We now return you to the 20th century.

This computer has multiple problems -- yes, again, and ever since I bought it -- but anyway, it has a bunch of dysfunctions, including no sound. Multiple attempts to fix it -- my repair guy was here for 4 hours -- have failed.

I'd gotten awfully used to MP3 convenience. Now: no carefully compiled playlists. No easy clicking, no uninterrupted 90+ minutes of music at a time. Worst of all -- no YouTube! Larry is fine with my using his computer, but since everything at his desk is set up for a left-handed person who likes s-l-o-w mouse scrolling 8~) I won't do that every day.

But I can access music to work by, using old fashioned 20th century technology, CDs, a player, and my headphones. CDs not only have a full, rich sound -- MP3's are cruddy, really -- but many I bought in the 1980's still play. There's a lot to love about music that's not disposable.


This also got me to dust and organize my bookcase to make room for the boombox.

I really would like to get Sindows out of my life forever. We've already gone un-Window Shopping at the local Apple dealer, and I'm thinking on a Mac for next year, but right now I can still work and write on this machine, so that purchase can wait until the other bugs --- and there ARE others, including no saved log-ins anymore (Yes, I've done all the suggested fixes)-- drive me so insane that I take this thing to my cousins' house on the next Confed'rate Holiday and let 'em fire their cannon at it.

I do not like my computer.

Sanctuary

I hated Junior High School with a passion. When people play games, like "If someone promised you a million dollars, would you ___?" I can say with confidence that, while I would take a million dollars to relive some unpleasant things in my life, there is one thing that even a million could not induce me to go through again and that was junior high. I was a target of bullying on grand scale. I'm not sure why. I was from the right side of the tracks and wasn't particularly odd looking, though I was somewhat fashion challenged.

12-14 is a cruel age. I wasn't alone by any means. A kid who exudes shyness and tendency to submit will kind of attract it, like blood attracts sharks, and the structured environment of elementary school had given way to the looser movement of shifting classrooms which allowed the meanest people free-er reign for bullying others.

Two days ago we were in Charlotte visiting Cousin Emily, and she asked me to go with her to my old junior high. She was donating to them some posters with vintage photos of the class of 1936, which her dad was part of. I've visited other sites from my youth but never had any desire to go back to that school. It appears in unpleasant dreams often enough. I (smiling) accused Emily of trying to "help" me "confront my demons" which she found hilarious, but we went, sat in the office, handed the old photos to the assistant principal who was a very nice, enthusiastic guy, and Emily said, "Could you give my cousin a nostalgia tour?" while I rolled my eyes.

But, though not particularly nostalgic about the place, I was a little curious to experience it again. Predictably, the school seemed smaller, less intimidating. There were some new buildings. The landscaping was lusher.

And I did remember something good, something I actually wanted to see. The library.

1968 had been a pinnacle of school misery, but at the end of the year, I became aware of an option for the next year. You could be a Library Assistant. It wasn't the hot activity. Hip people who craved authority and power wanted to be Office Assistants. I doubt if they had any power at all, merely got to stand at the desk and say hello to visitors, or staple and photocopy things, and might have had a little fun, but anyway, there was very little competition for library assistant positions and I applied and was accepted for the 1968-69 year.

Taken 8-13-2009

The school library was physically, as well as symbolically, apart from the rest of campus. The building and the walk to it are so much the same that it's almost weird. It's not the library anymore, but used for chorus and band. That shady walkway which ambles down to it, taking you away from the roar of the crowd, has not altered a bit.

Inside, two walls were almost all window and looked on woods as richly green as they are today. As a library in 68-69 it was, not dark, but sort of shady and nice. The librarian was a hip, cool young woman right out of school, who wore miniskirts. We hung around the checkout desk and stamped things and alphabetized cards and stapled stuff and generally had a serene hour a day in that wonderful, quiet little building where no one harassed anyone.

It was really good to see it again. I skipped the classroom buildings and the girls' bathroom where I would spend lunch hours eating crackers, to avoid the harassment of the lunchroom. Most of that is all renovated and doesn't resemble the old days anyway.

OK, OK! Emily was right. Revisiting it was good. Thanks to this delightful place, ninth grade was not as bad as seventh and eighth had been. High school (grades 10-12 in our system) was, actually, comparatively, great. Jerks seemed embarrassed to behave in quite so immature a manner as they had back in junior days, and while school irritated and angered me often, I never feared it again.

Fighting nature

My garden makes kind of pleasant, innocuous blog material, but that's because I avoid telling the parts of the story that are slightly more interesting but definitely more embarrassing.

I'm afraid I'm one of those wackos who took survival measures when Y2K was coming. In 1999 we were still in NJ in our wonderful Victorian house with its nooks and crannies, and I piled canned goods and a huge sack of Sam's Club rice into an odd little closet I kept shoes in. Later, when a local food drive arranged with the postal service for carriers to pick up donations, I dragged the 20(?) pound rice sack out to the porch and our poor mailman hauled it away.

c. August 1997, just after we bought the house.

But, no, I have not entirely changed my nutcase ways, because I honestly think that the ability to provide ourselves with at least some of our own food could become a necessity rather than a hobby. If we never need a food-producing farmette, the kids just might. Or might want one. The current economy being the mess that it is, I wanted to begin my learning process now. This place we're in now is not very good for a sustainable life, but it's fine for a learning laboratory. We'll have some acreage eventually. Why be a novice in 5-10 years?

This is part of the reason why I'm trying things that are more difficult to grow. I like some of the easier crops like lettuce and cukes well enough, but, bottom line, salad holds limited interest for me. I want to be able to raise serious sustenance vegetables that keep better and have more recipe versatility. I'd rather fail more and learn more, than succeed at things I don't care much about. Ideally, I'll have a greenhouse too, and have a small but steady production of salad veggies.

I'm as complete a novice at this as one can be. I've never been into gardening for pleasure. I have to avoid sun, which means getting out there at 6:30 AM to work on it while the yard is still fairly shady. I'm also not a morning person, so this is a radical shift.

I'm also not a detail person. Gardening, especially organic gardening, requires some vigilance and attention to detail. You can't just decide to take a few days off. Nature doesn't.

So I'm not exactly a natural-born gardener. An online friend once told me that if I ever joined her role-playing group, they'd probably dub me The Goddess of Convenience Foods and Take-Out. I have to fight nature, and by that, more than the predators and the weather, i really mean my own nature.

While gardening is kind of calming and satisfying even for my temperament, for me it's more a means to an end, than an end in itself.









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So! I planted my carrots and broccoli almost 2 months ago. We oughta be eating the stuff by now, but neither was the right crop for its location. They didn't die, they didn't grow. They all just sat there suffering in the too-long day of full broiling South Carolina sun.

Both are now in containers. I used to have ornamental trees in these two square planters, years ago. Each crop has a planter now, and both are perking up. Naturally, as soon as I put the carrots into a shadier spot, we've had nothing but cloudy days and downpours. I can move the planters to adjust for weather, so we may get some food out them!

The peppers are happy in the raised bed, though. They love this climate. We harvested 2 and had stuffed peppers, and Larry's (mumble...thriving...mumble) garden produced enough tomatoes for me to make a sauce that looked pink and wimpy, but that had the richest, most delectable flavor... o my! Home grown tomatoes demonstrate the blah-ness of grocery store produce to a mind-blowing degree.

And the rest of my big box garden is now an attempt at, believe it or not, a pumpkin patch. A weird but very sincere pumpkin patch. Larry had a couple plants that needed a spot and I thought I'd try it.

We're also dinking around with pest-discouraging companion plants, which is the reason for the marigolds, and the basil, which you see there to the left, between the pepper plants (and which contributed to my delicious tomato sauce). Nasturtium seeds are in those rectangular planters. Nasturtiums are supposedly good for discouraging certain bugs as well. We'll know a fair amount by the time we've got space for a mini-farm.

I'm learning in fits and starts.

Beware of your credit card company!

I'm sure my readers are all too smart to fall for this little -- I can't call it anything but a scam. But just in case you have not run into this, here's a caution.

If you pay bills online,

WATCH OUT for the date that the website defaults to, as being the "payment date."

Used to be that my credit card company's payment site defaulted to the current business day. ONLY if I logged on after business hours, or on a holiday, or weekend, would the default date flip over, to the next business day. And in fact, no earlier dates could even be clicked on the site.

But those were the Good Ol' Days.

Today I logged on to pay my bill. Just after lunch, at 1:00 PM.

If I had not looked carefully, I would have missed their little deception. My payment date was apparently .... Monday? August 3rd ??!

The bill was due today, and that meant it was about to mark my payment as late.

I thought : "Uh-oh! They've backpedaled the cut-off time to noon instead of 5 PM!"

They have this little drop-down calendar, about the size of a pea, next to the transaction. As mentioned, when their definition of "today" is officially over, that calendar has no previous dates. Your earliest choice is the next day.

But, those little sonuvaguns! (OK, that's not what I really said) ... Today was still coming up as an active option.

I had to arrow back to "Previous month" because, this being the last day of July, it had set itself to its August calendar.

Then I had to choose July 31st.

I paid, and I paid on time. My confirmation said so. July 31st was available all along, but they'd have levied some obnoxious late penalties if I had not noticed their scam and jumped through their little hoops to choose today's date.

Maybe readers are familiar with this practice, but just make sure they haven't snuck it by you !

Katherine

I got this faded and slightly damaged little photo in yesterday's mail, from my same-age cousin, Emily.

Until now, I had never seen a childhood photo of our grandmother. Not one. The most youthful photo I had was this one :


...in which she's certainly over 18, and probably 20-something. She and her sister are the two young ladies on the righthand side of the picture. She's standing, her arm affectionately linked through that of an unknown young man, and her sister is seated in front of them. The other members of this party - no idea who they are!

Of course I knew her only when she was well over 60, but the young lady she is in this outing party photo has always been as familiar as can be, in personality as well as appearance.

Grandmother was charming, witty, bossy, and absolutely NOT someone you lightly chose to cross. I could imagine her easily as that cheerful young woman of the outing photo, in her element -- she and her sister were the Belles of every ball, and she changed not a whit as she aged, loving parties and, as long as she was in charge of things, enjoying the matron role only a little less than she'd enjoyed being young and sought-after.

As Emily and I approached dating age, she once remarked to us, "I can't imagine anything nicer than a nice boy." Remembering that makes me smile.

Grandmother had two sons (Here she is with my dad, who is uncooperatively blurring the photo, 1929 or so):



...but when those sons married and each produced a granddaughter for her within a few weeks, she at last had -- she thought! -- budding debutantes to groom for social success. Our tomboyish ways were a great disappointment to her, and I don't mean that in a particularly cheerful way. I think that, to some small degree, it broke her heart.

Even the shot of her at age 18-22 is "Grandmother." The woman I knew. Someone we all found a bit overpowering, so we fortified ourselves by putting her in a "box" defined by all the family anecdotes: tales of her funny quips, the things she found outrageous, her liking for control. But the childhood photo -- that wide-eyed little girl? That's Katherine, and it's the first glimpse I've ever had of her, and that's kind of scrambling my head. But I'm so SO glad to glimpse her at all.

Bowl of Plenty

This is not even the first harvest. We've enjoyed a couple tomatoes and an earlier Japanese eggplant. We actually just ate them without my blogging them first! OMG!

My garden gets credit for the peppers. The rest come from the gardens under Larry's care.

The gardening books lie. "Carrots are easy" says one book. "Carrots like full sun all day," says another. What I'm learning is that we live in a subtropical area in which the instructions given by most books aren't applicable. The Ortho book puts us squarely in what it calls "zone 8" and the book is wrong. At least along the coast, the Floridian "zone 9" stripe ought to creep upward. A few carrots are eking out an existence in the box planter, but 12 hours of South Carolina sun is way too much for them. I will NOT give up on carrots. I like them. They keep. They're versatile. This is a learning experience! More will be revealed.

Me and The Arts

I tried to take advantage of the cultural opportunities that college gave me -- never mind the uncultural opportunities -- with disappointing results.

Piano 101 wasn't so bad, but I think I needed to study an instrument while I was young, and by "young" I mean 6, not 22. My brain had a lot of trouble with the digital dexterity needed, but I was glad I gave it a try. Embarrassing though it was to plink "Thoughts at Twilight" for a faculty jury, since that was the standard final exam for music classes, I got through it, curtsied as required, and got an A for effort.

Art 101 was another matter. The biggest disaster of my college career. I don't think right for drawing. My brain rejects attempts to translate the 3-D real world into 2 dimensions. I struggled through the class and gave an immense sigh of relief when it ended.

It's kind of miserable to be able to form pictures in one's head and just not be able to realize them on paper (or canvas). But I lucked into living in the digital age, so I have access to Art For The Rest Of Us, i. e., manipulating clip art :





...with a photo program.

And if I were a real artist, I could probably do a better job of even that, since the final product can defy physical reality without my even perceiving it.
My calling this picture "final product" is probably inaccurate, since I'm sure I'll tweak it a lot more before I'm done!

Then it got interesting

Nude. By C. Cosentino

I was up very early shoveling garden dirt, my muscles are sore, I was tired, and I was not in the mood to go to Brookgreen Gardens, or anywhere, but Larry wanted to photograph a particular sculpture, so I decided to fight my general unenthusiasm, take my camera and come along.

A bright, sunny day is actually lousy for picture-taking in Brookgreen. Very little shows to advantage when its own textures are overpowered by sun-dappling. so I didn't fire up the camera in the gardens. But on our way back out, we stopped at the current sculpture show in the indoor gallery and there I found some cool stuff to photograph.
Background: Girl with Sweater. By B. Lucchesi
Foreground: WPA Guitar Girl. By N. Kaz.

Only something was very wrong. The LCD window on my camera blacked out. I could shoot, but I could not see what I was shooting until after I took a picture. Then I would get a playback.

There's a little viewfinder, but -- just to add one more obstacle! -- I was looking at this whole indoor sculpture show through very dark prescription sunglasses, because they were all I'd brought. With the glasses, the view in the finder was too dark and without them, it was too blurry.

I know! I know! 8~) Keep reading.

So to distract myself from freaking out over whether my camera was broken, I decided to play around with shooting through pure guesswork. And that is when things got interesting! No lengthy setups. No framing or fine-tuning. Just click click click, then see what got captured.

Many shots are just what you'd expect -- weird, blurry, a corner of nothing identifiable. But some were pretty cool anyway so here they are -- each picture in this post is exactly as I shot it. Sized down, but not sharpened, cropped, or contrast-manipulated in any way!

This photo is the biggest disappointment because you get no sense at all of the guy's facial expression. The title is Trust. Sculptor: LeaAnn Cogswell. He looks like he's scowling, but he's actually looking sideways and is very worried about something.

[Correction]: Girl with Dark Eyes, by S. Layne.

Projection. By R. Reutimann.

Sumo Wrestling Toads. By S. Worthington

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Once we got back outside I kept it up and did some garden scenery too.





Here (below) is Larry rescuing a large grasshopper, which you can't see because it's now under the leaves.


And yes, I figured out what had happened to my camera. Stuffing it into my purse pushed a button I never use. "DISP." Apparently you can turn the display off. Why anybody would want to, I have no idea, but it sure was a relief to push it again and have the display reappear!

A village Fourth

Murrells Inlet has a nice low-key Fourth of July celebration and the centerpiece each year is the boat parade. Locals decorate their boats with red, white, blue, and often gold drapery and flags, and make a traditional circuit through the marsh.

The time varies from year to year, based on the hour high tide occurs -- this photo was taken at about 6 PM -- and the boats are spaced so far apart that you can't get many in one shot. Actually, if you look beyond the boat in the foreground, you'll see (dimly, I'm afraid, because zooming with my camera fuzzes out the quality) other boats ambling around in the harbor awaiting their turns.

They never come down as far as our neighborhood -- the water isn't deep enough -- but we watch from my parents' porch, in between conversing, laying down placemats, eating fried chicken and just lazing around with (in my case) a Pepsi on the rocks, and a book.

And after dark, fireworks will issue from the same place up the inlet, where a cookout and celebration are going on at the harbor park. We might go out to the front porch and watch them pop above the trees.

Hope everyone else is having as enjoyable a weekend!

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part IV: Marauder

We have a mystery marauder. Something dug my garden out one night. And I mean dug it out.

We managed to trap a raccoon, but that's not the end of the story. Possibly, the garden was raided by a raccoon, but while raccoons will dig, they generally dig holes. This destruction indicated a bigger and a less precise animal, which threw out half the dirt, destroying most of the seedlings.

But another clue is that something bigger and tougher is preying on raccoons. Something big enough to make a thorough meal out of one -- Larry found the few scraps it left -- and to take off the lower leg of this little guy we caught in our trap (who now lives in Brookgreen Gardens).

There are stray dogs around, often abandoned in the state park across the creek. Coyotes have been spotted in the area, though a little further inland. So far. The species of the marauder is still unknown, but I'm in recovery mode with the garden.

I lost all but 2 little carrot seedlings, but they are hanging in there. And so are the peppers; doing well, in fact!

I'm restarting the carrots, this time in starter pots, and fencing the garden when I get them in. Raccoons climb fences, but we also employ cayenne pepper and Critter Ridder [TM]. This is a real learning experience!

No news is bad news

Wow. This is what I get for getting busy and leaving a blog entry in draft mode for a couple of weeks, without doing a final edit and posting it.

2 weeks ago (the draft is dated 6/16), I started a blog entry which, among other things, mocked our local newspaper for what I call the "Baptist Of The Day story." If it keeps the paper alive, I said, then OK, but I think this dumbing down and pandering is killing it, not increasing revenue.

Today the paper took it further, with a new policy to give over the Monday front page to a feature topic. The entire front page. Guess what topic they started with. (It's not featured as heavily on their website : here's the Sun News site.)


You'll need to zoom these, I'm afraid. OK, these articles really could be good explorations of our community and our society, in an appropriate part of the paper. But ... the front page? The whole front page??

My 2-week-old blog entry follows:
--

The local newspaper keeps shrinking and TV news gets stupider, and I watch the changes and the debates about how the public can get the information it needs, but I tend to stay out of them since I have no solutions. But then a related topic that I've always been vocal about pulls me in anyway.

I ran across this kind of nifty website the other day. It's called Banned Books Online, and has links to some (but only selected) famous censored books that are now available, full-text, online. Most are easy to get anyway these days, but I thought it was a great example of what's good about access in the world we live in. And not everything about it is good.

Then I spotted the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Blue Ribbon Campaign button, there at the top, and clicked it.

Library school turned a lot of us into ardent anti-censorship banner-wavers, and in 1981 it was a very cool thing to be a near-absolutist about it. Back then almost anything could be published by somebody somewhere, but access points (libraries, bookstores, mainstream media, any entity that selected what to offer) had more gatekeeper-type control over availability. People had to work a lot harder to find out on their own whether a book, a point of view, an idea, existed, much less to get it in-hand. They were more dependent on our judgment, and it was drummed into us fledgling librarians that libraries had a particularly heavy responsibility to understand and apply the difference between being selective, and censoring.

Once upon a time I would have jumped onto any "anti-censorship" bandwagon that rolled by. But as I read through the Electronic Frontier Foundation site, something stopped me in my tracks.

The first item reads:

You Have the Right to Blog Anonymously. EFF has fought for your right to speak anonymously on the Internet, establishing legal protections in several states and federal jurisdictions, and developing technologies to help you protect you[r] identity. With your support, EFF can continue to defend this right, conducting impact litigation to establish strict standards to unmask an anonymous critic in more jurisdictions.

OK, if bloggers are to act as "citizen journalists" they need to be able to expose corruption and post material that offends, without getting Molotov cocktails thrown through their living room windows. So I read this and I thought, Cool! I can get behind tha--

Wait a minute.

The ability of journalists to protect sources has always been important. But there it is. Are bloggers sources, or are bloggers journalists??

Kind of both (See Item 2), and the question that comes to my mind is: isn't this a conflict of interest? "I can publish allegations like a reporter does.... but I get to hide my identity for my own safety, like a source."

The accuracy and value of information from sources, anonymous or otherwise, depends on their coming through an identifiable, accountable source. "You have it from [Joe Reporter; The Daily Observer; Cable Spews Network] that this isn't just a claim, it's verified." Or, "This is only an allegation, it is NOT verified at this point."

I live in, o gawd, South Care-o-lina. Where, when you find Harlequin [TM] romance readers, you've found active minds.

(See? I'm not a journalist, so I can stereotype to my heart's content. There are educated people and a university and everything around here. You can buy Richard Dawkins and D. H. Lawrence in the bookstore down the road, but if I make this area sound like The Republic of Gilead, some readers really could get an impression that's way-exaggerated, though not entirely falsified.)

I had a talk with a couple of locals the other day as I paid for a sackful of books at a thrift shop. "You must love to read," smiled one very pleasant lady, leaning on the counter. "Yes, I do," was my noncommittal response, since, though I keep too many, I really do list most of them for sale.

The checkout lady contributed: "I hate to read. I quit when I got out of school."

"Me too," agreed counter-leaning lady. "I don't like to read. Except my Bible. I do read my Bible every day."

Larry quietly exited the building, to resist expressing himself.

"That's right," said checkout lady. "I read my Bible."

These are the people who probably still get the newspaper (See? If I were some kind of Citizen Journalist, I'd have thought to ask!) because it's still on the list of Everyday Things People Do. And these are the subscribers whom the Sun News tries to keep by dumbing itself down and down-er, with a Giant Color Picture of Something Unimportant, which takes up most of every front page, and with its pandering to Christianity by means of what I call the Baptist Of The Day story. You can just hear the newsroom briefings: "Got to feature a Christian doing something Christian in every issue! FIND something!"

If these were just smart tactics to keep the paper selling, I'd applaud them, because the paper also puts things that those subscribers will not seek out, but that they very much need exposure to, in front of them every day, and persists in running both points of view on issues. Even as the staff undoubtedly wince when another "You pinko liberals!" cancellation comes in.

But the tactics are not working and the paper keeps shrinking. I mock it, but I shudder to think what we'd do without it.

Because if blog journalists take over the job, my Bible Ladies won't be reading them, but they still vote.

And because there will be a verification problem. Even the smartest, most proactive local reader who seeks out independent online reporting about what our officials and business moguls are up to, will have no way of sorting the good self-appointed journalists from the bad. Some obviously incompetent writers will fall away, but those who can craft prose like a pro will be judged as responsible and trustworthy, unless someone could really call them on facts.

And what the bleep will we do then? The issues this raises go way beyond the blog Bill of Rights, but on that facet of blog journalism, I have to voice serious qualms. Doesn't the top layer -- the user-interface layer -- of news publication have to have a known name and address? If you're going to be a journalist, don't you need to be willing to allow oversight by somebody? If you're a lone self-appointed journalist, even a responsible, truth-seeking one, to whom do you answer?

Liberals and conservatives alike have crossed the line, have believed that getting the public to hold the "right" opinion on some issue was vital, and suppressed or fabricated evidence to make it happen. If other investigators expose your story as fake, how do we find out about it and "fire" you?

These issues are there even if anonymity is not granted to blog journalists, but if it is granted, accountability becomes that much harder. If you won't identify yourself, how much more abuse of reporting power does this allow?

Yet it's undeniable - blog journalists are vulnerable, and can risk every harassment, from having the local Founding Family quietly arrange for a rotation of Sheriff's Deputy nephews to follow them 24/7 and ticket every gum wrapper they drop, to mailbox bombs. But how can we guarantee them safety and freedom to investigate, and still guarantee the readership some accountability? The EFF statement seems to acknowledge that unmasking is sometimes necessary and urges only "strict standards," but that's one heckuva hard standard to set if you want truth maximized.

All I've got is the questions, no real answers.

A surfeit of dragonflies

Yes, this really is a photo of something, which you can see if you click it to enlarge -- i have uploaded the biggest version! -- but sometimes a photo just is NOT adequate.

We're experiencing this delightful and sort of baffling phenomenon. A dragonfly population explosion.

This was taken at about 2 o'clock this afternoon, prime dragonfly time. The air is so busy with them that it is very likely that the shot contains more than 20, though my beloved but basic camera turns the more distant ones into specks. Go outside and you are surrounded, but at ground level, they just don't show in a photo against the foliage, which is why I aimed at the sky.

To stand outside is to stand in a wonderland, like a very busy metropolitan hover-port in a futuristic animation. They are various colors, also not discernible in the sky picture. They land on everything. They land on you. They weave and crisscross and gorge themselves on gnats and mosquitoes, and chase each other, lacing the air with their paths, thousands of them.

It's been very rainy and possibly the mosquito population has also exploded, providing the dragonflies an exceptional buffet. I dunno. But there are ten times more dragonflies out there than I have ever seen at one time, in my life.

A song for Jenny

Pet Project

For previous posts in the WHTTWOT Pet Project, look here and here.

Don't cry, it's only literature

I don't know exactly what possessed me to buy this book several years ago. I guess, after reading Books and Readers in the Early Church, I got interested in early Christian writings or something.

So I sprang for this thing. It's called Early Christian Latin Poets. I found most of the poets rather uninspired, same old rewording or imitating psalms, blah blah. But the intro to the selection from Paulinus (b.353 CE, Bishop of Nola from 406 CE) intrigued me, when the editor said that one poem "gives an amusing account of three miracles involving farm animals selected for slaughter in fulfillment of vows to St. Felix, set deep in the Campanian countryside."

This is now, officially, one of my least favorite "miracle" stories, ever.

I wish that I could just hate the poem, without getting all emo and genuinely upset by it, but that's what happened. I tried the self-talk technique :

Look, it's only a legend. Check out the iconic Christian literary elements: biological miracle, willing self-sacrifice, even a no-room-at-the-local-inn subplot.

And if something real did inspire the story, this pig has been dead for, like, 1800 years (the stories were old by the time Paulinus wrote about them). Most farm animals become dinner for somebody, including you, hello? and sacrifices fed the poor, so don't get bent out of shape about one pig who's probably fictitious anyway. Is this half as bad as the Abraham and Isaac story?

It didn't work.

Part of this book is on Google Books, including most of this poem (only the first 2 lines are missing), so here it is, if anybody wants to know firsthand what I'm talking about. Start with page 64.

But if cruelty to animals upsets you, I invite you to skip it. Here's the story it tells. Farmer fattens up this pig to a huge size, to make his sacrifice to St. Felix more spectacular than anybody else's, and then sets out to walk him to the Felix shrine, apparently a long journey away, since they have to lodge there someplace.

Only the pig is too enormous for his legs to bear him up. Great planning there, guys, positively failblog-worthy. Anyway, the pig collapses almost immediately and can't get up, and they can't lift him, so the farmers go back for a bunch of small pigs to make an equivalent sacrifice and take them off to Felix's shrine, having no choice but to leave Superpig stranded in the road.

They make the trip, they offer their pigs, they participate in FelixPalooza, they go rent lodging for the night.

Meanwhile, somehow, the huge pig miraculously, with divine intervention, struggles to his feet. And further, he manages to hike this whole long way to Felix-tropolis where this ritual will take place, without getting lost, stolen or eaten by wolf or man along the way. More miraculously yet, his master has taken a lodging out in the boonies because the big crowds made lodgings near the event hard to find, and the guy comes out of his rental hut to find that his pig has tracked him to this obscure place off the trail and is greeting him happily.

Why couldn't this poet be as dull as the others in the book? Because he vividly describes the sheer joy that this pig expresses on finding the jerk, licking and nuzzling him. You'll undoubtedly note that I work up no empathy for the substitute pigs whose emotions aren't described.

Then the poet exults about how the pig's joy ... um ... was actually because it longed for the fulfillment of its Holy destiny. It was overjoyed to be sacrificed.

And I find myself cussing out some asshole farmer who lived 1800 years ago if he was even a real person at all.

A good academician could read it dispassionately. "Symbolic literary elements, blah blah, oral folk traditions, blah blah, early-Christian era transition from pagan practices, yadda yadda." Maybe even find it amusing. Me, all I could think about was this gentle, intelligent animal, indulged to the nth degree all its life and thinking it's a beloved pet, abandoned to die in the road and struggling up to go find the master with whom it was strongly bonded. Only to get a knife to the throat. I tried to switch from calling the pig "he" to referring to him as "it." Didn't work.

Here's my idea of a miracle story : how about, as soon as this twit farmer coos, "Hey, look, my big ol' buddy made it here! You want to be sacrificed, yes you do!" God (Who exists in Eternity and can access sporting goods of later centuries) drops a bowling ball on the farmer's foot and thunders, "Betray this animal's trust and you'll get it on your head next time."

The book's on eBay now. New, it would retail for 35 bucks, so maybe someone will find it a bargain. The rest of the poems may be by other poets and be totally unlike this one, but somehow I couldn't find the desire to pick it up again.

INSERT CELEBRITY NAMES. RUN PROGRAM. LOGOFF.

All attempts to make this a single image, and still make it legible, have failed. You'll need to enlarge each of the three images.

Sorry.

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part III

On Monday morning I went outside, looked at this thing, and thought, This is absolutely hideous. A vampire would sleep in it. What was I thinking?!

And that was even before I saw the photos of Sherwood and Diane's beautiful, and productive, gardens.

Out came the pad and pen, and I started redesigning it (yet again!) into several lovely little terraces. Then I kind of came-to and remembered that what I wanted it for was growing food, not decorating the yard. Lots of lovely terraces would take up more square footage with stonework and leave less actual growing space.

Larry suggested we simply build an attractive adjunct with just a few pieces of the pricier decorative stone. Thus the new half-circle broccoli bed you see here:


It still looks like a tomb. But a nicer tomb. One with a place to leave offerings.

And with some hi-tech irrigation equipment, we're good to go.

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part II

It's bigger! It's better! It took 15 bags of soil to fill it up and I'm starting to think this project has become slightly ridiculous in its grandiosity, but there's no turning back. Two little green pepper plants await their spots, and the carrots will go in next. And I'm trying to make this vegetable bed as organic as possible. Thank you, Thomas Supply (for concrete blocks) and Home Depot (for soil and seeds). I haven't even got the growing started yet -- the photo is from this morning, and lugging in the dirt was today's project -- and I'm already realizing that concrete block is going to absorb more water and not hold it in the soil as well as wood would have. I may line it with stone after this year's crop is done with, finances willing.



Long long ago, I copied this Once and Future King quote from a brochure that promoted a library reading campaign (You can click it, for a readable enlargement). It moved from bulletin board to bulletin board with me and then, when wall space was limited, to a file folder labeled "bulletin board type stuff," which I've just perused.

I have very little to be sad about. Everyone and everything is doing OK. My tendency toward melancholy is mostly brain chemistry, and mild at that, and what triggers it lately is more a matter of seeing "the world about [me] devastated by lunatics." But that's a big one. The lunatics are attacking on so many fronts.

On ronniecat's recommendation, I'm in the middle of reading Three Cups of Tea, and finding it very soul-lifting. The fact that it's won prizes and sold so well bodes well for many of the things it has to say; one of which is that fundamentalist, violent Islam is not all of Islam. The people of these villages embrace a Western stranger, and support education. For their daughters. For all their children, for everyone's future. Their ranking Muslim cleric supports the effort.

As I read it, i think, Good! the more understanding this book and this project brings to people who equate Islam with violence and oppression, the better.

Then I wonder, Why can't such an understanding of Christianity come about??

Why is only the fundamentalist brand, the brand that calls for the beliefs of fundamentalist denominations to be imposed on all, why is this the very definition of "Christianity" in the minds of so many people? Not just simpleminded, lazy, or mediocre intellects, but highly intelligent people?

In part, it has to be because we've let the narrow version of the faith co-opt the word. Those of us who honestly believe that the message of Christianity is one of love, not sweet sentimental gooey luv, but healing, feeding, building-for, lifegiving love, a message of offering, never forcing .... we've been too quiet. We've let it become synonymous with a politics that seeks to force the tenets of particular denominations on the most personal aspects of every person's life and heart.

It's something to work on.

All of which leads back to the garden. Learning really is a terrific therapy for being sad, but I'd add one. Another good thing for being sad is to build something.

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part I

Larry is growing the squash and tomatoes. I wanted to make a raised bed, for carrots and maybe something else. I tried raising carrots back in New Jersey 10 years ago and found that they are quite picky about soil conditions.

And I didn't want to use wood. Untreated lumber will rot. Treated lumber - I just do not want the chemicals around. I know they aren't as bad as they used to be, and i know that they don't leach all that far into the soil.

I don't care. I wanted concrete block. Also unnatural, but it'll have to do.

How to abuse a compact car.

Larry could carry two blocks at a time. I could only carry one at a time, plus I kept stopping to take pictures.


But I did almost all the building!

The Building Inspector

And .... this bed is too small.

So I redesigned it. It's now larger than the version in this picture.

Stay tuned for further pictures.

And for our negotiations with other interested parties: