Someone got my dander up and so I had to write a letter to the editor, which was published today.

Since I am officially a farmer, I took some of my produce down to the county fair today for judging. I brought a quart of pickled beets and eggs and pints of pickled green beans, salsa verde, tomato sauce (made from the white Dr. Carolyn tomato), and apple butter. I’ll find out next weekend if my goods are ribbon-worthy. I think I’ll go to the fair next Saturday, wearin’ my overalls.

The kind folks at HomeExpo have compiled a gigantic list of plans and blueprints to build practically anything you might want to build, from greenhouses to solar cookers, walking sticks to chainmail armour. It’s do-it-yourself heaven.

So you’ve got a major appliance on the fritz. Squeaky dryer, for example, or leaky dish washer. Odds are you can fix it yourself if you only know what to fix. To educate yourself, make use of the American Appliance Company’s appliance diagnostoc charts. They’ve got charts available for most every brand of major appliance, complete with photographs. And should the repair require parts, they’ll be more than happy to sell you some.

A family of five cats plus two diagnosis of feline leukemia (despite vaccination) equals a very upset household. We’ve turned our house into two sealed quarantine chambers, with the two separate from the three. All want to go out and play like they used to, but they can’t for a long while. If ever. We’re still sorting things out and coming up with a plan.

What do I and the Thirty Years War have in common? As of today, we’ve both been around the same length of time. Though I doubt that, hundreds of years from now, people will write about me in the next twelve months as “The Thirty Years Eric.”

Chris and I went to the drive-in theater over the weekend. It was the first time for both of us in many years. We saw Rat Race, and both of us enjoyed the extreme silliness. It was nice to see something besides the devestation on nearly every TV channel. This drive-in is closing soon, but unlike the rest which are vanishing, this one is being replaced by a new two-screen drive-in theater a bit further up the road.

I am, and always have been, a sky gazer. I have been known to peer into the night sky for hours, taking in the bredth and beauty of it all. This drive led to my pursuit of a degree in astrophysics, so I could make sense of it all. In my thirty years of gazing, there has been one constant: airplanes. My Missouri childhood home was close enough to St. Louis to see quite a bit of traffic. The New Mexico desert skies were less populated, but the planes were there. When I moved to Georgia, I was amazed by the amount of traffic. The first night I spent in a cow pasture watching for meteors, I quickly gave up on the showers to count planes. At one time, I counted fourty planes in my field of view at the same time. But tonight, for what is likely to be only time in my life, the sky is silent. It is eerie, when you realize what is missing. The silence of jet engines is louder than the scourge of crickets we currently have on the farm. It is eerie.

We’ve been warned for years that things like this would happen eventually, no matter how strict we made things. To actually watch it happen is staggering. The next few days are going to be rough, indeed.

This is the best explaination of how to play cricket that I’ve ever seen. It’s written for an American audience, and it answers all the questions I’ve ever had about the game. I used to watch cricket games going on in college (played entirely by foreign students), and never completely understood what was happening. I want to play now. (Thanks, Brennan.)