• Tag Archives Mary

  • Changes

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                           Waxing Dark Moon

    The leaves have finally changed color in our yard.  It happened almost over night.  Many went dry before they turned, but more have become red, gold, yellow.  The colors of fall are as much a part of our landscape as the snowdrops and daffodils are of spring.   Fall’s color gives us one last Times Square moment from the vegetal world before the emphasis moves to the monochromatic grace and elegance of winter.

    Sounds like Dr. Mary Ellis may visit over Thanksgiving.  The Singapore government nixed an earlier visit due to the H1N1 virus.  Mary’s had a lot going on over the last four years.   Working and finishing a dissertation has never been easy; it consumed extra time and holidays.  This would be the first Thanksgiving I can recall in a long time that she would be here.  It’s always good to have family around during holiseason.

    Kate comes home today.  Her primary exercise for the next bit of time will be walking.  Yes, she’s up and about.  No 100 yard dashes in the near term, but moving is good, real good.  She cannot twist, so no Chubby Checker’s music on the CD player.  She also has to bend at the waist, no flexing of the back.  She will need percocet for a few weeks.

    Fortunately hand work is how Kate spends time while listening to lectures at continuing medical education so she has projects to keep her busy.

    As soon as she’s able (maybe right now), she can also start using the treadmill.  5 minutes at first, then more as she heals.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Health Holidays 📎and tagged

  • The Lords of Finance

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                  Waxing Dyan Moon

    Spent this morning planting egg plant, building trellises for the peas and getting familiar with the current state of the garden.

    A note from my sister said the presentation of her thesis work in Athens (Greece) went well.  Quite an accomplishment.  Way to go, Mary!

    Still in a post-vacation fuzz, lost naps catching up with me.

    Got the docent sign up form for next year and it has to be in by tomorrow.  Since it’s a first come, first choice deal, I’m not gonna get my first picks this year for the first time since I started as a guide back in 2001.  It means I’ll most likely miss touring the Louvre show.  Darn it.

    Reading a book right now called the Lords of Finance.  It explains in detail the precursors to the great depression and the central bankers who made it worse.  I’m not sure why this kind of reading appeals to me, but it does.  The story so far shows the intimate linkage between World War I and the economic devastation wrought by it and the subsequent market failure in 1929.  Reparations by Germany and the damaged economies of France and Great Britain after the war created a chaotic finanical situation in which policy decisions by central banks factored more than ever before.  Some of those decisions made things a lot worse.


    📂This entry was posted in General 📎and tagged

  • Ex-Pat Life in Troubled Times

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    37  bar falls 29.69  0mph NW  windchill 36   Samhain

    New Moon (Moon of Long Nights)

    2004 Photo SE Asia Trip Bangkok

    As many of you know, my brother Mark lives in Bangkok.  Thailand is almost invisible in the American press, so you may not have noticed the protests that have been going on there since early in the year.  The politics, even to Mark, a long term resident of Thailand, do not make much sense.   One school of thought believes it is the Bangkok royalist elite facing off against the more rural and populist base of recent prime minister and now exile, Thaksin.

    Difficult to say, but this Buddhist country has a lot of unregistered guns and the protests have taken a nasty turn.  Apparently the goal of the yellow-shirted PAD protesters is a coup by the military which they hope would turn the government back to more traditional  royalist influenced politics.

    Mark and Mary, both ex-pats, live out their lives as foreign nationals in cultures far removed from the West.  Even English speaking, British spawned Singapore has a Chinese government and a citizenry made of up of Malays, Chinese, Indians and a few Caucasians.  As non-citizens, even though well established, their daily lives can get upset when the politics turn nationalist as ex-pats are often visible reminders of the other.

    In Mark’s case, as an American and a white man, he is culturally and physically obviously other almost every where he goes in Thailand.  When jingoism gets cranked up, no matter what the cause, the tendency is to notice strangers/farangi when at other times they may well be invisible.  He feels understandably a bit nervous, but he also says, “It’s a rush to be here.”  The politics are an alive moment, a culture trying to sort out its future and its present, searching for the mix of groups that can govern.  We just had such a moment in the last year here in America.

    I respect and sometimes envy my brother and sister.  They have access every day to the unique and the different, to the daily lives of persons who respond to different customs and values than those we learned in Alexandria, Indiana.  Like them, I value those kinds of interactions and find their willingness to stay admirable.


    📂This entry was posted in Asia Family 📎and tagged

  • Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    79  bar falls 29.73 4mph NE  dew-point 65  Summer, hot and cloudy

    Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

    Good thing I checked the Minnesota History Center hours before I drove all the way to St. Paul.  Closed.  Closed tomorrow until noon.  Had to shift my research hours, so I spent some time outside today putting down the last of the mulch, the third tier.  It’s much larger and much less closely planted than the bottom two tiers.  I’ve gone to either straw or leaves, no cedar or other store bought mulch.

    Mary writes that she is in suspension now, waiting for the critique of outside reviewers for her dissertation.  Tough place, that.  Waiting is difficult for us humans.  We prize agency and anything that diminishes our ability to act makes us feel uneasy.  It highlights the underlying truth of the human condition, that is, we are never in control of our lives; our agency, no matter how powerful, is always transient.  Sic transit gloria mundi. 

    To counter punch that though we have ars longa, vita brevis.  Art is long, life brief.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family 📎and tagged

  • Cool House Plants

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    69  bar rises 29.73  0mph NNW dew-point 57  A summer night

                       Last Quarter of the Flower Moon

    This time period, after the iris bloom and the lilacs have died back, we have annuals like petunias, begonias, geraniums and vinca plus the odd Siberian Iris and peony, not many late June perennials in our garden. We await now the Asiatic lilies.  My favorite among our flowers many of the lilies in our garden came from lily fanciers who live in the upper midwest.   Purchased at a lily growers special season sale at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, they come in beautiful colors and many, like the Star Gazer, have scents that beguile.  A bit later the hemerocallis, day lilies, will begin to bloom. They will take us into September along with the Liguria, the bug bane and the bush Clematis.

    It is a clear night.  Stars light the sky, ancient messengers of events and objects of long past. They are deep history, a counterpoint to the now.  Insects chirp.  The occasional owl hoots.  Maybe the sound of some small animal scurrying through the grass in search of food.  A bats quick, furtive flight crosses the moon’s half lit face.

    These nights offer a softness and elegance found only in the natural world.  There is no need for fancy dress, cocktails or dance music.  All you have to do is walk outside and share the company.  Your clothing or lack of it will not matter. Some of the party may find you irrestible, of course.  Yes, unwanted attention sometimes mars a quiet night.  It does show, though, that you have a niche. You are the canape.

    Kate and I spoke to Mary on Skype today.   Arranging a physical connection with Singapore has its modest challenges.  She called us, for example, at 11:00 PM today, though it was 10:00 AM here.  Today has long since turned into tomorrow there.  She’s off this week finishing the revisions to her dissertation.  Then it heads out to her supervisor for one last check, then onto external readers.  More revisions likely.  Finally, the oral defense sometime from now.  Later, awarding of the doctorate.  Pretty cool.

    She may visit the temperate latitudes building at the Botanical Gardens as a treat for finishing.  That’s where they have trees and plants adapted to cold weather, a mirror to our conservatories with their palms and philodendrons and other tropical vegetation.  A strange notion from the perspective of Minnesota.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Garden Great Wheel 📎and tagged

  • Time Slows, Becomes Sacred

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    25  93%  26%  0mph  NNW bar 30.05 steady  windchill25  Yuletide

                            The Full Cold Moon

    Go now, Christ’s Mass has ended.  This day devoted, on the one hand, to the infant who would become a world changer, and, on the other, to a joyful orgy of celebration, much like the Roman Saturnalia, comes to an end in 45 minutes.  It came and went without the usual hullabaloo here and that seemed to keep the whole season leading up to today calmer, less stressful, especially for Kate.  A good thing.

    I have felt few tugs of nostalgia for a tree, presents, even the gathering of family which I now associate with birthdays and trips to Colorado and Thanksgiving more than with Christmas.  This all helps me refocus on the Yuletide and, now, on the Useless Days at the end of the year.

    Time continues to go slow, snow comes down, as it has all day; and, the long dark has 3 more days yet to run before the sun once again stays a bit longer, headed toward spring and the glories of summer.

    Kate and Anne and I ate dinner at Sofitel.

                    kate-and-anne-and-me600.jpg

    It was a pleasant way to spend a holiday meal.  It also meant Anne had to drive only half as far as when she comes to our house.   The top Kate wore came from Singapore via my sister Mary.  Mary’s hard at work right now putting together the literature review on her doctoral dissertation.  Not big fun, but necessary.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged

  • A Truthful Christmas Letter

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    A note before bed.  The nights are long now.  The sun set at 4:32 PM today and won’t rise again until 7:48AM.  This is good news for those who like dark, cool nights for sleeping.  I do.

    We’ve received a few of those letters in the mail; you know the ones, dense paragraphs filled with people you don’t know, pets and projects.  One of them stood out.  It was from a former partner of Kate’s.  She wrote of a year filled with her husband’s boss, “and former friend,” indicted for several felonies.  She went on to detail a year with the usual kind of vaguely horrific stuff that happens in all our lives, but usually goes unrecorded, suffered, yes, but not written down.  It was wonderful and made me hopeful for this folk art form.

    We also get a few Christmas cards each year, fewer and fewer since I haven’t sent cards for decades and Kate hasn’t either.  My favorite one so far this year came from cousin Melinda and her husband, Bill, aka, the Hoosier Cowboy.  It had two guys on horses greeting each other in the snow.  The line below them read, From our Outfit to Yours.

    The bookcase consolidation and purging, moving the exercise equipment and downstairs TV project moved closer to completion today.  It would look better with built-ins.

    Brother Mark is back in Bangkok and Woolly brother Mark is back in Minnesota.  Brother Mark had an accident in Phnom Penh. He was hit by a motorcycle, but not injured too badly.  This just before he left for Bangkok.

    Sister Mary, in Singapore, has used all of her vacation days this year to complete her dissertation.  She handed it in and now awaits a verdict as to its acceptability so she can move onto the next stage of the process.  No fun, that waiting.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged