After the Rain

It hasn’t been a good year, but there have been worse ones, or so I try to remind myself. The world hasn’t been filled with much in the way of good news which make it easy to forget the better moments that happened. One needs to keep an eye open in order to catch those fleeting moments of magic that make life worth living.

A sunset drive last night in search of food to break the monotony of my diet featured an unspectacular sky leading me to leave my camera behind. So of course, I saw something I’d never seen before --  a column of rainbow light coming from the middle of a cloud on the horizon. No rainbow arch, just a nearly straight shaft of prismatic color descending from the sky like a psychedelic tornado, it caught my disbelieving eye.

Testing the FujiFilm HS25EXR, Part 2

More fooling around without a clue in order to see Fuji’s camera can do. As will become obvious, there is a lot to be learned yet. More photos and even a video only scratch the surface of what this far too capable mid-sized digital camera is capable of.



Ever behind on the times due to a lack of money, I feel like I’m constantly reinventing the wheel. It doesn't help I've forgotten everything about photography in the past five years. Due to dependency on automatic settings, pictures are never quite what I hope for, so expect to do better than this if you get your hands on the HS25EXR or one of its close relatives in the HS family.

In my previous post, I mentioned how post processing is needed to get good results. Spoiled by my Canon’s producing great results straight out of the viewfinder makes this a new experience. The two unaltered (other than resizing) shots above are a good illustration of why EXR mode is threatening my sanity.

July Refuses to Go Gracefully

Normally complaining about a month involves that eternal and universal topic of weather. Yeah, the weather has been weird with ferocious gnats making the good days outside miserable, but it has been the unrelenting bad news that makes me want the month to just leave already.

The latest is my father having to be hospitalized again. After more than 24 hours of vomiting brown blood, he caved and we journeyed to the ER to see now familiar faces. At the rate he’s going, we’ll start being invited to family outings of the staff. Symptoms are the same as two weeks ago, but in greater volume and violence.

April Hail

This is supposed to be the season of April showers to bring forth May flowers, but what does April hail bring?

We had quite a storm here last night with two rounds of hail involved. The entire area was hit by this according to Channel 19 and I feel sorry for anyone outside at the time.

Fortunately the car is not dimpled from I can see this morning. This is despite the gale force winds driving the hail that made a din that I’d never experience before. Later rain reduced the cover somewhat leaving a well salted yard under the gray skies of today.

More rain, freezing rain, and snow are in the forecast to make things even more fun. It will be hostile weather until Sunday rolls around with 50F temperatures again. Have they executed that groundhog out East yet?

A Couple of Pests

While perusing the news, I ran across two articles about invaders. One is an invader of the blood stream and the other of trees. Both are connected to me oddly enough, so they caught my interest.

Lyme Disease’s bacterium has been found to be far more unusual than thought. It is the first living organism to be discovered that doesn’t live by consuming iron! Instead it apparently uses maganese as a substitute and that explains why it is so hard for the immune system to fight. Tricky things, the microscopic.

Let’s hope that the research is correct and leads to a better treatment of the disease. I did not enjoy my bout of it last year.

Meanwhile, slightly less close to home, the emerald ash borer has entered Houston County with finds in La Crescent. Worry about the insects has been around for years, but they took their time in arriving. I used to carry a card for identifying the insect that got got thrown out during a fit of wallet cleaning. Time to get another one, I suppose.

Just recently I’d been talking to a friend who will be doing a summer internship mapping out the problem in Winona, which is north of La Crescent. The focus of that won’t just be detection, but advising on substitution of different trees to replace the ones being cut down. Interesting stuff, that.

I find myself disliking bugs of all kinds after reading the news today. I wonder why?

Back to working on my next review.

Dry in the Breadbasket

Forget about the fluctuating temperatures this winter because there is something more problematic going on with the weather. There is a serious lack of precipitation to alleviate the drought that has been going on since last year. Take a look at the map and you’ll see the heartland which produces most of the wheat, corn, and soy beans is not doing well.

Not a pretty picture, is it?

Locally, things aren’t great, but could be worse. The fields near creeks and rivers fared well, but those farther out varied considerably this past growing season. Even though we are near two creeks, quite a bit of the corn was underdeveloped. Farther west things were a lot worse in Minnesota.

The map tells me food prices will be going up with even more pain at the grocery store than just the inflation we have been experiencing. Lucky for me I’m attempting to downsize my body so less food isn’t a problem. But to families raising children this is a real concern.

Hopefully the weather will get more unpredictable and do something to relieve the situation. If you are interested in following the drought, check out the National Drought Mitigation Center page for it. It is regularly updated, hence the screen capture above to catch the moment.

October Already?

Nine days into the month too? Gah, time is going by too fast.

The leaves have already turned and the high winds have removed many in the Yucatan area. I took these photos last week when I realized Fall had snuck up on me. The colors by Dresbach Lock and Dam were more spectacular, but I did not have my camera with me. Time to get back into the habit of having it along.

The younger maple started turning then stopped, but what intrigues me is that some leaves turned orange for the first time. It is supposed to be a red maple, but has always turned yellow. Maybe there is hope yet.

Hokey Smoke!

While finishing up the Beowulf review tonight, I heard a loud impact on the air conditioner. Sometimes a panicked cat will jump up there, so I checked it out to see if there was an emergency. Instead, I beheld this:

I blinked multiple times because I had never seen anything like it. Then I realized what it was and was even more shocked. It was an honest to goodness flying squirrel!

For some reason I had always thought they were bigger than this little guy, but there was no mistaking the flat tail and membranes between the legs. I had no clue they even ranged into Minnesota.

Some Guitar Fun

A video from a father and son duo I am friends with. It has been a trip watching Chris Jr. move from drums to guitar and then evolve as a player. The kid has a lot a talent and learns it all by ear.

"Just Because" is a fun tune and this noodling around turned out well, I think:

Another Day at the Polls, Another Fiasco for the MNGOP

Ron Paul’s libertarians have struck another blow on behalf of losing to Democrats. Yesterday, an incredibly low turnout of 3% of voters participated in the primary and, like the caucuses before, it enabled the Paul backed candidates to get the nod.

Kurt Bills barely won against a candidate nobody knew anything about. Running in tribute to a noted leftist, Paul Wellstone, shows just how Republican he really is. Meanwhile, in CD1, the Paul backers got Allan Quist in over a much superior candidate. I guess spending money on those terrible television ads worked.

The blame does not mainly fall on Ron Paul’s followers. This is the end result of laziness, corruption, and sheer stupidity by the MNGOP leadership with the rank and file Republicans being just as bad. If people would pay attention and get involved, the fringe would not take over. For all intents and purposes, the state party is dead.

As of today, I no longer consider myself a member of the zombie state party and beholden to voting for the candidates running under the Republican banner. At least I can stay aligned with the national party, which still has room for true conservatives. I no longer feel guilt about my health taking me out of political volunteer work after watching the incredible stupidity being put on display.

I will not be voting for Quist or Bills, which is effectively voting for Walz and Klobuchar. It does not matter, for neither has a snowball’s chance in Hades to win. It is a pity, for this looks to be a vulnerable election cycle for Democrats in general.

I will be voting for Greg Davids HD26B, Jeremy Miller SD26, and Romney/Ryan. All of them have my full support and I expect to write letters to the editor on their behalf.

Fly Like an Eagle

Living out in the countryside has many benefits with one of the more interesting ones being the variety of wildlife that inhabit the area. Bald eagles have been making a comeback over the past couple of decades and lately have been moving into the Yucatan area. For some reason I never have a camera when one is around. Today that changed, though I was not able to get good pictures in the end.

My father came downstairs and announce he had been watching quite an aerial show. Puzzled, I asked if a crop duster was in the area again. No, he had been watching a bald eagle fight with a turkey vulture over a carcass and had not bothered to let me know it was going on…

Odds and Ends 4-10-2012

Since I have not done this in awhile, I will throw some links up to what has caught my attention lately.

Locally, the apple orchards that are such a part of the region are under threat thanks to the cold snap this week. The combination of unusually warm temperatures followed by unusually cold ones is lethal to apple buds. Not much can be done but hope there will be Honeycrisp’s this year.

Ah, those wacky Japanese using high tech to better humanity. Oh wait…

At least they are diverting resources from making robot women. Don’t get me started there.

Having watched the dot com bubble of the late nineties, I have been getting the feeling of déjà vu again. It turns out I am not alone in worrying over how the latest Internet startups are over priced. I suspect we are headed for a dot com bubble 2.0.

The media in all its forms is increasingly dishonest as things crank up for the elections this year. Race baiting is one of the more evil ways to stir things up and it is being employed fully as a rallying tactic for the left. Outright fabrications are being spread around to inflame tensions. The ends justifying the means rarely leads to anything good, but people never seem to learn that.

The mainstream media cannot be trusted to be guardians of the truth or public good and I wonder if they ever were worthy of it. Given how partisan they have become, they resemble the state controlled media of totalitarian states more and more. Maybe the idea that yellow journalism died out was an illusion in the first place.

One thing that has bothered me for a very long time is how humanity lost its willingness to take risks by the end of the 20th Century. We need to go to space, take chances, colonize, and build. Yes, people will die in the endeavor, but there are far worse things than death. One of them is stagnation. So it is sad to see plans from the 1950s aimed at going to Mars and realizing there is little chance that will happen this century.

I am probably not alone in that. An anime adaptation of Space Brothers has started airing in Japan and streaming worldwide at Crunchyroll. It is a rare thing these days to see an anime featuring characters that are all adults and dealing with adult problems. Set in the near future, it is about a pair of brothers hoping to make it to the Moon and beyond as astronauts. Warm and sentimental, it also catches some of the current cultural malaise in Japan. Man, it makes me wish we had real space programs and not the token jokes we have today.

Land Rights Battle in Houston County Gets National Attention

It was something of a surprise to get an email from a friend linking a post on Glenn Beck’s site, The Blaze and asking if this was the local issue a mutual friend was involved in. Sure enough, it is all about the land rights fight here in Houston County.

The money quote from Bjerke in the article is no surprise. Beyond his left wing politics, this is business as usual for the county commissioners regardless of political affiliation. Dictatorial is a common adjective thrown at them in this area and is the norm in most rural counties.

But now some comments on the issue at hand. In a nutshell, Houston County doesn’t want residences increasing in land areas zoned for agriculture. The theory is city folk will come in and destroy the area if they are allowed to build homes here. So to restrict building, only one house per 40 acres is allowed.

That is very restrictive, especially for families that want to keep farms in the family and have the next generation build their own house on the family homestead. A neighboring county, Fillmore, is worse from what I have been told. There are areas zoned where it is something like 120 acres that the same kind of ordinance is applied to.

Something that needs pointing out is Houston County’s population has been declining for years. All this talk of bringing in manufacturing companies is moot if there isn’t a population to supply the labor force. You also need the population to make up for lost tax revenues given out as tax breaks to said companies. So limiting population growth in any way is foolish.

Having been approached years ago to possibly be the spokesman for the group that was forming to fight this, I declined. While sympathetic and thinking they are in the right, I had some issues with using the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of the “pursuit of happiness” as a basis for fighting the zoning law. Land rights is one place the founding fathers botched things. With no explicit land rights expressed in the document or its amendments, it left things wide open for abuse. This is curious due to the amount of writings about those rights before the Constitution was created.

In the end, I believe an amendment to the state constitution is needed and then a push for an amendment on the national level. Nothing less will solve this problem completely and safeguard our rights to land ownership and stewardship.

What goes unmentioned in the post on The Blaze is that there is an element of religious intolerance, if not persecution, involved in this dispute. The original case was fought by a family belonging to a tiny Christian sect called the Marinathas. Outside of mainstream Christianity to some degree, they have been the objects of rumor mongering and ridicule by outsiders.

The rumors that were spread by supporters of the commissioners went something like this: they want to build a cult compound like Jamestown so they can gather people together and take over the area. Needless to say, this did not help the atmosphere. From my dealings with members of the sect, I have found them to be very good, God fearing, and patriotic people. Being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I can sympathize about being misunderstood.

I will admit that the family involved in the case were far too hot headed in the way they initially handled things. While they thought they had been given a verbal agreement, you have to have something written when dealing with government. Otherwise misunderstandings can and will arise like it did in this case.

But the fight rapidly grew to include many people outside the Marinathas and there is quite a cross section of concerned citiziens in Concerned Landowners. It has become quite the brouhaha and the commissioners are finding themselves in contested elections now. It will be interesting to see how the national attention affects things in this small rural county.

As for the media censorship of letters to the editor, this is normal and there is no such thing as an impartial newspaper. I do think Heather Gray went overboard on banning all letters on the subject, but The Spring Grove Herald is a DFL aligned newspaper so do not expect an even break there. Instead, mourn the fact that no conservative has been willing to throw money away at a dying medium to counter liberal papers. Actually, the biggest issue is that Gray was mayor and editor at the same time. That was a big conflict of interest that reminded me of Charles Foster Kane’s desires to control everything, albeit on a microscopic scale.

I hope that the battle for property rights gets some results, but I am not holding my breath. Once entrenched, laws are nearly impossible to repeal.

That Was Yesterday

With another frost warning for tonight, it seems like summer is but a distant memory already. For me it is the second lost summer in a row with hardly anything done outdoors. Yet tomorrow is October and I must move on, even if the sun refuses to shine this week.

I am having too much fun watching The Big Sleep to review it. Today I will be watching the original unreleased cut to compare versions and I am looking forward to it greatly. It is too bad we live in an era where somebody like Bogart could never be a top tier star.

Hot Fish Shop that used to be in Winona is going to reopen. That is the good news. The bad news is that it will be in Rochester. Ah well. Hopefully the recipes will be the same as what I remember. But it would be nice if it were closer.

Facebook is out to prove they are utterly evil, it appears. Narcissism is a bad thing and it looks like a lot of people are going to find out just how bad. What is going to alarm people the most is finding out that Facebook never really gets rid of deleted messages.

Because of all the privacy flaps, I know people moving to Google + and Twitter instead. But I would say they are not going to be much better about data harvesting. What do you expect for a free service?

Hope that this report pans out. Just because we finally got Bin Laden does not mean the mission is over. There are still a lot of bad guys out there and the way Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey are going there will be many more new ones.

And I stalled finishing this long enough for blue sky to appear and actual sunlight to emanate from above. At last the new matchstick blinds will get a test.

A Community Effort: The Yucatan Sign

In the coming harsh economic times (we haven't seen anything yet), people will have to start pulling together to make it.  Divided we fall is a true principle and this urge to scatter apart will not serve us well in trying times.  Because of growing difficulties in our little part of Houston County, there has been a conscious effort by those of us on this end of our road to start doing things to help each other.  So we've been exchanging home grown foods and the like, something that used to be common place in rural culture.  It is a good thing that has been lost in our profligate era of debt and materialism over the past few decades.

So what started this local change of behavior?  It started with a sign.

In the early 1990's, the local Yucatan Supper Club shut down and took their sign down.  That sign had been used as a way point by UPS, FedEx, and other delivery services for ages.  Some of us got together, led by my late mother to put up a sign on the corner of the crossroads as a replacement.  It was a simple design, with the added bonus of a flower box at the bottom. 

Over the years, it served us well, but age and weather caught up to it.  In recent years, all the stain had worn from it, with the wooden letters blending into the boards and beginning to fall apart.  We often talked about repainting it, but never got around to it.

A deck project changed that, with leftover stain inspiring two of our neighbors to get moving on the long talked about restoration.  The sign was dismantled, new letters purchased, flowers planted, and leftover paint used to do most of the painting.  Donations and labor were contributed by Mern Flatten, Randy Roland, the Rykhus family, my dad and me.  On August 24th, we bolted the sign back up:

Bank Failures Coming Closer to Home

Houston County, we have a problem.

Yesterday, this article jumped out of the headlines, as Spring Grove is a town I spent a good chunk of my school years in or around.  Jennings State Bank was the 95th bank to fail in the United States in 2009 and the first local one. It may not be the last.  The FDIC has warned Security State Bank of Lewiston to correct their lending practices and their Hokah branch is in Houston County.  Until recently, Houston County had been unaffected, not a surprise for a small county.  It is a temptation to say we are too small to fail, but realistically that is not the case.

It is clear we are not done with bank failures, whether they be local or national. Today brought another round of gloomy news, with a report from the special inspector general appointed to look into the banking stress tests conducted a year ago.  The biggest banks were said to be financially sound when Treasury Secretary Paulson knew otherwise.  To wit, he lied about it. Citigroup and Bank of America are singled out in the article, but there have been rumblings that Wells Fargo is not in good shape as well. Apparently, the "too big to fail" argument won out over honesty with Bernanke and Paulson.

None of this inspires confidence at any level.  When cover ups begin, they are usually due to one of two things: the desire to protect oneself from trouble or blame and the other being paralyzed fear of large consequences too horrific to contemplate.  My suspicion is that the latter is the case. In the end, no amount of running from reality will make bad things go away.

Time to prepare for reality on an individual basis, as the current crop of politicians and bureaucrats have no desire to face it.

UPDATED:

Looks like the national level isn't as big as it gets, the question now being posed is whether the World Bank is going to fail.

Lanesboro Flooding

Some pictures of flooding in Lanesboro from Doug Baker.

Flooding, Redux

Once again our county is a disaster area, though not as bad as last August. The rains came more steadily and widespread, with already saturated soil refusing to absorb the 5 to 10" of water pouring from the sky. The South Fork of the Root River runs behind our property and we spent Sunday watching it rise slowly until it finally crested its banks over night. Water had pooled up in the adjacent field giving the illusion of flooding, but it took until today to become reality.

August was not that long ago and earlier this year the water had threatened briefly, so I'm well tired of the flooding. Eight years ago, we had the flood of the century, or so we thought. That appeared to be a once in a lifetime flood in the valley, but here we are -- again. Fortunately, the damage has not been as severe as last year in the immediate area. Over in Wisconsin, it is looking worse as Gays Mill, Viola, and Soldiers Grove are facing record flooding.

I'm counting my blessings and hoping the forecast rains this week turn out to be light, or we'll be seeing mudslides again. Some more pictures from our neck of the woods follow:

Hokah Hammered

Going East from Houston, I could see that the Root River had escaped its banks and then some. Looking like a giant had spilled a glass of chocolate milk, the muddied water had completely swamped fields and farms in the river valley. Traveling HWY 16 gave an idea of just how damaging all the rainfall had been. While there were areas that had been flooded over, apparently briefly, the bulk of the damage was from mudslides. The shoulder was in terrible shape, eroded soils had undermined the guard rails and many a post were dangling, suspended in mid-air. Entire hillsides had collapsed onto the highway and I can see why it took an entire day to open it again.



Approaching Hokah, I knew what to expect, floods are almost a way of life there. We even had an ice jam cause one during the winter a year and a half ago. So I've been mystified why people keep building businesses in the low end of town, even the best levees can't prevent everything. What was a surprise was seeing back yards missing from houses on the high end of Hokah. I looked up a street to see a garage in the street, then looked up to see the house above it partially collapsed. Not good.










The local Kwik Trip always floods when the Root River floods, so I wasn't surprised to see the used car lot next to it flooded. What I didn't expect was to see one car floating and others stuck partially in the overflooded plain next to it. I used the picture of the car in a previous post, but I'll use it again because it captures the mood of all this destruction well.











My dad pulled into the Kwik Trip, I didn't say anything because I'd told him the power was out in Hokah before we left. He was surprised to find it closed and we headed up to the downtown of the small village. There the Post Office was open and so was the small cafe, they had a generator going. We stopped in and had breakfast and ruminated on what we'd seen.




One of the things I always liked about Hokah was the wooden footbridge they had near the fire department. As you can see by the photo, it is no more.




We left Hokah and went home, Dad counted 16 major mudslides on the way back. Once home, the forecasts called for more rain, heavy rain.

A Town Spared

With the mandatory evacuation ordered in Houston and more rain coming, it was a long night. The last thing I wanted to see was the town flooded out and given that Ace Telephone is headquartered there, phone service across two counties could be affected. As it was, the Internet was already out and they are the main provider in the area. Being thoroughly modern, I get most of my information off of the Internet these days and the National Weather Service serves as my home page. With no net, there was no way to watch the radar returns on demand.

No matter, I'll watch the Weather Channel, they must be covering things here. Nothing but Hurricane Dean with a few mentions of flooding in Minnesota. It was clear that the old media wasn't keeping up due to their dwelling on the flashy prospects of hurricane damage. Information from local sources was haphazard due to the amount of damage done throughout the area and in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Then there was the Sunday effect, things slow down around here on Sundays, it isn't a big city market.

So information was limited. Mainly, it was text scrolling at the bottom of the screen that gave any idea of what was going on, it seemed as if every road and highway was damaged or closed. There were two deaths in Houston County now, one around Mound Prairie, the other by Spring Grove. Phone calls to and from friends revealed water standing high South of Caledonia and massive road damage North of Houston. I heard about Church members cut off by their driveway simply ceasing to exist.

It was a long night and the next morning at least brought back the Internet. The Root River had come within half a foot of topping the levee at Houston, but the levee held and the water was going down. Friends in Hokah weren't reachable until they called later in the day, they were cut off from every direction and had a beach where their lawn used to be.

My father and I decided to head out and see if anything could be done to help in Houston and promptly ran into a traffic jam of people trying to return home. A humvee with Army National Guard troops was blocking the way into town and questioning everyone returning. Realizing we wouldn't be allowed in, we instead decided to take HWY 16 to Hokah and find out how bad travel was going to be.