sobering kitchen job

I'll come into the kitchen and leave the Civil War out on those fields.

The faucet was broken. Fix-its from the local hardware store didn't do the job. I went to Lowe's and bought a new faucet. A year ago I switched from Home Depot because its CEO made inordinate millions in one year when workers were laid off.

I had assumed that this was a job for a plumber, the soldering together of copper pipes. No. This too has been plastisized.

The towel is to catch water drips and keep me away from who knows what chemicals. Photo taken with manual settings, new for me.

a sobering read

Not all information at our pixel outpost in Monterey gets digested from online. Here's an actual tree technology book. I read it last week.

Faust is the president of Harvard, but, I guess, first of all a historian. Don't ask me to borrow it. I'm putting it up on Amazon, whence it came. Got it for half of the listed $28.

An entirely new niche to the war research of 1861-65--the impact of death. We're talking here of 620,000 youthful, mostly, bodies. A few civilians. We're talking here of acres of corpses in summertime.

Not only was the anguish over the death itself, but over the loss of identification. Over half were never identified. So the parents in Vermont, say, didn't know if their son died in Virginia or Kentucky. We would say closure was never possible.

Who picked them up? How and where were they buried? What did the preachers said about death. It sheds light on the context of the Gettysburg Address--by 1965 getting around to respecting the bodies. Let's see, we're the civilized half of the world, right?

wi-fi lights the night

Thanks to a slow laptop on loan from my work and wi-fi in our house thanks to the ingenuity of Joel, well, work can go on and on.

While some neighbors debate the salvific nature of buggy whips, we're wildly embracing wi-fi.

While some neighbors are reading the Sugar Creek Budget by kerosene lamp, here's Dorcas working on a seminary course on biblical interpretation by the glow of pixels.

backstage

My blog is usually photo driven. The photos come from a hand-held camera. Now to go backstage and see one more gadget.

I can't believe this--for $20 I have a decent tripod. There's the corner of the piano on the right. I didn't bother to crop.

I'll see if, how, and when this gets put to use.