Snake Stories

But I am so pleased with our Darlin’ Daughter (AKA Snolf the Second). A few days ago, I invited her to read a book with me, the deal being that we’d alternate reading pages. She very reluctantly agreed—not surprising, that, since she has been telling herself for quite some time that she can’t read.

Yes, her reading was slow and halting, with a lot of the drawn-out sounds characteristic of someone who is sounding out words. (Her cute, high voice doing this, with an invariably rising pitch at the end of each sound, sent me into fits of giggles, which did not help the situation. But, thankfully, she giggled too, rather than get mad at me.) I think she surprised herself by how well she was doing; the next day she hopped into my lap and asked when we would continue reading the story. And her reading was noticeably better than the first day.

We just finished today’s session, in which we started reading a different book. D.D. still sounds out a few words very slowly, and her overall pace is that of a beginning reader, but I do believe she can be called a “reader” now. A little bit of phonics work, and I think she’ll be soaring on her own!

I’m so thankful Lobo and I resisted our inclinations to try to push her on this. Yeah, she may be starting later than most kids, but some just seem to need more time to be ready to handle reading. Pushing will not help that, and will almost certainly hurt the child’s attitude and interest in learning how to read. Reading is far too critical a skill to risk like that, especially for the dubious aim of remaining on the educrats’ timetable.

I have always loved to travel. My parents often told me about my great enjoyment of a trip to the upper Midwest taken when I was just three years old—I don’t know whether I’ve reconstructed things from their recollections, or if they’re genuine, but I’ve a few wisps of remembrance of immense bridges and lots of water from the trip through Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. By the time I was old enough to consider it, I was yearning to get out of small-town Ohio and see some of the world. It took decades to accomplish that, but I have, yet wanderlust still pounds in my blood.

As I got older, I became fascinated with not just the places, but the people, too. That’s a big part of why I became a psychologist, but even so, the academic interest has never exceeded the intensely personal interest I have in humans. By “intensely personal” I don’t mean busybody nosiness—I simply mean an interest in the unending variety and creativity of human creatures. As a teenager, I read Richard Bach’s Illusions, and much of it resonated with me. One of the more powerful elements was Don Shimoda’s attempt to teach “the reluctant Messiah” of the profound differences between individuals—I’d thought a lot about that years before reading the book, and grokked its importance then. This was the first time, as best I recall, that I confronted the reality that other individuals didn’t recognize that truth. I think that I had also begun to realize that freedom and tolerance are the essentials for creating a happy, healthy person and life, although it was (again) to be many years before I realized the full implications of my youthful philosophical ponderings. Having recently returned from a walkabout to the Arizona desert, doing a lot of thinking and observing (both within myself and of the areas I traveled to and through), I’ve been powerfully reminded of the glorious diversity of humankind.

From the cold, frozen Midwest, my companion and I traveled south and west. Breakfast was typically coffee and eggs of some sort, but as the temperature warmed as we neared our destination, so did the spiciness of the ingredients accompanying the eggs. Tabasco sauce was ever-present on the table, or brought with meals without needing to ask—a welcome sign that I was among people who like their food the way I do. Shapes became less pasty and pudgy—darker skin and darker, straighter hair became common. Physiques seemed to separate into “lean” and “fat”—few people appeared to exist in that corporate-cubicle in-between of couch-potatodom. The pace of life slowed. As the landscape became drier, the effort required to live in its embrace became a visible constraint—but not an insurmountable one. When we reached the small town that was our base of operations for the walkabout, I was met with another surprise. Or, more accurately, I saw it shimmering in the distance as we drove through the desert—a glimmering white sea that was not sand, not salt, but aluminum. Snowbirds fly to the area in their RVs, creating a senior-citizen city the likes of which I’d never imagined. The sound of a toddler’s laugh from a nearby table at Sunday breakfast was as foreign there as a moose call would be in downtown Los Angeles.

All that differentness, in a relatively small trip across one small area of this planet ...

The reality of Richard Bach’s message walloped me again. Each of us is different, unique. The commonality we all share may be no more than being Homo sapiens.

So how can anyone dare to presume to tell someone how to live her or his life? How could the nannies possibly conceive that their narrow little boxes can adequately hold all of humanity’s (and inhumanity’s) possibilities? How can I tell my children in good conscience that I know what’s best for them, that I know how they “ought to” live, when the times, society, and knowledge they’re growing up in are so different from when I grew up?

The nanny-ninnies can’t conceive of my horror at their prescriptions and proscriptions—but that doesn’t stop their efforts to push their ideas on others. I’m not convinced that their pleas of doing good are sincere, anyway; it’s a good cover and nothing more, as any perceptive individual can twig, even under the cover of the state-approved media outlets. Their ultimate answer, when they’re pushed to it, is that they’re protecting us from anarchy—a claim that stops many intelligent individuals, wrongly, in their tracks.

I’ve never shied away from the A-word. I transformed from confused statist to full-blown ancap in a span of days, and was much happier for it. While I’ve often pondered how to best offer my thoughts on the beneficence of anarchy to the freedom movement, it has never been an important enough issue to take up my digital pen and create the essay. Now, it would seem, I don’t need to. I came across a clear, beautiful essay that says it much better than I likely ever could. Butler Shaffer is the author, and it’s worth interrupting this ramble to read it now (or refresh yourself with it, if you’ve already seen the essay at LewRockwell.com. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

For those who didn’t bother to follow the link, here’s a paragraph that sums it up nicely, and is worth plastering on every freedom-lover’s site on the web:

“Anarchy” is an expression of social behavior that reflects the individualized nature of life. Only as living beings are free to pursue their particular interests in the unique circumstances in which they find themselves, can conditions for the well-being of all be attained. Anarchy presumes decentralized and cooperative systems that serve the mutual interests of the individuals comprising them, without the systems ever becoming their own reasons for being. It is this thinking, and the practices that result therefrom, that is alone responsible for whatever peace and order exists in society.

Terrific stuff, eh? We act in harmony with this wonderful system so much of our lives, yet even we anarchists, we intellectually-minded libertarians, often overlook or forget its simplicity, scope, and unalterable truth.

After discovering that article, I was feeling quite good. Imagine my surprise when the day got even better.

For those of you who’ve been regulars to my personal web site, friends of mine at the Liberty Round Table, or conversed with me at The Claire Files or LibertyForum [both no longer extant as such], you know that I had been having difficulty dealing with my self-imposed work and personal demands. One thing I was considering is what form, if any, my future activism should take. As I said in a temporary farewell message, I was as close to burnout as I’d ever been, and quite surprised by that. It seemed that no matter what I did, no matter how good I made Freedom News Daily, how much I wrote about the need for individuals to find their own way to “do freedom” in the way that works best for themselves, or helped promote others’ great work, it was never enough. Why couldn’t the cats, er, not herd themselves—I’m not that deluded, nor would I want that—but simply just go do it: do their own freedom without waiting for or worrying about others? Why do so many of us contrary, individualistic, stubborn libertarian types seem to be waiting for The Magic Bullet Solution to Winning Freedom Now and Forever?

My friend Richard Rieben offers some valuable insights to that, as I commented prior to my walkabout in the essay Individual and Group: A Perpetual Tug of War?. One of the most important points he makes is that any group runs counter to the interests of its individuals—simply by virtue of the nature of individuals and groups. One need look no further than the national Libertarian Party to see how trying to herd individuals to greater freedom has brought more failure than success to the freedom movement. Yet in many pro-freedom circles, especially think tanks, the focus is on “public policy”—essentially groups butting heads over how much freedom individuals ought to have, or need to have. So—back to that surprise at last—I was taken aback by the title of the essay I saw by FEE president Richard Ebeling: There is no Central Plan for Winning Liberty.

Indeed.

Ebeling clearly presents why such a thing could never work, and discusses how each individual can choose a course that is most effective for himself with respect to advancing liberty. Not surprising information or ideas, but terrific to see coming from a respected institute nonetheless. “No Magic Bullet Solution” and “Anarchy Works!” (as I think of these two essays) fell into my mind, which was refreshed from my time away and ready to tackle some challenges anew. But now I don’t need to tackle a couple. Oh, I’m sure I will in some form or other, but it’s nice to know—again—that my thoughts are not way out from others’ in the freedom movement. It may be irrational of me, but those two essays renewed my hopes quite strongly.

My walkabout was an intensely solitary time, despite the near-constant presence of my traveling companion. That person—one of the very best friends I’ve had (and could ever hope to have) in my life’was on a similar mission, and in part because of that we were able to be together without intruding into each other’s space. Our interactions were the epitome of a truly voluntary relationship; we worked out arrangements that suited each of us when necessary or desired by us, and left each other alone otherwise. Simple; easy; and gloriously effective. One of the unexpected joys of the journey were the vistas opened up to me by my friend’s eclectic musical tastes. I smile every time I think of a pirate plundering the grain co-ops “on Regina’s mighty shores”, or reflect on an unusually insightful lyric about relationships wound around a catchy rock melody. I’ve long been encouraging individuals to do freedom. To that I add, with the reverberation of Captain Tractor’s exuberant refrain prancing in my mind: free yourself!

Do it your way.

Do freedom. Free yourself.

Brad Spangler has answered an interesting freedom-oriented meme, and tags me to do likewise. The question is: “What motivated you to start looking into Anarchist/Libertarian thought?” So, here goes my answer.

I happened to see this report last Friday, but got busy and forgot to comment. Joe Nuxhall has died.

But not without some fun. HughesNet’s tech support (“Unplug the modem and wait 30 seconds”™) apparently wasn’t content that our connection was enormously laggy, because they totally borked it. Advanced tech support (“Unplug the modem and wait 2 minutes”™) wasn’t much better, but MAL finally did get the system working again. Huzzah!

I have a lot of stuff to catch up on, but little time for online activities today. However, I do have some helpful gardening advice to share with you.

Find a straightforward recipe and clear instructions.
Tell your children you’ll make a lunch for them that requires mayonnaise.
Gather the ingredients and equipment, and go to it ...

Yep, right here, yesterday, I demonstrated fairly clearly how harsh I can be with myself. I’m the problem, the incapable one, the clueless one ... and even though a good part of me knows that isn’t always an accurate representation, whenever a problem arises The Inner Critic jumps up and starts pumping those messages. Way back when, my kindergarten teacher observed and remarked on this element of my way of being; while I have made a good deal of improvement since then, it is somewhat embarrassing to realize that I still have a long way to go.

Okay, with a few exceptions, I’ve spent much of my day trying to get my Kubuntu install working the way I’d like. The primary challenge remaining (as far as I know right now) is to get PGP working.

And in trying to get it working, an embarrassing, dispiriting thought came to me ... what if I’m a luser who isn’t capable of handling being outside the proprietary corral?

Maybe I was one of the smartest kids around, back in the day: at a fairly young age, I vowed never to marry, because I realized there was no way to be sure that my husband and I would change in congruent ways as we aged—thus, I concluded, making promises that were binding “until death do us part” was not a wise move.

Then I must have turned into one of the dumbest teenagers around, because with my first experience of something approaching adult love, I repudiated my childhood vow, and worse: I ignored signs of deep-seated differences, and made those “until death” promises.

Don’t know which end of the intelligence spectrum I’m closer to these days, but I learned a lot from that relationship, and I have been much more observant and careful in subsequent voluntary relationships.

Last winter, MAL reported that he’d seen a couple of rabbits around his house, and tried to feed them, but they rejected his offerings—even carrots, which he described as “chocolate for rabbits”. This year, though, they’ve gotten over whatever qualms they had; and with the brutally cold weather, and more recently, substantial snow accumulations, we’ve been happy to share our carrots with them. We figured they were eating them, since we’ve observed a few nibbled-on stubs, along with rabbitprints in the snow, and a few pellets.

So far I’ve had no more computer meltdowns, but then again I didn’t shut it down last night. I have mostly been trying to organize files in preparation to back up everything in case we need to drop a new hard drive into the box. I currently cannot access the email I had on Thunderbird, which includes a lot of stuff that had languished in my “to reply” folder for too long already. I don’t think it’s lost, but I don’t have any sort of word processing software working to test that. I also do not have PGP/GPG working, which hampers comm further. My Firefox is dead, but I was able to extract a backup of my bookmarks file, so that all the basics for the next Salon are still preserved somewhere. Unfortunately, I’ll have to wait until I can read the file to complete the issue, which is probably just as well. In short, I do not trust this machine in its current state to do much of anything beyond web browsing. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to solve the problem this weekend.

Coordinating nicely with a thaw in the weather ’round here, I’m finally well enough to be slowly getting back to what passes for my normal routine, although I’ve no stamina to speak of still. It’s pretty amazing that a bug that originally seemed so mild could sap the strength from us so thoroughly. Thanks to MAL’s care (fortunately, he didn’t get it), the snolfs are dealing only with residual sniffles, and I’m working on that endurance challenge.

I had hoped to start catching up on my backlog of email the day I fell ill ... but now I’ve three deadlines looming much too close for my comfort. So off to that work I go.

Snolf the First was sick all day yesterday—fever, chills, very scratchy throat, awful headache, weak ... so guess who’s got the bug today? Darlin’ Daughter and I, that’s who. This headache rivals some of my worst hangovers.

With any luck I’ll be more vertical tomorrow ... but for now, back to bed with the wiggly, sick snolf.

Well, the good news is that I survived this truffle-making round ... over 350 truffles made. But it took longer than I had planned (keeping the chocolate in temper was the primary time-eater), and did leave me in a time crunch. The truffles have been sent on their ways, however; and I hope to get some pictures up later today. I took lots of shots of all the goodies lined up, but haven’t had time to so much as glance at them.

I noticed Sunday evening that my hands were starting to feel quite dry ... not surprising, given how often I needed to wash—or at least rinse— them while working. Using lotion isn't a good idea while working with chocolate; if it’s strongly scented it could contaminate the chocolate, and I’ve been told some of the substances commonly found in lotions can interfere with tempering, too. Best not to take any chances. But by the time Monday was done, my hands were full-on chapped, and painfully sore. Any motion that required moving my fingers was uncomfortable, at the least. Taking yesterday off from typing and washing helped a lot, but my hands aren’t completely healed yet. Not sure how to tackle this unexpected problem in future rounds ...

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed an uncomfortable sensation taking root in my head, but being out shopping, I wasn’t able to do much about it. It felt a lot like a caffeine-withdrawal headache, but that didn’t seem possible to me; I’d had my usual morning dose of coffee. Giving in to the temptation of a Coke, the discomfort eased ... but returned a couple hours after I’d finished the drink. Upon returning home, I ate a bit of chocolate, and again, the headache dissipated some. Now, I hadn’t been licking my fingers, nor liberally sampling my wares, so I was at something of a loss to explain this until some research this morning turned up what I had begun suspecting: caffeine is absorbed through the skin; and with my hands having chocolate all over them for the better part of two days, it seems likely that I was getting a steady low dose—and not working with chocolate yesterday, the withdrawal kicked in. “Kick” is the right word, too: when I woke up this morning, my head was really throbbing. Still working on eliminating that. I guess that means that this product would work as billed, although I wouldn’t count on absorbing a cuppa’s worth from a typical shower.

And last, I really took a hit on private shipping on the truffle orders! I underestimated how much weight the boxes add to orders ... still a lot of room for improvement, packaging-wise. But progress is being made, so I’m not too unhappy.

In other “ouchy” news, commenting remains turned off, as the spambots appear to be hovering nearby still. I hate to say it, but we may not be able to re-enable comments until after the move to the new software platform is complete. Progress on that project is proceeding well, however; my goal is to accomplish it before February 1. And it has become top priority, so off to it I go.

Still finishing up some things on the great truffling and carameling sessions today—which was anticipated, so there’s no cause for alarm, at least not yet. As expected, I continue to learn a lot:

Couverture chocolate is the domestic cat of the food world. Every kind is a little bit different, and even after one has familiarized oneself with one kind's idiosyncrasies and tried to accommodate them, it’ll still do unpredictable shit just to drive us humans batty. White chocolate is the pampered princess puss of the litter. And the kind that I’m working with is the queen of princesses. ‘Nuff said.

It does not bode well for extended candy-making sessions when one’s opposable thumbs suddenly aren’t. One was just a minor nuisance—some kind of cuticle injury that was tender—but the slash on the other thumb, obtained when working with the gorram coconut on Thursday, has been an ongoing challenge. Just this morning, I pushed a little too hard on it and got the cut seeping again. Thankfully, neither the coconut nor anything else has a suspicious pink tint to it. But the injury has slowed my work considerably.

Even though my tempering and molding skills have languished since the summer, and despite my injury slowing me down, the work is going well. I’m also getting better with each round of molding. I do believe that, with a bit better planning and organization, I can make a successful go of this business, and still have time to enjoy other important areas of my life.

Despite what I thought was ample advance planning and ordering, adventures in online commerce continue to give me fits. A large chocolate order was apparently eaten by the site’s daemons, necessitating an emergency order from another company, which thankfully came through splendidly. I have two orders for candy cups apparently still in some netherworld ... last I heard from one, my order “will be shipped when your payment clears”—that occurred days ago, however, and I’ve seen nary a peep nor a candy cup since then. If I can build an inventory, that will help my flow of work tremendously—but I’ve yet to find good e-tailers for all my packaging needs.

And speaking of packaging ... I’m beginning to despair of finding a good packaging solution for my caramels. The cellophane wrap kinda-sorta works well; it’s attractive, but the caramel sometimes insinuates itself around the edges of the wrappers. And it’s difficult to neatly remove all the caramel from it, I know ... I could cook the caramel longer, to make it firmer, which would help the packaging problem; but the feedback I hear is that the softer texture is very enjoyable, and I’d hate to mess with something my customers like so well.

The new recipe for caramels turned out the best batch yet. Y’all are lucky MAL and I didn’t gobble up the whole batch. And as I suspected, the Ghanan milk chocolate on boy caramels is divine. Gotta order more of that chocolate pronto. They do an exquisite bittersweet as well ... still haven’t tempered it to see how cooperative a kitty it is; that’s on today’s list.

I adore experimenting with flavors and combinations for truffle flavors. My mind swirls with possibilities at the slightest provocation (MAL helped over the weekend by proposing a line of “prank” truffle flavors ... akin to sending one’s former love a box of dead roses, I suppose; trotter truffles, anyone?); and with minimal encouragement from folks who’d be willing to help support the endeavor (i.e., by suggesting flavors/combinations, buying them, and providing critical feedback), I can easily see working flavor experiments in to the regular lineup.

Decorating is also great fun. Using colored cocoa butters to create all kinds of chocolate art is a blast ... but it’s also kind of pricey. That work also requires a fair amount of extra time, so I am undecided about what to do on that front.

Okay, more than enough blather for today ... back into the kitchen I go! And with any luck, by the time I’m done with the last flavor, I’ll have some pretty cups to start packaging orders in, in plenty of time for shipping out this afternoon (don’t want them sitting in a warm building or truck for hours before they start their journeys).