What is a "tiehacker"?

"Tiehacker" is a term originating in the Ozark hills of southern Missouri. It referred to a class of people from WAY back in the hills that made a living cutting trees into ties for the railroad. I first heard the term from my wife shortly after we married. I had been working outside all day and was dirty and stinky. When I came inside, she told me I looked like a "tiehacker" and had to get cleaned up. She had learned the word from her father, and thought it just meant "a bum". Never having heard it before, I looked it up. Although I am not really a bum, I thought it was interesting, and I do have a life-long love affair going with the Ozark hills, so ... there you have it!

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Cell phones and gardens.

Somebody posted this on Facebook. Kind of funny.

At my age, 54, I remember when phones were these clunky black things that were wired to the wall, and the headset had a coiled cord that would occasionally get tangled, and to call someone you had to literally turn the dial seven times.

Then, along came the push-button "tone" phone. Then, a real revolution, the cordless phone. The base was still hardwired, but the handset was cordless and could be carried around the house, and even out into the yard.
The cellular phone was the big revolution. The bag phone was a clunky thing. I never had one but a couple of my friends did, and they thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread! 
The earlier self-contained cellulars were approximately the size of a brick, and about as heavy. I did have one of those.
Fast forward to today. We continue to call them "phones", or "smart phones", but in truth, they are not really phones anymore. They are miniature computers that have a cellular phone function. It seems like everyone has one now. And we can't figure out how we ever lived without them.
But maybe we should. As wonderful as those things are, all the stuff we can do with them, they have a real dark side, that isn't spoken of very much. They are easily tracked and their location pin-pointed to a precise location. Early cell phones could be triangulated by which towers they pinged, but the best a tracker could do was pin-point a neighborhood. All the new phones, however, have GPS tracking built into them, that allows them to be pin-point located to within a few feet, in real-time.
And we have heard so much about the NSA spying on our phones. It is a scary world out there, and getting scarier by the minute. Big Brother is watching you!

Have been thinking about my garden, and how I want to do it this year. I think I am going to do a raised-bed version, with concrete blocks around it. The raised bed will have the tomatoes, squash, zucchini, peppers, onions, and so forth. And the holes in the blocks will have various herbs, and perhaps some flowers. 

It is a little late now for this year, but I have also thinking about ways to start seeds. I have thought of a way to utilize cardboard toilet-paper tubes as seed pots. And, I have been looking at those plastic containers that contain the strawberries that the Debster buys during the off-season. They hold two pounds, and are a convenient size. Black plastic with a clear lid. Can't help but think they would make decent miniature green-houses for those seed-pots. I think I'll start stocking up on this stuff, and see what happens.

Another project, that I will be working on soon, involves stuffing those little cat food cans, or tuna fish cans, with paraffin-soaked cardboard, to be stored and used as emergency stoves. Will have to experiment a bit. And I doubt they will be good for anything extensive, but in an emergency situation would probably be great for at least heating canned soups and such. Watch for more on this in the near future.

Until next time
God Bless
Ron

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