Illustrative

Surfing a popular news aggregator this afternoon, I noticed this succession of headlines. No wonder people are distracted to the point of near-imbecility. In the estimation of this aggregator (and by convention, therefore, in the estimation of its readers, these two facts are of more or less identical importance.

Congratulations, reddit. You are officially irrelevant (if you ever had any relevance to start with).

Dig it!

For the last several days, when I've not been busy being ill, I've been working alongside the house to install a large planting bed.

This is not the simple exercise it may sound.

The area is partly what used to be covered by the deck (under the new bay window). The entire area is about 9 feet by 30 feet, slopes a little ungently, has a pair of nasty crape myrtle trees growing in it, and contains our air handler as well. Yuck. Plus, the soil is basically hard clay. Down to about four inches, it might be amendable, with enough patience and compost. Below that, it's hardpan.

So the first step of the process is boxing out the bed with old railroad ties (which I love as borders. I had nearly enough left over from Emma's play yard to skirt the whole area.

Next, the serious digging begins. I'm removing enough soil (or "proto-sandstone") to leave with with roughly a foot of total depth to the top of the ties. (That crack in the tie above? Pulled shut with a 10-inch galvanized lag screw I had left over from something else...that was fun, let me tell you.)

Here you can see the basic outcome. Essentially, I'm building a huge flowerpot. I'll backfill this with good topsoil from the landscape center up the street. They're due to deliver five cubic yards on Wednesday. I'm hoping to have everything dug out so they can drop it right into the bed. In the meantime, I'm finding lots of interesting stuff -- old copper and iron gas pipe, a complete place-setting of flatware, old toy balls, assorted bits of siding trimmings, half bricks, and so on.

Oh, and a skink. Found him in the mulch one evening while Emma was playing nearby. Once I got him calmed down, he discovered that my hand was a welcome source of heat in the evening cool, so he stuck around.

At first, Emma was a little reticent about touching him.

That went away soon enough. To the skink's chagrin, doubtless. We let him go in an old oak stump nearby, and I dropped a left-over half cubic yard of topsoil into the bottom of the new bed.

Not bad.

Now I'm working on digging out the rest of it. The crape myrtle came out more easily than I'd anticipated. Biggest problem so far is the layer of gray hardpan about 10 inches below the surface. It's not diggable. It can be scraped off, flaked off, or chipped off, but digging out a good spade full of this stuff just isn't on the cards. Still, things are moving along.

I'm setting the ties as I move up the bed, pinning them into the clay with 18 inch section of 3/8" rebar. I'm also learning and filling a quarter-cubic-meter barrow full to the top with clay and trying to push it uphill is a losing battle. So I'm moving smaller loads at a time. Hopefully, I'll have this all done by next weekend. I'll post more pics then.

It's Amazing Levitating Jesus™!

Went to church a while back for my nephew Wyatt's christening. St. Thomas has a beautiful sanctuary, and part of the Easter decor involved a large collection of flowers in front of a plain wood cross. Affixed to the front center of the cross was a bracket, from the end of which dangled a Christ figure plainly designed to be hung on a flat wall. The net effect was an image of Jesus levitating over a field of blooms, powered presumably by the sheer uplift of pollen.

I wish I'd been sitting more to the front, so I could've captured the full effect. It humorous, if well-intentioned. Oh, and to the right, you can see the amazing Klingon Vigil Lamp. This this I seriously do not get.

For non-Catholics, the vigil light is kept burning next to the tabernacle when there's consecrated host inside. Which is pretty much always. Growing up, our vigil light was, if I remember right, a small candle. Fine.

This thing, though, is brushed steel in the shape of a U with terrifyingly pointy uprights. In the center of the U is a cherry-red lamp with an electric light inside. The full sense is, as I noted, very Klingon.

Weird.

Amazing Transforming Owl

No idea what species this is, but the reaction to "aggressor" owls is...wait for it...a hoot.

Man about the yard

The goings-on this weekend have been domestic. Visits to the grandparents' are cancelled as E fights off the remains of a virus. L and I slept late this morning, since E was kind enough to accommodate. Aside from a brief interval of rain, the weather has also been cooperative.

The grass is receiving its first haircut of the year, thanks to a delay engendered by a faulty trickle charger and a dead mower battery. Seventy-five dollars later, I have a new, more reliable charger and a new battery, along with a functional mower. The neighbors, I feel sure, are happy.

Also finally getting to work on a new bed where the old deck used to be. Pictures will be along shortly.

Convenience?

Uhhh...no. If it was "for my convenience," the changing station would be right here where I am now, not out the door and down the hall in another room. Another in an ongoing series of corpspeak complaints

why?

Dependent arising: "The understanding that any phenomenon ‘exists’ only because of the ‘existence’ of other phenomena in an incredibly complex web of cause and effect covering time past, time present and time future."

Elusive question. Why? In roughly eight years of keeping an online journal of some form, I've never been able to answer it. There are bits and bobs of an answer around -- to post funny stuff I find, to rant about things that infuriate me, to show pictures I like. In the end, I have a sneaking suspicion that it represents an attempt at self-definition. This, I am coming to realize, is an exercise in recursion.

I exist only because of others. I am defined by what I represent to others. Self-definition is a handy illusion, but it is an illusion. I can only hint and suggest. In the end, the picture is colored by others. In the end, all I can do is navigate the web, not create or destroy it. Everything I am, and everything I do, is intimately linked to everything, and everyone, else. A given link may be too small, too subtle, to pluck from the tangle, but it is there, nevertheless.

I half-suspect, when it's late, that I'm more a subject than I've previously acknowledge to the peculiar American mythos of the rugged individual. That's a false bravado on our part. He doesn't exist...never has.

Maybe what this is really about is a coming to terms with my rejection of that mythos, and my own attempts to acknowledge dependent arising.