Counterintelligence

...ing down on that cheese. Few things in nature are as deliberative as a cat making a call on jumping. The assault on our kitchen counters actually came in two parts, somewhat like finding an alternate route up Mt. Everest. The first step came two weeks ago when the cats figured out they could jump on the counter adjacent to the stove. From there they must have spotted the other counter and a week later made the dinner party assault on cheese summit...

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Thinking Local

...ity group such as a club, synagogue, church, lodge etc. In those groups we used to see each other socially outside the closed domains of our homes, making the kind of meanness and dissension we’ve seen here in Silver Lake less likely to happen. This is not to say that things were perfect when we had more affiliations. You could also get groups like the KKK. And the demands of households where both partners must work means that we have less time to...

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Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

...ecause his philosophy demands that you to focus intent on the garden, thus making the act of gardening a kind of sacred duty. But, this winter, I’ve still got a lot of tasks to complete and don’t have time to develop either a biodynamic compost pile or, gasp, thoughtstyle my way to some new, alternative method of sacramental gardening. So I decided to try straw bale gardening again. My last attempt, that I blogged about and even did a video of, wo...

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Unflipping the Gentrifence

...unds.” This pamphlet is part of the Internet Archive’s Building Technology Heritage Library, an essential resource for anyone interested in historical preservation. I recycled all of the old gentrifence, but had to buy some more lumber to complete the project. To make the oddly shaped pickets, I used a combo of table saw cuts along with a jig for my jigsaw. Making jigs increases speed and safety. I’m not entirely happy with the metal handrail but,...

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Boozing Bees

...tians organize a prize-fight. . . I have never heard of strong drink being used in feeding bees, except in one instance. I remember reading in L’Apiculteur years ago, of an old time beekeeper having fed his bees with bread dipt in honey which had been mixt with a proportion of wine, to cure them of diarrhea early in the spring . . . The beekeeper whose colonies are robbed by other bees, whiskey or no whiskey, can lay the blame on himself, and hims...

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