Rachel’s parents have a really cool limestone clock carved by Rachel’s great-grandfather. The timepiece is from a car of the era. Family lore says he used a hammer and screwdriver because it’s the only tools he had.
All week long I’ve been looking forward to organizing and cleaning the garage today. So what are your “boring old man” weekend plans?
The general consensus used to be (here in America) that the Christmas season began the day after Thanksgiving. As with so many other consensi, that is dead. Apparently it now begins the day after Halloween. By the time I retire it’ll probably begin mid-summer.
Thyme and cabbage soup on the fire
Final trick or treater count!
Rachel says happy Halloween
Half a day of work, a haircut, and then Halloween fun begins. Should be a nice day for trick or treating tonight, plus it’s a Friday. I’ll use my clicker counter again this year and report back.
Rachel’s bread making just gets better and better. Look at this perfect thing! It’s intended as a bread bowl but I’m just going to eat it with butter. Don’t tell her.
The Jack o’lantern I carved today and the pumpkin painted by Darcy last week. Bring on Halloween!
Two years ago today, I made a trip to some family graveyards with the intention of facing some old trauma. That was an important trip for me, in hindsight. If a sign of forgiveness is that the memory of wrong remains but without the emotional charge, then that has been accomplished in me.
About to head out on a day trip full of visits to sacred sites and tending to the dead in family graveyards. The midpoint of the trip will be the Christ of the Ohio statue, which not enough people know about.
Today was our annual trip to Huber’s to pick a pumpkin for this year’s jack-o’-lantern. Beautiful, fun day. A lot of road construction, though, which added over an hour to the driving. Now we get comfortable and watch some Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Rachel and I went out on our first date thirty years ago today! It’s for this reason—and all the subsequent fall family fun resulting from that day—that October has always been special for us.
We also put up our Halloween lights today
Backyard fire on this Sunday evening.
My mom gave me this roadside tchotchke last week. Looks to be from Columbus, Mississippi or Missouri, neither of which have a Lincoln connection as far as I can tell. But that’s part of the weird Americana charm, right? I have a long memory of it hanging in our garage, so I’ve hung it in mine.
As I drove by the Landmark Baptist church near our house, I decided to refresh my memory on Landmarkism. I had a copy of Trail of Blood as a teenager and toyed with the idea of using some of its arguments to make a similar genealogy of the fundamentalist Pentecostal group I was in.
I’m making persimmon pudding for an equinox meal today. There may be misappropriation of pulp going on here.
This looks like the churches I grew up in, with two differences:
- We would not have had a baptistery. We did baptisms in a deep spot in a local creek.
- If we would have had a baptistery, we would not have jumped into it. We would have said that brother “got in the flesh.”
Otherwise, totally us.
Another sign of the shift out of summer: we can hear the scrap yard a mile from here in the morning. Turns out, sound travels farther in cold temperatures.
One of the things I’ve learned since taking this new job is that the feeling of vague dread every time I think of work is not, in fact, necessary.
Rachel, Darcy, and I visited the Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum today. Pretty cool! Mostly it made me wish even more for a landscape filled with shrines.
Found this while doing some research at the local historical society. I was on the cutting edge of technology in 1988!
At the new job, I’m back doing work that requires a ten key. (I guess it’s not technically a ten key but that’s the term we always used for it.) So rather than using the one already at my new desk, I brought in the one I had from my old job. It’s probably twentyish years old. Fun!
Rachel and I just spent an entertaining hour getting a bat out of Darcy’s room. The good news is that our neighborhood has bats! We even saw another one swooping just outside the window, perhaps concerned for his friend.