Samhain                                                            Thanksgiving Moon

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.” ―Meister Eckhart, “Selected Writings,” translated by Oliver Davies (Penguin Classics, 1995)

Samhain                                                                         Thanksgiving Moon

The solar panels and the inverters are here. Tomorrow they go on. Not Tuesday, too much snow. 15 inches. Not today. Too much wind. Gusts up to 60 mph. Hopefully tomorrow will be just right.

Samhain                                                                         Moon of the First Snow

A video for the coming of the fallow, dark time.

NASA:  Published on Nov 1, 2015          It’s always shining, always ablaze with light and energy. In the ubiquity of solar output, Earth swims in an endless tide of particles. Every time half of the Earth faces the Sun, we experience the brightness of daytime, the Sun’s energy and light driving weather, biology and more. But in space, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) keeps an eye on our nearest star 24/7. SDO captures images of the Sun in 10 different wavelengths, each of which helps highlight a different temperature of solar material. In this video we experience images of the Sun in ten different wave lengths.

Samhain                                                                             Moon of the First Snow

The days bounce from warm to cold, dry to wet. Today it’s 65 here and sunny. 60 tomorrow, then 50, then 34. Nighttime lows begin to head into the 20’s. These blue sky warm days are glorious, a salute to the spirit.

P.T. today, winding down. Only two more sessions. My flare up that began after the reunion in late September has waned. Tincture of time, yes, but also Dana’s deep muscle work and the 45 minutes to an hour of daily exercises and traction. This is palliative, remedial stuff, but it does have the promise of slowing, limiting further degeneration. Makes it worth the time and the slight pain.

Well. Paul Bunyan I’m not. I hung another lodgepole, this time in an aspen. It was my second tree of the afternoon and it fell slightly further to the left than I intended. I’ve cut it down twice, but it’s still stuck. A jerry-rigged rope around a hand weeding hoe helped me get it about halfway down, but after many, many tugs with the rope around my waist, the pine was stubborn. If only I had Babe. Easy peasey.

Tomorrow.

Now to my p.t. exercises to fend off pain from the afternoon’s work.

Samhain                                                                        Moon of the First Snow

Mars, Venus and Jupiter are in the early morning sky this week if you’re up early. Thanks to Gertie and the return to standard time, I am.

The ol’ sleep demon had it in for me again. Nothing bugging me. Just. Awake. At 1:30 am.

Out my east facing window a salmon colored ribbon of cloud backlights the lodgepoles, could be a cover for a Zane Grey.

Fire mitigation, more loft readiness, probably p.t. Work out.

Over the last few days I’ve gotten gradually back to Ovid. Yesterday I translated 5 verses, the most so far. I’m pleasantly surprised that my facility seems intact. Now if I can get back to that novel.

Mabon                                                                        Elk Rut Moon

I’ve been vacillating on the solar power. The impetus to install it is strong both from a future tense perspective, renewables are necessary, and from a political perspective, distributed power generation removes one more lever of control. But. It’s expensive and not strictly speaking necessary. We have limited funds from the sale of our Minnesota property and need to be strategic about how we spend them.

Part of that strategy involves protection of an emergency fund that covers a suddenly disabled vehicle or a precipitous drop in stock prices. The latter could drastically reduce our monthly income for a time. We’ve made a decision about how much we need in that fund and will protect it. That leaves a finite amount of money for kitchen remodeling, external sprinklers, a lower level bathroom remodel, solar and other things we think of later.

This morning, while the dogs were outside after their morning meal, I ran through various amortization schedules. My goal was to find a five year loan amount that could be paid off at the same monthly amount as our electrical bill. Once I found that I got easier about the whole thing.  The loan will protect some of our available cash for the other projects, get paid off in an amount of time that will leave us years to enjoy zero utility bills, and give us a way to advance the great work*.

It may or may not add value to the house, but it should attract the kind of buyer we want, just our gardens and orchard did in Andover. The prospect of zero utility bills will be an incentive.

*Thomas Berry defined the great work of our time as the creation of a sustainable presence for humans on the earth.

Mabon                                                                                Elk Rut Moon

Drove to the base of Shadow Mountain, maybe 3 miles from home. A small business, Grow Your Own, a hydroponics supplier and winery, sponsors live music certain late afternoons. The Brian Del Mar Band played yesterday. Bryan is to the front left. This is a Yes tribute band so the music was familiar to me only as genre. They did throw in a few others: Beatles, Creedence, but mostly they stuck to Yes. I guess.

The atmosphere was definitely sixties, only sixties in 2015. So lots of gray hair on stage and off. I told Kate it felt like we were living in a distributed assisted living setting. Which, come to think of it, might be a good thing. In spite of the photos I captured of these aging hippies, we were having a good time.

Lughnasa                                                            Elk Rut Moon

Near the old capital of Illinois. 3:45 a.m. Awake.

Sleeping is not a gimme anymore, if it ever was. Now something in me wants to be awake late in the night or early morning. I fight it sometimes. Other times I get up. Like now. Once in a while I’ll take a sleeping pill. Like last night. I no longer get agitated about it, which obviously makes it worse; but, I wish it were different.

The road from Alexandria is literally and metaphorically a long one. One friend yesterday told me his son, a successful petroleum engineer, had an even more successful wife and ended being a stay at home dad. “I had more problem with it than her parents did,” he admitted. Another woman, a long time girl next door, told me she had a son living as a gay man. It wasn’t until later, when she told me she was now a member of the Christian Missionary Alliance, that the phrasing struck me as odd.

Cooking the pig, though it troubled me, produced the warmest memory of the day. Leonard, Frank, Tom, Eugene, Steve, Jerry and I stood around the barbecue talking, laughing. The years had not dulled our appreciation for the silliness, the strangeness of being together, separate, as we humans are, yet bound to each other, as we can be, too.

I plan to get to Abilene, Kansas today, perhaps a bit further. Then, into Lakewood to drop off the rental car, over to the lab to get my PSA test underway and home. Back to Shadow Mountain.