Steven Harper Piziks

 Voting by mail and early voting are set to begin soon. The Hopium Chronicles has some good advice, worth sharing here:

–Vote the minute you can. If you vote in person, vote the first day you’re allowed to. If you vote by mail, vote as soon as your ballot arrives and then return it in person to a drop box to avoid post office delays (intentional or otherwise).

–After you vote, check online to make sure your vote was received and has been recorded. If it hasn’t, contact the Secretary of State’s office and find out what happened and how to fix it.

–There are three reasons to vote early. 1) Because the parties check the voting lists every day and cross off people who have voted. That means they can concentrate on the low-propensity voters (and save money and time by not concentrating on you.) 2) It makes it more difficult for Trump and his thugs to cheat and/or interfere with your vote. 3) It runs up the score, making it harder for Republicans to swamp the polls on the actual election day. And 4) The news that Democrats are outnumbering the Republicans in voting causes Republicans to give up and/or despair and maybe decide not to vote while making Democrats get enthusiastic and decide to vote. (It’s called the bandwagon effect.)

We arrived without further incident at the rental place. It was a HUGE, three-bedroom/big kitchen/full living room apartment. My first house was smaller than this place! It was over a three-car garage attached to an even bigger house. It was also in the middle of the woods at the top of the river valley. Thick trees and greenery surrounded the place and we later found a long staircase that wound down the steep side of the valley to the Muskegon River at the bottom where a gazebo nestled among the trees let you gaze across the river and listen to the birds. It was impossibly idyllic and was a great place to unplug and zone out. It felt like we were in the middle of nowhere, but actually the (small) city of Newaygo was less than two miles away, so it had all the advantages of a country getaway and the additional advantages of easy access to city amenities.

We spent the rest of Thursday exploring Newaygo a little. It has a wonderful downtown with a mix of new buildings, original buildings that date back to the 1850s, and re-habbed old buildings. It's been flawlessly kept up, and we suspected there was some civic thing going on to keep the place buffed up and tourist-friendly. (Later we learned this was correct.) We found a funky cafe and had supper. I had chicken stuffed with goat cheese and topped with crisped spinach. It was fantastic! Darwin got ... chicken tenders. (Sigh.) 

At the edge of town is a big cemetery, and we took a quick drive through it. One grave stood out because on it was a statue of a Civil War soldier with mutton-chop sideburns, holding his rifle like a cane. He was striking a heroic pose. Darwin and I both wondered who this guy was and what he'd done to rate such a memorial. I jotted down his name for later research: Samuel Harder. Then we went back to the flat for the night.

Friday was genealogy and history day.

Darwin and I are both history buffs, but we're most interested in the everyday history of everyday people in everyday places. Small towns are especially interesting because they tend not to have big, state- or country-level historical events that overshadow everything else. Also, the buildings are easier to "read." Darwin and I =love= dissecting buildings in small towns. We've become experts at dating when a house or store was built and at spotting the changes that've been made over the decades. It's great fun speculating what might have been the purpose of this bricked-up doorway, or why the staircase that obviously used to be behind that place was removed. We also like imagining what the town was like during the pioneer and Civil War eras. Newaygo was a great place for this kind of thing. 

Our first stop--at my insistence--was the local library, which is right downtown. A bit of poking about turned up a room set aside for works that weren't part of a library's lending collection, including a big shelf of historical documents. They were a real jumble--yearbooks from the 1940s to the present, random newspapers, indices, local government publications, and books on local history written several decades ago, all mixed up together. Historian score!

We had intended to spend only a few minutes in the library but wound up being there for more than two hours. I uncovered some random events of interest while Darwin hunted for mentions of his family: McClary and Freeman. As often happens when we do this, my random samplings turned up references to Darwin's family before he found anything, and I shared them with him. The McClarys and the Freemans weren't especially wealthy or influential in the area. They were blue-collar people who mostly worked in the lumber industry, though a couple were involved in city politics. Darwin was able to confirm a couple of suspicions he had about his family tree, which was nice.

We also turned up information about Samuel Harder, including a trove of letters he'd written. (!) Samuel was an ordinary guy. He worked as a laborer until he joined the Union army and trained as a sharpshooter for the Civil War, though there was no mention of him getting any commendations or medals or saving lives or anything special. He wasn't even an officer. He returned to Newaygo when the war ended, got married, worked as a furniture builder and at other jobs, and had ten children, six of which survived to adulthood. His letters made him out to be a kind, nice man who loved his family greatly, and wasn't shy about saying so. He also teetered at the edge of poverty all his life. One letter lamented that he didn't have enough money to send a package to his son, who lived one town over. He felt helpless and upset when his beloved wife developed chronic ear pain that made her miserable day and night. (I'm guessing she had some kind of recurring infection that modern antibiotics would have cleared up in a day.) She became an invalid and died, still suffering the pain. I felt bad for them both just reading about it.

One thing that was mentioned not at all was who put the war statue of him on his grave and why they did it. Samuel's Civil War record wasn't anything noteworthy. He and his family weren't prominent or wealthy. He wasn't involved in local or state politics. So why the statue? And who paid for it? No clue. My own thinking is that Samuel was simply much-beloved in his family and among the townsfolk, and when he died, they didn't want this nice man to be forgotten, so they clubbed together to put a statue on his grave and keep his memory alive. If that was their intent, it worked--over 150 years later, Darwin and I were learning about him, and now you have, too!

We spent so long at the library that we got hungry for lunch, so we went food hunting. There was a new, tiny sandwich shop and we tried it. The sandwiches were thick and delicious, though it took a while to get them because there was a line and because the shop was a sole-proprietor affair with only two employees: the owner (a woman approaching middle age) and her mother (who volunteered her labor for free). The electronic menu boards sported pictured of food that were clearly AI-generated, and kind of creepy to look at. The owner was probably trying to save money. I think she would have been better off installing chalkboards like other funky sandwich shops do. But the food was good.

Then we headed for the cemeteries. Despite the recent deaths in the family, cemeteries fascinate both of us. We love trying to piece together bits of history based on names and dates carved in stone. Darwin poked around until he found the graves of his great-great-grandparents and of a great-uncle who had died at the age of 18 in a sawmill fire that was probably arson. We also found several graves that I always think are really poignant--the kind that have home-made grave markers on them. One was just a name scrawled in poor handwriting in the cement meant for the gravestone foundation, and it was misspelled, to boot. (We looked it up.) Four graves had wooden crosses with the names carved in them. Several had just the tiny metal plaque with a name on it provided by the graveyard. There's a lot of poverty in rural Michigan, and these graves are evidence of that. A loved one dies, and the family doesn't have the money for a gravestone, so they make do. These graves especially reek of sorrow and desperation to me.

For one of these graves, however, you could see the family decided to go all-out, and fuck the devil! There was no stone, and the marker was one of those wooden crosses with the guy's name carved into it, but the family wasn't going to let a lack of money get in the way of memorializing this guy. On the grave was a pair of work boots with flowers planted in them, two beer bottles, several bouquets of silk flowers, a ring of fieldstones to mark the grave's border, a metal Ford logo, and a bunch of other stuff. To the cross was nailed a grease-stained baseball cap, a few shreds of some work coveralls, and a sculpture made of garage tools welded together. I could imagine someone in the family saying, "Okay, we can't afford a tombstone, so instead, we're all going to go down to the grave tomorrow and decorate it real nice. Everybody bring something!" And they did. So there!

On the way back to the rental flat, we passed what I lovingly refer to as a Michigan redneck bar. These are always one-story, shabby buildings with, at best, a gravel parking area on a country road where you wouldn't expect a bar to be. They look like the kind of place where everyone inside would fall silent and stare at any stranger who comes in, but actually I've always found them to be filled with ordinary people drinking and talking and laughing, and the food is often surprisingly good.

The reason this one caught Darwin's eye was the name: the Freeman Inn. This is one of his family names. "Do you want to stop and look in?" I asked him.

Darwin almost refused, then changed his mind. "Let's do it!"

The place was like all the other redneck Michigan bars I've been in. There were about seven or eight other people who didn't give us a second look. We got a table and intended just to get something to drink and maybe a snack, but then realized we were coming up on suppertime, so why not eat? I had some soft tacos and they were very good. A short conversation with the waitress revealed that the place =used= to be owned by some Freemans, but they sold it to someone else who kept the name for continuity's sake. That was all anyone knew, but it was still fun to learn. We finished dinner at a little after five, and the place was already filling up. Despite its shabby appearance, the Freeman Inn does a brisk business.

Saturday, there was an annual carnival in town: the Newaygo Logging Festival. It featured local craft booths, sidewalk sales, carnival food trucks (you have to get elephant ears and kettle corn--it's the law), historical demonstrations (a blacksmith and some guys in period dress answering questions), and lumberjack games in the park, which consisted of men going at logs and beams with chainsaws to see who could carve them up the fastest. This was a serious competition. They had multiple judges, a timekeeper, and a PA announcer. Though one time they had to halt the contest because a little boy dashed out into the cutting area to pick up a round cut from a log. He examined it, then dropped it, and ran back to his parents again. Everyone found it completely adorable.

I love these kinds of things, incidentally. They're a part of Americana, and they're different in every place that has them. We trolled the craft booths, and I bought some handmade soap. Interestingly, I also came across multiple booths that sold Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia: dice, coasters shaped like dice, bits of costumery, leather dice-rolling pads, statuettes of D&D-style characters, and so on. Make no mistake--table-top role-playing games have become mainstream. One such booth sported a bunch of fridge magnets with quotes from the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. "You will not break me!" "I don't have thumbs, Carl!" "Mongo is appalled." "Glurp glurp!" And so on. I'm in a D&D group that loves the DCC books, so I took a photo of the display and texted it to everyone. "Anyone want something? Speak up now!" Two of the gamers responded quickly, and I snagged their requests. 




Yesterday we'd seen a little bookstore with the straightforward name of the Newaygo Bookstore, but it had been closed, so today we checked it out. From the outside, the Newaygo Bookstore looks like a small, slightly shabby book shop that's trying to attract customers by doubling as a coffeehouse. But once you get inside, you discover that the place is about four times as big as you thought. The front has a generous selection of new books, and behind those are room after room after room of used books of all sorts. There are also little reading nooks adorned with cozy chairs and cute lamps. It was both a surprise and a delight and we spent considerable time there.

After that, we went back to the flat. I got restless and persuaded Darwin to explore the grounds of the house with me. This was when we found the staircase and the gazebo down by the river. We spent husband togetherness time just letting the river and woods wash tension away. 

Sunday, we slept in, then packed up and drove home through clear weather. No storms! It was a fine weekend.

 When I was a kid in the 70s and attending SF conventions in the 80s and 90s, hotel check-in times were two o'clock, but you could often get an earlier check-in by asking for it beforehand. Checkout times were 11:00 AM or even noon, and it wasn't usually a problem to get an even later checkout time by just asking the front desk.

Then, in the 00s, things ... shifted. Check-in times became later. Checkout times started earlier. Nowadays, check-in isn't until three or even four o'clock. Checkout is 10 AM, and the front desk doesn't like to extend it--or they'll do it for a fee.

Why the change?

Staffing. If a hotel has three hours (between 11 AM and 2 PM) to turn the rooms over, they need a bunch of housekeepers. Then, someone realized that if they cleared everyone out of the hotel by 10 AM and didn't let new guests in until 4 PM, they'd have twice as much time to turn the rooms over, and could therefore cut the housekeeping staff in half.

So now we're all stuck hanging around the hotel lobby (or finding a place to stash suitcases) until almost suppertime, and then hustling out the hotel door and hunting for breakfast towing a pile of luggage, all so a billion-dollar-a-week hotel chain can save money by firing a pile of people.

But no one seems to have noticed this. Or if they have, they aren't saying anything.

Ahem:

The Washington (DC) Science Fiction Association (WSFA) pleased to announce the finalists for the 2026 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction:

“Half Life,” by Steven Harper, Skull X Bones, , ed. by David B. Coe and Joshua Palmatier, Zombies Need Brains LLC, (December 2025)*

“Bag of Holding” by Liz Westbrook-Trenholm, On Spec, Vol 35., No. 3, Issue #133, Copper Pig Writers' Society (October 2025), ed. by Diane Walton

“Billionaire’s Tears,” by Vanessa Ricci-Thode, Escape Pod (July 24, 2025), ed. by Mur Lafferty

“Blackrock,” by R. M. Olson, Skull X Bones, ed. by David B. Coe and Joshua Palmatier; Zombies Need Brains LLC, (December 2025)

“Guardians of the Well,” by Rose Strickman, In Another Time Magazine, Issue 3, (June 2025), ed. by Agatha Grimke

“The Last Mardi Gras,” by Raven Jakubowski, DreamForge Anvil #20, DreamForge Press, LLC (June 1, 2025), ed. by Scot Noel

“Not a Fish,” by Andrew Dykstal, Beneath Ceaseless Skies #434 (June 12, 2025), ed. by Scott H. Andrews

“The Teleporting Disaster Fairy,” by Rati Mehrotra, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 67 (November/December 2025), ed. by Michael Damian Thomas.

The award honors the efforts of small press publishers in providing a critical venue for short fiction in the area of speculative fiction, and showcases the best original short fiction published by small presses in the previous year (2025). An unusual feature of the selection process is that the voting is done with the identity of the author and publisher hidden so that the final choice is based solely on the quality of the story.

The winner is chosen by members of the Washington Science Fiction Association (www.wsfa.org), and the award will be presented at their annual convention, Capclave (www.capclave.org), held this year on October 2-4, at the Rockville Hilton & Executive Meeting Center, 1750 Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD.

Cathy Green
for WSFA Small Press Award Committee
Award Sponsored by the Washington Science Fiction Association and Capclave – Where Reading is not Extinct

*I changed the order of the nominees from the original press release to put my story first so it would be more obvious why I was posting. :) The Skull X Bones anthology is available at https://www.amazon.com/Skull-X-Bones-Alan-Smale/dp/1940709865 .

Congratulations to all the nominees! See you at CapClave!
 

 This came up in a friend's group, and I thought I'd repost my observations here.

As part of my continuing canning campaign, I canned tomatoes.

As I did with the blueberries and strawberries, I didn't pick them myself. I bought them from a farm stand. $50 for a bushel. As a bonus, I'd visited my mother recently, and she had a whole bunch of jars, screw lids, and unused inner lids in the basement that she said she'd never use again, so I happily harvested those. It brought the cost down considerably!

I had already learned a lot from working with berries, so I was primed and ready! Tomatoes are more complicated to can, though, and I had to work out a system. Tomatoes need to be scored, blanched, cooled, peeled, quartered, cooked, jarred, and finally processed for 40 minutes in boiling water--many, many steps--and you can't really send all the tomatoes through each steps at once, unless you have a trio of car-sized cauldrons!

First, I set the big processing cauldron on to heat, since I knew from experience it would take a long time to come to a boil. I'd also scored from my mother a blanching pot with two matching colanders, which made things go faster--I scored enough tomatoes to fill one colander, dropped it into the boiling blanching pot, then scored enough tomatoes to fill the second colander. This kept things moving. I removed the first set of tomatoes from the blancher (and discovered if you do it really fast, the water doesn't drain back into the pot quickly enough and will spill over onto the stove powerfully enough to extinguish the gas burner), dumped them into ice water, and dropped the second colander into the blancher. 

I peeled the blanched tomatoes, and that was as fun as I'd remembered from helping my mother when I was a kid. You squeeze the tomato, and if you do it right, it pops right out of its skin! The proper sound effect for this is "squip!" When they were partly done, the second colander was finished, so I dumped those into ice water and finished peeling the first set. The second set was cool by then, so I peeled them, too. Next, I cut the stems out, quartered the fruit, and put it all into a big stewpot. This went onto the stove until it came to a boil, which would take a while, so I went back to step one: scoring another set of tomatoes for blanching. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Once the stove tomatoes had boiled and stewed for five minutes, I ladled them into jars I'd already prepped in the dishwasher. Although my mother had put tomatoes into quart jars, she was feeding a family of five and needed a bunch all at once. I've just got two people here, so I went for pint jars. Used my wand to lift inner lids out of simmering water (I was using four out of five burners now) and popped those on, followed with the screw tops. The full set went into the wire basket, which in turn went into the huge processing pot of boiling water. There they bubbled for 40 minutes, which gave me time to start work on the next set.

It was busy, busy work that occasionally got a little frantic. There were times when it was time to remove a set of tomatoes from the blanching pot at the same time the stewpot finished boiling and I was in the middle of peeling yet another set. It took some time and kitchen management skill to get through it.

After several hours, the last batch of jars was boiling in the processing pot and I was down to the 10 pounds of fresh tomatoes I'd set aside for making marinara sauce. I'd rather have my own marinara for spaghetti, but I don't always have the energy or patience to make it on a given day, so preserving a bunch of it seemed an ideal solution.

My mother never made marinara sauce at home, but I have my own recipe for it, and I'd decided to try using my Instant Pot to speed it up. I blanched and peeled everything (I don't like peels in my marinara), then smooshed the tomatoes by hand to crush them. I sautéed onions and garlic in the bottom of the Instant Pot and poured in the crushed tomatoes. They just filled! Added salt, pepper, oregano, and parsley and set the pot to pressurize. 

Meanwhile, the final set of jars had another half hour to boil. I was able to take a break!

One sit-down later, the last jars were done and the marinara sauce was ready. I set the jars on the counter, but kept the processing water hot, since I'd need it for later.

The Instant Pot had cooked the sauce well, but by the time it got up to pressure (20 minutes) and cooked the tomatoes (also 20 minutes) and I depressurized it (5 minutes), I could have just stewed them myself just as well. A note for next time.

I used a blending wand to puree the tomatoes into sauce, then tried putting the Instant Pot on sauté to simmer it, but the Instant Pot didn't like that, and anyway, the shape of the pot meant it would take a long, long time for the sauce to cook down, so I divided the sauce between my two biggest wide-bottom pans and left it to simmer for an hour. That worked, and I got the consistency I wanted. It also gave me time to clean the kitchen--canning gets water and tomato detritus =everywhere.= And so, so many big containers to wash! 

I jarred the sauce and got only five and a half pints. Marinara really cooks down. Next year, I'll probably double this. The jars went into the processor, and I finished cleaning up.

When it was all over, a bushel of tomatoes had produced 35 and a half pints of preserved tomatoes and 5 and a half pints of marinara. Only one jar--tomatoes--didn't seal properly and had to go into the fridge along with the half-jars. 

By now it was after 8:00. I'd been at it for more than eleven hours, and I also forgot to eat lunch! I ordered pizza and bread sticks so we could dip the bread sticks in my marinara, and it was absolutely delicious.

Next up: peaches!

 Michigan's primary election for Governor and Senator was held yesterday.

 Speaking of advice columns, Miss Manners today addressed one of my pet peeves:

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Referring to "guys" has become a constant refrain during newscasts: "Now over to you guys" for every opening, and "Back to you guys" for every conclusion. Restaurant servers greet customers with "How are you guys?" and "How are you guys doing?" and end with, "You guys have a nice night" -- regardless of the gender of the diners.

Is anyone else bothered by this? Once you start noticing it, it can drive you crazy.

GENTLE READER: Indeed. And the widespread use of "guys" to address women is particularly mystifying after the fraught learning process of changing job titles from masculine to neutral -- "fireman" to "firefighter," "stewardess" to "flight attendant," and such.

Miss Manners is just grateful she is not the language police.

(Me again):

People used to claim that "he" and "man" and "mankind" were gender-neutral when used to refer to the general population. They never actually were. It was blatant sexism from the get-go, and nowadays we've mostly managed to eradicate this insidious little custom--except when it comes to "guys."

When did "guys" become the standard group word? It's not gender-neutral any more than "man" is, but you hear it everywhere. I've even heard women address a group of women as "guys."

When I complain about this or call people on it, and they say, "Guys is gender-neutral," I respond with, "Ask some of your straight male friends how many GUYS they've slept with, and you'll soon see how gender-specific that word is."

What to use instead? "Folks." "Everyone." "Everybody." "People." "Group." "Class" (if you're a teacher). "Guys and gals" is ... iffy. You may have non-binary people in the group to whom neither term applies.

Avoiding "guys" in a mixed group is often a habit, but it CAN be broken. Can you do it?

I've been teaching myself to can. My mother used to can a lot, and I both watched and helped with prepping ingredients (peeling blanched tomatoes, cleaning strawberries, sorting blueberries, etc.), but I never did the actual canning part. So I had to learn. Fortunately, canning isn't actually difficult, just time-consuming. 

I'm cheating in one important way, though--I'm not picking anything myself. I can't count how many days my siblings and I spent picking strawberries, blueberries, tomatoes, apples, and more. Strawberries weren't too bad--you can sit down, the berries fill up a container quickly, and it's kind of fun to lift the plant leaves and look for little red treasures. Tomatoes were the most physically difficult because they're heavy, and a basketful of them is a hard lift. Blueberries were the worst. The season comes during the hottest, buggiest part of summer and it takes a LOT of blueberries to fill a pail. My brother, sister, and I agreed that dropping the first blueberry into an empty pail, where it rolled around the bottom and illustrated just how much room was left to fill, was discouraging. You knew you were going to be there for a while.

I didn't want to go through that again, especially because the boys are grown and gone, and Darwin has flatly refused to pick anything, so it would just be me out there. It would take a lot of work to pick berries on my own. I also looked up prices and discovered pre-picked berries aren't much more expensive than U-pick berries. U-pick blueberries, for example, cost about $3 a pound. Pre-picked blueberries cost $25 for a five-pound box, or $5 a pound. And they're already washed and sorted. That means twenty pounds of pre-picked berries cost only $25 more than u-pick, and it would take me HOURS in the hot sun to pick 20 pounds myself, AND I'd still have to wash and sort them. Is it worth it to pay $25 more for someone else to pick and sort for me? Yes. Yes, it is.

This was NOT the case when I was a kid. U-pick was way cheaper than buying at the market. I suspect the price has effectively come down because machines have taken over a chunk of the labor and modern farming techniques have increased harvests, making everything that much cheaper.

So I bought pre-picked berries. 

The internet is a wonderful tool for teaching yourself a new skill. It right handily showed me how do the stuff I didn't do as a kid. Canning hasn't changed that much. You still use that big, dark blue canning pot, the matching jar rack, and the canning funnel. The jars and lids are exactly the same. The only things I don't remember from childhood are a jar lifter (a tong-like device that let's you pick up a blistering hot jar without burning yourself) and a magnetized wand that lets you lift inner lids from simmering water. 

I canned a whole pile of strawberries into jam in June and found I was a dab hand at it. Yesterday I canned 20 pounds of blueberries into jam. The steps were the same as they were forty years ago: mash the fruit, cook it down until it boils, add lemon juice and pectin, boil some more, add a hella lot of sugar, boil one more time, ladle into jars, put on lids, boil jars in huge pot for 10 minutes, remove, let cool, listen for the little POP as each jar seals. The part I was ignorant of was the boiling of the fruit and of the jars. I had never done that. But it isn't difficult, and I pulled it off handily. The weather also cooperated. Canning makes for a hot, steamy kitchen, usually a misery in July, but it was only in the mid-70s that day. A couple window fans kept things comfortable. Perfect! 

Next up, I'm planning to do peaches, though I'm going to freeze those rather than can them. It'll be easier, and the peaches come out better anyway. In a few weeks, I'll try tomatoes, and maybe marinara sauce.

Now I have a LOT of strawberry and blueberry jam. Guess what everyone's getting for Christmas this year?