O. C. F. Caretaker's Journal O. C. F. Caretaker's Journal
"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a cross-roads.
One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction.
Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."---Woody Allen
Saturday 26 December it's been pretty quiet and still here at rancho ocf, the songs of the chickadees and the woodpeckers have been our very own christmas carols. mary and michael came out for holiday dinner and hot tub. they're the first humans we've seen since thursday. not too shabby. what a place to spend december 25. the sun has been glistening on the frosted grass, the dragon's nose dripping icicles and the long tom rippling without thought of hollydays and santa's sleighride. how privileged we feel to have spent this very memorable christmas in magicland.
Friday 24 December hi! norma and dick here being guardians of the fair site for the christmas weekend. what else is there for a nice jewish girl and an ex-sikh to do? i just hope santa finds us here. by the way, if you want to track the jolly old elf tonight, try http://www.registerguard.com and click on the link to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). the fair site is lovely and quiet, frosted over, hardly a creature is stirring. maybe a mouse but i haven't seen one. several birds, though. we've gone on a couple of photo shoots; i used up my last shot right before a flock of geese flew over my head so close, i saw the whites of their eyes. well, you hang those stockings with care now and we'll check in tomorrow. come on out and take a christmas day walk at the oregon country fair site. we'l have eggnog, mulled wine and chocolate chip cookes awaiting. merry, merry everyone.
Wednesday 14 December While we recorded an inch and a half on site yesterday it apparently rained much harder than up in the Coast Range. That and rising snow levels has brought another flood through the Eight. I spent the entire day cleaning up the Yurt and getting ready for the trip tomorrow. It is a bit of a hassle having to let people stay here overtime I what to go somewhere, but on the other hand it is nice to be able to share a space as nice as this one is---and I get to return to a clean house. Fisher was just now a bit of an adventure kitty. The back zipper in my Jeep is broken and I was half way to the store to pick up a some weekend feeders for my fish when I realized she was along for the ride. When I got out of the store she was up under the Jeep and wouldn't come out. Undoubtably I looked quite ridiculous alternately crawling around in the rainy parking lot on my hands and knees cooing "here kitty, kitty", and walking around to the other side muttering "stupid cat" under my breath. Anyway she's back where she belongs and I will most definitely check it out quite we toughly before leaving in the morning. This will be my last entry until I get back around 3 January. It is possible that norma may add an entry or two of her own here. I wish everyone a Happy Holidays and a Wonderful New Millennium. Assuming we still have computers when I get return, I'll be back with ya'll then.
Tuesday 13 December On Thursday, the day after tomorrow, I am headed down to San Francisco whith Hilary to catch a Green Tortoise bus tour to Mexico. The trip will last sixteen days and will travel down the western coast to Mazatlan, ferry to the tip of Baja, the return up the pennisula. In essence we will be circumnavigating the Sea of Cortez (also known as the Gulf of California), spending a lot of time swimming in its semi-tropical waters. It will be a nice break from the Winter doldrums and we will bring in the year 2000 in at least some kind of style. Tommy and norma will be spliting the Yurtsitting duties while I am gone, and I thank them for helping to make it possible for me to go. The last couple of days have been spent getting the Site battened down somewhat so that it is secure while I am gone and with other preparations. Steve and I braced up the fence behind the Sauna wit a dozen T-posts and two by fours as it gets flattened by the exiting water during flooding.
Sunday 11 December On Friday I met Steve and norma at the town office to clear out the History Booth storage locker. Unfortunately norma had just been rear ended and her car totaled, but fortunately she was alright. We stored part of the stuff in the office basement and I took the rest to the Hubbard barn, which will save the Fair fifty bucks a month. Saturday we burned the dimensional pile. It was huge and sopping wet but we managed to get it burning with a little help from the petroleum sciences. Bucket was here and helped me prune some pine boughs to decorate the WOW Hall's Membership Party. Bob Fennessy certainly does an amazing job on that every year, with over ninety businesses donating food this time. It was a feast and as always was the best part of my holidays and probably for a lot of other folks as well. Today was a sort of deja vu all over again. We returned to the burn which was quite naturally extinguished---as it had been raining heavily. Steve pushed the remaining muddy soaking wet woody debris into a mass with the tractor. Amazingly we were again able to coax it aflame in the pouring rain, the secret weapon being the blower, which turned our sputtering little fire into a virtual blast furnace. Then tonight I was back at the WOW Hall. I really enjoy being there and I really do need to get out a little bit more often to socialize. On my way over I noticed that the new tenents, Jason and Stephanie, were finally here moving in to the old Hubbard place.
Friday 10 December The origin of the computer keyboard layout that lies before you of had its origins an invention of Christopher Latham Sholes in 1867. He and his associates finally solved a centuries old problem by putting together the prototype of the first commercial typewriter in a small Milwaukee machine shop. Sholes took his invention to Remington, the arms manufacturer, to have the machine mass-produced. The first Type-Writer appeared on the market in 1874 but not until after Remington's second model was introduced in 1878 did it meet with commercial success. While the first machines typed only capital letters, the new Remington No. 2 added the shift key,which caused the carriage to shift in position for the printing either the upper or lower case letter on each typebar. That same year a Mrs. L. V. Longley developed ten finger typing and shortly after that Frank E. McGurrin, a federal court clerk in Salt Lake City, developed touch typing---whereby typists would type without looking at the keys. The subsequent improvement of typing speeds quickly became problematic as proficient typists easily caused the typewriter mechanisms to jam. The first typewriters had the keys layed out alphabetically in two rows. They had letters on the end of the typebars which were arranged in an arc. If two typebars were too near one another, they would tend to jam when typed in quick succession. Sholes had to redesign the keyboard by taking the most common letter pairs (TH for example) and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances from one another. He did this using a study of letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard (as it came to be called because of the first six letters in the top alphabet row) was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. As a result of this rearrangement, the keys that were used most frequently were not as easily accessible to the typist. The QWERTY layout effectively reduced the speed at which users could type, and thereby paradoxically improved their efficency by preventing jamming of mechanism. In 1932 Professor August Dvorak, an early Ergonomics researcher Washington State University, set out to develop a more efficent keyboard layout. He analyzed the English language to determine which letters were the most frequently used. Dvorak's home row uses all five vowels and the five most common consonants---AOEUIDHTNS. With vowels on one side and consonants on the other, a rough typing rhythm could be established as the hands would tend to alternate. It never caught on however. Keyboards typically possesses over 100 keys generating approximately 120 different symbols or control characters (not even counting capitalized forms), making it significantly difficult to commit to it memory. The QWERTY layout has become a defacto standard by virtue of being the first---and since no manufacturer could viably introduce a product that would require its users to have to be retrained. Thus it is that today's computers still utilize a keyboard layout designed for a device first marketed over a century ago. Several good history of the typewriter type links here.
Thursday 9 December A very quiet day around the Fair. In fact it was one of those days when nobody came and I never left, so I haven't seen a living soul all day. Which is fine by me since one reason I took this job was to get away from all the hubbub. Geese flying overhead were plenty to keep me me company. I started up all the trucks and let them run for awhile and took Mothra and the Blueberry Princess over to the Hubarrd barn, which is new storage space for the Fair. I took a long walk over the property. I built up another bike out of the old cruiser frame and worked on the upper floor of the Ware House during the afternoon while it rained.
Wednesday 8 December Last night my server was down and that was all the excuse I needed to skip the daily entry. Yesterday Steve and I took one last run with the truck and tractor to pick up a few more odds and ends that had gotten pushed around by the last flood. After that I chained off the four bridges in the lots and Snivel Road. For the most part it's a wrap for vehicles down on the floodplain until next Spring. I denailed and cleaned up around the new east wing, staying dry by working underneath. Today I took some time to clean up my own scene, which was beginning to get out of hand. There were several visitors out today. The dumpster was emptied and ordinarily that wouldn't be news, however the garbage truck driver had quitwithout notice and that has resulted in us being without service for well over a month. Phillip Guyette works for Lane County Public Works and they fix up old bikes there to give to charity during Christmas. He let me come and pick through the leftovers and I got some useful stuff out of it.
Monday 6 December My main accomplishment today was insulating the pumphouse at the new property. Although built with more holes than Swiss cheese, I used up a bunch of old foamcore board and made it tight enough that a lightbulb should keep it from freezing. This evening I attended the last board meeting of the millennium. Leslie is off on sabbatical. Although the number of agenda items was small the meeting expanded to fill all available time. On the way home giant raindrops fall through the beams of my headlights to make thick black puddles in the road ruts. The entire night is enveloped in their cold collective wetness as they drum out a steady pitapatation on my roof and windshield, tires swishing about beneath.
Sunday 5 December VegManEC Sunday and the crew was out repairing and finishing the staking of the bale dams. They also wrapped certain trees with chicken wire to prevent the beavers from eating them. My day was spent with Arrow roofing the east wing of the Ware House. We finished the job up as the darkness set in, which at this point comes pretty early. It will be nice to have yet another dry space this Winter. We have plans to install a sink, a water filter, a hot water heater, and perhaps even a washer and dryer, so volunteers will have a place to wash up and get a drink.
Saturday 4 December Arrow came out last night and he, Steve, and I went to our usual Our Daily Bread dinner. Today we caught a break in the weather as we resumed work on the east wing of the Ware House, which lacks only a roof, which is where the project has stalled since right before the last Fair. A lot of time was spent installing the flashing that will prevent water from leaking down the wall. Kirk Shultz was out to retrieve the bamboo he got with our order from Vashon Island. He and I went down to visually survey an area that will be looked at by the Path Planning Committee in March. He then helped Arrow and I work on the roofing until dark. The land swap with the City of Veneta has been signed by both parties this past week. There are still some details to be worked out but this is exciting news. We have camped on this land, known as the Far Side, for the last three years, but now we own the approximent fifty acres of prime mixed hardwood forest on the other side of the Long Tom adjoining our property.
Friday 3 December Today is the first day of Chanukah (or Hanukkah), which celebrates a struggle for religious freedom. Over a thousand years ago the Syrians ruled over the Israelites. King Antiochusy decreed that the Jews bow down to his image, which he had installed in the Temple of Jerulsalem , and to worship the Greek gods---but the Jews were forbidden by their own religious law to worship idols. There were some who did as they were told, but many others refused. A group calling themselves the Maccabees rebelled, and after three years of intense fighting were successful in driving the Syrians out of Judea and reclaiming the Temple. They had to completely clean the building however, and to remove the all the Greek symbols and statues. On the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev, the job was finished and the temple could be rededicated by rekindling the Menorah, which is the traditional symbolic nine-branched candelabrum. Once lit it was never supposed to be permitted to go out. Unfortunately there was only one small jug of olive oil to be found, enough for just one day. Miraculously it kept burning for eight days before more could oil could be made. The word Chanukah means "rededication". Also known as the Festival of the Lights, it is now celebrated for eight days to mark the victory over the Syrians, the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple, and to commemorate the miracle of the oil. On each successive night, the number of candles lit on the Menorah increases by one. Prayers accompany the lighting of the candles. Foods such as potato pancakes, called latkes, are.cooked in oil. Small gifts are given to children each night. There are also songs, games, and toys---particularly the dreydel, which is a spinning top. Due its proximity to Christmas, Chanukah has taken on an additional significance as an alternative holiday.
Thursday 2 December This morning I exchanged the empty oxygen and acetylene tanks from our new welding rig for full ones at Pacific Airgas. Of course I had to test it. Voila, we have ignition. The rest of the day I sent putting a crusier bike together. Nothing too fancy about this one, but it is hard to improve on a plain old utility bikes for plain old utility uses. I have to admit a bit of an obsession with my bike building lately, but I don't think it is the worst thing I could be doing. Being able to fabricate things out of metal is a valuable skill that I am learning along the way. Here is a shot of the recycled bike trailer that I finished last week.
Wednesday 1 December We're on the home stretch for the year 2000,
with one little month left to go. Today is Woody
Allen's birthday and his quote above, darkly humorous as it is, nicely
fits the bill this month what with Y2K and the WTO. Today is also Rosa Parks
Day. On the 1st of December 1955 she was sitting in the first row towards
the back of a bus where blacks were allowed to sit at that time. Three black
men occuped the row with her and the seats reserved for whites were all
taken. A white man got on the bus. Not only did the rules state that blacks
must give up their seats to whites, but also that they could not even sit
in the same row. The bus driver ordered the four people to stand so the
white rider could sit. The three men complied but Mrs. Parks refused to
move. The police were called in and she was arrested. It has been said that
Rosa Parks was an exhasted seamstress too tired to get up. This is not at
all the case. She had once served as the secretary to the president of the
NAACP and had recently completed a workshop on race relations. She was tired
all right, tired of injustice. Within several days, with the help of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (who was then a pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church) and others, the Montgomery
Bus Boycott was organized. It eventually took the United States Supreme
Court to declared that Alabama's state and local laws requiring segregation
on buses were illegal. On the morning of 21 December 1956 Dr. King and Reverend
Glen Smiley, a white minister, shared the front seat of a public bus. The
boycott had lasted 381 days. It was a huge victory for the fledgling Civil
Rights Movement.