Friday Shorts 03-13-2009

☼ Good morning, world. Up since 3 but turns out wx worries seem to be for those north of us–at least as far as getting in for my 8:00 patient this morning. Getting home, another matter perhaps. And to think I almost replaced the studded tires with the regulars stored over in the barn–would have been premanure.

☼ I have a large mountain of white oak and hickory to show you tomorrow. Wood man finally showed up about 4:00 (his “after lunch” and my “before dark”). I can’t imagine how many hours of chain sawing, lifting, splitting and some other verbs that will save me next year. And so what will I do with the time saved, I ask myself?

☼ Made it to the NRV Planning District Commission’s “Floyd 20-20” visioning thingy and remembered being at a similar event five years ago, suffering the same crossed eyes, with three different colored markers, two colors of notecards and yellow dots and red dots and five easels with posters holding flipcharts we were suppose to prioritize with our urgent, important and possible county desiderata. Sorry. My brain doesn’t function in those settings–too much like a committee.

☼ Good News-Bad News on the book front. Lesson learned: only import plain vanilla text (*.txt) files into InDesign or it gets bad indigestion. My designer friend had an OH S____ moment when all the first four chapters disappeared irretrievably. Originals intact, and will convert from my rich text imports (that look perfectly fine but at some point become toxic.) Live and learn.

☼ Well let’s see: Pakistan on the brink of civil war, China seems about to call in our outstanding debt and flu vaccine is contaminated with H5N1. I think I liked it better when I was in Browser Isolation.

☼ I’m going to sit down with the Southern Seed Exchange catalogue (online version) over the weekend. Any recommendations for non-hybrid varieties of anything you’ve had experience with would be appreciated. I did a lot of fresh research into the risk of losing our “agricultural sovereignty” as fewer and fewer companies (read: Monsanto) own more and more of our seed genetic resources. We’d better start winning that battle of plant and animal germplasmic freedom one farm and garden at a time, or…

☼ Okay, I’m heading  to the image archives to see what totally irrelevant image I can find to go with this grab bag of flotsam. Oh, and thanks for those who chimed in yesterday on my artificial melodramatic whining. Never take me seriously. Well not never. Thanks for de-lurking.