How Did This Happen?

Most of the people I know work very hard, but I'm pretty sure most of them love their lives. When I get into a pensive mood, as during the past week, I sometimes wonder if my own life is tragic or glorious. There have definitely been tragic moments, such as when my cousin Liz died at the age of 46. She'd been one of my closest friends since we were babies just learning to walk. We talked on the phone every day, saw each other often. I was the one the cops came to with the news that she'd crashed her car. I think she herself (or some aspect of her) came to me as well, that same day. I was working in the garden and suddenly saw a vision of a bloody face. My first terrified thought was that something had happened to my daughter, and I ran to the house to make sure she was OK. I learned later, that the vision came at the same moment Liz died.

My father, whom I adored, died five years after Liz. 

I've also been, at various times, financially destitute, divorced, near death from pneumonia. When I was a young person first trying to make it on my own, I sometimes didn't have much money for food and had to subsist on beans, brewer's yeast, vitamin C pills, and food people left on their plates at the restaurant where I worked as a waitress (I would encourage customers to order meals I especially liked, hoping they'd leave some for me). 

Even during the times when I had very little money, I never felt poor. I always considered it a temporary condition. And yet, I've also had, from as far back as I can remember, a sense that things can change in an instant. I lost two childhood friends, one when I was two, to pneumonia, another when I was 5, to leukemia. Maybe that's one reason ... maybe too because the threat of nuclear war was a constant ... our neighbors had a bomb shelter that doubled as a pool room, and in school we had to do drills where we cowered in the hallways with our arms covering our heads. I can remember, even as a young person, thinking at a birthday celebration where a decadent chocolate cake was served after a rich meal: "I must remember every detail of this, in case some day I am starving and have only my memories as comfort." 

I have never even come close to starving. Even when I was eating the leftovers off customers' plates in the restaurant, the worst thing I suffered was a boring cuisine. I never actually went hungry, nor was I even undernourished. In fact, I usually felt really good. I think the beans and brewer's yeast were a pretty healthy diet, or would have been if I'd thrown in some fresh fruits and veggies (at the restaurant I tended to love such treats as cheese blintzes rather than fruits and veggies). 

I eat very well now, my main problem being self-restraint. In fact, my life is close to everything I every dreamed of having when I was young and poor: a loving, highly intelligent husband; work I enjoy; pleasant places to live; occasional travel, but not too much travel; a beautiful, intelligent, sweet daughter. Almost every day is a joy to live. Of course I know it can't last forever. I'm already getting old. But, as someone called Mary Butts once said, I "build a little fence of trust around today."

One of the most wonderful things about my life is that I can walk to work, and it is a lovely walk. I've always arranged my life so that I could either walk or ride my bicycle to work, but some walks or rides have been better than others. My present walk between home and work in San Antonio is one of my favorites.
Below are some photos of what I get to look at when I walk to work. From late spring to late fall, the sun is so bright, and the shade so deep!

A couple of days ago, I took a short break from working on tax returns. A couple of blocks from my office, there is a Methodist church. From the sidewalk, I could hear the sounds of an organist practicing. I followed the sound; the front doors of the church were locked, so I sat on the steps and listened. Here is my view west from where I sat on the steps:

And here are some photos I took with my phone as I walked between the office and home:

High Cost of Housing

I have been disappointed not to find any new insights into the reasons for high housing costs in Jane Jacob's book; however, I'm grateful for the motivation to think about it. Jacobs mentions the following reasons:

• supply and demand
• low-density of housing in suburbs
• greedy landlords in urban areas

The first seem obvious. The third is not as obvious to me. I'm not sure I agree with it, except in special cases where landlords are given special deals by local, state, or federal governments, or where they are backed by organized crime. 

No doubt, some landlords are greedy. Some waiters are greedy too, and some engineers, and some senators, and some students. It's true that some lines of work might appeal to people who are less greedy than average -- Peace Corps volunteers, for example. But in the 23+ years I've been working with small business owners, I have not noticed that landlords are any more or less likely to be greedy than most other groups of people. So OK, some landlords are greedy, some are not.

Given that the group of people who are landlords contains some greedy members, is it reasonable to conclude that those members who are greedy can cause an overall increase in the cost of housing? The only way this could be true would be if the greedy landlords had a disproportionate influence on the price of real estate. Otherwise, if the greedy landlords raised their prices, people would rent or buy from the non-greedy members of the group, and the greedy landlords would either have to lower their rents, or go out of business.

In some cases, greedy landlords do have a disproportionate influence on real estate prices, such as when a developer gets special privileges from a city government (tax breaks, use of the government's eminent domain powers, free or low-cost infrastructure, etc.). My grandmother Lois Lamar was ripped off by greedy developers who had friends in the City of Austin planning department back in the late 1960's. She owned an entire block of land between San Pedro and Salado Streets near the University of Texas. My great grandfather Arthur Lamar had bought the land and built three houses on it with his own hands. He and my great grandmother rented out two of the houses and lived in one. My father's parents lived in one of the houses from the time my father was born until he was 6 or 7 years old. [Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson lived across the street for a while, back when Mr. Johnson was a teacher] 

The developer's friends in the City of Austin sent my grandmother a notice that San Pedro Street was going to be widened, and she would lose more than half her front yard and would have to pay for all sorts of remedial plumbing work. If I received such a notice from the city, I'd check it out, but my grandmother was an old woman and not in the best of health. I don't know why my father didn't step in. Maybe he didn't know any better either. 

When the developers showed up and said they were willing to buy the land (at a ridiculously low price, to be sure, but after all, the street was going to be widened and chop off a huge chunk of the land), my grandmother agreed to sell it to them. I have always been a somewhat cynical, suspicious person, but I was just a kid at the time. I urged my grandmother not to sell, to fight it. But no one would listen to me. So the greedy developers pretty much stole the land from my grandmother, put up a hideous apartment complex, and rented out the apartments for the highest price they could get. One of the most infuriating things to me about the whole affair was that the apartment owners mentioned in their advertising that the land had once been owned by a descendant of Mirabeau B. Lamar, second president of the Republic of Texas. This was not strictly true, as my great grandfather was the descendant of Mirabeau B. Lamar's brother. But this particular land owner had already demonstrated that he was not an honest man. [San Pedro Street has never been widened, to this day]

To the extent this sort of thing has happened and continues to happen, greedy landlords are part of the cause of high housing costs, but only to the extent that they can work in partnership with groups of people with coercive power, such as local, state, and federal governments, and in some cases, organized crime. The entire west campus area of UT is now masses of large apartment complexes. There are very few of the small houses, duplexes, and four-plexes left. My daughter lived in one of the very last ones when she was a student at UT. She had to move when the owner sold it to make way for another large apartment building. One might imagine that, with the higher density, it would now be cheaper to live in the west campus area, but the new apartments rent for more per unit than the old houses did. 

Why is this, I wonder? When you replace, say, 32 units with 70 units, why don't the new units rent for something in the neighborhood of 1/2 the cost of the old units? One reason is that the new units are, well, new. Shiny and clean and new. But, based on my observation of both the old and the new, the new units are not as well built as the old ones; the finishes and fixtures are usually not especially nice. One cannot get any cross ventilation, so one is forced to use electric or gas heating and cooling, all year round in order to be comfortable. There are no private outdoor areas. One reason new units cost more than old is that building materials cost more now. But given this fact, isn't is insanely wasteful to just tear down the old buildings and cart away the lumber to landfills? So I suppose one needs to add profligate waste to the equation. This still doesn't explain what motivates the owners to waste materials -- perhaps the cost of labor makes it more expensive to remodel than to tear down and rebuild? I don't think this is the answer, at least not the whole answer. [This is something to think about and return to later]

Also, city codes now require more expensive building methods. People have so many electrical gadgets that many electrical outlets are required in each room. Since the structure allows for only limited (sometimes no) ventilation from the outside, air conditioning is mandatory. People also demand more bathrooms per household. One bathroom is no longer adequate for a two or three bedroom unit. I can't think of anyone but tenants and home buyers to blame for this situation. Sure, I guess you could blame advertisers, movies, TV shows for giving people the idea that they must own 150 electric gadgets per household and have one bathroom for every 1.5 occupants, or whatever. 

But people don't have to do what the advertisers suggest. 

A Philosophical Moment

A few years ago, I decided to find out what career coaches do, so I signed up for a few hours of coaching. One of the things the coach did was administer some aptitude tests. I was relieved to find that both law and accounting were on my list of good career choices, since I earn a substantial part of my living from the joint practice of law and accounting (I am a tax lawyer). I was also very surprised to find library science as a top career choice. It's true that many of the people I know have lots of books, and my husband and I together probably own 7,000 volumes, maybe more. We've never actually counted, but they take up a huge amount of shelf space. But library science had never, ever occurred to me as a possible career choice.

Wiki says, "Library science (or Library and Information science) is an interdisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools ofmanagement, information technology, education, and other areas to libraries; the collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of information resources; and the political economy of information." 

Various careers in library science include librarian, metadata librarian, legal research, general research ...
I find legal and general research very appealing. I have a compelling need to learn new things, every day, and delight in integrating new pieces of information into my whole concept of The Way Things Work. By compelling, I mean utterly necessary for my mental and emotional well-being. I become very unhappy if I am not able to spend at least an hour or two a day learning new things. 
Which explains why I am spending time reading *Dark Age Ahead* by Jane Jacobs on the morning of a tax return deadline. This is not mere frivolous dawdling. I am getting my fix of new knowledge, so I can go forth and review tax returns for the rest of the day.


Writing in the early 2000's Jacobs focused on the breakdown of 5 pillars of cuture in the U.S. and Canada:

• community and family
• higher education
• effective practice of science and science based technology
• taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities
• self-policing by the learned professions

Just before I began writing this blog entry, I was reading Jacobs' analysis of the availability of housing to people, and how the cost of housing relative to earnings has risen during the latter half of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st. I had to stop at that point, to check Jacobs' statements against my own observations and other things I've read or heard about. She's definitely right about the cost of housing, but why has this happened? I'm sure Jacobs goes on to discuss the reasons, but I want to think about it myself first, before I read what she says (an aside: Jacobs died in 2004, yet I am writing of her as though she is speaking right now, today -- what a marvelous thing writing is, to allow the dead to speak to the living)

Because of recent experiences I have had with tenants who told me, in all earnestness, that they had no money to pay their rent, while at their sides was the fresh, new box that had contained the 42 inch TV they had just purchased, my thoughts naturally turned toward blaming tenants and homeowners. 

Far as I can tell, the particular tenants who are living in my house, rent-free, even as I write this, used to have more money for their household. The husband had a well-paying job in Michigan, while the wife shopped and minded the home. The husband lost the job in Michigan, took a lower-paying job in Texas; but the wife still spends as though the household had its old, higher income. 

That leads to a further question, because I don't think "my" tenants are unique. Considering the huge amount of credit card debt that USians have collectively run up, millions of USians have kept on spending based on income levels they no longer have. Likewise, our Congress continues to spend money it does not have. What is the cultural root of this tendency to be out of touch with reality? The answer is definitely not "capitalism." I think it's something more deeply rooted in human biology. Perhaps the same root that causes people to keep eating, even after they have already eaten enough to satisfy their energy needs. I say this, not as an aloof observer, but as a human who constantly struggles with my weight and budget.

Tortilla Soup

Corn tortilla Chips (made from non-GM corn -- see Seeds of Deception)
Olive Oil
Diced tomatoes to taste
Shallots or onions to taste
Garlic to taste
Chile (poblano, jalapeno, etc) to taste
Cooked chicken and broth
Sliced avocado
Cretan oregano
Lime
Salt to taste

Ideally, cilantro should be used for flavor, but the summer heat has killed mine, and I have not gotten around to planting more. I used some cretan oregano to give the soup more flavor; common oregano would also be good.

1. Make chicken broth; remove bones and cut meat into small pieces
2. Add diced tomatoes (I prefer my tortilla soup not to be overpowered by the tomatoes, so I only use one or two; other people prefer to use lots of tomato)
3. Chop challot and garlic and cook in olive oil until tender; add to soup
4. When the soup is hot and ready to serve, put tortilla chips in a bowl, and pour the soup over them. Garnish with avocado slices.
5. Squeeze lime juice into the soup just before eating it.

With a piece of cheese on the side, this makes a complete meal.

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I

Ol

Feeling Sad

I have seven too many roosters in my small flock. They have reached the age where they're making life miserable for the hens, so the time has come to begin eating them. I killed the first one this evening -- he is becoming tortilla soup.

It's been a while since I killed an animal. I feel sad about ending the rooster's young life, even though the soup smells delicious. Eating meat is something one has to accept if one raises chickens for eggs, or cows (or goats) for milk. There are always too many males, and you can't just turn them out into the streets.

When I lived at Altamira, I used an ax to kill chickens -- chop off the head in one swift blow. I used the "broomstick" method this evening, because I left the ax in San Antonio and don't trust my skills with a knife. The broomstick method (I actually used a wrecking bar) seems quite gentle, compared with the ax. The bird relaxed for a moment, then went into the usual death spasms. One can never say for sure, but I got the impression that it was a painless death. I've noticed, when I've been in accidents, I don't usually feel pain as the injury is taking place, only later. I would guess that death by guillotine or neck snapping is painless.

At least when I kill chickens myself, I know they had a very happy life up until the last moment, and that their deaths are quick. If I were to buy chicken meat from a store, I could be pretty sure that the bird had an unhappy life, and the last moments could have been really horrible.

Herbicide Resistant Pigweed - jobs for people on farms

Summary of news story: An ABC news story from the cotton fields of Arkansas:at least one strain of pig weed (amaranth family) has developed a tolerance for herbicides, and can no longer be controlled by chemical spray. Like the giant ragweed that's currently growing in abundance on my land, pig weed grows large, fibrous stems within a few weeks. The stems "stop a combine in its tracks" (according to a farmer who was interviewed), preventing harvest by machine. Some farmers are paying laborers to chop out the pig weed; others will have to hire labor to harvest the cotton by hand. The chemical companies say they're working on the problem but do not expect marketable results for 6 to 8 years.

My comments: I do not know of any herbicide-resistant GM crops in the amaranth family. It looks as though pig weed probably developed the herbicide resistance on its own, in the same general way that certain bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. Researchers have observed cross-species and even cross-family sharing of nutrients and genes. I recently read an article about the danger that antibiotic-resistant strains of staphylococcus will pass their resistance to other kinds of bacteria.  If cross-family sharing of genes is possible, then it's possible that pig weed could have "picked up" genes for herbicide resistance from GM crops, but far as I know, it's not likely.

It's interesting to consider the affects that herbicide resistant weeds and insecticide resistant insects could have on the economy. One possibility is that unemployed people could find work on farms chopping weeds and harvesting cotton. I would not expect many U.S. residents to take this sort of work, and the general mood in the U.S. seems to be against allowing in immigrants. More intelligent farm machines could be be very useful for chopping out weeds before they get large, but it will be several (many?) years before machines of this sort are available commerically. Most of the focus right now seems to be on robots for harvesting, because until recently, the least expensive means of controlling weeds has been chemical sprays. Another possibility would be a move toward more elegant farm management, using permaculture techniques. I would like to see a combination of intelligent machines and elegant management techniques.

See: Precision Ag Works (progress on crop machinery robotics) and Vision Robotics

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The Wonderful Mesquite

I've written about the mesquite before (http://huerto-de-altamira.blogspot.com/2009/02/germination-of-honey-mesquite-prosopis.html). February, 2009, when I wrote about germinating mesquite seeds was before I bought the Berry Farm. I no longer need to germinate seeds, unless I want to introduce genes from mesquite trees in San Antonio (which is where I picked the seed pods).

Soon after posting the 2009 blog entry on the mesquite tree, I was delighted to get an email from a fellow mesquite-lover, Peter Felker. He studied mesquite trees when he was at Texas A&M University, Kingsville, and sent me several articles that confirmed my own observations that mesquite trees fix nitrogen, making it available to neighboring plants, as well as helping neighboring plants withstand droughts. Many people around here believe that mesquite trees suck water away from other plants, but the evidence I've seen is all to the contrary. My guess is that mesquite "pump" water from deep down (I've read that their roots can go up to 100 feet deep; don't know whether this is true, but I know they're very deep-rooted trees) and release it through their leaves.

Here is a photo I took yesterday of a stand of giant ragweed near a group of mesquite trees. The ragweed only grows around the mesquite trees. Outside a radius of 20 or 30  feet from the edge of the canopy, there is no more ragweed.

Ragweed has a shallow, fibrous root system, so is unable to tap deep into the soil for nutrients. Since nutrients tend to wash easily down through East Berry Farm's sandy soil, it's very likely that the mesquite trees are providing both food and water for the giant ragweed, which explains why they grow only in the vicinity of the mesquite trees.

A study done in Virginia showed that common ragweed (closely related to giant ragweed) contains more digestible dry matter than alfalfa and is almost as high in crude protein.

[See The Nutritive Value of Common Pasture Weeds and Their Relation to Livestock Nutrient Requirements

A. Ozzie Abaye, Associate Professor, Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences, Virginia Tech; Guillermo Scaglia, Assistant Professor, Iberia Research Center, Louisiana State University; Chris Teutsch, Associate Professor, Tidewater Agricultural Research and Extension Center; Pepper Raines, Montgomery County Public Schools]

The giant ragweed produces a tremendous amount of biomass, and with its high protein (~ nitrogen) content, makes excellent mulch for the garden.

Native grasses, Coastal Bermudagrass, day lilies, canna lily, strawberries, and olive trees all grow better at the Berry Farm than similar plants not planted near mesquite trees.

Besides improving the garden soil and providing light shade, mesquite trees provide a more direct source of human food. Dr. Felker also mentioned that he had helped to set up a business in Argentina that sells flour made from mesquite pods. At the time, I had to hunt it down in a store (I found some at Central Market in San Antonio), but it can now be purchased online: Casa de Fruta. It is a delicious addition to many breads and pastries, including pancakes, bread, and pie crust.

Mesquite also provides a beautiful hard wood for furniture and building (I've seen incredibly gorgeous mesquite floors (See Texas Mesquite Wood Flooring).