The Consequence of Matters

  Christmas has landed. My neighbor around the block does this every year the day after Thanksgiving. There are so many that half of it is in a borrowed part of his next door neighbor's yard. In addition to the Santas and penguins and stuff, there are 8, count 'em 8, manger scenes and not a single baby Jebus among them. One has a manger but it is empty. One has everyone gazing adoringly at the grass. Several have a variety of farm animals -- sheep, donkeys, shrunken camels (I mean seriously; who has seen a camel the size of a large dog?) -- at the focus. The group on the roof next to the Santa with the one cylinder sleigh is missing a Mary and has Joseph and the three wise guys looking down benevolently on the whole menagerie. And there is one that appears to be made out of fourth graders, which is just creepy. This blow molded plastic light bulb religion was tacky back when it was new in the 60's and age has not improved it. 12 Myra Wheat, Nancy Mercer and 10 others 27 ...

  OK, you've gotta see this. It's the continuing story of Hannah vs. The Basement. She evaded all my previous efforts and for about the last month I've been trying to figure out how. I borrowed an idea from barbed wire security fences and put a 10 inch board at a 45 degree angle along the top of all the pegboards on the theory that her legs don't bend properly to get around that. Didn't work. So then I got some blue chalk dust from Home Depot, the stuff that is used to refill chalk line markers, and dusted it everywhere on the theory that wherever she went over she would knock some off. It is all still in place. The camera has been giving me some problems. Events recorded to the cloud are only available about half the time. The rest of the time, they throw an access error. The ones I could see, there was a curious camera artifact, a sort of white blob that files at high speed around the frame. So my working theory was that my basement is haunted by ghosts and that t...