For those of you who won’t know, Balticon is a SF convention. I am there primarily to promote A Method To The Madness: A Guide To the Super Evil, and also to meet some new publishers, editors and writers.

from amazon

Making the Crossing

But,

it is a SF convention so there is likely to be some supreme silliness. Not to worry, I will be mostly back to myself come Monday. You might see some very odd posts from me here, or on the various Social media streams. You have been warned.
-Jeff

Warning, this is where I go off the rails and things I say from here on out might be considered spoilers

What I don’t like is the current trend in movies to simple take an old story and rewrite it with more action and different characters, that capitalize on the nostalgia of the old version to get people in the seats to see the new one.

Now because I have not actually seen it, and only heard rumors, I don’t know that it is true, but I have heard that the new Star Trek Movie is a reboot of the Khan Story. If this is the case it will make me very, very sad.

WHY?

Well here is the thing, in a universe as big as the Star Trek Universe, really any universe that has as much room to play in like that, why would you retell a story. I was ok with them starting the time line over again so they didn’t have to stick with Star Trek Canon. But if the time line is started over again, why are they telling stories that happened in the other time line? Why not create brand new stories. Why would you just take the old stories and rehash them. I mean basically you have this whole huge universe that you have developed before you, you don’t have to follow the old rules because you already used the cheat code of resetting the time line, why would you go back to the old stories? I just don’t get it.

Then there are the reboots of things like GI-Joe and Transformers. Why would you bother with those. I mean we all know the story of how the Transformers came to earth and save us from the Decepticons. It was not that great of a story the first time. Yes, good when you are 5-12 but now when you look back… are we all just so eager to relive our childhood that we can’t move forward? And because the writing was not that good last time and there as not enough sex in the old ones we had to add that? Can’t we just look at new properties that have not already had their chance on the big and even some times the small screen? I guess that is what bugs me most. There are so many great stories out there that we finally have the technology to show in a great way on the big screen, why are we retelling stories that we have already seen before?

How about this, instead of retelling the Khan story why not skip the whole Nexus thing where Kirk died in such an unsatisfactory way, and give him a death we can be proud of, and then pick up with other characters in the Star Trek universe? I mean there were two other Enterprises between Kirk’s Day and Picard’s day, that we have only vague outlines of what happened to them, there are some prime stomping grounds for a new run at the Star Trek universe. And there are More Enterprises between the end of Picard’s timeline and The time when the temporal cold war mentioned in “Enterprise” erupts into a full scale war. You could pick any of those, and have a lot of fun with them.

Happy Birthday Kiddo! You make me laugh and groan with your jokes at times. You have a great sense of humor, and your heart is almost always in the right place. I wish you all the best on this day and all days. You brighten my days, and am glad to have been your dad for the last 14 years.

So I will share what I think was the most important part, or at least the part that struck me as the most important part. We celebrate Christmas and Easter as the coming and the returning of the second person in the three persons in God, but we don’t normally remember that Pentecost is the celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit, who is after all the third person in God. And yet there is no huge celebration with a tree, or baskets full of chocolate eggs to find.

Part of it I am sure is that the Holy spirit, unlike Christ, has no physical manifestation that we can understand. Yes, I realize the irony in what I just said. The Holy Spirit has not physical manifestation. But, the truth is, that we as humans have a hard time getting our minds around something that we can’t see or touch. Think about St. Thomas, who did not believe that Christ had risen until he could see Him. A slightly different thing but the same point. He could not see Him, therefore he could not believe.

The other part of it, I think, is that the Holy Spirit, unlike Christ, is still with us in a very real sense. When Christ ascended to Heaven, or really before he did, the Holy Spirit came to the apostles, and the Holy Spirit remains with us today. Like other things in our life, when they are there every day, we marginalize them or even forget about them being there. We forget to celebrate the wonder that they are.

If you will allow me to get off on a bit of a tangent here, I think this is what happens a lot of times with marriages. We get so used to our spouses being there, that we forget to celebrate them. We forget to remind them how special they are, and how much they mean to us. This leads to feeling of alienation and people drifting apart. (By the way this is really a thank you to my wife who is very good at letting me know how much she appreciates the things that I do, and never lets me feel like I am not important to her.)

The same thing can happen with us and the Holy Spirit. We forget It is there. We forget to ask It for help, and we stop being able to feel like It is part of our lives. We don’t celebrate It the way that we should. I know at least, I have forgotten to do this. This is something I hope to be able to fix now that I had a chance to think about it. Thank you Father M. N. for point it out to me, and giving me this to think about.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.

O, God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit, did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever enjoy His consolations, Through Christ Our Lord, Amen.

This year, I think that we have what would officially qualify as a hobby farm. We have chickens, sheep and now a small garden plot. I think and hope things are a bit different than they have been in the past. First, we have other people relying on us to keep the sheep alive, and second we have kind of a model to follow, even if that is kind of our own model.

Four of the six sheep we are hosting belong to folks who belong to our little collective farming project. We all come and work one piece of property and we will all get a share of the crops. It works out pretty well. So there is that motivation. We have to make it work because other people are expecting us to.

But the model that we are following is a little different. Like I said, part of the reason that we likely failed in the past was the amount of work. We were not prepared for it, and not willing to put it in. This year, we are working on the collective hobby farm and getting an idea of what needs to happen. I call this the real hobby farm because while we are using about a 1/3 of our 5 acres for farming and most of that is dedicated to animals, they are using 4+ of their 5 acres. They are using it for various crops. But by putting in the work there, the work that we have to do on our own small garden plot seems almost negligible. Sure the sheep and chicken require work, the middle children and I get up early every morning to go tend to their needs, but it is not a lot of work to feed and water the chickens, or to move the sheep from the barn to the field where spend their days.

Alright, the work that we did yesterday on our own plot did not seem negligible, it took us almost all day, to carve out the plot and get things planted all by hand , and only with hand tools. We decided not to try to rent a tiller or any of the other power tools that we normally use, so everything was done with shovels and a pickaxe. It was slow, hot and hard work but I will be honest it really felt good to get it done. I am a bit sore from the two days of work (between 6 and 8 hours each day) but it really kind of feels good. Besides getting out and working with the kids is always a lot of fun, not to mention good for all of us.

I have said it before and I will say it again, I am both very excited and very nervous about this.

The nervous part first. At heart I am an introvert. Sure get me In room with people I know and I will talk their ears of if you give me a chance, but put me in a large situation where I don’t know many people and I am unsure about my surroundings and I revert to the awkward teenager I was.

“Hite, table for one. Sir we have no table how about some standing room only for wall flower space next to this potted plant.”

“Yes, yes that would be fine.”

Really the story of my life. The other reason I am nervous is because I will have my oldest two sons with me. I want them to see their dad, in a better light that than that. They are 16 and 14 so they have lived with me long enough that they know my issues, but I want them to come and have a good time, and not be weighed down by me. One of my sons is a lot like me in the fear of crowds and new situations and the other one, well he fears nothing. So it should be interesting.

I am excited because there are a lot of people going to this, that I have talked to and worked with online and never met in person, and I am pretty excited to meet them (Also terrified for the same reasons.) (You know, the what if they don’t like me in person, kind of thing.)

This year, unless I get drafted onto something else, I am only going to be on one panel that is “Galley Table Live” at 1PM on Sunday. You really don’t want to miss it, Scott Sigler (the dark overlord himself) is going to be there. (And thus begins the jokes about the dark lord and the dark overlord meeting for the first time.) Also Chris Morse who is a fellow writer of Evil Mad Scientist type fiction. Of course it would not be a Galley table without Laura Nicole and our Stowaway Doc Coleman. We are either going to talk about endings or I am going to do a last minute pirate take over, I don’t know which yet. And yes I am in charge of the panel so it should be interesting. I will make sure that I go to enough panels ahead of time that I know what I am doing.

from amazon

Last, I am working on a new story. More about my writing in another post, but for now let’s just say that I am writing again. As I said I am working on a new story. I misread a tweet the other day and I thought it said something about Supernatural Socks. I have no idea any more what it was actually about, but that is what I thought it said. This story is all about Supernatural Socks, with any luck, I will be able to have it done and ready to go before Balticon. I would love to have a new work for people to see. I will likely give it away for free, but It feel pretty darn good just to write again.

That is it. Those are my hopes and dreams and fears for Balticon. If you are going I look forward to seeing you, if not then I hope to see you in years to come.

Having said that, I can’t really tell you everything that happened in one post, it would be way too long, so instead I am just going to share they story of what happened last night, as a kind of allegory of what the last month has been like.

If you didn’t know, we are working with a group of folks who all used the same CSA last year. They wanted to continue to support the CSA but the family that was running it just could not make it happen. Not anything they did, it is was one of those cases where the idea was great but the money just was not and so it would not work. So this year they said, we will use our land but we need everyone to come and help us. There was some desire to also expand into other areas were people had some expertise, or just really wanted to add that to what the “farm” could provide. Among those was sheep.

We, other than the family that have the farm land, have the largest piece of property and most of it sits unused most of the year, so I volenteered to host the sheep. Based on everything I was told, it was pretty darn easy, you keep the outside in a rather small pen that is somewhat mobile, and as the eat all the grass in one spot you move them to the next spot. Yup I can handle that. No Problem.

My wife and I made a plan. It kind of fell part, and so on the spur of the moment while I stood in Home Depot, I made up another one. Now I will pause here to say I am not brilliant or anything, it just seems to have been an better idea. (Mumbles something about lightening striking.) So my older boys and I set up a pen, and we were ready to go.

Now it was time to get the sheep (lambs really.) We arranged a farm to get them from, worked out a price, and arranged to pick them up. by arranged to pick them up I mean that someone said we needed to get them this week and yesterday was the only night that we could make that happen.

I called The farm a couple of times during the day to make sure that we could come get the lambs but had not gotten any responce. But since this was the only day this week to make it happen, I moved forward with the plans. My older boys pulled the seat out of the van and put the old dog crates in the van ( we were told the was a good way to transport them, and really it worked very well.)

I got out of work, picked up the van and headed to the farm. So good news is the farmer was there, and they were ready to sell us the sheep. So we got ready to take them home only to find out that they were not fully weaned, and they had never been outside. See the paragraph above about the outside pen that I built for them, OUTSIDE.

I am pretty sure the farmer saw that deer in the headlights look on my face and said he would also sell me a bale of hay for $5, since they would need food not being outside and all, and for the first few days would need to be introduced to the outside.

We finally got them in the van and part way home when I realized that I didn’t have the supplies I would need to build a pen for them. I had the space in our shed / barn thing but we didn’t have the supplies. (Read nails) So after a couple of call to my wife explaining the plight and how it would be difficult to go to Home Depot with 6 kids and 6 sheep I determined that I would go home and make something work.

Did I mention that every time I got out of the van the sky opened up? Don’t forget that detail because it is important.

For the next thirty minutes I worked with one of the older kids to try to get something built with the supplies I had, knowing that my wife was coming with better ones soon. Then two other families showed up. They didn’t have the supplies with them, but a quick phone call and 30 minutes later someone did show up with the supplies we needed.

after what felt like an hour though I am pretty sure it was shorter than that we managed to get a pen built, and started to get the sheep moved into their new home. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…

#6 got out of her cage before someone could grab her. There was a small issue with one of the boards on the pen so I was distracted and my son thought sheep were like dogs and would need to be chased. Sheep want to be together and it would have followed the others but he didn’t know that. So he gave chase. Five minutes later he was still chasing and he was tried out and the sheep was still fresh. So It was my turn. followed the sheep, who was was really scared at this point, around our yard, into the neighbors yard, and back agin a couple of times. It finally headed toward the back of our neighbors property toward a small stream.

At this point I will remind you that, these sheep have never spent any time outside, and are only about 3 months old. They have been as sheltered as sheltered can be. The Sheep heads for the very rain swollen stream, and decides to jump in. It hit the water and the look on its face was priceless.

Since this was the first time It had stopped moving in almost 15 minutes, I jumped in after it and was able capture the sheep. The water was only about hip deep, so there was little danger to the sheep or I but it was still very cold and obviously wet. Not like I was not wet enough from the sky opening up.

Wool is like a sponge. The sheep that had weighed about 30 pounds now weighted closer to 50 and was not used to being carried by me. Eventually we got back to the barn and I set her down in the pen. Everyone was happy. Well happy is relative term. They had food, and were together. I was glad I was not chasing them any more, but was also very wet, and by this point tired and frustrated.

The good news is that I can laugh about this now.

It is now a week later. (Yes, it has taken me almost a week to write one stinking post.) The sheep are pretty darn happy, and we have learned to move them all in one herd from the barn pen to the outside corral about 300 feet away, and can usually do so in less than 5 minutes so we are pretty darn happy.

So that is our adventure last week. There have been more, and I will try to get them posted a bit quicker. I promise there is more to come. After all there is the adventure that will be Balticon.

So this week’s prompt is:

It has been two decades since you saw the light of day. Really any light at all Joe. Are you sure you want to step outside in the middle of August?

So this week’s prompt is:

You are on a colony mission to a new world. You discover a creature from an ancient race, on a the planet that was supposed to be devoid of life. It is among the last of it’s kind, but there are others. They don’t really want you on their planet, but don’t have the numbers to be able to drive you off. They do have the weapons, but using them could be as dangerous to them as it is to you and the other colonists.