Tag: Dunwich

I Have My Priorities

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So today was an early day because I had to head to the office.  I was already running late when Camera Girl walked out of the kitchen and said, “Don’t react or the dogs will start barking but there are a couple of momma turkeys at my bird feeder with about eight young.  Go take a look.”

So, they were under the bird feeders looking for seeds on the ground that the normal birds spilled out of the feeders.  But eventually they weren’t satisfied so they headed out into the fields.  Camera Girl saw them heading for the gardens and said, “They’re headed for the raspberry patch.  Do you think they’ll eat any of the berries.”  I answered knowledgably, “No they only eat bugs and small critters.”  Of course, they immediately attack the patch and clearly start picking ripe berries off the canes.  I didn’t look back at her but I think there was a look.  And I think there might have been a derisive sound.  I came back with her own famous statement, “Well, everybody’s gotta eat, right?”  So, I announced that I had to leave for work and made a show of ignoring the prehistoric creatures that had invaded my domain.

When I got home, I got the update.  They had not only picked all the ripe raspberries but they then cleaned up the ripe blueberries too.  Then they went down by the swamp and annoyed Moe and the rest of Camera Girl’s murder of crows that hang out there during the morning.  Finally, they walked the perimeter of the fields until they ended up near the road and then made a nuisance of themselves for the motorists until they finally crossed the road and headed for the next swamp in their path.

I’ve always been interested in the turkey population because they provide an opportunity for interesting photographs.  But here they were adding insult to injury.  They not only didn’t eat any of the copious beetles that are afflicting my vegetables and flowers but they went out of their way to pillage my favorite summer fruit crops.  This is the thanks I get for never hunting them or setting the dogs on them or even making fun of their homely appearance, clumsy walking style or spastic flying abilities.

Well, truth be told they’re still in my top five species of birds I like to see around the place.  I like seeing the vultures (turkey and black) in the trees.  I like to try and get a shot of a Great Blue Heron fishing in the swamp and I also hope one day to lure some of the local ravens into a closer arrangement.  I’ve always thought they were fascinating creatures.

But there’s something appealing about a flock of turkey hens with their young walking around in Dunwich in the summer acting like they own the place and livening things up.

Yep, that’s true.  However, if they come near the berries again, I may just get some rocks and help them to move along at high speed.  At this time of year, I have my priorities.

Maybe He Wasn’t Ready for His Own Show

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So, the First Selectman heard about Stephan Colbert losing his gig with the Late Show and somehow got the idea that maybe he could end up as a replacement on CBS.  He called me into his cave and said, “Listen Appetizer, I want you to get on the blower with Bill Paley and tell him I have a great idea for a late-night comedy show.  I’ll call it “Late Night Selections.”

I said, “Sir I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but William Paley died in 1990 at age 89.  And currently the parent company of CBS; Paramount Studios, is being acquired by another entertainment company Skydance Media and they have decided that the old-style late-night show is outdated and unprofitable.  They have not only not renewed Stephen Colbert’s contract; they have ended the whole Late Night production company.  They’ve effectively fired two hundred people in order to save $100 million.”

This outraged the First Selectman, “Who ever heard of anyone dying at 89.  Why I’m in excess of a trillion years old and I’ve never felt better in my life.  Sure, I eat healthy and stay away from fatty food like Mexicans and Italians but last time I saw Bill in 1948 he was the picture of health.  He was smoking a cigar, drinking a martini and pinching his secretary.  You don’t get much livelier than that!”

I interjected that notwithstanding his fond memories of Mr. Paley it was unfortunately true that new management was in place at the Tifanny Network and perhaps this was not the time for a new late-night show.  This got me nowhere and so yesterday I was assigned the task of putting together a stage for this dynamic new production.  As luck would have it, I read an ad for Colbert’s extra furniture going up for sale and picked it up for a song.  I think it was being sold hot by the disgruntled stage crew.

Well with a little alteration to allow the five hundred foot tall First Selectman to interact with human sized guests on the stage we had it up and running this morning in time to go through some try-outs.  As luck would have it Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren were all hoping to get some extra face time during Trump’s problems over the Epstein case so the First Selectman was able to book all three of them for his trial run.

Well, there were problems.  During the first segment Schiff began banging the drum about Donald Trump being a fascist.  Now the first Selectman used to be a close personal friend of Mussolini so he innocently said, “What’s wrong with being a fascist.”  Well, Schiff went ballistic and started going through his talking points about Trump assaulting women and being a felon and starting an insurrection and before you know it, he was calling the First Selectman a reactionary.  Well, this didn’t sit well with the First Selectman so he ate Schiff.  And when Pelosi and Warren saw this from the wings, they came running out screeching at a very high pitch.  As it happens the First Selectman is very sensitive to the particular frequency so in self-defense, he quieted them by eating them.

Well, the booking agency was very upset and said they couldn’t provide any more guests, except maybe AOC and Mamdani because nobody likes them anyway but the First Selectman said Puerto Rican and Middle Eastern food gave him the runs.  So, he’s given up on the whole show idea.  It’s all very sad.

Happy Fourth of July 2025

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I learned a lesson about planning.  It should be associated with thinking.  I had an auto maintenance appointment that I wanted to get done before last week’s big trip.  But because I’ve been distracted by unfortunate circumstances, I couldn’t get an appointment on time (bad photog!).  I said, “Well give me the appointment next week.”  So, I pick the day before the Fourth of July!  Well, you know what’s hard to get to work on the day before a long holiday weekend?  Auto-mechanics!  A one-hour maintenance job keeps me waiting there for four hours.  The sad part is I could watch all the lined-up cars sitting there for three hours and then they were all done in the last hour.  A nine o’clock appointment for a mechanic who’s showing up at noon is kind of a sad situation.  Of course, some people started flipping out at eleven thirty and by 1 pm they were demanding the site manager be summoned for the maintenance clerk’s summary execution.  Of course, the site manager was on vacation until next Tuesday but it was a noble sentiment.

Being old I realized my own culpability in the whole idea of scheduling something involving waiting for the day before a major holiday.  I tried to do some on-line stuff over their customer wi-fi network.  But I got bored so instead I watched the people.  It had a certain entertainment value.  I guess the thought that I had was there are definitely two kinds of people.  The kind you would want in a lifeboat and the kind who will get thrown overboard.

Later on, we had one of those thunderstorm/hail storm/minor tornado/mini-monsoon downpour thingies here today.  It had been very hot and muggy and just walking around the yard was a major effort.  Then all hell breaks loose, the power goes off, the dogs go insane and suddenly the air is twenty degrees cooler.  And we’re watching from the window and saying isn’t it great to watch this from inside?  And it was.  The trees were whipping around and the sky was full of water and ice and the clouds were moving fast.  And then in fifteen minutes the sun was out again.  Well, no trees came down and the dogs calmed down so I went for a walk.  The air was sweet and there was a strong breeze.  Just an interesting kaleidoscope of weather.

And now we have the Fourth coming up.  Sitting in the service station watching their television I saw a news item about how some of the more progressive towns and cities were replacing their fireworks shows with a swarm of drones forming shapes in the air and changing colors.  It looked so incredibly lame and so sad I just shook my head.  The newscaster went out of his way to say how much more environmentally friendly and carbon neutral the lame drone show was than a fireworks display.  And I thought, this encapsulates the difference between people who enjoy life and people who do what they’re told is good for them.  These are the same people driving Priuses and getting their fiftieth COVID booster shot.

Well Happy Fourth of July.

I Feel Like a Phoenix Rising Over Arizona

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Reviews, SF&F Book Reviews, Trump , , ,

The suffering is over.  The waiting is over.  The only thing I have left to do this week is get the oil changed on my car.  I can read, write, watch movies, sit in a hammock in the shade (well, if I had a hammock), write poetry (not good poetry), plot the overthrow of the Dunwich town government, laugh in the face of death, learn to play the piano; you name it!

Great Caesar’s ghost!  I’m exhausted just reading that list.

So, emerging from my forced isolation I see that nothing of note has happened in the last five days.  The endless jousting between the press and the Trump administration continues and Trump slowly accumulates small victories from the courts and larger ones from the Supreme Court.  Good!  I’ve declared victory (for the most part) and allow the world to slowly become Trumpified while I get on with my agenda.

I finished my re-read of the last third of my book and came to a few conclusions:

  • I like the writing. I like the way it reads.
  • I like the story line. It moves forward.
  • There is something missing to allow the story to end satisfyingly for all the threads of the book.
  • So, the good news of the first two points makes it worthwhile for me to tackle the bad news of the last point.

As I earlier stated it was weird to read the book after a good long time and read it as if I wasn’t the writer.  Of course, I knew the plot but the writing seemed fresh to me, like I was reading it for the first time.  Now, I did make some edits and even made some small changes to the wording during this read.  But I’m good with what’s already done.  So, I’ll kick around a few ideas to see which one makes the ending most satisfying.  Good.

The summer has gotten amazingly hot and humid.  And this has drawn the grandchildren to want to swim in the pool.  And this year the water is perfect.  Perfectly clear.  No algae.  Good pH.  No leaks.  There are a few small cracks in the liner above the water line.  So, I bought a patching kit and I will attempt to fix them myself.  If I botch it, I’ll call in the professionals and they’ll overcharge me but make the problem go away.  But it’s good to see this expensive hole in the ground get used by someone who can enjoy jumping in and swimming around.  I think in the fourteen years I’ve live here I’ve gone in once.  Oh well.

So, let’s see where Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is in a few days and where the various wars are in a few weeks.  But I’m ready to enjoy the seasonal weather and do some cooking out with friends and relatives and enjoy the only true summer month in the otherwise blighted New England calendar.  Because remember, July is the only month in which measurable snow has not fallen in southern New England.  That makes it sacred.  Enjoy.

Dunwich Slips Into Permanent Dumb

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Dunwich is a strange place.  Although most humans here appear to be sentient, they’re not.  Many of them continue to breath and move and even talk without even the tiniest shred of gray matter.

First Selectman Cthulhu called a town meeting last night and tried to explain why they should finally vote to accept the 2025/2026 budget during this third referendum.  But regardless of how many citizens he ate, they would not agree to a budget.  Finally after he was developing acid reflux, he asked them why they would not agree.  Their spokeswoman was a vapid forty-something who stood her ground and said, “Why do we need a budget?”

Cthulhu was so flabbergasted by this lack of understanding that he dropped the six Whatleys he was about to swallow and just broke down and wept.  Finally he composed himself and just walked off right through the south wall of town hall and hasn’t been seen since.

In his absence I took it upon myself to explain to this rube just how government worked.  I explained that a budget allowed us a framework for stealing the public’s money and also provide a basis for increasing this theft on a yearly basis.  This actually worked and she thanked me for the clarity of my explanation.

Seriously, this question was actually raised at a town meeting, “Why do we need a budget?”  I think the millennials have reached that point where maintaining a viable civilization is very doubtful

There’s Gotta Be

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Now all the stuff comes at us left and right.  Today is Father’s Day and that’s great.  But also, I went to the high school graduation commencement ceremony for one of my grandsons.  It was raining so we were sitting in raincoats on chairs covered in plastic with another sheet of plastic over our legs.  So, it wasn’t exactly relaxed and carefree.  But you come out to support the family and these ceremonies have their logic and things will go according to this logic.  There are the two main speeches by the kids with the best grades and there might be a poem from the poet laureate (imagine, at eighteen!).  And all that’s fine.  It’s all about beginnings and endings and growing up and moving out into a larger world.  And that’s great.  The kids are thinking about all the friends they’ve made and all the growing up they’ve done and being excited for the future.  None of the sentiments are all that original.  But that’s not the point.  For the adults it’s nostalgic and for the kids it’s marking the day and saying goodbye to childhood.  All good.

But then they send up this girl whose speech is associated with some kind of a prize.  Maybe the speech was what won her the prize.  Although if that were true, I have to wonder who is in charge of the curriculum at this high school.

First of all, it was way too long.  The valedictorian’s address took about seven minutes.  This other thing seemed to go on and on.  Of course, maybe it just seemed to go on for hours.  The thesis was that the classroom was the only place where she was happy.  And she hammered away at all the other parts of life where she was unhappy.  Home with her family, between classes at school, at events with “friends,’ working on projects with her classmates and interacting with other people in general.

She described how only in the classroom did she feel accepted and valued by those around her.  Her family, her friends, her classmates in general and just random members of the human race made her feel unappreciated and negatively valued.

After this had gone on for what seemed forever Camera Girl and I looked at each other with the same expression, “What the hell is this!”  So, I looked around and I could notice at least a few of the spectators had a pained confused expression.

Finally, it ended and there was applause but compared to even the poet laureate it was short and half-hearted.  Later on, I was thinking about this speaker.  She was sort of odd looking.  Short, heavy, noticeably unattractive and her expression was a sort of grimace.  And I wondered whether her speech had been vetted by whoever is in charge of the commencement.  I’m guessing not.  Maybe that’s part of academic freedom.  The speakers are free to say whatever they want.  Well, if that’s so then I would at least hope they would make an effort to choose for speakers only those who weren’t undergoing a mental breakdown.

Honestly, I wouldn’t allow someone that morose to speak in front of a crowd of high school students and their friends and family.  It might convince them that the faculty and the administration were nuts too.  I think this girl is symptomatic of the general breakdown of mental health in this generation.  This girl’s maladapted view of life seems to have been selected as a virtue by whoever selected her to speak.  I think we were supposed to empathize with her point of view.  I didn’t empathize with her.  All I felt was sympathy for her friends and family for having to live with someone so messed up that sitting in a classroom was preferable to all other forms of human interaction.  I’m guessing she is part of the LGBTQ “community.”

I guess in a way I should take comfort from the experience.  When school ends this week, I’ll be seeing my grandkids.  And we’re bound to get along better than the antisocial nightmare I listened to.  When I see the graduate, I have to ask him what he thinks of the girl who made this speech.  There’s gotta be a story behind that trainwreck.  There’s gotta be.

The Blue States are Hurting

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Trump seems to have turned off the faucet that Biden was using to keep the blue states solvent.  A sense of panic is setting in and lots of towns are finding their voters are revolting against the budget increases that followed the end of the COVID gravy train (CARES Act).  All of the unfunded mandates that were paid for with that money now have to be paid for by the state and local governments.  And the local governments are squealing like stuck pigs because the state is hanging them out to dry.

 

In Dunwich it’s reaching a crisis.  There are grumblings against Cthulhu because he took credit for the CARES Act spending.  Now he’s being blamed for the higher taxes and another Great Old One; Azathoth is taking advantage of the outrage to challenge Cthulhu in the coming First Selectman race.  Azathoth’s campaign literature is branding his plan as MAGA (Make Azathoth Govern Again).

He’s handing out red hats and recently he’s started to take on a familiar orange tint.  His boldest campaign promise is that under his administration he would pledge not to eat anyone at public meetings or official town functions.  When asked for public comment by the local radio channel Cthulhu ate the reporter and walked out of the studio vowing to put a stop to all this “fake news” and misinformation.  He was quoted (from a distance) as saying, “This is madness.  If I can’t eat my constituency when they cross the line, then Dunwich would descend into anarchy and no one wants anarchy, except anarchists and I hate anarchists, even thought they taste really good.”

 

Outside of the Dunwich enclave the human (or somewhat human) local governments are probably going to have to tighten their belts a good deal.  Lots of services that everyone has come to think of as critical will be on the chopping block.  One of these is winter road treatment.  Salt, sand and other materials have surged in price this year and depleted supplies will likely bust the budgets of towns and cities if we have another normal winter like we had in 2024/25.  Likewise with neglected infrastructure and school costs.  The state has mandated very expensive special education requirements.  Providing these mandated services may mean that the rest of the students will lose out on curriculum and services like library and arts classes.

It’s believed by the local governments that if these services are curtailed that voters will agree to add them back into the budget.  But from what I’ve heard and seen this isn’t the case.  A revolt is going on and the angry voters in New England may finally have become fed up with the feckless spending that their politicians routinely legislate.  The next few weeks are going to be instructive as these towns and cities struggle to resolve the impasse that has developed.  The budgets are overdue and without a budget they can’t begin signing contracts and paying salaries.

I think I’ll go to Azathoth’s July rally.  I hear he dances a mean YMCA.

Probably Not Smart

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Apparently random luck rules our lives to an extent that I think is hard to overemphasize.  Back two weeks ago I wrote about a tree that came down across my driveway.  After I finished cutting the top of the tree away, I took a big wrecking bar and rolled it to the side of the driveway.  For the last two weeks I’ve been planning to cut it up into smaller sections and put it aside.  But there it still is three quarters to the side of the lower driveway and one quarter on.  It looks awful and speaks volumes about my lack of organization and discipline.

But the funniest thing happened yesterday.  A guy was driving on the road by my house when something strange happened.  The shoe he was wearing on the foot that he used for working the brake and gas got tangled up with the gas pedal and he couldn’t get it free.  Somehow, he must have panicked and lost control of the steering while attempting to free his foot from the gas and he ended up turning onto my property close to where the driveway was.  He crashed through some small pines without even slowing down but the trunk of the downed tree was perfectly positioned to stop his car dead.  He wasn’t badly hurt and his car only sustained some damage where it hit the tree so it was able to back out of the debris once he got over the shock.  Looking at the line he was making through my yard the next stop was the bottom floor of my house.  That would have been bad.  That would have been a mess for both of us.

So, this is apropos of nothing.  It’s just kind of crazy how two random acts of fate can interact with each other to some almost purposeful end.  If that tree hadn’t fallen, he would have hit it square on and his car would have been totaled.  If I had cut it up as I had planned in a timely manner he would have landed in my house and we both would be having a very bad month.

It’s funny.  Even when I have bad luck it seems to turn into good luck for me.  For a long time, I’ve had this theory.  I feel like I’ve been borrowing good luck from an account and one day it’s all going to come due and I’m going to have a phenomenally bad day.  But maybe I’m wrong.  The exact mechanism of luck is not apparent to me.  And I think there are different kinds of luck.  For instance, I never win at games of chance.  I’ve never made a fortune investing in stocks.  All my luck runs to bad things not happening to me.  And almost all of my luck involves escaping the consequences of my own poor judgement; sometimes by mere fractions of a second or sixteenths of an inch.  And it’s been going on since I was a child.  And over the course of a lifetime, I’ve become convinced that there really is something called luck.  And some people actually have it significantly in their lives.

Anyway, it’s just something that seems to happen to me from time to time.  Maybe I really do have a guardian angel.  I guess it would be the height of ingratitude to ask him to let me hit the mega-millions just once.  Probably not smart.

Everybody’s Gotta Eat

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The circle of life.  Despite the claim in the song, Disney never shows us the predators, including his highness the King, chowing down on the herbivores that provide the carnivores with their sustenance.  Theoretically Mufasa is the apex of the food chain but all of his meals are “off-camera.”

But Camera Girl claims to be a wildlife realist and the hawks and vultures, the foxes and coyotes according to her “gotta eat.”  So, when a rabbit or a squirrel ends up as a meal somewhere on the property, she shrugs it off, “everyboody’s gotta eat.”

Today one of the local hawks performed its patented power dive a couple of feet away from Camera Girl’s bird feeders and the bird (we think it was a catbird) never knew what hit it.  Oh well.

But there is a more gruesome aspect than just the kill.  The hawk eats the entire bird while plucking the feathers as it goes.  Camera Girl watched this from her kitchen window and I could tell she wasn’t shrugging it off.  She has a soft heart.  And since she feeds the birds and attracts them to the location, she feels that she was responsible in a way for the predation.

And all things considered that is true.  That hawk would not have caught that catbird today if she didn’t feed those birds every day.  But I tried to cheer her up.  I said, “Well, you’ve been feeding these birds for years.  And all those free meals have contributed to the health and longevity of all these birds.  With all that extra food they’ve probably produced double the number of hatchlings they would have raised if they were thin and weak.  Maybe that very catbird would never have been born if his parents hadn’t eaten the seeds you provided.”

So, I threw that out there.  Hopefully it helped a bit.  And I’m sure she’ll bounce back tomorrow when she goes out early to feed Moe and Flo the crows and Poe the raven.  And she’s been watching this skunk (of course, it’s Pepé Le Pew) that appears at dusk and scratches around where Moe’s food was earlier in the day.  He’s almost all white and kind of wide and flat to the ground.  He looks like a giant Tribble or a furry version of the Horta.  But so far, I’ve managed to avoid it while I’m doing my late afternoon watering.  The last thing I need is getting skunked in my own yard.

Of course, the flipside of all this is the fact that the bird feeders also occasionally attract black bears to the property.  The last time the bear used its weight to bend a very substantial steel tube all the way over.  I guess it’s within the realm of possibility that one day the circle of life might mean I could be on the menu for Yogi Bear.  So, there is that to consider.  I’ll mention this to Camera Girl and see if that changes the whole risk to reward ratio for her bird feeding hobby.  I tend to doubt it.  She really likes those birds.

June, Moon, Spoon, Tune

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What is it about the first really hot patch of summer weather.  Today was the first day where the inside of the house was warm enough not to require three layers of clothing.  The attic has absorbed enough heat so that it has finally heated up the leftover winter air.  It’s actually uncomfortably warm inside and I’m luxuriating in it.

And outside it’s ninety.  Butterflies and dragonflies are flitting around and the birds are tearing around looking for food for their hatchlings.  The moist hot grass is breathing water right into the air and you can smell the photosynthesis cranking away.  I love this kind of weather.  It rejuvenates me.  It makes me wax rhapsodically.  It makes me babble idiotically.  It recharges body and soul.

For the last couple of weeks, on and off, a hatchling milk snake has been sheltering under an old sheet of copper that I put out for snakes.  I have been hoping for years for a mouse eating snake to take up residence in the lower driveway wall.  We have plenty of mice and moles and voles around here and a milk snake (or even better, a black rat snake) would put a real dent in their numbers.  So, I’m cautiously hopeful that this little reptile is gonna stick around.  But currently he’s so tiny that nothing but the youngest pink mice could serve him as food.  I wonder if he’s presently surviving on insects, worms and maybe very small salamanders.  Well, it’s something to think about.

But it’s not all fun and games.  I’m still so behind in the repair and maintain chores.  I haven’t even gotten to clean the really high gutters.  I’ve got a twenty-four-foot ladder and my guilt is slowly driving me to get busy on it.  Camera Girl thinks I should hire a handyman to do it but I scoff at this kind of defeatist talk.  And likewise, all the other chores.  They build character and spare the bank account.  So, I’m putting together my schedule and thinking through the order of operations and locating rope and other supplies to set up the ladder.

Today I saw the biggest spider I’ve ever seen around here.  Whether people call them fishing spiders or wolf spiders I haven’t done a close identification.  But it was a huge bugger.  He’s living close to where the exhaust from my heating system reaches the open air.  I’m guessing the heat is an attractant for insects in the colder months.  I’ll attach a photo here.

Camera Girl says she bought a red coneflower plant for me at Wally Mart.  I’m making a row of various perennials but especially coneflowers.  They attract butterflies and other insects for my photography.  And finally, the other three preying mantis egg sacs that I can still find have all now hatched out.  And they’re pretty evenly spaced around the property.  Nice how that worked out.  Of course, there were another six or eight of the things that seem to have disappeared.  Well, that’s on me.  Anyway, it’s an excellent day to be out and about.  Nothing exciting just the good old summertime.  June, moon, spoon, tune.  All that stuff.