Steve’s book list, my local bullshit news

****,
Just fin­ished up Farm City by Novel­la Car­pen­ter.  A refresh­ing book on urban farm­ing that did­n’t have the usu­al holi­er than thou horse­shit that seems to per­me­ate the prose of every fuck­ing new food­ie writer who sticks their head up out of the let­tuce (excuse me, arugu­la) patch.

Am into books on dry­land irri­ga­tion and rain­wa­ter stor­age, bee­keep­ing, water stone sharp­en­ing and wood work­ing right now.  Does­n’t make for rip­ping­ly excit­ing read­ing unless you’re into any of those things.  Oh yeah, eco­nom­ics as well.  Essays in Per­sua­sion by Keynes.  It’s a lit­tle dry but at the same time fas­ci­nat­ing stuff.

Just went to the San Diego Bee­keep­er’s month­ly meet­ing and got all abuzz about bees, but I don’t think I’ll bee able to get Lee to sign off on a hive up on our roof.  Enough bee bull­shit talk.  Nor­ton (our lit­tle ter­ri­er) was aller­gic to bees and we’ve just fin­ished a 6 month desen­si­ti­za­tion end­ing in a 10-bee sting with no ill effects, but that has­n’t been enough to con­vince her it’s safe to have a hive in the yard. Fuck.

I’ve still got to dig a huge fuck­ing hole in the back­yard for my cis­tern 5′ wide x 6′ deep by 20′ long, and no room to get a back­hoe in.  Just as well, I have a gen­er­al dis­like for machines.  Wil­fred The­siger told me years ago that the down­fall of civ­i­liza­tion was the inter­nal com­bus­tion engine, (or as I think Ed Abbey called it, the infer­nal com­bus­tion engine) and that seems to be a good gen­er­al rule as long as you can make rea­son­able excep­tions.  So that’s got to be done before the rains arrive around Thanksgiving.

Would love to build a kick-ass lit­tle work­shop in the back­yard with hand tools, but it’s got to leave me enough space for a few chick­ens and what­ev­er oth­er bull­shit I come up with; a fer­tile mind means you have to fig­ure out the space to imple­ment all your ideas.  A bless­ing and a curse, espe­cial­ly with a 3,000 sq ft lot, of which 1,500 sq ft is house/garage.

What else…work is going well, not a lot of room to make more mon­ey, but plen­ty of room to make a dif­fer­ence and that’s enough to keep me there anoth­er year or so at least.  The pro­gram they have right now seems to have been designed by a troglodyte.  “Unghh, huh, hoh, beat ’em till they learn.”  I mean, good stuff when they’re brand new but we’re sup­posed to be the train­ing part of the pipeline, not selec­tion.  Pet­ty bullshit.

Lee & I are head­ing down to Chile (Tor­res del Paine) for a 10 day trek in Decem­ber, so she’s get­ting fired up about that.  In the mean­time we’re going to expand the ATM busi­ness into a few more machines as we need the write-off before the end of 2010, so while it’s a short term mon­ey-stretch it’ll end up being good some­time next year.

Saw a few fish swim­ming around our lit­tle docks today at work so aim to bring in a rod and see if I can pull some o’ dem suck­ers in for the grill.  Lots of shit to do, lots of shit going on, main­tain­ing an even strain (Wal­ly Schirra, I think.)  Now that’s a hell of a book, “The Right Stuff.”  You prob­a­bly read it a thou­sand years ago.  Also, don’t know if you’ve read “Trout Bum” by John Gier­ach, but I’ve always liked it; good enough to re-read about once a year.  Speak­ing of good re-reads, I just saw Menck­en’s “Hap­py Days”, his wit is sharp enough that it needs lit­tle whet­ting to re-enjoy yearly.

That’s all the stale garbage I’ve got for now.  Off to bed, have a long and late dive tomor­row night.

Cheers,
NFH