This morning I’m off on a trip to california to visit a friend in the Bay Area. I’ll also be making stops in Vancouver, Washington on the way south and in Eugene, Oregon on the way north to visits friends. I’ll be gone a week and it should be a lot of fun. I’ve got a nice Pontiac G6 rental to speed me on my way.
I may post along the way. It’ll depend on whether I can get access to the Internet easily and if there is time between driving and socializing.
Best wishes to all until I next post.
Here are some photos from Kansas. Most of these are from the trip we just completed but a few are from an earlier visit in 2005. If you hover your mouse over a photo before you click on it, you’ll get a description.
We’ll be leaving in a few hours to journey back to Kansas City, then to Chicago and finally back to Seattle. We can only hope that all will go well with the airlines and our connections.
It’s been a busy and interesting couple of days. To say I’ve enjoyed my time with Sharon’s mother and brothers would be an understatement. They are a family I am very happy to have married into.
On Monday, we discussed the fact that there’s a perception that the taste of the well water on the farm has changed in the last year of two. On Tuesday, Sharon and I drove over to Manhattan, Kansas, to the health department there and got a small sterile bottle to put some of the water in for testing. We ended up seeing a lot of Manhattan before we found the place but I actually enjoyed driving around in a new town. Tuesday night, while everyone sat around, a conversation began about the history of the farm; when it was homesteaded, when parts of it were sold, whether or not the title was in Sharon’s mother’s name as it should be or in her father’s name (who passed away in 1986). There was also a question of whether or not they were paying property taxes on 40 acres when, in fact, the actual area was closer to 30.
That all piqued Sharon and my interests and so on Wednesday, we got up early in Topeka and drove to Westmoreland, Kansas, which is the county seat of Pottawatomie County and went to see the Deeds and Mapping folks there. What a pleasure it was dealing with professional folks in a small county. We had immediate access to the folks who could answer our questions and friendly service. Bonnie, in the Register of Deeds office and Brenda in the GIS office were both especially helpful and knowledgeable.
After an hour and a half, we knew everything we wanted to about the correctness of the current deed (it was right!), the property lines, when the property was home-steaded and a variety of other interesting facts and figures. It was a great treasure trove of stuff to take back to the family that evening.
We also stopped by the Health Department office in Manhattan again and dropped our bottle of well water off for testing. Sharon Wolff here was our contact person and wonderfully helpful and knowledgeable.
I’ve kidded Sharon several times about how easy driving in Kansas is. You just point the car, lock on the cruise-control and wait to arrive as you gaze at the passing scenery. Driving from Topeka and to Manhattan to Westmoreland and then back to St. Marys was like that. We also shared the inevitable jokes about the Flint Hills which Sharon claims are the mountain ranges of Kansas.
In the afternoon, we went to see Judy, Sharon’s childhood friend and her husband, and discussed their plans to travel soon to Belize. We also went out and Sharon looked at some of Judy’s trees which were having a problem. It was hot. 95F and 95% or more humidity. I suppose people get used to it but I was dying standing in the sun as they looked at the trees and discussed remedies.
Last night, we all looked over our loot from our trip up to Westmoreland and watched the TV reporting on the bridge disaster in Minneapolis. We all sat around together until late because we all realized that when Sharon and I left, we were not coming back for awhile. It felt poignant to me.
I took a number of photos yesterday and I’ll be posting them here when I’m at my computer at home tomorrow.
Ps. I joke about the Flint Hills of Kansas with my wife. But, the truth is, they are quite beautiful. A fellow from the Flint Hills area who runs a blog to promote tourism there wrote a comment and passed links to me to two articles about the area:
NY Times article: ➡
National Geographic article: ➡
Flint Hills Blog: ➡
It’s raining in North East Kansas. Flood warnings in several areas near where we are. We hit a major cloud burst coming out from Topeka this morning just like yesterday. The weatherman says it may rain on and off all the time we’re here. That’s great by me – I like this warm rain. I’m just hoping for a big thumderstorm. I like the noise and excitement of it <smile>.
We’ve been having a good time visiting with Sharon’s family here at the family farm. I’ve looked around here and realized how differerent their experiences were from mine growing up. Sharon and her brothers were born here and their lives have always orbited around this land and house that her relatives homesteaded and built back in the late 19th century. I, on the other hand, was born in New York and raised in Southern California and lived in not less that 35 different places from when I was 15 until 1990 when Sharon and I married and moved to Washington State.
I hope to take some pictures later today and post them here of the farm.
I’ve been trying to talk everyone into mounting an expedition over to Manhatten to look for a nursery so we can have a look around at what running a nursery in this part of the country looks like. It’s also fun to go for a ride in a new place.
I’ve been using my spare time to read a book on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and I think I’ve got it – which puts me a lot closer to have total control over the presentation of this blog. I’m also wanting to redo the www.woodscreeknursery.com site which our business uses. it is long overdue for a face-lift.
Cheers from Pottawattamie County in Northeastern Kansas!
We travelled yesterday.  Seattle to Chicago to Kansas City and then took a rental car to Topeka where we have a room for four days.  We’re off in an hour or so for St. Marys, Kansas, where Sharon grew up.  Her mother and two brothers are there at the farm.
Cheers, until tomorrow.
– I just read a piece by Jim Kunstler (author of The Long Emergency) over on his Blog, Clusterfuck Nation. it was entitled, Peak Tech?
– I have to say I agree with everything he’s saying. We are in very deep yogurt and we are defintely not doing the right things to get out of the mess – which only means we’re going to fall farther and farther into it. I think that the Peak Oil business will, perhaps, come on slower than many Peak Oil pundits are claiming – but it will come.
Here’s a link to his piece: :arrow:
– Well, I thought I wasn’t going to post anymore until I returned from our trip but when I saw the juxtaposition of these two stories, I just had to sit down and write a bit more.
– First, we have the story that the democrats in the Senate, lead by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), have backed away from requiring all states to employ so-called voter-verified paper records in their systems – even though earlier this year, she called for enacting such changes by 2008.
– Then, next, we have news in from the San Francisco Chronicle which is reporting that computer security researchers throughout the University of California system managed to crack the security on every voting machine they tested that has been approved for use in the state.
– Yeah. If you aren’t concerned yet, take a cruise through these earlier stories I posted on this topic: ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡
– This is a serious problem, folks. If you are still not sure, ask an expert computer programmer what the chances are that voting machines without verification trails can be hacked.
– I’ve listed this post under “The Perfect Storm”, “Capitalism & Corporations” and “CrashBlogging” because the same urges which cause Capitalism and corporations to be about profits and not people, are also behind the efforts to corrupt our voting systems so that folks can attain power by stealth that they could not attain through a fair ballot box.
Sharon and I are off in the morning for Kansas to see her family so I’ll be gone until August 2nd. So, they’ll be no posts during that period.
– Oil is going to get tight as the Peak Oil issue slowly creeps up on us. The US’s involvement in Iraq is thought by many to really be about cornering and controlling significant oil in the region to ensure the US’s continuing ability to supply its economy with this essential material. China, India, and Europe are also all looking for how they can establish control over the oil they will need to continue growing.
– Japan is a particularly interesting case. 95% of their oil is imported and without a guaranteed supply, they could easily revert to a medieval fishing and farming culture. No one imagines that they will let this come about without a struggle.
— — — — —
ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, Guam — To take part in its annual exercises with the United States Air Force here last month, Japan practiced dropping 500-pound live bombs on Farallon de Medinilla, a tiny island in the western Pacific’s turquoise waters more than 150 miles north of here.
The pilots described dropping a live bomb for the first time — shouting “shack!” to signal a direct hit — and seeing the fireball from aloft.
“The level of tension was just different,” said Capt. Tetsuya Nagata, 35, stepping down from his cockpit onto the sunbaked tarmac.
The exercise would have been unremarkable for almost any other military, but it was highly significant for Japan, a country still restrained by a Constitution that renounces war and allows forces only for its defense. Dropping live bombs on land had long been considered too offensive, so much so that Japan does not have a single live-bombing range.
Flying directly from Japan and practicing live-bombing runs on distant foreign soil would have been regarded as unacceptably provocative because the implicit message was clear: these fighter jets could perhaps fly to North Korea and take out some targets before returning home safely.
But from here in Micronesia to Iraq, Japan’s military has been rapidly crossing out items from its list of can’t-dos. The incremental changes, especially since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, amount to the most significant transformation in Japan’s military since World War II, one that has brought it ever closer operationally to America’s military while rattling nerves throughout northeast Asia.
In a little over half a decade, Japan’s military has carried out changes considered unthinkable a few years back. In the Indian Ocean, Japanese destroyers and refueling ships are helping American and other militaries fight in Afghanistan. In Iraq, Japanese planes are transporting cargo and American troops to Baghdad from Kuwait.
Japan is acquiring weapons that blur the lines between defensive and offensive. For the Guam bombing run, Japan deployed its newest fighter jets, the F-2’s, the first developed jointly by Japan and the United States, on their maiden trip here. Unlike its older jets, the F-2’s were able to fly the 1,700 miles from northern Japan to Guam without refueling — a “straight shot,” as the Japanese said with unconcealed pride.
More… ➡
– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, recently, a friend of mine suggested the website bugmenot.com 
as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.
Kevin Holden Platt in Beijing, China
for National Geographic News
July 9, 2007
China the world’s fastest growing economy, has earned another startling superlative: the highest annual incidence of premature deaths triggered by air pollution in the world, according to a new study.
A World Health Organization (WHO) report estimates that diseases triggered by indoor and outdoor air pollution kill 656,000 Chinese citizens each year, and polluted drinking water kills another 95,600. (Related: “China’s Pollution Leaving Mountains High and Dry, Study Finds” [March 8, 2007].)
Air pollution is estimated to cause approximately two million premature deaths worldwide per year,” said Michal Krzyzanowski, an air quality adviser at the WHO Regional Office for Europe.
Krzyzanowski worked with WHO to look at costs and casualties of pollution across the globe. He helped the group develop new air quality guidelines that set out global goals to reduce deaths from pollution.
More… ➡
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