Lou's Musings

I'm Back

Have I said this before?

After a long hiatus I'm picking up my pen to flail myself back into action. It's been a year or more, the last entries coming from Susan and inspired by our trip to Morocco. We did indeed learn from that supposedly underdeveloped country. Not so much how we should live our lives and conduct our polity. More about where we've come from, how humble is in fact noble, how simple is an abstraction of complex.

Community

I have been away far too long. This time family matters have taken me and Susan out of town to tend her mother who is elderly and ailing. Life comes full circle and its completion ironically is frustrating and fulfilling at the same time. My mother in law lamented as we were struggling to get in the car to go to her vascular specialist, “getting old is so messy”. I couldn’t help but think how messy it was watching our daughters come into the world. I guess life is messy.

Peak Wine

The word “sustainable” is bandied about a lot nowadays. What will farming look like—what will living look like—after peak oil? I would like to pose another question: what will the wine industry be like after peak wine?

Dear Diary

I've had it wrong. Blogs are not about polished writing, not that mine is, necessarily. They are about stream of consciousness and networking. What am I thinking? What do you want to know? How can we find out and share? I'm watching our newly adopted barn owl hatchlings in their hacking box (we'll talk more about that later). They eat everything then puke up the parts that they can't digest: bones, hair, feathers. We also can learn from our regurgitations but need to run everything through the system first. So I promise--sheepishly--to post more often.

Water

This won't be (probably) what you think. Not a political diatribe about the profiligate use of water by advanced societies, nor the monopolization of water by global interests.

No, it's about the beauty of water. Are you a farmer? Or backyard gardener? The tick-tick of occilating sprinklers is one of the most galvanizing and soothing of sounds and it even comes with great visuals; better than any TV show I know including HBO.

Solarized

It's been a long haul, but we finally put the finishing touches on a very significant (for us) photovoltaic solar system. It is designed to energize the winery processing and vineyard maintenance areas, visitor facilities, and irrigation pumps. (I'm not including the bread oven even though it is indirectly solar fired thanks to oak firewood)

Young in New York

I'm terribly excited about an upcoming event that's completely outside my normal mundane world (is that a double redundancy?) My world is that of shovels and tractors, this event is more soulful and etheric (to borrow from Rudolf Steiner).

Our younger daughter Maggie is a Photographer in NYC, struggling as most urban artists must,

The Farmers Market

Healdsburg has gone through a lot of changes in recent years. It used to be a dairy town with its claim to fame being the annual harvest of prunes. Newcomers called them plums, but to really belong you had to call them prunes even before they got wrinkly. We used to be known as the buckle of the prune belt; I guess I could say something like it's what holds your pants up, but I'll resist the temptation.

Rain Today. And Tomorrow

This has been an unbelievable spring. There has been more rainfall than we've seen for years and the timing is horrible. Never mind the fact that we just spent a ton of money fixing the road, using that magical elixir...

Hello

This is my first day, my first post. The world is a blank slate; bring me chalk.