Beltane Waning Flower Moon
Installing the new modem and router, as far I’ve gotten, went well. Surprised the dickens out of me. The last time I configured a router I gave up and called Geek Squad. The only time I’ve ever used them. This thing sets itself up, sort of. Now I have to configure the wireless connections on the laptop and my study computer, but it’s all working here on the computer I use for the internet, blogging and e-mails.
So, little to no down time on that account. Whaddya know?
Imbolc Waning Wild Moon
Those in the health care world, at least the care provider part of it, use medical in a way most of us lay folk don’t. They ask people they meet, especially spouses like me, if they’re “medical.” Kate payed me a compliment in this vernacular a few months back by saying, “He probably doesn’t realize how medical you are.”
What does it mean? In part it means a familiarity with the everyday life of medicine, that is, a life dealing with blood, sputum, questions about constipation or overactive bladders, stitching up wounds or struggling with life or death in a code blue type situation. I sense, too, that it refers to an acceptance of the brute facts of life. Illness and trauma happen and they happen to all sorts of people at all sorts of times in their lives.
At some point the news can be bad, “He didn’t make it.” or “You have lung cancer.” kind of bad. They also know, better than most of us, that death comes in many forms and that it comes to us all. There is a contradiction here; however, since contemporary medicine sees death as the enemy and procedural medicine as their chief weapons in this apocalyptic struggle. I use the word apocalyptic here in reference to the universe that dies with each person.
Medical also means going into the refrigerator for something to eat, taking what looks like a sandwich in a ziploc bag and discovering the container says: Specimen Transport Bag and has the red and black bio-hazard emblem with BIOHAZARD written in bold black letters against the red field.
Being medical does put you in a world different from the day to day, where we consider normality health, enjoy a certain consistency to our routine and find trauma or illness an upsetting deviation. It’s been a privilege, this past 20 years, to learn about it from the inside.
Imbolc Waning Wild Moon
“The one common experience of all humanity is the challenge of problems.” – R. Buckminster Fuller
I’ve had a lot of our common experience today. Both of my computers have gone mute. The Gateway, on which I’m writing my novel and doing art history research, I don’t mind. This one, though, on which I listen to music from Folk Alley, Skype with the grandkids and watch videos on many websites, well, I do mind.
I spent several hours today under the hood of this device, trying this, trying that. I don’t know. My main speaker doesn’t show any electricity getting to it, but I’ve checked all the connections. Frak, as they would say on Galactica. Part way Geek but not far enough. But enough about my common experience, Bucky.
We’ve had a run of weather that has not suggested much in the way of commentary for my weatherblog on the Star-Trib weatherwatcher site. High pressure has kept us stable and reasonably warm. Not a bad thing, even, perhaps, a good thing, since evaporation without rapid melting reduces the chance of flooding in the Red River Valley.
Kate has got her sewing machine humming, churning out princess regalia for the soon-to-be 4 queen in waiting of Pontiac Street. She bought 4, 4, tiara’s for Ruth today. A couple of cute outfits for the Gabester’s 2nd birthday, they’re both April babies, and a new shower head completed her longest shopping excursion since her back surgery. She’s feeling a lot better, more stamina. More sass.
Imbolc Full Wild Moon
Close to the horizon, appearing large and red, the Full Wild Moon lit the sky on my way home from the Vietnamese Restaurant where my Woolly brothers and I broke spring rolls together tonight.
The moon remains one of the under appreciated natural events, in my opinion. It goes through its phases every 30 days, passing from absent through quarter, half, then full and then disappearing in the reverse order. It’s presence in our sky affords an opportunity for beauty unsurpassed by mountain range, ocean view, desert and all we have to do is go outside at night and look up. The moon shows up in spite of city lights and its beauty shifts and changes, giving us an astronomical show free of charge, available to all.
On another note. The precocious grandchild: I received this picture, a month in advance of her fourth birthday. It came in an e-mail in which the subject line was: All by herself!
I know. Cute and a genius to boot!
Grandkids are special. Each and every one. Precious, too.
I sent them back an e-mail that read: Great! Now all she needs is her own checkbook.
Imbolc Waxing Wild Moon
Met the Grout Doctor today. Turns out he wears a yellow weatherproof jacket, very new jeans and rubber duckies. Allan came by to give us an estimate on what it would take to rehabilitate some aching tiles and bring that new installation gleam back to the steam bath. More than I’d imagined, but less than we were willing to pay, so Allan will return on Thursday to get started. Gonna give the whole shebang an acid bath. Sounds very Hannibal Lecter to me.
Fiddled with the new Panasonic camera we got today, too. The number of things it can do amaze me. It can focus on an object and then retain focus on that object as it moves. How can it do that? If you turn a little switch, it will shoot HD quality video using any of the settings it has for still photography. How can do it that? The twelve megapixels it shoots my buddy Jim Johnson tells me is just at the minimal range of what magazines expect in photos. Well, at least the camera’s good enough for the pro mags. I haven’t shot any images with it yet. I want to devote a day or so to using all the various gadgets, learn how it performs.
Also put together an 8 object tour for next Friday, the public tour Highlights: Art from 1600-1850. My theme is the Grand Tour, which was popular in that time frame. In my Grand Tour though we will visit all but the Australian continent, while retaining the traditional focus on European art of France, Italy and the Low Countries. I’ve begun to use the new Grove Dictionary of Art. It has depth and breadth. It taught me today about the Grand Tour and the various phases through which it passed before finally dying out as the middle-class began to travel more. Just wasn’t the same with all those shopkeepers in the Uffizi.
Put in more words to the Unmaking. I’m close to the middle, maybe a bit passed it. We’ll see how it is after I finish and it sits on the shelf for a while. Then I’ll have a better view of it. Right now it’s so close to me, I can’t tell anything.
And Vega came inside limping tonight. Limping makes us take deep breaths, because it can mean the onset of cancer, has meant the onset of cancer in at least three of our dogs. On the other hand it might be an injury. We hope.
Imbolc Waxing Wild Moon
As the Great Wheel turns, as the earth flies in its unimaginably long ellipse around the sun, we go on pretending in a terra-centric universe. The sun rises? The constellations rotate through the sky? The moon rises and sets?
It’s no wonder the Catholic church was so reluctant to buy it. I mean, who was this guy Galileo and this other guy Copernicus compared to the Church Fathers?
Woolly Buddy Tom Crane surprised me at our recent retreat on a matter related to this. I’d read a New Yorker article about the execution of a man in Texas convicted of arson in the death of his children. The point of the article was to demonstrate that an innocent man had died as a result of our use of capital punishment. It did this by using a renowned arson investigator who critiqued the arson investigators who sealed the man’s fate. (I just did a quick look and I can’t find the article right now. If I find it, I’ll post a link here.)
Anyhow, I mentioned it to Tom, a forensic engineer, and he said, “Oh, yeah. Evidence-based science. That’s we talk about all the time.” He went on to say that it was a great tragedy.
What struck me though was this notion of evidence-based science. My first reaction was, is there any other kind? Then, I realized: intelligent design, climate change deniers, any time ideology substitutes conviction for evidence, we risk non-evidence based science.
It was Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum who made the wonderful analogy about method. If, he said, your method chose the wrong path for you on which to run, running faster would only take you further from your goal. He proposed that method was all and that the empirical method was the right one for science. This idea did not catch on overnight and there are still realms it has not penetrated, most notably of late of course, the GW Bush Whitehouse.
Winter Waning Moon of Long Nights
I went on the great errand run this morning. To the pharmacy for drugs. To the jewelers for two watch batteries and to leave a pocket watch for repair. Then over to the Spectacle Shoppe to have them repair the glasses that Vega bit. Mildly unsatisfactory, but workable. After that spectacle, all the way over to Lights on Broadway to buy unusually sized bulbs for this and that. A completed circle then brought me back home. Maybe 40 miles or so. Strange.
There were the small oblong pills, tan in color, containing a chemical the somehow regulates the uptake of serotonin in my brain, a pill that I read recently doesn’t help me. Not sure about that, so I’ll keep on taking them. Tiny batteries, smaller than the nail on my little finger, power watches for years, a triumph of miniaturization; yet, the watch I sent off for repair, made a hundred years ago or so, works, as watches had for centuries by quick tweaks of the thumb and forefinger. These glasses, plastic frames and round, cost almost as much as the lenses within them, lenses that correct my vision so I can read highway signs before I’m on top of them. Then the small lamps that light my workspace, halogen bulbs, but special and difficult to find, fan lights also difficult to find. These items replace the candles or gas light or kerosene lanterns of not that long ago.
The length of the journey seemed outsized to me until I began to realize the stunning technological distance each separate product represented. That they are available to me in so small an ambit is the amazing thing. That they are available at all depends on the brain and its mysterious companion, consciousness. Every day is a wonder, even the mundane.
Winter Waning Moon of Long Nights
One of the reasons the web continues to fascinate me, and it does, lies in its capacity to surprise me. I read an article in the Economist about Internet Archives. This is an astonishing effort spearheaded by one man to make the worlds information available on the web. You may have heard of the Wayback machine, a way of finding lost or neglected websites, but this project has so much more. It has a lot of live music, an especially active Grateful Dead collection. It has moving images, including commercials, a quick entre to marketing and cultural cues of the near past. It also has an incredible number of texts, complete and free. Worth a look.
I’ve not had a tour since mid-December. While I enjoy the down time, I do feel disconnected from the museum. There’s a tendency, living this far out, to hunker down, particularly in bad weather. I’m not as comfortable as I used to be heading out in snowy, icy conditions and that contributes to the hibernation. As I’ve written before, this all helps the writing, getting into a rhythm, focus. That’s true, but I miss the connection with both the art and my fellow docents. They have become an important part of my life, one of the social pillars for me. So, I look forward to getting back at it in February.
Winter New Year’s Day Full Moon of Long Nights -11
Russia to Plan Deflection of Asteroid From Earth 
(Apophis* the meteor Russia plans to deflect)
I read about the Russian’s plan the other day and a bizarre thought crossed my mind. I’ve watched several different asteroid approaches the earth movies and brave scientists or working class astronauts save the day.
Here’s the crazy idea: what if an intended deflection does not work and has the unintended consequence of pushing an asteroid closer to us rather than further away. In other words what if the big asteroid strike comes from human error not bad like orbital mechanics?
As these things move from science fiction movie into tomorrow’s news, we have to face our fallibility. Just sayin’
*Known in scientific circles as both 2004 MN4 and 99942 Apophis, this 885-foot-long space rock has a fairly good chance of impacting the Earth within a quarter century..
After making a breathtakingly close pass on Friday the 13th in April 2029 — less than 10 percent of the distance between Earth and the moon — Apophis will have about a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2036 when it swings back around.
To better understand Apophis’ danger to Earth, some scientists advocate sending a transmitter to the asteroid’s surface to better track its movement.
Winter Full Moon of Long Nights
“Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.” – Benjamin Franklin
I want to weigh in on two critical debates germane to today and tomorrow. First, the blue moon. Current definition says a blue moon is the second full moon in the same month. Since we had the full Wolf Moon at the beginning of December and now have the full Moon of Long Nights, this is a blue moon. Therefore, anything you do over the next three days can be once in a. (astronomically speaking the moon is full for only a second, but the human eye can’t distinguish the difference among the night before, the night of, and the night after, so I say three days.)
Yes, Virginia, there is a second and older definition of a blue moon.* I agree with the infoplease folks, however, that it is fussy for contemporary purposes and not as applicable to current life. So, I agree that this is a blue moon. Go for it.
Second debate I noticed in the newspaper letters to the editor. A man claimed that decades receive their designation from multiples of the number 10: 2010, 2020 and so on. Therefore, he claims our decade will not end this year, but a year from today. He has forgotten two things. First, the first decade is ’00–pronounced to rhyme with naughty. That decade runs from 2000-2009. Why? Well, as the dictionary definition says, a decade is ten years. Count’em up. Now the question is, at the end of the century, will we have an extra year? Nope. The 90’s will end in 2099 since December 31st, 2099 marks the day before 2100. Doesn’t matter to me since time will have a much different quality for me then anyhow.
May 2008’s blue moon qualified as such under an older definition, which is recorded in early issues of the Maine Farmer’s Almanac. According to this definition, the blue moon is the third full moon in a season that has four full moons. Why would one want to identify the third full moon in a season of four full moons? The answer is complex, and has to do with the Christian ecclesiastical calendar.
Some years have an extra full moon—13 instead of 12. Since the identity of the moons was important in the ecclesiastical calendar (the Paschal Moon, for example, used to be crucial for determining the date of Easter), a year with a thirteenth moon skewed the calendar, since there were names for only 12 moons. By identifying the extra, thirteenth moon as a blue moon, the ecclesiastical calendar was able to stay on track.