Category: Life in Dunwich

My Adventures in the Mythical New England Town of Dunwich

Monday’s Done

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Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

After a hard day of de-lousing a 600 ft tall squid-headed dragon you’d think I could relax and eat my supper in peace.  Instead, I’m confronted with a thousand-point drop in the Dow.  Back during the Black Monday crash in ‘87 a five-hundred-point drop was a catastrophe of mammoth proportions (about a 20% of the Dow).  Now double that drop is just a few percent of the DJIA.  But it certainly makes the talk of recession sound a lot more ominous.  I have to assume that Kamala, Queen of the Cat Ladies, will throw a hissy fit and demand that Dopey Joe threaten to fire everyone at the Fed if they don’t lower interest rates.  Well, sure.  That will fix things up, won’t it?  Well at least until November anyway.

Everybody is thinking that Iran will attack Israel and we’ll get dragged into it.  Well, I hope not.  I’m guessing that Iran will work through Hezbollah to harry the Israelis in the north, but not attack them directly.  Netanyahu has quite a problem on his hands to neutralize Hamas.  It’s almost as if his only option is to separate the women and young children from the adult make population and fight the men without inflicting casualties on the innocent.  Well, if he figures that one out, he deserves a Nobel Prize for War.

The Ukrainians have installed their new F-16s in Odessa and I guess hope to use them to attack Crimea, Zaporizhzhia and maybe elsewhere.  It remains to be seen if Ukraine can change the status quo of Russian dominance in air defense over Eastern Ukraine.  The F-16s are supposed to be superior to the Russian fighters.  But ground-based defenses are a serious threat to even an advanced aircraft like the F-16.  We shall see.

I saw that Real Clear Politics has shifted the polling to a Kamala Harris lead of a point or so.  Well, never underestimate the number of blue-haired cat ladies in the American population.  Imagine Commander in Chief Kamala Harris reviewing the troops in Iran or Venezuela or Mexico by Zoom call and giving a rousing speech about the new battery driven aircraft carrier painted green and “manned” by a wholly trans crew.  Or imagine Kamala giving a speech at the United Nations outlawing “whiteness” and pointing to the success of post-white cultures like Zimbabwe and South Africa.  Or just imagine Kamala dedicating the addition of George Floyd to Mount Rushmore.  Well, not exactly an addition.  More like replacement.  Those dead white guys would have to be erased to make room for Floyd’s head.  Now that’s progress alright.

Looking around at what’s going on so far this week makes me nostalgic for my time at the de-lousing procedure at the boiling acid vat of Cthulhu.  Sure, the sulfuric acid fumes are lethal and the parasites are the size and ferocity of wolverines but the mission is simple and words still have their real meaning.  The same can’t be said for the “real world.”  In what universe is Kamala Harris a world class leader?  By what objective standards are the results of Bidenomics prosperity.  By what double-speak was Kamala’s handling of the border crisis a success?  Bring on the acid vat!

31JUL2024 – The Curse Has Come upon Me.  Well Pretty Soon Anyway.

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The First Selectman Taking a Stroll

A terrible fate is creeping up on me.  Periodically, First Selectman Cthulhu has to have his external parasites burned off by soaking in a lake-sized vat of boiling sulfuric acid.  It’s uneventful but a very long process that requires someone to supervise.  From next Monday until the Wednesday of the following week I will be in a form of purgatory.  Isolated from the site and forced to endure almost unimaginable tedium I shall not be able to write my posts under my normal conditions.  Whatever output I produce will be stilted, uninspired and generated in a state of exhaustion and mental duress.  Come to think of it, you may not notice the difference at all.  But undoubtedly, the word count will go way down.  I should be able to load up the Pictures of the Day and the Quotes of the Day this weekend.  But beyond that everything will be hit and miss.

Like some kind of latter-day Prometheus bound with cruel spikes driven through my immortal flesh into the adamantine stone beneath and with a cruel eagle constantly devouring my ever-regenerating liver, I will endure all this uncomplainingly knowing that I do it for the good of all mankind, or at least for the good of the MAGA Republicans.  Maybe Trump can visit me on my mountain crag and speak words of encouragement and snide insults at the eagle.  If he has the time.

If any of you have any content that you want posted feel free to e-mail it to me and I’ll make sure to publish it as a way to keep the readers happy.  When the time of my internment is through, I shall return renewed and rededicated to the proposition that all internet links are created unequal.  That they are endowed by their content creators with varying quality based on the qualities of these creators themselves and on how hard they are willing to work to make the content entertaining.

As the hours slowly pass during my captivity I’ll try to imagine what it will be like when President Kamala Harris is the commander in chief of this formerly great nation.  I imagine how she will take the rostrum in the House of Representatives and give the State of the Union address and we’ll all applaud as she describes the glories of her electric yellow school bus bill.  This bill will require the confiscation of all private, gasoline powered automobiles and mandate the use of buses for all travel.  With a $40 trillion dollar price tag it will be the boldest and most expensive bill ever passed and it will certainly convert us into a banana republic in the image of Venezuela.

I was just listening to Trump at one of his rallies riffing on what a loser Kamala Harris is.  It was funny.  I guess I’ve missed his rally patter.  It really is quite hilarious the way he describes her failure as “border czar” and her statements on defunding the police during the Summer of Floyd.  And his equally harsh mockery of Biden is quite amusing.  I think Trump is wise to highlight the fact that Kamala kept Joe Biden’s condition as a secret from the country.  That is indeed a damning accusation against someone trying to gain the trust of the country while running for the office of president.

Today is the last day of July and I consider it the end of New England Summer.  I’ve read that measurable snowfall has been recorded in every month of the year except for July in southern New England.  If that is so then August is early winter.  I have already begun preparing for it.  I’ll begin prepping the snowblower and break out the snow shovels.  I may wait a few weeks before wearing thermal underwear but it’s almost time.  Turkey deep fried on the barbecue for Labor Day?  We’ll see.

Father’s Day – 2024 – Crashing Plaster and Pancakes

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And the rolling year has once again brought us back to that most equivocal of fake holidays, “Father’s Day.”  When I say fake, I mean that it’s a manufactured occasion that has no long history of celebration.  Its equivocal nature is owed to the mixed feelings that everyone in a family feels about dear old Dad.  Well, at least that’s my own point of view.

And this is based on my own father and the way he raised his six sons.  Basically, it was like some kind of anthropological experiment that was started out with the best of intentions but then went horribly off the rails and eventually completely overwhelmed the investigators and had to be recast as a cautionary tale for all involved.

A more beleaguered man has never walked the face of the Earth.  He was always outnumbered, outgunned, behind the times, short of resources and out of patience.  I don’t remember him getting through a single day in that house without screaming and hollering at several or all of us.  We were terrible kids.

We broke everything he owned.  We lost every tool he possessed and we caused at least one disaster a week.  His house was perpetually on the edge of crumbling into something resembling the debris piles seen in old footage of London after the Blitz.  When leaks would develop in the house’s flat roof his solution was to use a hand drill on the ceiling to direct the leak and put a bucket under it.  His idea was that by tapping the leak it would prevent it from soaking the whole plaster ceiling and have it collapse onto us while we were sleeping.

He had a steam heat system which perpetually leaked at all of the radiators.  And he battled this problem by attempting to use string and grease to seal the threads of the pipe joints.  But the threads were so stripped that this never accomplished much of anything.  But he soldiered on with the hope that one day he’d catch up with his expenses and have a plumber come in and replace it all.  Finally, the ceiling in the living room underneath the leakiest radiator on the second floor collapsed.  All the plaster crashed down on the living room floor and exposed the wooden laths in the ceiling.  One of my younger brothers was overjoyed and he said aloud, “This will finally force him to fix the ceiling once and for all.”  Well, no.  That ceiling remained in that condition until after my father’s death a number of years later.

So, my example of fatherhood was definitely idiosyncratic.  And as for Father’s Day, if my father could have had his wish on that day, it would have been to lock us all out of the house for the whole day and leave him alone to watch baseball, horse racing and boxing on his tiny, pathetic, black and white, constantly drifting television set.  But that was an impossibility.  We were an omnipresent reminder of his status as Dad.

So, on Father’s Day he often fell back on his only real domestic skill.  He could make pancakes and French toast by the imperial ton.  And in that house, he had to.  He bought the cheapest pancake mix and syrup he could find in bulk containers.  I always imagined that he got it from war surplus.  And when pancake day arrived, he’d cover all the burners on the stove with griddles and he would cook and we would eat stacks of pancakes until we couldn’t move.  It was probably the high point of our lives together.  For that brief time, we were all happy simultaneously and we were all well fed which rarely otherwise occurred.

So maybe Father’s Day should be like that.  A day when Dad should find something he knows he can do that makes the whole family admit that he’s good for something other than paying the bills.  Anyway, it’s a thought.

Camera Girl Grows Up

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Camera Girl is acknowledged across the multi-verse as the worst dog trainer of all time.  Whereas children and grandchildren respond to and obey her enlightened methods of child rearing, her dogs on the other hand are completely wild.  This happens because she thinks dogs are perpetually infants.  And so, she coddles them and allows them to walk all over her and run amok.  Many years ago, we had our first German Shorthaired Pointer, Max.  He was a magnificent specimen of a very large GSP and I thought he was fairly well-behaved.  But one weekend I come home to find my youngest daughter standing on the couch because the dog had taken her socks while she was putting them on and was growling whenever someone came near them.

So, I went to get the socks from Max and he bit me.  I was shocked.  I asked Camera Girl, “When did this start?”  She looked sheepish and said since he’d started to mature, he had been getting aggressive.  I guess I’d been busy over the last six months and hadn’t spent any time training Max.  But now we were in a bad situation.  I didn’t want to lose the dog but I couldn’t have a large strong dog that might bite my kids.  So being a lunatic I put on a pair of cowhide gloves and winter coat and attacked Max.  I went for the socks and he went for me.  I grabbed him around the neck and threw him to the floor and pinned him.  Then I growled like a lunatic and bit him on the throat.  And I never had another bit of trouble from that dog again.  From that point on he worked for me.

Over the years Camera Girl has improved slightly.  But depending on the temperament of the dogs, she’s done anywhere from fairly well to really poor at training them.  Our latest pup is a female basset hound and she is feisty.  And she likes to chew on things, including me.  So, I started to follow Camera Girl when she was “training” Penny.  And of course, the dog was running the show.  She had this short legged chunky hound running around causing chaos and the only attempt at training was baby talk admonishments. So, I demanded that we get her straightened out.  Now luckily there have been great strides taken in dog training since my days of biting Max on the throat.

One training aid is a shock collar.  Well, actually it’s a combination buzzer/shocker.  Camera Girl is way too tender-hearted to shock the dogs.  But I’ve finally demanded that she start using the buzzer and use it consistently to get Penny to stop biting and jumping up.  This is actually also for her own good.  Basset hounds are very prone to hurting their backs and jumping up is a good way for them to do that.

And what do you know?  After about two weeks of consistent training the absurd puppy is finally, finally beginning to behave.  She hasn’t even tried to chew on my face once today.  And I’m overjoyed.  I think Camera Girl is finally beginning to grow up.  Any day now I’ll be comfortable enough to finally throw that ratty coat and gloves away once and for all.  And it’s a good thing.  I think next time the dog would win.

Mowing Your Problems Away

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A few weeks ago I was introduced to the term “no mow May.”  Apparently by not mowing the lawn in May there is a theory that we allow all of the pollinating insects to do their thing and Gaia will be happier and not allow volcanoes and asteroids to kill us all.

Now everyone on this site knows of my undying allegiance to the Green Revolution.  I’ve had the “global warming hockey stick graph tattooed on my eyeballs so that I’m constantly thinking about how much danger the planet is in.  So of course, I sacrificed all other considerations and refrained from mowing the lawn.

Well, lawn would be a misnomer.  My neighbors despise me for the sheer tonnage of dandelions in my fields.  They accuse me of robbing them of the perfect lawns they lust for.  I am, in a word, a heretic against the religion of lawn care.  But be that as it may I held out all May.  And as they drove by my property and the grass and weeds got taller and taller I could feel their hate growing and the dark side of the force becoming stronger and stronger.  But I would walk about unconcerned, at play in the fields of the Lord, luxuriating in the waist high sea of grass and weeds, taking macro shots of bugs and the grass itself and whatever else struck my fancy in my fantasy of a post-Leftist Earth.

But yesterday was May 31st and Camera Girl confronted me and reminded me of that fact.  And she had that wifely look on that I could tell meant that she would brook no nonsense.  And noticing it I said, “Oh, June already, how time flies!  Well, thank goodness it’s stopped raining.  I’ve been worried I’d never be able to get out there!”

So yesterday I hooked up the ride-on mower to a battery charger and got out my new ear protection and safety glasses and gloves and gathered up the various debris that was scattered all over the property and checked under the exceptionally long grass around places where there could be rabbits, foxes and other varmints hiding and collected all the large rocks, tennis balls and dog toys that Camera Girl hurls around the yard for the canine crew.

And this morning bright and early at 11 am I went outside and began the ordeal.  Yikes!  No mow May is a tricky calculation.  Sure, it bought me a couple of weeks of sloth but what a wreck.  I ended up recutting about a third of it and the cleanup was considerable.

Remarkably, Camera Girl was so impressed by the improvement that she seemed to forget that I was the cause of it looking so awful in the first place and I was treated as the conquering hero.  At late snack there was a slice of some kind of pastry, sort of like a Danish but less doughy, that I didn’t even know was in the house.  It was served with a mug of coffee just the way I like it and all was sweetness and light.  Women are extremely unpredictable creatures.  They get stirred up about things that we don’t even notice.  And we almost never know whether it will be in our favor or not.  But as has been observed by greater minds than mine, they are the only source for producing more human beings that we have so far discovered.  So, there we are.

There’s a lot to be said for cutting the grass.  A man can lose himself for a few hours and he can find his mind wandering in and around a lot of problems that are somewhere in the back of his mind.  Alternatively, he can also sometimes forget his problems for a little while.  Today was one of those day.  I turned off the 2024 election and all the rest of the madness for a few hours and damned if I don’t feel a lot better.

Bridging the Gap

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The summer doldrums have officially begun.  Until Labor Day the only interesting news will consist of Donald Trump being prosecuted, persecuted or whatever the Left wants to call their absurd gestapo action in multiple jurisdictions.  So, we’ll have to interest ourselves in “other things” until then.

And that is what I’m scratching my head over.  Book reviews, movies, television, plays.  Science, music, religion.  I’ll have to widen my net to capture things that normal humans interest themselves in.  And that’s all to the good.

This weekend we will be hosting some of the Minions.  Their parents will pull up to the top of the driveway, toss them out of the vehicle in duffel bags, hit the horn and speed away into the night hoping for the best.  Camera Girl has cooked mass quantities of pasta sauce, meatballs and sausage and thereafter imperial tons of spaghetti will be cooked and consumed.

She has procured from various local libraries DVD’s featuring questionable cartoon characters from a selection of eras ranging all the way back to the 1970s.  I have begged for a boycott on any further screenings of Scooby Doo and his associates.  The answer I received was noncommittal.

The pool will be “opened” this weekend but I expect that for the first week or two the water will be suboptimal.  Specifically, it will be opaque and green.  I tried to sell Camera Girl on a trip to the regional zoo.  She shot this idea down claiming kids don’t like zoos.  Hmmm.  Maybe she’s right.  Maybe we’ll go the reptile zoo instead.  I know kids like reptiles.

We’ll probably have a baseball catch one of the days but I’m hoping we can get in some time at the pool table.  I think a good sense of geometry and dynamics is useful for any growing boy.  Plus, it’s been pretty warm for the last few days and the basement tends to be cooler.

It’s time to find out if the Minions are already slaves to their electronic devices.  As far as I know these younger descendants aren’t yet tethered to smartphone entertainment devices.  But I’d also like to cut back on the television time too.  I’ll make it the long weekend objective to try and bridge the multigenerational gap using non-electronic media.  I might even introduce them to the concept of human speech as a means of communication and entertainment.  I might even (shudder!) bring down a book from the shelf and read aloud.  Hopefully it won’t have the local constabulary at my doorstep demanding equal time for whatever woke PBS kid’s series is currently topical; Gender Fluid Jenny or Fern Affirmed or whoever.

I think I’ll start the weekend with a seminar on geographic and demographic topics in Middle Earth.  I’ll skip Beleriand at this time.  The Silmarillion is too depressing for the young ones. I’ll highlight various topics with video presentations from Peter Jackson’s motion pictures.  I’ll start with the Numenorean kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor and use this as a jumping off point on the branches of the royal family.  Of course, there could be extra points for anyone who can specifically identify how many generations separate Elrond and his multi-great nephew Aragorn.

Well, let’s see if I can freehand a map of Middle Earth.  As me old gaffer always said, “You’re nowt but a ninnyhammer, photog!”

The Dunwich Budget

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Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

Here in Dunwich we had our town budget meeting and the Finance Committee asked for a 10 percent increase and there was an uproar.  The Bishops and the Whateleys demanded that First Selectman Cthulhu go into closed session with them and provide an itemized list of all the increases in expenditures.  At the end of the session the First Selectman exited the chamber.  When asked by the committee if all demands had been satisfied, he belched out a dark viscous cloud and declared, “Sure, at least until dinner anyway.  I’m always hungry an hour after Whateley.”

During the next session a group of concerned Dunwichians demanded that alternative revenue raising methods be provided.  Cthulhu suggested a 0.001% head tax be levied.  This low rate excited many of the concerned group and they asked what details would still have to be worked out if this tax was provisionally approved.  The First Selectman confided, “Well we’ll have to figure out how to decide which heads to harvest.  I favor going blind fold and just biting off whatever heads come within my grasp until I’ve reached the agreed upon total.  That seems fairest.”  It was unanimously decided to shelve that proposal indefinitely in favor of the 10% tax increase.

Democracy in action in Dunwich is a frightening but somehow clarifying process.  As opposed to other less mythic New England towns Dunwich cuts through the pretense of egalitarianism and nakedly reveals the precise power dynamic between Great Old Ones and anyone small enough to be engulfed, chewed and swallowed by their cephalopodic maws.

But to be fair, it’s not as if Americans aren’t equally at the mercy of their government.  Paying taxes and not receiving services like police protection, safe drugs, secure borders and honest representation in Washington are standard operating procedure since at least the Obama administration.

Surely, no one is surprised anymore that no balanced budget is ever negotiated, approved and administered.  Since Obama’s time continuing expenditure resolutions and multi-trillion-dollar omnibus boondoggles are the new normal.  I wonder if it is even possible to get a balanced budget enacted.  Would the administrative state just shrug it off and print more money and chalk it up to the need for “clandestine intelligence programs” above the public’s pay grade to know or even question?  I have to confess I’m curious what in the world Trump will do if he gets back into the White House.  It’s rather like being one of the fifth century Westen Roman emperors.  You have to go through the motions of giving orders to the generals but outside your window you can see the Goths and the Vandals carrying off the last of the treasury.

This beyond reckless deficit spending will eventually lead to collapse.  It has to.  Really the only question I have is whether there is a plan to handle the collapse or will the rats just desert the sinking ship for greener pastures.  Will the Obamas flee Martha’s Vineyard for New Zealand or Singapore?

Well, at least locally, the budget process is carefully controlled and all due respect is provided to the voters.  First Selectman Cthulhu is also the ballot clerk at the budget vote.  Every registered voter receives one ballot and casts it proudly.  And we’re proud of our innovations in local government.  By pre-printing the yes oval already filled in we have saved hundreds of dollars over the last few years in the cost of pens and markers.  And that way Cthulhu doesn’t have to eat any “no” voters.  That’s progress!

Tales from the Van – Part 1 – The Sisterhood

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Many years ago, I commuted into Boston for work.  And because at the time there was no commuter rail from where I lived, I took a van in.  We all paid a fee and some of us drove the van on occasion and on those days, we’d get a day knocked off our fee for the next month.  And I’ll have to say that we had a very “diverse” cast of characters.  And I mean that by every definition of the word.  Not only racially, ethnically, careerwise and socio-economically but also philosophically and by personality type.  We were a motley crew.  We even had a guy who worked for one of the intelligence agencies (or so he said).  There were a few people who couldn’t stand each other and there were some very close friends.

But even though most of us didn’t know each other “in the real world,” for an hour in the morning and the afternoon we spent our time talking about the events of the day and the latest sit-com and our work day and our home lives and anything else to pass the time.  And it’s a funny thing but to the people on the van what we thought about the world was a pretty important part of our day.  We would argue politics and social trends.  And once in a while, the guys would even get together for a social gathering.   One time I had the boys over for a poker game and sandwiches.  It was a great success, meaning no one lost too much and everyone ate too much and drank way too much beer.  And this cemented the male camaraderie of the van immensely.  Once you’ve bluffed yourself to a pot with a broken straight it’s almost like you’re boyhood chums.

There was a feminist contingent on the van too and they would provide a united front when explaining why men were the cause of all the problems in the world.  That is until they needed help with a flat tire or an angry motorist on the road.  I remember a time when I was riding shotgun while one of the most strident feminists was driving the van through Boston street-traffic.  It was an awful ride.  We were in a bumper-to-bumper jam and she had lost all patience and was laying on the horn every other minute or so.  Finally, the guy in front of us in a brand-new sports car, throws his car into park, jumps out of his car.  He’s about six foot five and comes running over and bangs on her window with his fist.

Well, this champion of female equality, jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran to the back of the van like a shot.  Which I found hilarious.  Until I realized she had left the van in gear.  So of course we rolled into the back of the sports car.  Now I had to climb over the hump and get into the driver’s seat.  The engine had stalled out and I had to nurse it back to life and then throw it into reverse to separate us from the sports car.  All the while the irate driver is hopping up and down screaming over us hitting his car.  I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I shrugged my shoulder and pointed out to him that traffic was moving and tried not to laugh.  After he convinced himself that his bumper wasn’t much the worse for the bump and realized that if he wanted to make an accident report of it, he’d have to tell a traffic cop that he had been threatening a woman driver for being a woman driver he slunk back to his car and we proceeded.

But that little demonstration had us laughing at the sisterhood for a good long time about having a concrete answer as to, “What good are men?”  But pretty soon the sisterhood had convinced themselves again that women were the only intelligent life in the universe.

There was another occasion when the gals were plotting their takeover of the world.  And they had managed to set off one of the less easy-going guys with their claim that a pack of five women could kill any man in a fight.  They badgered him for a good long time and they could see this talk got under his skin so they did it all the more.  They demanded that he tell them how he could possibly hope to fight against five opponents.  After all, they said, if all of them constantly pummeled him from all sides they’d eventually injure him enough to overwhelm him.

So finally, he said, the tactic he would use would be to get a strong hold on one woman and bash her head into the ground and then do the same to each of them consecutively.  He believed this would have a twofold advantage.  Firstly, finishing off one opponent completely would significantly improve his position in the fight.  But more importantly, he believed that psychologically women would be unlikely to continue attacking a man that had just bashed a woman’s head in.

His logic seemed to have been persuasive.  The gals gave up that thought experiment completely and the rest of the ride was very quiet.  After that they didn’t bother him about the war of the sexes, so to speak.  I think they were kind of scared of him.  What he said must have struck them as accurate.

But by the next day we had some new thing to argue about.  I think it was the Oscars.  The girls had a very long talk about that with very little help from us.  But at least things were back to normal.

Of Raspberries and Road Work

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Princess Sack of Potatoes is on Spring Vacation from Kindergarten so she is visiting. And so, she and Camera Girl went to the local lakeside park to play on the jungle gym and swings with the other paroled inmates of the local centers of lower education.

They’ve left me on my own recognizance and I am reveling in the freedom and using it to inspect my domain in the cloudless sunshine of the day star (Sol, G-type main-sequence star, G2V; approximately 4.6 billion years old).  And right away my leisure is disturbed by the state road crew and their private contractors come to remove the dying ash trees that threaten the power and communication lines during wind and snow events.  Unfortunately, one of the largest trees along the road is an enormous ash that adjoins the west field.  And his last day is now at hand.  The crew has a machine of incredible strength and capability.  It’s a gigantic arm that grips the tree near the top of the trunk with hydraulic fingers and then brings into play an enormous saw that cuts off the tree below the grasping hand.

Then the arm, defying gravity and inertia rotates at the shoulder and deposits the top of the tree on the side of the road.  Then it takes a purchase farther down on the trunk and repeats this operation a few times and voila, no more ash tree.  Just a pile of logs.  The crew then takes a conventional but enormous chain saw to the stump and bring it down to the ground in a few minutes and then off down the road to the next victim.  Ah well.  These ash trees have been dying off for decades.  My area is relatively off the beaten path so I guess it’s finally caught up to us.  American Chestnut, Elm, Ash.  Good heavens, what will be left in another few generations, you have to ask.  But I guess there is some hope.  The project to restore the American Chestnut either by selective breeding of the survivors or by genetic engineering of a hardy strain is slowly (but hopefully surely) reaching the end point where the trees will be released in to the world for regeneration of that majestic species in Eastern North America.

The thornless red raspberries that I planted a couple of years ago are back in leaf again and spreading nicely in the bed where I planted them.  They have been a rare case where the product lived up to the advertising.  They produce abundant, large, delicious fruit and they seem to thrive enthusiastically in the very boggy spring soil of that part of the property.  And since both Camera Girl and Princess Sack of Potatoes are big fans of this fruit, I have gained great praise for my project in introducing them to the yard.  This summer I hope for a bumper crop of many quarts of the fruit.  The only real hazard is the local black bear population.  With both blue berries and raspberries on site an ursine prowler is something to consider.  Well, I’ve got my bear spray.  Yogi beware.

Well, the girls are back so I must adjourn.  We must be at play in the fields of the Lord.