It’s the animals that are hard to take. They didn’t create the mess, but they have paid the ultimate price. We need to stop screwing things up in hopes of making a dollar. The money isn’t going to last, as people should now realize, and you can’t ever replace what was wiped out.

People will rebuild, and we can hope that they do it wisely, but there are always the wastrels who just want to loot for the short term.

Windows had a major security update yesterday, and that may have set off the problems. I have to keep this machine vanilla for business reasons, so it has been fairly robust. The world of Windows is a soul-sucking mess, and Gates should pay for eternity.

It’s sad to believe that so much has been destroyed. I am still amazed by the giant ferns, and had to park (on the narrow road, yes) and go see them close up. Driving on the narrow roads was much easier than driving in the city… although it takes a brain reset to drive on “the wrong side” regardless. 🙂

Windoze manages to corrupt itself after about 8 months or so… I think it’s a feature! My system decided to do just that yesterday. It keeps announcing that the “System Has Recovered from a Serious Error”. Maybe it has, but it hasn’t cleared the flag that makes it keep telling me about it. And I’m really busy with work right now with no time to reinstall. Yes, hell for Gates is sounding like a plan.

LadyMin´s last blog post..I Love Red Flowers

When LadyMin was here and we went to Marysville, we found a little store in a tiny town called Taggerty, about half way between Marysville and Alexandra. This store had some 250g plain brown bags of coffee (not like lunch bags, proper lined and sealed coffee bags. I was a little suspicious of course, but desperate for a coffee! So I got one… It was delicious!! We went back, and they were all out! 🙁 Apparently it was made locally, Was a very nice mellow coffee. 🙂

Latest fire stats are:
210 people dead, 30 still unaccounted for
450,000+ ha burned out
Over 3,500 buildings destroyed
735 ha of fruit trees, olives and vines
7,000 ha of plantation timber
190 ha of crops
168,000 ha of pasture
2,150 sheep, 1,207 cattle
An unknown number of horses, goats, llama’s, alpacas, camels, poultry and pigs
Several million wildlife animals and birds

The Water Authority is saying that the Maroondah Reservoir may have to be decommissioned if the contamination from ash, salt and other materials is as severe as the think it might be. LadyMin has some photo’s of the Maroondah Reservoir. It was a beautiful place. We came down a road called the Black Spur which is a narrow winding highway covered on both sides by ancient huge ferns, All gone now. 🙁 She thought I was just playing a trick on her because she was just getting used to driving here. 😉 But I think she discovered that it was worth the trouble. Unlike me with NOLA, at least she got to see it before it was destroyed.

*sigh*

I just spent a fun day reinstalling Windows after it totally crapped out this morning for no reason I could figure out!! Really… I didn’t install or change anything! Even system restore or backups wouldn’t fix it. *shrug* I suspect that the system reg became corrupt somehow. Oh well… I wanted to test a new system anyway, and the old one was getting slower every day (as Windoze does!) LOL

I really hope there is a special hell reserved for Gates. Where he can spend all eternity with the Bushmoron, Cheney, Rove etc and the rightwing evangelical nutters and Murdock and a few others. I could just about go to bed with a big grin thinking about that! LOL

The “fair trade” coffee is generally better because it isn’t caught up in the industrial stream that moves at the pace of the big roasters, not the ripeness of the beans.

Very true about the coffee. I am always on a quest for a better bean. I’ve found some decent coffee at World Market. They have a variety of free trade coffees from South and Central America. Recently I found a bag of Kenya AA, very nice. I stay away from that pre-ground stuff in a can though.

Oh, yes, the coffee sold in the US just sucks. It is generally old because of the industrial systems used. Even if you buy the beans and grind them yourself, they will be old and not stored in optimal conditions.

I once had a source for great Colombian beans, but the War On Drug™ made that a PITA. I don’t doubt that at least one source was not above smuggling, but it would have probably been emeralds or Incan artifacts, which are much more valuable than agricultural products. Obviously something is going on when someone has no visible means of support, but never runs out of cash.

One thing I do miss from Texas is the ‘Texas one-eyed stack’ of pancakes! At least, that’s what they were called at the place we stopped for breakfast. I don’t even remember the name of the town. But it was good. I think they were buckwheat, a stack of 6 thick pancakes with bacon on the side and assorted accouterments provided. And a decent coffee too! A luxury in the USA! Really GOOD coffee was damned hard to find, and yet, all the US movies make out that everyone loves the great coffee there. As far as I could discover, only people who’d never left the USA thought that. 😉 🙂