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strawberries and marriage equality
Friday, June 24 2011
I was feeling pretty happy with my solar controller this morning, to the point where I realized I might have to find some other tinkery project to obsess about. But then as the day wore on, I realized there were still a couple nagging things about the menu system I wanted to change. I also wanted to add a new menu item (to control the cycle rate of the master controller's main loop), and that would be a good opportunity to see how easy it is to add new menu items. It turns out it's pretty easy, but there are a couple arrays that need to have their sizes incremented in their declaration. (I labeled all of these in the source code so future menu items can be added with ease.)
When I was coming back to the house after checking the mailbox today, a large truck passed me heading north on Dug Hill Road. It wasn't going very fast, but even so it managed to leave a fresh new roadkill in its wake. I saw a small, dark blob (a mouse, a vole, perhaps a chipmunk), dart out from the southwest side of the street and intercept the truck's tire just as it passed, like a missile purposefully aimed at it. The truck continued onward, but the dark blob remained where it had met the tire. From a distance it had seemed to run into the side of that tire, but evidently part of the blob had instead been crushed by it. I saw legs reaching out from the blob and kicking pathetically into the air, and for a moment I thought I should run over and stomp the poor thing, whatever it was, out of its worst day on Earth, but within a couple seconds I saw the kicking stop. Though it was clear that the blob had died, it lived on in my thoughts, those kicking legs representing a lot of unpleasantness we prefer not to spend much time thinking about.
Meanwhile Gretchen had been out picking strawberries in the afternoon with Deborah. The cost to pick as many as you want at the farm in Ancram was $20, and she came back with about five pounds. Tellingly, though, you can buy organic strawberries for not much more than $4/pound in the local grocery store, and that doesn't require an hour of the sort of work that, in the absence of Mexicans, Georgia parolees refuse to do. Of course, Gretchen might well have eaten an additional pound while she was picking them, but that's also a side benefit available to Georgia parolees.
Later this evening, Gretchen made another of her delicious vegan lasagnas, the kind where smashed tofu substitutes for cottage cheese. It also contained spinach fresh from our garden, though our spinach plants are produce spinach leaves that are, on average, the size of a quarter, and it's time consuming to harvest more than a token amount.
Late this evening word came that a bill legalizing same-sex marriage had passed the NY Senate (which is under narrow Republican control). Usually these days political news is always bad news, and change is always bad change (try to get an abortion in Kansas these days and then go back in time to 1983 and try again). But with marriage equality, there seems to be a real tsunami working against the numbnuts. They should divert their attention to causes that are less lost, such as forcing rape victims to carry their pregnancies to term (providing, among other things, Darwinian selection for rapist genes).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110624 feedback
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