Mimic

Yesterday morning, one of the smoke detectors started its low battery chirp.  I took it down, but couldn’t figure out how to remove the battery.  I didn’t think Jack would think it was a sufficient emergency for me to wake him up before he would normally wake up.  I put it in the mudroom, where I wouldn’t hear it chirp, since the mudroom is on the other side of an exterior door.    When Jack got up, I asked him to remove the battery and it stopped chirping.

Later, when I went out to feed horses, I was astonished to hear the chirp again:  same pitch, but at a more rapid interval.  I was finally able to track the source of the sound: a magpie sitting on a telephone wire.  It must have heard the smoke alarm chirping in the mudroom, through the dog door, and decided to incorporated the sound in its repertory. 

Like Pick Up Stix, With Nails

Today, I did something I expect I will never do again:  I pulled a building down that was hitched to our truck. We went from this:

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To this:

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and filled a large dumpster. I didn’t really think we could get it done today, and I have rarely been this tired.  We salvaged some wood to build a loft in our new shed, but most of the wood was very old and brittle.  I am amazed the old barn stayed up as long as it did.  (It was partially taken down by a severe wind storm early in 2007, and we decided we didn’t want to try to repair it one more time.) We had been discussing getting rid of the eyesore since we bought the place nearly sixteen years ago, but it was a very useful eyesore.

Before we hitched the truck to the building, Jack first used a sledge hammer to remove everything that looked as though it could provide lateral support to the structure. When the building started shaking as he sledged, we first tried to push it over with the truck. (The Darwin Awards kept going through my mind.) That loosened things up a bit, and the building came down quite readily when we hitched the corner support to the truck. The horses, eating in the next field, didn’t even flinch.

The area enclosed by the panels still needs a lot of cleanup before I can remove them, but at least the dumpster is full, and we won’t have to rent it for more than the one week mininum.

Brad DeLong answers the question: is 2008 our 1929?

No. It is not. The most important reason it is not is that Bernanke and Paulson are both focused like laser beams on not making the same mistakes as were made in 1929.

They are also focused, but not quite as much, on not making the mistakes made by Arthur Burns in the 1970s.

And they are also focused, but not quite as much, on not making the mistakes the Bank of Japan made in the 1990s.

They want to make their own, original, mistakes…

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong.