LJR Enterprises

Too bad this workshop is way up north of Traverse City.

A free one-day workshop for farmers and aspiring farmers on how to grow crops in low-cost “hoop house” greenhouses will be offered on Friday, Oct. 5, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Black Star Farms in Bingham Township.

Leelanau Enterprise

Storms came one after another this past week. On Thursday, my friend Bill mentioned quite a breeze visited his house (he lives north of Chicago). He asked if it made its way here.

Yeah, I think it did, Bill.

Click a photo to start the slideshow.

I came across this article this morning.

“I see an increase to the desire to learn about canning as we are moving to home-grown local food,” she says. The proof: The number of folks signed on to MSU’s food preservation correspondence course on canning is more than twice that of last year.

I googled the course and it’s extremely reasonable at $30 for a 7 week course that covers pretty much every aspect of food preservation including canning, freezing, and drying. Washington State University offers a Master Food Preserver program. How cool would that be on a business card?

In this part of Michigan, you have to do your job searches with mlive.com. A typical online newspaper. Not as bad as the Sun-Times, but pretty bad (at least mlive loads fast).

I’m doing my weekly job search and an annoying Dell ad pops up. You know the type, the one that floats and you either have to wait for it to finish its animation or click the close button. I close it. The jobs link doesn’t work.

Ok, I’ll let it finish its animation — reload the page. Still, the link doesn’t work. Close the tab and open a new tab. Same problem.

Are you telling me it isn’t Firefox compatible now? That’s exactly the problem. I suppose their developers use IE6 and IE7. That’s a bad sign. You test on IE6 and IE7, you don’t use it.

All this trouble and the search results for computer work was much the same — medical (RN, LPN, etc). Apparently, we’re a sick bunch here in this corner of Michigan. At least our local economy has one growth industry.

From Boing Boing–

Detroit houses selling for less than cars

Houses in Detroit are selling for less than new cars:

Folks, the ground underneath the house goes with it. You do know that, right?” he offered.

After selling house after house in the Motor City for less than the $29,000 it costs to buy the average new car, the auctioneer tried a new line: “The lumber in the house is worth more than that!”

Link (via MeFi)

Update:
From the same article: “At a weekend sale of about 300 Detroit-area houses by Texas-based auction firm Hudson & Marshall, the mood was marked more by fear than greed.”

They couldn’t even find a Michigan-based auction company to sell the foreclosed homes?