Sandra enjoys some of the free on-demand television series which can be viewed over the interweb. Down under, one is funded by the government, the other is part funded by both government and advertising. I’ve noticed a trend in her viewing which includes both German and Scandinavian noir. Hmm, dark tales which would leave me with nightmares for weeks. I’m simply not man enough for such exciting narratives. But it’s an equal opportunity thing for my lady, and the folks on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the Americans, also pump out some super scary content. I can’t watch that either, and on a more personal level find it deeply weird that the protagonist of the series “You” has the same personality type as my own. I’m much nicer, unless people really p#ss me off, err, sorry, I meant to type, annoy me deeply.
My personality type gets such a bad rap and seems to go from one extreme to the other. There was that mustachio’d German bloke in WWII who caused so much havoc. You have to admit that he had a rather stupid looking moustache. But then on the other end was, Mahatma Gandhi, who had equal parts good and kooky ideas. People don’t mention the kooky ideas in these enlightened days, and what’s with looking like he needed a solid feeding? You don’t see me skipping my meals! Far out! My favourite is the fictional Jane Eyre, who for her own reasons threw herself into a ditch after the dastardly Mr Rochester did the dirty on her. Spoiler alert: She got the upper hand in the end. You go Jane! Respect.
Anyway, one of the kooky things about my personality wiring, is that I love to write. Regular readers by now would have become aware of this fact. It is a pleasure to sit at the computer night after night and bang away on stories and/or missives. So there I was on Monday night tapping away at the keyboard. Sandra had plans to watch an episode of ‘Nurse Jackie’, as you do – except the screen was black with a little worm chasing it’s tail in some sort of strange circulating motion.
Such wormy iconography is projected onto screens as a pacifying tool. Please be patient whilst the worm seeks its tail and the computer does whatever it is meant to be doing. Except the sorcerous monster continued on its mysteriously never ending journey for far too long. A call was placed with the resident tech geek, i.e. me.
Upon closer inspection, with some wangling of the various interweb settings, I determined that the ad-blocker and cookie tracker protection were the cause of the black screen of television series on-demand death. The moment of truth had arrived, Sandra had to make the decision to enjoy the entertainment, take the advertisements and corporate stalking for her own good, or do something else with her time. The fictional character of Nurse Jackie, who seems to be a lot of trouble, would probably approve of the viewer stitch-up!
A quick lesson on how to switch the protection settings off, then on again, took a few minutes. The entertainment continued. I returned to writing. The incident did provoke some empathy, for clearly the provider was in a bind and most likely needed the advertising revenue. Their marketing targeting is way off! Last I checked Sandra has no need for incontinence pads, pensioner insurance, and / or cruises. The aged care provider showing off the hot young gardener whilst two elderly ladies look on in admiration was hardly realistic. I’ve met people who do gardening for a living, and they don’t look like that. Oh well, it’s probably all just revenue to the provider.
We live in such an odd world nowadays. A few days ago, the state government locked down all of the coastal and eastern extreme parts due to fears of bird flu spreading. In reality, what that means is that people can’t move their avian pets, poultry etc from those areas. Last I checked, birds can fly vast distances and probably couldn’t give a toss for the disease control areas. They’ll do what they do, just like that bloke from the “You” series did. Fun fact: interweb forums suggest that fictional character also has my personality type. We are not amused, for he seemed like a bit of trouble as well. Whatever, getting back to bird flu, it is a well known fictional trope, that someone always breaks quarantine, but in this flu case, my gut feeling suggests that it won’t be a human.
A lot of the controls and surveillance stuff getting implemented, looks pretty stupid to me, but I guess it makes people who are meant to be in control, look like they’re doing something. Anyway, if the systems are all that great, then how come some idiot in the US managed to put a few fake transactions onto a never used credit card last week? Now that was a truly odd moment and candidly made me wonder if the banksters had been hacked, yet they weren’t telling, or hadn’t realised.
Fortunately the nice banksters fixed everything up – a week after the charges hit the card, but the incident stole a few hours of our day. The card was cancelled, the charges disputed, and it was just one big hassle. At least we’ve learned we can physically bar all international transactions. Take that ye pesky miscreants! The story the banksters told me was that the hackers use arty-fish-al intelligence to run random combinations of credit card numbers, until they hit the jackpot. My lucky numbers apparently came up. It’s like winning the lotto, but losing all at the same time. This nonsense would be easy to stop, and on this interweb site I run a program which blocks bots that attempt to access it too quickly. How hard is that? Those botheads need to slow down and chill out for a bit. Sheez.
Guess we’re all taking baby steps in this strange new world. My hope is that the tech bros run out of mad cash sooner rather than later. It’d save the everyday person some hassles, but might cost them heaps in lost investments, err, sorry, expenditures. But until then, and also after then, I’ll continue to write, Sandra will enjoy her noir series, and we’ll remain content here in our remote eyrie.
The weather for most of this week was superb for forest clean up work. That’s what we do at this time of the year. We pick an area and remove most of the dead saplings. The small deceased trees can’t compete with the much larger trees, so they grow to around 20m / 66ft before then dying off. The thing is, the young upstarts get their revenge on the old and tall trees by providing heaps of fuel for forest fires. If a fire gets hot enough, everything carks it and even the soil gets sterilised. It’s not nice, so best if they’re harvested for firewood.
Often the roots of those tree have rotted, and they can be pushed over, by hand. When that isn’t possible, I fell the small tree, grind out the stump and collect the logs in a big pile. In September, I’ll cut those lengths up into firewood sized logs and store them away under cover. Being dead and air dried, they’re ready to be used now if necessary – which due to good planning, isn’t needed.
Once the stumps are ground down, the area is mowed. It looks a bit rough now, but in two years time it will be amazing to see. The local wildlife keeps a close watch on our activities in case we turn up any tasty grubs, which is often the case.
During the clean up work, we often discover the remnants of over a century of logging activities, and did that lot leave a mess or what? You’d imagine that with all of the big bulldozer machines they clearly used, a few extra minutes of activity would be spent burning off the tree stumps littered through the forest? But no, and we also find discarded beer bottles! Why clean up after oneself? Well, I am bothered, and cleaned up a few of each of them this week.
A few months ago I completely reconditioned the fuel system on the fifteen year old large chainsaw, and it runs at beast mode nowadays. The tree stumps are very dirty timber which necessitates a lot of chain sharpening, but nobody said this would be easy work.
The remnants are remarkably heavy, wet and dense. When they can be moved, we load them into a power wheelbarrow and dump them onto a bonfire.
After many hours, the bonfire usually burns down to quite a small size. We use the very smallest of the dead trees as fuel, otherwise the large chunks of cut timber will struggle to burn – at this time of year. In summer, they’d go off like a frog in a sock!
Observant readers may notice in the background to the above photos, just how many dead saplings grow in this particular flat-ish area of the property. It’s an unusual forest arrangement. I’m guessing they all got off to a good start over a couple of wet years. Then the inevitable dry year came along, and the big trees outcompeted them, all of them. Here is a big tree which was clearly damaged in the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires which only just brushed through the land here.
Reducing the fire risk, protecting the larger and older trees (which have the hollows that provide housing), plus creating opportunities for edible ground-cover plants the forest critters will enjoy eating, are one part of this story. The other is that the forest pays us for this service in rocks. Some of those are rather large, and will be awesome for the garden:
Might need to split that one in half. But the sheer volume of rocks recovered, is remarkable and will be put to most excellent use when the warmer weather returns later this year.
By Sunday, the rains had returned as a storm swept up from Antarctica. Such weather suggests to me that the frozen icy continent is rather cold! The monster picked up moisture over the Southern Ocean as it moved north. Probably cold there too. Brr!
Rugged up against the cold, I spent most of the day in the machinery shed fixing and servicing many of the machines we rely on for the work done around here. One of the machines is something of a lemon. I don’t know whether the machine was damaged during manufacture, or due to carelessness when serviced long ago, but it’s been a pain. The original bolts holding the ignition coil into place, were threaded. I’d replaced those a year ago when I discovered the cause of the continuing starting problems. The positioning of the coil was then reset, but the thing had slipped again and the machine would not start. This time around I added some plumbing tape to the bolt threads and gave the coil a little bit more breathing space in its setting. This extra gap may burn the coil out quicker than it was designed to, but at least the machine will run. What a nuisance.
The rest of the machines only needed minor things attended to here and there. No big deal.
Anyway, warmer weather is on its way, and the Manchurian Pear has popped out lots of buds and will soon be full of blossoms.
One of the Almond trees has broken dormancy way too early. There are a few flying insects around, but not nearly enough to justify all of the blossoms.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 10am is 5’C (41’F). So far for this year there has been 810.6mm (31.9 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 757.0mm (29.8 inches)
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