Riley's Farm Journal June 14-19, 2009

Stupid I-Phone Tricks - June 14, 2009

We attended a home school high school graduation last night, and two different celebration parties afterwards. Mary volunteered to pick up a cake for one of the graduation moms and the Iphone GPS pointed us to a non-existent Sam's Club on Perris Blvd, a full 8 miles from its actual location. Borrowing the language of "Galaxy Quest," I kept doggedly advising Mary to allow the "little blue thingy" (indicating our position) to overtake "the little red thingy" (the non-existent Sam's Club). We bowed to this new technology right until...read more.

Pinning Hope on Beasts - June 15, 2009

It might work at birthday parties, but in real life, you would never pin a tail on a donkey, and you certainly wouldn't do it blindfolded. I've watched enough election cycles to know that is exactly what we do as voters. We pin our hopes on a candidate, or, even worse, a party, and we usually get kicked in the teeth. It doesn't matter if..read more...

Shaping Fate - June 16, 2009

One way of remembering the weddings of your life is to chronicle the roles you've played at them: guest, ring-bearer, usher, videographer, present-boy. All of those parts, even that of a guest, has a kind of peril attached to it. People want weddings to go just right, and what if you are the guy whose cell phone blares "La Bamba" right at the "husband and wife" moment? What if you stretch your legs at the wrong.. read more.

Heah, kids, gather 'round the set!

It's time for another episode of..

Customer Service in the

Post Christian World - June 17, 2009

I'm not in the habit of giving consumer financial tips, because I don't know what I'm talking about, but I will extend this advice with respect to dining out and credit cards: if the waiter makes a fishy mistake, have him void the ticket and give you a receipt for the void, then sign the corrected ticket. The other night, at a high concept restaurant called The Inquisition (not really), the waiter handed me a sub-total..read more.

Flat Out Gorgeous This Morning ..AND..

Four Riley's Farm Web Scripts - June 19, 2009

The farm is beyond beautiful this morning--a whole leafy-green salad field of strawberries out there, climbing red roses everywhere, grapes fattening up. You just have to see it... read more.

Summer, Town Crier, Weddings

Jesse Blesch has started in on the painting of a signboard in the tavern that we're wildly excited about. When you walk into the public house, this week, you can see it being hand-lettered and I imagine over the next few weeks, you'll start to see the Hawk itself appearing feather by feather, hue by hue. Nothing beats that hand-painted-right-over-the-planks look. I just stand there and watch it sometimes.

Summer Day Camp is getting some pretty heavy bookings, but we keep getting requests for a week long overnight camp from the Orange County and San Diego parents--so, farm staff, if you're reading this, let's get together and plot it out. (As in today.)

The Strawberries are a' popping--big time. I think we had a lot of people anxious for cherries last weekend, but it was kind of nice to see the patch getting picked by LOTS of families last Saturday, and even a few here and there on a Monday. U-Pick Strawberries are a bargain family outing, and the new high fashion is thriftiness--so get hip. Pick a few strawberries.

All the really cool kids and moms take their dad to the Night Before Father's Day at the Old Packing Shed. There's still time to be one of them. Games, Music, Tributes to Pop! We have towering crates of glass-bottled Dad's Root beer stacked up and ready for you to swill too.

August is not my favorite month around here, (largely because it doesn't seem to be your favorite month around here), so I've decided to give you a little break from what our fearless leader is calling a "Deep Recession." Free music. Michael Wassbottten of the Mill Creek Boys and Freeman House are putting together double-header Americana music on Saturday nights from 5 to 9 PM. Two great bands will be featured at each show. You can pick raspberries and strawberries, enjoy our farm grill barbecue, shop for gifts in the general store, and hear some great music. There's nothing quite like live music on a Summer Saturday night, and the music is free. The barbecue isn't free, because I am not the federal government and I don't have that fancy paper they use to print money, but we will give great value for very off-Broadway prices. Keep checking back.

Mallory and Eric's wedding was something like an hour or two in a pleasant sidewalk cafe located right smack dab in the middle of heaven. I can't do it justice. I really didn't get to enjoy my own wedding, because an arctic storm was blasting through the packing shed, but I had so much fun talking to and dancing with our guests and basking in the joy of it all, that, I confess, I wish there were a wedding everyday around here. (Heah....) Normally, I prefer conversation, but I danced and made toasts and threw rice and got completely OUT of my normally introspective, cranky self. Mallory and Eric did it the right way--and it was cause for a celebration! Praise God.

Summer

I haven't been writing quite as much, because we've been doing some last minute summer planning, and I'm always traumatized by bulk emails, which I had to compose and send out yesterday. I realize that as you all proceed through your day, with your various challenges and personal trials, that a Riley's Farm update may or may not be helpful in making you feel better about life.

Suppose, for example, you're a warehouse foreman and a 40 foot semi-trailer has just damaged your loading door--and you have 30 minutes to find someone responsible to wait for the repair crew, or sit alone in the warehouse all night, guarding expensive imported European cheese and sausage baskets. Someone is reading your email in your office and they yell:

"Heah, Chuck, the strawberries are ready for u-pick at Riley's Farm."

"That's great," you respond, agitated, "but I have a 10 foot hole in the warehouse wall, Duane--and WHAT ARE YOU DOING READING MY EMAIL?"

"I signed you up for the updates, man. The Riley's Farm updates....so you'll know when the strawberries are ready..and when the Father's Day hoe-down thingy is."

"Duane? Have you got that repair crew?"

"I don't know what your talkin' about. Crandall says you're the repair crew. Heah, Riley's Farm has a summer camp."

I suppose our updates could you hit you at a good time, but I'm always afraid our emails will arrive sometime between two big emails you have to send your accountant, pronto, with two really big fat PDF files you can't get to attach, and your wife will be looking over your shoulder, and she'll see the little "Riley's Farm: Father's Day, Strawberries, Summer Camp" and she'll say, "ohh..read that one," and you'll say, "Heather. We've got 10 minutes to get this down to Peter or we're going to have trouble with the franchise tax board. We can do the Riley's Farm huckleberry thing later."

The point I'm trying to make is that you should make some time to celebrate. It will help you forget about the hole in the warehouse wall--and it will address another nagging reality brought home to your correspondent by these pictures of his son, over the years.

Life goes by too quickly.

On Behalf of Goats

Could I have a word with you?

There's something to be said for a small goat company, not publicly traded. If you have more than a few acres, you won't even have to buy your original investment. Someone's kids will grow out of their 4H years, and they will give them away. If you get a male and female, your stock will split over and over again, and you will have several hundred shares, after just a few years. At first, when someone says, "heah, there's a baby goat out there," you think, "heah, cool," and then baby goats are being born more or less every day, almost like mail delivery.

There really is no management class to worry about in a company of goats. In fact the word "class" and goats just don't go together at all. They can be cute sometimes, sort of wise looking, but very--how shall we say?--honest about their needs, candid, frank. Sometimes brutally frank. They are not exactly storybook in their manners.

"Look at that cute little goat eating the hay."

"Look at that cute little goat being bottle fed."

"Oooh, gross. What is that goat Doooo-ing??"

And another goat comes into the world.

Other than creating new baby goats, goats generally just like to eat and run around, and they will mow your lawn for you, or eat down just about anything you want eaten down, and some things you don't want eaten down. They generally look pleased to see you, because they believe you will throw some piece of vegetation, or some section of an old grill cheese sandwich into their pen. And they are generally right about this. They expect you to feed them and they have a way of getting food out of you, and even your guests, even though they have no spoken or written language. If you put a "please don't feed the goats" sign near them, you could almost see the words "yeah, right" being scribbled over the text, before the Sharpie ink dried. No human child has yet been born who does not feel an immediate, visceral need to feed goats upon seeing them for the first time. At 49 years old, I still feel the urge to throw some sort of food into their pen.

The government, by and large, doesn't care about goats, and no one has told the Treasury that goats can move--so there is no goat tax yet. The S.E.C. does not regulate goats, nor does the Department of Transportation, though some goats could drag a grown man to work every day, if there was an old grill-cheesed sandwich in it for them.

Once in a great while, you get a mean, nasty goat--and then you have a free gift for that bus driver who keeps asking whether you sell goats or not. Theoretically, the goats could come in handy if there were some major disaster and you needed a source of fresh protein, though I believe I would wait for the FEMA relief before I tried a goat taco. Still, the ranging, growing flock, from a survivalist standpoint, is comforting.

Sooner or later, of course, the herd will get too large, and then you can call up one of those parents whose child has just joined the local 4H club. I think you can sell a little goat for $40 or $50.

But you won't ever really be parting with it, because later, after the 4H years are over, you'll get it back...

...and some bus driver will be very happy.

Showers, Constitutions

Early Summer Mist

We had a delightful shower this last Saturday with that old Oak Glen summer weather pattern--two or three days of clouds rising like castles over the Forest Falls ridge and then boom--cool winds and rain. This one was just a pleasant late spring wash and I saw guests standing out in it, sort of celebrating. Storms have a kind of signature that lets you know whether they're dangerous or not, and if I could order weather, I would order at least a dozen of these a year. No hail. Light rain. Cool wind. Proof of the Almighty #4324-lr.(3c).

The farm, courtesy of many dedicated hands, is looking more and more story-book these days. There was so much manicured cultivation in every direction, when I walked the place yesterday, that I got to thinking I should remind you all that when you come up, you can spend at least an hour or two exploring the place, along the red-dash marked trail on the farm map. (Follow the map carefully; we do have neighbors.) There are some cross-valley vistas that can't be done justice by any photo, so you should come up and have a meal, then take a walk. Can a corporate restaurant offer you acres of acres of farm land, by way of after-meal constitutional? I think not, sir. (Don't quote that last sentence out of context by the way.)

Taking a Constitutional

Two Quotes this morning, the first from Federalist #78:

Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.

The second, hauntingly, comes from a period more than 30 years later:

"It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression ... that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; ... working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped."



--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821

The first quote is Hamilton's and the second is Jefferson's. They weren't the best of friends, of course, but the erie prescience of Jefferson is difficult to ignore, even if he had the benefit of watching the "federal judiciary" in operation for some years, by the time he made this damning observation.

The fight over Proposition 8 this week, and in the oncoming months, highlights a sorry reality about our judges' soft-spoken but voracious appetite for power.

Hamilton wrote, truthfully, that the role of the courts is to determine if a statute violates the Constitution. "No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid."

Certainly, in instances where our Constitution is very clear, as in the case of the 2nd Amendment, we would expect the court to strike down all kinds of restrictive gun laws, which go far beyond the regulation of the militia and extend to an outright banning of the clear right of the people to "bear" arms.



However, when the life-time appointed jurists began looking to the Constitution's "penumbral emanations" to strike down laws they don't agree with, or use court orders and injunctions to make law they would prefer, they make themselves into whores without the face paint. Read the Constitution of the United States. Do you find any explicit or even implied right to kill another human being in the womb or define marriage however you like? It doesn't exist. It's not there. If you want it there, amend the document, but don't pretend a judge should be making policy. Supreme court nominee Sonia Sotomayer advocated just that in a candid, but caught-on-tape moment. In so doing, she broke a trade secret of the guild. ("Shut up, Sonia. We know we make policy; we're just not supposed to tell the public!")

Judges have an obligation, a sacred obligation, to make their arguments without resorting to a chain of implicit and tenuous assumptions about the intent of the original language. When you hear someone talking about the United States Constitution as a "living, breathing document, capable of change," ask them if their marriage licence is "living and breathing." Ask them if their wedding vows can be changed to reflect new partners, as the urge comes along. Ask them if their bank can change their mortgage agreement whenever they feel like it. Ask them if the treasury can just decide whether to make good on its "living, breathing" bond obligations.

Say what you mean, judge, but don't lie to yourself. A judge who makes himself into a legislator is really no better than the worst sort of con artist or rapist or murderer on the street. Each of these thugs has active contempt for the law, but you could argue that the "policy making" judge is far worse than the murderer, because when we feel that even judges can't be trusted to obey the law, why should society? Murderers only kill people. Bad judges can kill the very law that protects us from muderers.

Believe it or not, the founders, in their wisdom, knew that even those appointed to sit on the bench would be capable of this sort of depravity, and they fully expected both the legislature and the executive to check that depravity. In practice, however, they don't. A truly constitutional president would have ordered federal law enforcement to "stand down" on any Roe v. Wade related prosecution or arrest, and he would have allowed the states to make and enforce their own criminal law on the matter. He would have encouraged a show down with the judiciary, when it becomes infected with policy-makers, as opposed to jurists.

Hamilton argued that the judge had no "sword," but in fact he does. If you ask most policeman where their authority comes from, they will hold up a court order. American law enforcement has become nearly unquestioning in its sense of obligation to the courts. Just once, I would like to see an order from the governor (or the president) come into conflict with an order from a judge. Even better, I'd like to see a city council get a little Patrick Henry spirit, and order their police departments not to enforce a federal judicial order they thought was an egregious infringement of their local right to representation.

Let the checks and balances begin.