Happy Wednesday, folks.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Okay, I mounted a new handlebar bag. I took one of those nylon padded lunch bags that come with a hard plastic tub inside, drilled holes in the backside, used a thin metal plate to catch the screw heads inside. On the outside I mounted a couple of bent wire hooks to grab the handlebars, and held them in place with big flat washers and lock-nuts. If I hadn't punched holes in this thing, it would have wound up in the trash anyway, because nobody wanted it.

Iain is supposed to be working on a front rack, if he can make any sense out what I sent him, and if he can make the materials he has fit what I requested.

I got my cheap solo tent out and inspected it. Then I walked through a set-up in the living room. The instructions were about half useless, leaving out critical details, which is typical of Chinese made stuff that, if made in America, no one could afford it. At any rate, I can now probably set it up out at a campsite. A couple more times and I could do it in the dark.

My sleeping bag and mattress should arrive tomorrow. I hope I never have to mess with Amazon again. I have collected a bunch of tiny hygiene items and all I need to find now is a compact boiling pan with a lid, and I have to make a Sterno stove.

We have a start on the fund for the new bike. I'll probably shuffle it off into a savings account to protect it; I suspect this is going to take awhile given how much it will have to be. Then again, if this attracts the wider support I'm hoping for, I'll need a separate account like that, anyway. It becomes technically self-employment if I ever receive more than break-even on what this project costs, so I'm keeping track of every dime I spend for it.

Tomorrow should be my first long ride around town. In the near future, I'll be planning my first over-nighter to Red Rock Canyon, Hinton, OK -- about 60 miles away. I'll come back a different route and there should be lots of nice pictures and a grand story to tell. This will show me how my body responds to repeated long rides. The goal is to be able to do this for a week or two at a time.

Before the Democrat Party was completely taken over by Ideologues, there was a more conservative, pragmatic and uniquely Southern phenomenon known as the Yellow Dog Democrat. I used to work with some when I was first employed in a Furniture Plant. All but extinct nowadays, here is a rather long but, entertaining talk by one on YouTube: "How to be Happily Unreconstructed in a World Gone Crazy by Ben "Cooter" Jones." I find it a delightful respite from the modern political landscape.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

There is an app called Nextdoor that has been unleashed on the oasis of tranquility of the holler.
 The Damn Yankees already invaded and devastated this area in the spring of '65, ....1865 that is.
Because of our close proximity to $$$Town, Blowing Rock NC. People who ain't from around here have been buying property close by. The first half mile of the holler belongs to members of the Bolick family, my neighbors and we're in the middle of them. I have only good feelings for the Bolicks, they are Hillbillies just like me and know how to act. What troubles me is that these foreigners bring with them Yankee busybodiness and this "community"/ advertising/ activism app gives them the ability to transform the area with their damnable ways. At least, in 1865 they wrecked the place and left. I have been reading their whiny assed posts like "why can't they (which always means the damn gubment) invest in the infrastructure to bring fiber optic here". "UPS has lost 4 of my packages, why...." more "they" BS. "I'm having to use Vianet. What are you using? [implying something that's better]". My response was "Two cans and a string". What has always pissed me off about these people is their assumption that what they bring is innately better to the preexisting culture and that they are bringing Civilization to hayseeds. It's a high handed, dismissive, patronizing character disaster that borders on a genetic mutation that propels them to interfere with things. I'm gonna organize the neighbors for the defense of our culture. We moved here specifically to get out of a town controlled by these parasitic liberty vampires.
Pray to keep the holler a sanctuary of Hillbillyness. 
I shoot firearms for fun, on my own property and I'm not alone, lots of us do. The last thing we need is an organized bunch of firearm illiterate virtue signalers trying to stop our fun based on BULLSHIT!!! They will get no where with our officially 2nd Amendment sanctuary county commissioners. It's the civil lawsuit harassment that concerns me. I know that this is the tactic of the sjw. 
Nothing is happening yet but, even a dolt like me can read the tea leaves.
.
.

Nana is in hospital again after being home for 2 weeks. We don't know yet what's going on, at first we were told that she had an infection on her spine and they were going to drain fluid, they didn't find fluid, it is a lump that they biopsied and we're waiting for the results.

Hello again.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

I didn't put this in the Prayer Request subforum because I'm not ready to make it a prayer request. Rather, I just wanted to share something that is somewhere above a passing fancy: I'd love to ride across the state of Oklahoma on my bike, camping or couch surfing or whatever, and taking pictures. Maybe I'd shoot videos, too. It would require sponsorship, but maybe not a lot. My current bike could handle most of it, at least at the start, but that much riding would eventually wear it out. At some point, component replacement would be more expensive than buying a new bike.

It would be a whole lot easier to feed myself at least partly from local vendors and sources than to pack a bunch of food, but I'd have to be careful about avoiding wheat and caffeine. One of the biggest challenges is facing the blistering hot temperatures during the summer, and finding ways to deal with excessive sun exposure.

Anyway, this isn't yet the kind of thing where I'm determined to go do it at any cost, but I think I may be working in that direction. I'll probably need to start by taking longer rides where I live until 50 miles is just an easy workout. I may also include taking the bike out on the back of the car and riding around somewhere out there in the boonies -- frankly, that's most likely the way I'll do most of it. Even then, it would eventually require getting some conscious cooperation from other folks out there, and that may be the hardest part of this whole idea.

I'm honestly dubious that I'm equipped to edit videos and publish anything but narrative. So I'm putting this out as a trial balloon idea. If it gets enough traction, I'll take it farther. I don't think it belongs hidden away on my Radix Fidem blog.

What say ye?

I'm reading statistics about this plague. One of the biggest problems in getting straight info is the long lead time between exposure and symptoms -- roughly 3-4 weeks. There is also a big disparity between symptoms and positive identification of the cause.

That said, a few things stand out. (1) It appears to hit Chinese folks harder due to genetic factors having to do with ACE2 receptors in the lungs, which is the attack route the virus uses. Euro descendants seldom have many of those receptors. It is predicted to hit American Natives hard for historical reasons of correlation with Asian genetic predisposition. (2) Some reports have said it's hitting Wuhan hardest out the rest of China, and not just because that's where it began, but for similar genetic clustering factors. (3) Most of the folks dying so far are elderly men with significant health compromises before exposure. A major statistical factor is deficiency in Vitamin D (and sun exposure), as well as selenium, both of which are well established as problems in the Wuhan area.

Virtually none of this is widely published, but despite being mere correlations (not causes), it is more solid than what is being reported.