All posts by Charles

Cooking, Coronavirus, Family, Health, Holidays, Judaism, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Yesterday

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Trash. Covid. Vaccines. Kate’s wakeful, but good night. Sleep. Me. Sushi Win. Their Special roll. Spring rolls. Purim box from CBE. And, one from the Kabbalah Experience. Memories of Covid. Early ones. Seoah among them. Cold. Blue Sky.

Sparks of Joy: Rigel prancing. Kep lying on my legs. Kate excited. Vaccines.

 

Kate, costumed for Purim

 

Spent yesterday, some of it anyhow, moving and rearranging and tossing. Stuff that has needed doing but I’ve not felt the energy for. Found that energy. Felt good. Not done, but will finish this week.

Drove over to Congregation Beth Evergreen to pick up a Purim box. Each member has one. A mask, groggers, and I don’t know what else. Got another box from the Kabbalah Experience with masks and paints for Purim. Will explain all in the Friday megillah post.

In the same direction as Sushi Win so I got takeout. Sushi Win is an above average sushi joint. A special treat that it’s up here at all, so we order takeout every once in a while. Big tips, too. We want to see them survive the pandemic. Us, too.

Couple of Sheriff’s vehicles at Derek’s yesterday. No idea why.

Kate woke up with an idea about how her terrible bout of herpes might be involved with her current condition. She’s going to get her medical records from Abbott-Northwestern, see if they can help. I sure hope so.

A meme from Facebook: Mars is the only planet we know inhabited entirely by robots.

News of the strange: Saw an article in the Washington Post about an Oklahoma man who killed a neighbor, cut out her heart, cooked it with potatoes, and served it to his uncle and his family to get the demons out. Apparently didn’t work because he then killed the uncle, the uncle’s four year old grand-daughter, and stabbed his aunt in both eyes. WP, 2/24/2021

 

Family, Health, Shadow Mountain

Transactions

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Monday gratefuls: Talking with Kate. Kep in the morning. More Snow. Chili. Making. A dawn red Sky over Black Mountain with blue sky behind. The Ancient Ones. Going deep. Life pivot points. Alcoholism. Covid. Vaccines.

Sparks of Joy: Red in the Sky. Bill’s love story. Purim.

20th Anniversary, 2010

Realized yesterday that one of the issues with caregiving is that so many interactions are transactional. Change a bandage. Free oxygen tubing from the door. Take down the feed bag. Get coffee. Food. Talk about how to deal with illness. Money meetings. Getting the newspaper. And so on.

Nothing wrong with these. Nothing at all. In fact they define caregiving. But. They are not the casual back and forth of a couple meeting in the kitchen while making a sandwich. Talking on the way to a restaurant. Over a meal. While working together in the garden or listening to music at a concert.

Transactions are typically one way in caregiving. Who wants that? No one, but it is a fact of life with someone who is chronically ill. I know this is obvious, but it has just occurred to me.

Why is it important? Because it’s the casual interactions when the relationship grows, learns about itself, nurtures both ways. This can happen during transactional moments; but, then the emphasis, the attention, is on completing a task, making sure it was done well. Not the same, not the same at all.

Working on how to introduce more casual time into our day. Kate wants to play games. OK, that’s one way. I want to sit down and talk. Her fatigue and lack of stamina make even these simple ideas difficult. Often she’s in bed. Disappeared.

Any ideas from out there in Ancientrails world? Happy to hear them.

Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays, Judaism, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, US History, Weather +Climate

The Frozen Rose of Texas

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Sunday gratefuls: All the Megillah’s. More snow. More cold. A good sleep. Cold chicken. Red Lobster biscuits. My Ecuador alpaca coat. My new LLBean insulated plaid shirt. My duckies. Love the cold, don’t love being cold.  Vaccines. Covid. 45 gone. 46 in. Judah and the Black Messiah.

Sparks of Joy: Fresh, white Snow. Rigel jumping up on the deck like a 5 year old. Life.

 

 

Those vaccines. Hard to come by up here in the mountains. Not yet. We’ll get them though. Sooner, I imagine. Haven’t gone the obsessive click now, click again, click now, click again route. We’ve survived Covid so far doing what we’re doing. Gonna keep at no visits, grocery pickups, only essential medical visits. Probably for a while after the vaccine, too.

Love that they’re out there. That we’re eligible. That others are getting them. That more will get them. Might be Happy Hanukah and Merry Christmas. Ho, Ho, Ho. or Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel. If that happens, I’ll still enjoy the darkness of the Winter Solstice, but I’ll be right there with the light worshipers, too. Can you imagine how festive a season that will be?

Meanwhile a hyper clean, car sized robot will roam Mars punching holes in its surface and storing soil in special containers for the second part of a three stage project. The second stage is a lander that picks up those containers and the third stage returns them to Earth for NASA and European Space Agency labs. 2025-2027. Far away from the virus infected planet it left last July. Smart Perseverance.

And, maybe, just maybe, our nation will have made progress on sorting out its painful contradictions. I watched Judas and the Black Messiah yesterday on HBO Max. Fred Hampton was 21 when J. Edgar conspired with the Chicago P.D. to eliminate him. 21. When I watched, I kept saying yes, Fred, yes. Power is people. Capitalists, no matter their color, exploit the people. A Rainbow Coalition. Yes, Fred. Then he died in his bed, never waking up, his pregnant Deborah arched over his body.

Of course, the move reminded me of the damning curse of racism, but it went further, much further. Fred brought together Puertoricans and poor whites. He saw the thread that wove together the oppressed and was able to speak to it, to help others see it. No wonder they killed him.

What if the Proud Boys and the Black Panthers saw common cause? They could. It’s corporate capitalism that keeps them both down. What if those of us on the far left joined, too. And Chicanos. And Asians. And Native Americans. There would need be no violence. That sort of self-awareness would win at the ballot box.

I know. Texas. How would you like a $16,000 bill for keeping the heat on? See the paragraph above.

Asia, Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on the news, Dreams, GeekWorld, Letters, Memories, Mountains, Myth and Story, The Move, Third Phase, Travel, US History, World History

Go, young one, Go

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Simple roast chicken. So good. Red Lobster dinner rolls. Likewise. Shadow Mountain Israeli Salad. Cooking. Kate’s feeling better this morning. Rigel prancing in the snow. At 12+. Kep and his serious life. Perseverance. For all those at JPL. Yeah! For all those from Colorado who participated (a lot). Yeah! For the part of our soul that is curious, that wants to see, that wants to know.

Sparks of Joy: That roasted chicken when it came out of the oven. Vaccines. The love of and by dogs.

We live in an age of exploration. I know it got started even earlier, but we have good evidence of humanity leaving Africa and spreading out over the Earth. A long period of exploration that once begun, we have not been able to stop.

Yes, it’s had its bad moments. Many of them. Colonialism its worst, I think. But a lot of glorious ones, too. Rounding Cape Horn. Summiting Everest. Walking the land bridge from Asia to North America. LANDING ON THE MOON. Voyager. Curiosity. Perseverance. Down to the Mariana’s Trench. Into the microscopic, the sub-microscopic.

And there are the psychonauts who explore the mind on hallucinogens. The mystics, who do their exploration without technology. Scholars who roam libraries, tells, caves for evidence of our long pilgrimage, how we have handled it. Children who go down the block, turn right into the field, and leave this planet by means of their imagination.

We are explorers. Pilgrims. Wanderers. Always hunting for some new place to live our lives, or to visit to expand our life at home.

I celebrate each explorer. Each pilgrim. Each wanderer. In you, in us, we grow beyond this species and into the future. May it always be so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on the news, Dogs, Science, US History

Space Boy

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Friday gratefuls: Grilled cheese. Chicken. Snow Plows. Ted of All Trades. Snow. Cold. Like back in Minnesota. Holding Kate’s hand. Her feeding tube. 45 gone. 46 in office. Friends, ancient and new.

Sparks of Joy: NASA. NASA employees at JPL. Perseverance on Mars. Perseverance landing on Mars.

 

 

I watched it. Or, rather I watched as the scientists at JPL watched their instruments. One man’s leg jiggled the whole time. Up and down. Others went from screen, looking for information. A slight grimace there. What did that mean? All the more difficult to read because of the ubiquitous   masks.

News about the parachute deploying brought cheers. Then, back to business. The heat shield disappeared. Perseverance was, according to a dial on the screen, 19 kilometers from the surface. Then, the dial read in meters.

“Perseverance has landed!” Arms went up in the usual touchdown, goal post signal. A clenched fist or two. Smile wrinkles at the eyes. Cheering. Backslapping.

How could they stand it? These folks work for years, in this case at least 8 years, to build a one-off machine, delicate and sturdy. A tough combination. Then they strap it to a tank of explosives and shoot it away from Earth. For a long, long journey. All of that can go perfectly. Did.

But. There’s that final mile. Oh, yeah. Atmosphere. Gravity. The potential for 8 years of work and billions of dollars to crumple in on itself, a wrecked car on a distant planet. Parachute. Heat shield. Navigation. Sky crane. All points at which things could go wrong.

As one NASA employee said, “Thousands of things have to go right. Only one thing going wrong could destroy all this work.”

That same employee said, right after the landing, “This is what NASA does! This is what we can do when we put our brains together. This is what this country can do!”

I was with them during the 7 minutes of terror as the lander went offline due to the extreme heat of entry into the Martian (get that, Martian!) atmosphere. Holding my breath, biting my lip.

Yes! I teared up. All that complexity. All that work. All those things that could have gone wrong. All those things that went right! Captain Midnight. Buck Rogers. Sputnik. The Eagle has landed. We are a space faring nation. My 10 year old heart filled up with dreams, impossible dreams, and spilled over into a 74 year old’s reality.

When we grew up, rockets were, well, not much in evidence. Sure there was Goddard. And, Von Braun. The V2. The winged bombs over London. John Carter was our Mars hero. But the thought of landing a machine on Mars. Any machine? Nope. Not in the mind of even the most space-crazed child of the ’50’s.

To live through the Russian space program. Sputnik. Then, Laika, the one way space dog. Yuri Gagarin. Mercury. Apollo. That wonderful Apollo 11. One small step for Man, one giant step for Mankind. A footprint. A flag.

My space eyes all along have been boy’s eyes. Eyes filled with wonder. Eyes filled with tears. Eyes that have seen things happen that were beyond even that boy’s hopes. It was his heart that leaped into the bodies of the NASA folks yesterday. His heart that felt the emotion. The success. The joy.

 

 

 

 

Health, Politics, US History, Weather +Climate

A Cold South

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Dr. Thompson. House cleaners. Vaccine. Covid. Carl Hiaasen. Screen writers for The Alienist. Oximeter. Blood pressure monitor. Prostate cancer. PSA’s so far. COPD.

Sparks of joy: Dr. Thompson. Snow coming. Poetry. Perseverance getting closer to Mars.

 

Cooked Steak Diane and saffron rice for a birthday supper. Easy Entrees. Steak was wonderful. Thick and the sauce a great complement. Plenty for more meals. The rice. Meh. But, if it was gonna be meh on one, the rice every time.

Saw Dr. Leigh Thompson today, replacing Dr. Gidday. I like Dr. Thompson. She’s humble and knowledgeable. A good combination in my opinion.

Cold in the south. When I saw the forecast map, I thought, They’re all gonna die. Not all, but a lot. And suffering.

Power grids down. I learned on NPR that Texas is an island, power grid wise. That means it won’t go down along with other nearby states, but it also means that they can’t import power from the grid outside their borders. A tough reality right now.

I like the idea of a 1/6 commission. The more we learn about the web of propaganda, organizing, and negligence that helped create this insurrection, the safer we will all be. Oh, and it might cement even further 45’s culpability. That would be ok.

What a time! We’re about to dump 1.9 trillion dollars into the economy. The weather is crazy. Covid has new variants up its sleeve. Kids are out of school. Millions are out of work. The next few years will define interesting times for the United States. Looking forward to being part of that.

 

 

Astrology, Our Land and Home, Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History, Weather +Climate

Chilly

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Monday gratefuls: 7 degrees this morning. Up 26 from yesterday. 75th trip underway, go Earth. Joseph’s happy birthday on Facebook. Vaccines. 45’s guilt. Those who know it. Those who don’t. Covid. Winter and all its trimmings.

 

Sparks of Joy: Kep and food. Rigel’s prance. 45 out, 46 in. Seeing dogs sticking their heads out of car windows. Young children being themselves.

Our house. Needs insulation. When wind blows through the mountains, it also blows through our house. Nice in the summer, not so much in the winter. The windows leak. Doorways, too. Also, the heating of the great room, kitchen, and sewing room is inadequate. If I were married to someone other than Norwegian Kate Olson, we’d have fixed all this years ago. As it is, we usually just put up with it until it gets a bit warmer. -19, however, challenges even Scandinavians. Maybe later this year?

However. We’re much better off than those poor bastards in the South. Respect to all of them for confronting ice and cold in a place ready for neither. Friend Bill Schmidt recounted his daughter Moira’s observation of a highway near their Austin, Texas home. Ice. A hill, a curve. Brake lights. Cars slippin’ and slidin’.

Talk to any Colorado native and they’ll tell you that all of our traffic problems are caused by Texans who move up here. Maybe 5%. The rest is people who just don’t know how to drive.

The lunar New Year has turned us into the year of the Ox. If this is your spot in the twelve year Chinese astrological cycle, you’re likely “Prudent, follow procedures step by step, take things slowly, unlikely to be influenced by others or environment, do things out of personal idea and ability, go ahead steadily and surely, always can achieve the set goals.” This according to Your Chinese astrology website.

As a February pig myself, I’m “…very talented, kind and full of vigor. …lucky to get help from the elders and assistance from benefactors. …could be very dignified and healthy during the life.” Same site. Well…

And, finally, a political thought for today. I agree with the Democrats decision to not call witnesses for Trump’s impeachment trial. The McCarthy call revelation was tasty, no doubt, but the better choice was to finish the trial with dispatch.

No chance for a second narrative to take hold. The House managers did a better than credible job at prosecuting their case and showed the nation Trump’s guilt. The vote would not have changed and having it a short time after their good work underscored the 43 boot lickers’ shame.

We’re a long way from done with all of this; but, now we can move onto the important work. Undoing as much of 45’s legacy as possible quickly and moving on matters too long neglected like climate change, racial and economic justice, immigration, radical police reform.

Dogs, Family, Minnesota, Politics, Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Rough Seas Ahead

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Sunday gratefuls: -19. Here! Valentine’s Day. 74 round trips, ticket punched. Easy Entree’s. Gifts and good eating. Rigel, who woke me up with a birthday kiss this morning. Kate’s somewhat better day. Snow. We need it. 57 yes. The cowardly 43 lions. Better get to Oz and get some courage. Vaccines. Covid. Third Phase life, it’s sweetness and its bitters.

Sparks of Joy: The heart shaped tin from Easy Entree’s. Rigel’s kiss. George Will. No, really. The loft. Being alive.

 

 

Well digger’s belt buckle? Oh, something to warm up with here this morning. -19 when I got up. My weather station so that’s as local as it gets. The weather gods brought me a reminder of my 40+ years in Minnesota. Which hit -50 and lots of other -‘s. Would that it could last longer. We’re still cold lovers, Kate and me, though we have become fans of the solar snow shovel, too. Cold, then warm enough to melt what fell.

In Minnesota my birthday was almost always very cold. Here not as much. So, a nice present. Namaste, divine weather beings.

The Senate vote? Yes, sure. It’s embarrassing to our country, to our democracy, to our civility, to the rule of law, to human decency, but why do you ask? Oh. You thought as, one columnist said, they might not lick his boots? Perhaps you thought that sending an angry mob to fight like hell against their constitutional duty to recognize the votes of our nation would make them change? Now you know what politics are like when fear rules.

The only thing they had to fear, as FDR said, was fear itself. And, unlike our entire nation during WWII, they let it overcome them, those 43 cowardly lions. I agree with George Will, again, “Although not nearly as tragic as 9/11 in lives lost and radiating policy consequences, 1/6 should become, as its implications percolate into the national consciousness, even more unsettling.” Washington Post, 2/13/2021

The Senate vote, while not surprising, suggests something  sinister. That those divisions  on display on 1/6, and this is Will’s point, I believe, reduced 43 members of the “world’s most prominent deliberative body” to 90 pound weaklings. They fear sand being kicked in their face by the fascist-no-longer-thank-god-in-chief. Who will stand up, agree to be their Jack LaLanne?

Or, their Dorothy? Who might lead them to meet the Wizard? In this analogy Trump would be the man behind the green curtain, turning wheels, pushing levers while looking meek and ashamed when discovered. Yeah, you’re right, this analogy stays firmly in fantasy.

Another point of agreement with George Will from the same column: “An essential conservative insight about everything is that nothing necessarily endures. Care must be taken.” This is a lesson of the Trump years. And, I have learned it.

There is a fruitful, necessary tension between protest and the fabric of democracy. Without it protest would never, could never, succeed. Now though, thanks to the right-wing troops, the real sheeple, I know there is a line beyond which even protest must not go.

In former days I had a thirst for revolution, a dramatic and overall change in our body politic. Back then I refused to believe in human imperfection. If only we could get policies and the economy right. If only we could change the structure of political life. Now, though, I know.

This imperfect institution, our democracy, is exactly as Churchill said, the worst form of government, except for all others. It is fragile and wonderful. When it works, it allows us to fight and makeup. To consider change in our common lives and take action. Yet a man as coarse and stupid and venal as 45 can bring it close to extinction. As Will says, care must be taken.

Colorado, Dogs, Family, Health, Holidays, Jefferson County, Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History

Life in the Mountains

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Psalms. Rabbi Jamie. Gwen, Ayelet, Dean, Jan, Cherie. The class. Much needed, as I said before. Jackie. Hair stylist and lovely human. Covid survivor. Kep and Rigel, Kate. In our family crate. Yeti blue microphone, a stand. Dreams of podcasting.

Sparks of joy: A new hair cut. Kate’s revived color. Vaccines. Ruth. Hawai’i. Always there, waiting. My poem, Death’s Door. The Trial of 45.

 

 

Couple of odd mountain anecdotes involving emergency vehicles.

Told you I bought Kate one of those help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up buttons. It has three receivers. One in the loft, one in the kitchen (for when I have the fans on), and one in the great room. She’s turned over on it a couple of times and alerted me. Learning the system.

A couple of days ago I’d gone downstairs to watch TV. I heard the alarms sound from upstairs. Kate was up there! I ran up. Kate sat quietly at the table, playing solitaire. What? An emergency vehicle had gone by, lights and sirens. Something in its passing, like calling to like, had set off the alarms.

Second story. On Thursday we went into Swedish hospital for another visit with Kate’s pulmonologist. On the way home there were again lights and sirens, Hwy 285 closed ahead of us with pylons and ambulances; police cars just under the overpass where we turn to go back to Shadow Mountain.

I noticed the flight for life helicopter circling above us. It went west over 285, then came back as we routed around the traffic backup. As we made our way back to Barkley Road, it came down, then went back up again as if searching for a place to land. Even though there was a clear stretch of highway.

Jackie, our hair stylist whom we saw yesterday, told us that a man driving a truck that repairs windshields had plowed into the back of a CDOT truck. The workers were repairing the cable that prevents cars from going into the lanes of opposing traffic.

The truck driver died. As we watched, a flight for life was made unnecessary and went back to its home.

 

Impeachment and Trial. Guilty. You know it. The GOP knows it. Even Trump knows it. See his phone call to Minority leader Kevin McCarthy:

“…in her statement Friday night, Ms. Herrera Beutler recalled a conversation she had with Mr. McCarthy, where the Republican leader described Mr. Trump telling him, as the attack on the Capitol was unfolding, that members of the mob were “more upset about the election than you are.”” NYT, 2/13/2021.

This is state of mind. No uncertainty. Just glee. Put him in jail. Orange for the orange menace.

Rolling the years over for the 74th time tomorrow. That’s beginning to be high mileage. I’m good for another couple a decades, if not more. At least that’s how I feel. Of course, we’ll see.

Gonna cook a special Valentine’s dinner for my sweetheart and always Valentine, Kate. And, for me, too.