The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We got a Grange Hall on the South End.  Still got members even.  Okay, not many, just a few Die-Hards holding on by a toenail, trying to keep the place from sinking into the tideflats or falling into the hands of some fast buck developer bent on high rise condos that face the Sound.  The South End String Band threw in with these Grangers back in ’04, sold $5 tickets that got you a dinner and an aural onslaught by an 11 member ensemble.  Made nearly 4 grand and kept the place open another decade.

But …. Times being what they are, the good folks at the South Grange need a little help once again.  So the Band, now as downsized as the Grange is, decided to throw in once more.  After all, these are the folks who organized and built Camano State Park with 1000 volunteers from the island and Stanwoodopolis back in 1949.  And they did it in one day!

We’d like to make this an annual event, tie it in with the Harvest Jubilee and keep Tradition moving into the 21st Century.  Come on down Saturday Sept. 22nd and listen to the South End String Band regale you with a night of Camano backwash roots music and plenty of tall tales, exaggerations and outright lies.  Where else you gonna get that outside of a political rally?  And all for a $5 suggested donation.  Good cause, good people, good band (we warned you there’d be bald-faced lies) plus we’ll be offering a full meal deal of beer and wine plus snacks and dessert offerings.

Mosey down and help us out.  The South Grange — still standing.  Just like us.

Saturday Sept. 22nd  6 pm to when the cows come home.  2227 South Camano Drive (just south of Elger Bay Store) Shoes and shirt not necessary.

www. southendstringband.com

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It’s harvest time on the old South End!  Big doings, oh yeah.  The whole Harvest Jubilee weekend is going to build to a Grand Finale and you KNOW where we’ll be having it —- that’s correcto, amigo — at the South Camano Grange.  After you’ve toured the farms and listened to the speeches, after you’ve petted goats and ogled alpacas, after you’ve tasted Smokey Point butter squash and tried to spell arugula, after you’ve driven all those miles on not-so-sustainable gasoline, after all the nettles are harvested and the free range crabs are rounded up, there’s only one last stop, one final jubilation, one Monster Party you should NOT miss.

The South End String Band is cranking up the volume, serving adult beverages and offering up a foot stomping, toe-tapping, barn burning, old fashioned SOUTH END HOEDOWN.  We’re going to help the Grange with your $5 suggested donation and we’re going to show you what Sustainable Partying is all about.

We’re going back – way back – to when the Grange rocked, when the entire community hauled on down and shook the moss off the roof.  We’ll have snacks for sale and we’ll offer up some moonshine wit and wet powder wisdom for anyone wondering why the South End is the Shangri-La-La of the Western World.  You show up, we’ll make you a certified (or certifiable) citizen of the South End.  No ID necessary.  And no credit check required.  It isn’t called Harvest Jubilee for nothing. SOUTH GRANGE HOEDOWN 6PM – to when the cows come home Satuday Sept. 22nd South Camano Grange 2227 S Camano Dr. (just south of Elger Bay Store) “Where the Past isn’t Prologue, It’s just Prolonged….”

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/audio-cyber-rage.mp3[/podcast]audio — cyber rage

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One of the hazards of scribbling nonsense in these 21st Century blog sites along with about one billion other yahoos is that there are folks out there who really – and I don’t mean maybe – REALLY don’t like what they read in Skeeter’s pantheon of purpled prose.  Maybe some search engine sends em by mistake, hooks on a key word, next thing you know, instead of a self-help forum, they got some chucklenut waxing profane about a subject they couldn’t care less about.  And now, instead of Helpful Tips from Tom on how to turn their unhappy life into something swallowable, they got precious time wasted scrolling down South End Babble and boy howdy, somebody needs to reimburse them!

So they write to me in the anonymity of the internet.  Which is the digital highway equivalent of road rage on the interstate.  Flip me off, swerve into my lane,  jam the brakes.  They’ll show me who’s who and what’s what.  And the best part: they’re untrackable, anonymous as drive-by shooters.  Splatter my windshield with shotgun pellets and don’t look back, just speed away to the next unlucky target.

These are some very Very ANGRY! people out there with us.  More than you think.  Way more.  I suppose we’re lucky they shoot from the lip, not the hip, but if you ever made the mistake of commenting on a forum or some issue that meant enough to you that you weighed in, then you probably learned firsthand what I’m talking about.  Civility is most definitely not a valued trait in Cyberville.

I’d like to see the volume and vitriol dialed back a bit.  I know, probably won’t happen, probably get ratcheted UP even more if anything,  But personally, I’m weary of the ranting, the hysteria, the apoplexy.  And hey, you, the guy who sells antiques and read the blog by mistake on cleaning out my storage shacks, maybe hoping for bargains:  I’m sorry you thought this offered no insights for living your life.  And I’m doubly sorry if you thought I was so self- centered I used the blog to make myself look attractive.  I guess we won’t be dating.

I don’t have anything to sell, pal.  Not the junk I cleaned out, not the ideas in my head.  And .. .sadly…. it sounds like we’re all a little late to offer you tips on living.  Let’s both just figure it out on our own.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/who-is-ayn-rand.mp3[/podcast]who is ayn rand

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I got a friend whose granddad came over from Norway to America in 1901.  Bought some land on Camano Island between the Stilly River and Utsalady Bay, built a 12 foot by 12 foot cabin that still stands and lived in it until he built his house, about 2 or 3 times bigger, and it still stands with an addition that made it a 750 square foot palace.  This, for all us newcomers, makes him a bona fide North End homesteader.

To get to his farm he had to be ferried across from Stanwoodopolis, then hike the 2 or 3 miles up Land’s Hill and across the hogback we all use now, although we got a road these days.  Shopping was a bit more strenuous than it is for us Late Arrivals.  You can bet he was like a lot of us South Enders are today  —  he only went in to town when he had to.

My buddy still lives there in the ‘modern’ house his father built.  He’s added lots of acreage over the years, kept the farm going, the chickens, the gardens, the cattle herd.  It would be easy to imagine him being pretty proud and possibly smug about carrying on the American tradition of hard work, a veritable Captain of His Own Destiny.  We all like to think our lives were the result of our sweat, our smarts and our individual Can-Do attitude.  But my friend would disagree.  He says none of this would have been possible without the bridge being built finally and the roads laid down, the electric lines strung, the whole infrastructure that supports us all.

We aren’t Laplanders, you know.  And we don’t exist in a wilderness.  Even if, as we pioneers down here like to believe, we’re far from the oversight of Rome over there on the ‘other’ island with its seat of power centered in Coupeville, about a 2 day drive far far from home through multiple counties and over various bridges.  It’s fine to take pride in our Emersonian self-reliance, to build a house or a business or a life.  Just give some credit to the many unseen hands that paved the way.  Believe me, nobody’s going to think any less of you.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/audio-self-reliance-googled.mp3[/podcast]audio — self reliance googled

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Wasn’t it Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote admiringly about self-reliance?  About two hundred years ago?  Well, I got some news for Ralph.  The world changed.  It got real small, Ralph, about the size of an I-phone, and nowadays you rely on IT, not on yourself.  I got friends who go to the grocery store to buy a couple of last minute items and they no more than get to Aisle #1 than they need to call the missus and see if she’d prefer the large size or the organic kind or a plastic jar not the glass one or exactly what kind of mustard?

I really don’t know what to make of this.  Do my buddies call across the house every morning to see what color socks they ought to wear today?  I mean, damn!  Make the decision!!  All by yourself.  Be brave.  Be bold.  Get the mustard YOU want.  Then live with the consequences!!!

We got GPS to help us NOT get lost.  We got Google to find us a quick answer to about anything.  We got Facebook to keep us abreast of our pals’ last 6 hours of late breaking activity.  We got internet shopping and Netflix movies and satellite TV.  We got e-mail and cellphone and twitter and text messaging.  We haven’t got one iota of time to make even a simple decision, you get right down to it.

Poor sorry Ralph Waldo.  He might’ve been stuck sorting it out solo, but we’re linked up, digitally connected, nano seconds from somebody else’s answer to any question we got.  And we got plenty of questions.  Just none we’re willing to answer by ourselves.  We need confirmation, we need a social network, we want to know if our friends will approve, if they bought that product, if they liked that movie, if they’re going to that restaurant.

Ralph probably ate his hot dogs without mustard, is my guess.  Too much trouble deciding.  Besides, if you google it up, the supermarket hadn’t been invented…..  Don’t believe me, cellphone a buddy and ask them.

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