Extinction Rebellion Isn’t About Climate Change

 It is funny how the universe delivers us all the right things. Or perhaps it is just our penchant for recognizing patterns that makes it seem so. In either case, it is remarkable how often the signals come through the noise exactly when we need them to.

Only recently I began thinking how the outcries around climate change and mass extinction were actually manifestations of a greater longing, that of a need to transcend our previous modes of social organization — tribes and kingdoms, empires and nation-states — to create a new, planetary entente, one that treated the rest of life on earth, not as competitors, but as fellow stakeholders in a common enterprise.

Then I came across this:

“Such problems both require and provide opportunities for learning new ways of problem solving as a global society.”

It was in a paper titled “Carbon dioxide from fossil fuels” by Kan Chen, Richard C. Winter, and Michael K. Bergman, published December 1980 in the journal Energy Policy. I would never have known anything about it were it not for the fact that Google served a Scientific American article that referenced it up to me. The first two sentences of the abstract alone are enough to make one place their head in their hands and weep.

If present scientific information is reasonable, the world is likely to experience noticeable global warming by the beginning of the next century if high annual growth rates of fossil fuel energy use continue. Only with optimistic assumptions and low growth rates will carbon-dioxide-induced temperature increases be held below 2°C or so over the next century.

I first heard the term ‘global warming’ in January 1990. We were just pulling into the small town in northwestern Montana where I grew up, having spent the holidays visiting my father’s family in southern California. My brother Jeb, an avid skier, was looking out the window of the ragged Ford van my dad’s band used to haul their equipment around, his profile silhouetted by the reddish glow of high pressure sodium lights. There was hardly any snow.

“God damn global warming,” he said. I was stunned. I had never heard him swear.

Global warming. I didn’t know what it was, precisely, but I had heard it mentioned enough times, had collected enough data somewhere in the back of my mind, that I understood what he was referring to. But I was 17, and much more concerned with getting together with my girlfriend after being gone for ten days than how much snow was on the ground, or why. I believed in peak oil and thought that would be the first catastrophe that our petroleum fueled economy would visit upon us. Cars were woven into the very fabric of American society, especially for a teenage boy growing up in rural Montana in the latter part of the 20th Century, and there was no reason to expect we would abandon them.

But still. My brother’s words haunted me. Global warming. He seemed so sure of it.

My brother Jeb is a scientist, and he doesn’t talk much. When he does, he is usually correct, at least in the sense that he has his facts straight. Unlike me, he doesn’t draw many conclusions. Once, I asked him to make a judgement on a matter of ecology, one that he had been studying for the previous five or so years. His response: “Need more data.”

As it turned out, he was correct in attributing the lack of snow to global warming. Not only that, he was referencing a scientific theory that was already a decade old, at the very least, a well-documented one that had very little need for ‘more data’. This wasn’t knowledge I should have had some vague recollection of. It was a fundamental law of physics underlying the current, past, and future existence of life on earth.

And yet I still don’t think that global warming is what this is really all about.

(By the way, I don’t call it climate change, and I don’t think it was a good idea to pivot away from the original term. Climates change. The issue at hand is that the earth is warming, beyond that narrow (Overton, for those buzzwordy among us) window for which the current crop (yes, I did that deliberately) of life forms on earth is adapted, which will likely cause another ice age following a brutal period of excessive heat. I don’t know if changing it was a PR play on the part of the science community or a psyop on the part of the sequestered energy industry, but, in either case, we should go back to global warming. And we should repurpose Nancy Reagan’s infamous ‘Brain on Drugs’ ad in doing so. “This is the Earth. This is the Earth on sequestered energy.”)

There was a time, when we lived as tribes, that, should you range too far from the group alone, you stood a high likelihood of encountering another tribe and being either captured or killed. Later, that fear expanded to include assault by army or boat, culminating in the threat of a thermonuclear weapon (or precision drone strike) incinerating you without your ever even knowing it was there.

Somewhere in the middle of all that (right around that atomic bomb point, in fact), that fear went from being a valid one, to being absurd.

There is never going to be another global conflagration. I have said this elsewhere, and you may tire of hearing it, but I will never tire of saying it. They aren’t my words, I borrow them from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who presided over the last great war to end all wars. A cliche, except this time, it really was.

“The only way to win the next world war is to prevent it.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower at a rally in the Civic Auditorium, Seattle, Washington, October 17, 1956

During World War Two, and certainly throughout every single conflict we engaged in since, we traded with our enemy. What this means, in an economic sense, is that this wasn’t a war that needed fighting.

Fast forward to today, and we are so entangled in a web of global supply chains and overseas markets that a world war would not only be unthinkable, but infeasible. Who would ally with and supply whom, and to what end? And who would fight it?

In times past, we were limited in our knowledge of the world outside our own by a singular limiting factor, the horizon. We had notions about what was on the other side of the mountains or the sea, but the only way to test their validity was to physically move beyond that horizon. Today, we not only know what is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean (it’s Asia, in case you were wondering. I just looked on Google Earth), we can observe it remotely in real time, or at least get eyewitnesses accounts (the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming — they should be there in 18 hours or so).

“What we do not understand, we fear. What we fear, we judge as evil. What we judge as evil, we attempt to control. What we cannot control … we attack.”

— Author unknown

The thing is, we understand just about everything, at least about what’s lurking over the hill. Thus, we have nothing to fear, nothing to control, nothing to attack. The Chinese or Russians have no more need to fear our attacking them than we do their attacking us. Again, the preeminent Dwight D. Eisenhower:

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

Which brings us back to global warming. Our concerns about global warming are as much about the potential for it to shake this final and tenable peace as they are about its very real physical dangers. That existential threat — of crop failures or an outbreak of some virulent pandemic — posed by climate change is real, but the potential for violent conflict brought on by fears arising from that threat, aroused or otherwise, even more so.

But does that mean we should arm ourselves and prepare to defend our shrinking coastlines, flooded crop lands, and drying wells from hordes of climate refugees fleeing even worse off places? Or better yet, launch a preemptive strike and rid the world 3 billion CO2 spewing East Asians? I realize there are voices in the crowd, loud ones, crazy ones even, that say ‘yes, that, exactly’. But the answer is no.

What we need to do, have to do — what I would argue we truly long to do — is reach out, despite our fear of the unknown (because we can never really know what is going on in the minds of people halfway around the world, even with the technological wizardry of CNN and the International Space Station at our fingertips), and extend the olive branch of peace to say, “we understand that we share this world with you and we want to figure out how we can best do that”.

This, more than anything, is what is driving movements such as Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion and whatever similar such movements in Russia and cloistered China and the Muslim world call themselves. The concern isn’t with global warming. It can’t be; we’ve had 40 years to do something about that and have done nothing but make it worse. The concern is with missing the opportunity to finally free ourselves from the fear and distrust and competition that have so long shackled us and to begin crafting a collaborative commonwealth that does justice to the magnificent gift that is planet earth and the existence of life upon it.

The rebellion isn’t about stopping climate change, even though that has become the latest in its rallying cries. The rebellion is much older than that, easily dating back to the times of Christ and Buddha, probably to the very dawn of civilization itself. It is an expression of our collective desire to move beyond these governments, these oligarchs, these nationalists, these fascists, these cultural norms and primeval instincts, to realize our true nature and answer the call for love and kinship that resounds within us.

A Lot Can Happen In A Lifetime

It has literally been a lifetime since I updated this blog.

Betty’s Isis of ByDog, the Siberian Husky who was a puppy when last I posted, just turned 10 years old. The command leader I spoke about, the one we were going to get from Mark Nardin, dotters about the yard like an old grandma walking around the mall. She is fifteen and could go at any moment, and would, were it not for the key to her longevity, doggie yoga. We have lost Kona, Blue, and Paluk, two of those tragically. Tensaw, as Brandi puts it, has lost his marbles, but at twelve is still as spry and energetic and talkative as he ever was. He has lost the habit of sitting atop things, preferring to yell at his kids to stay off the lawn or curl up in one of his three spots and mutter to himself.

His progeny, the ones we call the puppies or, alternately, the Crazies, are seven. There are four of them - Buck, Jig, Whip, and Buzz. In the tradition of sled dog kennels, we named the litter after a theme, in our case, types of saws, in honor of Tenny. Together with Flier, a rejected intact male we acquired from the kennel of Kim and Kelly Berg, they make up Brandi’s race team. Buzz does not race, having been afflicted with seizures. He still likes to run, but cannot maintain the level of fitness that the others have, and the heat seems to trigger his Grand Mals.

Of all the losses, besides Kona, the cat was the most painful. Her name was Montana, but we mostly just called her Cat or Kitty. She was odd, as cats typically are, but she was terribly sweet and important to me. She quit eating for some reason while we were away at Brandi’s parents’ over Christmas last year and went 70 days without food before succumbing. I miss her immensely. 

We have another feline, Priscilla, the barn cat, who guards the metric ton of dog food we keep in the Sled Shed from the hordes of mice that had been decimating it before we got her. She thinks she is a husky and she torments Okanogan, the old lead dog who is now nearly deaf and blind, by being constantly underfoot, but refuses to come inside, even though she wants to. Only the old dogs tolerate her, the others all want to make her lunch. Tenny and Isis got into her once, when we forgot to lock her in the Sled Shed before letting them out. They tore into her pretty good, but she is a scrapper and, ultimately, recovered, seemingly none the worse off for it. The experience certainly didn’t lessen her love for the puppas, although she is wary enough of the younger dogs to seek refuge under the deck now whenever we mistakenly let them out in the yard together.

As is nearly always the case, Isis has lived up to her namesake. The terrorist group was not even a thing when we christened her, at least not in mainstream media, but she has certainly lived up to the title. She was a terrible fit for our kennel, wanting only to be a single dog and a family pet, and we would have found her a more appropriate home long ago were it not for the fact that Keegan refuses to allow it. She is a horribly spiteful and jealous creature, barking ceaselessly when the other dogs are running or playing, but utterly fearless and unwilling to ever back down, even when she knows she’s outmatched. Shyla, Tank’s sister from Paluk’s litter, nearly killed her on one occasion, and Isis would have gone down fighting had I not been able to break it up. To her credit, despite being completely unfit for it, she has always sought to run and keep up with the team, and I have always respected her for that. Some of us with the will and desire simply weren’t gifted the athleticism.

Of all the mistakes I have made in the past 10 years, Isis is least among them. I have come to realize that life is actually all mistakes, in between mere survival. Those rare glimmers of success we enjoy are built upon mountains of wrong decisions, lessons learned, trial, error, and reiteration. Any experience to the contrary is really just luck or good fortune, whether that is being born into privilege or having a mentor to guide you.

I sold the tractor last week. I had forgotten I once called her Bertha. It was sad to see her go, and not only because I lost money on the transaction. I don’t do well with loss, and I get hung up on things easily. The tractor was a sound investment, even if I sold it for less than I paid for her. It is hard to fathom how much value there was in that machine. When it came off the lot some time around 1960, the sticker price was in the neighborhood of $3500. I paid $6500 for it in 2008, which means it was worth nearly twice as much, and that without even considering all the value it had provided in the course of its 40 year lifespan. I am definitely glad I bought the tractor, but I hardly made use of her anymore, so I thought it best I pass her along to someone else who would. I believe I made the right decision.

I got out of fire in 2017, although not really, because, like the Marines or the Mafia, once you join, you are in it forever. It’s an addiction really. You get addicted to the tension, and the ultimate release, when a fire breaks and all that anticipation floods out in a fury of action. And then it becomes a grind and you can’t wait for the season to end. It is much akin to the military in many ways, only you always have the option of retreat. I still work as an AD through the Bitterroot, going on assignments. This year I spent the months of August and September operating a remote, virtual expanded dispatch from my bedroom office. I have been promoting the concept for years, and it was fun to finally get the opportunity to test it in practice.

The property has changed, although coming back to this blog, I realize not as much as I had planned or would have liked. I went on a few detours along the way, disappearing down a rabbit hole of micro-distilled spirits and several other endeavors, that didn’t yield as much fruit, or at least not as quickly, as I had expected. It has been a remarkable learning experience, and I made a few new friends along the way, which is all anyone can really ask for.

We put a lot of effort into the place this year, however. We had come to the jarring realization about a year and a half ago that the house was well beyond due for a paint job. When the painter came by for the estimate, he said, “A paint job is the least of your worries,” and put his thumb through the siding. So one of last summer’s fire assignments went to replacing the bottom third of the siding. Lesson learned: water your lawn, not the side of your house.

Early this summer, the paint crew returned and prepped and sprayed it. We looked at a lot of options but, in the end, settled for a khaki because it was the color that clashed least with the roof. Brandi is certain there is no harder color to match than that of our roof, and she may well be right. We have never seen another house with a roof the color of ours painted anything other than khaki.

We also put in underground sprinklers around the lawn. I had plumbed the pasture with new irrigation piping last year and needed to get it buried anyway, so we said what the hell. It was a gift to Brandi for her birthday - no more dragging hoses around the yard and fighting with sprinklers while I’m gone on fires. It turned out to be a disaster, and we kind of regret it. Before, we watered the lawn with ditch water, and this system is connected to the well. The hum from the pump keeps me up at night, and that’s to say nothing of all the other problems that came along with the installation. Dealing with contractors often leaves me shaking my head. At least it will save us from watering the siding.

Our garden this year was outstanding, and, on top of all the wonderful produce, I seriously believe it saved my sanity. I would go out there at least once a day, sometimes just to stand and look at the plants. Tending a garden is the most important thing a person can do, in my opinion, after tending their family. I truly believe that.

Speaking of family, the boys … wow, it has been a long time. I only just hit upon the fact that Rohn had not even been conceived last I updated this blog. Well, they are boys now, and all that comes with it. I love them like crazy, but that’s a tale for another day. Rohn and I have to go pick up Keegan from cross-country practice.

Do We Have the Will to Change the World?

There is no love lost between the boomers and me. I couldn’t explain it better than this, so I recommend the read if you care to understand my reasons. But I have to give them credit for one thing. When it came right down to it and the game was on the line, they put their money where their mouth is and changed the fucking world.

It might be why they did little to impress afterward. Maybe they figured they had triumphed, that the revolution was complete. Maybe they felt they had done their part and deserved the rest. It must have been incredibly taxing, altering the human narrative as they did. Perhaps it took it all out of them.

1968 was the single most pivotal year in modern history, comparable only to 1945, the year when the boom began. For the boomers, at least the cohort I’m referring to, although many of the principal actors in ’68 were actually born years before, it was their Midway, their Stalingrad, their Ardennes, literally their Khe Sahn. It was a turning point in the war.

The list of achievements that year is too long to do it justice here — 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apollo 8, ASC II, hypertext, The Beatles’ White Album — a litany of innovations that defined the next 50 years. But none of them hold a candle to what was truly accomplished. For all of its subtext, Planet of the Apes doesn’t fully capture the political and social upheaval that marked 1968.

It’s telling that current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was sworn into that same office in 1968. The corollaries between that year and this — a conservative political climate committed to the restoration of “law and order”, black athletes protesting entrenched racism, a long standing American military occupation of foreign soil, nationalist politicians speaking out against immigration — are numerous enough to give pause. There is one marked difference, however. When the powers seeking to maintain the cultural and economic establishment they aimed to dismantle came out to crush them, rather than sit around and complain about the status quo, the boomers actually took to the streets and did something about it.

And they had every reason not to. One by one, the leaders of their movement, beginning with JFK in 1963, had been assassinated, often right before their eyes. Their government, society at large, even their parents, were all aligned against them. They were literally attacked, jailed, beaten, shot. And still they struggled on.

Compare that to today, when, faced with levels of inequality and injustice that rival the days of serfs and emperors, the best we can muster is a hashtag campaign on social media. It’s sad really. Every attempt at moving forward, at creating the level of fundamental shift such as the boomers achieved in 1968, is consumed from within, sold out before it can even begin to assume its true potential. Sure, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates went corporate, but only as a means for achieving their greater goal, that of enabling others. The money just followed. Gen X spent no time at all devolving the internet into a commodified caricature of its original intent. Those attending the current analogue, cryptocurrency and blockchain, with their arguably greater capacity for moving humanity into the next epoch of prosperity and enlightenment, didn’t even wait that long.

Could it be that we are incapable of such conviction? That this is one of those things, like so many others, that the boomers neglected to impart to us? Can we hope to regain the fortitude necessary to persist in the face of seemingly insurmountable social, economic and cultural forces, to endure suffering, almost certain failure, maybe death? Is it possible that, as they did in ’68, we need the boomers to take it to the streets, that we might actually need Joe Biden to show us the way?

The problem is, I don’t think they have it in them. And it’s not just my personal “hang-up” with the boomers, to borrow a term they popularized, that leads me to say this. They have told me so themselves.

“We really need the college students of today, and the Gen Xers of today, to take over the world, sooner rather than later,” climate scientist Dr. Steven Running informed me during a recent podcast interview. “Because I have to admit, my generation doesn’t have enough guts to make the changes, they’re too wed to the fossil fuel life, and I think we’re more of the problem then we’ll ever be the solution.”

Still, I wonder if we have the courage, or the skill set. Because, on this golden anniversary of the Year of Protests, the very same war rages on, and we’re not in the streets, and least not like the boomers were. We’re still wed to the same systems — political, social, economic — the majority of which are completely incongruous with our new global civilization, to say nothing of the ecosphere, and I see no indication that we’ll change. It’s clear that, as demonstrated by the successful memes of Brexit and MAGA, all we really want is for things to return to some romanticized vision of the past.

So now we’re putting it on the next generation to save us. But the trouble is, even if the college students of today were to heed Dr. Running’s exhortation, we’re asking them to do so while bound by a straitjacket. We make up the system, the framework, the infrastructure in which the millennials and their younger counterparts are forced to operate. Their generating the impulse necessary to change its momentum would be challenge enough even with our cooperation, let alone when half the available energy is either at rest or actively opposing it.

In other words, this is hard fucking work. No disrespect to Dr. Running, who is still in the trenches, but we’re going to need all hands on deck. Because, unlike the boomers, we’re not merely upending a prevailing culture. What we’re dealing with isn’t just a change in mindset, although that is still an important part of the equation. We literally have the entire apparatus supporting our existence to remake.

Prior to 1968, it was okay to treat people like second-class citizens. It was okay to exploit developing countries through imperialist policies and military action. Those practices were de rigueur. Post 1968, it’s no longer okay, but we continue doing so because our system requires it. And that system is what we have to change.

For all my personal animosity toward the boomers, I readily admit we’re indebted to them, and not just because they gave me life. They spawned an entirely new breed of idealism, one that advanced the notion of equality beyond de facto to make it a priori and then extended it to the rest of the living and non-living systems as well. They altered our very expectation of how the world should be. Quite unlike the virtual nihilism we practice today, the boomers actually believed they could make a difference, and, in 1968, did everything in their power to see that occur.

But this is 2018, not 1968, and it’s high time we manifest that expectation in reality and make incarnate the ideals that the boomers fought to enshrine. Arguments that these things take time or that we must work within the constraints of the current system are worse than denial or outright refusal, only serving to highlight the fact that, while we recognize the need for action, we intend to do nothing about it. Largely because doing something quite likely means enduring the personal discomfort, hardship, and pain that we are currently externalizing to someone else.

via Dollar Street

Our predicament only becomes all the more vexatious with the realization that there is no one to turn our anger on, no establishment to rail against, no others. In 1968, the battle lines were clear — a new and progressive counterculture united against the forces of an old guard overtly and conspicuously intent upon ensuring the continuation of its ways. Today, we are the establishment, begrudgingly upholding the status quo through a mix of fatalism, apathy, and the understanding that the only confrontation we can expect to have is with ourselves.

That is not to say there is not an established order, a prevailing modality that shouldn’t be assailed and dismantled with the same ardent fervor and resolve as the boomers afforded segregation. There is. It just isn’t going to present itself in the form of us against them. This time around, it is us against ourselves.

Still, we shouldn’t fear the fight, if only to prove to the boomers that we are as capable of driving change in 2018 as they were in 1968. That the generation who tore down the Berlin Wall isn’t about to let another go up. That our policy of non-participation really was a calculated strategy, not a mere attempt at avoidance.

So what does the fight of 2018 look like in real terms? At its core, it revolves around our putting outcome and purpose back in the driver seat and relegating the pursuit of profit to an impetus, rather than an end unto itself. More concretely, it’s about devising solutions to fundamental problems rather than those created by our failure to do so or our desire for distraction. And it means coming to terms with the fact that we really are one unified global community, no matter if we want to be or not.

There is absolutely no chance that we are not moving beyond this present state. It is inevitable and, at the current rate of change, will happen sooner than we think. The only matter up for debate is whether we want that future to resemble a scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation or one from Soylent Green. It’s a catechism we cannot avoid, and, it fact, the question has already been posed. About that, there is nothing we can do. Determining the answer, however, is entirely up to us.

Always Something

Water continues to be the theme in Western Montana, which is good, because it is the most important thing.  The grass is tall in the fields and the weeds high in the ditch.  Some of the sow thistle between Silver Sage and here is over seven feet.  I would have thought the mosquitoes would be worse, but so far they have hardly appeared at all.

The fire season has been nonexistent, which should translate into more free time, but it hasn’t.  Most of the projects I had thought to accomplish haven’t even been started, let alone finished.  We should get the rest of the dog yard fenced this Friday and that will be nice.  The irrigation is flowing and just keeping up with the lawn using a borrowed reel mower is about all we can manage.

We had Melissa from the Ravalli County Weed District come by and identify all our succession vegetation for us.  Mostly we got mustard.  She did point out some Canada thistle, which we knew about, but she also noted that we had some field bindweed growing amongst the landscaping on the south side of the house.  Everyone, even brother Jeb, makes an ugly face when I mention the field bindweed, so I tend to believe it will be hard to get rid of.  Fortunately we haven’t seen it in the pasture yet, and I can only hope we don’t.  The grass is relatively well established in there and healthy, always the best defense against invasion.

Melissa recommended we use Roundup on the mustard patch around the stable, on the two potentially harmful gigantor nightshade plants we discovered, and on the area where we found the field bindweed.  I don’t much like the idea of using that stuff but I don’t know much about it.  I asked around a bit and word on the street is that it is has no adverse effects on humans, nonetheless I’m rather hesitant.  After a little Wikipedia indoctrination, I’m even more so.

I don’t see mustard as much of a threat, and the nightshade we may be able to beat back with a pair of trimmers.  Our neighbor Rod down the road has offered to help us to spot spray the Canada thistle with some Milestone.  Brandi dug up most of the sow thistle and a couple more seasons of that should take care of it.  She also has been cutting seed heads off the Canada and I’ve been pulling the bindweed before it flowers in some attempt at control.

Getting out of the weeds a bit, the big news in our world is that Brandi has accepted a permanent position at Rocky Mountain Laboratory.  That means we’ll be sticking around the Bitterroot for awhile, and I like the feel of it.  It gives us the confidence to really invest ourselves in the smallholding and the community for the long term and allows us freedom to consider a greater range of possibilities.  Now I can imagine working this place over the course of ten or twenty years.  It’s exciting.

In the mean time I’ll just try to keep up with Keegan and the lawn mowing, which may have just got easier since the irrigation has quit again.  Guess I shouldn’t have opened those valves in the pasture.     

Ah, Peace & Quiet

It’s pretty quiet around our place.  Not literally, of course, but in the sense that not much has happened as of late.  In literal terms, it’s anything but quiet.  Howling huskies, squalling pups, clucking hens, and a babbling baby all conspire to ensure that silence only occurs for short periods in the dead of night.

It’s winter, so our world revolves primarily around … dogs!  A return to more seasonal weather had us headed up the West Fork again, where we found the recent cold snap and snowfall had vastly improved trail conditions.  The dogs all ran well and little Icy got her first taste of the trace.  Paluk’s pups are four weeks old and as cute as ever.  I get endless enjoyment from asking Brandi which one of them she is going to keep.

“So, we can keep a puppy?”

“No.  It’s just a thought experiment.”

“Oh.”

The chickens we got from our smokejumper bro Rogers haven’t been producing any eggs.  They got a little traumatized by the inevitable dog v. chicken encounter which occurred the very first day we had them on the property, but they still offered up an egg a day for a week or so.  Now they aren’t producing at all.  I’ve asked around a bit and it seems they aren’t unique in this.  My buddy Sells’ urban flock in Missoula isn’t producing either.  He is running heat lamps and we aren’t, so that doesn’t seem to be a significant factor.  I should do some more research online, but I will probably just wait until spring when the days get longer and things warm up and see what happens then.

Despite my best efforts, I have more or less come to grips with the fact that the dogs are going to take up a lot more space than I had originally imagined and that their presence is going to seriously hinder our ability to host other livestock.  I’m really none too stoked to come walking out the back door to find four of them hanging from the neck of a shrieking sheep, so abstinence is the best policy there.  I still maintain hope for a couple of weaner pigs and a cow, but I've finally accepted that flora may be more the focus than fauna in the near term.

I’ve been doing some reading about food forests and garden design and I’m pretty excited about planting some fruit trees and berry bushes this coming spring or fall.  I’m thinking about taking a pretty loose approach to gardening this year and basically just throwing seeds wherever there is some bare dirt.  I would really like to put some bulbs and native shrubs in as well, and I’m really interested in starting some hops on the fence around the dog yard.  But as with everything, how much I can accomplish will largely depend on the availability of those two scarcities, time and money.

Keegan turned one last month and has become upwardly mobile.  His favorite thing in the world is taking hold of a pair of fingers and marching back to the bathroom to fetch his toothbrush.  He can crawl, pull himself up on the furniture, and stand no-handed for a half second, but he has a terrible habit of not going all the way to the ball and is always pulling up short and having to reach in.  We’ve been working on fixing that.

A glorious thing about one year old Keegan is that he speaks.  Not English, but a language that is entirely his own.  He often sits there and rattles on to himself for minutes on end.  You can’t understand a word of it, but he knows what he's saying.  I don’t know where he got it but he’s quite the orator.  He loves to spout off some longwinded tale and then finish with Keegan’s patented “I Approve” salute, which is always worthy of a laugh.

So that’s what I mean when I say it has been pretty quiet.  No sonic booms or explosions.  Just a dull roar.