Tag: spring

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.

Emerging From the Cocoon

photog Current Events, Guns, OCF, Photography , , , ,

Just finished up a large and annoying project at work.  So, I’m celebrating a day of freedom with a big mug of coffee that Camera Girl made for me.  To paraphrase a line from a movie, “What did people do before they had coffee?”  Someone once told me that the American Century was fueled on coffee and cigarettes.  I could believe him.  Could the decline in American effectiveness in so many arenas be attributed to the decline in smoking?  It’s an interesting idea.

I’m looking out the window at the grass growing and the first butterflies of the year.  Unfortunately, I’m also seeing the first carpenter bees of the season.  For anyone lucky enough to not know what these are, they look like exceptionally large, aggressive bumble bees that burrow into wood (such as the outside of my house) and make a nest in which they lay their eggs.  Camera Girl was picking some dandelions that were in one of her raised gardens when a couple of these destructive bugs started to buzz around her.  I warned her away from the garden and promised to find out where they were burrowing and use lethal force to settle their hash.

May will be a very busy month both at home and work.  And that’s fine.  With the longer days and hopefully the warmer temperatures there will be more time to fix stuff and set things up around the grounds.  Today I was reminded of another piece of carpentry that has intruded on Camera Girl’s sense of how things should be.  And with the price of lumber and hardware reaching astronomical heights, what a wonderful time it is to be a homeowner.

The first hummingbird sightings have occurred and Camera Girl has put up her feeders.  I’ll try this year to do a better job with the 200-600mm lens to get some really good shots of them.  Yesterday I went out to get a few shots of the big elm tree that grows around here.  The leaves were bursting out of their buds and the tree has a very distinctive appearance that I wanted to capture.

Another drama playing out this spring is the epic battle between Camera Girl’s pet crow Moe and his arch-enemy Poe (a newly arrived raven).  She leaves scraps out for Moe in the morning but lately Poe shows up and snatches them.  Just now Camera Girl called me over to the living room window to witness Moe dive bombing Poe and forcing him away from the snack area.  Secretly I’m a fan of Poe.  I’ve always wanted a raven in the neighborhood and this seems like my big chance.  Maybe it’s my fate to become the man who made peace between Moe and Poe.  I mean can’t they all just get along sharing the chicken fat?  Nobel Peace Prize?  We’ll see.

 

I think it’s time for a photo expedition.  I’ll have to make a survey of what the local environment has to offer.  There are usually some antique car rallies and such things but I was hoping for something a little different.  What I think I’d like to get to is a gun show.  I know very little about guns but I think they could make a very good photo opportunity.  I’ve contacted one of the bigger shows to see if they have any qualms about photography.

Well anyway, we’ve finally put the last vestiges of winter behind us.  I saw a spring peeper stumbling around after I raked up some leaves and he staggered away into the woods looking like Mitch McConnell blinking in the lights of the photojournalists trying to confirm that he is indeed still breathing.

This weekend we’re going to a lecture on the latest word on beekeeping.  It’s been more than a decade since my last hive collapsed.  I’ve watched a few videos on the “natural” beekeeping method.  I stopped trying to keep them when the varroa mites devastated the whole industry back fifteen years or so.  I’ve toyed with the idea of catching a wild swarm on the theory that these bees have come into equilibrium with the various pests and will fare much better than the heavily “medicated” hives that exist on the edge of succumbing to the very insecticides used to beat back the mites.  I’ll ask this local expert what he thinks and who knows, maybe I’ll try my hand at beekeeping again.  Although I’ve been warned that between blueberries, raspberries and bees I’ll have every black bear in a fifty-mile radius lined up to clean me out.  Such is life.

Well in the immortal words of George Costanza, “You know, Spring! Rejuvenation, re-birth, everything’s blooming, all that crap!”

16APR2023 – OCF Update – This’N’That

photog Current Events, OCF ,

So I enjoyed writing that review last night of the “groundbreaking” 1960s movie Blow-up.  Mocking something so utterly dumb was life-affirming.  It’s like watching that video of Musk brow-beating that dopey BBC reporter, just wonderfully satisfying.

Today we have a party to go to in the mid-afternoon so it’ll be a limited writing day because I also was handed a honey-do list by Camera Girl and there was a seriousness in her demeanor that leads me to believe that stalling will be seriously frowned upon.  Well, uninstalled new windshield wiper blades and blocked driveway drains are the stuff of wifely discontent so I guess I best bestir myself.

On the plus side I knocked off another 2,000 words on the story.  That’s another 2%.  Pretty good, pretty good.  And on the topicality front I did add an AI character to the story.  And that was before the current mania.  It was probably more an homage to “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”  Interestingly I’ve made mine a girl and she’s possibly the most enjoyable character in the book.  I’m trying to decide whether to kill her off or her creator.  One of them will have to go.

We had a ninety degree day on Friday.  That’s pretty damn hot for mid-April.  But we’re back in the fifties today.  But the heat really activated the dreaded mayflies.  Yesterday a cloud of them enveloped me while I was pumping gas.  Four of them followed me into the car and I was swatting at them like a lunatic while trying to drive on a busy road.  And the pollen is so thick you can taste it on your tongue.  People are walking around coughing up a lung.  Ah the joys of spring.

But life is good.  We turned the heat off a few days ago and there was still a balance in the heating oil account.  So Dementia Joe hasn’t quite bankrupted me yet.  Camera Girl will put aside her soup recipes and all sorts of warm weather provender will appear on the menu.

I was reading through the daily news and opinion rags with distaste.  The left is made up of dishonest people and idiots.  But the Right is hardly a paragon of virtue and intelligence.  Even when they get something right often it’s like the whining of the village idiot.  It’s just too painful to listen to.

I was watching a vlogger post about how camera photography was dying and how phone photography would kill it off any day now.  Maybe he’s right but that just tells me people are just too lazy to use the best tool for the job.  But he has a certain point.  The convenience of the smart phone has taken a heavy toll on the use of conventional cameras.  But despair seems a little melodramatic.

Well I better get on with my chores or I won’t get fed today.  Camera Girl is a Harsh Mistress. So enjoy the day and I’ll see what I can think of to comment on later.