Ghostlight
This post will be a bunch of random items. Friday started at 3:15AM enjoying some Willamette Valley Pinot in a can and some TJ’s Dark Chocolate Truffle Bar, followed by some letter writing (Snail Mail even. Who does that anymore?). Now I am writing this. Then at first light I am off to clear the entryway porch. Or that was yesterday morning. Now its Saturday morning as I edit this post and add more to it. Same time.
Canned wine? Really? They have been canning Beer for years so why not wine? Remember that there are supply shortages and due to the energy crises glass is getting really expensive. The cost of Art Glass has exploded 400% during the Pandemic. The above 2020 vintage I got last year at Trader Joe’s.
I am still hoping to hear from Lizzo. Her booking agent at least passed my info on to her. Or maybe my cyclothymia is setting me up for disaster. Still it would be an honor to meet her and give her one of my flutes!
I will be making some Accordinas!!! Marcel Dreux (www.accordinas.com) shared with me where he gets his reeds. These are really expensive. Instead, I am going to extract ancient reeds out of 1050s vintage Melodicas. The Hohner Professional 36 and the Samic from Bohemia used individual reeds. So did something called Claviettas from Italy. It turns out that these were made in Borel’s workshop and use similar reeds as his Accordinas. These were never intended as a performing instrument and used reeds with bronze blades that sound more like a harmonica. Not so for the Professional melodica - so these reeds are all in Stainless Steel which can take much more abuse. I found a Borel Clavietta for $87.50 with 34 reeds (this is sufficient - the Borel Accordinas use 44. What is missing is the high end which I never use) and it may arrive today. I have located several of the Hohners for sale along with one of the Samick melodicas. My great grandmother from Prague was last named Samick.
This is probably a common name similar to Svoboda. Speaking of which I did get a nice crop of my favorite pepper, named after the composer Tomas Svoboda who first introduced me to this pepper in 1975. Saltwater Seeds grew a much bigger crop too, and they will have the Svoboda Pepper on Seed Racks from Olympia up to the Canadian border next spring.
We might move to Florida. The sea shelling is good there. Its warm and you can grow anything there. Lately the weather here in Seattle has been cold and rainy and dismal and its never ending. Been this was since June and everyone is tired and cranky from it. I’ve heard that waterfront property in Fort Myers is going for really cheap and they even throw a few boats on the lawn as part of the deal. The people down there live well into their 2nd centuries due to frequent applications of Botox and something called Gator Juice (Google this). Plus, one is finally out of the range of the noisy Growler Jets training in and out of Whidbey NAS. We’ll be long gone when the next 100 year hurricane arrive. They have scheduled it a little early, August 26, 2122, arriving at 2:56 PM.
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Well Salsa and Moles (the animal) is on hold until my coauthor has some time. She was very excited - but then realized that the school year was beginning and she is a special ed teacher. This can wait.
Nancy just emerged from a long work tunnel and I took a break from mine and we went out to the Elwha Interpretive Center on Friday, peeked over the fence and then had some nice street tacos at a great place called Little Devil’s Lunchbox. They have a nice stage setup there and I am looking into this spot as a performing venue. Baby Gramps has performed there a few times. I just heard that the Danish folk band Gangspil, one of my favorite groups, will be here the week before President’s Day weekend.
We were fortunate that Sequim and Port Angeles were in kind of a hole in the smoke - no drought derived from similar mechanisms as the Puget Sound Convergence Zone and the rain shadow there. AQI was in the 40s. We got home and it was around 120 or more.
On our way home we looked at Pedego electric bikes and learned a lot. Nancy is intrigued and wants to try them. I am looking into retrofitting a mountain bike as a cheaper and perhaps safer alternative (the accident and injury statistics are significantly higher on the eBikes mostly due to the weight). Conversion kits are around. However, some of these bikes have very comfortable seats with lower back support. I am getting one of the seats for my Lemond Spin Cycle. I need a little less PSI in my prostate region!
The Pedego Bikes are really expensive, starting around $3000. On a TikTok page of the hottest Costco finds, I learned about the much more affordable (under $700) and less heavy Jetson Haze Electric Bikes. These have much less range but are more my style.
I might go see if the Sequim Costco has these in stock when I head that way on Monday to collect some mushrooms from Maddie’s Mushrooms. I am missing their mushroom conference today. MM is located just up the street from one of my favorite fossil localities and tidepool hotspots.
Back to Hollywood! Everyone is preparing for Halloween and the movie theater in downtown Port Angeles especially. They had on their marquee “Ghost Light” which probably refers to the shimmer that ghosts leave. But I though what a great title for a vampire movie similar to the one set in Forks, combined with the movie Gaslight! We get the term Gaslighting from that movie. Immediately a screenplay idea that I will add to all of my other screenplay ideas, none of which will ever get written.
Ghostlight - a synopsis:
South of Forks on Gray’s Harbor is the fictional town called Hoaxium populated by MAGA style conspiracy theorist rednecks, many who moved down from Forks to get away from all the vampire tourism, made popular by the documentary called Twilight. These MAGAs at least they know that Vampires don’t exist. They aren’t that stupid!
Its just things like global warming, Hunter Biden and Bigfoot. These are conspiracies by the government to take all of their guns away. They know this!
Except that Vampires do exist!
In fact, the Vampires up in Forks all the way to Carlsborg got the heck out of there too due to the same offensive Vampire Tourists. They thought they could blend in down in Hoaxium and happily work the nightshift at the big combined pulp mill - oyster processing plant. These vampires innocently try to come out, hoping that the Democratic State Government would support it. But in an electoral upset, Tim Eyman and Ammon Bundy run the State, which joins with Idaho and Oregon veering off to the hard right. They want to secede from the Union along with Texas and Florida.
Flashback: Just before dawn a night shifter named Ostrea is heading north on 101 with her load of oysters from Willapa Bay to be processed in Aberdeen. Meanwhile truck full of shredded wood from the clearcuts on Mt. Olympus (President Desantis finally allowed this!) for pulping driven by a dayshifter named “Beaver” collide head on - note that he is headed the wrong way, high on a common local product (Hoaxium is the Crack Capital of the West). Ostrea walks away unscathed. Beaver’s air bags save him. So the two are looking at the huge mess of shredded wood mixed with live oysters.
Beaver says “My boss is going to have a huge chip on his shoulder over this!”
Ostrea says “Shucks!”
They lock eyes and immediately fall in love. Beaver doesn’t mind the love bites as he is someone who regularly cuts himself for pleasure.
The oysters are declared unfit for consumption by humans and vampires. They offer to pay for the bulldozer to push these into the wetlands adjacent to the highway, claiming that these are organic materials. The paper company who owns the shredded old growth decides to make toilet paper out of this soggy combination anyway instead of bulldozing it, earning an award from local environmentalists. The paper company discovers that the addition of Calcite and Apatite (converted from Aragonite from all of the wood) to the pulp gives the paper a pearly sheen, and makes it more abrasive - which is good for wiping. Another benefit: as one wipes, that Apatite passes through the skin and helps keeps teeth enamel intact and cavity-free. They win more awards, just before the environmentalists are all rounded up and sent off to prison.
Hoaxium is very conservative and the new mayor has won, running on the “Vampires don’t Exist” platform. There are some couples where one works the day shift and one works the night and they are like ships passing in the dawn and dusk. Even the dayshifters start telling the nightshifters that vampires don’t exist and eventually, the vampires gradually start believing this. This is demonstrated mostly on a personal level with Ostrea and Beaver.
The movie ends though when the vampires, who are all convinced that they themselves do not exist, all start getting sick and start dying. The CDC comes in to investigate all of this sudden Anemia and Lupis-like bad reactions to sunlight. There is a run on SPF-5000 Sunscreen which is in scarce supply due to supply chain issues. The daylighters react to the CDC, sure that the government is there to take away their guns. After all, they aren’t the ones dying.
In the final scene Beaver cruelly insists that Ostrea is not a vampire since they don’t exist, as she dies in his arms after agreeing with him.
Works of Phiction.
I should write up a book of my imaginary screen plays and opera libretto ideas that don’t go anywher. I will call this work of phiction (something that will never be published probably) Imaginary Screamplays. Actually I write enough of these here such as the above. I’ll just put these into another Substack with that title. Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum is a masterwork of similar content.
Summer in Seattle ends on Friday according to the meteorologists. Nancy will be refinishing the entryway porch this week as I would on the hand rails and bannister. I need to get the woodshed squared away. We just got a few gallons of oil and tested the radiant floor. It runs but then cuts off. It shouldn’t be the nozzle plugging up as we had it serviced recently. Might be another component so this will require a technician. It may also be a faulty thermostat. We didn’t really plan to heat with it with oil at $5 a gallon and likely to go higher. Another project to finish is fixing or correcting the downspouts and the genera drainage on the north side of the house. I will have that roughed in this weekend and ready for covering, as soon as I get some gravel by the bucket from a quarry just down the highway. I don’t need that much. Gravel used to run about $40 a yard. Now its close to $200. This is inflation. Last summer 1/2”” CDX plywood was way over $100 a sheet.
The Chestnuts are ripening. The squirrels are back. They are entirely ignoring the peanut butter in my live traps - or they all had Covid and no longer can smell anything. I have been picking up chestnuts from the ground but one can see accumulations of empty burrs at the base of some trees. The peanut butter may be stale. I just got a new jar last night and am heading out to rebait the live traps before sunrise. Unless I go back to bed and sleep in…
Time to post this - typos and all. We are not moving to Florida.