earth home garden

Big Bear Native Garden Tribute!!!

2011-07-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

This year a new award has been added to the Sierra Club's 9th annual Xeriscape Garden Tour. The "Jim Otterstrom Earth Home Garden"Award will be presented to the garden that has created the most natural setting including but not limited to native plants. Jim Otterstrom was a native plant proponent and his garden was living proof of his belief that native plants were the best way to landscape your yard. The Otterstrom yard was a perennial favorite on the tour, with Jim and Peggy Otterstrom handing out seeds, sage advice and lemonade. With the passing of Jim in January of this year, the Xeriscape Garden Tour commitee created a new award in his honor.

This year's tour is Saturday, July 16th from 9am to 4pm. Attendees can start the tour at Emingers Mountain Nursery on Big Bear Blvd. in Big Bear Lake, across from Denny's. Participants will have until 4pm to complete the self-guided tour of seven homes. We are still in need of three volunteers. There are two shifts, morning and afternoon, which makes it possible to volunteer AND take the tour. A fun pot luck party takes place on Sunday July 17th, to thank the voluteers, homeowners and sponsors.

Thank you to our sponsors for making this a free tour to the public: Big Bear Lake Fire Protection District, Big Bear member Susan Piestrup, City of Big Bear Lake, CSD Big Bear City, DWP, Emingers Mountain Nursery, Hunters Nursery, Master Composters, Nativescapes, TSL Landscaping and USAA. For more information on the tour contact Christie Walker at (909)866-5006.

2011-01-24T09:59:00.000-08:00

Jim-
I am here and I can't get my head around that you are gone from this life. Today we are going to have a memorial service for you and I don't know if I can talk. There is so much in my heart but I have never been good with putting it into words. I didn't get the gift of words that you were blessed with. Family has always been most important to me and I always felt I was trying to hold us all together and not always successfully. I feel with the loss of you I have now lost two impostant siblings. We had some difficult times in our childhood but I have always loved you and respected the person you grew up to be. I admired your tenacity and ability to stand up for all those things that were so important to you. From a distance I saw what a wonderful husband and father you became. From the time I moved out of California (many many years ago) we have only had moments together. I cherish those moments. I feel like so many people know you better than I do because they have had the priviledge of spending time with you. But my heart has a connection to you that only brothers and sisters can share and that is where my heart is breaking right now. I don't want to reflect on missed opportunities because I can't bring time back but I do remember so many good things about you and I love you. It was hard to be together with the miles between us, jobs etc. But thank you for being my big brother, thank you for my sister Peggy who I love with all my heart as if she were always in our family and for my wonderful niece and nephew. Thank you for caring about this world and doing your part to improve it. I admire you and wish I emulated you more. I will miss you more than you know. You will always be in my heart.
Your sister,
Linda

Dad

2011-01-23T12:33:00.000-08:00

Dad...
This doesn't feel real. I keep picking up my phone to call you and seak consolation. I can't believe I can never smell your sent. It is like a wonderful mixture of sweat and dirt. I will never get to hear your voice, I almost can't remeber it, I have to reach so far in to extract the warm way you talked. You could say one word and have a lifetime of passion behind it. To touch you again, you were so solid and there. I will miss the tiny chip in your bright smile. When I look in the mirror all I see is you. I hate that the day keeps going on. I don't want to brush my teeth, get dressed, eat..... I just want time to stop cause you were just here. I miss you. I am not ready for life without my daddy. I want you to hug me and tell me to stop worring, that death is a part of life. I cannot accept this yet. I feel like we were supposed to do so much more together. I wanted to hike the PCT with you. We still need to write down all your adventures so I can have them always. I still want to tell you how much you have given me by just being you. I can't imagine who I would be without you. I can't imagine my life without you. The world is lonely without the space you shined in. I know you didn't feel good dad. I am sorry. I wish I could make you feel better. I always thought loved healed everything, but I guess that wasn't enough. You are my magic. You are my imagination. Your are the reason I dream big. I have such intense compassion and emotions that I was given by you. I know that when the world hurt, you hurt. I am the same. It is so hard for me to show that cause it makes my days more difficult, but know that I understand the burden you carried. I share it with you. My heart is broken.... I love you so deeply and intensely. I have called so many people today, they all cried. They know, everyone knows what an extraordinary and unique man you are. I have been sitting with Dallas a lot, I see so much of you in him. We want to spread your ashes in a sacred place that will never be developed. If you have any ideas... I hated going to the mortuary, so removed and impersonal. If we had it our way we would have kept your body and had a sacred burning, deep in the forest to release your spirit among the trees and clear sky. I am so sorry I can't do that for you. Jimmy thinks we should go kidnap you from the place and become outlaws so we can honor you in the desert when you are free from the constraints of this greedy civilization. Just say the word and we will.

Much Love
Jamie

Jim Otterstrom November 14th, 1945 - January 22nd, 2011

2011-01-23T06:07:00.000-08:00

Thank you to all the beautiful and inspiring people that have shared your lives with my father Jim Otterstrom. I know this blog was his release, his comfort to know that there were like minded people living their lives all around him. You will all have my heart forever. Much love, Jamie Otterstrom

For Gabrielle Giffords and all those whose lives were ruined on January 8th, by an act of hatred...

2011-01-09T10:19:00.000-08:00

~VICTIMS OF HATRED~

Click on image to enlarge

images from the public domain ~ collage by jim otterstrom 2010

I've been trying to come to terms with the contempt and hatred I feel seething through our society since I was a young boy.

I've also been consistently disappointed in my fellow human beings for as long as I can remember, and in myself for carrying within me seeds of that same toxicity which poisons hearts.

Is it any wonder we have so much insanity in a world where every innocence is promptly contaminated by the appalling gore of our collective misdeeds?

We are reaping the fruit of violence we have sewn into the fabric of history---even as we continue shouldering the burden of horrific destruction we still fund throughout the world, with our tax dollars, the sweat of our labor, and the lifeblood of humanity---all in disregard for every other species on earth.

Like the people in this collage, we are all victimized by hatred, fear, and ignorance, including our own.

Whatever we think of the individuals pictured here, they were all moved by the cruelty and injustice they saw around them to speak their truths, with compassion for others, and for that, each one was assassinated.

They made mistakes. After all they were only human, woven from the same imperfect cloth as the rest of us, but their common thread was compassion, and they died because of it.

We are capable of becoming so much more than we are, and each of the persons above gave us a glimpse into possibilities.

As long as I live, no matter how ugly the world becomes, I will hold love and compassion in my heart, and do my best to reach beyond the atmosphere of contempt, bitterness, fear, and hatred which permeates our times...
...even if it kills me.

~Peace & Love~

Jim Otterstrom

Gabrielle Giffords favorite quote, from her facebook page:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, let us strive to finish the work we are in." ~ Abraham Lincoln

1967 ~ The "Summer of Love"

2011-01-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

A digital self portrait I made from a photo taken in 1967.

The original photo probably belongs to Que? magazine, but the digital rendering is mine.

I was sitting on an old bridge over Topanga Creek playing my guitar one day in 1967 when a pretty young hippie girl came over to listen and hang out with me. A few moments later a car pulled up and some very busy people with cameras and tape recorders rudely interrupted our barely budding relationship. It turns out they were "journalists" for a Mexican magazine, I think it was called, 'Que?'. Anyhow, they were on assignment in California to do an article on the phenomena of the hippie culture. They took pictures of me and my new friend of a few minutes, asked a bunch of stupid questions, then sped off. A few months later, during '67s "Summer of Love", I was living in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco (of course) and while walking down Haight Street, saw my picture on the front of a Spanish language magazine at a newspaper stand. Even though I don't read Spanish I bought several copies (for my mother) and this self portrait is made from one of the pictures in that magazine. I liked the photo because of the nonplussed expression on my face as I scribbled my name and personal info onto a piece of scrap paper for the female reporter who had just interviewed us, using my guitar for a desk. Unfortunately, my lovely new friend seemed quite disillusioned that I would waste our precious time talking to people like that, and left right after they did.

The well aged photo is one of those crappy little halftone things that doesn't render well by scanning so I decided to lend it an authentic '60s feel by jazzing it up in Photoshop with some acidy looking psychedelic effects.

Oh, if you thought it was a photo of me writing songs, poetry, or philosophizing, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I was 21, and into Girls, Love, Nature/ Environmentalism, Peace, and Music, in that approximate order.

I have no regrets over my deliciously squandered youth, life is to be enjoyed, and I had the good fortune of being young in an amazingly uninhibited, free-spirited time & place.

Imagine the odds, out of the entirety of the vast cosmos, that your molecules, your atoms, would be evolutionarily woven into the living fabric of this beautiful planet Earth, of the stunning Milky Way, to eventually become part of a human, born and raised in sunny Southern California, just in time to spend your youth wandering the canyons and beaches of a rapidly fading paradise, amidst the 1960s no less, a time of unprecedented freedom of expression for our species.

In the end, we are but the stuff of stars, and I find peace in knowing the very essence of our being sings within the breath of time, while dancing toward the mystery of tomorrows.

(~; HAPPY NEW YEAR ;~)

"To a Mouse" Robert Burns, November, 1785

2010-12-27T16:06:00.000-08:00

Robert Burns Original Poem-

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering pattle.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An' fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's win's ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld.

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

A translation to standard english-
Small, crafty, cowering, timorous little beast,
O, what a panic is in your little breast!
You need not start away so hasty
With argumentative chatter!
I would be loath to run and chase you,
With murdering plough-staff.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
And justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
And fellow mortal!

I doubt not, sometimes, but you may steal;
What then? Poor little beast, you must live!
An odd ear in twenty-four sheaves
Is a small request;
I will get a blessing with what is left,
And never miss it.

Your small house, too, in ruin!
Its feeble walls the winds are scattering!
And nothing now, to build a new one,
Of coarse grass green!
And bleak December's winds coming,
Both bitter and keen!

You saw the fields laid bare and wasted,
And weary winter coming fast,
And cozy here, beneath the blast,
You thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel plough passed
Out through your cell.

That small bit heap of leaves and stubble,
Has cost you many a weary nibble!
Now you are turned out, for all your trouble,
Without house or holding,
To endure the winter's sleety dribble,
And hoar-frost cold.

But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

Still you are blest, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,

I guess and fear!

from Wikipedia

For the intro to the animated poem of, 'To A Mouse', we hear a little honest arrogance from the Ploughboy Poet, who died at the wise young age of 37.

"It ever was my opinion that the mistakes and blunders, both in a rational and religious point of view, of which we see thousands daily guilty, are owing to their ignorance of themselves. To know myself had been all along my constant study." Robert Burns, 1785

Apparently, I share some of Burns' heretic arrogance, but I do include myself among "they" and "them" as well.

"They persisted in their foolishness until nothing remained but scorched Earth. In the name of their gods, and their myths, they destroyed each other and the living planet they shared with millions of species. A tendency for narcissistic self deception led them into a civilization diametrically opposed to the laws of Nature." Jim Otterstrom, 2010

I composed the heresy above on December 21st, 2010, Winter Solstice, (see previous post) as a not so hypothetical epitaph for the human species if we continue in our selfishness, and this morning---6 days later---I stumbled across Burns' poem for the first time in decades, feeling a renewed kinship with the man.

"The best laid schemes of mice and men", indeed....

A Winter Solstice Epitaph For Humans From The Year 2110?

2010-12-22T12:37:00.000-08:00

Click on image to enlarge

The Kuwaiti Oil Fires background photograph was borrowed from Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

How many more holiday shopping seasons can the earth endure?
My heart reaches out to the other living species of planet Earth during this orgy of consumerism we call Christmas.

Sunrise ~ Elwood, Utah ~ December 11, 2010

2010-12-11T12:12:00.000-08:00

Click on photo to enlarge © 2010 jim otterstrom

Clouds pour off the Wasatch Front while the sun peaks over the mountains this morning as Dallas and I took our walk. The view is to the southeast and my mother's house is in the far lower left of the photo, just beneath the sun flare. You can see smoke rising from our neighbor's chimney on the horizon to the right of the sun flare, the temperature was about 32 degrees.

Sixty-Fifth Birthday ~ November 14, 2010

2010-11-15T08:27:00.000-08:00

Jim & Peg ~ Gone 'American Gothic' in Utah?

My 65th Birthday gift, a beautiful sturdy pitchfork, inspired this tongue-in-cheek parody of the severe tone of Grant Wood's 1930 painting, 'American Gothic', which depicts a 19th Century farmer with his daughter in front of their farmhouse.

Well, I'm not quite old enough to be Peggy's father, she's only seven years younger than I, but we had fun making this image anyway, and we are portraying a husband and wife team here.

Peggy has an authentic weary expression on her face because she was getting tired of holding up that heavy basket of apples as I experimented with camera settings and tripod adjustments while making several different exposures.

We think her strained expression suggests something of the difficulty in being a hard working farm wife married to the ornery old coot she's standing next to, and Peg says she's also amused by the way her glasses slid down her nose to give it that pinched look.

The apples, from my mother's orchard (directly behind where the camera was located), were later baked into my birthday pie and Peg also made a cheesecake for the occasion.

Our son, Jimmy, who shares the same birthday is here too, so he and I conjured up a bar-b-que under a canopy out of the rain which began falling shortly after the photo was made.

The home-cooked food was delicious; my birthday dinner consisted of a deliberately tiny, lean, and tender steak, asparagus stalks grilled with rosemary, thyme, & pepper (Jimmy's recipe), a small baked potato dressed in olive oil and cracked pepper, a small broccoli salad with red onion, sunflower seeds, dried cranberries, raisins, and other secret ingredients, and, of course, a sliver of Peggy's scrumptious wheat-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, apple pie with allspice, nutmeg, and fresh ginger. Oh, and another little sliver of that irresistable cheesecake with the graham cracker crust.

And, I received gifts too, the pitchfork, a pair of Carhart workpants, thick winter socks, and some extremely warm & soft insulated elk hide gloves.

Jimmy's gifts included a new amp for his electric guitar and he spent much of the day entertaining us while I was also enjoying a couple of glasses of Moab Brewery's tasty Dead Horse Amber Ale (the last of my 'growler'), and later some nice Merlot.

I can assure you, a very enjoyable day was had by all (especially grandma I think), and I appreciate more every day what a rare and priviledged time we live in, very unlike the recent past, and the very near future.

~enjoy each precious moment~

Click on painting to enlarge - 'American Gothic'

circa 1930 by Grant Wood

Halfway Home...

2010-10-28T11:39:00.000-07:00

It was about 31 brisk degrees when I left home on my ride to the Post Office this morning, a nice temperature for bike riding if you're wearing a few layers. It's a 4.4 mile ride into town along roads like this and I stopped for this picture about halfway home. We had a couple of days of good rain here, then some snow showers Tuesday evening, and the Wellsville Mountains are now capped with a dusting of snow.

I've made so many photos I don't know where to start in posting them, so this one will have to do for now.

The Good, Bad, & The Ugly

2010-10-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

Mantis religiosa

This big beautiful girl is one of many Praying Mantids (Mantis religiosa) we've encountered while doing yard clean-up around mom's place during the past 12 days. They are in the process of depositing their foam-like egg cases right now (see photo below) after which they will die. Each egg case or sac can contain up to 300 eggs. Praying Mantids are an insect species beneficial to humans because they are voracious predators of other insects, many of which are damaging to flowers, vegetables, and fruit.

If you're not convinced of the predatory skills of this amazing insect you can see photos of one that actually captured and ate a hummingbird (click here). Yes, she may be a lovely long-legged green-thinking biocentric female but I wouldn't want to get too close to her if we were any where near the same size.

Mantis religiosa Egg Sac

What's Scary About This Picture?
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Many people think insects are ugly or scary looking, especially big insects like Praying Mantids, but to me they're elegantly beautiful in design and fascinating to behold. What's creepy looking to me in this picture is my hairy old arm...

Melanoplus sanguinipes
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Another handsome colorful bug in abundance here is the large Migratory or Spur-throated Grasshopper (Melanoplus sanguinipes), but this insect is a pest to humans, notorious because of it's appetite for agricultural crops, grasses, leafy vegetables, fruits, flowers, buds, and even tree bark. My guess is that these critters are a challenge to control with organic methods when you're surrounded by miles of cornfields, but, not surprisingly, these grasshoppers are a favorite food of the Praying Mantids above, which, I'm sure, is why the mantids are also here in such great numbers.

Before & After - Some Of What We've Accomplished In The Past 9 Days...

2010-10-11T18:21:00.000-07:00

Peggy and I have really been enjoying the past nine days of labor intensive outdoor work cleaning up mom's overgrown acreage under these big beautiful Utah skies.

The four photos below are before and after pictures of the orchard and a large fenced area at the back of her property which could be divided up between vegetable gardens and the raising of farm animals such as chickens & goats.

Much of this area was 4 to 6 feet deep in a thick nasty tangle of weeds, brush, & cockleburs, and quite a challenge to deal with, but we're getting there!

I must say here that, if this were my place, I'd have a herd of goats to manage the weed problems, to help fertilize the gardens, and to provide milk for drinking and the making of goat yogurt and cheese, and, that being said, we'll move on to the reality of the present circumstances.

Weed Management With Infernal Combustion Machines!
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Yes, we accomplished a lot in a very short period of time mainly because my mother has this little John Deere tractor mower that rose way beyond the task it was designed for, which is basically to mow big lawns, which is why mom bought it.
We were in dire straits here with too many chores to do and not nearly enough time to address them all in some sort of sustainable way before winter sets in.
So, I'm certainly not proud of the fact that we converted about 7 more gallons of fossil fuel (on top of what we blew through the U-Haul truck) into the C02 which is every day rendering our planet less habitable for humans.
But we came here to help my mother, and, at this point in time, I have to do that partly within the context which she lives, and, as I said above, if this was our place things would be done in a different way.

Weeds Ready For the Chipper/Shredder

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Peggy and I brought our electric chipper/shredder with us because we knew there was going to be a mountain of stuff we could use for mulch and compost and we're just getting started with that.

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

This little pile is just the first trailer full of chipped and shredded weeds headed for the compost heap. The horse manure in the corral will be another essential ingredient.

Note the empty bottle of Negra Modelo in the John Deere's beer holder, sometimes it's so obvious that I'm just a redneck farmer at heart.

The above photos show only a part of the many problems we've had to address in these 9 days, from a huge overgrown lawn to runaway shrubbery and weeds in the flower beds around the house, to broken door latches, lost keys for important locks, automatic sprinkler malfunctions, a broken fitting in the plumbing for the well, and so many other things I've already forgotten.

But the three of us are having a lot of fun together and that's what's important.

The Wild Places Around Us...

2010-10-10T08:12:00.000-07:00

Dallas With The Wellsville Mountains

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

This photo was taken from the road my mom lives on, about 100 yards south of her house.

The view is to the east and that's the Wellsville Mountains Wilderness in the background, home to deer, elk, moose, mountain lions, bobcats, and bighorn sheep. The Wellsvilles are also located in a major western flyway for raptors.

The Wellsville Mountains run north to south, between us and Logan, Utah. The two highest peaks are Box Elder Peak at 9,372', and Wellsville Cone at 9,356'. Depending upon the source of your information, the Wellsville Mountains are either the steepest mountain range in the U.S., or one of the steepest. Only 5 miles wide, they rise 5,000 feet from the valley floors surrounding them. There are only 17 miles of trail in the mountains and one of these days I'll be hiking them.

Wildlife Refuges and Wilderness Areas Within Bicycling Distance

Area map courtesy of National Geographic Topo! Click to enlarge

The Everyday Beauty Of The Bear River Valley...

2010-10-09T09:02:00.000-07:00

~Afternoon Sky~

Our View From The Dining Room This Morning
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Each of our days here is enriched with the overwhelming beauty of the natural world.
Yesterday afternoon found us under the splendid sky pictured above while this morning a family of deer graced the orchard outside mom's dining room windows.

Dragonfly After A Rainstorm...

2010-10-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

Click on photo to enlarge © 2010 jim otterstrom

A showy thunderstorm rolled across the Bear River Valley here in Utah last evening providing us with a magnificent light show out the dining room windows at dinner time. Rain came and went through the night and we awoke to a brief downpour about six this morning. Wandering around the yard just before breakfast I came across this dragonfly lying in the grass. I picked it up and placed it on an old piece of wood for this photo. It was still alive but I'm not sure it will survive its drenching.

~postscript~

The above dragonfly dried out warmed up and flew away...

Our Home Away From Home Here In The Bear River Valley Of Utah

2010-10-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

Mom's House In Farm Country

Peggy, Dallas, and my shadow coming home from our first 5 mile morning walk in Utah.

We'll be spending at least the next 6 months here helping my 85 year old mother out around the place.

Peggy and mom, still in their jammies, in mom's kitchen this morning.

Peg & Dallas on a morning walk along a crossroad near our new digs. We are headed back to the road mom lives on, which runs perpendicular to this one, about 1/4 mile east (the direction Dallas is facing) where we'll turn right for another 1/2 mile to get home.

Another view of mom's big house which she fell in love with about 5 years ago on a trip from California to visit her sister. She put a deposit on it, sold her house in the San Fernando Valley, and moved out here, lock, stock, & barrel, at 80 years of age.

Looking northwest through part of mom's orchard with our chickens still in their traveling cage. They have since been moved into a large makeshift coop.

A horse named Horse, whom belongs to one my mother's friends, resides on a back corner of the property. The view is to the west.

Looking north across the back 1/2 acre of moms property I can envision a huge vegetable garden at this end with chickens and goats inhabiting the far end.

We've already made the small shelter in the distance into a makeshift coop for our chickens, which we brought with us. This area lies just behind the orchard and large raspberry patch.

Looking northwest from the middle of the orchard which has varieties of apples, pears, peaches, cherries, and apricots. Below are a few pictures of the fruit we are now harvesting.

This pear tree is just loaded!

This apple didn't bear heavily this year but the fruit is sweet, crisp, and delicious.

This apple tree is heavily laden and we're planning on baking some apple pies here in the next few days.

More apples.

Horse with our makeshift chicken coop in the background.

Looking northeast across a view of the Bear River just a few hundred yards south of my mom's place. This is one of the places we go on our morning walks now.

A view to the northeast from the orchard fence. My mom's property ends where the cornfield starts and the raspberry patch is just behind where I was standing when I took the picture.

A view to the southeast with part of mom's raspberry patch in the foreground.

The raspberries were in dire need of water as were parts of the orchard, all the trees need pruning and there's much weeding and outdoor cleanup to be done.

That's why we're here and hopefully we can get much of that done before it snows and the ground freezes., we've already made quite a bit of progress.

~POSTSCRIPT~

To our friends who are trying to e-mail us. I have to contact Charter.net and set things up differently before I can reply or send e-mail, and, at this point, we are no longer receiving e-mail either.

Thirty-One Years Ago Today...

2010-09-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

...On The Slopes Of Mauna Loa

A Delightful Little Animated Story...

2010-09-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

PG&Es Smoking Gun?

2010-09-11T09:03:00.000-07:00

Ground Zero of San Bruno

Gas Explosion (before the explosion)

This image from Google Earth shows the intersection of Earl Avenue and Glenview Drive in San Bruno, California sometime before the PG&E gas explosion which occurred here at approximately 6:24 PM on September 9th.

You'll notice what appears to be an asphalt patch running diagonally across the upper part of the intersection, possibly indicating some recent excavation work there, but what is much more interesting is the white painted oval outlining the entire intersection.

That prophetic oval predicts the exact position of the crater which was later created by the blast.

Residents in the area had apparently been reporting the smell of gas for some weeks before the accident and some reported that PG&E employees came out and did a survey of the area.

What did PG&E employees discover? Why is the location of the future crater marked so perfectly? If PG&E did know or suspect there was a leak why didn't they respond more urgently?

Good questions for those who lost loved ones or homes, or who have been injured, burned, or maimed by this tragedy. Was it preventable?'

~~~~~

I discovered this image while trying to find out exactly how close the explosion was to our sons girlfriends mothers house, which, I discovered, is about a block and a half south of the crater.

We thought our son, Jimmy, was staying there and had called the house, coincidently, just moments after the explosion happened, and his girlfriend, Dyanne, answered saying she couldn't talk because there had just been a plane crash or something and they were being evacuated.

We spent the next 18 hours or so believing our son was there too, and couldn't make any contact with them. It turns out that our son had gone to North Carolina a few days earlier and probably wasn't aware of what was going on in San Bruno, because he has no phone right now.

Anyhow it was a very long day for us and we still haven't heard from Dyanne, but I'm assuming she is OK because, from the pictures available now, it looks like her mom's place wasn't affected except by the evacuation order. They probably can't go home until the utilities are restored.

~postscript~

We got a finally got phone call from Dyanne this morning. They are back at her mom's house now but still have no gas service, and no internet. She had to go to the library to send me an e-mail and her phone service just came back up.

She said the whole thing was such a frightening experience that she's still at a loss for words...

Innocent Dragonfly is Crucified on the Grille of a Jeep Cherokee!

2010-08-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

Click on individual photos to enlarge
All photos © 2010 jim otterstrom

Sacrificed to a machine, the haunting corpse of a dragonfly hangs by its wings from the crossbar of a 1995 Jeep Cherokee grille on August 6th, 2010.

I was quite taken aback when I discovered this unfortunate victim of an automobile suspended from a plastic cross---it's fragile body perfectly preserved in graceful form---too reminiscent of familiar images of a more well-known crucifixion.

Most bugs splat unceremoniously into oblivion when they're hit by several thousand pounds of machinery speeding down a highway, leaving us not much to think about except cleaning up the mess, but somehow this magnificent little creature, even after death, has managed to tell us something about the beauty of its existence, and the tragedy of its passing.

Yes, it's just another bug, one of billions lost each day to the unintentional recklessness of human activity.

Yet, perhaps this tiny innocent member of earth's living community has also died for our sins, by our hands, so that we might once again be patiently reminded by Mother Nature of the destructiveness of our way of life.

How many messengers does Nature's Creation need to send us before we finally get the message?

We have already wiped out 98% of our old growth forests, 99% of our native prairies are gone, 80% of the rivers in China no longer support fish life, and 90% of the large fish in the worlds oceans are gone.

Earth is currently losing between 150 & 200 species every single day, and I can only wonder at the bountiful diversity that once graced this planet before our species came stumbling along into fossil fuels, industrialism, and the age of the infernal combustion machine, which may well render the planet uninhabitable for oxygen breathers.

I'm certainly not religious in any traditional sense of the word, but take another close-up look at this dragonfly, it has a message for us, and, it even looks as if it might have been praying when it died...

...praying, possibly, for the rest of us.

So, just in case, I'm keeping it in a box until Easter.

Photographed on a cloudy afternoon with a Canon SX10IS on a tripod; manual function, super macro setting, ISO 80, f/8.0, at 3 tenths of a second. Contrast & brightness slightly modified in Photoshop CS3. Some images cropped to show detail.

Big Brother Raids R-Own-Ranch & Condemns Property!!!

2010-08-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

At Home On The Smith Family's

'R-Own-Ranch' in 1980 Click on photo to enlarge - ©1980/2010 jim otterstrom

Photo left to right; Thelma Smith, Edgar Smith (gramps), Karen Smith (Miller), Peggy Otterstrom, Jim Otterstrom, Ed Smith, Debra Smith, Clark Smith, with Boots & Chewbacca in front.

Just before Peggy and I moved to Big Bear this is where we lived, in that army surplus quonset hut, on the Smith family's 60 acre 'R-Own-Ranch', a secluded paradise two miles up a dirt road from Mulholland Drive in the Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu Canyon Road.

We moved here shortly after we were married, and the ranch is also where we started our own family, Jimmy came into the world during our time here.

We were quite happy living alongside this down to earth Old Calabasas family who welcomed us into their lives as if we were born & raised right there with them.

Most of us worked for the Post Office, either in Calabasas, or Woodland Hills, which is how we became friends, and we held many unforgettable postal gatherings up at the ranch---far from the rat-race---where people could relax and let their hair down without bothering the neighbors, because there weren't any.

At these large pot-luck get-togethers there was often live music provided by musician friends---from young rockers, to aging big band era players---the majority of whom were working at the Post Office too. The family also---long before my days there---had rigged up a fenced (with chicken wire), night-lighted (with salvaged flourescent fixtures), volleyball court, Ma & Pa Kettle style, where, old & young alike, would often play into the wee hours of the morning.

On more normal quieter nights, the family always gathered in the living room of the original old home-built house where four generations of Smiths would gregariously indulge themselves in hours of playing Scrabble, Monopoly, or any number of board, dice, or card games, until way into the night, and there was also a game room with a pool table off the living room overlooking the vegetable garden.

I loved sitting in on those games and listening to family tales about things like hiking miles to the old Calabasas School on a trail which led from the ranch, over the mountains, and down to the quaint little town of Calabasas. But, I don't believe I ever once beat my ol' buddy, Ed Smith, or his sister, Karen, at a game of Scrabble. Those two were just too damned sharp, but then again, they played the game almost every night for much of their lives.

That's the kind of thing families used to do when they lived in remote rural areas, far from the nearest neighbor, before cable or satellite TV, or computers.

I was absolutely charmed by this unassuming family of self-reliant old-fashioned folks who still lived---even during the 1970s, '80s, & early '90s---much as they had throughout the 1940s & '50s. I felt like I had come home, and I still think of them as family, and their 'R-Own-Ranch' as the country home I always longed for.

During our few years there most of the activity centered around the main house, which apparently came into existence around 1927---long before there were enforced building codes in those unincorporated areas---with several rooms obviously added on, maybe as late as the early 1950s. Also, of course, was the war surplus quonset where Peggy & I lived---which had been erected in 1956---35 years before the city of Calabasas was incorporated. And there were a couple of small trailers there too, available to family members who sometimes came and went depending upon their situations at any given time.

Living at the ranch was always an adventure, and definitely not for the faint of heart. The day we moved in was during the midst of a wet winter, and the private road leading up to the ranch had just washed out about a 1/2 mile down from the house, so Peggy and I had to trudge back & forth up that last muddy 1/2 mile with all of our belongings. That would've been late 1979, the year I bought my first 4-wheel drive Toyota, for obvious reasons.

The Smiths owned a tiny, ancient, rickety Caterpillar bulldozer which could, periodically, be patched into some semblance of working order to assist with road repair during washouts, which came in handy because the 1.2 mile dirt section of the road was almost completely wiped out twice during our 3 year stay at the ranch. Those are rewarding and memorable experiences in my life, working side by side with the Smiths to rebuild their road, and this is also when Peggy learned how to use a chain saw and I got to know her rugged hard-working side.

Then there were the fires. A couple of years before we moved to Big Bear a fire broke out to the north of us in the middle of the night, near highway 101, and we were awakened by a call from the fire department warning us to be prepared because it was moving in our direction.

There was a fire hydrant on the property near the main house---the cost of which was surely added to the R-Own-Ranch tax assessment, but the fire department would no longer allow their equipment up the narrow road to protect just one old house. They did however offer to provide us with some fire hose, a nozzle, and a bit of safety instruction if we wished to defend the place ourselves, an offer we gladly accepted.

Over that tense ensuing day the fire moved slowly toward us and some of the Smiths decided to drive down and talk with the firefighters stationed by the big fancy houses at the lower paved section of the road near Mulholland Drive, to see if they might change their minds about sending a truck up. What happened instead, was that a sheriff wouldn't allow the guys back up the road, which left me and Peggy, along with Thelma Smith, probably in her late 50s then, and her son Clark, in his early to mid teens, to defend the place.

I suggested to Peggy that she should leave and told her I was going to stay and fight the fire. She said, "I'm not going anywhere without you"! So, Peg and I followed the fire department advice, wrapping our heads & faces in wet towels as the fire advanced over the hill and moved in upon us. We kept the house and everything around it soaking wet, and when the smoke got too thick we'd adjust the nozzle to a fine spray over our heads and breathe, through the wet towels, the oxygen that was emanating from the misting spray of water falling around us. A few times I had to leave Peggy in charge of the hefty fire nozzle so I could run back to the quonset and use the garden hose to extinguish small fires that had ignited in knot-holes of the leafless deciduous 'Trees of Heaven' growing along the side of the metal building, which was otherwise rather impervious to fire. That's when I discovered how strong and courageous Peggy is.

The fire burned around us for a couple of hours but eventually moved on and the Smith homestead was spared for the time being. Then, in March of 1983, just a few days before Peggy & I moved away, another fire headed toward the ranch, and we were prepared to man the hoses again, but the previous fire had cleared most of the underbrush so this one just burned on past us.

Sadly, in 1996, a third fire finally burned the original family home to the ground while the Smiths stood by helplessly at the bottom of the road where the police, once again, wouldn't allow them up to defend their uninsurable property.

The quonset hut and trailers survived though, and members of the family, including Thelma's now 70 year-old brother, Lloyd Smith, and his son Gary, continued living on what was left of their scrappy beloved ranch, until, completely unannounced and unexpected, "on July 8th, 2010, the Calabasas Community Development Department, its building officials, code enforcement officers, other employees, personnel and agents, Los Angeles County Animal Control, and armed Sheriff’s deputies — a total of 14 people, eight of whom still remain unidentified despite requests for the City to identify them — descended en masse on one of Cold Creek’s founding families in the heart of undeveloped upper Stokes Canyon, 1.2 miles off the beaten track"*.

*Excerpted from the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation August, 2010 newsletter. Read the whole creepy story about the raid here.

In more decent times and places, in an America once striving toward democracy, these human beings---long-time historic pioneering residents of their community---would've been treated with a modicum of courtesy and respect, instead of like common criminals. Their old non code-compliant homestead would've been considered grandfathered, and partially exempt from today's strict regulations, and they would've been officially notified as to whatever health & safety issues required immediate attention and given some time to come into compliance.

But no, 11 days after the raid the Smith family's electricity was cut off, and 7 days after that the water too, leaving 70 year-old Lloyd, and his son Gary, homeless. The bastards even came and capped off the fire hydrant!!!

Because, as you can plainly see, the Calabasas of today is a miracle of modern Capitalism, where destructive profiteering defines progress, and appallingly ugly subdivisions of enormous disgusting "mansions" are smeared all over the once lovely hillsides that the Smith kids wandered on their way to school.

There's no room in Calabasas any more for down home folks like the Smith family, or in the rest of the Santa Monica Mountains for that matter, it's all gone to shit now! And the robber barons who run the world these days don't even have the decency to come in and make the family a fair offer for their land. They just send in a bunch of lackey bureaucrats to do a little dirty work, raiding, condemning, and evicting elderly life-long residents, probably figuring they'll be able to get what they want for almost nothing, while these people are suffering under duress. And I sorely suspect they may well succeed, because ordinary folks just don't have the resources it takes to fight powerful monied interests.

Interestingly, this raid was conducted around the same time an out-of-state owner of 300 acres somewhere in the vicinity of the Smith property, was inquiring about having his land incorporated into the city of Calabasas for development purposes, and would it surprise anybody if the Smith acreage just happens to lie between his land and the rest of what is already contiguous to Calabasas?

Whether this turns out to be the case or not, you can bet your ass that somebody's got an eye on making big bucks off the corpse of R-Own-Ranch, where generations of Smiths, through their labors of love, toiled away for 60 some years on their remote little plot of paradise, enlarging their home, one room at a time, planting gardens, building ponds, repairing roads, paying taxes, and raising their kids, all by themselves, without the need for pre-schools, playdates, or ritalin.

As for the people who live in all those sterile new giant Calabastard enclaves---those anti-coyote, anti-clothesline, anti-cesspool civilized newcomers whose filth & excrement flows through a nasty maze of pipes to some oft malfunctioning sewage treatment plant before being dumped into the Santa Monica Bay; whose countless Hummers, Escalades, and Navigators foul the air above the sacred mountains I once called home---I feel sorry for you and can't even imagine living in one of those oversized crapboxes and calling it a home.

In my eyes R-Own-Ranch is a victim of the same corporate driven oppression which has subverted democracy all across America by buying off the government, rewriting the rules to benefit the rich, and redistributing the wealth of a once thriving middle class---who were the backbone of the country---to a small percentage of the population, which is why the gap between the rich & poor is wider today than ever before, and growing by the hour. Pure raw evidence of the class wars the entire world is in the midst of.

And, for the record, these are my own opinions, and neither my thoughts nor my memories were verified, approved, or authorized by any member of the Smith family.

My anger and indignation over human beings subjected to this kind of treatment is my own, and I'll speak my mind about it anytime I damned well please, especially when it hits this close to home.

Finally, to all the members of the Smith family; to Ed & Cindy, Karen & Dan, and all your kids; to Thelma, Lloyd, & Gary, and all the rest of you. Peggy and I hope you will find a way to get 'R-Own-Ranch' untangled from this nightmare. We will always feel like a part of your family and this is very painful for us too.

The late, Edgar Smith, patriarch of R-Own-Ranch who bought the place in the 1940s.

'Smitty' in 1980Click to enlarge - © 1980/2010 jim otterstrom

The, late, 'Smitty', son-in-law of Edgar, husband to Thelma, was the sole rural letter carrier for Calabasas, delivering the mail to every residence for several decades.

A very pregnant Peggy, with our goat, in front of the R-Own-Ranch vegetable garden in October of '81.

Peggy, in front of the quonset with Smith family dog, Chewbacca, about 16 hours before our son Jimmy was born, and check out the cat on the tin roof above the door.

Quonset Bathroom - 1981Click to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

The quonset bathroom during a facelift I was doing on the place while we lived there.

Remodeling Our Bedroom - 1981
Click on photo to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

Ed Smith, grandson of Edgar, son of Smitty & Thelma, helps me (in the middle) with the drywall in our bedroom while, Debra Smith, looks on from the doorway to the bathroom.

Peggy, just days away from motherhood, poses for me in our newly remodeled bedroom in the quonset hut at R-Own-Ranch.

Postscript

If you think this post simply describes an unfortunate isolated incident please follow this link to see a short audio slideshow about ex-Marine & Viet Nam vet, Joseph Diliberti, a stunningly creative human being who may lose his 4 acre property in San Diego County, as well as his magnificent hand-crafted ceramic home, under somewhat similar circumstances.

This kind of stuff happens every day, to good people all around the world, who are victimized by the thievery of empire builders who are now beginning to run out of resources to steal; and by classism, elitism, racism, and sexism.

If you lived along the Yangtze River in China, they came and took millions of your ancestral homes for a huge dam to power the industrialists factories, an engineering monstrosity which, at best, will silt over in a dozen decades or so. If you live in Tennessee, they may soon come for the coal under your feet---if they haven't already done so---removing the mountian tops around your home, destroying the landscape and displacing the wildlife who live there, while ruining the watershed and poisoning your water and your air. If you live in Sumatra, and survive a tsunami, they will come and confiscate your land, replacing your fishing villages with luxury resorts. If you live in Central America, they will come and confiscate your homeland for banana or coffee plantations and put you to work in sweatshops making designer shoes or T-shirts for a few bucks a week. If you were a Native American, they might have brought you gifts, like blankets intentionally infected with smallpox, to kill off your people and take over your land with much less resistance. If you live in Iraq, they will come and destroy your country to procure the oil you're sitting on.

And the list of victimization goes on forever, from East Timor, to the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of America; from the brutality of the British, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, & American empires, to the murderous history of religious fanaticism; from the Crusades, to witch burning in America, and the horrific radical muslim fundamentalism of the Taliban.

I believe, as Dan Quinn wrote in his best-selling novel, Ishmael, that some humans are takers, and some are leavers, and for the past 10,000 years or so, the takers have been winning big, but I think they are running out of time. The planet can't afford them anymore...

Friday Morning ~ Home, Sweet Home

2010-07-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

You are looking at about one quarter of our native plant garden. This morning's photo is to the east, from the deck, with the beer garden patio and shed in the background.

Enjoy your Friday, and your weekend, this is where we will be spending ours...

~PEACE & LOVE~

St. John's Wort Relative?

2010-07-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

This flower is blooming in a gas station planter next to the sidewalk we use to get into town. The plant is a low growing perennial shrub which appears to me to be some sort of commercial hybrid related to St. John's Wort.

The light was just perfect last Friday morning when I saw this beauty just begging to be photographed. I added watercolor brush effects in Photoshop.

A Mother With Her Nine Ducklings At Sunrise

2010-07-13T13:29:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, shortly after sunrise, Peggy, Dallas, and I came across this family of Mallard Ducks gliding along beside the footbridge at Stanfield Marsh.

The dim early morning light required me to use a fast & rather grainy ISO setting of 400 to capture this moment which I later softened with a light touch of watercolor effects in Photoshop.

The results are beautiful to my eye, portraying the scene with an artful interpretation beyond what the photograph captured.

The Flowering of Earth Home Garden...

2010-06-19T13:18:00.000-07:00

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Saturday, June 19th, finds our native plant garden erupting with the local colors of summer. The above photos picture the flowering of penstemons, Indian Paintbrush, Blue Flax, and California Poppies.

Yesterday's Iris Revisited

2010-06-07T09:23:00.000-07:00

~Wild Blue Iris~

To fully appreciate the detail plus size the enlarged image

In yesterday's post I implied that I could've happily spent more time with this lovely flower, so I spent another hour or so caught in its beauty this morning as I created this digitally painted graphic image from my photograph.

This new image has a taste of Georgia O'Keefe inspired eroticism, dramatic light & saturated color reminiscent of Maxfield Parrish, and elements of my own surrealistic leanings in the texturing of the flower and the suspending of it in blackness.

An artsy-fartsy hodgepodge, but it works for me...

Created with a Canon S10IS camera and Photoshop CS3

Wild Blue Iris

2010-06-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

Iris missouriensis

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

A Wild Blue Iris (Iris missouriensis) blooms near the shore of the Stanfield Marsh this morning.

I sometimes find myself blushing in the presence of such sensual beauty, so feminine in its expression.

I spent half an hour with this Iris today and that wasn't near long enough.

I laid down close to it, touched its soft tender petals, took in its delicate scent, and painted its graceful beauty into my memory. And then I photographed it to share with you.

Georgia O'Keefe was inspired by flowers like this to create some of her most passionate and controversial work.

I share Georgia's love for the passion and sensuality in nature, it's what drives evolution and the perpetuation of life.

~Long Live Sensuality, Passion, And Life~

Positive Thinking For A Wednesday Morning In The Waning Days Of Industrial Civilization...

2010-06-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

A Desert Sunrise Beyond The Power Grid

Click on photo to enlarge - © jim otterstrom 2009/2010

Each new morning brings opportunities beyond the possibilities of yesterday.
There is a new story unfolding before us, a story borne slightly more visible with every passing day.
A story that lives beyond peak fossil fuel and Industrial Civilization.
How that story unfolds depends upon us...

jim otterstrom 6/2/2010

Below are some positive constructive thoughts, from Andrew MacDonald, for a Wednesday morning dimmed by the depressing gloom of the Gulf of Mexico tragedy.

Living the new story
by Andrew MacDonald

Published Wed, 06/02/2010 - 07:00
by Radical Relocalization

In this time of transition, two stories run through the culture. One is about continual growth and ascendancy. It's mainstream culture's story, the everyday world we're familiar with. The other is the as yet little known story of radical change and descent as we enter the time of necessary simplification - reskilling, retooling, relocalizing. The two stories compete out there in the public conversation of course but also in us and our personal relationships. It often hits me again how deep a hold the status quo's got. We're pretty much wired into it in our daily routines of shopping, speaking, working and living. It's current reality and it's everywhere and hard to see for that reason.

We've lived in that old story for a very long time and its back story - that growth is good and inevitable - is so in our bones, so embodied in us literally that new thinking doesn't affect it much. The Industrial Revolution and the turbo-charge provided by fossil fuel has strengthened these assumptions. We maintain them in small unnoticed ways. When we go shopping or to work, when we talk to friends - we're actors in a world where the script is still the old story about progress and growth and we bow to that story's conventions before we know it. If we watch TV or advertising, it's the old story, even if with some new lines. Importantly the old story is also the one the people we love are plugged into, including our parents and grandparents. Debunking it can seem disloyal to them. The need to be loyal to the story our family honored isn't noticed much either, but it's at the root of a lot of what seems stuck in our culture.

In short we're caught between a rock (the one that sustained us in the past) and a hard place - the challenging realities that we'll need to sustain us in the future.

So how do we move toward the new story? The new story tells of the descent to a world of less fossil fuel use, more localism, more community. It's a new world in which more is asked of us and more interdependence is needed between us; we really can't do it all alone. The new story stretches us personally to imagine new possibilities, exercise unused talents, to admit to ourselves and others what we really want. "Our past remains present, literally occupying us, til we go into & through it with our awakened, full-blooded presence" tweets Robert Masters. The rewards are high in the new story, so's the cost; it's out of our comfort zone.

I'll talk elsewhere about self-authoring the new story and writing a script that meets more of our needs but right now I want to focus on two practical supports for it that are renewals of our associative life. The first is doing community projects with others: gardening, sharing skills, utilizing local markets, working and building things together at the block level or its equivalent, generally building more local community and economy.

The second support takes the form of small groups that can act as micro-climates for the new story. I agree with Peter Block that "the small group is the unit of social transformation"! These explorations will happen eventually on their own given enough time. The trouble is we don't have much time. If we do nothing and coast, change will happen at what we used to call a glacial pace - a pace that glaciers no longer travel at. We'll need to be proactive on this one.

A small group is a practical help by reinforcing the social glue that connects the community and gets things done. It's also valuable in helping us adopt the new paradigm inside ourselves and see elements we just can't see on our own. It's a place where we can try things on for size, see how others are doing it, literally learn together. In the process, the new story becomes more real and embodied. Doing nothing tends to leave us, for now, in the context of the old story. (Sign up for Andrew MacDonald's newsletter for small group updates and support.)

But we do need to move quickly as possible into the new story now. We don't have the luxury of having the old story slowly come to pass over the next 20 or 50 years. Uh, no! Peak oil, financial implosion and climate change are happening now! And we can't just think our way into the new story by tacking some new thoughts in. The story doesn't live and breathe at the level of thought - especially not abstracted cyber thought. It's the spirit in which we move and talk.

More Essays and Ideas from Andrew MacDonald

'MAYDAY! SOS! MAYDAY! SOS! MAYDAY! SOS!' I'm Trapped In A Psychotic/Psychopathic Civilization Of Serial Killers...

2010-05-01T05:23:00.000-07:00

Click on photo to enlarge - photo credit unknown, image courtesy of Erv Nichols

Warning!

Rant Ahead!

"Take the rag away from your face, now is the time for your tears"

It's way past time we took the rags away from our eyes and looked directly into the horrific reality of our petroleum addiction.

Ours is an insidious addiction, mostly hidden from us beneath layers of lifelong denial, which enables us to mindlessly murder our mother, the living earth, with the sick vengeance of a deranged serial killer.

We talk a good line though, like so many addicts in denial do, claiming to care most deeply about our families and the environment, about freedom, democracy and the quality of life. But our actions speak much louder than our words, and those actions prove us to be hopelessly dependent upon the destructive extraction and consumption of the world's ever more scarce resources, a cultural co-dependency created over a dozen or so decades by mixing great quantities of oil with our short-sighted desire for comfort, convenience, self-gratification and security.

Our habitual dependency upon this ever more frenzied oil-driven civilization of reckless consumption has undermined democracy and freedom at home and around the world. It's destroying our environment and ruining the future, not only for our children, but for every species on earth. So we lie to ourselves when we say we care about these things above all, because it's obvious that what we really care about is stuff.

We want a continual fix of stuff; more, bigger, cheaper, labor-saving, convenient, stylish, sexy stuff!

Americans are fond of the term, "Put your money where your mouth is", and we do exactly that. Just look at the billions of dollars you and I have squandered on the destruction of Iraq in our country's futile attempt to monopolize their oil.

Our former president said, "the American way of life is not up for negotiation", and we've forcefully demonstrated that anyone who gets in our way is totally screwed.

As we display increasingly antisocial behavior in our relationships with the other people and species we share the planet with, we reveal that, in fact, we have become a psychotic/psychopathic civilization, a species of sociopathic ecocidal maniacs to put it bluntly.

Yes, I mean all of us! The symptoms of psychosis are clearly defined; a loss of contact with reality, grandiose delusional beliefs, paranoia, defensive aggression, thought disorders, hallucinations and antisocial behavior.

Our disease is systemic throughout society, a classic substance-induced psychosis resulting from our 150 year addiction to petroleum and its associated derivatives.

We can no longer imagine living without our daily fix of oil even though every shot we take further destroys the world which made our lives possible in the first place.

Through our addiction to this cheap abundant (although quite temporary) energy packed substance, we've fooled ourselves into believing we're super-beings, exempt from the laws of nature and the limits to growth. In other words we have lost contact with reality.

Under the influence of the happy-juice we call oil we've experienced a euphoric rush that has kept us obliviously stoned for a century and a half, which by comparison, leaves the high from any other addictive substance paling to utter insignificance.

The manic hyperactivity induced by that rush of oil into the arteries of our society allowed us, in very short order, to transform our primal insecurities, and our creative wet dreams, into a monstrous civilization whose monolithic edifices will stand for centuries as eroding monuments to the ostentatious arrogance of a narcissistic species gone mad with self-absorption, over-consumption, and obsessive compulsive disorders.

We have deluded ourselves into the grandiose belief that this pile-of-crap civilization we've plastered across the planet is a modern miracle, evidence of our manifest destiny as masters of the universe.

We Americans make up only about 4.5% of the world population yet we consume 25% of the world's resources. We are the world's number one trash producers, generating 40% of humanity's trash, and we're number two in climate altering CO2 emissions (just recently displaced from #1 by China), responsible for over 20% of global atmospheric accumulations.

We are---and have been for over a century---the development model for a civilization that has spawned the 6th greatest extinction episode in the 4.5 billion year history of earth and it is estimated that we are now losing around 200 species a day, or 70,000 species a year, through habitat loss and the pollution of ecosystems.

You and I are the ones responsible for this latest round of extinctions; for the climate change happening now; for the melting of the polar caps and glaciers; for the coming rise in sea levels, and the subsequent displacement and homelessness of billions of human beings.

We may also be primarily responsible for the very existence of those unsustainable billions of people because of increases in the world food supply created by our development of an international industrial/agribusiness model.

A model completely dependent upon the petrochemicals used for fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, a model which also requires the production & maintenance of gargantuan fleets of farm equipment and transportation networks to produce those agricultural products and get them to markets around the globe.

All of this has unleashed global-wide opportunities of unprecedented magnitude for greedy profiteering by a select few at the expense of everyone and everything else. So, as a matter of course, the world economy is now managed by a gang of legalized thugs & racketeers, rivaled in greed and ruthlessness only by illegal drug cartels, fundamentalist religious fanatics, and an emerging flotilla of Somalian pirates.

"Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king"

Capitalism is a Ponzi/Pyramid Scheme which robs the larger populace of the commons to benefit a handful of elites, where obscene profits perpetuate unlimited growth on a finite planet. One of the results has been the contemporary hallucination that our destruction of the planet somehow makes us wealthy.

The wealth of America is now nothing but an imaginary bubble kept aloft by the printing of money, which becomes ever more worthless by the moment. Before long that debt bubble is going to burst into flames like the Hindenburg Blimp, as we might gather from the precedents unfolding in Iceland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain (not to mention California---the 5th largest economy in the world---which is essentially bankrupt).

The perpetual wars we're now waging have deepened not only our national debt, but our national paranoia as well, resulting in over 6,700 military installations--- bases, warehouses, or support facilities in nearly 150 countries (under the guise of defending freedom & democracy)---all to enforce our world dominance and gain control of dwindling resources in the interest of "national security", or what I call our assumed national supremacy.

Meanwhile, here in the "land of the free, the home of the brave", we have the highest per-capita imprisonment rate in the world, 25% of the incarcerated human beings on planet earth are behind bars right here in the good ol' USA.

Is this the definition of Democracy and Freedom?

Is this what the Statue of Liberty stands for?

We all know better...

True freedom lies in the unspoiled bounty of nature where all species are created equal, where those who can't, or won't, adapt to the limits of their environment eventually perish.

We're so deep in denial of our collective addiction that we've kept shooting petroleum into the bloodstream of our lives without facing those limits until we have, quite suddenly, found ourselves up against a wall, with the limits of our ecosystems staring us in the face, point blank.

Perhaps this will wake us up, most addicts need to bottom out before they can face reality and attempt some sort of recovery, but sometimes it's too late for that, when the damage is beyond repair.

So, go ahead my fellow addicts...

Drill Baby Drill!

Buy Baby Buy!

Drive Baby Drive!

Kill Baby Kill!

...but beware, our chickens are coming home to roost.

My name is Jim, I'm in recovery from the Petroleum Age*

*Thank you, Chellis Glendinning, for the societal recovery concept.

Every Day Is Earth Day...

2010-04-22T08:46:00.001-07:00

We came upon these two male Wood Ducks along the shore of Stanfield Marsh during our morning walk last Friday.

Peggy and I were loving the spring weather last week, working in the garden and the greenhouse, while today we are enjoying a brief return to winter with 4 inches of fluffy new snow on the ground.

Every drop of precipitation makes for a more bountiful spring as over 100 species of well established native perennials bring our wild garden back to life.

Today is just one of 365 days in which the year 2010 gives us the opportunity to celebrate the miracle of life on Earth.

~HAPPY EARTH DAY~

Vanishing Landscapes...

2010-03-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

Old Mojave Homestead - March 11, 2010

Peggy watches the sun set from a crumbling Mojave Desert homestead along the Palmdale Road near Victorville, California during one of our rare road trips.

The picturesque old stone houses and wide open vistas in this part of the Mojave are disappearing quickly now as huge shopping centers and sprawling residential subdivisions creep across the landscape, burying the living desert, and it's history, beneath an unsightly scourge of human excess.

However, even the profound ugliness of rapacious growth and the grotesque spectacle of modern commerce are only temporary aberrations along the timeless course of life's evolution.

The light of the sun warms us with optimism at each dawn, and provides the opportunity for thoughtful introspection at the end of every rare and precious day, when the fireball of our solar system rolls beyond the horizon, often spreading a blazing display of color across this most beautiful of planets.

Death & destruction are cyclical and constant, yet life is a self-renewing resource, and time is on its side...

...as long as billions of stars continue shining their warm magic into the far corners of the universe.

Brief moments out of the vastness of time and space are all I have to share with you, miniscule observations from a tiny speck of the cosmos, but what a wondrous little speck it is.

No wonder it's currently overpopulated with almost seven billion consumers...

...this too shall pass.

First Day Of Spring!

2010-03-20T14:40:00.001-07:00

Procreation is in the air, and, the water...

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

During our first walk of spring today, Peggy, Dallas, and I came across this pool of Spotted Brown Trout trying to make it upstream to suitable spawning grounds.

We have seen trout in this pool before, during early spring of previous years, but it still takes my breath away when we come upon them.

These beauties were at least 14 to 16 inches in length.

Today is one of only two times during the year in which the day and the night are of equal length, and, once again, I bow in humble respect to the wonders of nature.

A Joyful Vernal Equinox to you!

Our 1915 Singer Red Eye Treadle...

2010-03-10T13:47:00.000-08:00

Peggy treadles away at our 95 year-old Singer Model 66 Red-Eye.

This reliable old machine was purchased something like 20 years ago from a local antique & junk shop for $75. It runs like a top, purrs like a kitten on steroids, and consistently sews a perfect stitch.

We also have a 1917 Singer Model 99 Hand Crank "portable", which also runs perfectly. The 93 year-old hand-cranker was found here at a Big Bear thrift store, where we gave $50 for it maybe 18 years ago. For my money these are two of the best purchases we've ever made, as these Singers seem nearly indestructible, and all you need to run them is a tiny bit of muscle power. I don't think technology gets much more elegant than this, I could wind bobbins all day just to watch the bobbin winder work!

Last summer we downsized our bed from a king size to a queen size (when we found a like-new second-hand mattress set for free) and, in this video, Peg is altering one of our old king size sheets to fit the new mattress.

Peg still has her fancy Viking electric machine but she's really enjoying working with the treadle right now, and getting some practice on it, because she wants to use it for her upcoming sewing project.

This post also seems the right place to share with you this post, at antiquequiltdating.com, about Anne Kusilek, a professional quilter and sewing machine collector who, since 1990, has done all of her sewing on human-powered machines. Did you check out Anne's custom sewing table with five machines mounted above five individual treadle bases? An inspiring post and a beautiful collection of machines too!

New Pine Floor & Door For The Sewing/Crafting Room

2010-03-04T08:28:00.000-08:00

First, We Tore Out The Carpeting... Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Our current project is the renovation of the sewing room.

Before we could start on the fun stuff we had to tear out our vintage 1969 lime green carpeting and pull up the foam padding to reveal the plywood sub-floor beneath. Then we pried off the nasty carpet tack strips at the perimeter and pulled out all the staples which held the padding in place. Once that was done we had a clean slate to work with.

To keep it simple and affordable, and to avoid using exotic hardwoods or synthetic laminates, we went with standard 1x12 pine planks from our local lumber yard.

We used Taylor's 2071 Tuff-Lok solvent-free floor adhesive to adhere the boards to the sub-floor, and then nailed the planks down, three nails across, every two feet, with square shank copper boat nails to add beauty and help prevent cupping of the wide planks.

Yes, pine is soft, and it does wear faster than hardwood, but in my opinion it wears beautifully.

We made the decision to use pine planks after looking at photos of wide-plank pine floors in old houses, some of them over 100 years old. That's durable enough for our purposes.

Square Shank Copper Nails Add Beauty & Durability
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Laying these floors is a pretty simple straightforward job. We measured and cut all the boards first and laid them in place to make sure everything was square, then we picked them all back up again, and glued & nailed them down one at a time. I pre-drilled the nail holes in the planks to prevent splitting and the 3-inch long 8-gauge copper nails (from Faering Design) go way into the thick plywood sub-floor.

We did the living room floor by the same method nearly 5 years ago and it's still as flat and solid as the day it was finished.

A New Pine-Panel Door Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

We also relpaced the beat up holllow core door with a pine-panel door to match the floors.

The door isn't the pre-hung type so I had to buy door jamb stock and build the casing myself.

I've hung a lot of doors in my time but this one was a bit of a chore because standard door jamb sets are too wide for our walls. They're milled to fit 4x4 framed walls with drywall on both surfaces, but our cabin doesn't have drywall, only a much thinner wood paneling, on the interior walls.

So I had to rip about 3/4 of an inch off the jamb stock to make it fit properly, not really difficult, just a little extra work.

The New Floor & Door Together
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

This is how the entrance to the room looks now with the door installed and a preliminary sanding done on the floor.

The Semi-Completed Floor
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

This photo shows the floor before the preliminary sanding so you can still see the pencil lines I used to lay out the nailing pattern. I have since sanded off the pencil lines and any obvious stains or rough spots in the wood which still needs to have a finish applied and baseboard installed.

Nearly Completed Door
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

The pine panel door as it looks from inside the sewing room.

The trim molding has been applied, the finish nails recessed with a nail set, and the holes filled with wood dough. A little more sanding and it's ready for a few coats of satin clear finish.

FIVE YEAR BLOGGIVERSARY!

2010-02-26T11:41:00.000-08:00

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

On February 26, 2005 I sat down at the computer and created Earth Home Garden out of thin air, and now 5 years have passed and this is my 659th post.

In many ways the blog is not what I had envisioned back then but it has also become something far more personal and meaningful for me than I could've imagined.

Earth Home Garden was conceived as a place where Peggy and I could share our ongoing experiments with living more self-reliant sustainable lifestyles---something we've had in common since we first met 30 some years ago---which we started focusing on more acutely over the past twenty years.

As it reads in our Blogger profile, "Earth Home Garden represents what we love in life; our bountiful planet, Earth, and all her natural diversity; our cozy little cabin Home, and the family it has sheltered for 29 years; and the Garden around us which nurtures so many native creatures and helps feed us as well".

So my intent was to write here specifically about nature, homesteading & food production on a small property; about do it yourself home maintenance, crafting and sewing; and about moving toward a salvage based personal economy where what we acquire is mostly used, second-hand, or recycled, whether it be household items or other materials. And, I have posted quite a bit on those topics.

However, it didn't take long for me to realize that Earth Home Garden also represents something more than that, because, also involved, is my oddball decision making process which has driven me to wholeheartedly embrace big changes in our lives, such as living car-free.

An innate sense that we are one with the earth (and the entire cosmos for that matter) tells me that what happens to our ecosystem also happens to me (and to those I love). Therefore my perception of our culture, and the world around me, is highly subjective, and I strive to make decisions accordingly. I've often been advised to be more objective but I believe, as author Barry Lopez suggested, that "the objectification of everything non-human" is what has allowed us to treat our world with such callous impersonal disregard.

Consequently, Earth Home Garden also became a place for me to bare my radical ecologist soul, and vent my frustration with the omnipresent destruction of all that which I hold so dearly.

Surprisingly enough, I've received as many enthusiastic or supportive comments on my sociopolitical diatribes and rants as I have on photos of nature & wildlife, or posts about pine-needle basketry, acorn processing, and gardening, etc., and I've made far more than a few friends here who I feel very close to.

For the past month I'd been contemplating ending Earth Home Garden with today's post, but after reviewing all the pictures, and some of the posts, I realize how much I still enjoy doing this when I find the time and energy.

Still, I must say, writing is like pulling teeth for me, it hurts until all the words are out there...

I love reading well written words, and I've learned over the years that those words are never going to come easy for me, but I'm often strongly affected by images---the fun part of blogging which I truly enjoy---so most of my posts are inspired by a picture. Somehow, when I look at an image that interests me, the words start coming along easier. It's why I became interested in photography in the first place I guess, so I might be able to express my thoughts or feelings with some clarity of focus.

I have my camera with me constantly and there are times, when the light is right and my head is clear, that everything is photogenic to me, and then several days may go by when nothing looks interesting at all. Because of this reality, I began going through my old photos, slides, and artwork to find material for blogposts when I'm not otherwise feeling inspired or creative.

For me, this happy accident of a method has added a depth to Earth Home Garden that weaves today, and sixty four years ago, together into an ever-evolving artful record now spanning much of my life.

And blogging in this way has reconnected me with many old friends and created new opportunities in my life, and the lives of my kids too. Our daughter is now living in Santa Barbara, working on a boat there, and attending college, partly because of a friend I reconnected with after posting some old pictures and stories on the blog.

Something else I've learned while blogging is that any kind of preconceived continuity is almost impossible to maintain because, "life is what happens while you're busy making plans", and some of the constant disruptions and distractions which come along can be long term life changing events for an entire family, such as the car accident our son was in 4 1/2 years ago that left him legally blind.

And, like everyone else alive these past five years, we've had much to deal with; family members battling cancer; my stepfather passing away from complications due to Alzheimer's Disease; our kids struggling in today's economy.

We've had the kids and their significant others, including the dogs, staying with us on several occasions. We have friends & neighbors in similar situations, or in economic dire straits, or with health problems, but much of this doesn't go on the blog because people don't want their lives made that public.

Then there's the normal social obligations of having friends, of being part of a neighborhood, and a community, and when you add all that to the everyday responsibilities of caring for your property, your gardens, your animals, and each other, it's often hard to make time for blogging, which is why this is my first post in almost a month. And why I'm often negligent too at responding to comments or checking in with my blog friends.

Once again, I apologize for that.

Still, all things considered, when I look at the mere 100 pictures (out of more than 700 posted thus far) which make up the composite photo above, and think about all the posts they inspired, about the lives, memories, and collective span of time they represent, I'm truly astounded that I've managed to post almost seven times that much content here in this brief but tumultuous 5 years.

My, how time flies when we're having fun!

Celebrating 13 Years Without A Car

2010-01-31T12:27:00.000-08:00

Today is the 13th Anniversary of our decision to live without a car.

Peggy and I truly love knowing that we can live quite comfortably without a gas-guzzling, CO2 belching, atmosphere destroying, infernal combustion death-trap parked in our (no longer existent) driveway.

We are proud that our decision means we haven't spewed approximately 163,000 pounds (or 81.5 tons) of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere during those 13 years.

It makes our hearts feel good that we actually enjoy life without an automobile as much or more than we did when we owned one.

It was another step toward freedom from servitude to the corporate state.

We don't buy their cars, we don't buy their gasoline, we don't buy their oil & tires, we don't buy their auto insurance, and we don't borrow their money for car loans.

But, for me, the most important aspect of all this, is that, in a couple of decades when our kids are facing the ever worsening consequences of this culture's destructive behavior, they will know that mom & pop gave enough of a damn about their future to at least make dramatic and constructive changes in our own lifestyles now.

We are leaving our descendents an unimaginable mess and future generations will not look back on us favorably.

The graph below, borrowed from Wikipedia, shows the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the past 50 years. I have slightly modified the chart by circling the maximum 300 to 350 ppm target we need to achieve if we are going to avert irreversible climate catastrophe (read a related up-to-date article here), and by placing a black X at the point where Peggy and I stopped owning cars.

As you can see we got rid of our climate killing vehicle a full decade after that 350 ppm target was exceeded, so---fully realizing by that point in time that we could no longer live at peace with ourselves if we didn't take personal responsibility for our own emissions---we took action.

We're trying to do our part and I'm renewing my pledge right now, to all the species of planet earth, that I will not own another fossil fuel powered vehicle during this lifetime.

On that note, Peggy and I will toast each other tonight with glasses of Pinot Noir over a spaghetti dinner by candlelight.

Click on graph to enlarge

The photo at the top of this post, of a 1940 Chevrolet Master Deluxe 4 Door Sport Sedan, was made on April 18, 2005, at Goffs, a historic railroad town on old Route 66 near Needles, California.

The town is being restored by the Mojave Desert Heritage And Cultural Association, of which Peggy's stepbrother, Phil, is Vice-President.

Peggy, her sister Penny, and I, were out there for the weekend as part a of a volunteer crew to do some weed abatement and other work.

THE WOLF MOON

2010-01-30T07:53:00.000-08:00

The Wolf Moon, the largest, brightest moon of 2010, 14% bigger in diameter and 30% brighter than our lesser full moons (see why here).

The Wolf Moon was named by Native Americans for the wolves howling during cold winter nights. It is also known as The Old Moon, or the After Yule Moon.

The photo was taken from our deck last night at 9:19.

Canon S10IS---Hand held, full zoom (560mm), 1/500th second, f/5.7, ISO 80---cropped.

Keith Olbermann's Quick Comment about Haiti, Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh

2010-01-15T19:33:00.001-08:00

Enough said!
And thank you Mr. Olbermann for saying it...

Good Morning...

2010-01-07T06:50:00.001-08:00

We are the greatest nation of consumers and polluters in the history of the planet.

We should be very proud...

The Court Jester...

2010-01-04T12:59:00.000-08:00

...overstepping the bounds

"His characteristic idiom suggests he is a 'natural' fool, not an artificial one, though his perceptiveness and wit show that he is far from being an idiot, however 'touched' he might be.

His folly could be regarded as the raving of a madman but was often deemed to be divinely inspired.

He holds up a mirror to make us aware of our times, mocking politicians and public figures of power and authority.

He served not simply to amuse but to criticize his masters, or mistresses, and their guests.

Jesters could also give bad news to the King that no one else would dare deliver."*

*(excerpted, edited, and out of context - from Wikipedia)

Perhaps this is my calling, Court Jester to the Evil Empire, but then again, there are so many of us...

...so many fools dancing to the tune of our masters while cautiously poking fun, as best we can, without provoking any fatal consequences.

Keep 'em laughing, keep 'em amused, but whatever you do, don't overstep the bounds...

Alas, when I get too near the edge, I can always change hats and revert to my cover as an artsy-craftsy garden gnome.

But not just yet, these are the cold dark days of winter and I'm still feeling a tad bit cranky...

;~o

(Stay tuned for 'Looking Back From The Future', Part 3)

In the First Gloaming of the New Year...

2010-01-01T23:25:00.000-08:00

~From Our Deck~

January 1st, 2010 ~ 5:01 p.m.

The Sons of the Pioneers---back in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s---sang of Tumbling Tumbleweeds, Cool Clear Water, and Blue Shadows on Timber Trails, invoking harmonic poetic imagery which defined with great clarity the open prairies and rugged mountains of the Southern California I grew up in.

In several songs they also sang about, "The Gloaming", a term you don't hear much anymore which describes the light of the sky during those brief moments between day and night.

Nowadays we would usually think of that time as dusk, or twilight, but whenever I see a sky like this I am definitely, 'In The Gloaming', and I can hear those sweet cowboy harmonies ringing through eternity.

~A Joyful New Year To All~

Here Comes The Sun...

2009-12-21T05:04:00.000-08:00

Solstice Eve Sunrise

Looking east from the frozen shore of Stanfield Marsh yesterday morning at 6:39.

Peggy and I are heading out with the dogs in a few minutes to see what our world looks like this morning, on the shortest day of the year.

Tomorrow the days begin lengthening again.

Hooray!!!

~HAPPY SOLSTICE~

Looking Back From The Future, Part 2:

2009-12-15T18:35:00.000-08:00

...But The Emperor Has No Clothes.

Yep, that is definitely me---26 years old, stark naked, and in charge of an abandoned bus---while smoking a Camel, with the rest of the pack stuffed in a paper-bag turban on my head!

We are now over 37 years into the future from that moment, in October of 1972, when I made this rather amusing self-portrait.

Amusing to me now---from a decade into the succeeding century---not so much because I was still smoking cigarettes, or because I was starkers, but simply because a poorly executed photograph, recorded while spontaneously clowning around, with no forethought whatsoever, now seems almost prophetic.

I don't remember consciously trying to make a statement about peak oil or a post-petroleum world with this picture. I had merely discovered a derelict old bus at a remote burned-out homestead deep in the Santa Monica Mountains, which seemed like a perfect location for another of my irreverent photographic diatribes on the obvious (to me) consequences of our industrial civilization.

And, characteristically, I made those statements with a thumbing of my nose toward conformity, conventions, and the narrow-minded short-sightedness that I believed brought our culture to that point.

My photographs from the late-middle 20th Century often depicted blighted decaying urban or industrial locations, juxtaposed with naked humans, which I preferred to be women.

To my eyes, the lovely graceful female form lent more impact to the contrast I was attempting to illuminate between us---a single, vulnerable, mammalian species---and the ugly wreckage we were leaving in our wake as we subdued this magnificent planet.

Besides, I was a young male with a lot of lead in my pencil and the perpetuation of life on earth is all about biology, chemistry, pheremones and sexual attraction---just ask the birds, bees, and flowers---so naturally, I was quite taken with the anatomy of the opposite sex, but there wasn't a lady to be found when this picture was made, so you're stuck with me.

Where I lived, in the 1960s and early 1970s, young people spent a good deal of time naked together, outdoors, diving off rocks into secret swimming holes, or body-surfing, sunbathing, and playing volleyball at nude beach hideaways, until the gawkers, perverts, and cops discovered us.

We weren't preparing ourselves for careers, or advancement in the corporate world, we had temporarily escaped the nasty oppressiveness of materialism and competition, and were just living life to the fullest, while we could.

Change was coming though, Alvin Toffler's 'Future Shock' was written in that era, but most of us hadn't read it yet, because we liked it right where we were. Many of us had read Orwell though, and Huxley, so we had a pretty good idea of what was ahead for humanity if our civilization continued along the established path.

So, today, people of that age have their faces stuck to computer screens much of the time, fingers to the keyboard, and ears to the cell-phone, gaming, texting and tweeting in their cyberspace social networks, while constantly being electronically profiled, saturated with personalized corporate come-ons and media-hyped celebrity worship, as they're fed a steady stream of ads reeking with images of luxury, glamour, and "bling bling", that promise to make their lives more fulfilling.

All that's happening right here in the midst of a collapsing civilization now engaged in ceaseless wars over the earth's rapidly dwindling resources!

RETCH!!!

One might ask how I can be so pessimistic about our culture and yet so seemingly optimistic about life and nature?

Well, let's start with my negative outlook on our corporate owned military industrial civilization, because that perspective is the culmination of a 64 year self-guided contemporary history course.

~~~~~~

November 14th of 1945---exactly 100 days after my country dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, instantly incinerating 80,000 men, women, and children---I was yanked from my mother's anesthetized womb with a pair of forceps, slapped on the ass, and had a latex nipple shoved in my mouth so I could suckle a bottle of imitation breast milk until some Doc Frankenstein came along and chopped off my foreskin.

Welcome to Life, in modern America!

I got past that initial shock and started adapting to my new world, learning how to crawl, climb, and walk, in pretty short order, all of which were a big help in enabling my escape. My escape from the bars of the crib, from the playpen, from the four walls and the fenced yard. From the arguing, the bickering, the spankings, and the rules & regulations.

Fortunately for me, in 1949, when I was 4 years old, we moved from the city to the rural farming area of the West San Fernando Valley (now the porn capital of America), and my playtime quickly evolved into outside explorations of the natural world, away from people, in the company of frogs, tortoises, butterflies, birds, flowers, and creeks full of dragonflies & pollywogs.

I was in paradise, for a little while...

...but I was learning to read & write too.

All the while discovering that most activities involving other people were conducted on their terms. Someone puts a pencil in your right hand, saying, this is how it's done, so I would immediately put the pencil in my left hand, because I had my own ideas about things.

Like most kids of those days, I liked to draw, color, and paint the flowers, butterflies, bugs, and all the other magical things I saw in the natural world around me, I just did it left-handed.

Too soon, came the big yellow machines, grading, scraping, and compacting the earth, digging ditches, laying pipe, paving roads, and building houses; hundreds, and thousands, and then tens of thousands of houses. Little boxes all the same, laid out row after row, upon land I had previously shared with tumbleweeds and grazing sheep as I roamed the open prairies, the wheat fields, the vineyards, the orchards, and the rocky crags of the long lost San Fernando Valley I remember so fondly.

In fifteen years it was all gone, paved over with the destruction of progress.

By 1964, a place I loved had vanished into thin air and I was questioning everything people did, I was becoming a critic of my culture.

In school I was taught that this land of ours was once occupied by primitive savages who had to be moved out of the way to facilitate progress and development, and, by the time I was 8 or 9, I wanted to run off and live with those Indians.

Another thing I remember vividly from elementary school is seeing a cheery uplifting film, produced by a paper company, about how companies like theirs were responsibly managing America's forests, selectively cutting trees and carefully replanting, to preserve those forests in perpetuity for us, and all the wildlife which lived there. There was no mention of the clearcutting, the chemical pollutants, or the habitat and watershed destruction we would later associate with that industry.

I remember too being taught that our American democracy was a Beacon of Freedom for the rest of the world, and another specific 'educational film' still sticks in my mind, about our partnership with friendly brown neighbors to the south, in Central America, through which we exchanged their delicious tropical foods for our help in modernizing their countries.

But we didn't hear about Allen and John Foster Dulles, or the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita), or the fact that we were displacing entire populations of indigenous people from their homes and their land so a few businessmen could get rich supplying Americans with bananas, pineapple, and coffee.

And we were clueless too, about the Dulles brothers involvement in the 1953 CIA coup which overthrew Mohammed Mosaddeq, the Western friendly democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, reinstating the Shah Of Iran, an authoritarian oil company friendly dictator, who would reign for the next 26 years, fueling the flames of the radical Islamic Revolution of 1979. That ill-conceived greed-motivated '53 coup was a mistake which would culminate in much of the terrorism we endure today, including the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001.

But something else was being drummed into my head at school---every month when the air-raid sirens went off, and we did our duck & cover drills, cowering under our desks---and that lesson was that the Russians were evil people who wanted to rule the world, and they were very likely going to send nuclear armed missiles to destroy our country.

We had to be prepared...

On several weekends my family actually went out window-shopping for bomb shelters. I clearly recall climbing down into those stuffy claustrophobic oversized tin cans and wondering how long I could stay in there before going crazy, or if the air filter would really keep out the radiation.

I was also taught, in Junior High School---when I was considered old enough to know about such things---that slavery was a tragic scar on American history which had been rectified by the Civil War. But I wasn't told, that, in the South, schools, restaurants, public transportation, restrooms and drinking fountains etc. etc. etc., were still segregated.

Nor was I taught---even though the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified nearly a century earlier, in 1870, giving African Americans the equal right to vote---that the great majority of blacks were still excluded from voting by discriminatory State voting regulations.

None of this was in the textbooks of the 1950s, nor was it spoken of at home, and what little reporting there was on television, or in newspapers, was miniscule, biased, and trivialized.

There were no black people where I lived, in fact there were very few people who weren't as lily-white as me and my family. I had almost no multi-racial/multi-cultural experience until I was in my teens, except for one uncle who was married to a Native-American woman that actually breast-fed her babies right there in front of God and everybody else, including me. I was in awe of her!

Our 1950s world was portrayed to us on television screens, where we shared the life experiences of Lucy & Ricky, Timmy & Lassie, Ozzie & Harriet, Amos & Andy, and the Cleavers; June, Ward, Wally, 'The Beaver', and the neighborhood troublemaker, Eddie Haskell (Boy there's a double entendré innuendo for you, 'Beaver Cleaver').

These light-hearted situation comedies made us feel quite comfortable & cozy about our world of glamorous looking '56 Chevys & '57 Fords and our labor saving washers, dryers, and garbage disposals. It was all brought to us by the good folks from Kellogg (who nourished us with "wholesome" highly processed sugar-laden breakfast cereals), or General Electric (who urged us to "Live Better Electrically"), or DuPont ("Better Living Through Chemistry"), and many other fine upstanding companies.

It all looked so nice on the little black & white TV screen, while, behind the scenes, General Electric was contaminating our world with PCBs, DuPont was producing DDT (which very nearly sent Bald Eagles, Pelicans, and many other bird species to extinction), and Kellogg was morphing into part of the Frankenfood industry which today makes consumer products (I can't call it food) contaminated with GMOs, "not approved for human consumption".

Around that same time, our government was conducting experiments in biological warfare, and it was revealed---in the mainstream media many years afterwards---that my hometown, Reseda (once voted one of the 10 best places in America to raise a family), was among many other towns in the San Fernando Valley which were subjected to that experiment. We were unknowingly bombarded with mild cold or flu virus germs, released from airplanes, to test the effectiveness of spreading airborne viruses for military purposes.

I didn't know all of this at the time, but I was becoming aware enough of the real world around me to realize that much, if not most, of what was being spoonfed to me by my culture was a big stinking pile of pure unadulterated bullshit!

At this point, I not only questioned authority, I came to see our authority figures and experts as contemptible charlatans, nobody was speaking the truth!

Around 1955 or '56, we started hearing about some greasy rebellious singing hoodlum called, Elvis Presley, or 'Elvis the Pelvis' as he was known after his Milton Berle Show appearance. He was a big sensation, but not allowed to be viewed or listened to in our house, because he sang "jigaboo music" and gyrated his hips like a sex maniac!

I immediately sought out his records!

Another considerable influence on my own rapidly developing distrust and sense of rebellion was the reality of my parents divorcing when I was 12, and my diabetic father proceeding to drink himself to death by the time I was 15, in 1961.

He was 36 years old.

Then, just eight days after my 18th birthday, in 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. Four and a half years later, Martin Luther King Jr. met the same fate, and two months after that, JFK's brother, Robert, was also killed.

By this point in time, me, and a sizable chunk of my generation had already turned on, tuned in, and dropped out!

When I made the photo above all of this ancient history was less than 10 years behind us, as fresh in my mind then as 9/11 is today.

Nixon was in the second term of his presidency, a few months away from being impeached over Watergate. He had just removed the dollar from the gold standard because America was too deep in debt from the Viet Nam War to be able to pay off our foreign obligations in gold.

The war was raging full-steam as draft-age American kids rioted in the streets, and four students at Kent State University had been gunned down by our own National Guard during an anti-war demonstration just a couple of years earlier, in May of 1970.

1970 was the same year America reached Peak Oil production (exactly on schedule with Marion King Hubbert's much ridiculed 1956 prediction), which received very little press in light of everything else that was going on in the country, I don't even remember hearing about it at the time.

Then, precisely one year after the above photograph was made, in October of 1973, the Arab members of OPEC, along with Egypt and Syria, began an oil embargo against the United States (related to American support of Israel), driving gasoline prices up something like 400% and creating fuel shortages, long lines, and gas rationing all across the country.

The embargo lasted 5 months and life in America would be changed forever...

"The 1973 oil price shock and the resulting 1973-74 stock market crash are said to be the first events since the Great Depression to have a persistant economic effect" (from Wikipedia).

Inflation (or stagflation---high prices and a stagnating economy), tied to rising energy costs, was the bane of the 1970s and early '80s.

That got people's attention, and cash-strapped Americans began buying inexpensive, fuel-efficient, foreign-built compact cars in large numbers, causing considerable consternation to the Big Three domestic automakers. GM, Ford, and Chrysler cried foul play and demanded government intervention which eventually resulted in import quotas on Japanese cars.

Buy American backlash gripped the country and budget-minded fuel-conserving owners of foreign cars (like me) were labled as traitors by some of our more over-zealous patriots.

The roots of road rage had been sewn...

It was also becoming quite obvious that American manufacturers couldn't compete with the cheap labor markets we had long exploited once these developing countries had their own modern industrial economies in place. So we began exporting our technology, and our jobs, leaving once thriving factories and towns to decay into the poverty-stricken rust-belt wastelands they are today.

One solution to the rising oil prices was the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, completed in 1977, 4 years after the Arab Oil Embargo. The pipeline, over the past 32 years, has conveyed a total of 16 billion barrels of oil from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, Alaska, enough to supply America for about 26 months, and the Prudhoe Bay reserves are now in steep decline.

In 1989 the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of that oil into Prince William Sound, killing between 250,000 and 500,000 seabirds, 1,000 Sea Otters, 300 Harbor Seals, 250 Bald Eagles, 22 Orcas, 12 river otters, and billions of salmon and herring eggs, not to mention the ruination of a pristine ecosystem.

Are Americans willing to accept that scale of environmental destruction for 26 months worth of oil (or maybe 52 months by the time the wells are dry)? Apparently so!

Over the past 37 years, since this picture was taken, we've endured no less than 6 recessions and a sober look into the causes reveals that oil prices played a central role in each of them.

Petroleum is the trump card upon which our entire economy is founded and the myriad of intertwined vested interests who speculate (gamble) in a stock market based on artificial currency can be brought down in minutes by any hint of instability.

And our economic house-of-cards is anything but stable...

Economic pressures, tied to energy prices and inflation, drove reactionary California voters, on June 6th, 1978, to pass Proposition 13 (the Jarvis Tax Amendment) which virtually destroyed the State's economy and infrastructure, including our school systems, police, and fire departments. California's education system went from being among the top 5 in the nation to among the bottom 10 in very short order. And the tax burden of my parents generation (who benefitted greatly from the property value gains they accrued during the inflationary years) was simply transferred, in multiples, to the shoulders of my generation who were also paying highly inflated interest on our mortgages.

In the early 1980s, during Ronald Reagan's deregulation years (America's most cherished president), we descended from the world's largest creditor nation to a debtor nation, and by 2006 we would be the world's largest debtor nation.

So the redistribution of wealth, from the working-class to the upper-class---once so skillfully manipulated by the robber-barons of the late 1800s & early 1900s---was reborn and supersized, as was the the political polarization between the rich and the poor, and between 'so-called' conservatives & liberals (so-called because the conservatives don't conserve & the liberals don't liberate).

In times of economic crises, when upward mobility is out of reach of the average person and resources are scarce and expensive, the ultra-rich and powerful quickly expand their holdings to become even more so. Today, as during the Great Depression, surviving companies are in a feeding-frenzy over the corpses of their former competitors, buying them up as fast as they can (often with taxpayer dollars).

Consequently, you might notice, the market for exotic super-high-dollar luxury cars is booming right now, while the rest of the industry is either bankrupt or teetering on the edge.

As of 2005, out of 30 industrialized countries studied, the U.S. had the 3rd highest inequality and poverty rate, with Mexico at number 2 and Turkey at number 1.

As billionaires increase in numbers, and corporations become bigger and more powerful, that power is used to exert more control over the governments of the world by demanding less regulatory oversight, which leads to more social and environmental irresponsibiliy, and less accountability.

Over these past 37 years we've also witnessed countless corporate caused disasters of unprecedented magnitude, such as industrial accidents, oil spills, toxic waste spills, and economic meltdowns.

Details of many of these tragedies are engraved in my memory and they're also readily accessible on the internet for anyone who cares to educate themselves about the hard realities of our civilization.

There's no need for me to repeat all the gruesome details here, but I will post links to a few of them in case someone is interested in a refresher course.

1978 The Italian Dioxin Crises (Roche)

1978 Love Canal (Hooker Chemical/Occidental Petroleum)

1978 AMOCO Cadiz Oil Spill (AMOCO)

1979 Three Mile Island (Metropolitan Edison-Babcock & Wilcox)

1984 Bhopal Disaster (Union Carbide)

1985 Savings & Loan Crisis (deregulation)

1986 Chernobyl (regulatory failure)

1986 BSE Crisis-Mad Cow Disease (regulatory failure)

1988 Piper Alpha Platform Explosion (Occidental Petroleum)

1989 Lincoln Savings Bankruptcy (Charles Keating/Keating 5)

1989 Junk Bond Scandal - (Michael Milken)

2000 Dot-Com Bubble (venture capital speculation)

2001 Enron Bankruptcy (Kenneth Lay - accounting fraud)

2008 The U.S. Housing Bubble & Subprime Mortgage Crisis (deregulation)

2009 Bernie Madoff Securities Fraud (regulatory failure)

2009 General Motors & Chrysler Bankruptcies ("The Great Recession")

OK, so those are just a sampling of the most memorable anthropogenic calamities of the past several decades, and they truly only hint at the destructive chaos reverberating exponentially throughout our economies, our ecosystems, and our civilization as a whole.

The cost of all this to our society in economic terms is staggering and our descendents will be paying for our stupidity for generations to come.

But the real tragedy is the destruction we're wreaking upon the living diversity of this planet. 20% of mammal species, and 25% of bird species are expected to be extinct before the end of the century. Many of the worlds fisheries have already crashed and many more are on the brink. Our air and water is polluted, even in the most remote parts of the world, and our climate is warming, melting the polar ice, and raising sea levels.

All of this is being hastened by a single species which has lost its bearings and no longer has the capability of living sustainably upon the planet it evolved from, and with.

It should be easy to hate such a selfish and destructive species, but I can only find empathy and compassion in my heart for my fellow humans.

I can see that, as a civilization, we are quite helpless at this point to reverse the momentum (or even slow it significantly) that is leading us toward collapse and die-off. A hundred years from now our population, as well as the plentiful bounty we inherited, will have been severely decimated.

I have instinctively felt this my entire adult life and nothing I've witnessed in 64 years has done anything but intensify that feeling.

Nevertheless, I can't live a life dominated by doom & gloom, people want to enjoy their lives, and I'm no exception.

Like everyone else I need to experience happiness and joy in my heart, to know beauty and love.

After a very difficult adolescence, trying to come to terms with the awful mess the world was in, I turned back to nature, to pollywogs, butterflies, and banana slugs, where I rediscovered the beauty I desperately needed to survive amidst the ugliness of my civilization.

Once I immersed myself in the natural beauty around me again, for the first time since childhood, I also began encountering thoughtful sensitive human beings, mostly through their writings or conservation work, kindred souls who share my love of the natural world and abhor its destruction.

Now, all those shining lights among my species are too numerous to list here, but I want to acknowledge the ones that stand out right this moment.

First and Foremost

~ Bob Dylan ~

Because the bard of my generation long ago refreshed my ability to listen and to think, and he still does!

And then there's

John Muir

John Lennon (Imagine)

Edward Abbey

Henry David Thoreau

Gandhi

Rachel Carson

Aldo Leopold

Dave Foreman

John Burroughs

Gary Paul Nabham

E. O. Wilson

William R. Catton

Charles Darwin

Arne Naess

Wendell Berry

Alexander Von Humboldt

David James Duncan

Charles Francis Saunders

Bill Devall

David Quammen

Stephanie Mills

George Sessions

David W. Orr

Paul Shepard

Barry Lopez

Richard Heinberg

Gary Snyder

Peter Matthiessen

John Michael Greer

Without these voices, and so very many others, my spirit would've perished many years ago and surely taken my body with it.

They helped restore my faith in humanity and expanded my capacity for love and compassion.

Wild Nature, and lover's of the wild & natural, are the most inspiring companions I've found during my continuing journey through parts of two centuries.

And my empathy for all concerned stems from the realization that we're all victims trapped in the same out of control vehicle.

A civilization is simply a vehicle created to get you from one place to another, from yesterday to tomorrow, so to speak. A few civilizations have traveled several millenium before running out of gas, and a few very old ones haven't perished yet.

Today's industrial civilization burst upon the scene barely 250 years ago, as we began taking advantage of the energy available in refined coal, one of our most abundant fossil fuels. But things didn't really get rolling for another century when Colonel Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in the United States, in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, exactly 150 years ago.

I'm 64, and have witnessed unimaginable changes during my life, and I remember much of it as if it were yesterday. If you simply double my current lifespan, you get 128 years, add another 22 years and we're back to the dawn of the Petroleum Age.

Basically, the day before yesterday on the scale of human history, or a fraction of a second in geological time.

During that blink of an eye, by best estimates, we've used up about half the oil available to us, oil that was millions upon millions of years in the making, and the half we've used was the stuff that was easy to procure, thus cheap to produce.

Modern civilization is completely dependent upon the kind of growth enabled by that cheap abundant energy source, it's how Capitalism and the economic myth of unlimited growth came into dominance.

Planet Earth now harbors more than 6.5 billion souls whose survival requires the perpetuation of an obsolete system on the brink of collapse.

We are always led to believe, by those who make lofty political promises, by those who can afford to make glitzy media presentations, by those who want to sell us something, that our future is rosy if we'll just knuckle down long enough to get over the current hump.

Well, we're at the apex of a hump now alright, and ironically, it very much resembles the hump of that Arabian Dromedary Camel on the cigarette pack in my turban. Our hump is known in peak oil circles as the Hubbert's Peak Bell Curve, and we are about to slide down the slippery slope of its backside, and things don't look so rosy.

World oil production has recently peaked (see chart), 39 years after America reached peak oil production in 1970.

Our civilization, the vehicle we are currently traveling within, is steered by emperors who would have us believe that we ride a magic bus, exempt from the laws of nature or any limits to growth.

But the truth of the matter is, our magic bus is just a broken down heap, headed for the junkyard, and the emperor has no clothes once again.

Journal entry

December 15, 2009

Looking Back From The Future, Part 1:

2009-12-12T08:34:00.001-08:00

A Cargo Cult Shrine...

...to the Myth of Unlimited Fossil Fuels.

As oil became scarce and expensive, toward the end of the brief but fantastic 200 year Petroleum Age, people built shrines to the oil and automobile culture, continuing to drive their gas-guzzlers in the belief that some new technology would soon produce a cheap replacement for the once abundant fossil fuels which made such extravagance possible.

Unfortunately, they were wrong...

The historical photograph above was made at an actual working tire and wheel store, in one of the 10 most affluent well-educated counties in America, during the early years of the 21st Century.

Such folly seems unimaginable today as those of us who remain scavenge the grotesque ruins of that addictively consumptive oil-addled civilization for tools and materials to help make our humble lives of meager subsistence a bit easier.

But even now, scattered on the fringes of crumbling cities, there are deeply religious and highly volatile cargo cults who maintain vigils and conduct Sunday Prayer Services in ancient Gasoline Station Temples (This custom is rooted in practices beginning as early as 2008, as archived here and here).

Devotees can sometimes keep electric lights on, during sunny days, with scavenged jury-rigged solar panels and the few, dim but priceless, still working LED bulbs they've managed to scrounge.

These poor souls will explain to you, with a desperate distant gleam in their eyes, that they must keep the places "open for business" as much as possible because nobody knows for sure when the big tanker will return to fill their underground reservoirs again.

Twice a year, in late December and early April, you'll see hundreds of the devout, chanting and singing, as they make their sacred pilgrimages to distant rusted out refineries, or long dead oilfields, where they burn effigies of M. King Hubbert.

It's a pitiful and somewhat scary experience to encounter these fanatical groups who cling so mindlessly to obsolete mythologies.

But don't ever ridicule or make fun of their beliefs and rituals, they are known to become violent when confronted with conflicting viewpoints.

Anonymous journal entry

December 12, 2163

Quote Of The Day, from Copenhagen...

2009-12-11T06:13:00.000-08:00

To the United States Congress:

"You Approve billions of dollars in defense budgets. Can't you approve $200 billion to save the world?"

Lumumba D-Aping, Copenhagen Climate Summit negotiator for the G-77.

Say it like it is brother, there's no money for Peace, Love, or Health Care, but there's plenty for war and corporate bailouts!

And here's a quote from me:

"Halliburton, Leading The World In War Profiteering".

Dick Cheney's Halliburton is now a Dubai corporation, they moved there to avoid paying taxes in the U.S., the country that made them filthy stinking rich...

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?

That question comes to mind because we are so close to Christmas, a day of reverence and worship for the world's Christians, and Capitalists (ohhh, the irony).

And, I know what he would do, he'd be crucified for his advocacy of throwing the money-changers out of the temple.

Another quote from me:

"The Earth Is Our Temple, and Today, We Are The Money-Changers".

~PEACE~

My Best Eagle Photograph, or...

2009-12-06T08:31:00.000-08:00

This magnificent American Bald Eagle is a resident of the Moonridge Animal Park here in Big Bear. The eagle has been injured, is blind in its right eye, and can no longer survive in the wild.

My original photo has the plywood ceiling of the eagle enclosure as a background. I replaced that background with the actual color of a Big Bear sky from one of my other photos because I couldn't bear to continually look at such a gorgeous creature in captivity. So, I set the eagle free, at least in the Spirit of a Photograph.

It took me more than 5 hours of working in Photoshop, pixel by pixel, to redefine the feathered edges of the bird to my satisfaction, a chilly afternoon well spent if you ask me.

The original photo was made on the same August day in 2007 as the Turkey Vulture photo below, these birds are next door neighbors. The sky color was taken from the Red-Tailed Hawk photo below the Turkey Vulture.

Will You Still Need Me...

2009-11-14T05:11:00.000-08:00

The Beatles asked us that question 42 years ago, when I was all of 22, and I can remember trying to envision any of us at the ancient age of 64.

Well, here I am, now an official member of the Old Buzzard Club, by Beatle standards anyway, and I don't have to imagine anymore, I can just look in the mirror at the reality of it all!

As for the answer to their question, I may be in luck. Peggy still says she needs me and I smell something good cooking down in the kitchen, which means I may be getting fed in a few minutes!

I'm feeling very fortunate today, half of the Beatles never made it to 64, and yet I'm getting ready to take a nice morning walk along the lake with my dear wife, Peg, and my sweet dog Dallas.

Plans for the rest of the day include making an apple pie together with some of the bucket full of apples a neighbor gave us off her tree. We're visiting with my old, old buddy, Charlie Melton (50 years as pals now), who came to celebrate the occasion with me, and tonight, the three of us are going out dancing to the great blues music of our friend Jimmy Reid.

I was officially sixty-four at exactly 5:11 A.M., just about the time I started putting this post together.

The Turkey Vulture photo was taken by me at the Moonridge Animal Park, here in Big Bear, in August, 2007. The animals at the park have been injured, or can no longer survive in the wild, for one reason or another, and this handsome ol' buzzard is one of the inhabitants there.

Red-Tailed Hawk

2009-11-02T10:50:00.000-08:00

Monday morning, during our walk along the shore of Stanfield Marsh, Peggy and I were privileged to catch this Red-Tailed Hawk on the dead tree where I've also photographed a Bald Eagle now & again. I've seen this bird here a few other times in the past couple of weeks but this is the best photo I've been able to get.

2009-10-31T00:00:00.000-07:00

All Hallows Eve...

Goodbye Farmer's Market...

2009-10-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

...until next year

Click on photos to enlarge © 2009 jim otterstrom

Yesterday was the final Tuesday for our Farmer's Market this season and the vendors won't be back up here until next Spring. We'll miss having this weekly produce market just a block and a half from our front door.

Our garden is done for the year too...
...goodbye sweet summer.

C'est la vie!

A Drizzly Fall Morning...

2009-10-14T11:53:00.000-07:00

...brings beauty to the eyes of beholders

Our morning trek began later than usual today because we needed to go to the bank and Post Office after they opened at 9 A.M. It rained lightly yesterday afternoon, and all through the night, letting up this morning as we made our way into town under a sky of broken clouds and rainbows.

As we walked along the sidewalk, approaching the signal light at the entrance to the Interlaken Shopping Center, where the bank, the Post Office, and Von's Supermarket are located, I happened to notice this leaf lying on the concrete.

Yes, it's just one fallen leaf clothed in raindrops, but it's the one, of thousands, that caught my eye and the diffused light made for a very nice image.

Shot with our Canon S10IS in Manual/SuperMacro mode, ISO 80, f 8, at 125th second. As recorded by the camera - not cropped.

Anniversary...

2009-09-16T09:54:00.000-07:00

Peg and I are celebrating our 30th Anniversary today.

And just how are we celebrating it?

By immersing ourselves in the common everyday beauty of our simple fragile lives, by taking an early morning walk with our beloved Dallas, and, by sharing a delicious home-cooked breakfast together out on the junk-shop patio before we get back to work painting the house and cleaning up the yard in preparation for winter...

To live a life of voluntary simplicity, "Simple in Means, but Rich in Ends", to borrow a phrase from the Deep Ecology movement, has been our goal for many years, and our commitment to that ideal strengthens with each passing day.

Extravagance and consumerism are not habits either of us find attractive, sustainable, or rewarding, but we did purchase a gift for ourselves which is in harmony with what we've accomplished thus far in our lifestyle changes.

Peggy has been researching Haybox Cooking and I've decided to build one for us in the very near future. So we bought ourselves a new Lodge cast iron 5 quart Dutch Oven (regularly $43.99, on sale for $26.99, with free shipping) which will be ideal for use with a Haybox.

Thirty Years...

...and you got Peggy a dutch oven???

Exactlioto Quasimoto, Peggy is the frugal one in our household, and I would've been in hot water had I gone out and squandered a wad of money on some lavish gift. Peggy is extremely down to earth and I really love that about her.

Remember, it was her idea to get rid of the car almost 13 years ago.

Thank goodness, because I wouldn't be the least bit interested in, or compatible with, a 'Material Girl'.

And tonight, after the day's work is finished, we'll be enjoying a nice hot bath together, a little massage, and then, who knows???

;~)

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY PEGGY SUE!!!

AND THANK YOU FOR ALL THE PRECIOUS YEARS YOU'VE SHARED WITH ME...

...another anniversary gift

Shortly before 7 A.M., during our walk this morning, three Great Blue Herons were congregating near the footbridge, two of them sitting on the railing. As we approached I was taking pictures and two of the giant birds flew off before I was close enough for a good shot. But this one here allowed me to get within 12 feet or so, staying there for a good long time while I snapped pictures and Peggy & Dallas looked on.

It's rare for a heron in the wild to allow a human to get this close, let alone two humans with a big black dog.

A gift indeed!!!

Painting The House...

2009-09-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

The past several days we've been prepping and painting the house in between our other activities around here. We're hoping to have the whole thing done before the weather turns on us.

It was 25° F on our back porch this morning, but the tomatoes, eggplant & squash are doing fine in the greenhouse thus far, and the vegetables growing outside are relatively cold tolerant.

Yesterday's Tomatoes...

2009-09-08T07:44:00.000-07:00

Home Grown & Vine-Ripened

We got a late start on our tomatoes this year but they're coming on strong now. These were all started from seed by Peggy, and the varieties shown are Super Sweet 100, Yellow Pear, and Early Girl. We have several other varieties too including a couple of heirlooms, Black Krim, and Cherokee Purple, which should be ripening very soon.

It's starting to cool off here now but the tomatoes are all in the greenhouse and should be fine, at least through September.

The beautiful weaving under the bowl of tomatoes is one of a pair of chenille placemats woven for us by our friend Judyl (see Santa Barbara trip here) on her loom.

Whimsical Nostalgia Junk Chimes...

2009-09-06T08:09:00.000-07:00

Tinkering around in my nearly completed junk-shop I was inspired to put together these wind chimes from more of my junk collection.

While removing an old hole saw from my electric drill recently I bumped the edge of the blade into something noticing that it rang out with a beautiful clear tone.

I have dozens of these old saws, of various sizes, rusting away in a box, so I had a great time digging them out and clanging 'em all together to hear their various tones, thus the idea for this wind chime was born.

For the following week or so Peggy and I were picking up every picturesque tin-can & lid we saw lying by the roadside and she also found the lovely bit of barbed wire & the old spring hanging there.

I went through our collection of beach glass from a vacation with the kids in Fort Bragg over two decades ago, finding the shell, a bottle neck, and some old ceramic pieces from electrical devices.

I strung a bunch of old dog tags, from our dear-departed pets of the past, together on a chain, an old metal California license plate tag from the year of Peggy's birth, and old brass Post Office registry cage chit, with the number 14 on it, the day of the month on which I was born.

There's an old pocket watch cover with my initials, a gift from Peg on our 10th Anniversary, which I used daily until the cover broke off (we're celebrating our 30th in 10 days).

Add some glass beads, a few old reflectors, some spinners from the tackle box, and some rusty old bailing wire, and there you have it.

I did buy some thin steel cable to suspend the whole mess from the beaded rack of manzanita wood at the top (see picture below).

I looped the cables through a pair of holes in each saw, fastening them together with aluminum cable ferrules. Suspending the hole saws in that manner allows them to ring without the tone being deadened.

The wind chimes now hang over the table on our beer garden patio, gently swaying in the breeze to play their soft clear song.

Rust never does sleep, especially around our place.

Tool-Shed/Workshop/Studio/Beer-Garden Nearing Completion

2009-09-02T09:46:00.000-07:00

Front Entrance & West Facing Beer Garden Patio

All summer long we've been enjoying our meals out here on this cozy little patio decorated with the recycled artifacts of the lost (Mid-Twentieth Century) civilization I grew up in.

I just finished siding the north and south walls of the shed, the day before yesterday, then painted the recycled window olive drab.

The siding on these walls all comes from four 10 foot long sections of weathered picket fence we salvaged from a neighbor several years ago when he replaced it with chain link. I still have three more 10 foot sections for some future project.

This beautiful wood was either going to be kindling for a fireplace or would've ended up at the county landfill.

The big window came from an old lodge up here that was being remodeled some decades ago and fitted with new windows. I got several of them free of charge, just for hauling 'em away, and they've been used here over the years as tomato hot-houses and even a temporary home for baby chicks once. I have at least two more of these I'm saving for a garden potting-shed.

On this wall I staggered the old fence pickets randomly, using as many of the original nail holes as possible and then drilling new holes where they were needed.

The very old marble-reflector porcelain-on-steel DETOUR sign was given to me by a friend & neighbor some years ago.

As you might guess, I spend a lot of time out here now tinkering around with my various hobbies & crafts. Again, most everything here was built from scrap, salvaged wood, or recycled junk. The 'carvings' at each side of the window are from an old piece of junk furniture we dismantled (I have 3 more of them too).

The workbench and ceiling are from salvaged wood, and the wall around the window is covered with empty seed packets used in our vegetable garden, which I adhered to the wall then tinted with amber shellac. The trim by the ceiling is recycled wiggle-board.

The small stained-glass windows hanging there were the first two windows I made, for a stained-glass class I took way back in the early 1970s. The tulip design was made from a very simple beginner's pattern.

As some of you may be aware, we have several friends who get together now and then to enjoy the many delicious craft beers being brewed these days, so, just for fun, I decorated the back wall of the shed with nearly 100 different beer carton graphics, giving them the same amber shellacked finish as the seed packets.

These are the actual cardboard six-pack (or four-pack) cartons which I cut out and pieced together one by one. They were mostly donated to me by my beer drinking buddies, Bill and Denny (thanks guys), but I've had just about every one of these beers over the years. Ohhhh, and so many more!

They make an appropriate addition to the workshop considering that the adjoining patio is the beer garden which will be served by the tap in the front wall, starting on September 27th, when we will be christening the joint with keg of good beer and a shrimp-kabob barbecue.

Peggy took this shot of me in the studio about 8:45 this morning, a quite common sight around here now.

I have a just little more work to do inside, finishing up trim on the interior west wall.

Click here, here, & here, to see older posts of the beginning and evolution of the project...

Afternoon Pickin's

2009-08-25T16:14:00.001-07:00

Very Fresh Organic Food

Some of this fresh-picked organically home-grown food will be on our dinner plates in a matter of minutes. We're having broiled tuna (our friends Mark & Deb caught it) with salad tonight, poached eggs on toast for breakfast tomorrow, and something with eggplant for either lunch or dinner tomorrow.

Unfortunately, you can't see the abundant variety of salad greens in that basket because I kind of buried them under the other stuff.

The Greenhouse Today...

2009-08-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

Eggplant, Tomatoes, & Yellow Crookneck

In the greenhouse today we have several dozen Japanese Eggplant ripening on the vine, a bunch of Yellow Crookneck Squash, and hundreds of Tomatoes just beginning to ripen.

Our Saturday Lunch

2009-08-15T14:24:00.000-07:00

Lunch yesterday was a veggie sandwich consisting of healthy-sauteéd' (in vegetable broth) Portobello Mushrooms with Japanese Eggplant & onions, on a bed of Romaine Lettuce & fresh cucumber slabs, under sliced tomato & Mung Bean sprouts, all stacked between two slices of Food For Life 100% Whole Grain Ezekiel 4:9 Flourless Bread, lathered on one side with home-made hummus, and on the other, with Follow Your Heart Grapeseed Oil Vegenaise.

We create variations on this theme several days a week, sometimes with avocado and a slice of cheddar, but always making a superb tasting sandwich!

By my best reckoning, this absolutely cholesterol free sandwich, including the hummus and Vegenaise, provides about 290 calories, maybe 75 of them from fat (derived mostly from healthful essential fatty acids). But that's not the reason to eat this thing, the reason is because it tastes so danged good!!!

While I'm on the subject of food, I should, once again, recommend our bible on healthy eating, 'The World's Healthiest Foods', by George Mateljan.

880 pages of comprehensive and invaluable information on the world's hundred most healthful (commonly available) foods, including nutrient richness charts (based on nutrient density per calorie), exhaustive nutritional analysis charts, detailed explanations of why each of the foods is good for you, and, the most healthful ways to store, prepare, and cook them.

~Includes 500 delicious recipes~

(Incidently, the sandwich above is not one of the recipes, but the ingredients are among the Hundred Healthiest Foods, and the method of healthy sauteéing the eggplant, mushrooms, and onions is right out of the book.)

This huge book is the product of 10 years of research by Mateljan and a team of nutritional scientists, and it's a virtual steal at around $25.

If you're interested in this book you can order it directly from http://www.whfoods.com/ or buy new & used copies through our Amazon.com book link in the sidebar to the right.

Alpine Pedal-Path Morning---Slightly Smoky

2009-08-15T11:54:00.000-07:00

~Wildfire Smoke from Upstate~

For the past couple of mornings smoke has been blowing into the valley from the wildfires burning in the more northern parts of the state, near Santa Cruz, and Santa Maria, to name a couple of them.

We started off this morning intending to ride around the lake but breathing the smoke at our end of the lake (east) was already bothering us a bit, and when we saw how thick it was on the west side, over the dam and Fawnskin, we decided to alter our plan and ride the Alpine Pedal-Path along the North shore instead.

So, our near 20 mile planned ride turned out to be somewhere between 10 & 15 miles instead, but still very enjoyable, as you will see.

~Sagebrush Delight~

It seems that everything has it's benefits, the smoke from the fires made for a gently-muted light this morning, almost as if I had a light-diffusing color-saturating filter on my camera.

A Meadow Along The Bike Path
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

We stopped for awhile by a little stream to contemplate the soft loveliness of a smoke-tinged light falling on this meadow, all the time acutely aware that the sources of this very smoke are causing great anxiety in other parts of California ( and I hope our friends in those parts are out of harms way).

Ancient Juniper - A Veteran Of Many Wildfires
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

This Western Juniper (Juniperus occidentalis) along the bike path is probably somewhere between 500 to 1,000 years old, and possibly older, which means it has lived through many, many wildfires during its life, and, as raggedy as it looks at the base, it's still very much alive. One tough old tree!

Enjoy your day...

Monarch Butterfly on Narrow-Leaf Milkweed

2009-08-14T09:18:00.000-07:00

Milkweed is the host plant for the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Here a male Monarch feeds on one of three Narrow-Leaf Milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis) growing in our garden.

Cabernet, with Blues, in the Afternoon...

2009-08-13T15:08:00.000-07:00

Afternoon sunlight filters through my glass of Cabernet Sauvignon as J.J. Cale plays his beautiful blues instrumental, 'Shades'. What is mellow?

;~)

Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life...

2009-08-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

...How Did You Begin Yours?

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

Peggy and I have been sleeping on the deck, outside, under the stars, for the past few weeks. We wake up about 5 A.M. and have been alternating between long morning walks and bike rides around the lake.

This morning we left the house on our bikes, at 5:45, and found another beautiful sky waiting for us. We could see rain in the distance ahead of us so I stopped at Von's deli and asked for a plastic bag to put my camera in, just in case.

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

In the enlarged picture you can see rain falling over to the west of us, and, as we got over near Boulder Bay, the roads were wet but the rain had moved out ahead of us.

You may also notice a rainbow coming down through the clouds in the right side of the photo. It appears to be touching down near the Serrano Campground on the north shore, near the solar observatory, and sure enough, when we got over to the bike path that runs through the campground the ground was still wet.

Boulder Bay

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

As we rolled west the clouds moved to the horizon and blues skies opened above us.

Near The Dam, Looking Southeast
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

Shortly after crossing the dam, and heading back eastward toward home, we stopped for a water break at this overlook.

A Couple Of Hours Later...
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom
Tuesday is the day our local little Farmer's Market sets up shop, just 2 blocks from our house, so after our ride we leashed up Dallas and headed over to pick up some fresh produce.

Click on photos to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

All this fun and we were home before 9 A.M. looking forward to working in our own gardens.

~We Hope You Are Enjoying Your Day~

Peace & Love
Jim & Peg

Good Morning from Big Bear...

2009-08-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

Four Photos From This Morning's Walk

Click on photos to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

The pictures speak for themselves, a sunrise walk to remember, bathed in gorgeous light.