A Lesson Idea…

Here I talk about a story John Taylor Gatto tells about a little lesson he learned in 3rd grade, back in the 1930s. Not sure if my high school kids would get it. Here’s another approach:

Kid’s drawing, borrowed from an NPR article. My tax dollars at work.

You all are taking drawing, and this is a very good thing, but maybe not for the reasons you think. When you ask a little kid to draw Mommy, what the little kid does is draw a circle for the face, add a couple little circles for eyes, a red curve for smiling lips, and some squiggles for hair.

The kid is happy and satisfied. Mommy sees the drawing, is informed that it’s her, and is also happy.

So it is a picture of mommy. But what did the little kid actually draw? The mommy in front of him? Or rather, his idea of his mommy?

All of you, taking drawing lessons now, and no longer little kids, would not draw mommy this. No, you’ve learned not to simply draw your idea of your mom, but rather to look carefully at you mom (or whatever you are drawing).

http://hopeisthewordblog.com/category/education/science-education/page/6/

Rather than simply drawing something you ‘know’ inside, you want to look at the world outside and try to draw what’s actually there.

It’s a lot more work than just drawing what you think. You have to be prepared to study and absorb the lines, shading, and colors of real physical objects, and then work hard and practice to render those elements into a beautiful drawing.

It’s worth it, I hope. Some of you already draw fairly well, and all of you are already better than when you started a few short weeks ago. If you just stop at your idea of mommy or a horse or whatever, you’re stuck in your own head. The real world is unable to get through.

Now let’s look at an expression in English: to draw a conclusion. I propose that drawing a conclusion is very much like drawing your mommy. It’s easy, and childish, to simply reach a conclusion based on what’s already in your own head. Such conclusions might be satisfying to you; maybe even make your mommy happy – but they’re lazy and immature. You can do better. It is the business of this school to help you do better.

It’s a lot of work to try to understand an argument from outside your own head. You have to listen, puzzle it out, ask questions, think some more, maybe run a few ideas past your friends and family to see how others think. It might take a long time; sometimes, you may never reach a very firm conclusion at all! But the process of trying to understand, of exercising your mind, is how you grow outside your own head.

Here’s the big question: how do those ideas inside your own head, the ones we all tend to use to answer almost every question we face, get there in the first place? Magic? A miracle? Or something else? How do you know these ideas are true?

And here’s the hard lesson:

There are many reasons to lie to children, the Jesuit said, and these seem to be good reasons to older men. Some truth you will know by divine intuition, he told us, but for the rest you must learn what tests to apply. Even then be cautious. It is not hard to fool human intelligence.

John Taylor Gatto

Some people lie; many more people, for many different reasons, repeat lies without consciously lying themselves. And you – young people who naturally trust your friends and teachers – are the target of a LOT of lies.

The world is full of peoples who do not love you, but certainly want to use you for their own purposes. They know how to tell a lie such that children, whose defenses have not yet fully developed, are likely to absorb it without even being aware of having come to believe. The easiest way: get other children to parrot the lies, and then level criticism at anyone who dares say anything against it. You don’t believe X? Then you’re a hater, a bigot, a Nazi! And worse!

Nobody wants to be called names by their friends! So we take the easy way out, and just follow along. Pretty soon, we’re the ones calling our friends and family foul names – names we’re unlikely to even understand! We’re the ones parroting ideas we don’t understand. This is not an accident. A lot of evil intelligence has been devoted to convincing kids they believe things that they don’t even understand. Then those kids grow up to be adults who have never learned how to really work at thinking, and parrot the lie to yet more children.

This is the source of a lot of the misery in the modern world: lies told to children, who grow up into mobs willing to shout down, insult, and ostracize any who dare disagree. All over ideas they don’t really understand.

It is critically important for you, our beloved students, to learn how to examine ideas on your own. We are going to teach you how. Do not just accept what you are told, even from me! I will do my best not to tell lies, but even I – especially I! – am easy to fool!

Free Citizens and Police States

One of the bitterly funnier moment I’ve had in my life was when a long-time friend who had just recently become a Chicago judge told me in all seriousness that what the world needed was more lawsuits.

Hammer, meet nail.

He seemed to seriously (and arrogantly) think that society’s problems would get solved if only people submitted them to the adjudication of right-thinking people such as himself. No other options existed in his mind, as far as I could tell, such as a personal commitment among citizens to resolve their differences peacefully, or suck it up and take minor injustices for the team. No acknowledgement that, if the court system is what’s holding your polity together, that polity is already dead.

Or, checking in on Scripture:

Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison.

Matthew 5:25

Attempting to solve more and more issues in court is not a road to social improvement, but rather a sign of an already dead society – the twitchings of a culture’s corpse.

—

The function of laws. We have long had the notion of the law-abiding citizen. That’s a person who understands that laws need to be obeyed, especially when there is no one there to enforce them. The laws work, when they work, because of a consensus of the law abiding. In a such a culture, responsibility and enforcement are ultimately personal, not a function of the enforcement arm of a legal system.

Much more important, law abiding citizens can only exist within a strong culture. Personal relationships and obligations, personal honor and virtue, must be highly valued by a large enough group such that those who do not value them are forced by social pressure to conform.

A law-abiding society is the only kind of society in which people can have any real freedom.

The alternative is the police state. A police state is here defied as a situation where laws matter only to the extent to which they are enforced.

We tend to think of totalitarian dictatorships when police state is mentioned, with official thugs lurking everywhere, but I will here contend that insofar as an individual’s relationship to the law depends merely on enforcement, police ‘states’ are ubiquitous.

These ideas came up as I discussed the state of local schools with people who have had children in them or had friends who have had children in them, or otherwise had experiences in them. It has gotten to the point, according to these folks, where it takes literal physical assault of a teacher to call down any disciplinary action on a student – and even that might not be enough. Teachers tend to get whatever percentage of the students who are interested in learning into the front few rows, and simply let chaos reign in the back rows and try to teach over it. Admin and teachers are at war – the idea that admin would take steps against the students for the teacher’s sake is laughable. The schools rules are ignored until they are enforced. Exhausted teachers have little interest in enforcing them. Any teacher who does enforce the rules is instantly an outsider, more likely to draw the ire of admin than its support.

The students in this environment divide themselves or are divided into feral tribes. In the No Rules tribes, attempts to flaunt whatever norms do exist drive behaviors. Who can wear the most scandalous prom dress? Who can utter the most filthy profanity? Who can defy the teachers most obviously? Such behaviors increase the standing of students in their tribe.

Is this all true? I don’t know, but the people telling me this are not the kind of people given to melodramatic exaggeration. I therefore assume so.

But even if reality is not quite that bad, anything like such a situation illustrates not so much the Law of the Jungle as an at least nascent police state. In the jungle, you win or you lose, there is no appeal. In a police state, you get away with whatever you can – until you can’t. In the jungle, no one is there to stop you if you try to burn it all down, while it is likely someone would try to stop you from burning the school down.

And here is the crux of the matter: what happens to the fine young arsonist in this latter case? Since all violations of the laws have been ignored so far in his young life, what does he expect to have happen? Will it be ‘fair’ in his eyes? We can easily imagine a modern principal simply letting him go due to assumed mitigating factors – and we can just as easily imagine the child (if old enough) thrown into jail. The reader can insert the variables that might influence such different outcomes.

Similarly, a student holding views unpopular with his teachers can become the target of abuse. The teachers’ vendettas become, in effect, the law – and there is nowhere within the school system for such a student to turn.

While it may seem fun, after a fashion, for young hooligans to do whatever they think they want, eventually, all boundaries have been pushed too far, and something must be done. The school system is an organism, and as such wants to live. It is a police state in which there is no real freedom and no escape – and our children are being raised in it.

Oddities, Goodness, & Harumphs. There Will Be Cake.

1 Recall that we had all three of our middle children get married within about a 19 month period: end of May, 2020 through early January 2022. 10 months ago, we welcomed our first granddaughter – The Cuteness, who I, who have seen a lot of babies and who am totally unbiased, think is quite possibly the cutest child ever born. No, really!

Now, over an 18 month period starting with the birth of The Cuteness, we will welcome our first grandson – due early November – AND our third grandchild (sex TBD) in early April, 2023.

Life is good. Three marriages followed by three babies – one each! – to three happy couples. God willing, I may still live to see my children’s children chasing chickens in the yard of our hobby farm.

2. Second week as a headmaster just completed. School was good, but reminded me of the old joke: I spent a month in Cleveland last weekend. These have been the longest two weeks I’ve had in a looooong time.

3. So, these days of light posting: write about some gripping education history book, something grueling and essential, and I’m lucky if 30 people look at it. Write about dropping a piece of avocado toast, and get 100+. Both way down from peak traffic of a couple years ago, but still.

4. I don’t know if I’m being overcautious, but I’m wary of posting anything too political or potentially controversial here these day, thinking I have an image to uphold as a headmaster of a joyful, Catholic, classical high school. ot hiding anything, just not broadcasting it here. But it’s not like there isn’t 15 years and a couple of million words of my thoughts already out there, if anyone cared to look. Thoughts?

5. Here’s a cake one of my daughters made:

In a Cabin in the Woods (not working on my manifesto – I ain’t even got one!)

Checking in, from beautiful Arnold, CA. (pop 3,288; elevation 3,999′) where the entire family is meeting up. But am working on a few things, as follows.

I’ve been working on the pulp-style space adventure from 28 years ago that I found 50 pages of when packing up to move. ‘Working on’ here means taking pictures with my iPhone, offloading them to my laptop, then using Googledocs’ OCR function to open them up as text. It kind of works! I will need another hour or two to clean up the formatting and obvious mistakes, and still need to find the penultimate chapter that somehow got separated from the other draft chapters and read it in. Still faster than retyping it, for me, anyway.

While the writing is obvious amateur first draft level, I love the ideas. I’ve got Dante in there – one of the bad guys is named Smarrita, as in:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood
Where the straight way was lost

And the deal gone bad is with a race I call Selvans – our hero finds himself in a dark spot in the ‘woods’. And so on, I was being cute.

Funny: Brian Niemeier’s Soul Cycle (reviewed beginning here) is all about Dante in Space, and here I was, 28 years ago, writing a very different Dante in Space book. I would be happy to be half as good as Niemeier. Along the same lines, found a short story from back then where the premise is that explorers crash land on an Eden-like planet, only to slowly starve to death, as their bodies can’t break down the available nutrition – a variation on a theme from Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim. I’ve been obsessed with this thought for decades: that the chemistry of LAWKI is so weird and unique, with seemingly arbitrary ‘choices’ among chemicals and stereoisomers, with crazy things life-threatening prions, it would be amazing if encounters with alien life, no matter how superficially benign, didn’t kill us. I would think that the first step toward terraforming would be to nuke the planet from space, just to be sure. This is a theme in several short stories and two novels I’ve started drafting over the last 30 years or so.

Also, is anyone else bothered by the ‘enhanced’ pictures we get from the Hubble, and will no doubt soon get from the Webb? I look, and see nothing; I look, and see nothing even using fantastical modern tech. BUT – I don’t look, let that tech feed its input into spectrographs, computer algorithms, and other fancy stuff, and they produce:

Beautiful, but what is its relationship to reality? I don’t know.

This is also a ‘picture’ of the Pillars:

Also beautiful.

In what sense are either of those pictures real? Certainly, no naked eye look at the Pillars is going to look anything like either of these, even ‘naked’ eye through a powerful telescope. The question becomes: what information do we want to convey? In the old pulp draft, I have passages like these:

The small circular viewports on either side of the module cabin dimmed automatically for a moment, to protect the delicate eyes of the occupants from the brilliant flash of the cruiser disintegrating into plasma and dust. On the front viewer, a computer processed image revealed the details of the explosion, all extraneous light and radiation filtered away. On that screen, the ship neatly vanished into a gradually thinning aura. Neither man was watching,

and

The star cruiser appeared quickly, a sudden point of light, then a highly distorted image of a ship, trailed by a thousand house of mirrors reflections strung back into space-time. Then, just as suddenly, and with no apparent logic, a perfect little star cruiser was visible alone against the field of stars. Despite his predicament, Warner couldn’t help wondering how much of what he just saw was the result of the viewsys’s inadequate attempts to create a sensible image out of unknown inputs, and how much was “really” taking place. The question was nonsense, he reminded himself.

It’s a little bit like MiniTrue: somebody had to decide what is the important information, and arrange to have the ‘unimportant’ information filtered out.

Next, my beloved and I married 35 years ago on May 30; our older daughter married 2 years ago on May 30; our middle son married May 29th last year. Younger daughter married Jan 8 this year – but we let her and her husband come anyway. Joint anniversary celebration. Because 3 of our kids married over an 18 month period, it is now a running joke to remind our 18 year old son that he doesn’t need to get married anytime soon, it’s OK.

We, our 18 year old son, and our older daughter, her husband, and their 7 month old daughter are already here; the others are due in Friday morning and staying through Sunday. A rip-roaring anniversary hoedown! Elder son-in-law found a nice big cabin for us all.

It’s nice to have a family where everyone gets along. Anyway, we had lunch and a walk yesterday at White Pine Lake, a reservoir in Arnold. I walked to the dam and back:

The dam spillway

The creek flowing away from the dam.

And here’s the view from the back porch, where I sit typing this.

Temperature is sensory-deprivation-tank perfect: I was falling asleep earlier, sitting on the back porch, in shorts. Ideal.

Next next, our house is scheduled to hit the market tomorrow, if all things go well., with open houses this weekend. St. Joseph, please pray for us, that the Father may prosper the work of our hands to His glory! Meaning, of course, that we get a good offer soon, and find a good place to buy.

Starting next Tuesday, we will be staying in another very dear furnished rental in Auburn, and spending our time house hunting like mad. Not gonna look at the markets, no siree, not me, not one bit… AAAGH!

Interesting times.

End of Eras

Home stretch, as it were, of emptying our home. 27 years of stuff. Confusing thoughts and feelings about all this. But let’s not wallow in nostalgia! Or, at least, not just wallow in nostalgia…

First, the weather. As all 20 long-time readers may be aware, I’ve used this data set to track local rainfall for the last several years.

top of the page.

Our local flood control district has 32 automated rain gages set up across the county, and put up this web page with near real time automatic updates as shown. Over the past 4 or 5 years, I decided to use these numbers to get a more general idea of local rainfall, rather than just using the one local gage for Concord, CA, that seems to provide the go-to numbers for the press.

As discussed in previous posts, these numbers are both beautiful and flawed. Beautiful, in that they provide a real-world snapshot of rainfall over a couple of hundred square miles updated every 15 minutes. But, as a note on the page says:

The District does not warranty, guarantee, or certify the accuracy of the rainfall data. The data accuracy and availability can be compromised due to equipment failure, power loss, equipment defects, loss of calibration, or internet/radio communication equipment failure of equipment provided by others.

This disclaimer is on top of the inaccuracy built into the round numbers used as average annual rainfall totals per gage. Since accurate annual averages are of little use to the Flood Control District, it’s obvious they just took a guess and stuck with it. So, for example, the Ygnacio Valley Fire, Concord, station has an annual average of 17.00 inches. Exactly. They have been tracking rainfall at this station for 43 years; the annual average has not changed over the 5 or so years I have been watching it. And so on, for most of the gages.

Since the annual per gage averages are numbers I use in my fancy-pants spreadsheet to estimate total rainfall as a percentage of average, all my numbers have at least this built-in error. I also watch (this is all for my own weird obsessive amusement) how many stations hit or exceed their annual averages, and by how much. Thus, this year so far, as of this morning – and it happens to be raining at the moment, so this will change – 21 out of 32 stations have gotten at least 80% of their annual averages, while 16 have hit 90%, 7 reached 100% and 1 has even exceeded 125%.

This is where it gets stupid. Or stupider. The Mount Diablo Peak station has, in every year I’ve tracked it, had both the highest rainfall and the greatest amount and percentage over average. This year, it shows over 130% of annual average. There are several other stations that have, in terms of percentage of annual average, consistently run way ahead of the other stations. On the other hand, the Kregor Peak, Clayton, station shows under 50% of its annual average this year – and it is maybe a couple miles, and visible from, the Mount Diablo Peak station. And a number of other stations similarly have fallen ‘behind’ the overall averages each year I’ve watched them.

Such consistent inconsistencies call my whole project into doubt. I don’t blame the Flood Control District in the slightest – all they want to know is how much rain is falling how fast and where, so that they can warn people that the creek’s gonna rise. My whole project makes little sense in that context; the ‘errors’ I’m spotting, that throw my numbers into chaos, simply don’t matter much if at all to the Flood Control District.

Nail in the coffin: this year, 5 or 6 of the stations have failed more often than not to report any usable numbers. Either blank cells, or data that fails the sniff test. That Ygnacio Valley Fire, Concord, station mentioned above happens to be the one physically closest to our home. Today, it shows no rainfall at all for the last several days, while 4″ deep puddles have been forming on our patio. So, not believable.

In order to use the data in my fancy-pants spreadsheet, I have to clean it up by removing stations with bad data. Since not all stations are created equal – annual average rainfall varies from 11″ to 33.50″, in addition to the inconsistencies mentioned above – it matters which stations one removes. Removing any stations because you don’t like the data is bad science. I think we’ve reached a point where even I can’t convince myself my analysis proves anything.

That said, we’ve reached 92% of annual average rainfall! Woohoo!

Next, we had to tell our 94 year old neighbor of 27 years that we’re moving out. This old gentleman has watched our kids grow up, and has put up with our dumb former dog, and just been a great all-around neighbor. He’s the kind of guy who will keep an eye on the whole neighborhood in a friendly way, and even go have a talk with any neighbor who is maybe not being quite neighborly enough. Best neighbor we’ve ever had.

He was pretty emotional, as were we. In the last few years, his dearly beloved wife died, he had a fall and broke bones, and finally, after decades where he seemed to have hit about 60 and just stayed there, he is finally showing his age. He’s almost house-ridden these days, with trips to the doctor and daily walks with caregivers his only outside activates. This, for a man who was forever puttering in the garden and driving himself to church and so on. Please remember him in your prayers.

Next, had my pianos moved yesterday. The upright from the 1890s is sitting in storage; I bit the bullet and had my 1927 Steinway sent in for restringing. Too expensive! But now seemed the time. So, for the rest of my life, at least, there will be a truly fine piano to play in my home.

Finally, this same neighbor has 4 sons but no daughters. He fell hard for our younger daughter, who was born while we lived here. He got to see her grow up from infancy. She became, I think, the daughter he never had. Plus, she’s a cutie and the sweetest kid, and was always kind to him. Well, this daughter of ours, married just short of 4 months, is now expecting her first child. Due in November. Very hard to get my head around.

The gravitational shift of having one granddaughter living 60 miles away was huge; adding a second grandchild makes it totally irresistible. When we move, we plan to be much nearer to both.

House is almost empty; the Insane Brick Project is about 50 bricks from completion; the house will look and be in better shape than it ever was while we lived here; POD in the front drive being loaded up; a storage unit packed to the roof. While a Friday departure date seems to have been a little optimistic, we should be gone gone by Monday. 30+ years in the area, 27 in the same parish. All over.

More Mask ‘Humor’

As mentioned here previously, I occasionally attend the same morning weekday mass as the kids from the local Catholic school. I get to see first hand how this whole masking thing is working out. If it weren’t for the panic and terror used on kids to make them comply, it would be hilarious.

Today, the kiddos were again at mass. The total masking percentage seems to have fallen somewhere just under 50% Remember, the kids are no longer *required* to mask up, so what we’re seeing here is kids who either on their own initiative or at mommy’s or maybe daddy’s insistence keep masking up.

Saw a new one today – the Neck Mask. That’s a mask worn under the chin. Two kids were doing this for a while; one eventually pulled his mask back up to full upright and locked position, Later, he took it off completely. Somebody is getting mixed messages. While many still wore their masks right and proper – predominantly, the older girls, but not exclusively – others were doing all sorts of mask improve. Under the nose, chin masking, constant fiddling with it.

That last bit is the killer: not that logic or reason matter, but if in fact those masks worked at all, they’d be covered with Deadly Virus Particles, such that Rule #2, right after ‘mask up’ would be: keep you hands off them! The classic today: some little kid pulls down her mask, then does an elaborate sleeve wipe of her nose – then puts the mask back up. She’s just a kid, so OF COURSE she does the sleeve wipe.

I mean, you’re a kid. You’ve got a runny nose (It’s allergy season big time here.) It’s making the inside of your mask icky! Feels gross. So, without a moment’s thought, you take that stuff and wipe it on your sleeve (and spread it around on your face). THEN, you put the mask back up. Because… Kids gonna kid.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is SCIENCE! As I mentioned, if it weren’t for the panic, anxiety, bullying, fear mongering, and, frankly, child abuse, this would all be hilarious.

Brief Chin-mask Update

This morning, attended a morning mass also attended by most of the school children in the parish school. In the sample I could see, the percentage of kids masked has fallen to maybe a little over 50%. Saw any number of below-the-nose masking kids, and one admirable little boy going full chin-mask.

This among the minority of kids I could see, as we sit toward the front.

If it weren’t for the tragedy and child abuse involved in terrifying/cajoling children into making this otherwise pointless act of compliance, it would be funny.

Update to the Update: Dredging up Memories

On a positive note, at Mass today were more people than even OCD I could unobtrusively count, so don’t have numbers, but it looked like over half were unmasked. Progress, of a sort, but we can’t let this fraud and tragedy simply vanish as if it never happened. People MUST face the facts: the news is now 24/7 war in Ukraine (even though 6 other equally tragic and atrocity-filled wars are going on elsewhere at this moment- ever hear about them? Why not, do you suppose?) just as the news media, especially outside the US, is starting to acknowledge the tragedy and farce that was the COVID response. Masks? Never worked. “Vaccines?” Not so safe and effective. Deaths? Overcounted. And so on.

Overall, the obvious is coming out: the lockdowns, masks, panic, “vaccines”, and all the terror and disruption and destruction they inflicted did nothing to stop COVID, but caused irreparable physical, psychological, and political harm.

Nuremberg trials, or bust. We must not forget, and forgive only once people are in jail or dangling.

Sigh.

Next, as mentioned, in amongst a set of old papers were some compositions I’d started back when I was 25 and a private composition student of Susan McClain in Santa Fe. I transferred the music to one partial piece into MuseScore, a setting of the liturgical text

Domine, non sum dignus

ut intres sub tectum meum,

sed tantum dic verbo

et sanabitur anima me

In English (literal)

Lord, I am not worthy

that you should enter under my roof

but only say the word

and my soul will be healed (and healed will be this soul of mine)*

I’d only set the middle two phrases. Somewhere, unless I threw them out, are pages and pages of draft settings for the first and last phrases. I really liked the settings of the middle two, but could not come up with anything satisfying for the beginning and end.

After hearing what it sounded like sung on ‘ah’ by MuseScore, found I still liked it, enough to want to finish it. So I got on it.

I imagine this happens in writing or any art: one’s style or taste changes over time. I remember one piece I wrote in college, where it went through 3 or 4 style changes over the course of a 3 minute piece, such that the ending sounded nothing like the beginning – that piece never saw the light of day. It’s not automatic that one can recapture the style from almost 40 years ago. But I’m trying. Lots of fun, really want to finish this.

On a less fun note, we are now having to deal with stuff and memories packed away almost 10 year’s ago: our late son’s things. We didn’t have it in us to do anything more than pack it away at the time, but now we’re needing to at least put it into storage.

Yesterday, we moved out a bookcase he had made. He was maybe 18? 19? when he made it, with little help from me. He was our oldest, I had no other experience at the time working with my own children. I knew it was good – at least as good as the ones I make – but didn’t realize how amazing it is for a kid with very little woodworking experience to crank out something that nice first try. Very simple design, but the fit and finish are excellent. He went with a dark stain, and sanded between numerous coats, so it was very smooth and even.

No pictures, didn’t think of it. When we move his desk he made just before the bookcase, I’ll try to remember. Kid was a genius and a saint, with a craftsman’s soul. I miss him.

Anyway, bound to run across many other bits that trigger memorie3s. 27 years in the house, with 5 kids raised here.

Our youngest and I and hoping to finish at least the walls on the last planter today. there are also 4 little towers and a sort of connecting wall to be done, don’t know that we’ll get to them today.

I got to get out of this place. But it’s not like all the memories are bad.

* Doing a lot of word painting, so the words in the order they occur matter.

Year End(?) Update: Wedding, Writing, Stuff

I’m going to use the following feeble excuses for not writing here for over a week:

1. Younger daughter is getting married in 3 weeks;
2. I’m ‘working,’ mostly in the sense of worrying about and planning, the sale of our house in (we hope) March;
3. It’s the week before Christmas.
4. Volunteered to help the Caboose execute his Eagle Scout project, which tied up the better part of the last 2 weekends.

A local cemetery, managed by our parish, has suffered from neglect and vandals for many years. It is the resting place of many of the pioneers of our town, with graves dating back to the mid 1800s. The local historical society as well as the parish and some of the neighbors have been trying to fix it up. The Caboose’s Eagle project: put in two benches, replace the vandalized and missing cross from the central monument, and clean up. Above: one of the benches, concrete still wet.

An epoxy resin cross (getting granite was not in the budget) affixed atop the central monument, from which vandals had destroyed the original. It came out way better than anticipated – this angle distorts the scale and might make it appear too small, but it’s not.

Other than that, I got nothing. What I have been doing:

A. Making Christmas gifts for the family. They are coming out nice, but, since it’s possible some of the recipients might read this blog, I’ll have to skip the pictures and of course any further details until they have been delivered.

B. Finishing the Gloria I’ve been working on, and working on the Kyrie. I’m at the point where I need to let the Gloria sit – I can keep tweaking it forever, but I probably will just let it go.

I switched over completely to composing in Musescore. It – just works, and revisions are so, so, much easier. Sigh. All that time mastering buggy whip making writing fair score by hand is now useless. My son-in-law swears by Musescore as a composition tool, as you can get instant playback as you go and the fair copy is a print command away. Beats stomping stuff out on piano, which is my usual method.

Sheepish request: any musicians out there with Musescore who would like to hear it/offer feedback? It’s all of 4 minutes long. If so, send me an email at yardsale of the mind (without the gaps) at G-mail dot etc. and I will email you the file.

C. Watching a Youtube series on counterpoint and fugal writing, based on Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassus. On the one hand, I know some of this stuff; on the other, I’m largely an ignorant fool. As I think Nadia Boulanger once said: composition is not theory, but technique, and you get technique by practicing. Will I live long enough to work my way through all of Fux’s and Gran’s exercises? Writing in this style – counterpoint and fuges – is highly technical and mathematical – there is structural stuff you need to work out before you get very far . I’m very bad at that part. Don’t know how many times I’ve written myself into a corner…

D. Had this very vivid idea for a story. Of course, I’ve got half a dozen other writing projects I have not been working on, so now I get another idea. Saw a meme the other day, where this writer is musing something like: “Some people got to bed and *sleep*? They don’t toss and turn working out the plots for a 7-book series? And then they wake up *refreshed*?” I haven’t slept well in years anyway, seems I just need to get mor4e productive about it. I may throw up a chapter as semi-flash fiction when I get a minute.

F. 3 years into involuntary semi-retirement. I need to get a job. Don’t need the big bucks anymore, just something reasonable.

Aaaand – that’s all I have time for at the moment. Tomorrow and Friday begin the annual Great Christmas Cooking & Baking Event. With married kids, we have multiple Christmas/New Year’s/Epiphany parties to go to/host, my beloved is in demand as a pie maker, and I’m always making something, too. So, maybe catch y’all next year.

Have a happy, holy, and blessed Christmas season, not to end before Epiphany at the earliest!

Post Calorific Vision Update/Collected Wisdom

A. Back to back Thanksgiving feasts, Thursday with Elder Daughter & in-laws, Friday at soon to be Younger Daughter’s in-laws. (Should all that be hyphenated? “At the house of the family that will soon become our younger daughter’s in-laws” is what I’m saying. She’s already our younger daughter…)

It was very nice to hang out with friendly, descent people simply having a good time enjoying each other’s company. This is the antidote to the life of fear being rammed down our throats – which is why it is both critically important to do it, and why our self-appointed betters are trying so hard to keep us from doing it. People simply getting together with people without getting anyone else’s permission is the death of totalitarianism.

On to more pleasant aspects. Our new granddaughter was the star of the first gathering. One month old, and, sadly in one respect, a chip off the old block: sleep is strictly optional, and not to be indulged in when it would be most appreciated by mom. BUT: sleeping in the arms of granddad seems to work, so I got a bit of bonding in, sitting in quiet places, holding and patting the little angel as she slept. Prepping her for a sleepless night, no doubt. Sigh.

We finally got the 4-generations photo: great grandma, grandma (my wife) mom (my daughter) and baby.

On to Gathering: The Sequel. The soon-to-be in-laws raise pigs, so the highlight of the meal was a ham that had been part of a pig raised on the property not too long prior. Ham from a home-raised pig is a completely different thing: much redder, more tender, different texture altogether, and delicious. Not a huge ham fan in general, but this stuff was excellent. So daughter’s soon to be father in law (this is tiring!), a very generous man, weighed us down with frozen pork as we headed out the door. I’ve now got a couple pork chops the size of small dinner plates and nearly the color of beefsteak, a pound of bacon, sausage, thin-sliced ham, a nice hock, some dried meat sticks – very cool stuff. It’s probably going to stay in the freezer until Christmas, as we’ve got leftovers to last nearly until then!

But much more important: the house was full of children, I think I counted 6 who were 5 and under, and a handful of teenagers. Included were a set of 11 month old twins, crawling about.

And everyone was totally cool, herding the kids around when necessary, but otherwise just letting them be kids. I love that! In all the exactly 2 perfect and socially responsible children households among most of our acquaintances, the adults would not be able to simply let the kids do their thing without constant supervision. Here, all the adults – and the teenagers, including our youngest son – are perfectly fine at keeping one eye on the short people, doing a little minimal intervention if absolutely necessary, and otherwise acting like normal human beings. Exactly once, I corralled a crawling baby and redirected/redeposited him in the living room when he had headed out into the dining room – only because that’s where most of the older people were, and he seemed headed out of easy view.

I might have overreacted.

The baby took it completely in stride – big strange person he doesn’t know, scooping him up, making faces and yakking at him, moving him back to the room he’d just crawled out of, plopping him down next to his brother and a couple toddlers. He just got on with it.

One toddler had a wee bit of a poutfest because he’s a toddler. Otherwise, no fits or crying jags or acts of wanton destruction. Kids were absolutely having a blast playing with other kids, adults got to be adults. This went on for hours.

It might seem stupid to harp on people being normal and happy – but this -THIS – is what is our betters are trying to take away from us. THIS is what masks, lockdowns, mandates, anti-social distancing, fear, mind-numbingly STUPID propaganda, and getting the terrified to report on the sane, are trying to destroy.

So get out there and have fun with people you love!

Gratuitous picture of a back yard raised pork chop. Computer mouse for scale. None of that ‘the other white meat’ nonsense here!

B. Note: we didn’t host any Thanksgiving events ourselves. Yet, the total kitchen output leading up to Thursday and Friday:

The spousal unit: 14 pies, including the usual – pumpkin (both traditional and strudel), apple (both two-crust and strudel) – and specialties – hazelnut-pecan (to die for), mincemeat (the real deal) and carrot-ginger pie (which looks like a pumpkin pie, but tastes quite different)

The youngest son: whipped cream for pies, hard cream (whipped cream with brandy in it) for the mincemeat.

Me: 8.5 lbs. of pot roast, beef gravy, three loaves of pumpkin bread (to give to one of the ladies who helps with grandma), 2.5 dozen pumpkin cream cheese muffins (To share with neighbors), an apple pie (for the other lady who helps with grandma).

Team effort. There’s a ton of overlap in there – youngest son and I peeled a lot of apples, for example, and I was assigned the task of mixing up some pumpkin filling for pies my wife was baking, and she supplied the mincemeat and instructions, and I made the crust and assembled the pie. And so on. Output listed by who was responsible, but the work was shared.

Totally fun. We did our best to clean as we went, so the kitchen is only sort of a disaster.

C. A downside: Despite what Heraclitus says, the road up and the road down are not the same. 1 hour, 16 minutes to get home from Elder Daughter’s house; 2 hours, 10 minutes to get there; 1 hour, 23 minutes to get home from future in-laws house; 2 hours, 10 minutes to get there. The 80 corridor from San Francisco to Sacramento (and beyond to Lake Tahoe) is prone to heavy traffic. Returning later in the evening, we hit none; going up in the early afternoon was not so good.

That’s why we need to move closer to people we love (and farther from people we loathe. Win-win.)

D. More reality from Clarissa’s blog. Do things to be normal. Do things to be yourself.

When I was a kid, the women I admired the most were the ones who put make-up on first thing in the morning on weekends and holidays. This meant they saw themselves more as women than as cooking-cleaning-disciplining-yelling machines. With the makeup they were signaling that they wanted to be liked by men. This meant they were likely to smile more, scream less, and be easier-going. Kids automatically veered towards the make-up wearing ladies in the house because they were more open to playing with the kids or at least not as likely to police their every move.

Obviously, make-up isn’t necessary to be a happy woman and not a screeching harpy. But in the USSR, everything was designed to crush both womanhood and manhood. You needed to work hard to not feel like a sexless cog in a gigantic production machine. Men had their own rituals of maleness, just like the women had the weekend makeup.

If only you knew how hard it was to get makeup in the USSR. The fact of being willing to use the precious, rare substances when nobody outside of your family would see you signaled that you valued the private space over the public. And that was. . .not in keeping with the ruling ideology, let’s put it that way.

Not sure what this really is, but it appears to be a Soviet-era ad for lipstick?

E. Got a bunch of way-cool Christmas presents to make, which – the best kind – require the use of power tools. Rain has not returned since the monsoons of October, and none are forecast before 2nd week of December. So, out come the table saw, router, sanders, and planers, in the nice sunny 60F weather expected for this afternoon.

Do something you like, with people you love. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.