ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Another summer ruined?

As tough years go 2019 would rank right up there....at least that is what I thought then.  Diagnosed with cancer, followed by the removal of the lower lobe of my left lung, followed by the normal recuperation that follows such an operation but then the news that the cancer had been totally removed and there was no further treatment needed.  That changed my initial opinion of 2019.   Not as bad as I thought. 

Then along comes 2020 it started out just fine, I was making a good recovery from the cancer surgery, but then the crap hit the fan yet again and boy another year that sucked...at least from March onward.  Following 2019 I had hoped for the ability to get back to normal...including some travel and a visit to our Arizona kids.  Needless to say that didn't happen, but it is hard to complain since everyone else in the world was in the same boat and a lot of people lost loved ones....so again a year that seems terrible at first glance turns out to be one that I really shouldn't be complaining about.  We got a lot of work done around the house and I did a lot of work in the flower beds and got things cleaned out and on top of that we got a whole new kitchen, pretty much from the walls out.  The sort of thing that makes you fall in love with your house all over again.  

One little odd event during the late summer which we gave little thought to at the time is worth describing.  I had been working out in the yard and it was a typical hot and humid day and I was doing some pretty aggressive hacking away of ground cover I was eliminating.    I needed to cool off and walked into the house, through the kitchen which was then only about half completed, into the dinning room where a new sink, and a new fridge and stove were all sitting in the dinning room still in their boxes where they had been for several weeks.  

Now the rest of this story I don't remember...I only know what Camilla has told me.  I walked into the living room and asked her what was in the boxes!  Keep in mind they had been delivered something like 2 to 4 weeks earlier.   I kicked the sink box and asked....."What's in this box?"  Was I kidding around?  She looked at me and said she knew I was serious and that something was very wrong.   She told me what was in the boxes and that we were getting a new kitchen and she then led me to the kitchen and was pointing things out and I kept repeating..."I don't remember any of this".  She took me back to the living room where I sat for some time before I came back to myself after 5 or so minutes.   We thought maybe I had suffered a heat stroke which can cause confusion.  We talked about the "event" for a couple of days and Camilla finally talked me into going to talk to the Doctor, just in case it was something more serious.   My doc, suspecting a possible stroke,  ordered an MRI which came back showing nothing significant that would explain the "event".  I had not had a stroke. Good news, add it up to being overheated and forget it.  

Several months passed and Camilla reported one other "event" and suspected another but both were of fairly short duration and in fact the first one she did not even realize what it was at the time it happened.  We were both sitting in the office and she was talking on the phone and I was at my computer.  She said I spun around and vomited on the floor....then I got up, cleaned up the mess with paper towel and went back to the computer.  That evening she asked me how my stomach was feeling and I told her "fine, why?"  She explained that she was just concerned since I had thrown up.   I looked at her like she was nuts and told her I did not know what she was talking about...even getting up and looking in the wastepaper basket for the dirty paper towels and CRAP...THERE THEY WERE.  WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?  

I had been making plans for a trip out west with our youngest grandson, and then came March 16th.  We finished dinner and I picked up my plate and carried it to the kitchen thinking to myself I was going to find something for dessert.  Camilla heard a loud crash and called out asking if I was all right.  I did not respond.  She found me laying on the floor in the pantry, unconscious, she talked to me, and then touched my leg and she said my whole body stiffened when she touched me. She called 911 and both the LFD and the Ambulance arrived.  I am told, but do not remember that the firefighters helped me up off the floor and walked me to the dinning room and were talking to me.  I have no memory of any of that. Then the Ambulance arrived and they helped me onto the cot and wheeled me down to the street and hoisted me into the back of the truck.  I do have a sort of hazy recollection of the feeling of being lifted up and I recall that the medic kept talking to me, asking questions all the way to the hospital and all I wanted to do was go to sleep.  As they were unloading me things were clearing up in my head and I remember being wheeled into the ER and of the events that happened there.   I had a cat scan which showed no stroke so they sent me home and did not make a specific diagnosis, just an unexplained loss of consciousness.  

I returned to the family doctor and I was referred to a neurologist.   At the first meeting with the Neurologist he said "You are having seizures".    So here I am in 2021 with an new ailment...a seizure disorder.  I have had 4 or 5 EEG tests, including one this weekend where I will be wired up for the whole weekend, day and night.  Like everyone else in the world as soon as the doctor suggested it was probably some kind of seizure disorder I started combing all the information I could from sources on the internet.  The closest definition to what I have experienced is something called a "Complex partial seizure". My symptoms all fit that particular type of disorder.   Since March 16th there have been two other "events" that were both less dramatic, but still troubling.  I have had another MRI and the result was much the same as the one from last summer.   

Oh...and did I mention, my driving privileges have been suspended by the doctor and Camilla.  That might be the biggest challenge of all.  LOL...  she and I have very different driving styles and habits. My driving style is one that was influenced by 30 years as a police officer and I have a hard time being a passenger.  I am learning to keep quiet, but it has been a challenge, and I have a ways to go.  Even though I know that I will always get a ride to wherever we need to go or even wherever I want to go...there is still a sense of loss of freedom and that's a very real thing...that feeling of needing to be dependent on someone else. We helped take care of both my mother who developed dementia and my father in law who developed full on Alzheimers disease.  I now have a much clearer idea  of a few the challenges they encountered, like when we took away their car keys.  

So I escaped Covid but am getting a lesson on brain health.  Maybe that is the most healthy way to deal with this...look at it as a lesson and learn as much as I can?  Does that even make sense?  As far as I know this isn't life threatening so I just need to deal with it.  I could bitch and whine that it isn't fair that 3 years in a row have sucked for me, three summers ruined but what would that get me?  2020 could have been so very much worse for me than it was.  I recognize that.  

 

This Old House

      I grew up in an old house of both indeterminate age and style. 

     It probably dated to sometime in the late 19th or very early 20th centuries, it never seemed to have a definite "style".  It lacked all of the elements normally associated with any specific architectural style.    It was just a big square two story box with 4 rooms down and four rooms up.  It had been built with no extra ornamentation either inside or out. No gingerbread trim, the woodwork was plain and probably of pine which was always kept painted.  The floors were pine, great for splinters, also kept painted or mostly covered with rugs and later with wall to wall carpet. The walls were plaster with wall paper in one or two rooms downstairs.  At some point in time an enclosed porch had been added to the front.  When my parents purchased it in 1950 there was not even any indoor plumbing.  Dad walled off one corner from the kitchen and created a small modern (for 1950) bathroom before they moved in and the old outhouse was moved away from yard near the back door and sat behind the tool shed for several years.  The new bathroom left my mother with a smallish L shaped kitchen. I'm sure she was happy to give up some kitchen space for an indoor bathroom.  

For a short time, perhaps around a year or two, three of the upstairs rooms were occupied as a separate apartment by my dad's brother Gwin and his wife Josaphine. The fourth room upstairs was shared as storage space.  There were small closets in three of the upstairs rooms, but none downstairs.  They shared the downstairs bathroom as well but had their own kitchen upstairs.  I can remember, as a toddler, standing at the bottom of the stairs and asking my aunt for gum and she would throw a stick or part of a stick down to me. Eventually my sister was born and my Aunt gave birth to my cousin and the shared living arrangement became crowded. My Aunt and uncle and cousin moved out and my family expanded into the upstairs. My parents occupied that house for 54 years and raised us 5 children there.  During those 54 years the house received several major updates including a kitchen remodel and two different additions.  Today my nephew is raising his family there and there have been further remodeling projects and additions. The house still lacks any definitive style description.    

I have had people tell me that they were not interested in owning an old home, for a variety of reasons…. too much cost to bring them up to date and keep them maintained, style not what they like, room layout that doesn’t meet current lifestyles, and any number of other reasons (excuses).  My wife and I have lived in a “modern” house exactly 4 of our 50 years of marriage.  It was a nice place, and served our young family well for those 4 years but it just didn't seem "natural" for either of us.  Besides that 1960’s vintage National Home we have lived in a classic 1920’s bungalow, an 1880 farmhouse, a small 1880’s town house that that originally sported a gingerbread victorian porch that a prior owner had had removed as he tried to alter the appearance of of the house to appear as a much older colonial style (not recommended),  a very special 1850 brick Greek Revival farm house and finally a 1913 Colonial Revival where we have been for the past 30 years. All very different styles and all had their own advantages and all presented different challenges as we tried to make them into homes that worked for our family. 

As you can see, besides the National Home, our homes all shared one trait…they were all homes of “a certain age”.  Some might label them “historic” and indeed our current home is part of a historic neighborhood and is protected under the city’s historic preservation ordinance.  That protection assures us that after we are gone the house will retain some protections and will perhaps be maintained long into the future. The first thing a friend asked me when he learned our home had been included in a historic district was “does that mean you can never change anything?”   

In short the answer to that question is “NO, that does not mean we can never change anything”. Exterior work requires approval by the historic review commission and that normally presents no problems.  I would probably be prevented from wrapping this brick home with vinal siding or tearing off the porch or making some other alteration that changed the overall style of the house.  Work on the interior of a historic house however, does not require pre approval…you can make the interior as “modern” as you want.  Add bathrooms, remove bathrooms, remove walls to make larger rooms, refinish floors or replace them with modern material, etc, etc.  Let me provide an analogy for what you can't do, using food.  You can't take a meatloaf and put icing on it, making it look like a cake.  

Kitchens in old homes are notoriously unfriendly to the way in which people today like to work in a kitchen.  For one thing kitchen designs of old never assumed more than one person would ever be working in the kitchen at the same time so many original kitchens in older homes were quite small and had few cabinets and few or no counter tops, instead relying on the home owner using a stand alone kitchen cupboard. 

I want to show you what I mean about making the inside of an historic home as modern as you wish. The following photos were taken 4 historic homes in my neighborhood. Each kitchen is suited to the homeowners tastes.  Two of the houses date to the first decade of the 20th Century, the other two are in homes that date to the mid and late 19th Century.  

 

Lake Stansbury, Quigly's Pond and other forgotten places

It's really difficult for us today to imagine what our downtown looked like before we were here.  The natural inclination is to believe that we would probably have no trouble identifying where we were if we were suddenly dropped into the center of downtown a hundred years ago...or much farther back in 1835.   What did it look like when William Digby arrived?  Some, maybe even most of the buildings would be familiar if we found ourselves back in 1920...street names would certainly be the same....the courthouse would be recognized right away.   Fifty years earlier, less than one lifetime, would be a different story...it might take some walking around to get our bearings...a lot fewer buildings would be recognizable...there's a railroad running down the middle of 5th Street.  There is a courthouse square...but wow...that building in the middle looks a lot different than we are used to seeing. Good heavens...there are saloons and grocery stores in almost every block downtown.  A number of the folks we meet along the walk are speaking German.   

How about one more bump back in time...let's take a look at downtown around 10 years after it was first laid out.  If asked I bet most of you would agree that downtown Lafayette is mostly flat, and today a drive down Main street from about 11th to the river would seem to verify that belief.  The truth is, that at the time Lafayette was first laid out on paper, and for more than the first decade of existence, downtown wasn't the wide-open flat space we know today. There were hills and even a small lake covering a portion of the original townsite. That downtown area would best be described as slightly rolling, and clearly sloped toward the Wabash.    

One of the best, if not the best descriptions of old Lafayette were written by Sanford Cox who was a very early settler in Lafayette arriving here before 1830.  Some 30 years later Cox published many of his memories of his adopted hometown.  One of the most astonishing things he remembered was our very own Lake Stansbury.  Yes, we had a lake downtown.  A body of water that was more or less permanent but grew or shrank with the seasons would have looked quite similar to the photo above. The true nature of that body of water would probably be better described as a pond, or marsh, rather than a lake which is usually a deeper body of water than a pond. What it lacked in depth it made up in surface area.  Cox described it covering ground from 6th and Brown streets to the southwest reaching Third and South during the wet season.  An area of several acres and blocking the routes of several streets.   It was a popular skating area during the winter. Finally, about 1839 the town board voted to drain and fill the "lake".   

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Lake Stansbury is that the demise of the lake was intimately tied to the birth of the Pearl River according to Cox. Lets allow Sanford Cox himself to explain.  During the 1860's and '70s Cox published several newspaper articles about the history of Lafayette as he remembered it. One such collection was published in a book called "Old Settlers" Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Valley which he published in 1860.  His Newspaper articles came later.  On November 15, 1871 Cox said this:   "If one of the early settlers of Lafayette that had moved away 30 or 40 years ago were to read the newspaper accounts of the improvements on Pearl River and the frequent inundations of that stream that occurred within the last 8 or 10 years he would be puzzled to know what portion of the town the raging river poured"    He would recollect the Spring Branch, just large enough to swim a duck that ran along near Samples Tan Yard at the south extremity of the village: and Lake Stansberry in the northeastern portion of the village"  "but our long-absent settler would not have the slightest remembrance of Pearl River"   Cox went on to explain that improvements of the streets and alleys, along with some extra effort by the town board in 1839 drained the little lake and where kids once skated during the winter was then covered with homes, churches, hotels and business blocks.  "Caleb Scudder, (first male child born in Lafayette) and his juvenile companions used to do some of their best skating where Trinity Church now stands"   

Now for the connection between Lake Stansbury and Pearl River:  Cox explains that the same cause that drained the lake created Pearl River.  Water always seeks a lower elevation, always.  Before the forest was cleared and "improvements" made....streets and lots graded, buildings built, Canals and railroads built...before that, all of that surface water (rainwater that wasn't absorbed) drained toward the river from the hills east and south of downtown....some of that water never made it all the way to the river...instead of ending up in pools such as Lake Stansberry and other wet places scattered here and there and then being slowly absorbed.  Another location that collected a lot of surface water was known as Quigly's pond located where St. Elizabeth Hospital was later built.  The building of the Wabash Railroad, diagonally through town had a major effect on water descending the hills east of town...forcing excess water to turn north to around Greenbush where it finally got over or under the railroad embankment and from there it wound around, ending up in Quigly's pond.  The pond had an outlet where excess water flowed generally southwest to about 8th and Main.   This was not a steady stream like a creek or river...it was surface water running toward the river from the high ground east and northeast of town during and after rainy or stormy weather.  The more that streets got graded with stone gutters and brick paving the less water was absorbed along the way, instead that water just ran down the street seeking lower ground.  There seems to be no one, not even Cox who can explain how the name Pearl River came about.  One guess is that 7th St. North of Main street was originally named Pearl Street, and that was the location where much of the flood waters ended up on their way to the river.  Around 1870 the city built a storm sewer line from Main street where the Pearl crossed to a point on South 5th, south of Alabama where waters of the Pearl joined the waters of the Spring Branch stream westward to the river.  

That storm sewer solved periodic flash flooding that had plagued parts of the downtown area as more and more of the surface area was covered by pavement and buildings.  It retained the name Pearl River even though it was never really a river at all.  It developed a strong and somewhat mysterious local mythology over the years.   Most or at least many portions of that original brick sewer have been replaced and rerouted with stronger and longer lasting material.  

Birth, Life, and Death of the American Porch

 

 Beautiful, full wrap around porch with lots of gingerbread. 

        The Birth, Life, and Death of the American Porch

    There is a lot to see and admire when walking or driving through historic neighborhoods.   One of the architectural elements that might attract your attention are the porches on some of the older homes.  The original idea of a porch can probably be traced back to the rock overhangs in front of caves.  If you had a cave home with some protective overhanging rock you had a place to sit out of the weather and watch for danger approaching.  Even better if your rock shelter was on a hillside providing an even greater more distant view.  

Porches have not always been a feature on American homes but they reached their height of popularity, and extravagance, during the second half of the 19^th century.  The word porch comes from the Latin, porticus but the feature has gone by many names including portico, stoop (Dutch), veranda, plaza, and others.  A porch can be open or enclosed, but they all serve the same function as a transition space between outdoors and indoors and between what is public and what is private.  It is a literal intermediate space between two worlds that have been increasingly separated in our time.  

Inviting

  

    Porches were originally built for good, practical reasons but quickly became important social gathering spots.  Porches were where social norms evolved as the use of porches evolved.  Porches became the extravagant and important architectural feature that they were in 1900 as a result of American industrialization during the 19^th century plus the suburbanization of our cities.  Gingerbread was in high demand and Fancy millwork was being created on an industrial scale that was readily available for new construction or the addition of a new porch onto an older existing home.  You could select from a wide variety of styles right out of a catalog.  Additionally,  mass-produced millwork was much less expensive than fancy ornamentation that had formerly been created specifically for one customer, perhaps even on-site at the new building. 

Among the practical reasons for the development of porches was protecting the door from the weather.  In the days before air conditioning shading the house from the hot summer sun was a big benefit of a large porch.  A large wrap-around porch, along with high ceilings, and large windows helped keep Victorian homes bearable in the summer heat.   

Sometimes though, even those features were not enough, and porches were used for sleeping and even eating meals.  In the early twentieth century, some homes were built with a porch designed specifically as a “sleeping porch” usually located on the second floor near bedrooms.   If they did not have a porch our Victorian ancestors sometimes slept in tents in the back yard during periods of excessive heat. 

When it got too hot to sleep in the house a tent under the trees worked for some.  

As the nineteenth-century progressed the social role of the porch increased.  It developed into an outdoor parlor, a true extension of the house into the landscape.  Sitting on the porch became an important part of the daily routine for many of our ancestors.  Rutherford B Hayes summed up the Victorian love of porches when he wrote in his journal in 1873: “The best part of his house is the veranda. But I would enlarge it. I want a veranda with a house attached.”  

While innovations such as mass-produced millwork fostered the proliferation of porches in the nineteenth century, new inventions led to the decline of the porch in the twentieth century.  The automobile allowed people to get out of the house for entertainment and relaxation.  The telephone allowed neighbors and friends to chat without meeting personally.  Housing styles popularized in the construction boom following World War II eliminated the front porch as the back yard became the focus of family activity.  The final nail in the coffin for the popularity of the porch were the inventions of air conditioning and television.  Why sit on the hot porch and watch traffic drive past when you could sit in your air-conditioned living room and be entertained by a program playing on that magic box?

I grew up in a house with a front porch that was nothing other than a transition space between outside and inside the house. It was a place to leave muddy shoes and dirty coveralls.  There was a closet at one end where dad hung his work coats and boots. We had a back door but no porch was associated with that door at all.  Eventually, dad had a concrete stoop poured but no one would ever mistake it for a porch.  

Some of my fondest memories of childhood are recollections of hours spent at my grandparent's house which had three porches, designated as North porch, East porch, sometimes called the front porch, and the back porch or South porch.   Some of my best quality time was spent there on the "north porch" with one or both of my grandparents on the porch swing that always hung there.  Usually, that was during the early evening hours as the last of the daylight was fading and bats would come out and start swooping over the front pasture getting fat on mosquitos and other insects.  It was there on that porch that stories of "the old days" were told and eagerly listened to.  My later interest in genealogy must have certainly started on that porch.  The large back porch was what I'd call a working porch.  Two large cupboards there kept jars of canned produce, jams and jellies.  Work boots, aprons, a large wash tub could also be found on that porch.  My earliest memories are that it was open but some years later they enclosed it and a daybed appeared there.  

One of my favorite neighborhood porches.

Finding much of a porch on any house built since World War II is just about impossible.  As a society we have turned inward, turned our backs on the street, and on our neighbors and are poorer for it.  

 

The Mouse Brigade

 

I was a charter member of the Robinson Brothers branch of "The Mouse Brigade".  The Robinson Brothers were a farming partnership made up of my dad and his two younger brothers.  There was also a second partnership that involved my grandfather and his farm called C.G.Robinson and Sons.  It won't be clear for many readers just what the Mouse Brigade was about until I explain something about farming during my childhood and youth. Specifically, I need to talk about corn and how harvesting and storing corn was once done compared with how it is done today.  

Corn is a member of the grass family and is a native American plant that was first cultivated around 7000 years ago in the area of Mexico or Central America. For almost all of that 7000 year period corn was harvested by hand. The ears were pulled off the stalk and the grain (seeds) were removed from the cob only when it was time to make food.   Around 100 years ago farmers started using mechanical means to harvest corn and the ears were then stored on the farm in buildings known as corn cribs until it was time to either feed it to livestock or sell it. Some amount of it was also consumed by the farmer and his family in the early days but by the time mechanical corn pickers arrived the vast majority was sold off the farm if not consumed by livestock.  I do remember my dad would plant a short row of popcorn which we kept for our own use over the winter.  We also planted some sweet corn which we used during the summer fresh out of the field.  

Early in history corn was stored in baskets and most of it was consumed by those who grew it.  Soon after their arrival here in America corn began to be grown by the Europeans after they learned about it from the natives. 
Eventually, enough was grown and harvested by those early settlers that they needed something more than baskets to store their harvest and that is when corn cribs came about.  The first were log or split log affairs and often had no roof.  They were built with gaps between the logs to allow air to circulate through the stored corn.  That corn was always stored on the cob. By the time the 20th Century rolled around corn cribs had become more thoughtfully constructed out of better or at least more finished material.  Often they were built as double cribs with an alleyway between the two cribs for storing machinery, all under a single roof.  Sometimes a corn crib was built into a barn or attached to a barn with or sometimes without a covered alley between the barn and the crib for storage. A crib inside or next to the barn was an especially popular option if much of the stored corn was going to be fed to cattle or pigs over the winter.  

From about 1866 when the government first began estimating corn production information to about 1940 average corn yields in the U.S. were around 36 bushels per acre.  Between the rapid adoption of hybrid corn varieties, plus the increased use of fertilizer and pesticides the average yields of corn have increased rapidly since the 1940s to averages just under 200 bushels per acre.  Those increased amounts of production required much greater storage capacity on the farm and for the next 25 years Additional and larger corn crib space was added to many farms.  Cribs were built of cement block, brick, metal, or wire.  During the 1960s round wire cribs with metal roofs were popping up all over rural America. 

Many of these wire cribs were constructed during the 50's and 60's

Double Crib with alley for equipment storage. 

Farmers could no longer consume even a fraction of what they were growing and unless they had very large livestock operations even that was not going to make a dent in the crop.  The 30 year period from 1940 to around 1970 was a time of tremendous change in corn farming.  By the late 1960s many farm families had replaced mechanical com pickers that harvested ear com with combines that harvested and shelled the kernels off the ear in the field.  The corn cribs that had been used for ear corn needed to be remodeled or new storage systems used. Corn cribs, once a common sight, are disappearing or converted to other uses.     

Let me back up to the years when we were still using tractor mounted corn pickers and storing ear corn.  That brings me to my memory of the "Mouse Brigade".   Robinson Brothers did not have a large livestock operation so our corn was not used for that.  When it came time to sell our corn at one of the local grain elevators we hired a custom corn shelling crew.  They would arrive with a corn sheller that was either mounted on the back of a truck or some models were towed behind a tractor.  Eventually, Dad and his brothers purchased their own corn sheller and did their own corn and that of some neighbors.  The adults and high school boys hired to help did the heavy work, scooping or raking corn out of the bottom of the crib into a conveyor that carried the ear corn up and into the sheller.   Inside the sheller, the ear corn was shelled and the shelled corn was run out of an auger spout into a truck or wagon. The sheller separated cobs and husks.  The husks were blown out of a canvas tube by a very large powerful fan.  They pointed the tube away from those working and the shucks and the occasional piece of cob were blown into large piles and then usually burned The cobs came out a different place and those were either just piled up and burned or loaded into wagons or trucks to be taken away.  I think a lot of times the cobs were just piled up and burned along with the husks. Sometimes I believe cobs were used for bedding material for livestock.   

Cob pile 

As you might expect corn cribs were popular places for animals to visit, and many took up permanent residence, mostly mice and rats, but sometimes we would find a raccoon or Squirrel, or sometimes a snake would be found.  Snakes were attracted to the cribs due to the abundance of mice and rats.  

 As the corn was moved out of the crib the mice and rats kept trying to move out of harm's way.  Initially, they did not try to leave the crib but just moved deeper into the corn pile. Eventually though, their cover was reduced to only a few bushels of ear corn back in a corner and they would make their escapes out of the cribs.  Those escaping rodents were the job of the Mouse Brigade, and we took that work seriously.   Toward the end, when there was only a small pile of ear corn left to scoop out the mice would come out in droves, or so it seemed to us.  We were using shovels, snow shovels, brooms, or just stomping them with our Davy Crockett boots.  At some of the places where we shelled corn there were also dogs involved in the Mouse Brigade.  I recall us shelling corn at the Biddle farm west of Brookston and they had a big old farm dog of unknown breed and that dog was an excellent mouser.  He was pretty fast and he did not waste time simply killing a mouse, there was one chomp and the mouse went right down the hatch and he would grab another.  That was the only dog I ever saw who could eat so many mice, without ever chewing them, but I suppose he could be much more efficient by not wasting time chewing up what he killed.   Once in a while, a rat would run out of the crib, but more often they were spotted by those working inside the crib and were dispatched while still in the crib.  You always knew when a rat had jumped out from under the corn because there was enough yelling coming from inside you could hear it over the roar of the sheller.  As we got older we graduated from the mouse brigade to scooping corn while younger family members were introduced to the mouse brigade.  That didn't last long because about that time we bought a combine and quit storing ear corn and not long after that the sheller was sold.   There were two wire cribs on our farm, one crib in a barn and another crib attached to another barn with an alley between the end of the barn and the crib. Those are all gone now. 

 

John Deer 720 Diesel tractor and Minneapolis Moline Corn Sheller circa 1959. 
To see a sheller in operation: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1588822327966213

You light up my life... just stop!

We are a nation of cowards, afraid of the dark.  About a month ago my son sent me a photograph of the night sky he had taken in Arizona near where he lives.  It reminded me of just how much a lot of the rest of us have forgotten about what a dark night sky can look like. All because of man's habit of always ending up making too much of a good thing.

Clearly, electric lighting was a boon to mankind.  Electric is safer than using kerosene or gas for lighting, and it's far better for our eyesight.  That said, we humans have taken something good and turned it into something else.

I fully understand and even appreciate well-done landscape lighting.  When I walk down my street at night I appreciate the lighting on the exterior of the neighboring church that highlights the beautiful architecture but just past the church are two parking lots, both owned by the church and you could easily read the fine print on the back of your credit card without any trouble at all.  There are no events happening at the church and yet they keep those parking lot floodlights on all night. Across the street is a local funeral home which is in a nice turn of the century house.  Again, they have some appropriate landscape lighting and some light pointing toward the front of the house where their name shows on a sign....on one side of the house is a parking lot and again...bright floodlights wash the entire parking lot and the whole side of the house with brilliant light.  No night activities are going on...the funeral director and his wife live upstairs and are probably watching TV.  I bet they don't need any nightlights in their apartment.

Why do my street lights shine light not only down at the street/sidewalk where it's nice to have some light, but also directly upward?

Has there been some horrible crime spree in my neighborhood I'm not aware of?  It seems to me to be a terrible waste of electricity, but as importantly it is the very real source of pollution of our night sky.  Are we really so afraid that we need all that light?  Studies have shown that light pollution is bad for the environment as well as human health.

My grandparents lived on a farm a few miles from town. I remember going to visit them after dark. They turned on the outside light when company came at night and turned it off when the company left.  It always felt like a welcome to me.  In the summer we could lay in the yard and look at the stars without being blinded by a lot of neighborhood light. When I look up at the night sky from my house today the number of stars visible is perhaps a third or a quarter of what I can see when I visit our son in Arizona and what I remember seeing when I grew up on the farm.

Am I foolish because I'm not more afraid?   Can't we just turn down the lumens a little and redirect them to where they are actually of use?  The photograph above was one of my early experiments with long exposure night shots to capture star trails.  It was taken late at night  Aug 7, 2003 at 11:30 PM.   I was about 13 or 14 miles north of Lafayette and ten miles west of Delphi. It was a dark night, the moon was just past first quarter and was low in the west at my back.  I was facing east.  My lens was open for 83 seconds.   The yellow-orange glow left of the barn is Delphi light...ten miles distant.  The glow on the right is Lafayette and some of that light is well over 15 miles away.  I leave you with this question, Do we really need our towns and cities lighted up so bright that they are visible from space? 

The Complete Dummies Guide to Facebook and Facebook Dummies

In the beginning, Facebook was such a great idea and even now it holds some promise of being a decent tool for communication if people actually thought about what they were doing when they open their news feed. 

It could be so much more than what a lot of users allow it to be.  I'm talking about positive things, but too often it's an uphill battle to remain positive about all the ways people actually use it when they interact with friends and the world at large.  

Have we all lost our ability to communicate with one another? I think more people should look at Facebook as if they were having an actual conversation with a friend or relative, one that can be overheard by everyone in the room around you. One that your kids or grandkids can hear.  That might solve some of the issues I see with the platform.  

Two developments have taken much of the shine off Facebook, at least for me.  First, they learned to monetize the product and then they learned to weaponize the product. Advertising is a huge cash cow for the company, and I understand that the product would not exist if the company could not get some return on their investment so I'm willing to see advertising when I visit Facebook.  

What I mean by weaponized is that Facebook collects all sorts of information about us for the purpose of showing us specific advertising that we might actually be interested in.  That means that the company that paid for that ad would stand a better chance of getting the viewer of the ad to open the ad and, with a little luck, visit the company website and make a purchase.  Most companies don't want to purchase advertising that doesn't actually result in sales so Facebook works very hard collecting our likes, dislikes, politics, marital situation, number and ages of children, health, and all sorts of other information on each of us users.  In a lot of ways, they know more about us than our families do.  They even use information from people on our friend list to direct ads to us. For example, just this week I've had several ads pop up in my feed telling me that some of my friends "like" Best Buy.  

 It boils down to this: the more information you put about yourself on Facebook—where you live, your age, where (and if) you graduated college, the companies, brands, and activities you like, and even where you work—determines what kind of ads you'll see. In theory, it makes it so that targeted ads are more relevant to you personally. If you like knitting you will be shown advertisements for yarn rather than for sporting equipment. 

There are settings you can change and share a lot less information with Facebook....but that would not lessen the number of ads you see, but only change the type we see.

The second current problem with Facebook in my view is politics and it is a much worse issue than learning to deal with advertising.   What we have learned is that some very dangerous enemies of the United States have learned that they can sway public opinion in the US by making certain kinds of posts on Facebook using fake names and accounts.  That is a huge problem for the country and my hope is that law enforcement and security experts are working to defeat that problem.  

Perhaps less serious, but most annoying on a personal basis are those users who use facebook only for telling the world how much they love/hate whichever politician or how they feel on every single social issue imaginable.  It doesn't bother me that people have political opinions, I have them too, but why is it necessary to post 4 or 5 of those opinions each and every day.  I have "friends" at Facebook who post nothing but political "memes" copied from somewhere else. Some might even be funny, but mostly they are just irritating. If you tell me (and the whole rest of the world) once that you hate Nancy Pelosi I don't need to be told again, or again and again, or every day for months.  I promise. I will remember your political preference.  I promise too; if you post political memes that make fun of or belittle my political preferences I will remember that too. Are you sure you want to be friends with me? 

If you write down your own ideas expressing political beliefs I will appreciate those, even if I don't agree, but knowing those are your own words....I respect the idea that you went to that effort.  Two people, even with different ideas can have a conversation that way.  Posting the most unflattering, or even altered photo of your political nemesis, with some snarky comment, or even a false or misleading bit of information about that person does not invite conversation.  What it invites is just another snarky meme of the opposite view.  Why should I have to be explaining these concepts to adults?  

Don't get me wrong, I believe adults can, and should have discussions involving political ideas but most of the political rot I see on Facebook does exactly the opposite....it creates a feeling of not wanting to talk to the person who posted it, it creates isolation between two sides of any debate.  Each side simply moves to their corner and throws political meme's at the other side without ever really trying to understand what the other side believes and why they believe what they do. 

For those of you who are not quite sure what I mean when I say "political memes" this is a brief description.   The political meme — most often text over an image, sometimes short videos or digital clip art meant to spread and be imitated — is often a guttural, simple message, sometimes couched in humor, like the doctored video of Hillary Clinton being hit with Trump's golf ball. Four random samples of what I call political rot followed with brief comments about each.  

 This one is a classic, text over a photo with a very simple easy to remember message.  
Often though the makers of these things
 look for the worst picture of the person 
 they can find, and if they can't find one  
they doctor one.  Very easy to copy and 
use on your own page.  Perfect for the
mentally lazy who don't want to be bothered writing something themselves.    

 Sometimes a bit of humor is used to make the message seem less unkind.  

But just as often humor is skipped altogether.  This one is classic in that they dug up an unflattering picture of the former first lady....and maybe enhanced it a bit to make her look worse.  

This is technically not a meme, but this is the sort of picture that haters of Nancy Pelosi dream of finding and turning into a meme. 

  







A note to my facebook friends....if you start using a lot of these on your page I'm going to lose interest in visiting your page pretty quickly.