Well, the boys from the road crew were back today and finished off the job, but good. A tractor trailer was blocking my driveway and the trailer was an open topped box that was rapidly filled by an enormous wood chipper that ate whole sections of tree trunks that were ten feet around. The noise that came off of this thing was considerable and the hounds were incensed. The chipper finished off the big white pine in less than an hour and that included all the scraps that they had trimmed off the trunk.
Then they moved on and took care of the two ash trees. These were smaller but the hardness of the wood gave the machine a different sonic tone as it spat the sawdust into the trailer. And the wood was a lighter, cleaner looking stream as it flowed into the box. And soon they were gone too. Of course, gone didn’t include the debris that the crew left far and wide. Between sawdust, small branches and pine needles I’ll be cleaning up the tree bits for the whole of the spring.
But I’ll have to say I’m impressed by the state of the art in robotic forestry. It sort of reminded me of a Dr. Seuss book where some absurdly complicated string of machines reprocesses some thing into a completely different substance. The only thing missing were the absurdly bright primary and secondary colors along with Thing One and Thing Two running the machinery. And come to think of it, the foreman did look a little like the guy who didn’t want to eat the Green Eggs and Ham.
Well, after they finished, I went to work and when I got back home the temperature had dropped down into the forties and it was once again raining cats and dogs. You know I’m pretty sick and tired of the rain. Last year it rained endlessly from April to the end of June. I dream of kidnapping Camera Girl and dragging her to Southern Utah. When I was there, there was a little snow but the ground looked like a desert and at this point that would be A-OK with me. But the lure of the grandkids is too powerful for her.
So, I heard a little while ago that Israel counterattacked in Iran and some other places. Well, that’s a little disturbing. The way Joe Biden has been talking I think maybe they’re ready for some really bad things. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. I guess I’m just sick and tired of the forever wars. Maybe I’m so tired of it I’m willing to see it all blow up now. Just fire them all and let God sort it all out. It sounds right.
But then I think of the kids and the grandkids and of course I don’t want that to happen to them. So apparently, I’ll have to let the morons we have running our foreign policy continue on with their insane games and their demented strategies. Ukraine, Iran, Israel, Syria, China. All that crap.
Humans are the most remarkably clever animals. Look at those machines I saw working today. Reducing those trees to dust was an acceleration over nature of many orders of magnitude. They reduced the work of twenty or fifty years of natural processes to machine minutes. We are that paragon of animals that Shakespeare mentions. But simultaneously we are led by gibbering idiots. They could reduce the whole human race to dust in minutes. So, there it is.