LJR Enterprises

I knew there was something I didn’t like about this guy…

Romney placed his family dog, an Irish setter named Seamus, into a kennel lashed to the top of his station wagon for a 12-hour family trip from Boston to Ontario in 1983. Despite being shielded by a wind screen the former Massachusetts governor erected, Seamus expressed his discomfort with a diarrhea attack.

Washington Post link.

I just took a footprint quiz. If everyone lived like I do we would need 2 1/2 planets! It’s because I eat meat and don’t have access to public transportation. So I wanted to know, what can I do to be a better person? Well, I can eat less meat and visit this website and start buying their environmentally friendly products… like disposable diapers.

Hey. As long as we’re all on the same page.

My beautiful, pink dogwood is no more. It had to go so that our well could be repaired. Last time we had our well worked on (only a couple of weeks ago) I contemplated trying to move it by hand (we don’t have money to have it professionally moved) but decided that I would probably kill it anyway and that I should just enjoy it in it’s ‘current’ location until the well had to be worked on again. The only problem with my decision was that I thought I’d have another season of blooms before that happened. C’est la vie.

I’ve been trying for sometime now to understand the USDA’s NAIS (National Animal Identification System) program. There seem to be a lot of holes in their logic to me and I don’t think that its really been thought through.

Here’s a puzzling piece of logic in the form of a question posed and answered on the NAIS website:

Q. If a Person Raises Animals for His or Her Own Use and the Animals Never Leave the Owner’s Property, Do They Need to be Identified?
A. Under the current plan, animals that never leave a premises do not need to be identified. However, animal owners are encouraged to identify their animals and their premises, regardless of the number of animals present, since many animal diseases may be spread whether an animal leaves its home premises or not. Examples of such diseases include West Nile virus, foot-and-mouth disease, vesicular stomatitus, and equine infectious anemia.

Hmmm. If the point is to track diseases that are being spread by the “commingling” of animals that happens during the transportation of said to feedlots and slaughter houses, why do they need to know that I have livestock at all if I’m not moving it anywhere and no animals are being moved to my property? What good will it do me or the program to register my premises and animals with the NAIS when my animals would only be exposed to disease by means other than commingling? Aren’t I already required to report these diseases if they occur on my property?

It’s interesting to me the way the outside world creeps into my house. I’m not talking about the “evil television,” or the influences of my childrens’ “evil classmates.” I’m talking about EVIL, spawn of Satan straight from the lake of fire… cockleburrs. They come into the house on shoes, dogs, coats, sweaters, mittens, scarves, hats, socks, underwear, trucks, buses, airplanes, trains and I think I saw a couple of them riding in on Segways. Madeleine complained just yesterday that after she picked all of the burrs off of her pink, Converse high top shoelaces outside, she came inside the house only to get more burrs on her shoelaces! So, we did the only reasonable thing there is to do. We took a full sized axe and walked around the property hacking gleefully at the cockleburrs and piling them up. Next week we are going to have a bon fire of cockleburrs and dance around it naked.

-Robinson