Steven Harper's Blog, page 62
August 21, 2018
Oh, the Humidity!
It's awful! In winter, it gets so dry that your lips crack and nose bleeds, and in summer, you swim instead of walking.
To cope, I bought a new dehumidifier--a large one--and installed it in the basement. It filled up right quick, and had to be emptied every hour for a while. But now? The puddles have dried up, the tanks are barely damp, and you can feel the dryness in the air. In fact, the basement is now dryer than the upstairs!
There needs to be a little more balance, here.
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Bad Neighbor?
Last night, we were finally able to haul it all out to the curb. Whew! But then I realized I hadn't changed the cat box. I did so, and ended up with a bag of used litter that totally wouldn't fit into the trash container. Not a hope. I stood out there in the summer darkness, wondering how to handle this. I didn't want to leave it for a week. The smell would get worse and worse.
My eye fell on my neighbor's trash container. Well, why not? I trotted over, lifted the lid, and dropped the bag in.
A bit of movement from something large caught the corner of my eye, and I started a little. My first thought was, "Crud! My neighbor is in the yard!" Then I saw it was a deer. It was staring at me. Caught!
"Boo!" I said, and it bounded away. I went back inside, kitty litter neatly disposed of.
Am I a bad neighbor?
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Weighty Matters
Darwin is getting some very nice definition. (Yow!) So am I, actually. My sleeves are tighter. When I stand with my arms at my sides, my arms press against my chest (and vice versa). Pretty soon I'll develop the gunslinger walk all the pro lifters have. :)
But the most telling moment came two days ago. I went shopping for a dehumidifier to clear the damp from the basement. I asked a clerk for directions and she sent all the way back to the farthest corner of the mega-store. There were three or four models, and like most Americans, I picked the middle on. It's a little over three feet tall and built like a mini-fridge. I suddenly realized I hadn't grabbed a cart. I sighed. My choices were to go all the way to the front of store, grab a cart, come all the way to the back of the store, and push the dehumidifier all the way to the front of the store again; or I could carry the thing to the front.
I pulled it off the shelf. The thing was HEAVY. I could feel it. But I was lifting it with ease. No trouble, no strain. As I carried it to the cash register, I kept expecting to get tired or feel strain. Nope. It was no trouble at all. At the register, the clerk asked if I wanted to cart to carry it out to the car. "No, thanks," I said, and carried it off.
Real world applications to the gym! :)
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August 13, 2018
Sold! And Cover Reveal!
Years ago, I wrote a genie story for MZBFM, but it was very short, and I've always wanted to write a genie-in-the-bottle story that more fully explored the relationship between genie and master. This desire combined with an old Arab folk tale about a man who accepted the service of a genie on the condition that he make different wish every day, or die. The man eventually realized he was running out of ideas for wishes, so he told his wife what was going on, and she told him to wish for a rope made of sand. The genie was unable to spin a rope from sand, but was required by the wish to keep trying until he did, and now he sits in the desert muttering, "Ropesssss of sssssand," which is now why we have sandstorms and why they make a "ssssssss" noise.
Anyway, I wrote about a young man caught in a similar curse, and in the process found myself also writing about the nature of free will and the symbiotic relationship between servant and master.
LACE AND BLADE 5 is set to release in February, 2019, so watch for it. Here we have the cover!
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August 11, 2018
Fish Fail!
Today I decided to try it. I followed the recipe exactly, as I always do the first time I make something. It came out of the oven looking interesting--a big pie of hardened salt. I cracked it open at the table, lifted the fish out, and served it. Darwin and I tried it. (Max hates fish in general and refused it.)
Ohhhhh, it was awful! Salt, salt, and more salt. Blargh! We picked through the fish, looking for bits that weren't all salt, but they were few and far between. Blech!
Fortunately, I'd reserved a bit of fish from the recipe and baked it normally so we had at least a little something to eat, but boy! Awful, awful, awful!
After cleaning up, I made myself a smoothie out of bananas and frozen blueberries. Much better!
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August 6, 2018
Unpacking
When we get home from a trip, no matter what, we unpack everything. Suitcases are emptied. Clean clothes go back into the closet. The bag of dirty clothes goes into the washer. The toiletries are returned to their places. The car is emptied of all trash. Souvenirs are sorted and put away.
We collapse into bed, but in the morning we get up and the house is already completely in order. We like it that way!
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Home Again!
In the morning, Darwin hauled our stuff outside while I fetched the car and managed to park it reasonably close to the flat we'd rented. Parking in Boston is a true nightmare, one on par with driving in Boston. And when you find a spot, it's expensive. We paid close to $200 in parking fees. We also paid close to $100 in toll road fees. And gas is a lot more expensive there. And . . .
At any rate, we loaded up before anyone noticed I was illegally blocking a driveway and we zipped away. Even though it was a Sunday morning, it took a long time to work our way out of the city.
Fourteen hours later--fourteen LONG hours later--we arrived home, our vacation complete!
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Salem
We drove into the town, and I wasn't sure how to react. Salem, as we all know, was the site of one of the most awful and idiotic and frightening eras in American history. On the other hand, "only" 19 people were murdered at Salem, against the uncounted thousands of Native Americans who were murdered. On the other hand . . .
Anyway, I've always been angry about the Salem trials. The dichotomies and hypocrisy and utter idiocy are just too much for me. None of the victims were Witches as I think of them today, but they've been adopted post-mortem by the Pagan community and are the biggest symbol of fear, oppression, and mob rule in America. Note that Donald Trump (incorrectly) invokes the Salem Witches at every turn these days.
I maintain that if I were ever accused of Witchcraft in Salem, I would have told the judge to drop the whole thing, or I'd confess to Witchcraft and tell everyone that the judge signed the Devil's book along with me. Then I'd howl and scream and writhe on the floor while begging the judge to stop sending his soul out to get me. That would end the trials right quick.
At any rate, the outskirts of Salem are dumpy and ugly. I threaded our way to a parking lot in the downtown area and we set out to explore.
Salem has a love-hate relationship with the trials. When you walk around the place, you see lots and lots of signs and plaques that point out all sorts of historical events (none of which are recorded in any notable history books or taught in schools), and they rarely mention the trials at all. "Hey, guys," the signs plead. "Salem isn't just about hanging Witches! Really! Lots of other stuff has happened here, too. Guys? Hello?"
But everyone knows the only reason anyone visits Salem is because of the trials. And so they grudgingly set up a couple museums and a little Witch-themed shopping area that sells candles and psychic readings and statues of Witches and cheap stuff inscribed with pentacles. The place manages to be both tawdy and pitiful, to tell the truth.
We found the old cemetery. It was tiny, the size of a good-sized suburban yard, and like the one in Groton, it was crammed with the dead, even though not all of them had markers. None of the accused Witches had markers. The bodies of most of them were spirited away by their families and buried in secret, and the others were buried unmarked in the cemetery. The city did put in a memorial, though. It's a set of stone benches, each inscribed with the name of the accused Witch and the year in which he or she was hanged (or, in the case of Giles Corey, slowly crushed to death under a pile of stones). People often put cut flowers on the benches. A hefty crowd of visitors sifted through the grave markers.
One person related to the trials DOES have a stone: John Hathorne, the main judge in the cases. He kept the trials going, sentenced innocent people to hang, and refused to listen even when the Witches' "victims" admitted they had lied about being attacked by magic. When you were hanged for Witchcraft, your property was auctioned off by the town, and Hathorne bought property freed up by the executions he himself had ordered.
I hawked up and spat on his grave.
A huge, ancient oak tree that must have witnessed the trials and the hangings dominates one side of the graveyard. It's so big that its lower branches have drooped down to rest on the ground. It was covered in green acorns. I picked three of them to take home for my altar--life out of death.
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Octavia E. Butler Exhibit
The museum's web site is here: pasadenahistory.org/ and if you search on the name "Butler," you'll find a number of lectures and special activities that center around her and her writing.
I'm thrilled that I could contribute something to her history!
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August 5, 2018
Groton: The Exploration
Groton is the town where Darwin's family is from. Several families founded the town in the 1600s, and Darwin is descended from nearly all of them: the Bloods, the Laurence's, the Nuttings. The list goes on. Since most of his family lines intersect here, he's been interested in visiting for years. Today was the day.
Groton is a smallish town in rural Massachusetts. It's in a deep, wide valley with a bunch of other small towns strung like beads along the string of an extremely busy two-lane highway. We drove slowly through Groton, noting the library, the town hall, the Groton Inn (est. 1640), various churches, and lots and lots of houses built in the 1700s. Darwin was enchanted and fascinated.
And then we found the cemetery. "The Old Burying Ground" they officially call it. It's across the street from a church, and was probably at the edge of town when it was first platted. It's a tree-covered cemetery surrounded by a low stone wall that was built in segments during the 1800s, if the inscriptions on the wall are any clue. (At one point you can see where they got a new or different mason to do the building--the wall becomes suddenly loose and shoddy.). We later learned that although there's lots of unmarked space, the yard is actually stuffed full of burials, with no more room for more. It looks emptier because a great many graves were unmarked or marked with wooden monuments or with stone monuments that didn't survive. The latest grave we found was form the 1940s. Most were from the 1700s and 1800s.
We found a lot of stones for Darwin's ancestors and distant cousins, including some from his great-something-grandparents. Darwin was a little overwhelmed at finding the graves of people he'd been reading about or researching for years. We found an awful grave marked with a double stone. It was for a three-year-old and and eighteen-month old who died within a day of each other of throat distemper (diphtheria), according to the stone. I can't imagine losing two small children within a day.
We also found a double tombstone that was for two different wives of the same man. He was buried next to them, with a stone of his own. Darwin and I puzzled over these for a while, and finally worked out that the man married Wife 1, and several years later, she died. He married Wife 2, and several years later, HE died, leaving Wife 2 behind, and her family or children must have raised the double stone once she died. This was odd. Why would Wife 2's family created a shared stone for Wife 1 and Wife 2? Especially since several years had passed between the deaths of Wife 1 and Wife 2?
At last Darwin hit on a theory: the two wives were sisters. When Wife 1 died, the husband married his sister-in-law (a common practice in those days), and then he died, and later Wife 2 died, so the family put up a single stone for both sisters. That makes a lot of sense, though we'll never know for sure.
We had lunch in a cafe that was trying hard to be a Cool Organic Place, but the food was decidedly mediocre for the price. Ah well.
Then we explored the town some more, looking at the 18th century buildings and even finding a house some of Darwin's ancestors lived in. It was a private house at the end of a long driveway, so I drove down it. "What are you doing?" Darwin hissed.
"Heading up for a look," I said. "We came all this to find these things, and then we aren't going to look? The owners won't do anything anyway." I drove up until we were close enough for Darwin to snap a couple photos, then I backed to the road and took off. No one did anything. There!
The library had a little information for Darwin, too, and we spent some time there so he could root through old books.
A big house on main street has been converted into an historical society museum. It was closed, but I made Darwin come around and peer in through the windows. "Nobody cares," I insisted, and nobody did. Darwin got a good look. A sign out front announced a free tour of the place tomorrow morning.
"Do you want to come?" I asked, and he said he did.
So in the morning, we got the car out of hock and drove back. This was a Saturday, so the traffic around Boston was lighter, but in Groton it was actually heavier! And it was bucketing rain. A flood warning was in effect for the area, in fact, though we encountered no problems.
It took us longer than expected to the car out of the parking garage in Boston, so we arrived about five minutes after the tour had already begun, and we joined a group of six other people in the house's drawing room. To my surprise, the tour was being conducted by a tall, gawky teenaged boy. I think the woman who ran the place was his mother. But he knew the material and was very well-spoken, so kudos to him!
The house had only recently opened after heavy renovation and rescuing, and we saw a great many artifacts from the 17th and 18th century families that had owned the place. The original family wasn't related to Darwin, but there were a great many references in the house to his relatives.
Here we have to pause for some Darwin family history. Back in the Colonial days, a tribe of natives kidnapped two small children from the Nutting family, some of Darwin's ancestors. The kids were his great-something-uncle and aunt. The natives hauled the children to Quebec and sold them to a white family, who took them in, though it wasn't clear whether it was as adopted children or as actual slaves. Many years later, the Nutting family found the children and asked for them to be returned home. Unfortunately, the kids had no memory of their original family, and they viewed their Canadian "parents" as their family. They refused to come home, and stayed in Quebec for the rest of their lives under their adopted names.
Now. While we were shifting to a different room, I struck up a conversation with one of the women on the tour. She mentioned that she was related to people in Groton through her ancestors, and I asked which. "The Nuttings," she said, and mentioned that she always thought her entire family was from Canada, but it turned out she was descended from a child who was kidnapped away from her Groton family, and . . .
So Darwin got to meet one of his cousins! And the woman's sister was there as well, so that made two!
After the tour, we explored yet more of Groton, taking our time. We came across what looked like a park, and in the middle was a large shed made of wood. Signs posted outside announced that it was a farm stand. The double doors were flung wide, and no humans were in evidence. Inside we found a glass-fronted refrigerator with home made blueberry jam and fudge and cartons of blueberries in it. There was also a freezer with ice cream bars, a table with Groton t-shirts on it, and other home made food items.
Another sign informed you that everything was on the honor system, and pointed you toward a locked cash box mounted on the wall. A price list was on the table. Darwin and I found this completely charming, and Darwin announced we had to buy some stuff. We loaded up with jam and ice cream and blueberries and Darwin stuffed the money into the slot at the top of the cash box. We never did meet the owners.
Several times while we walked around Groton, Darwin paused to spread his arms and breathe in deeply. "I love this place," he said, and he's already making plans to return, this time with intent to stay in Groton itself.
On our way back to Boston, I checked the GPS and discovered Salem was only 25 minutes away . . .
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