Hunker Down Diary – 27apr20

George Rebane

Today is HD51 for the Rebanes.  As most people, we have been doing extensive Facetime with family and friends, and Zooming in for meetings.  We also meet surreptitiously for dinners with equally hunkered family and friends. The rest of the time is taken up with household chores and deskwork.  RR readers know what I’ve been noodling about.  Jo Ann has been busy with her Republican Women Federated, NC Republican Central Committee,  and Union editorial board work.  My labors on the boards of MIM and SESF have been minimal since the C19 lockdown.  And now that the weather guessers are predicting warm weather going forward as far as the eye can see, it’s time to get the farm going and the horseshoe court spiffed up for competition.

We are also participating in weekly online cocktail sessions with other couples.  These have turned out to be more fun than we anticipated, and all of us look forward to the next week’s happy hours.  So all in all, social life continues along newly created paths.  We always have a fire going during the evenings which are divided into TV nights and reading nights.  The TV fare is all prerecorded stuff of various series, new/commentary programs, movies, and documentaries.  (Years ago, we pretty much weaned ourselves off of live broadcasts, everything gets put on the DVR – we pace the presentations, they don’t pace us.  I suppose everyone now does that so it’s hard to see why advertisers still pay to advertise, unless some people still watch live TV.)

Today we had to make a trip into town for bags of soil and sand – soil for Jo Ann’s farm and sand for refurbishing my world-class horseshoe court.  She gets the best manmade soil you can buy which contains all the nummies that her veggies want, including 15% chickenshit.  Long ago we decided not to run the numbers on the actual cost of our vegetables – we’re not in competition with Safeway, but they are with us.  It has turned out to be a labor of love and the pure joy of eating loads of home-grown veggies.  We even enjoy the late night hunts for tomato worms with our UV flashlight.

But my big report of the day is that regardless of what our out-of-step governor dictates, the people of Nevada County are not staying at home.  Traffic on the roads and Brunswick Basin was somewhere between normal and heavy.  The nursery parking lot was so full with people coming and going that they had two clerks out there directing traffic.  Picking up sand at B&C was no different.  The entire shopping center’s parking lot was full of cars, and the store full of  people.  More than half the people were not wearing masks.  It is clear that it is the people who have ended the lockdown – rural Californians are not waiting for the word from Sacramento.  The only thing we are still waiting for is the county to get their jackboot off our necks and let the restaurants, bars, churches, and theaters open up for sit-down food, worship, and entertainment.

Sometime in the not too distant future I’d like to see some constitutional legal beagles from the Left argue the legality of the government’s peremptory shutdown and destruction of our economy and social life.  From my perch, this has not been the finest hour for enterprising and independent America.  And now the data is coming in from multiple sources overseas and within our borders that national lockdowns are wrongheaded and more dangerous, most certainly in the long run, than hunkering down.  (more here)

Comments

[Bill Tozer]

What a nice post, Dr. Rebane. I can visualize you and the lovely bride excitingly going out in he dead of night to snipe hunt tomato worms. A couple that picks tomato worms 🐛 together stays together.

Yep, things are getting back to normal. Traffic in PV was getting more cars and parking it’s getting harder to find at the hardware store today. Saw pickup after pickup, car after car carrying in a weedeater to repair or get a repair part or spark plug to get it going. Weather turns nice and warm and suddenly everybody notices they have tall grass and a jungle bursting forth around the house, lol. Suddenly people wake up and know now is the time to get ‘er done. You can always tell which one did not drain the gas out of it last fall. :)

Hummingbirds are out on my hummingbird perennials (blooming), moths and butterflies fluttering about, and bees everywhere. Every year brings something new. I just have 4-5 different distinct kinds of bees that take turns on the plants till fall. Honey bees, bees that a fat and hairy pure yellow color with black strings just like 8 the cartoons, , regular bees, carpenter bees. Better than that one year that brought trillions of flies. :)

Last June my weedeater shaft snapped on my last cut in the first week in June. Perfect timing. I dropped it at SPD Saw Shop and got it back in November. I would call and ask, “What month are you working on? Answer: “last week in April.” ok. Waited a couple months and call up and ask, “What month are you working on? Answer, “second week of May.” Ok. They were slammed like I have never seen before.
It was sort of like the frenzied mob grab-mobbing the Charim. After the Paradise Fire, everybody in Nevada City and in the boonies realized for what seems like the first time that there is the next forest fire growing around the house and then the good citizens try and fail miserly to start their old Homelite chain saws or old Craftsman weedeaters...and then all raced off to the saw shop in a big panic.
Not me. I am prepared. I got ready for this Spring by dropping off the weedeater last June!, lol.

BTW....got my last chainsaw cut done for the the season yesterday. Perfect timing. Put that beast away. The chain doesn’t have one more cut in it. Last cut was at ground level in the dirt (on purpose, I have to look at it and I don’t like seeing 2” of trunk) and even hit a rock as it’s finale. Like I said, perfect timing. Felt the pressure to get it done now BECAUSEi am dying to play in the garden...

[Bill Tozer]

re: last paragraph.

“Sometime in the not too distant future I’d like to see some constitutional legal beagles from the Left argue the legality of the government’s peremptory shutdown and destruction of our economy and social life. From my perch, this has not been the finest hour for enterprising and independent America.”—Dr. George Rebane

‘Government Bears the Burden of Proof on Coronavirus Restrictions’
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
April 25, 2020 6:30 AM

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-restrictions-government-bears-burden-of-proof-before-denying-freedoms/#slide-1

[rl crabb]

I saw this coming and purchased most project and garden supplies weeks ago. We did hit Weiss Bros. last week for veggies, but it wasn't too crowded.
I'm not ready to dismiss the danger of Covidaurus, especially being on its preferred menu of well-aged human. But I'm not going to forgo summer tomatoes.
Some things are worth dying for.

[Scott O]

crabb - "But I'm not going to forgo summer tomatoes.
Some things are worth dying for."
Exactly - let's open the economy up and get back to work.
If the financial picture doesn't improve fast, printing money is not going to do any good.

[Bill Tozer]

I am a firm believer in a fifty dollar hole for a 5 dollar plant.

Q: What’s the best time to plant a tree?
A: Twenty years ago.
———
Rumor has it that Governor Wretched Gretchen Wicked Whitmore of Michigan may rescind her ban on nursery products sold at box stores. She is running for the VP spot and the good folks of Michigan are up in arms over the crackdown. Not exactly an endearing figure. Michigan is bigger than Detroit. One size does not fit all.

Let my people go! Now, would you rather play with the tomatoes and give them a big heaping of love with every fiber in your being....or go paint a musty closet? Let my people go play in the pumpkin patch!

https://reason.com/2020/04/13/michigan-gretchen-whitmer-bans-all-public-and-private-gatherings-will-still-allow-lottery-sales/

FYI, Texas allows for feral hog hunting...year round.

[George Rebane]

BillT 857pm - FYI, so does California.

[Bill Tozer]

Happy gardening Dr. Rebane...and Walt..and Earl

Here is a very very long article by VDH in the New Criterion. One of those sites that I have never been able to copy and post the link. He hits all the points, from history to lefty relations with China,to all the actors involved in our Great Hunkering Down. Don’t think he left anybody out. A hunkering down article is you are so inclined.

“What terrified the world in general, and America in particular, were media-driven reports of occasional excruciating symptoms and sudden death among a small percentage in good health that overshadowed the fact that the majority of the infected had mild or few symptoms. News blared about the less than 0.5 percent of the infected non-elderly who died and ignored the 99.5 percent under sixty-five who had recovered. The media hyped models that showed biblical plague rates of death in the coming weeks, never returning to such prognostications when they were proven fallacious if not hysterical a few weeks later.”

The scab & the wound beneath by Victor Davis Hanson The New Criterion.

[scenes]

Like so?

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/5/the-scab-the-wound-beneath

[scenes]

Huh. By gawd yer right Mr. Tozer, typepad (aka, 'Worlds Worst Blogging Software') won't take those links. They just disappear into a memoryhole or a spam catcher.

[scenes]

ah, thanks for retrieving the link George, if that's what you did.

In other opining, JHK speaks:

"Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, Joni trilled half a century ago. Another song, by CSN, went, it’s been a long time coming, it’s gonna be a long time gone. Boomers. Back in the day – before they invented the hedge fund, glyphosate, and political correctness ­– they had a way with the deep vision thing. And now, here we are! Just like they saw it.

Open up is code, of course, for return to normal. You’re kidding, right? Where I live, the future happened ten years ago. Main Street is nothing but consignment shops, that is, old stuff people got rid of, mostly for good reasons. The one thing you can’t get there is food, unless there’s a bowl of mints next to the cash register. Oh, and the Kmart in town shuttered exactly a year ago, so the supply of new-stuff-waiting-to-be-old-stuff has been cut off, too. Welcome to America, the next chapter."

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-great-conundrum/

[Bill Tozer]

My, my. Great minds think alike. This is exactly what the good Dr. Rebane has been saying all along. Herd immunity will soon be our only real option.

Buck Sexton
@BuckSexton
·
“We need to focus on testing” is what public health experts and politicians say now that many of us have figured out their projections were no better than guesses, our therapeutics don’t work, we may never have a vaccine, and herd immunity will soon be our only real option”

[George Rebane]

scenes 742am - Yeah, I saw you had tried it three times when I checked the spam folder. For some reason TypePad's algo thinks short comments with an URL are spam. That was true some years back when advertisers commented on blogs that had audiences. But please, when you see that happen, tell me about it in a comment or email so I can check it out and post it. Thanks.

[scenes]

"For some reason TypePad's algo thinks short comments with an URL are spam. "

lol. That's not much of a rule-based system, although I think I've seen similar situations make it through. Maybe the thing to do is to give a good healthy quote from the URL, not such a bad thing in any case.

[Bill Tozer]

Well, the headlines say it all. One in four Americans have grown tired of being Hunkering Down, some areas with police tactics, some with drones to catch the non-compliant hooligan ‘criminals.’ More and more Americans starting to worry about the economy than the virus....and the hits just keep on coming.

“EXPERTS WORRY ‘QUARANTINE FATIGUE’ IS STARTING

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/04/experts-worry-quarantine-fatigue-is-starting.php

[Bill Tozer]

Chicken squat, get it while it’s hot.

Speaking on using 15% chicken manure in the garden because of its high nitrogen and phosphorus content, another use has been found in or Great Hunkering Down.

‘Swedish city to dump metric ton of chicken manure in park to discourage festival gathering’

https://www.foxnews.com/health/swedish-city-dump-2000-pounds-chicken-manure-in-park-limit-large-gathering-amid-coronavirus

[Bill Tozer]

‘That Hideous Strength Animating Joe Biden”

The presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America is a walking corpse of a person, who absent-mindedly mutters progressive catchphrases that sound vaguely familiar, if entirely incoherent. What keeps him going?
—
“What should we expect from a Joe Biden presidency? Sleepy Joe, propped up, being worked by machines (or at least by the Democratic Machine) if not literally, almost literally, and having ideas pass through him, as a mouthpiece that the zeitgeist has deemed acceptable, and has taken full control of.

Practically speaking, the progressive spirit of the age will not simply possess him like the muse (or a demon). In reality, the members of its young and eager movement who will hold their noses and vote for their fifth choice nominee, will stand behind him. The AOCs, Julien Castros, and (more directly) Kamala Harrises of the world will smile and nod as he parrots their ideas, garbling them through the filter of his vacant mind.

As frightening as the prospect of a decomposing president sitting in the Oval Office might seem, the hand in the rear of that potential meat puppet scares me more.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/06/that-hideous-strength-animating-joe-biden/
————————————————-
Dear Diary: I hope we don’t have to hunker down until the Climate Emergency is solved. Still haven’t to to GV grocery shopping (or GV at all save a trip to Riebes to grab a battery) and I still don’t have a mask.

Not to self: get a mask so I can go to the dump one of these days. I was hoping the Governor would mail one. I have become dependent on the Great White Father in Sacramento. Is this what being institutionalized feels like? Have I sold my soul?

[Bill Tozer]

re: Jo Ann’s garden vs. The Mob’s garden. Or as AOC said in utter astonishment, ‘food comes from dirt.’ Wow, it’s some kind of miracle.

‘Who else dares speak for the mistreated vegetables of CHAZ/CHOP?’

“After I see what they've done in Seattle, I feel like taking someone else's land, too, whether they like it or not, and growing tomatoes or cannabis on it, just as the good Chazistanis, or Chopitistas, are doing. And, like them, demand that taxpayers bring me snacks.

The bad part? They've taken over blocks of land in downtown Seattle that doesn't belong to them by force, just like those evil white Europeans of old. They've driven off the police. They have their own armed militia. They issue demands and still expect taxpayers to bring them clean port-a-potties and Gatorade. And, of course, snacks.

But every dark leftist cloud has a silver lining. At least they're trying to grow vegetables. They haven't given a name yet to their collective farms, or farmers, though I propose they call themselves kulaks.

The kulaks were expert farmers, once.

Yet whether they know what happened to the kulaks or not, the truth is that Americans grow weary of being screamed at. Many fear that their careers will be ended by the Jacobin-led cancel culture. Soon it will be time that all will be invited to bend the knee and take the soup.

But before soup time, as a gardener I must draw a line in the mushroom compost when I see the horrifying gardening photos smuggled out of CHAZ/CHOP.

It looks like they just poured dirt on top of cardboard, or on top of old social distancing markers (remember social distancing?) and just stuck a few tomato plants or weed seedlings in there. They didn't even water them. They're withering.“

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0620/kass062220.php3