Lift Up Your Hearts!

As I've mentioned before, a great advantage of being in a denomination that celebrates the Church Year is that Christmas is not just one day, but 12, and lasts until Epiphany comes, on January 6. So today you get a Christmas carol, and not just any Christmas carol. Coventry Carol was nothing special to me until the we lost our firstborn grandson at the end of November. Intellectually, I celebrated Christmas as usual, but emotionally I simply could not handle all the songs about the joyful birth of a baby boy.

Coventry Carol remembers that the birth of Jesus brought about the Massacre of the Innocents as King Herod sought to destroy the future king he had heard about. It was the perfect carol for that year.

Herod the king, in his raging,
Chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”

Which brings me to one of my latest YouTube channel finds, The Salisbury Organist, for a different look into this haunting carol.

'Way back in the 1980's, my family enjoyed spending time with good friends who owned a summer camp on a lake in Vermont. The following is a story from the year my father made the mistake of being part of camp-opening at the beginning of the season. Names have been abbreviated to protect the innocent and the guilty. I hope you find that this tale of minor summertime woe brings you a little bit of cheer this Christmas season, if only because it didn't happen to you. It's funny how we often find misfortune to be humorous as long as it's sufficiently distant in time and space. But don't feel bad about that. Dad would have laughed—that's why he wrote it the way he did.

Friday, 5 June 1987

I was the first to arrive. I expected D. around 9 or 9:30, A. and J. around 2-3 a.m., and E. even later. What I found in the cabin did not leave me overjoyed. When the camp had been "winterized" the refrigerator had been unplugged and the doors propped open as they should have been, but what they failed to do was remove what appeared to have been some popsicles and something that had been wrapped in aluminum foil and was about the size of a pan of brownies. Whatever it was, it had long ago spoiled and left a very unpleasant odor in the kitchen and a mess in the freezer compartment. At this point I went out and bought some sponges for cleanup and some bottled water as the water system had yet to be made operable. When I returned, I set about cleaning up. In addition to the mess in the freezer, the refrigerator was full of what I at first thought were mouse droppings, but which I later concluded were egg cases as they were too uniform and shiny to be droppings. They may also have been seeds that were stored there by some creature for future use. The refrigerator door contained a shelf with depressions for holding a dozen eggs and each depression held at least a half dozen of these seeds or whatever. Anyway, with sponges and ammonia I cleaned up everything but the smell. Out of all this I came to two conclusions: 1) Next time I won't be the first to arrive, and 2) when the guys go up this fall to close up the camp, J. should go to take care of the details that the guys tend to forget. As you will see later, this latter conclusion was reinforced during the weekend.

About 9 o'clock I got a call from E. saying that D. was leaving Middletown about 8 o'clock which meant he would not arrive until around midnight. I had held off having dinner until D. arrived, but I now decided that D. would have eaten by the time he arrived and it was time for me to find some dinner. I went to the Checkmate restaurant and found they were closed to the point that they would sell only ice cream. While I was wondering what I would find open at that hour of the night, I concluded that there was no reason I couldn't fix my own dinner. So I went into Fairhaven and to the Grand Union where I bought the ingredients for a fried egg sandwich and then returned to camp where I fixed just that.

D. arrived around midnight. He snacked a little and we went to bed about 1 a.m. J. and A. arrived around 2:30.

Saturday, 6 June 1987

E. arrived about 6:30 and with that we all got up. A., D., and E. got the water system working after a little problem getting the pump primed. But when they turned on the water to the house, a large spray emerged from an elbow in the cold water line to the bathtub in the main bathroom. Clearly they had not opened the faucets when they drained the system. So while the pump-installers went to play golf, J. and I tackled the elbow problem. Naturally the elbow was old and nothing like it has been made in years. The people at Gilmore's Hardware threw up their hands, but at Tru-Value they put together a combination that would do the job. Having finished this repair, we turned on the water, only to find a stream pouring out from under the house. A soldered joint in the copper tubing to the wash basin in the small bathroom had come apart and that is where the water was coming from. J. and I went back to Tru-Value and bought a torch, solder, and flux and made the repair. This would not have been difficult except that we were working with a clearance of only about six inches between the house and the ground, and not only was the working space cramped, but I also made a reasonable effort to avoid setting the house on fire. So now we turned on the water again and all was well until I ran water into the wash basin. Now water gushed out of the basin drain pipe which was broken near where the copper joint had come apart. Since there was no leak except when the basin was used, the solution this time was to pass a law that the basin would not be used until repairs had been made.

Now we could open the line to the water heater so we could wash dishes in hot water. I opened the valve, and was showered from the water pouring out of two big cracks in the copper line into the heater. So once again we went to Tru-Value where we bought some couplings and a length of tubing. I cut out the bad section and soldered a new piece in its place. Now we could turn on the water again, and this time water sprayed from an elbow on the bathtub in the small bathroom. By now it was nearly closing time for Tru-Value and besides, we didn't dare go in that store again today. So we went to a hardware store in Fairhaven, but they did not have exactly what we needed to put together a substitute elbow, so we returned to camp and resorted to heating our water on the stove.

In the meantime, E., A., and D. had not only gotten the water pump running, but had played 27 holes of golf, and put the dock into the cold Vermont lake on a chilly and windy day. So we had a light supper of hot dogs before everyone fell asleep, woke up, went to bed, and fell asleep again.

Sunday 7 June 1987

We were slower getting up this morning than yesterday. I got up about 8 o'clock and J. and D. followed at decent intervals. Even E. did not sleep as late as A.. The first trip out was to Tru-Value (where else?) for the needed elbow, which I installed, and we soon had hot water. I consider hot water one of the most luxurious necessities for the good life at a camp, or anywhere else.

It's Christmas Eve, and I have many things to say but no time to write. Instead, I offer this beautiful King's College Choir rendition of O Come, All Ye Faithful, with its glorious descant, and on the last verse the magnificent Willcocks chord on "Word."

You're welcome! Have a

Very Merry Christmas!

“Afraid of heights?” Helmer asked. “Perfect. You really are a mixed-up lad. You come here full of defiance and anger, and then you show up and you’re a horrible, hobbled mess. You spend a week with me, and now you’re such an efficient student it’s scaring me and I begin to think you might someday be some kind of decent soldier. And now this."

“I’m willing to work and overcome anything, sir. Including this,” Picket choked out.

“Don’t worry,” Helmer said. “It’s just another enemy to be taken down in the end.”

From S. D. Smith's The Green Ember.

We have so many wonderful Christmas albums, collected for well over half a century, many wonderful, wonderful works reaching from the 21st century back to almost as long as Christmas music has existed.

But the one that most strongly and emotionally says Christmas to me is the Harry Simeone Chorale album, "Sing We Now of Christmas." It was released in 1959 and is my earliest memory of Christmas music. To my great joy, I recently found the album available on YouTube. The cover is a little confusing, because it shows the title as "The Little Drummer Boy," and the image is different. But the songs are the same. This link, Sing We Now of Christmas, will take you to a playlist where you can hear the whole album in order, or return and play your favorites.

I realize that my love of this recording of Christmas songs is wrapped up in the aura of a very happy childhood and all that I loved about the Christmas season, so your mileage may vary. But, as objectively as I can manage, I maintain it's one of the best compilations for telling the story of Christmas coherently through song while including both the old familiar carols and lesser-known songs from more distant times and places.

You may already know this. I didn't, so I'm putting it here so I can find it again. This is the situation in Windows 10; I don't know about any other system.

Have you ever wanted to change the case of a letter in a Windows file name? Say, "my recipe" to "My Recipe"? It ought to be easy, right? But every time I made the change, Windows reverted back to the original, as if it didn't recognise the change in case as a real change.

The solution—or at least the best and quickest I've found so far—is to make a greater change first, say "my recipe" to "xMy Recipe", and then alter the filename again, taking away the extraneous part, in this case the "x."

It's somewhat annoying, but I've been working intimately with computers since the early 1970's, so "kluge" is my middle name.

Fun fact: Here's part of an AI-generated answer to a question involving the Body Mass Index.

Question: If I could figure out how to measure my height in square meters (or inches), would the BMI result look better, or worse?

A modern song based on a 19th-century French novel played in the style of Irish music on a hammered dulcimer! Unfortunately, it's a YouTube Short, and I see no way to embed it here, as I do with their regular videos. But you can add a little brightness to your day if you click on this link.

Heather reported seeing this awesome car/bumper sticker combination in the Walmart parking lot.  Who says Walmart customers are illiterate?

This wasn't the actual car she saw, but an image I found online, taken by someone from a school student pickup line.  The best comment I saw to that was "Gonna take them forever to get home."

This Thanksgiving we did not have turkey.  A guest provided a ham, so a turkey would have been 'way too much food.  So I roasted a mini-turkey, aka a Wild Pastures whole chicken.

I have to say, it was really, really good.  I'm more than ever convinced that mass-produced food is bred for lack of flavor.  The day before, I had rubbed it all over, lightly with honey and fresh lemon juice, then heavily with a dry mixture of salt, black pepper, and "Alliums Plus," which is my homemade ground spice blend of various alliums, green peppercorns, and celery seed.  I filled the (small) cavity with peeled and lightly smashed garlic cloves, a couple of large springs of rosemary, and half a lemon, and let it dry brine (uncovered) overnight in the refrigerator.   The seasoning was light enough to let the chicken flavor shine.

Almost as good is what happened after the meal was over.

I've tried off and on for years to make my own broth/stock, with minimal success.  Oh, I would succeed in creating broth, but it would turn out to be no better than I could get at the grocery store for a whole lot less work.  But this time was different.

After our Thanksgiving meal, I dug out the crockpot and put in the chicken carcass (which fit perfectly) along with a collection of onion skins and leg and thigh bones from previous meals of Wild Pastures chicken parts, which I had collected in the freezer.  I filled the pot with water and let it simmer until the following day.  I added no seasoning additional to whatever came with the carcass (minus the half lemon, which I removed).

After removing all the solid material and straining the liquid, what to my wondering eyes should appear was a hearty, delicious stock.  You can tell how much good came out of the bones by the way it jiggled when cooled.

Now I am again excited about making stock. It was a small batch, which helped, as did keeping it simple, but I'm looking forward to, rather than dreading, the next opportunity.

What do you picture when you hear autism called a "spectrum"?

I think of a linear scale, the kind you see in so many surveys, such as this:

That's the image that comes to my mind, but I don't believe it's accurate.

Recently, I saw a short video of a man who dusted a thin metal plate with sand, and then drew a violin bow along one side, the vibrations creating a pattern with the sand. By placing his fingers on different combinations of points on the edge, he could create beautiful, complex patterns. These are called Chladni figures, and you can find out more in this demonstration, which is under 10 minutes long.

This strikes me as a much more reasonable way of describing the set of people that we have decided to label "autistic."

What of other people? What of other dimensions?

Maybe the true value of diversity lies not in magnifying our differences but in celebrating our beautiful patterns?

Forevergreen is a new, short, animated film.  I know nothing about it except that a friend recommended it, and I found it enjoyable and moving.  I belive this preview (of the entire film) will only be available for free for a week, so if you're interested, watch it soon.  It's 13 minutes long.

I had an idyllic childhood. Not perfect, but as close to that as anyone I know. And one of the best parts, I now realize, was growing up with engineers.

Schenectady, New York, where I spent the first 15 years of my life, was the home of the General Electric Company. As it did the skyline, GE dominated our lives, night and day. My father was an engineer, as was his father, and his father's father, and he worked in GE's General Engineering Laboratory. My parents met there, where my mother, a mathematician, also worked. Many of our closest friends were engineers or employed in related fields. Schenectady in those days was a hotbed of science-and-engineering-types, and as far as I could tell, everyone I knew was smart. Smart was normal, and not just among the scientific folks. I suspect that living in Schenectady in its heyday resembled what I imagine living in Silicon Valley or the Seattle area is today.

I'm not talking about genius-level, though there were certainly some of those, but rather down-to-earth people with practical experience and skills, who also read a lot and loved to have discussions about ideas and on just about any subject.

Not that I appreciated it at the time as I should have; I took it for granted. But my recent "archivist" work with my father's journals and other writings has made me realize what a blessing it was to grow up in such a community. They even had their own way of speaking: their conversations were filled with jokes and wordplay, exaggerated and understated language, and what I realize now was an advanced everyday vocabulary. It wasn't until I had had much more experience outside of our parochial bubble that I realized that there are many people who find what I consider a normal vocabulary to be a sign of arrogance, who take the exaggerated/understated language literally, to the point of misunderstanding or even offense, and who either don't understand or don't appreciate the humor.

It takes all sorts and conditions of men to make a world, many of them wonderful. If you understood the "sorts and conditions of men" reference, you are part of a different distinct community, one I did not come to recognize and love until some 30 years ago. Appreciating other cultures and especially loving one's own are not mutually exclusive conditions.

What chiefly concerns me is that we seem to have entered an age when differences are being replaced by diagnoses. The other day, a new friend was telling me about her son, who in high school was triply exceptional: He excelled in academics, in music, and in sports. It's not uncommon to see people who do very well in two of those areas, but three is a rarity. At one point, he was moved to express the concern that he might be "on the spectrum." What social pressures drive an obviously intelligent, capable, and well-rounded child to label himself with a diagnosis? Why do teachers and doctors (and even parents) put so much effort into finding boxes into which they can squeeze children?

As I told my friend, in my day, in my world, we used another term to describe being "on the spectrum."

We called it normal.

As I wrote in Let the Worms Decide, I decided to do my own experiment on what our composting worms think of junk food.

I began the experiment with the worms "hungry"; I had let the available food dwindle 'way down in hopes of increasing their willingness to accept my offerings. I placed a clean paper towel on top of the moisture mat for greater visibility for the camera; normally their food goes under the mat, but I knew the clever little creatures would find it. From left to right, top to bottom: chocolate chips (60% cacao), a Starburst candy, two gummy bears, two Hallowe'en-sized Twizzlers (strawberry), an Airheads candy, brown rice, a piece of paper towel soaked with local, raw honey, some arugula, and a banana skin.

Four days later, the chocolate chips had apparently begun to mold, and the Starburst was completely covered in it. The other candy had softened and faded, but was untouched. The rice was very popular, but it's hard to tell what they thought of the honey. The arugula showed a small amount of interest, and there was some activity at one end of the banana skin.

After seven days I took pity on the worms and ended the experiment so I could give them a larger quantity of food I know they like. As you can see, there was a lot more worm activity. The rice was completely gone, and there had obviously been a lot of action around the arugula and the end of the banana (note all the worm castings). The chocolate showed a reasonable amount of interest and there were a number of worms around the candy—but they may have been munching on the paper towel. The Airhead seems to have been totally ignored.

It's hard to draw any firm conclusions. The worms can't really eat many items until the bugs and microfauna have done their pre-processing work, and some foods may take longer than others. I don't know why the arugula went so slowly; usually greens go quickly, but perhaps arugula is too "spicy" for the worms—I know they don't like the strong-flavored lemon balm.

I would have thought that the candy, being mostly sugar, should have been easy for them to handle. But I was wrong. According to my Brave browser's AI,

Red wiggler worms should not eat candy. Candy is high in sugar and often contains oils, artificial ingredients, and other additives that can harm the worms or disrupt the balance of the composting environment. While red wigglers can consume a variety of organic matter, including fruits and vegetables, they should not be fed processed foods like candy, cookies, or cake, as these can lead to poor bin conditions and attract pests.

So there you go. Ultra-processed foods are bad for worms, and probably for people, too. Then again, chocolate is bad for dogs, they say, and good for people (in limited quantities), so make your own decisions.