Good morning. Last day of the mail trail. Then two days off. That's a spotted bee balm. Annie just put a bunch of them out for sale. Time is short. So I'm going to sign off. Off to the mail trail. I hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. Day 5 of the mail trail. I hope you have a great day! From the front meadow: Rattlesnake master #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. I was out planting at dark last evening. The soil moist from the rains the night before. I am driven by color and a diversity of life. That's the only way to explain digging in the dirt at dark when I should be on bed resting for work. Coneflower from our front deck at dusk. Off to the mail trail. #gm #countryliving

After closing time the Bean Brook Nursery mowing crew goes to work. Meet Willy and April. #countryliving #nativeplants

Good morning. It rained hard last night. Puddles in the pasture and on the driveway. I took this photo at dusk last evening. Took a bunch of them. I think this was the best one. We have 3 types of coneflowers for sale. In a phone conversation with Annie yesterday she said there's going to be a lot of plants going up for sale in the next couple of days. Things are really growing. Looking healthy. Come release them from their pots. :-) Off to the mail trail. I hope you have a great day. #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. A lot of orange and yellow in the meadow right now. It just keeps getting better. Every year is a surprise. I am off to the mail trail in a few minutes. Long day yesterday. Day after a holiday mail and packages are always heavy. Two days in one. Looking forward to a shorter day today. Barring any catastrophe. I almost got creamed by a semi pulling a box trailer yesterday. Looked it in my rearview mirror. It wasn't stopping. Thankfully he eased it over to the shoulder and got around me. Smell of burning trailer brakes wafted in the window as it went by. A good reminder distraction kills. Off to the mail trail. Hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. Off to the mail trail in minutes. Got called in. Leadplant is starting to bloom in the front meadow. They're looking so good I grabbed a couple off the for sale table and plugged them in yesterday afternoon. Hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. It's 8:25. No one is awake yet. I've been up since 5:30. Layed on the couch until 6:30 because I could. Most of the days the push is on. Not for the next 2' days though. I have mentioned that I buy Bitcoin. This month will mark my 4th year. I started buying the day of my Dad's Memorial Service. The goal was to hold onto it for 4 years. In a few weeks I will have made it. The price of it is way down. Things haven't been looking good for months. I never expected it to drop this low. And they say it could go lower! I have conviction though. I will continue to hold. There's promise in Bitcoin. One of the promises is that time will stretch out for those who hold it. I want time to stretch out. It's going way to fast for me right now. They call it "time preference." Where you're secure enough financially that you can plan your future doing what you want to do. Where you're not working for the man. Early retirement. Which isn't even on the horizon. Not like it was for my depression era grandparents and baby boomer parents. I can always hope though. I don't play the lottery, but it must be a similar feeling. I knew a guy one time who was in the middle of an acid trip or had smoked some powerful weed, I never knew which, who said he stopped time. That has always interested me. I used to live a life where time did stretch out. At that time I believed in catastrophe. The inevitable collapse of industrial civilization. I still do to a certain degree. This way of life it seems can't go on forever. So I put my faith not in The Machine (human created) but The Community of Life (diivinely created). The intelligence that created The Community of Life is much wiser than the human artifacts we surround ourselves with. That's the shift I keep coming back to in these musings. This search through a life lived. The pre Ishmael life and post Ishmael life. It's just past 10 now. Everyone is awake. Time to get outside. We're open 10 to 4 today. I was reluctant to post this. Yet I think there are others who struggle, consciously or unconsciously, with the question of how far modern civilized humans can push the Earth's limits. And what we'll leave behind. Gotta go now I hope you have a great day! That's a photo of a deer skull. It died on our land. My son skinned it and tanned the hide. The meat was too far gone by the time he found it. #gm #cofferchain

"My life is proof of what America makes possible. I left Vietnam as a refugee, grew up poor in America, built a career through education and hard work, and now have a wonderful wife and three children. That is the American Dream to me. It is not just wealth. It is freedom, family, opportunity, and the ability to determine your own future. "That is also why Bitcoin resonated with me. I found Bitcoin because it reflected the same principles that shaped my life: clear rules, individual sovereignty, property rights, resilience, open competition, and long-term conviction. "America gave my family freedom through a country. Bitcoin offers individuals monetary freedom through a network. One opened the door for me. The other opens a door for anyone, anywhere, to protect the fruits of their labor." ~ Phong Le #bitcoin #freedom

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again." ~ Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

Good morning. Happy 4th of July! It's a big one. This nation is 250 years old. I'm 51 years old. And it occurs to me writing this I have always been happy to be an American. I got to play and coach baseball. My family all the way back to my great grandparents have been supportive. I have had the freedom to say what I want to say privately and publicly. We have homeschooled our kids for close to 20 years. I received a free public education. I got to read radical books without persecution. I get to deliver mail and packages in Springbrook, the community where I live. We have a native plant nursery in our front yard. I sit Zen meditation every morning. And I buy Bitcoin. Socially friends, family, and neighbors might raise their eye brows, but the powers that be have left my family and I alone. My family is starting to wake up. I'm at the kitchen table. A paid day off from the mail trail. Another thing I am grateful for. Once and awhile someone will have something good to say about these morning updates. I appreciate it. I have made it a practice. I have thought about being more private. I lived for years that way. It was a pleasure. Less stressful. Less self concern and all that. Yet this pushes my comfort zone. Challenges me to be more open and vulnerable and connect on a human level. Ok, I gotta go. I hope you have a great 4th of July weekend! Oh, the picture. Annie texted that to me while I was on the mail trail the other day. It's an early sunflower. She and our oldest son were out in the meadow identifying plants. #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. I took this photo as I was heading out the driveway yesterday morning. It's from our front meadow. I spent some time in it last evening. I never regret spending time in it. We've been planting natives in there for I think 7 years now. There's not even close to enough plants in there. The last couple years I have focused mainly on planting grasses and sedges. Yesterday I read a quote by Aldo Leopold that got me excited. It was on the mail route. The algorithm showed it to me when I turned on my phone. "This biota, through ten thousand years of living and dying, burning and growing, preying and fleeing, freezing and thawing, built that dark and bloody ground we call prairie." — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac I pulled over and started writing. There's so much in it for me. One thing I wanted to do was text my family. I don't usually ask for gifts. But in this instance I wanted to ask if somebody could watch the house for a day or two while our family went down to Leopold's shack in Baraboo, WI. It's on the Wisconsin River. One of my favorite places on earth. Been there once. I like Leopold. He question progress Gotta go. Off to the mail trail. Hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

November 22 of 2022 was the last day you could ever buy bitcoin below $16,000. On that day, the vast chorus on social media was predicting lower prices right around the corner. They were all wrong. One of these days, maybe it was yesterday, maybe it’s in the months ahead after a recovery from yet another dip, we will experience the last day that anyone ever buys bitcoin below $60,000. On that day, the vast chorus on social media will be predicting lower prices right around the corner. AGAIN, they will all be wrong. The vast chorus on social media is always the most bearish at the BOTTOM of a bear market, which is when they should be most bullish. ~ Joel Bomgar

Good morning. Off to the mail trail. I hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. It's 6:20. I have signs to put out yet. They tell people we're having a native plant sale. I'll put some out on the way to work. It cooled down a bit last night. It made sleeping tolerable. That's one of my favorite pictures from the front meadow. It's harebell. It's still blooming. I saw it mixed in with yellow flowers last evening. I had to stop and do a double take. Each year the meadow becomes fuller. We've plugged a lot of plants in there over the years. That's it for now. I'm off to the mail trail. I feel like there's something I need to say. And that usually hits me going down the interstate at 70 miles an hour. Then it's gone. Most of the time never to be seen again. Hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. I took this photo years ago. When I started to become drawn to natives. Or maybe when they started calling me. One never knows. It's butterfly weed on the roadside of a mail route I subbed on. That was the nice part about being a sub. I got to see a lot of country and get to know a lot of people. I did it for over 15 years. I can open the local paper most weeks and recognize a name and face in the obituary section. It's hot in this house. 80 degrees. Floors are sticky. Humid. My family is sound asleep with fans running. I'm glad they get to sleep and not have to run off to the rat race. Tomorrow is our oldest son's birthday. He'll be 27. Annie I got together on his 3rd birthday, and never looked back. Eventually, with the encouragement of Annie's grandma and dad I adopted him. That meant a lot to me. They believed in me. Her grandma payed the attorney bill. Her ashes are up on our shelf. Long story. Ok, I gotta go. That was fun to write. I hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Good morning. No mail trail again today. Back to work tomorrow though. Thinking of my fellow carriers out there delivering in this heat today. It's supposed to be 91, but feel like 100. Supposed to be a breeze though. Part of me wants to go in and give the carrier filling in for me a hand. So he can have an easier day today. It's been months since he's ran this route. That's a no, no though. There's no pay or insurance to cover that. Looking forward to potting plants with Annie today. There seems to be no end to what she needs to plant. I took this photo of a pale purple coneflower a few minutes ago. The ones we have for sale in 2" pots look amazing. I'm off to get the day started. I hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

“You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what's broken, but to get what's broken blessed.” — James Hillman #quotes #psychology #soul

Good morning. It's 9 AM. Bean Brook Nursery is open 10 to 5 today. No mail trail for me today and tomorrow. The break will be nice. Noticing more and more black eyed susans coming up in the front meadow. There already is a lot of bright yellow lance leaf coreopsis flowers. Annie has been picking false Japanese beetles off them. They devour the flower. In years past they've devoured all of our lance leaf flowers. Hayden (16 yrs. old) and I are going to swing over, pick up my mom and grandma, and head down to Hungry Hollow. It's near Barron. A weekend event full of working vintage farm machinery and such. We've gone the past two years. Hayden likes to stop by and talk to the blacksmiths. There's just a lot of soul in the whole event. Well, that's it for now. I hope you have a great day! #gm #coffeechain

Bought Bitcoin this morning. Like I do every morning. There is no turning back. We are moving from an analog world to a digital world. It doesn't matter if I am for or against it. I am a registered member of the digital world writing on this phone. The politicians and other noise makers can say what they want to say. This is where we're headed. But the Tao Te Ching says: "Do you want to improve the world? I don't think it can be done. The world is sacred. It can't be improved. If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it." Are we losing the world written about in the Tao as we move to the digital? #asknostr