I enjoy looking at my tablets and phone even when I’m not using them. The reason is they use a live wallpaper that constantly changes. My very favorite live wallpaper is Northern Lights.
I’m a northern lights fan and this wallpaper is stunning and also soothing with its gentle transitions of the aurora, twinkling stars, and an occasional shooting star.
I really liked these, too:
Mystic Night Live Wallpaper
This is one of the most beautiful renderings of America the Beautiful that I’ve ever heard. The photography is fantastic. Hillsdale College is the ONLY college in the U.S. that refuses to take a cent from the government. As a result, it can offer courses rich in American history, the U.S. Constitution, and love of liberty, and teach them the way they SHOULD be taught, not how the government wants them taught. Hillsdale offers great FREE online courses [podcasts] on American freedom that are worth a listen. And you can sign up to receive the FREE Imprimis magazine. That alone will provide new insights on topics that you won’t find anywhere else. Hillsdale was founded in 1844 and is regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the U.S. They aren’t a bunch of wackos spouting tyranny. But you will learn how our founding fathers were often regarded as such.
Busy_Chicks
My order of day-old chicks arrived last Tuesday. They were little bundles of fluff. They still are, but at the ripe old age of 6 days, they have all sprouted wing feathers and today their little tail feathers are popping out.
Vanna_Says_Goodby
My sheep are gone. My livestock guardian dogs are gone. I’ve had Barbados Blackbelly sheep for 17 years and the dogs for 7. I don’t know the version of me who doesn’t have sheep and dogs.
I made the decision to sell my flock and dogs last January. I’ve spent the last 6 months trying to get my head around the idea and to live with my decision. I found them the best homes I could. The dogs get to stay with their sheep. They will be well cared for and loved–both the dogs and the sheep.
It is so quiet tonight without the dogs barking at owls and rabbits. Ever since they came to live here, I’ve always felt safe knowing they were out there, protecting the sheep and my farm. Sometimes they barked at things that I might have wished they wouldn’t, but I remember too well the horror I went through before they came, when a cougar and coyotes got into the back ram pasture and devoured four entire 90-lb ram lambs in one night’s work. The cougar came back 2 weeks later and started on the ewe lambs, killing one before I could get out there with my gun. I locked the sheep behind bars at night for the next 2 months until my friends could bring the two Pyranees/Anatolian puppies they sold me. I’ve slept well every night since they arrived in 2004.
The barns are empty. There are no happy bodies in my pasture. This will take some getting used to.
Why is this important? I had to do something that I knew was going to be incredibly painful because I also knew it would be the right thing to do for the sheep. Health issues were making it difficult to care for them. The rams had learned that they are bigger than I am, which is not something you ever want a ram to learn. Three weeks ago, a ram joggled my knee on his way past me and buggered it up. It was just beginning to feel better last week so I decided to spend the day grooming my ewes so that they would look beautiful for the big sheep transport day. Long story short, a crazed yearling jumped into my face and caused me to put all my weight on my bad knee. Now it is seriously buggered up. So although I had planned to sell the sheep before I got hurt, it didn’t turn out that way. But the injury was very convincing as to the wisdom of my decision to sell.
When Google shut down its iGoogle RSS reader in 2014, I searched for replacement options. After trying several, I settled on Netvibes.com and have been very happy with it. It can pull feeds from any available blogs or Web sites, but the big selling points are the available widgets and the extensive customization I can do. Widgets, like weather, news, and (most importantly) photos of cats, turn this dashboard into a visually pleasing landing page. Plus I can make as many separate pages as necessary on my dashboard (e.g., one for finances or games). Here is a screen capture of my Netvibes dashboard (click to enlarge):
I can “hope” that as I get older I don’t get Alzheimers or have a stroke or suffer any of the afflictions that cause pain and suffering or loss of autonomy. I can hope.
I’ve always been ridiculously proactive about things. From the time I was a little girl, my parents taught me to make my own future; put into place now the foundation for events that I’d like to have happen in the future. It’s how I got to Africa when I was 16; how I purchased my own house before I was 35; how I owned my own business at age 40. Those events didn’t happen because I “hoped” they would. They happened because I laid the foundation for each of them and actively worked to build on it.
Hope is not a plan. I do my best to keep healthy, but I cannot control what may ultimately “do me in.” There is a host of chronic, progressive physical disabilities that I may succumb to (COPD is what I live with now), most involving intractable physical pain. To simply hope that I die a good death isn’t a good plan, especially since the odds don’t favor it.
But it is a basic human right to choose to end one’s life when a person judges the quality of their life to be unacceptable. This right by its nature implies that the ending of one’s life is one’s choice, including the timing and persons present, and should be free of any restrictions by the law, clergy, medical profession, and even friends and relatives no matter how well-intentioned.
To the extent that I can increase the likelihood of dying peacefully, with dignity, with autonomy, I need to lay the foundation now and build actively on it as I grow into my senior years.
To this end, I’ve done a few proactive things:
I educated myself about ways to end my life peacefully and with dignity. The best resources can be found in the book Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying and the book Five Last Acts – The Exit Path:The arts and science of rational suicide in the face of unbearable, unrelievable suffering (click images to link to Amazon).I have been surprised at how having a good plan reduces the stress of worrying about something I can’t control. I am in no way suicidal; I enjoy my life, and every day brings a beauty and spiritual grace that gives me joy. But like all long-term goals, part of the process of getting there is adjusting one’s attitude and thinking. Americans are unwilling to talk about their own death or even think about it. I talk about my plan to a lot of friends, and I can see that although they respect my right to feel the way I do, they are uncomfortable hearing me talk about it.
Just as my parents taught me to lay a good foundation for my life, they have always been open and forthright in talking about death and their plans for their own deaths. They’ve involved me in the preparation of several drafts of their wills; in their choice of donating their bodies to Science Care (http://www.sciencecare.com/) for medical research, education, and training; and in discussions about their eventual funerals. So it is not surprising that I have the tools I need to help me prepare for my own death.
I have a plan and it gives me hope.
My springtime “I-need-to-plant-something-green” eyes are inevitably bigger than my August “what-the-heck-was-I-thinking-when-I-planted-all-those-freakin’-tomatoes” tummy. Because I preserve a great deal of the meat and vegetables that I grow, I dutifully can all those tomatoes despite the growing number of unused and unneeded jars of canned tomatoes building on my pantry shelves.
This summer was no different except that I planted double the number of tomatoes than usual, thinking that I needed to provide my parents with tomatoes since they no longer grow their own. Well, they moved into a retirement home that provides all meals. To make matters worse, I learned in July that I needed to forgo my usual high-acid diet to help an acid reflux problem. So no more tomato dishes for me.
The tomatoes plants, however, outdid themselves.
My practice is to wash the freshly picked tomatoes and immediately freeze them in gallon zip-lock bags. Then when the weather cools off and I don’t mind heating up the kitchen with pots of boiling liquid, I preserve the harvest for long-term storage. This post describes two ways that I let my crock-pot do the heavy work for me.
That’s it. You’ll need to shake the juice to mix the pulp and liquid; it naturally separates. Store in the fridge for 10 to 14 days. Makes 1/2 gallon of juice.
The most time-consuming task in making tomato sauce is cooking it down to remove the liquid and thicken the sauce. The crock-pot will do that for you.
The pulp in the bowl is the perfect consistency to make tomato sauce, pizza sauce, and spaghetti sauce. We’ll add some basic spices to make a general-purpose tomato sauce. When you open the canned sauce, you can add meat or more spices to suit whatever you are making.
Yesterday I bottled 120 bottles of wine from my 2012 harvest. Apple, peach, rhubarb (my favorite) and grape. I drink one glass of wine every night in the winter. In the summer, I drink one bottle of beer (which I also brew–won 2nd place in the Colorado State Fair one year). I am not a wine connoisseur; I make wine because I enjoy working with my farm’s produce and also because I can’t afford to buy the quantity of wine and beer that I drink (one glass a night adds up fast!). My wines are “cottage wines” made in 4-5 gallon batches in plastic buckets. Using glass carboys would be better, but it would cost a small fortune to buy 8-9 glass carboys, which is generally how many buckets I have going at a time. I like sweet wines, and although my goal is to produce lovely clear liquids, sometimes fruit wines are difficult to clarify. But they taste great!
Wine-bottling day is long and tedious
. Most of the time is spent washing buckets and bottles. My kitchen is converted into an assembly line: wash two boxes of bottles and drain; fill each bottle from the bucket; cork the bottles, put the bottles in boxes; repeat.
Wine-making day, which occurs on the day of harvest a year or more before wine-bottling day, is also long and tedious. The fruit has to be juiced and each recipe sized to fit the quantity of juice that you end up with.
The effort of making my own wine pays off every night when I can sit back and enjoy (literally) the fruit of my labor.
I didn’t get a thing done today because for hours this female Bullocks Oriole kept hurling herself at my office Windows and pecking at the glass. Occasionally the male would show up and she would run him off. She was obviously very agitated, and it amazed me that her behavior persisted for so long. Finally, I was so concerned about her hurting herself, I soaped the windows, hoping to eliminate the reflection that I assume she was seeing of herself and assuming was a rival Oriole. It helped a little; she settled for handing on the window screen fabric of the side windows that I could not soap. At least she couldn’t hurt herself on the screen.
The entertainment wasn’t all outside the window. Three of my six house cats spent their day frantically trying to catch this poor bird that was mere inches away from their noses but oh so far away on the other side of the glass.
Grace lives in a house with nine other cats–five of them sharing the same inside space. Most of them are pretty mellow and they get along okay. None of them are buddies. Good napping spots are at a premium, and all of the best ones (like the sunbeam coming in the front door or the top berth on the cat condo by the livingroom fireplace) are quickly taken when abandoned by their previous occupant. So sometimes you have to get creative when you need some alone time.
Why is this important? Privacy is becoming a scarce commodity. Get it when you can.
