I only watched Steve Irwin’s program once, and that was because I was visiting my dad and stepmother in Florida, watching what they watched. Their television consumption was limited, since she was uncomfortable with the immoral fare on television nowadays. But she didn’t object, apparently, to watching predators tear their prey limb from limb, and so they watched a lot of animal shows.

Even when I had cable I never watched animal shows. Animals, to be blunt, bore me. I don’t hate them, and the idea of owning a dog has its charms, but animal programs just make me uncomfortable. When the lion hunts down the zebra, I identify with the zebra. When only one male seal out of a hundred gets to have a harem and reproduce himself, I identify with the ninety-nine. When the wolves turn on a wounded pack member, guess which wolf gets my sympathy?

In other words, animals in general aren’t very nice. I prefer people. And I don’t even like people much.

The main thing I remember about Irwin was that stunt a few years back when he held his baby son in one hand while feeding a croc with the other. That just gave me the heeby-jeebies.

Still, I just read this report that says that his last action in life was to pull the stingray barb that killed him out of his heart.

That’s style. That puts him in the Viking league.

I quote from St. Olaf’s Saga in Heimskringla, the sagas of the kings of Norway (Samuel Laing’s translation). This excerpt concerns Thormod Kolbrunnarskald, an Icelandic poet who was fatally wounded by an arrow in the chest at the battle of Stiklestad, where St. Olaf died:

Then [the nurse-woman] took a large pair of tongs, and tried to pull out the iron; but it sat too fast, and would in no way come out, and as the wound was swelled, little of it stood out to lay hold of it. Now said Thormod, “Cut so deep in that thou canst get at the iron with the tongs, and give me the tongs and let me pull.” She did as he said…. Then Thormod took the tongs, and pulled the iron out; but on the iron there was a hook, at which there hung some morsels of flesh from the heart,—some white, some red. When he saw that, he said, “The king has fed us well. I am fat even at the heart-roots:” and so saying he leant back, and was dead.

One could die worse.

And how did I spend Labor Day? I spent it laboring.

Someone among the Powers That Be at the Bible School decided that today would be a good day for Student Orientation this year, thus dragging the young people from the bosoms of their family barbecues, causing mothers to weep and fathers to mutter darkly.

I was summoned to give my Oscar-nominated Library Orientation PowerPoint (you didn’t know the Academy Awards had a PowerPoint category, did you? Of course an Antiwar PowerPoint beat me out this year: “Sixteen Reasons Why Democracy Is Tyranny, Plus Eight Reasons Why Honor Killing Is the Culmination of Feminism.” Personally I thought it derivative).

Afterwards I went to the library and did my usual stuff. I suppose I could have closed the place up, since technically I work for the seminary, and the seminary was closed. But I’d been told my new student assistants might want to talk to me, so I hung around.

Give me a medal, somebody. I’ll put it where the Oscar should have gone.

Last night I dropped into the AvPD Chat Room for the first time. I joined a web group for people with Avoidant Personality Disorder recently, and they’ve been talking about this chat room. I haven’t had a regular chat room to participate in since I became a non-person at Baen Books, so I thought I’d try it.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that there were only three people there, counting me. What do you expect, trying to start a Loners’ Club? One was a guy from Singapore (where it was about 9:00 a.m.) and the other was a teenage girl whom I assume was somewhere in the U.S (as a prudential matter, I never ask teenage girls their locations online).

It’s very weird to communicate with other Avoidants. Trains of thought that seem perfectly reasonable when they run in my own mind sound utterly insane when other people express them. Now I know how normal people feel when they talk to me.

Maybe it’ll help me get some objectivity.

If it does, I’ll turn it into a PowerPoint.

I substantially finished getting the textbooks ready for the students today. I came back from my vacation week and was appalled to see the mountain of cartons from publishers awaiting me in the bookstore. I immediately took it as probable that I wouldn’t get them all priced and shelved in time for the first day of class on Tuesday. Or that if I did, it would only be through coming in on the weekend to work on my own time. But it went fine. There are a couple loose ends–books ordered too late (mostly because the instructors dawdled), one set that came in today that I haven’t got a price statement on yet, but essentially the job’s cleaned up.

Why do I torture myself this way? Why do I always expect the worst?

That’s a rhetorical question. I know why I do it. I prefer constant depression to occasional disappointment. If I expected the best, I wouldn’t get what I hoped for a fair proportion of the time, and that would hurt. But if I expect the worst I can never be disappointed, and sometimes I’m wonderfully surprised. It means I walk around with a low-grade depression 99% of the time, but I’ve gotten used to that.

There’s the small business of joylessness being essentially the Sin of Sloth, but that’s something I try not to think about. Joylessness is an easy sin to ignore. It isn’t any fun, so how can it be bad?

Speaking of fear (I was sort of speaking about fear. Worry’s a form of fear), Andrew Klavan has posted on the Horror genre over at Libertas. Klavan doesn’t blog enough, but it’s a big day for me when he does.

One of the things I worry about is disappearing from view altogether as a novelist. If that happens, it will be some comfort if I can know that Andrew Klavan was a big success.

The books are in the mail. Congratulations to the Children of Fortune.

(You did all read the small print, didn’t you? The part where you are now enrolled in the Lars Walker Perpetual Book Club, and obligated to buy a copy of one of my books every month for the rest of your natural lives? And since there are only three published, you’ll have to purchase the same three over and over? You understood that? Good.)

By way of Mirabilis, this fascinating story about a 3,000-year-old Celtic mummy found in a remote area of China.

Can you imagine what this man’s story was like? What his world was like?

There would be a great novel in that story. Hope someone writes it.

But it won’t be me. I’d have to give myself a whole new education in ancient Celtic and Chinese cultures. I’ve been studying the Vikings my whole life, and I still often wonder whether I’m qualified to write Viking novels.

This is off the record, right? You’re not going to share this with anyone? I’ve got deniability here?

Because if this gets back to me, I’m toast.

But look at the slate of drawing winners. Examine it for a moment:

Roy Jacobsen. Blogger. The only other blogger I’ve ever met, as a matter of fact.

Michael Peterson. Blogger. (Not very prolific, I’ll grant you, but a blogger.) And a pastor of my own church body.

Omie. A Chattanooga resident. Who else lives in Chattanooga?

Coincidences? You make the call.

I insinuate, you decide.

Speaking of the drawing, I’d hoped to get the books in the mail today. I was going to take them to the post office near my workplace, after work.

Unfortunately I left them at home. Then I thought, “No prob. I’ll walk them over to the Robbinsdale post office, five minutes from my house, when I get home.”

I got there at 5:01. The place closes, I then learned, at 5:00.

I’ll try again tomorrow.

They’re going Media Mail, so it’ll take a few days.

The fact that I’m corrupt doesn’t mean I’m rich.

The winners have been emailed and confirmed. Congratulations to Roy Jacobsen, Michael and Omie for being randomly selected in the drawing.

Remember this is the first of two contests for Lars Walker novels. The next one will be open to bloggers and require a certain kind of post. I’ll let you know soon.

I’ve almost fallen under the wagon this week with multiple stress sources, but as always the Lord is my shepherd. Some people talk about feeling the Lord is distant, that he’s left them at the train station and they don’t know when he will return. I think I understand the feeling, but I’ve never felt that way. When I feel distant from the Lord, I blame myself for leaving him. I am prone to wander; I am prone to leave the God I love.
If he ever left me, I would die.
But you and I don’t know one another well, if at all, so I’ll stop. The drawing for Lars’ books will close today at 11:00 a.m. That’s before noon, if you aren’t reading the time correctly. I will announce winners after they respond to their emails, so we may not know who wins today.

If you were listening to Hugh Hewitt last night, you heard him and James Lileks broadcasting from the Minnesota State Fair in full Johnstown, Pennsylvania-telegraph-operator mode, sounding like the last survivors clicking away at their post as the mighty waters swept all away.

I was not there. I was at home in my basement office, working on my novel. But I can verify that it did indeed rain and storm quite hard. It got pretty dark and my electricity flickered once.

Not good baling weather.

I was thinking about baling on Monday, during my walk. Monday was a good baling day. I looked at the bright sun. I felt the heat. I thought, “This is baling weather.”

Let me explain to you about hay and straw.

Hay is what you bale at this time of the year. Or rather, what you used to bale. I don’t think farmers bale much anymore. They have new, arcane methods of putting forage up. I think they do it digitally now, since Dell Computer acquired International Harvester or something.

I still remember an old commercial for the Yellow Pages from back in the Sixties. It drove me nuts. It featured a stereotypical movie cowboy in a Roy Rogers costume singing to his horse. The final lines went, “…and the pages are yellow, like hay.”

No. No, they’re not.

Hay is not yellow. Hay is green. Hay is any grass (we used alfalfa) that you allow to grow tall, then cut and dry for storage over the winter, so you can feed it to the livestock. The bales are heavy, and they smell musty and organic, a little like scum on a pond.

Straw is yellow. There are various kinds of straw too, but we used oat straw. After the oats have been harvested, you cut down the stalks and bale them. They’re light to handle. You use straw for animal bedding. It is not eaten, unless the animals are really, really hungry.

Part of the confusion comes from “Away In a Manger,” I think. There’s that line that goes, “The little Lord Jesus, asleep on the hay.” People sing that and think that sleeping on hay is normal. It’s not. Jesus was sleeping in a manger, a feed trough. Hay belongs there. Babies (usually) don’t.

Once hay has been cut, it’s raked into windrows in the field. If God wills, the hay will lie there and dry, giving you time to turn it over once with pitchforks, to expose both sides. If it rains at any point in this process, you can still use the hay but it won’t be as good, and it’s likely to rot or get moldy.

Then you take the baler out and bale it. Your baling equipment (ours anyway) begins (began) with a tractor pulling a baler, a long, low box on wheels with a conveyor thing on the front to scoop up the hay. The hay passed through the guts and got compressed and tied with twine. The bales were then extruded from the machine’s anus to one or two guys waiting on the wagon that followed. This job was generally mine and my brother Moloch’s, though our grandfather often came out to help.

The bales had to be stacked on the wagon. It was a flat wagon with no sides or front, but a tall back. The first level of bales would be laid down perpendicular to the length of the wagon. The next layer would go parallel (or vice versa. I forget). This was supposed to lock the bales, like staggering bricks in a wall. In fact, the bales always swayed, and the kid on top of the pile was never sure when the whole thing would tumble, sending him to the ground with a lot of heavy hay bales falling on top of him. But the stacker below had his own risks. When the hay was all stacked he would generally be left with about six inches of free space to stand on, as the whole assembly bumped back over farm lanes to the farmyard. It was an operation that would give an O.S.H.A. inspector nightmares, but we never complained. It was good enough for our parents and grandparents; who were we to be sissies?

People with big barns could generally just run their bales up a conveyor into the loft and dump them. Our barn was small. We didn’t use a conveyor but a contraption on a pulley called a “hay fork” (if I remember correctly, which I probably don’t). Eight bales at a time were clamped into the grip of the hay fork, then when the hay had been hoisted up into the barn, a trip rope would be pulled, releasing them. In theory. In fact, the fork either dropped the bales too soon or wouldn’t let them go at all a fair amount of the time.

At the end of the day’s baling, when all the hay was up in the loft, Moloch and I would climb up there and start stacking. Because of our lack of space, we had to organize all our hay in the loft, to get as much in as possible (what didn’t fit would get stacked in the farmyard under tarps, a less than ideal environment). It would be hot as a potter’s kiln up under that roof on a summer afternoon, hot not only from the air temperature but from the chemical action of the drying hay. It was the hardest, sweatiest work I’ve ever done in my life.

And that’s what I think of every year at this time.

I had an odd feeling last night. I don’t like to think of myself as the kind of blogger who writes a lot about his feelings, but…

I guess I am.

Anyway, I was working on my Viking tent awning. I put together this non-historically-authentic, purely functional tent-awning thing to keep the sun off me when we’re doing encampments. I got the pattern off the internet. It’s a simple project, being built on a 9×12 painter’s drop cloth.

My first awning didn’t last long. I was pretty sure from the start that the fabric wouldn’t hold up to any kind of wind. It was thin stuff, like a 600-page novel written in six months. I wanted to reinforce the grommet locations, but I didn’t have any spare canvas. So I figured I’d make the first awning, then use it to patch the second once it had failed.

I’m not kidding you here. That’s how my brain works.

The fabric failed down in Bode, Iowa, and one of my vacation projects this week has been to whip up a new one. I bought the heaviest drop cloth I could find, and I used patches made from the old awning to reinforce the grommet locations, just as planned.

All that set-up exposition was provided to explain how I came to be watching “Criminal Minds” on TV last night, sewing away at a big piece of canvas with a large needle and heavy thread.

It came to me, all of a sudden, that this activity felt comfortable, familiar.

But I’ve never done it before in my life. Not on a big piece of cloth like the awning.

Then it occurred to me that I’m descended from hundreds of generations of Norwegian fishermen who spent a lot of time mending sails.

Genetic memory? (Possible.)

Incipient psychosis? (More likely.)

In any case, it was a strange enough feeling to blog about on a quiet, rainy August day.

Today I got a picture of my white squirrel. You’ll note that he’s now missing a portion of his bushy tail.

Life ain’t easy when you stand out from the crowd.