Monday, April 30, 2012

Late night silly Ideas that Make sense and other things.

Dear Readers,

 Trying to show someone that the idea works, even though the rest of the world is telling you a different story can drive you insane.  I have have been talking so much about the BioWebScape theories I have been cooking up that I have been dreaming about them in the edges of sleep.  Just today or was that yesterday, I was out looking at plants in a local albeit far from here nursery, They have over 30 acres spread out with electric golf carts to get you too the places they know where they have what you want, but can't just walk you there in a few seconds, but have to drive you there.  We were looking for several things, and just wanted to get out and go for a sunday drive, which is what it turned out being, as the place is a bit far from here on the edges of Little Rock far to the SouthWest.  The local gardening center had to close because of whatever reason, but the only things that are left are the big box stores and the local grocery stores that handle a few plants, but nothing that is totally about plants, and the things you can do with them.  This place we went too, has a huge selection, and have loads of water features all the supplies to make them.  Though the Prices are far out there and not in my budgets, I can get ideas that I haven't had in a while.   I stopped being a tropical fish breeder a while ago and stopped thinking of having fish tanks wall to wall all over the house over a decade ago.

So some of the ways to feed myself in the BioWebScape designs have been only running toward plants, which is not the whole picture, just part of it. And Since I already have a house, I don't have to think much about making a home on my land, so that I can save all that spare Earth Land area for the wilderness we seem to be razing every day, just to make parking lots, or big huge palm nut tree farms so that we can use them to make Bio-fuels for the cars we just seem to want to use for everything.   We are just using the land the wrong way and getting more and more bad ideas, and further away from the easier ways to do this, all the time it seems.

So tonight while mulling over what is the smallest hunk of land I could live off of, if I got only the food I needed,  not the cotton, or the trees for the desktop for the computer, but the food that the farmland is being wasted on trying to produce for me and the industrial uses that they think is best, but not really seeming to work anymore, even though they are hell bent on still doing it the failed way.  I keep seeing a farmer plowing his dusty field that had no life in it at all, just a dusty pile of flat dry dirt and thought to myself WHY?  They call that farming, I call that moving dirt in the desert and nothing about living with plants and the life I can see out my back windows.  Though it does not help that the guy down the road just piled more dirt on his old lawn and put down a layer of grass sod and put in bedding plants in a soil base, that looked like river bottom sand, with even less organic matter than the texas farm field in the above example was about.

We go through, tearing out the trees to put lawns, then wonder why the food prices are so high!  We plant parking lots then wonder why we aren't getting any rain this year!  We have been changing our environment so much that we DUH! that is why the weather is odd, that is why our climate is tilting oddly after all these years of us bit by bit tearing out the green and putting in something that is not a functioning system.

So if I start with a chunk of living land, the is only 20 feet on a side, and make up 12 of them,  each 400 Square feet in total,  and get only one month's food off each 20ft by 20ft square,  I will be able to easily prove that I can live off of one 9th an acre.   That is 4,800 Sq Ft, of growing space to get a whole year's worth of food from.   I can make a chicken coop wagon, to move over a set space once a week, moving to a new space every week and never going back to the old space till next year, and plan out crops that will mature in every month of the year so that each space, is only used for food for 30 days, and then anything else on it can be used as give away or whatever uses that produce in the best way, but I don't have to depend on it, as I have a new 20 by 20 space with that months foods on it.   That is what I was working on in my head and forced myself to get out of bed, as I could not sleep and think of it too.

Here I have been telling people that in my climate and my water from the Sky allotment I can grow enough food for me on just 1/6th of an acre and that if we plotted out places this size all over the world's growing ranges where people want to live, we can in general feed everyone on earth, all 8 billion of us, going that high to give people the concept edges that I am not just thinking of today's crop of people, but a future too.  We could feed them off of  just a bit less than 2,100,000 square miles of the earth's surface with ease.  Their diets don't have to bland, wheat and chicken everyday either.   Really this is so easy that I can't see why people don't think this way!  I Have been seeing the roof tops of houses filled with green things for over 30 years,  Plants just everywhere, parking lots covered with food producing features, even if You wanted to also park cars under them.

Urban planners are redoing spaces all over the world as we speak, I am not the only one to have seen the madness and thought, hey wait a minute, what are you all thinking about! And gone and done something different, Trying to prove our ideas with examples.   Now I have been tied up with the planning stages for a long time and the other things we Call life and haven't really set down to get this honed into a designed space.  But I thought for sure other people would have seen the light and moved toward a better way of living by now, and the change just never showed up.  So here I am changing my hunk of the world to what I have thought about for over 30 years, and writing and telling people about it in a more active way.   Now I don't have more than about 10,000 US Dollars a year to live on, and I try to be frugal in my water use from the local city Tap Water source, and the energy use I have tried to keep low,  even with the ideas I have, I just can't afford it being high.  I don't own one of the smart phone plans,  I just have a cellphone that gets a call out to the world and though it does also have a nice stopwatch feature and calculator, I don't use it for much else than a connection to the people that I need to talk to, so there is that to consider as limiting myself from the whiz bang of everyday life of the 2010's and up in the timeline.

Last year I did an experiment, I went a whole year without taking a shower or a bath. Not in the traditional sense of it anyway, I used about a quart of water in a sponge bath every few days, and used alcohol and witch hazel rubdowns to kill the odd things that might have harmed my skin during the day.  Lucky for me I did it when the rest of this area was going through it's own water shortages.  I would brush my hair several times a day, as it is long and just needs that anyway, but I never washed it with water, unless I was caught in a rain storm or was just playing in water, though I didn't get to swim like I had hoped too.  No one was the wiser for my action,  as you can't tell if you have had a bath or not,  only in your own mind is that the case, if you do take care that when you leave your house, you have sponged off, and worn clean clothes.   Which I was careful to keep old habits of when I get home, the outside wearing clothes, go back in a used but clean pile and the inside round home clothes go on the skin surfaces.   Generally around the house I wear a pair of shorts and not much else.  I have had to start going outside more often wearing my sandals, but last year I was generally also barefoot while gardening, and around the home, and I have never much liked shoes in the house.  My parents were telling me that I never liked shoes as a kid, not that I needed them, even though they could afford them for me, I never liked them, and I guess I know why that would be the case and now I can't wear them much anyway as my feet are the way they are, shoes would just drive me insane.  And yes I can walk about on the hot pavement, Blacktop or Cement in the hot summer sun, though the really hot areas can be avoided, as I can still burn my feet, I know I have done that a time or two in the summer months.  So it is true that if I was caught outside in the middle of nowhere with out shoes or clothes, I wouldn't think twice about the lack of them and just go on about getting whatever I needed done, done.  We put a bit to much into the idea of having pretty coverings anyway a lot these days.  Yeah I can see all those Women that would be my companions roll their eyes and all those men out there, wondering why I don't like those neat golf shorts and suits and ties....  But seriously, we don't really need them to get from point A to Point B do we?   If we want to be noticed, yeah sure, be noticed, I dress plainly and get noticed either for that, or that I have long hair and open doors for people when I don't have too.  I am not really sure why people notice me to be honest.  Though I would be lying if I said, I did not like it, just can't figure out why they do.  Though I have been told I do look around like I own the place and am checking it out to figure out where I can put something back in order.  Which if I think about it, is exactly how I see almost every place I go as being a place that is mine, and where is the off the shelf item to put back or the chair to move straight or the table to bus, or the door to be opened.   If I just looking for something in a store, I will automatically look at fronting items on the shelves, and I guess that is how people have clued into me maybe working there, or being management, in that I don't wear company colors, but I act like I work there or own the place.  And I do, in a way.   Every day you have a job,  and if you can help someone else do theirs easier by helping them fix something, do it, it makes their days a little less filled with so many things to do.  UMmm   so there might be a bleed off of Charles zone feel,  There is the owner walking about, and I can go ask him what is up, and where the bathrooms are, or ask him what he thinks about things...  Laughs.

Sooner or later it says in the Bible that God will come to judge the living and the dead,  What happens if he has been walking about everyday for the last billion or so years checking the place out first hand in a body you can see?  ((  God's days, aren't like ours, he can and is everyplace at the same time, so forget about fooling him, or hiding that secret you have from him, not going to happen, that is you thinking he is just like your parents whom you could hide things from. Not the same thing,  so stop putting him in that same box.  ))

So now that I have told you all about the idea that you can easily feed everyone on earth on only 2,100,000 Square miles, if not less.   As we will get a lot of food from the 400 Square feet of growing spaces in those other 11 months of the year,  what should we be doing with the rest of the 57,000,000 Square miles of the earth's land area that we don't need to grow human food on?  Save it from shopping malls, and parking lots please, and stop wasting so much time thinking we need million and billions of gallons of fuel to feed those millions and millions of farms that we don't need.   We can and have the spaces to make just about every country on earth feed itself, just with a bit of planning.   That we have all this angst and gnashing of teeth is our own faults, we don't have to be this way, and I and other have proved it, even if the wind and the rain come to tear your places down, you can and know how to store food, so stop being caught with your house built out of straw in a high wind area.

 I just saw today in the paper or online that people are putting Safe Rooms in their houses, as if that was a neato new idea.  The old storm shelters and root cellars just aren't in people's thinkings it seems.  But how many times did the wind have to knock your houses down before you thought, umm  high wind, flat land, no caves, geee, just build it again with these soft sticks, and lets hope no more wind shows up..... It was rather frustrating to see people just keep on and keep on doing the same thing over and over again expecting to get different results from something that it seemed plain to me , was an easy fix.  Build better living arrangements and stop being afraid of a little wind and rain.  

 Oh and before I forget to mention it,  all that Ocean out there can be built on too,  you just have to build your own islands in a way that the wind and ocean don't harm them as much as they do tiny ships.   Even the tiny ships that are carrying 2,000,000 barrels of Crude oil are tiny, to the island/ boats I am talking about.  We have the skills and the ability to build sky scrapers,  Why not take them out to sea?  This is not a new idea I have seen plenty of other people doing it for years, and years, as I used to read a lot of sailing magazines and have thought of living on an iceberg a lot, as I like the cold a lot more than most.

You build a wedge / pyramid like structure,  with a lot more bulk and mass below the waterline than above it, so that you get the iceberg affect and aren't as tossed about by storms and waves.  You can make them big enough to literally be floating cities and never need to go ashore for anything as it will all be there for you.  Not something you can do if you are worrying about where you next meal is going to come from, but if you are only using 2,100,000 Square miles to feed all 8 billion of us, why not use the extra time and energy toward making things like house more people and do all those other things people keep dreaming of and lamenting that you will just run out of everything, as we have been wasting it so much we now can't see a way around the bottleneck we have gotten ourselves into.  Step out of the bottleneck and look about and do What Christ said,  Notice the birds..  They don't go places that aren't alive, they travel to where the food is, and they don't much just limit themselves to the hunks of land, they are pretty much global flying creatures.  Maybe we should be thinking out of the boxes we keep putting ourselves into.

So I will say goodbye and
May Christ's peace that does pass all understanding be yours one and all.
Charles.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Okay first off............. then there was more.

Dear Readers, 

 There they go changing things again. First off they changed blogspot so that now I have to use another browser to post to the blog, which bugs me, then they tell me that my old internet browser is not up to their standards, but if I really want to look keen I could get their prized program.  The more a company owns you the more you will feel owned by that company every time you have to sign a new deal, get a new program, or right what they want you write, or edit it the way they want you to edit so that they can get more sales from your words.  In this case Blogger and the other places that make the internet what it is, aren't really yours, till you pay someone for them.  If you are getting a free service, wait till they change it and then complain like me.  Laughs, sadly, nothing seems to stay the same, I liked how the place looked before the change, it was easy to use before the changes.

 I haven't been in the mood to write the long way, as I can just imagine it the super fast way and see all the fancy cars, the space ships, the islands that are made out of the earth under your feet, but from deep down like 500 miles under your feet, and all those other things that the imagination can do, but now I have to get some of that in the head out of the head out of the head or else the head gets boggy and slow at imagining other things.  sighs.

Give me a week to figure out if I want to scream or not, okay I did scream a bit at the Tom Petty concert I went to just last Saturday,  Great show, a few songs I had no clue what they were, but that was going to be a given, as I don't buy records much anymore, heck I even use the term records if that can date me for you all.   I don't have a smart phone, Don't plan on getting one, as they cost more, and would not fit my hand like the headset kind I like, the ones that even though they aren't do look a bit more like the old bell telephone hand held bell shaped knobby phones from yesteryear.  There will always be something cool about having a speaker up near your ear and a mouth piece down by your mouth that you don't get with a book like small flat panel that reminds me more of a deck of cards than a phone, which just goes to show you that they aren't being used like phones much these days anyway.  People just like the hand held computers that they don't have to have a lap or desk ready for them to use.  But people are just as addicted to them as they were their old phones in the houses they used to talk out of, only now they can carry the phone with them anywhere and look a bit silly doing it, like they are lost in their own little worlds of games and talking.  Which they are.  They have this idea that they are more connected to the world than they were before, but now they can ignore the people standing right next to them.   Or they can be on the phone and also sitting in seats in a big arena watching, or sorta watching Tom Petty talk or sing or play a guitar,  Sometimes I just wanted to reach out an electronic hand and turn them all off, but then I thought that they'd lose their sense of place and all go screaming for their mother's and father's and someone to give them back their toys.

In my stories in my head, I have several phone devices, mostly just like my own flip open ear to mouth phone, but with added features, like always being connected to somewhere else, or being a device to use to make other things like 3-D hologram displays that are interactive, where you can just reach in and move things about and voice command the display to change, and layout different views like a world or city or even a house, or building that you can't do in the world we live in just yet.

But I try not to live like I can't do anything without having my phone near me, In fact as I type I can't quite remember where my cellphone is off hand, I know it could be in the kitchen, or my bedroom on top of a rock display case, or it could be lost in a pocket of a pair of pants, or outside under a rose bush or in the trash can or.... oh the list goes on and on, I could have nuked it and made it into a toaster just to spite the darn gaming world.  Okay really it is not that bad it is either the first two places or it is lost, laughs a bit off handily at the idea that I could lose something that other people would just panic over.  It is just a phone or a handy stopwatch or calculator to me.  As I have have used those two other features in recent weeks, seeing as how I don't have a regular stopwatch and I like lite calculators, and have need to get another one that can do complex numbers and square roots and things like that, but I haven't gone to the extreme of doing that again, like I did long ago with an old Ti-35 or was it 55, it had light emitting diodes that I could see at night without having the lights on in my room.  Now I just do without the big number crunching or write it long hand on a notebook I keep handy for such things.  But I don't like that this new phone can't use numbers bigger than 1 billion.  What is with that?  Beam up my brain I don't use big numbers, so why have a calculator on my phone that can do trillion cubic feet to gallons of saline solution with X amount of halite?  Come on you didn't save much data processing power by taking away the function of being able to go to 10 to the 93rd power did you?  Oh well they just made the phone less useful outside of being a phone, which is almost all I use it for anyway.  No  I don't want to download a App for that, at least not at x.xx dollars and cents that I can ill afford, if I was going to spend a lot of money on games and things I would just go drop 3 quarters into the pool table and play pool and drink real beer and talk to real people, even though half of them, would be hugging their phones, so as not to lose them in the cracks of the bar stools, or somewhere on the tables or a pool table pocket.

I must be an old timer now, or at least seem that way in my views.

Oh and before I forget it, the weather is fine and we have lots of veggies growing in the beds out back, though I seem to have gotten impatient as things take long to grow and I can see them fruiting out and getting eaten faster than they can grow and get there.

I plan on making my mulberry trees more like bushes next season, but that is going to have to wait a while for pruning them.  They were a bit tasty, I'd like to have more, but will have to wait on the thorn less blackberries to grow out and get ripe.  I have eaten ones in the wilds in recent weeks, and have gathered odd seeds I have no clue what they are, for testing later.  So it is not like I haven't eaten fresh fruits and things, just not a lot from my yard.  Oh I have been collecting green seed pods from radishes that have gone to seed, they are a nice spring taste, almost slightly sweet with a hint of radish flavor,  I plan next year to grow a few rows of them just for that purpose as the radish seed pods produce a lot more per plant than the roots do and I wanted to try them in a mild dill pickle or sweet pickle or something to can up with odd things you don't see anywhere else.  I am always thinking of new ways to collect odd edible seeds and pods and see if things are edible at different times, even though no one else seems to know what the heck I am talking about,  maybe if I had more books on the subject, but even then, I don't think many people think about all the foods we don't eat now.   When I see pictures of markets in other lands, where the farmers are just a few miles away in the hills and valleys and they bring 50 kinds of potatoes to market cause they grow them all.  You just don't get that in a grocery store near you do you?  Once a long time ago in a report that was text based only, they mentioned that in South America likely they ate 20,000 different kinds of plants.  Granted some of them weren't all in one region, but 20,000 different plants would just overwhelm the local market around here, you'd need 18 years to try one at every meal and never repeat any.  We are so limited in our choices it is not even funny any more.  Kinda of sad to say the least.  I have always dreamed of having had tasted every edible plant on earth at least once, seeing that likely that is going to impossible unless I get started collecting them myself and going to places that have them and buying trips to the moon and all the other places that new and unusual plants are being grown.  ( the moon might have plants, or at least the greenhouses there might have plants by the time I get there to sample the local growing conditions for that colony the other countries have placed there from now till the time I get up there to sample the local lettuce crops )

The whole concept of BioWebScape was centered around that notion that we have a lot more food sources than we have been lead to believe just by going down to the local food shop, or local market.  We Could be growing more millet in the drier regions of the USA that we can't get corn to grow in because of the dry climate.  We could be growing more things that we just don't want to grow cause someone says it is to hard, or the rain is not there for it, or the local population just won't like that oddly shaped veggie or strange new taste.  We have been limiting ourselves into a bottleneck and now that we are here we are complaining we are running out of food.  Well if you only eat 5 kinds of the 3,000 kinds of potatoes in the world, whose fault it is?  If you only eat 3 grains and haven't even thought of making millet into ethanol as it does better in the dry conditions of the New Climate out west than corn now does, and you are complaining, well do the looking into the other things, you could be doing.   I have said in the past, why aren't we looking at Kudzu as a crop in places that it already grows, and using it for more than something to complain about.  Sure it is here and well it is not native, but you can't go back and tell those people that moved it here all those years ago that it would turn into what it did.  Just learn a new way to use it instead of just spraying it year and year over trying to get rid of it, when you could be funding a way to use it for something.  We have all these creatures and plants that didn't start here, though we are ones to complain as most of aren't from these parts unless we can trace our trees that far back.  We are almost all transplants to somewhere we weren't before.  If you want to complain go right ahead, but know that someone out there is trying to do something besides complain and use these things now that they are here.   250,000 years ago in a land far away a bird dropped a seed that he had eaten and it had not gotten digested totally and bingo a new plant arrived to the land he was flying over, he never did stop to ask anyone if they would mind having a new plant species there or not and never even came back that way, as he was eaten just a few minutes later by a bigger bird, thinking about the nice snack that just flew by.  So the story of the first Plant that no one liked on that little spot of land oh so long ago started.   We are only a few thousand years in our present locations, and only have records of a while of being here, and even though we love the world we live in now, in 50 years it will be totally different even if we do not one thing to change it.  It will get changed just by being here.  The sun will keep pushing ions on the planet, the rains will fall the floods will wash plants and seeds and animals to new locations and things will change.  If we don't learn to live with it, or at least learn to make the best of it, then that is our faults not the rest of the world's.   We are always claiming to be the biggest and brightest creatures on the face of globe, yet we are acting like spoiled kids and not getting our way.

20,000 new tasty things to try, or maybe millions of them, can't you see the potential ?  Who wants to be limited to 3 kinds of foods for the rest of their lives?  Not any bright Eyed Kid I see in the mirror everyday.

The peace of Christ that passes all understanding to you all.
Charles.




Monday, April 02, 2012

What if you are all almost wrong, but some of you are right on the money, but the other's...