A tale of two strays

Turned out her name is Xena

The first stray was a dog, wandering down the road in front of my house in mid-March when we still had snow on the ground. She was dragging a leash, which made me think she'd gotten away when someone was trying to walk her—especially since the leash was entirely too wimpy for a large dog.

Since this was early evening, we kept her for the night. In the morning, I took her to our vet to scan for a chip.

Yes! She had a chip. The people at the vet clinic called the owner of record and put her in their kennel to await her people. Done! Easy peasy.

The second stray is a cat. A week ago, I was walking our dog, Butch, and our cat Princess Red. When she tags along, I'm always turning and calling her, in case she gets too far behind and can't tell which way we went. (I don't think cats can see a great distance, can they?)

So, I'm calling, "kitty, kitty, kitty," behind me--and out comes this gray cat, talking back to me. She let me come up to her and scritch her, and she sort of tried to follow me away despite the dog I had on the leash.

After finishing the dog's walk, I went back in my car. Sure enough, she came right out when I called. The house she was hanging out in front of had an empty divided pet dish on the front porch--AND the phone book that had been delivered over a week before. Looked like she was abandoned.

So I grabbed her, threw her in my car, and took her home. I set her up in our spare bedroom with her own food, water, and litter, and shut her in.

I listed her on the local Facebook lost & found pet pages. I put up little posters all around the corner where I'd found her. I had her scanned for a chip: no joy. Went to the pound to add her to the "Found Pets" list, but couldn't bring myself to leave her. She's affectionate and eats up any human attention. But all efforts to find her people were in vain. Not one phone call. 

We are calling her "Mia."

We thought about keeping her. But she's horrible to our other pets (a dog and three cats). She clearly needs to be the only pet in her home.

I tried to take her to the no-kill shelter in Rockford, Noah's Ark Pet Sanctuary, but they were full up on cats.

Meanwhile, her behavior seemed to indicate she was in heat. (Don't ask.) Another complication.

Finally I heard back from PAWS. They will subsidize the spaying and then put her on their adoption list. They don't have a shelter in Rockford--they just use foster homes.

I'm glad I didn't have to resort to taking her to the pound. I feel affection for her, even though we can't keep her. Even right now she is lying stretched out along my leg.

But wow! What a hassle!

After these experiences, I am totally sold on microchips. Once I find a job, I want to get them for all our pets. (Only one is chipped so far.) More information on pet microchipping.

Greening the Desert

© Jofs | Dreamstime Stock Photos
& Stock Free Images

As promised, here is a link to the TED talk that blew me away. Its run time is 22:20. Greening the World's Deserts
We've all been told that desertification is the result of overgrazing. For the past hundred years, governments in Africa, the United States, and elsewhere, have set aside land to keep it from being grazed at all except by tightly controlled herds of zebra or bison. And yet, desertification has only accelerated.

Zimbabwean scientist Allan Savory has been working to understand this for decades, and started testing his theories in Africa in the 1990s. He's now head of the Savory Institute, which is implementing these strategies all over the world.

What's the solution? If you haven't watched the video yet, the spoilers start now: Mimic nature in grazing practices.

Written like that, it sounds obvious... but it runs so counter to the conventional wisdom of the past hundred years that he has to take some time to prove it in the video.

My husband's grandfather owned a cattle ranch on the Texas-Oklahoma border. After watching this video, my husband said, "Grandpa was wrong--he always said, You can only run one head per acre here, it's too dry." Allan Savory would quadruple that at least. My husband did point out that this method would be labor-intensive, which must be why people didn't do it from the outset.

You have to let the cattle completely trample an area before you move them on. This solves the problem of grasses decomposing by oxidation instead of biologically, which is why they currently burn grasslands. Unfortunately:

Burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares. --Allan Savory

In Savory's method, whatever grass the cattle didn't eat is chopped up and mixed with dung and urine by their hooves. It then proceeds to compost biologically, and fertilize the next generation of grass.

The farmers we get our grass-fed beef from does something like this. We got a mini-tour once, and she let us watch her move the herd from one plot to another. They grow alfalfa, put the cattle on a small area of alfalfa, and let them eat it up. When we drove up, they were mooing in a thoroughly grazed and trampled area, gazing longingly over an electric fenceline at tall, lush alfalfa. She turned off the electricity and let the line down, and the herd galloped joyfully into the fresh area. Happy cows!

It makes me think of what I've read of the vast herds of American bison moving across the prairie before they were nearly killed off. No wonder that land was so fertile.

And it's sad to see that some areas of the United States are turning to desert when they were once the feeding grounds of those herds.

It's ironic that Savory has to sell the TED crowd on the idea of more cattle rather than less... environmental conventional wisdom has been telling us for some years that cows are bad because they generate methane, which is a greenhouse gas. He points out that the land rejuvenated this way will take care of the methane.

And this is the compassionate solution too. So many of these areas are no good for farming in their present state--people can only survive if they have meat to eat (or if they get food aid, of course). This is the sustainable way to get people to where they can feed themselves.

Something Savory didn't mention is the conventional wisdom that it takes a lot more land to raise cattle for food than to raise plants for food. I wonder how that math works out if you're running four times as many animals?


© Orientaly | Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

I hope this idea takes hold. I think it will help many people... whether he's right about the global warming impact or not.

Freelancing!

I'm currently busy doing a book design & layout for a publishing company that farms out most of that kind of work. I think I'll withhold the name of the company until the book appears.

I like being productive rather than just kicking back and collecting unemployment. And even if the income gets deducted from my benefit check, it will look a lot better to potential employers that I've been doing SOMEthing.

Something to read after you've ordered your seeds

Just a quick note to mention that I've reviewed a book on Goodreads—The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening and Life by Margaret Roach.

This book is organized as a journal of one year in her 2.5 acre garden in New York State—winter, spring, summer, fall. I enjoyed it. If you're a gardener, be sure to also check out her blog, A Way to Garden.

Unemployed, redux

This time I'm really unemployed. The grace period is over, the fat lady has sung.

Ryan International Airlines is no more. The link goes to the Wikipedia article, which is mostly accurate, except that the Chapter 7 filing was delayed while purchase offers were entertained. So 24 of us stayed on to keep the operating certificate on life support in case someone purchased it.

The company that won the "bidding" in the bankruptcy court insisted they had the purchase price on hand, but in the end they only transferred $200,000 of it. They were given an extra day and then the door was closed. My last day of work was February 27, 2013.

I'd been toying with the idea of looking for a new job since the Chapter 11 filing a year ago, enough that I'd updated my resume. Too bad I didn't get serious about looking.

I'm now in the process of applying for unemployment, getting some kind of interim medical insurance, etc. And trying to not let myself waste time just because I can.

I did finish the sweater I started knitting in December, just in time to wear it to the retirement party of our CFO last Saturday night... which morphed, of course, into a "wake" for all of us. (He joked that we stole his thunder.)

I've never filed unemployment before. And I'm still reeling from the shock of it all. I guess I am, anyway, because I have a hard time getting to sleep at night. There have been nights I was still awake at 3 am.

To be continued....

Joining the global conversation with TED

I spent the day at TEDxRockford Live today. Exciting, inspirational, and I met a few people I never would have met otherwise.

NIU-Rockford played host with their beautiful auditorium. We watched yesterday's TED event recorded in Long Beach, California, streamed directly from the TED website. The talks we saw today won't be available to the general public until mid-March.

What is TED? A series of talks on "Ideas Worth Spreading," interspersed with music, dance, and other entertainment acts from cutting-edge performers. I have watched many videos of TED talks over the years, and almost always find them fascinating and inspirational.

Today their special focus meant we heard from several teenage scientists. Taylor Wilson, the teen who built a nuclear reactor in his family's garage, came on shortly after entrepreneur Elon Musk, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were a nuclear fusion of minds backstage. Another teen has developed a test strip that costs a nickel and detects cancers of the pancreas, ovaries, and lungs EARLY—while there's an excellent chance of survival.

They saved the best for last, of course. The final talk was an absolute stunner, and turned certain conventional wisdom on its ear. You'd better believe I'll be blogging more about it when I can link to the video.

I also stayed for lunch—which the local chapter paid for!—and met several interesting locals, as well as sitting in on a committee meeting.

I'm so glad I spent a day on this!

Goats really can yell like humans

When I first saw the headline "2 minutes of nothing but goats yelling like humans," I didn't think they would sound so MUCH like humans! Tell me God doesn't have a sense of humor. :)