“On a verdant slope of Mount Maenalus, in Arcadia, there stands an olive grove about the ruins of a villa. Close by is a tomb, once beautiful with the sublimest sculptures, but now fallen into as great decay as the house. At one end of that tomb, its curious roots displacing the time-stained blocks of Pentelic marble, grows an unnaturally large olive tree of oddly repellent shape; so like to some grotesque man, or death-distorted body of a man, that the country folk fear to pass it at night when the moon shines faintly through the crooked boughs. Mount Maenalus is a chosen haunt of dreaded Pan, whose queer companions are many, and simple swains believe that the tree must have some hideous kinship to these weird Panisci; but an old bee-keeper who lives in the neighbouring cottage told me a different story.”

Today I am reviewing a beekeeper from the works of H. P. Lovecraft. I expect that even the most devoted fans of Lovecraft would barely remember this character, though, given that he is alluded to but twice in a minor Lovecraft story, “The Tree“. He doesn’t even do anything in the story. Basically, this story is narrated by some chump. That chump tells a story that was related to him by a beekeeper. Thus, the beekeeper is neither the narrator, nor is he actually a part of the story of the tree.

What do we know about this guy? Not much. He’s Greek. He’s old. And he knows this story. He automatically gets Two Honeycombs for being a good beekeeper (one doesn’t get to be an old beekeeper if one is not good at it, after all), but I could infer more. Maybe this beekeeper actually knows a lot more than this one story. Perhaps he knows all manner of secrets of the Lovecraftian universe and all its monsters and such. It seems entirely likely that this beekeeper is a major force in protecting humanity. Nobody out there can prove me wrong! But, unfortunately, this story also can not prove me right.

Two Honeycombs out of Five.

I must now face the wrath of the Dark Lord Char’Nagh, for I have failed him this year. I set a bunch of goals for myself at the start of 2017 and I not completed them all in time. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised about that, considering that I apparently labelled last year’s End of Year post as the “2017 Ender” so, as far as this site knows, the year was over before I even started on those goals. I doomed myself!

Realistically though, I did alright. Only three goals on my list were not completed. The sad thing is that two of them were the biggest projects I set for myself:

Obviously, one of those is Secret Government Robots. My webcomic is now several years past the time it was supposed to end. I swear I have worked on it. I’ve even got pages fully completed and ready to go up, but it remains incomplete. One obstacle I’ve got here is that I’ve finished the story in my head and in my notes, so all that is left is the drawing. The drawing is my least favourite part of doing a webcomic. I am a reluctant artist. And I don’t really have an audience here. This is a story I told for myself, and myself knows the ending. But I’ll get it done.

The other of my largest projects this year was to read the Decameron. I didn’t even get halfway through. Other reading-based goals included just “Read Ten Novels” and “Read Two Collections of Short Stories” and I beat those easily enough, then exceeded them. I spent lots of time reading extra books when I ought to have been reading the Decameron, because it was a written goal of mine. This is a symptom of my second obstacle toward getting these goals done, they were both pretty daunting. I put them off as long as possible, to focus on other things, and then as the end of the year drew close, I knew I wasn’t going to get them done, so I just didn’t do them.

Clearly I need to find another way to focus on large projects. Perhaps the best thing about setting those goals is that it’ll train me to recognize how I focus on things and I’ll be able to plan accordingly in the future. Perhaps.

(I mean, also I was sick for three months of 2017. The kind of sick where even reading was hard for me to focus on. I didn’t want to use that as an excuse, but I have to admit, it did happen. Let’s hope I won’t have that in 2018.)

As I said, there was a third project I did not complete. It’s just a minor little thing (though it got more complicated as I went on), and is about half done. I don’t feel as guilty about not finishing, and still intend to do so this year and put it on the site. I will say no more at this juncture.

So this year, I’ve set fewer goals of some kinds, and more goals of other kinds (expect more Beekeeper Reviews this year than last, for example), but I still feel like I’ve got two big projects (and one small one) hanging over my head. Let’s try this again…

“Between two beekeepers there can be no strife. Not even a tepid hostility can mar their perfect communion.
The petty enmities which life raises to be barriers between man and man and between man and woman vanish once it is revealed to them that they are linked by this great bond. Envy, malice, hatred, and all uncharitableness disappear, and they look into each other’s eyes and say ‘My brother!”

Uneasy Money is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse and, like most of his works, it is a farcical comedy. Unlike too many of his (and everyone’s) works, this is a story about beekeepers. The fact that they are beekeepers is not particularly relevant to the plot, so I’d hoped I could go into detail without giving much away, in case anyone wanted to check out Wodehouse (which they ought) and decided to do it through a work not related to his more well-known franchises. But I do kind of need to spoil a bit here. There are two beekeepers in this book and they fall in love. I admit that’s a pretty big spoiler, but I assure you there are jokes and misunderstandings that will get a reader through the story even knowing the ending.

Elizabeth Boyd is an American beekeeper, but she isn’t making much money at it. “She had not prospered greatly. With considerable trouble she contrived to pay her way, and that was all.” On top of running her bee farm in Brookport, Long Island, she also has to take care of her loser brother Nutty. She’s a hard working, nice young woman.

William FitzWilliam Delamere Chalmers is an English lord (albeit one of the poorest of them) who enjoys beekeeping. He worked for a year on a bee farm until his lack of money and the response of his peers. “The general impression seemed to be that I should be foolish to try anything so speculative as beekeeping, so it fell through. Some very decent old boys got me another job.” Luckily, by the end of the book, Bill and Elizabeth are off to be wed and buy a big farm of their own. He’s a particularly nice guy, if a bit dim.

How do they rate as beekeepers? Well, Elizabeth is the only one employed as such during the events of the novel, and she admits her business just barely scrapes by. It isn’t for lack of trying, though. Any success she has at the job comes from natural aptitude, for she “loved bees, but she was not an expert on them” and she has “reached a stage of intimacy with her bees which rendered a veil a superfluous precaution.” Bill may not keep bees during the story, but at the very least he has a year of experience and no fear of the insects. He is capable of the job. And what of fighting? Well, it isn’t the kind of story where they get to do much fighting, but Bill is often described as a physically fit and even imposing figure. It isn’t his nature, but I suspect that if he had to fight, he’d do alright. Also of note: on one occasion, when wanting to inflict some minor pain to Bill, Elizabeth pokes him with a pin, which is on brand as a stinger. Maybe she’d do more with that motif in a fight. Any supernatural powers? Nothing significant, though there is one moment when Elizabeth is trying to hide something from a snooping reporter and one of her bees “stung him at the psychological moment” which could be coincidence, but also could be a bee knowingly doing its keeper’s bidding.

Beekeeper Rage? Well, Elizabeth at one point notes how quickly she goes from being unhappy that her brother may come into some money he will surely misuse, to “boil[ing] with rage” when he doesn’t get it. She knows it is inconsistent, but the rage is still there. But also “it was a trait in her character which she had often lamented, that she could not succeed in keeping angry with anyone for more than a few minutes on end.” So there isn’t too much Rage to be had.

Three Honeycombs out of Five.

At this point the city is teeming with students again, and classes have begun anew. I am not attending them, though. Intent on becoming financially stable, I am taking at least a year off of my schooling. This is the monetary saving that I should have before I quit my job to go back to school, but that I had not the forethought for.

I am a little sad that I won’t be in school (though if I can find some that fit into my schedule, I may sit in on some larger, easy-to-blend-into classes), but I was also getting pretty tired of all the stuff I hate about school too. Perhaps this break will allow me to refocus on the positives sides of schooling before I go fully hateful of the system, as I did back in my teenage years.

And also, maybe I’ll have more money when the year is over.

But I will to work on my education in my own way through this year. I have taken fifty books from my Unread Books bookshelf and set them aside in a pile. I plan on reading the heck out of all that pile before this time next year. Some are the kind of works of literature that could come up in my education. Others are not. Either way, it’s more reading than I’ve been able to do during a school year, which is generally close to none. Here goes.

I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try to give some updates about PDR on this PDR Website.

As I have mentioned, I am done with school for a while, so I’ve been making the most of my time off. Not by going anywhere or doing anything that would involve spending money, oh heavens no, but I’ve been quite relaxed as I am. I am still very broke, as is my usual situation, but it does feel like I am now broke, but improving instead of broke, and getting worse. So that’s a plus.

It should be obvious from the title (“The End”), but the current Secret Government Robots storyline is the last one. This is what the whole thing has been building up to. It’s going to be pretty long, and I am taking my time with it (it involves more drawing than I’d like it to). It is also not the top priority project I have going on right now (the lack of any audience beyond myself allows me to justify that), but I do hope to get it done before the end of this year.

Haiku!

Remember haikus?
No? Yeah? No? I don’t either.
Were they limericks?

One of the things I am currently prioritizing as higher than webcomic making is reading books. Perhaps the biggest drawback to being in school again was that I was unable to read almost ever. I had to read too much for school, so I never had time to read anything in full, and anything I wanted to read for pleasure became something that stole time from schoolwork. But not anymore! In my effort to get back into reading, I have taken fifty novels from my ample Unread Books Pile and broken them into a smaller, less daunting pile that I am working my way through at the maximum pace a PDR can manage.

At this point, I have to admit, I still feel kind of burnt out from schooling. But once I get a few books read, a few pages done, and one or two other projects off my to-do list, I should probably be less overwhelmed and that will only make it easier for me to do more things. Hopefully.