Blowing in the wind

I took a walk outside to see the stars this morning. It’s always delightful to see the heavens filled with the bright lights of far away galaxies. You can’t do this in the city!

It’s 50° outside and the forecast is for wind, and lots of it. But, early this morning, not a leaf is stirring and the skies are crystal clear. But later, when the wind picks up, the dust from all of the recent harvesting activities will cause a brown haze to fill the valley. Walnuts are the latest crop to be harvested and the roads are clogged with exotic orchard harvesting equipment moving from one farm to the next. Shakers and sweepers, windrowers and bank out wagons, all part of the necessary tools to gather the nuts. A byproduct of all of this activity is dust and lots of it!

We have 3 walnut trees and those trees provide more than enough nuts for this family! Most are not harvested and go to waste. But a few are eaten; I love to pick a handful of walnuts, then crack and eat them. I have a bag filled with them out in the garage and whenever I feel the urge, I grab the nut cracker and enjoy!

And later this month or the first of the next, I will be seeing the pecans dropping…and the crows descending. Pecans are not a normal crop for this part of the valley, though I heard that some farmers are experimenting with them. We have 2 trees and 2 varieties of pecans; both quite good. This year the nuts are much larger than last year, though not quite as many. That’s fine; as much as I like pecans, there is no way that we can eat them all. And we give the nuts at the top of the trees to the crows.

Here’s a little something from the news…

Blowing in the Wind
What finally caused President Bush to very publicly consult with his generals to consider a change in tactics in Iraq was the fear that his party could lose in the Congressional elections next month.

Of course I have to ask; isn’t that called flip flopping? Waffling? What ever happened to “stay the course”? Of course it can all be explained away with a few choice words. And politicians are quite handy with words. And speaking of words; when you put the Pentagon and the politicians together, they can come up with all sorts of new words. Like “collateral damage”, this replaces “killing of innocent civilians”. Or “redacted”; replacing “censored”. How about “rendition”, which is the new word to replace, “kidnapping”. Do these people really believe that by creating new words to replace old ones, you can somehow lose the meaning?