As Tara mentioned in the last post, our burn pile last week was likely close to an acre in size and contained a varied cornucopia of farm related trash. Kris Luce and I spent some time yesterday grabbing fill from the pile and found the following:
- Iron Water Heater
- Two more large fram implements (one of which is a tractor!)
- Two Axles
- Four tires
- Front seat of a truck
- Two transmissions
- One engine
- FULL FRAME from a large truck
- 55 gallon drum
- Assorted steel siding
- About 75 feet (so far) of metal pipes
- Two more mattresses
- 4 flywheels (whatever they are)
- A distributor

By the way, we only hit about 1/10th of the pile. I grabbed some of the large stuff that was loose and light enough for me to carry without the tractors help, but the list will grow from here.

The reason we are grabbing fill dirt though, is to keep reclaiming in a positive way the land. So yesterday with Kris' help, we tilled the garden and a few other areas. After Kris left I planted:
- 42 Evergreen Trees
- About 350 Strawberry plants (from the Luce's)
- 6 Raspberry Bushes (Luce's....again)
- 47 Sugar Maples (last week.....with lots of help from Kris)

In other news, Liloia.com will soon be renamed Liloia-Luce.com, as I have to figure out a way to thank Kris for all of his help. It was either that or give them Trevor....

We found a U-bend, an axle with two tires attached, several buckets, Ball jars filled with mysterious brown goo, an old tractor, a disc plow, various pokey things that look like medieval farm implements, the head of a pickaxe, heavy metal gears, the hood of a car, piles of rebar, large screws, a well pump, concrete building footers, brown glass medicine bottles, a kidney dish, a hot water boiler, ten thousand asphalt roof shingles, barn siding, and several unidentifiable pieces of machinery.

Anyone have a trash bag?

This particular recipe calls for a sour cream/baking soda mixture that fizzes up and gives the bread some lift. I like to sprinkle some brown sugar over the top before baking to give it a sweet, golden crust.

There's nothing better than a slice of this with some butter and a cup of tea.

The forty near the garage are a mix of different evergreens (fraser fir, balsam, etc.) which will someday be Christmas trees. (They look large because Trevor got down on the ground to take the picture. They're actually just a few inches tall.) The fifty in back are sugar maples for syrup-making in about a decade.

Last year, most of us in attendance went through the initial training, but as with most tools used within the corporate environment our use is limited unless specifically required by our jobs and therefore we are doing a bit of catch up right now.

Eloqua does some really great things such as customer profiling, clickstream analysis, robust analytics and form builders that allow you to automate a lot of administrative tasks after emails have been sent.

The only problem so far is that Eloqua being a Canadian company has only Ontario based trainers who say a lot of things like
"A-Boot" (About)
"Owt" (Out)
"A-Gain" (again)
"Yah" (yes)

It's interesting..... :)

Trevor and I gathered pinecones from under our evergreens and made pinecone bird feeders. We get a lot of birds on our island -- we'll see if any are interested in this type of seed. Trevor hated the old-bacon smell of the lard/oatmeal mixture, so I had to do that part. He rolled them in birdseed afterwards and we hung them in the trees.

I fully expected the little guy to die in there -- who knew if woolly bears ate pizza herbs? But sure enough, we came downstairs one day to find that Barry the Caterpillar had spun himself a little brown cocoon in the warm corner of the jar nearest the candle I keep burning in the kitchen.

The other day, I saw a flutter in my peripheral vision. Barry had emerged as a lovely orange-ish Isabella Tiger Moth. He stayed inside for 24-hours to wait out a cold, rainy day, then we released him into the backyard.

I had to at least make sure that we didn't send the young lady home soaking wet, so I convinced them both to take an umbrella outside. You'll notice in the photo that neither umbrella is in a position to protect anyone from the rain. Hey, I tried.

Things at work have been going really well. I regularly tell the people I work with, that I feel bad for them since I have the "best job in the company". I am sure I don't, but I am really enjoying my work these days and I get paid to play online and talk to customers about the web all day.

That unfortunately also means that I am working like a maniac. I have been traveling quite a lot for the last year or so, and not posting to the blog. I joke with Tara that this is now www.taraliloia.com since I can't get as involved as I would like. The way I am getting involved today is by blogging about what I am doing at work, which is as good as it's going to get.

Right now, I am in a workshop on Inorganic Analysis for chemists in the New Jersey area. The presentations are pretty good, and there are about 90 customers in the room here (Sheraton, Edison). After lunch I am going to be presenting to them about the benefits of online ordering and why they should use our website more often. Hopefully I don't trip on a cord or fall off the platform they have here. :)

The slush sounds like shards of glass grinding against each other and the shoreline. Each piece is only a couple of inches across and there are millions jostling for position mixed in with leaves, sticks and sand. It's like an immense lakewater Slush Puppie... which would probably not taste that great.

Slush ice can trick a nine-year-old into thinking it's solid ground -- which will result in water up to your ankles and a quick change of shoes.

This is a happy piece of driftwood on Lake Champlain that will likely be gone in a few weeks when the fishermen start loading boats into the water at the lake access point.

This weekend, the lake level was high enough to splash over retaining walls and flood a few yards on the shoreline. Today, our neighbors across the street -- who are inland, but next to the swamp -- have no grazing fields for their cows on the left-hand side. It's all lakewater, high enough for waves and probably a small boat.

And the water level was a few inches below the road over the swamp yesterday, so it's likely right up to the edge or over today... and rising, says the Burlington Free Press. There's still one other road for the south islanders to get to the north side, and lots of food in the pantry!

In Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, there are a mountain's worth of great ideas wrapped up in a solid story. There's a washing machine mother, a brother who rises from the dead, a severed thumb that grows a body, a girl with wings, and free wifi... all wonderful things (none of which are elves and unicorns...). But the devil is in the details and a few of those details niggle at me here.

In Star Trek, Mr. Spock never turns to the camera to offer a 15-minute lecture on how transporters work and why they are good for free society. In this book, we spend too much time in geeked-out explanations of how to blanket a city with free wifi and why it's the Right Thing To Do. Even as a full-fledged nerd I was a little put off by the lectures coming from all over the place; a telecom employee, a reporter, etc.

And then there are the relationships. This is the same issue I found in the wonderful novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- the characters taken singly are interesting and multi-dimensional, but the relationships just aren't believeable. I don't feel an emotional connection between people. I read the words that say they care for each other, but I just ain't feelin' it.

As far as the nuts and bolts of the story, there are a few little gimmicks that could be more than just clever tricks if we only knew why they existed. For example, the names of the main character and his family morph constantly within a set of rules that help the reader follow the changes. The eldest son is always called a name starting with "A," the second son's name always begins with "B," and so on. The name changes are not too jarring, but we never know why. Is it a fit of authorial pique or something about the nature of the characters?

Again on the name front, early in the book Alan meets a neighbor whom he calls Mimi as a joke. Her roomie starts to correct Alan, but Mimi stops him and says,"Mimi is as good a name as any." But it's not hers, and we never get to know her real name. Is that important? It's hard to tell, since we never get into the nature of Mimi and why she's a winged creature like a bird, bat, or angel.

Then something happens to the writing about halfway through the book. I'm having trouble putting my finger on it, but the storytelling changes. I had to re-read a few pages to ensure I hadn't missed something. We're knee-deep into a critical part of the story, then we suddenly shift to another time and place. The rest of the book jumps around and we never quite settle back into one coherent story.

It feels as if this book is the first half of a longer novel. We're tantalized with an elaborate alterworld that lives alongside our own mundane existence. I was eager to explore that world and learn even a little bit more about it's nature, but we never quite get in the door. The final "journey to the mountain" near the end of the book had the feel of an elaborate resolution to come -- I was braced and ready for at least some sort of peek at an answer -- but none ever arrived.

It was as if my parents piled all four kids in the car, loaded up with luggage, smiled with a gleam in their eye and said, "We're going somewhere fun today!" then drove cross-country for nine hours and ended up at a ShopRite in a different town.

This lovely aerial photo of Isle La Motte was taken by the McEwens as they flew over. The swamp that cuts the island in half is very photogenic from the air.

My only complaint is that for "root beer" cupcakes, (two cups of it in the batter), there was barely any root beer taste. I boiled up some extra soda into a syrup to drizzle over the top to give a little more flavor. Maybe root beer extract in the batter would end up with a better result.

I skipped the brown food coloring, but they're still cute as anything with their little ice cream scoops and straw.

American Airlines basically forced the entire universe to scramble for new flights, causing delays and problems for thousands of flights and an unknown number of passengers. But that's not what this post is about.

As I sit here waiting for my flight to BTV on Northwest, I am confounded by the number of airport employees that are on their cell phones during their work shift. I'm not talking about "Billy fell out of a tree, I have to go!" kinds of calls. I am talking about "Oh no she didn't!" kinds of calls.

Why is it that this is acceptable by the airlines? As customers are more and more frustrated by delays, rising prices, less room and cancelled flights shouldn't great customer service be their way back into our hearts? How often have you had to actually wait for help at a counter, not because there was a line in front of you but because Jimmy just had to tell Jeanie that Michelle said that she was looking fine today?

With all the cumulative processing power and time used in these pursuits, I have a funny feeling that these people could take on larger problems and solve them in all this apparent free time. Why not fix our energy crisis? Or plan our exit from the Middle East? Or perhaps cure cancer?

I would be happy if they could just get my flight to take off on time so I can go home.