Escape From Suburbia:  A good movie.  However you MUST watch the prequel, The End of Suburbia.  Anyone who wants to understand us, should watch this movie.  It is about peak oil, the moment when the world can produce the maximum amount of oil possible.  This would not be an issue, if our civilization was not based on cheap oil.  We can no longer afford a 3000 mile Caesar salad.  The first of these movies will blow you away.  The second was a good documentary, but it was more about the lives of people who were afraid of peak oil, and the choices that they were making.  No new messages, but the same faces.  What made this movie worth a mention was that while all these experts were forecasting doom back in 2006, one of them mentioned that the cost of fuel would reach a certain breaking point, then the stock market would collapse.  Didn’t this just happen folks?!?!?!  Giant corporations tried to save a buck by off-shoring our jobs, but suddenly failed when the costs of doing so bit them in the …..well, go watch the pair of movies.

Best movie ever:  King Corn.  Two guys from Boston learn that you are what you eat. Not only do we eat corn based products, but we feed our livestock corn products….so we are slowly turning into corn based beings. Two Bean Town graduates move to Iowa to grow an acre of corn to learn how it enters the food stream.  Not only is it mind-shaking for our food, it does describe what it’s like living here.  It’s filmed in Greene,  Iowa.  We are in Greene Country, Iowa, but the people and the feel are the same.  I should make my New England relatives watch this to understand why we moved here.

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This was our first real snow.  We got a little bit of a dusting before, and I’ve seen a few flakes now and then.  Today we woke up to a good 2″ of the white stuff.

I do hear tomorrow will be quite warm in comparison.  We might not be into full blown winter yet.

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It might have been 40 degrees today, but I went to the farm for a little bit.  Actually, I loaded up my truck with leaves and took them to the drop-off site and it was closed!  I took them to our compost pile on the farm instead.  While I was there, I made use of my time by cleaning up the shed.  I found some tarp and shade cloth that might help be a wind break so we can work on the interior wall of the greenhouse.  The outside wall is still comprised of slats and will be replaced by twin wall polycarbonate sometime.  I also brought home the little propane heater to make sure it was still working.

The wind is usually nasty, and it really must have been nasty during the last week.  Remember the portion of the barn that was collapsed?  The remains were resting on a little interior room.  I noticed today that one of the walls had violently snapped in half, and several of the boards on the back wall were now crushed.  I think it fell about a foot.  I few of the 1×6s  (the thin way) are still holding the end, and I can still see a 2×4 holding up the middle of the floor underneath.  I was able to pull apart the framing that was the front wall.  I can shake all the remains by hand, so it’s quite dangerous at this point.  Maybe another storm or two will do it.  I found a crowbar buried in the front of the barn, no rust.  I had been looking for that one.  Also, I noticed that the field behind the barn was plowed over recently.  I found several pieces of boards pulled up out of the dirt.  Did I mention that we found the front hay loft door WAY out in the cornfield?  It must have flown!
It’s odd.  With the corn gone, you can see the barn remains now.  Instead of seeing the giant roof from the corner of O and 320th, now you round the bend and see the only standing wall.  From a distance, it looks like a construction site trailer.

The final fate of the barn?  I don’t know.  There is some good wood and beams there, and there is one section standing. I’d love to get all the fallen down and junk wood removed.  Then I can trim the back 1/3 from the standing barn, and cleanup over what was the main walkway.  If the rest seems OK, we could stick a little roof on it, and get a shed/chicken coop/something.  We have been trying to save all the good curved rafters.  Most of them were shattered.  We have enough for a small coop, or a good doghouse.  I still think I can dig out the pen area of the barn to use the footings as the sides of a small pool or pond. 

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Another one of those incredible, Indian Summer, 70 Degree weekends was just here.  This allowed us to almost finish the West side of the Crib, clean up a lot more brush, and get all the barn out of the field.

Bill Sutton, who farms around us did bring one of his tractors down.  In exchange for some of our pile of field rock, he donated some time to helping move material and brush around.  He also used the bucket’s reach to cut down the branches  that were hanging over our driveway.

I think I figured out how to cover the greenhouse space, I just need an excuse to get to a home improvement store to look around.

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