Occupation of Independence

 Micro-climate or micro-calendar?  What do you call it when a mountain blocks sunrise or sunset?  Think of it as a mercifully early September, the fantasy of a mid-summer sufferer.   The late sunrise from one of these mountains fooled me one morning.  I should have started my bike ride even earlier because we had some climbing to do before making it to "[redacted] Summit."  It is funny how specialized an outdoorsman can be.  I was hoping for lots of climbing in middle gears, and I got it.  The irrigated fields had tall green hay.  Grasslands are rare and precious in the western mountain states. Have you ever seen a hatch of "Mormon crickets?"  They are a type of grasshopper, I suppose.  Fat and black.  They cannibalized the smooshed ones.  I tried to avoid smooshing them with my bicycle tires, but it was impossible to avoid them all.  Looking at them more carefully, there also seemed to be a lot of copulation goi...

Once again I have benefitted from developing the right attitude towards discomfort in the Outdoors.  There is nothing you could do on the "positive" end to enhance your appreciation of this little creek in my backyard in central Idaho.  By "positive" I mean such things as a bigger, steeper, or more famous creek. It was fun to wallow in an intense appreciation of this creek.  Doing so almost completely depends on developing a long-suffering attitude to the opposite of this creek.  This of course is a standard stump speech on this blog.   It was really the sound that made everything click for me.

 It is probably shocking to many people how ancient superstitions still affect big events in today's modern world.  I would like to add modern superstitions to the last sentence. The notion of Progress has almost become a Deity the last couple centuries.  I mockingly call that point-of-view the "Whig Interpretation of History."  You'd think that World Wars I and II would have weakened the blind faith in Progress. Onto the World Wars, let's add the current genocide in Gaza.  I wish I knew Israelis a bit better.  But it seems as though they don't really worship Yahweh so much as they worship being Jewish.  But what does it mean to be Jewish?  To wear a cloth disk on your head's bald spot?  To grow curly ringlets on the side of your head?  Certain petty rules about food, unique national holidays, or speaking Hebrew? Such things are interesting and help to put more variety into the world, but they seem too trivial to worship as a pseudo-d...

People like me who aren't 'water people' should envy those who are.    I am not planning on changing, but it is satisfying to appreciate their point of view more and more, over the years. The older a person gets, the less excuse they have for being a blockhead.  For instance, every summer I fight summer instead of just surrendering to it and then adapting to it.  I had a friend once in a bicycle club who got tired of hearing people gripe about the heat.  He told them, "It's summer.  It's supposed to be hot."  He was right, and I knew it at the time. The biggest source of worry in summer is my little dog getting hot in the van, in a parking lot.  I already owned this 'Breeze' fan from Fantastic but didn't use it much.  So I moved it into the van and found a way to mount it.  Then it plugs into the cigarette light.  It helps. Of course if you didn't already own the Breeze fan, you could just buy one of those USB-rechargeable mini-fan...