Sunday Wrapup 3/13/2011

Hiromi's last utterance before he went to bed just now was "The third nuclear reactor in Japan just blew up." He's been following the events in Japan, on NHK, I think. Apparently, not much is known yet about how bad it was. It may have happened with this one just as happened earlier. In that case, the structure (building) around the reactor blew up when a potent mixture of hydrogen and oxygen ignited, but the reactor itself (made of stainless steel six inches thick) was undamaged. The explosive situation developed because sea water had been used to cool the reactor, in the absence of the usual cooling mechanisms because of damage from the earthquake and tsunami.

When sea water is used, it's the last resort, since the reactor is forever rendered useless after that. The threat of a meltdown was serious enough to warrant this drastic action.

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I marvel at the concern of Americans over the loss of life in Japan, the destruction of cities, and the threat of radiation. Yet in WWII, Americans dropped bombs on two cities in Japan, resulting in the death of 200,000 people, destruction of two large cities--Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the release of radiation that caused illness and abnormalities for years to come.

These many years later, the peacetime use of atomic energy has again become a fearsome threat, piled on top of shocking natural catastrophe. And the whole world is concerned.

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When a tornado or ice storm goes through Kansas, loss of power is a common result. But our roads are still here and usually our power generating capacity is still intact. Restoring power is just a matter of crews getting out to reset poles and re-string lines. Not so in eastern Japan. The major coastal highway is gone in many areas, sunk permanently to a level that places it on the ocean side of the shoreline. Getting to many of these towns has been impossible so far. And their electric power plants are blowing up and threatening to poison everything in the vicinity.

If you think of how cold it can still get in Partridge, Kansas (We're getting snow this evening.), think of Sendai, Japan--near the earthquake epicenter. Both Partridge and Sendai are located very nearly at 38 degrees latitude, north. I hear that people there are cold and hungry, and in the dark. Many, many aftershocks--so many that officials have lost track--keep people too scared to stay inside all the time. At least one aftershock registered above six, and one this evening was at least four. This is no tropical nightmare. It's a wild winter in Japan.

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We have not heard from Jae, the exchange student who lived with us for ten months. His family lived much closer to the earthquake damaged area than most of Hiromi's family. We're not sure where he is based in his job as a journalist, and, of course, we're not sure what his role in reporting on the recent disaster might involve.

He's not very diligent in answering his Facebook messages, and right now, that's the only contact information we have for him. So we wait, and pray for him and his family in the meantime.

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We had night school on Friday evening from 6:00 pm till about 12:30 am. I may have been the only person there who came straight home from school in the afternoon and took a long nap. I showed up at school after things were underway, as I usually do--since I'm not a full-time teacher. People seemed fairly bright-eyed at that point, but even coffee, Mountain Dew, and energy drinks didn't sustain that condition indefinitely.

A lot of students had worked feverishly all week to earn "E" privilege status for the night school event. As a result, the learning center was fairly de-populated much of the evening. When students weren't in class, they trucked out to the shop to play basketball or watch others play.

Marvin had assembled the park benches the comp class donated to the school, so they were pressed into service in the shop on their "maiden voyage" day.

Friday was a spring-like day, and the windows were wide open during the first part of night school. But the wind shifted to the north during the night, and it got a lot colder.

Typing class came near the end of the day--an intentional scheduling maneuver to provide something a little more active than doing pace work. While they were working on designing Plain Talk covers, I overheard Nathan say, "OK, I'm getting tired. I spelled 'of' o-v-e." Nevertheless, he whipped out an on-the-fly original poem for the cover of the Plain Talk. It started out with "I'm getting tired . . . " When he showed it to me, he hastened to assure me that this isn't really what he would want on the cover.

I wondered yesterday how parents feel about our night school. I don't know that they've ever been asked, and I think they probably should have been. Any comments out there?

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I loved the Gathering for Gardeners, except that I got tired of sitting on those hard folding chairs. We moved so quickly from one lecture to the next that there was no time to get up and move around, let alone zip to the back for a cup of coffee or water and a cookie or two.

I often marvel that the same people who are really knowledgeable about specific gardening subjects have the good fortune to be good speakers too. Or maybe I wouldn't notice it if they weren't, since I find the subject captivating in any presentation.

Among other things, I learned that mole baits do no good since the only thing moles are used to eating are live soil dwellers. The only remedy for moles, besides dogs that dig them up and cause more damage in the process than the moles might do, are fairly grisly traps--one of them called the harpoon type--which gives you some idea of the dispatching mechanism. For pocket gophers, on the other hand, baits are often effective. We have either moles or gophers--moles, I think, but I had never considered the gopher possibility before yesterday. I'll have to examine their entrance or air-hole mounds more carefully to know for sure. The tunnels look much the same.

I found out why it's so hard to find David Austin roses in the trade. The rosarian who spoke yesterday said they're wonderful roses, but they stocked them faithfully for some time, and there was almost no demand for them. "We couldn't give them away," he said. And here I was drooling over their pictures in the Wayside catalog and deciding yet again that I couldn't justify spending the money, not dreaming that they might actually go away some time because no one was spending the money. Last year Stutzmans had some of them, and this year they have none--just when I'm finally ready to use gift money and other odd bits I've collected to buy some good landscape roses that also make great cut flowers.

I have almost no patience with tea roses--naked as they usually are from the knees on down, with terrible complexion problems (blackspot) if you don't spray them within an inch of their lives, with only one chafer-beetle-laden blossom on each stem. Then if you ever grow a perfect one, you bring it indoors, and it promptly blows itself totally open and then drops its petals. This is not a satisfactory scenario for a field-grown cutflower grower. I want bushes that look good in the landscape, resist diseases fairly reliably without sprays, don't shiver themselves into oblivion in the chill of winter, and look good in a vase on the table for at least four days. Some of the David Austin roses fill the bill as do some of the roses bred by Kordes, a German breeder. They don't have to have the classic tea rose shape, as long as they're full-petaled or graceful in some other way.

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Yesterday I met a farmer's market friend who referred in passing to her husband's having been laid off because he refused to falsify safety inspection records his boss told him to falsify. He had worked as an engineer with this company for more than 30 years.

Our Sunday School lesson today in I Peter 1 was apparently written to a group of Christian Jews who were dispersed in the area that is present-day Turkey, among people who did not share their faith, and did not take kindly to seeing them live out their faith. The raging persecution that was unleashed later had not yet arrived, but life was hard for Christians, and Peter was writing to help them understand the reasons for hope.

I thought of my friend's husband. Maybe his workplace experience put him in a situation much like those Christians in Peter's time--suffering for doing what was right--not because Christianity is outlawed, but because following Christ has always put people at odds with the ways of a world in conflict with the way of Christ. Nevertheless, we have reasons for hope, just as they did.

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Perry Lee and Judith celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary today with an open house. At 5:00 there was to be a time of singing out of the Coleman's song books, arranged for men's voices. We went early and didn't stay for the singing.

The old pictures cycling through on a screen provided a lot of interest. Perry Lee's prized black '57 Chevy appeared in some of the pictures.

Lyle and Maria and Owen and Wanda orchestrated the event.

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I sat beside Esther in church today. I could tell she was Asian and soon learned that she is Kim's sister--who is married to my former student, Esther. They grew up in Paraguay. She and her husband Arlen are here from PA visiting their son who is a student at Bethel College in North Newton, about 50 miles from here. He was with them today. I hope he feels welcome to come back.

With all the CASP guys still here, we had quite a diverse group at church this morning.

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Our dining room is partly turned into a potting shed, as is often the case this time of year. Hiromi transplanted some tomatoes while I was off to the Gathering for Gardeners yesterday, and I seeded another half dozen flats of ornamentals after I got home. We have peppers and eggplant ready to transplant also.

Hiromi also transplanted the Swiss Chard. We'll see if they survive the transplanting. They're not known to do well under those conditions, and I had planted them into individual cells because of that. My plan was to move them directly into the garden, disturbing their roots as little as possible. We obviously weren't quite on the same page in this matter.

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I'm still amazed with how well everything works on this second-best stove we got from LaVerne and Rebecca at a very special price, and I'm really enjoying cooking and baking again. I notice, however, that the burners are not as hot as they were on our old one. I think it's because it has sealed burners, and the grates must have higher clearances to accommodate the burner position. The increased space between the burner and the cooking pan allow more heat to escape and direct less of it toward the bottom of the cooking pan. I read about this phenomenon on the internet when I was trying to identify the characteristics of various stove options.

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I think I agree with the person who commented on daylight savings time by marveling that anyone would think that you could take a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it onto the bottom of the blanket and expect to end up with a longer blanket.

Just when I could begin to look forward to waking up to daylight, the morning schedule is plunged back into the Dark Ages. It's almost enough to make me reconsider my preference for early morning rising.

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My aunt Judy (Mrs. Perry) was in the hospital last week with lung problems. She is at home now, but still on oxygen, except when she puts it aside because it's too much bother. She is quite frail, and apparently has some dementia.

Lydia Yoder also had a very weak spell last week, but returned to normal after a day or so.

Conrad and Rebekka's toddler son David also was in the hospital with pneumonia.

A lot of people are sick with the flu, and the illness often sticks around a while. We've had one or more absences at school almost every day for the past few weeks.

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Achievement tests will be given this week at the high school. We're hoping for good attendance on those days. At the grade school, there were a number of absences on testing days, and the prospect of making up the testing looks fairly daunting.