Yesterday we had a couple of big rocks moved to where they can be seen and appreciated. Took the landscape guy (Brad) about half an hour.
Spring 2022
I’m reluctant to declare any bird feeder squirrel-proof but this one is pretty close. You can see the tiny wheels turning inside the squirrel’s head. And they never give up.
Been a particularly good year for Redbuds. The blossoms are so thick they look cake icing.
Covid is over!
New tag: dystopia
Given my fondness for speculative/science fiction, I was a little surprised I didn’t have a tag for ‘dystopia.’ Many of my favorite novels are set in “an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.”
Snow Crash, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, Twenty Thirty, The Handmaid’s Tale, Mockingbird, and –of course– much/most of William Gibson’s work (The Peripheral, Agency, the Bridge Trilogy, and pretty much all the early stuff).
“The country had cracked”
“It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities. It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave.”
— Distraction by Bruce Sterling (1998)
Land Rover Hardtop Rack
In a couple of weeks it will be time to remove the hardtop from the Land Rover. (The first true sign of spring.) For the last few years this has involved gathering a crew to remove the top (video) and move it to wherever I could find to store it. If the ceiling of one’s garage is high enough, you can simple winch it up until it’s time to drop it back on in the fall. Insufficient head-room on my garage forced me to store the hardtop in a rental unit which worked fine until a tornado swept through Jefferson City.
After repairing the banged up hardtop I stored it in a basement room, a tedious and cumbersome process. So the next year we suspended the hardtop under the deck. Which worked fine but, again, took a half dozen people. What I really needed was a way to unbolt the hardtop, lift it up, and drive away. I needed a LRHR (Land Rover Hardtop Rack).
A local machine shop has constructed a simple steel frame and it should be ready in a couple of days. I found a good spot for it on our recently acquired acreage. While raking away old leaves and wood chips I discovered big cement slab that was part of a dog run 40 years ago.
It’s almost in the exact right spot and here’s the strange part: the hardtop rack will be seven feet wide and twelve feet long. The slab is 7’5″ wide and 25′ long.
The plan is to back the Land Rover up to the rack, unbolt the top, and back the truck under the frame. We’ll then use tie-down straps to suspend the top to the rack and ratchet it up off the body of the truck. We won’t be adding the hoop kit this year because I discovered I liked driving the truck topless.
UPDATE 4/26/22: The rack has been delivered and assembled. Still have to bolt the rack to the cement pad but the plan is to lift the top this weekend.
April Showers
Raining off and on all day. While I’m more than ready for warm, sunny days, I never mind a good rain.
Regionally, the American Southwest is in the grips of a 22-year megadrought, the worst in recorded history and the driest since at least the year 800, according to a new analysis of tree ring records. (KQED)
Wildlife: Black Snake
The door in the photos below is to my tool room in the Annex. Guarding the door is our resident Black Snake, Murray. 
Wikipedia assures me Murray is a “good” snake (my word, not theirs);
Rat snakes live in a variety of habitats; some overlap each other. Rat snakes are excellent climbers and spend time in trees. They live in habitats ranging from a rocky hillside to flat farmland. It prefers heavily wooded areas and is known for having excellent climbing ability, including the ability to climb the trunk of large mature trees without the aid of branches; the snake is also a competent swimmer. During winter it hibernates in dens, often with copperheads and timber rattlesnakes. This association gave rise to one of its common names, pilot black snake, and the superstition that this nonvenomous species led the venomous ones to the den.
While Black Snakes are harmless, I give this guy a wide birth because… well, he’s a snake. Like the article says, where you find Black Snakes, you’ll find copperheads. I killed at least a dozen last summer. Fortunately, they tend to stay on the ground. Like Indiana Jones, I hate snakes. But they’re part of rural living, so…
Bluebirds
We have a lot of Bluebirds coming to our feeders this year. We keep them supplied with meal worms which they seem to love. We only have one house which is home to the nest below.
I thought this was a male, based on the plumage but apparently not.
Only the female incubates the eggs. The male does not participate in the incubation of the eggs. The male protects the territory and brings food to the female while she is incubating the eggs. The female takes breaks to feed and poop in the morning hours and throughout the day. — Bluebirds Nests and Eggs: All you Need to Know
More brush pile porn
When you start clearing brush there are no good (close) places to put it so you just start a pile. Or several piles. As you make progress you quickly see you should have put the piles where they would be less visible but now it’s too late to move them. I got tired of looking at a couple of piles so it was time for the Big Chipper.