Category Archives: Woolly Mammoths

Garden, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Go Now, The Growing Season Has Ended

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Fall                                                                          Samhain Moon

Today chain saw bar and dental hygiene.  Real gritty home stuff.  A bit more Latin, of course.  My paperweight is still in the annealer.  Cooling down.  I can get it Wednesday.  It will sit next to my Father’s Day mug I made at Northern Clay Center.  Back to kindergarten only now I’m making my projects for myself.  Is this the beginning of the second childhood I’ve heard so much about?

The hosta and coleus have all gathered in on themselves, drooping in that post-frost finale.  As the Minnesota Updraft Blog said:  The Growing Season Ends.  It ended for us here last week when we pulled the tomato plants, the egg plants, the beets and the last of the greens.  Frost bit plants look hurt, their cell walls burst by ice, what was contained now loose and sharp.

This is the way the growing season ends, not with a bang, but a droop.

Art and Culture, Woolly Mammoths

You Dip Your Honey Rod in the Molten Glass

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Fall                                                                         Samhain Moon

Glory hole.  Boil.  Jacks.  Crimpers.  Gathers. Honey rods. Annealer. Diamond shears. IMAG1071Taglia. Paddles. Tweezers.  If you encounter this unusual constellation of tools and equipment, you’re about to work with glass.  Molten glass.  Molten as in 4,300 degrees molten. Molten as in droops off the end of the honey rod if you don’t keep rolling, rolling, rolling.

(Frank ready for his first gather.)

You dip a honey rod into an oven, a 4,300 degree oven filled with about 350 pounds of molten, transparent glass.  Twist two or three times and get a good gather on the rod.  Pull it out, orange, heat blasting back from the oven.  Roll it.  Roll it.  Over to a table that might be an Indian spice sellers tables with small mounds of wares, dip the molten glass in yellow or white or blue, move it back and forth so the color coats the gather.

To the bench.  Rolling, this time maybe pull out the tweezers and grab the end of the IMAG1070gather, pull it, twist it.  Then maybe the shears to make a few cuts. Still rolling.  Rolling. Always rolling.  Another gather, bigger this time, over the first gather, the one with color. Rolling, rolling.  Always.  This time layers of newspaper soaked in water.  Yes.  Newspaper.

(Charlie with newspaper.)

Wet newspaper.  Thick, wet newspaper.  In your hand, against the heat of the second gather, rolling still rolling, you shape the whole, now headed toward that most mundane, but forgiving of glass shapes, a paperweight.  Back in the gloryhole for a heat blast.IMAG1058

Back to the bench.  This time the jacks grip the molten glass at the rod’s end, making a line around it, a line that will make breaking the cooling glass off the honey rod possible.  “It perforates the glass.”  Oh?

(the glory hole)

Whatever it does, sure enough, after gently tapping the gather at the jacks imprinted line, the paper weight falls off.  A blow torch comes out, heats the rough edges and makes the bottom molten enough to receive initials.  Gotten know which one is yours.

Then they go into the annealer.  It gradually steps down the heat so the coefficient of IMAG1063expansion doesn’t overtake the masterpiece and shatter it.  Ready on Wednesday.

What the Woollies did this Monday night at Minnesota Glass Arts.

(Jen releases her demonstration paperweight from the honeyrod.)

Art and Culture, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Changes

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Fall                                                                          Samhain Moon

Buddy Mark Odegard has found a new style in poster-like art about the Northshore.  Good

We’ve had snow and we’ve had rain, who knows when I’ll be back this way again.  I do.  Next season around the same time.  Loving the change of seasons.  The transitions may be later and milder, but they’re still coming and I still love le difference.

Found out my chain saw needs a new bar as well as a new chain, so I’ll have to visit the hardware store tomorrow:  new glasses, dental visit and a chain saw bar.  These are the kind of things that take me into the really retail and away from cyber-purchase.  Hands on matters where time counts.  Otherwise, I’d rather get it in the mail.  No schlepping and it saves on gas.

What?  I heard that.  Yes, it does save on gas.  Shopping on the internet aggregates deliveries among many people allowing for a much more efficient route and far fewer trips per item.

Woolly Mammoths

The Herd

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Fall                                                                      Samhain Moon

Frank B. bought supper last night at Christo’s.  A large crowd:  Stefan, Bill, Scott, Warren, Mark, myself and Taylor Helgeson, fresh from Hollywood and the music scene.  He has an album underway.  I enjoyed speaking with him.  His Montana stories were graphic and interesting.

We spoke of our most ancient and beloved one cell mutual ancestor, learned how artificial inseminators gather bull semen, and what getting musical ideas pushed forward requires in the California of at least one of ours dreams.

Christo’s is a Greek restaurant a block down from 26th and Nicollet.  It’s fare is adequate and Greekish.  Ample quantities.  After the meal we gathered outside for a tusk raising in honor of our guest, Taylor.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

The Universe At Work

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Fall                                                                      New (Samhain) Moon

Lunch with Bill Schmidt.  Bill says “the universe works” and means in part by that that problems have solutions even if they’re not evident through the usual channels.  His working example is his own experience with a milking herd for which he was responsible.

The herd came down with pseudomonas.  As he said, bad news.  The Wisconsin state vet advised him to kill the herd and start over.  No, he thought to himself, someone out there knows the answer.  So he kept himself open to an answer as he worked the land in Door County.  It came through a soil tester who knew a guy who might know something.

Sure enough, this person had a solution that involved colostrum.  Mammals produce colostrum in late pregnancy.  It is a milk that contains antibodies to protect the infant animal against disease.  It saved his herd.

The larger lesson, Bill believes, is that we need to keep ourselves in a constant state of openness for answers, for new information, for ways of thinking that might seem strange, yet have real value.  He practices this in his daily life.

 

Bees, Family, Feelings, Garden, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

Wholeness

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Lughnasa                                                                  Harvest Moon

Mabon eve.  The night before the fall equinox.  Tomorrow the light loses its struggle to own more than half of the day, a gain achieved back at the Summer Solstice in June.  From this point on the light diminishes and the darkness increases to its zenith at the Winter Solstice.

Been meaning to report on an interesting feeling I had at the Woolly meeting on Monday night.  I took two pies Kate had baked:  ground cherry and raspberry, both of fruit from our garden.  I also took a box of honey from our  hive, Artemis Honey with the label made by Mark Odegard.

When I left, after having sold 18 pounds of honey, I had a feeling of wholeness, that’s the best way I can describe it.  I had worked all season on the garden, the orchard and with the bees and somehow that evening I felt one with it all.

When I told Kate how I felt, I said it felt like something private was made public, that those two worlds knit together in one moment.  She said she got a similar feeling when she took food for a group, as she did so often for work and as she does now for her sewing days.

It was a good feeling, however understood.

Cooking, Garden, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths

Friends

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Lughnasa                                                                  Harvest Moon

Woolly meeting tonight.  Kate baked a ground cherry pie and a raspberry pie.  Big hits.  “All hail, Kate!”  There was applause near the end for the desert.  Yin served her wonderful variations on Chinese originals, tonight a noodle and pork and vegetable dish.

Scott introduced the topic of the Singularity and we talked about technology and change for the rest of the evening.  Mark Odegard brought up a good point about advances in technology contributing to a digital divide with digital haves and digital have nots.  This divide will tend to reinforce class and racial divisions.  He said this in reaction to me saying I wasn’t particularly worried about the Singularity.  His point was that the rapid advances in technology can and will have unintended social consequences.  He’s right.

In this argument I find myself on the conservative side, that is, I believe there are so many fundamental activities that make us human from painting to poetry, music to novels, athletics and theatre.  They are not reducible to code nor products artificial intelligence can reasonably be expected to create. There are also the incredible complexities of life itself, human relationships, the intricate interlocking webs of ecology systems that will always, I believe, outstrip any technological advance.

And I love technology, gadgets, the new.  Just don’t see them hanging out with me at a Woolly meeting as full participants.  Ever.

 

Asia, Bees, Garden, Woolly Mammoths

Tea Making, Merchandising

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Lughnasa                                                              Harvest Moon

I set the timer for the Zojirushi water boiler for 6 hours last night.  When I came downstairs this morning, it had heated the water to boiling and allowed the temperature to descend to the holding temperature I selected, 175 degrees.  This allows me to take water from it at that temperature all day, filling my pitcher, my teapot as many times as I wish.

Earlier this morning I made a pot of Yunnan White Jasmine Tea and am now on my second pot.  Each pot brews about 8 ounces which I drink from a tiny Chinese style teacup my sister purchased for me as part of a set.  I use the pitcher and water table from that set, too.  I can make 4 more pots of tea before I have to switch tea leaves.

Did a spray of brixblaster this morning (reproductive plants):  raspberries, tomatoes, IMAG0876ground cherries, broccoli and carrots.  The vegetative plants left are leeks, beets and greens, but not enough to mix up a batch of qualify.  After the spraying, I picked ground cherries.  They will fill out the amount Kate needs for the pie she’s baking for the Woollies tonight.  She’s also making a raspberry pie.

Tonight I’m taking as well a box of Artemis Honey for sale.  The first time I’ve actively marketed our honey.  I feel strange doing it since I have an almost Confucian attitude toward merchants, but I’m trying to learn to honor my labor.  Marketing Missing is the next, similar, activity.

 

 

Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Friends

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Lughnasa                                                            Harvest Moon

Friends Tom Crane and Bill Schmidt offer some alternatives to the paradox of time and learning I wrote about in Prospective Nostalgia.  Tom urges stretching the notion of the humanly possible: “Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; but if a thing is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach.” Marcus Aurelius.  I agree.  It was just this attitude that let me take up Latin even though I felt languages were beyond me.   A helpful reminder.

Bill recommends reading for the hell of it.  Walking in the woods for no purpose.  I read a lot just for the hell of it.  A lot.  And I agree that it helps open up human experience.  I’ve fallen away, recently, from walking in the woods to no purpose.  Used to do it quite a bit.  Likewise a helpful reminder.

I appreciate these thoughts.  Thanks, guys.

 

Great Work, Woolly Mammoths

Visiting the North

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Lughnasa                                                         Honey Moon

The full Honey Moon has an amber cast tonight, appropriate for our work tomorrow and Wednesday.  Driving back from Wayzata it hung high in the sky, clouds passing before it.  It was warm, 80 degrees when I left the retreat center and the Woolly meeting there.

Tom showed a DVD from his trip to Svalbard.  It was a stark but beautiful land and sea and ice scape populated with curious polar bears, blubbery walrus and ring seals.  The ring seals only show up on this DVD as the meal of a large male bear.  The video of a polar bear suckling her cub was, according to a Swedish polar bear researcher, unique.  He’d never seen it before and, interestingly, said he never expected to see it again.

There was, too, the story of ocean open months earlier than normal, of the pack ice decline separating the polar bears from their main, almost exclusive food source, the ring seals and the staggering potential of upsetting the theromhaline cycle if Greenland melts. This could shut down the Gulf Stream with a cascade of unknown effects.

We went on from there to discuss superstitions and masculinity.  I had a sense that the conversation about masculinity per se, oddly a subject only lightly discussed among the Woollies over the years, might hold more for us at some other point.

It was, as always, good.