Topix Underground

This is beautiful. It's 80 degrees, I'm alone and it's dead quiet around here. I have a small table-top propane grill with an adapter hose so I can use a 20 pound cylinder. That lasts for a year. It's going to be 90 tomorrow. I'm staying here to spray water on the 50 or so plants I already have in the ground. There's another 350 or so to plant over the course of the next week.  By summer, the joint will be crawling with bees, humming birds, dragon flies, butterflies... The more wildlife the better. This is the right assertion of 'diversity'. I want to add a water feature to the garden. I think the cats would dig that.

This is beautiful. It's 80 degrees, I'm alone and it's dead quiet around here. I have a small table-top propane grill with an adapter hose so I can use a 20 pound cylinder. That lasts for a year. It's going to be 90 tomorrow. I'm staying here to spray water on the 50 or so plants I already have in the ground. There's another 350 or so to plant over the course of the next week.  By summer, the joint will be crawling with bees, humming birds, dragon flies, butterflies... The more wildlife the better. This is the right assertion of 'diversity'. I want to add a water feature to the garden. I think the cats would dig that.

I have a 120 in the ground, 30 some odd to go. Plus, did you know that Vincas will seed?  Looks like I have around 80 or so volunteers. In the wrong place of course, not sure how many I can move without killing them.

I have a 120 in the ground, 30 some odd to go. Plus, did you know that Vincas will seed?  Looks like I have around 80 or so volunteers. In the wrong place of course, not sure how many I can move without killing them.

Last week it was below freezing, this week it's too hot. Every year I get older, I get better at this and less interested in my 'job'.

It's all kind of emblematic of a larger nation-wide, maybe world-wide, trend where just paying the freight on an ordinary life is becomeing prohibitively expensive because we are being milked like cattle. In this two-horse town, in the past several years, the family owned grocery store, hardware store, auto parts store, veterinary clinic, pharmacy have all been sold to 'private equity' firms or corporations. So now instead of getting the old man or old woman that knows what they doing, you get some teenager in a vest with a name tag and everything is 3 times as expensive. There used to be a dozen lumber yards within a 30 minute drive of here. Now I have to commute down to traffic-town and pick through the bullshit at Home Depot with all the other chumps....but they offer credit (at 30%).

This....


"Demand for high-end homes has been booming, with sales at the $1 million-plus price point growing faster than any other part of the market. At the same time, sales at the lower end of the market — sub-$250,000 homes typically targeted by first-time homebuyers — have dropped in the past year.

The divergence is another example of the K-shaped economy, in which high-income households are thriving and spending while lower- and middle-income households are pulling back as the cost of living rises. In the long run, such shifts can exacerbate the wealth gap as longtime homeowners reap home equity gains while first-time buyers struggle to enter the market at all."




The Dow isn't the entire economy. For 90% of Americans the economy sucks.

It's all kind of emblematic of a larger nation-wide, maybe world-wide, trend where just paying the freight on an ordinary life is becomeing prohibitively expensive because we are being milked like cattle. In this two-horse town, in the past several years, the family owned grocery store, hardware store, auto parts store, veterinary clinic, pharmacy have all been sold to 'private equity' firms or corporations. So now instead of getting the old man or old woman that knows what they doing, you get some teenager in a vest with a name tag and everything is 3 times as expensive. There used to be a dozen lumber yards within a 30 minute drive of here. Now I have to commute down to traffic-town and pick through the bullshit at Home Depot with all the other chumps....but they offer credit (at 30%).

Milked like cows is a very good description of it.

This is not the weather we had when I was young.  I don't care what you call it, things are changing.

I never saw a tick in my life until the past several years, now these ‘stink bugs’, vegetation, insects fish, wildlife has all shifted since I was in high school…dramatically. Ice cover, the Lakes, it’s all getting weird. Also, this shit the farmers spray out here….there isn’t a weed or bug in sight on top of the land where we draw our water from. It’s in the water, the food, the air, the dirt.