At the grocery store yesterday, 2 raw whole chickens were $31, but one whole cooked rotisserie chicken was $5. Plus the stores were out of hot chocolate & lettuce and almost out of candy canes & chicken thighs (but had plenty of chicken breasts). Blueberries are back after being out for a month. #GroceryWeirdness#ClimateCrisis#ClimateDiary
It's mid-December here & I am harvesting persimmons (normal), summer avocados (the winter ones aren't ready yet), tomatoes (I guess no killing frost this year), peppers, pomegranates (a month late), and my sugar bush thinks it is already spring along with some of the chickens. We are having unseasonably warm weather. #ClimateDiary
I was looking at a field today and suddenly the thought occurred to me that the development of agriculture (not just industrial, but any agriculture) probably hastened environmental degradation. Once there's agriculture, people stop being nomadic, stop relying on the ecosystem as a whole to provide food.
Once you concentrate your food production in one or a few areas, as time goes on your progeny comes to know only that lifestyle, comes to forget the importance of the ecosystem's health.
@glightly There are also studies looking at how once the best agricultural land (like LA) is used for that, eventually agricultural uses are displaced by housing, pushing agricultural into less optimal sites outside the more developed "city" areas and taking the best agricultural land out of production.
It is so sad seeing prime agricultural land used primarily as a giant dog kennel or paved car storage with people living there buying food from outside the region
I've been busy & offline the last month or so, but now it is mid-December in the US & my garden is producing an abundance of tomatoes, basil & green onions.
@ayo They are not necessarily genetically modified just because they come from grocery. But only about 1 out of 1,000 apple trees grown from seed are good for eating fresh. The rest pretty much need to be fermented into hard cider before consuming. But if you get a tree, you can graft an edible variety onto the seedling and convert it to something better than grocery apples. Is he prepared for the high likelihood of disappointment?
#Highway18 in California still has a lot of the original #WorksProgressAdministration infrastructure from the 1930s and non-stop scenic views. It has to be my favorite place to drive (it is rare to see bicycles as it rises almost 6,000 feet (2 kilometers) in a short distance and even cars can struggle in parts.
#SpringFlower in #October. Normally the snow should have started in September and put the flowers to sleep until April, but now we have flowers instead of snow. Also, the local arboretum moved their plant sale a full month later due to lack of snow. #ClimateDiary
#Fuyu#Persimmon ripening on the tree. The rain all spring & summer has made them big. We are still harvesting figs & just starting to pick pomegranates & avocados. #ClimateDiary
@ai6yr They won't even let you have the rabies vaccine here if you get bit by a dog. Much less check if the dog got the vaccine. At least in the 1980s they would hold the dog for observation. People used to be far more careful to keep their dogs from biting people because there was always the possibility the dog would die.
Same area in the UC Davis Arboretum I took a photo of yesterday, but with the frame expanded so I could take in the color of the flowers as well as the fruits. #FruitToot
@ai6yr@glightly I see Brittlebush, firecracker island snapdragon, prickly pear cactus and Mexican fan palms. They are are useful for chickens and all have something potentially edible for humans if you know what & how to harvest.
@ai6yr@glightly We have pet chickens, so I know what they like by experimentation. (They are great pets, you can train them, hold them & put them on a leash, they eat tons of pest insects & you get eggs, unless everyone decides they prefer the roosters for pets).
After the Romans left the UK, a lot of their tech stayed around. There were still working hypocaust, the roads were still there, the cultural melding ...
But some technologies were lost. How extreme or dramatic this was seems to be a matter of debate.
I wonder if there were Saxon age brits who were moon-eyed for Roman technology, who kept trying to do things the way the invaders did it. I wonder if other Saxons rolled their eyes at them.
@futurebird I think that is in The Sword of Shannara trilogy to some extent (post-apocalyptic human future with Lord of the Rings style overlay of fantasy characters and magic replacing science). The series definitely has the potential to be adapted that way.
@futurebird That is the Disney remake. The original Disney version (from the 1970s or early 1980s) was more about sacrifice and the horrible choices people in love have to make. (Warning: Ariel dies in the original version, which completely changes the story arc). Hans Christian Anderson stories are often quite dark in comparison to modern reinterpretations.
@inquiline It looks like they are Western Drywood Termites. The red & black striped abdomen with black wings is very atypical of termites. Apparently they normally swarm midday in October. But they look more like our local ants than any termite has a right to.
Interesting article reviewing attempts at storing carbon dioxide underground. End result in almost every case is increased fossil fuels production with questionable carbon sequestration.
@ai6yr They rate the homes by the creek that are vulnerable to flooding by us as at lower climate risk than the (less wealthy) homes nearby on high ground. It is messed up.
@davidho It is better than trying to use GPS on a cell phone. But my car is so old, the screen only displays navigation (GPS) & radio, which is about right. The only improvement would be if you could get vehicle diagnostics while parked instead of watching DVDs. But really all I want is a velomobile that goes 70mph & seats 8 with room for a cooler behind the last row of seats (but it should still have a screen for GPS). Sadly the US makes such a vehicle illegal.
Talking to a friend who’s in the hospital and had a sign on their door requesting masking, for their safety. Most staff only wore paper masks, if that. (Doctors were worst at masking at all.)
Yesterday friend had a bit of a sore throat, and was immediately COVID tested and now the door sign is “heightened COVID risk” and everyone is wearing N95s on entering.
They’ve decided to have a sore throat until discharge, since apparently the only way to be protected is to pose a risk to the staff.
@amaditalks You can sneak a HEPA into most hospitals under guise of "allergies" and they ignore it after the first day. That saved my mom when a relative visited maskless with active COVID (yes, the hospital actually said it was ok, now public health is trying to find the source of the outbreak).
Testing the fireplace this weekend. It raises the indoor temperature enough that other heating isn't needed. However, using it to cook food results in a very narrow window between "so undercooked you risk food poisoning" and "too burnt to eat."
Toilets have lids because when you flush a toilet it creates a torrent of micro droplets that settle on all of the surfaces in the bathroom. It's important to shut the lid before flushing.
Many people are unaware of this.
(I'm all for trying new and different things, but sometimes "you never see x" because x is a terrible idea.)
@futurebird Even when you close the lid each time you flush, there is enough that gets out to fertilize the orchids on the toilet tank in perpetuity (but it doesn't travel far enough to fertilize the ones in the shower).
