Stephen King vs. H.P. Lovecraft

/ Shane / 6 Comments

Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft (most famously known for the cthulhu mythos) are two of my all time favorite authors. They are similar in the sense that they are both extremely famous horror writers who are widely acknowledged as masters of their craft and legends in the horror genre. However, it occurred to me the other day that the similarity ends there. Within the horror genre, they are at absolute opposite ends of the spectrum.

Mr. King’s genius is in capturing the “every man”. He is so good at capturing a slice of life, painting a picture that is so ordinary, that you’re absolutely sure it could be you. The horror is that it could happen, really honest to god could happen, and close to home too. When you read a Stephen King story, you kind of feel like the story was written by a nice guy, a friend of yours, to whom you can relate.

H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft is the opposite. Somehow he’s able to capture something so awesome and alien that your mind shudders to comprehend it. Lovecraft’s horror relies on a sense of majesty, a sense of wonder. The horror is that it’s so big and alien that there’s absolutely nothing you could do about it. In fact, there’s nothing anyone could do. Lovecraft doesn’t disrupt suburban “every man” utopia by bringing the story into your home, he destroys your home, the world, and everything in it. When you read an H.P. Lovecraft story, you kind of feel like the story was written by an alien in human skin, or, best case scenario, a strangely lucid lunatic.

King’s heroes are every men as well, the duty usually falling to kids, housewives, or middle-aged, small town sheriffs. Lovecraft has no heroes. In a Lovecraft story, you’re the hero if you survive, period (with or without sanity intact). That’s really the best you can hope for.

So both are frightening for their own, very different reasons and I wonder if anybody enjoys both ends of the spectrum as much as I do?

I guess the take away is that the horror genre is as wide and deep as the tentacle of great H’chtelegoth himself.

My short career as a surveyor

/ Shane / 2 Comments

I mentioned that one of the things we did up at The Haven was to post “no trespassing” signs around the perimeter of our property, but I didn’t mention the “how” of it, which is actually a story unto itself.

We knew where the stakes were in the front, and we were told there were stakes marking the back corner, but we had never actually seen them. I know from experience that it is very, very easy to get turned around in the woods, or to think you are walking a straight line to your destination while blithely walking in exactly the wrong direction, or at a right angle from where you think you are going. There have been times where we were at the exact opposite side of the property from where we thought we were. There have been times where I would have sworn the road was in one direction, and I was completely wrong. There have been times when I have stumbled on a path that I would have sworn wasn’t on the map, or not found a path even though I would have sworn it should have been *right there*.

Therefore, we had planned to use my sister’s GPS to make sure we were staying on the property line. I know GPS isn’t 100% accurate down to the millimeter, and it’s possible that it wouldn’t be able to get a good signal in the woods, but I also know that my head isn’t even 10% accurate, so it couldn’t have been worse with the GPS than without it. Unfortunately, the GPS was a complete failure. It worked perfectly in our trial runs along the road, but as soon as we moved into the woods, it just completely stopped. It insisted that we must be on the road, and wouldn’t even update the latitude / longitude indicators. It was worthless.

I really, really wanted to get the job done, but I really, really doubted our ability to wing it. We decided to make do with what we had, and give it a shot. We would lay the signs in a line where we thought they aught to go, waiting to nail them in until we were sure we ended up in the right place. If we ended up being off, we could work our way back correcting them until we had a more or less straight line.

What we had was a simple compass and some yellow caution tape. We went to the road, where the GPS was working, and paced off 30 yards. Assuming the GPS was right, we now had a roughly 90 foot long “rope” of caution tape (we had been planning 100 feet, but we figured 90 was close enough). Then, I positioned myself on the stake and used the compass to ensure that Rachael was walking a straight(ish) line. When she got to the end of the tape, we laid a sign down and did it again.

Here’s the thing though, we had a lot of room for error. First off, all of our assumptions were based on the fact that the tape was 90 feet long, which we didn’t even know for sure. Second off, the compass was very fickle, and I could get about any reading I wanted, within maybe 20 degrees. The tape would often need to be bent around trees or tossed over bushes. And there were times when I couldn’t even see Rachael to see if she was on the line or not. (I had the “holding the compass” job by virtue of the fact that Rachael had a pink shirt, and was thus much easier to see in the woods than my navy blue.) Even if we were off by only a little bit on each spot, the small error could propagate to a large error after repeating a dozen times.

When we got to the back of the property and found the stake was directly on our line, it was probably one of the greatest moments of my life. We were sweaty, we were tired, we were scratched up, we were dirty, we were thirsty (we didn’t bring any water with us because we didn’t expect it to take 2 hours!), and we were absolutely sure what we were doing wasn’t going to work. There it was, right where it was supposed to be.

It just seemed so crazy that we could do it without any kind of technology. I have to say, I became an absolute believer in the compass that day.

When we got back to camp, everybody was over working on the raspberries. “You know,” I said, “if we have to walk back there, we might as well go on the edge of the property and put some signs up. Just to the raspberries. That would save us some time tomorrow…”

A few minutes later, we were back in action on the other side of the property. When we got to the raspberry patch, everyone had already left, so we decided to just keep on truckin’. That side was infinitely more navigable, not to mention that we had refined our system a little bit, which means we finished the entire side in 30 minutes, rather than the 2 hours it took on the other side (to be fair, we also didn’t have Evie “helping us” on that side either). Well, at that rate, we might as well do the short(er) distance across the back, right?

It was a long, difficult day and I was absolutely beat, but the no trespassing signs were up, and mentally I felt great. It was such a sense of accomplishment to crawl through bushes for two hours and then suddenly find out the fruits of your labor paid off! It was great to see all the little ins and outs of the property that I hadn’t gotten to see yet, especially the very back corner. And there is something psychological about fencing in the property that really makes you feel possessive. It was great to clarify where exactly the property line was in a few ambiguous places, and it feels like we now have a safety net to help keep us from wandering off our property or getting lost.

Without a doubt it was the most satisfying project I’ve done on the property.

Special thanks to my sister and co-surveyor, I definitely couldn’t have done it without her. Repeatedly, she had to climb through brambles and bushes to keep the line straight, only to have me stroll around on an easier path once the marker was set (did I mention we were wearing shorts during this?). She did it without complaining. Even though we didn’t really chit chat, I felt like it was a nice bonding moment. Especially when we found that first stake, my friends. There was a lot of hi-fiving, let me tell you.

That’s a mom’s birthday for you

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Today is Sara’s birthday, and she is truly having a mom’s birthday.

Last night I made a cake while Sara pre-prepared her birthday dinner (from recipes that she picked out). She had to cook it herself today before I got home from work while also managing the kids. She suggested oatmeal for breakfast, even though she hates oatmeal. What she really needs is a vacation, but what she’s getting instead are some presents that “require some explanation”. I never had time to take the kids to get a separate present, so they slapped together a homemade card yesterday morning.

Aren’t birthdays wonderful?

Sara deserves better than I give her most of the time. Aside from the fact that I should probably put in a lot more effort on getting her a gift she would like (although I have been *dying* to give her her presents since I bought them a month ago…I just hope she likes them as much as I would, since they’re not something she would probably pick out on her own!)(mom birthday), family life can be rough, and tiring.

So thanks for putting up with your family. We really appreciate all the “mom” things you do!

A very Haven weekend

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Another amazing weekend at The Haven.

This was our most ambitious weekend yet in terms of what we wanted to accomplish, so it felt super-extra good to get it all done. We posted no trespassing signs around the entire perimeter of our property. We cut down not one, not two, but three trees and got them all cut up and stacked for firewood. We planted not one, not two, but something like twenty raspberry plants. We pruned and opened up the area around not one, not two, but at least a dozen blueberry plants. And all of this on top of a million other little things, like chopping branches and scything ferns to make paths, preparing food, washing dishes, watching the kids, etc.

I truly, deeply, from the bottom of my heart send a special thanks out to everyone who helped us accomplish so much. I honestly thought that we had planned way too much work for one weekend, but it didn’t feel like we did nothing but work (at least not to me). Every time we work on the land, it feels a little bit more like it’s really mine.

Actually having so many people up there (8 this time, counting the kids, plus a large dog) was actually pretty fun. It was almost crowded in the clearing, with 4 full sized tents, a screen tent, the fire ring and the new “slide platform”. It almost felt like a little city or something. We actually had a half-way respectable ring of people around the fire, reunion style.

It didn’t go off without incident, however.

On Friday, I took the kids up to The Haven by myself, while Nathan and Amanda swung through and picked up Sara after work. By the time everything worked out (including digging up all the raspberry cuttings, thanks again guys!), Sara didn’t end up getting up there until about 1:30 a.m., long after the kids and I were asleep. This meant that she wasn’t around to help get the kids into bed, which is why I was hiking in the woods to the bathroom tree in the dark, alone with two kids.

The clearing was pretty bright yet, but as soon as you cross that threshold into the trees, night crashes down hard. Add to that all the night sounds coming out around you, and the kids were clinging to my legs like they were the last two lifeboats on the Titanic. I tried to be extra cheerful to set a good example, but oh my god you guys the woods are so creepy at night! So I tried to act like there was nothing to be worried about, and concentrated on trying not to trip as I dragged two small children through the woods.

I was sort of in a hurry to get out of there, so of course Oliver had to do some business. Not only does that take a long time, but it also necessitated digging a hole to bury the evidence. Perhaps it was my raw brute strength, or perhaps it was the fact that my mind was preoccupied wondering if that was a pair of lightning bugs or possibly Sasquatch eye-shine, but whatever the reason I somehow managed to stomp down on the shovel hard enough to rip the handle out of my hands and lever it full speed into the side of my face.

The last thing I saw was my glasses hurtling off into the forest.

The pain was staggering and disorienting. It felt like I had just been kicked directly in the side of the head. When I finally recovered from that, I realized that I *could not see a thing*. Without my glasses my vision is practically non-existent to begin with, but when you combine that with the darkness of the forest at night, I was not-literally as blind as a bat (because a bat can see at night, and I didn’t have echolocation).

I knew which direction I had last seen my glasses traveling, but I was afraid to even walk in that direction lest I step on my glasses and crush them. I couldn’t even see my own feet. Trying (and failing) to keep the panic out of my voice I said, “Evie and Ollie, I need you to come over here and help me, right away.” Ollie immediately grabbed the shovel and said, “I’ll help you!” so I let him struggle with that so he would stay out of our way.

“Evie, I lost my glasses and I can’t see anything. I need you to find them for me. Is it okay for me to take a step?”

Luckily, Evie leapt to the challenge admirably. Luckily for us, the inside of my glasses are light blue, so that showed up against the gathering gloom a little better than the dark blue exterior. We quickly found my glasses, and I was able to finish digging the hole and get out of those cursed woods with only a large red mark on the side of my head to show for it.

And other than that, we all had a great time…

Quote Monday is in a hurry

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie: “Hurry and get to Grandma’s house! I don’t want my naked ladies to die!”

I don’t believe any context is necessary on that one.

We were watching Oliver interact with a distant relative that he didn’t know. He was talking to him, trying to climb up in his lap, and trying to get him to jump rope. Eventually we realized that he thought the man was Grandpa Ron (and upon reflection, he does look a lot like Grandpa Ron). “You should say something,” we urged Ron. “See what he does when he realizes that isn’t you.” I figured at the least Oliver would do a double take, and possibly be embarrassed that he had the wrong guy. Not so.

Sara, pointing to Grandpa Ron: “Ask Grandpa Ron, he’ll jump rope.”
Ollie, nonplussed: “That Grandpa Ron won’t jump rope, but this one will!”

I guess Ollie doesn’t find it weird that there’s two of them now.

Evie: “Why is it called ‘The Sound of Music’ and not ‘A Female Deer’?”

I’m sure everybody would rush right out to see a movie entitled “A Female Deer”.