It was a gorgeous weekend here in Vermont. Fall colors are probably near their peak if they haven’t hit it already. On Saturday Kelly and I took Lilo (our youngest dog and also the youngest of all our animals) out on a short expedition to downtown (where we dropped off our voter ballots) and then we walked him to the downtown park near the river. Kelly had been there before, but it was my first time there. I have been missing out because, as you can see, the park is gorgeous.
Sign near the park entrance.I love this building. The Frank Adams Grist Mill is a museum now. Another park sign. This one is down near the river.Wow. Scenes like this are one of the reasons why we moved here.This view of the river is just a couple hundred yards away from our house. Gorgeous. Lilo is surprisingly unafraid to get wet, which is very un-dachshund-like behavior.
I will continue to post here in the blog now that I have gotten back into the habit again.
As someone who has worked in IT for… well, almost 30 years now, I have generally embraced new technology as it arrives. Certainly there have been trends in the industry that I have not been enthusiastic about at all, such as the domination of the software market by subscription models which require you to pay a monthly or a yearly fee. That trend has also led to software makers not selling software on a CD anymore, and that led to computer makers not putting CD-ROM drives in computers anymore. I am not a fan. I also dislike the trend that makes devices smaller and thinner at the cost of said devices not having 3.5 mm headphone jacks or ethernet ports or even many ports at all. It means that to connect things that used to be quite standard (like a printer, or a network cable) you now have to buy an adapter or a dock of some sort (unless it’s Bluetooth or wireless). And that’s annoying to me.
So if you want to use AI to do your homework for you, or if you want to hand your creative impulses over to it and let it do all your writing and thinking for you, be my guest, but don’t expect me to support you by enthusiastically embracing the technology and the slop that it generates as “literature” or “art” or anything of the sort. I think it’s crap. And I think that techbro billionaires would LOVE to not have to worry about paying salaries and benefits to human beings if they could just buy robots or AI tokens to do all the work instead. But I will keep insisting that my books and music and movies be made by people, and I hope society will ultimately agree with me.
On October 16th, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a group of followers in an armed attack on the U.S. Armory and Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Brown had hoped the attack would spark a slave revolt across the South, or at least cause many slaves to join him at Harper’s Ferry. But it seemed nothing went as Brown had planned. By the morning of the third day, October 18th, U.S. Marines under LT Israel Greene (overall commander of Federal forces opposing Brown was Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee, the future Confederate general) stormed the engine house where Brown and the last of his men had fortified themselves. Of the 22 raiders, 10 were killed during the raid, 7 were captured and later hanged, and 5 managed to escape. Brown himself was badly wounded but survived to stand trial. Brown was tried in Virginia state court rather than a Federal court largely due to the intervention of Governor Henry Wise and the ease with which he convinced President James Buchanan. Brown was convicted after the jury deliberated for less than an hour. On November 2nd, 1859, after Brown gave a statement that became known as his “last speech,” he was sentenced to death by hanging. Due to Virginia law a month had to pass before the sentence could be carried out. In the intervening time, plans for a rescue were made by some abolitionists, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but none were carried out. That month Brown had hundreds of visitors, wrote over 100 letters (most of which were immediately published), and hundreds of letters were received by Brown, Governor Wise, and others connected to the trial. Brown’s trial was the first to be reported in newspapers around the entire country (even the West Coast) due to the recent completion of the transcontinental telegraph. Although newspapers everywhere reported on the event, only a few papers actually had reporters present, and at least one of those reporters went to great lengths to hide his identity from locals. Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859, the first person to ever be executed for treason in the United States. His funeral would take place on December 8, 1859, after his wife Mary had traveled with Thomas Wentworth Higginson and others to retrieve the body from Virginia and bring it home to North Elba, New York.
Kelly and I took a trip to northern New York in late November 2024 and had the opportunity to visit the Brown farm and see his grave. Note the snow already on the ground in November.
The grave, using the headstone Brown brought from Connecticut that had previously belonged to his grandfather who died in 1776. After that grave got a new headstone, Brown brought the old one to his New York farm.Statue of Brown by Joseph Pollia that was erected in 1935.
As I get back into the habit of posting here in our blog, I will put up more pictures from our little day trips like this.
One of the things I have missed about regularly posting on our blog has been the ability to really work out my thoughts in writing, which is ordinarily not something I get to do much anymore. We don’t use social media much these days, especially since Elon Musk bought Twitter and then proceeded to wreck it. I am still on Twitter (I steadfastly refuse to call it X), because there are still good people on there and I refuse to let Elon and his troll mob chase me away. Kelly is on Instagram a good bit. But Twitter is not designed to really let you express yourself eloquently when you have to pay Elon money to write anything more than 140 characters long. And he has enough money, he doesn’t need any of ours.
The 2026 midterm elections are now less than a month away, and I am admittedly a bit apprehensive about what will happen. All hyperbole aside, this election is going to be immensely consequential because it may present the only chance the American public has to stop Trump and his enablers in Congress before the 2028 presidential election. Without even going into whether or not the 2028 election is going to happen and whether Trump will put himself on the ballot, I am just not sure how much damage will be done to the country by November 2028 to be confident that we can wait until then. Trump’s first term was bad enough. But after having four years to plan how they would do things differently if they returned to power, Trump and his supporters have been rapid and methodical in their destruction of America’s reputation on the world stage, in the erosion of our civil liberties, in the sheer scale and variety of the virtually open public corruption now happening, and in the reduction or elimination of countless Federal programs and departments (much of it through DOGE) that were designed to serve the public good. It will take decades, possibly generations, to repair all of the damage that is being done, and I think we don’t even know or understand the full scale of it all yet.
The Republican party essentially no longer exists except to support Donald Trump. It has become increasingly authoritarian and even less willing to tolerate dissent than before, which hardly seems possible. I am somewhat encouraged by the fact that Trump’s popularity of late has weakened considerably, but I worry that the Democrats, particularly among their leadership, may not measure up to the crisis that is building. Supposedly they are planning for all sorts of possible problems that may happen concerning the midterms. I sincerely hope so. I have great confidence in local and state officials here in Vermont. My confidence in the Democratic party at the national level is less than I would like. And I worry that there will be voters that, although they don’t like or trust Trump and his party, they may not feel great about the Democrats either. And that needs to change. People desperately want to see real results. I know we do. People need to feel like it is still possible to save our democracy and that the Democrats are able and willing to do so. I think that is what people want and need to hear.
I am a little late in posting this, as it happened a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to make a post about our cat Mabel. She was the older calico cat that we adopted about three years ago. She mostly stayed in her room, and so the person she interacted with the most was me. And she was daddy’s girl, in many ways. She loved to sit with me when I was reading. She also loved pets and cuddling near me in cold weather. We were really hoping that she would eventually be comfortable enough with the other animals to not just have to live on her own in her own room, but it just wasn’t meant to be. We know that Violet really wanted to be friends with her. I wish that had happened. Still, she was loved dearly, and we were happy to have given her a comfortable and loving home in her golden years. We miss her already.
This weekend promises to have both record-breaking cold and deep snow for us here in Vermont. We have an Extreme Cold Warning for tonight and tomorrow where the wind chill is expected to be 25 to 35 degrees below zero and a Winter Storm Watch where we are expecting total accumulations of snow from Sunday to Monday to be between 12 and 18 inches.
Of course, if you are a nimrod who doesn’t understand the difference between weather and climate, like the current occupant of the White House, you may ask “what happened to global warming?” But hopefully no one reading our blog is that dumb.
Well, it occurred to me today that it has been a very long time (two and a half years – yikes) since either of us have posted anything here on the blog so I thought I would do something about it.
We have been steadily making changes and improvements to our house here in Vermont. The two most notable things done in the last year or so are 1) the clearing out of all the overgrown invasive species in the front, side, and back yards, and 2) the addition of a solar panel array to the house.
The solar panel array as seen this fall. Note also the lack of heavy vegetation in the yard.
So once I can remember how to properly post everything, I will put up some more posts.
December 29th, 1862. Young Major Adolph G. Rosengarten, temporarily in command of the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry, is killed while leading an ill-conceived charge on two regiments of South Carolina infantry concealed in a cornfield behind a fence at Wilkinson’s Crossroads, in Middle Tennessee. It was his 24th birthday. His second-in-command, an even younger (only 20 years old) Major Frank Ward, is mortally wounded in the same charge.
The 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry, also known as the Anderson Cavalry, was a unit with something to prove. The regiment had actually mutinied at the beginning of the Stones River campaign due to problems with the commissions of their officers, and so only 300 or so men from the regiment actually left camp on December 26th. But there was a great need for cavalry, and so those men were put at the front of the right wing of the army commanded by Major General William Starke Rosecrans to scout Confederate positions as the army advanced from Nashville to Murfreesboro. They skirmished with some cavalry from Texas at Nolensville on December 27th and then made contact with Confederate infantry on the 29th at Wilkinson’s Crossroads.
I will write up a bit more on this fascinating (at least to me) unit in another post when I have more time.
Doing some housecleaning today in the kitchen and the room next to it. The room next to our kitchen is kind of a warming room, at least that is how I look at it, but we also call it the library annex since it is next to the library and will, most likely, contain a number of bookshelves and lots of books.
The room’s most distinguishing feature is the mantle and fireplace. It is gorgeous. They literally do not make them like this anymore.
The most important function of this is, of course, to provide a place to hang stockings at Christmas time for our furkids.The mirror just needs some cleaning, but otherwise is in great shape. Not sure how old it is, but older than us for sure.Love these details. Beautiful.The cast iron insert and cover, which are rare enough to be notable, were clearly designed for coal. Still, we should be able to build small wood fires in it.Close up of one of the columns.
I can’t wait until the day I am able to make a small fire in there, and enjoy the space by sitting with Kelly while having a glass of port or Madeira and maybe some of the furkids warm themselves in front of it too.
