A line of strong thunderstorms is approaching and will soon be over Schloss Bodissey. The rain has started, and the thunderclaps are getting louder and louder.
It shouldn’t be enough to take out my internet connection, but with the Thoroughly Modern Phone Company you never can tell.
This is just FYI. If all activity ceases here later this evening, you’ll know why.
I went into town yesterday afternoon to do some grocery shopping, and while I was gone a line of thunderstorms came through the area. I assume they were part of the trailing edge of Hurricane Beryl, which had so much fun in the Caribbean earlier this month and is now disappearing into Ontario as a diffuse low-pressure system.
I got home to Schloss Bodissey just as the storm broke, and was barely able to get the groceries into the house before the rain started bucketing down. The storm was dramatic, with plenty of thunder and lightning, but no significant wind — just a welcome two inches of rain. The electricity never went out. I checked the phone when I came in, and it was still on.
However, after I put the groceries away, when I sat down at the computer to resume work, I discovered that the internet was out. All that lightning and thunder must have scared away the demons that run the local server.
It is often the case that the internet comes back on overnight without my needing to take action. Since making a tech support call to the phone company is a pain in the [nether orifice], I decided to wait until morning, and went to bed.
When I got up this morning, the light on the modem was still red. I fortified myself with breakfast and coffee and began the ordeal of calling tech support. It’s a grueling process — you have to go through a seemingly endless series of robot menus, some of which take touch-tone inputs, while others require voice. After responding to all the standard questions about power-cycling the modem and so on, I was finally transferred to a human being. In this case I was very fortunate to be referred to Pedro rather than Jamsheed — the Latino support people are much easier to understand than the guys with thick Bangladesh accents.
After talking to the tech I had to endure waiting on hold repeatedly while being forced to listen to horrible music. That took about forty-five excruciating minutes. Finally he told me that the soonest he could send a technician out would be tomorrow between 8am and 5pm.
Which is ridiculous, because all they have to do is send a guy out to reboot the rain-soaked server. But there’s nothing a mere customer can do. They don’t care. They don’t have to care. They’re the phone company.
And then, mirabile dictu, the internet mysteriously returned about two hours after I got off the phone. You never can tell.
I’m way behind in everything, obviously. I’ll read all the email and put up a bunch of posts, and there will be a news feed before midnight.
Unless another storm comes through.
It was beastly hot earlier in the day, but now the sky has grown ominously dark. There are faint rumbles of thunder, and rain is falling steadily, although not all that hard. Based on the radar map, there are at least two waves of storms coming through.
Knowing the phone company the way I do, I have my doubts that the internet will remain on the whole time — after all, there’s a service interruption whenever a bluebird perches on the server box, or a cow scratches her back against it, so a real slam-bang storm is bound to knock it out.
It’s also possible that the electricity will go off, but the electric co-op is more reliable than the phone company. So we’ll see.
Anyway, if the site goes dead and comments stop getting approved, you’ll know why.
The rain is welcome — we’ve been in a severe drought for a month — but I could do without all the boom and bang.
Long-time readers will remember my late wife Dymphna, for whom this blog was created almost twenty years ago. For the first few years, while I was still employed full-time, she was the principal contributor here, and posted prolifically until her worsening fibromyalgia rendered her mostly unable to sit and write at length. Even then, she continued put up an occasional post until a few days before she died.
Today is the fifth anniversary of her death, and I’ve decided to honor the occasion by writing a more lengthy tribute than usual. Readers who are here to read the dystopian news about the Great Jihad or the New World Order may want to skip this post, and wait for the horrible news to reappear, which it will do soon enough.
I’m not going to eulogize my beloved again — the one I wrote the day after her funeral was good enough — but instead will ruminate on various aspects of our time together since we first met forty-five years ago.
In the past five years I’ve learned that grief is a long and complex process. The first few months were horrific, so awful that I can barely remember them. My memories of the summer of 2019, beginning with the week of the funeral, consist of a jumble of disjointed snapshots, fragments of a time that was so ghastly that it has made me amnesiac. When I was digging out the link for the eulogy, I noticed that I started posting again later that June, and then continued more or less as usual from them on. But I can’t really remember any of it. I look at a post and think, “Oh, yeah, I guess I wrote that,” but I have only the vaguest memory of it.
I was just starting to come out of the horror when the “pandemic” hit in March of 2020, which ushered in a new form of horror. The “new normal” that I live in now was thus forged in the crucible of two great traumas, one deeply personal and sorrowful, the other a profound political evil. Nothing has been the same since then.
I’ve reached a sort of steady state of contemplative melancholy. It’s a condition that allows me to socialize and enjoy myself, but always with an undercurrent of sorrow. I doubt that will ever change.
It’s not a bad life, just different.
The picture at the top of this post was taken at my one-man show in the fall of 1987. The one below was “taken” six years earlier, here at Schloss Bodissey:
Dymphna posed for the painting on a hot summer evening in August of 1981. You’ll notice the cigarette in her right hand, next to her face. She said she had to keep one lit while she was posing, to drive the mosquitoes away.
The front porch is still there, but it’s somewhat different now. Back then there were grapevines on either side of it — Concord grapes, white on one side, red on the other — that had been planted by the previous owner. A couple of years after I painted the picture, Dymphna had me dig the vines up and move them, because she had other plans for what eventually became the front flower beds. On the north side is an infestation of wisteria where the grapevine used to be, but I cut it back every year. On the south side is a camellia bush that has grown quite large.
There are railings now on all three sides of the porch, and also down each side of the stairs. The three steps and the porch slab, all of which are made of concrete, are a somewhat different color today, because they’ve been painted a few times. Here in red clay country, bare concrete tends to turn orange over the years where people walk on it, as you can see to a certain extent in the painting. But now it’s just a nondescript grey — for some reason the orange iron compounds don’t seem to adhere to concrete paint.
There are two medium-sized spirea bushes on either side of the stairs. The one on the south side would have partially obscured Dymphna if it had been there when I painted the picture. Both of them just finished blooming.
Other than that, the porch is pretty much the same. The light is exactly the same as it was in 1981, except that it has an LED bulb. Sometimes when I’m out at night, I notice that the shadows of the posts radiate across the lawn just like they did back then, although they are now also accompanied by the shadows of the railings. The little slate pieces that we used for a front walk have been pulled up and replaced with larger, thicker rectangular slabs of slate, but the walk is in the same position (and kind of disappears under the south spirea bush at one point).
I had to rotate the digital photo of the painting and then correct the color in it to prepare it for posting, and it made me all nostalgic. Looking at it up close like that really brought back the time when it was painted, and it seems so recent — just the other day.
Late in the spring of 2023 I was finally able to contain my grief enough to write a poem about the grieving process, but without wallowing in it. The difficulty had been increased by the fact that I knew I could no longer read the final product aloud to my wife when I was done, which had been my habit for the last twenty-five years or so before she died.
Instead I sent it to an old friend of mine who “gets” poetry, and has also written some excellent poems himself. He wrote back to say that he saw it as “a containment chamber for the emotional chaos,” and he was exactly right. I told him, “I process my emotions fairly well, analyze them, figure out their interactions, etc., but I keep them to myself, because I’m a severe introvert. I express them via the poems, but even there the expression has to be coded. I don’t come out and say, ‘I’m unutterably sad’, but rather ‘My lady grew clematis there’, to contain the same dosage of the same emotion. I say, ‘Erect the gibbet! Tie the noose!’ rather than ‘I’m afraid of dying’.”
I won’t be putting out a revised edition of The Nothing Tree in Bloom, so the new poem will remain unpublished. I’ll just stash it in a folder with all the others, in a drawer of the filing cabinet.
The alert literary sleuth will discover references to Rudyard Kipling, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, John McCrae, and Edward FitzGerald, among others. The verse is iambic throughout, but has an irregular rhyme scheme. Syllable counts: the quatrains are 8-8-8-6, while the couplets are 8-8.
The National Weather Service forecast for Saturday here at Schloss Bodissey includes a “winter weather advisory”: we are to expect “mixed precipitation”, with “snow accumulations of up to one inch and ice accumulations of one-tenth to two-tenths of an inch.”
Furthermore, “Precipitation is expected to begin as a mix of snow, sleet, and freezing rain between 4 and 7 AM, then change to mostly freezing rain between 7 AM and 10 AM. Precipitation may mix with or change to rain by late afternoon, before ending during the early evening.”
It doesn’t sound serious enough to cause a power outage, but you never can tell. So if Saturday evening comes along and this is still the top post, and comments aren’t being approved, you’ll know why. Just assume that I am sitting here drinking wine (an Alvarez de Toledo Mencia, probably) by candlelight, keeping the temperature in the house above freezing by using the propane range in the kitchen…
Update 1:00pm EST: There was a little freezing rain, nothing significant, before I got up this morning. Since then it’s pretty much just been rain. It’s raining hard now, but not much ice on the trees. So it looks like the electricity may stay on, at least for the time being.
Merry Christmas, everybody!
The weather at the moment doesn’t look anything like the photo at the top, which was taken here at Schloss Bodissey in February of 2006. It just seemed seasonally appropriate. Right now it’s actually quite mild, and semi-overcast. There’s been almost no snow so far this season.
The future Baron is here. We’ll be having a nice Christmas dinner in a little while, so posting will be light. I hope you all have a joyous Christmas.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
I’ve got family here today for the big meal, so posting will be light. However, there’s an important report on Geert Wilders’ victory that needs to be posted.
Other than that there will probably just be the news feed later tonight.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow!
If you live on the East Coast, you’ve probably heard about Tropical Storm Ophelia, which came up through the Carolinas and is now in the process of looping through Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey.
The real action is pretty far away from Schloss Bodissey, but still, we’re getting a lot of rain, and some gusty winds, so anything is possible. If the lights go dark at Gates of Vienna tonight, that’s almost certainly the reason.
I went out late this afternoon and didn’t see any trees or big branches down, so I’m not really worried. On the other hand, the phone company’s antiquated equipment may decide that this is a good time to crap out. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Long-time readers are aware of my persistent issues with phone and internet connectivity. The phone system out here in the Far Boondocks is roughly equivalent to two tin cans connected by a piece of string. It doesn’t take much stress on that string to zap my internet connection.
Last Friday, right after I finished moderating the comments that had come in overnight, my phone and Internet went out. Clear blue sky, no wind, beautiful day — and the phone went out, just like that.
I’ve learned from experience that when the phone goes out on a Friday, I can expect it to stay off all weekend. The phone company doesn’t send technicians out here to fix outages in their off hours. Repairs are scheduled for normal work hours, Monday through Friday. So if the phone goes out on Tuesday, it might be fixed on Wednesday, if I’m lucky. But if it goes out on Friday, I can forget about any repairs over the weekend.
As it happened, Saturday was the day of the memorial service for my very good friend who died last month (see “Thanatopsis”, August 6). The future Baron came down for the weekend so that he could attend it. Before he left yesterday, I had him come with me while I drove us to where there was a cell phone signal, about eight miles from here, and used his phone to call tech support in Bangladesh. After going through interminable touch-tone menus, and listening to horrible music while on hold, I finally got to talk to a personable young lady with a thick Bengali accent. She apologized profusely for the difficulties I was having, then made me listen to the horrible music for a while longer while she looked into the situation. When she returned, she told me that there was an outage in my area, and there was no estimated time for the repairs to be completed.
I knew ahead of time that she would say that, because that’s the way it always goes. But it’s important to go through the forms, just for propriety’s sake, and set up a trouble ticket.
I also knew that the phone would come back on today, because it always happens that way. The technician comes to work on Monday morning and looks at his trouble tickets while he drinks a cup of coffee. Then he gets in his panel truck and comes out here to Eerie Hollow to reconnect the string to the tin can.
It had been more than a month since the previous outage, which was a pretty long run. Let’s see how long it takes before the next one.
Generally speaking, if you see me disappear for a weekend without any advance warning, you can assume there’s been an outage like this one.
Update: The storm seems to have passed through. It was loud, but not all that violent. There was no hail, at least not here at Schloss Bodissey.
Central Virginia is currently under a severe thunderstorm warning, and I can already hear the thunder and see the lightning. The storm is rapidly approaching, and we may be in for hail and high winds.
If Gates of Vienna stops being updated after this post, you’ll know why.
I posted last week about a huge old oak tree in the back yard of Schloss Bodissey that fell down during a thunderstorm.
I found a guy who was willing to cut it up and haul it out of there. He wants the wood, so he’s doing it free of charge. He’s just leaving the small branches behind to be chipped up by the other tree man. Then a third guy will come in to grind up the stump.
After his first session, enough space had been cleared back there for me to be able to walk around the surviving oak tree and assess its condition from directly below. When the other tree fell, it broke several major branches off the surviving tree as it came down. They were all on the east side of the tree, which afterwards had almost no foliage left on that side. In the highest part of the tree, all the remaining branches were on the west side, overhanging the house. If that tree had fallen during a storm, it would almost certainly have at least clipped the corner of the Eyrie — which is where I’m sitting right now — as it fell.
There was no way to avoid it: the tree had to come down.
Early this morning the tree man took it down using his bucket truck. It was an impressive operation. I watched him up there in the bucket, lopping off pieces at the top of the tree and dropping them down into the yard where his assistant could pick them up and move them out of the way. Then he got to the upper section of the trunk, and cut it into short sections, dropping them right under the bucket, each landing with a deep WHUMP. Finally he tied a rope around the top of the remaining trunk and anchored it to the bucket truck. He did the standard two cuts at the base to get the tree to fall in the desired direction, and down it came. I was taking photos of the operation, and caught the split second just before the trunk hit the ground:
That was taken through the back door. The one below was taken about three seconds later, through the storm door:
From time to time I’ve posted photos of the two huge oaks in the back yard of Schloss Bodissey. The photo above shows the northernmost of them. It was taken almost twenty years ago, in October of 2003, when the last rays of sunset were touching the top of the tree.
Below is the same tree early this morning:
It was difficult to get a view of the full length of the fallen oak. I had to set up a stepladder in the midst of the dogwood tree’s foliage to take the shot.
Here’s a view from ground level:
And from a window up here in the Eyrie:
Here at Schloss Bodissey the sky is very dark and thunder is rumbling…
The National Weather Service has issued a severe thunderstorm warning for this area:
Prepare immediately for large hail and damaging winds. For your safety, move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. Stay away from windows.
If this post is still on top late this evening, or tomorrow, you’ll know why. Given the combination of the phone company and the electric company, some sort of outage is to be expected.
Last Friday afternoon there was a thunderstorm here at Schloss Bodissey. As storms go, it was a nothingburger — a little bit of lightning, a little bit of thunder, a brief but heavy downpour, and no wind to speak of. Even if I had thought of it, I wouldn’t have put up a warning post about it. There was no way the power would be knocked out by that storm.
And it wasn’t. The lights didn’t even flicker. But I didn’t reckon on the phone company.
The phone and internet both went out during the brief downpour. I thought they would surely come back on quickly, after a negligible storm like that one. And so I waited. And waited. Fixed dinner and waited. Then I went to bed.
The next day (Saturday) the phone was still out. That day happened to be the fourth anniversary of Dymphna’s death, so I kept to my planned schedule. In the afternoon I went down to the church to put fresh flowers (all of them hers, picked from our yard) on her grave. Then I walked across the road to the country store, learned that their phone was working, and asked to use it to call the phone company. The young lady working the cash register was very kind and helpful.
As usual, I had to go through a labyrinth of digital-touch tone menus, beginning with not pressing 2 por español. I had to punch in my phone number. I had to punch in the last four digits of my social. Then it wanted me to punch in a number where I could be reached. I didn’t have one, of course, but I had to give them one to go any further, so I punched in the future Baron’s phone number. Then I went through a series of punch 1 or punch 2 choices that I can’t remember. Then the robot voice told me to wait while it checked my service, and to see if I already had an open repair ticket (I didn’t).
Finally I was put through to a human being in Bangladesh or Kolkata, with a thick Bengali accent and an inferior fidelity phone connection, all while other Apus could be heard babbling in the background. As a result I was only able to understand about 50% of what he said, but it didn’t really matter, because I’ve been through the drill so many times before.
First he asked me the same questions that I’d just punched in all the numbers for. Evidently the robot doesn’t pass on any information to the Gunga Dins who have to talk to customers, so I had to tell him all that stuff all over again. Only then could he pull up my account and look into the issue.
He then told me what I knew all along: there was an area outage as a result of the storm.
“But Baron,” you say, “if you knew it all along, why did you bother going through all that hair-tearing rigmarole with the phone company?”
Because I needed one piece of information: the estimated time when repairs would be completed. I knew from long experience that it would be the final thing that Jamshid would tell me.
And he did: “Mr. Edward [they always call me Mr. Edward; they don’t really get the distinction between first and last names], the estimated time when the repairs will be completed is Monday June 19 at 1:30pm.”
And sure enough, service was restored today ahead of schedule, at about 10am. The signal has returned.
That was on Saturday, so I had two more days to twiddle my thumbs and watch DVDs while my email piled up and people waited for their comments to be approved. During that time I thought about the #!@%*&@?#!! phone company, and how it could possibly take three days to rectify the effects of an itty-bitty trifle of rain. And I think I figured it out.