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historically speaking, peace in europe is an aberration.

Politicians in Hungary are calling for a list of prominent Jews in the country. Greece has been rioting pretty much for the last two years over austerity cuts. Spain and Italy are circling the same bankruptcy drain. France just lowered the retirement age for some workers to 62, while Germany—the country that pays off the rest of the Eurozone’s credit cards—raised theirs to 67.

I’m pretty sure some people over there are starting to have reservations about their various countries having reduced their armed forces to National Coast Guard & Railway Police levels. I mean, Britain has no floating bird farms anymore with which to project power if, say, the Argentinians make a move for the Malvinas Falklands again, and Germany has reduced its armored divisions from six to two (and their army’s total strength from twelve to three divisions). Because the Cold War is over, Europe is one big happy family, and nobody’s ever going to distract from domestic troubles by pointing fingers at Jews or foreign agitators again, right? Right?

capitalism.

zweipad.

One of our heavy-rotation pieces of technology is the iPad we got two years ago, shortly after they first came out. Robin uses it for therapy with her patients, the kids play games on it, and I find it handy for watching movies in the evening.

With our upcoming trip to Germany, we figured that we should get a second iPad. The kids fight over our current one at home enough as it is, and a transatlantic flight basically requires two of these wonderful attention-absorbing devices so we don’t have battles over whether to watch Iron Man or My Little Pony at 30,000 feet. So Robin went out and got a new iPad mini the other day.

I will admit to skepticism when they revealed the iPad mini. We already have iPhones and the larger iPad, and the mini didn’t really sound like it would fit a niche in our household. But now that I’ve had a chance to play with it for a few days, I find that I enjoy it more than the bigger model. There’s a CNet review of it that says the mini is “shockingly nice to hold”, and that pretty much nails it. It’s the size of a Kindle Fire, but much thinner, and the texture and the tapered edges are—in typical Apple/Jony Ive fashion—just right in the hand. Technologically, it doesn’t have much that our old iPad lacks, aside from the rather nice built-in cameras, but the form factor is ever so much easier to use when you use the thing as an ebook reader or movie player or a handheld video console for kids.

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We got the 64GB WiFi version (our Verizon iPhones can function as hotspots for the iPads if we need that capability on the road), and overall I like it much more than I expected. Hand it to Apple—they know how to make some slick gadgets.

in the news. masters and servants.

the surveillance state eats its own.

Here’s an excellent Salon.com article on the most worrisome and least-addressed aspect of the Petraeus affair—the fact that the Feds were able to dig up what they did without evidence of a crime, and without any warrants.

Money quote:

“Having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.”

One assumes General Petraeus fully supports the current reach of the surveillance state in much the same way post-Reconstruction whites supported gun control—it’s all fine and dandy as long as the Sheriffs remember that it’s just supposed to be used against Those People. But if the director of the CIA can have his emails snooped without a warrant or evidence of a crime, I doubt that looking through mine or yours would give the FBI even a twinge of civil liberties concerns.

friends. health. new hampshah.

dadcation again, and a request for a friend.

I get to spend a good chunk of today’s Dadcation at the tire place while letting them perform the biannual ritual known in New England as the Changing of the Tires. Because the all-seasons on there are down to “questionable” status after almost five years, I’m having snow tires put on, which means my wallet will be lighter by about $450 when I get out of here.

Luckily, we have the change budgeted in, and we usually don’t break out into cold sweats when we have to replace some essential item in the household. We also have killer health insurance—benefit of the wife’s position at a local hospital—so medical expenses are never really in the back of our minds either. That makes us pretty lucky in today’s economy. (Gold-plated health plans are a pretty rare thing to have for writer-types.)

Some people don’t have great health insurance, or indeed any insurance at all. My friend Tamara recently came down with basal cell carcinoma, and her health insurance is pretty much a sticky note on her laptop that says “Don’t get sick.” I know that a lot of the folks reading this blog also read Tamara’s blog over at View From The Porch, so I’m going to put out a request for you to go over there and see if you have some change in the couch cushions that you can dump in her PayPal account to help her cover the expenses that go with being restored to cancer-free status. There’s a “Donate” tip jar button there, so it’s quick and easy to contribute a few dollars to repair the Snarkolator and keep the snark flowing.

(Like my friend Matt says: if you have enjoyed Tam’s wit over the years, you’d take her out for a dinner if you had her in the neighborhood, right? Just buy her the dinner in advance to make sure she’ll be around.)

I thank you in advance. More later, when I’m not dying a slow heat death in an overheated tire store lounge. At least they have WiFi so I can publically document my slow desiccation.

castle frostbite. friends. parenting.

taking a breather between storms.

I’m at the Fancy Bread Place, part of my weekly Dadcation ritual. (For those of you just tuning in, that’s when I get to leave the house for a morning once a week without kids in tow.) Two days ago, we attended a friend’s wedding over in the White Mountains, in a location that required us to do a lap of northern New Hampshire because you can’t get there from heah, at least not in a straight line. The wedding was lovely, though, and I’m glad we went.

Tomorrow, said friend and her husband are coming up to Castle Frostbite for a Halloween party. They’re bringing three little girls for a sleepover with our kids. We’ve done that before a few times, and it’s always fun, but LOUD. Five kids in the 3-8 age bracket can work up an amazing din. So right now I am enjoying a bit of quiet and calm before heading back to the Castle to get it ready for tomorrow’s festivities. There will be home-made “Bones of the Dead” cookies, mummy cupcakes, cocktail weenies, Halloween candy, and a bunch of, uh, special parenting sauce for the grown-ups. Tune in again on Sunday, when our intrepid correspondent live-blogs his hangover.

(I kid, of course. Our intrepid correspondent doesn’t get hangovers.)

 

castle frostbite. new hampshah. weather.

still here.

After-action report from Castle Frostbite: no big harm done here. We lost power for a few hours, and the winds were worryingly strong at times, but nothing got damaged. The chicken house remained in place.

The chickens have benefited from Sandy—when I let them out this morning, the run was a muddy mess, but all that moisture had drawn a lot of earthworms to the surface. It was like a breakfast buffet for the birds.

castle frostbite. new hampshah. weather.

snor’eastercane update.

The weather is still pretty sedate here in Upper Cryogenica. The wind gusts have picked up a bit, but it’s still nothing unusual for the season. The storm is predicted to pass well to our west, but we’re still in the cone of possible projected courses, so we’ll see how that goes.

New York is getting socked right now, and the storm isn’t even ashore yet. It’s making the windows here at Castle Frostbite rattle every now and then from seven hundred miles away. Boston is 100-ish miles to the southeast, and they’re shutting down the town and folding up the sidewalks from what I hear. I’m expecting to lose power as the storm gets closer, but we’re all stocked with firewood, batteries, and water. At least it’s not ten below with a foot of new snow on the ground outside. I just hope that the chickens don’t get blown into Quebec…

family. new hampshah. writing.

41.

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I’m not much of a photographer, but this picture is probably my favorite of all the ones I’ve taken. It’s the cemetery right up the road after the surprise late October snow we had last year. I used no filters or any post-processing, and the camera was the lowly built-in iPhone 4 one.

I’m 41 today. The sun is out, and the day looks a lot like that picture, minus the white frosting.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a lot like Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins—thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. I think I’ll turn the computer off for the rest of the day and take the kids out for some lunch and a bike ride out in the green. The writing will be here when I get back, as it always is. I have two novels to finish by the end of the year, but it won’t hurt things to take the day off from the regular routine. I need to recharge the batteries a little and think about how to spend my forty-second ride around the sun.