Faith and Spirituality, General

A Normal Cataract For a 60 Year Old

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37  bar falls 30.08 3mph dewpoint 29  Spring

              Waxing Crescent Moon of Growing

It happens to each of us from time to time.  A slap in the face, either gentle or harsh, that says you’re getting old.  Jane West, my opthamologist, whom I consider a friend, gave me one today. 

“You have a slight cataract.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, I’ve been drawing it for several visits.  It’s not significant.  It’s a normal 60 years old cataract.”

“Oh.”  Not knowing there was such a thing.  And I had one.

“Will it progress?”

“Yes.  But how fast depends on so many things.   General health. (good)  Diet, especially anti-oxidants. (I start my day with at least 3/4 cup of blueberries in my oatmeal.)  Diabetes. (nope) Family propensity. (Don’t think so.)  So, it’s nothing to worry about.”

I believe her.  She’s always been straight with me, a quality I prefer.  Still, a normal 60 year olds cataract?  I’ve never wanted to be normal and definitely not in age-related phenomena.  I want to be age-defying, younger than my years, in really good shape for a guy…with the usual cataracts.  Sigh.  I know these are forlorn and at one level even harmful hopes.  In these matters I prefer a large dose of contradiction.  I wish to be younger than my years, yet aging gracefully.

Family, Great Work, Woolly Mammoths

My Y Chromosome

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32  bar steep rise 30.08 1mh NNW dewpoint 27 Spring

              Waxing Crescent Moon of Growing

This  invitation is also for any of you read this blog and would like to come.   I’d love to see you.

Sierra Club Power 2 Change House Party Monday, April 14th 

 7:00-8:00PM

Hosted by Charles Buckman-Ellis 3122 153rd Ave. NW. Andover.Learn about the Power 2 Change campaign, an effort to educate the public about what is at stake in the 2008 elections. High gas prices and America‘s dependence on foreign oil have made energy one of the most pressing and important issues of this political season.  We face a crossroads, and we need to challenge all of our elected officials, including the next President, to provide the leadership we need to move America in a new direction on energy.  Between now and Earth Day on April 22nd, the Sierra Club is working to get the word out that we need leadership who will make the right choices.  Join us for refreshments, meet your neighbors and learn how you can take action.  RSVP to Margaret at 612-659-9124 ext. 306 or Margaret.levin@sierraclub.org Visit the web site to learn more about this important effort: http://www.sierraclub.org/power2change/minnesota/ 

Note: This is NOT a fundraiser.

 Come to the event if you can.  I’d love to see you.  (Anybody who reads this is welcome.)

Whenever Kate comes home and I’m watching a football game or a basketball game, she’ll say, “Aha. Caught you with your Y chromosome in action.”  Doesn’t happen often, but had she not been in San Francisco, she could have found me watching the last half and the overtime of the Kansas/Memphis game of the NCAA finals. Whoa.  What a game! Kansas, down by 9 with 2:12 left to play and down by 3 with less 2.0 seconds left to play. Chalmers hits the three.  Tie.  In overtime Kansas takes advantage of a missing big man (Dorsey) and goes on to win pulling away.   

That wasn’t all though.  Tonight was also Woolly night at the Istanbul.  This is a y-chromosome only club.  We talked about Rome, about China-Tibet, Danish desserts and Pawlenty’s veto of the Central Corridor light rail.  Stefan and Bill celebrated birthdays.  A guy’s night out. 

Talked to Kate when I got home.  She’d called the home phone, left a message and said she forgot I was the Woolly’s and that she’d call tomorrow.  I picked up the cell phone, called her cell phone.  She answered.  I said, “I just called to tell you we’re old farts.”  “Why?”  “Because I could have had my phone turned on and you could have called me at the Istanbul.”  “You called me on the cell phone just to see if I’d answer?”  “Yeah.  If you hadn’t, that would have meant we were O.F.’s for sure.” 

Mailed another package to the serviceman in my life.  Still strange.

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Art and Culture

Deepening

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37  bar steep rise 29.91 4mph N dewpont 30 Spring

                   New Moon (Growing)

Amanda (MIA staff) interviewed me today for a promotional video for the museum.  In the process I met a videographer who has full time employment the museum doing “random assignments” that museum staff create.  Amanda asked for a one-word summary of my experience with the museum.  Took me a while, but I came up with deepening.  She also asked me to reflect on how the guide and docent program had changed my perspective on the museum.  “I’ve gone from voyeur to participant.” 

How had my view of art changed?  “I see art on two levels (at least):  spiritual and historical.  The spiritual aspect involves responding to the aesthetic choices made by the artist.  One of the fun things about the MIA is that as an encyclopedic museum, I get an opportunity to experience aesthetic choices from a vast range of human history.  That aspect remains much the same, though I’ve had more time with the objects which does deepen the experience.”

“I’ve always loved history, but now I can add the aesthetic dimension to my historical knowledge.  In this sense my view has changed quite a bit as I’ve added in art historical approaches.”

“The biggest impact overall, though, has been an opportunity to deepen my knowledge of Asian art.  This opportunity has, in turn, led to an outside the museum reading in more and more Asian history.  I’ve gotten more interested in Taoism, Confucianism and Shintoism.”

Interesting session.  Don’t know whether they’ll use much of mine or not.  Several people agreed to the interviews.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel

Spring Ephemerals

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32  bar steep rise 29.79 1pmh SSW dewpoint 30  Spring

                       New Moon (Growing)

Snow!  Yes, it happens in April.  Even May here sometimes.  Even so, at this point it seems like such an insult, a step backward when the engine of solar warming has already taken hold and eliminated most of our snow cover.  Yet, even as I write this I don’t mean it.  This is the ever present dynamism of our latitude, visible both in the deep cold and dark nights of midwinter, as well as the forwards and backwards of early spring.  And I would have it no other way. 

The plants that show signs of life now, that spear their first leaves up through the oak leaves and straw laid down to keep them cool until temperatures even out a bit, they are ready for this, made to achieve height and bloom before their contemporaries.  This is an example of what Bill Mollison (author of Permaculture) calls a time niche.  Most perennials have specific time niches. Part of flower gardening involves learning their niches. Only then can you have a garden with blooms throughout the growing season. 

Daffodils, tulips, bloodroot and anemones fall into a category roughly named spring ephemerals.  Their strategy is to grow, bloom, and begin to die back before the larger, woody plants like trees and shrubs leaf out.  That way the spring ephemeral gets light denied to those that grow later in the season, light filtered or blocked out entirely by the leaves of maples, oaks, dogwoods and lilacs. Ephemeral refers to their time niche and defines them as the mum and aster are as fall bloomers.

I like the spring ephemerals.  Their pluck, their hardiness and their almost too obvious metaphorical value regenerate horticultures spirit in me each year.  Right outside garden patio door I can see the red leaved tulip plants and the yellow green daffodil leaves.  Up from and behind them the iris have already grown as much as six inches.  The moss has turned bright green and buds on the dogwood and magnolia have swollen. 

At this point I’m always reminded, in an admittedly perverse way, of the Aztec poem that goes something like this:  We are here as in a dream between a death and death.  I haven’t got it quite right and I can’t find it.  The intent though is to say that life is the illusion, that our true existence is in the realm we think of as death, we emerge from it at birth and return to after death.

Friends, General, Weather +Climate

Slicing and Dicing. Chopped. Simmered.

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46  br steady 29.67 2mph ESE dewpoint 44 Spring

                     New Moon (Growing)

A light, but steady rain falls.  A cold rain.  The pre-emergent and the cygon I applied yesterday will get a chance to work themselves thoroughly into the soil and around the Iris rhizomes.  As the rain melts the remaining snow, I will have a few spots left to hit with the pre-emergent, but not many.  I’m ahead of the curve this year and hope to stay that way with regular, not too lengthy garden sessions.

A full stomach is a great aid to grocery shopping.  The list and only the list, so help me Martha.  And so I did.

Back home I made lunch, watched the first episode of Battlestar Galactica’s last season (I recorded it Friday night.  Love that DVR) and loaded the dishwasher.  After lunch I got out my Golden Plump chicken, read the directions for CNS on the back, and then began slicing and dicing carrots, celery, onions.  Saute the veggies.  Then 10 cups of water, Paul Prudhomme poultry seasoning, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for an hour and a half.  Underway.

While doing that, I also made a green salad since I had the carrots and celery and onions out already.  A few strawberries bought a week ago had that soon to rot look, so I chopped and diced them, too (I was in a rhythm.) and put them in plastic containers with a cutup orange each.  So there.  Domesticman to save the day!

A nap  now.  Naps on rainy days, cool rainy days.  A wonderful thing.

Art and Culture, Friends, General

Bloggers Need Union?

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51 bar steady 29.68 2mph SSE dewpoint 36 Spring

                    New Moon (Growing)

Don’t know whether you caught the article in this morning’s paper about bloggers.  It seems bloggers are the new cottage industry, working at home at piece rate, grinding out post after post after post in a grueling 24-news cycle that, this article claims, often leaves little time for sleep or food.  In fact, the premise of the article was that there might be a new cause of early death.  Blogging.  Yikes!

Here I am, doing two to three posts a day most days, eating and sleeping and exercising, plus living a life.  Not to mention that I blog for free.  In fact, I pay for the privilege since Kate and I rent webspace from the nice folks at 1&1 Internet.  There’s also that 6.99 a year for the domain name, ancientrails.com.  OK, the price is cheap, especially for what we get, but still.  This article said some people make as little as $10 a post.  As little.  I could pay my entire internet overhead with 3 posts, maybe 4.

Oh, well.  If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing cheaply. 

This is more of a point than I make it sound.  The garden.  My novels and short stories to date.  Touring at the Art Institute.  None of it pays a dime, at least so far.  Yes, I did make $80.00 last year doing tours after hours at the MIA, but that hardly counts.

None of this discourages me, but it does make me wonder if I could find a nice patron who’d like to hype ancientrails and pay me, too.  Wouldn’t turn it down.  Unless it interfered with my editorial prerogative, of course.

Paul Douglas, who mentioned this website in a recent Star-Tribune weather column, got released from WCCO.  Several people wrote him notes.   He deserves it.  He’s a creative guy and a Minnesotan through and through.  Doesn’t sound like he’s gonna line up for unemployment either.

Groceries this AM, then making CNS (Jewish penicillin) for my ailing docent colleague, Bill Bomash.  He’s the guy who broke his femur in five places.  The class will provide a few meals for him and his wife over the next few weeks.

General

A Safe Port

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61  bar falls 29.66 2mph SSE dewpoint 37  Spring

                       New Moon

A nap.  Reading more in permaculture, now into the design chapters.  I’m going to post some stuff on the Permaculture page tomorrow.  The thinking of Mollison fits mine. 

Two Woolly birthdays this week, Stefan Helgeson and Bill Schmidt.      

A workout watching UCLA get manhandled, literally, by Memphis.  I’m not sure why, but I wanted to see UCLA win.  Oh, well.

Ruth got sick at her birthday party so a Skype call from Grandpa got shelved.  Kate’s out there, so she’s been seen by a pediatrician.

Time with Kate gone changes the texture of the house and the yard.  Her energy puts a certain spin on the day, her presence is a comfort in times of trouble.  As long as there’s no trouble, I can use the time without her to focus on projects.  If there’s trouble, life becomes more difficult.  We are each other’s safe port.

Garden, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Tulips and Daffodils, Oh My!

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54  bar steady  29.77 3mph ENE dewpoint 32  Spring

                            New Moon

This is a fecund time.  I spent a couple of hours today putting down pre-emergent weed prevention in the flower beds, moving some mulch completely off now, the garlic, and putting Cygon on the Iris to prevent borers.  Cygon is now a prohibited insecticide so my stash is pretty much it.  Our beds are not near running water and we have a storm drainage basin to catch run off so I don’t see my limited use of Cygon, once or twice a year on about 40 Iris, as a great health hazard.

Just being outside is wonderful.  Where the snow melts back, as it has begun to do even here, we often  find tiny tunnel systems in the grass.  Voles dig these under the snow all winter.  At first it seems that they might kill the grass, but in fact, I think the opposite is true.  Where they go, the soil gets aerated and the grass continues to grow.  It looks strange and possibly harmful when you first see it. 

The Iris have grown about six inches and now is the time to get those damned Iris borers.  If you raise Iris, you know what I mean.  If you don’t, well, they’re slimy and icky and eat the rhizome.  Yeck.  

Tulips and daffodils have also begun to press through the snow and frozen earth.  With the showers we get this week I wouldn’t be surprised if we get some blooms, especially if it warms up, too.   

General

This and That

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49  bar rises 29.77  0mph ENE dewpoint 32 Spring

                           New Moon

Kate’s either in the air or just on the ground in Denver.  Jon will pick her up and take over to his house for Ruthie’s birthday party, or some kind of celebration.  I will call them about 6PM tonight.

After dropping Kate off at the airport, I turned around, drove all the way through St. Paul, onto 94, then 280.  At 280 I connected with 35 E, then 694 to 10, 10 to Round Lake and Round Lake to 153rd.  I do this so often, in one combination or another, that the drive feels normal, but it’s actually several miles.

On the way home I diverted to Costco to get gas, $70.00!, for the truck, then over to Home Depot for some Preen, a couple of buckets, Brush-B-Gone and kitchen garbage bags.  That took up the time between 8:00 AM and the 8:30 opening bell for the Anoka Post Office.  Mailed a package, then came back home for an egg, some yogurt.

160 pounds today.  The upper end of acceptable, so I have to be more vigilant this week, still in good shape.

Geez, this is domestic.

Cinema and Television, Family, Garden, Travel

Really Creepy Vampires

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42 bar rises 29.73 0mph W  dewpoint 28 Spring

         Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

OK.  I’m taking off my hair shirt and hanging up my cilici.

Today is Ruth’s second birthday.  Ruth is our first granddaughter.  The thought of another life, connected to your own, just starting out, makes the world seem a more congenial and more precious place.  Her blue eyes, mischievous quality and alertness augur an interesting and bright future.  She feeds the dogs, carrying their bowls with that peculiar toddler rolling gate.  She also crawls in the dog crate and closes the door to go night/night. (She’s just pretending.)  Jon and Jen are good parents, another fact that makes the world more congenial and more precious.

A quiet evening after the workout.  Started watching 30 Days of Night.  Vampires attack Point Barrow, Alaska just after it heads into 30 days with no sun.  One of the vampires says, “We should have come here a long time ago.”  A bit of Draculian humor.  A good movie so far.  Great production values, interesting actors and really creepy vampires.

Kate leaves tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM (with me as taxi driver) for Denver to celebrate Ruth’s birthday, then onto San Francisco for a family practice CME.  I plan to do some garden work tomorrow, like put down weed preventer and remove some mulch, maybe rake a bit.  It’s still too early to do much, but I’ll be able to get started.