Finished Reading: “The Medieval Machine”

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I spend the weekend entertaining some friends from Kansas City.

We had a great time, but the combination of gloomy fall weather and a general goal of taking it easy meant there aren’t really any stories to tell, nor are there any interesting pictures.

This gives me a great opportunity to lay out a few of my thoughts after reading The Medieval Machine.

It was a pleasant surprise to find how much I learned from this book. Often I find nonfiction a little harder to read. (have I ever mentioned my every-other rotation goal of fiction/nonfiction? It’s been tougher to maintain than I had hoped.) Having established that I enjoyed learning, I really wanted to argue with the author at every turn about his conclusions and implications.

I suppose a quick summary might be helpful. The book covers the major mechanization of the middle ages (also sometimes called the dark ages). As it turns out, that period was full of advancement and progress, mostly around water and wind power. Access to non-manual forms of energy are easy to take for granted, and the book was eye-opening as it described all the tasks powered by falling water, grinding wheat, crushing ore, and conditioning fabrics, to name a few.

Another aspect that quickly became apparent is how much freedom I take for granted. The book was full of examples where the person who built a new mill was able to force everyone in the region to use it. This compulsion went so far in one case that the local governor sent troops door-to-door confiscating hand mills by sword point, leaving the peasants no way to grind flour except to use the governor’s new mill.

My frustration with the author started in the introduction where he stated with great confidence that there were no innovations left to be had that could significantly impact the course of human progress, and we were doomed to a slow decline… so stated in the year 1970. I may have been so put off by the introduction that I imagined most of my remaining gripes, but I couldn’t help but feel like the author wasn’t sure everything he was describing was actually a good thing. As if he felt that saving millions of man hours grinding wheat was somehow a loss.

In the end, the book made me spend a lot of time thinking. Thinking about the massive wealth of infrastructure we have, thinking about the impact of virtually unlimited access to information regarding nearly anything, and just marveling at how we got here from there.

Given the amount of thought and reflection it generated I find myself willing to forgive most of my gripes and say the book was a good read… although not one I am likely to read again.

-Jordan

Deer Season 2011

Posted on by Jordan

It is that time of year again.

As with every year, I started preparing by confirming that my rifle was still shooting accurately:

That was at 100 yards, and the squares are an inch across… so I don’t have any excuse to miss this year I suppose.

Although my last post contained pictures of snow, Nebraska wasn’t having that kind of weather over the weekend.

We arrived at the farm with opening morning forecast to be in the mid 60s!

I should go back just a little I suppose, ‘we’ constitutes myself, one f my cousins, and his two boys. The plan was to include another cousin or two, but that didn’t work out this year. As has become the tradition we hunt with a few friends from the area, meaning the total number of hunters is at least six if not ten.

Ok, so not only was the weather too warm, we got to the farm after dark on Friday night. Not ideal when we wanted to have a few portable stands up, and do a tiny amount of scouting before opening morning.  As is often the case, work got in the way of our initial plan. At least it wasn’t my work this time… still unfortunate that it cut into the hunt.

I will skip large portions of not seeing any deer to keep this narrative somewhat interesting. After finding that our initial plan was not great, and knowing that the weather meant the deer were not going to be particularly active until evening, we setup a tree stand and scouted a few good lookout places to position people for the twilight hours in the hopes we would cross paths with something heading out into the fields for a snack.

I should mention that the great spot I used last year wasn’t an option because our only foot bridge across the creek washed out. We talked about improvising a replacement, but were concerned that we would disrupt the deer too much if we were running equipment to erect a new bridge.

When the sun started to set Saturday night, I was positioned in a tree stand overlooking what appeared to be a crossroads of deer trails. About an hour later, that theory was proven correct when about five doe wandered past me and started grazing around the edges of the field to the north of me.

It was awesome to see deer after the disappointing morning, but having them not only walk around but stay around turned out to be kind of a pain because I felt like I couldn’t move at all. I wound up waiting until well after dark to leave, because the deer didn’t wander away until then. From what I could tell, there weren’t any bucks around, but at least I got to see something!

I setup in the same stand that morning and saw…. nothing, … again.

A few of us spent a couple of hours walking through pockets of cover we thought might be a good place to catch a deer sleeping but didn’t discover anything.

At this point nobody in the family group had gotten anything, and with one exception hadn’t even seen anything to be excited about. It was a little distressing, but we were all still hopeful that something would turn up.

I went back to my stand, hoping that it was a better dusk location than dawn. Shortly after I got setup, there was noise clearly indicating that something was slowly working it’s way towards me. The noise was coming from my only blind spot, but it was unmistakeable that something was moving around, and slowly getting closer. Twenty minutes of sitting motionless later and I finally got a look at a squirrel who apparently really liked jumping back and fourth on the ground.

At that point I got kind of frustrated, and got out my phone to send a few texts and see if anyone else was fairing better than I was. The news wasn’t any better from them so I wasn’t feeling like I needed to stay particularly stealthy and stood up to get a better look at the deerless area around me.

Except that just after I did that I heard rustling in the leaves again, and looked over to see a small buck standing directly across from me! I really don’t know how he was able to sneak in so close without my hearing something, but he did. On the other hand he didn’t see me, so I was able to get my rifle up and on him without spooking him. Then I was able to fire once without spooking him. The second shot came quickly after the first, but… there was a delay.

Remember that bridge that washed out? had it been in place I wouldn’t have need to remove my boots and roll up my pant-legs to get this picture:

As you can see, I am basically out of light, and I only had my phone with me. It turns out to be rather difficult to take a you+deer self portrait using my phone, so you will have to live with the picture I got 🙂

The next thing I discovered is that deer float! That was a nice thing to discover because everyone else was still hunting.

The other hunters didn’t find any bucks, and passed on does again. It was nice to have something, even if it wasn’t a real impressive buck.

-Jordan

Snow… /sigh

Posted on by Jordan

I had been toying with the idea of having a commemorative blog post just for the fact that we finally have our garage organized to the point both cars can park in it.

That didn’t end up happening, but this morning we woke up to find a reason to be really happy both cars were inside:

This snow is slushy enough I don’t think there is much risk it will be with us until March, but it still means the effective start of winter and it’s hard to be excited about that prospect right now.

Alright, that’s probably enough whining… 🙂

-Jordan

The Actual Day, And Other Events

Posted on by Jordan

I know, the last post already covered my birthday, so I won’t go into much detail, but there are a few highlights I though should be covered.

It isn’t every day Heather does baking, and I don’t think I have ever devoted much blog space to her endeavors in that arena. Also, Heather doesn’t generally make desserts. Apparently turning 30 is enough of an occasion to warrant making a cake though.

I encountered this cake at a Church function about a year ago, and really liked it. Heather took note, and managed to obtain the recipe from the aforelinked blog. The results were every bit as good as I had remembered!

In passing I should mention that I thought it was cool that the recipe used a technique I sort of stumbled onto a few weeks ago. Because our oven’s “broiler” is just turning the top heating element on continuously, I started throwing the oven to broil for the last minute or two when making pizza to produce a more pronounced browning/crispy/almost burnt appearance like you would see from a restaurant pizza.  The cake uses it to more or less rend the butter and cream out of the coconut, leaving a great crispy texture on the top of the cake.

So, enough about food. What else have we been up to?

Well, Heather has taken family pictures for a substantial number of people. It’s still just a hobby for her, and she seems to really enjoy the process of getting to work with people, and produce something to remember this time with. She is really starting to produce high quality results with the camera.

And me? I am still working with the scouts. Just this past weekend I got to sleep in “Fort Pella” a sort of novelty structure standing on the grounds typically used for summer camp, but accessible to Troops during the off season.

It’s distinct in that whenever the troop has the opportunity to use the fort we don’t setup tents, and instead the boys sleep under the roof sections of the tower.

My role with scouts has changed quite a bit over the past few months. I now work directly with a single patrol of younger scouts, and am responsible for helping to provide the opportunities they need to actually advance in rank. The troop works really hard to stay true to the “boy led” philosophy of Scouting, but I had no idea how much of a balancing act that turns out to be. It’s probably more of a challenge to get all the adults on the same page as to what that means than to actually implement with the boys, but I think we are starting to find a good approach everyone is happy with.

aaand I should stop before this gets too introspective 🙂

Suffice to say that I am enjoying scouts more now that I have a more direct responsibility instead of simply being a warm trained leader body for camp outs.

-Jordan