Great description From a Twilight Zone radio episode: She lived every hour of her life as if she was perpetually late for a dentist appointment.  ¶ 5:01 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Peanut (and pecan) sheller Bill and I helped Roey, one of the fellows working on the Malian Peanut Sheller project, pour concrete for a sheller at the biofuels coop about a week ago.

By 'helped', I hope it is understood that we stood around asking an endless series of questions while we watched Roey do most of the work :) It was great, though; I love concrete, I love agriculture, I love the idea of increasing capacity with simple tools, and I assume I will love Africa when I get there sometime. Oh, and I love hanging out with Bill doing interesting things like learning how to make peanut shellers :)

The pictures might be confusing because there are actually two molds, one for each part of the sheller. But you'll get some idea of how it went anyway.

In the first picture, Bill and Roey are 'greasing' (actually 'buttering' because that was the only solid grease we had easily at hand) the mold for the sheller.



Then, Roey put the pieces of the mold together



And we took turns mixing concrete



Then the 'crete was poured into the mold

  ¶ 2:09 PM 2 Comments Links to this post

  Fingertips

I thought it would be fun to have 'prosthetic nails', so I had them installed right after Christmas. Now I can induldge my occasional whim for nail-painting without having to worry about my squishy-soft nails buckling and ruining the paint. They are strong! Took me a while to figure out how to open a can of cola, though :) For about two weeks afterward (and continuing to some extent even now) I developed an obsession with tapping my nails on every different type of surface to see what it sounded like. Weird, yes.

These pics are actually the same shade, taken in natural light and indoors. Grainy cellphone-pics, but still interesting how different the shade looks in different light.  ¶ 1:28 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Co-conspirators

A couple of pictures of me with two fellow Libertarian activists - Phil Jacobson, who is chair of the LPNC, and Tom Bailey, who has his own Wikipedia entry, and is the only person I have ever met 'online' who looked exactly like I expected him to when I first met him in person. Phil and I had been at some meeting Sunday morning (and thanks for the pastry, Lee!), and dropped in on Tom to say hi (and so I could take a test ride on his new bike). The first pic was taken with my (new) cellphone camera (which, I discovered, actually has a timer), and the second with my 'real' camera.

Don't we absolutely look like we're about to go bomb a federal building or something? In fact we were conducting a tour of Tom's poultry yard. I really want to keep some hens for eggs, but then we'd have to decide on what to do once they stop laying. Bill's not really big on eating things he knows personally.  ¶ 8:01 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Dramatic pictures of undramatic places


While visiting Maryland at Christmas, I took some pictures around my sister's house after a rain in the late afternoon. There was this fantastic rainbow right over the farm where she works, which is right across the road from her house. The rainbow pics came out OK (the farm owners certainly loved them and used one for an advertisement), but the really weirdly dramatic one is the pic of mucky-wet cornfield right behind the house. When the light is weird around those winter evenings, things can look totally alien. I included a pic of the house next door (with a bit of rainbow) just to show how utterly different lighting can be in two pics taken at the same place and time. Well, and because I love the countryside there even in winter (it's very near to where I grew up). The girl in the rainbow-pic is one of my neices. We were all going photo-crazy - it really was a beautiful afternoon moment.  ¶ 7:34 PM 0 Comments Links to this post