Tried a different way of doing things . . .

I have always plowed my driveway with my compact tractor. That has meant removing the loader before the first snowfall and installing the plow. That's not too hard, but getting the loader back on in the spring is a hassle and meanwhile I don't have the use of the loader. Even worse is that the tractor-plow setup just can't handle a very deep snowfall, and we had a lot of those the past two winters.

Last winter I ended up having to hire a neighbor to clear out the driveway once the snowbanks on either side got too high for my little tractor to break. He has a tracked skid loader, and he wound up giving me a boulevard as wide as the Champs Elysee in about 90 minutes of work. So I figured, what the heck, maybe I can clear the driveway with the loader.

Here we didn't get the world historic gotterdamerung experienced by our federal capital. The six inches or so we did get seemed ideal for trying my experiment.

The answer is, you can do it, but it's tedious. You have to keep going back and forth, scooping up snow and dumping it. And the result is kind of uneven. It's hard to get the loader positioned correctly to pick up the snow close to the ground, without digging into the surface, so I ended up with patchy areas of remaining snow and skinned ground. Deeper snow would be much more tedious, of course, because I'd have to dump the bucket much more often.

So, I'm calling this a failure. A kid loader would work better because it automatically aligns the bucket to horizontal, which I have to do by hand. Maybe with practice I'd get better. My neighbor's machine has tracks, which would help a lot in deep snow, and a larger capacity. So, I think I'll invest in a plow truck.

Abnormal Psychology

Since I'm sure everyone who reads this is a football fan, you already know that the New England Patriots won their playoff game yesterday and will travel to Denver for the conference championship on Sunday. A major contribution to the victory came from future hall of fame tight end Rob Gronkowski. Gronk is a fan favorite not only because of his freakish athleticism, but also because of his amiable, slightly goofy persona.

What no-one associated with the Patriots will ever talk about -- and if you ask, they'll pretend not to hear the question -- is that Gronk was once one of a pair of bookends. His opposite number at the position was almost equally big, strong, fast and skilled Aaron Hernandez, and when both of them were on the field no defense in the NFL could match up.

That the Pats managed to survive an $8 million a year hit to the salary cap while said Mr. Hernandez was residing in the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts, a maximum security prison. He will only emerge feet first, which means that as a young man he will experience maybe 60 years of timeless existence in which the days of the week and seasons of the year are unmarked. This is because he murdered a man named Odin Lloyd, the fiancee of his girlfriend's sister. By his girlfriend I mean the mother of his baby, who lived in his house.

One would think that someone like Lloyd, virtually a member of the family, would get some consideration. But apparently he did something that Hernandez perceived as a slight, although the prosecutors never did establish a motive. It seemed to have something to do with an incident in a bar a couple of nights previously -- Lloyd was talking with the wrong people or something like that.

It wasn't what one would call the perfect crime. Hernandez rented a car -- something he apparently liked to do although he could have afforded anything he wanted -- and called up a couple of his friends from his hometown of Bristol, Connecticut. Small time hoodlums, car thief-drug dealer type guys. They picked up Lloyd, and drove him to an industrial park near Hernandez's house, their location revealed on his cell phone GPS throughout the journey. Then Hernandez shot Lloyd 6 times, the shots heard by security guards.

It's amazing how strong the code of Omerta was with this group. The accomplices obviously had every reason in the world to flip, but they didn't. They'll go on trial later this year. Hernandez had his girlfriend dispose of the murder weapon. Compelled to testify, she claimed she didn't know what was in the box and couldn't remember what she did with it. This despite that she won't see a dime of his money once it's gone to lawyers and lawsuits.

Speculation is that the motive may have concerned Lloyd speaking indiscreetly about a double murder the year before, for which Hernandez will go on trial in a couple of months. Since they prosecutors already have him on ice, they apparently just want to close the case convincingly for the sake of the survivors. The allegation is that a guy spilled a drink on Hernandez in a bar. He considered the apology insufficient, so he followed the guy out, pulled up to his car at a red light, and fired into the vehicle killing two total strangers and injuring two others. Assuming this story is true, does that seem like an overreaction?

The human brain is an extraordinarily complicated machine. A little bit of miswiring can have very strange results. If you were rich and famous, with the chance to get a whole lot richer in the coming years, would you go around murdering both strangers and friends for no particular reason? I didn't think so. Now, he may have been bumped on the head a few too many times in his professional endeavors. It is also alleged that he was a dust head, i.e. a smoker of phencylidine which for some unknown reason is abbreviated PCP. That can drive people nuts. However, research finds that PCP is not strongly associated with violence -- reports of violent acts are largely limited to people with a pre-existing tendency to violence. Since Hernandez also shot a guy in the face while he was at the University of Florida that would seem to apply. (The guy refused to press charges, probably because the incident had to do with drug dealing.)

It seems Hernandez never left behind the small time criminal milieu he grew up in, and that his self image as a strong and manly man was insufficiently served even by being a star in the National Football League. How sad is that?

Mid Non-Winter Musings

Well, despite some normally cold temperatures as I alluded to last time, winter as we know it has yet to show up. Today is a rainy day, and we've had no snow to speak of at all. I'm sure it will happen eventually but it's not yet in the forecast.

So I've been working on getting my mother set up with benefits and services she will need in order to either stay in her house, or if that really isn't feasible relocate and somehow afford assisted living. She had savings at one time but they evaporated during my father's long final illness. The state takes everything, as you probably know, before they'll start paying.

My mother still does have her house and some valuable possessions, so despite the reverse mortgage she could cash out with enough to get her into some sort of an acceptable setting, I think. But what about the many people who don't even have that? Growing old in poverty must be really awful. And of course it makes me worry a bit about myself, even though I am still working and saving and do own my home. But looking at the situation now from my family's experience, I realize that you really have to be wealthy to feel secure.

It's no wonder that people are anxious nowadays. We're all expecting to live for a long time and we haven't organized society to make that work for most folks. We seem to be the denial champions here in the U.S.A.

Cold

We're finally heading into some cold weather -- Monday and Tuesday are predicted not to get above freezing, although it will apparently be only a brief shot of frigidity. I've pretty much forgotten what it's like, having to get up in the middle of the night to stoke the stove and make sure it's going before I leave for work. Then when I get home at night the fire has burned out and the house is chilly. It takes a half hour or so for the stove to really get working.

Normal people nowadays keep their houses at 72 degrees even when nobody is there. Even the very progressive folks who turn the thermostat down when they aren't around don't turn it down very much because they can't stand to wait for the house to get warm again. If you think about it, that seems awfully wasteful. After all, we can stand to be outside with our coats on, so we can probably stand to be in a 55 degree house for 30 minutes. Before the days of central heating, the bedrooms were quite chilly and the temperature in the house would go up and down depending on when the fire got stoked. The Indians only had one room but I imagine it was pretty chilly in winter pretty much all the time. People lived that way here for thousands of years. Maybe we should be a little more tolerant of the cold.

Commerce and the human condition

Today is the annual Coming of the Seed Catalogs, which reliably arrive in my PO box in late December. This is commonly an inspirational moment for writers -- it manifests the essential symbolism of the solstice, the newly lengthening days initiating the gestation of reborn nature in the coming spring and all that.

But I'm too cynical for all that. The merchants know that seed catalogs will be a lot of fun to look at this time of year, so we'll do it. They hope that by getting in at the beginning of our spring fever, we'll turn to them instead of the competition. And they hope our fantasies of abundance will exceed the size of our garden plots and our endurance for sweaty brows and we'll end up buying mass quantities.

They're probably right. But this time, by golly, I really am going to assiduously cultivate 800 square feet and grow enough onions and carrots, and bottle enough tomato sauce, to last me all winter. Just you wait.

The Firewood Business

I haven't bought any firewood for at least 15 years, when I lived in the city. I can get all I need from deadfall on my own and my neighbor's property. He has a lot of acreage on which, for some reason, the trees tend to fall down more than they do on mine, and (he claims) he can't use a chainsaw because his ex-wife made him promise he wouldn't, even though he now has no positive regard for her. Whatever. There are other opportunities to scrounge. For example my brother and I recently dealt with overgrown vegetation at my mother's place and I got a good truckload of firewood out of  the deal.  In fact my only problem right now is that I don't have enough space to shed everything.

But that's not the point of this post, except to demonstrate that I know the time, effort and investment in equipment required to shed a cord of firewood. Around here, it sells for about $200, and believe me, if you're making $20 an hour you are Hercules.  It's really hard work, you have to constantly maintain the equipment, which means spending money on chains, fuel mix and oil, and small engine repair, not to mention the investment in your truck and tractor (which is pretty much necessary if you're dealing with big trunks and needing to pull stuff out of the woods and load heavy pieces). Also, before you can sell it, you have to shed it for a year.

Unfortunately for Karl Marx, this pretty much shoots down the labor theory of value. There just aren't enough people who want to buy it in bulk to soak up the supply, and the market has a lot of friction. It's too bulky and heavy to be worth moving long distances, for the most part, so you have to find your buyers nearby. I understand there are people who will haul firewood to Manhattan and get a better price, and then there are those ridiculous little bundles of six logs sitting outside the supermarket in plastic wrap with a $6.95 price tag or whatever it is. But that's a very narrow channel.

 I have a probably impractical idea of making a deal with Home Depot, and setting up an operation on the edge of the parking lot -- there's a lot of open space at the Windham location -- with a truck scale, a lot of shed space, and log splitters. Guys can bring in their green, unprocessed material and we'll pay them for it on the spot -- much less than final retail but they won't have to go through all the hassles. We'd do it by weight, not by volume, but whatever the weight equivalent is of a typical cord of green hardwood we'd buy for say, $100. Then we'd section it, split it and shed it, and sell it a year later for $225 or something. (Convenient location, trusted business, top quality guaranteed.) We'd also sell odd sizes for less, and kindling. And we could dicker up and down with people who brought in stuff already processed, or lower quality. Then you'd have a much better functioning market.

Of course, I wouldn't want to encourage people to start clearing land for fuel, but I don't think much of that would happen. It just isn't worth it. We'd be getting material from people cutting roads and clearing house sites, cleaning up deadfall and tree work, and we'd be preventing it from going to waste. If it decomposes, it's going to put it's carbon back into the atmosphere anyway, so you might as well extract the heat on the way, I figure. Not going to happen though.

Warmth

As usually happens when it's unusually warm here in winter, we have a dense fog. Actually it has never been this warm in Connecticut on December 24, since people here had thermometers. Today is just the culmination of the warmest December in general. It's certainly let me conserve my wood pile and it's made life generally easier. The squirrels are literally swarming in the woods, and looking fat. Life is easy for most of the critters, but not the ones who normally hide from raptors under the snow.

Now, here in southern New England we expect a lot of variation in the weather. It's not at all unusual to have warm spells during the winter, and some winters are milder than others in general.  As you know, last winter turned extremely cold and snowy in January and stayed that way through March. The prognosticators say we should expect more precipitation in winter here in the coming decades; the question is whether it gets warm enough for much of it to be rain, or for the snow to melt quickly. Until then, more snow will make winters seem harsh, even if the temperatures are tending to rise.

Whatever humanity manages to do about burning fossil fuel, the climate will continue to change, so we need to accept the consequences. One of the worst things for this neck of the woods will be if the hemlocks all die. When I bought this property the forester I hired to do prep work told me they were doomed because of the woolly adelgids. But we had some winter mornings that were cold enough (-6 F.) to kill the insects. If that stops happening, they'll come back, and the hemlock groves will turn into ghostly gray monuments to our folly. I can't bear to think about it.