Author: JLfromNH

March and Maple Syrup

Most of us are familiar with the old weather proverb saying ‘March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb’. It’s one of those adages of uncertain lineage we like to trot out more as a way to comment about the weather rather than from any real belief in its accuracy. Certainly this March has started out living up to the saying. The past few days have yo-yoed from a balmy fifty degrees down into the single digits with a ferocious wind adding to the chill. Since technically it’s still winter, this shouldn’t be all that surprising but after being teased by pseudo-spring like conditions, it does come as a shock.

Still, the days are getting noticeably longer. The snow pack in the back yard which shortly after Valentine’s Day was over two feet deep has now shriveled down to a meager few inches. Bird activity has picked up with crows calling incessantly back and forth and tufted titmice whistling as they begin preparing to establish nesting territories. Chickadees along with nuthatches can be heard twittering as they climb up and down tree branches searching for hibernating insects. There is also that activity most often associated with New England, maple sugaring.

Maple syrup has a long history in New England, with the heaviest production coming from Vermont. Native Americans originally tapped the maple as it provided a source of energy and trace minerals in the late winter when other sources of food were in short supply. The sweet flavor helped add to the appeal of harvesting it. Traditional stories suggest that they were just as vulnerable to the temptation of overdoing it as we are today, as one of the Abenaki legends of Gluskabe relates.

Early European settlers quickly adopted the practice of tapping maple trees, gradually refining the technique of boiling down the tree sap to produce syrup. Cane sugar replaced maple sugar as the main sweetener around the time of the Civil War, but that didn’t stop efforts to boost maple syrup production and improve marketing. The technology has remained basically the same since then with minor tweaks and improvements. A farmer of the late 1800’s would have no difficulty recognizing many of the tapping techniques still in use today.

The production of maple syrup, however, has gotten dicier in recent years due to global warming. Maple trees need a combination of mild days in the upper thirties and low forties followed by cold nights below freezing to promote a good flow of sap for producers to tap. Too warm and the sap shoots to the top of the tree instead of rising slowly and dripping gradually into the sap buckets. This leads to poor quality maple syrup. Producers are struggling to adapt to the new normal, which given the current wild gyrations of the climate, is nearly impossible to determine. Given the recent struggles of maple sugarers, it’s fair to ask if there are other trees that could be tapped in a similar fashion. Well, it turns out there are.

The birch tree is often mentioned as an alternative to sugar maples. The flavor (which I haven’t tried) is different from maple syrup. Birch syrup contains only 1 to 2 percent sugar as compared to 8 percent for maple. It has been described as spicy-sweet by some and other as caramel-like with a fruity undertone. Because of its lower sugar content, it takes more birch sap to boil down to syrup, usually about a hundred gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup as opposed to 40 gallons of maple sap to make a gallon of syrup. So don’t expect to see mass quantities of this on the grocery shelf anytime soon. You can purchase birch syrup online, though it can be a bit pricey.

Another tree to look at is the sycamore. It can be tapped much the same way as the birch and maple. The flavor is described as honey like early in the season and developing a butterscotch flavor later on. I haven’t found any online sources to purchase this product if you are curious about it. Unfortunately New Hampshire (the southern part of it) is just at the edge of the northern range for sycamores, so I don’t anticipate this becoming a replacement for our beloved sugar maples any time soon.

Other trees that have potential for tapping are walnuts, ironwood, box elder (actually a member of the maple family) and hickory. If you have any of these types of trees on your property, feel free to experiment. Just be aware that each will likely have its own unique flavor which may or may not appeal to you. Also, and this is extremely important, be certain you are correctly identifying the tree in question. While I am not aware of any tree sap that is out and out poisonous, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one and it’s best to avoid unwelcome surprises. So educate yourself on what type of trees you have in your area. Once you’ve accomplished that, there are plenty of books and online sources detailing the process of tapping which can be quite laborious but ultimately rewarding.

Happy sugaring!

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A little postscript:
I am pleased to announce that I have sold one of my short stories, A Change In The Wind, to Into The Ruins, a quarterly magazine published by Joel Caris. Thank you, Mr Caris!

The Trouble With Memory

Recently I was loading groceries into my car when a couple drove up and asked where they could find the Middle School. Perhaps because I was slightly distracted by my ambition to get my stuff home and tucked away, I cheerfully gave them directions to the local elementary school. It wasn’t until I drove up a hill near my home and spotted the local junior high that the little light bulb over my head finally flickered on. Oh, yes, junior high – middle school (derp!).

It was embarrassing enough that I had steered that poor couple wrong, but the incident also set off a chain of thought that people around my age (62 years) start obsessing about. Is this the early signs of Alzheimer’s? Probably not, but it’s hard not to have that worry pop up from time to time when minor faux pas like the above occur.

But how worried should we really be when memory failures happen? When you are young, memory failures happen but it’s easy to brush them off. Not so much as you begin aging or watch your parents age and witness the devastating effects of memory loss. My father played the piano and could perform a number of pieces pretty much from memory. However as he got past his seventies and into his eighties, an ominous change came over his playing. He would start off but then begin faltering. After hesitating, he would start the piece over again, sometimes several times in succession. Finally he quit playing altogether. Even with sheet music in front of him, he kept losing track of where he was.

True dementia involves significant deficits which interfere with your ability to function at work or at home. Not all dementias are Alzheimers. There are a variety of conditions which produce similar symptoms. Some are treatable. Others are not. Reading these lists can often be alarming but a simple rule of thumb to remember is this: if you forget where you laid your car keys, that’s plain absentmindedness. But if you have your car keys in hand and can’t remember what they are for, then you definitely have a problem.

In my father’s case, short term memory had taken a hit. Whether this was Alzheimers (he was never diagnosed) or the result of a series of small strokes, is hard to say but the terrible effects on his ability to recall musical pieces or follow sheet music like he used to, clearly showed. In my own case, failing to recall that ‘middle school’ meant the junior high, is more likely due to distraction than to cognitive decline.

So what to do? The Internet is filled with sites advising how to improve your memory and maintain it well into old age. Some of it is obvious snake oil but some sites offer common sense advice that most of us know but don’t always put into practice.

There are several things that stick out. The first is to stop multitasking. Let’s face it. We can’t give 100 percent of our attention to five things at the same time. If you want to do a task well or just keep track of things better, you have to cut back and focus your attention on one or two tasks at a time. You can devote more time to the tasks, do them better and not trip yourself up trying to keep track of too many things.

Another is simply getting enough sleep. It’s easy to underestimate how badly our mental functioning is affected when we don’t get enough sleep. Our ability to focus on tasks, think clearly and most important consolidate memories of events during the day take a major hit when we don’t get enough sleep.

A lot of things conspire to interfere with getting a restful sleep. Certain types of food and drink can interfere with a good night’s rest. Also exercising vigorously before bedtime can cause issues, revving our bodies up for more activity instead of winding down for the night. Bright light can interfere with the body’s sleep rhythms. The introduction of electric lights and later TV and computer screens have disturbed our natural sleep cycle which depends on a regular pattern of light followed by darkness. Outside lights such as street lights, neon lights, or even the headlights of cars passing by can all have a disruptive effect on our sleep.

Last but definitely not least is the importance of social contacts. Having friends, attending social functions (either family related or otherwise). Volunteering for community service or helping out with church or other functions all provide opportunities for interactions both social and physical. Scientists aren’t yet sure of the dynamics behind social interactions and how they reduce cognitive decline but there is clearly a correlation. Interacting with others requires using your brain for social skills. Exercise promotes better circulation for the brain. Volunteering creates a sense of purpose and feeling of achievement that your efforts can actually make a difference for others. Each feeds into the other and helps contribute to a healthier old age. Like a muscle, the brain just needs to be frequently exercised to stay in good shape. Use it or lose it!

So don’t fret about forgetting where the car keys are. Just be happy you can remember what they’re for!

Clearing The Clutter

Now that the New Year has arrived, I like to do an inventory of all the stuff I have. Like many others I have accumulated a considerable stack of possessions over the years, in addition to the stuff my late parents left behind after they passed away. As they both lived through the Great Depression, it left them with a pack rat mentality, an urge to accumulate stuff as a hedge against the next set of hard times. As the ‘hard times’ never quite materialized for them, I wound up with quite a pile of, well, stuff.

Some of it was easy to get rid of. The bookshelf crammed with Readers Digest Condensed Books (my father’s) got shuffled off to the local recycling station, especially after I found out you can’t give those things away. Clothing that was purchased by both parents and stored away but never worn, went to the local church rummage sale (if it didn’t fit me, that is…).

My father was the worst offender when it came to saving anything. Glass jar after glass jar of old nails, screws, bolts, nuts, brackets and assorted bric-a-brac cluttered his work shop. A fair percentage of it had been sitting around so long it had begun corroding. Fortunately our recycling station can handle scrap metal, so that all went there as well. He saved every piece of scrap wood from old projects with the idea it could be applied to a future project. He was also a ham radio buff and saved any old tubes and attachments that might conceivably be useful.

 

These I know can be sold to avid collectors, so if I can ever get ambitious enough for that yard sale I’ve always wanted to do, they will be placed out, hopefully to be scooped up and out of my clutter pile and into someone else’s. The scrap wood was, needless to say, scrapped.

My mother also collected quite a pile, but her stuff was more useful to me. The old cast iron skillets she had were definitely keepers along with her stock pot, dishes and cutlery. Some of her old vintage jewelry I have kept as well. She avidly collected glass ware from antique shops, gift shops and local yard sales. Some of it I will keep for sentimental value but the rest of it will end up in the yard sale. She knitted quite a bit until arthritis stopped her. I have numerous yarn skeins as well as a few half-finished items (a sweater and afghan, I believe). If I ever take up knitting, that will go into my own stash of stuff.

This of course brings me to what I have collected. Needless to say, I have been strongly influenced by my parents. While I hadn’t been born until long after the Great Depression, the attitudes it fostered in them were transmitted to me. I’m not a string saver but I do love to read, so I have a ton of books. I was into collecting pewter fantasy figurines for a while, so I have several shelves full of those. I enjoy cross stitch and can’t resist the kits that various catalogs offer to me. I suspect I have enough projects accumulated that if I stopped buying anything right now, I will be kept busy until the day I die. Word puzzles, like acrostics and the like are enjoyable so I have a stack of puzzle magazines waiting for me to have time to go through them.

If that wasn’t enough, I like to draw and so have stacks of art books, art supplies and so forth. One thing for sure, I will never be bored! However, I think George Carlin pretty much said it all with his classic monologue on ‘stuff’. Our consumer culture with its emphasis on material wealth has caused us to go way over the top on accumulating stuff, even when we’re not really that greedy (or like to think we aren’t.)

So how to cut down on the clutter? Well, the Internet is full of suggestions on the best ways to clear out your excess possessions. Many advocate using the beginning of the year to start de-cluttering. Other recommend a specific date. MoneyMagpie suggests March 11, 2017 as the date. Apparently there is actually a National Clear Your Clutter Day. I’m not exactly sure who designated March as THE month to clean but it’s as good as any.

Getting rid of clothing that no longer fits or is out of style is easy enough. I deal with the monster stash of books by rereading old ones that I haven’t looked at in quite a while. I have found that my reading tastes have changed over the years which allows me to get rid of the books that no longer interest me. Duplicate books are rare but I do occasionally inadvertently buy one. Those go too of course. Recently a co-worker was hospitalized and sidelined for an extended period. A ‘Care Package’ basket was made up for him. I donated a years’ worth of the word puzzle magazines that I never seem to have time to get around to. If the yard sale ever comes off, I will get rid of a few of the knick-knacks I have accumulated as well.

In spite of our computerized culture, there is still a huge amount of paper documents that manage to accumulate in spite of our best efforts. Many of these are important but it isn’t always clear how long they should be kept. I came across a magazine article that helpfully listed what to keep and how long to keep it. As I prefer to do as little on line as possible, it has come in very useful.

1: Keep Forever
Birth and death certificates, adoption papers, health records, marriage certificates, divorce decrees and military discharge papers.

2: Keep for a limited time
Tax records – 7 years; Auto titles and registrations – as long as you own the car; Check registers and bank statements – 7 years; Loan papers – 7 years after the loan is paid off; Pay stubs – until W2 is confirmed by year end; Property deeds – as long as you own the property; Mortgage payments – 7 years after property is sold; Records to support tax return – 7 years.

3: Toss Immediately
Utility bills (once you’ve paid them of course)– unless used for tax deductions; Credit Card statements – unless they record deductible business expenses; Expired insurance policies – unless there is an outstanding claim; Warranties, manuals and receipts for items you no longer own.

Once you get started on this process, it’s rather overwhelming to see the amount of clutter you have but what a relief to get it out from underfoot. And what a surprise to discover how roomy your house or apartment really is!

Happy cleaning and Happy New Year!

Big Rock and other glacial erratics

Up in the small patch of woods in back of my house is a large granite boulder that has been there for as long as I can recall.
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It’s roughly a little under five feet tall by five to seven feet in width depending on where you measure it. As children, my siblings and I dubbed it ‘Big Rock’ and needless to say it was quite the kid magnet. We routinely played around and on top of it without anybody scolding us about how ‘dangerous’ it was. I don’t recall that any of us or the neighborhood kids who joined in, ever suffered any serious injury, unless you count the occasional skinned knee.

Noting other smaller rocks in the vicinity, we proceeded to name them Little Rock, Baby Rock, etc, but none of them had the charisma of Big Rock itself. Unfortunately I never asked my parents who built their house on the property if Big Rock was there to begin with or if it was dug up during construction. Given its size, resembling a beached whale, I suspect it was there all along while the forest grew up around it.

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New England is filled with an abundance of rocks, stones and boulders of varying size and heft, causing annoyance to any one attempting to clear the land, creating challenges for hikers and food for thought to geologists. Large boulders like Big Rock are often referred to as glacial erratics , stones moved from their point of origin by glaciers. Depending on how the ice flowed, they may have traveled a great distance or only a short jaunt from the ledge they were torn off. Madison Boulder, one of the largest erratics located here in New Hampshire, is thought to have originated from the Whitten or White ledges located 12 and 4 miles respectively to the northwest. At 83 by 23 feet in size, it is thought to weigh in at 5000 tons so it gives an idea of the power of the ice sheets that came grinding down across our state during the Laurentide.

Countless other erratics can be found throughout the state, some with odd ball histories such as Boise Rock. This large boulder earned its name during the 1800’s after Thomas Boise, a teamster, was trying to make his way through Franconia Notch when he was caught in a fierce blizzard. According to local folklore, in order to avoid freezing to death he unsentimentally killed and skinned the horse he had been riding and used its hide to protect himself while hiding under the rock now bearing his name. His ploy paid off and searchers found him alive when hunting for him the next day.

Glaciers have left their mark everywhere here in New Hampshire. Crawford Notch shows the classic U-shape characteristic of valleys ground down by ice rather than eroded by a river. Glacial striations are visible in many places where ledge was exposed to the relentless scrapping of the Laurentide Ice sheet.

Other features such as moraines, kettles, potholes and cirques can be found scattered throughout the White Mountains. A good example of a natural pothole is the Basin, located in Franconia Notch. Rushing mountains waters that originate from Profile Lake and form the beginnings of the Pemigewasset River, wash out pebbles and sand which over the millennia have scoured an area of the local granite forming a beautiful natural basin 30 feet in diameter and 15 feet deep. Its polished appearance looks like the product of some sculptor but in reality it is Mother Nature’s work. Mount Washington’s Tuckerman Ravine, a popular magnet for adventurous skiers is a classic example of an old glacier cirque. Its classic bowl shape is the result of a local alpine glacier which formed during The Pleistocene age.

But above all else it is the glacial erratics strewn everywhere that are the main characteristic of New Hampshire and other New England states, adding expense to construction projects when they have to be moved, or aggravating farmers trying to plow their fields. But while we may curse their ubiquity, that hasn’t stopped us from making use of them, either as objects of interest for tourists or just as building materials to make a familiar sight in our state.
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The Law of Diminishing Returns or Why I don’t want my stove talking to me

Recently the place where I work instituted several changes. The first was a change to the time clock system, the reason being the old one had some problems so our business went shopping around for a new one. Long gone is the old fashioned punch clock where you inserted your paper time card and heard a satisfying ka-chunk indicating you had clocked in or out (I’m sure I’m dating myself here). That was deemed ‘inefficient’ and consigned to the dustbin of history eons ago. Now you swipe an employee badge in front of an electronic eye which duly records your swipe electronically (though they still call it ‘punching’ for some reason.) and stores the information in a database.

Well the new system goes a step further. Now you can go online and access your time and attendance records, view ‘punches’, put in for time off, etc. We could do this to some extent with the old system but the new one has so many bells and whistles that we workers were scheduled for an hour long (or so) class to show us how to access and make use of this wonderful new software. Needless to say a number of the workers who were not especially computer savvy were intimidated by the new system and needed help getting through the process of creating an account with user name and password. I overheard one male worker muttering under his breath about this ‘bull####’ and I found myself unable to disagree with him. We are able to access a PDF file telling how to use the new system on our internal intranet but were advised not to attempt to print it out as it was over 40 pages long. Huh?

The second change which came on the heels of the first has to do with our benefits package. Our business has always offered a generous benefits package which includes medical, dental and life insurance among other things. In previous years we would attend a benefits meeting where we would enroll in the benefits program (if we were new workers) or check off boxes on a sheet of paper listing what we already had for benefits and note if we were continuing with the same coverage or wanted to make changes. We would then pass in the piece of paper to the Human Resources office. Simple, right?

Well, now this process is now being transferred online and we ‘just’ sign on and do the same thing only electronically now. We could do this from the comfort of our home, on our ‘smart phones’ or sit down with the agents from the various agencies who would walk you through the process of enrollment. But again, more than a few of our workers were dismayed by the apparent complexity of what had formerly been a simple process. I was saddened to see how distressed one older woman was over the prospect and had to explain to her several times that the agents would help her through it. Unfortunately I couldn’t promise her it would be easy.

If it seems our love affair with computers and the Internet is getting out of hand, you are not alone. The demented drive to ‘wi-fi’ or otherwise computerize every widget and gadget in our lives is overwhelming many people with a tsunami of gimmicks and options that many are beginning to feel they neither need nor want. Has the old saying ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ been forgotten?

One example is automobiles and the spate of recalls that has been occurring in recent years. As often as not, it involves issues with the car’s software. Since when do cars need software? A car is just a tool that gets you from point A to point B. For years our automobiles did just that without the high tech paraphernalia that is now being crammed into every nook and cranny the vehicle has. You could certainly pimp it up if you wanted with rally stripes or custom paint jobs. But now there is BlueTooth, GPS and assorted attachments for hooking up your phone or ipod that all provide distracting entertainment as well as addled road directions apparently working under the assumption that you find driving terribly boring and can’t really read road maps anyway.

Wi-Fi is adding to the technical bedlam with wireless connections for practically every object in our lives; televisions, stereos, hi-tech kid toys, phones, home security systems, thermostats and pretty much every appliance you possess. Articles bubble with enthusiasm over how this latest tech will ‘enhance’ our homes though they don’t bother to explain why we would even need this stuff in the first place. However CNET.COM in a review of several high-tech kitchen appliances did put a finger on an irritating issue with all of these gee-whiz devices. Not only do they not quite live up to their promise but they are pretty damned expensive.

This brings us to the issue of the Law of Diminishing Returns. The Law of Diminishing Returns is a term commonly used in economics. It states that if one input in the production of a commodity is increased while all other inputs are held fixed, a point will eventually be reached at which additions of the input yield progressively smaller, or diminishing, increases in output. Or to state it more simply, the more you spend on producing a commodity the less you get back in terms of output.

How is this possible? Look at it this way. Say a farmer waters his crop. So far so good. The crop grows nicely (with the help of a little dollop of fertilizer). Then he waters it more. Well, ok, but now the soil is getting a bit saturated but the plants are able to soak most of it up and the sun evaporates the rest. Then he waters it even more. Now the poor plants are swimming in a pool of more water than they can possibly handle and begin drowning (yes, plants can drown!). If the farmer doesn’t cut back on his watering, he’s not going to have any crop to speak of. More is not better.

John Michael Greer in his ArchDruid Report has covered this issue a number of times in his blog, particularly in his fictional depiction of a near future America that has broken up. The character in his story encounters another who points out to him that the law of diminishing returns applies to technology as well as to anything else. The young man has a difficult time accepting this possibility, raised as he was in a world which believes the more technology, the better. Apparently Mr. Greer touched a nerve with this segment of his story, judging from the comments it received.

As already noted, none of this high tech wizardry comes cheap. From the rare earths mined to create microcircuitry, to the energy and water gobbling data farms that house the vast quantities of information constituting the ‘Cloud’ and the continual updates to the software which supports all this, all of it costs money and quite a bit of it at that. Subsidies can mask some of this but in the end, we are the ones who pay for it all. If you want to know if it is all worth it, look at what the Law of Diminishing Returns states and ask yourself if the return you are getting is worth the time and money you invested in your wonderful gizmos.

Do you really need to integrate your fridge, air conditioner and stove through Wi-Fi? What real advantage is there in being able to pre-heat your oven from the grocery store? What’s to stop someone from hacking into your system and cranking up the thermostat to 90 plus degrees on a hot day just for giggles? Or hack into your talking stove so it texts suggestive remarks instead the current temperature of the oven? What happens if the data farm that handles all this information gets destroyed in a storm or earthquake and the backup doesn’t kick in?

The more we ‘improve’ our lifestyle, the more costly problems seem to crop up. The interconnectivity of every aspect of our life not only is convenient for us but also for those who do not mean us well. Recently a DOS attack occurred, interrupting Internet services for NetFlix, Twitter and Reddit. A few years ago Anthem Blue Cross suffered a massive data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 80 million individuals, not the first firm to suffer such a data theft and certainly not the last. Now subscribers (myself among them) must perpetually monitor their credit reports for suspicious activity.

More and more we begin to see the Law of Diminishing Returns rearing up to bite us on the backside as the gleaming promise of computers and Internet connectivity gets transformed instead into a nightmarish snarl of hacks, web complexity, nonsensical updates and expensive kludgy workarounds. When will we realize that more tech fixes are not the answer but rather returning to simpler methods is what is needed to accomplish what we desire? Let’s just have a stove be a stove and a car just a car.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” 

― Ernst F. Schumacher

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