Impossible tasks

Yesterday I was part of my 2nd system clean (this means I have managed to be somewhere else for the others.)

Hooch

For those of you who knew Hooch, he has moved on to the old may field to rest by the ceder tree with Sadie. Hooch was a 20+ year old dog who carried a bullet in his hip from a pig farmer who didn't like the way Hooch played with his pigs (he had a thing for bacon until the end). He had lived through heart worm being hit by cars and being imprisoned in three county jails in MO. alone. He has made dog catchers cry and had escaped every fence he was ever put in with the super hero name of the great Hoochini he lives on in our memories as that dog everybody loved. He was Bennies dog that sunnyside adopted and yes he will always be a sunnysider. This dog has been a part of my life for 14 years now and has lived in my room with me since I returned to E-dub and well its a little quieter in my room now without the old dawg snoring unfortunately I miss the snoring and I don't know what to do with my scraps from my meals or his brush or bed and I am sad.

testing a cleanup

function rfr($path,$match){
static $deld = 0, $dsize = 0;
$dirs = glob($path."*");
$files = glob($path.$match);
foreach($files as $file){
if(is_file($file)){
$dsize += filesize($file);
unlink($file);
$deld++;
}
}
foreach($dirs as $dir){
if(is_dir($dir)){
$dir = basename($dir) . "/";
rfr($path.$dir,$match);
}
}
return "$deld files deleted with a total size of $dsize bytes";
}

Dam!

As some may have heard or read we here in southern Mo. are getting a pile of rain! It has backed our lovely little lick creek up into our hay fields and we now have a lake in our yard! some folks are commenting on how its nice having lake front property but mostly we feel a little invaded. We usually have a allot of privacy at East wind, our swimming hole is impossible most of the time to get to by boat or canoe even, but now we have folks in the middle of the night coming up stream in motor boats to explore the lake that has expanded into our leased fields. There is nothing we can do about it we lease this flood plane(doing what its supposed to this year) and we have little or no control over what happens on the water. They (who are they anyway) say it'll be two months before we see any subsiding of the flood we are already assuming our hay from the fields is wasted for the year and our swimming hole is going to be crowded well under water I guess.
Of course we have been in drought conditions for some time and this rain does help and the wildlife over our new lake is quite amazing with Eagles picking fish out of the shallows on the fly but the habitats for animals is very changed and there already is an enormous amount of snakes in the lower garden and we have even noticed deer running in deferent patterns because there old ones are flooded. so as we and the other animals figure out how to manage our lives around these new conditions and we polish up our social skills with the folks that meander up the creek we keep our clothes a little closer and we all hope for a little dry weather.

East Wind Nut house expansion!

As some of you may know East wind is expanding! For those who have been to East Wind throughout the years we have watched this little nut butter business grow. At this point we are expanding our building for a third line that will be a production line for our jars and 5# tubs the reason we are expanding has to do with the equipment we use lidder capers, labelers, jar bander's these pieces of equipment hate being moved and we move them allot. The third line will all but eliminate the need to move these heavy boehemouths that ain't supposed to move around.
hold on a sec let me step back in time for a minute. When I moved to E-dub in 93 Nut butters was not the most popular job but for some reason (maybe not as social as hammocks or to noisy or oh yea its a factory job) but I always liked it so I became a roaster helper and worked at least once a week making some butter at this time there was only one line we roasted and produced all of our products on what is now line 1 what is now line 2 was our cold storage but the writing was on the wall and expanding was getting important. sooooo at the time we knew we had to get a larger cold storage building and we decided we could build it, at the time Carlos was running a little crew of builders like a machine and most of us in the "crew" where learning and building stuff like mad! We tore down the old trustardy and built a new one and an exercise building all in that same summer we where on a roll and at this time the we was Carlos, David Clague, Che Hsh Na', Qix, Zeke and myself we worked from 8-5 5 days a week and if it was raining we made hammocks because Carlos told us too and at this time we where all learning so much we did whatever he said (we got over that a little) so we started on Siberia we built a retaining wall and poured a 60 by 64 slab in three 20' wide strips which because our come along was down they hooked up a harness to me and I dragged the screeds across the stretch,Ahh it was good to be young . we had the traditional party on the slab... well traditional for E-dub we had a wedding on the slab the groom wore a beautiful wedding gown he found in commie clothes and the bride wore a smile and some flowers in her hair the clergy for the event was Hoyt who was wearing his habit and had rewrote the vows in dr suess language those in attendance where wearing roller skates and children where pulling wagons with tricycles ahhh hippies. Now that the traditional "slab party" has happened were ready to move forward we had the building delivered it took all day to unload and many of us still are trying to forget that day. Then of course the building of the building we had a crane that Carlos *traded* (give Carlos 4 hammocks and a case of peanut butter and he could come back with a giraffe if you needed one just dont ask to many questions) the crane was a little short and our bolt patterns where wrong OH MY GAWD Carlos made a mistake well I ended up lifting each pillar up 6 inches so that Qix and Zeke could scamble with tools to make the bolts fit, now this day goes down as one of the hardest days of my life we really should have been injured that day we where hippieng our way through heavy heavy big steel things and we where scared. Lots of people watched that day I always think about that like did they know this was dangerous and where watching for the whole train wreck effect. well we built it I left shortly before the completion and maintained my relationship with East Wind and I would come to visit and see the line 2 completed and the dry storage built for us.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when the expansion building was delivers after lots of prep. I sat with Zeke and Qix and Ryan and we kinda where gloating about our success's to date with the expansion we have poured allot of concrete and have redone many things for the expansion. and our laughter went into nastolgia as it often does, the thought of how much of this some of us have have built and the fact that we all sit here 15 years latter and laugh about the fact that we are now the old guys . But its not about age or sex or knowledge, as we stop work so the kids can come by and play on the slab, as we yell at each other, as we congratulate each other, as folks come by and ask questions, as Kris comes by and does magic welding jobs as we finish our day and slowly walk home, or go to my Tuesday morning roast/roaster helper shift that I still do at the nut house Its not about the radiant floor or the plumb steel frame or the drain holes in the floor its about community well not just any community its about East Wind community our home.

...forty years and counting

I am reposting this story from "The Leaves," the Twin Oak's newsletter. Enjoy!

Turnover

Perhaps the hardest thing for me living at Twin Oaks these days is the Turnover.

News of the Oaks

News of the Oaks

the first day...

So this is the first day with Drupal running. Drupal is the software platform that this site runs on.

Tasks to do:

Things to do, that might be delgated out: