Tag: Reclaiming the Family

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.

Bridging the Generations (Part 3)

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Sorry I was missing from the site most of the day but today was a grandson visiting day here at the Compound.  Tertius (the third) is currently twelve years old.  And that works out because I can still keep up with him in a baseball catch and shooting pool without looking too feeble.  Against all odds (the recent weather forecast) the sun was out and it was about fifty degrees.  And after two half-hour catches, I can proudly say my right shoulder and elbow are both reasonably intact.

Camera Girl provided the requested bill of fare (spaghetti and meatballs, cookies and cream ice cream, lemonade) and I provided the requested cinematic presentation (extended version of “The Two Towers).  The conversation was limited to an in depth discussion of how Elrond and Aragorn could be related, his current progress in school band (baritone horn) and the trade-off between a lot of snow (which he likes) and not getting out of school until late June (which he is against).  I tried introducing the question of dark matter but I didn’t seem to spark his imagination with it.  Probably needs some background in physics first.  I guess seventh grade science isn’t that advanced.

I’m happy to find that we have maintained good relations and I recognize several of my traits in him (the poor kid) and am highly pleased that we both enjoy a baseball catch as a good way to pass time and get a little exercise.  Now, if he were sixteen, I’d probably be too old.  And come to think of it sixteen-year-olds have other interests than playing sports with old fogeys.   But currently I can throw it far enough and fast enough to keep him interested in the game.  And it’s actually good exercise for me too.

And at 6:30 pm I drove him home to his parents and told Camera Girl that all is right with the world and we must have done something right to have such nice grandkids.  To be honest, she probably did something right.  I’m just born lucky and hang around with the right people.

So, I checked the news to see what I missed today and so far, I don’t see anything new.  Trump, blah, blah, blah.  Musk, blah, blah, blah.  Resist, resist, resist.  Rinse, repeat.

I was glad to see there was a fair amount of interest in the Heinlein post.  I figure a lot of folks from our generation were fans back in the day of RAH.  I’ll say that reading his stories gave me an interest in space and when the time came to think of engineering as a profession, his stories made it seem more interesting than it might have without his influence.  Of course, he didn’t warn me enough about how stupid everyone in the executive suite would be.  But maybe it was a different time.

So now we have to prepare for our visit from Quartus (the fourth) in the next couple of weeks.  We have to nail down the menu.  I already know his choice in movies.  He’s going to demand at least a triple feature of Godzilla movies (Lord help me).  As far as sports it may be something esoteric.  Sometimes the kids have toys like tops or yo-yos or other less recognizable geegaws.  But now is the time to go through the research stage so that the actual event goes smoothly.  Who knows?  Maybe bowling or laser tag will be on the agenda.  Well, I better rest up.

Bring Back the American Mom

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Today was the last family party of the Christmas holiday season.  The kids go back to school on Monday and everybody else starts their diets to scrape away all the fat we’ve absorbed since Thanksgiving.  And it has been a fun season.  What with the Trump election win and the gob-smacked silence of the leftist crazies there has been a veritable aura of peace and calm.  Well, relatively speaking anyway.  After all you can’t eliminate terrorist attacks and brutal war news completely.  But all in all, the last month and a half has been pretty nice.

So, two weeks from Tuesday Donald Trump will be sworn in.  As is his way, his every word and deed will stir up a hornet’s nest of outrage in the establishment media and political communities.  He will be fought tooth and nail every step of the way in courts, in Congress and in the agencies, he is attempting to reform or destroy.

Well, that will be a long story.  The coming months will tell us if he can make any headway in ending illegal immigration through deportations and border security.  And his other reform goals will take just as long to implement.

But tonight, I was just trying to put into perspective where our society is and where it has to go if we’re to last as a nation.  And I would say the most unsettling problem is the current baby drought.  Specifically native-born American women are not having children at replacement rates.  Now, why is that?  Currently the blame game ping pongs back and forth between blaming young men and young women.  But I would say the true culprit is the culture that has enabled a world view by young people that includes the following “facts”:

  • Women are better off in careers than as mothers.
  • Employers should prefer hiring women rather than men, especially white men.
  • There are too many people on planet Earth.
  • Bringing children into this world is a crime.
  • A middle-class lifestyle that allows for the raising of children is no longer within the reach of young adults.

Looking at all these statements I see a dystopian version of the world.  The only statement there that has any basis in fact is the last one and that situation needs to be rectified by our government if they hope to prevent this country from disintegrating into a sad, hollowed-out vestige of the dynamic, prosperous place it was a century ago.

To do this, each of those “facts” needs to be refuted and policies enacted to reverse the opinions and their effects that are currently laying waste to our society at all levels.

The first change needed is to convince young women that getting married and staying home to raise a large family is the most valuable and meaningful “career” they can have.  This is the key change that makes restoration of our society possible.  And the only way these young women can be convinced is for the government to put in place policies that subsidize couples forming and sustaining families.  Specifically, the policies should specify that men must remain employed and women must remain at home during the childhood years of their children.  Ideally these mothers should stay home until their children move out at eighteen years of age.  After that, mothers moving into the workforce shouldn’t be too detrimental to family life.  Although I wouldn’t force them to go.

Now this idea is anathema to modern feminist views.  That isn’t surprising since feminism is anathema to family life.  But it is absolutely vital to maintaining the health of the nation that women be convinced to resume their place in the home; not as part-time mothers of latch-key children but as moms.

Never Go All in Against a Witch

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Some of the grandkids were over today to complete my transformation into a beached whale.  More food appeared from heaven knows where and eggnog and desserts rounded out the meal.  And after some talk of this and that we got down to a high stakes game of Texas hold ’em.  The game was played completely for pride with no cash changing hands.  The chips were divvied up and play went on for hours with fortunes waning and waxing almost at random.  All except Camera Girl.  She is not only a canny bettor but also possesses supernatural luck.  And finally, it came down to her and me.  I was holding a pair of aces and the flop was nothing to write home about.  She and I were betting very heavily.  On the turn an ace showed up.  The final card was a second queen.  We had put most of our chips in the pot and I went all in.  I showed her my two aces and she showed me her pair of queens.  Four of a kind!  I accused her of witchcraft and spent the rest of the game railing at her from the sidelines.

Luckily coffee was served shortly after the game was over and I could gracefully move on from my somewhat unsportsmanlike behavior to my more dignified pose as pater familia and patriarch of a great nation.  All question of who beat whom in a meaningless game of chance was left behind and more important matters took center stage.  Discussions about which were the best Christmas toys or gifts were spirited.  The remote-controlled planes seemed to be the people’s choice.  I watched some cellphone video of these battery powered wonders buzzing the neighborhood at remarkable speed and surprising acrobatic agility.  The remarkable thing was how they survived the crashes I witnessed into the ground and trees.  It seems the drone revolution has reached the adolescent fraction of the American population and it is being enthusiastically embraced.  I was happy to see that these flying wonders did not include munitions of even the mock variety.  A small victory for world peace.

Tomorrow is work.  But I’m hoping it will be a short week and I’ll be able to extend the family fun a while longer while the kids are still off from school next week.  It’s heartening to see that simple games and food can still serve as an adequate excuse for fun.  No video games were played.  We even left the television off.  Sibling rivalry and parental scolding were not absent and some folks were too drowsy from food to avoid snoozing on recliners but for the most part the generations showed sufficient tolerance for each other to bridge the boomer/millennial/zoomer chasms of culture and conditioning.  And even that most fraught relationship, father-in-law/son-in-law was carried through with mutual regard and tolerance.  Having now been on both sides of that relationship I have equal respect for both partners in that arrangement.  It’s a strange but important set of rituals that bind up families and benefit everyone.  But for grown men it will always be a somewhat awkward interaction.  Luckily the wives and daughters can help to smooth out and buffer the whole dance.

I was thinking of writing something about the H-1B visa squabble going on.  But I’ll leave that up to various talking heads to battle it out.  Trump should be smart enough to figure out which way the wind blows on immigration, legal and illegal.  If he can’t figure it out, he’s not going to have a very productive presidency.  Instead, I’ll spend a little more time calculating the odds of getting a four of a kind in a Texas hold ‘em hand.  Now that’s an important question.

The Tale of the Two Jakes

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So, after yesterday’s doom and gloom post I was glad that today we were out of the house for something a lot less depressing.  We were picking up Princess Sack of Potatoes for a sleep over.  And before coming home we watched her team’s weekly soccer game.  Now any parent knows that five- and six-year-olds playing soccer consists mostly of a scrum of eight or ten kids in a circle kicking the ball back and forth at each other’s shin guards.  Luckily at this stage of my career as a soccer spectator all I’m looking for is a lack of drama from the parents and at least one goal for “our side.”

And the soccer gods were smiling down on us today and “our side” got most of the goals.  But more accurately the Two Jakes got almost all the goals.  And it was something of a doppelganger experience.  Each team had a little boy named Jake.  And each Jake was probably about four feet tall with closely cropped dirty blond hair, the number “4” on his jersey and a monomaniacal drive to get the ball in the goal.  These two boys were the only players on the field who knew how to dribble the soccer ball and this allowed them to dominate the ball until faced by a wall of opponents.

Luckily for our side, their coach had drilled them all to run for the goal if the other team got the ball and this allowed us to effectively limit their Jake to two goals.  Unfortunately for the other team, their coach hadn’t equipped them with this strategy so our Jake had the opportunity to score about a half dozen goals.

Other than the coincidences of name, number and appearance there is nothing unusual about two teams at this age only having one competent striker.  But the reason I mention this situation has to do the with the boys’ fathers.  Because they were both cheering on their sons with the same name, they caught each other’s attention and began a conversation that I could overhear.

And it was a pleasant surprise to hear them both comparing notes on their sons’ drive to score goals.  Both of them complimented the other on their son’s skills and both seemed to disclaim having anything to do with it.  You could tell they were both a little proud but neither was at all wound up while watching the game and there wasn’t any of the embarrassing sidelines haranguing that is so awful to see at these games.  There was plenty of applause and cheering when goals were scored (or missed) but both of them behaved as adults watching very young children play a game.  Compared to the behavior of so many parents at these events, it was a breath of fresh air.

And that provided me with just enough hope for humanity to shake off the grim shadow of life in Joe Biden’s America for today.  When we got home, I spent a little time talking about the game with my granddaughter and discovered that for her the most important things about the game were that they had scored at least one goal and that they got to buy something from the ice cream truck.  And in retrospect her priorities seem about right.

But it was nice to see two grown men behaving like grown men.  Maybe that leads to two more grown men a generation from now.

Finding Significance

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Regular readers know that I admire, perhaps excessively, a small number of well-known literary works.  Shakespeare has several of my favorites.  But there are gems scattered throughout western literature from the Iliad on.  And of course, there’s the Bible.

I’ve always admired this speech from Macbeth:

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

 

These are the words of a man who has come to believe that life is meaningless.  But it’s really a rationalization for the results of murdering his own conscience.  He was describing the hell he had created and that soon would engulf him permanently.

And I find this idea instructive.  I think if you keep in mind that there is a moral order, then it gives you a sense of perspective.  You can be surrounded by evil and forced to deal with the worst of humanity.  But if you can work to preserve the things that are good then you can have some peace in knowing you are giving meaning to human life.  And that’s not nothing.

Despair is a godless pleasure that we’re not allowed to imbibe.  You have to work to make this crazy world of ours better.  Certainly, we are currently seeing a diminution in the state of our world.  The morals, the morale, the wisdom of our society is draining away in a shocking way.

And that’s alarming.  But it’s far from the first time and it’s probably not the worst example on record.  It’s important to keep things in perspective and act reasonably.  We will be surrounded for the foreseeable future by people who have bought into the current narrative.  This includes all kinds of very harmful ideas and practices.  The results of this are the excesses of our culture; confusion over things like the roles of men and women and the importance of traditional practices in living our lives and raising our children.

We can instill meaning and purpose into our actions and interactions with each other by choosing carefully to perform the actions that improve our surroundings and make us better people.  And this is especially important in our relations with the young.  They are growing up in a world that has been stripped of reason and dignity.  They spend their every waking minute immersed in a world of TikTok influencers and other phony celebrities telling them what they should think and what they should value.  It’s a wonder they haven’t all been degraded down to the status of sub-human idiots.  I feel it’s especially important to enrich the lives of the young people in my life with things that nourish and expand their minds and souls.  There is the meaning that we can find; keeping this world from falling into a new dark age.

Life is brief but it is a tale told by whatever truth you have in your heart.  If it signifies nothing then that is what is in your soul.

A Sense of Wonder

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My recent foray into Dunwichian power politics may have struck some of my readers as morose and unnecessarily pessimistic.  Possibly so, but I was trying to capture the essence of our current reality where an honest and transparent analysis of how our society works reveals enormous hypocrisy.  And the nature of our “democracy” reveals itself to be a process manipulated by the powerful who have no regard for the people.  But just to show you I haven’t despaired of life I was reminded today of what good can be achieved by getting involved with the young.

I remembered as a youngster being intrigued by astronomy.  Maybe it was because of the space program that was getting off the ground about the time I became aware of current events.  Maybe it was because my parents gave me access to books and other resources concerning science.  But however it happened, I was fascinated by the details of the solar system.  I was always reading statistics about the size, location and physical attributes of Saturn and Jupiter, Mercury and Mars.  And once I began reading science fiction, I became all the more absorbed by this extension of my world into the solar system.  And I suppose that my early interest in science is responsible for much of my orientation in school and afterwards.  Engineering was the logical conclusion for someone interested in the practical application of science to life.  I suppose that if NASA’s space program hadn’t petered out after the moon landings, I would have tried to get involved in an engineering program that had the potential of involving space travel but that was just a childhood fantasy.

But remembering how exciting and interesting it was to discover the larger universe, I decided to give Princess Sack of Potatoes her first astronomy lesson.  We looked at photos of the planets and I tried to explain some of the physical characteristics of the various worlds that circle our sun.  Mercury and Venus are too close to the Sun and therefore too hot.  Mars is too small and too far from the Sun and therefore lacking a useful atmosphere and too cold.  And I tried to explain why the gas giant worlds weren’t places where terrestrial life could exist because of their nightmarish temperatures and pressures and poisonous atmospheres.

So was my lesson successful.  I don’t really know.  She seemed interested enough and she enjoyed the colorful photos and pictures of the planets.  But will it inspire a deep curiosity about the universe.  Well, it’s much too soon to tell.  Maybe after we begin to discuss interstellar and intergalactic space I’ll see if she becomes bored with the subject.  But there was definitely one moment of planetary solidarity.  When we had finished with Neptune, she wanted to know what had happened to Pluto.  Full disclosure, I was very angry when the international astronomical societies stripped Pluto of its status as a planet.  I felt it to be an arbitrary and probably anti-American gesture.  So, this sympathy for Pluto by my granddaughter was a very welcome occurrence.  When I found out that this emotion was fostered because the planet has the same name as Mickey Mouse’s dog, I was a little less enthusiastic.  But still, when dealing with small children you take your victories where they come.

So, teaching children and inspiring curiosity about the wonders of science is something that we can do even in the world of Joe Biden and the American Security State.  One small step for a grandfather, one giant leap for mankind.

Pay Back for Paying Forward

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Two thirds of July burned through.  But we got the sun and heat the calendar promised.  So, I can’t kick.

Swimming pools are an awful nuisance to the owner especially if he lives in the north.  The winter weather beats the hell out of the polymers that the liner and the filter loop are made out of.  In every practical sense they’re a bad deal.  A dead loss except for one very important aspect.  They attract grandchildren like no other power on Earth.  To paraphrase “Field of Dreams,” “If you fill it, they will come.”  Like a law of nature, a hot summer week, a swimming pool and youngsters react like iron filings to a magnet.

And that’s great.  Provide the pool, some burgers and lemonade and they’ll swim and dive and splash around until their fingers and toes become as wrinkled as prunes.  But why, you might ask, would anyone want to have a bunch of noisy, boisterous, unruly kids around when peace and quiet is so much easier?

Well, the answer is simple.  Grandchildren are the one and only, absolutely authentic, sure-fire fountain of youth that has ever been discovered by mankind.  When you steal away their children away from your children and spoil them rotten with bilious food and frivolous activities; like throwing around a baseball or letting them play a game of hide and seek in your yard, it’s as if you’ve stepped into a time machine.

When you referee their squabbles and join in their silly card games and argue with them about whether T-Rex is stronger than Spinosaurus or whether a dragon that breathes fire is more powerful than one that breathes ice or when they draw birthday cards for you with all the care and concentration that a five-year-old can muster you are transported to a different world.  A much, much better world.

Getting to spend time with your grandkids is the payoff for all the years of work and worry that goes into raising a family.  We try to spend as much time with our kids as we can but work consumes so much of our time.  And worrying about getting them launched into their adult lives steals away so much of the time you have when you’re in the prime of your life.

So having the chance to really experience the small joys of children at play in your later years is imbibing the quintessence of life.  And it makes the prospect of getting old acceptable.  Our mortality is THE fact of life.  We get a span of time on this giddy rock hurtling through space-time.  And sooner than any of us imagine, the sands start building up in the bottom of the hour-glass.  But if we see children and then grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren; well then, we can feel as if we did our part to keep this crazy, confusing, hopelessly conflicted endeavor called the human race staggering down the road for at least another generation or two.  And if after we’re gone they think back on us and smile about something we said or did, well, that’s one kind of immortality.

And that has to be enough to make the whole thing worthwhile.  Because as far as I can tell, that’s about as good as it gets.  And that’s good enough for me.

Father’s Day – 2024 – Crashing Plaster and Pancakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bridging the Gap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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