Access to Tools

[hannah j]

After WP's visit early this summer (so long ago!)  my interest in human powered (with some help) vehicles was rekindled. 

With the extraordinary heat, the problems of growing food in a changing or erratic climate was made clear.

So, I thought maybe we needed a discussion centered on tools and such.  Thoughts?

[pan]

God how I hate having to put on my reading glasses to see anything....

[waldo mobile]

They can not be owned. They are free range. We only take the eggs. They are waldo peepers.

[pan]

Leveraxe trust the Finns to design a better way ax for splitting wood.

[waldopaper]

wow if I had $300 wood get this thing.  But that's about 1/2 season's worth of would right now. 

[pan]

Went to a street market and the first thing I saw were Mormon missionaries advertising "Free English" hand lettered on a yellow sheet- another pair of them with identical signage set up kitty-corner of the busy intersection.  They, like all cults, weren't advertising what they were really selling.  J kept telling me to not say anything as we waited for the light to change - she knows what I wanted to say.  Just ignored their "Labdien" (good day) entreaties.

Crossed the street and came upon a metal worker who was selling his wares.  Like the missionaries, his ad wasn't really featuring what he was actually selling.

He had several barbecue set-ups and other things.  This pile of axes caught my eye. The one with the extended wedge on the side of the face looked especially nasty.  When I took this picture I thought of Waldo.  We have seen some really nice hand-made knives that I would have loved to have purchased for you but...we aren't made of money....but at least I thought about the gift and they say that the thought is the point!

[pan]

Not sure I totally get the traveling permaculture garden/drum circle concept (especially the traveling garden) but this seems cool.

Viewed the video - looks like she is trying to set up her traveling artist-in-schools gig for drum circles and just threw in permaculture as a way of making it seem sustainable.  She says "less carbon impact" but something has to tow the trailer....

[Mouse]

should I say what grips my heart and squeezes,
what nestles at my back, blowing frosty breezes up my spine?

[Mouse]

tried out new delivery of polymer clay instead, second go. without a mechanical way of compressing and stretching it to the malleable and useful stage, it reflects the handling and is much more fun that way.

This one is Pardo, from Germany, with beeswax

[pan]

It appears that the world is starting to catch up with some of the ideas for solutions that Waldo was promoting years ago...

Composting toilets

[waldopaper]

Thinking about a Christmas Story  

Henry sat comfortably in the dining car and watched the Virginia winter roll by outside.  The war had been over for a long time.  Yankee officer offered a cigar.  Henry could see war still smoking tracks everywhere.  But Henry's engine was pulling good.  Macht der Baron money.  Working on der railroad.  Alles gut, alles gut.  Ja ja chuffed the engine approaching Lynchburg.  Henry Flagler Heinz steamship future whee!  Whee the whistle blow whatchoo know Wasatch  know think of a story you can tell Jubal Early.  Poor old man alone on der Weihnachten.  Jubal does not mind.  American Ebenezer Scrooge.  Stories are all he has now, and he has plenty. 

 

Henry told the Yankee officer the engine was his new Heidelberg design.  Vacuum brakes and noiseless airbox manifold.  We are developing seamless boilers that can take the pressure.  If not here, then we will make them in Germany.  Kaiserreich is born like a star in the east.  Tredegar was trying the same technique on the guns.  Our Heidelberg design is applicable to steamships as well.  And the Yankee officer excused himself.  If such a Heidelberg design actually existed, Henry sure-as-shit would not describe it in such detail to one of Pierpont's office boys.  Young amateurs.  Jubal will want to take care of business first.  Then- the stories.  

 

Jubal's stories were like a gold mine.  Henry knew about gold mines.  Or an entrance to Hell.  Like old Jubal himself.  Jubal hated Carl like poison, but never understood his XI Corps boys anyway.  Henry felt himself getting old.  Escaping the revolution, Henry took to the Ohio because he could not take to the Rhine.  So long ago.  Cards and women.  Fights were avoidable.  It was Carl who asked Henry to shoot that man.  Henry was born a hunter.  The Baron sent him to hunt.  The trick was knowing what the Baron desired and why.  Tears in the eyes... remember Cristoph in his fancy Prussian uniform with beautiful Solongin bei der Tannenbaum.  

 

The battle was beginning to take shape, and Carl was being Carl again... telling Henry he must again decide.  The battle, sir?  I think not.  I am a civilian, sir, and a foreign one at that.  And unless you intend to take me prisoner.  Carl.  I have a fine room at yonder hotel.  Which is now being swarmed by General Early's men, dummkopf.  Nhaaarwuck said a bullet.  Carl saw no more of Henry in July, 1863.  And they never talked about that again until Chattanooga.  Jubal cackled like a jaybird.  Both had business elsewhere... and soon.  That might make Jubal laugh.  Rainy Christmas eve in Lynchburg, and Mozart had the phaeton ready.   

 

The stocky black dwarf spoke only German.  Henry declined the reins of the phaeton.  What gives, Henny?  Don't have a story for Jubal yet, Wolfie.  You know how he hates to be bored.  Plenty legal business papers, boss.  You know how he loves money.  Henry and Mozart laughed together.  Such a mean old man.  But he cries easy these days too don't he.  Even a bad old man can only stand so much heartbreak brother.  Still got some his boys and girls left.  But he don't see it.  His nation gone.  Loved that more than anything.  I know.  He gotta let it go.  Not the three king star.  Our new German Kingdom is a sunup... from his beat-up sundown day.    

 

King Jesus in a land of poets and thinkers.  The East is Red.       

[Mouse]

would you cut the throat of the neighbour's cute goat? Not I said the witch, closing with stitches her pocket of gold.  

ruined the lawn, was it poisoned with kerosene?

Meanwhile in this kingdom on earth with animal welfare so high as it was, newcomers are offering our cows and lambs to their foreign god, cutting their throats with a sacrificial prayer and hoisting them up to bleed out in full consciousness of their agony and fear.  This is how it is done these days, as it was written in their holy script, They shall eat our meat.

Twas I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow..

every week I make venison stew with a piece of deer shot a few miles away.  I never attend the venison feast at the castle, but I can see the castle from my stove as I stir and think upon the deer and the hungry mouths and the cooking pots of centuries.

The rabbits the Roman soldiers brought two thousand years ago have only just gone. A sure source of meat and warm fur, they bled to death in their burrows, taken from the soft downs by a haemoeragic virus of eastern origin this last summer.

The children and gardeners swallow the lies they are fed.

[Mouse]

would you like the recipe?  plain cooking, I buy 2 venison minute steaks  for just under £5, and braise them for 3 hours in a stock made with a red onion, a clove of garlic, ginger, turmeric, black pepper, sea salt, a stick or two of celery, Worcester sauce, and a sweet potato all caramelised in butter before adding the meat.  Then add hot water and masses of mushrooms.  That's about it till the last half hour, when potatoes go in, ready for the hungry teenager and me to share, with a cupful of broth for the fleeting lecturer, and even some for lunch tomorrow.  

That once a week does much to sustain one, in gratitude, remembering the hanged and the transported who also sought venison in their diet, a few short years ago.

Good Lord, I've forgotten to add the shredded kale ten minutes before the end, that often happens, it's such a shame!