Rivenrock Gardens Cactus Blog… go to www.rivenrock.com for edible cactus

A California Central Coast Organic Edible Cactus Growers Blog

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The Canyon

: The Canyon bottom…third day of winter, Dec 2008

: The Canyon bottom…third day of winter, Dec 2008

: The Canyon road…third day of winter, Dec 2008

There are many canyons in California that provide a feast for the eyes and senses. American West Travelogue has a great article about ten great day hikes on the Central California Coast.

On Sorrow

“Sadness is but a wall between two gardens”
~Kahlil Gibran~

~Pink Floyd~
‘Sorrow’

The sweet smell of a great sorrow lies over the land
Plumes of smoke rise and merge into the leaden sky:
A man lies and dreams of green fields and rivers,
But awakes to a morning with no reason for waking.

He’s haunted by the memory of a lost paradise
In his youth or a dream, he can’t be precise
He’s chained forever to a world that’s departed
It’s not enough, it’s not enough.

His blood has frozen & curdled with fright
His knees have trembled & given way in the night
His hand has weakened at the moment of truth
His step has faltered.

One world, one soul
Time passes, the river rolls

It’s not enough it’s not enough
His hand has faltered

And he talks to the river of lost love and dedication
And silent replies that swirl invitation
Flow dark and troubled to an oily sea
A grim intimation of what is to be.

There’s an unceasing wind that blows through this night
And there’s dust in my eyes, that blinds my sight
And silence that speaks so much louder than words,
Of promises broken

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~Enigma~
‘Sadeness’

Procedamus in pace
In nomine Christi, Amen

Cum angelis et pueris,
fideles inveniamur

Attollite portas, principes, vestras
et elevamini, portae aeternales
et introibit rex gloriae
Qius est iste Rex glorie?

Sade dit moi
Sade donne moi

Procedamus in pace
In nomine Christi, Amen

Sade dit moi
qu’est ce que tu vas chercher ?
le bien par le mal
la vertu par le vice
Sade dit moi pourquoi l’ ‘evangile du mal ?
quelle est ta religion ou` sont tes fide`les ?
Si tu es contre Dieu, tu es contre l’homme

Sade es-tu diabolique ou divin?

Sade dit moi
Hosanna

Sade donne moi
Hosanna

Sade dit moi
Hosanna

Sade donne moi
Hosanna

In nomine Christi, Amen

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~Enigma~
‘The Rivers of Belief’

Take me back to the rivers of belief
Take me back to the rivers of belief
my friend

I look inside my heart
I look inside my soul
I promise you
I will return

And when the Lamb
opened the seventh seal
silence covered the sky

Take me back to the rivers of belief
Take me back to the rivers of belief
my friend

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‘Om Numah Shivaya’
~Apache Indian~

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~Kahlil Gibran~
`The prophet’

Then a woman said,
“Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.”

And he answered:

“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises
was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being,
the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine
the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit,
the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart
and you shall find it is only that which has
given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart,
and you shall see that in truth you are weeping
for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,”
and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come,
and when one sits alone with you at your board,
remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales
between your sorrow and your joy.

Only when you are empty
are you at standstill and balanced.

When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver,
needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

dum spiro spero — while I breathe I hope

rain at Rivenrock

It’s been horribly dry for the last couple of years. Our pond has not accumulated water for two years…. the main creek in the canyon is dry for stretches of hundreds of yards. Now we’ve had nearly ten days of rain for which we’re profoundly grateful. The rain has come in such a way that even though cumulatively it is a large amount for us… it has come with a gentle ease and settled itself into the ground. The thirsty soil is admitting all the rainwater, and the thirsty plants both native and introduced are sucking it up. It is easy to see the great amount of water that has been admitted into the tissues of the local plants in the last two weeks.

While this causes problems with harvest as we cannot pick while the plants are wet, nor is it good for the plants to have open wounds when it rains….. we realize and accept the fact that rain must fall for us to have water. And with the coming of this plentiful rain, we expect another year of healthy cactus for harvest and sales throughout the USA.

love your enemies and pray for your persecutors.
This will prove that you are children of God.
For God makes the sun rise on bad and good alike;
God’s rain falls on the just and the unjust.
(Matthew 5:44-45)

Alles Klarr, Herr Kommissar?

‘Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress’
~The Hollies~

Saturday night I was downtown
Working for the FBI
Sitting in a nest of bad men
Whiskey bottles piling high

In the late seventies I was working as a military liaison with the German Police. Germany was going through a high number of home-grown terror incidents. The local terrorists were called ‘The Baader-Meinhoff Gang’ after two of the leading actors. All told, this group of terrorists (who would today be called ‘gunmen’ by the media) killed 36 citizens, and injured hundreds through their use of explosives. I got called to a couple of incidents in which these people factored. I also collected the ‘Wanted’ posters which had the photos and descriptions of the ringleaders. When I first became aware of the individuals in the group, they were in long hair and had beards (mostly on the men). By 1980 their semblence had morphed into what we later called ‘Yuppies’. With their newly-short hair and clean shaven looks, and the conservative but clean and modern clothing gave them an anonymity that terrorists need. Then… poof, I was out of there… back in ‘The World’. And for years, I thought about all the terrorism seen in Europe… and why is it we have so very little of that here?

I came upon an article about the recent release of one of the terrorist leaders… one I remember from the posters.. a certain Christian Klar has just been released from prison after twenty six years. He was responsible for the deaths of nine people, and terrorised (which is why I call him a terrorist) thousands, perhaps millions. He killed a prosecutor, an industrialist and a bank official and anyone who happened to be in the way of his target…. I still remember the press at the time showing the smoldering wreckage of the Mercedes of the banker.

I was given a tour of a prison while in Germany. I thought that the German penal system is pretty easy-going compared to ours. We complain about ‘Country Club’ prisons (I worked in one for a time), but we also have hard-time ‘Big House’ prisons (I worked in one of those also), but I think Western Europe in general has tried to coax itself away from punishment as a deterrence, and even further from trying to ‘warehouse’ people away from the population (which is what we mainly do here.. and I’m not so opposed to that). No, Europe seems to want to give a ‘time-out’ sticker to the offender , get them away for a while, and talk them into rehabilitation.

At any rate, for twenty six years, Europe was free of his terror. Let’s see what the next ten years brings, is he rehabilitated? Will he still plot anarchy and sedition?

But, as the articlesays, Christian Klar is free.

Just because I like it so much….

here’s Falco,
with his song
‘Der Kommissar’

In German of course

Tunnel Boring Machines

There are fine examples of tunnels all throughout the world. Some are ancient, dug laboriously by hand through miles of rock, and some are being drilled with the use of huge machines today.   These ‘Tunnel Boring Machines’ (TBM’s) are what is used nowadays for long transport tunnels. Two were made famous during the excavation of the ‘Chunnel’ linking Great Britain with France.   Here is a great animation showing how these behemoths work… what a great use of human intellect to construct huge things and cut into mountains!

   We have a nice hillside behind our home… it is composed of fractured shale bedrock, and although it is easy to cut into….it is not good for tunneling into as it has lots of different stresses from many different angles depending on the twists and slants of the various strata. For this reason it is said to be very dangerous to work in, and hard to come up with a good solution against collapse (mine-speak for ‘cave-in’). We have two neighbors who are both miners, they recommend I listen to them and not go digging into the hillside. So even though it means the abandonment of my dreams of an underground city, it might well lead to preservation of my life.

   But I bet with a machine like this, I could put in a nice little series of straight runs through the hill…. not quite the little warren of twists and turns and private nooks and crannies and storerooms I envisioned, but something more akin to the start of a mushroom farm perhaps?

Dark Roasted Blend has a great article on these huge Tunnel Boring Machines.

Rivenrock yearly web statistics (marketing stuff)

Rivenrock Website 2008 totals
(well, as of 19 Dec anyway)

Downloads….
These are both our brochures that people
download to have for themselves
(saves us printing and postage),
or they are the free screensavers we make
and let people download for free (it’s advertising for us)

We had over 7,000 downloads people wanted, cool

Downloads from Rivenrock.com in 2008

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Our Most Popular Pages

We had nearly a half million page views
on our website this year
Here are our twenty most visited pages

Rivenrock.com page requests 2008

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Search Terms
What search terms did our visitors use
to come to www.rivenrock.com?
This table shows us that the majority
are looking for information on cactus.
A great number also are looking for organic
or composting information in general.
So we had almost 100,000 visitors
referred from search engines

Rivenrock.com 2008 search terms

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Speaking of Search Engines,
How much traffic did the individual
search engines bring us?Woah Dude!
Google’s the Mother-of-All Search Engines.
Over half of our Search traffic
comes through big ol Google.

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Total Sessions 273,693.00

  Total Pageviews 447,508.00

  Total Hits 2,639,373.00

  Total Bytes Transferred 65.66 GB

  Average Sessions Per Day 747.80

  Average Pageviews Per Day 1,222.70

  Average Hits Per Day 7,211.40

  Average Bytes Transferred Per Day 183.69 MB

  Average Pageviews Per Session 1.64

  Average Hits Per Session 9.64

  Average Bytes Per Session 251.54 KB

  Average Length of Session 00:04:39

An ‘Average Length of Session’
of over four minutes is good.
It means people are staying to look
at the pretty pictures!

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Where do our visitors come from?

We had people visit our site from 153 countries this year.
Here’s the top twenty by number of hits.
All of our sales are in the USA.
But it is fun to make an informative website,
and know that people from around the world are visiting it.

: rivenrock.com top 20 countries by hits

But sometimes it might be that
some folks in the least populated areas,
that we’d consider to be very foreign and exotic places….
might visit our webpage because to them,
it seems foreign and exotic.

‘Foreign’ and ‘exotic’ are words to denote
something with which we are not familiar.

rivenrock.com last 20 countries by hits

Here’s the last twenty places in terms of
numbers of visits to our site.
Note how many of them are remote areas
or of very small population,
yet each one seems very foreign and exotic
to me from the USA…
Saint Helena is a tiny island,
sometimes referred to as
‘One of The Most Remotist Places on Earth’.

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So, it was a good year,
we had good traffic on the site,
and more people know of our cactus.
Year by year,
it all grows….
just like a garden

‘A whiter shade of pale’ or ‘It Was a Dark and Stormy Night’

Back in 1980 I was working on a tuna boat. Seems like all the commercial fleet turned into protected harbors for a little blow (it was the eighties after all). We were fortunate to turn into a bay that happened to have a college nearby, and it seemed like half the college girls in the town came to the dock that night to see the fishermen. The bar on the end of the dock was crowded, the music was blasting… the room seemed to ebb and flow like the waves that ruled my life… and the wind gusting outside made it seem as if the roof would blow off like in the song…but someone must have played this song over and over again, because every time I hear it… I remember that night… a time of magic.

Music has a way of pulling deep into our subconscious… perhaps it is the rhythm, perhaps the lyrics, but it can seem the notes and words are etched as the labels of the files we have stored in the marvelous grey matter we call a brain. Pull up a song… you can easily access some of the times you were travelling somewhere while that song played. Music can give us a placement into the past, a notch with which we can access some little tiny moment, location or circumstance.
‘Brandy’, by Looking Glass brings me back to that same time… the same sea… the same night.

‘Brandy’
~Looking Glass~

He came on a summer’s day
Bringin’ gifts from far away
But he made it clear he couldn’t stay
No harbor was his home

The sailor said ” Brandy, you’re a fine girl”
“What a good wife you would be”
“But my life, my lover, my lady is the sea”

Yeah, Brandy used to watch his eyes
When he told his sailor stories
She could feel the ocean foam rise
She saw its ragin’ glory
But he had always told the truth,
Lord, he was an honest man
And Brandy does her best to understand

At night when the bars close down
Brandy walks through a silent town
And loves a man who’s not around
She still can hear him say

She hears him say ” Brandy, you’re a fine girl”
“What a good wife you would be”
“But my life, my lover, my lady is the sea”

Cactus ice

   We got what are to us some really low temperatures this morning.
   The temperature was 29 degrees at three AM. I went and turned the water sprinklers on the terraces on. This would put the warm water from the well onto the plants, the water will freeze from the cold air, and as the water freezes it actually releases a certain amount of heat energy to the plant. This will help keep the plant warmer than if the water were not applied. the problem is, once you start the watering during such a freeze, you must continue it until the sun comes and warms the surrounding air allowing the ice to begin melting. If your rate of application is not adequate, you can actually have more damage occur than if you had not applied water at all.
   Fortunately I designed a really ‘killer’ water irrigation system… we’re running a 3″ main pipe and 2″ laterals, running out to six foot tall standpipes with large sprinklers that have a thirty five foot throw at that pressure… all fed by gravity from a large water tank near the top of the hill. The water pressure near the bottom of the hill is 80 PSI.    When the water froze on the leaves, it left long icicles on the plants. I got some interesting photos… and made them into a screen-saver you can download for free at www.rivenrock.com/cactusiceart.exe

Ice on the cactus

Ice on the cactus

I hate it when this happens….

Statement as of 8:54 PM PST on December 17, 2008

… Frost advisory remains in effect from 3 am to 9 am PST Thursday…

Later tonight… diminishing winds… clearing skies and drier air moving into the region will allow for some radiational cooling.
Temperatures are expected to lower into the upper 20s to lower 30s in coldest wind protected locations late tonight.

A frost advisory means that affected areas can expect at least two hours of subfreezing temperatures between 28 and 32 degrees… with possible damage to crops and tender vegetation. Measures should be taken to protect sensitive crops and vulnerable animals should be kept indoors in a barn or similar structure.

The Mask, and the Mirror

The Typealyzer is a website that purports to look a site over and come up with some ideas of the personality of the blog writer. This is what they said about the writer/s of this blog…

ENFP – The Inspirers

The curious and insightful type. They are especially attuned to possibilities that involves peoples potential. They usually have a lot of relations and are very perceptive and often unconventional.

They enjoy working together with people and to make use of their enthusiasm. Lonely work and environments with many distractions make them scattered and often gloomy feeling overwhelmed withdraw further.

`Eh, as they say in the header... "Note: writing style on a blog may have little or nothing to do with a person´s self-percieved personality."`

One who fights with monsters,
Should be careful
lest he should become a monster,
Sometimes when we stare into the abyss,
the abyss stares back

~Nietsche~

Self introspection is always a tough thing if we are being honest with ourselves, we all run short of the standards we would usually set for ourselves. If you reach your standards, perhaps you need to re-notch a little higher up. Isn’t it the same thing with anyone or thing?… most will only come up to the standards you set… most will avoid running much higher due to the ‘nail that sticks out’ phenominon.

I heard this song below before I ever realized its name was Marrakesh. When I heard the lyrics, images of my time in Morocco came to me…. travel is a good thing. It can leave lasting images of other places, peoples and cultures…. and it will have an indelible impression on your life and your perceptions.

Marrakesh Night Market
Loreena McKennitt

They’re gathered in circles
the lamps light their faces
The crescent moon rocks in the sky
The poets of drumming
keep heartbeats suspended
The smoke swirls up and then dies

Would you like my mask?
would you like my mirror?
cries the man in the shadowing hood
You can look at yourself
you can look at each other
or you can look at the face, the face of your god

The stories are woven
and fortunes are told
The truth is measured by the weight of your gold
The magic lies scattered
on rugs on the ground
Faith is conjured in the night market’s sound

Would you like my mask?
would you like my mirror?
cries the man in the shadowing hood
You can look at yourself
you can look at each other
or you can look at the face, the face of your god

The lessons are written
on parchments of paper
They’re carried by horse from the river Nile
says the shadowy voice
In the firelight, the cobra
is casting the flame a winsome smile

Would you like my mask?
would you like my mirror?
cries the man in the shadowing hood
You can look at yourself
you can look at each other
or you can look at the face, the face of your god

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