"Christiansen's Comments" from March 03 2011 Hinds County Gazette

Here in Mid-Mississippi It is Spring for sure!




The Japanese magnolias are blooming…but that is not a sure sign of spring…they often get caught by a frost.

I am saying it is Spring, because the earth worms are coming closer to top of the ground, there are worms squirming in every hole I dig and I have dug lots of holes in the last couple of weeks. And too, those pesky fire ants are back to building their homes above the ground….great mounds. As annoying as those ants are, I still have to respect their building skills…they are fast builder too. You no doubt have noticed, fire ants don’t seem to mind, even on short notice, picking up and moving. I spread ant poison on their mounds, , by the next morning they have up and moved a few feet and began building again. You can say a lot of things about the fire ant, but you can not call them “lazy“.



It is beginning to smell like spring too, I was driving down old highway 80, last Wednesday afternoon, right there in the vicinity of Dennis Gray’s airfield, were two tractors, one on each side of the road, plowing up the ground …I slowed down and rolled down my window and breathed .….the aroma took my breath , the ground was still damp from the recent rains, wet ground has a more intense scent then dry dusty ground….But I love the smell of fresh tilled ground damp or dusty.



I would have pulled over and stopped, back in the day, when folks were less nervous and fearful of any activity out of the norm…. and got out of the truck, sat on the tailgate to watch and sniff awhile…but, I didn’t want to alarm anybody, so I didn’t …I just rode by very slowly with the windows down. …



I Sure didn’t want the men plowing, to feel compelled to call the law and report “a suspicious acting person“. Can you just imagine, when the officer arrived and I went to trying to explaining my actions , “I just stopped to sniff the dirt.” well…. They may not have handcuffed me…but they may have felt duty-bound to contact my family to give an account, of what they regarded as bizarre behavior. “She said she stopped to sniff dirt.”



I do not believe we are as tolerant as we once were of the eccentric and mildly batty souls who live amongst us. I don’t know…maybe it is a lingering effect from 9/11.… maybe since 9/11our definition of “normal” behavior has become more limited.



Now those eccentric and mildly batty persons that we are familiar with, our very own hometown slightly mad characters ….they are fine…we accept them as they are….But the stranger who appears eccentric and/or mildly batty, we avoid them like grime death….hope they don’t try and talk to us when we encounter them in the grocery or on the street. I was going somewhere with this, but I have forgotten where now…so I will end here.



Love to all

Christiansen Comments, Hinds County Gazette Febuary 10 2011

The XL11 Super Bowl contest have been played and a winner declared…

So the holidays are officially over. The Super Bowl was the last big binge eating holiday until Thanksgiving. Do you feel like you have been in an eating marathon ?




Oh, yes, of course, I know, we do have lots of days of celebration left in 2011, Valentines, St. Patrick Day, Easter, Mother Day etc. ...but they are typically a one day eating event or at the most a weekend …from now on our celebration eating will be more a sprint then a marathon.



I know you all have seen the commercials that are aimed at trying to make us feel guilty about using paper…everybody is wanting us to go paperless….”save a tree”. You all, I say out loud to the TV, “Some people making a living growing and harvesting trees!!!” Any way that what I thought….Driving past great fields of pine trees and following loaded down log trucks. Going…? I don’t guess I know where they are going…

But still and all, that activity lead me to believe, growing trees and growing corn, cotton soy beans etc. were the same. They were all crops loaded on trucks going to market.



Don’t misunderstand, I was born a “tree Hugger” and I am still a “Tree Hugger“. That is…when I am in my home state of Nebraska, trees are precious there. Never saw a log truck in Nebraska. In states the likes of Nebraska, Oklahoma and Kansas there are far fewer trees then here in Mississippi.



Now then, I was watching Farm Week on PBS last week…My suspicions that trees are a cash crop was confirmed….did you know there are two factories in Mississippi that manufacture wood pellets. Do you know what the pellets are used for? Heating!…Seems oil and gas are becoming more expensive. ..so people up north are using the pellets to heat their homes. According to the report on Farm Week, the folks in the American Northwest prefer pine pellets and the folks in the North East prefer hardwood pellets.

http://msucares.com/news/farmweek/

Why pellets and not logs? They didn’t go in to all of that…maybe pellets are easier to transport. The pellets are bagged like dog food…in fact the pellets did not look unlike dog food. Oh! Oh! I remember why pellets and not logs! There is something in the manufacturing of the pellets that makes them burn in a more environmentally friendly manner.



And the fuel pellets that are manufactured here in Mississippi are used to make electricity Too!!!! That’s right! In an effort to make the manufacture of electricity, safer and less dependent on oil, some electric power plants are using a sustainable product…. wood pellets! Wood Pellets manufactured in Mississippi!

http://www.envivabiomass.com/

Did I mention, most of power plants generating electricity from Mississippi wood pellets are in Europe? We have been looking for ways to make us less dependant on foreign oil…we found one and we are shipping it abroad.



No matter where the pellets go….Fuel pellets have to be good for Mississippi’s economy. And I am proud we maybe helping to light the Eifel tower.

Love to all

Call if you need me


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"Christiansen Comments" Hinds County Gazette Febuary 3 2011

I am so much better now the sun has shined!

I puttered in the yard Friday and Saturday, actually I did more then putter, I got a pretty good bit of work done. Friday I sheared the crepe myrtles…but only lightly. Because, my friend Peggy Ann, a master gardener, called what I have done to them in the past “Crepe murder”. Following Peggy’s logic that made me a “crepe murderer“….I didn’t much like the sounds of that…. So I did not cut them back to waist high as was my usual habit ….just the very tips.



But in my defense, I was told to get crepe myrtles to bloom, I had to cut back them quite severely. And I must say this, in all of the years I have cut them back so brutally…none ever died….but come to think about it,,, they didn’t bloom profusely ether…. So to my crepe myrtles, I opted to be horticulturally kind this year.

At the bottom of the hill I have a contorted mulberry and a cedar tree…. they were becoming entangled…I thought giving a rather messy, unkempt appearance to that part of my yard…The contorted mulberry, obviously needed more room. Saturday morning, I walked to the bottom of the hill , bow saw in hand.

I stood and contemplated on the two trees… cedar was a volunteer it came up on it’s own…it grew up, to it’s present 15 foot height…with no help, and very little encouragement from me. The contorted mulberry on the other hand, has been pampered and praised, from the day it was planted…That contorted mulberry is the most exotic plant on the place….one year ago December, when one of it’s very large branches broke and fell to the ground, I shed tears..



I was ready to cut the “dime a dozen” cedar to the ground. Even though, standing between the two trees, I came to recognize, it was the mulberry encroaching on the territory of the cedar…robbing it of sun light. But, I knew, if I didn’t do something, eventually the cedar would become weak.



Because, I know how I feel….after days and days with out the sun‘s reassuring warmth and bright light….I didn’t want to….but I had to do, what I had to do. I took a deep breath and walked up to the enormous offending branch on the mulberry, and cut it off.



Love to all, call if you need me


PS
For those of you who read me both in the Gazette and on line, I hope you see, I do know how spell crepe myrtle..(It's not crape myrtle)..I am one of the world's worst spellers, so normally would not know if a word was spelled correctly or not...but  as I was writing that morning I looked it up...because I thought maybe crepe myrtle was one word....I blame the spelling error on an auto spell check program...they are built in to most word processing programs........it must have been turned on that day at the newspaper.

PS
 to my PS Crape Myrtle can be spelled ether crepe myrtle or carpe myrtle.