Lugnasa Garlic Planting Moon
Two Rembrandt tours today. The crowds have begun to thin out some, though the tours were still around 30 for both Bob Marshall and me. Today’s were good. Interested people, engaged. Paying attention. Good questions and response.
Into St. Paul tonight for sheepshead. We’ll see what the cards have in store.
Lugnasa Garlic Planting Moon
More work done on Missing. But not as much as I might’ve. Went to sleep last night late after a nice evening out with the Woollies. I also did my short bust plus resistance workout. The combination knocked me out until 9:30 a.m. That leaves a narrow window in the morning.
The MIA’s annual docent letter came out, detailing the number of visitors with whom docents come in contact. It’s a lot. 59,000 in round numbers. With all the guide programs we interact with a third of the museum’s annual visitors. When I consider that museum going for me is a largely solitary process, that number seems about right.
Lugnasa Garlic Planting Moon
Woollies met at the Oxford Condominiums near the Lexington in St. Paul. Chez Haislet has moved to a 900 sq ft place on the 2nd floor. We had the stand in one place and turn around tour, seeing Charlie and Barbara’s great collection of Japanese prints and their bedroom with an imperial robe over the bed.
At 7:00 we adjourned to the University Club, the funky building at the point where Summit takes a quick jog toward the Cathedral. We ate outside on a flawless evening, with the temperature just so and a table full of Woollies and Wives.
We discussed books and life and death. Ate supper. Had dessert. Went home.
Lugnasa Garlic Planting Moon
Woolly meeting tonight at the University Club in St Paul. Topic: read, reading, want to read this summer.
My list: Pale King, Newsflesh trilogy, Existence, 2312, Redshirts, Mitch Rapp series, Arctic Rising, Last Hundred Days, Dracula’s Guest, Path to Power, The Tiger, Master’s of the Planet. to read: Istanbul Passage, Aleppo Codex, I, Lucifer, Magic Hours, A Great Aridness, Our Divided Political Heart.
plus all those Rembrandt Books.
Lugnasa Garlic Planting Moon
Kate at the Track
Kate consulting the handicapper/race analyst at Running Aces
Ruth, looking beautiful, like her Grandmother on the Georgtown Loop Railroad
Gabe, responding to the train whistle
Jon and Jen
Lugnasa New (Garlic Planting) Moon
Morning with Missing. Kate out to find sodium bisulfite, a preservative that maintains color in dried apples and pears. Not an easy product to locate.
Up late last night and early today. Sleepy.
Today’s Kate’s 68th birthday. We’re going to the track tonight to celebrate. The harness track, Running Aces. It’s in our area.
Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
A tour with a home school group that accreted more folks as we moved along, even though we went from gallery 3 to gallery 2 then to 1. These tours have been fun, audiences appreciative. Glad I got the chance to do it.
Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
Brother Mark is on the Greyhound headed to Lansing, Michigan. He got a bank account setup, got a new passport and attempted to get a driver’s license. Maybe next time on that one.
Watched a bit of the Olympics last night, but diving just doesn’t do it for me. Looks like the Chinese are pretty good at it though. Also watched about five minutes of the Viking’s game. Enough for me.
Filled out a survey that included the following question. I’m in the next to last age category! OMG.
What is your age?
This is a very interesting idea:
“For the Greek, Hemeroscopium is the place where the sun sets. An allusion to a place that exists only in our mind, in our senses, that is ever-changing and mutable, but is nonetheless real. It is delimited by the references of the horizon, by the physical limits, defined by light, and it happens in time.”
Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
5. It’s not the Other World; it’s the real world.
Continuing my mini-series on the real world, today we deal with number 5. Some of you know I have a fascination with Celtic antiquity (my heritage–at least half of it, the other half is German), especially the ancient Celtic religion.
(holy well, a bridge to the other world. Ireland)
The sidhe, or faery, the realm of the fairies was one expression of the Celtic notion of the Other World. In Celtic mythology the veil between this world, the realm of the living, and the Other, the Other World, is tenuous. At certain points in the year this veil thins and beings from both realms can move back and forth. The Celtic feast of Samain, Summer’s End, the last of the three harvest festivals which marks the finish of the growing season and the beginning of the fallow time, was a holiday well known for this very characteristic.
In its contemporary, very watered down version, Halloween, the costumed wee folk going from door to door reflect this traffic. Folks from this world, the living world and hence a real world, not necessarily the real world, could go through and could be captured by those in faery. Likewise, folk of the Other World could cross into this one and, if they chose, carry captives back to their own real world.
Another riff on this question of the real world comes from the ancient faith of the Mexica, the Aztecs notable as part of this long tradition. In this instance, our world, the living world, is not the real world, rather the real world is both before birth and after death, this realm being merely a dream between a sleep and a sleep. I suppose you might put the Christian afterlife in this same vein, since the life eternal has a more real aspect to it than this very temporary proving ground.
Update: George Leisner, shown here, got fired from his job as a real estate agent after his son posted this video on youtube and a blogger sent it to his employer.