Category: Life in Dunwich

My Adventures in the Mythical New England Town of Dunwich

In Hera’s Kitchen

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Today is the highest of solemnities in Camera Girl’s kitchen calendar.  I, even I, am banned from encroaching on the rituals being performed.  And I’m no fool.  Interfering with the magic going on risks the spoiling of those spells and the blighting of the baked goods being produced; a horror not to be imagined.

Today Camera Girl and her daughters and now her granddaughter will gather like a coven of witches and take their magic ingredients and hover around the stove and drink coffee (or hot chocolate in the case of Princess Sack of Potatoes) and knead dough and add vanilla extract and hand shape the grandma cookies and the chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies and whichever new variants they decide on.

And wondrous aromas will waft through the house and when they’re through there will be a pile of cookies to get us through to New Year’s Day.  Splendiferous confections that turn a coffee break into a feast.  And make watching an old movie into a special event.

But even ignoring the practical results of this activity, this is a primary ritual of our domestic calendar.  The hand written recipes are coming on fifty years.  The paper is beginning to crumble and the writing is fading from exposure to ingredients and wear and tear.  I’ve warned Camera Girl that they need to be copied and digitized, printed out and distributed to her daughters to preserve them from loss.  But if it’s going to be done, I’ll have to take on the project.

I look at some of the recipes and the notes on them and see the names of friends and relatives from long ago.  Only one or two living women are represented.  Most are from our parents’ and grandparents’ generation.  A few go even farther back.

And that’s a comforting legacy.  In these times when fools are trying to deconstruct the meaning of man and woman and sever the traditions that have given meaning to our lives, there still exist people and rituals that ground our lives and make them human and pleasant.  Baking cookies may seem to some people to be a trivial and possibly harmful activity in a world of obese people.  But it’s exactly opposite.  Christmas cookies are a special and specific part of the year.  Once they’re done, we don’t make more.  We move onto the winter months when we subsist on meager fare, far removed from the bounty of summer and fall.  Christmas is a celebration and an ending of the year and needs to be treated as such.

So, I will withdraw from the kitchen and keep myself busy with other things while the women commune with their flour and butter.  From time to time, I’ll find an excuse to walk by the kitchen and see how things are going.  And maybe my granddaughter will come visit with me for a game of Candy Land.  But for the most part I’ll leave them to their industry and their talk.  And before I go to bed there will be the hoard of golden and white and brown cookies in various cookie jars and containers.  And of course, there will be a big mug of coffee and one or two (or even three) cookies waiting for me to enjoy during a holiday movie.  God bless you Camera Girl and long may you bake.

With Visions of Sugar Plums Dancing Over Their Heads

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Christmas Cooking, Sony A7 III, Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens

 

The last week before Christmas.  Now Camera Girl must marshal all her powers to coordinate the schedule of buying and cooking the feast.  Today she came home with a ham, chopped meat, escarole and some of the other ingredients of the various courses.  The roast beast won’t arrive until the end of the week.  And the pies and cakes won’t be baked or bought for a few days more.  I was explicit that there must be a good quality vanilla ice cream in copious quantity to complement the pies.  And very good coffee to wash it down.

The mashed potatoes, corn, crescent rolls and the stuffed mushrooms are all last-minute items that won’t be started until Christmas Eve but they’ll add their dimension to the meal.  And finally, I demanded chestnuts and that rope of dried figs that no one ever eats.  Camera Girl, being the frugal woman that she is, complained bitterly that chestnuts now cost $8 a pound.  But I was adamant.  I never liked them as a kid but my father-in-law always had some out at Christmas and after trying them a few times I actually developed a taste for them.  As for the dried figs, they’re so hard that they’re almost inedible but somehow it wouldn’t be Christmas without them lying around on the table so I demanded them too.

And this year I’ll show my little granddaughter the trick with the mandarin orange skin and a lighted match.  The oils in the skin are flammable and she’ll be amazed to see it ignite around the match when I squeeze the skin near it.  And this year I think I’ll try to get the kids to join in a penny ante poker game with me.  Camera Girl has an old bucket of pennies.  There must be a thousand of them and we can play for hours without any serious money changing hands.

I’ve got my favorite Christmas DVDs at the ready and several albums of Christmas music on tap.  And no one should be sick this year because everyone has already been stricken with the Chinese Bioweapon recently.  I don’t know that I’ve ever had a sugar plum but I’m pretty sure there’ll be all kinds of chocolates and mints on the table.

Sure, everything is about twice as expensive as normal and that old dimwit Biden keeps gassing off every few days about Ukraine or gay marriage or trans-something-or-other but I’m satisfied that this will be a good Christmas despite him and the rest of the grifters who run the crime family that fleeces us.

It’s still Christmas, friends, family and food and that’s a pretty good combination.  I can no longer feel any community with the degenerates that surround us and plot bigger and uglier ways to degrade the good things in the world.  But I feel kinship with the normal people that work hard and raise their kids and try to make the world go round.  With them I can hope for a Merry Christmas and we’ll worry about the New Year later.  Where’s that sweet potato pie?

5DEC2022 – OCF Update – More Focus Stacks

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Today I was part of the long chain of knowledge that begins with the “the master of those who know” and extends all the way to my four year old granddaughter.  In the spirit of Aristotle we recreated the dialectic on the various animal classes.  I tried to explain the reason why a grasshopper was different from a mouse.  We talked about the higher animals and the lower animals and I even got around to explaining why dinosaurs are related to lizards and birds.  After about a half hour she’d had enough and we went back to a match game for dinosaurs.  And after that back to Candy Land.  Well I’d still give Princess Sack of Potatoes the intellectual edge over Plato but I think I need to get some high quality color phtots of different animals to make the discussion more compelling for her.

Once Camera Girl led her granddaughter into the kitchen to bake some pumpkin bread I decided this was a good day for some macrophotography fun.

So I took some focus stacks.  I had a tiny old Roman coin and a long dead beetle lying around so they were my subjects.

15DEC2022 beetle stack
15DEC2022 coin face 2 stack
15DEC2022 coin tail stack

The focus intervals don’t seem to have been sufficient to give a perfect stack.  But i’m using a Sony Remote Commander and it doesn’t have any calibration for the focus change.  I have a little program I can use while tethered to my laptop but the A7 IV requires a USB 3 cable and I only have USB 1 or 2.  So I’ll have to go out and get one.  But still a nice exercise.

All in all a day well spent.

Dunwich Complainer – Avalanche 2022 (In Rumble-Rama)

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Yesterday as I lolled around in my lazy recuperative stupor, I was suddenly aware of a booming sound and the sensation of shaking.  At first, I assumed I was still goofy from the COVID and had imagined it but then I saw that the dogs had picked up on something too.  I thought, “Maybe a truck came down the driveway and banged into the house.  So, I got up and went to look outside.

And what I saw was a boulder sitting on the lower driveway.  I could see where it broke off from the wall.  What I had heard was it falling, bouncing and rolling to a stop.

I was still kind of lethargic yesterday so I left it as, “to be continued.”  Today I felt more myself.  So, I investigated.  It’s roughly 4’X2’X1.5’ and I estimate it weighs about 1,500 lbs.

Looking at the exposed surfaces it looks like over time the rock has been fracturing and finally the weight was too much for the remaining stone to support.  It’s these lousy New England winters.  Freezing and thawing incessantly wreaks havoc with structural integrity.  It’s why I’m the broken-down husk of a man that I am.

So, this boulder is a metaphor for how the world wears down even the best of us and then sends us crashing to earth abandoned and out of sorts like a modern day Humpty Dumpty.  Very sad.  Very abstract, so deep.

But now I have to move the darn thing and then figure out how to prevent the dirt that was being held in place by it from eroding away.  Camera Girl will see me like a modern-day Sisyphus toiling to roll this huge stone up the hill.  What’s next?  The extinction level asteroid strike?  Yeah, why not?

photog Bound

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The men of my family have an endearing trait.  Whenever we’re sick, even to an almost imperceptible degree we carry on like an antique hero in his death agony and expect our wives to baby us to an unhealthy degree.  Now this week as it happened, Camera Girl is seriously under the weather.  She’s been slowly recovering since Saturday.  Today she’s at 60% and improving.  But today I woke up with muscle aches, possibly a slight fever and a headache.

Ahhh, the perfect malady.  Just bad enough to be recognizably sick but not bad enough to distract me from my act.  So, all day today I’ve been an invalid caterwauling about my aches and pains and the bravery I was demonstrating.  Like the great titan Prometheus, I was shackled to a crag in the Caucasus Mountains (or maybe my recliner in the living room).  I could feel Camera Girl going through the slow burn.  It’s a delicate balance.  If I lay it on too thick, she’s liable to poison me or smother me in my sleep.  But with just the right touch, the day is passed for both of us in a tolerable haze of delirium.

I spent the day watching YouTube videos about artificial elements in the island of stability and mockeries of string theory.  With enough aspirin and turkey soup I almost felt human by dinner time.

But later my fever returned and I descended into madness.  To go along with this mania, I put on a pretty bad prison movie from 1947 called “Brute Force.”  Burt Lancaster is a prisoner who stages a jail break to save his wife from a cancer diagnosis.  The pipsqueak, Hume Cronyn is completely absurd as the sadistic captain of the guards.  But as ridiculous as the movie was it was perfect for my delirium.

When Camera Girl addressed me I started changing my “thems” to “dems” and “these” to “deese.”  Pretty soon I told her that no “twist” was gonna tell me how to run a jail break.  I reminded her that no prison could hold me for long and I added for good measure that no one would take me alive.

Eventually I passed out from a combination of malaise and bad acting.  When I woke up a mortally wounded Lancaster tossed Cronyn from the guard tower to the mob below who tore him apart.  Ahhh, those were the days.  No transgender prisoners, no pronouns, just good old prison justice for stool pigeons and screws, see?

Now I’m wrapped up like a mummy trying to keep from getting the shakes.  I think I’m done with bad movies for the day.  I’ll put on some country music and try to sleep my way through the worst of this.  Funny thing is Camera Girl now seems genuinely concerned with my health.  There’s a word in Italian that means pity; peccato.  Of course, in the dialect that Camera Girl’s people spoke back in the old country it was pronounced like “pea-cod.”  Well, my pathetic weakness and whining have finally broken through and I’m garnering the attention and peccato I so richly deserve.  I win again!

My hope is that I’ll be almost human tomorrow.  But one never knows, do one?

Happy Thanksgiving 2022 to Everybody

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What a splendiferous day.  Camera Girl, working on her early food preliminaries, busy as a bee and supremely skilled.  Me, lazier than a lion in the noonday sun, puttering around, anticipating the feeding frenzy to come.  I research anything that comes into my head.  I find solutions to problems that I’ve put off solving for years.  I’m profoundly contented.

I finally made a walkaround outside a little while ago.  That good, late afternoon sun, every photographer’s friend as it transmutes everything it touches into gold, gives me some subjects for my camera.  A frost-burned rosebud, a dying stalk of millet, some seared oak leaves on a branch.  Quite unspectacular subjects but with an obvious relevance to the season.  The walk was invigorating.  The fresh air did me good.

Tomorrow will be a full day of family.  I won’t spend much, if any, time on-line.  Which is all to the good.  The site daily content is all pre-loaded.  Hopefully the world will have the good grace not to explode until after I’ve enjoyed my holiday.  So, everyone will be so good as to amuse themselves tomorrow while I give thanks for all the wonderful people and things with which God has seen fit to populate his universe.

If something important or amusing strikes me and I decide to throw it onto the site tomorrow I hope most of you will be too busy or too groggy with food to notice.  There will be plenty of time on Friday or Saturday to catch up with my pearls of wisdom(?).

I’ll have to say the results of the elections have made me unexpectedly upbeat for the future.  I feel like the future is up to me to create and that greatly energizes me.  No more waiting for saviors or depending on luck.  I feel like the world is for those who seize the moment and wrest the future they want out of the indifferent present that we see around us.  The American dream was shown to be just that.  The fellowship with our American “brothers” on the Left has been revealed to be a lie.  But this revelation is liberating.  An open enemy is so much less dangerous than a false friend.  None of the Bushes or McConnells or Bidens or Obamas can surprise us anymore.  We know just how evil they are and we can anticipate most of their attacks at this point.  So, there’s no reason to think of them at all on a day of thanksgiving.  I’ll think about all the good people that I’ve heard about or met in the last year and I’ll be thankful for blessings that I know I’ve enjoyed.

I hope everyone out there eats and drinks way too much of some delicious things.  I hope that you have a chance to talk to some folks that mean something to you.  I hope everyone has time to think about this life and the good things that we should be thankful for.  And I hope you have a chance to enjoy yourself and relax.  I intend to stay up late tomorrow after everybody goes home and watch some old movies and get up late and then eat a lot of leftovers.

God bless you all.

21NOV2022 – OCF Update – We Go On

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Good morning.  The sun is shining the cold has set in and everything is in motion for the Thanksgiving holiday.  And everyone has his part to play.  Even I, the laziest man in Christendom, have chores and errands and must play my part.  Wonderful.

We fulfill these parts even as the edifice of western civilization degrades and crumbles all around us.  And I say, okay!  No more whining, no more railing against the corruption and greed that fuels the destruction.

Play into the storm.  Look for the advantage.  Protect you and yours.  Intelligence and reason are real.  Even if the world pretends they don’t exist, they do. Teach your children that the hot stove burns and poison kills and a loaded gun isn’t pointed at a friend.

There are plenty of things to do.  Ferret out the things that have value and hold onto them.  Find the good people and show them your value.  Don’t waste your time on nonsense.

Do something to make things better every day.  It doesn’t matter if it’s insignificant.  Make each day count in some way.  Even if it’s something you have to do anyway.  In your mind find a positive aspect and accomplish it.

Don’t lose touch with your people.  Reach out to them even if they’re far away.  In our all-encompassing communication infrastructure, there’s never an excuse for losing touch with the people that mean something to you.  Take a moment and say something meaningful to one of them as often as you can.

There’s no need or room for despair.  What’s needed is work.  Find something meaningful to do and DO IT!

The Republicans are useless and evil.  the Democrats are in charge of everything and satanic.  How is that different from 99.9% of recorded history.  Maybe we had Camelot in this country for a couple of hundred years and now it’s over.  Suck it up.  Move on.

Keep your eyes open for something better that comes along.  Don’t give up on politics but don’t expect the good guys to come over the hill and restore us to the 1950s or even the 1980s.  That’s highly unlikely.  Settle for someone doing something that makes things a little less horrible.

Believe in yourself and believe in common sense and believe in the good that you can do for your family and friends.  There is good and evil and there is right and wrong.  Use the brains that God gave you to figure out the difference and make the hard decisions.

And keep your eyes open in case there comes a point where you need to jump out of the way of anything really, really bad.  That’s the one that worries me.  But worrying doesn’t accomplish anything so keep that in the back of your mind and do all of the rest of it today and tomorrow and the day after that.

And that day after that is Thanksgiving!  So, get on with it and there’ll be turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie waiting for you on Thursday.  That’s good enough to keep me going.

20NOV2022 – OCF Update – This’N’That – Of Mice and Math

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Sunday, the day of rest.  A good day to regroup and sets things in order for the upcoming week.  Especially this week.  Had a blast with the old grandsons yesterday.  Fun outing, good food.  Got home and skipped dinner.  Skipped all food and drink and maybe that was a mistake.  I was still recovering from that virus that was in the house the last couple of weeks.  But I figured I could skip the cold meds.  Big mistake!  Woke up at 4:30 am with a splitting sinus headache.  So, I beat a hasty retreat to the cold medicine and then sat up for a half hour to let it knock down my sinus inflammation.

But today I’m definitely on the mend.  So, I spent time working on minutia.  I’ve been using the Logitech M570 Wireless Trackball Mouse as my pointing device for the last six or so years.  It’s a great device in most ways.  But unfortunately, the switches for the left and right click buttons give out after a couple of years.  So now I have three of these things that double click when they shouldn’t.  I finally looked into the problem and found a YouTube video that shows how to replace the microswitches and eliminate the problem.  Now I’ll have to buy a soldering iron and some other bits of gear and become a technician.  Well, that’s kind of fun.  Plus, I’ll fix the other two mice and become mouse anti-fragile for the foreseeable future.  Yeah me.

The other thing today was about was to delve into vector analysis.  I never had the time back in the day to play around with the more advanced theorems to get a solid handle on the tensor notation.  In the past I’ve been exposed (as if to a disease) to Del Notation, Dyadics, the Laplacian and equally complex concepts.  The Kronecker delta and how to expand the determinant was something I had to memorize in order to solve some problems in physics.  But if I’m being honest there was very little comprehension on my part at the time as to how these manipulations made sense.  Now I’ve got some time I think I’ll take another whack at it.  The question as to whether I still have sufficient brain cells to thread my way around it and whether those brain cells can retain it remains to be seen.  But it might be fun.

So, amid my other occupations I’ve added electronic technician and math student.  That should make Thanksgiving week an interesting time.  Maybe I’ll buy the microswitches and soldering iron on Black Friday and get some huge discount.  I’ll probably also have to buy some kind of giant magnifying glass on a flexible arm just to see the attachment points for the switches.  It’s a pity I can’t purchase new eyes too.  But once again, the future we were promised all those years ago before Blade Runner hasn’t quite materialized yet.  Well, no need to get all whiny about it.  Magnifying glass works too.

So here we go into Thanksgiving Week.  Turkey, gravy, stuffing, pumpkin pie, old movies and family.  What’s better than that?

And the Wisdom to Know the Difference

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The new schedule has begun.  Yesterday I spent the morning on fiction writing.  That was fun.  After that I wrote my post.  Today I headed off to the office for my first normal workday.  That was interesting.

I am under the weather.  Camera Girl and by extension Princess Sack of Potatoes gifted me some kind of cold-flu-virus-thingamajig involving sinuses, nose and throat suffering but mercifully no lung torture.  I’m doped up on over-the-counter marvelous miracle drugs that actually seem to abate most of the misery.  But I’m still only firing on seven cylinders which means this post may be a little off.

But all-in-all I’m feeling relatively upbeat about my new perspective on US politics.  I no longer have to agonize over whether Herschel Walker or Dr. Oz is going to squirm through the Democrat ballot harvesting dragnet.  It’s no longer my problem anymore.  I live in a country that has a single-party political system and it isn’t a party that’s going to favor me or my family.  All I have to worry about is whether I’m doing everything I can to produce a space where people like me can flourish.

And since I’ve just started this phase of my life, I’m cutting myself some slack.  I don’t have to solve all the problems of living in New England overnight.  But what I must do is begin thinking in this new way and continuously test and improve my assumptions about what can be done and what can’t.

So, for instance, my town is one of the few towns in my state that is measurably Republican in voting record.  So, we can elect Republican selectmen and school board members and a Republican state representative and state senator.  But we can’t elect a Republican US representative or senator.  So, that tells me that we can have quite a bit of influence in the local laws that are written and a little influence on state laws but basically no impact at the national level.

So that should be my basis for evaluating the future.  The state and federal government are the main threats to me.  They can increase my taxes, curtail my freedoms and poison the minds of my children and grandchildren with warped lies and dangerous fantasies about life.  Each of these threats require an evaluation to decide what preventative actions can be taken to protect against these problems.  And these actions have to be evaluated to see if there is a net positive or negative from having to implement them.

For instance, moving to a different state or a different country might protect me from losing certain freedoms or eliminate indoctrination of my children.  But what other things go along with that?  Would I have to sacrifice economic opportunities.  Or would I be forced to become a stranger in a strange land, someone who would always be thought of as an outsider?

So that’s why I’m going to cut myself a lot of slack.  Big changes like emigrating are not something you do lightly or quickly.  For now, I’ll concentrate on the small things like participating in local government.  And since I’ve made that move, I’m patting myself on the back and awarding myself all kinds of bonus points and participation trophies.

And that’s why I’m feeling so upbeat amid the wreckage and ruin of the mid-terms.  I don’t want to walk in the footsteps of the social justice types but I will quote one of their favorite messages, the Serenity Prayer, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference.  I’m going to do what I can and stop stressing about things that just don’t seem to be happening.

If someone appears who can get things done, I’ll support him.  If my small efforts put me into a position to accomplish some change on my own, I’ll do it.  And if all else fails I’ll keep my eyes open to know when and where to jump to avoid disaster.  That’s as much as I can think of.  And that’s what I’ll write about when I’m not writing stories or taking photos.

Election Day in Dunwich

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Election Day was my first day at my new gig as Dunwich Deputy Election Scourge.  My job was to apply a gigavolt prod to the Great Old One voters to keep them moving in the chutes.  To some people this might seem a little odd.  Well, most towns don’t have Great Old Ones (GOO) as a component of the voting population.  These must be given their own separate line and voting booths and kept under tight control or they would escape the line and begin eating the humans.

Things went very well all morning and at 4 pm I was starting to think we’d get through the day without any trouble but at 4:20 pm we had our first incident.  One of the high school ballot checkers foolishly leaned up against the steel sides of the chute while drinking a Diet Pepsi.  A tentacle wrapped around her ankles and dragged most of her through the space between the steel guard rails.  Four nearby scourges began firing on the GOO with their prods while the Chief Scourge shouted in an Australian accent, “Shoot her, shoot her.”  But it was all for naught.  The ballot checker had long since disappeared into the florescent green maw of the GOO, never to be seen again.  All that remained of her was a dismembered hand with shiny blue nail polish still holding a bottle of Diet Pepsi.  The clean up crew kept carefully outside of the safety lines that surrounded the chute.  Needless to say, morale amongst the election checkers plummeted.  Buffy had been a popular member of the team and would be missed at the high school senior prom.

But we redoubled our vigilance and kept a close watch on the younger volunteers to prevent another regrettable incident.  When it was 7:50 I began to think we were out of the woods.  But in the final minutes, disaster struck again.  A final GOO entered the chute and headed for the checker area.  When the Checker went through the list there was no record of Azathoth (sometimes referred to as the “Blind Idiot God”) ever having registered in Dunwich.  This was not well received by that symbol of primordial chaos.  But before the checker had a chance to state that same day registration was now a reality in Dunwich, the monstrous nuclear chaos from beyond angled space punched a ten-foot hole through the hardened titanium wall and flattened the unfortunate checker into the concrete floor with an invisible limb.  It then began pulsing energy in all directions, preparatory to collapsing time-space and thereby forcing Earth through a singularity.

Before we retreated out the rathole I punched the upload button to preserve the ballot data.  Then I hit the timer for the tactical nuke and released the goat blood into the floor trough to distract the GOO and give us a chance to escape.  One minute later the bunker we had entered was buffeted by the fifty-kiloton detonation.  A few minutes later we exited by another tunnel that opened about five miles from ground zero and we proceeded above ground to election HQ to fill out the paperwork and tally the votes.

An irate state election rep who had received a complaint from Cthulhu called to officially chastise the town for gross discrimination against a protected class (GOOs), levy a fine and strip us of our status as a sanctuary city.  We absorbed this abuse, finished up the election tally, submitted it to the state and to the press, licked our wounds and headed home for a very late dinner.  Well at least Azathoth didn’t get to vote.  That bugger is a well known progressive and it was already a pretty bad night for the Right so every little bit helps.  Some of the Republican Town Committee tried to blame this on Trump.  You can’t please some people.

Politics sucks.  Next year I’m hoping to get on the town road crew instead.  It doesn’t pay as well but they don’t have to wear radiation badges and necklaces of garlic and wolfsbane.  So you have to take that into consideration.

Progressives really are monsters when it comes right down to it.