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webmd.com We have a new grandperson, courtesy of Elliza and Daniel, with a heap of help from Elliot. That, to the right, is not the baby. I do not know who that is:  I just needed a picture. We do have pictures, but they have been captured by another device. One of the pictures we do have has a caption that reads, "Girl to be named later". Let us now think about punctuation, and be glad for it. "Girl, to be named later." (Is that a grand-daughter, who does not yet have a name?  Or is it that she will be named "Later"?  Later Hubbard, or maybe Later Chen?  And that suggests that eventually, there will likely be a Last Hubbard or Chen.) "Girl to be, named later." (This will become a girl, and she will be named after she becomes a girl.) "Girl to be named, later." (This female person will receive a name, after a while.) Grandfatherpersons do not have a lot to do.

It is official! Elliot has a sister. Elliot's sister does not have a name, so far as we know. There is no report that she weighs anything.  So we have a granddaughter with no name who does not weigh anything.  We assume that if it ever stops raining in Portland they will take footprints of the little tad and we can refer to her by pattern.  By god, having little babies is fun when somebody else is doing all the work; making decisions about college and tuition; whether to go Mac or PC, all that! Elliza and Daniel have got the routine down pat. Mari is already sewing something, probably. I am going to mix an early afternoon drink, and smile.  Do my part.

It goes something like this, I think: being alive is a wondrous and mysterious thing! We are, today, awaiting the news that we shall be grandparents again. It will be Elliza and Daniel's second child: a couple of years ago, Elliot was born, and she has been a wonder since. And . . .  and this is not at all a sad thought but as full of wonder as first coming to life, in a few day I shall be eighty-six. I have no premonitions, but no pretensions, either: I do not expect to live forever. I am not that much in love with artificial joints! Not so long ago in human history-- that part of our past that we can recall (there is so much that came even earlier)-- people tried to explain the difference between being just something, and being alive. "Breath!", they said.  "Living things breathe!" And there we have something like the notion of soul. Take breath away, or lose breath, and life is gone: only a breathless body remains. That is ...

This is Cooper on sentry duty. His post overlooks the small draw down which water flows every time we have such a downpour as we rarely see here in the Sonora but which as unlikely as memory insists must be, must happen or the wash would not be there.  It is the same view from a different post at which Jao announced that he could see the whole world. It is Cooper's world.  There are coyotes day and night patrols and herds of javelinas sometimes a Lone Ranger probably a young male driven out by a patriarch "Not under my roof!" he said "Go make your own bed!". He is under orders is Cooper to report every sighting to the house not to be a hero at a show of force. It is dangerous duty truth be told tusk and fang warfare but Cooper is game. That's the problem actually.

Mass. Audobon Once upon a necessity to escape the ties that bind in a small Iowa town I built a log house fifteen miles farther into the countryside. Once while building that house I heard wild turkeys strutting down a fence line so I stood as still as I could and watched. They came three of them seeing me leerily but baffled by my stillness came anyway toward the woods peeking up like stitches above the dry grass down the fence line. The neighbor's rooster more morning crow than hero heard and saw them across the draw and came running farther than he knew it was arriving finally almost at the intruders larger than the rooster by God intended. He stopped ducked one might say his head and hid for home. In Yellville Arkansas at the Yellville Turkey Trot Festival the Yellville Air Farce drops live turkeys  from a low flying low life plane onto the Yellville Turkey Trot festivalgoers as near as one can steer a terrified turkey b...

facebook.com You might not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but you can teach an old dog old words. The crossword puzzle clue was, "Like good farmland"; six letters, no perpendicular clues. "Perhaps some variation of 'loam', 'loess' . . ." Then "arable" crawled up from somewhere, like an earthworm.  It would fit, but . . . but I didn't know precisely what "arable" meant.  So I looked it up.  Arable farmland is in distinction from pastureland.  Arable land can be plowed.  Pastureland is not plowable; but usable as grazing land. I am almost eighty-six years old, and have been hearing and using the word "arable" for almost as long, but like so many words a curious kid hears and reads, I had fenced in a definition of sorts by eliminating what it probably did not mean, and running it with things it got along with:  a foggy, useable system, close enough not to be wrong, but loose enough not to be precis...

Of course it is brutally reliably warm here in the summer! But this is November 15. In spite of the chill here in November we cling to life like roses. Just saying . . .

"Sweetwater":  straight from the "Sanitary District"! It was not sweet when first I tasted it; still unused.  Water in the Sonora Desert does not evoke images of rainforests and mountain snows; no surge of salty seas.  It tastes of minerals and open pit mines. But the County, or City, or Someone Responsible has created a wetland on the west side of town, alongside the dust-dry Santa Cruz River, to reclaim as much of the water we waste as it can, and in doing so, has created not just a process and a place for water to be sifted and sanitized and sent back into the ground, but a kind of park, with ponds lined to frustrate the desire of water to run downhill, down into the ground, so it ponds up, nourishing the happiest cattails God ever created, surrounded by what might have been riverside trees.  It is a magnet for water-loving birds, and bird-loving, ankle-booted, binocular-bearing aviary statisticians. I go there to take pictures, watching where I st...

spacefarms.com "Guns don't kill people:  people kill people." You know the words.  You know the tune. OK.  Machine guns don't kill people. Hand grenades don't kill people. Land mines don't kill people. Improvised explosive devices don't kill people. And nuclear bombs never killed anybody. People did. I suppose you could say the same thing about cars. Cars don't kill people:  people kill people. So we register and license cars, so we can identify them. We license drivers, so they can show that they have been trained. Not everyone gets to drive a car. There is an age limit. You can lose your license if you do things we agree would make you a danger behind the wheel. But we don't think guns should be registered. We don't think people should have a permit to own and use a gun. God, we seem to think, created index fingers for firearm purposes. Maybe we should require a license to be stupid, too. It isn't about ...

influxentrepreneur.info Maybe things have changed:  maybe they always were this way.  We do not choose our political parties because of what the party stands for:  we chose our political parties because of who and what they are associated with. Let's get down and personal.  Most of us belong to the same religious group our parents belonged to.  Most of us belong to the same political group our parents voted for.  I woke up one morning and discovered that my parents were Lutheran of a sort.  Lutherans are a cantankerous lot, and we were cantankerous Lutherans, not agreeing with most other Lutherans:  that is what made us Lutheran.  And Dad, especially, was a cantankerous Democrat. I do not know how I turned out to be such a sweetheart. No, I do know!  That is the point here. Before I go further, it is quite likely you grew up within the confines of your parents' religion, too, and it is might not be a surprise to you that you...