I have just added some new parallels. I killed a little more than half of my trees. The simple explanation is root rot that weakened the plants right before a massive heat wave. I had assumed root rot was impossible with the soil mix I use, so I didn’t really worry about it, and now I’m suffering the consequences. Here’s the complicated explanation: first, some back story; this year I starved my plants of fertilizer pretty much all spring long for a rather complicated reason revolving around manipulation of the annual hormone cycle of deciduous trees. In early June I started using an organic fertilizer often used in hydroponic systems called Age Old Grow. I’ll come back to this.

I built a pond in my backyard mainly for the purpose of watering my trees. My problem with tap water was that I was seeing massive, ugly mineral buildup on the rims of my pots and on the trunks and leaves of my trees. Tap water here is full of chlorine and other chemicals and lots of salts and other minerals. Pond water solves this problem because the chlorine evaporates and the mineral particles bind to eachother and settle to the bottom of the pond.

So, this year is the first year I watered my trees exclusively from the pond, and the first year that I tried an experimental nutrient program. This turned out to be a terrible combination. I have never had problems with root rot in the past because the chlorine in the tap water basically sterilized my root systems, which isn’t ideal but it works fine. So I removed this preventative against root rot, and at the same time fed my trees an organic nutrient known to promote root rot if used improperly. I was using it improperly.

The lesson to be learned from this is that by attempting to fix a problem that was basically aesthetic in nature, and definitely manageable, I created a whole new set of problems which were much more severe than the original issue I was trying to fix. I think this is something society does over and over again. It’s a rather unspecific principle that is difficult to learn from because of its own subtetly. Think of our foreign policy and how our government often attempts to fix a small, manageable foreign situation, and often ends up with larger problems as a result. Think of all the many subsidies given to different industries for a variety of reasons, which so often end up having entirely unintended consequences for the economy. Think of the current economic crisis and just wait for the problems that will arise as a result of the actions taken to artificially stimulate economic growth. I could go on like this for page after page.

As for my trees: I am feeding the survivors an enzymatic nutrient that breaks down the rotting roots and promotes healthy new root formation. I believe that it is working. I’m glad to be able to learn from my mistakes, and I think I see this disaster as an essential step towards mastering the art.

So, many of you know that after being unemployed for 3 months, I started working in the civil filing department of the Sacramento Superior Court. It was a temporary contract, so I never felt the comfort of being securely employed. I finished that job about 3 weeks ago, and I was almost in a panic about what I was going to do for work.

Luckily I only had to endure one jobless week. I just got a job as a bike messenger for a company called Attorney’s Diversified Services (ADS).

So here’s what happened. First of all, I got to know a number of bike messengers while working at the courthouse. I worked behind the civil filing window with all the other clerks, and bike messengers bring documents to the courthouse to be filed, so I’d see the same general group of couriers every day. Near the end of my temp contract I started asking everybody I knew if they were hiring, including approaching most of the bike messengers. I figured that my experience at the courthouse may be valuable to legal services companies and/or law firms. The first week after my contract ended I brought my resume to dozens of these types of companies. One week later I got a call from ADS and landed a job

The pay is terrible, BUT, the job is awsome. This is my second week and I already love it. I get to ride my bike all over downtown all day. It’s also very interesting. Legal stuff has always been intersting to me. I get to see how a lot of that world works. I’m in and out of law offices all day, I’ve filed all sorts of documents with the superior court, appellate briefs with the third district appellate court, documents under seal at federal court, served a lawsuit against Arnold Schwarzenegger (yes, I’m doing process service), filed articles of incorporation at the secretary of state, done some interesting little odd jobs for clients, etc.

So that’s what’s going on with me. I’m making about a third what I used to, and I don’t expect I can ever make much more doing this, but for now it’s fun and new and I’M NOT UNEMPLOYED.

I removed all the old soil and trimed the roots back substantially.

And here it is replanted.

it is planted in my special soil mix which I mix myself using four seperately sifted materials. It is tied into the pot with anchor string. I sprinkled the bare roots with a fungal inoculant that contains multiple varieties of microrhiza and trichoderma fungi and beneficial bacteria bacillus subtilis to create an active soil ecology and ‘rhizosphere’. I also used a rooting hormone when I watered it.  It should be allright.

I cannot start the training that I’d like to quite yet. I have to wait until this years’ shoots ‘harden off’ which should be early June. If i trim the foliage now I will mess up the hormone cycle in the plant and basicaly halt the root production that I need right now since I repotted. So I did a little sketch of my training plans.

the lower drawing represents the tree as I bought it. The upper drawing is the basic structure I want to bring forth. I am fortunate to have so many small branches to work with. I will be able to choose the most ideally placed brances and trim out the rest. The darker lines on the upper drawing show the basic position I will move the selected branches to.

I bought some other trees as well that are waiting to be repotted. Wait for the three tree shohin forest that I will be doing next week.

Just for fun, here are the new bonsai tables I built just last weekend.

I got the hot tub free on craigslist; the patio stones, bricks, and some of the cinder blocks, were free from craigslist; the sink was found on the property I’m renting, probably been sitting around for 30 years. I bought the mortar, pump, filter, and various piping, fittings, valves, and other random materials. I probably spent about $300 on the whole project, and certainly not all at one time. I’m very happy with how it turned out. I just put some cheap small fish in it, and I’ll add the fish I really want in a couple of weeks once I get a biological cycle going. I still need to add patio to the other side of the pond, fill the seats of the hot tub with river rocks, add pond plants, plant ornamental grasses in the holes in the cinder blocks, etc. I’ll post more pictures later this year. I’m trying to run the thing chemical free. I’m going to experiment this year, and hopefully next year grow tilapia and crayfish to eat.

Enjoy the photos of the whole project, starting with the completed pond.

1) I’m engaged. I proposed to Kylie on Valentines day. We are going to be married this summer on the beach. More details on that will come once we have a solid date and details.

2) I haven’t eaten Beef, Pork, or any kind of bird or other land animal for about 3 years. Even more interesting, this is not a moral decision for me. At least not exactly. I kinda forget why I stopped in the first place, though I guess it was a mixture of fashion and health concerns. For a while I didn’t eat any meat at all, but I gave that up a couple of years ago and now I eat whatever I want, which just so happens to not include any land animals. I have planned on eating chicken for the last two years and just haven’t gotten around to it. Not once. The reason why is that a few years ago I decided I would eat birds again if I raised them and killed them myself. This is a very difficult thing to do when you live downtown…  I don’t think I will EVER eat beef or pork again, simply because I find the thought, appearance, and smell of red meat to be disgusting now.

3) I’m a bit of a gamer. I play Xbox Live way too much. I love Halo 3 and right now I’m really into Call of Duty World at War. If anybody has an Xbox and would like to add me as a friend, my gamertag is Kipersnack.

4) I am a small ‘l’ libertarian. (most people probably already know this but I’m running out of facts here) I do vote Libertarian, but only as a protest vote. If I actually thought a Libertarian party candidate had a chance to win, (which will never happen) I might not vote for them. The party platform isn’t terrible, but they’re candidates generally stink. They’ll take anybody that has a name, instead of looking at the candidates actual credentials.

5) I love Anime. I’ve seen hundreds of movies and series. My favorite is the Ghost in the Shell series. It is incredibly intelligent writing and sophisticated plotlines. I also love the disney-ish fantasy style, like Princess Mononoke, Howles Moving Castle, Nausica of the Valey of the Wind, etc. For anymody that isn’t into anime, I recomend watching Akira, or Paprika. Those two movies are excellent, and also very representative of mainstream anime.

6) I’m an extremely Un-superstitious person. (is that a word?). I have to bite my tounge when somebody starts into a conversation about astrological signs. I know it’s just silly fun but I’m amazed at how many people (most, it seems) fully believe that their zodiac sign somehow says something about their personality. I just don’t believe it’s even slight based in truth. At all. I also don’t believe in ghosts, which is another subject that comes up often enough to annoy me. When people get into their stories about their ghostly experiences, I’m allways saying to myself that this person is either lying, or they have screwed up their memory so bad by telling and retelling this story that they actually think it’s true. I’m sure there are forces at play in our universe that we haven’t yet explained with science, but making up magical alternative belief systems is silly and doesn’t explain anything.

7) I’ve been to jail. That’s right, I’m a hardened criminal. Or rather I neglected to pay a speeding ticket once. Same thing. Anyway, when I lived in Vegas, I got pulled over for an Illegal U-turn, and when the cop ran my license, he saw an unpaid ticket and he arrested me. I even had money in my account to cover it, but it didn’t matter. It was a friday night, and I had to stay in there until early monday morning because they apparently don’t process payments over the weekend. I wasn’t allowed to pay the $250 fine myself at all. I had to have a friend come down and pay it. It was an extremely uncomfortable experience all around. The worst part was sitting there and not having any idea when I would be released. I could have stayed for a week and been more comfortable if I had known exactly when I would be released. But two days sitting there thinking they would release me any minute was absolute hell for me.

So, I can’t really tag anybody else because everybody I know on the blogosphere has been tagged already.

He rescinded one of Bush’s executive orders which allowed former Presidents to claim executive privilege when faced with releasing old records. On top of that, he’s now making it more difficult for himself to classify documents under executive privilege, by suddenly requiring the attorney general to sign off before he can do so.

On his first day, he ordered a stop to all military trials at Gitmo. This is big because it has long be known that those trials were a complete joke. For a good understanding of the previous administrations policies regarding detainees, watch the documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side. Obama will order order Gitmo closed very soon, bet on it.

He has ordered all executive agencies to come up with a plan to expedite the compliance with all FOIA requests. Bush’s administration, specifically John Ashcroft, pretty much did the opposite by ordering everyone to do everything in their power to refuse or bog down FOIA requests. Obama had this to say:

For a long time now there has been too much secrecy in this city. The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, then it should not be disclosed. That era is now over. Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.

This Obama guy is pretty cool so far.

For years now, I’ve had a link in my sidebar to a study done by CATO entitled The Constitutional Record of George W Bush.  Obama should read that, and reverse the problems outlined in it one by on.

Another suggestion for Obama (by the way, these suggestions are being made on other blogs. I’m not original): END THE WAR ON DRUGS. I’m certainly not optimistic that this will happen, but here’s the argument. No set of laws and policies have done more to erode the people’s faith in their government than those known as the War on Drugs. It has ballooned the size of our prison system, created an unemployable underclass of nonviolent offenders, eroded our constitutional protections in a huge variety of ways, turned small town police forces across the nation into quasi-military operations with the equipment and gear that go along with it, and corrupted our justice system almost beyond repair by distorting the relationship between crime and apropriate punishment (mandatory minimums and three strike laws). But besides all that, (especially since nobody listens to common sense anymore when it comes to DRUGS) it could be a silver bullet for the recession. Consider this, alcohol prohibition was ended right at the end of the great depression, or at least right at the bottom of the deflationary cycle. Suddenly there was an entire new sector of economic growth. The legal trade of alchohol brought new tax revenue. It brought jobs in manufacturing, distribution, retail sales, bar and club revenue, etc.

UPDATE 1/23/09:

Since today’s news is right along the same lines as my post yesterday, I figure it belongs here.

Obama just ENDED THE WAR ON TERROR. That doesn’t mean that counterterroism measures are suspended. Quite the contrary, it free’s up intelligence to actually snoop out and fight terror, since that’s not what the War on Terror was about. It nothing more than symbolic bullshit meant to give wartime powers to the executive branch on any soil, including our own. Obama also just nullified every legal order made by any lawyer in the executive branch regarding interrogations since 9/11/2001.

This guy is turning out to be a libertarian’s dream. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of complaints about his fiscal policy, especially if/when it proves not to actually help the economy, but to hurt it instead through domestic inflation and the further weakening of the dollar as america’s credit rating plunges because of such a poor balance sheet. HOWEVER, I’ll be happy to take a strong civil libertarian executive with poor fiscal policy; especially since he’s replacing a tyrant with absolutely no incling of civil libertarianism AND absolutely shitty fiscal policy.

Some people will get it.

I’ve shown the big maple a few times on here, and it is still my favorite piece. The little guy is some kind of micro-leaf birch that I’ve been training for two years now.

I was waiting to show it until it got one more growth season and thickened up a bit, but this comparison was too cool to pass up. I am very proud of the little birch. Training it has been a bit of an experiment. I wish I had pictures of the little cutting that it was when I bought it. I have painstakingly pulled and moved every single branch on this tree to the position I wanted.

Here’s a picture of my primary method. It’s much to small to actually wire the branches so I pull them into position using thin string tied to wire anchors. This is a picture of the third or fourth set of strings employed over almost two years.

I now have about 10 shohin or mame style bonsai. They are becoming my specialty. This one is barely over 3 inches not including the pot. just wait til I grow it for a few more seasons.

I wanted to make some custom cement blocks for a yard project that I’m working on. (I’ll post pictures of the completed project later; until then it’s a suprise)

I thought It would be as simple as making a mold and pouring in cement. So I made a mold, which was itself a pain in the neck.

I wanted blocks with a hole in the middle, (which will make more sense when you see my final project later) so I cut 16 pieces of 4×4 8 inches each.

Then I spread vegetable oil all over everything to act as a releasing agent.

Then I mixed, dyed, and carefully poured the cement. I favored one side of each block with the 4×4s, but even the smaller wall of the blocks were close to 2 inches; everything was carefully measured. I had Kylie hold each block in place and help me trow the cement.

then I waited a couple of days for it all to set. for some reason I assumed I’d be able to simply take apart the mold and, with a mallet, hammer out the 4×4 centers and I’d have these custom blocks with holes in the middle. Unfortunately, my assumptions were incorrect.

I tried to extract the 4×4 on just three blocks. They all broke. The others are ALL cracked, even though I didn’t even try to take out the 4×4s.

What an enormous  waste of time and money.  Some quick research on the internet or just a call to my father would have saved me a lot of time and trouble. I called my dad after the fact and he explained the problems. First and most importantly, I used the wrong cement and aggregate. I needed to use Portland cement and probably smaller aggregate. I also should have used some type of synthetic fiber to make it even stronger. I shouldn’t have used wood 4×4s to mold the center hole, since the wood expanded and they were impossible to extract. And finally I should have kept it all wet while it cured.

I spent around 60 bucks on the whole thing, maybe a little more. And that was just for one batch of blocks; I was planning on doing another batch. mason blocks are about $2.00 apiece at Home Depot. I think I’ll just buy those to complete my project.