Love of Green in the midst of Politics

There’s no proper way to convey a message to the World. That World will reject you. Or at least, half of you (of the World) will treat the message as an affront to your belief or maligned in dignity. Damn the Torpedoes!

This site is intended to bring a sense of balance to what is otherwise chaos in a media world of Lefties and Righties. Well, as I happen to be ambidextrous, I’m going to go out on a limb and introduce myself to you all with a personal story that has nothing to do with political affiliations.

We all have hobbies, or wishes for a hobby, if our free time could afford us such luxuries. As like most of us, I’ve managed to find hobbies in my fragmented moments between demands from business in nature just outside my door. That limited access to the real world of freedom has formed into a hobby of observation of those lives that live with a simpler focus on life, above and under my back porch. Throughout the day, with ebbs and flows, I opine away with thoughts of great portent for this customer and that, and will bring a cocktail or a fizzling Coca-Cola to my porch depending upon the stress it brings. I’m not a particularly observant man. In fact, I’m outright ignorant to my surroundings. I’m candid in my methods, and am growing less approachable by each process for which I find a way to automate humans out of the equation.

I am a process technologist, who brings to the forefront, hundreds of complex idiosyncrasies of what others would perceive to be a “workflow”, into a thread, into my head, and I toss those specifics about throughout my day… and I help to find ways to automate decisions there within. This effort of micro-focus draws me into a personal state that is undoubtedly unappealing to my wife, as I seem to be in nothing more than a haze for a good portion of my day. But as for wildlife, whether that be squirrels, or the house-friendly amphibious life, they can tell I don’t present any harm, and they treat me, often like a tree or a rock, or a slug. That has afforded me a new hobby, and perhaps, a new set of unusual friends.

I have observed this unusual companionship for a few years now, as this unsuitable talent has overwhelmed my role in the world. I have built a Treefrog home next to my porch light that accommodates their need for constant food- bugs drawn toward light- and have watched and supported generations of toads who live around and under my back porch. Countless hours have been spent sharing a hope to find commonality with the animals surrounding my backyard world, in moments that I seek muse from the complex demands of my job. My wife, to her credit, consistently finds ways to assimilate my love for a perceived connection with a toad, to that of harmony with the greater world with whom I work. And only a few years ago, I was an extrovert and her, the introvert. Life is funny.

Such nature efforts would involve coaxing insects into a tree frog trap for an entire season, and to watch such frogs develop a large natural family outside their natural habitat. It also involved naming and loving generations of small toads become large toads, and talking to them, and respecting their distance, and eventually learning of their needs borne from knowing and depending on us. Only in the last two weeks, did we learn that perhaps, the toads weren’t seeking good “buds”, but were in fact, begging us for something. We had been letting them down.

The backdrop reality is: Four years into living on a sludgy and soggy property, my wife and I recently decided to become aggressive in making our rear and front property a happy and sludge-free property in the world of Texas muck. This involved several thousands of dollars and a lot of labor in building French drains to relieve us of our watery circumstance that surrounded the world we called our homestead property. It didn’t take but a week thereafter to realize we had upset the apple-cart we had come to know as our hobby back-yard amphibious family.

In the last two days, we came to meet ALL of the toads with which we had become acquaintances, but they all met us at the same time. Each one of them seemed to be risking their lives to convey a message. Not one single one seemed comfortable with the situation, not with their exposure, nor with any trust scenario with my wife and I, as we sipped on a cocktail in awe. Instead, they seemed tentative, determined, and desperate. They were all risking their lives. We quickly realized that they didn’t trust us, as they propped themselves up around their getaway hidey-holes, and they guardedly watched us together, in some sort of resolute unison that didn’t resemble the laisser-faire connections we had found with each other in the past.

The reality set in for my wife and I. In only days or a week or so, we had dramatically changed the lives of those amphibians we came to love… 1. We had just made very efficient, every single drop of rain water, in the form a French Drain system that would purge the water away from our property without fail. 2. We had held off on any Sprinkler activity, because we had damaged, bided our time, and only recently repaired the entire sprinkler system which had been damaged in our effort to install teh French drains. We were starving our backyard buddies.

So here we were, with out comrades of several years… watching the generations of toads and frogs we had named and known, and watched grow, for 4 years, all putting on a show for us…. only for us to realize that we had formally starved our named generations of friends of their precious need, for over 1 1/2 months…… WATER. So my wife and I greeted them each by name, and assured them that we would overflow their cup/s, and that we were sorry we had interfered with their habitats…. I turned on the freshly repaired sprinkler system, and watched them all revel in the cold water. They literally sat there while the water sprayed upon them… The frogs are gone… but those toads reveled. I reflect, with some contemplation, on the fact I am a hunter, and a conservative, and I realize we all make friends, and they should be of all different sorts and races and colors and needs, and if we are smart…. it has nothing to do with politics.