London's Burning!

   The Title could have been "London's Bridge is Falling Down," except I believe that has been relocated to Arizona!  What is really happening and could it happen here?

   The Ladder to Success only works if you can see the first rung.  The London Riots are not about the death of a black man being shot by he police.  He is no martyr, we don't even know his name.  That is not the issue at all.

   I am reminded of the movie, "A Clockwork Orange".  Tons of violence in a post industrial age where identity is lost.  There is a problem with gated communities and block after block, row after row of apartment dwellings. It creates a "them Vs us" atmosphere.  The greater this divide the more occasion for trouble.

   I thought of titling this post, "I have to water my tomatoes", that simple sentence would explain all I am trying to say.  It contains responsibility and ownership, something to be conservative about.  Youth today are feeling left out, an isolation finding comfort in gangs and street violence, the darkness of drugs and despair.  If they see the rungs of the ladder at all they see them as broken or a ladder meant for someone else.

   The difference between what is happening in London and other "hot spots" in the world is a matter of degree.  The London Rioters are lucky.  Lucky to be in a civilized country of law with a custom and culture

admonishing violence, a country where very few of its policemen even carry guns.  A country that, so far, has

never used tear gas, water cannons or rubber bullets or other efforts at crowd control.

   But they want a piece of the pie too, these rioters who have lost an ability or ambition to actually earn their possessions see this an an opportunity, an "easy money" opportunity of theft and destruction of what is not theirs.  They see it as a destruction of things they cannot have.  Toppling a broken ladder.

   A part of this problem, in an attempt at appeasement, in a type of bribery in return for non-violence, we have given them too much.  Or too little?  What used to be a small segment of society, the "down and outers"

the unemployed, underemployed, those struggling with minimum wage and minimal jobs is now a larger percentage of the population.  "They" have become "us"!

   England has a National Debt problem also and for the past two years has attempted to balance their budget on the backs of the poor with various austerity measures.  Basically less for the poor and less for the police who protect us from them.  This is clearly NOT working in England and why anyone would want to do this here is beyond me.

   Jobs.  Whether in England or Egypt or here, this is really what it comes down to.  Given a chance people would rather be good.  Life is easier with a solid footing on one rung of the ladder and the next rung within reach.

   This is a serious issue and I don't know how to solve it.  We could be next.

Art, my garden and Happy Stuff is HERE

STEEL SINKS!

My $5,000 "Retirement Fund" in Steel Stock is now worth less than $3,000.  The Stock Market "Crashed" yesterday and is nose diving again today and I wonder what all this means?  Where is the $2,000 that I lost?

I wonder who got that?  I wonder how hard they had to work to get it?

   The Stock Market "Lost" over a Trillion dollars yesterday.  One day.  I wonder where it went?

   What was supposed to happen with our credit down grade is money should be harder to get.  A little higher interest and money would become scarce.  No one would loan us any.   In theory that should make existing investments more secure, old money better than new money.

   That is not what happened.  The Bond Market (people loaning us money) went nuts!  Lots of money entered the Bond Market and Stocks plummeted.  Now, what the hell could this mean?

   Bonds are often "long term investments", meaning over five years, often ten.  I remember buying them in grade school, a left over from WWII.  We would buy them at .25 cents a week and $17 dollars would buy you a Bond with a face value of $25 dollars ten or so years later.  Yes, Bonds are loans and they are based on faith.  In ten years things will get better.

   Stocks have become a "right now" investment, more closer to gambling than investing.  With computer generated buying and selling and day trading lots of money changes hands hourly and a great deal of money is lost or won in an hour.  Today the economy is in the tank and stocks are more like lottery tickets, pretty unusual if you should win.

   Nothing is related to any of this.  In the last three years Schnitzer stock has seen a high of $117 and a low of $23 and sits at $40 now, going down still.  The price of steel keeps climbing, always inching upward and never in retreat.  Buying steel stock in not the same as buying steel.

   America should have a quadruple AAAA+ credit rating, no, not because our industry is so great and not because of our banking system.  We need to improve those.  We should have the highest credit rating simply because we are the only "dream on the table".  In this game of Monopoly it is our best card to play.  The world knows this even if we have lost that card in the shuffle.  They still want to loan us money.

   I will keep my steel stock.  I like telling people that "I own Schnitzer Steel".  I think my little ownership of the corporate world gives me license to be critical of it.  And voting gives me the right to be critical of my own country and our complaining bickering political system that drove us into this mess.

   There is no second choice, no one else at bat, no other political system, no other country, no other economy.  Now is not the time to fold 'em, not yet time to count your cards.  We are the only game in town.

My garden and art stuff is HERE

Yes, We Have Some Tomatoes!

 My First Tomatoes!

Finally, almost exactly one month late, the first tomatoes are ripening!  I have nine varieties and a total of 27 plants.  Some get only 2' tall and others, over eight feet tall.  Some are Black.

Many are purple, some yellow, orange, and of course, some are red.

   At the moment most are green.  The weather is good now, better than most of the country, low '80's every day, but it took a long time getting here.  One of the coldest, wettest Springs on record.  I lost two plants to early blight and chopped branches off others to try to save them.

   Can you imagine the anxiety in being a farmer?  Too wet, too dry, too cold, too hot, seldom "just right".

   A lot of the tomatoes for the fresh market are grown in greenhouses these days.  They can be grown in Iceland now!

There is something about the warmth from the Sun, how that marries into a tomato to offer the perfect fruit. 

   Tomatoes are related to potatoes and are part of the "deadly nightshade family"!  Such sweetness from a plant thought to be poison!  A native of South America, the world didn't know much about tomatoes until the 19th Century.  I feel sorry for the Kings and Queens that never had a "BLT"!

or just a tomato and cheese sandwich.

   I like the color combination of my different varieties, makes salsa pretty and each color is a different flavor.

August tomatoes are the best.  It is the warmth at night that is important to the tomato.  I am hoping for a late Summer.  The cool Fall evenings can drain the flavor from a good tomato.

Tomatoes ready for the dryer!

   Until I discovered food dehydration and dried tomatoes I canned them all.

   Most commercial dried tomatoes are the same as store-bought tomatoes.  They are grown from a variety designed to ripen all at once and be picked by a machine.  Their genetics are for perfect roundness and firmness.  They are picked green and allowed to turn red in a room full of gas.  They never ripen, just turn red and have the bite of an apple.

   My tomatoes and my dried tomatoes have a full flavor that is difficult to believe.  You can do a million things with dried tomatoes but what I like best is just on a cracker with a piece of cheese and to give them away.

   It is one of those "art things", a gift that can't be bought.

More of my garden is HERE

Maybe We Have Enough?

   Our Economy is based on Consumerism.  We ourselves are the engines that keep it going.

   We are caught up in a "chicken or the egg' argument.  Business can't hire if we aren't buying and

we can't buy if we aren't working!  That is a difficult egg to break.

   I don't know the statistics but Billions and Billions of dollars are spent to encourage us to buy new

stuff, the latest and best, new and improved!  More is better and we are induced to buy stuff a dozen at a time.

   This is trickery that has worked for the last 50 years or so.  It is the secret to the SUV success.  We needed the bigger automobile to haul the bigger stuff and more of it.

   I have made my living for the past forty years because of this desire for more.  I made houses bigger,

adding rooms and pushing out walls.  More room for more stuff.  My customers would have to work harder to pay me and pay for the added stuff they needed.  It is an engine.  Keep feeding it and it grows.

   Happiness has even been connected to material possessions, even Spirituality with eight story Mega-

Churches.  Bigger, taller, closer to God.

  It is the Garage Sale Season and it is pretty amazing.  I see fat people selling three exercising machines.

Three of them.  I see poor people with boxes of CD's or the old VHS tapes, hundreds of them originally purchased for five bucks each!  Falling apart furniture less than five years old is pretty common too.

Kitchen gadgets, small appliances are pretty common.  No one cleans a microwave any more when it is easier to just buy a new one.  Maybe a better color too.

   I look at all of this stuff.  There is seldom anything cool from grandma there.  This is stuff they worked for,

saved for or charged to their accounts and paid dearly for.  Something they needed.  Happiness on sale.

Now they are selling it by the pickup load, yard after yard, block by block, all over this town.

   Somehow or another all this seems to be okay.  It is expected that whatever we buy will be used up, sold or thrown away.  We get rid of our possessions like we were changing light bulbs.  The paint fades, it has a scratch, the color isn't right, it doesn't fit.  It isn't what I thought it was.  It doesn't make me happy!

   So we do it again!  We work hard, give our best third of the day to some job, come home tired and maybe think of the weekend and shopping!

   It is interesting though.  It is an engine with one cog broken.  No job, no buying.  No buying, no job.

I am going to get a bumper sticker for my truck:  "I would rather be fishing".

this website is free, you can join me HERE

I Create My Own World

The World is nuts around me.  There is some airline issue in Congress over 16 Million Dollars that is costing 25 Million Dollars a day to resolve, causing 70,000 people to be laid off, putting danger to the airline industry and its passengers.  Congress is on vacation and the bill will be over a Billion Dollars upon their return! This is so disgusting I don't even look into the details.

   I have my little 1/3 acre almost in the center of town and hide out here in a world of my own.

 Creating a New Entry to my Garden

   Today I will invite you to join me!

This was my Spring Project, creating a new Entry to my garden.  For years I had railroad ties as the border to my garden because they worked and it was all I could afford.

They are not good for the garden.  They leak creosote and after 20 years were pretty much rotting away.



I have made a hundred changes to my property in the forty years I've lived here. Some little and some big.  This Spring I made permanent concrete borders to my garden.

This next photo was taken yesterday of the same area.

The flowers like this new entry and the green beans

are growing up the new fence section.

There are two separate gates into my garden, a main gate

with an arch and a huge Trumpet Vine and on the

far left side a smaller gate.



 Lots of flowers at the Garden Entry





 Two more weeks and I will post another photo!

Everything is behind schedule this year.  We had a wet, cold Spring and the garden is just now playing "catch-up".  In about two weeks this Trumpet Vine Entry will be at its best with hundreds of deeply orange flowers which will last until October.  I picked my first tomato!  So there is hope.  Zucchini, of course, grows no matter what and I have been eating cucumbers and lots more from my garden!

 My Other Garden Entry

and this is my other garden Entry.  I have two because I like to build gates and I don't want people to feel trapped. If you should ever visit me there is always a way out.

More  of my Garden is always HERE

I am an Optimist!

It is true.  I have a tendency to look on the bright side and seek the positive.  I am not even against the

"Tea Baggers"!    Oh, there are elements to them I couldn't support but they know how to get a conversation going!  Like a dog with a bone, they won't let go!  This is not all bad at all.  There are issues we need to talk about.  We need to discover pro's and con's along the way.  I see all of this as an opportunity.

   I would like to see discussions more goal oriented because that is the way I am.  A little more honesty wouldn't hurt either.  I think there were other issues in the recent National Debt debacle, other conversations going on.  Six months of bickering, bringing the World to the brink of economic disaster and they managed to knock off a whopping 1% on the total bill.  My neighbor and I could have done better than that and we seldom agree on anything!

   There will be no sudden changes.  I think politicians don't really want us to know what is going on so they slip it to us slowly!  It is clear however that this 1% is hard on the backs of the poor and puts more pressure on the States.  You will see them tumble next and we will no longer be "United".

   The Gorilla in the room will be our military adventures and the price of  energy.  I certainly have a lot of questions about that!

   I remain an optimist in everything I do.  It is a benefit of 35 years as a Remodelling Contractor, knowing my job was never in tearing things down but rather in fixing them, improving them.  I had to have a Project Goal and a Daily Goal or I would get discouraged and lose my way and always I had to finish on time or I wouldn't make any money.

   The trick will be to keep this conversation going, maybe leave our hats at the front door.

   Always have a goal and work, with baby steps when necessary, in that direction.

 My Garden Entry

   I do that in my art, in my daily living, in my work, wherever I find myself.

More garden pics HERE

I Own Some Stocks...

I admit it.  I own a piece of America.  I am a very small part of the "Corporate World"

   Several years ago I thought it might be fun to buy into the Stock Market.  I am not talking a lot of money here, I am not that kind of guy.  But I had a good year that year and was willing to invest $5,000.

   I did a little research and now realize that I should have done a whole lot more.  I want to explore my reasoning with you, why I put it where I did.

   I could have put it into Apple Computer and bought their stocks at $200 a share.  That would be just 25 shares in a technology I knew nothing about.  It seemed like a lot of money in an already topped out market.

We had a chip manufacturing company in our city.  They came here with huge promises, lots of money and tremendous tax breaks.  They built the biggest building in our city and demanded 20% of our water and 20% of our electricity, a necessity in their operations.  Both were rerouted to them along with street improvements

and other infrastructure developments.  It was a huge project taking over three years to complete.

   I think they hired about 500 people and paid them good wages although the top management was from Korea.  The building sits vacant now with overgrown grass.  Streetlights that still work on roads that go nowhere.

   The computer business can change over night.  I think the whole operation moved to Thailand in one weekend.  The building sits empty as sort of a monument.  It has a huge parking lot.

   So that was all scary to me and I didn't want to invest in computers, although Apple sells for close to $400

a share today.  I could have doubled my money!  It is funny.  Apple Computer has more money than our Federal Government!

   I did look at Gold.  In tough times of economic insecurity Gold has been the standard of investors.  When all collapses around you gold always raises in value.  You can possess gold, take it with you.  Hide it in your underwear.  I think one needs to be a pessimist to invest in Gold.  I have faith we will get out of this economic mess and come to our senses.  I had images of being beaten and my gold stolen.  Nothing seemed "right" about that.  Betting on gold was betting on disaster and "winning" meant wanting things to get worse.

   I wanted to invest this paltry sum in something I believed in and knew a little about.  I wanted some potential of course.  This was a business venture and I wanted a profit.

   I couldn't invest in anything that damaged the Earth or frankly, anything that helped the Arab World gain more wealth.  If there is a God I would hate to sit at His knee and discuss how I destroyed His garden!

I had no interest in oil even if it trippled my assets.

   I wanted something that could be reused, recycled, regenerated, born again, over and over.  Something that cleaned up this planet.  I am thinking that if we ever get our act together we need to build.  Major Public Structures can put millions of people to work.  That is how the Pyramids were built or the Great Wall in China.  Our own infratructure, our roads and bridges have not been significantly improved since the 1960's.

You can't build anything without steel.

     More steel is created through recycling than through mining these days.  Refridgerators, bed springs, old toasters and automobiles and the stuff bought last week at Walmart gets recycled into new steel, becomes rebar and structural steel.  Maybe a bicycle.

   There is a Schnitzer Steel Yard in my town and I see the pile to be recycled gaining height every day and then it disappears, loaded up in box cars to the steel mill where it is melted down.

   This is a huge company with yards all over America, starting with a guy and his horse drawn cart in Alaska over a hundred years ago.  It is an American Story and I liked that.

   It has been a roller coaster, going from $25 to $50 to as much as $117 per share and now about back to $50.  It will grow with America or fall by the wayside with us.

   I choose to keep it.