reading

I finished Boswell's London Journal a while ago. It was a mildly interesting read in that it was utterly mundane. It is a great illustration of how people really aren't any different than they were in the the middle 18th century. The journal covers Boswell's year in London when he was out of school and not yet settled down to a job. He's living on an allowance from his father and trying to make connections with the upper crust and important literary figures. There is plenty of name dropping, self-absorbed egocentricity, piety, and fornication. So yeah, some things don't change.

28. James Boswell's Boswell's London Journal

the ides of August

I can't remember all that we did last weekend. The weekends are starting to run together into a mix of pulling, cutting, and burning brush. If I remember right we did a brush burn on Saturday. I also pulled out a bunch of honeysuckle, some rose, and even some buckthorn trees. So all in all, a typical weekend this year.

This weekend I went out and pulled rose up in the forest beyond the wash on Friday and Saturday mornings. I got about half the remaining area beyond the wash cleared out. There really isn't much area left to clean up. Over the last few nights we've canned 15 pints of dilly beans and 5 pints of pickled peppers. Today I'm focusing, for a given value of focus, on getting things cleaned up in the laundry room, a room which is the dumping ground of epic proportions. The whole house has gotten kind of out of control. I've got to take the time to get things inspected, detected, selected, rejected, stacked, filed, and processed.

The days are getting shorter. I'm finding it really pleasant to sleep in now because the birds are no longer inclined to wake us up before 5am. Now they are happy to sleep to a reasonable hour. And I'm happy to have them sleep to a reasonable hour.

reading

I finished reading Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail today. I bought it from Fedco a few years back and finally dug down to it in my reading pile. I bought it because it's about peppers and I read all sorts of books about peppers. It wasn't what I expected, but then again I don't think it was what the authors expected when they started out. I think they started out with the idea of writing a book about how climate change is affecting pepper growing, but their conclusion seems to be farmers meet all sorts of challenges with determination and improvisation. Farmers don't always succeed and there is a real danger to having a diverse food supply from urbanization, mass production industrial farming, and potentially climate change. It can be quite grim being a farmer, but most of that grimness has been in play for decades or centuries. It is not getting better and climate change may make it worse. Farmers can tell you when they have bad weather, no one can tell you that one bit of bad weather is caused by climate change. At least not yet.

29. Kurt Michael Friese, Kraig Kraft, & Gary Paul Nabhan Chasing Chilies: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail