Another small conservation action

I had an idea for conserving money and other resources that I thought I'd share.

I print my own Yule wrapping paper, using the 75-sq.-ft. Reynolds Freezer Paper.

It takes about half an hour or 45 minutes to print a whole roll of freezer paper with a stamp, but look what you get:

75 square feet as opposed to the 15 sq. ft. in a roll of wrapping paper — at $3.25 for 75 sq. ft., as opposed to $3.99 for the 15 sq. ft.
Plastic on the non-decorated side, which helps anchor the gift to be wrapped
No caustic dyes or inks, no clear plastic tube wrapping to throw away
Beautiful stiff creamy white paper that you make special with very cheap ribbon or just curling ribbon bows
A small but thick, sturdy cardboard tube in the center of the roll that begs to be reused by children in Candlemas crafts

If you have help, you can also just rubber-band a red and green marker together and hold it on the paper while pulling the roll under it, jigging and jogging your markers creatively as you go. (Red and green are goddess colors too!)

The hardest part is finding it at this time of year; but, though Wal-Mart did a no-hab, Albertson’s obliged. I bought three rolls for less than $10, the woodcut pinecone stamp 10 years ago for 12.98 and the pigment ink pad for $8.99 at the same time.

Merry Yule wishes!
Angie

A small rant about CNN

I have almost entirely ceased watching CNN; now I go into the library and work or play while I listen to it off and on. The problem is that when I watch it, I get so upset that I talk (or shout) back, and this disturbs my husband's enjoyment and understanding of the news.

Part of my reasoning is below, in an e-mail I just sent CNN/a.m. What do you think of how the news is reported today?

[Dear CNN:] Re Kiran Chetry, et al.

True journalists don't comment on the news, they simply report it.

I don't want to know how your gorgeous Iranian reporter or your excitable but dignified-looking black male feel about the news items on their show; this isn't about them, it's about the news. And when your reporters do go, "What's that about?" it's always with some childish, Liberal, PC or Socialist slant. America needs Edward R. Murrow or the equivalent in times like these, not the Mickey Mouse Club and Annette Funicello.

They may be fashionable, but it's not reporting. If they want to be stars, send them to the soaps. Please: I don't watch the soaps, but I bet they could use all that acting and makeup talent.

When I turn on CNN, I want to see serious news, not a local coffee club (check out that dress! that Botox! That dental work —the glare from those teeth!) show. These days only the BBC and one local channel are getting it right.

Please go back to being the enviable Cable News Network, and quit with the Comedy, New Dealers and Nitwits.

###
All that said, I happened to overhear their "Quick Vote of the Day" — viewers were asked whether the guy with the GETOSAMA license plate (which might be offensive to some) should be forced to give it back. I went and voted No, but then I wrote to am@cnn.com with the subject: The Right Not to be Offended

The body text read, "Does not exist. The right to Freedom of Speech does. What doesn't the State or the DMV understand?"

And then I pointed out, "Speaking of Free Speech, check out how S 1959 and HB 1955, "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007," eviscerates it.

If you ever decide to return from infotainment to journalism, and should you do so before these bills are passed and it's too late, you might warn the American public that the First Amendment is about to be repealed. Maybe you could even help stop these bills' passage; doing so could very possibly save your own industry, if not your job. What will the Administration need with perky infotainers when it controls everything said?"

And I'll be damned if Kiran Chetry didn't read the quip first graf aloud and quote me by name, not 10 minutes after I hit "send." She called my e-mail "interesting." (Wow. So that's what 15 seconds of fame feels like. Sumbitch.)

By pouncing on and repeating only the sound bite and ignoring the serious news in it, the perky infotainer proved my point using my e-mail. I'd lay you odds the director realized it right after she did it.

"In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous." -- Robert G. Ingersoll

18 Ways to Piss off a Pagan

Got this from the Fort Worth Witches' Meetup list, and the poster said she'd gotten it (uncredited) from a friend's blog. If you know the author, please tell me.

18 Ways To Piss Off A Pagan!

1. Be considerate: Rearrange their altar so it looks neat.
2. Blow out their altar candle if it is daylight. (No need to waste a good candle!)
3. Sweep up the salt they carelessly left at the doorway.
4. Sharpen their Athame.
5. Untie the knot in their cords.
6. Try on their jewelry for fashion sense.
7. Pick up their crystals for a closer look.
8. See how far their crystal ball will roll (dogs love this).
9. Use their runes as extra Dominoes.
10. Play "Old Maid" with their Tarot cards.
11. Toss holy water on them "just to see what happens."
12. Ask them if they are a good witch or a bad witch.
13. Debate with them about "True Religion."
14. Ask them if they are Satan worshippers.
15. Tell them how the Bible says they are going to hell, then ask if they can make you a love potion.
16. Point to their pentacle necklace, almost touching it, and ask, "Isn't that supposed to be point down?"
17. Refer to a business meeting as "a come-to-Jesus" meeting.
18. Leave Chick Publication tracts lying about the break rooms and on their desks.

Today's image is "Angie's Tranquil Cats." It was taken very near the summer solstice, which is why the sun is coming almost straight down through the stained glass dining room window. Mo spotted the cats — the big one of which is Stevie the neutered Turkish Van and the little one a tailless female stray, not his spawn — and bade me take a picture. Good eye, Mo; this was the best of 13 images taken. I sent it to my mentor, Meredy Amyx, and she took the green out of it, reduced its size, and sent it back to me for desktop use. Since then an artist has asked if she might paint from it. Nancy's website is www.nancyparkart.com .

I ran an ad in June when a gray tabby female brought her four kittens to our home and basically pointed the finger at Stevie. They certainly all looked like him, and at least three if not all four were Turkish Van kitties. Well, those kittens were gone inside a week, but by then we had also found three strays abandoned up on the frontage lot. This was "Bobbi," the tailless one and the only one to survive — and someone who cannot have children adopted even her!

"Do witches even celebrate Halloween?"

Happy Samhain and Halloween from Star Ranch!

Man, a FOXNews female bobble-head pissed me off the morning of Samhain, making "topical" news out of a for-profit "Witch School" someone has started up North so people can learn to worship the Goddess "properly." (That's a whole different subject, on which more anon.) With a perfectly straight face, this nitwit blonde anchor asked, "Do witches even celebrate Halloween?"

That's like asking, "Do Christians even celebrate Christmas?" Pagans (which broad label includes but is not imited to Witches) invented Samhain, long before the Chrstians co-opted the sun-god's and Mithras' birthday celebrations to divert everyone's attention by celebrating Jesus the Christ's birth three whole months early!

I wish just one of the infotainer talking heads on news stations these days would pretend to be a journalist and actually do a story instead of just reading the TelePrompTer -- do some research instead of striving for the easy laugh and the memorable sound bite.

We are accepting a lot of crap as actual factual news, and it is warping the way we think about life. More on this later, but for now ask yourself: Isn't most of the stuff hidden down in the crawl these days more important than whatever the anchor is laughing about?

(Today's artwork is a jack-o-lantern that Mo drew and I cut. Hope your New Year is a wonderful one!)

Lessons from the Orchard

Back in 1992 or so, after we got our house dried in and we had plumbing and interior walls and a real door on the bathroom, Mo and I started a papershell pecan/fruit orchard. His mom, Louise, and her sister Rose both brought lawn chairs up the hill and blessed the first few trees we planted, watching as we dug the holes and drinking iced tea and chatting in the way of loving old sisters everywhere. And over the years trees have died (the winter of 92/93 was a cruel one) and come back from the roots as natives — or maybe, as Mo suspects, we were just sold native pecan trees for the price of papershells. We planted three peach trees in it, too, and Parker County peaches are famous all over the state. Back in 2004 the Loring peach tree produced heavenly tasting, gorgeous peaches that weighed a good pound apiece and probably held a cup of juice, but since then the plum curculio and some kind of little boring asshole insect have ravaged them.

Unlike the past two years, this one is a good year for pecans. I have learned some nifty things this year, from trees that (all of a sudden, it seems!) are now anywhere from 7 to 35 feet tall. I've converted my looseleaf notebook to a computer file with a drawing and photo, even though I'm sure there are orchard tracking programs out there. It’s a small orchard, only maybe an acre wide; we only have some 40 tree positions, and some of those trees have died permanently and will not be replaced.

➺ Ten pounds of mixed pecans, unshelled, fills a #10 bucket to the brim.
➺ Bad pecans feel lighter, may have a piece of hull that won't come off, and float high in the water.
➺ Shelled papershell pecans sell for about $12 a pound in the store; the farmer's market in Weatherford buys unshelled pecans for from 60 cents up to $2.50 a pound, if they like the taste, and sells them for up to $7 per package (no mention of how much a package weighs).
➺ If you drain the gray water from the washer on a papershell pecan (and don't use bleach), that sumbitch will grow fast and tall and produce 3-inch-long pecan husks. The nuts themselves, shelled, are very nearly 2 inches long, and they're delicious. That's important because papershells usually are bigger than natives but they're almost always blander tasting; it's as if the flavor of a small native nut has been spread throughout a nut two or three times its size.
➺ Pecan trees need 50 feet between them, not 30.
➺ Peach trees give up after about 15 years, no matter how good they were.
➺ Even if you plant a native nut tree over the septic system, it will not turn into a papershell. Any seedling you find is going to be native, because papershells are all grafts.

Mo was harvesting pecans the other day and something fell on him: a four-inch-long green cutworm-looking critter with brown spots all down his sides. A similar-looking bug family ate my whole fuschia plant this year, but no tomato worms attacked my tomato plants (they both died of fusarium or verticillium wilt instead). Mo brought this one in the house and put it in a brandy snifter with some pecan leaves and a small twig, and it promptly turned a darker red-brown, made itself a leaf cocoon and went to sleep within one day. It never hatched.

But: The image at top is what a similar critter turned into: a gorgeous Luna moth, the first I had ever seen.

Will the Irish Al Sharpton please nail Arby's?

The Arby's commercial with the jigging chimps is sad and insulting to persons of Irish heritage: If you think step-dancing is so easy that a line of chimps could accidentally (or purposely) break into it spontaneously, try it.

Incidentally, PETA should be gigging Arby's for making chimps look like a line of grinning blackface mummers -- so the real Al Sharpton could show up on the news any second now, explaining that blackface, unlike the noose, is REALLY racist symbolism.

Today's Thick Air(C) is "Hard Thought," (C) 2007 by me.

Inventables(TM), a lifelong frisson

It's hard for others to believe my luck, but not for me. I am the luckiest person I know, not least because I tell my ears nothing but the things I want my brain to help accomplish — ergo, "I am the luckiest person I know."

One piece of such luck happened when a new editor I had copyedited for in hunting and fishing (Predator Xtreme magazine, formerly Varmint Masters) recommended me to a new publisher in a whole nother field — new technology. I can't tell you how excited I was when I realized that www.inventables.com was where new materials and processes met new applications, and they seemed to want ideas!

Somehow this new job led to my obtaining an invitation for all Mensans to view each quarter's new Inventables(TM) technologies package and contribute ideas via the Inventables online database, without having to pay the horrendously high (to someone whose royalties don't pay for a small DQ Chocolate Chip Blizzard per month) subscription fee. What a great benefit for Mensa members, huh? And at no cost to the organization!

Sorry, no can do.

Apparently this organization of smart people has an even smarter Executive Director, and she had already signed the organization to an exclusive contract: The Mensa Process, a marketing consultant company that pays a middle-class-salary licensing fee annually to market the fact that it uses Mensa members' off-the-wall creativity in its customers' behalf, objected to letting Inventables offer such a nifty free benefit to Mensa members if Inventables was going to gather the resulting ideas and, like, do something good with them. Oh, well.

As I understand it, the offer is still open to all members of Mensa's M-Inventors special interest group. Now if we could just find a way to get those 50-some people access online, I feel sure they'd soon be burning up Oz's inbox.