sheepdog

Thanks for starting this topic. It's one I find fasinating, and sadly, much ignored by the media, who seem to be all hung up on the double dealing, dirty handed, back biting politicans and their current campaine tactics. Personally, I'm getting rather sick of hearing all the garbage they are spouting out, wish they would spend more time on this mars landing. I can't even imagine the technoligy that this rover must have and how it all works.

Well, still no crow visits, guess I'm going to have to give up on that little game. And the hummingbirds are still ignoring my feeder. I do have some good news though, I'm going back to playing Wiley Coyote and trying to befriend the next generation of Road Runners. He is no where near as tame as the last one, but is starting to let me get pretty close. I even got a pretty good picture of him the other day. (or her, as the case may be, I'm not much better at telling the difference in them than I am crows.)

It isn't the number of posts you make, it's the size that counts. (yes, size really does count! ) A few dozen one liners isn't going to get you any hosting credits, but a few well thought out paragraphs on a topic of your choise is the way it works. What really helps is if you can start topics that other people would be interested in so they can make comments and then you can have a discussion that earns everybody involved hosting credits. It's not set in stone to my knowledge exactly what staying active means. Basicly you have to be here enough to earn the hosting credits to pay for your site. If you come in every day, and make a short comment or 2, or if you come in once a month and type up all kinds of discussions it really doesn't matter. Just keep track of how much money (or Mycents as the case may be) you have in your account and know the ammount your site costs per month. It's always wise to be at least a month or more ahead in mycents, in the case of computer problems or just life in general that might keep you away from the forums for awhile.

Not sure if you would classifly this as an invention or an inovation, but either way, here is a way I solved one little problem.We put out some new trees this year, some Cherry trees and I was bound and determined they were going to live despite the drought and everything else that usually goes wroung when I plant trees. The ground in the spot I planted 2 of the trees is heavy clay soil. I can ammend the soil and improve the fertility of it over the next few years as the trees grow, but there was a real problem with watering them. The water just runs right off when it hits the hard packed clay and does the poor tree no good whatsoever. So I came up with a rather brilliant idea to fix them so the water could soak in slowly and actually give the trees some badly needed water. I just used a few of my left over cedar stakes from the building of the arbor, gathered up 4 milk jugs and punched a hole in the bottom of each one with a micro chip needle. Just zippy tied the handles of the milk jugs to the stakes to keep them from blowing away every time we had a little puff of wind, and now all I have to do is fill the jugs with water. With the small hole in the bottom the water leaks out nice and slow, it takes about 5 minutes for it all to run out, plenty of time for it to soak slowly into the ground. It's working great! Now, if the goats don't get out, or some careless person doesn't run over them or weed eat too close to the base of them in a few years maybe I will have some wonderful sweet cherries!

This forum is one of my favorites, at least it frequently gives me a chance to write something and offer some kind of help, but I'm curious. Hardly anyone ever comes back in here and lets us advice givers know if our tips helped or hurt or worked or what happens. I'd just love to see a post someday that says, "Hey Sheepdog, that really worked, we got married, our first kid is on the way and now we plan to live happily ever after." Sure would like to see some follow up here. Besides, if my advice doesn't work, maybe I need to rethink my ideas, and I don't know if nobody tells me. A person hates to give bad advice on something as serious as our personal relationships.

This is a huge and complex issue. We have equal rights under the law, that all people should be treated equally without reguard to race, religion, sex, etc. But we have other laws too. One thing I would like to bring up on this point is that we also have a seperation of church and state. In every religion I know of, marriage is a union between a man and a woman. It is the foundation of the family. But now, you have the government butting in trying to change something that to me is a concept of religion, and therefore, nothing the government should be butting it's nose in. That is if there really is a seperation of church and state.

Ha! Thanks. I should of thought of something simple like that. Still haven't figured out where all those "friends" came from. And I wanted to add a page to my groups list, but couldn't get it to add. On the ones I already have on the list, FB added them automaticly when I applied to join and was approved. But this one is a Congressman's page I just wanted to read occasionally.

Personally, I think this is a terrible tragedy. That woman has spent the majority of her life in training for the olimpics and I'm sure has worked very hard or she would of never made the team in the first place. To be kicked out for such a stupid, unimportant comment is a travesty. I can't believe that political correctness has gotten to such an extreme. This is totally stupid. I have no idea on what freedoms of speech Greece has, but I'm getting sick and tired of our freedoms being encroached upon simple because we might offend someone. We may have freedom of speech, but how can we not be afraid to open our mouths if our lives can be destroyed over one stupid offhanded comment?

Thanks jlhaslip! Finally found that little sucker. They sure don't make that easy for you. But at least I got most of the emails stopped from coming to my inbox. However, yesterday when I went to check my breeders board and looked at my page, I saw where I now have 35 friends! I did NOT approve any of the new ones. I only had 3 that I approved when I started my page. I don't have any idea where all these came from. A lot of them were people I'd never even heard of. How the heck did that happen? I had trouble figuring out how to delete them, and the process is very slow and time consuming, so I'm really ticked off over that. Need to figure out how to keep that from happening anymore. And now it says I have 6 friends, but it only shows 5 pictures, so I guess I have a secret friend? And ok, at the risk of sounding completely stupid, (which, when it comes to computers I actually am) I have yet to figure out how to make a paragraph break when I am making a post at FB. Normally you just hit enter and it skips down a line, but in FB it enters the message.

Ok, that's all true, but then again, most wells are tapped into the aquifers, and a large part of this water is used long before any overflow can make it to the ocean. In times of drought, like we have now, the aquifers are not exactly overstocked with water. I don't think much is getting to the oceans at all. In our area, some of the more shallow wells are actually going dry. So if it is as you say, being stored in the aquifers, and they are not being constantly replenished by rainfall, there is not going to be any dumping in the ocean.

I can't for the life of me fathom how any human being could even go crazy enough to do something this terrible. How can you even consider taking the lives of random human beings that you don't even know, that have never done any thing to you that you don't even know? It is my understanding one of the victoms was a 6 year old child. That is just beyond insane.There is no way to justify this kind of action. I don't care if you had a crappy childhood, or your boss picked on you, there is no reason to loose your mind in a manner like this. Lots of people have tramatic lives and they don't get off by killing random people. Something is seriously wroung with this sicko. I sure hope he gets culled from the gene pool.

What a sad situation! Thank god for freedom of speach in the good old USA.

Welcome to Xisto, glad to see some new blood. I hope your experience here is pleasant and you make lots of new friends, should be easy to do here, this is a pretty good natured and friendly bunch around here.

Just finished a very good book that I highly recommend everyone put on his or her reading list. Joel Salatin's "Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal."The purpose of the book is defiantly twofold. First, to promote local agricultural practices and keeping healthy, fresh food in the community where it’s benefits promote not only the health of the consumer but the local economy as well. But the book also goes into great detail about how ridiculous government regulations make it impossible to do this. If you have every wondered about the stupidity of our own government, this book will be a real eye opener. While it deals mostly with agricultural regulations, it also delves into several other problem topics, like insurance and zoning regulations. You will be shocked at the number of things that make everything we do not just difficult, but in some cases, impossible. Did you know, for one example, that in many locations, the government can tell you what size house you can build on your own property, and that it is illegal to build a house too small? Having myself personally dealt with the same mentality and brutality of federal inspectors as the author has, I enjoyed the book on a very personal level, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who has been harassed unmercifully by bureaucratic buffoons who have let the tiny bit of power they have with their job to make the persons they are overseeing life a living hell. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Many of these inspectors have mental problems. They cannot tolerate anyone who defies them or stands up to them. Some of the things they do are actually criminal against the people they are hired to oversee. One case in the book told of how one of the officials the author had argued with actually went to his customers, local restaurants, and threatened to shut them down if they continued to purchase fresh eggs from him. Government officials can and do use the power of their positions to inflict harm upon the citizens they are in charge of. While we champion the cause of freedom and our rights to chose our own leaders, it is a very sad state of affairs when these people in unelected positions are the ones that can make our lives a living hell and can dictate weather or not we can conduct our business and make our own livelihood. The sad thing is we have virtually no recourse when we fall victim to one of these corrupt officials. We can complain, but everyone thinks we are just some nut case who is mad because we didn’t supposedly do good enough to pass their inspections and therefore are dead beats or no goods, and the more you complain, the more harassment you will receive from the inspectors as payback for bucking them. It is a sad and dismal situation, and has caused many small businessmen and farmers to simply throw in the towel on their dreams and aspirations and give up in despair. Which of course, further hurts the economy and the local job market. My hat is off to Joel Salatin for the courage to write this book, and I hope to help him promote it and make everyone aware of the terrible havoc corruption in government causes. Please read this book!

Thanks, that does seem to be the way it works. They sure don't make it easy for you to find any privacy settings, I looked all over the site and couldn't find a single way to set any preferences. I suppose since it is their business to share information, they don't want you to try to keep anything private. I did finally find a link on an email they sent me of a post made on a forum I joined so I could opt out of getting individual emails at least from the groups.

Yes, I couldn't agree with you more. Another thing I won't even bother eating are store boughten tomatoes. They are probably the worst of all vegetables to have to eat when commercially grown. There is just no cmparison with them and home grown tomatoes. The problem lies in the early picking of commercially grown tomatoes and other vegtables. They are picked before they are ripe or fully mature, because when they are ripe, they get soft and can't handle the stress of shipping the usual thouands of miles our produce is drug across the country. And it's not just fruits and vegetables that suffer from commercial raising. I made a recent convert to "farm fresh eggs" with my hired man's wife. I occasionally give them extra eggs when my hens get ahead of our own egg eating abilities, and now she can't stand to eat store bought eggs. Even though my chickens are not "free range" because there are just too many dogs around here for that to be feasable, I still occasionally pick them armloads of fresh greens, and they get all of our table scraps the dogs wouldn't eat. It makes a tremendous difference when they get variety in their diets instead of one single type of commercial feed.

Ok, bad as I hated to, I signed up for Face Book. I really missed my old buddies on my dog breeders board, I'd been on that forum for probably 10 years or so, as long as it's been online. But the software that ran it was outdated, so the owner moved it to FB.So far I'm not impressed. For starters I'm not thrilled about having my every move and other information all out there. I hope to keep the information about me down to the very bare minimum. I already see no way to keep my birthday from showing. It's nobodys damn business how old I am. And I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but I have no urges to have 100's of "friends" in some cases people I don't even know, just to see how many I can have, which seems to be the goal for many at FB. All seems so petty and shallow to me. I need to know if I can send messages on FB to people if I am not friends with them? My sister in law says I can if I have the address of their "wall?" I saw a couple peoples walls, but a few I wanted to send messages to I couldn't find the wall. Also, how do I set my preferences so I just read any messages when I log into FB? I do NOT need any more freaking emails in my regular email, I can hardly keep up with them as it is.

There are just some things that I won't sacrifice just for price vrs taste. Butter is at the top of that list, there hasn't been a tub of magarine in this house for years. Even if butter is $3 a pound and that other grease is $1. What's the point of eating something you don't enjoy? There is more than enough land to raise both grain and cattle in this world, without any detriments to the enviornment. Common sense agriculture practices, such as crop rotation, grazing land rotation, irrigation, and many other breakthroughs make this completely feasable. Also keep in mind, cattle make more than meat. Their digestive systems also produce one of the finest natural fertilizes in the world, and they can survive on roughage that is not fit for anything else to eat, and in the meam time, these grass lands that feed the cattle protect the soil and actually conserve our resourses. Row cropping of marginal lands causes the washing away of valuable top soil, which in turn causes water polution and other detrimental effects on our enviournment. Most of the meat a cow makes comes from this grassland, not grain. Cattle are "finished" on grain before butchering, they do not usually grow up on it. I am luckier than most, I'm not stuffed into some nasty, overcrowded city, and therefore, I have lots of options open to me that other folks may not have. We can grow our own meat. Cattle certainly take a fair amount of room, but most people can at least have chickens or rabbits in a small area. You would be shocked to know how much meat a rabbit can make in a years time. And funny after sharmiladevi mentioned apples, I hadn't really thought about it, but it's true, I've seen that lately in what few store bought apples we have purchased. And believe me, there have not been that many! We have our own trees too, and let me tell you, once you get used to your own home grown fruit, you just won't be able to stand the tasteless mush that passes for fruit in the grocery stores these days. It's sad really. So many people out there don't even know what real food tastes like.

Cases like this remind me of one of my favorite stories about my dear sister in law that my hubby loves to tell on her. Years ago when her son was in his juvinal delinquint state, he told his teacher that his mother had beaten him. In that particular case, she had not, though she probably need to. Anyway, the school reported it and two police officers showed up on her doorstep. I think those 2 cops got about the worst cussing they'd ever gotten in their carreers and she ran them off.(and trust me, I have personally seen what she does when a police officer pisses her off) And when the boy got home from school, she did beat the holy living crap out of him. And you know what? He never claimed his mom beat him again! So I guess there are more than one way to solve such problems.

Every year the volunteer fire department is Squires puts on a big 4th of July celebration, complete with carnival type rides and game booths for the kids, grilled burgers, and lots of good entertainment, all leading up to a big fireworks display at 10 pm. They mostly have local entertainers, but this year they had a guy singing that was really good, country/gospil singer and guitar player that writes his own music and all. He was very talented, had a great voice, I'm surprised he's not more famous. They also had a square dancing family that included 4 generations of dancers. Granted, they wouldn't of made it very far on dancing with the stars, but it was still fun to watch. And they had all the local politicians there, allowing them to give a (thankfully) short speach to introduce themselves to the audience. I have 2 favorite things I enjoy the most at the festival. First of course, is the homemade ice cream. And second, I love people watching there. You see everything from old hippies to gals that look like they got lost on the way to the disco. Babies in their mothers arms, old foggies with walkers, they all turn out for the Squires celebration. I did miss the exhibit the local trout farm usually puts on, they bring a big swimming pool filled with trout and let little kids fish for them, that is a real ball to watch, the kid just go crazy when they catch a fish. All in all it was a pleasent evening, and nice to get out and get away at least for a few hours.

Eeek, what a crummy way to start a vacation. I'm glad you thought of the scooter thing though, and it sounds like everything turned out pretty good despite getting off to a very rocky start. Hope your foot is better now.

Here it comes, just want we always wanted, test tube meat! http://www.thedogpress.com/SideEffects/In-Vitro-Meat-126.asp Of course, backed by PETA, (and I'm not even talking about People for Eating Tasty Animals) and their significant financial contributions. Remember all those donations they ask for to help the animals, well this is what they use some of it for. Besides of course, burning down houses, and labratories, and lobbying for laws that will prevent you from owning or enjoying animals in any way shape fashion or form. Personally, I'll take my chances with meat grown on an animal, not in a test tube. Sure, they claim it can be made disease free, but what about taste and nutritional value? How can they synthasize the grass and grain and fresh air and sunshine that makes the best steaks in the world? Granted, the study was started by NASA, and I can see some need for a good protein source during space travel or in a space station where living animals might be impossible to keep, and for short term dietary needs in this sort of condition, but for long term human health I think this is a really bad idea.

For months and months congress has been after the Attorney General to release documents related to the failed fast and furious gun deal that ened up costing the life of one of our border patrol agents. Congress has cajoled and threatened and done just about everything all to no avail. So this past week they had their big vote to hold Holder in comtempt of congress. He was overwelmingly voted to be in comtempt. So then the justice department comes along and says they aren't going to prosecute him. WTF???? If that was you or I, we would allready be in jail. Why all the ranting and raving and carrying on if they aren't going to do anything anyway. I'm just pretty sick of the whole deal. Politicians seem to be able to get away with doing just about any dang thing they want to. They should be held accountable for their actions just like everyone else is.

Yes, that is what we have all been told. I have to wonder though really, is it true or exactly how much chemicals actually make it to the ocean? There is an awful lot of dirt between the Kansas wheat field and the Atlantic Ocean. It would have to pass all the way threw Oklahoma and then Texas, and there is a lot of Texas. Chemical fertilizers are designed with chemicals that are used by plants. The plants take up the chemicals and make them up into plant parts. It would seem that any excess run off would just be used by the plants where ever the run off rain carried it.

Well, I'm not much of a computer whiz, but I can try. First off, by makeing posts here at Xisto, you can actually earn free web site hosting credits. I'm pretty sure if you are new at all this you can make a lot of posts just discussing how to do some of the many things involved in building a web site. I'm sure there are lots of people here that can talk you threw any difficulties you may run across, and if your like me, I'm sure there will be a lot of those! For web site building, you need a program, there are lots out there to choose from, I use Front Page, and truely hate it, but it's all I know. And it took me several years to figure it out, so I'm not up for trying something different, no matter how bad I dislike it. There are also hosting sites out there that provide web design software with their web hosting service, but I find most of these to be cookie cutter forms you just fill out with your information and pictures, and they don't have any way to make them truely unique, original and are pretty boring.