Posts Tagged ‘learning’
Just Learned
After a lifetime of identifying as a tail-end Baby Boomer, I have recently discovered that I am a member of Generation Jones, a distinction coined by an American cultural commentator in 1999. Consisting of people born between the years 1954-1965, the issues we faced during our coming-of-age years were different from our older Boomer siblings. I certainly recognize the characteristics of pessimism and cynicism in my young self that are generally attributed to Jonesers.
I remember being told in a class in high school during the energy crisis years in the ‘70s that it was unlikely we would ever live in single-family homes by the time we would be having kids of our own. The use of DDT had made bald eagles nearly extinct. We were burning a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer. The Watergate scandal led to the US President’s resignation. Classic rock music was getting squished by disco and punk. It was all rather depressing.
When Cyndie and I started dating, I held the mindset of not wanting to bring children into the messed-up world. In reality, we did buy single-family homes, I landed a good job, we raised two wonderful children, and thankfully, their development helped me to discover the need to seek treatment for depression.
While reading about Generation Jones, I saw this tidbit that made me chuckle: What does Elvis mean to these three generations? Boomers > King; Jonesers > fat; Gen Xrs > Costello.
My Boomer siblings remember when phone numbers started with letters. When I was starting high school, we had a second phone line exclusively for teen use. Boomers watched the “Mickey Mouse Club” on TV in black and white. I watched “The Banana Splits” or “The Monkees” in color.
The distinction makes sense to me. The span of time originally associated with the Baby Boom generation was too long. Things changed so fast, we Jonesers grew up in a different world compared to the main Boomers.
It’s all a far cry from life today. Cyndie and I are currently navigating the complications of avoiding driving on the fresh sealcoat on our driveway for a couple of days by parking in the back yard and driving through the back pasture and the hay field to get to the road.
While Cyndie was closing gates after I had driven her car through, she took a picture of Mia coming over to see what the heck we were up to.
When I made the second pass of cutting all the overgrown lawn areas a few days ago, I left out the labyrinth. Not only does the grass need cutting in there again, but the bushes are in dire need of a visit from the hedge trimmer.
I wonder how much of my drive to have our landscape look well-kempt aligns with the traits of being in Generation Jones, or if it’s more a carryover Boomer trait.
I’ve learned enough things in my life to sense that there are likely as many similarities between the two generations as there are differences.
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Learning How
Every day I am learning how to do something. Some days it’s as simple as figuring out how to identify what I want to do next. Sorting out wants from needs and determining priorities. We do that our entire lives but I feel like I am still learning how to do it with each new day’s parameters.
None of us have been to January 19, 2024, until now, under today’s circumstances. It wouldn’t hurt to take a humble and inquisitive view of whatever tasks we face each day, whether they are familiar or not. We might learn something. For one example, we all need to learn to adapt to the ongoing changes of our warming planet.
Lately, I find a lot of my learning has to do with our dog, Asher. My life would be a heck of a lot easier if he spoke words in my language.
“Just tell me what you want!”
That usually gets me the tilted-head blank stare or just continued whining.
One thing that he seems very happy with is heavy physical play from me. I’m not always in the mood, but when I am, I try to give him a strong dose of roughhousing.
His foster mom told us he liked to play rough with their other dogs so I use my hands like a dog’s mouth and grab at his neck and ears when we do battle. Sometimes I push him away (he charges right back at me) and sometimes I pull him in to keep him guessing.
You can see in the pictures that Asher has a ball in his mouth. That is the object we are battling over for possession. If there is no toy to occupy his teeth, my head and hands become the next target for a grasp by his jaw.
The matches are no-holds-barred and I need to be sure to remove my glasses because I get punched a lot when he is trying to reach out and get a leg up on me.
The struggle I have with this game is that he never seems to get tired of it. I need to learn how to nurture a transition to a cool-down activity when I’m ready for a break in the action.
There is no tapping out, although he is sensitive enough to back off and check on me if he notices I got hurt.
The easiest way to switch his focus is to produce a dog treat for him to eat. Asher has learned an impressive level of command compliance indoors with training drills. I wish the offering of treats carried the same power in the great outdoors.
We both are learning more about each other every day.
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We’re Learning
“I’m not there yet.”
“But you don’t know where you’re going.”
“At least I am going.”
Cyndie has a tee shirt with the phrase, “Not all who wander are lost.” Well, not all who are lost, wander, so there.
That reversal of thinking reminds me of a cartoon I saw that showed two birds with binoculars sitting on a branch in a tree, exclaiming, “Ooh! A khaki-vested paunch belly!” The panel was titled: The Birdwatcherwatchers.
Yesterday we had our final of two private sessions with the trainer from our 6-session dog obedience class. All things considered, Asher is doing great for his age and the relatively short amount of time he has been living with us. It gives me hope for future progress potential.
The amount of success won’t be limited by his ability to learn but by our ability to improve our skills of consistently delivering timely commands, acknowledgments, and rewards. One clear example of what Cyndie and I need to work on is our goal of teaching a “Leave it!” command.
We now know we have been forgetting this is a two-part command. If Asher ‘leaves it’ we are happy to go on our way but since all the things we are working on involve our dog checking back with us, we need to teach Asher to look back at our eyes for confirmation of ‘leaving it.’
He gets rewarded for looking back at us after obeying the command, not for simply ignoring a particular object of interest.
We walked through an exercise several times where our common mistakes were repeating commands (he will learn to ignore repetitive words out of our mouths), tugging the leash for compliance (what if he’s off-leash? He will learn to wait for the tug, and if it doesn’t come, compliance must not be required), and failing to notice when he looked up at us for confirmation/reward.
What worked best for us was to have the trainer talk us through the routine as it was happening. Could she just follow us around all the time?
I was so tired driving home after the session I struggled mightily to stay alert. Cyndie served a mid-afternoon snack while I read in my recliner and then sleep overcame me. That’s one way to lose track of a day.
I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ll get there eventually.
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Yard Birds
********** (Yesterday, an otherwise wonderful Sunday morning, I failed in my battle with learning the new “block” system of editing a WordPress post. I lost my temper, threw my computer, and went outside without publishing a post, where I would be able to work on projects I could control.
Try as I might to format the text and images to achieve my intention, the results consistently foiled me. After repeated unintended results which looked ridiculously wrong, from which I could not find the “undo” option that would at least return to the previous look, I boiled over.
Without going back and striving to accomplish my goal, I am, for now, resigning myself to living with whatever result this new editor mode produces, whether I like it, or not.
The following is the text and images I wanted to post yesterday morning, not as I intended it to look, but as the WordPress software allows me to present.)
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The pullets and Rocky are still confined to a fenced courtyard attached to the coop, but the big girls –a buff orpington, an australorpe, and a wyandotte– wander the property freely.
Saturday, while Cyndie was cleaning up the pine needle aftermath left from our removal of another dead pine tree, the three hens showed up to get in on the action.
Never one to pass up an opportunity to offer food to her loved ones, Cyndie had a treat ready to serve.
The girls rarely pass up the offerings of anything edible.
I think it shows in their not-so-svelte silhouettes.
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Gender Reveal
We are two months into our third year of buying chicks online and having them shipped through the mail. This year is the first time we have had reason to question the gender of one of the birds. Each day the evidence mounts, pointing to a probability that one of our two New Hampshire chicks is a cockerel instead of a pullet.
Do you see any signs of a difference between these two?
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The second one’s face is a little out of focus, but you can still get a general sense of the difference in the wattle and comb and detect the wider chest of the young dude on the left.
Cyndie thinks she heard an early practice crow last week that sounded like a “honk” before our rooster suspicions began to really gel. It was such an uncharacteristic weird sound, she had no idea who made it until we started looking into the possibility we might have a rooster. Cyndie then found some recordings online that matched what she’d heard near our coop.
Looking back, a behavior Cyndie witnessed one night when she got to the coop before they were all inside can be seen in a whole new light. When a Light Brahma and a Dominique straggled behind outside after all the others were in, the big New Hampshire suddenly ran down the ramp and grabbed the Brahma by the back of the neck, pushed her head into the ground, and held it there for a bit.
Then the New Hampshire let go and walked back up the ramp and inside. The other two followed soon after. Cyndie was shocked by the scene and I remember her describing it as seeming like the New Hampshire went out and ordered the other two to come inside. We thought it was just one of the hens being “bossy.”
Based on what we are coming to terms with now, that behavior would be totally in line with the way a rooster would treat the hens.
So, I guess we’ve finally had the question answered for us as to whether we should get a rooster to protect the hens, or not.
All that’s left now is to see if we can guide this cockerel toward behaving kindly with humans and ferociously toward predators when the rooster hormones fully kick in next year.
Cock-a-doodle-doooo!
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Powerful
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there is something to it
the energy
brain chemistry
powerful juju
but who’s in control?
who’s driving that bus?
because it’s not in control
and moving way too fast
so much momentum
ignores the breath
it’s flooding the circuits
alarm bells and whistles
betray their intent
when employed so flat out
too many days in a row
searching for relief
from the race
by racing
until
by some different magic
the solution just shows up
with little in the way of fanfare
the race can be over
if you can choose
to simply
stop
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Learning More
Last night we attended a community education class in River Falls on the topic of planning when to initiate receiving Social Security payments. As you might imagine, it was rich with fascinating detail and enticing facts. Yawn.
One of the highlights of the night was the series of images used for the presentation, collected from years of marketing literature received by the instructor for his financial planning business. He pointed out the universal themes on marketing materials from a wide array of retirement industry service providers shows happy, swooning gray-haired couples on beaches wearing light-colored linen clothes.
He seemed to have amassed an endless supply of these images and has devised a keen way of getting additional use out of the photos.
One aspect of importance he conveyed was the total amount of money ultimately available if certain choices are made. Make a different choice, you end up getting less money in the end.
So what? That parameter of maximizing the total dollars collected over time does not hold much allure for me.
If by the end of 25-years, when I’m in my mid-to-late 80s, whether my total amount received ends up plus or minus $20K seems an illogical parameter on which to prioritize. More important to me is whether I will have enough income month to month to cover my expenses.
Especially when the length of time I will be collecting is not a given. Why set a goal to collect the most money possible by the time I reach 85-years when the timing of my demise is not guaranteeable?
I tend to spend within my means, so if I have less money, I spend less.
All this planning would sure be a lot easier if I knew what my medical expenses will be as I age. Something tells me the discs in my lower back won’t become less of an issue in my eighties.
When we walked out to the parking lot of the high school in the dark after the session, there weren’t many cars remaining. A woman in front of us climbed into the only car parked in the front row. That created a problem for us, because we had parked in the front row. Where was Cyndie’s car? It made no sense.
I walked closer to read the license plate on the car despite the headlights shining in my eyes and recognized them as Cyndie’s. About the same time, the woman was discovering the car she was in didn’t look anything like hers.
Somehow, though Cyndie claims she didn’t do anything, as we approached, our lights came on and the woman in front of us assumed it was her car responding to her fob, so she climbed into Cyndie’s Honda. The woman’s Subaru was out of view in the adjacent spot beyond ours, in the second row.
We all had a good laugh over the confusion.
This kind of thing happens when aging minds are preoccupied with planning for our eventual financial scenarios.
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New Focus
We have something new to focus on today: altering the natural instinct of two broody hens. It is interesting to discover we are far from alone. It appears that the primary method is to put the hen in “jail” for a couple days. A cage lacking in a cozy place to settle, elevated to allow air cooling from below, seems to be the go-to solution.
Something along the lines of a rabbit hutch or a dog crate is common. I did an image search and discovered a remarkable number of people have documented their version of a ‘broody breaker.’
I was thinking about making something out of material I have stacked in the shop garage, but the lure of a quick purchase to get the ideal cage is a strong temptation. I wish we weren’t dealing with two at once.
That actually fuels our interest in breaking this habit as swiftly as possible, as the information we have read indicates the behavior is contagious.
Two days ago, I was oblivious to the syndrome of a broody hen. After reading on the topic, I suddenly feel included in a group of many people raising backyard chickens. There are so many versions of the same story, with the common thread on the internet revealing folks in search of details on how to deal with it.
This reminds me of the first time I discovered a massive magazine display at a bookstore. I had no idea there were so many publications. Growing up, I was exposed to a tiny subset: Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and Popular Science were of particular interest, among several others that made their way into our house over the years.
Standing in front of a wall display featuring magazines covering more lifestyles and hobbies than I realized existed was a real eye opener for me. Had I known at the time, I could have picked up whatever the backyard chicken mag of the time was, and read all about it.
I haven’t been to a bookstore in a while, but I bet that magazine rack isn’t nearly as impressive. It is probably a single tablet device connected to the internet with links to every imaginable topic. There, you can find pictures of innumerable versions of solutions to whatever new problem you have stumbled upon.
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Ghost Leaves
On a walk through the woods with Delilah yesterday morning, my attention was grabbed by some disintegrating leaves that never fell from the tree. They looked like ghosts of leaves.
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Why did they not fall to the ground?
Especially in the face of some wind gusts that were strong enough to break loose a roof panel on our wood shed. Yesterday, there was dead calm in the morning, so I took advantage of the perfect weather to work on replacing the busted section.
Learning from experience, I added some cross supports that will better hold the overhanging side from flexing, should future winds blow from that same direction.
That simple structure, built to store split logs while they dry for a year, has provided multiple lessons from failure.
When it blew over in a storm, I figured out a way to secure it to the ground by stringing some old fence wire over the cross beams and running it through the eye of earth anchor augers in three strategic locations.
With the help of my friend, Mike Wilkus, who came to my rescue when re-assembling the shed after it had overturned, I learned how to improve the diagonal bracing to stabilize the overall structure.
It leaves me wondering what the next failure will be that might teach me yet another lesson in the great world of being an amateur builder.
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Better Sink
I am always learning, and thanks to George’s comment on yesterday’s post, where he reminded me about something he shared on a recent visit, I have a renewed appreciation for the value of our grassy fields. Improving our planet is not all about planting more trees.
Grasslands are actually a more reliable carbon sink than tree forests, because they store much of the carbon underground in the root systems.
George pointed me to a podcast where I was able to learn about the Santa Maria Cattle Company in the Chihuahuan desert ecosystem where they are successfully reversing the desertification and building grassland using cattle as the primary tool.
Seems like inverse logic, doesn’t it?
Mismanaged, cows can overgraze and destroy the grassland. Luckily, better thinking is leading to a more enlightened perspective. It is possible to learn from our mistakes and choose a better way. Fernando Falomir and his family are showing what is possible and sharing what they have learned so others can do the same.
Inspiring!
George also turned us on to Gabe Brown and the work he is doing to champion regenerative agriculture. Turning dirt into soil! Seems so simple.
Instead of the convention of tilling the earth to plant one crop and ply herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, while also needing to add irrigation to achieve results, Gabe reveals how farmers can succeed by mimicking the diversity of nature instead.
The compacted and deadened dirt can be exchanged for a thick aerated biomass soil that seems so obviously logical as to not require harsh and harmful chemicals to be viable. It can be done, because that is the natural way things worked before we started slamming our short-sighted mass production methods across the land.
In fact, we have a wonderful example right in the heart of Minnesota, where George has returned to his family land to put these precious principles into practice with Walker Farms.
It’s not all about trees.
I’ve definitely learned that.
Thanks, George Walker!
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Relative Something 