Category Archives: Weather +Climate

Minnesota, Weather +Climate

Just Like Canada

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                                             Waning Honey Extraction Moon

The nights have grown cooler.  The August moon has begun to fade away, and the September moon will not come for a bit.  Dark nights approach, a time for the occult.

Minnesota, Mark says, feels like Canada and the Twin Cities feel like Canadian cities.  The bright blue August sky, the changed slant of the sun’s rays, the occasional cottony fluff high above us all combine, with cool nights and the gradually decreasing highs to put us in the same northern space as Ontario, our nearest Canadian neighbor.

At our best, we are like Canada.  We believe in health care for all people, a good education and jobs that require education.  Winter helps define us and, hey, hockey is big.  We have an openness to our governance that seems to be true in Canada, too.

We share some totem animals, too:  moose, raven, lynx, wolf.

If Minnesota could be the next province, it would fit right in.

Asia, Family, Sport, Weather +Climate

Running Aces Harness Track

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                          Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

“Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul.” – Horace

Horace has an early version here of wherever you go, there you are.  My brother has carried the same soul with him from the soi of Bangkok to the exurbs of the Twin Cities.

Mark, Kate and I took off through the beautiful backroads of northern Anoka county and made it, after a couple of years of talking about it, to the Running Aces Harness Track.  I’m not kidding about northern Anoka county, much of it is as interesting and as attractive as the northern part of the state.  There are large stretches of marsh land and forest, small lakes, pine trees and surprisingly few development thanks to a generally high water table.  Driving back in the night it was exactly like traveling on county roads in Cook County.

Running Aces.  A subculture, harness racing has a lovely track here with plenty of seating and parimutuel betting.  When you drive up, there is a big port cochere, much like the entrance to a resort hotel. On the benches around the curve of the drive a man sat hunched over smoking, his peroxide blonde hair mussed, as if he had been running his hands through it.  Just inside the glass doors a floor to ceiling painting commemorates Minnesota’s harness racing legend, Dan Patch.

Floor to ceiling glass doors allow a glimpse of the harness track off to the left, it’s gravel covered surface banked and curved.   In the middle of a half moon layout and up on a raised floor was the off track betting area where races throughout the country showed up on several flat screens mounted one next to the other.  A woman with bottle red hair, a jean-jacket and sequined cowboy boots passed betting slips to a middle-aged man with an impressive paunch.  They studied them, trying to read the runes.

At the right lies the card room.  Several Asian folks played Pai Gow Poker, an Americanized version of a game originally played with Mahjhong tiles.  There were black jack tables, the James Bond favorite, baccarat, a Mississippi river boat table and several, perhaps 12 or 14 tables filled with 8 players each engaged in Texas Hold’em, the dominant form of poker played on the professional circuit.

We passed those by and headed out to the track. (Though I snuck inside later and checked them both out.)

The betting windows have wood fronts and look much like old bank teller cubicles, save for the How to Bet sign posted below.  The betting windows and three lines of chairs occupy an enclosed area that has a full view of the track, but has either A/C or heat depending on the circumstances.  Outside there were tables, rows of chairs, a few benches right in front of the track and a restaurant with a patio area.

Kate and Mark had purchased a racing program while I parked and they had it out, trying to read it, figure out the symbols and the information about horses in each of 8 races on the card for the evening.  Post time was at 7 pm.  We missed the first race, but saw the second.  A white Cadillac has a long starting gate arranged like dragon fly wings while extended.  The Cadillac takes off and the horses trot up as the Cadillac heads toward the starting point about half way around the large, 5/8ths mile track.  When the Cadillac hits the starting point the dragon fly wings retract and the horses take off in a flying start.

Tonight a 3/4 Honey Extraction Moon sat directly over the far straight away as the sky went from blue to dark blue to bruised red then a clear night.  The air temp was about 68 degrees.  A perfect night for racing.

We didn’t understand much of what was said and even less of what was written, but we did see a couple of races where a horse came from back in the field to win at the end.  I noticed a guy in jeans and a windbreaker come to full attention as the horses pounded down the main straight headed for the finish line.  What happened mattered to him.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

A Season Bent Toward Darkness and Cold

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                Waxing Honey Extraction Room

Since March I’ve driven home at 8 pm, each Sunday, from Tai Chi at the corner of Hennepin and Franklin.  As March receded and April arrived, then May and June, the evening drive had light, then light in abundance, with the sun setting well after I got home.  Now we are in Lughnasa, a full six weeks past the Summer Solstice.  This last Sunday night the sun had begun to fall behind the trees as I headed toward Highway 252.  The long downward slide toward the Winter Solstice is well underway, the days growing shorter and the nights longer.

This is my time, now, the season bent toward darkness and cold even while the heat of summer continues to swell the fruits of the garden.  I can already feel the movement inward and down, the contemplative months reaching out from the future, beckoning my soul.

Once the harvest begins in earnest, which it did here in July with the garlic crop, the gardening year moves toward senescence, ripening proceeds the coming of brown withered stalks and leaves turning already to dust.  Nature puts the bounty just before the fallow time.  It is the fallow time though, the time after the sensuality of seed fertility has yielded to summer and produced crops, crops that finish the plants purpose for that season at least, in many cases forever, that leaves room for the imagination, writing its dreams on stubbled fields, carving its fantasies in clouds pushed down from the north, opening the heart to its own rhythm.

(Allison found this Van Gogh drawing.  It even has the hint of melancholy the season brings in its train.)

Asia, GeekWorld, Humanities, Weather +Climate

9 Pins

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                                   Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Woke up this first day of Lughnasa to Knickerbockers playing 9 pins and throwing strike after strike after strike.  A nap on a thundery summer day has a luxurious feel, velvet, cushy.  Gertie spent the nap at the foot of our bed.  Both she and Rigel have mild ceraunophobia, shrinking when the lightning tears a hole in the sky and air spills into the vacuum.

This morning I translated, sort of, an entire verse of Pentheus’ story.  When I say sort of, I mean I’m reasonably sure about the translation in terms of Latin grammar, but not sure what it means.  Greg will help me clear that up on Friday.  I’ve taken almost three weeks off and it showed.  The work went like slogging threw a marsh, progress, but with a lot of effort.

Speaking of effort, I’m now practicing Tai Chi with more regularity, something I’d also let slide over the last month or so.  Tai Chi requires muscle memory so the practitioner can concentrate on the form, then become relaxed, totally part of the movement.  Some parts have gotten laid down in my neuronal pathways, but, so too have some errors.  Sigh.  Yesterday’s practice, done in the same dance studio over the former Burch Pharmacy had characteristics of Birkam Yoga.  Hot and sweaty.

Got a call from Carlson Toyota this morning.  Our Rav4 will have to take a drive of 400 miles to get here, but it will be here tomorrow.  The color, white, and the interior, beige, were not what Kate wanted, but they were available.  The Tundra, Kate’s faithful companion for 11 years + will get sold to a scrapyard for $500.  An undignified end for such a good friend, like the glue factory.

Politics, Weather +Climate

A More Violent World

Leave a comment

Mid-Summer                                                                          Waning Honey Flow Moon

A violent, but quick storm blew through this morning, sheets of rain and bending trees, water flowing in the gutters; in it I saw the world that is to come and is now, heat and deluge followed by tornadoes and flooding, the world we have wrought and one whose future looks only more chaotic and wild.  It is not yet a world impossible for human kind, but we seem bent on creating one.  In Death of the Liberal Class Chris Hedges says the only way our communitarian values will survive is if we hunker down and ride out the dramatic changes ahead, all the while resisting the oligarchy and its all consuming maw.

While I tend to agree with Hedges’ diagnosis and his prognosis, the optimist in me, the non-doomsday guy wants to keep struggling, trying to push our collectivity towards a sustainable future.  A piece of me wants to hang on to the political actions I take now, the measures Kate and I have already taken, not to head off in what might be a monastic and quietist direction.  Not sure right now how I’ll make a decision to change course, but it feels like I may be headed there.  A more violent storm still comin’.

We intended to spread mulch today, but canceled because of the storm.  Maybe tomorrow.  A good day to rest, collect ourselves for the week ahead.

Art and Culture, Politics, Weather +Climate

Life of Riley

Leave a comment

Mid-Summer                                                        Waning Honey Flow Moon

On Monday I started the clay class.  Monday evening the Woollies made monoprints at Highpoint Print Co-op.  Last night was the History of Graphic Design lecture on graphic design, 1950 to the present and tonight Justin and I meet to discuss the Sierra Club’s legislative process and other matters related to the club’s political work.  This has been a demanding week and next week won’t be easier with guests coming.  Ah, the quiet life of the Golden Years.

Moorehead was the hottest reporting station on EARTH yesterday.  A dewpoint of 88 made the heat index 134.  Yikes.  Thank you, global warming.

More clay today.  More wedging, centering, drawing up cylinders and, I hope, bowls.

GeekWorld, Travel, Weather +Climate, Writing

Ancientrails

Leave a comment

Mid-Summer                                                     Full Honey Flow Moon

Talking with Mark today it occurred to me, for the first time, that part of what was going on with him, maybe a lot of it, involved repatriation.  So, I looked it up on google.  Turns out repatriate adjustment has many facets, most of them difficult to integrate, often leading to feelings of isolation, alienation and just plain old bewilderment.  Especially when you return suddenly, as Mark did, from twenty + years abroad, the country of his birth has changed.  A lot.  In subtle and not so subtle ways.  I’m just beginning to understand this phenomenon, but as a brother and as a student of anthropology, it fascinates me and gives me considerable pause.

Last night, during a violent thunder storm, our power went out and, presumably, our generator kicked in.  But, as life goes, at 4:45 am, our alarm decided it had to begin chirping.  And chirping.  Not the wailing kind of all hell’s broken loose kinda noise, but a persistent annoying chirp.  After muffling it and going back to sleep, Kate got up and called the company.  We had to replace the back up battery in the unit’s central box.  This is a twelve-volt battery with sulfuric acid like your car battery.  Who knew?  Anyhow the new one now rests where the faded one was and all is well with the alarm system.

My History of Graphic Design course project, redesigning Ancientrails, has got me thinking about why I do this.  Do I do this for you, the reader, or for me?  I have kept diaries and journals since the early 70’s.  They vary in systematics and consistency although over the last 20 years I’ve kept regular journals on matters from spirituality to art history, reading the classics to daily experiences, thoughts.  Ancientrails extends and continues those, which were private, so in that sense this is a public journal, but a continuation of a private one.

It is not, however, like the private one, unread.  Readership varies from peaks of around 200 a day to a more average 50.  There were some 1100 visits this month.  A small number for most websites, infinitesimal really, but considerably more than the one who read my private journals.  Having readers changes the content.  I’ve made four of five gaffes that have gotten me into hot water with family, lost me a job and caused certain allies to wonder about my discretion.  Each one of those events creates a certain amount of self-censorship, as does the possibility that anybody might read any of this at any time.

Ancientrails is also a document on the world wide web.  That means html, tags, pictures, news, links.  These features create a more accessible journal, a deeper journal with ties to other webpages and direct access to information about a topic.  Not sure where all this goes quite yet.  Still thinking.  If you have any input, leave me a comment.  Thanks.

Politics, Weather +Climate

The Deal. The Old Deal, Not A Big Deal.

Leave a comment

Mid-Summer                                                               Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Apres deluge.  Drove into St. Paul this morning, a long chunk of the ride behind a pick-up with Louisiana plates.  Felt like the bayou during the tail end of a hurricane.  Driving in Minnesota seems to perplex our citizens when there is a significant amount of precipitation.  Makes the whole driving experience a little like pin ball.

Big political news.  A deal.  Done on the backs of the poor and the K-12 education system.  Brilliant.  A Republican coup for which they need to be held responsible come 2012.  Of course, any election results next year may have a null effect if the world ends in December before the victors can take office.  I’m not counting on the end of the world however.

The Star-Tribune ran an article that said, and I believe it to be true, that the Republican focus has shifted from balanced budgets to smaller government.  Evidence for this in the article was the Republican agreement to a Federal budget that didn’t balance for three decades.  The same tone has sharpened and polarized the budget debate here in Minnesota.  To the extent that this focus remains and clarifies for Republican pols the situation becomes a struggle over the meaning and purpose of government.

It is arguable though, and I would agree with it, that electoral politics are so broken in the United States that our two parties are twiddle dum and twiddle dee.  That is, both parties have become lapdogs for the corporate oligarchy that runs America, bending policy and legislation to suit the flood of money that washes over each election cycle and that gets rinsed in the legislative session that follows.  Finally, the public is hung out to dry.

Still, I find it important to engage party politics because there are so many short term issues effected by the differences between dum and dee.  Read the details of the budget compromise and you’ll see the kind of things I’m talking about.

To engage party politics as a long term political solution, however, will not get us where we need to go.  We need to pick up the banner of economic justice and push equity in every venue we can.

Art and Culture, Dogs, Weather +Climate

Second Life

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                      New Garlic Moon

Rigel has spent the morning with a very worried look.  She doesn’t like thunder and barks at it to tell it to go away.  That doesn’t work well.

She’s not nearly as reactive as Tira, one of our Irish Wolfhounds, who somehow had it in her head that she was safest inside a vehicle.  That meant if a window in either the truck or the Celica had been left open, she’d jump inside.  My Celica still has her clawmarks in the upholstery.

In the wee hours of one morning I found her hanging worn out over the top of a chain link gate we used to keep the big dogs out of the garage.  She’d jumped it, but gotten stuck.  In her frenzy she ripped the truck license plate, which was within reach, to shreds and scratched up the truck hood.  The license plate cut her lip and there was blood everywhere.  I thought she was dead.

Running over to her, I lifted her off the gate–not easy, since even the smallest Wolfhound bitch weighs in at 150 pounds–with sheer adrenalin.  She struggled to her feet and looked very happy to see me.

Stayed up a bit late last night working on my avatar in Second Life.  Inspired by the presentation yesterday I decided to check out a virtual world.  There’s a learning curve to it.  So far my avatar, Quam, a Latin word for why, has ash blond hair and is wearing a get up cobbled together from an array of clothing options, none of which really suit me.  In this regard a typical male, however, Quam does not want to spend all his time figuring out how to be a clothes horse so his current outfit is good enough for now.

Quam learned how to walk, fly, push things, see up close, how to chat, how to change his clothes, but his meat package real world avatar got sleepy and had to go to bed.  Not sure I’ll stick with Quam, but if I figure out how to do it, I’ll get a snapshot of him and post it here.

Here’s the weird part.  I had dreams of flying and of going to the tops of buildings to scout the terrain.  I did both of these things in Second Life.  Hmmm….

Asia, Family, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Weather +Climate

Monkey. Still. But, Making Progress.

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                     Waning Last Frost Moon

Whoa.  84.  Sometimes I think of the seasons as if we were on a moveable patch of earth.  On a day like today our patch got shifted on the seasonal moving belt to about Georgia.  Last week we were parked above the Canadian border for a while.  Who knows where we’ll go next.

I have passed the 50% mark in reading Monkey:  Journey to the West.   That means I’m somewhere around 1,000+ pages in.  Hard to tell on the Kindle, though I know precisely how far I am in percentages.  This book is funny, wise, rollicking, supernatural and just a bit cynical.  Well, maybe a lot.  Yesterday I bought a book that features English works on the Chinese classics.  It has a lot to say about these favorites, but I’ve still found no commentary that helps me get, say, the wood, water, earth, fire, metal sequence or the names of some characters or the works referenced as if everyone knew them.  Next up, probably next year, is The Dream of the Red Chamber, the best of the six, in the opinion of several writers.

While hunting for a picture to go with this post, I discovered that Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman graphic novels and several fantasy novels started, back in March, on a screenplay for a trilogy based on Monkey.  Should be interesting.

If you feel like you have the time, both Monkey and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms will more than repay the effort.  There’s a different culture at work here, sometimes a radically different one, but, at other times, radically similar.  That’s the power of reading works from other cultures, insights you can’t get any other way.

A slow day.  Business meeting in the morning.  We scheduled a couple of days in July, post Kate’s second hip surgery, to go over our expenditures in the first six months of retirement, check them against our budget, see where we need to adjust.  Big fun.