X-flares, Hams and a bad day

The snow has ended and the sun is shinning through a window into the loft as I turn the dial of my shortwave radio. Today the only sound I hear, on all the bands from 10 to 20 meters are no different than what I have heard for the past few days… nothing but the background roar of the sun having a bad day. As I continue to turn the dial my mind wonders what would happen to our world if the sun had a “very” bad day,

                                             I think it may, be something like this………….

It had been one of those mornings that started off badly when I tried to log into the ARRES emergency net and heard nothing but static. Then when checking the other frequencies the same quiet roar of S5 static filled his headset. On my way to work I stopped for gas but the gas pumps would not recognize my debit card and when I went inside to get a coffee there was a big sign CASH ONLY our computers are down. I decided to stop at the bank and get some cash in case the pumps were still out after work when I was greeted by yet another sign that said BANK CLOSED computers down. When I tried to call my wife and let her know what was going on my phone showed that there was no service.

Sound like a news story from a place hit with a hurricane or a scene from an apocalyptic movie? No just a simple fact of life in the year 2013. Everyone of us is dependent on a computer somewhere that stores data about us or we deal with a business that is totally dependent on a computer. Our phone system, that can not operate without the aide of massive computers, is as fragile as those computer hard drives are and can be shut down or destroyed in a instant by natural physical forces.

I know in some circles it is ego boosting to complain about the conspiracies that swirl around us. For instance a secret global organization that aims for world domination or a government conspiracy to purchase billions or rounds of ammo and armored vehicles to quell a citizens revolt, but almost everyone is missing one important disaster that will shut down entire portions of the world when it happens, and that is solar storms. Weather caused by a sunspot or a CME, a coronal mass ejection, this energy from a strong enough blast sent off from the sun will shut down every electronic device on the part of the earth facing the sun when it hits us.

I remember, as a child in grade school, walking into my bank and making a deposit. The teller would duly record that deposit in my bank book. Today there is no paper trail whatsoever of our deposits withdrawals or car and home mortgage payments. When we are hit with one of these solar events our money and our ability to communicate will be lost!

Last week there were a number of X-flairs but we were twice blessed because they were small events and more importantly because they were not aimed directly at the earth. When as in the past an X-10 or 11 happens and were are directly in it’s path it will indeed seem for many to be the end of the world. I am fortunate, for many reasons, to live here at the top of the world but I also experience those solar events first because of living so close to the magnetic North pole, and even a small one like the X flair that happened on 5/15 is effecting me.

The story continues….
I arrived back home from work a couple hours later it was a short day because the equipment at work was inoperable. I was concerned but also knew I had planed well. With weeks of stored food and water along with a nice reserve of cash that should hold us over the worst part of this incident.

So I think we should not only be mindful of what the global powers are doing

but what we can do to survive when our part of the world goes dark.

Guns and dozers

The printer hummed and clicked as it printed out what was asked of it. We had spent hours getting the programing just right because a wrong calculation could seriously harm whoever ended up with the printed product. The printer sounded its completion but we still had to wait until it was cool enough to touch. At that very instant there was a loud knock on the cabin door, I walked over and looked out the window and could see the place was surrounded by ATF agents and I knew at once they were here to confiscate my printer.

Sounds a bit far fetched but it seems that the federal government is once again interpreting laws to suit there needs. A Mr Cody Wilson is running into a scenario just like this one when he designed, printed and test fired a ‘printable handgun’. His gun fires a single round of .380 auto ammo. Pistols, it turns out, aren’t that complicated. They essentially need nothing more than a trigger, a firing pin, a chamber to hold the round and a barrel to allow it to accelerate out when fired. Wilson’s innovation was making a gun work out of plastic.

Coming soon…background checks for people buying printers?

………
Like many of you I remember, when I was very young, spending countless hours playing cops and robbers and cowboys and indians. We had a nearby field where we even dug out a deep hole covered it with wood and made it a fort. At times some of us would be outside the fort throwing balls of dirt at the ‘fort’ pretending they were hand grenades. Other times in our back yards we would race around on our bikes pretending we were cops chasing robbers firing our cap-guns at the bad guys, stopping only when we heard one of our mothers holler for us to come in for lunch or dinner. Well there is an old song that fits today ‘The times they are a changing’!

Two 7 year old boys were suspended for two days from school for pointing pencils at each other and pretending that they were guns. Now we already know that many people carry political correctness way too far and it seems we are now taking to the extreme the total ‘no tolerance’ policy for weapons on school grounds.

But to suspend children for playing Army with a pencil?

 

………
Lastly there are many of us who feel frustration with the insanity of some of our governments actions. We may not see it but we carry these frustrations with us and reflect it in our interaction with people we meet. It is wrong and most of us do not even notice that we are doing anything different, but one man decided to drive a bulldozer through a couple peoples homes to relieve his frustration.

Guess we are due for more background checks first it was guns, then printers and now people who drive bulldozers.

Are you still wondering why I live in the woods.

Breaking up in Alaska

Breakup is a sure sign of spring

In Alaska we have another meaning for the word breakup it is where
  the solid river ice ‘breaks up’ and the river flows again.

For example we can compare the bridge picture from March

To one taken May 15th

But it all means the same thing
                                                               soon it will be time to fish again…..

Mea-Culpa, obama-care, gay in NBA and King Kong

I first wish to thank my friend for her ‘vigilance’ in bringing to my attention all the mistakes on my blog postings over the years. After I researched her ‘comment on Alaskan tales’ I found that she correctly commented that there has indeed been one person killed in Alaska by a wolf attack. I can only offer in my defense the fact that she may have missed the title of the posting ‘Alaskan tales’, and Webster’s dictionary defines the word (tales) as “ a fictitious story or narrative”. Maybe she just didn’t understand the meaning of the word ‘tales’? I also offer to you my readers that this incident did in fact happen to me, the way I wrote it, sometime between 1996 and 1997 near the native village of Rampart.

………
Apparently another true story has because of the internet become something of a mythic legend. In 2001 on Prince William Sound’s Hinchinbrook Island a Mr Ted Winnen shot a 10 foot 6 inch grizzly. At the time it was estimated to weigh between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds. Over the years that the story has drifted around the internet the bears size and viciousness has grown proportionally as the years increased. By the time the late Natalie Phillips, an Anchorage Daily News reporter, got around to debunking the story for the first time in fall 2001, the bear “towered 12 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed more than 1,600 pounds.”

The internet sometimes has a funny way of “bending” the truth as it is repeated.

………
I find it odd to hear that our representatives in Washington are seeking a waver for their staff from following the new rules under obama-care. Of course considering that the representatives themselves are covered medically for life under a special, gold plated, medical plan they did not seek a personal waver.

I wonder what they would do if they did not have this ‘life-time’ medical coverage?

………
I also find it odd that our president would, within hours of the Jason Collins announcement, call and say “he could not be prouder” that Collins announced to the world that he was gay. The part that seems odd to me is that obama considers this incident so important that he immediately gets involved but when our embassy in Benghazi was attacked he left Washington for a fund raiser in New york. Apparently the announcement was of critical importance since the major television and radio networks had it as their lead story for two days.

Then again considering that we have to show photo identification to board an airplane, cash a check or buy liquor but not to vote I can see why some think news about a gay basketball player is more important than one of our embassies being overrun and our ambassador tortured and murdered.

 

And finally…
the signs are all here…
mud in the driveway, heater shut down, mosquitoes buzzing,
DOT tearing up the roads and RV’s full of tourists clogging the highways….

I can’t wait for it to snow again

An Alaskan tale… wolf encounter

The fog rolled down the hill like ocean waves and darkness descended making the outbuildings disappear, it was the stuff that ghost stories are made of. My eyes strained to stay open as the fog’s cold damp air embraced me, when off in the distance came a sound that cut through to my very soul. The long mournful howl of a wolf out looking for it’s nightly kill.

 

 

 

It has been reported that in Alaska there have been no fatal attacks on humans by wolves….

 

But one quickly forgets these facts when you are alone hundreds of miles from any civilization and you hear a wolf howling nearby. I was asked by a friend to help protect his horses from wolves that were in the area. Apparently a large fire to the East of his homestead was pushing all the wild animals Westward right through his valley. He was stuck working on a job at the other end of the state and said his wife after many days of fighting off the wolves alone was tiring and needed a break.

It was about 5 am and hours since I heard those first wolf calls. The light was just starting to reveal the corral’s when all the horses started to walk in circles. It was like watching a compass, as they moved in unison first one direction then back the other way. Finally they stopped and all looked to the South. It was from there I hear another wolf call, answered almost immediately from what I thought was right behind me. I turned only to see the tail of an animal disappear around the back of the barn.

By the time I returned my gaze to the South there was three wolves trotting down the road toward the corral. I fired the shotgun twice and they scattered in different directions. Almost at that instant there was a howl from the North over by the lodge that was followed instantly by three shots. Now I had wolves on three sides and my adrenaline was pumping. When I looked back at the coral the horses where whinnying and there was a wolf standing right at the fence. I couldn’t use the shotgun so I moved closer to avoid hitting the horses.

Little did I know this was all to draw attention from the real attack behind me in front of the barn. The wolves were after the miniature ponies and came creeping along the side of the barn while I was focused on the corral. The wolf by the corral ran off as I approached and when I walked back to my 4 wheeler I saw the others almost on top of the miniatures. I couldn’t wait so I fired the shotgun in the air and ran over, hoping that would scare them off and it did.

After that they didn’t return and I sat down on the 4 wheeler and tried to relax. I started to fall asleep but something woke me and as I turned a wolf, with eyes almost glowing and mouth drooling, was no more than a few feet from me and for an instant we both froze. As I moved raising my gun the wolf turned to run but not before I emptied the revolver in his direction……

There may have been no reported fatal attacks on humans by wolves in Alaska,

but to this day I wonder what that wolf was going to do.

The American Matrix

80% of the population of the world is just like Alice in wonderland where she takes the rabbits hand and follows him down the rabbit hole. Smiling and skipping all the way blissfully ignorant to life in the real world around them. Myself I would prefer to be more like Neo in the Matrix and be given the choice of seeing what is really happening with our lives by taking the red pill, although the majority of Americans, I am sure, would prefer the blue pill where they can continue to enjoy hours of sports, MTV, Dr Phil or the unreal world of “reality” TV. Yes I know it is hard just trying to keep up with the expense of just ‘getting by’ but why is that?

I remember back when I was in grade school and my father worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He would come home and yes there would be talks of paying this bill or that one, but we like most other households managed to get by just fine. With just one person working most families, in the 50′s and early 60′s, managed to go on vacations have a nice car and the home they wanted. What has changed so drastically that it now takes two people working full time with one or both of them also with a part time job and yet they are still in debt?

I may be changing my opinion or going senile because I thought the ‘occupy Wall street’ movement was just a bunch of unemployed idiots with too much free time on there hands or people looking for a hand outs from the government and big business. I also thought that a man named Alex Jones was nothing more than a doomsday-er and conspiracy nut, and everything he talked about was just insane babble. But today sitting here in the cabin surfing the net checking out news stories and doing research the fog is slowly lifting and things though not crystal clear I seem to detect a general outline for what is happening.

 

And maybe it would be something like this…

 

Here Neo have another beer and calm down, all this talk about a global long term conspiracy to take over the United States is drawing too much attention. I think between you listening to that crazy guy Alex Jones on the radio and those long talks with Morpheus you’ve definitely gone over to the dark side. What do you want to do get us in trouble with the Fed’s? You see Pete that’s exactly it, we were a society that allowed free speech and now if you are even thought to question what the government is doing you are labeled a insurgent and then you disappear. And it’s all done perfectly legal under the Homeland security act… no rights, no lawyer, no trial just a jail cell in a re-education camp somewhere in the deserts of the SouthWest.

Tomorrow I am going to have that long talk with Morpheus he has been promising. He said he will only speak the truth, and only what he has found out himself about what the government is doing, like buying billions or rounds of ammo and thousands of firearms and armored personnel carriers. Wait a minute Neo that’s the same crap that Alex Jones is raving about on his talk show…. No Pete Morpheus has said he has proof that Homeland security is buying all the ammo and firearms and storing it in detainee camps around the country, and what do we need all those camps for? And if that story is true there is room in those camps for all the terrorists in the middle East.

It’s almost like in that old movie the Matrix where people live their lives never knowing that they are not in the real world. The only difference here is our government and governments around the world have made life so difficult to survive so we are so focused on just staying afloat that we never pay attention to the big picture. Hell when we do have some free time the last thing we want to do is think about is politics or what some big wigs down in Washington are doing. No we crack open a beer and watch some TV, play some ball or just try and relax. I am telling you one day we will wake up and the constitution and the bill of rights will be a thing of the past because while we were watching TV or surfing the internet those rights were legally taken away. OK I’m in tomorrow we sit down with Morpheus and let him tell us what he knows? Well maybe not tomorrow it seems no one has seen Morpheus since that trouble at the race last week. You remember they declared martial law and had everyone stay off the streets. I heard they arrested quite a few people when they tried to stop the search of their homes without a search warrant, and you know Morpheus and his love of the constitution. But as soon as he surfaces we will definitely have that talk.

To be continued?

New life

The volcano explodes with a force not experienced since the creation of the universe. Boulders and rocks were thrown into rivers and stream beds hundreds of miles away. A grotesquely beautiful jagged rock sits on a stream bed and mindless of the death and destruction around it passes into eternity. For eons that once distinctly beautiful rock has been washed over by countless millions of gallons of river water to become just another ordinary smooth stone.

 

All of us have gotten an itch every now and then, a feeling somewhere on your body that demands to be scratched. In Alaska in late spring it is mostly caused by mosquitoes the size of B2 bombers. Whatever the reason it is just not, for the most part, something you can ignore. There is one itch that no amount of physical scratching will sooth and that is a mental itch and I have been plagued by one for quite a while now.

Many things effect our daily lives and when a number of these are out of balance we look for ways to re-align them and to some of us this problem manifests itself as a mental itch. That is a problem or situation that comes to the mind’s surface throughout the day often when we least expect it. If we allow it, it will consume us and we will think of nothing but how to solve an unsolvable problem. And herein lies the rub… if this goes on long enough the itch becomes an obsession and if we allow that, it will consumes us.

I began this posting by describing a grotesquely beautiful, jagged rock being thrown miles from it’s birthplace by the force of a volcanic explosion. I ask your indulgence in that I propose that our lives could be remotely compared to that rock. We are born and live our lives every second of which we are being assaulted by outside forces. Some of those forces we absorb and they causes us to grow positively and some cause an erosion to some part of our being. As we travel through life these forces mold us into what we are today. For some of us we still have some of that rough edged persona, never allowing outside forces to mold us. For others we are polished smooth by the years of existence.

A young boy walking by a stream bends over and unknowing of its history
picks up that flat smooth polished rock and after eons of erosion
quietly skips it across the stream where it begins a new life.