you who didn't go to law school -- or those of you like Hillary Clinton who went to law schools that do not teach basic legal principles (I'm looking at you, Yale and Harvard) -- it has been accepted legally that corporations are people ever since we have had corporations because otherwise you could not sue corporations for their wrongdoings. The law applies to people. You can't sue a dog for biting you; it isn't a person. But you can sue its owner. Are we getting the picture?

Pro-life people are vehement about their beliefs for obvious reasons: people who support abortion are totes OK with killing babies. Naturally, some of them put a lot of bumper stickers on their cars to tout that position. It is, after all, a life-or-death argument. And noted liberals such as Camille Paglia support abortion rights while freely admitting that is the killing of an unborn child. Few liberals are so honest.

But once you toss out the pro-life people, you can pretty much bank on a car covered with bumper stickers belonging to a liberal. And you can also bank on those bumper stickers -- at least those that go beyond mere support for a particular candidate -- having absolutely no intellectual coherence.

The Party of Science continues to beclown itself on gender

Can we at least consider the possibility that the left -- or at least the part of the left that drives the Democrat Party -- is absolutely batshit crazy? How else can you describe the people who think that anthropogenic global warming is etched in stone -- it's a theory, people, with damn little evidence to support it -- but that gender is open to debate?:

But my discomfort with the gender-reveal party goes beyond my standard objection to fanfare surrounding gestational markers—which is primarily that, because we don't celebrate non-pregnancy-related milestones with the same enthusiasm, we're reinforcing the archaic notion that a woman's value rests squarely in her ability to grow tiny humans. The issue with gender-reveal parties in particular is: Aren't they potentially damaging to said tiny humans?

For starters, gender-reveal parties don't actually reveal gender—they reveal anatomy. Gender is a wholly different thing, inextricably tied to the social constructs around it. (Fun fact: Blue used to be the color most associated with little girls, due to its association with the Virgin Mary. But Hitler—yes, Hitler—feminized the color pink by forcing gays to wear triangles in that shade during World War II.) A gender reveal conflates the two.

Think about that for just a second. Celebrating the gender of your child makes you like Hitler. Plus, biology no longer matters. This dumb-ass piece of shit can't even accept that gender is binary. Look down, see vagina, female. See penis, male. Gender does not determine the gender to whom that person is attracted, but it certainly determines the gender of that person. Very few people are born with gender confusion as a biological matter. And by "very few," I mean a vanishingly small percentage -- about .0006 percent of the population.

As for the whack job who thinks you're Hitler for associating pink with your baby girl, well, fuck her, because she's wrong. Jezebel.com, hardly a conservative bastion, quotes Smithsonian.com indicating that the pink/girl blue/boy association long predates Hitler:

Ladies' Home Journal article in June 1918 said, "The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl." Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

Jeez Louise, can you be much more stupid? No, you can't. And calling you Hitler for buying pink blankets for your baby girl isn't even the stupidest thing this stupid bitch does. She tries to separate gender from anatomy. I'm sorry, but XX on the chromosomes means female. XY means male. That's it, those are the choices. People might be confused for a lot of reasons, but usually when we encounter a person who decides that Position X is true despite the clear evidence that Position Y is actually, true, we call those people delusional.

For example, if I declare myself to be the grandson of Warren Buffett and therefore his heir, it doesn't matter how stalwartly I stand by this "identification," all evidence shows that I am full of shit. Warren Buffett will not be altering his will to include me, because I am delusional.

This gender identity horseshit is the same thing. Gay is different. People are attracted to whomever they are attracted to, regardless of gender, even if that person is of the same gender. Not for me, but have at it.  But when you claim to be a gender you are not, I'm sorry, you have serious mental issues. Unless you are in the .0006 percent of people who might actually be gender-fucked up, you are just mentally fucked up. Gender is not social, no matter what some batshit crazy Cosmo columnists might want to suggest. I don't much care if some Cosmo columnist is "uncomfortable" about a gender-reveal party. That sack of shit doesn't understand science.

Funny, I thought there would be an earth-shattering kaboom

On Wednesday we jumped through 57 hoops to move everybody on the project to the basement, and move the folks in the basement to the floor we were on. The purpose was to make sure we had enough room for the new people being added today to our project. Talk about underwhelming.

I'm not sure how many people got added, but it looked like no more than about 30. I expected twice that. The agency -- and, by extension, the law firm -- is wailing and moaning about an upcoming deadline we can't meet without greater clicking speed and, apparently, more clickers. Based on the numbers they mentioned, 30 people ain't going to cut it. On the other hand, what the fuck do I know? But I was unimpressed by their effort to address the problem.

Existential crisis

As regular readers have noticed, I have not been posting as much in recent months. Nowhere near as much, in fact. Not everyone considers this a bad thing, but the purpose of a blog is to post, and I have not been doing so. It has not been for lack of time, either. I had considerable down time over a span of about two months where I was mostly unemployed. One might think a guy with nothing else to do could post more.

Which brings us to the problem. This blog was started to comment on the foibles of Temp Town, and perhaps to shed a little light for outsiders on what it is like to exist in Temp Town. Unfortunately, nothing can compare to the shit show that was the project that gave birth to this blog, and so, gradually over time, the posts about Temp Town have become less frequent and, frankly, less interesting. It is increasingly difficult to find new things to say about Temp Town -- short version, it sucks and lots of crazy people are here -- and it is even hard to say old things about Temp Town without sounding like a cranky old man. Which I seem to be.

On the flip side, without Temp Town, why is this blog here? Sure, I do food porn, and game food porn during football season, and I do politics (much to the chagrin, no doubt, of the mostly liberal members of Temp Town who read this blog -- all five of them), but lots of blogs do those things, and almost all of them do them better. I sometimes do military stuff. Again, so do lots of blogs, and most of them better.

So why am I here? Should I continue. Most of my visits are probably porn-seeking spambots who come by because I say "fuck" a lot. No, really, I say "fuck" a lot on this blog. If you doubt me, search for "fuck" on this blog. I say "fuck" a lot. But fuck that. Who fucking cares?

Anyway, I'm thinking of quitting. Would anyone care? Would I?

This doesn't mean I'm quitting, or even that I'll quit in the absence of a massive show of support. I don't expect that to happen. It just means I'm not sure what I'm doing or where this blog is going.

Strange doings on my latest gig

Today, out of the blue, we got moved from one floor of this agency's review space to another floor -- this one in the basement. Basements, of course, are never good, but often it is hard to tell a basement review space from the windowless above-ground review spaces we often get, so that part didn't bother me much.

However, I had a great seat in our old space -- end of the row, so only one person next to me, away from the prying eyes of associates and staff attorneys, and just generally quiet. Worked for me. You hate to give up a seat like that.

Thankfully, I got an equally good seat down in the basement, despite the chaotic nature of the move. So I'm happy with the seat part. And let's face it, as a temp, all you have is your seat.

This, alas, brings us to why they moved us. The basement space is larger, and tomorrow a horde of new temps are joining the project. I don't know how big of a horde, but my guess is about 50. They've been bitching to us for more than a week about an interim production deadline and how we are going too slow to meet it. They already expanded the hours for this week -- a lot. Now, they are adding people. We keep getting assurances that we are "nowhere near" the end of this project, but I am a firm believer in Rule No. 1: They're lying.

I figure we have two weeks to go, three max. Obviously, most temps consider that to be pretty close, not "nowhere near." Agencies and temps have a very different view of what constitutes "nowhere near." For agencies, it means "not tomorrow." For temps it means "many weeks, maybe months away." Unfortunately, temps don't get to define the terms. Yeah, I'm already looking for a gig starting in the next week or two.

Seriously? And you want to pretend to be objective?

The Washington Post continues to show, as if it weren't through its news coverage, that it is not even kinda-sorta-can-we-pretend objective. As a "news" offering, the Post now gives us this:


Really?

Squatter or hired help?

So, we have a groundhog who lives under our neighbor's shed and spends most of his time in our back yard. On the one hand, he eats a lot of the clover that grows in our back yard. On the other hand, between the groundhog and the bunny that lives in our back yard, I am not allowed to mow, so I hope they both eat the living fuck out of the grass back there.

Ad it turns out, the groundhog might be willing to help me out. He certainly seems interested in the lawn mower:

I mean, really interested:

Sure, he wants to look around for threats, but that's only natural for a groundhog:

But once he feels safe, he's interested in the mower:

Really interested:

It's almost like he's riding a motorcycle or something. If he's ready to help mow the grass, I'm ready to let him.

If this is a model employee from Syria, I am totes in favor of letting fucking none of them in

It would appear that a German hairdressing shop recently hired a Syrian "refugee" as a hairdresser. Stylist. Whatever. Everybody thought that was grand. What a fine example of how these "refugees" could blend into German society.

Or not, as it turns out:

On Wednesday, Herzberg (Elbe-Elster) suffered a horror. A hairdresser was attacked and severely injured by her Syrian employee.
It was regarded as a model for a successful integration. The Syrian Mohammad H. (39), a hairdresser's master from his homeland, had found a new life and work in Herzberg. He was valued and popular in the hair salon of Ilona F. (64). All the more puzzling, what happened yesterday on Wednesday.
As the prosecutor's office in Cottbus confirms, Mohammad H. went off at about 6.30 pm with a knife on his boss and injured this in the neck area. Another Syrian (22) intervened and "prevented so much worse," as Gernot Bantleon, chief of state, reported. What was the trigger for the attack is still unclear from the perspective of the prosecutor's office. The investigations are running.

I got to tell you, if this is a model integration of Middle East refugees, I have no problem with never letting a single one into this country.

Prime Day at Amazon is coming

July 11 is Prime Day, apparently because 7 and 11 both are prime numbers, meaning they are divisible only by 1 and the number itself. Cute. Anyway, I am an Amazon affiliate, so please, participate in Prime Day. I make money, it costs you nothing. What's not to love?

We have a squatter in our backyard

Maybe not everybody knows what a squatter is. It's someone who takes up residence on property that is not their own but acts as if it is. Well, we've got a squatter. It would appear that a cousin of Punxatawney Phil has moved into our backyard:

Technically, he appears to have moved into our neighbor's backyard, as he seems to have dug a den under the fence and, apparently, under the storage shed that is just on the other side of the fence:

But I think he likes it here. He appears to be a juvenile groundhog, maybe a year or so old, possibly as much as two. Not very big as groundhogs go, but not from this year's litters, I don't think:

Along with the bunnies, Mrs. Wolves considers him one of her new pets.

The Farm omnibus edition

I went to The Farm several times over the July 4th weekend, as I was off Monday and Tuesday. Did a lot of weeding, watering and harvesting. First of all, the crops are doing well. The peppers are getting big:

The okra, on the left, is booming, while the leaf lettuce on the right continues to produce well beyond expectations:

The bean crops -- we have three staggered plantings at this point, with more to come -- are busting:

As you can see:

The carrots are at the point where thinning them yields edible-size carrots:

And the kale and Swiss chard continue to produce, also beyond seasonal expectations:

Unfortunately, deer discovered the tomato plants and may have set expectations back a bit:

I also planted more garlic. Alas, the bed I wanted to use looked like this:

Yes, those are weeds. When I finished weeding and planting, it looked like this:

We also did a pretty good amount of harvesting over the holiday weekend, as the summer crops are starting to produce some early results. The first potato bed -- we have two, planted a few weeks apart -- produced early results. The plants were browning. We thought they were sick, so we harvested, with surprisingly good results for so early in the potato season:

The second bed looks very healthy and should be ready for harvest in August. We also had some early representation by the squash bed:

All the peas are in and harvested, and it was not a bad showing:

The first of the beans also came in:

Still getting leaf lettuce:

And kale:

Thinning the carrot bed continues to yield edible size carrots.

I'll be back at The Farm in a couple days. Lots of thunderstorms watered the crops, so we should see more good results.