Lemon Trees Part 2

I re-potted my lemon trees and made a rather startling discovery about my possible coffee addiction.

That isn't even all the coffee cans I put plants in and I actually need more of them. At least I found a good use for old coffee cans.

I do my part when I fart

Finding out that since cows produce methane gas and that this gas is bad for the environment and helps cause global warming. Since I can't somehow destroy or disperse the gas created by cows I decided to focus more on the gas I produce. Now when I fart I light a match to help prevent global warming. This should be about as effective as those light bulbs I changed over to LEDs.

Just remember not to have that match too close when you let one go or you might burn your ass.

One Lemon Tree

I know I haven't been on in a while but things have been very complicated for me. After a recent loss I was walking and trying to clear my head. At my feet was a small bag of lemons. The lemons were in perfect condition so I picked them up. Laughing to myself about how my life has literally just given me lemons so I went home and made some lemonade. Looking at all the seeds on the counter I wondered about growing them to see what would happen. I quickly rinsed off the seeds and placed them in some soil.

A few months later I had some tiny lemon trees growing and though not much was better in my life I felt like I was at least accomplishing something. Now I need to use those lemon trees to try and get something more.
I wish for somewhere to live and will trade the lemon trees to get it. I would like a house in the forest. I am not too picky but I would love to live in the forest. Somewhere I can plant my redwood trees and allow us all to grow and prosper.

I will meet you to trade the trees.

They have grown a lot since this picture was taken a year ago but I am currently re potting them and will have an update soon.

Here are 6 of the trees. As I am sterilizing the soil one pan at a time in the oven you can see why I would only have a few of the trees done at a time.

Therapy

Going to therapy was always kind of a problem for me. Apparently I have so many problems that the psychiatrist thinks I am delusional. It is only when I start pulling out legal records that they figure out that my life is just that fucked up. Basically I have had some pretty bad psychiatrists who have told me "no one's life can suck that bad." Which is pretty much why I don't get along with or see eye to eye with any therapist.

So yes, I have been shot before. My father shot me with a shotgun for not hoeing enough corn fast enough.
Yes, I had to dig out the bird shot myself and treated the wounds. Yes it hurt, and yes it made me upset. So now I tend to be afraid of having a gun pointed at me with intent. Go fucking figure.

Yes, I would regularly get woken up by a deranged man who would order me out into a field to do manual labor all day in whatever I had slept in the night before. I wouldn't even be given the chance to grab shoes, food, or water. The sharp gravel path to the field really hurt my feet then the hot  clay dirt would burn my feet. To this day I have ridiculously thick calluses on my feet. Then I had to work in hot sun till my mother came home and then I would be given access to food and water. But if I didn't get enough work done he wouldn't give me dinner. On those days I would have worked outside all day and would then have to cook all of us dinner. The worst part would be if I didn't cook enough food then I wouldn't even get any. Yes, my father was a complete asshole.

Yes my father and uncle both have meth addictions. He chose meth over me so I have been adopted by a couple different men who accept me as their daughter. It is a pretty sweet deal. I get fathers who actually give a shit about me and don't have to put up with contact with a meth addict who tried to kill me repeatedly.

Yes I grew up with a schizophrenic sister who would randomly beat the shit out of me for no reason.

Basically with all of this we aren't even up to the issues I had by age 10 so I can pretty much win on having a sucky childhood. Too bad that the shit still hasn't stopped flying yet.

Inheritance

I don't remember much from my great grandmother because I was so young when she passed. She had a tiny dog that was more afraid of me than I was of it. The hair was so thin that even the gentlest petting would cause her to flinch. She always felt safer with great grandmother than with me.

She sacrificed her only bath tub to grow a large tree which she had kept for years. No one would let me touch the tree and for years I didn't even think it was a real tree. No matter how much I begged I wasn't allowed near the thing. I don't even remember which kind of tree it was but it basically had the bathroom to itself. Not having any toys for me to play with she would turn on this electric flower which would change colors. I would sit here for hours in a darkened room with a rubix cube just watching the colors change. I never did get very far with the cube though since one of my cousins had already taken all the stickers off and put them back on once to show that he had solved it. A different cousin took the think apart once to solve it so it was rather broken.

When she died I didn't know what that meant. My mother tried to explain that we couldn't go see her any more and that all her things would be given away in a process called inheritance. I really wanted the light with the color changing flower. I had my heart set on the item knowing I would receive it. What I was given rather shocked and appalled me. An antique zit popper, an emergency sewing kit, and antique dish towels. Yes I admit that I had really bad acne but to have it explicitly mentioned in her will in front of the entire family was a bit much.

The device bears a striking resemblance to this one. Basically I was explicitly given a small piece of aluminum that would fit in the palm of the hand and had been used by many of my relatives to remedy their acne. That thought on its own is rather gross. But with the application of some bleach I had to admit that the device did work. I used it for years till I lost it. The sewing kit I lost almost immediately. Apparently I was only given it to stop the relatives from arguing about who should get it. The dish towels are something I still use today but it took a college class to explain them. See flour and sugar were once sold in fabric sacks and people would then use those pieces of fabric for other purposes. In this case they were turned into dish towels. I know because the logos are still on them though they have faded a bit.

It is nice that she mentioned me in her will but it took years to fully appreciate the irony and oddity of such gifts.

The Great Sriracha Famine Begins

The official court ruling went through today so you may now partially kiss your sriracha good bye.

National Novel Writing Month (how it all ends)

There has been an exciting new biological discovery inside the tomb of the Chernobyl reactor. Like out of some B-grade sci fi movie, a robot sent into the reactor discovered a thick coat of black slime growing on the walls. Since it is highly radioactive in there, scientists didn’t expect to find anything living, let alone thriving. The robot was instructed to obtain samples of the slime, which it did, and upon examination…the slime was even more amazing than was thought at first glance.

This slime, a collection of several fungi actually, was more than just surviving in a radioactive environment, it was actually using gamma radiation as a food source. Samples of these fungi grew significantly faster when exposed to gamma radiation at 500 times the normal background radiation level. The fungi appear to use melanin, a chemical found in human skin as well, in the same fashion as plants use chlorophyll. That is to say, the melanin molecule gets struck by a gamma ray and its chemistry is altered. This is an amazing discovery, no one had even suspected that something like this was possible.

Aside from its novelty value, this discovery leads to some interesting speculation and potential research. Humans have melanin molecules in their skin cells, does this mean that humans are getting some of their energy from radiation? This also implies there could be organisms living in space where ionizing radiation is plentiful. I’ve always been a big panspermia proponent, the idea that life did not originate on Earth but is actually common in the cosmos. Organisms that can live in space certainly gives more credence to this idea.

Possibly this could also be used to create plants or mushrooms that could grow in space, serving as a food source for space travellers. Maybe these fungi could be modified and used somehow to clean up radiation contaminated environments. There’s quite a few of those, in fact the disposal of radioactive waste is still a huge and unsolved problem. Now the fungi couldn’t actually eat the radioactive isotopes, I’m not saying that, but if they can live in radioactive environments they might be used to somehow scour out or concentrate the radioactive isotopes in such a way as to facilitate their clean up.

Imagine, there’s fallout from a nuclear accident and what do the guys in suits do? They show up, spray mushroom spores over everything, and a few weeks later the mushrooms are harvested and disposed of while the contaminated area is now radiation free. It would certainly be useful, the picture at the top shows the still abandoned town of Priyat, Ukraine. It was built to house the workers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and was evacuated within hours of the accident.

An excellent story about the Chernobyl disaster and Pripyat is at the Ghost Town link. Just be aware that, no, Elana didn’t actually ride her motorcycle through the radiation contaminated zone, that was poetic license on her part. (Motorcycle enthusiasts have motorcycled across Europe hoping to duplicate her tour, only to be told by the guards that that motorcycles are not allowed in the contaminated zone.) The pictures and descriptions are accurate though, some of the images are incredibly poignant. Just think, a whole town where the inhabitants fled without warning, leaving all of their possessions behind.

Fortunately the Chernobyl reactor was an old and unsafe design, only one other reactor in the world was built the same way. It was right here in Berkeley, a research reactor built on campus in the fifties. It was sagely decided to quietly shut it down after Chernobyl; while it couldn’t have had an accident on the scale of Chernobyl, the locals were a little concerned anyhow. In fact it was a block away from my favourite burrito place, yikes.

(The above image was released into the public domain by its author. Credit: Jason Minshull.)

https://unitedcats.wordpress.com/2007/05/29/major-biological-discoveryinside-the-chernobyl-reactor/