Snake Berries

When I was young, my mother would sometimes send my brother and me into the fields to pick wild strawberries.

We were always admonished to watch out for the snake berries.

Snake berries look like strawberries. The biggest difference is that strawberries grow so that the fruit hangs down, while a snake berry grows so that the fruit points up toward the sky.

Mom always said snake berries were poisonous. 

This is actually called Potentilla indica or Duchesnea indica as its scientific name. It is most often called a false strawberry or mock strawberry. I have no idea where my mother learned to call it a snake berry but apparently others do too, as I was able to find this information by typing in that name. It is also sometimes referred to as an Indian strawberry (no clue why).

This berry is not indigenous to the US and apparently was brought into the country from Asia. It's considered an exotic invasive species. It must be hardy since it is all over the place around here.

Apparently it is not poisonous but also not very tasty. Mostly it is considered a weed.

Here are resources:

https://kids.niehs.nih.gov/topics/natural-world/wildlife/plants/false-strawberry/index.htm

https://www.wildernessarena.com/food-water-shelter/food-food-water-shelter/food-procurement/edible-wild-plants/duchesnea-or-indian-strawberry

What Is Up With AOL?

When the Internet first became a "thing," my only access was through America Online. At the time, it was a dial-up service with an 800 number and that is how I first accessed this new technology. My local phone service did not offer access, and I live out in a rural area that still has limited Internet connection.

So my first experience with the Internet was that EEERRRRR  WWWOOOOO DWEEEE sound that one used to receive upon connection, followed by, "You've Got Mail."

That was, as best as I can tell, on June 20, 1994 (according to my AOL account information). I set up a main account and two other accounts, both of which I still use, because I think at the time you were allowed three. Then it went to five, then to seven.

So I've been with AOL for 23 years, and I've had the same email accounts for 23 years. For a long time I paid a monthly fee for Internet access, and then about the time AOL became "free" (with advertisements) my local provider finally offered DSL in my area, so I switched to that and kept the free email accounts.

Over the years AOL has been, more or less, reliable. The stuff surrounding AOL has changed - there used to be active groups you could join, a closed community sort of thing. I made some friends online during that time, a few of whom I still keep in touch with. Never met them in person and probably never will, but we've followed one another from AOL to gmail to Facebook or whatever.

I stopped using AOL software a long time ago (and recently threw away a bunch 3.5 disks that had American Online 2.0 on them). I access it via my browser. For the longest time it has worked fine - a little menu came down so I could select which email account I wanted, it remembered my password, I went in and did my business, and came back out and went to the next account.

Now AOL seems to not want me to do that. It wants me to sign in constantly. This wouldn't be such a big deal if my password was something easy, like "password" but AOL, you may recall, had a breach in 2014. I changed my passwords and they are the most convoluted things you ever saw.

I am hoping this is a hiccup in what used to be a fairly decent email service, but if it continues I may have to look for something else - or somehow stick with a single AOL account. That will be difficult but not impossible. One of the accounts I use for the junk stuff that businesses want to send out; the other I use for personal mail, not business mail. I have yet another account (not AOL) for that. (At one time I had 11 email accounts. Whew.)

Other people use AOL because it is familiar. It still says, "You've Got Mail" to me sometimes (not every time, which is kind of weird). I have adapted as the thing has changed, but after a while you get tired of typing in long passwords.

I did every search I could think of to see if there was something up with these recent quirks in AOL but nothing satisfactory came up as an answer. There is a problem going on - I see other references to it in various places, but not sure what is happening.

Sunshine Week

This is Sunshine Week, which a period when newspapers and other media point out that open government is good government.

Unfortunately, in spite of the internet and what seems to be an overflow of information, we really live in a time of great secrecy when it comes to how individuals and groups deal with public funds. I see it at the local, state, and federal levels. Monies change hands and the public remains unaware.

As newspapers in particular have fallen by the wayside, with few readers and fewer reporters, local governments in particular have no watchdog to keep them on their toes. No one is attending the local council meetings at towns, for instance, where hundreds of thousands of dollars are being used for . . . whatever. Hopefully for the public good, but without someone to pay attention, how does anyone know?

One nearby town in recent years learned that a trusted employee had embezzled a great deal of money. That's a singular example, but how does anyone know that someone isn't writing a check for $200 for a tire but actually pocketing $50 of it? Without oversight and accountability, the public doesn't know.

And then there are plans and improvements and other uses that the public rarely or barely has a say in. Maybe you don't want a statue in the courthouse yard, but suddenly there it is. Or maybe you want more money for the library, but instead you find that there are no new books being purchased for the year because money has been diverted to sports or something.

Newspapers in the old days (which makes me sound old, good grief), were considered "the fourth estate." Newspapers held significant power to point out and advocate for change. The local newspaper was the "paper of record" and supposedly everything of importance was recorded in the paper. The local reporters kept an eye on things, questioned what was going on, and raised a ruckus when something didn't look right.

I have always been a strong advocate of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws, and have had to use those laws at various times. In one county I covered (not where I live and work now), the FOIA became a vital resource for citizens as a school board went amuck with public funding. So too when a local official used public funds to keep her house from foreclosure.

Little by little, though, the legislatures at the state and federal levels are chipping away at the public's right to know. Virginia's FOIA has a lot of exceptions that allow local and state officials to go into "closed" meetings, where the public has no idea what is discussed. It takes a level of trust to keep from wondering if they really do "discuss only what we went into the meeting to discuss" during those talks behind closed doors.

I, for one, never trust a politician, so I always take those promises with a shrug. I have no way to disprove their word, though later events might make me question when, exactly, did they talk about thus and such. By then, though, the deeds are done and it is too late.

If you believe the public has a right to know, I urge you to become familiar with your state's FOIA laws. You can learn more about Virginia's FOIA by visiting the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council website.

Ask your local representatives to abide by existing FOIA laws, and urge them to always consider open government to be a good thing. Remember, nothing absolutely has to be discussed in closed session. That is a choice your elected officials make.

Sugar Substitutes

Part of my problem with dieting is I crave the sweet stuff. I am a sugar addict.

I like colas. I like sweet foods. Cakes, pies, cookies, chocolate. I try very hard not to eat them and behave myself and act like an adult but, raised as I was with no dietary guidance, it is sometimes difficult to know what is the correct choice. Generally speaking, not eating it is the correct choice, but it is not the choice I like.

What I crave is sucrose, apparently. White table sugar. Yum, yum. According to Wikipedia, there are lots of different kinds of sugars. White refined sugar is probably the worst, but I imagine all of it is suspect.

I do not drink diet drinks because of aspartame. Here is a pro-aspartame website. It will tell you how safe it is.

I lately have been chewing sugar free gum with it in it, though, something I need to stop doing.

Here is a website that tells you how terrible this drug is. It lists 92 different problems that aspartame can cause, including MS, lupus, cancer, vision problems, and death.

Personally, I think this is a loathsome chemical, foisted on the public, oddly enough, by Donald Rumsfield (check this FDA site for some interesting comments about this). Call me a biased liberal, but I feel sure that anything Rumsfield had a hand in simply cannot be good for me.

The 'net is full of reports about asparatame and the illnesses is reportedly causes. Just type it in.

I know when I drink a soft drink with aspartame, it makes me lightheaded and I feel funny. It makes my limbs tingle after I've been drinking it for any period of time, kind of a neuropathy, or something. So I don't drink diet drinks. (I don't notice the same effect from chewing gum, however.)

The government says aspartame does no harm. Since I tend to believe little the government tells me, I guess you can figure what I think about this. I think the stuff is poison.

Excuse me while I throw out my gum since I seem to have forgotten this until now.

Then there is saccharin. This sweetener drug has been around well over 100 years but it is supposed to cause cancer. I don't like the aftertaste and don't use that, either.

Saccharin is only on the market because in 1977 Congress overrode the FDA and forced it to approve it. Check it out at this FDA website. Trust those folks on Capital Hill, yes?

I have tried fructose, and found it wanting. This is also found in most foods as high fructose corn syrup, although Wikipedia is quick to point out there are differences between fructose and high fructose corn syrup.

Splenda is sucralose, and it leaves a taste like chlorine in my mouth. I couldn't figure this out until I looked up stuff about it, and discovered it is sugar turned into a chemical that is, guess what, chlorine. Go to http://splenda.com for the corporate smiley site about it if you want the Disney spiel.

This sweetener also supposedly causes thymus problems and possibly cancer and other problems. It has become quite popular at a very alarming rate. At least it is alarming to me.

There are books about the toxicity of sucralose, and many websites. Just type it in a search engine and be amazed.

I once tried Stevia and it sent shivers all through my body. I have hesitated to try it again. However, of all sweeteners (other than white table sugar), this is the one that I think is the best to use.

Stevia is about 300 times sweeter than sugar. It supposedly has been used for 1000 years in Paraguay. The FDA cracked down on it in 1995, supposedly at the behest of the sugar industry, and Monsanto (Monsanto is a giant food company that apparently exists to make money from foods, regardless of the potential for poison, for anyone who doesn't know that, which I suspect is many Americans).

Stevia is now widely available in the U.S. Information on side effects is conflicting and it depends on who sponsored the research, of course. Research by the aspartame companies shows it is bad; stevia sellers say it is good. I would not use Truvia, which is a sweetener derivative of stevia.

One notation found that stevia makes your body process sugar a lot quicker. At http://sweetleaf.com there is some information, but it is a corporate site and doesn't say much. It does say there have been 1000 tests and it's found to be safe.

Japan apparently has banned most sweeteners except for stevia and sugar.

Craving sweets has been time consuming for me while I try to look all this up. Mostly what I found on things other than stevia is very alarming. I hope it makes others think, too, because indeed these are chemicals. Why should we add chemicals to our bodies?

Help! My boxwoods are dying

About five years ago, I noticed a dead branch on one of my boxwoods as we came out of winter.



I cut the dead branch, thinking perhaps the snow had weighed it down and broken it.



The dying continued. And so it continues to this day, a branch at a time.

These are current photos, taken Monday. The first boxwood has long since died and been removed.



I had five boxwoods and now I have four. The one on the end is half dead.

Grandma Firebaugh gave us these boxwoods 20 years ago. I planted them and they thrived. Then the branches began dying one by one.

She has passed away. She was the one person who might have known what was wrong with my plants. She was a great gardener.

The only thing I could come up with was mites. I have sprayed and sprayed and put down all sorts of pesticides for mites.

It hasn't helped.



I found some information that indicates it could something called English Boxwood Decline that affects boxwoods after they are 20 years old. It says there is no cure, though.

It also says it can be caused by drought, which actually is when this started appearing, after the drought earlier this century.

The death has spread to yet another boxwood and I am loathe to give up on my lovely shrubs. Does anyone have any ideas?

The Guardian in Roanoke

A reporter from The Guardian, a major British paper, is visiting Roanoke to see what the real people of America think about the election.

Check it out:

The Guardian in Roanoke

Newspapers in a Death Grip

The latest edition of the New Yorker offers an intriguing article, "Out of Print" by Eric Alterman, about the end of newspapers.

The initial paragraphs are an interesting history of newspapers in the U.S. Being a Virginian, I always thought this state had the first newspaper, the Virginia Gazette, but apparently Massachusetts beat the us to it by about 34 years.

The article in The New Yorker gives the Huffington Post credit for taking information digital, although this has been occurring in varying stages for a long time.

The article points out that without traditional media, there would be nothing for websites like HuffPo and similar sites to sound off about. This is the most important point of the entire article.

The author states it thusly:

... Huffington fails to address the parasitical relationship that virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with newspapers. (emphasis mine)

According to this very long story, HuffPo has created a community; hence, the hits from unique users. That means popularity and advertising revenue.

Everybody has something to say, it seems, and everyone wants the opportunity to say it.

Never mind that for the most part the opinions rattled off are worthless. Occasionally there is a gem among the inane, but it's infrequent at best. Essentially everyone is talking at once and no one is listening.

I have a naive view of newspapers in that I believe in the Fourth Estate (interestingly, I could not find a good definition online for what this means).

To me the Fourth Estate means an organization that watches out for the Greater Good. It sides with no one and nothing except Truth. It doesn't decry torture on one hand and okay it on the other simply because the government says water boarding is legal, for example.

I believe newspapers should hold views of the common man. If newspapers are political, they should only be so in a push for equality and in defense of the common man. If the views of the common man are completely opposite, as it seems these days, then maybe it's time for newspapers to give up this charade of neutrality and become a blue paper or a red paper and move on.

Newspapers have gotten away from Truth, however one defines that. They are now only about advertising dollars. That comes first. The news is secondary, something to fill the pages.

I have watched with something akin to horror as publishers have made decisions that have ultimately ruined their product. They've cut news staff, changed layouts and focus, and generally created the situation that exists now. In essence, newspaper owners have destroyed their own reason for being.

I agree entirely with this statement:

The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies’ solution to their problem was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.” That may help explain why the dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month.

By cutting staff, publishers have mutilated the sense of community that HuffPo professes to have found and taken advantage of. How can a community feel that the newspaper is a part of it if there is no presence?

If reporters do not attend events, from pancake breakfasts to government meetings, the relevancy of the newspaper ends. The community at large does not know the journalists and reporters and has no connection. They have no sense of ownership and participation in the news and thus no feeling that their needs and desires are reflected in the pages.

It is the knowledge of communities, whether that community is as small as a neighborhood or as large as a state - or these United States - that is missing. It takes a village to write a newspaper, frankly. One or two people can't do it all.

They miss far too much.

I am of the opinion that the Internet is not killing newspapers. Newspapers survived television.

Their demise began in the 1980s. Was it a result of deregulation, with the news now in in the hands of a few - a few whose motive is profit, not Truth?

This is not a problem of revenue or advertising. It is a political decision to make newspapers irrelevant. This is because newspaper stories, unlike the soundbites of TV, actually have depth. TV says such and such happened - a good, well-researched newspaper story tells you why it happened. TV does not do that particularly well.

When I read a newspaper, it is because I want to know the whys of an event. Or why a person is who he or she is. Only a well-written story can give me that information in a concise, if sometimes lengthy, method of communication. It would take hours of news footage to tell the same story.

The people in power - whoever that may be - do not want the whys of a story to be known and well understood.

This is why stories about the countdown to the battle of Iraq, for example, seldom touched on the past (which could have indicted the nation for its role in aiding and abetting the sovereign nation we were conquering and which never questioned the government rhetoric). This was a political decision in the newsroom. It had little to do with advertising.

I believe print edition of newspapers have a place. If ultimately they do not, then an electronic version of a newspaper, one in which journalists are paid to report real news and features and to be a part of the community, is a necessity.

Whether that online newspaper becomes a place of news or a place of inane chatter is in part up to the public and very much in the hands of the publisher.

Without good, dedicated staff and support of a publisher who wants to put out a good product that is again the voice of the common man, newspapers will indeed fail.

And then all we'll have left are a million opinions, and not an ounce of Truth.

Too Much Stuff

I want to direct you to The Story of Stuff. This is a 20 minute film about ... all the junk we acquire.

It's about all of the stuff you have around you. It's about my computer and your chair and the books I read. It's about your house and my clothes and the cars we drive.

We have too much stuff, I think. I have spent a bit of time in recent years attempting to rid myself of some of the stuff I have thoughtlessly accumulated. Most of it I was sorry I bought; some of it I don't even know how I obtained. Or why, for that matter.

Stuff collects dirt, wastes money that might be put to better use, wastes time, energy, and resources. Sometimes I look at all the "sitty-around" stuff I have in my house and wonder why I need it. I really *don't* need to collect Department 56 figures and houses. Would my life be incomplete without that collection? Probably not.

I have no idea what resources are wasted in making such things. All of this stuff ... we can live without it. Can't we? If we're not careful one day we might have to.

You can read an article about The Story of Stuff and how it came to be here if you want.

Also, I had a bit of trouble with the video loading; I'm on a DSL connection. In case it takes a long time for you, too.

Manuscript Submissions

In a comment on this entry about a writer's conference I was asked about manuscript submissions.

I noted that there was no discussion at the conference about proper formatting. I said in my previous entry that manuscripts should be double spaced, have 1" margins all the way around, use good white clean crisp paper, and have boring fonts (Times Roman or Courier or Arial, generally) and use only one side of the paper.

That is for hard copy submissions. Many publications still request submissions by mail. Others ask for a hard copy along with the article (and/or digital photos) on a disk such as a CD. Some might ask you to e-mail the document and follow with a hard copy. There are as many ways of doing it as there are publications.

Even if a publisher will take a document over the Internet, it still must be formatted properly. That can take some finesse because every e-mail reader pulls things up differently.

The most important thing is to follow the directions in the writer's guidelines for the publication you are working with. If they say hard copy, send them hard copy. If they don't go into detail about margins in the document, then follow the standard above. If they say send a disk, send a disk. If they say submit by e-mail, do that. If they want something in .pdf or .rtf or .doc format, be sure that is what you send them.

By all means, be professional in what you do. These are business people and they are operating a business.

In Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write, Elizabeth Lyon states:

Be generous with your margins. ... Use 1" to 1.25" margin for all sides. It's standard to drop down six line spaces (or half an inch) before you begin your header.

She also notes that there is no longer two spaces after a period. This has been a difficult thing for me to overcome, because I was taught to use two spaces (I learned on a typewriter - remember those?). I think a lot of older folks (that makes me sound ancient, doesn't it) have trouble with this.

Moria Anderson Allen in her book Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer has an entire chapter on formatting your manuscript.

For print manuscripts, she says:

Good paper (20-pound bond minimum, never erasable
Double spacing
1-inch margins all around (at least)
A clear, readable font
Paragraphs indicated by indents, not by an extra line space

She goes into great detail on formatting; it's probably the best chapter on this that I've ever read. She also goes into fonts and electronic submissions (which have their own set of rules).

I mention all of this because it is an important detail. It would be awful to have created a great work that never sees print simply because in the final phase of creation the writer is sloppy.

Lyon also says, "If you're rather be writing your book than editing for format, hire a perfectionist to edit it for you."

I think that might be me.

In the Spotlight

I thought I'd mention some of the bloggers I enjoy reading.

Check them out!

Ms. Eleneaous has returned after nearly a month's absence. Today she writes about her experience with a new computer that only had a two-month life span. A few days ago she had a brilliant entry about freelance writing.

Becky at Peevish Pen writes often about writing, poetry, farm life, etc. She and Ms. E. are two of four bloggers I have met in person.

The other two are Tom at Creativity blog, who also recently started posting again, and Fleitz at the Roanoke Firefighters blog. Tom writes about life, spirituality and takes good pictures and poetry; Firefleitz writes about the fire department. I met Tom at a council meeting; he may not even remember. I met Firefleitz when I picked up a copy of his book, Firefighting in Roanoke, as a present for my husband. He probably doesn't remember that either.

Jeff at Jefferson Street Realist posts about life in Roanoke. Today it looks like he's burning up the airwaves (blogwaves?) with words about music.

When I started seeking out the work of other area bloggers, one of the first I found was Colleen's wit and poetry over at Loose Leaf Notes. She has such enthusiasm about life that I always leave her site with a smile on my face.

Some newcomers to my must-read list (well, in the last six months or so, so they're not that new) are June at Spatter, and Beth at Blue Ridge Blue Collar Girl.

June, as best I can tell, lives in both Floyd County and in Florida. She writes great entries about a myriad of things - check our her January 19 entry about Huckabee for intriguing thoughts on that political candidate. She also does something she calls a Friday Fact. They are always interesting reading. Beth has been absent for a while but her January 14 entry explains that she is in the process of moving/buying/selling, etc., and all that entails.

If I had an award thingy I would offer it to each of these bloggers, but I don't. I hope you enjoy them all as much as I.

The others on my list on the right are also worthy of a mention - unfortunately, I've run out of time! Do take a look at their work sometime.

Get Out the Vote

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half. - Gore Vidal

The hallowed halls of the Virginia General Assembly never heard such a speech as the one Mary Johnston gave before the learned politicos on January 19, 1912.
An advocate for a woman’s right to vote, Johnston, an area native and by then a much-accomplished and well-respected author, told the legislatures that she paid $1,000 annually in taxes to the state, yet had no voice in how the revenue was spent.

Her family settled western Virginia and had fought in all of the country’s wars up to that time. Yet recent legal immigrants, who knew nothing of democracy, she said, were treated as if they knew better than she what the interests of the state might be.

“We are asking that those who live under the laws of a state … may have something to do with the making of those laws,” Johnston said in another speech, this time before a meeting of governors. “We are asking that we who pay a very considerable portion of the taxes of the State and of the country may have a voice in the apportionment of those taxes. We are asking that we who work may have a say as to the conditions under which we work.”

For six years, Johnston gave up much of her life so that women could obtain the right to vote. She suffered from vicious personal attacks from anti-suffrage groups. She did not give up.

How sad then that today, the local voter registrar expects less than half the entire population of the county to turn out when the polls open on November.

Less than 100 years after Mary Johnston took a stand and fought for the right to vote, have we thrown it away? If just half the population votes, and half of those are female, then only 25 percent of the women in this area will bother to exercise a right for which some women were imprisoned.

Not long ago, I heard someone on a late night radio talk advocate a change in the voting laws so that only landowners could vote.

I have heard other people advocate taking the vote from women and from minorities. No doubt about it, at this very moment, there are folks working to undermine a linchpin of democracy that 50 percent of you, male and female, black or white, apparently take for granted.

If you don’t vote, they could very well be successful, because you can be sure they will vote for candidates who think similarly.

Voting is your right. It is also your duty as a citizen to take this single action every year to ensure that the county or the country is overseen by the best person.

So make plans now to go vote. Tell your boss you may be a little late the morning of November 6.

It’s that important.

If Google Were Evil...

I ran across this short story called "Scroogled" which is a fictionalized account of what life may well already be like only we don't know it.... What if Google took over ... where would it all end?

Or check out this fact-filled article on Parade.com:

Is Anything Private Anymore?

Very scary. I am not a fan of cameras and instant information and the government's ability to spy on everyone. I don't think I need my face on a camera because I'm ... being a good law abiding citizen and doing what I'm supposed to do. Whether I do it in Target or in Walmart really isn't anyone's business but my own.

This is so "1984" that I can hardly stand it, and yet, here we are. Nearly there.

I know there are people who think, oh, if you're obeying the law, what difference does it make who is watching... but the problem is you just never know how the person behind the camera is going to construe things.

Scary scary scary. Scroogled indeed.

Press Release: Harvesting Veggies

NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release

1,000 VOLUNTEERS NEEDED
TO HARVEST VEGETABLES

One thousand volunteers are being recruited by the Volunteer Farm near Woodstock to harvest tons of vegetables from 28 acres to help feed some 100,000 hungry Virginians served monthly by the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank in 25 counties and nine cities.

“Before they rot in the fields, we must gather cantaloupe, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and watermelons, and get them on the plates of our hungry neighbors,” said Bob Blair, CEO of the non-profit farm. “We need churches, civic organizations, schools, businesses, and families to send us volunteers to work about 4 hours in the mornings. We especially need help during weekday mornings, since the veggies are maturing each day.”

Volunteers can sign-up online at the Farm’s web: www.VolunteerFarm.Org. The “Calendar” shows the planned work for each day, number of volunteers needed, number already registered, thus showing the short falls. The web also provides directions to the farm, liability waiver, and background information.