Out on the ladder this morning using the pressure washer on the solar panels. After checking our panel production by time, I noted that yesterday some of the panels operated at 110% of their capacity. Guess the removal of the pine pollen has had an effect even though the panels still look occluded.
The sun up here at 8,800 feet is fierce and requires sun protection winter and summer. The heat when standing in it can quickly become too much. Of course the solar panels are on the south side of the house, so when working on them the sun is an issue. I finished before the peak of the UV index which begins at 10 am and ends around 4 pm.
We’re gradually changing the house and grounds to suit our preferences. We have plans for some plantings in the far back, well outside the defensible zones 1 and 2. Probably lilacs and shrub roses on the edge of our leach field. On the leach field itself we’ll plant bulbs and some flowers suited for an arid climate and the kind of sun we get. That’s this fall.
The now thinned lodgepoles have also changed the look. To my eye they look healthier, more space for individual trees and more sun, too. I like the less crowded, congested feel. Kevin of Timberline Painting will make our garage, shed and interior look better. Bear Creek Designs are coming by today for an estimate on redoing our bathrooms. I had guessed two years for settling in and I think that’s going to be pretty accurate.
Timberline Painting will clean, then seal, the garage and shed wood siding in a couple of weeks. Both decks, too. Plus some interior painting that will finish up the kitchen. Projects remaining have begun to dwindle. A bathroom remodel and getting our sound system better organized will put us almost to the end. For now.
Kevin, owner of Timberline, has also begun taking our fire mitigation logs. He may clean up the back. Glad Kate asked him if he wanted it. When he was over yesterday, we talked about the mountain summer. “We had frost four weeks ago and we’ll have it again in nine weeks. Our summers are short up here, but wonderful,” he said.
He’s right. When we had eighties last week, Denver was in the low hundreds. And Phoenix. Well, if one city could be the major metropolis of hell, it would be Phoenix. 120 degrees! Also, the humidity here is low, so we cool down quickly at night and the heat is not so oppressive as equivalent temperatures in the humid east.
Kate and I are going to work on the garage today. I moved everything into the center last week, leaving the walls bare. Kate’s idea. It makes rejiggering the locations of various things much simpler. We’ll put my old ikea shelving up along the eastern wall, then I’ll move all my journals onto it. I moved them down from the loft last fall because I just didn’t have enough space for them. We’ll also finally get all of our tools out and organized, tables set up and the floors cleared off. Jon’s going to use one bay for boxes. Having four garage bays is a real luxury occasioned by the size of the loft which the former owner built to house his construction estimate business.
Light to dark. A continuum and a dialectic. Our inner lives fall, always, somewhere along this line. Our life might be bright, cheery, goals and actions easy to see, our days bouncy and their weight upon us like a feather. Or, our lives might be dark, intense, solemn, our next moves difficult to imagine, our days heavy, weighing upon us like a great rock.
But the Great Wheel shows us a yet deeper truth. Light to dark and dark back to light is the way of life on this earth. In the temperate latitudes this truth is at its most nuanced and its most fruitful. Quite literally. In temperate latitudes, as the Solstices mark out, we go from the Summer victory of light to the Winter victory of darkness.
Though darkness seems to be the dialectical opposite of light-winter the antithesis of summer-in fact darkness gives plant life a time to rest, rejuvenate, prepare for the rigors of another growing season. The light, when it begins to bear down upon the fields and forests, encourages and feeds them, preparing them for the harvest. In the places where the seasons are more extreme, like the tropics where daylight remains equal to night all year round and at the poles where night and day extend for months exuberant plant life can overtake whole regions. Or, at the poles ice can become so thick and vast that it covers hundreds, thousands, of square miles.
The Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice then are not opposed to each other. The transitions from light to dark and dark to light for which they are the zenith are necessary engines for the well-being of all of us who call this planet home.
Thus we might consider the transitions from light to dark in our psyche, in our soul, as variations necessary for a full and rich life. Of course we need the sunshine of children, of love, of hope, of success. The times in our lives when those can dominate are like the summer, the growing season. Yet, grief and failure are part of our soul’s turning, part of our reaction to and integration of life’s darkness. Also, those practices which can take us deep into our inner life are like the fallow times of fall and winter providing rest and rejuvenation to us.
Today we celebrate the solar equivalent of our live’s growing season. Mark out those matters in your life that flourish, that bring joy and love, that encourage your fulfillment. But, know as well that even events like divorce, like the death of a loved one, like the failure of a dream can enrich the soil of your life, must enrich the soil of your life or else we pretend that the Great Wheel does not turn, but rather stops and becomes one season, to the eventual death of all we know.
The Summer Solstice begins the gradual victory of dark over light, the one we celebrate at the Winter Solstice. Light and dark are not opposite, but parts of a whole, parts of your soul and its ancientrail toward death.
Actions have consequences. Putting up the solar panels means we have to pay attention to those things that impair our efficiency. Last month’s electric bill was $10.28, but pine pollen has coated the panels again and is reducing production. No rain forecast, so I’m going to get up on the roof with a hose (what could go wrong?) and wash them off myself.
The rains of the past few weeks have also grown a nice crop of fuel in the back so Kate’s going to take to the lawn mower. We have to keep the fuel mown down to less than 6″. Kate’s also been prettying up the garden beds around the house, satisfying her dig in the soil and make things grow need. Looks nice.
Finding a contractor to wash and reseal the wood siding for the garage and the shed is a next task. Bids. Something I want to get done before the summer is over. And the garage itself needs clearing out, as I’ve mentioned.
Rigel had two teeth pulled yesterday during a dental visit to Sano hospital. She’s doing well this morning although last night she woke Kate up with her barking.
Slowly getting back into cooking using NYT recipes. A tomato and pomegranate salad I made Sunday received an encore performance for Kate’s quilting group. The eight women that showed up left only a spoonful to take home. The best kind of praise.
Today I’m marinating leg of lamb to make Jerusalem shawarma. This one required some herbs and spices we didn’t have so I had to go to a spice shop. A fun place.
I used to cook a lot and enjoyed it; but, after Kate’s retirement, we slipped into a habit of her cooking. Rectifying that requires some rearrangement of my day since I normally work out around 4 p.m., a good time to cook supper.
Learned last night that Seth and Hannah will not be taking the logs from the backyard. Seth’s done a lot of fire mitigation, too, and has plenty. That means I’ve got to figure out something to do with a hell a lot of wood. It’s work I would have had to do if they hadn’t been in the picture, but I’d hoped they would relieve me of a lot of it. Not gonna happen. Still noodling this one.
Still this guy, 55 years later
The flow of work, Latin and novels and reimagining, has slowed to a trickle since late March: Asia, Vega, iconetectomy on Ancientrails, then wildfire mitigation. This week or next, probably next, I’ll start up again.
Like restarting workouts I’ve found it’s best for me if I start slowly, build toward a full morning of work. I’m excited to return to intellectual work though I’ve enjoyed the hiatus.
Physical labor has its own rewards, not least among them a mindfulness required when using sharp objects and lifting heavy weights.
It’s Sunday. We’ll head out in a bit for our business meeting, going somewhere nearby for breakfast. This is a routine, weekly. These meetings where we discuss money matters, calendar, upcoming projects, how we’re doing are an important part of our marriage. They prevent issues that could divide us or surprise us from sneaking into our lives. In a sense they’re the board meeting for our marriage in its quasi-corporate aspect, but more than that they are a commitment to open discussion, to mutual decision making, to the sort of hard headed pragmatism I believe many people around the world see in American culture. Thanks to Ruth Hayden.
The sprint that started after we got back from Asia with Vega’s sudden, fatal illness, then the copyright infringement legal problem and the subsequent expunging of images from Ancientrails, followed by three weeks or so of fire mitigation is nearly over. Cleaning out the garage and organizing it, clearing off the swedish shelving in the house and getting the china cabinet upstairs into the guest room will be the last of it. Then I will get back to Latin, to Jennie’s Dead and Superior Wolf, and reimagining faith. That is, I’ll get back to working on them in the mornings.
The slash is gone. Chipped and carted away. We had two big days of chipping, one from work done last fall, this one from work done over the last three weeks. The bulk of the fire mitigation project is now over. The remaining logs will be stacked by the end of the week.
Taking the branches off up to ten feet will happen this year, though I’m not certain yet whether I have to wait until fall to protect the tree’s health. We’ll mow the fuel in the back so it doesn’t get higher than six inches, maybe two to three times, maybe a bit more if we continue to get rain. Screening all the vents and other openings in our house is another fillip, as is taking the few pine needles out of our gutters.
Slash June 1 treetops and limbs
After the electricity production limitations of snow and gloomy skies comes pine pollen. This yellow maker of new pines comes off the lodgepoles in wind driven clouds. And, it coats solar panels, reducing their effectiveness. It appears to pare between 10 and 20% off their regular capacity. It rains tonight so I’m going to wait and see if that eliminates the effect. If not, up on the roof with a hose and spray nozzle.
Even though it is 76 here today, the humidity is only 33%. But, it’s 92 in Denver. Gotta love the altitude effect on air temperature.
One unhappy camper. Yesterday, after the lights went out as IREA shut down our electricity for scheduled maintenance, the generator came on. Just as it was supposed to do. A minor but real victory in an as long as we’ve been here slightly unfinished project. But. No power in the house. Gnashing of teeth. Verbal expressions of displeasure. Frustration of immense proportions.
This meant that until Todd from Altitude Electric came out about 10 am we had no power, even though our solar panels were producing electricity and the generator was producing electricity. We were making a lot of our own power and able to use none of it. Irony? I think so.
“So you try to remain calm and remember your training. Not easy to do as you use the last t-shirt that came home in the box with your nephew from Iraq to try to keep the inside of his head where it belongs.”
“Meantime help from the young man that caused the incident is running around getting in the way crying ‘Please don’t let him die, I didn’t see him. Please don’t let him die’. Tried to be nice but had to tell him to get the f out of the way.”
“Was trying to figure out how to make an airway out of Pepsi bottle or something when he slipped away, as the fire department pulled up.”
Redneck for Hire, Pinecam.com
Life. Like the flickering of a firefly or a summer breeze passing through a mountain meadow. We have it, then we don’t. Tyler, my young helper who will be a junior next year at Conifer High School, had an uncle killed in a motorcycle accident on Highway 285, Saturday. Pinecam.com, that smalltown breakfast joint of a website, had several entries talking about the accident.
One, from a poster who takes the handle Redneck for Hire, was very poignant. He has EMT training and was on the scene before Elk Creek Fire Department. Tyler’s uncle died in his arms while he tried to remember something he could do to help. What was an abstracted source of hometown news became personal, even for me, though only in this tangential way. It’s the slow integration of our life with the lives of others who live near us.
Driveway the day we got home from Korea. Eduardo and Holly cleared it.
Our neighbor Holly is still in California, having had thyroid cancer surgery at Scripps in San Diego. Eduardo worked on the family beach house outside Tijuana. His father has late stage Alzheimer’s and the beach house is a place for him to enjoy. The two of them cleared our driveway before our return from Korea.
Next door neighbor Jude’s dogs are quieter, the front yard neater. He has a woman friend who has moved in. Jude was fired from his job as a shift supervisor at a casino in Blackhawk about a year ago. He returned to the welding business of his father, having worked there before. Now, he says, he’s so much happier. Glad he was fired.
Jon and Jen are in the early stages of a divorce. Painful news in so many ways. Yet, having been there myself, I know that once a relationship sours the way back can close down forever. Made more difficult of course by Gabe’s hemophilia and both Ruth and Gabe’s gifted, but troubled personalities. As grandparents we’re very limited in what we can do other than that most important thing: love them all, through it all and afterwards.
You might consider this an OMG moment for us since we moved out here to be closer to the grandkids and Jon and Jen. To the contrary. It makes the move make even more sense. We have a chance to be of real assistance, up close. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Jon already. Nodding. Listening. Reassuring. We will be here.
Yes. life is a firefly flickering or a summer breeze across a mountain meadow, but while it flickers, while the breeze blows, what an amazing experience.
We’re gradually changing the house and grounds to suit our preferences. We have plans for some plantings in the far back, well outside the defensible zones 1 and 2. Probably lilacs and shrub roses on the edge of our leach field. On the leach field itself we’ll plant bulbs and some flowers suited for an arid climate and the kind of sun we get. That’s this fall.
