for now, the only thing we're growing on this farm is kids - not the goat variety

Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 9)

Too Many Mangoes! (but not any more!)

Hello folks!

It’s the peak of summer and mangoes have been in season. Mango trees can be seen on someone’s property on nearly every street, but there’s only one (that we know of) dropping mangoes on public property. We have picked up around 200 mangoes this season, and they’re still coming!

Of course, we want to preserve as many as we can. We’ve been eating 2 mangoes per person per day, which is just about all we can handle, and our freezer is filled with mango, but we’re still not keeping up.

So what should we do? We don’t want to just throw them away! But “throwing away” really means “throw in the compost pile”, so it’s not a total loss. But still, here we have organic, non-irradiated, non-GM mangoes from a tree we run past, and it would be nice to consume as many as we can.

I found a recipe for lacto-fermented mango chutney online, and made up a couple jars. It was fine; not too yummy and a little too soupy (because these mangoes are RIPE!), but at least it’s healthy and good for the gut.


Last Friday I made up another couple jars. Too busy to get out the recipe, I followed it to the best of my memory. Maybe I tweaked the recipe in a good way, or maybe 3 days was all it needed (as opposed to a week), but this batch turned out better.

I noticed the chutney separating as they were fermenting, and finally resisting the temptation to stir them yet again, I called Doodle into the kitchen to taste test for me. Turned out, the juice was yummy, and the chutney was yummy, but mixed…. not so much.

So I let them separate, and now we’re left with delicious mango-ginger-lemon juice, and chutney that is much more balanced for not having all that mango juice mixed in.

Win-win! Now we have yummy food and a way to keep on bringing in those mangoes!

Good luck trying out lacto-fermentation and preservation in your kitchen!

I’m off to process the mangoes for today’s snack!

Rosebud

I will fear no evil

I swam in the Gulf of Mexico this morning.

The wind had whipped the sea into confusion, so I was forced away from the shore, into the swells.

Starting about 10 years ago, I regularly took my teenagers out into open water and taught them to swim efficiently for a mile or so.

But the unspoken challenge was to be brave in the dark, deep water.

I said very little about this and put on a calm, dismissive air whenever the topic came up. We also used the trick of giving our fears a funny name.

“Oh, lovely… a fished nipped at you? That must have been Reginald trying to give you a kiss on the heel.”

And, baruch Hashem, we passed many watery miles in safety.

But fear management is a serious business. And, for me, the key is living a life of integrity. Here’s how it works:

I’ve turned over my life to my Creator. I’m fine with whatever results may come of that. My job is to stay within His parameters, as best as I can understand them.

I thoughtfully concluded that I would benefit, physically and mentally, from a swim this morning. I believe He will back me on this.

So I go into the water confident that I am in the center of His plan, regardless of how things fall out.

A little later, I am among the swells. My instinct is to look for shark fins, but this is a fool’s errand. To swim efficiently means having one’s face in the water 90% of the time. In the brief moment of turning the head to breathe, one can see very little, and that through foggy goggles. You are doing well if you can sight the horizon so as to stay on course.

Still, the temptation to panic is always there, especially when you brush up against something unexpected. But statistically it is useless to be scanning the surrounding waters.

This is where it helps to firmly resolve not to even try to look for lurking dangers. The best response is to say, “I am here for a purpose. My life is in Your hands.”

I will fear no evil.

Going into such water at all is a kind of prayer of surrender to the Creator.

So I just swim, and leave the rest to God. Between temptations to panic, I enjoy the rise and fall of the swells.

Doodle approaching adulthood

“It is good for a man to bear the yoke when he is young.”

-Lamentations 3:27

Doodle is hitting adulthood at a full run.

He was up this morning around 4, coding. His goal is to be freelancing as a programmer as soon as possible.

We’ve had great luck as a family with the Upwork platform. Sudoku started freelancing at 16 1/2 years old and was clicking within about 6 months.

Unfortunately, Upwork now aggressively defends itself against under-18ers. Doodle tried to start up with them 8 months ago, did one job (successfully) and then got booted off.

So, he’s eager to restart things when he hits 18.

He has been coding for about half his life now, and has built a great many projects, some of which are discussed in this blog: games, tools, 3d experiments, etc.

His current focus is on being a dependable coder. In other words, a coder who can be trusted when he says a project is done.

This is a rare and difficult art.

Typically, one finishes a project in a frantic, exhausted late-night push. You send off the email to the client: “It’s done!!”

The next morning the coder awakens (very late, of course) to a flood of emails about all the bugs and errors encountered by the users of the digital product.

So, a family of methods and “tools” (really just more code) has arisen to professionalize the process of determining when you have really crossed the finish line.

And Doodle is, slowly but surely, learning how to be a “careful coding Ninja”.

But at 6:30 he had his sneakers on and the two of us ran the mile to the basketball court in near-darkness.

We have an old favorite family basketball game called “Gotcha”. The basic idea is that everyone lines up at the free throw line and has to get their ball in the basket before the person behind them does so. When you score before a person ahead of you (sometimes more than one!), you holler “Gotcha!”

…and the eliminated persons generally feel glad to get a break.

When you have good shooters, the rounds can go on for a long time before a winner is determined.

The big challenge of the game is to keep shooting accurately in the midst of so much running.

So, this morning, we did some warmup and then launched into Gotcha.

With just two of us, a round can be won in seconds or it can drag out for minutes. When someone manages to wins three rounds in a row, they have won a game. Then we rest.

But, before we began, I remarked that I had not won a game of Gotcha against him for a month or more. (That was very unusual. I figured it was just a run of bad luck. For years we’ve been close enough in skill for it to be exciting, but I would have to admit he’s been a little better than me for several years.)

Doodle nodded thoughtfully.

He started inspecting the court surface and found a tiny rock and made a chalk-like line halfway between the foul line and the “top of the key”.

“Whoa! That’s pretty far back!” I said. The line was about 3 feet from the foul line (my shooting line). “…not that I’m complaining.”

We began to play. I think you know how this turns out.

I was shooting well and hustling.

Didn’t matter.

After he had won two rounds, I issued my patented maxim:

“Proxima gana casi todo!”

Loosely translated, that would be, “Triple or almost nothing!”

I lost again.

For what it’s worth, he was working hard to beat me. I didn’t have to run as far, but I’m not as good at shooting well under conditions of exhaustion. Each game was taking 8-10 minutes, and we really weren’t resting between them.

Not one to give up easily, I asked to play again. He immediately accepted.

Some time later, I conceded before we finished the game. My shooting form was decaying horribly.

As he stopped running upon hearing my words, I got a really good look at him. He looked like a man who had just run an all-out mile. His eyes were bulging and his breathing was maxed out.

But somehow he was still sinking most of his shots. Grace under pressure.

I took a moment to soak it all in.

This is my son on the cusp of adulthood.

“Do you still want to wrestle this morning?” I asked.

“Yup.”

Update

Hello friends. I took some time to look over the site today and found it in poor maintenance. It’s been a very tough last year or so for the Harrisonfarmers and there was precious little time for site maintenance.

Anyway, I just approved a boatload of comments and I can see that the contact form hasn’t been working and some other problems. Hopefully we’ll get to those soon. Bye for now.

“Waiting for build to finish” bug in Android Studio and the Custom View Curse

Note: If you are a regular Harrison Farm reader, most of the terminology will probably look like Greek. (From Marathon: “But you’ll probably want to read it for the sake of the italicized portion at the midpoint.” ) If you are a frustrated app developer, this may save you up to 1.5 hours of waiting for Android Studio to restart, not to mention 10 hours of debugging.

Note 2: This bug only happens when one is using a custom view in an XML file. If you don’t even need to use the XML display, the bug shouldn’t hinder you in any way.

One day I was coding along my merry way when I opened up an XML and flipped over to display mode. That was when I was confronted by the message: “Waiting for build to finish…”

What this message even means, I’m not sure. It seems to be referring to the Gradle build, but nothing was building at the moment. I gave it a little time and nothing happened.

I went off on a big, huge rabbit trail which took me through restarting Android Studio ~40 times. I found the culprit XML file, I did some trial-and-error until I found that the problem was in a custom view Java file of mine. So I did some more trial-and-error to find out that the problem didn’t seem to be in my code at all. It was just some mysterious problem with that specific file.

And this brings the story to a sad chapter in my life. After around 3 weeks of trying to defeat this bug, I finally lost momentum and just stopped coding … for about four months. I had tried reverting Android Studio to an older version, I’d tried to modify the compiling scripts, I’d tried learning Kotlin (a Java alternative). So I just gave up. I could’ve asked Carman for help, but I had lost momentum and my sense of motivation.

4 months later, Marathon gave me some encouragement and told me that I would have extra chores until I had solved this bug, and that he was willing to help me any way he could. Sure enough, this gave me the motivation I needed. After about a week, I broke through.

Don’t let your momentum stop. What wouldn’t I give for 4 whole months of (nearly) bugless coding.

 

Next I went through some more trials and errors (this time having to delete and recreate a new file + restarting Android Studio with each trial) until I found the root of all my problems: a simple uninitialized variable.

 

What do I take away from this?

Problems with Android Studio:

  • They didn’t give me a NullPointerException error. They didn’t say anything about my error either in the XML error boxes or during the Gradle build.
  • If you open display mode in only one bad XML file, all others get the same problem: Infinitely “Waiting for build to finish”. The only way to reset this is to restart Android Studio.
  • If you try to display a bad custom view in an XML file and the XML file gets the “Waiting for build to finish” error, that file is forever infected with the “Custom View Curse”, as I call it. Even if you fix the error in the Java code, somehow the XML will always fail on that file forever. In order to rid a custom view Java file of the Custom View Curse you have to… well, you actually can’t. You have to copy the code, delete the file with the Custom View Curse, create a new Java file with the same name, then paste in your old code. The Curse is invisible, as far as I know. It’s probably in the file metadata or something.

Android Studio isn’t perfect. The problem isn’t always you.

The Decency of Ralph Moody

We recently received this nice note as a comment elsewhere in the site. I thought it would be worth sharing as a special post:

What a treat to find this site.

My mother and father were divorced when I was 6yrs old and I lacked a father figure.   At around 7 yrs of age we began reading this and an eight year old boy, along with his own father, filled that hole in my life.    I never cried so hard when Father died and “so long partner” still brings the feeling of loss to my soul.
I’m 65 yrs old now.   In 1982, while reading to my own sons, the longing to tell Mr Moody what he’d meant to my life grew strong enough to attempt to reach him – when I did I found he’d recently past.   I was devastated for having waited too long.   Now I read with my grandchildren.  Also, since retirement I have met dozens of men in the shooting world with whom I shoot and I’ve shared Mr Moody’s series with many of them, their appreciation is great though I can’t imagine the hooks going so deep as they do in my own life.   I consider him a gift and a treasure.   The decency that exudes from every page of his series is a decency I strive for, too often failing, in my own life.   I loved that man and his family without ever knowing them.    John

Workhorses and Angels

Okay, time to brag on the kids some more.

What could be more appropriate to a family, with many limitations and of modest means, than to work on our voices and learn to love singing?

Okay… yes. In theory, it makes perfect sense. But this is 2019, and we are surrounded by shiny screens, self-balancing wheeled gizmos, “People are Awesome” videos, pianos that make “Chanting Monk” sounds, etc.

Isn’t singing … uh … rather pedestrian?

Yes, it is. And it usually requires a kid to be under special circumstances for them to inconvenience themselves enough to work on their voice enough to strengthen it, enough to enjoy their own voice, enough to hear the subtleties of harmony. Certainly being part of a good choir program could do this for a youth. Another possibility would be growing up in a culture of singing as is the case for the religious set.

We mostly lacked those type of advantages, but it seems we’ve been able to cobble together our own inspiration and knowledge to get to the promised land of singing.

We just had our breakthrough moment on the above piece of Christmas music. (I plan to record our next sing of it. We’re happy to send an audio of this out to our friends. New friends, too. You can introduce yourself here.)

It was Milkmaid on the soprano, Rosebud and Sudoku on the alto, myself on the tenor, and Doodle singing bass.

Yes, dear little Doodle is getting to be big Doodle and may be due for a more dignified blog name. His range goes a step below me, and he struggles to hit middle C.

But he is really the main workhorse behind our singing progress. He had to endlessly help me on these tough accidentals in the tenor line (he learned all the parts so as to help the rest of us), and he’s the one who pushes new music on us and is the first to figure out what’s going wrong when we sound bad.

Appreciation also is deserved by Rosebud, who practices singing nearly daily with Doodle. Thanks to their faithful practices, the two weakest voices in the family have nearly become the two strongest. They love to sing now, and it shows.

This morning, during our basketball game, there was a little down time for some reason, and they started singing something quietly together.

Somewhere along the way, they got inspired. I asked Doodle about it and he pointed to two things:

  • One was my stories of singing anywhere and everywhere once I had learned how to harmonize in my late teens (this was one of the early connection points between Milkmaid and I)
  • He says secondarily he’s been inspired by online videos of strong singing and harmony. (See the BYU Vocal Point performance of “Nearer my God to Thee”.)

So that’s what it took to get our breakthrough moment. We all nailed our parts. We stayed on pitch. As you can see, we ended with “the song which now the angels sing” … and it sounded angelic to me!

Bamboo stalk segments coolness

We have a bamboo stick in our humble home. It’s roughly 7’4″, and we use it to point at the whiteboard when we’re eating supper, discussing chemistry.

We thought it would be fun to measure the ratio between each of the segments’ length and diameter. Here is what we got:



 

As you can see, something very cool is happening to the ratio, which is in the farthest right column. First it’s 0.73, then in the middle it decreases, then it increases again to 0.74. Hopefully we’ll learn the reason for this someday.

Thanks to Quinn Dombrowski for pic.

Wikipedia alert

I am of the opinion that a person capable of being convinced generally only needs a few good hints and pointers, so I’m going to keep this short. If you look to Wikipedia as a source of knowledge, you will want to take an hour or so to follow the trail I lay out here.

We watched the Laura Poitras documentary Risk this past weekend and I was left confused by the end. So I went to Duckduckgo.com and did the following search: “was the Russian government responsible for the DNC hack”.

Below are the top 10 results.

I consider these results to be pretty balanced, but how would I know if the search engine was leaving things out? At least I can tell, just from the headlines, that there are conflicting narratives represented here, and I appreciate DuckDuckGo for that.

Of all these results, I found the content of the Wikipedia article most remarkable, given what I learned from the other links. Below are screenshots of that Wikipedia page shown in the results: (you might find it easier to read the most-recently archived version here, which should be identical to the below since it was archived since the last edit to the Wikipedia page)

And below are, perhaps most crucially, screenshots of the “Talk” page associated with the above article: (you might find it easier to read the most-recently archived version here, but there may be some differences)

Good luck! Seek and ye shall find.

Extra credit assignment: Once you’ve decided on what you feel are the most crucial pieces of information in this story, do your own search on your favorite search engines and see if you are happy with the results.

He thinks I can

By nature, I’m really not a very ambitious person. I’m happy to go along to get along, to do just enough to keep up with what’s average and call it good enough. No need to overdo things, right?

A reverse layup going up…

Then there’s Marathon. He gets kicks from pushing himself. There’s always something new, always something to understand more deeply, some new way of pushing himself.

Marathon also pushes the kids to work hard and go deep…and I get pulled along too, you know, because I don’t want to miss out and get left behind.

But I am getting left behind as they pass me in height, physical, and yes, even mental strength. And that’s okay. It’s wonderful, really.

But I don’t have to get left completely in the dust, especially with Marathon in my corner. Somehow he knows what I’m capable of, and he believes in me more, I think, than I do myself at times.

Case in point: chemistry. We’re started the Khan Academy chemistry course as a household. Ugh. I really thought I would have had to bail out weeks ago, that it would just be too much to tackle with keeping up with the household and with work obligations. But I decided to try to carve out an hour a day and see if I could hang on.

Yesterday we reached the end of a unit, and Marathon went ahead (so like him) and did the unit test. It took him X minutes, and he told me he thought it would take me about double that. Today I took the test. I didn’t rush. It took me exactly the amount of time he had predicted. The test was nine problems — no multiple choice or matching. It wasn’t easy. I got every single one correct! Moles, balanced equations, limiting reagents — this stuff is sticking to me in my mid-40s!

Another case in point of how Marathon seems to know what I can handle — reverse layups. Do you know what that is? It’s a basketball move where a player moves under the basket and as he passes underneath, he reaches up and lays the ball in. It’s backwards from the “normal” layup. All three of our basketball-playing kids love this move.

Well, as you can imagine, as the kids are getting taller, faster, stronger, it’s getting hard for me to keep up on the court. Doodle can shoot threes, Sudoku “moneybags” is dangerous anywhere within 15 feet of the basket if left unattended, and Rosebud’s ball handling can leave even grown men flummoxed. Where is there room for me?

Usually I just help the kids with their basketball quests as needed, stuff like rebounding for someone’s shooting drills. If I’m not needed, I’ll go and hit a tennis ball until someone works up the teams for a game, and then I’ll typically get matched up against Rosebud.

About a month ago, Marathon encouraged me to start working on reverse layups. He thought having that skill would be a way for me to take a greater part in games.

Ugh. Really? Me? Okay, I’ll give it a shot.

So, I’ve been working under the basket on those neck-tiring shots. And, yes, I’ve been getting better and better.

Today was the day I successfully executed a reverse layup in a game. There were cheers all around, from both teams. I think Marathon was more excited than me. It was also special because Carman had come out to play with us this morning, which is quite rare.

Thanks, dear, for believing I can when I’m not so sure.

Thanks to Michael Li for the image.
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