Category Archives: Woolly Mammoths

Woolly Mammoths

The Herd Dispersed

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Lughnasa                                 Waning Green Corn Moon

The Woollies have come and gone.  Kate’s wonderful meal has begun to work the true miracle of transubstantiation, beets and potatoes and chicken become Bill, Frank, Charlie, Warren.  We did a tour of the orchard and the vegetable garden, talking along the way about permaculture.   The topic interested everyone.  It was fun to share the work Kate and I have been doing here with good friends.

Kate’s idea of giving the big dogs bones to occupy them worked well.

The dining room table had 9 people around it.  It felt like a family dinner.  We never moved from the table.

Jim Johnson showed up and brought his idea of selling lambs to individuals.

Now, tired.  Good night.

Cooking, Woolly Mammoths

Ready

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Lughnasa                             Waning Green Corn Moon

The table has its two extra leaves, making it big enough for 8 seated with space, 10 or so with a little up closeness thrown in for good measure.  There are daisies and marigolds in vases.  Our entire apple crop for this year–3–rest in a Japanese bowl.  The greens have been cut, washed and chiffonaded.  Kate has roasted the turnips and beets.  The chickens will go into a clay pot each and the potatoes will go onto boil.

Appetizers are ready and we’ll get the ice when Warren arrives to help.  The house got an extra cleaning today and the patio and deck have been swept.  We’re ready.

It’s fun to do this once in a while.  Gathering our own produce and preparing it made me feel like a small farmer.  It’s a good feeling.

The temperature will be moderate and the sky clear.  A perfect evening to consider local and sustainable agriculture, but even more a perfect evening to entertain friends.

Cooking, Family, Woolly Mammoths

Mammoths Trek North

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Lughnasa                          Waning Green Corn Moon

Today the Woolly Mammoths put themselves on the ancient trail to the north, a gathering of the herd happens here in Andover starting at 6:00 p.m. or so.  Kate has helped me with the meal the last two meetings, or, better, I have helped her help me.  The menu includes two brined and roasted free-range chickens.  It also includes potatoes from our garden with our parsley, roasted beets, turnips, and carrots, and possibly, tomato and onion salad from our garden.  I say possibly because three of our Cherokee Purples began to turn last Friday, all the rest of our tomato explosion are still green.  Kate will also make her signature dish, a rhubarb pudding.

I have to go out this morning and retrieve my new wedding ring from the jewelers so Vega, Kate, and I can have a small ceremony during the meeting blessing the new ring.  Then there’s a chain to get to keep Rigel out of the damned orchard.  Ice.  Bones to keep the big dogs happy during the meal.  The little things that have to get done before a large meal.

So, I’d better get to it.  Talk to you later.

Cooking, Sport, Woolly Mammoths

Debrine and Chill

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Lughnasa                                 Waning Green Corn Moon

Kate made banana bread and cut up vegetables.  I went to the grocery store and returned.  In the average year we may entertain non-family members once or at most twice, family sometimes 3 or 4 times.  We’re far away from the center of things here in Andover, true, but we’re not big entertainers or party goers in the first place.  Kate is comfortable cooking for guests while I’m not, so I’m glad to have her home.  We make a good team.

Tiger Woods is a competitive guy.  He chewed nails today when he made a couple of bad shots near the end of the PGA.  They ensured Ye Yang’s victory, the first Asian born PGA champion.  Tiger also said some bad words.

I have to go debrine the chickens and put them in gallon freezer bags with olive oil.  They’ll stay in the fridge over night.

Dogs, Health, Woolly Mammoths

My Dog Ate My Remote

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Lughnasa                                 Waning Green Corn Moon

OK.  In previous episodes of the Vega/Rigel saga our heroines have:  escaped multiple times, eaten the recently installed netaphim, chewed up various hoses and their inside beds and, most famously, eaten my wedding ring.  All that, but now they’ve done something serious:  revealed the insides of the dvd player remote.  Yike.  Can you imagine manually inputting every command to your dvd player?  I thought not.  Sigh.

Kate’s back and she’s glad to be back.  It allowed a day to rest and today we’ve begun work on the meal for the Woollies.  I dug potatoes and pulled beets and carrots (three colors–white, purple and orange)  while Kate brined the two free-range chickens I bought yesterday at the grocery store.

While filling the dogs pool (yes, they have one in addition to the water container.), I squatted down to hold the hose, the shortened bit Vega has left me.  Crack, snapple and pop.  Not rice krispies.  Nope.  It was my lower back.  Owee.

Kate is a great resource on how to handle back pain so I have been her apprentice since then.  She also gave me some pain meds that helped, too.  I wanted to go out to the Marsh in Minnetonka to see the opening of Moon’s art show, but I can’t make it.  Moon is Scott Simpson’s 92 year old Cantonese mother-in-law.

I do have to go to the grocery store for the stuff we decided we need for the meal.

Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

A Yellow Moon

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Lughnasa                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

A yellowed moon hung in the sky tonight, almost full.  It made the drive back in from Minneapolis a delight as it sailed in and out of view.

In tonight for the Land Use and Transportation Committee meeting.  What a dynamic group!  They are still fighting the Stillwater Bridge issue after all these years.  They also have transit oriented development on their agenda as well as a new issue called Complete Streets.  In essence Complete Streets wants street planning to have all users in mind (pedestrians, bicyclists, cars and the handicapped in particular)

A crisp meeting that ran on time.

Thunder has begun to roll in so I’m going to have shut down soon.  After the Sierra Club meeting, I drove over to the Black Forest where the Woolly’s first monday meeting had just begun to wind down.  I saw Mark and Frank and Stefan before they left.  Warren and Scott stayed and we talked about Moon, Scott’s 95 year old Cantonese mother-in-law who lives with them.  She’s having a show of her calligraphy and painting at the Marsh.  It goes up on August 16th.  There will also be a book of her work available at the show.  Amazing.

China tour tomorrow for 7-8th graders.  I added a tour this Friday of Chilean students connected with St. Johns who want a tour of American art.

Aging, Dogs, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths

Watch the Video

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Summer                 Waxing Green Corn Moon’

Former Door County dairy farmer and Woolly Mammoth Bill Schmidt passes the Dairyland baton to northern Indiana’s Fair Oaks Farm.  Why?  They produce enough milk to provide for the dairy needs of an 8 million person city.  They have 25,000 acres and 32,000 cows, milked 3 times a day on a moving carousel.  Hard to believe?  Watch the video.

Kate and I spent the morning at the Minnesota Spine Center.  We met a confident and capable surgeon who gave Kate some possibilities she had not had before.  Whether any of them will relieve what has now been a 20 year 0rdeal that has caused a lot of pain and cost here 3 1/2 inches in height we do not know, but we will.

Vega the wonder dog continues.  Now she has found the netaphim running through the raised beds.  She has gnawed on some of it though she cut through none of them.  She’s an intelligent, active, inquisitive dog.

The Blackberry Storm I got at the Verizon store got terrible reviews when it first came out.  I have used it for a few days now and can say that the problems I’ve encountered so far fall the into the severely annoying class, frustrating but not crippling.  Example.  Like the I-Phone, the device it attempts to copy, it has an acclerometer that switches the orientation of the screen from portrait to landscape when you turn the phone.  Unlike the I-Phone the Storm does not always respond to the turn, at least not right away.  Likewise the internet link acts up sometimes, offering less than the full website for viewing.

On the other hand it has a full qwerty keyboard in landscape mode and two thumbed typing can  be accurate and fast.  It also has a smaller footprint than the I-Phone, something I appreciate.  It will work for my needs just fine.

I’m back to working out with the full routine:  flexibility, resistance, balance and aerobics.   Body and mind work better when exercised.

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, permaculture, Woolly Mammoths

Becoming Native To This Place

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Summer                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

westorchard709

The next meeting of the Woolly Mammoths will be here in Andover.  That means it’s theme and subject matter time.  The theme will be, Becoming Native to this Place, the title of a book by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute.  The subject matter will focus on the gardens, permaculture and the local food (slow food) movement.

At the Seed Savers Exchange conference held two weekends ago in Decorah, Iowa a commercial grower told of his change to the local foods idea.  A grower of greenhouse foods for various distributors who took his foods far from northern Iowa, he recounted attending a meeting sponsored by folks whose agenda was local foods.  They showed that, due to commodity based agriculture, northern Iowa was a net importer of food.  That astounded him.  He switched his focus then to growing vegetables for local consumers, working on niche markets like institutions, restaurants and grocery stores in the northern Iowa area.

He didn’t mention Michael Pollan by name but the subject matter was similar to Pollan’s recent work, In Defense of Food.  The Woollys have read the Omnivore’s Dilemma and the Botany of Desire.  We’ve also looked at the notion of Homecoming and the Great Work by Thomas Berry.  This August meeting, only 17 days after Lughnasa, the first fruits festival of the Celtic calendar, will celebrate the Woolly’s interests in home, food and continuity.    southgarden709400

Continuity?  Yes.  The Woollys have a 20+ year record of perseverance with each other and, by implication, an interest in this place we have  chosen to call home for those same number of years.

To the Woollys who read this:

Please choose one of the books or websites indicated and take a look.  While looking pick out two things:  what surprised you?  what would you like to know more about?   If you want, also look for something that seems off or misguided to you.

Faith and Spirituality, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

No Ring. Yet.

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Summer                            Sliver of the Waning Summer Moon

Inquiring minds want to know.  No, Antra, no joy yet.  There are still a few possibilities but the weekend trip and a busy day has not left me time to go check.  We have approximately an acre and a half fenced and 2/3rds of that is woods, so we may never find it.

Woolly’s tonight.  We discussed Good and Evil in our own lives.  Tom Crane showed a wonderful documentary about a French region focused on Champion sur Lignon.  The people in this whole region hid Jews during WWII.  In interviews with them after the fact they implied that they just did it.   It was a very moving story.  It hit me especially since they were Huguenots, the group to which John Know belonged.  Their position relative to helping the Jews I recognized from work within the Reformed tradition.  Then, too, clergy played a direct role in the attitudes that led to their extraordinary, yet very ordinary actions.

Aging, Family, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

Woollys, Grandkids

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Summer                     Waxing Summer Moon

Tomorrow we get the full on Summer Moon.  We’ll have a warm, but not hot night with a brilliant satellite.  No good for astronomy, but great for moon viewing, a favorite activity among the Japanese.

Woolly’s met tonight at the Black Forest.  Mark, Stefan, Bill, Tom, Frank and myself showed up.  Mark got the dam site job.  He reports next Monday morning to Lock and Dam #1, the first official lock on the Mississippi River.  The job runs until the river ices over and the barges cannot come.  Stefan’s been giving himself fits over his children.  A potential liability of parenthood.

I showed off the Kindle.  I’m a fan.

Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe are back from a weekend in Chicago.  There was a Bandel family reunion with rooms at the Doubletree and visits to Grandma and Grandpa, Ruth and Gabe’s great-grandparents.  They are back here for four days, then they strike out for home in Denver.