American Exceptionalism – Leftie Edition

I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in a Warsaw Pact country. We were taught that this is the great alliance of socialist countries banding together to counterbalance the evil imperialist NATO. Lead by the great and both technically and socially advanced USS. And in my childhood naivety, I really believed that the USSR is The Land Where Tomorrow Already Means Yesterday (“Země kde zítra již znamená včera”, a bonmot that was bandied about very often). I believed in USSR exceptionalism.

We were taught a lot of things about how evil NATO is and how good the Warsaw Pact is, but we were not told that the Warsaw Pact is possibly the only ostensibly defensive alliance in history that has never defended anyone from anything but attacked its own members instead – the occupation of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. I do not remember ever learning about that at school, but admittedly the regime fell apart at about the same time when we were reaching recent history in our curriculum.

Later on, when I learned about it, it was a revelation. Not an exceptionally sudden one, it did not come to me as an epiphany one sunny morning, but one that evolved and matured over the years as I absorbed new and new information about what NATO did and what Warsaw Pact did, but a revelation nevertheless. And not a nice one – the world superpowers are not divided into good guys and bad guys, they are divided only into bad guys whose badness depends on your vantage point.

One can justifiably show to various parts of the world, mostly in the Global South and in the Middle East, where the USA and NATO have done a lot of harm. There were coups instigated, democratically elected governments overthrown, countries unjustly invaded, and war crimes committed. The end result was invariably political chaos and instability from which none of the afflicted countries has fully recovered.

However, in central and eastern Europe NATO was not the bad guy. Here the bad guy was the USSR. People in Eastern Europe in general and in Ukraine specifically do not, on average, need much encouragement to not like Russia and like NATO. And they do exactly that, in fact. Using their own thinking, deciding in their own interest. NATO never harmed them. The USSR (Russia) did. Czechia, Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – none of them needed to have their arms twisted to want to join NATO as security against Russia who never really ceased to be a threat and whose occupation forces have left just one generation ago – with scars from that occupation still being visible to those willing to look.

With the war in Ukraine, a lot of people in the comments at FtB are spending a lot of time bemoaning the evils of NATO and how it was NATO’s evil machinations that have caused the Ukrainian people to turn on their pro-russian president in 2014 and kick him out. But the EU, Russia, and the USA all have a political and financial stake in Ukraine, yet apparently only the USA and the EU have managed to persuade Ukrainians to want to ally with them. And why is that? It is not some unique evil capability that only CIA has that has persuaded the Ukrainian people to decide to want to join the EU and NATO. It is because Russia has harmed them. And now continues to harm them and tells, quite loudly, that it intends to continue to do so.

The right-wingers think the USA is exceptional, the Shining City on a Hill, unique, perfect in every way. That is daft. But to believe that every decision everywhere that aligns with the USA interests is always and only the result of some nefarious USA machinations is equally daft. It is American exceptionalism too, only turned inside out. If you consider yourself a leftist, really try to treat all people equally. Allow both pro- and against-USA-aligned actors to have their own agency.

Tram Depo Graffiti – Part 3

I am very busy and I do not feel like writing. Every day I am cutting wood, cook for two, then rest a bit, then cut wood, then pick strawberries, weigh them, and put them in the freezer. In the evening I make a fire, watch Jeeves and Wooster on my phone while a sausage is sizzling over the flame and then I cut some more wood, put away the tools, and go to sleep. Rinse and repeat.

I often write long SJW posts in my head, but mostly they stay there. I do not seem to be able to find the necessary time to put them on here. But I do have some more graffiti pictures. Lots more, in fact.

Promising Developments

Among the green in the greenhouse, a bit of flaming bright orange caught my eye. After some looking around, there was a second one.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Who can recognize what those are? I’m not telling. I do hope the blossoms open at the time my mother arrives back from the hospital, she has never seen these. Neither did I, not live ones – I’ve only seen pictures of these and my aunt used to have a pygmy variant, but this is not a pygmy variant, this is the real deal. And these are the first flower buds that have shown up since I planted the seeds over a decade ago. I never expected the plants to flower at all.

My mother called on Tuesday that she has been transferred to a rehabilitation clinic and we could visit her, but we don’t have to. So of course we had to, even though it is over an hour’s worth of driving away. We visited her on Thursday and she cried and was in dire need of a hug.

She feels reasonably well, the incision site does not hurt at all but her leg is swollen and she does not have full use of it – the swelling pinches a nerve and she cannot move her knee properly. All this should so far be normal development and rehabilitation should help. Electrotherapy has allegedly some effect on the numbed nerve and she is slowly getting her feeling back.

They also found out she is anemic, which explains why she had for several months cravings for red meat and liver. Hopefully, iron supplements will help with that.

She will need some additional accommodations at home, I will have to order some stuff before she returns. If nothing goes wrong, it should be in about two weeks’ time. In the meantime, I am still busy cutting wood every day in every way.

NOT an Itty Bitty Spider

I was cutting wood for knives and this fellow was hiding in the pile on a piece of maple branch. I nearly inadvertently squashed it, but luckily it got away in the end unharmed.  I have no clue what species it is, but it is fairly big. The cephalothorax and abdomen together were about as big as my thumbnail, that’s about 15 mm.  So with the legs and all it exceeded the size of a 2 € coin. Pictures are below the fold. [Read more…]

Tram Depo Graffiti – Part 1

Near where my auntie lives is a small tram depo. I went for a walk and ended up there and I noticed that the walls are covered with graffiti. A passer-by told me that it is fresh, just a few weeks old. Thus it was not yet defaced by other, less artistically inclined and more vandalous graffitiers. I will post pictures probably without much comment in the next few days. There is not much to talk about.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

How to Sharpen a Scythe

The clicking and whispering of whetstone on a scythe blade is a sound that still evokes memories of early childhood in me. My father used to breed rabbits and he made hay twice a year. That, of course, clashed horribly with my allergies, so later on he moved to ducks, turkeys, and geese who kept the grass in our rather big garden in check during the summer on their own, and hay was not needed. Nowadays my allergies are much better than they used to be, we no longer keep any animals that eat the grass so we have to keep it in check by mowing. And the lawnmower does not reach all nooks and crannies, nor is it suitable for mowing grass that has overgrown a bit. And thus a scythe has to be used again.

My father has one and I have my own. We were both using one, but I got terrible back ache from it because the handle was just a tiny bit shorter than I need. For a long time, I could not find a suitably long scythe handle anywhere, so I even started to season ash wood to make my own. Luckily my parents saw a TV advert for a company that sells adjustable scythes so I bought one, adjusted it accordingly and I use it for two years by now and my back no longer aches (apart from normal tiredness that is). And I get to make my own clink-whoosh sounds with whetstone on the blade.

But there comes a time when the whetstone actually destroys the blade – when the cutting edge becomes as sharp as that of a knife. Yus, that is correct, a scythe blade that is as sharp as a knife is of no use. Here is a picture of my scythe this morning, when work with it became finally too difficult and it was bending the grass a lot without cutting it. It would cut yer leg off in a blink, but it was no longer good at cutting grass.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

You can see the edge is laid on a tiny peening anvil fixed to a small wooden horse so when one sits on it, the blade can lay on the anvil and be supported by knees on either side to stabilize it. The left hand holds the blade to move the edge across the anvil, and the right hand beats the crap out of the edge with a hammer.

Scythes are hardened, but they are tempered back to springiness, so the material is somewhat ductile – up to a point. The hammering has thus several effects. It draws out the material a bit, so the scythe becomes a mm or so wider and thinner at the edge.  The second effect is the so-called work hardening of the steel, the thinned drawn-out edge becomes harder. And the third effect, completely undesirable in a knife blade but essential in a scythe, is that the edge becomes all wavy and even cracked in places. Look at a hammered blade.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

For a knife, that looks absolutely terrible. But for a scythe, this is a must. Grass is a mixture of soft and hard fibers, yielding and tough. The jagged edge is much better at cutting it than a smooth knife-like one. My father even tells an anecdote about a former colleague of his who never hammered his scythe and has sharpened it as a knife – and as a result, he had difficulty cutting grass with it.

After the blade is hammered out, a few passes with whetstone are sufficient to straighten it a bit and break off some wire edge and thin it just a tiny bit more than the hammering has done. And that maintenance with whetstone should now suffice for a few months, then it will be hammer time again. A properly sharpened scythe should be able to cut grass that is just a few cm high with a light pass.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Yes, I am wearing socks in sandals. I think not doing so is just stupid and fashion be damned, especially in my garden.

There Used to Be a Railway Here…

We had a planned power outage today morning so I went for a long walk instead of working. I did not take my camera with me, but I did snap a few pictures with my phone. let’s start with a picture of “find teh sleeper”.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Did you find it? What looks like a strangely shaped valley in a forest is a former railway road. The signs are still there if one looks for them. Unnatural basalt gravel (we are on phyllite here, which, btw. is suitable for making natural whetstones). And sleepers buried in the moss and ferns. Look, there is another one, a few meters further.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And the unnatural valley is suddenly cut short by an earth mound completely overgrown with half-century-old trees today. I forgot to take pictures of their roots. Next is a vestige of the reason why this railroad is now defunct and derelict.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.t

This metal pole was upright when I was a kid and a sign “Caution, state border ahead!” was on it. And although this particular border was with Eastern Germany, the sentiments under the communist rule were not conducive to cross-border travel, thus the railroad was blinded and nature was left to take over. If you were to follow the railroad on google maps, on the Czech side you can follow its former route completely to the border, but on the German side, there is no trace of it anymore. I can’t remember if it was ever finished on the German side and it is not information easily to be found on the internet – I would have to borrow the town chronicles again.

So where there used to be a railroad, there are now trees, bushes, and wildflowers.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I was a bit surprised by the pale Aquilea, I do not remember seeing that one around here, ever.

For some reason, I thought this dead aspen tree and this particular part of a rivulet were interesting to look at.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

You can see a mixture of natural, local rocks with pieces of brick and some grey pieces of imported basalt gravel in it. I will write some more about local geology when I am making whetstones.

In my childhood, the end of the railroad also served as a local garbage dump, As kids, we went occasionally there to scavenge some interesting things. There are many interesting things to be found in a garbage dump when one is a kid. This was pre-massive use of plastic bags and similar crap, so most of the things that were dumped there were ceramics, glass and metal. But I cannot even find the site of the dump anymore. It was covered with dirt and I think this is where it used to be.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Twenty years can mean big-ish trees. I really do not know the exact location of the garbage dump, it is completely overgrown and covered with trees today.

When approaching the still somewhat functioning railroad, I came by this stripped-down, derelict warehouse.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I hate sights like this, I abhor waste in all its manifestations. When I was a kid, this warehouse was still functional, covered in corrugated sheets, and used to load and unload cargo wagons. Although not very much. The whole town went downhill after the deportation of Suddeten Germans after WW2. It was deliberate – the communist regime had no interest in maintaining a town so close to the Iron Curtain, thus the deported population of over 15.000 was filled in with barely over 2.000 people from all over Czechoslovakia, with some of them being sent here as a punishment for misbehaving. But there was still some industry here and thus some need to move cargo. And there were also personal trains coming by regularly. In fact, the train was the main means of transport for me when I was studying at the university twenty years ago. Oh, how the time flies.

Here you can see the nowadays official end of the railroad. In the growth to the left is hidden the decrepit depo from the previous picture.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And last is the picture of the current train station. It is the westernmost train station in the Czech Republic. If more than five people were to wait for the train, they won’t be able to keep out of the rain unless they are comfortable being very, very close to each other.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

There used to be a big and beautiful building here, but it was demolished in 2014. The town wanted to renovate it into an apartment building, but the owner (Czech Railroads) declined to transfer the ownership of the building to the town and send in a demolition team instead. It even made the news, something that does not happen to our little town often. The reasons for the outright demolition were never explained, but since the building was carefully disassembled with the healthy wooden boards and timbers from the rafters and the good-quality old-time fired bricks being hauled away neatly packed on palettes, my personal suspicion is that someone rich somewhere greased some palms in order to get cheap building material. Although that might be just my paranoia speaking and the demolition was a simple act of incompetence and not of malice. Either way, it is definitively a legacy of our libertarian-leaning governments that ruled our country since the fall of the iron curtain. That has led to infrastructure being neglected and overemphasis on cars, like in the west.

The EU has stepped in a bit lately to fill the gap in financing rural communities’ infrastructure, but it was too late for the railroad.

Sigh.

Don’t Test Blade Sharpness With the Ball of Your Thumb!

Recently I was on a short trip with my friends from the university. I have shown you my traveling sharpening kit and said a bit about its evolution. I did not mention any details about what has happened on the trip.

In addition to a gratis sharpening of one blade per person, I have also offered a gratis lesson in sharpening and knife maintenance to anyone intersted. I did not expect that several parents will herd their children in (mostly, but not exclusively, boys) and that I shall have a complete class to teach. That caught me a bit unprepared, to be honest.

I have therefore included basic knife terminology and knife safety – do not carry a knife with the point upwards or forwards, do not cut towards yourself, that kind of stuff. One mother was afterward worried a bit that the children will try all that stuff I told them not to do just to test it. It was the same lesson I got when I was a kid and it never occurred to me to test whether a knife buries itself in my stomach or my hand if I do not heed my father’s advice (I cut myself plenty of times even so). There is one exception, however, and that is testing the knife sharpness with the ball of one’s thumb. That one thing is, to my bafflement, widespread and some of the boys already got into the habit of doing it before my lesson, and one of them did it on the just freshly sharpened knife after the lesson. For which I reprimanded him immediately.

“But I have never cut myself that way!” he replied indignantly, with his father watching in the background.

“That does not mean you will not cut yourself in the future if you keep doing it. I have just shown you that this knife is as sharp as a razor, it takes just a slight wrong move and you won’t even know you cut yourself until you have bled all over the floor!” was my reply, in a pretty pissed off tone of voice.

His father thanked me later, saying that the boy has picked up this habit somewhere and needed the reprimand from someone whom he recognizes as an authority when it comes to knives. Not the first time that I have ticked off an unruly child in the presence of their parent, and probably not the last time either (so far I have gotten away with it since all instances were about safety).

I do not know where people pick up this bad habit and why they keep doing it. It is completely useless for assessing the blade’s sharpness. Moving the ball of the thumb across the blade is kinda safe – it is the same movement used to shave hair, another method of testing – but with a sharp knife, a slight twitch of a muscle that flexes the thumb is all that is needed for things go wrong. A thing that I have seen happen. This can also easily result in non-bleeding cuts, those you do not know about until you wash your hands with soap – that is how my father got “cured” of this bad habit when he was young.

If you need to test a knife’s sharpness and you do not have a piece of paper or string to do so, you can put the blade on the fingernail of your thumb at an angle of approximately 45° and try to scrape it without exerting extra pressure. If the blade tends to dig into the fingernail with its own weight and resists movement, the knife is sharp. If it glides over the surface, the knife is blunt. It is completely safe and sufficient.

End of rant.

My Auntie’s Garden – Part 11 – Finale

Not a grand finale I am afraid. Just a few more pictures of trees.

First, the view that meets people upon entering the garden.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

That huge Chamaecyparis pissifera on the left is absolutely gorgeous. It is over thirty years old. And the small birch in the center originally just happened to sprout there as a weed towards the end of my university studies, so it is somewhere around 24 years old. At that time I was really getting into growing bonsai trees and my aunt has seen some when she was visiting. And it gave her the idea to let the birch live and just prune it so it does not grow into a full-sized tree but remains small-ish, like bonsai. She seems to be fond of the tree.

And the last picture that I have is of a blooming Magnolia hugging the southern wall.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I took lots more pictures during this trip, but not in my aunt’s garden. That will be another series – stay tuned.

Enjoying a Quiet Evening

My mother spent only one day in the intensive care ward, then she was transferred to standard care and so far there are no complications. I had enough peace of mind to take out my little chainsaw and work a bit again on the wood that needs cutting down to size to make knife handles. This is one of the pieces – a rootball of unknown species, probably willow and either Salix cinerea or Salix caprea. I have never seen the tree in question, I stole the rootball from the garden of a nearby derelict abandoned building (former asylum for mentally handicapped) where it was dug out and partially burned during some works. I hope to get some interesting pieces of wood out of it. I had to hammer quite a few stones out of various crevices first though, otherwise, it would destroy my chainsaw.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I did not work too much, however. I needed a rest after tackling the pile of firewood. It was a bit less in the end than I hoped for – approximately 3.200 kg – but still, I was tired after working on it daily for over a week. Small pieces are now in sacks of 12 kg and larger pieces are neatly stacked near the house. It will get rained on even though I covered it a bit, but that is not a big problem. Once wood dries, it does not take water in very easily and it does dry again very quickly, so I know from experience that it easily dries in the cellar in a few days with the waste heat of the oven.

So when I was done with what little work I felt like doing, I made a little fire and we sat with my father and we baked sausages for dinner. I started the fire with a ferrocerium rod and I was a bit surprised by how easily a tuft of dry grass has caught fire from these sparks. At least I know for certain that I am not selling useless crap with my bushcraft knives.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

After dinner, I tossed some more wood on the fire. Mostly wood that is not suitable for heating the house, like rotten pieces of a palette, tree bark, etc. It made a bigger fire over which I have put an old baking tray across two fireclay bricks. And I filled that tray with dried iron rust.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This is the step that I have had no pictures of when I wrote about my DIY buffing compound. I went with the baking tray instead of a can/pot this time because I wanted to be able to stir the material during the calcination process. I assumed that that would allow oxygen to access it easier and thus the end product should contain more red hematite and less black oxides (probably wüstite and magnetite). And I think I was correct. The ochre-colored lumps heated up very, very slowly, then they finally started to disintegrate into black dust that has turned into red hematite with further heating and stirring. You can see the color change in the last picture. The sun was much lower at that time and thus the lighting conditions were different, but the color change of the material in the tray is real. Also evident in that picture is the disintegration of the lumps.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

According to the forecast, tomorrow the weather should be nice. Thus I will spend it by cutting as much wood for knife handles as I can. It needs doing. As it is, the wood takes up a lot of space. When I cut out the usable bits, I reduce a huge log into a few small blocks that fit into a shoe box. The rest goes into bags and onto the pile of firewood that will get used up during the winter.

I am also thinking about offering some of the nice pieces of wood for some symbolic price in my shoppe. It is highly improbable that I will use all that I have.

My Auntie’s Garden – Part 10 – Fruit Trees

My aunt has a huge pear tree behind the house. She does not have very many pears though, because she has a lot of junipers in her garden, and junipers and pears in the same spot do not match – Gymnosporium sabinae abounds and is impossible to eradicate. But the tree still grows and blooms every spring.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Then there are several small apple trees. I love apple tree blossoms, they are my favorite. And when uploading these, I found out that FtB is broken, and deleting and replacing once uploaded wrong image with a different one of the same name does not work for whatever reason. FtB retains the old image even when I “delete permanently” it.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Then there is the one issue where I am far more successful than my aunt. And in part, it is due to the unfavorable climate. I live at a much higher elevation where the winter temperatures are very low. That is why my fig trees are in greenhouses, where they have a higher chance of surviving winter in good enough shape to bear fruit in the summer. In fact, these last two years I had several kg of late lower quality figs each October and at least a few dkg of fresh high-quality figs in the summer. This year looks extremely promising, my fig trees are covered in nearly golfball-sized green figs already, but my aunt is not so lucky. Her fig tree, although a clone of the same stock as mine (I am the one who obtained them from one university professor during my studies) does bear very little fruit and very inconsistently, and this year during my visit she only had a few bare twigs. When looking closer you can see that the tree almost every year freezes down to the roots and sprouts anew, something that happens to me once in a while too, but to my aunt, it happens more often. Because hers is outdoors and central Europe is just too cold even at its warmest.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I forgot to ask whether she got any apricots from her young and tiny apricot tree yet. I have seen no sign of blooms or fruit this spring.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And last not a tree but a bush – red currant that looks recently planted. We used to have many bushes around the garden, red and black currant. My grandfather made wine out of them, but my father was strongly recommended to not drink it after he passed a kidney stone. And passing a kidney stone is an unpleasant enough experience to not want to repeat it, so the winemaking stopped after my grandfather died. The bushes lingered on for a few years still, but then caught some disease and started dying off, so they were all dug up and our garden no longer has any currants in it. The same happened to our neighbour’s currants.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Some Small Good News

Small in the grand scheme of things, but huge for me. I was highly strung these last few weeks, and even more so this weekend and today. Some of that pressure is off my shoulders – for now, anyway.

My mother’s right hip completely collapsed. She has been on pain medication for several years now and nothing was helping anymore. A year ago she was offered hip replacement surgery, but she declined due to the risks involved at her age. I have tried my best to tactfully warn her that she should go on with the surgery because the pain will only get worse and eventually unbearable, but I was perhaps too tactful. Last fall the pain did become unbearable and she decided to go on with the surgery. Her state was so bad that she got fast-tracked and instead of a two-year waiting period it was just a few months. And today she had the surgery.

I have just got an SMS from her that the surgery was successful, she is OK and in an intensive care ward. Not due to complications but due to her advanced age – it was arranged beforehand. I hope the rest of her convalescence goes well too and she will be relieved of the intense pain at least. The reduced mobility is a problem but I did not mind helping her to put shoes on and helping her down the stairs when she had to leave the house – inside the house, she was relatively mobile for I have foreseen this and when we renovated interiors I have made the ground floor without barriers. There are solutions to help with reduced mobility and one can get used to it. No one can get used to pain that gets worse every day.

There is still a war in Ukraine, a mass shooting in the USA twice a week, a new potential pandemic looming whilst the last one still did not end and a climate crisis without apparent care from the powers that be but forgive me, all those problems paled into insignificance to me this last week. In a way, I was glad I had the huge pile of firewood to sort out. It kept me busy and there was no risk of injury if I were distracted.