A writer friend put a promo link to one of my books on one of the major news aggregator sites last week, with the refreshing result that sales of the book skyrocketed – this was my first historical, To Truckee’s Trail, and the one which was almost the most fun and the fastest to write. I was a bit downcast when I finished it, because it meant that I was done with the story and had to say goodbye to all the characters, especially the one or two which had been created for the story out of whole cloth. Truckee must have been such a fast write for me because the whole plot was already there: the first wagon train party to make it over the mountains into California with their wagons, and not having lost a single person to the emergency of being stuck in the deep winter snow with slowly diminishing food supplies. The participants in that great adventure were all real, historic people, with the exception of the little boy Eddie Patterson, and the noble mastiff Dog; it was more a matter of teasing out what little could be deduced about what they had been like, and then and fleshing them out to become real, breathing, sympathetic characters. There had only been one diarist among that party, and that diary was later lost, and only one member of the party left a memoir later on … so I had a little bit to work with and was sorry when it was all done. I couldn’t write a sequel – the story was whole and perfect the way it was, and in any case two of the central characters, John and Liz only lived for a few years after – I still think that is why the story of the Stephens-Townsend-Greenwood-Murphy wagon train party was so little known, otherwise. John Townsend would have been an important and influential person in California, historically, and how he helped lead the party to safety from the jaws of icy death in the mountains would have been part of it.
There were three interesting connections between the Stephens-Townsend Party, and the tragic Donner-Reed Party, aside from the circumstance of both being trapped in nearly the same place in the pass over the Sierra Nevada. The first was that elements of the Donner-Reed survivors took shelter in the same little cabin by Truckee Lake which Moses Schallenberger, Allen Montgomery and Joseph Foster had built to winter over, hoping to guard the wagons which their party had to leave behind for lack of oxen to pull them. The second was that Martin Murphy’s youngest son, John, later courted and married Virginia Reed, who is usually cast as one of the heroines of the tragedy. And finally, the old mountain man and trail-guide, Caleb Greenwood, was a volunteer – in spite of his great age – in one of the organized relief efforts to rescue the survivors of the party. I did consider, when I came around to writing the Gold Rush adventure of Fredi Steinmetz in California a decade later, of having him meet briefly with Moses Schallenberger, and John and Liz’s little son, or maybe even some of the Murphy family just to complete the circle – but the plot just didn’t allow for that.
Other “after words” to my books – it was suggested that following Willi Richter’s life and adventures with the Comanche in the late 1860s, and his return to his birth family ten years later would make a ripping good yarn. But that would make necessary a really deep dive into Comanche history, life and culture, and I just didn’t feel it. Another reader suggested maybe exploring the anti-German lurch on the part of the general public around the time of World War 1, but I just didn’t feel that, either. So much came crashing down in that war and immediately afterwards – empires, optimism about the future and society generally – I just couldn’t feel that, either. Although I did reference in passing in My Dear Cousin, that Steinmetz’s family legally changed their name, because of the anti-German animus of the time; which is why Fredi and Sophia’s granddaughter went by the surname of Stoneman.
I wonder if I should have added a bit more to that book, mapping out how the post-war world treated the two cousins and their husbands. The couple that I based part of Peg and Tommy’s lives in Malaya on, eventually had to leave their rubber plantation for their own safety because of the Communist insurgency. They had children by that time, and the constant threat against all of their lives – threats carried out to the point where they had to fortify their main residence – forced them to leave. I rather think that Peg and Tommy, with the children that they had after Tom and Olivia (and they would have had more children) would have eventually relocated to Australia and rebuilt a secure life there.
For Vennie and Burt, I have a feeling that they would have had a rockier road. I couldn’t see Vennie settling down to be the perfect wife of an up and coming academic at a moderately snooty west coast private college. I think that they would have separated – but not divorced — after a couple of years. I could picture Vennie going back into nursing, serving as a military nurse in Korea. She had a rather overdeveloped sense of duty. And eventually, Burt would have taken up another position, somewhere in the intermountain West, and he and Vennie would reconcile, perhaps adopt a couple of war orphaned Korean children, before having a couple of their own. So that’s how that ‘after word’ might have gone – but I don’t believe I’ll be writing it out – the story was complete as it was.
Now, to finish the Civil War novel, which is half-done, and leaving Miss Minnie Vining as an established lecturer on feminist and abolitionist causes … a writer’s work is never done.
I’m almost certain that I witnessed the seeds of teacher-training wokism yea these four decades ago when I was wrapping up the class hours necessary for a degree in English, an age before it became screamingly obvious that a BA in English didn’t guarantee that the recipient of it was conversant with proper grammar, spelling, the literary output of the greats from Chaucer to Wilde, or blessed with the ability (even if only acquired through imitation) to write in a clear and pleasing style.
With my usual efficiency and persistence, I had managed to complete every single required class for that golden degree by three and a half years into the enterprise, leaving me with just a requirement for so many class credits subject unspecified for my final semester toiling in the groves of academy as they presented at Cal State University Northridge. (A state uni with practically no notable characteristics or reputation then, or now. It was your standard state university, providing in a workmanlike fashion, higher education to a mixed bag of students – freshly minted high-school alums, foreign students, working adults and returning senior citizens.)
So, I looked at the catalog offerings for the spring of 1976 and decided that I would indulge myself intellectually and just sign up for any elective that looked interesting in the catalog. This put me in a class in Roman Art & Architecture, and another in Japanese Art &Architecture, both of which proved to be totally fascinating, challenging, and eventually useful – the Japanese one, especially, as it turned out to be a graduate-level one aimed at art majors, and did I have to seriously hit the books in order to pass! The Roman A&A final included a final exam involving drawing an accurate map of classical Rome from memory, naming the seven hills, including the lines of major avenues and aqueducts, and marking the location of about twenty major landmarks. This turned out to be useful when I passed through Rome as a tourist in 1985 …
It was the third ‘what the heck that sounds interesting’ elective which was the class that I found memorable and for not a good reason. I began to hate it, root and branch, topic and professor … a smug and smarmy male who reminds me in memory of the irritating Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf. The subject of the class was “Children’s Literature” and upon reading it in the catalog, I thought – hey, interesting subject, a study of classic kid-lit from the early days, a survey of the bigs in kid-lit; a little Frances Hodgson Burnett, some of this and that … what made writing and reading for the underage set appealing over the decades …
I had been raised on classic kid-lit. Mom was rigorous in that respect. I had all of them, either read to us, or on the shelves to read for ourselves. Everything: Child’s Garden of Verses, Little House on the Prairie and all in the series, Little Women and the sequels, Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, the Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy, the Jungle Books, Winnie the Pooh and dozens more. I thought I would be in a class exploring what made those books and others such enchanting and enduring reads. What made them so special that they were still being read by and to children for decades or even centuries after having been written … and in that I was crushingly disappointed. More than that – outraged, although never sufficiently to rend the lector from limb to limb and encourage my fellow students to piss on the bloody remains. I did want that BA degree, you see. I already had plans, post-graduation.
As it turned out and which I should have noted before enrolling in it, the class was one of those required/elective for those aiming for a teaching credential in the state of California. And it was dire … I figured that out within the first couple of lectures. First, when the lector/professor figuratively urinated all over Child’s Garden of Verses, condemning it for being stupid bad poetry with an ump-de-ump rhyme. Yes, the poetry in Garden is fairly simple – Shakespearean sonnets it isn’t – and yet I (and others) can still recite verse after verse from memory. Then when the lecturer took a number-two dump on Wind in the Willows, picking out one chapter – The Piper At the Gates of Dawn – for an extra specially contemptuous sneering as saccharine, sentimental and trite. For myself, I had always loved Wind in the Willows, and believed that chapter to be charming, lyrical, and beautifully descriptive.
So, the lector/professor was an obnoxious philistine; I am certain there were skid-row bums and burned-out hippies with better literary judgement. Just to put the rancid frosting on this rancid cake of a course, he … umm … exposed the class to a bit of kid-lit that he thought was just the thing for your average middle-school reader. I have mercifully forgotten the title and author, although at this date I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a book that he had written. The hero and narrator was a teen boy whose family went from Nantucket Island in time for the 1893 Oklahoma land rush, set up a homestead there, and then by some misfortune that I don’t recall, the father died, they flaked out of the homestead claim, and the boy and his mother went all the way back to Nantucket – sadder and wiser, or so the narrative had it. A highlight of the book was the boy acquiring a girlfriend who had been a captive of the Indians (tribe unspecified, or at any rate, I don’t remember) and it was implied had been sexually initiated by the experience. She gave him a hand-job, described in a conversation between the two of them. Ugh.
That was the point when I decided that it was a darned good thing that I didn’t want to be a grade schoolteacher, if this kind of materiel was what one had make a show of lauding, while spurning the great body of enduring stories and poetry. I wonder how many other rational people made the same decision – and that’s why our schools are deeply mired in predatory wokeism. Comment as you wish. And no, I never wanted to teach school anyway, but if I had, I am certain this one class would have kicked any such desire out of me. I’ll just write good stories for kids, and read the good stuff to Wee Jamie.
This last weekend, I actually went out of my house/neighborhood and did something different. Something interesting and out in the real world, or something that resembled the real world, out there, beyond the keyboard and computer screen. I had a table for my books at a cultural event, the Folkfest in New Braunfels. Historically, New Braunfels was one of the German Verein-founded towns in the Texas Hill Country, one of those that I have written about in my historical series; the main reason that I was invited to the bash under the oak trees at the Heritage Society’s campus on the northern edge of town. The Adelsverein Trilogy touches on the circumstances and reason why more than eight thousand German immigrants ended up on the wild and unsettled Texas frontier in the 1840s. A consortium of German noblemen and princes hoped to make a tidy profit – and to do a good deed for their struggling countrymen – by taking up an entrepreneur grant in the independent Republic of Texas. They were honest in their hope to make the venture advantageous economically for them, which distinguishes them from many other ostensibly charitable enterprises of late. That the Adelsverein went broke within two years had more to do with the princely gentlemen overselling their program to eager potential immigrants and badly underestimating the costs in transporting them to Texas. That it resulted in a godly number of able, educated, independent-minded and patriotic new citizens turned out to be a bonus. It also resulted in Kendal, Gillespie and Comal counties being almost completely German-speaking for better than a hundred years, which explained the prevalence of dirndls and lederhosen worn with cowboy boots at the Folkfest.
The Heritage Society has moved a number of buildings of historical note onto the property; a dog-trot cabin, carpenter’s shop, a windmill, one-room schoolhouse. blacksmith shop and others. For the Folkfest, these buildings are inhabited by docents and volunteers, augmented by historical reenactors in tents and pavilions, eager to exhibit their skills and gear. The flintlock and black powder shooters shot their long rifles regularly during the two days, as did the cannon crew with their antique artillery piece. There was live music under the trees – a Celtic band, a children’s choir singing German folksongs, a clogging dance troupe, an array of country-western singers – and a children’s costume parade on Saturday, carrying on the tradition of a May Day parade established by the teacher of the first school in New Braunfels in the 1850s. A pair of charro performers demonstrated rope tricks and fancy riding skills in a temporary rink, the owner of a genuine 1913 Ford Model-T gave rides around the circuit of the grounds, and the owners of an authentic cowboy chuckwagon demonstrated making biscuits and cooking over a fire with iron Dutch ovens. In other years at Folkfest I have seen lace-makers showing off their skills, and carpenters demonstrating how to use templates and hand-tools to shape chair spindles and legs. Last year, the hayride was in a wagon pulled by a pair of horses, this year merely a trailer lined with hay-bales pulled by a tractor. But there was a good crowd, over this last weekend; families and couples having fun, listening to the music while sitting at the tables by the beer garden, under the great oak tree in the center of the grounds by the beer garden. There wasn’t a single mask in sight, and no social distancing that I could see. It all reminded me that not everything is awful and catastrophic – and that many of us are holding on tight to our history and our traditions.
Weapons Array – the large revolver at upper left is a Walker Colt, which weighs nearly five pounds
Well, it’s really kind of sad – that erasing biological XX-chromosome no-kidding 100 percent female women seems the ultimate endpoint of early 21st century popular prog-thought, as mad and illogical as that might seem as an ambition, or rather an idée fixe. The ancient jape of a fox hunt described as ‘the unspeakable in hot pursuit of the inedible’ comes to mind, only this is the deranged in pursuit of the unachievable. As little as I think of the long-time and loud professional Feminists-with-a-capital-F (or LT&LPF(F) as I call them), and their tendency to view all men as potential rapist and abusers, I would have expected them to be assiduous in protesting for the actual physical safety of biological women in women-only spaces like restrooms, locker rooms, battered woman shelters, hospital wards and prisons. Alas, they would seem to have fixated on the availability of reproductive health or as the rest of us call it, abortion, as the great fight for the LT&LPF(F); the hill upon which they wish to see fetal humans die. I mean; what the hell, LT&LPF(F) – you look away from the physical safety of real, no-kidding vulnerable women … and focus on the rights, ways and means of killing fetal humans. Good job, sisters. (Not.)
I previously would have assumed that the LT&LPF(F) would have looked askance at biological male athletes declaring themselves to identify as female … and walking away with first or second place in track, swim and wrestling meets. That pretense strikes me a particularly egregious; honestly, while I am not a biologist as my mother and father were, my memory of childhood roughhousing with my brother and his friends is quite vivid. The last time when I could hold my own in a physical contest with any of them was at the age of twelve or thirteen, just before puberty hit all of us. That certain born-male athletes have hit on the scheme of claiming to be a woman in order to score wins is a scam. It’s low, dishonest and a cheat. I’m amazed that such can look at themselves in a mirror, without shame and embarrassment at going so low for a win and a medal.
Sexual dimorphism, as Daddy lectured us on nature walks, is a real thing: as it applies to humans, males of our own human species tend to be taller, heavier, and better muscled, and clustered at the extremes of the Bell curve as far as intelligence goes. Females tend to be smaller, lighter, with a higher percentage of body fat, cluster at the middle of the intelligence Bell curve, and be a little better at fine muscle skills. That, and we can have babies; growing them within our own bodies for nine months and nurturing them for many months afterwards, whereas males can really only get them started, which takes a matter of energetic minutes at the most basic level.
We all of us, male and female alike, have our own skills and strengths – and honestly, I have always appreciated those strengths, as well as liking men, generally. (Men are cool, they focus on the immediate, they fix things, build things, and fight for what they value, all qualities which I have always found terribly attractive.) So why now are progressives wedded to the notion of deleting biological women? Is it just the latest and most attractive trend among progressives? Or do they really-o-truly-o hate and envy the female, as some of the early radical professional feminists(who hated men, unreservedly) used to claim.
Discuss as you wish.
The Hollywood-based entertainment industry appears to have written off most of America in Flyoverlandia (according to this post) as hopelessly unwoke, racist and dumber than dirt, in their untiring efforts to embody the soul of Woke in their various offerings. Apparently, they believe in an audience just waiting uncritically out here; An audience intellectually gape-mouthed like baby birds just waiting to swallow uncritically whatever gets dropped into them. In pursuit of that goal, according to the same article, they have made their own professional hellscape, what with the growing fear that one wrong word, tweet or visual will make them the unemployable target of their peers, in the grand scramble for achieving ultimate wokery by scapegoating each other. Couldn’t happen to a nicer lot of vicious, vacuous, jerks, hypocrites, and pedophiles … even as the audience for movies released in theaters drops through the floor, and the most-watched continuing streaming video drama is one which has done so practically unnoticed by the mainstream news and entertainment media. More »
My daughter and I have just finished making the various kinds of fudge that we distribute to neighbors, friends, and various workers and employees of places that we do business with. We hit upon this seasonal gift a good few years ago, after a visit to a very nice shop in Fredericksburg in the Hill Country, which featured infinite varieties of fudge. Those that we tasted were excellent, and my daughter was inspired to replicate the variety. We had previously done cookies and other home-made treats, but when it came around the next year and neighbors began asking us, with wistful hope, “Are you going to make fudge again, this year? We really liked it …” we realized that we were onto a winning strategy for holiday gifting.
The assortment – packaged in little tins from the Dollar Tree
The word literally translates from Spanish as “child-buyers” – as defined by Wikipedia in one of their less politically unstained entries: “a concept coined by Victor Hugo in his novel The Man Who Laughs. It refers to various groups in folklore who were said to change the physical appearance of human beings by manipulating growing children, in a similar way to the horticultural method of bonsai – that is, deliberate mutilation … stunting children’s growth by physical restraint, muzzling their faces to deform them, slitting their eyes, dislocating their joints, and malforming their bones.” The mutilated or stunted children were then provided as dwarves to amuse a noble court, or as performers in traveling circus sideshows. A historical truth, folklore repeated to frighten children into good behavior, or just a melodramatic literary creation? Who knows for certain? More »
After our adventures a couple of weeks ago in sorting out the garage deep freezer, my daughter and I decided that we ought to tackle the pantry – which we had done a year or so ago and disposed of most of the badly out-of-date food and condiment items at that time. We did so again today, but fortunately this time the oldest item found was some ranch dressing mix from 2013. The few other items disposed of were of a much more recent vintage. There were two reasons for this project; the first being that we simply had to find the little jar of turkey brine mix that we bought last year after Thanksgiving. We had bought a jar of the same brand after Thanksgiving, 2019, and used it for the turkey breast last year, and it was absolutely splendid! Yes, we shop the marked-down shelves, after the holidays. Got a problem with that? (The way prices are going up on various items, this is something that all of us had better get accustomed to doing.) And, no, I don’t believe the quality degrades after sitting a year – it’s mostly salt, sugar, and an interesting blend of spices and dried fruit.
The other reason was that I had two lots of new air-tight pantry containers – various sizes, all to store the various flours, pastas, rice, grains, and beans in. The pantry was crammed to overflowing, with much of the contents in round glass jars in various sizes, which didn’t make economical use of space, and square containers with the contents marked, which would possibly make better use of the telephone-booth-sized pantry … (‘Mom? What IS this?’ ‘Either bulger wheat or wheat berries…’) (‘Why do we have three different bags or jars of jasmine rice/bean thread noodles/cornmeal?’ ‘Because we couldn’t find them the last time we were looking and just bought more…’) I understand that this happens with ill-organized garages. Can’t find the hammer – go and buy another, which is how people finish up with half a dozen hammers, or adjustable wrenches…
It turns out that we have a ton more of dried and canned beans, canned tomatoes, and various oriental noodle items than we thought we did. Our resolve to carefully store and label the darned things is renewed. And putting all the various dried staples into square containers and labeling them as to the contents turns out to have saved considerable space in the pantry, as well as making certain items much more visible, even if this project took up most of the day. Which should save time in searching for them, the next time we need a can of coconut milk, a bit of tomato paste …
We’re brining a turkey breast we bought some weeks ago, and putting together a nice small family Thanksgiving feast, turkey, mashed potatoes, roasted brussels sprouts, wheat bread and sausage stuffing, gravy and the usual pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce – all carefully calculated so that we don’t have too much in the way of leftovers … when I was growing up, we’d be eating turkey leftovers in various guises for most of the three weeks after Thanksgiving … and just when we polished off the last of it … there came the Christmas turkey and another month of leftovers.
For Christmas dinner, we’re planning on doing Boeuf en Croûte. The beef roast is in the freezer – we bought it a few weeks ago. May as well, while we can still afford it …
I was reminded of one of my personal great moments in customer service when I ran across this article in the Daily Mail. Honestly, I think that the provision of expensive gift hampers for the holidays is one of those in which British merchants have it all over American, but then they had a long, long, long head start on us. More »
My daughter and I, accompanied by a selection of stock, Wee Jamie in his stroller, and a full assortment in a cooler bag of our lunches and his bottles on ice, spent all day last Saturday at a craft fair in Beautiful Downtown Bulverde, at the senior center there. Which is disconcertingly under the flight approach of a tiny airfield just down the road; at odd times all day, a small single-engine aircraft road overhead just above tree-top level, the shadow of it skating over the treetops and meadow. My daughter had a selection of her origami earrings, most of it stock created early last year. What with the advent of Wee Jamie, who will be six months old this month, and her interests in developing a career in real-estate, this is a hobby which she will have to set aside for a time. She also had a selection of wood-burned oversized Christmas ornaments, which all went to one purchaser who wanted them for an outdoor Christmas tree display, and a collection of small needle-felted seasonal ornaments which, alas, did not sell. We were kind of discouraged because of this. Maybe next year. We worry about what hell the retail economy will present to us, by next year. We had thought that shoppers at the craft fair would be interested in spending their money with local small crafters, what with all the ships stuck off-shore, loaded with crappy consumer goods from China for the holiday market season. We’ll see what happens with post-market sales – there is always a bump-up after a market event.
I had two bins of American Girl doll-clothes and costumes, which were much admired, but didn’t sell as well as they have in the past. At least I covered my half of the table fee and then a bit, which is always reassuring. Our only event the rest of the year will be for my books, at Miss Ruby’s Author Corral in Goliad, the first Saturday in December. My daughter is looking forward to taking Wee Jamie to see Santa, although posing for a picture in the saddle of a longhorn steer may be a little too much to expect of an infant who will be only seven months old when he has his encounter with the Guy In the Red Suit Who Drives a Team of Reindeer And Delivers Gifts to Good Children on Christmas Eve.
On the other hand, Wee Jamie was both much admired for his baby cuteness, and for his being absolutely good throughout. He napped in the stroller, didn’t fuss, consumed two bottles … and was so exhausted by effort of being cute for the entire day that he slept that night from about six PM until past nine on Sunday morning. Wee Jamie is coming along, in his development. I insist that there is nothing to worry about, in missing some of the development benchmarks or hitting them late, which is the pediatrician’s concern. It is my adamant belief that he is about a month behind the expectations because he is a boy, stubborn and reluctant to develop, and another month because he was delivered three weeks before full term, at barely five pounds and a bit. He smiles for my daughter and I, a smile which is all over his face, he is of late entranced with toys which rattle, make crunchy sounds, and musical notes, he has discovered and been entranced by his fingers and hands, and his reflection in one of the toy units. He rocks back and forth from side to side, when laid on my daughter’s bed. Turning over is nearly within his grasp, we think – and he can almost sit up unaided for almost a minute at a time. He also seems to enjoy watching videos, especially the series Shaun the Sheep. He sleeps mostly through the night, after his 5 PM bath, and the bottle which follows – which is a great relief to both of us.
We took a break on Saturday – almost the first seriously cool autumn day – after the Daughter Unit finished prepping at her real estate broker’s office for a property showing on Sunday afternoon. She was home by afternoon, and that was when I told her that the Catholic parish beyond the green belt behind our house was having their fall festival. All morning, I had listened to the sounds of a live band or music on the public address system, and I could look out the kitchen window and see the pavilions set up in the parking lot, and the crowds of people moving from booth to booth. St. H—‘s has staged their yearly event regularly, and we have checked it out frequently: many of our close neighbors attend services there regularly. To our amusement when we heard about this – as well as the amusement of that friend who reported it to us, the parish priest there once preached a sermon on the topic of adapting to new circumstances and specifically mentioned our rooster, Larry Bird, who’s crowing the priest could hear across the green belt. More »
So, I was watching Youtube videos, mostly to amuse Wee Jamie, the Grandson Unit, as he sits propped up in my lap – we are attempting to keep him awake and amused during the day so that he will sleep for a good portion of the night. I found this video, about antique historic home renovation, wherein the couple who purchased a historic Victorian went through the room where all the unwanted detritus from the previous owners were stashed in tatty boxes, ancient suitcases.
The couple went through the room full of junk left over from the owners of the next of kin and rejects from the estate sale, looking for treasure, or at least, interesting relics of modest value … and one of the assortments they found was stuff consigned to a trash bag – a disintegrating photo album stuffed with seventy-year old pictures and documents to do with a first brief engagement of the wife of the previous owner to a naval aviator. The engagement took place during WWII and ended when the fiancé was lost at sea during a naval aviation action. There were the photographs, letters, certain documents, attesting to the existence of the doomed romance: a portion of two lives – possibly all that was left of one, all wrapped up in a single bag.
It all reminded me of several members of my own family – that all of their lives were summed up in a handful of pictures, documents and bits of this or that, and fading memories, as the people who knew them the best passed away themselves. There was a small, cheap suitcase which held the bits and pieces of my Uncle Jimmy’s nineteen years; the olive-green wool serge blouse and trousers of his US Army Air Corps uniform, a scrapbook he kept, full of newspaper and magazine cuttings, which were equal thirds divided between the war, news about aviation and various big bands, a small black pocket diary for 1941, which mostly documented the movies and big bands that he went to see, and the friends that he hung out with. For December 7, the entry was “War” with three exclamation points. There were a few other items in the suitcase which I don’t remember. My brother Alex has the diary, possibly the scrapbook, too. The rest likely burned in the 2003 fire which took down my parents’ retirement home, along with just about all the other relics and things which Mom and Dad inherited from their respective parents.
Of Great-Aunt Nan, I have an autograph book, full of messages from her friends, pictures of her in her WAAC uniform, a tiny “Ruptured Duck” service pin and a couple of other things. Nan lived a peripatetic life in small rented apartments. She traveled the world; some of her souvenirs also gravitated to me; some silver bracelets, a couple of tiny dolls which serve as Christmas ornaments. Of her older half-brother, Will, who perished on the Somme in 1916, there is even less remaining – copy of a single picture of Nan and Will. Nan herself was the last person living who remembered Will at first hand. Mom will be the last one, save for some childhood friends of the same vintage who remember her brother.
In the end, that’s all that most of us ordinary people leave – memories in the minds of those who knew us, a few faded pictures and entries in various public and private records.
Much to the horror of progressive school boards, teachers and administrators everywhere, the parents of kids in public schools are becoming increasingly irate at various flavors of poison being mainlined into their kids: the imposition of Critical Race Theory – or whatever it is being called this week in order to deflect criticism – mask mandates and inappropriate sex education which amounts to the sexual grooming of K-12 students. Or what is even worse; schools tolerating, excusing, and covering up lawless behavior committed by students of the favored minority group o’the month. The simple fact is that normal parents are practically guaranteed to go berserker on anyone or anything which threatens harm to their child. This seems to come as a surprise to school administrators. More »
It’s one of those things which I was always mildly aware of for decades, mostly through the medium of novels with an English setting … but now it has become painfully and bitterly obvious that there is an American class system, it’s malignant. Here, we had always prided ourselves on being relatively class/caste fluid, a place where one might go from rags to riches through striking it rich, developing a better mousetrap, investing cannily, and still be on the same social level as ‘old money’. This new divide is bitter, hostile, and possibly lethal. It’s the social and political authoritarians, who crave power over the rest of us, pitted against the working and middle classes – those who have a degree of control over our own lives, enough income to be at least tenuously comfortable, the leisure and energy to take part in public matters, even if only in a small way. The middle class have the effrontery to believe that yes, we ought to be able to control our own lives, rather than have every aspect controlled by the authoritarians.
The outlaying suburb where I live began being developed from open land on the far north-east sector of San Antonio in the late 1970s or early 1980s, as nearly as I can judge – a rolling tract of meadows, dotted with oak trees – many of which still survive, and cut through with a small creek feed by small natural seeps and springs. Most of the older houses are small tidy bungalows, although one segment of older houses in the development are a bit larger, and on lots considerably larger than the bare quarter acre or smaller. Few houses are rentals – most are lived in by owners; a good range of small young families, working professionals and retirees.
The development went through several different development companies, or so I have been told – the last of them was still filling in empty lots when I bought my house in 1995; there were still two model homes, and a construction trailer parked on a lot at the top of the hill for some years after that. Given the natural run of things, a lot of the older homes have been remodeled; owners have upgraded from the original contractor-grade fixtures, and a violent hailstorm in 2006 or so ensured that practically everyone got a new roof. A handful of houses now have the metal roofs, which cost about two-thirds more than the usual run of asphalt tile.
But the main thing that I have noticed lately are the colors that houses are painted. The series of development companies seem to have had a pattern book of house plans for a vaguely neo-Palladian/mid-Victorian stick-built one and two-story houses with various degrees of brick siding, ranging from all the way around in brick to just a few ornamental pillars on the corners. There seem to have been about twenty or thirty basic designs, and about the same number of colors of brick … and most homeowners had the exterior of their house painted in something that match the prevailing shade of the brick trim. Which came down to a neighborhood palette of colors exploring the whole exciting and vivid range of off-white, creamy-beige, yellowy-beige, beige-brown, pinky-brown, plain old brown-brown, and various shades of grey. A few non-conformists ventured daringly into houses painted in various shades of blue, from navy-blue to a cheery Caribbean light blue with white trim. But the iconoclasts – ah, yes; we iconoclasts broke away decisively from fifty-shades of neutral beige conformity! Our houses are painted green; shades of green ranging from light green, through olive, and into leaf-green! And they look very nice, and stand out, making easy for strangers to locate them, too, although I have my doubts about the taste of the family who went with brilliant Kelly green and yellow trim.
In noting a pair of interesting and sort-of-related developments this last week, I am wondering if they are an indication of just how deeply angry ordinary Americans of a deplorably conservative bent are with the panjandrums who provide our entertainment, of the pro-sports and movie varieties. The first is the fact that ratings for the NBA finals are cratering, and other pro sports aren’t very far behind. The Commie Crud probably is discouraging physical attendance at games, for sure, and ostentatious displays of partisanship for Black Lives Matter on the part of players have definitely ruined any pleasure in watching games for viewers who just want to forget about politics and protest for a while. It’s also a very bad look for well-compensated and privileged Black players – a good few of whom are not precisely paragons of gentlemanly and law-abiding behavior themselves – to go on national television openly expressing solidarity with an assortment of Black thugs, addicts and criminals who have had fatal encounters with various police forces in the last couple of years.
Black lives may indeed matter, but it certainly doesn’t look as if the lives of Black business owners, Black police officers and random innocent Black citizens caught in exchanges of lead disagreement between Black gangsters matter don’t seem to matter very much at all to the most outspoken BLM supporters in various sports. We suspect that the lives of White citizens are valued even less, although one might think that the money paid by White fans for season tickets, sports memorabilia and product endorsements might earn at least a little apolitical courtesy. It would appear not … and sportsball fans of all colors are abandoning the stadiums, fanship and broadcast games with alacrity. It might be that professional players of some sports might have to have a second job to support themselves in the off-season, unless the Chinese fans and endorsement dollars keep them in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.
Once to ev’ry man and nation Comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth and falsehood, For the good or evil side; Some great cause, some great decision, Off’ring each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever ‘Twixt that darkness and that light.
– James Russell Lowell
So the first shots in the shooting war have been fired, to the surprise of practically no one who has been following civic matters over the last six months. Admittedly, that the first would be fired in Kenosha, of all places – that’s a bit of a surprise. Although it isn’t at all startling that a Trump supporter would be gunned down on the streets of Portland by an Antifa thug shortly thereafter, to resounding cheers of approval. The hateful rhetoric and the violence against property has been ratcheting up and up, as has the violence against persons. At this juncture, bullets are merely a short step. For at least two people – Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha and Michael Reinoehl in Portland, the choice to pull a trigger has been made, and made irrevocably, whether for good reasons or bad. (It is somewhat ironic, to read of this linked story, of progressive activists sniveling about the presence of “self-appointed†vigilantes being tolerated by local police, harshing the mellow of all those justifiably indignant progressive protesters, whose street protests have, unfortunately and most mysteriously, turned into orgies of arson and looting.)
This last weekend, I had a tiny and depressing demonstration about the facile nature of local news – the news making machinery behind the popular song as the pop song used to go. I did local news-gathering myself as an in-house broadcast professional, doing a daily radio news program for Armed Forces Radio, Seoul Korea edition. I know how the pudding is made; have the basic framework for the story, go out and talk to people for the bits that fill in the story already mentally mapped out in your mind – and go and do it again the next day, and the day following. Daily news is sausage; stuff that casing with whatever the story requires, a judicious combination of meat or filler.
There was a house fire last Sunday afternoon in our neighborhood – the first I knew of it (since I was working the final edit of Luna City #9) was when the Daughter Unit flung open the door, saying that a nearby house was on fire, that the dogs from the house were running loose on the street, and could I bring some doggie treats and help everyone catch them?
“…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…†“The consent of the governed†– and what a concept, hey? And outlined in our very own Declaration of Independence. That the government has authority only as far as those it governs permits, allows or tolerates; a notion which seems to have escaped the more stubbornly authoritarian among us, such as the governors of certain states: among them Gavin “Gruesome†Newsom, of California, the Unspeakable Kate Brown of Oregon, Gretchen Witmer, the Grand Karenator of Michigan, J.B. “Jabba the Hutt†Pritzker of Illinois, Ralph Northam, the Baby-Killer of Virginia and the weaselly and nipple-pierced autocrat of New York, Andrew “Missed It By That Much!†Cuomo. All the above-listed, and a good few others of lesser notoriety and office went on an authoritarian kick: “Close all the things!†seemed to be their rallying cry, after first ignoring the first warning signs of the Wuhan Coronavirus, aka the Chinese Commie Crud, and then losing their damned minds when the National Establishment Media lost theirs.
Well, I have to say that social distancing – or even more pronounced
social distancing than is normal for me – is letting me get stuff done around
the house. The Daughter Unit has work obligations, and a social life of sorts, which
the Great Wuhan Coronavirus Panic of 2020 has not yet impacted to any degree.
We stocked up at the beginning of the month, topped up over the weekend, so
there is nothing I particularly need for projects at the moment. The gym has
closed for two weeks – and here was a place which routinely sanitized for your
protection anyway. We walked the dogs energetically this morning, in place of
an hour on the elliptical, and then the Daughter Unit went off to her place of
work, assisting her employer with sorting out their personal and professional
expenses for the year. It turns out today that the IRS will generously grant us
another ninety days to file, due to the Great Wuhan Coronavirus Panic. Well, it’s
a very ill wind indeed that blows no one any good.
I may eventually have to go to Lowe’s for wallpaper paste, and some more paint rollers. The new back door awaits installation now, being painted on all sides, so I moved on to the trim around the hallway doors, and the underside of the attic space access ladder. When the new and toweringly efficient HVAC system was installed some years ago, replacing the decrepit and leaking original contractor-grade system, they put in a brand new ladder and a heavy wooden panel covering it into the hallway ceiling – and I never got around to painting it. So that is done, and tomorrow I will haul in the tall ladder and do the trim around it. I watered the garden, and planted some lettuce, and an assortment of basil seeds. We already have garden tomatoes, by the way – from some starts in 2-inch pots that I bought last fall and protected through the winter, and a wayward plant left over from last year – and the first couple of cuttings of spring salad greens, from seeds I planted early last month. It’s been that warm, you see.
Laundry – done sheets, and blankets. What an onerous chore was
lifted off the shoulders of women, with the invention of electric washing
machines and dryers? What might have been the weekly-occurring project taking
up several days of brutal labor over a boiler, wringer, and clothesline now
takes a turn in the washing machine and two hours in the dryer. Listen, you
could never sucker me into going into one of those ‘history-house’ projects. I
know very well what doing household laundry in the 19th century involved
– at the very best, sending it all out to an industrial laundry in the big city
and hoping that you got all your stuff back again in one piece, or at least,
the pieces you sent it out in. Plus having to sew on all the buttons again,
unless you had a maid to do all that needlework. The late 20th
century to start of the 21st is the best century ever, thanks to
household electricity and plumbing (not to mention air conditioning!) and don’t
ever you let some freak afflicted with nostalgie de la boue a la The Life Primitive
tell you any different. (An all-over bath once a week. Indeed – spare me.
The ancient Romans had the right idea, as far as frequent bathing went.)
And – I processed the bag of small sweet apples through one
of those patent apple-peeling/slicing gadgets, dropping them into a bath of
water acidulated with a little lemon juice, and put them into the patent dryer
that I am supposed to do a review of, when all those little apple slices are
dried. And only then, did I turn to writing…
I had been half-expecting that San Antonio would cancel or delay the yearly Fiesta; this was made official Friday morning: put off the celebrations until November. Fiesta San Antonio was originally focused on Sam Houston’s victory at San Jacinto – which took place in April of 1836. (Lot of other events being cancelled as well.) Since Wednesday, I had been getting emails from various companies who I do business with, at least enough business for them to have my email: Costco, Sam’s, Petco, Frost Bank, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the Texas author’s group (who have put off the Wimberly book event from June until November)the senior center in Bulverde who hosts a fall craft fair, Lowe’s and Home Depot – I think. All had pretty much the same message: “Aware of the Covid-19 thing, taking every precaution – deep-cleaning, sanitizing, encouraging sick employees to stay home, those who can to work remotely, concern but doing what we can, customers encouraged to wash hands, self-quarantine if feeling ill …†I wonder now if there wasn’t a degree of coordination going on, or if all the corporate public relations departments simultaneously came to the same conclusion. Reasoning? I rather thought the city and the Fiesta Commission would have to do something of the sort, after reading of Disneyland closing, and the LDS temporarily suspending meetings at every level.
I had a client make the final payment on a finished project late this week, and the two potential clients whom we met with earlier in the week are deferring a decision or a start on their projects until later (if ever) so I could take a break from their stuff and do a little bit more on the ongoing house project; a replacement door for the back door into the garage, and one for the second bedroom, which the Daughter Unit currently occupies. We found a quite acceptable metal-reinforced panel door at Home Depot for a reasonable price, but the door for the bedroom is another matter. We were looking for a door with a glass panel in it, for the bedroom is at the end of a hallway with only a single ceiling light, and no natural light from the outside whatever. So – the Daughter Unit has been pushing for the door with a translucent glass panel in it, so as to allow natural light from the bedroom window to seep into the hallway. Only problem was … expense and availability. Such a door is a special order; not in stock at either of the big-box home improvement outlets. Although Wayfair had very nice ones available – the very cheapest of them was $300, which is … a little out of budget. I had to go and order from Home Depot, and the door will be delivered early in May. Until it arrives, my attention will be focused laser-like on the rest of work in the hallway; specifically, covering the ghastly popcorn texture with beadboard panels and cornice molding, and the peel’n-stick lino with cork flooring and new baseboards. (This will be a test run for the look of the rest of the house …) Until I can begin on that, though – I need to replace the narrow set of shelves along the hallway which houses a simply huuuge collection of paperback books. This will involve boxing up all the books, and taking down the metal brackets and MDF planks in order to complete painting that wall, and seeing to a complete-floor-to-ceiling shelf unit just wide enough to accommodate paperback books… no, really, I would rather work on my income taxes …
All the bits and bobs and lists of expenses and profits from sales in various venues, are all tallied up and ready to be delivered to the nice gentleman CPA who has done my income taxes since 1995. What I will do when he retires for real, I have no idea. I can just hope that he is one of those who will carry on out of habit, looking after a diminishing pool of clients, rather like my late business partner did with her clients – and she handed them all onto me, those who survived. I can only hope that my CPA has a younger apprentice handy.
In other news, it seems that springtime has arrived – alas, not in the trees to the back of the property, which is mystifying. The plum and peach are still bare sticks; no blossoms or budding leaves at all. Neither is there any fresh spring growth on the thrice-cursed hackberry weed tree, just the other side of the fence line – a tree which I hate with the passion of a thousand burning suns for the manner in which it scatters nasty, weedy sprouts all across my yard. I hate the hackberry, so I do. If the wretched seedlings aren’t pulled up entire by the time they are about three or four inches tall, they send a tap-root halfway to the center of the earth and defy extermination … only cutting damned thing off at ground level and painting the bleeding stump with a chemical concoction available from the local nursery keeps it from propagating… This weekend, plant out the various seeds and seedlings, as mid-March marks the last possible frost in South Texas. I did get a jump on this, in sheltering some tomato starts through the winter; they are just now bearing a handful of tomatoes ripe enough to eat, and a tub full of spring greens is nicely ready for salads … and that was my week.
Well, you can, sort of – but in the larger sense Thomas Wolfe was right: you can’t physically go home again, not after a good few years have passed. I’ve amused myself, since discovering google earth and street view by looking for and locating the houses that I have lived in, and seeing how they appear now. That is if I have a clear memory of the address, and if the house itself still exists. Which is not always the case: the GI student housing in Santa Barbara was gone shortly after Dad finished the graduate level program at UC-Santa Barbara in the mid-1950ies. I have no notion of where to even begin looking for the house in the backwoods of Beverly Hills (yes, Beverly Hills does, or did have a backwoods, per se.) With unpaved roads, even, although it probably isn’t the case now. The White Cottage at the corner of La Tuna Canyon and Wheatland in the Sun Valley end of the San Fernando Valley is still there, although it looks as if the massive sycamore tree that shaded half of the back yard is gone, and La Tuna Canyon road has been widened and had sidewalks installed, so the fence line has been moved back. I can “walk†up the half-mile of La Tuna Canyon to Vinedale Elementary. The shapes of the hills looming over the canyon, as it funnels back into the Verdugo Hills are still familiar. Many of the roads which ran back from La Tuna Canyon were unpaved then – they’re paved now, it seems.
Mom and I, on the front porch of the GI Bill Student Housing
The next house, which I always thought of as Redwood
house, was at the corner of Hillrose and Rosetta, at that corner of Shadow
Hills which touched the edge of Sunland. Again, a dirt road, and lines of olive
trees which had once been part of an olive orchard. That house is long gone –
it was where the 210 Freeway drops down into Big Tujunga Wash, halfway between
the Ralphs’ on Foothill Boulevard, and the fire station on Wentworth. I can
“walk†from Sunland Elementary to Olive Grove and up a block to Hillrose … and
that’s where the road ends, at a chain-link fence overlooking the highway.
Redwood House, from the hillside below
The house after that, the second house on the left up Cedarvale from Estepa, was curiously only a stone’s throw from the White Cottage, geographically. Not by road, though – it was a drive of at least half an hour between the two, going around through two different canyons. It’s been remodeled, extensively from when we lived there, and the new owners cut down most of the trees around the house. We liked the trees for the shade, but now the view is spectacular, or so I can judge from street view. The pool is still there, but I can’t see if the well still exists. There was a small spring/seep in the hillside, and a small well which never dried out entirely. I lived there from the age of sixteen, until I enlisted in the Air Force. My parents sold that house when my youngest brother finished high school and decamped to Northern San Diego County.
In the driveway of Hilltop House: Little Brother, Dad, the family station wagon and Mom.
I think the barracks where I lived at Misawa AB is
gone; that whole base was revamped when the F-16 wing moved in. I can’t even begin
to find building in the R housing area, out the POL gate where I rented the
little sliver of apartment. That whole area has been revamped. The Wherry
duplex in the enlisted housing area at Mather AFB where we lived for a year –
that’s all gone. It looks like all very upscale condos, now. That was a very
bare-bones kind of place; conblock walls, industrial linoleum on the floor, and
metal cabinets in the kitchen. I had no furniture other than a rattan rocking
chair, a couple of book cases, and my daughter’s crib when we moved in, but by
the time we moved on, I had managed to purchase a single arm chair, an
upholstered small sofa, a round wooden table and two chairs. There was a
trailing rose bush by the front door. The housing office inspector gave me
grief for trying to train it up the porch supports. This experience and the chore
of cleaning that place before checking out of that base cured me of any desire
to live in base housing. Uncle Sam is a sucky landlord.
The barracks at Sondrestrom AB in Greenland is still there; they’ve jazzed up the grey concrete slabs with red and white stripes, and green paint, and put a modernistic entryway to what was the dining facility; not much has changed with all that, at least on the surface. Looks like there are some restaurants, and a B&B, but the general aspect is still gritty grey dust, and bare rock mountains looming above. As we used to say grimly to each other: it’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there. In the winter – when it was midnight-dark for most of the day with perhaps a pale twilight at mid-day, it was an amazing and unearthly sight; to come down the hill from the AFRTS station, and see the whole base lit by glowing yellow lights. In the dry arctic air, the vents from the buildings filled the head of the fjord with billowing golden clouds of water vapor.
For three years after that, we lived in a second-floor
apartment on a corner in suburban Athens; a narrow balcony ran around two sides
of the apartment, which took up the whole of a single floor, at the
intersection of Knossou and Delphon.
From the windows on the street side, we could look out at the Saronic
Gulf and the perfect triangular island of Aegina; it looks like they have built
another three or four story apartment block across the street, so likely there
is no chance of that same view from the apartment today. The little tile-roofed
villa across the road in the other direction is still there, but the empty lot
which was next door, in which an elderly man kept chickens and rabbits and a
bit of a garden with lemon trees, has been replaced by another three or four
story apartment block. But the building itself looks well-kept; whoever is
living in the second-floor apartment has a series of nice plants in pots along
the balcony.
Spain: the place where we lived the longest until we
settled in Texas. I had no taste for a high-rise city apartment, which was all
that was on offer, until the friend who was helping me house hunt said, “Let’s
go see if there’s anything in San Lamberto…†This was a complex of duplexes and
low-rise apartment buildings outside the city, which once had been American
base housing, but now was in private ownership. There was an empty unit
available for a reasonable rent, at the corner of what is now Calle Placido
Domingo and Calle C. A ground-floor unit with a garden, and a shaded terrace.
It is barely recognizable, now, although the two palm trees are still there and
thriving. The new owners added a swimming pool, a small addition where I used
to stack wood for the fireplace outside the dining area window, and a covered
shelter for a car. The low wall and pillars are still there, but they have put
in dark green fencing panels above, and the lawn looks a little better than
when I lived there. My daughter went from kindergarten to the sixth grade in
the time we lived there. I tried tracing the route that I usually drove from
San Lam, past the Spanish regional airport to the Garripinellos gate, but again
– too much has been changed. It used to be a narrow wandering country road; now
there’s some fairly substantial interchanges.
The little white and grey house in the middle of the
block of Jefferson between 36th and 37th was the perfect
small house. I wish I could have owned it, so that I could have fixed it up properly.
A perfect dolls’ house, with a big window on either side of the front door, and
a long garden in back, with hedges so thick on either side that the lights of
other houses could barely be seen in summer. Lilacs along one side, a row of
apricot trees on the other, a bearing cherry tree, a shed where we might have kept
chickens, a green lawn and a garden plot which I managed to rototill for two
summers. In the spring, lilies of the valley came up at the edge of the front
walk … we were there for two and a half years. The sun came up in the morning
over the iron-grey wall of the Wasatch front, and in the afternoon, light poured
in through the back of the house through an enormous picture window which gave
on the yard. Paradise. I am still angry at the assignment detailer for my
career field, who did not send me back there; this after hearing for years how
they would reward you for years overseas by making certain that your last
assignment before retiring was to the base where you most wanted to be. The
house looks good, though: the present owner has taken down that cheap metal
awning over the porch, and put in a planter and a new set of steps where the
front porch used to be, and taken out the ragged hedge which formerly bisected
the lawn.
The Jefferson St. House when I lived in it – in winter
Korea: a year in a barracks building, across the road
from the Navy Club at Yongsan Army Infantry Garrison. It looks as if that
building isn’t there, as far as I can see. The whole garrison has relocated to
Camp Humpreys, but the Dragon Hill Lodge still exists, as a recreation center
and hotel run by MWR. No luck in tracing anything of my route to work at AFKN,
on the hill above the main PX.
The one home that I most deeply regret loosing was not
a home which I lived, although my daughter did, during the year that I spent in
Korea; that was Mom and Dad’s retirement place, the house that Dad first
designed and oversaw building on a rocky knoll with a view down into the Guajito,
in the hills above Valley Center, Northern San Diego County. They spent five
years doing this, having initially expected to get it done in three, but had a
marvelous time anyway. When we came home between tours in Spain (having saved
the government a bomb of money through signing on to a second tour in place, so
we had a free round-trip home as a reward) the house was coming down the home
stretch, and we shared the RV with Mom, Dad, and their dogs. It was far enough
along that we celebrated Christmas in the house, among the sheets of drywall
stacked up in the dining are – drywall which Dad would teach me to hang and mud.
Mom designed and laid out the garden – and when the house burned in the Paradise
Mountain Fire in 2003, Mom and Dad moved into another RV on the site and built
it all again, with improvements. (They hired out all the tough jobs that Dad
had done, first time around.) We made a road trip from Texas to California most
years. And then Dad died, suddenly in 2010. Mom didn’t want to leave the place
they had shared, although … we all worried about her being there alone with the
dogs. My youngest brother even brought up how risky it was, only to be slapped
down. A few years later, his fears were realized when Mom fell and injured her
back so severely that she was paralyzed from the shoulders down. Their house
had to be sold, of course. My sister, who took over care of Mom, needed to have
her own house renovated to accommodate a semi-paralyzed invalid. Originally, we
were all four supposed to inherit a quarter share of it, and I entertained thoughts
of buying out my brothers’ and keeping the property as a kind of family compound.
Not to happen. I used the proceeds from the sale of my own California real
estate to fix up the current Chez Hayes. Likely, I will never return to California.
But I look at the view from the dead-end road past Mom and Dad’s house, and
follow the dirt road back, looking at all the places that we went past, and
think of the view over the Guajito, of how I would run on the dirt roads in the
early morning, and the quail pattering through the thicket by the gate because
Dad was in the habit of throwing out seed for them, the bends in the Woods
Valley Road, the stench from the chicken farm at the foot of the last leg of
road up to Mom and Dad’s…
It doesn’t look like the new owners have done very
much, at least, not that we can see from the road view. But the owners of the
next property over seemed to have established a nursery; greenhouses, and sheds
and all. The previous owner of that place had let it go to wrack and ruin;
basically returning to nature after the fire, save for messing around incompetently
with an earth-mover on weekends – to the detriment of the watershed down into
Mom and Dad’s driveway.
My daughter looked at the satellite view, and said, “Don’t
say anything of this to Mom.â€
We finished taking down the Christmas tree and the holiday ornaments over the weekend, and having gotten into an organizing mood, we decided that it was time to tackle two more household locations in series need to a good reorganizing; the spice cupboard, and the pantry. The pantry is a tall cupboard about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth. A couple of years ago we ripped out the original wooden shelves – which were deep and impractical – and put in narrow wire shelving all along the back,
The reorganized and edited pantry
The renovated spice cupboard
up to the very ceiling, and even narrower wire shelving along the sides, and on the back of the door. This let us be a good bit more organized with the staples, canned and packaged goods, but … well, it had gotten to the point where we couldn’t find anything, or we had three or four containers of stuff because we bought more when we couldn’t find it. I mean, really – four packages of fajita seasoning, and three of celery salt? And to our hideous shame and embarrassment, some of the packaged mixes, for bread, cakes and frosting were more than four years past their ‘best by’ dates. Bread mixes definitely lose their mojo very shortly after their expiration date; this we know for certain, through experience. And there were some home-canned items that … we just couldn’t. They were on a high shelf at the back, and I didn’t even want to salvage the jars, the contents looked so nasty.
Set to work on the spice cupboard, first; helped by a set of 12 4-ounce lidded spice jars gotten through Amazon Vine for review. The set came with a small collapsing funnel, as an extra. Sorted, amalgamated, repacked, and a half dozen jars of spices actually thrown away – I mean, I could not remember how long ago I bought that little jar of dried fennel; not that I needed it any more as I have a large fresh fennel plant going great guns in the garden. And the powdered horseradish root absolutely has to be something that I packed in the last move. In 1994. (A couple of years ago I found a jar of Spanish saffron on the shelves. From Alcampo, the Spanish equivalent of Walmart. We rotated out of Spain at the end of 1991…)
And then to the pantry, which went rather faster than I had expected – but oh, my – there was a lot of stuff in there. A nice portion of the more-than-time-expired baking mixes went straight to the trash; the Daughter Unit and I felt rather bad about that. All those news stories about how Americans (or whatever) throw away so many pounds of food – eleventy!!! Well, we threw away our yearly share in one fell swoop, but honestly – most of the packages and jars had best-by dates of at least four years ago and were purchased from the ‘severely marked-down’ shelves at HEB … and if we hadn’t gotten around to using them in the last four years, then the odds were that we would never do; why prolong the agony? There went three or four bottles of cooking sauces, and a Fisher & Wieser blueberry sauce that we had never found anything to do with, and otherwise we love Fisher & Wieser; all the other F&W products were reprieved, and the Daughter Unit sorted them into ‘marinades/sauces’ and ‘salad dressing’ categories on the shelf.
At the end of this exercise, we had a bit more shelf-space (enough for the eight-pack of canned diced tomatoes from Costco) and the Daughter’s stash of exotic teas and her favored brand of coffee. With luck, we might actually be able to find stuff in the pantry … and the Daughter Unit has sternly warned me to consider what we might have in the pantry when planning the menus over the next couple of months.
Every couple of years, I am driven by circumstance, reflection, ambition … something! To look back at the year so nearly done with and look ahead at what I’d like to get done in the new one. Pretty much everything that I hoped to get done in 2019 has been accomplished, or nearly accomplished, as I wrote a year ago, “…for 2019: new bathroom, cleared-out garage, and a size 10/12 in jeans again. Piece of cake, eh?â€
Two out of three isn’t bad and the size in jeans is currently about a 14/16; say two and a half goals accomplished. The renovation of the master bath was completed by late spring and now almost completely paid for, the garage is mostly cleared out and organized – especially as I put some of the contents on Nextdoor for sale, which funded some Christmas gift-purchasing frivolity. In addition to this, I got the two Luna City collections done and launched, both print and eBook versions. But I did not get the new garage door installed – that must wait on the new year. That will be the first of the goals for 2020; getting a functioning garage door. The existing door was, I believe, either installed by the people whom I bought the house from in 1995, or even one installed by the original builder of the house late in the 1980s. In any case, it’s falling apart. Constructed of wood and composition panels, it is so much decayed that much of it might actually be broken apart by hand. Installation of a new door is not something which Neighborhood Handy Guy wants to venture upon – rather dangerous with the necessary springs and cables, as I understand it, so I must call on the services of a small company who did the same for a near neighbor. In a fit of efficiency, I asked for, and received their business card, and it has been magneted to the refrigerator door ever since. Being able to put one of the cars inside the garage, and to do workshop stuff inside the remaining portion is the main household goal.
The second goal is to finish the Civil War novel, That Fateful Lightning, and two Luna City episodes during 2020. Being that I have committed to Third Thursday in July at the Court Street Coffee as the launch for That Fateful Lightning, and for Luna City #9 means … well, I have found that nothing is quite so inspiring to literary output as a deadline. Which gives me the rest of the year for Luna City #10, and yes, there is plenty of material to work on in that regard.
There are some secondary household goals for 2019. In no particular order of importance – which means they will be sorted as soon as the bargains for required supplies and elements present themselves, those goals are:
1) Start on replacing windows and the patio slider door. All of these existing are original to the house, and as the writers of Victorian novels would say – are in a much-decayed condition. The window replacements will mean replacing and painting the window trim boards, and patching/replacing the siding. The most-weather-exposed sides of the house – the western-facing – are the worst-affected. Fortunately, this is a small house, and those aspects are relatively small and well-within the abilities of Neighborhood Handy Guy, who also has a small sideline in exterior painting. And I have the veteran discount at the Big Box Home Improvement stores. (Both of them.) Eventually, probably when just about all the windows are replaced – a total painting of the exterior will be involved but depending on how much it costs for the windows, probably not until 2021. The Daughter Unit and I did the last exterior paintjob; the long-term plan is that I will pay Neighborhood Handy Guy to do it. Of this s**t I am too old and tired to do any more. I’ll count this job as well-begun with the worst two windows and the patio slider door done and dusted.
2) Replace the Chicken Abode – likely with something moderately-priced or on sale from Tractor Supply – and add a couple of more laying hens. The senior surviving hen has stopped laying, and the coop which we bought at Sam’s Club is falling apart. In the spring we will get three young pullets from the source where we purchased the original Three Chicken Stooges and thank you for a guarantee that none of them will be a young rooster. We already have one of those, and while he is being quite mellow and not noisy in the early morning any more, I wish not to endure the crack-of-dawn serenade.
3) Sort out more of the garden: a better garden of raised beds and containers for vegetables and herbs in the sheltered space behind the front gate, and to install a paved patio area opposite the front door. I’ve managed to nurse some discount tomato plants thus far through the last couple of chills, and some of them have blossoms on them. Hope springs eternal in the gardener’s mind; a triumph of hope over experience, at least as far as tomatoes are concerned. We already have the benches and a ceramic patio table, thanks to the generosity of Amazon Vine; all that waits on this project is a bunch of pavers, and a solar-powered water feature. Something with water playing over pebbles in a ceramic pot, cascading down to a hidden reservoir is my own particular dream.
Well, those are my goals for 2020; I believe that at least three-fourths of them are doable. Progress will be posted here, and on the FB page
Well – actually two days in the marketplace, one day spent selling and the other buying, out of our gains in the first. This first day was spent at a craft market in Bulverde – which, after a rocky beginning a few years ago – now has a good crowd of regular Christmas shoppers, looking for the hand-made and unique. (The very first year that we did this market, I spent all of my takings on the way home, at a nearby place selling junk cleared out of sheds and barns. I happened to spot a rain-sodden box of blue and white china plates, platters, and cups-with-saucers, which apparently once had been someone’s best china setting. I wanted a good set of plates to use for every-day … and yes, I did very well out of that sale. We have used them ever since, and only two of the plates are slightly chipped.)
We did pretty well at the sales; a lot of shoppers admired the American Girl doll clothes, lamented that they had no need of purchasing them – but enough did. Oddly enough – the three mermaid costumes left over from from last years at the San Marcos Mermaid Splash market sold. Also one of the Hispanic Folklorico costumes and both of the Civil-War era dress and pinafore combinations. A good few purchasers remarked that my prices were very good – which is nice to hear, although some of the outfits which sold were actually made from fabric that I bought … rather than scraps from the bale of leftovers resulting from years of home sewing. The Daughter Unit advises that I ought to make a few more contemporary outfits. Like – nightgowns, PJs and bunny and kitten slippers.
Well enough pleased with the day and our takings, we immediately went out to spend some of it, on Sunday morning; beginning with late brunch at Ikea in the cafeteria, and a quick peruse of certain departments. To our amazement, there is a little corner tucked away in the soft goods (bedding and pillows) for fabric by the yard. On a previous visit, the Daughter Unit discovered the bargain section, for slightly dinged, shop-worn, or extraneous display items – and in the very last leg of the long trip through Ikea, the real purpose of our visit. They have seasonal, and holiday items there now; one of those items is marzipan! I’ve always like marzipan, but quite often the stuff you get in stores here is old, dried-out and distinctly stale-tasting. Ikea has it stocked now in the little food area, in one of the freezer cases, which explains why it probably tastes so good. We bought four bricks each and set aside a place in the garage freezer. Very likely, the marzipan stash will be added to, as long as Ikea carries it.
On to Trader Joe’s; with Thanksgiving in two weeks, and another market next weekend, time to make plans. The Daughter Unit had her eye on another seasonal special – a frozen brined turkey breast, which will do very well for us. Final stop – the HEB, for a few more bits and bobs. The thing is that neither of us really likes the traditional Thanksgiving side dishes, and especially not when left-over. OK, a bit of home-made sausage and bread stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy … but that green bean casserole is just plain disgusting, and sweet potatoes doused in syrup and topped with marshmallows is a culinary crime against humanity. We like a medley of oven-roasted Brussel sprouts, red onion and kielbasa, and all of that is already in hand. So that was my weekend – and yours?
So this is what I get for being a ‘seat of the pants’ plotter – having to set aside some really nice scenes and conversations, just because my research into the time-line of the movement to abolish slavery in America in the decades before the Civil War suggested that my lead character would be coming really late to the party, in developing serious abolition sympathies if I started in the year that I tagged for the first draft. Miss Minnie Vining, blue-stocking Boston intellectual, abolition lecturer and war nurse (as was suggested in Sunset & Steel Rails) would rightfully have been marinated in abolition sympathies from about the 1830ies on. Having an epiphany and coming to the abolitionist fray in the mid-1850ies would have been … not quite credible. In other words, very late to the party … so I had to adjust that epiphany back about fifteen years, which meant going back and tweaking certain details to make everything fit. Ages of characters, even the existence of a character, development of technologies, topics of conversation to do with current events – like before the Mexican-American War, instead of after, way before the Gold Rush, instead of after, ascertaining that certain developments were in place … (note to self – Richmond-Fredericksburg Railway; check on that, too…)
All this plot points also must jibe with what I had briefly about the Boston Vinings mentioned in Sunset and Steel Rails, and in Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart also. This is a hazard of ‘pantsing’ background elements – of throwing in relatively unconsidered details for a bit of color and corroborative detail – and then after having to make a well-developed narrative out of those casually-mentioned little scraps. I did not sit down and write the Texas Barsetshire series chronologically from earliest (1825) to the latest (1900, with brief afterwards set in 1918), mapping out the lives of each and every character, nor did I particularly plan to have minor characters in one book take front and center later on in another. The Texas Barsetshire novels grew organically – from the middle, and in both directions, backwards and forwards in time – starting with the two German emigrant families (the Steinmetz/Richter) and the American-established Becker families. The Vinings – both the Boston and the Texas branches were grafted on later, when I needed to establish the marital woes of Margaret Becker. And now this latest WIP means that I have to expand on the Boston Vinings, along with lashings of materiel leading up to the Civil War … and keeping in mind that the next book after that, which is just now beginning to take shape, will reach back to the Revolution, and the doings of the Boston Vinings and a young Hessian soldier named Heinrich Becker …
Yes, it would be sensible to write it all in chronological order – but it’s much more fun this way. Complicated, but fun!
