Spring Hare Moon
Yes, Ancientrails is has turned over the season in Seminole, Texas. The view out of my hotel window includes an Alon truckstop with several shiny container trucks and two tall pylon signs: McDonalds and Phillips and a blood red sun over all of them. I’m in America.
Please see Greatwheel either later today or tomorrow for the seasonal post about spring.
Right now I’m going to catch you up on news you might have missed if you hadn’t read the Seminole Sentinel. This is a solid newspaper with good reporting unlike the El Dorado rag from yesterday.
On the front page is coverage of an educational session for the Farm Bill. It gives the usual view from rural America. We needed it. It’s too late. But, we’re glad to have it. Next to it is some folks who run a guar processing plant trying to get compensation for lost crops last year.
Guar? You might say. Me, too. Turns out it’s a legume, valued for gum arabic and its nitrogen fixation. This is a crop so old that wikipedia says it has never been found in the wild. It was first cultivated in India. Reminds me that the world contains so much I don’t know. It grows in semi-arid climates and on poor soil, so it’s not a crop for the midwest.
On the editorial page under the cleverly worded Wright Words, by Dustin Wright (groan), comes this interesting news. On Valentine’s Day in Carlsbad, New Mexico the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant reported trace amounts of americium and plutonium found above ground. The plants monitoring and filtration system kept almost all of it from getting into the air above ground. Wright goes on to add, “there’s still speculation about what happened below ground.”
Now, I have a good friend who is a nuclear engineer (you know who you are) and he’s convinced me that nuclear power might be a good transition method of electrical generation. Still, these kind of events are worrisome.
Well, that’s all the news from Seminole, Texas. At least all I’m going to convey. Now it’s a shower, then on the road for Carlsbad Caverns.
