The Life of Lou Ruppert

The kale sprouts are starting to get their true leaves. I ate a couple and they taste like kale, of course. The crocuses an old girlfriend and I planted in my front yard, before she got a house of her own, have come up, but haven’t blossomed yet. The catnip plants are starting to sprout at their base, but haven’t sent stalks up yet. The tulips are sending up shoots. I’m trying to keep track of when these things all happen.

Ages ago, people used to be able to tell their whole agricultural year based on what nature around them was doing. Between tracking solstices and equinoxes, and noticing what was in bloom or in fruit, one could get a pretty good idea what time of year it was, and would then know what needed to be done in the garden. Now we use Google or pay for an annual planting almanac.

My annual dandelion wine party is coming up soon. I always try to time it a week or two before the actual flowers come into bloom so that I can recruit workers at the party. The main brunt of the harvest usually falls in the first or second week of May here. That means the bottling party that precedes the tasting party will need to happen soon. By tracking what happens when, I can come up with a second excuse to celebrate when we bottle it. Maybe it’ll double as a crocus blossom celebration, or a festival to celebrate the buds of the tulips. People could build anticipation by watching their flower beds. Meanwhile, I’m watching my dormant garden, looking for an excuse to party. Summer is on its way!

Studies have shown that people have a hard time sleeping when exposed to bright lights at night. I try to dim mine an hour or two before bedtime, but usually there’s something I “absolutely have to finish” on the computer. So, despite my best efforts, I still end up getting beamed in the face with artificial sunlight. Thanks to a program I found recently, however, I no longer need to worry about getting a sunburn from my bright screen.

The program is called F.Lux, and it works by dimming the color temperature of your monitor as it gets later in the day, based on the sunrise and sunset times in your zip code. As I’m typing this, my screen colors are very mellow, like sunset in a hayfield. Running F.Lux, I don’t get that feeling like I’m in an interrogation room anymore, like I would before with a bright screen in a dark room. It’s available for PC, Mac, and Windows and is free, but sadly not open source yet.

I just got back from a fun religious retreat this weekend. The main theme was cool coincidences in which God intervenes in our lives for our benefit or the benefit of others. I thought it was a pretty cool coincidence, since I blogged partially about that yesterday, unaware of what the conference would be about. I’ll write more about that later, when I’m well rested, but I wanted to share my delight at things turning out that way. Even though it might seem like I had a premonition, I really had no idea what was in store for me.

Every time I see the name Hartford, I’m reminded of one of my ancestors, Thomas Hooker, who founded the state of Connecticut and the city of Hartford. A friend’s brother-in-law is from Hartford, and another friend used to work at the insurance company of the same name. Today I saw a boat named USS Hartford in the news and it got me thinking about the whole thing.

Thomas Hooker was a puritan preacher in the late 1600s. He would have probably lived out his life in England had his ideas not been so controversial to the religious establishment of the time. Through a series of random events, he was forced to flee to Holland, and then forced to flee again to the US. He could then have lived out his days as the preacher in a small church near Harvard Square, but somehow he ended up moving west into the wilderness and founding a colony in the middle of what is now Connecticut. The ideas he used for the constitution of that settlement were part of the basis of the US Constitution, and the name of his city is now everywhere. It’s like a chain reaction all starting from one little guy going to seminary in England and getting some difficult questions in his head. How weird is that? Could anyone have predicted that he would travel to all of those places and affect the world in such a big way?

When I hear that name, it’s like a little tendril of connection between this guy three hundred years ago and me today. That’s exciting. In a room surrounded by people, it’s fun to imagine who of the people there might turn out to be noteworthy in ten or sixty years’ time. I could be standing next to the next president or the next serial killer. When Charles Manson’s mom was feeding little Charlie, could she have imagined what he would have turned out to be? It took Albert Einstein two years to find a job when he got out of college, and had to have a friend’s dad’s help in finally landing a position. And when he did, they wouldn’t promote him because he didn’t study the stuff he needed for his job. He’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant out of wedlock around that time too. Does anything in that say “brilliant physicist?”

When Thomas Hooker’s friends probably sat him down and were like “Dude, what are you doing with your life? You’re going to lose your job, or worse, you might provoke the crown into executing you!” I wonder if he knew what was in store for him. All the preparation in the world is no match for the random “hand of God” in our lives. Anyone can be a fiery preacher, but who is going to found a colony on the other side of the world? Anyone can be crazy, but who is going to be a mass murdering cult leader? Do guidance counselors have any pamphlets for that? Anybody can study physics for hours and be fascinated with science, but who is going to be a world famous scientific visionary? It’s impossible to predict it. That’s fascinating to me. Will people in the future be writing about your or me in the same way as they have Einstein or Thomas Hooker?

So, while it was unfortunate to hear about those sailors getting injured in the Strait of Hormuz, part of me smiled and thought “Old Thomas, you’ve done it again.”

One of the things that makes me happy is when I can come up with a good cheap recipe on the spot. It’s like I’ve cheated the system or something. I got a chance to work from home this afternoon, and decided to use it as an opportunity to cook up a chicken leg I had in the fridge. I also had some leftover lablabi (more on that gem another time) and some chili beans. I threw it all together in a pot with some wine that had begun to turn, and simmered it all afternoon. Using nothing but ingredients I had on hand, mostly just leftovers, I created an amazing meal. I love it when that happens! And because I was home, I didn’t spend any more time away from the computer than I would have at work, so it was like getting a free chef to cook for me.

Springtime has always been the season for spacing out and being too drowsy to get anything done. My Wednesday class is normally difficult because, number one, it’s Arabic, and number two, I’m usually in a food coma because it’s right after lunch. Well, today I got to add number three: because it’s springtime. So, what’s a guy to do when his brain is not working, his body is exhausted, and yet the cruel universe still insists on making him try to get things done? The mighty blitz.

I don’t remember where I heard of the blitz, but it’s a productivity strategy where you just sit down and do as much as you can over a set period of time. Today I blocked out my lunch hour and installed a new webmail program for my church. I had been procrastinating that one forever! It went so well that after dinner I blocked out an hour and a half and entered most of my Arabic vocabulary into my study program. The trick is to set a block of time and focus on being efficient and fruitful during that time period, not on actually trying to get a lot done overall. It short-circuits the mental process that says “I am a zombie today. How will I ever get this done? We’re doomed! Lets just watch TV instead!” The new mental process says “Lets see how much I can get done right now, and we’ll worry about finishing it another time when we have more horsepower available, if need be.” It works great.

I finished watching Victorian Farm the other night. It’s a great series. I used some of my thoughts on it for my weekly Bible study. That’s a good justification for watching TV, right?

Things from the 1800s always bring back memories of growing up in rural upstate New York. We had an old farmhouse that was probably a hundred years old at the time, and lived simply in a couple of its rooms. While my classmates used to watch TV for entertainment, we didn’t always have a working TV, so we went for walks instead, or played games. We spent some time without running water inside of the house, except for sulfur water, so we’d draw water at our cousins’ farm and use that for drinking, and use the outhouse outside instead of the toilet inside. I remember gathering firewood for the stove, and the days of boiling maple sap trying to make syrup. Scattered around the area were rusting artifacts from the era depicted on Victorian Farm.

The thing is, despite what most people would probably describe as poverty, I was probably much better off than my peers at the time. I was creatively and intellectually stimulated, unexposed to consumerism and the selfishness that is modeled in popular culture. I ate healthy real foods, lovingly prepared by my own mother. I got lots of exercise and learned valuable skills by watching my parents. Most importantly, though, was that I learned that you don’t need much to have everything you need.

Some of the best times of my life have been when I’ve had almost nothing. Watching a series like Victorian Farm reminds me of how much we’ve lost as a culture, in terms of our connection with nature and our sense of what’s really important. When I have kids of my own, I hope to give them the same grounding in simplicity and self-sufficiency that I had in that old farmhouse.

Between a parade and full-fledged festival, a day of hardware work, and my main machine at home deciding that it doesn’t want to do video and audio at the same time, my time has shrunken down to below nothing. I can either blog daily for the sake of devotion, or I can do what I’m here for. I chose the latter.

I’ll probably continue the challenge a few days past Easter in order to pretend I’m still fulfilling my vows. I’ll also try to pick up as if nothing happened, which is what you’re supposed to do when you fall off the time management wagon. Still, I can’t help but be a bit disappointed, or proud that I didn’t give up.

Latest mind trick: Not being angry at myself for not getting everything done in a day that I need to, as long as I did my best with the time and worked fruitfully.

For health reasons, it’s important to slow down between work and sleep. It’s like the clutch when switching gears. Without it, you get ground down.

Last night, I made the mistake of checking my phone messages before bed. I had two texts from people asking for help with things, and I figured I’d follow up on both of them. I got online and discovered another request for help, so I tried to take care of that one too. Before I knew it, an hour had passed, and two of the problems couldn’t be resolved until the next morning anyway. At that point, it was too late to turn back. My mind was committed to solving their problems.

The result was that I ended up sleeping poorly. I made the mistake of trying to switch from hard-core problem solving mode to deep sleep mode without a buffer in between. There was no time for my brain to coast down. It took an hour of laying there, feeling like I’d just drank a shot of espresso, waiting for my body to slow itself down, before I could sleep. That’s not natural.

From the ancestral environment that people began in, right up until pre-industrial times, people lived by the sun’s schedule. If it got dark at 7pm, you weren’t up doing things until midnight. Sure, you might knock off a few tasks by soothing dim candlelight, but for the most part your activity-level would be governed by the sun. There was a natural period for winding down. Now we move things all over the place and wonder why we’re not healthy.

Each night, I try to stop using the computer and the phone an hour or so before I plan to go to bed. When I’m particularly organized, I’ll dim down the lights and grab a book. The times I do that end up being the best nights of sleep. Most things in nature are governed by the rhythm of the day or of the seasons. We’re foolish to pretend we’re any different.

After harvesting all of those kale seeds a week or so ago, I wanted to make sure they were viable. No sense planting them if they aren’t going to grow, right? Here’s the proof that they’re alive, after perhaps a week of growth:

These guys sprang up in no time at all!

I have to admit that there’s a kind of thrill from using those seeds I spent all that time harvesting. It’s a cool hack that cost me nothing but my time. Meanwhile, I feel connected to my ancestors who used to have no other way of handling crops but to do exactly what I did: hours spent breaking apart seed pods and pouring the seeds into something for use the following spring. The tradition begins again, and one more basic life skill is saved from obscurity.

These sprouts are only about two inches high. I made a mistake by making the soil too moist and reusing old potting soil for the starter medium, so I ended up with a wispy colony of what seems to be mold in the pot. Most of it is gone, but when it first appeared, it looked like thick cobwebs. (You can still see some bits of the mold colony, if you click the picture and look at it up close. Fascinating.) Because of that, I doubt these plants will be very healthy where they are. I’ll let them grow and thin them out anyway, just to see how invincible kale really is, but my actual crop will be planted in the garden itself this spring.