Post No. 1,001 - Cold Day, Random Thoughts

Random thoughts:

This will probably be the coldest night of the year. That's a comforting thought after receiving the heaviest natural gas bill of the season so far. In response, I'm enjoying a great crackling fire in the fireplace. I love the smell of real wood, and how it permeates everything in the house (when I was young I envied friends who had a real fireplace in their home. All we had was a frumpy wood stove for heat, or at least I thought so then.) This is so much better than last year's ice storm in Tulsa County when the electric went out and all we had was a gas log.

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It snowed this morning, a real treat since it had not been forecast. No significant accumulation, and it was very dry snow, requiring no extra tools or effort to dislodge it from the windshield. Two or three inches would've been nice ...

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Jettisoned the normal menu for a hearty pot of chili. It'll be a perfect night for it.

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Today Glenn Beck called the prospect of a collapse of the Mexican government a potential "Archduke Ferdinand moment" for North America. He said the resulting chaos inside Mexico at the hands of the drug cartels will result in violence that inevitably will spill over the border into the U.S. If this happens, he said, watch out, because many people along the border, particular Texans "have had enough." That sounds on target to me.

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I've been taking an interest in farm topics recently. In fact, we are thinking of acquiring land and growing some food because I suspect that it's going to come in very handy one day soon. In the course of my research today I saw some numbers on Oklahoma from the Oklahoma Farmland Trust. I'm assuming they are current.

There are 83,300 farms in Oklahoma. We've got 3.5 million total population, but only 83,300 farms? Of these, 48 percent receive one kind of federal farming subsidy or another. Nearly half! The report says there are 110,000 farm "operators" (whatever that means) and Oklahoma farms hire 50,134 people for work. Oklahoma provides about 2% of the agricultural production of the nation, ranking No.17 among all the states.

The numbers seem like a poor showing. And yet when I drive through the state and see so much empty, unfarmed land, why should I be surprised.