They Really Believe It

How synchronistic that I already had this scheduled to post today in light of yesterday's sickening insurrection.

I came across a blog post before Christmas in which a Southern non-believer, who is surrounded by evangelical Christianity, ruminates about Trumpism and the believers who have enabled him. It is not a hit piece and not about non-belief but contains observations by one who lives within that society, which includes his family and friends.

What I hadn't fully realized before I read the post is that as a broad group Evangelicals, or at least the ones where he lives, really believe in Trump and his goodness and disbelieve just about everyone else.

I had thought that they somehow excused his mendacity in a wink-wink, nudge-nudge sort of way, or were willing to forgive all in their love for the unborn as opposed to the born. While that might also be true, they do somehow, in their self-reinforcing bubble, believe that Trump is a good Christian and that the anti-Trumpers are of the devil (my words).

Here is the post if you're interested. It is not terribly long, even though the link is: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2020/12/13/trump-laid-bare-the-gullibility-of-the-church/ .

I am posting a few snippets because if you're like me, you just want to keep going through your own blogroll without being sidetracked, but I think it might also be worth your time to click.

As a Southerner, I could point to dozens of neighbors and family members who sincerely believe he is a man of deep faith who never lies and is driven by love of his country in everything he does.

As long as their favorite sources of information keep repeating the belief, none of them will ever learn that Trump’s surviving legal team had no real evidence of voter fraud ...

His followers immediately adopted his distrust toward the throng of epidemiologists and virologists ...

It’s difficult to get my head around that much death, but this is really happening, and yet thanks to their trust in Trump, millions of Americans don’t believe it’s real.

A compassionate church would have led the way in advocating for saving the lives of the most vulnerable among us by simply wearing masks and limiting gatherings, but their “pro-life” commitments only extend to the unborn (yet another obsession created for them by a political party). 

Hollywood, and basically all of the news (except NewsMax and OAN now) somehow undetectably manipulated the election in order to stop Trump from breaking up their global child-trafficking ring.

So, there it is. Millions live in a sea of disinformation and conspiracy theories. I am reminded of the man who invaded that one-level pizza parlor to stop the child prostitution that was happening in the basement -- when there was no basement. Or the recent Nashville bomber who, apparently, believed that Biden and his cohorts are lizard-aliens from outer space.

A Shoot in the Snow

It finally snowed, so Sue and I went for a little walk in O-Kee-Lee Park. It is a small and woodsy park that we don't visit often. When I describe it as woodsy, much of it is very scrubby and not terribly photogenic. This is not your classic English woodland. I took a longer lens and thought that I would look for little shapes in the chaos. Mostly, however, they were in shade and/or in a congested patch.

This is one that worked fairly well, but I still had to clone away a few distractions.

Still looking for little things, this is another but lesser attempt at the river edge -- just shapes and textures.

Sue was enamoured with light gleaming on the ice, so I obliged her by attempting a photo. I knew it would be a tough shot because the sparkles were terribly bright. To not have them appear as just pure white nothingness in the photo, I had to underexpose by a lot so that the rest of the scene became as dark as night although it was bright out. I did not convert the photo to B&W; this is the colour version.

I did take a few photos along the trail. This one is pleasing enough. Although there is much messy detail, I think the snow-laden, main subject stands out well enough.

Another tree (or a group) is a most interesting shape although with my long lens, I am not sure that I was able to get the best vantage point. Still, it is good enough.

Sue sat on a stump and had a moment of contemplation.

Then, she had a text from Shauna asking if we needed anything at the store.

I enjoyed the shoot in the snow, of which we have had very little this year, and there's not much in the 14-day forecast either at this point.

My Camera is Missing Hockey

I wrote this post before Christmas but events kept pushing it to the back of the queue. I have since taken a few photos (such as the ones you have seen with Danica), but I didn't get out much for quite a long time before that.

I am missing hockey or at least my camera is missing Jonathan's hockey games. While I do miss the game and seeing Jonathan play, I guess that I mostly miss the photography that goes with the hockey. 

It's winter and while there are winter photo-ops to be had around and about, I haven't been drawn to them so far this year. Besides, I have been waiting for snow of which there has been little. We did have a decent fall over the weekend, so I will have some winter photos to post tomorrow.

I recently had a plan to go downtown early in the morning to photograph the lights before there was much traffic. To that end I arose at 4:30, looked outside, knew it was cold (what else is new?), so back to bed went I. Then I thought I would go early that evening. I didn't.

It seems that at age 73, I am less eager to wander, so I dither and stay home. It is not only the cold that dissuades me, but I also grow more leery of night driving, and let's face it, we are in the time of very long nights.

While I haven't totally appreciated shooting hockey games through thick plexiglass or whatever that barrier is, at the very least it gave me something photographic to do in winter, without having to deal with the cold and dark outdoor environment.

Alas, there is no hockey this year, at least not as we have come to know it. There has been no league play, only practices and controlled scrimmages to which the public is not invited. Now, even that modest bit of hockey has been halted for most of January under the new pandemic regulations.

There is no good reason for me being so reluctant to get out and about. It is not that I am infirm for goodness sakes, and I do manage to drive, but I am hesitant regardless. A swift kick in the derriere might do me some good. Or maybe a crosscheck with a big ole hockey stick would knock some gumption into me.

This was my final photo of JJ in the final game that I photographed back on March 01 2020. We had no clue then of what was about to transpire.

New Year Burgers

For many years, we have enjoyed burgers sometime during holiday season. I have memories of, I think more than once, dropping in at a burger joint on New Year Day after the long drive home from visiting family in Toronto. In trying to recollect the cost back in the early seventies, I think those meals were up to 10x less expensive than they are now. Mind you, A&W is fairly expensive for a burger joint although worth the extra cost every now and then.

Then, for many years, a run to [usually] Burger King became part of turkey-cooking day which generally  was cooked a day or two before CHristmas. (Just once, I would like to type CHristmas without capitalizing the H but I never seem to manage. I usually correct the typo, but I am leaving it stand this time.) I would make a takeout run and bring the food home. It became a tradition that we looked forward to renewing almost every year.

We have often done the burger thing sometime during the holiday season, and I had a yen to do repeat it in some form to end 2020 even though no turkey was cooked this year. So, on the day before New Year, we opted to takeout from A&W and then to take it to the river rather than home.

While it is only a 5 minute drive to the park, we still faced the problem of keeping the food warm on a cold day. The solution was to put the food in the cooler into which we also inserted hot packs.

Sue and I prefer our food hot, so we were hoping that this would work. While it didn't work terribly well, at least the food remained somewhat warm.

Did you notice the lapdesk, above? Yes, we brought our laptop trays to help keep everything in order.

This is not the first time that Sue has taken a photo like this during the pandemic, and it may not be the last.

I must say that this was a totally fun blast from the past. Who but a teenager and now us oldies would want to eat in the car and actually get a kick out of it? The food was quite good, and it was fun to do something totally different from the norm.

Danica's Sleepover

Now that I have written of Jonathan's sleepover, it is Danica's turn, and it goes differently.

As I have written previously, Danica is not a gamer (and she's not a tv person either) although she willingly joins in when both she and JJ are here.

So ... what to do with the girl?

Well, one of my Christmas gifts was a renewal of my Ancestry subscription, but when I had first logged in, I had noticed that Danica's information was a little screwgie (as my Dad might have said). Her father wasn't listed on the chart at all, and her mother was listed as her father. I couldn't fix it in the short time that I had before her visit, so I gave her control of the computer and let her go to it. 

Genealogy interests Danica more than anyone else in the family and always has.

I was able to get up while she fiddled with this and that, including updating genealogical data on her own site, and I wandered downstairs for a few moments. I told Sue that Danica was so much quicker than I. She quickly grasped what needed to be done and did it in lickety-split time. Her mind is sharper than mine for sure . . . but I can still help her with her math on occasion.  :)

(Speaking of kids being sharper than adults, I am reminded of the time when I was waiting for my fiddle lesson as a beginner around the age of 60 and could hear a young girl's earlier lesson through the door. She sounded good, so when I got it, I observed to the teacher that the kid sounded better than I. She just shrugged and said, "But she's a kid," as it it was the most natural thing in the world.)

Danica had received clip-on lenses for her phone, so we played around with those. The fisheye was fun.

And the macro lens got her really close. This bird was just a small part of a Christmas card, and I didn't have to crop it.

But as much as she likes her phone camera, she also likes to use her (my old) DSLR, so when we went for a late afternoon stroll, that's what she brought. This was the walk where we shot the Cold Moon that I previously posted.

The water by the footbridge was frozen, so she descended with the camera.

After supper, we went out, along with Sue, to photograph lights downtown and elsewhere. Here we are on main street discussing camera settings.

We went to the river to photograph lights and reflections across the way. In the photo, she had walked down the ramp, almost to the water's edge.

While there, she posed with the estimable, Roy Brown.

Both Sue and I experienced some emotions when it was time to part ways with Danica on the next day. Having the kids at the end of the pandemic year was such a treat and the very best Christmas gift. They were so caring to isolate for us and make the visits possible, but now we are back to pandemic rules with more distanced visits when they can be arranged at all.

Jonathan's Sleepover

One gets behind in this bloggin' thang, particularly at this time of year and especially if one takes a few days off.

Today, I return to the sleepovers that we had with the kids after Christmas. I can skip the Christmas Day sleepover because I've already posted about that, so let us proceed to the two single sleepovers.

The kids had been due to go home on Boxing Day after their Christmas sleepover together and then return separately a few days later, but JJ decided to stay and have his personal sleepover that night.

With JJ, we play games. To be cooperative, Danica will join in when there's four of us, but it is not what she wants to do when it is just her with us. 

While we had played Sorry with the two of them when they were both here, it is better with 4 people than 3, so we preferred to play other games when it was just JJ with us. We played backgammon with him, or at least I did. Sue was helping him for awhile, but he was soon doing well enough on his own. It's a good game for strategizing, and he was picking it well.

Our backgammon games were close. At the end of one, I said that I would need to roll double ones to win, for I had 3 pieces out on the board to his 2, and mine were all on the very first point from Home. I could only get them home by rolling ones, and I would need 3 ones to get them all home. In other words, I would need to roll double ones because that would let me make 3 moves with 1 left over. I announced this in jest, but amazingly, I did roll double ones.

That reminded me at the time at Ron't cottage when we played some sort of board game involving die. I was well behind, but at the very end, I rolled double sixes, twice in a row to sneak the win. I had been so far behind that no other doubles would have sufficed. I presume now, although I don't remember for sure, that was equivalent to rolling 8 sixes while he had to sit and watch, and I therefore snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Ron just about had a conniption. I mean, what are the chances?

Generally though, it is a good thing that I don't gamble because I am not usually lucky at games, even though it happened on these two occasions. I have previously posted of my woes at Monopoly where, without exaggeration, I seem to spend all of my time either in jail or paying taxes and going bankrupt early.

Mostly, however, Sue and I played UNO with JJ: lots and lots of UNO.

We all took turns winning, but memory tells me that Sue won more than JJ and I.

JJ picked up a rule variant from somewhere and made us play that way. Usually a +2 card means that the next person picks up 2 cards and also misses a turn. Jonathan's variation was that if the second person also has a +2 card, s/he (I guess we are now supposed to say 'they', but it's hard for me) can play that, so the next person would have to pick up 4 cards, and so on.

Of course that could and did  keep going. Once, 5 +2 cards were played consecutively, and I had to pick up 10 cards. What a mittful! But wait! In the very next game, Sue found herself picking up 12 cards. Then JJ smacked her with an additional +4 pickup on the next turn.

Although I was also going to also post about Danica's visit, I think I shall keep this post to a reasonable length and so will write a separate post of her sleepover later, probably tomorrow.

Both kids are good to us. At one point Jonathan said something to the effect that he'd like to live with us. Of course, he loves his parents and really wouldn't, but it was a heartwarming thing to say to his grandparents.

Cold Moon Rising

When Danica was here on the 29th, we went out for a quick photoshoot just before supper. While I will likely post more about both of the kids and their sleepovers, I thought that today, I would post the Cold Moon Rising.

I didn't know that a full moon was upon us but happened to spot it through the trees when we stopped to take some other photos along the trail near the river. This caused me to find the path that leads to the river.

The moon was just beginning to rise over the far bank and looked pretty darn small in the camera. I decided to throw the camera way out of focus which made it seem big and close, and I like the result.

Knowing that every full moon has been given a name, I did a quick online search which revealed that this is referred to as The Cold Moon. Mind you, I don't think that the moon, or the man in it, really knows what its name is.

Danica followed me to the spot and also took a picture.

She then went onto the edge of the ice but not very far as it was thin and breaking. In this photo, she was photographing patterns in the ice.

Then it was home for supper followed by another walk to see and photograph the downtown holiday lights. But that can wait for another day.