Author: Marko

books. writing.

the forever war.

It appears that Joe Haldeman’s excellent Military SF novel “The Forever War” is on sale for the Kindle for a measly $4.95. If you haven’t read it yet, you definitely should, and if you have, you should get a Kindle copy anyway just because.

I’d have to lie if I said that “The Forever War” wasn’t at least somewhat in the back of my brain when I wrote my own MilSF novels. (The first one is still in Slushpile Hell, and the second one, being a sequel to the first, will probably not get any traction until #1 is sold.)

 

aminals. castle frostbite.

chicken fortress.

The chickens have a new home, the mighty Cluckheim Keep.

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There are some leveling and roof issues to be worked out this weekend, but Cluckheim Keep should be reasonably fortified against predators. They can’t tunnel into it, and those walls are pretty hard to chew through.

aminals. castle frostbite. new hampshah.

it’s a northern frost toad. they eat granite.

007Tiny toad.

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Miss Lyra with Tiny Toad.

That girl is absolutely fearless and non-squeamish when it comes to getting dirty and handling critters. Her brother is a bit more cautious in that respect. He would have looked at the toad, but he wouldn’t have touched it. And he wouldn’t have come running, toad between thumb and forefinger, and said, “Look what I found outside, Daddy!”

My little girl…the headstrong princess who takes a sword to the dragon to defend her play castle, and who comes inside after a day of play with scuffed knees and dirty fingernails.

this monkey house.

i will physically kill you. do you understand me?

“Rachel from Cardholder Services” did not heed my warning. Rachel is now on my Wood Chipper List. That’s a technical term that describes a list I’ve made of people who will be….gently corrected…once I have taken over.

I used to be nice, or at least reasonably polite, with people who cold-call the house to beg for donations or sell me something. These days, as I am older and a bit more cranky, I no longer make an effort at civility. I don’t give a shit who you are or what you are selling–call my number uninvited and try to get money from me for whatever reason, I will respond to you wasting my time by being as harsh with you as the situation warrants. And that goes doubly if you try to talk over me, interrupt me, or refuse to take my first “NO” for an answer.

Among my major pet peeves are guilt trip donation calls for the Orphaned Unborn State Trooper Babies Association (“But they keep you SAFE, sir.”), calls from the aforementioned “Rachel” (a known scam operation), political polls (ESPECIALLY the heavily leading ones where the questions are along the lines of “Were you aware of the fact that Candidate Thatguy cannot conclusively prove that he doesn’t eat foil-wrapped babies for dinner?”), and any sort of robocall that asks me to hold for a person. If I don’t hang up right away, defensive phone tactics include talking to them in irate German, asking them in a breathy voice what they are wearing (male and female alike), asking them to “hold on” and then putting the phone aside for an hour, or telling them (in a bad pseudo-Russian accent) that they’ve reached the embassy of the Kingdom of Upper Cryogenica, and would they mind holding while the ambassador finishes his karaoke session with the Sultan of Absurdistan?

Spammers. I swear, if it wasn’t for the shitty cell reception here at Castle Frostbite, I would have ditched the landline years ago.

 

this monkey house.

tying a knot in it for mother gaia.

One of the silliest things I’ve seen in a long time—the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. These are folks who think the human race should stop procreating until we die out and the biosphere can recover.

There was a community here in Enfield that practiced a small-scale version of the VHEMT. They were called the Shakers. They didn’t procreate (or have sex at all), so they died out, which is not exactly a shocking development for a religious community that can only gain members through adoption or conversion. The village is still there, and it has some beautifully constructed buildings on it. The Great Stone Dwelling is particularly impressive. It’s made of granite and was designed to house 150 people. The Catholics bought Shaker Village and then resold it, and now it’s mostly private residences sitting on prime real estate overlooking Mascoma Lake.

Human reproduction, tied to our most basic biological urge, is pretty much impossible to suppress, and any organization dedicated to the eradication of it has no chance of convincing more than just a statistically insignificant number of followers. 

things that go boom.

calling the scattergun experts.

I said in the comments to the post about the fox that I use only birdshot in my shotgun because of its age and the fact that it has a full choke, but to tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure. (If in doubt, play it safe, especially when you’re dealing with things that generate ten thousand PSI of pressure right next to your face.)

But there have to be people out there in Internet land who know for sure—is it safe to fire buckshot or slugs out of that particular scattergun? We’re talking about a Remington Model 11 (the Remington version of the Browning Auto-5), 1935 vintage, with a full choke, friction rings stacked for heavy loads. What say the jurors?

intertubes flotsam. parenting.

do you have volume discounts?

Best fake ad ever. If you’re a parent, you’ll find it hysterically funny. If you’re not, you may find it a wee bit offensive. Either way, put that drink away before you click “play”.

aminals.

I just had to go and thumb my nose at fate.

Not two hours after I posted that thing about the joys of owning chickens and how we haven’t lost a single one yet, a fox stopped by our front yard to help himself to a free lunch.

I was upstairs and heard the birds make a ruckus, so I went downstairs to investigate. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw a fox standing on our front lawn by the tree line, right where the chickens usually hang out under the pine trees in the morning.

I ran outside and grabbed the shotgun on the way out. (I staged it next to the door with an empty chamber and the safety on just so I’d have it handy in case of predator instead of having to run upstairs and fetch it out of the cabinet. It turned out to be a good call.)

IWhen I opened the door, the fox looked over and started running. Unfortunately for him, he chose to run almost straight away from me across the leach field on the other side of our driveway. Bringing the shotgun up and pulling the trigger was almost a reflex. I hit him in the rear from about thirty yards at a full run, and that was pretty much that.

The chickens were scattered to hell and gone. I walked around calling for them, but I was pretty sure that the fox either a.) killed the whole flock before I got downstairs, or b.) scared all the chickens into setting sail for Patagonia. But as I was approaching the burn pile at the bottom of our leach field, one chicken popped its head out of the pile. I called it, and it hopped off the pile to come over to me…and four more followed it, single-file, in no particular hurry. The rest of them had scattered in the woods behind the house, but they all came back to the coop within thirty minutes.

Except for Clucky #5, that is. One of the barred rocks didn’t come back. I was hoping she had just run too far and gotten lost temporarily, but when she wasn’t back by the coop at nightfall, I had to write her off as MIA/likely KIA. Either the fox killed her in the first attack, or she went into the woods too far and got lost or fell to another predator.

So now we’re down to nine chickens.

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I took a picture of the dead fox. It’s a shame, really—it was a very pretty gray fox, and I hated having to kill it, but a single fox could, and would, have wiped out that whole coop in less time than it took for me to write the first three paragraphs of this blog post. Foxes are smart animals, and even if I had chased him off, he would have remembered the big FREE CHICKEN sign invisibly hovering above our yard, and he would have returned and taken the rest of them. I could have tried to trap it, but I didn’t have a trap handy, and the Remington was what I had in hand when I stepped out to confront him.

Again, it was a shame—too bad the chicken was lost, and too bad I had to shoot that fox. I don’t enjoy killing animals, but there was really no other way to save the rest of the birds.

So, farewell, Clucky Five. We hardly knew ye. Your sisters ate your share at dinner in your honor.

in the news. military life.

fakin’ it.

And another example of people making up stuff to make themselves look like war heroes.

What kind of kills me about this one is that the guy served honorably in the MN National Guard, and was actually deployed to Afghanistan and Kosovo. Why would he feel the need to embellish his service record? At least he didn’t make up his service time from scratch and run around in a uniform he’s not entitled to wear, like some of the more egregious posers.

There’s no shame in having been a truck driver, cook, or supply sergeant. There’s those who pull triggers and kick in doors, and those who make sure the trigger pullers have all the ammo, food, and water they need. Both kinds are essential to the whole effort. But I guess until they start making videogames like “Call of Duty 5: Vehicle Repair” or movies like “Act of Valor: DD1348 Crisis”, some people will feel the need to add a little bit of extra color to their fruit salad.