Tag: family

The Intersection of Christmas and the Woke

photog Current Events, OCF, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family ,

It’s at this time of the rolling year that we think about what matters most in our lives.  Just as Charles Dickens designed into his story we think of the past, present and future.  And at this point in my life these become very distinct groupings.

When I think back to my childhood and youth it’s as if I’m looking out on a different world.  The America of my past was like a fantasy world where opportunity and optimism was omnipresent.  And Christmas was the epicenter of that sense of optimism because children are the center of Christmas and America was arranged around providing the next generation with a future of limitless opportunity.  And that culture back then was still a Christian culture and the religious and moral aspects of the Christmas story were at the very least still acknowledged.  Even Charlie Brown ended his troubled search for the meaning of Christmas with Linus reciting the New Testament text at Luke 2:8-14.  And all this positivity and solidarity produced a remarkably happy life for the great majority of Americans.

Now look at the present.  It’s not an exaggeration to say that pessimism is the dominant sentiment among Americans of every stripe.  And young people are convinced that the opportunities their parents and grandparents enjoyed will not be there for them.  And as far as Christmas goes, not only is religion now almost abandoned by the young but any spirituality or even morality associated with Christmas has been drained out of it by the popular culture and the cultural institutions on the Left.  Christianity is only referenced as a symbol of Western oppression or the patriarchy.  What has replaced it is a confused cult of “social justice” that allows any depravity as long as it’s in the name of sexual identity.

But what of the future?  I think it’s certain there’s no way back to the past I knew.  But that does not rule out escaping from the desolation we find ourselves in now.  We do not have to try to reclaim the lost souls that surround us on the Left.  We do not even have to hate them.  But we do have to separate from them.  In their confusion and despair, they have taken it upon themselves to destroy our children by confusing them with their insane views.  This must be prevented by any means possible.  The beginnings of this resistance can be seen appearing in various parts of the country.  To know if this will be effective, we’ll have to wait and see if it starts expanding during the friendlier environment of the Trump administration.  And there is some hope that the Supreme Court will lend a hand.  There are hints in the statements after the reversal of Roe v Wade that gay marriage may be headed for a similar reversal.  As with any discussion of the future every fork in the road is a flip of the coin.  But sometimes the coin comes up heads.  So, there’s hope.  What we’ll need to do is rebuild our culture on the durable parts of our heritage.  Morality will have to be redefined to support a healthy community that centers around normal family life.  Those who don’t fit into that pattern will have to be left to the other side to find a place in the world.  We’ll concentrate on people who can face reality and want to build something positive for their children.

So here we are on Christmas Eve and I try to remember and point to the past as a template, ignore the worst of the present and hope for and work for a better future.  Now past the roast beast and gravy and let’s get this show on the road.

A Better Mousetrap

photog Current Events, Humor, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , ,

Camera Girl is a courageous woman.  She will bravely rail against anyone who offends her sense of justice.  Unfortunately, she usually does this when it puts me in the firing line of whoever she is challenging or berating.  This can get a little dicey for me.

So, she has the heart of lioness, except when it comes to mice.  The poor girl is terrorized by the diminutive rodents.  Something about their tails fills her with horror.  And so, she wages a war of attrition against them in all the outposts of the Compound.  Specifically, the garage and the large shed that houses the yard equipment.  My own feeling is that areas outside of the house and its various attachments are outside of the jurisdiction of polite society and so a mouse or two more or less is not cause for alarm.  But she disagrees vehemently.  Part of the reason is that she has to go through the garage to bring the dogs to the fenced in areas she lets them out into at night.  And if the dogs sense that mice have been in the area, they become interested and this frightens her into thinking that one of Stuart Little’s relatives might make an appearance and trigger the dogs to catch and eat it.  For her this would be even worse than one running by her.

And so, she has taken to mining the garage and shed with mouse traps.  Interestingly, seeing a dead mouse in the snap trap is not frightening for her.  Once rendered inert, she discharges the traps at the edge of the pond and literally caws for Moe the Crow and Poe the Raven and their ancillary corvids to partake of the murine feast provided.  I find this to be one of her most eccentric rituals.

Anyway, a crisis has emerged.  A year or two ago we switched from the venerable wooden spring traps to a newfangled jaws-like version made of plastic.  She liked these better because they made it easier to release the dead mouse from the trap.  But recently these traps have begun failing.  Apparently, the mice were now able to extract the peanut butter that she baited the trap with, without the trap snapping.  She would come back from her trip to the shed, filled with a sense of dread and tell me this tale of woe.  The world turned upside down!

Because Camera Girl had never developed the knack for setting the older wooden traps I have, of course, been recruited to become the baiter of traps.  And also, I have been tasked with solving the mystery of the failed plastic traps.  And it has been implied that if I fail to diagnose the problem and correct it, I will have failed as a man, a husband, and an engineer.

O tempora, o mores!

So far, I have installed the wooden traps with the prescribed bait that was provided to me by Camera Girl.  That much have I done.  But I have only just begun to investigate a cause.  Could the traps be defective?  Could they have gotten rusty and thus less sensitive?  Might the peanut butter have become old and therefore easier to remove?

My mind has raced to encircle this mystery within a thicket of possible solutions.  But these are deep waters.  I cannot be too hasty.  A proper plan of attack is needed.  I’ll need a budget to purchase supplies, tools and instruments.  I’ll need a detailed schedule to properly scope the project and I’ll need a scapegoat in case the project is a failure.  Maybe one of the dogs.  Updates will follow but I felt this project was important enough to warrant an introductory post to benchmark the effort.

The single guys out there probably assume I’m suffering the beginnings of dementia.  The married men will probably understand that this is just one of the many accommodations a man makes to keep a wife happy.  And after all the expression, “Happy wife, happy wife,” Is not far from the truth.  But I do wish someone would invent a mousetrap with lasers.  It would make the who thing much more fun.

Update:

War Pig commented:

Mamaw used peanut butter in her traps as well, but when the diminutive rascals found out how to defeat that, she went to bacon grease. Mice, in Ohio at least, cannot resist bacon grease. Also the plastic traps tend to not give the same force as the wood-and-spring traps. A healthy mouse can get out of them and resist a broken neck due to their lack of dynage. Living on a farm meant constant vermin control. The little buggars aren’t stupid. We have to change out methods and baits from time to time. Thankfully, a generation of mice comes along a few times per year. So anything learned from the last generation is lost to the grandchildren.

Father’s Day – 2024 – Crashing Plaster and Pancakes

photog Current Events, Humor, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weaponized Cuteness

photog Life in Dunwich, Music Reviews, photog's Corner, Reviews , , ,

My five year old granddaughter, Princess Sack of Potatoes, learned “Feliz Navidad” in kindergarten.  While she was visiting I went to YouTube to play the Jose Feliciano version as an historical record for her, but opened this one by accident.

She was fascinated by this pint-sized crooner.  And so it goes for every generation.  Well, no harm done.  Her mother and her grandmother and her great grandmother had their crooners too, whether it was Frank Sinatra or Paul McCartney or whatever singer was out there.  But so soon?

 

Damn You Millan!

photog Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , , ,

Little Evil Dog (LED) is now about four months old.  And still in the midst of a teething frenzy as her milk teeth are falling out.  Sometimes Camera Girl even bleeds from the bites of this insane little basset hound.  There has been some improvement.  Lately she only draws blood once a week rather than daily.  Everything is relative.

Today I noted that Camera Girl was watching the Dog Whisperer on Nat Geo.  It’s that Mexican guy Cesar Millan who trains dogs.  Of course, there is nothing more absurd than Camera Girl trying to train her dogs.  They completely dominate her and systematically ignore all her commands.  It would be accurate to say that they have trained her.

I tried to imagine her attempting to use Millan’s techniques but I know that she could never assert authority over the dogs.  It just completely clashes with her babying of these canines.  And yet with her children and grandchildren she has always been able to maintain good discipline.  I think it’s the fact that intellectually dogs are like permanent infants.  They never reach a point where they can be responsible for their misdeeds.  Training always has to be a matter of dominance.  And so, she forever treats them like babies.  Even if the animal outweighs her.

And so, the problem of Camera Girl’s bad dogs can never be fully solved.  I have in the past had to force obedience from some of the larger male dogs on my own just for safety’s sake but she will never be their boss.

But as I watched the episode that Camera Girl had on it occurred to me that a wife whisperer would be an interesting show.  If some guy developed a format where he had men come to him with wives who behaved poorly and he came up with a regimen for bringing them back in line.  And of course, it should be a humane program.  No shock collars or whips; nothing like that.  It could all be done using positive reinforcement.  Even a muzzle probably would be unnecessary, although I could see where it would make life better sometimes.

I’d guess it would work with treats and gifts used to encourage good behavior and verbal cues to point out bad behavior.  I started to think how I could work some of these things into my home life.  I could use small rewards like buying her a turtle or a lizard if she behaved herself.  But I realized that my house would probably overrun with pets within a few weeks.  And since there weren’t any other treats, I could provide or withhold, there wasn’t a way forward with my wife whisperer idea.  It was a dead end.

But I did watch how often food was the treat that Millan used to train his dogs.  How he used it to reinforce good behavior or withheld it to show displeasure.  And then some things came together in my mind.  Grocery patterns and other aspects of my life.  And I was aghast.  She has been using Millan’s program on me!  Tonight, we’re having a pork roast.  That only went on the menu after I performed the winter yard close-up yesterday.

To Serve Man, it’s a training book!

Wise Penelope

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner, Photography , ,

Περίφρων Πηνελόπεια – Wise Penelope

Can you read wisdom in that gaze?  I’m not sure.  But Penelope she is.  Or Penny for short.  And her mistress, Camera Girl. possesses the virtues of Odysseus’s celebrated wife in abundance; patience, cleverness and faithfulness.  So Penny it shall be.

Is that the face that launched a thousand ships?  Well no.  But maybe a thousand smiles.

Political Theater, Hounds and Late Summer

photog Current Events , ,

So, I watched Tucker’s interview.  I didn’t watch the debate.  This morning I’ve seen a few clips.  My first reaction is that Fox News is essentially MSNBC with slightly less crazy, slightly less homely teleprompter readers.  My second reaction is that Chris Christie and Nikki Haley must be competing to be Joe Biden’s running mate.  Past that I don’t think it matters.

We’re in a lot of trouble.

I guess I already knew that but watching these things drives the point home.  It’s quite disturbing.  I guess the cavalry won’t be coming over the hill with bugles blaring and sabers flashing.  We’re on our own.

Alright, snap out of it!  Nobody wants to read stuff like that.

On the upside we had three sunny warm days in a row.  That brought out some butterflies and other large insects.  Very good for some microphotographic opportunities.  Even with the grandkids here I’ve been able to steal away to get some time with the camera and macro lens.  Next week the kids start school and Camera Girl will be sad.  But she has much to look forward to.  She has relented in her determination to get me to buy her a giant rabbit, specifically a Flemish Giant.  Other than as a source of food, rabbits don’t really seem to serve any purpose, to my mind.  But Camera Girl has been campaigning for one for several months.  After many attempts to dissuade her, I eventually capitulated to this demand.

But once it sunk in that Princess Sack of Potatoes was really starting kindergarten and she wouldn’t have anything to mother, Camera Girl knew a rabbit wouldn’t suffice.  So, she switched gears and demanded a puppy.  And I gave up without a fight.  Because a puppy in the house is infinitely better than a rabbit in the yard when it’s 10 οF outside and the rabbit needs liquid water.  Or a hundred other things that need to be done for the rabbit outside when I’d rather be inside.

So, yeah, sure.  A puppy will be joining the menagerie sometime later this year.  Not that it’s a wholly good thing.  Camera Girl is absolutely the worst dog trainer in the history of man’s association with these canine freeloaders.  Whereas with her children and grandchildren she is a loving but stern disciplinarian, with her dogs she’s useless.  They walk all over her and lack even the rudiments of obedience.  It’s pathetic and annoying.

I’ve toyed with the idea of taking over the dog training job for this new recruit.  After all, as paterfamilias it is my right and responsibility to hand down rough justice to my vassals.  And at this point, vassal-wise, this dog may be the end of the line for me.  So, the logic of it is there.  At the same time, Camera Girl will be working behind the scenes undercutting my authority and spoiling the dog behind my back every chance she gets.  Obviously, the choice is fraught with peril.  I must choose carefully.  Perhaps I will consult Marcus Aurelius or possibly Aristotle.  Homer Simpson or Al Bundy?  We’ll see.

So, this last full week before school is moving along, powered by LEGO blocks, old Disney movies, Camera girl’s short order cooking and my manly grit, determination and panache.  We will persevere and by next Thursday quiet and order will descend on the Compound and a new era of productivity will reign on the site.  Excelsior!

22AUG2023 – Scenes from a Family Gathering

photog Current Events, OCF, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family , ,
Christmas Cooking, Sony A7 III, Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens

Driving from a rural area toward a megalopolis is almost always a frustrating experience.  The closer you get to the heart of darkness, the worse the traffic becomes and the more likely it is that you will accidentally cross the event horizon and be sucked in, never to break free of the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the black hole collapse.  Or so it seems to me.

By comparison driving in the reverse direction, away from the beast, feels like a continuously increasing sense of relief as the road and the entrances become less and less congested and the craziest of the homicidal drivers are left behind or at least no longer have the traffic density needed to ensure maximum mayhem.

Now all of that was true yesterday as I arrived and departed from the party that I travelled to.  But despite the tension of defying the human density gradient around the suburbs of Gotham City I was sorry that the party couldn’t have been extended indefinitely.

Everything about the gathering was congenial.  It was almost the entire family.  And that’s no mean feat.  We are many and we are scattered much more than in the past.  And Sunday is a tough day for travelling.  Saturday being the optimal day to allow for recovery before work resumes.

And everyone there was splendidly sociable.  The talk was the usual mixture of family events, politics, current events and reminiscing about crazier things and planning for crazier things.  And I learned things that I had never known about people I know very well.  And I saw what the youngest generation is starting to look like when they socialize.  And despite all the dire warnings and predictions they seemed quite healthy and normal.

Of course, food is always a highly important component of one of these shindigs and the hostess was extremely wise in her choices and provisioning.  There were several completely different themes with respect to the menu and there was never any danger of running out of the favorites which is always comforting.  I will admit that I no longer make the impact on the buffet table that I used to.  And that is necessary.  I wouldn’t have survived my former exploits as a trencherman.  But I still grazed high and low and tried a bit of everything.  Wonderful.

But the highlight is when the old bulls stagger into a corner, collapse into a circle of chairs and start pontificating about what’s wrong with the world and what we should do about it.  And eventually we come to agreement that things are going to go to hell no matter what we say or do and then we come to agreement that at least the world has us in it to make it a world worth living in.  Now this was what I remember when the old bulls were my father’s and my grandfather’s generations laying down the law and telling us what was wrong with my generation.  And now, heaven help me, I’m at my grandfather’s age and making my last speeches before shuffling off the stage permanently.  What a strange thing time is.

And just in time the cake and coffee are served and we lapse into a warm glow of caffeine and pastry ingredients.  And all too soon it’s time to go.  We need to leave before it’s too late to make the drive back.  But of course, there is at least a half hour of goodbyes, to each and every one.  Back slapping and hugs and hand shakes for one and all and then last-minute details remembered and plans for the next gathering.  And then we’re on the road and headed home.  But the glow from the party is still with us.  We talk about what we’ve heard and seen.  We talk about those who couldn’t make it and those who are gone.  But it’s all a happy feeling.  A good feeling.

The country and the world have gone straight to hell.  There’s no denying it.  But good things still exist.  And the best of those things is family, is the humanness of family.  The ties that bind and the hope for a future and the precious, priceless treasure of the young in our midst.

The world is not all ruin and depravity.  There is hope.  And I can see it when we get together.

29JUL2023 – OCF Update

photog Current Events, OCF , ,

Hazy, hot and humid.

July!

So today I have the sixteen year old grandson here.  Now I have to up my game.  Sixteen is an island and nobody from off of that island can crack the code.  Will I have to play video games?  Do I have the reflexes do I have the brain cells left?  We’ll see.

Needless to say some part of the day will be a black out period on the site.  But I also expect the day to be shorter.  No one can expect to keep a sixteen year old’s attention except with other sixteen year olds.  But I’ll do my best.

Sixteen.  A fraught age.  At that age nothing I did involved coherent thought.  So many stupid people.  So many stupid ideas.  Just surviving the age was a minor miracle.  But that was a more forgiving age.  Social media did not exist.  All our sins and stupidities, for the most part, faded into nothingness.  Today they’ll nail you on a cross for anything or nothing.

But it’ll be good.  The torch is being passed.  With the abandonment of the European Americans by the federal government it behooves all of us to marshal our resources to boost our children and grandchildren out of the wreckage of the middle class and give them a fighting chance.  And just letting them know they’ve got a family that cares whether they live or die is a part of that.

So today will be interesting.  Hopefully we’ll shoot some pool, watch some bad super hero movies, eat some junk food and who knows maybe even talk.

See you around.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 16JUL2023 – Grandchildren

photog Guest Contributors, War Pig , , ,

Great plan and very worth while. Since my grandson’s father died young, I became the masculine figure in his life growing up. I took him to many firsts. His first fish caught, teaching him to shoot, the first squirrel shot, then cooked, kindergarten “graduation”, elementary graduation, high school then college graduation. The first time his team won a football game in juniot high then high school. His first big job out of college. Great memories to take with me when the black camel kneels at my door.

It is said you die twice. The first time is when your heart beats its last, and the second is the last time someone thinks of you. I have tried to place myself in as many good memories as I could.