GeekWorld, Weather +Climate

A New Weather Gadget

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13  bar steep fall 29.92  0mph  SSW  windchill 13   Samhain

Full Moon of the Long Night

Davis Vantage Pro2 Weathersystemdavis_system.jpg

My new weather gadget has arrived.  It’s a datalogger that will allow me to post information from my weather station to the internet.  As a result of that capacity, I have just signed a contract with the Star-Tribune to contribute to a weather blog.  Basically, I agreed to give them all the information, my postings and pictures in return for them having the right to do anything they want with it, in perpetuity, without my being compensated.  Sweet deal, eh?

The weather stuff is a hobby and I’m glad to have the opportunity to help other folks get a more complete picture of what’s going on around the state.

Right now my weather report is:   cold with snow on the ground.  Forecast is more of the same.

I’ll let you know when it’s all set up so you can check out weather from the northern exurbs of the Twin Cities metro area.

Art and Culture

Detaching From Isis

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12  bar falls 30.03  0mph SSE  windchill 12   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights

I had an ok 4th grade tour, a highlights.  They were responsive, curious and it felt adequate.

Then there were the 2nd graders from Marcy Open.  Whoa.  Many of them had been to the museum before and had very clear ideas about what they wanted to see.  Japan.  Europe.  Rooms.  Sculpture.  Each thing we saw they asked questions, saw more stuff to go see.  I sort of followed along, answering questions and encouraging their curiousity.

About midway through we took a group photo and they asked for me to be in it.  I sat down with them.  At that point a young girl named Isis latched onto my hand and did not let go.   We wandered through the building looking at various rooms while I tried to keep up with their energy.

One little girl, Amelia, kept wandering off and I kept having to corral her back toward the group.  At one point I asked her if she wanted to go back to the beginning and wait for us.  No, she didn’t.

At they end she came up to me and said, “Charlie, you’re the best!”  Meanwhile I had to detach Isis.  It was a peculiar, mostly random, but very fun tour.

Faith and Spirituality

Happiness is …

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-1  bar falls 30.19  0mph  NW  windchill -1   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights     Day 8hr 46m

“Take anything and everything seriously except yourselves.” – Rudyard Kipling

As I get ready for two tours today, Kipling strikes a note I need to hear more often.  With all the news about happy people spreading the love out three degrees of separation I wondered about those of us who go through life somewhere in the muddle.  Yes, muddle.

Happiness comes to me only rarely, then for brief moments.  I’m not usually gloomy, but I’m not usually sunny either.  I come from a family with manic-depression, so a tendency toward the melancholy probably came with the helix.  Melancholy is an old friend, in fact, some of my best writing ideas and creative work comes when he pays a visit.

In fact, I distrust happy people to some extent.  It always seems to me that they willfully ignore a large part of what goes on the world.  Spoken, I know, like a guy who takes himself and his world too seriously.

I am one, I am many.  Whitman and I have our melancholy, but we also have our quiet joys, raucous moments, times of abandon.

Well, this is a bit of a downer, but I’m gonna leave it in anyhow.  How I felt this morning.

Aging, Politics, Weather +Climate
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8  bar rises 30.11  0mph WNW  windchill 4   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights    Day  8hr  47m

I hear you saying often that you’re not turned on to politics. Well let me bring to bear the lessons of history. If you’re not turned on to politics the lesson of history is that politics will turn on you.—Ralph Nader, Countdown

Yes, Nader is right, but I wish he’d take his own lesson to heart.  Quixotic campaigns that drain the vote of the left and left independents have had their day.  Until or if the left can mount a credible candidate we should support the Democrats.

In this and many other ways I can tell I have reached old fogey status.  Twice in the last couple of weeks I’ve sent notes to the Sierra Club’s legislative committee that reveal, to me later, and probably to each member at the time, my more conservative approach.  With a $5+ billion budget deficit I think we should pitch our stuff in light of savings to the state budget.  Instead my colleagues queue up to decide which expletives are more appropriate for sulfide mining.

Used to be me.

We’ve had a cold December so far, considerably below normal.  This is the weather most of us here yearn for and miss as the winter’s have grown warmer.  The snow stays on the ground; the air is crisp.   Sleeping becomes a treat, a warm bear-in-the-den snuggle.

I have finally caught up, again, with my various chores including all the outside ones.  That feels great, but it does mean I have to reorient my daily activities and I’m still in the in-between place about that.  Soon.

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, permaculture, Weather +Climate

A Time for Thought and Contemplation

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20  bar rises 29.94  3mph  NNE  windchill 13   Samhain

Waxing Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

Snow falling again.  3-4 inches or so by morning the weather folks say.  Winter has come in earnest.

Each year over the last three or four Kate and I have moved further and further from the mainstream Christmas culture. We have little in the way of decoration.  We give small gifts if any to each other.  The kids and kin still get holiday related presents but our home is an oasis.

This pleases me for the most part since my focus at this time of year is on the Winter Solstice and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  I say for the most part because there is still a sentimental side that likes the songs and the lights and the presents under the tree.  Mostly though I find this time of year most conducive to introspection, meditation and creation.

The areas in which we will plant new shrubs, a shade garden and all the bulbs planted this fall are now under mulch, the first two under black plastic and mulch.  Finally done.  Feels good.

Finished the Host.  It’s a strange, thin book with many pages.  I liked it, but the veiled theology and the conceit wore thin as I got further into it.  A lightweight read.

Health, Holidays, Weather +Climate

Happiness is low total cholestrol and high HDL

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19  bar steady  29.95  0mph ENE  windchill 16  Samhain

Waxing Gibbous Moon of Long Nights      Day   8hr 50m

Moved more snow this am.  My third favorite internal combustion engine and I hit the slopes this morning (our sloping driveway, that is) blowing yesterdays fluffy stuff away from the driveway and onto the yard.  Over time this process can create impressive snow  walls along the driveway, but none so high so far that the arc of snow our Simplicity puts out can’t clear it.

Then on to the grocery store for baking supplies.  Kate is in hyper-cookie drive.  We have cookies of this kind and cookies of this kind and cookies of prize winning kinds.  I have cookies, especially cookies of the sugar cookie kind, currently at work becoming part of my body.

Speaking of my body.  Got my lab results back from my physical.  Total cholestrol 144 and hdl 46 (highest ever).  All other numbers were, in the words of my physician, “Great.”  This made me happy.

Missed my nap on Friday and Saturday.  Took a two hour nap yesterday, then went to bed at 10:30 last night (I’ve turned that corner) and got up at 7:45.  Guess those two days made me need the sleep.

Now I’m outside for the last–the very last–of the mulch.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Politics, Weather +Climate

A Magical Effect

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26  bar steep fall 29.56  0mph NE  windchill 26   Samhain

First Quarter Moon of Long Nights       Day  8hr 53m

At last snow has begun to fall.  Already we must have gotten an inch or so and it may well snow through the night.  I have the patio light on so I can watch it fall.  The reindeer, lit with white l.e.d. lights, turns its head back and forth, its wire frame body now sketched in fluffy snow.  The lit holly and berries on the patio table also have snow cover, the lights blinking up through small mounds of white.  We only have lights in the back and few at that.   They do a touch of whimsy to the long winter nights.

A gentle snow has a magical effect on the heart as well as the landscape.  It is one of mother nature’s outright expressions of joy.

Tomorrow I have agreed to go to a workshop on dismantling racism as I wrote earlier.   When I was in seminary, I participated in anti-racism training seminars run by James and Mary Tillman.  I even traveled to Atlanta and went a weekend long seminar with students from Morehouse University, one of the south’s premier black colleges.  With Wilson Yates, a professor of sociology at United Theological Seminary, we created an anti-racism training kit complete with videos for rural congregations.  At one point I worked with a professional program evaluation company, Rainbow, and evaluated the work of the James and Mary Tillman programs in various institutions.

Institutional racism and the unearned advantage of being white and male have been part of my political analysis ever since.  That first round of work was now over thirty years in the past.  It is a testimony to the intransigence and institutional nature of racism that now another generation has taken up the fight.

Part of me does not look forward to a long day on a difficult and unpleasant subject while another part of me is eager to get back to practical, political work on the issue.  We’ll see how it goes.

Kate’s neck bothers her today.  She has improved a lot in the last three weeks, but she has quite a ways to go before she can go back to her full time work schedule.

Art and Culture, Great Work

Long Day

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22  bar steep fall 29.71  1mph SSW  windchill  22   Samhain

First Quarter Moon of Long Nights

Two tours.  2nd graders.  Fun, but not as much fun as the dual language immersion kids.  A home-schooling group.  Some of the boys looked like they might go all Columbine except they had no school.  Could not get them to talk.  The moms, however, enjoyed the tour.

A long day, from 9am-3pm, long for a home boy like me anyhow.  I took an Alleve before I went and that seems to have worked well.

Tomorrow Sierra Club anti-racism training.  Now it’s about the inner work, the soul work of organizing.  Hmmm.  We’ll see.  The budget numbers for the state will make the next session pretty interesting.

General

Middletown and Tinseltown

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Erik Estrada returns to Muncie for police patrols
Dec 4 05:42 PM US/Eastern

MUNCIE, Ind. (AP) – Erik Estrada has returned to Muncie to take part in overnight police patrols in the city where he starred in the short-lived reality series “Armed & Famous.” The former star of the 1970s motorcycle cop drama “CHiPs” is a reserve officer on the Muncie Police Department.

The 60-year-old actor plans to work the midnight shift for three nights this week, patrolling city streets from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

He took target practice at the police gun range on Wednesday. On Saturday, he plans to help officers at a charity event.

Estrada filmed “Armed & Famous” for CBS in Muncie in the winter of 2006-07. He and several other celebrities patrolled the city as reserve officers.

He also returned to Muncie last winter to keep up his reserve officer status.