Fall                                              Waxing Harvest Moon

Fall                                     New (Harvest) Moon

Legislation and Latin today.  Legislation first, then Latin.  On the weekend bulb planting and fall clean up.  Also, a baroque tour to prepare.

Gotta get clearer about the darkness theme and its application to specific works of art, works that can be used in a Winterlights tour.  I know it seems like a stretch, yet it is one of those fundamental ideas that hides just behind the obvious.

How about those twins?

How about those democrats?

Fall                                             Waning Back to School Moon

Reentry.  Always a challenge after the sweet thrills of no immediate domestic or work related responsibilities.  Up early, fed the dogs, got ready for my appointment with Leslie.

We had a good meeting, discussing UU ecclesiology (if there is such a thing), leadership and being cast in the role of minister.  Lots of good stuff for the future.

Back home, nap.  Afterward, I got started on TV programs I missed.  A few to go, but I’ll get those as time goes on.

I have pink daffodils to plant, bees to treat for mites and check on syrup.  A baroque tour to plan.  Lindquest and Vennum in a corporate evening Friday night and this time I start Latin for sure on Friday.  Plus I have a meeting with a member of the Minnesota House on Friday to discuss some legislation for 2011.  Talk about stepping right back into it.

Lughnasa                                     Waxing Back to School Moon

Delight.  Joy.  Enthusiasm.  Passion.  The Woolly question for this Monday is, What delights you?   OED:  from Latin delectare- to allure, attract delight, charm please.

1.  to give great pleasure, enjoyment, to please highly

3.  to enjoy greatly

Joy.   OED:  a vivid emotion of pleasure arising from a sense of well-being,  the feeling or state of being highly please or delighted, exultation of spirit, gladness, delight

Finding the green frog this morning delighted me.  Digging potatoes, too.  Seeing Ruth smile and jump on the couch.  Watching Vega roll over and stick her legs in the air, smiling.  Watching Kate walk without pain.  Going on a long trip.  Seeing my boy.  Reading.  A good movie.

Speaking of good movies.  I just finished Gran Torino.  A brilliant tear-jerker.  Eastwood gave an oscar winning performance, but I don’t think he got one for it.  Also am nearing the end of Encounters at the End of the World by Werner Herzog.  This guy is a genius.  Antarctica never looked so peculiar.  He also weaves gently apocalyptic thought into the film as a whole.  Both highly recommended if you, like me, missed them three years or so ago.

Lughnasa                                         Waxing Back to School Moon

The docent luncheon today.  It is always an event where mediocre food meets a droner of a program.  I’s only salvation lies in the persons seated near you.  This is like the platoon in the army.  You wouldn’t go into the trenches for the colonel (Debbie or Sheila), but for your buddies, the folks seated near you, you will endure the whole as if it were something you really wanted to do.  The food this time was Asian, a plus in my opinion, but in name only.  We also had the awarding of various things for various levels of service.  One woman, Sally Lehman had been a docent for 45 years.  That’s a long time.  Even my class got pins for our 5 years of service beginning in 2005.  It’s gold and I have it on the bookshelf beside me.  Beside the five-year pin from the Collection in Focus program.  It’s silver.  Shows ya.

After the luncheon I wandered through the museum and found Embarrassment of Riches under installation.  This is a new photo collection documenting the global expansion and concentration of wealth that has characterized the last 30 years. It looks like it will be a stunner.  The lecture and walk through are next week.

The continuing ed featured the Decorative Arts curator who I found funny and detailed in his knowledge.  He showed a wonderful silver cup that the museum purchased by a Strasbourg silversmith named Baer.  It is his masterpiece, that is, the piece he used to gain admission to the guild of silversmiths in the Silver City.  It is a tour de force of detail and skill, called the most important work in silver of the 20th century to come out of Strasbourg.  Worth a look.

Home for a nap.

The out to UTS for an evening in the field education class.  I have responsibility for an intern this year for Groveland UU.  A disappointing evening.  The talk the talk the talk, a long line of talk.  No wonder lay people get weary of the clergy.  The stuff is fuzzy, emotive and allusive–religious.  I’ve changed since I was in the Seminary in the early 70s.  A lot.

I now find most of the process tedious, though I look forward to working with Leslie.

Lughnasa                                        Waning Artemis Moon

Whew.  After 4 hours wandering around the precincts of the Renaissance Fair Kate and I threw ourselves on the bed and took a two-hour nap.  Geez.  Feels like I worked hard all day.

The Renaissance Festival has a large role playing contingent.  Some get paid to enact certain character types from a real or imagined medieval period, others volunteer by showing up in costume and reveling along with the others.  One guy played the fool, running, smirking, smacking the tree leaves and pointing up at them as if they represented great wisdom.  Another, in a kilt, stood on a bench and preached the virtues of drinking beer in the morning while remarking to the passing women:  You’re sooo beautiful.  You’re mother’s beautiful (to a kid in a stroller).  One of the more remarkable roles I witnessed outside the potter’s shop where we bought some new pieces.

“A place to sit!  A place to sit!”  A man in his late twenties, perhaps early thirties, had a board attached to his back, a hat in the dirt with a few dollars in it and put his back in the air while on all fours, offering all comers a place to sit down.  “Show off your wife!”

A rope walker and fire-juggler had the crowds attention at one spot; while in another, folks lined up to be put in the stocks.  Later in the day, just as we were leaving, there was to be a royal wedding. “Is this a big deal?” I asked Kevin Caufield, the potter.  “We’ve never had one before.” he said.

Several shops sold swords, daggers and knives.   Real swords, daggers and knives.  In one place’s case $2,200 and up real swords!  Not to mention halberds, pikes, spears, broad axes, maces and other hand to hand combat paraphernalia.

The pottery shops’s  quality varied dramatically. They were the only ones I examined with care. It looked like mugs and cups sold the best, mugs with dragons, flagons embossed with all manner of symbols, including, improbably to me, the logo of the brotherhood of international electrical workers.  Many of the ceramics suffered from overly cute decoration, flowers and vines and such.  Some were poorly crafted.  There were, though, many fine pieces, too, most often not in the particular things we sought:  salad plates and bowls.

Food was plentiful: barons of beef, turkey drumsticks, ears of corn, gyros, pop-overs, candy on a stick, beer, wine, lemonade, cream puffs and gourmet pizza to mention only a few.

Shop keepers invariably greeted us as m’lady and m’lord.

As I imagine there is among re-enactors of various kinds from the civil war to the society for creative anachronism, there is a yearning here to leave, for a while, the confines of 3rd millennial civilization for a time when men wore codpieces and women were wenches, when disputes got settled without guns and bombs and when social roles had more constraints.

When I work in the fantasy genres in which I write, the same yearning comes over me, a desire to inhabit another world, another place and time for a while.  Only the most dogged or the most neurotic or the most blinkered hunker down in the day-to-day and never leave it.  We all need an escape hatch, a place to let this world go for awhile.  I believe religion serves that  purpose for many, fiction for others, movies, too and then there are these fairs, throwbacks to the celebrations of rural people gathering in one locale to exchange goods and services, to hear a few stories, drink a little, perhaps sing a bit and laugh.  Does it sound like the state fair?  You bet it does.

Lughnasa                                 Waning Artemis Moon

The Renaissance Fair.  Kate and I left home around 8:15 this morning, arriving at the Renaissance Fair ground around 9.  Traffic, at that time, was not a problem.  We wandered the grounds watching fools, knaves, long-bowmen, merchants, lords and ladies plying their wares and their trades.  The atmosphere was casual bawdy with buttons that said:  Ready To Be Mounted, Nay, Nay, Never and Let’s Be Bad Guys.  A bumper sticker on the way out, a black ribbon like the ones you see on many cars in yellow, read:  Support Bondage. That sort of thing.

Kate found a pop-over, her favorite.  We also located some ceramic salad plates and bowls, all different designs, but from the same potter, a high quality guy from St. Paul.  Our main purpose though was to stop by Courtesans and Costumes, the Renaissance clothing boutique owned, operated and provisioned by our neighbor Lydia Perlich and her S.O. Chad.  When we first went past around 9 they were busy upstairs sewing, trying to replace inventory sold the day before.  They have a room with a bed and electricity above their stall, which is very near the entrance.

They bought the stall and paid it off over the last year and intend to do the same thing in several other Renaissance Fairs across the country.  They travel to North Carolina, Louisiana and, they hope, Texas when the Minnesota fair closes.  Over time they want to purchase stalls in other fairs, for now they camp after setting up in the other states.  Lydia tells me Texas has more square feet, but Minnesota always has the largest attendance of any Renaissance Fair in the country.

More to say, but I’m tired.  Ready to go to bed.

Lughnasa                                    Waning Artemis Moon

A wonderful lunch with chicken/leek pie, a tomato, onion and feta salad and a fruit tart for dessert.  I didn’t make it to dessert, having had two pieces of the chicken/leek pie. The number of ingredients from our own garden: leeks, onion, carrot, tomato, raspberries made the meal that much more special.

The MIA has training tonight for the 3rd Thursday evenings, a sort of hip young single crowd draw.  I decided I’d go just for fun, see what it was like.  One Thursday a month wouldn’t be a lot. Of course, I’d have to keep track with our sheepshead night.

Lughnasa                                       Waning Artemis Moon

An inside day. E-mails, sorting out tasks ahead.  Doing online stuff like ordering pink daffodils for granddaughter Ruth, same for us plus some fall blooming bulbs and more daffodils for naturalizing.  Also bought a honey cake bundt pan (Nordicware!) and an Armenian Honey Pot with Good Year written on it in Hebrew from the source for all things Jewish.  That kind of thing.  Domesticity.  Kate’s sewing and I’m doing this sort of thing.

Going up now to reheat and brown the chicken leek pie for lunch.

Lughnasa                              Waxing Artemis Moon

Personal note:  Dan was at Depauw when I was at Wabash.  We never met.  The parent seems to have bred true.

On apples not falling from the tree:

Republican congressional candidate Ben Quayle Friday night lashed out at his political foes and the media for what he described as their “coordinated effort to assassinate my character.”

The 33-year-old son of former Vice President Dan Quayle was besieged by controversy this week after Nik Richie, the founder of the now-defunct DirtyScottsdale.com, outed Quayle as one of the original creators of the raunchy, sex-themed website lampooning Scottsdale’s trashy nightclub scene.