A top hurricane forecaster called Al Gore "a gross alarmist" Friday for making an Oscar-winning documentary about global warming.

"He's one of these guys that preaches the end of the world type of things. I think he's doing a great disservice and he doesn't know what he's talking about," Dr. William Gray...........................

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=3017716&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

I rode around on the routes in the refuge for a few hours today. Too bad it was cloudy and kind of cold - not very much like Spring - but it was fun anyway. A few flakes of snow in the air from time to time. Never saw another soul riding while I was out there.

What kind of a man explores hundreds and hundreds of miles alone on an ATV? A man who travels across the Nevada desert through blazing heat, suffers hypothermia in the cold Rocky Mountains, loses his only companion—his dog not once but twice, overcomes break downs & hardships, experiences the kindness of strangers, and records the epic adventure in a daily journal!?.....................................
http://www.atvwagon.com/beck-interview.html

Another regular size calf born today. Chores and milking is starting to take a little more time to complete again now. Not anything nearing record proportions, but longer than a week ago! It comes and goes. There's times when I have no little calves to feed by hand.

Will the wind ever stop blowing? Man, now that most of the trees are gone (from the tornado a couple years ago and the greed that followed) this place really blows! In more ways than one. Ha ha!

There is an awesome photo from the Hubble Space Telescope of galaxy NGC 1672. You can see the big picture here. I find it hard to believe that we are alone in the universe. Imagine if the human race is the best that the universe (or God) has created! Scary.

I'm trying out FireFox. I've tried it before on an old computer, but it didn't have enough RAM to run it properly. Works pretty good so far. I'm also trying out Thunderbird for e-mail. Only 2% of the people that visit my web site use FireFox. 74% use IE 6 (only because it came with the majority of the computers being used today) and the rest fall somewhere in between. I've never been a very big fan of IE or Outlook. Too many security and software problems. Not that there isn't enough trouble already with Windows itself!

Wishing for warmer (and less windy) weather!

Well, it did. It broke! By the time my outside faucet had thawed enough today to once again drain it, it was busted. I have been thinking of doing something different with it anyway to make it less complicated to take care of. I never thought it would freeze hard enough and long enough to break it, until it was too late. I wouldn't have even had it hooked up yet, except that I worry about fire weather. Especially now that the plantation by the house has been mostly cleared and all that is left is various stages of decaying pine boughs. Never know when somebody driving by will pitch a cigarette out, or thump their tobacco pipe ashes out on the outside of their car door.

I've added a news feature. You can click on my preselected search terms to see a few news articles for each. The ATV search term was a little tricky. If you search for anything ATV related, you always come up with almost exclusively accident reports. That's because ATV accidents get big ratings and are disproportionately represented in the media. Do all the car accidents get media coverage? No. Motorcycle? No. Bicycle? No. Snowmobile? Even though all the others have many more accidents, every ATV mishap gets coverage simply because it is big news to all the dumb bastards. It's not fair, and is always blown way out of proportion and makes ATV accidents look like a much more common occurrence than they really are. But, that's a whole topic in itself for another day. Hence, I added the - (minus) sign in front of "accident" on my search term. If it works properly, that will exclude all results with the word "accident" in them. Clicking on the other terms should be pretty much self explanatory. Just something I'm playing with. I'll see how it works.

Oh yes, and I've already changed the look of the blog again! Imagine that.

“At breakfast time I was sitting by the house at Vanavara factory facing North. [...] I suddenly saw that directly to the North, over Onkoul's Tunguska road, the sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest. The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire Northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn't bear it, as if my shirt was on fire; from the northern side, where the fire was, came strong heat.

“I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards. I lost my senses for a moment, but then my wife ran out and led me to the house. After that such noise came, as if rocks were falling or cannons were firing, the earth shook, and when I was on the ground, I pressed my head down, fearing rocks would smash it. When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways, and it damaged some crops. Later we saw that many windows were shattered…”

http://thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070403tunguska.htm

Change, change, change! The weather's changing, I've changed to a different ATV, and I keep changing the looks of this blog! I think I've finally settled on the proper blog look/format. None of the other ways seemed quite right, but this one offers a good balance between the formatting I want and the ability to customize a few things. But, you know me, I'll change it 100 times yet in my quest to get it perfect and still never be completely satisfied!

YUCK! Winter is back. I hooked up my outside faucet the other day and I hope it doesn't bust! I'm sure it's froze already. Never fails, as soon as my yellow bush starts to bloom, the weather turns to shit and it snows. What a wonderful place we live in.

Here's a picture of the tiny calf. It's hard to tell how small it is from the picture because there is nothing else to go by, but it's not a lot bigger than my shoe!

Another calf born this morning. I knew the mother was getting close, and she didn't come in the barn this morning at milking time. I went out in the dark to find her, and when I did, the calf was still hanging out of her. I thought maybe it was dead, but couldn't see it good enough and she wouldn't let me get close. She came right up and into the barn with the calf still hanging. In the light, I discovered the little bugger seemed to be ok, just that the cow was having a little bit of a hard time. I ended up pulling it out for her (if I could only count the number of times I've had cow placenta dripping from my elbows). Cow and calf are both doing fine. This calf is normal size. About three times as big as the tiny one born the other day. I normally don't like to milk a fresh cow when I'm alone because sometimes they get a little wild, but this morning like most of the time, I had no choice.

The tiny calf seems to have made it through the weekend ok (although, one of the cows croaked). She might even be growing a little bit. Still have to look at her twice every time just to make sure I'm not imagining her small size!

Hauled a few loads of wood up to the house yesterday. The ATV seems like it will handle it ok. Squats a little bit in the rear, but doesn't bottom out. It won't be as good at it as the Sportsman, but it'll do.