Don’t roll your eyes, Don’t roll your eyes, Don’t roll your eyes…

A few years ago I stumbled on a series of Anthony Robbins’ self-help cds at the thrift store.  I guess whoever bought them gave them away when they moved into their Castle on the beach in St. Croix.

Anthony Robbins

You can roll your eyes, but it does help some of us.

In all seriousness, I was grasping at straws when I found them.  I was (am) skeptical about self-help. I have a parent who turned to them (not Robbins, but others in the “rage therapy” vein) and I blame them for a lot of my late childhood issues.

But I was struggling.  It was 2005-06. I had no support, was essentially bankrupt, and had just spent the better part of the past year taking care of an alcoholic friend who manipulated me into one of the most soul-sucking friendships of all time.

I was desperate.

So I bought them and started listening.  I wasn’t doing it right. I was coming from an “I’ll show all of you assholes what I can do” instead of “Here I go! Watch me explore and develop my world!”.  It turns out that anger CAN drive you. The caveat is that it can only get you so far. In my case, I got up to 180 Lbs (in a good way), built an almost 3,000 square foot workspace from scratch, dated, traveled, and wrote a lot. Once you have grown and matured a little, it cools a bit and then you have to decide what to do with all of the emotion that you invested in these things that it created.  It taints the creation a bit.*  Others may not see it, but it does.

I’ve gotten better since then, but have gone back to those cds.  Friends make fun of me, and that is totally ok, but there are those of us who have no emotional tools to work with.  I am not a child abuse victim, have never been sexually abused, and enjoy what most people would consider to be a good helping of first-world racial privilege.  I can do just about anything.  I can make you an evening gown (or suit), tell you the best way to grow Paw-Paw trees, cure leather & hides, conjugate (some) Latin verbs, tell you the finer points of the NEC code as they relate to Chicago, make GREAT sutures (don’t ask how I know, please), and (poorly) code html.  I grew up with parents who told me that I “could do ANYTHING!” which meant that I could do anything with that little tidbit of motivation as long as it meant that I got married, became a doctor, and had millions of babies.

A lot of the breadth of my interests were mocked as silly.  Latin, especially.

So anyway:  I have picked up the Robbins series again and am listening to it with a more neutral ear.  My friend is dead, I have no romantic relationships, and I am running a business I never planned on having but enjoy more than most people enjoy their jobs.  I am in a good place to re-develop where I am going.  I can’t change who I am but I CAN change how I look at things and what is important to me.  Isn’t some of it ridiculous?  Yes, yes, it is.

And yet: One hour every morning is now going to be going back to the personal development basics.  To give myself the tools I wasn’t given and redirect a bit.  Kind of like adult braces: You are always going to have to wear that damned retainer because the bone is already formed.  You have to get over the anger and resentment that your parents didn’t take care of it when they should have and just move on.

* You should also know that if you connect it to music as inspiration, you will never be able to listen to those songs again.  And some of them are good. But nope – all you remember is the anger behind them and how that felt.  It is especially problematic if the person is dead or you really really liked the songs.

 

It’s Putalca Time!

I originally wrote this on an old MySpace Blog 12 June 2007 at 10:45 P.M.

I wanted to rescue it since I really don’t use the MySpace page anymore.

It’s Putalca Time!

Current mood:contemplative

Putalca. I always think of the word the first or second week of June.

I had a friend in high school named Marc, who was dyslexic and a little backwards. We would play cards with Marc and his wife when we got off work at the Burger King. I guess you could say that it was strange my friend Kristie and I were hanging around a 40-some-odd year old couple when we were 16 and 17, drinking beer, and playing cards in the side yard until three or four in the morning. But it was something different from the faux-goth angst I dealt with at school, and a whole lot more interesting in terms of life experience.

I did not sit down tonight to write about my relationship with Marc and Judy. In their side yard there was a large tree – one of my favorite trees – a Catalpa. Catalpas are a favorite of mine for a number of reasons.

Functionally, they are the perfect wood for fence-posts and damp areas. The wood is dense and has a green cast. Because the live trees can take a lot of abuse, they are also good for tree houses. Once the tree is cut, the wood is difficult to split and does not work very well for lumber or firewood. This was good for me, as I had a special affinity for them. More on that later.

Aesthetically, they are a kind of strange and knobby tree.

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They remind me, in the fall and winter, of strange and burdened old men. Crooked and worn, they are easy to pick out of the dormant woods. In the spring and summer they remind me of an old man in love. The leaves come on fast. They are large and heart shaped and have a heft to them. The first week in June, they start to bloom cascades of creamy white flowers spotted with orange and brown that smell sweetly and fall from the tree. By the second week in June, they are well in bloom, and the smell of the flowers can carry for yards and yards.

Catalpa in bloom

My particular affection for the catalpa tree developed around age seven or so. I had always known what they were thanks to a forestry program in which so many of the kids in the country were enrolled. They were also used as plantings along property lines and in cemeteries, so they were very common in the near-south, where I grew up. We had two of them on each side of our sandbox.

These two catalpas were planted around the civil war and used to mark a large gate that connected the barnyard to pasture. By the time Dad built the sandbox, the pasture was long grown over and the barnyard had become our side yard. But there stood these strange trees. Our sandbox was a large 16 foot square made of 2x12s that Dad had filled with two tons of sand. We did not have a TV at the time, so I spent a lot of time in the sandbox over the next five years letting my imagination go. These trees helped.

I should mention that we did not have a TV because we had no electricity. Mom would play a battery operated radio in the kitchen, but if one wanted control over their music, the only option was a wind-up Victrola in the living room. That Victrola informed and fueled my fantasy life in the sandbox.

For those who may not know, a Victrola is a record player that plays the old 78 rpm standard records. You wind it up, put the record on, and then lower the needle onto the grooves. When you release the clutch under the spinner, the record starts to spin and sound is vibrated through a series of baffles in the front of the case. There is no electricity involved, and the longest record you can play is – maybe – 10 minutes. This is labor-intensive aural enjoyment for sure. By the 40′s they were for the most part obsolete in all but the most remote areas. Most everyone had switched to electric phonographs by the 30′s and 40′s.

Because they were out of favor early-mid century, there was not a whole lot of selection as far as music was concerned. While my friends were listening to what we would now call “the best of the 80′s” pour from their parent’s radios and cassette players, I was content with Operas staged in the teens and 20′s, JaZZ recorded in Chicago, traditional German hurdy-gurdy oom-pah-pah, and blues from Mississippi.

One of my favorite Operas was “La Traviata”. I understood it. The other was “Lucia di Lammermoor”. But these particular versions were special. I am probably one of the only people in my peer group who has heard Lily Pons sing. The scene that was the most powerful for me was the “Mad Scene” in “Lucia…..”. Here, even if you do not know what she is singing, you just feel that her life is crumbling and she is losing her mind as well as her body as she is getting ready to kill her husband. The part is written for a very dynamic soprano and its power was enough to bring me to my knees. I was eight or nine.

Well. I was still a little kid in the middle of nowhere and needed something to do, so I began to incorporate these operas in the sandbox. While my brothers played baseball, (which I refused to play) I staged elaborate operas in the sandbox. On the south side was the stage – the proscenium framed out with twigs and pieces of rags. The audience sat in very graciously sloped stadium seating and an old wooden ammunition box was propped up over the audience for the more respectable and genteel members of society who had the taste and good fortune to purchase private box seats.

Unfortunately, my audiences were very lean most of the spring and summer – except the first two weeks of June. These were my prime attendance weeks. All of the ladies would come out in their finest dresses.

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La Traviata and Lucia di Lammermoor would play to standing room only crowds. Almost all of those in attendance would be women. And, even though they were all wearing very similar garb, they were secure in that they were very, very elegant.

I think the gentlemen who were in attendance at these performances resembled popsicle sticks or clothespins. Probably the latter, as the clothesline was next to the sandbox.

One day, as Lucia was just getting ready to murder her bridegroom, my father decided he had had enough. I should be playing baseball and not “Lost in my own world” (his words). I ignored him when he asked me to join him and my brothers, I avoided him when he told me to join them, and I forgot that he wanted me to play ball when he outright demanded it. So Lucia was getting into her highest notes when my father started toward me. My back was to him, so I did not see it coming. Lily (who was playing the part of Lucia – duh) must have been frightened to death. She could see him coming, and yet she kept climbing the register. Up and up she went, higher and higher, when – throughout the audience – there was muffled shock as someone was yelling “WHEN I TELL YOU TO DO SOMETHING IT BETTER HAPPEN MR DO YOU THINK I AM KIDDING I AM TIRED OF YOU WITH YOUR HEAD IN YOUR OWN LITTLE WORLD OR UP YOUR BUTT AND YOU ARE GOING TO PLAY BALL WITH YOUR BROTHERS”

Imagine the audience’s shock and horror as my father stomped them all into the sand as he jumped over my shoulders. In my head, stages were crashing as the gilded columns fell into the orchestra pit. Women were running every which way as their lacy petticoats were torn from their gowns. Men were driven, feet first, into the floor of the opera house. And there I stood. Unable to do anything about it.

I did end up playing ball that day – all the while thinking about the carnage in the sandbox. I don’t think I ever staged another opera at that particular venue. It was deemed too dangerous. The foundations must have been bad. We moved a few of the performances to the more secluded venues near the lake, and eventually the troop disbanded. Or I grew up a little.

I am not sure what made me first think that Catalpa flowers looked like Victorian ladies when they are inverted, but to this day I look forward to the first two weeks or June. I am very lucky that there are Catalpas in Chicago. I go to the park and eat lunch around them, let them fall on me, and before I leave I always remember to set up a few of them as if they were having a small get-together. Theatre troop veterans having a laugh at tragedy they escaped from that tense afternoon in June sometime around 1983.

What Should Be America’s Version of “Never Forget”*

When I was in Evansville, IN last month, I did a lot of walking.  I would walk from my mother’s house on Madison Avenue just East of Highway 41 to the library downtown.

These walks took me straight down Washington Avenue to Haynie’s Corner, where Washington goes left to S.E. 2nd Street and right to Parrett and Third Street.  This was not entirely unintentional.  Besides being the most direct way to the new Central Library** it took me past the corner of Third and Parrett Streets.

Third and Parrett Streets Evansville Indiana

Third & Parrett Streets, Evansville, Indiana. Where did the marker go?

The intersection is one of those strange cut-in intersections that is a result of the original Evansville plat being SE-NW and growing due East and North.

I was looking for something specific.  When I was in high school I brought my Grandma into town for lunch one day and we went walking.  She brought me to this weird little intersection to show me something.  A plaque.  I wanted to get a picture of it.

But there was nothing to be found.  I asked around and a few people say they remember it.  I know it was there when I moved to Chicago in 2000.  Now I am pissed.

The plaque commemorated a Civil War refugee camp that used to be there.  It doesn’t seem like much to some folks, maybe. To me it is part of my core.

I put away thinking about it when I came back to the city until I stumbled across this thread on Metafilter a couple of days later.  I made a comment, but my mind was cloudy and I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I could have been.  I NEEDED to respond, though, so I did. Now I feel like I need to flesh it out a bit.

The Metafilter thread was a link to The Civil War Isn’t Tragic, an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Ta-Nehisi writes for the Atlantic and has written some of the best modern social and racial commentary in his time there.

I have the same reaction to the Civil War that he does.  It does not mean as much for me and where I am today as it does for him (I am white and he is black) but we are in agreement.

It drives me nuts when I hear or read about Southern Romanticism, Civil War battle reenactments, or how maybe slaves had decent masters and it wasn’t all that bad… It drives me absolutely bananas when I am in Southern Indiana and see a Confederate flag as a bumper sticker or flying from a truck or in a window.

The Civil War wasn’t tragic.  It was the first step in what should have been the real leveling of American society.  It was a bloody birth that gave us the opportunity to make things right.  And we squandered it.

Let’s start at the beginning…

This is my Aunt Sarah Elliott:

Sara Elliott

Sarah Elliott*** c. 1880

 Sarah was born in the late 1840s in Elliott, IN.  Her parents were Welsh-Irish immigrants who were farmers, devout Methodists, and proud American abolitionists.  She grew up with the idea that one man shouldn’t own another.  It was part of their interpretation of the American identity that everyone really IS equal. One of the family sayings was (and still is): “If you are good enough to work for me, then you are good enough to eat at my table”.  When there were too many workers to eat in the dining room properly, tables would be set up on the farm and everyone ate al fresco. We are in the United States!

Her brother, William Elliott, was quick to volunteer for Union service when the war broke out. He served in the 42nd Indiana Volunteer Infantry from October of 1861 until October of 1864.

William Elliott Tombstone, 42nd Indiana Infantry

William's tombstone at Bluegrass cemetery in Elliott, IN

She then spent time with family in Evansville during the conflict at that refugee camp helping people get settled and reinvent their lives while her brother fought. He was taken prisoner at Perryville, KY at one point and was discharged in October of 1864 in Rome, Georgia.

The cedar trees in our front yard on our property where I grew up were trees that he brought back in his suitcase from the battle of Lookout Mountain.

Cedar, Juniperus Virginiana, from battle of Lookout mountain.

Cedar, Juniperus Virginiana, from battle of Lookout Mountain in Elliott, IN.

After the war, the family tried to do what they could to help reconstruction along.  Sarah and her mother took in orphans that were wandering the countryside and sent them to school so that they wouldn’t be taken advantage of by farmers who were using the refugees as cheap (often horribly abused and mistreated) labor.  They worked in town to help women get work and Sarah taught freed slaves that were now in Indiana to read.

All of this is to say that I grew up being PROUD of what these people did.  I grew up hearing about how OUR PEOPLE (meaning my family, not white people generally) did our part for the American struggle for equality.  I grew up with my Grandma lamenting that Southerners and Copperheads prevented a proper reconstruction and brought on the racial woes that we as a country had to face for decades after what should have been the beginning of the end of it. I grew up with the idea that April 9, 1865 is when the American dream of real independence truly began.

What does this have to do with anything?  A whole damn lot.

Being from original Lincoln Republican stock, it makes me sick that there has been a shift in the way we look at the Civil War and what it meant to the people fighting.  You hear about the tragedy of brother-against-brother and you read about how it wasn’t really about slavery but about “State’s Rights” you hear any number of things that may have some grain of truth, but (and let’s use the crazy-people caps lock for this):

I AM HERE TO TELL YOU AS A DESCENDANT OF PEOPLE WHO ENLISTED AND FOUGHT, WHO WORKED TO MAKE THIS NATION AND THIS WORLD A BETTER PLACE… FOR THEM IT HAD EVERYTHING TO DO WITH SLAVERY.

RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING.

They didn’t care about whether South Carolina printed their own money or Tennessee could  give women the vote.  They were concerned with their own souls in the eyes of their god and they were willing to fight and shed their own blood so that the taint of slavery would not be on them.

Period.

In fact, they weren’t particularly thrilled with the consolidation of Federal power that the war brought with it, but freedom trumped it all.  Freedom trumped everything.

As far as Lincoln changing direction into it and making it about slavery:
“The greatest thing about the President isn’t that he is one of History’s great leaders.  The greatest thing is that he admitted to being wrong and did what was right.” That was what my Grandma said about her mother’s take on his stance on slavery and why he is a hero.

So please, the next time you hear some idiot tell you that the Civil War was about State’s Rights and that slavery was secondary at best or perhaps even an accidental point in the whole affair, please remember my Aunt Sarah and her bother William.

Remember what they did and how they thought about it.  The problem is that time is slipping by and people like me – people who still have these kinds of stories to tell – are going away without writing them down. Cedars in the front yard become “those trees that have been there forever” and Uncle Will becomes an unmarked black and white photograph fading in a box in the attic.  I am lucky because I am so young for someone who has this much of a physical, historical,  and emotional connection to it. Eventually we will lose everyone who has a connection. That is how History gets re-written, and it isn’t good.

*Tangentially related: I was having a conversation with a Rabbi friend of mine.  We were talking about the origin of the Reform Jewish movement in Germany and America in the 19th century and it struck me that there is something similar in America as it relates to general race relations, how we understand each other… It got me thinking something… something about assimilation… Something about the idea that if people just put aside and tuck away what makes them different culturally things will be OK… If we just try to fit in well enough and blend blend blend everything will be fine… Like a battered woman who, if she just makes the dinner without burning it, will go one more day without being hit…

**Kudos to Evansville on the Library, by the way.  It is probably the nicest and most useful thing to have gone up in a long time.

***Her married name was actually Sarah Elliott Smith, but through a particularly gothic turn of events**** we don’t use Smith.

****She was the first wife of her future sister-in-law’s first husband and died of TB around 1888 at 40. Got it? It takes a second and isn’t really easy to grok without more background.  You will just have to wait for my genealogy blog to come out.

Ok, Cut The Comedy*

After this past Spring I decided that I was going to have the Summer off.
But like a late night infommercial: THAT ISN’T ALL! THERE’S MORE!

See, I have had a full-time job since 14 legally and a little before that in reality.  I have (had at this point) never had a Summer off.  Never. Add to that that my best friend died and you get a really good recipe for needing to forgo responsibility for a while.

So this was going to be not only my Summer vacation, but I was going to spend most of it in a bottle.  Yes, that’s right. I am an adult and have no work for three months, so… A Summer of near-constant drinking regardless of the time of day seemed like a GREAT idea. I had never done that.  I had always been too busy and had too many responsibilities.

So I tried.  Believe me, I tried.  My friend Carrie called it a “forgotten Summer” when I told her what I planned to do.  The thing is (and this is why I don’t drink in my regular life as a rule) I have such a high tolerance that I have never blacked out or forgotten anything because of booze.  I may may terrible decisions, I may overreact to things, the hangovers may be unbelievable, but I remember every second of it.

So I have been walking around with beer in styrofoam cups  (don’t worry, I don’t drive) drinking publicly for three months, feeling like I have been getting away with something and then drinking Cabernet or Burgundy from 4 p.m on and settling in with a nice Port before bed.

And now it needs to come to an end.  Luckily I am actually looking forward to it.  But it can’t go on.

After all, We aren’t in Wisconsin, dear.

*My mother’s catchphrase when we were supposed to go to bed and wanted to stay up and play and act like idiots.

Indulgent Redemption

I am going to try to be blunt but not offensive here. It will be hard for me, but in the interests of not seeming too ignorant, I have a nascent thought about what I have always privately called “indulged redemption”.

I was reading Metafilter today and came across this post.

In my mind, indulgent redemption is when one squanders a good deal of time and energy in things that don’t matter and then (TA-DA) finds their redemption in something outside of themselves.  Usually it involves lots of judgment and sometimes it even gives birth to screeds or political movements.  In my mind, it is almost always a negative thing.

I started thinking about it when I was a kid.  My dad, when he first met my mother in the early 1970s, was a fraternity party-boy.  My mother grew up with alcoholics and so wasn’t thrilled with being around it.

So in order to court her, he made a HUGE deal of not drinking anymore.  He was from a teetotaling family anyway, so it was fairly easy for him to do it.  So I grew up with one side of the family raging alcoholics and the other side prim teetotaling Methodists.  It was interesting, to say the least.

And that was my first introduction to indulgent redemption.  It comes close to martyrdom, but not quite.  It is more like wearing a judge’s gavel around your neck 24/7 because you deserve it.

This is just the beginning of an idea… Maybe I’ll get more into it later.

Oh! THAT is what it is!

I picked up a book a few years ago called The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, The World’s Most Astonishing Number.

Phi

This, my friends, is Phi.

I have been reading and re-reading it for the past two years and have never really gotten a good sense of it. I get that it has to do with the Fibonacci Sequence, but I am not a math major. While the idea of Φ (phi) makes sense to me, the nuts and bolts of why it makes sense don’t… make sense.  I mean it is the number or ratio I use when I don’t have an image in my head – chamfering an edge on a piece of wood, establishing a ratio of height-width, et-cetera.  1.618 just works.

So I re-read and play around with it, but it just doesn’t set in my brain.

And then I stumbled across this thread the other day on Metafilter. It is about a 13 year old kid who is experimenting with Fibonacci to harness solar power more effectively based on his observations of trees.

Then my friend Erin posts a link to this story.  And all of the sudden it makes sense.  The article isn’t very well written.  It seems rushed and a little cobbled together, but it has this:

My investigation started with trying to understand the spiral pattern. I found the answer with a medieval mathematician and an 18th-century naturalist. In 1209 in Pisa, Leonardo of Pisano, also known as “Fibonacci,” used his skills to answer a math puzzle about how fast rabbits could reproduce in pairs over a period of time. While counting his newborn rabbits, Fibonacci came up with a numerical sequence. Fibonacci used patterns in ancient Sanskrit poetry from India to make a sequence of numbers starting with zero (0) and one (1). Fibonacci added the last two numbers in the series together, and the sum became the next number in the sequence. The number sequence started to look like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34… . The number pattern had the formula Fn = Fn-1 + Fn-2 and became the Fibonacci sequence. But it seemed to have mystical powers! When the numbers in the sequence were put in ratios, the value of the ratio was the same as another number, φ, or “phi,” which has a value of 1.618. The number “phi” is nicknamed the “divine number” (Posamentier). Scientists and naturalists have discovered the Fibonacci sequence appearing in many forms in nature, such as the shape of nautilus shells, the seeds of sunflowers, falcon flight patterns and galaxies flying through space. What’s more mysterious is that the “divine” number equals your height divided by the height of your torso, and even weirder, the ratio of female bees to male bees in a typical hive! (Livio)

And there you have it.  The sequence explained.  I think I am going to pick up the book again once classes start and take another crack at it.  I think I can really get it this time around.

Agriculture Blog Is Up And Running

Just finished setting up the Agriculture blog I have been wanting to get going for a while now: Rural Pursuits.  You can click on the link or go to http://blog.tchad.ag.

Overall, I am happy with it.  It does need just a little tweaking, but it is there.  I have tons of things in the pipeline that I am writing – everything from Hedge Apples to Horses.

Ok, getting called away for real work now.  Stay tuned.

And Here We Go Again

So the Summer is almost officially over and I am back at the Workroom trying to make things happen.
I sat down last night and very loosely cobbled together a set of numbers that need to happen between now and the end of the Spring classes 2012.  It is A LOT, especially for what I do here. So I need to get on the ball and not just wait for my MacArthur genius grant to come through.

There won’t be any clothing made this year – at least not until the late Spring – I am thoroughly burnt out on making clothing for the time being and the idea of making a dress sends me into paroxysms of anxiety.  I am thinking of coming up with more designs and extending/developing the way they would be produced, but that is IT.

Instead I am going to try to develop the classes and other facets of the business.  This is going to include some instructional video work,  some language instruction, and more than a little high-end agricultural development in both Wisconsin and Indiana.
Today I have two girls coming up to work for a bit and then it is on to getting the Workroom up and running.  With Greg’s estate, the extended Summer vacation, and my general malaise since March… Well, the place could use some tending-to.

But I feel more put together than I have for a very long time.  It is funny how that works.

 

 

R.I.P. Homie, R.I.P.

One of the dogs up at Getaway Farms died today.

Homer on a Stroll

Homer was one of those good old mixed breed 14 year old dogs that every farm needs.

This Summer Cyndi decided was going to be the “Summer of Homie”.  She didn’t put any restrictions on him and let him do his thing.  Luckily he went before the cold set in and the ground froze solid.  It sounds morbid, but you have to think about these kinds of things when you are in zone 4.

RIP Homer.

 

 

I Am… SUPERMAN!

I have a Superpower.  I don’t talk about it much in the city because I don’t get to use it very much in town.

But it really is a Superpower.

I have no dermatological response to this:

Poison Oak

Nah-Nah-Na-Na-Nah

That, my friends, is Poison Oak and Poison Ivy. Plants I am not allergic to.  It may not seem like much to brag about, but when you are in the woods with people who are allergic to it (and most people are, I have found) you may as well be bullet-proof and trying to catch rounds coming from the end of a 357.  The reactions you get are the same.

So while anyone with me cowers and covers and runs from anything vaguely vine-y with three to five leaves, I am swinging from vines that would make them turn into oozing pustules of despair and regret.

Chiggers, on the other hand, are my kryptonite.

Too Bad Potato Soup Doesn’t Age As Well As Burgundy

I was so hungry.

I am in Elliott, IN and wanted to go to our place in Spencer County.  It is right next to where Abraham Lincoln grew up and I have always felt a connection to it.  My Dad says it is because the Spencer County farm is where I was conceived.

In any case, I wanted to go up there and so got a ride.  It is about 45 minutes away on highway 162.  On the way, I bought a bag of ice and a bottle of Port.  One can’t have a nice evening at one’s country place without a nice Port, you know… I did not, however, buy any food because I know that my Dad and his friends hunt deer up there and there is always lots of canned goods.

So I get to the farm after a comedy of errors and realize I didn’t bring the right key.  No problem.  I took the door off the hinges by removing the pins.

Once I get inside I realize that no one has been here for at least 7 years.  SEVEN YEARS.

The inside is a mess of mouse nests and snakes have shed their skins in every tight crevice possible. Also: Raccoons.  Turns out I will have guests with my Port for my country evening.  No problem.

I start clearing away the fire-pit that had been overgrown by Sassafras trees and got my firewood together for the night.  I looked at the cupboard and saw two shelves of canned goods.  Cupboard

Jackpot.

I got a fire going and opened a can of potato soup.  As it plopped into the pan I thought it looked odd.  I chalked it up to the freeze-thaw cycles that have happened over the seasons, but then hesitated and thought it was a good idea that I should look at the expiration dates. Oh, my.  My potato soup had a best if used by date of 2002.

I was so hungry I thought about taking the chance – the nearest grocery or gas station is miles away. But then I thought better of it and started looking through the cans…

I didn’t get a chance to eat much tonight.  All of the food is expired by at least 6 years and the only thing viable in the past five is the coffee.  Instead, I cracked open the Port and went out into the treeline to gather a local wild green: Lambsquarter. I boiled it up and had a couple of cups of it. If you have never eaten it, let me tell you it is quite good – milder than spinach with just the slightest pecan-ish nutty flavor.

As soon as I ate my wild-man dinner I started making really bad decisions.

As it turns out, if you haven’t been on an abandoned farm that has two unmarked and overgrown cisterns, four dilapidated outbuildings, and enough wildlife to stock four counties in more than seven years, you should probably not go wandering around in the dark looking for big dead trees to knock down and burn after having had a little more than half a bottle of Port.  At the very least take a flashlight.

Also: Once you find the cistern that hasn’t been used in 40+ years, best practice is that you should 1. Not try to draw water when drunk and 2. Not drink or use said water before boiling.

Breaking all the rules!

(I am lucky I didn’t 1. fall in and 2. Get Typhoid.)

 

Bacchic Delights

My brother and his 7th Adventist wife named their second child Bacchus.  Yes, you read that right.  The woman who doesn’t give her children medicine and believes that demons were haunting her named her son Bacchus.  Irony abounds at the Elliott estate.

In any case, you can’t name your son Bacchus and NOT have pictures of him picking grapes, now can you?  There would be something very not right about that.

And this makes me very happy:

Bobby and Bacchus picking grapes

My brother is the father of a GOD!

 

It Is Funny You Mention Demons…

After the Fire Demon that got his poor dimensional portal burnt up happened, I thought I would be done with demons for this trip.

Nope.

I was riding with my brother and his wife today.  They had just picked me up from the coal cabin I was staying at and were taking me to Grandma Schlachter’s house to spend the rest of the afternoon before either of them had to go to work. We drove down Hwy 245 past the small house they used to live in on our way.
It is a neat little farmhouse with a garage, outbuildings, and barn.  It is a very sweet little setup.  I liked it.

But then Bobby (that’s my brother) said: “I am so glad we moved.  The old lady was getting to be too much for me.”  I pressed him a little and he told me that they thought the place was haunted.  He said something about being driven crazy by ghosts when my sister-in-law piped up and said “It wasn’t a ghost, it was a DEMON”

Now, let’s do a little setting-of-scene here.  It will help you understand what is going on as we drive through Santa Claus (yes, that is really a town), Indiana.

My sister-in-law wants desperatly to be a good 7th Day Adventist-slash-fundamentalist.  Nevermind the fact that she has a mouth like a sailor, married a muslim in her first marriage, a rabid atheist (that would be my brother) in her second, or can’t distinguish any particular version of the bible.  Forget that she has only the loosest grip on any theology whatsoever. She knows what she wants to be and grasps at straws blindly to get there.  It makes for some interesting (if uncomfortable) family dinners to say the least.

So I look at her and say “Demon?”. “Yeah, a Demon!  Amir (that is her son by her first marriage) said that it would blow in his ear!  And I felt it too!”

Now.  I grew up around a LOT of fundamentalists.  The world was always ending, the end was coming, the coming was at hand, the end is nigh, et-cetera, et-cetera, et-fucking-cetera.  I am used to this kind of talk.

As an adult, I have found that it doesn’t work to directly counter what the person is saying.  What you have to do is engage them without insulting them or discounting the ridiculous thing that JUST CAME OUT OF THEIR MOUTH.

Needless to say, it is a battle.

So she mentions that she both believes in demons and thinks one was haunting her at the place in Spencer county.

Another aside: This is the same sister-in-law who told me that she doesn’t believe in medicine or pharmacology because “You know where we get the word “phamacology” and “pharmacy” don’t you?  We get it from the Latin word for evil magic.* Why would you want to give your children evil magic?”  Did I mention that she is an RN and is going for her PA?  Yeah. That.

So knowing that she had a love of etymology and that it was important to her in making theological decisions,  I thought it would be a good time to say:

“You know where we get the word ‘demon’?  It comes from the Greek word Dæmones!’ (‘ΔΑΙΜΟΝΕΣ’); which were not evil spirits, but rather neutral or positive spirits. In fact, Plato said that at Socrates’ trial he [Socrates] attributed his inspiration to his daemones.” {You, as a reader, can read more about Socrates’ trial here.}

She said: “Well, they must have been wrong or not know what they are talkin about!” She believes that the English language has been around “at least since the Romans”.

I said that it wasn’t until the Christian era we came to understand demons as malevolent or dark.  Well, she wasn’t having any of it.  She looked at me as if I had just said:  “Follow me to the dark side and let me rape your children while you eat the flesh of your mother. ” For. Serious.

And that was where demons in the real sense came into my sabbatical for a second time in as many weeks. Personal demons?  Well, that is a totally different story.  They are an everyday occurrence.

*We really don’t.  Here is the etymology for the word pharmacology/pharma derivatives.  They are Greek in origin. Considering it comes from the period after Christians destroyed nearly ALL of the world’s learning, well, I am surprised that we got this far <insert more rant here>.

And just for fun:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Algol

Um… That’s Weird…

After we got done clearing out the old garden and hauling tires into Kiel, WI for disposal, we took all of our scrap dry wood and tree branches and made a nice burning pile.
I stacked it so that it wouldn’t get out of hand and because it was so close to the garage and house, we had two water sources to keep it down if things got too crazy.

So we finished up this HARD day of work with three pitchers of Sangria and a big-ass fire.  You really can’t do too much better than that.

THAT would be Cyndi saluting our work after our first glass of sangria!

So we drank a second pitcher and thought it seemed like a really, really good idea to start scavenging the barn and farm for more dry lumber that wasn’t firewood she would need this winter.  We found an old door in the second storey of the barn extension.  I was hesitant, but when I saw that it had been cut down a couple of times and wasn’t restorable, in it went… along with some old rotten 2x4s and more than a couple of split pieces of real firewood that we decided to sacrifice.

It is always neat to watch structural things burn – things that have panels and edges.  The fire consumes them at the weirdest points and in some of the thinner spots they burn from the middle out.  In the case of the door, it caught fire first where the panels join the frame.
We just watched it from there…

As we watched it burn down we decided to open a third bottle of wine and make a third pitcher of fortified sangria.  This too seemed like a good idea.

We began to drink it and talked about how we may be burning some kind of a portal door.

So then the party came to an end, as these things often do, by a little kick and over pitcher #3 goes…  So sad.  We thought (briefly) about pulling out the whiskey, but then decided that would be too much and got ready for bed after digging out and muting the fire a bit.  It had started to drizzle a little and we felt safe that everything was under control.

Fast forward to the next morning and I am uploading images from the camera to the Mac.  Everything is clipping along until I get this series:

And so there you go.  We shouldn’t have burnt the ghostly monster portal door.  THAT, my friends, is what too much sangria fortified with vodka will do.

 

 

I’ve… Been Working On The Railroad…

Pretty soon the website for Rural Pursuits will be up and running, but in the meantime, I am helping my friend’s sister around her place.

Getaway farms is a great place that Greg’s sister runs by herself.  Try managing 15 acres, 7 horses, a huge barn and a track and see how far behind you get.

One of the jobs we tackled yesterday was getting old railroad ties up and out of the ground in a corner of the yard that used to be garden and grading it back into lawn.

Hauling Railroad Ties

There were 15 of these damn things!

Here is the thing:  When you tell me there is work to be done, I turn into a Real German®.  Not the happy lederhosen wearing beer drinking German that you see at the Bierstube, but a hardcore task master that stays on task and WILL complete the job.
We were laughing together as we dug out chinese elms and maple trees.  There was a little whining halfway through, but we powered through.  At one point, she was ready to give up and go eat.  I said: “Let’s finish this and then we can eat.  Let’s power through.  We get no comfort until the work is DONE!”  To which she replied: “OK! OK!  I know what happens to us Poles when we get under the thumb of a German!”

So the day went well – we worked in really humid windless conditions, changing clothes 2x because we couldn’t stay cool or dry, but we. got. it. done.

Needless to say, I don’t normally look like this after a day of work:

After pulling railroad ties for 7 hours.

Done.