More big rocks

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A couple of weeks ago I posted some photos of a big rock on our newly acquired property. The previous owners built their house around this formation. Since then we’ve discovered another big rock on the other side (and behind) of the house. Hard to see because it’s covered in about forty years worth of dead leaves, Honeysuckles, and brambles.

We still have work to do but Rock #2 is finally getting some love.

The 20 second clip below shows what the formation looks like before and after some clean up.

Chiropractic: Essay by H.L. Mencken

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The following is an excerpt from a 1924 essay by H. L. Mencken. It seems relevant in light of the stupid quackery that’s killing hundreds of thousands.

Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits — retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents. Now and then a quack of some other school — say homeopathy — plunges into it. Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.

“Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was a controversial American journalist, essayist and literary critic. During the 1920s, he became famous for his vitriolic attacks on what he considered to be the hypocrisy, stupidity, and bigotry of much of American life. For obvious reasons, his critics considered him highly skilled at satire but intolerant and often crude. This essay was published in the Baltimore Evening Sun in December 1924. Although the medical knowledge of his day was still quite primitive, Mencken knew enough to realize that chiropractic theory was preposterous.”

We got our third shot of the Pfizer vaccine

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They’re calling them booster shots but I’ve read a few articles that say it was always the plan to give three shots. Not something you want to publicize when you can’t get so many to get one shot. Barb and I got our shots eleven days ago. From CNN:

For individuals 65 plus, we saw significant declines in VE (vaccine effectiveness) against infection during Delta for the mRNA products,” Link-Gelles told CDC vaccine advisers this past week.

In a study of 4,000 healthcare personnel, first responders, and other frontline workers in eight places who were tested every week regardless of symptoms, vaccine protection against any infection declined from 91% pre-Delta to 66% during Delta.

Pfizer says its studies show booster doses bring people’s immunity back up to what it was right after they got their second shots, or to even higher levels.

How much higher? From the New York Times:

At least 12 days after the booster, rates of infection were elevenfold lower and of severe disease nearly twentyfold lower in those who received a booster compared with those who had received only two doses, the researchers found. The researchers acknowledged that their results were preliminary.

I like those numbers. And if I have to get a “booster” ever six months? BFD. I see my dentist every six months. While we’re on the subject of vaccines… My doctor recently suggested I get a shot of the new and improved shingles vaccine, Shingrix. Shingles is bad shit so I headed for the pharmacy. Turns out there might be a bonus benefit:

RZV (Shingrix) vaccination was associated with a 16% lower risk of COVID-19 diagnosis and 32% lower risk of hospitalization, suggesting RZV elicits heterologous protection, possibly through trained immunity.

At this point I’m masking just to piss off the anti-vaxxers.

Goodbye old pine tree

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We had a few trees removed today. Couple of dead/dying cedar trees and the big pine tree shown above. About half the limbs on this tree were dead and it was too close to the power line to take a chance. Once down we could see the tree was rotting from the inside so we made the right call.

On another part of the property there was a big (ugly) cedar tree in the middle of some gorgeous oak trees. It won’t be missed.

Our thanks to Cedric and his crew from Korte Tree Care. If you’re wondering, he’s wearing a “hard” cowboy hat.

Rocks and Trees

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The Annex was designed as an earth-contact home with a big ass rock as the defining feature. It is a cool rock and serves (for me) as a reminder of the impermanence of my existence.


But those giant oak trees. For years the previous owner allowed ivy vines to cover these beautiful trees. Very damaging to the trees over time.

So my first task after closing was to cut the vines. The tree guy we use assures me the vines will die in coming months and within a year the dead vines and leaves will fall from the tree.

We’ve been calling the rock “Dwayne.”

The best neighbor… is no neighbor

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We’ve been living in our home for 35 years. We built it in 1986 on about 3.5 acres of wooded land (A). In January of 2020 we purchased an additional 3 acres (B) when the lady who owned it died. Our closest neighbors (a woman and her adult daughter) have been talking about selling their home (C) for a couple of years but never seemed serious, until this year when they bought a house in “in town,” as we used to say.

One day a couple of months ago she told us she was going to put her home on the market. When she told me the asking price, I said we’d buy it. No inspection, no appraisal, no haggling. We closed on the sale yesterday at noon. We haven’t told many about the purchase because it happened pretty fast. But the first question is always, “So, what are you going to do with the property? Sell it? Rent it?” The answer is, nothing. The woman and her daughter are — in all likelihood — the last people who will ever live in that house. Why, you might ask?

Have you ever lived next to a really bad neighbor? It can make every day a living hell. But you could sell the place to some nice folks, you say. But you can’t control to whom they sell it, I reply. No, the best neighbor is no neighbor. And we didn’t buy the property for the house. We bought it for the towering, hundred-year-old oak trees. I think of it as a tiny nature preserve. The thought of someone cutting down those trees so their whiny little brats can have a swimming pool was… unthinkable. Or coming home to that TRUMP 2024 sign every day. Or their pit bull terrorizing our dog. No way, Jose.

To my way of thinking, we don’t really own the land. We own the privilege of living on it. Or saying who does or does not live on it. But we are nothing more than temporary stewards. And as we enter our Golden Years, Barb and I place great value on privacy. How does one put a price on something so precious? Oh yeah, did I mention the quiet? You can hear your heart beat. And at night the only light you can see is a yard light a mile or so away.

So we called the propane people to come get their tank. A plumber will winterize the house. The phone and electric are disconnected. And we’ll start giving away the appliances. What remains will be a big old storage building I’ve been calling The Annex.

This chapter is just beginning so watch this space for updates.

Drone Romance

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“Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan, In the Robot Skies is the world’s first narrative shot entirely through autonomous drones. In collaboration with the Embedded and Artificially intelligent Vision Lab in Belgium the film has evolved in relation to their experiments with specially developed camera drones each programmed with their own cinematic rules and behaviours. In this near future city drones form both agents of state surveillance but also become co-opted as the aerial vehicles through which two teens fall in love.”