AncienTrails

Let It Snow

9 75% 23% 0mph windroseSSE  bar rises windchill9    Holiseason

                                Waning Gibbous Snow Moon

We have the weathermen prophesying snow.  They have put out this kind of jeremiad in year’s past and naught has happened.  But they seem pretty damned confident this time. 

So, I’ll get up in the morning and drive to Elk River to pick up our snowblower, released early from the hospital thanks to special treatment.  Back here to read about conservation and 18th century painting for an event that might cancel if the weather turns out as predicted.

Spent this evening learning about flaking, delamination, inpainting and other nuances of the art conservator’s world.  Interesting. 

11 Kids from Westbrook

11 65% 24% 0mph windroseS  bar steady windchill16    Holiseason

                                Waning Gibbous Snow Moon

Business meeting with Kate this AM.  Off to the MIA for my mysteries of the ancient world tour and research for tomorrow night’s corporate event.  There were 8 boys and three girls from Westbrook, near Walnut Grove.  They were farm kids, big, one was 6 ft. 4″.  I didn’t have my best tour, not quite sure why, but it went well enough.  A good enough tour.  I think I require a bit of a spark in the group, some challenge, some intensity or I don’t work as well as I can.  Something for me to work with.

Copied several object files for galleries 305 and 306.  Walked the route for my conservation tour–two paintings, so it was a quick walk.  Finished up, came home.  Treadmill.  Watched F/X, a good movie.  Now, I’m gonna read the stuff I copied, plus the conservation material I printed out.

Ah, Well…

16 55% 27% 1mph windroseWSS  bar steady windchill16    Holiseason

Waning Gibbous Snow Moon

I play sheepshead.  But not very well.  I bring up the rear each time, though my play has improved.  It’s difficult for me to keep my mind on the game, a problem I’ve always had with games of skill.  When I played chess, I would play very well for 20 minutes, then my mind would drift and I’d give away my queen.  Not sure what that says about me, but it’s been consistent since college.

Bill blitzed us all tonight.  A remarkable evening for the man from Sturgeon Bay.

Saw my boy.  It’s so good to see him, hug him.  We have a great relationship and I’m very grateful for that, since my relationship with my father was the other end of the spectrum.  He’s got his physical at 5:30AM tomorrow.  The Air Force way.  He has also has to come back, again, to sign up.  Strange, but that’s the bureaucracy of the armed forces, just like any large, corporate activity.

Got to Kate late because Joseph and I were talking and I lost track of the time.  He’s at his Mom’s tonight and tomorrow night, then Saturday night up here.  Tired and off to bed.

The Boy Who Would Go to the Moon

14 49% 26% 2mph windroseS  bar falls windchill13    Holiseason

Waning Gibbous Snow Moon

Joseph called.  He needs his original naturalization certificate and his certificate of live birth for yet another physical for the Air Force.  He’s coming in tonight for his enlisted personnel physical.

I watched a TV program Tuesday night, part of a series called Mars Rising.  This segment was on the human factor.  As I listened the qualifications, they seemed to fit Joseph.  Handy, resourceful, able to think outside the box, good with people and groups, hardy, intelligent.  It’s a difficult task to sort out the right personality types for a mission where all contact with earth will be lost, at least in an immediate sense, early on in the flight.  That means, as the program pointed out, that there will be no repeat of Apollo 13 where NASA ground crews kept coming up with solutions to problems in real time.  The time lag necessary for radio communication over such long distances negates immediacy, leaving the crew responsible for any problems, from the minor to the urgent and life-threatening.

Joseph has eyes set on the moon.  He told me a couple of months ago that he’ll learn anything necessary to get a position at the moon base proposed by NASA.  “If they need engineers, I’ll get an engineering degree.  If they need doctors, I’ll go to medical school.”

To a man raised in the 1950’s, who remembers clearly the first tiny beeping ball, Sputnik, and was in college when we landed on the moon, Joseph’s dreams seem like science fiction come true.  In his life experience they are realistic, if lofty, aspirations (no pun intended).  Though it would scare the beejesus out of me if he goes to the moon or Mars, I’d be at JFK cheering him on.

Sheepshead in the Year of the Packer

 8 59%%  28% 1mph windroseWSW  bar rises windchill6    Holiseason

                                Waning Gibbous Snow Moon

I play sheepshead.  No, this is not a central Asian plateau game engaged on horseback with a member of the flock decapitated and used as a pre-polo ball.  This is cards.  It’s a game largely confined to Wisconsin and there most confined to the German heritage Wisconsinites of the cheese/beer & brat belt that starts at the Illinois line and runs up to Green Bay.  Though not a Wisconsin native, I lived in Appleton for a couple of years after college and before seminary.  There my relatives, the Merritts, came over to my house every weekend.  We bought a case or two of whatever was cheapest and sat down to play sheepshead.

The rules of sheepshead are arcane unless you’re familiar with them; if you are, you know they’re arcane plus. 

Tonight, with only a couple of years of Wisconsin living under my belt, I’m going to play with four guys who are natives.  Not only natives, but Green Packer fans.  A requirement if you live in the cheese/beer & brat belt.  Not only Packer fans, but Packer fans in a winning season.  Not only a winning season, but a season in which the Vikings have had holes in their dragon boat.  (though, I might say here, they did look good against the Giants last week.)  Not only a year in which the Vikings are no good, but a year in which the Packers skunked the Vikings, 37-0.  Sigh. 

You Cub fans, Red Sox pre-the World Series win, Gopher’s basketball or football fans, you know what this will be like.  I think it’s Jude who should receive a quick prayer before the game.

The Missing Seat

          12 62%  28% 5mph windroseWNW  bar rises windchill11    Holiseason

                            Waning Gibbous Snow Moon

A few snow flakes today.  Then, none.  Maybe this weekend.  Waiting for snow.  I want to stand outside, stick out my tongue and feel the snow.  I want to stand hip deep in snow, break out my snowshoes.  Hell, I’m even up for using my snowblower, if it was here now rather than in the hospital.

Kate undertook the reupholstering of our couch, something she’s done with skill and speed.  This afternoon we unscrewed the seat cushion from its base and popped it out, which left the couch unusuable this evening.  Had some mighty confused dogs wandering around; Hilo and Kona spend the evenings on the couch until bedtime.  Without it, they weren’t sure what to do.

I finished the #1 Lady’s Detective Agency tonight.  Funny, touching, reflective, human.  A great read.  The good news is that there are several more.

Also finished up five of the eight pieces for my Mysteries of the Ancient World tour on Friday.  That leaves me most of tomorrow to work on the conservation tour and the galleries I have to preside over for the Radiologists.  After that, back to the books and moving stuff around in the exercise area.  Someday soon, though, I will return to writing full time.  He said with some conviction.

Deck the Halls with Stock Tickers and Clipped Coupons

26  365  28%  0mph windroseSSW  bar steady windchill23  Holiseason

                            Waning Gibbous Snow Moon

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had Alan Greenspan in the car, his Age of Turbulence.  I’ve learned a couple of interesting things about him.  Ayn Rand and he were contemporaries; he writes about her as an acolyte.  Greenspan attended weekly gatherings at her apartment where debate went on “well into the night.”  She stood up with him at his swearing in ceremony for his first stint as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.  Also, in spite of his Republican credentials and engagement with Republican campaigns, he does not speak well of either Bush.  He admired Gerald Ford, loathed Richard Nixon, and had good words for Ronald Reagan.  He mentions after his comments on Reagan’s presidency that the federal deficit had gotten way of out hand, but doesn’t ascribe it to Reagan’s voodoo economics or his massive increase in federal spending on defense.  He thought Bill Clinton the most fiscally responsible of the presidents in office during his tenure at the Fed.

The economy looms large in the book, as you would expect, but his take on it has helped me understand the Republican, or at least libertarian take on it, Greenspan’s own location on the political pinwheel.  Greenspan views the economy as a vast, interlocking web of transactions large and small.  The health of the economy determines the fiscal health of most actors within it from Toyota and Microsoft to your neighbor and yourself.  So, he focuses on the judgments and adjustments necessary to keep the economy healthy. 

Here’s the insight I gather from this;  Greenspan and his ilk don’t necessarily have anything against the poor; it’s just that the poor are so far down the economic food chain and have so little impact on the economy.  He’s not opposed to schemes to help the poor, as long as they don’t endanger the economy; but, he will never initiate any.  He did take on Social Security, but because it posed, in his view, a threat to the future US economy.

Let me see if I can put this another way.  The economy and its numerical and institutional components come first when these folks think of politics.  Second is national defense.  After that, starving the government.  And, after that, home.

This view is not so much pernicious as it is narrow; rather than a human face, they see a balance sheet.  This does not make them bad people, simply focused in a different way from the folks with whom I do politics.

Half Life

 18  50%  29% 3mph windroseNNE bar steep fall windchill12   Holiseason

                              Waning Gibbous Snow Moon

“A young man’s ambition [is] to get along in the world and make a place for himself - half your life goes that way, till you’re 45 or 50. Then, if you’re lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.” - Robert Penn Warren

Well, I’m 60.  I feel on most days that I’ve made terms with life and I feel released; I act and choose from within myself, rather than with career or social expectations in mind.  Jung believed this, too.  The first half of life is about working on externals, marriage and work and family; the second half is about internals, individuation, that is, becoming the Self you are.   

On the other hand this does not mean that I’ve laid down my dreams, just that their realization has a more provisional status; they are no longer essential to who I am or who I hope to be.   The last few years have settled the who am I question and in its wake comes a realization of who I will become.  More of who I am.

The writing still matters.  I work on it as if it matters as much as work did when I was in my 30’s.  Yet I have let go of the need to succeed.  How?  Not sure, but Kate had something to do with it; John Desteian had something to do with it; and, the passage of time had something to do with it, too.  I don’t feel retired, yet I no longer feel defined by my work.  It is a good feeling, one I hope each of you who reads this know or will know.

Some amount of snow lays in wait for us, coming in from Alberta, an Alberta Clipper as the weather folk say.  Let it snow.

Mysteries and Conservation

14  48  29%  1mph  windroseNNW bar steep fall  Holiseason

                         Waning Gibbous Snow Moon

A cold day.  Sudden.  Not predicted.  A surprise.  No foreplay,  just, cold.  Now.

I have to give a Mysteries of the Ancient World tour on Friday and a quickie, 30 minute tour of the European painting and sculpture collection on Saturday.   The Ancient World tour will include the Woman of Lamouthe (15,000 years old), the Lady of Teshat (3,000 years old), then the Winged Genius from Nineveh (3000 years old),  Oceanus (1900 years old), an Athenian red volute krater with Dinoysus (2,500 years old), a Shang dynasty scepter (1,500 years old), Doryphoros (2100 years old) and an object to be selected.

The European painting tour will include our Lucretia by Rembrandt, Dr. Arrieta by Goya, Fanatics of Tangiers by Delacroix, and Van Gogh. 

It is so much fun to work with these objects and persons on tours.  The combination of research and then presentation fulfills a need I have to study and share. Here’s an example.  Just after I wrote the above I decided to go check the MIA website for conservation related information.  Sure enough there are two comprehensive websites containing detailed information about the restoration of Erminia and the Sheperds by Guercino and Castiglione’s The Immaculate Conception.  Since the group on Saturday will be Radiologists, I think they might find the restoration process interesting.  This will give me a chance to use my color printer and to prepare a tour based on conservation. 

Politics. The Sport of Kings and Queens.

8  51%  29%  1mph  windroseE  bar falls  dewpoint-6  Holiseason

                         Waning Gibbous Snow Moon

Politics.  Love’m or hate’m, you ignore them at your peril.   The silly season this time around is not so silly; in fact, it’s damned serious.  The end of the Bush era is at hand (unless Jeb is hiding in the ….) and fundamental policy issues have clear lines of demarcation.  Are you for a full-court press on climate change, starting with getting our own USA house in order, or are you for crawl and stall?  Are you a get the troops out of Iraq person or a stay the course person?  Are you a fundamentalist when it comes market capitalism or are you an advocate of economic justice?  Are you willing to consider a woman and a black man, or are you a WASP nest sort.

None of the candidates look good to me, but I’m used to that.  After years of working on the hard left, the lunatic fringe by some accounts, I never find a candidate who supports any of my positions, let alone supports all of them.  This year I find myself in a mellower mood, if only because I realize my political positions are not going to reach consensus any time soon.  On one key issue I differ markedly from my allies.  Iraq is a mess; and we should never have act pre-emptively.  Two bad mistakes laced with a huge lie about WMD’s.  Am I opposed to the war in Iraq?  Yes.  Do  I believe we should pull out our troops soon?  No.  We have created a situation where the responsible line of action is to assist Iraq stabilize politically.  Just how to do that I’m not aware enough of the facts to discern, but to pull out now and say, oops, sorry, is not a defensible course.  It’s like mom used to say, “You made a mess, now clean it up.”  Also, I do believe in the war in Afghanistan.  The war in Iraq deflected attention from the war with our direct enemy, the Taliban and their ally, Osama bin Laden. 

Otherwise I’m still out there on the edge.  Full-court press on climate change.  Economic justice.  I’ll consider a woman or a black man;  I have and neither one of them are to my liking.  One is to harsh, Hillary, and the other doesn’t have the experience for the job, Obama.  Who’s the third choice?  Nobody.  So, in the end, I’ll probably support Hillary because I want to get the Whitehouse back, hopefully with a Democratic house and senate.  Then, climate change work has a chance.  Economic justice has a chance.  Single payer health insurance (an economic justice issue) has a chance.  Affordable housing.