Category Archives: Our Land and Home

Family, Our Land and Home

Running the Manor House

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Imbolc                                                                         Valentine Moon

“Bob.  Gas man Bob.”  The sales rep from Centerpoint energy introduced himself, pronounced himself of German ancestry and therefore very excited about strong coffee, minor league baseball and variable speed fan motors.

The second estimate is on the table.  Literally.  At the end of our kitchen table.  Reliance and Center Point.  Nice folders.  Roughly similar costs.  A few bells here, whistles there.

Tomorrow Brad from Air Mechanical comes out.  He’ll be the last.  We’ll make a decision and should have a new furnace by mid-week next week.  At least 95%, maybe 96.5% efficiency if we decide we want the quieter variable speed fan motor.

Owning a home means these kind of transactions go on all year.  The handyman fixes the door.  The snowplower clears the driveway and the sidewalk.  Ray cuts the grass.  Mickman’s opens up our irrigation system and closes it down in the fall.  We have a crew that washes our windows outside twice a year, cleaning the gutters at the same time.  It’s all part of a balance among the things we can do and want to do and what we’re willing to pay others to do.

We do our own pruning, tree removal, garden amending, planting, bee keeping.  I maintain the electric fence and installed it.  We harvest our flowers, vegetables, fruit and honey.  We’re lucky that we can sort tasks out along these lines.  It makes life so much easier.

 

 

Our Land and Home, Travel, Weather +Climate

Take A Hike

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Imbolc                                                                     New (Valentine) Moon

Business meeting.  Money matters go well.  Calendar looks good.  I’ve had to pull back my Isle of Skye trip to the US, too much money going out unexpectedly:  furnace, Gertie.  I did find a great alternative though, lodge to lodge hiking on the Superior Trail.  I can do the same length of trip, beautiful hikes with views of Lake Superior, and spend about half the money.

Kate and I have been fixing the front door on the plate today.  I took the pins out of the hinges, levered the door off and we could finally remove the lock from the door.  Kate’s putting a new door knob and lock into the door right now, then I’ll go back up and rehang the door.  He said confidently.  This door’s solid core with a metal front.  Translation:  heavy.  It ain’t heavy, it’s my front door.  Yeah, right.

More Eddas and Latin today as the snow falls.

(winter storm northeast 2013)

A wet snow began to fall this morning and forecasts have it continuing into Monday.  Maybe 4-6 inches.  Not near as much as the poor Northeast.  Getting this monster snow storm after Hurricane Sandy.  Not a good thing.

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld, Great Work, Health, Latin, Our Land and Home, Translating Metamorphoses

95%

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Imbolc                                                                                Cold Moon

So the parade of salesmen has begun.  First up was Reliant heat and cooling.  They sent out a really good guy.  Told us what would fit, how much it would cost.  Very reasonable price.  Good furnace.  If I hadn’t had the others scheduled, I would have bought this one.  Still, we’ll hear the others out, too.  You never know.

This furnace runs at 95% efficiency.  As opposed to our current 80%.  Think about a difference of 15% less gas used.  Then multiply it by hundreds and thousands of homes.  Hard to believe.  Of all the strategies to combat global warming, the easiest and most immediate ones involve conservation.  More fuel efficient cars, furnaces.  Better insulation in homes.  Switching from coal-burning electricity generation.  Having cleaning crews in large buildings clean during the day.  Strategies that have broad application yet involve relatively straightforward choices and proven technologies.

Finally wrenched myself away from the image moving to work on the Edda’s some more.  Brunhild today.  A sad story.  Sigurd jumped into that burning ring of fire, but boy it really didn’t work out for him or Brunhild.

Also back to my one sentence of Latin.  Again, it seemed to flow today.  Based on past experience I’ll hit an impossible head-slapper tomorrow, but today.  All right.

I’m in my second week of rest for my patella-femoral syndrome.  I’ll start back on the workouts on Monday.  I’ll see how, or whether, this helped.

Been watching House of Cards on Netflix.  As the brave new face of television, I like it.  13 episodes up all at once.  We can watch it as we like it.  Cool.

 

Our Land and Home

Functional. Again.

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Imbolc                                                                   Cold Moon

This episode of furnace saga has ended.  The limit switch went in about ten minutes ago.  Carbon monoxide checked out ok.  Now the next episode begins.  A new furnace.  Probably.  90% efficiency or better.  Calling for estimates.  Deciding.  Installation.  Ugh.  Still, it is an opportunity to do a better job of using natural resources.  That’s a plus.

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Our Land and Home

Scattered Images

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Imbolc                                                                                 Cold Moon

Reorganizing my fragmented collection of images.  I have a method, it works, but there are a whole lot of images.  This may take a very long time.  Worth it in the end though because I will have a well organized image resource, collected by me and easily usable.

Watched Wim Wender’s “The End of Violence” last night.  Kate likes her narrative served straight up with no sides.  This  film had oblique angels and sudden turns.  She wasn’t crazy about it, but I liked it.  It was an early post-modern film.  A film about a film about violence in which the resolution of the film destroys the protagonist’s career and liberates him at the same time.  Clever, beautiful.  Well acted.  Bill Pullman.  Andie MacDowell.  Gabriel Byrne.

Looks like the critics on Rotten Tomatoes agreed with Kate for the most part.  I write these critiques before I look up the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  Sort of like translating Latin before checking with an English version.

I’m in full inside mode at the moment, not moving outside for much though I do plan to visit the grocery store this afternoon.  Cold.  And our furnace is out.  Fortunately I have my own gas stove in the study.  Centerpoint is coming today.  Could be the end for the furnace; it’s 18 years old and their life-span is 15-20 years.  Sigh.

 

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Considering the Lilies of Our Fields

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Winter                                                                  Moon of the Winter Solstice

Greens.  Peppers, especially those sweet hot peppers.  Leeks.  Garlic.  Onions.  Shallots.  Beets.  Collard greens.  Tomatoes.  Carrots.  Herbs.  Then, we’ll have the apples, plums, cherries, pears, raspberries, strawberries, goose berries, currants, wild grapes.  And honey.  That’s our plan for next year.  Most of it anyhow.  We’ll probably sneak a few things in just to see what happens.

Three or four years ago we began a gradual winding down of the flower beds as annual events, turning them gradually toward perennials following one another, growing on their own.  We have to do some major work this spring along those lines, especially the garden bed on the house side of our front path.  That one I’ll dig out, amend the soil, and replant altogether.  Gonna take out the Viburnum.  It’s never done well.

We have pruning to do yet this winter.  And I still have more trees to fell.  Winter’s a good time for both.

There is, too, the fire pit and its immediate surround.  Mark helped us on the fire pit when he was here.  This year it will become functional.

Indulging the mid-winter sport of garden planning.  An indoor prelude to the outdoor music of the growing season.

Dogs, Our Land and Home

Just Like #24

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Fall                                                                           Fallowturn Moon

Got a little wound up yesterday about anti-science.  Nothing on the plate like that today.  Just rain, or at least, drizzle.  Cool.  Gray.

Got my ax, my felling ax.  Handmade.  Handforged and sharpened.  Hand turned handle.  A simple tool.  I like that.  The kind I can understand.  After next weekend, I can get at it, too.  I have lots of woods, lots of chances to perfect my technique while getting aerobic exercise and upper body resistance work.

Gertie.  Like Adrian  Peterson.  A torn ACL.  Yes, her  ruptured disk has healed under prednisone therapy, but on physical examination her knee joint moved more than it should.  Probably a small tear that became big.

Interestingly, our vet, Roger Barr, says they never see torn ACL’s in sight hounds, our usual breeds:  Whippets, Irish Wolfhounds, Salukis, Pharaoh Hounds.  Their ACL, he says, is like a cord.

Gertie, though, our adopted granddog, is a German Short Hair, a breed that apparently does not have a cord like ACL.  That means she needs surgery.  Ouch.  Kate’s right.  Gertie’s young.  She’ll get back 80-90% of her use of that leg and her atrophied muscle should, with rehab, regain some mass.  So, we combed our budget and came up with the money.  Not an insignificant amount.

A Latin tutoring session today.  Gotta go.

Bees, Dogs, Garden, Our Land and Home

Animal Ironies

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Lugnasa                                                                   Garlic Planting Moon

Animal ironies.

5 years ago when we put in the orchard Vega and Rigel took it upon themselves to shred the netaphim irrigation system.  We built a fence around the orchard to keep them out.  This was around the time I installed an electric fence to keep Rigel inside the chain link fence that goes all round our woods and most of our property.

Of late, squirrels have taken to jumping off a small ash, onto the top run of the split rail fence and from there on to our honeycrisp tree.  This was the first year the tree produced much fruit and we anticipated them.  So did the squirrels.  I saw one squirrel, with an apple twice as big as his head, leap from the apple tree onto the rail, from the rail onto the ash, all the time carrying this huge apple.  After that he disappeared among the oaks.

Also, this year seems to be a gopher year.  They come in waves, some years almost none, others they seem to be everywhere.  This is an everywhere year.  In pursuit (I think) of the underground rodent, Vega and Rigel have decided to join local 147 of the Sandhogs after seeing this picture and admiring the work of their NYC brethren.

They’re hoping for new tunneling tips from their brothers.

Also, yesterday Kate took Gertie, our German shorthair into the vet.  Her left rear leg had not gotten better after a course of antibiotics to eliminate a possible Rocky Mountain Spotted fever infection.  Gertie began her doggy life running around in the Rocky Mountains outside of Denver.

New diagnosis, confirmed on X-ray?  Spinal stenosis effecting the 10th vertebrae.  Just like her mommy.  She’s now on a course of steroids to shrink the swelling, hopefully in a month or so.

One last animal irony.  After my decision a year ago to shift bee management practices, taking only the honey the bees could produce in a year, rather than trying to overwinter the colonies, I have been forced–by the bees–back to the U’s original management strategy.

That is, buy packaged bees one year.  Watch over them and help them thrive.  Make sure they have enough honey to survive the winter.  Divide them the next spring, take all the honey from the parent colony and repeat the process with the child colonies.

Once the bees educated me to the soundness of this strategy I can now declare this year a success since I believe both colonies will go into the winter with sufficient honey.  So much for my plans.  Bees laugh at the plans of man.

Great Work, Our Land and Home

The Exurbs post 1

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Lugnasa                                                       Garlic Planting Moon

When we turn north off of our street, 153rd Ave. NW, onto Round Lake Boulevard, we pass a small white house with cheap siding and usually a car or two parked in the yard and after it comes Field’s Truck Farm.

Our house sits on a peninsula of sand that once jutted out into a lake that extended from about Coon Creek Boulevard, a mile or so south of us, to county road 18, a mile or so north of us.  That lake is now a vast peat bog except for what was, I imagine, a deeper end, separated from what was the main body of water at this time by Round Lake Boulevard, and now far along in the eutrophication process itself, Round Lake.

Field’s grows corn, radishes, potatoes, tomatoes, onions and grass on the former lake bed.  It sits about 2 feet to 3 feet lower than the rest of the land around it and lower still when compared to the height of our land.  Just beyond the main sheds and buildings, including temporary housing for migrant workers, sit row after row of wood sided trucks, old tractors, some farm implements.  As we proceed north on Round Lake various plots of the old lake bed hold radishes and grass, a commodity for which Anoka County is the chief source in the state.

A right, or eastward, turn on county road 18 goes along the northern perimeter of Field’s farm taking us to Hanson Boulevard, where we turn north once again.  On three sides of the intersection here are large plots of wetland, covered mostly in bullrushes, a favorite habitat of the Baltimore Oriole.  North on Hanson finds us traveling along fields and forest, a countryside scene familiar to anyone who knows Minnesota’s northern region.  We are, in fact, the southern, or terminal end, of the great Boreal forest that extends north from here to the tundra in Canada.

The further north we go the more wetlands, forest and lakes.  Great blue herons float across the highway from one hunting ground to another.  If it were evening, we would have to be on the watch for deer and, of late, wild turkeys.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home

See the Heads?

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Spring                                                            Beltane Moon

Coming north on Highway 10 (or east, I can never figure it out and I’ve lived up here 18 years) just before the big Lowe’s store, it’s no longer unusual to see cars parked along the side of the road, drivers clomping out through the high grass, camera with a big telephoto lens in hand.  They’re headed toward a dead tree with a big clump of sticks in a high fork.

Kate told me she saw heads there a month or so ago.  I began to look, too, and finally saw a bald eagle circling the nest, coming in for a landing, presumably with food for the young’uns.  I’ve seen a head or two though I’ve never been able to suss out whether they were chicks or adults.

We hunger for peeks into the wild world, a personal glimpse of the life and times of creatures that live among us, but we rarely see.  Over the last 18 years Kate and I have a great horned owl hooting at night in our woods.  I’ve seen him/her once, it’s giant wingspan remarkable, yet hardly ever observed.

We have opossum, raccoon, woodchuck, rabbit, deer, coyote, skinks, snakes, frogs, pileated woodpeckers, bald eagles, great blue herons, egrets, too.  These last three we see from time to time, usually in flight, though the egrets are often there, serpentine necks ready to dip suddenly into the water.  The rest, almost never.

Around Christmas tree three or four years ago, back when I still fed the birds, a opossum took to visiting the bird feeder around midnight.  I happened on him one night and checked back frequently after that.  His small pink paws looked almost like human hands and I delighted in watching him do his opossum thing.  Why?  Because it was a glimpse of a neighbor, a close neighbor, one who shared the very land I claim to own, but whom I rarely–up till then, never–saw.

This takes me back to the discussion of mystery I had here a few weeks back.  We do not need to imagine a world beyond the one to which we have ready access; there is a large, unimaginably large world shrouded in mystery that lives near us, with us, within us.  Take the billions of one-celled entities that share our bodies, help us live our lives in return for some benefit derived from the eco-system that is our body.  A mystery, certainly.

Or the baby opossum I found huddled up far inside a dead tree, doing what all prey does when confronted by snarling predators–Vega and Rigel–hiding in an inaccessible location. If Vega and Rigel hadn’t been obsessively interested in this tree, I’d never have known the opossum was there.

The morels that visited us once 18 years ago, never to return.  Or, at least never to be found.  A mystery.  This is a revelation to us, the way for us to an original relation with the universe.  And, it’s in our backyard.