Just Another Day In The Sticks

There is nothing quite as romantic as coming home to a candlelit house. The romance dwindles a bit when the reason that candles are lit is because a storm passed through and knocked out the electricity. However, if you want to really talk about the opposite of romance it would be being unable to bathe or flush your toilets.

And that, my friends, is why we have a generator.

The power grid which our old house was attached to left a bit to be desired. At least once a year, usually in the summer when the drain on the grid was the highest, we would experience brown-outs or occasionally full losses of power. The year that everyone lost power (2003) we were having new siding put up on the house. I was in the basement watching TV when everything went out. Naturally, I assumed that the siding people had hit something, but when I went outside and saw that the traffic light at the end of the street was out we all realized that it was bigger than just my house. We were without power for about a week and this was when we learned that our hobbies really paid off. At that time I was still camping on a regular basis. (Side note: when I say camping, I mean honest to goodness, I feel all the rocks under the tent camping, not that I’ve packed up everything in a mobile home and just changed locations camping, but more on that later). We were also collecting oil lamps. We had quite the collection picked up from places like art fairs and the Michigan Renaissance Festival. The real feather in our cap was that the previous Christmas we had given a ton of people homemade candles. We still had a lot of the beta candles sitting around.

Between the camping equipment (including two stoves), the lanterns, and the candles, we were quite well off until the power came back on. We slept in the basement to avoid the heat and generally fared quite well.

Now that was decades ago. We’re much older. I sleep with a CPAP machine. And the New House™ is on a well so no power means no water. Shortly after moving in we purchased a generator. We have the house wired so it will run anything we normally use. In fact, two days after the electric panel was updated, we lost power. Our electrician was amazing, calling us numerous times to make sure that everything was OK.

All of this is an explanation of why, despite the storms that tore through the area yesterday and felled one of my neighbor’s trees, knocking out power to the area, I am still able to sit here on my laptop, in a nice cool room, typing this. Unfortunately, the local wifi carrier is also down, so I’m not sure if this will get posted in time. You’ll know by the time you read this.

[Author’s Note: It look like I might be able to upload this by using my phone as a hotspot. Ain’t technology grand?]

Totally unrelated announcement: if you want to hear me talk about Alien: Romulus be sure to tune in to Dead On Movie Reviews on 5 Sept. Other movies being discussed include Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Shaun of the Dead, and Thanksgiving.

Listening To: The dulcet tones of the generator chugging away on the deck.

Currently Reading: Birds Aren’t Real by Peter McIndoe and Connor Gaydos. These brave patriots have risked their very lives to reveal the truth about the government’s plan to eliminate all avian life in the US and replace the birds with surveillance drones. Have you ever seen a baby bird? Of course you haven’t. Why do birds congregate on power lines? Because they are really drones that are recharging. Learn these truths and more in this exceptional book.

Current Obsession: I’m just sitting here moaning about the fact that Evil has ended (the television show, not the concept). It was a wild ride, but eventually all good (and evil) things come to an end.

We’ve been addressing some really annoying behind the scenes stuff which we won’t get into here, but it has been absolutely headache inducing. Hopefully these issues will be fixed by the next post.

On a much happier note, we have received almost all of the edited stories back for our upcoming anthology and have started the formatting process. The broad strokes are finished for the stories we have in hand. Next up will be the little fiddly bits like special formatting for stories with epistolary sections, deciding on ornamental section breaks, and then the extremely difficult CHOOSING OF THE ORDER OF STORIES. We already know which story will be last, because it is the perfect closer for the book. We also know some that we want to pair together because they work well together. Beyond that, we always try to even out the longer stories with the shorter ones, try to strike a balance between the funny and the sad, light and terrifying.

We have also been hard at work on our next Kickstarter which will be announced very soon. Look for more information to come.

Forrests are magical places, even more so for those of us who grew up deep in the city. Leaving behind the concrete and asphalt for dirt trails which wend through thick stands of pines was often the highlight of the summer.

Granted, it’s not like we went deep off the trail into the great unknown. We would usually spend a week at a public campground on Lake Gogebic in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, not far from where my mother grew up (I’m first generation troll on my Mom’s side. For those not from Michigan, a troll is someone who was born “under the bridge” meaning the Mighty Mackinac.). It was the kind of place with sites that one drove up to, not hiked out to. This was good because our temporary home was a Sears Cabinmaster tent that probably weighed a good forty pounds and slept four easily with plenty of room to spare.

Our days were spent hiking, looking at waterfalls, and swimming in Lake Superior. It was decades before The Mrs and I went to Puerto Rico and I swam in the ocean that I learned that not all large bodies of water include the risk of hypothermia.

Speaking of The Mrs, we also had a number of exciting camping adventures. There was the time we were up north and it rained for so long that we ended up going bowling just to get dry (if you want to crack her up, just say “bowling in Bessemer.”). There was the time we went to Tennessee and sweat off fifteen pounds each. Notable portions of this trip included, after hours of driving through the countriest of country roads we passed through Pigeon Forge and the whiplash change of scenery broke my brain. That night we stayed in a motel where the a/c unit was held in place by the Gideon Bible. That was also the trip where we visited an historic homestead site somewhere or other. The road was a closed loop that passed by three or four historic sites. Traffic had come to a complete standstill but no one knew why. Eventually word passed down that there was a mother bear with her cubs by the road and people were jumping out to take pictures (always a great idea). At one point a woman who was a few cars back got out and was walking along trying to figure out what was going on. She had just said “There’s a bear?” when Kai, our 120 pound GSDxChow Chow mix stuck his head out the window (inches from her head) and barked once. I swear he was laughing when he looked back at me.

I am tempted to keep going and talk about some of the institutional camping trips I went on — church groups and school based — but I think that I will save those for a later post. There are some great ghost story campfire memories associated with those.