Although we’re always happy to see the hard winter snow melting, in the week afterwards, the previously concealed moraine - the detritus of last year’s unfinished jobs, interrupted by the same snows - stands revealed; stark, wet and ugly.
But then we have an opportunity, the fake springs of March, to tidy up as much of it as possible so that after the April snows, when proper spring eventually comes sometime in anticipation of May, we have a clean base from which the celebration of the end of winter can actually take place.
Or, in other words, it snowed again last night.
I don’t have any photos of it because I have no desire to get out of bed. None at all. The piggies the must be fed, but I promise you, they’re not pawing at the ground, desperate to start the day either. Seven months of winter is shitty, and I don’t care who says otherwise.
Still, it was nice this last week, and I did get a lot done. The two days of raking I promised in the last newsletter turned in to four days of raking, and I only did half of what I wanted. But it looks nice. I took up 18 big bags of leaves and moss out of the grass around the soft fruits.
Conditioning the grass like this nice and doing it early in the year might well double the amount of mowing I can do. Which means twice as much grassy pig food, twice as much mulch, and much more for the compost heap, to lock away those carbons.
I also weeded all the soft fruits except the asparagus, which is a shame. I would have liked to have done that before the return of winter, but it’s not so tragic. I dug up a third of the strawberries to be replaced with baby plants - it’s a good idea to replace your strawbs every four years. Yes, I know the maths doesn’t work here, but all 63 of my strawberry plants are the same age, so I need to do some catching up.
I did not move the pigs. We had plenty of sunshine. It was even occasionally warm. But it never got up to the giddy heights of two or three days of warm and dry. Yes, I want to move them over to fresh grass, but they won’t be happy in the open air if they get chilly. Looks like it’s going to be at least a couple more weeks. Poor porkers.
This week, the work load all depends on the weather. According to the prognosticators, the only times it’s going to not be doing “light snow showers” are when it’s doing “light rain showers”. I’m going to have to get out of bed at some point today, and, post cup of tea, I should busy myself with something or other.
Or maybe I’ll just get on with some reading. I have spent far too much time recently contemplating embodied intelligence - can any of the attempts at artificial general intelligence actually become intelligent without actual bodily experiences? I’ve been reading the books-by-philosophers which all tend to say “no”.
I think they’re wrong, but I also think that I should stop thinking about this, so I have two conclusions.
This week I am going to read trash romance novels in German.
The final proof that we exist in a simulation is going to be when all the existential threats to humanity that we can think of - nuclear war, pandemic, climate change and the emergence of a malevolent super-intelligent AI - all happen at the same time, the operator notices the glitch, and restarts the programme.
I usually like to finish on a positive note.
But not always.
😏
And so, with my traditional sign off, with much love and with uncharacteristic optimism for humanity, until next week,
Your loving Pirate Ben
xoxo
PS: If you’ve got this newsletter twice this morning, my apologies. I am an eejit and I posted it to the wrong place. I’ve changed a thing in my settings to make it much less likely that I do this again. Not impossible, but harder… Sorry!
I reckon the Great Controller must have felt the same about the massive glitches in the mid to late 1600s, Plague, Great Fires, 30 year wars. Better turn that shit off and on again, and hope for the best.