Tag: Camera Girl

Tomorrow is Another Day

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So today was a day of penance.  Sins of omission had to be paid for with sins of commission.  The pool fence has a gate with a closing/locking mechanism that requires the two posts and the door to be in rather finicky alignment to work properly.  Well, it’s been getting more and more out of whack for the last couple of years but I’ve been putting it off because … well because I’m a very lazy man.

But yesterday the pool guys opened up the pool so I figured I couldn’t stall any longer.  I had all my tools (drill, 200-foot extension cord, screwdrivers, pliers, wrench, two different socket sets and drivers, a small sledge hammer, wheel barrow, shovel, ear protection, eye protection, hacksaw) and the kits I was using to shore up the two posts and the hardware I needed to repair the gate.  The wheelbarrow and shovel were to fill a hole next to one of the posts.  I had dug it and filled it with large stones (~fifty pounds each) to hold the post in place but this wasn’t doing the trick.  So, I removed the stones and replaced it with dirt and compacted it with the sledge hammer.  But unfortunately, I couldn’t get at this post because of a large concrete planter that Camera Girl had filled with plants right on top of the post so I had to wrestle it out of the way.  Who knew concrete and dirt were heavy?

Finally, I could get to work on the posts.  But when I moved the planter, I must have covered over a hornet’s nest.  Because now they were looking for their nest and couldn’t find it.  So, they came looking for me!  So, I’m banging the reinforcing post into the ground and bolting it together and drilling holes into the post while dodging and swatting hornets.  So, I’m swearing and moving erratically to escape the bugs and Camera Girl sees me as she’s walking in the yard.  And she comes over to see what’s wrong.  But she blows up when she gets any kind of bug bite so I’m yelling at her to stay back.  So, she thinks I must be going crazy but after additional arm waving and hollering she retreats.

Finally, I finish with the first post and quickly manhandle the planter back in place and the hornets find their home.  So I go looking for Camera Girl to explain what was going on.  She yeah-yeahs me and tells me to get back to work.  The rest of the job goes fairly well.  Of course, I make approximately a thousand trips back and forth to my tool room in the garage because nothing fits and all the hardware is wrong.  But eventually the posts are square, the gate is straight and the lock works (more or less).  I put away all of the various tools and head to the pool to empty the skimmer for the first time.  But I can tell something’s wrong with the pump.  It sounds wrong.  I turn off the power and I see smoke coming from a union near a valve that the pool guys replaced yesterday.  The union cracked and the pump has been running without water for some unknown amount of time today.  I sigh.  Yep.  One step forward.  Two steps back.

As Scarlett O’Hara wisely observed, “Tomorrow is another day.”

Meanwhile Fifty Year Later

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Six down, one to go.  A fourteen-hour day just ended.  It went better than I expected.  It did end in failure and will have to be repeated in June but that’s a story for another day.  The main thing is I didn’t crash and burn in the middle and if I get through tomorrow, which will be easier than today, I can relax through my root canal or tooth extraction or whatever other dental horror story occurs on Thursday.

And I was completely isolated from the outside world today.  I don’t know whether aliens landed from the Andromeda galaxy and cured Joe Biden’s cancer and started flights of humans to their world based on a book whose title will eventually be translated to mean “To Serve Biden” (it’s a cookbook!).  I looked at the headlines tonight briefly and I couldn’t find anything of note but maybe I’m just tired.

While I was gone, I put Camera Girl in charge.  But the dogs know she is a pushover and they ran amok terrorizing her and just trampling her attempts to maintain order at the Compound.  It’s an old story.  She is acknowledged to be the world’s least effective dog owner.  She spoiled these dogs and now they neither fear no respect her.  I could restore order but what’s the use.  She refuses to discipline them in any meaningful way.  She just screams at them without any result.  But all of this is irrelevant.  Tomorrow is a day fraught with great significance.  Exactly fifty years ago tomorrow I first laid eyes on Camera Girl when she was just a seventeen-year-old babe at the beach in Brooklyn.

That day was an example of fate.  Neither of us was supposed to be at the beach that day.  And neither of us had ever met.  And just by the sheerest accident we each had a friend that knew each other and who had planned to meet at the beach.  So, by third hand luck we met and hit it off.  And now fifty years later we’re still keeping company and trying to figure out what the heck we’re going to do to keep this crazy merry-go-round twirling for a little while longer.

Fifty years is a considerable amount of time.  It’s basically my entire adult life.  The friend who knew her friend is long dead but still comes to mind from time to time because he may have been the funniest human being I’ve ever met.  I guess humor isn’t a good predictor of human success or even survival.  It is a very strange world we live in.  The unlikeliest chance can have a profound impact and steer the course of our whole life.

But all kinds of chance exist.  I had assumed we would celebrate our big day with some enjoyable event at our favorite restaurant.  But instead, I’ve got two chores to take care of and then I’m waiting on a root canal the next day that won’t let me enjoy food for a while.

What’s the expression?  You’ve got to take the good with the bad.  Well, that’s a crummy expression!  But also, very true.  Oh well.  It was a great day at the beach fifty years ago.  And there will be more great days to come.  So, on with the show.

Trad-Wife Boot Camp

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I wonder if Camera Girl knows that if she were a zoomer she’d be considered a “trad wife.”  I’m actually afraid to tell her what that is.  She’d shake her head and tell me that people today are ridiculous and I shouldn’t waste my time talking about ridiculous things.  But she’s so far out of the mainstream that she might as well be from another planet.

And that brings me to the topic of today.  How to find trad wives for my grandsons.  It’s a complicated question.  I wonder if Google Ads has a category for it?  I’m sure there are dating sites that categorize people by the lifestyle they align with.  But I don’t trust my grandsons to handle an assignment this important.  I’m not even sure if their parents are up to the challenge.  I think this requires Camera Girl to handle the interviews.

I don’t expect her to have the final say over the bride but I think she should be given a veto over the candidates that are obviously flawed.  Now of course the heart wants what the heart wants.  But I think it would make good sense to have some oversight of the matrimonial process.  Let’s face it, men are not very savvy when it comes to women.  In fact, the zoomers may actually be responsible for this whole kerfuffle about the question of, “What is a woman?”  Maybe they honestly don’t know.  Sure, they’ve seen them online but have they ever spoken with a live woman since graduating college?

What would make sense would be some kind of practical exam.  Let’s see:

  • Make spaghetti and meatballs from scratch.
  • Make decent coffee.
  • Make pancakes.
  • Figure out the menu for the week.
  • Bake an apple pie.
  • Entertain your prospective in-laws without saying the word “cringe” once.
  • Show that you like kids.
  • Tell a joke.
  • Go shopping with your prospective mother-in-law.
  • Don’t look at your phone once during dinner.

Now I know this is a stone-age list.  Women nowadays can’t cook, don’t want kids and have no interpersonal skills except in the office or on-line.  But that’s the point.  Men should be trying to find a way out of the awful world that girl-bosses and feminism has created.  If they marry, they need to find a woman that they’ll be able to stay married to for more than a month.  And if a woman doesn’t intend to have children, then there’s no imaginable reason to marry her in the first place.  If she wants companionship, she should save time and money and buy a cat or two or three.

Now it’s entirely possible that there are no more wifeable women left.  Maybe the whole western world of women is composed of girls who want to work in middle management and eventually end up as middle-aged, Botox-shooting, cat-keeping, barren girl-bosses spitting venom at the whole male sex for not wanting to serve as their place-holder partner at the corporate parties and gatherings.

If that’s the case my recommendation is for my grandsons to go marry a girl from a traditional country where women still give birth to children and think of house-wife as a pretty nice career.  But we’ll have to see how my talk with Camera Girl goes.  She’s ornery and may not agree right away.  But she’ll come around.  She likes to help young people.  And she can give remedial classes in the spaghetti and meatballs exam question if it’s a problem.  After all nobody is perfect.

Make Way for the Expedition!

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Voigtlander 10mm e-mount trees in vertical

Camera Girl is an excellent wife.  She understands the nuances and challenges of being married to a profoundly disorganized man.  And what she has done is become my enabler.  She knows how lazy and easily distracted I can be so she goes out of her way to find things in the real world that can help me in my stated goals.

For instance, I’ve been complaining about needing a photography trip to get a bunch of new pictures.  So, she took it upon herself to research day trips to photogenic locations.  Car shows, museums, stuff like that.  Well, she asked me if I want to go to a botanical garden on Friday.  Apparently, the weather is going to cooperate and she was able to get discount passes from one of her library friends (she loves discounts passionately).

“Perfect!” I said.  And so tomorrow morning I will assemble my gear and she will act as my native bearer or sherpa guide.  With her carrying all the weight, my inner vision will be free to unlock the mystical dimensions of the secrets of nature.  Like a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci (only without all the gayness) I will frame the photographs that will capture truth, beauty and small insects everywhere I go.

Like Frank Buck and Ali “bringing ‘em back alive” or Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquering Everest, we shall conquer new frontiers of arboreal greatness together.  I with my Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens and A7IV camera and Camera Girl with her 83-pound backpack with forehead strap to take some of the weight off of her shoulders.  To some this may sound excessive.  On the contrary, I’m leaving behind the laptop, larger tripod and the flash gear.  Everything I packed is critical; the portable generator, my yoga mat and the collapsible hammock for my 1:30 pm siesta.  After all we’re not barbarians, are we?  And she knows that the roll of a good producer is to, “keep the talent happy.”  After all, without my perfect composure and comfort the whole thing will be for naught.  Remember, art is the hardest thing in the world.  We must be perfectly in tune with the astral plane or it will collapse like a deck of cards or some other analogy.

As the kids would say, “I’m stoked.”  And I predict the most amazing results from this expedition.  I do intend to bring along some other lenses.  The 10mm Voigtlander should be useful for capturing some of the vertical shots of the trees and I’m considering bringing the Sony 200-600mm zoom for any shots of birds up in the higher branches.  And I guess I’ll bring the Sony 35mm f\1.4 for some landscape shots.  I’m not sure if I’ll bring the new 135mm f\1.8.  It’s kind of an in between lens.    Not really long enough for wildlife but too tight for landscape.  But it has great bokeh for backgrounds so I probably will bring it.  Ah, decisions, decisions.

So, I’ll be away for a chunk of the day.  The site will be quiet but I’ll be home in time to catch up with everything.  “Ali!  Where is my elephant gun you lazy heathen!”

Wednesday, Wednesday 02APR2025

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Ah, the Spring Honey Do List.  The most fiendish accumulation of annoying indoor and outdoor chores imaginable to the fevered brains of wives.  I had just finished what I thought was my chores for the day and had taken a shower when I saw Camera Girl raking the leaves off of the edge of the woods and her flower beds.  Now there is no more useless pursuit than raking leaves out of a forest but what can I say?  Female fastidiousness is as powerful as it is inexplicable to the mind of man.  When I saw the piles of leaves she had raked I foresaw her stooping to pick up all those leaves and painstakingly haul them to the other side of the property to her mulch pile and knew it would take days and break her back.  So, I rushed out and told her to leave the leaves(!) to me and I’d chop them with my push mower.  Hearing that I would be doing this she then proceeded to finish off the other woods for the sake of completeness.  Ah Chihuahua!  Well, no good deed goes unpunished.

But honestly chopping leaves with my trash mower is kind of fun.  After four to eight passes (depending on how wet they are) the leaves just about disappear into thin air.  It’s remarkable what steel and kinetic energy can achieve.  And I did get to see all the plants she uncovered along the woods.  The day lilies are about four inches tall.

The hostas near the woods haven’t appeared at all and some small woodland plants are already out and about.

After she left, I spent another half hour disintegrating the remaining leaves.  When I returned inside Camera Girl came running over and thanked me profusely for sparing her all that stoop labor of moving the leaves to her mulch pile.  And I thought to myself, “I am a good person, amn’t I?  Why else would she be so happy.  So, over the course of the evening several times I reminded her of how nice it was of me to come to her rescue and take care of the leaves.  But what I noticed was that after each iteration of my reminder her gratitude seemed to diminish.  And, in fact the decrease accelerated.  At the end I believe it tailed off sort of like the curve of y=1/Xn where n= the number of reminders and y= her enthusiasm for the reminders.  So, her enthusiasm approached zero as a limit but never quite reached it.

I brought up this observation to her.  She used some Italian hand gestures from her distant past and went back to the cooking tasks that she was busy with.  It’s a shame that her high school back in Sheepshead Bay didn’t do a better job of preparing her mathematically for her life ahead.  Being able to graph and recognize the various curves of common functions is a basic requirement of our technological age.  But we all have to be flexible and adapt ourselves to people as we find them.  And that is a tenet of my relationship with her and I remind her of it from time to time.

Dunwich Spring 2025 Has Sprung

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Today is Camera Girl’s birthday.  But being a woman, she doesn’t want to play up the whole getting older thing.  So, we call it St. Patrick’s Day and celebrate by having corned beef and cabbage.  But since boiled corned beef and cabbage is kind of blah, she makes it her own way.  It’s kind of Italian corned beef and cabbage.  The meat and potatoes are roasted and the cabbage is sauteed separately in olive oil with minced garlic and seasonings.  It’s really quite good that way.  This was also the day that the mallards returned to the puddle.

And the last of the great southern glacier melted away and left the great southern mud field.

I also used the warmer weather as an excuse to cut down all the raspberry canes in our garden.

This was a controversial act because depending upon whether we have summer or fall plants we will or won’t get any berries this year.  Apparently, summer berries take two years to produce berries while fall berries are one year berry producers.  If we have the two-year type then cutting all the canes means we’ll get nothing this year.  This will make me decidedly unpopular with Camera Girl and Princess Sack of Potatoes because they are big fans of this fruit.  But a man’s got to do, what a man’s got to do.  I was at an impasse.  I couldn’t tell what we had and figured solving it once and for all was the way to go.  May the Lord have mercy on my soul.  Well anyway, I’ll put out a bunch of fertilizer and try to maximize the growth we get this year.

Camera Girl was out feeding Moe the Crow and his wife Flo the Crow when she noticed that a large raptor was in one of the trees over the puddle.  After being alerted I sprang into action and captured some poor-quality photos through the balcony door window and a lot of intervening branches.  I think it’s a black vulture.  So now carrion birds are joining the menagerie.  Only in Dunwich.

Well things are moving forward and spring is in high gear.  We had a bunch of rain and so far, the Compound seems to have escaped any major winter structural damage.  And considering how much more and higher speed wind we’ve had in the last three or four years that’s encouraging.  This winter there have been nights when sitting in the living room and listening to the wind howling like some combination of a freight train and a banshee has been a little discouraging.  I mean I hate to be one of those old guys who claims that things were so much better when I was a youngster but honest to goodness, I think with the wind it must be objectively true.  And as a climate change denier this is inconvenient.  Although it’s as likely for the climate to be warming or cooling without the help of anthropogenic factors to blame.  So, it is nice that we can start to emerge from our winter cocoon and begin to enjoy the outside world again.

And so, slightly ahead of the calendar I hereby declare that Dunwich Spring has sprung.

Wish Me Luck

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Tonight, I asked Camera Girl what she thought I should write my post about.  She said I should write about the fact that Donald Trump doesn’t have a pet dog.  I countered, “But he doesn’t like dogs.”  She said that was weak and that if he got a dog, he’d be much more likely to succeed as president.  Well, what can I say?  She’s got me there.  Of course, exactly what kind of dog would be compatible with Donald Trump seems like a very complicated question.  Well, he’s kind of tall.  Maybe a Great Dane.  I explained to her that it’s sort of a moot question because Trump’s not going to change his mind at this point in his life.  Well, she rejected this explanation and stood by the idea that this situation spelled disaster for his presidency.  Oh well, agree to disagree.

Yesterday I sent a proposal for my unfinished novel to Ark Press to see if they are interested in this soon to be blockbuster story.  It’s almost twenty-four hours since I hit the send button on the e-mail and I’ve heard nothing.  As you can imagine, I’m crushed and dejected by the interminable delay.  I now question my optimism and see all of life as a hollow husk of what my hopes and dreams were.  I was planning on tying a lead weight to my ankle and tossing it into the pond thus ending it all.  But I realized the water depth is currently about three feet so it could take a long while to perish.  I need a better plan.

Plan B is to start a new career.  Currently the top contender is bare-knuckle-boxer.  My plan is to begin an intensive physical conditioning program.  I’ll start with road work and then add on a raw egg diet and finally I’ll find a good manager someone named Mick or Apollo or something like that.  I figure if I play my cards right, I’ll be ready for a title fight sometime in 2026 which being the 250th birthday of the United States will be sorta like what happened for Rocky Balboa only without the turtles named Bert and Ernie.  I told Camera Girl about my plan and she punched me in the stomach really hard.  It was sort of a foul.  I wasn’t expecting it after all.  But it really has affected my confidence.  I complained that, “Adrian never punched Rocky or did anything to discourage him from becoming the boxing champion of the world and aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”  She countered that Adrain was a doofus and Rocky was too short to be an effective boxer.  I reminded her that we saw the movie back in 1976 and she never said anything about those things back then.  She replied that she was still attempting to trap me into matrimony at that point so she let it ride for then.  But she claimed that she always thought Adrian was a doofus.  And as her final point she opined that boxers need very strong neck muscles and I have a bad neck.  Her point was that modern boxers hit so hard that my head would fly off my body after one punch and that would be gross.  Well, that was food for thought.

So, I guess I need a Plan C.  I haven’t really worked out all the details but maybe, possibly, I’m going to go pro in pickle ball.  I’ve heard good things.  But I haven’t bounced it off her yet.  Wish me luck.

Times that Try Men’s Souls

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One step forward two steps back.  Ah, the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune.  Last week the mainframe that I keep my photos and editing software on died a terrible death.  I had hoped at first that maybe the power supply had given out.  I sent it off to the local computer geeks with this dream of a call back the next day about how a wire had come loose or a fuse had blown and all was well.  Yeah.  Not so much.

I received the dreaded news that, “The motherboard is fried and all you can reuse is the case, drives and the fans.”

The horror.

Well, at least my photos didn’t go up the chimney so that’s good.  But this has put a kink in my photo-editing schedule.  For the last week I’ve been scouring my camera memory card for stuff to post and I’m reaching the bottom of the barrel.  I’ll need some more stuff really soon.  Plus, I can’t use my favorite editing software or the big monitors I usually use.  Well maybe I can, but I’d have to fiddle around with the wires and I’m too lazy to do it as a one-off.  But I must be stoic.  As the bard reminds us, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;  They kill us for their sport.”

Or something like that.

But not everything was bad this week.  I decided on a path forward for my story.  If you remember in the last installment, I had my good guys strike back at the vicious President of the United States who had hurled a 10-megaton nuke into their underground retreat.  As a counter attack they undermined the White House, the US Capitol, the Pentagon and a few other key federal buildings and sent them hurtling hundreds of feet into the underground abyss.  This effectively decapitated the United States federal government.  Specifically, the president, vice president, the congress and the cabinet secretaries are all dead.

What I’ve decided to do is arrange for the only honest man in the FBI to be selected to succeed the president.  And this is the guy who I’ve been using to track down my protagonist and his sponsors.

So, the antagonist I have who has been hunting for the sniper is selected for succession to the presidency.  In part he is selected for the knowledge he’s gained hunting the sniper and the organization supporting him.  But because the head of the FBI had been assassinated earlier, he was also the acting head of the bureau.  Of course, that isn’t technically in the line of succession for the presidency but with all the legitimate successors dead, the military and the supreme court put their heads together and after doing an inventory of who was left and who was willing, they chose my guy.

Now this is an outrageous scenario.  And so, it’s really a lot of fun to poke around with.  And because it’s so outlandish I can do more or less whatever seems like fun with it.  I have the poor schnook summoned to a military base and he’s thinking that he’s about to be blamed for the catastrophic failure of the manhunt for the sniper and instead he’s being asked if he will accept the presidency.  That’s a pretty great scene.  I think I’m going to have him ask if he can work remote from home.  That would be a nice touch.  I think that’s what I would ask for.

So anyway, the story is moving forward.  So that’s good.

Camera Girl laid down the law today and had me put the weatherstripping around the basement door.  She found where I had hidden the supplies and brought them out to me.  So, I grumbled and dragged myself over to the door and did it.  And you know, it really made a big difference.  But I really did a lousy job installing it and I’m planning to redo it and add a sweep to the bottom of the door.  Funny how these home improvement projects can grow on you.

And looking around at the Trump juggernaut I see he’s making headway in all directions.  He’s travelling to North Carolina and Los Angeles to get involved with the hurricane and fire victims.  And tonight, JD Vance was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.  Collins, Murkowski and good old Mitch McConnell were the holdouts that made Vance’s vote necessary.  Well, that’s why we needed the other Senate pickups last November.  But things are looking up everywhere in Trump world.

So that’s my post, a little this and little that.

In a Businesslike Manner

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After a little fuss and muss Speaker Johnson is Speaker Johnson again.  Okay.

And I hear the judge in New York City is going to sentence Trump right before his inauguration.  Who knows, maybe he’s going to try some dirty tricks like locking him up for the inauguration ceremony.  Maybe the Supreme Court Justice will have to swear him in from Ryker’s Island.  Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Okay, so we’re dealing with mental cases everywhere we’re supposed to have sages and scholars.  Well, what can I say.  These are fallen times and we have to expect idiots to drool on themselves quite a lot of the time.  But things continue to fall apart apace.  Some percentage of our veterans harbor homicidal tendencies toward the United States.  Well, they have lowered the standards for mental fitness so this should be expected.

But this is going to continue while Donald Trump begins to assemble and deploy his cabinet and they get to work terminating the deep state.  I won’t be surprised if some disgruntled former FBI agents decide to take pot shots at him going forward.

But I have bigger fish to fry.  Camera Girl was complaining about the foaming soap dispensers that I bought a bunch of years ago.  It seems they weren’t working smoothly.  The pump would get jammed.  So, I took one apart and tried to figure out what was wrong.  Well, there wasn’t much there so I washed the components and put them back together and tried it out again.  Well, now it wasn’t jammed but the damn thing didn’t work.  Nothing came out.  So now I was getting mad.  I took another one apart and cleaned it up and still couldn’t find anything wrong.  And when I put it back together it didn’t work.  Nothing came out.

So, I stopped taking them apart and since the internet is our friend I did a search for foaming soap dispensers and found this cool exploded view of the mechanism and noticed something.  There is a tiny ball that acts as a check valve.  This ball allows soap to be sucked into the valve but not pushed back out.  And I couldn’t remember seeing such a thing in the two pumps I disassembled.    Well, the stupid thing is only an 1/8th of an inch in diameter and transparent plastic so when I cleaned out the pump, I must have washed it down the drain both times.

Now this was very annoying.  I have since ordered fifty 1/8th inch polypropylene balls and a tube of food grade silicone grease.  With these invaluable supplies I intend to restore the two dispensers back into functionality.  Moreover, I will grease all of the pump pistons with the silicone and thereby satisfy Camera Girl’s original complaint about my equipment choices for the various sink areas of the house.  There are currently six of these dispensers in the place and each one will require this overhaul.

I wonder if she appreciates how lucky she is to have a technical individual of my caliber at her disposal twenty-four/seven?  I doubt that she could have gotten the quick response and analytical acumen that I provided in this foamed soap crisis from just any regular husband.  Far from it.  The only thing I regret is that because of the critical nature of the crisis there was not time for me to send out RFQ’s (requests for quotations) to three qualified bidders on the project.  Business, after all, should be conducted in a businesslike manner.

A Modest Moratorium

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So tonight, Camera Girl was unleashed on the baking supplies she’s been assembling for the last week or so.  Tomorrow our daughters and our granddaughter will be showing up at noon or so for the tradition grandma-cookie baking ritual.  Grandma cookies are Camera Girl’s mom’s recipe for what some people in the family call white cookies.  These are lethally addictive.  With a large mug of coffee (or milk for the kids) it’s almost impossible not to binge on every cookie that’s left in harm’s way.  It’s hard to believe that the ingredients are only things like flour, eggs, butter, sugar and vanilla extract.  There must be some cocaine or opium in them somewhere.

Well, anyway, tonight she baked alone.  She baked all the other cookies for the holiday.  She made oatmeal, chocolate chip, M&M and sugar cookies.  And then just to make sure I won’t survive the year she made a big pan of baklava.  Oh, man.  Even Zorba the Greek after dancing for a week straight wouldn’t be able to finish off the portion she made.  Between the butter, honey and walnuts I can see myself in the local emergency room receiving last rites as the intern on duty calls for the crash cart and the body bag.

Tomorrow I’ll be on a road trip to northern New England; to Vermont.  I’m riding shotgun just as company.  It should be fun.  Meanwhile the womenfolk will be bonding in the kitchen and indoctrinating Princess Sack of Potatoes in the mysteries of family tradition of the female variety.  All very sacred proceedings.  So, the holidays are progressing satisfactorily.

But it’s not as if all is normal.  After her latest shopping trip for the holiday supplies, Camera Girl was horrified at the increase in the prices of such staples as eggs, butter, flour and coffee.  I felt very sad for her so I tried to cheer her up by saying that after the holidays the prices would come back down based on supply and demand.  I think she could tell I was making it up but she forced a smile and we moved on.

Trump will have his hands full trying to fix the economy and deporting ten million illegals.  Just doing those things would be hard enough but he’ll have to do it in the face of not only a hostile Deep State but also the Congress.  The House has a razor thin Republican majority and the Senate is packed with RINOs who want to please their corporate paymasters and don’t give a damn about making America great.  Yes, he’ll have his hands full.

But despite all this resistance, I am surprisingly optimistic.  I was very pleasantly surprised by his victory.  And because of it, I no longer assume that the Left will have everything its own way.  Trump has seen a lot of the worst that the powers that be can do against him.  If he’s half as smart as I hope he is, he’s going to eliminate a very large number of his enemies from the ranks of many of the the agencies that he controls, basically the whole executive branch of government.  Unless he’s crazy he knows he has to eliminate large chunks of the management of the FBI and the Justice Department.  Once that’s done, I expect he’ll have an easier time dictating terms to the rest of the departments.  And in fact, after he has loyalists in charge of the FBI I wouldn’t be surprised if the various RINO senators suddenly become much more cooperative.  All of these people must have files that are kept for just such an eventuality.

Now maybe my optimism is foolish.  But the holiday is upon us and I think optimism is better for my digestion during this season of overeating.  January is the time for resolutions and facing facts.  So, unless a planet killing asteroid is discovered approaching Earth or I see the incoming ICBMs over Dunwich between now and Christmas I’m declaring a moratorium on gloom and doom.

I’m going to eat way too many cookies and much too much roast beast and spoil my grandkids and watch way too many old movies.  I think that’s a plan.