Category Archives: Weather +Climate

Asia, Bees, Cinema and Television, Weather +Climate

Departures

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                             Waxing Artemis Moon

Spoke with the folks at Dadant.  They found my order and have begun to ship the honey extractor and other parts of the Ranger extraction kit.  5 boxes from different locations.  Sounds like they’ll arrive before I have to pull the honey.

A wet, cooler morning with a hot day later and tomorrow to follow.  We continue on our stormy way.  Minnesota, that’s right, our Minnesota, leads the nation in tornadoes this year.  By a lot.  We have had 50 more than either Texas or Oklahoma.  Maybe tornado alley has found me and wants me back.  Paul Douglas says it’s due to a blocking slump in the jet stream that holds weather patterns here that would normally be further south.

Kate and I watched a Japanese movie the other night, “Departures.”  In it a young cellist gives up the cello after his orchestra dissolves.  He and his wife move back to his home in a small town by the ocean.  There he applies for a job listing seeking a person to help with departures.  A misprint.  It should have read departed.

I don’t know how common the rite of casketing is in Japan, but it involves, in essence, performance of what we consider an undertakers job (the cosmetic part, not the embalming which seems not to be part of the job) in front of the mourners.  The body is then placed in a coffin, also called encoffining, and transported to the crematorium where the equivalent of a graveside service occurs.  The whole process seems humane, accepting of death and the reality of grief.

As with most Japanese movies I’ve seen that have funerals, this one has a comedic side, too.

The movie pulls the heart, not in contrived ways, but in its honest depiction of difficult human moments, sensitively portrayed.  Highly recommended.  Available on Netflix.

Health, Minnesota, Politics, Weather +Climate

Gentle Politicians, Start Your Engines!

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                  Waxing Artemis Moon

Still feeling a bit punk, but I can breathe and I did get outside, pulled some weeds.  Much better.

As August hits mid-point, we’re still experiencing high dewpoints and temperature, at least for us. Local meteorologist Paul Douglas compared today’s weather to the Congo. Land of 10,000 weather extremes.

Huh.  Just occurred to me, the land of 10,000 lakes.  When the Chinese say the 10,000 things, they mean the whole universe.  10,000 is a favorite number among Chinese writers and thinkers; as I interpret it, it means more than you can imagine.  My understanding of the reason for selecting 10,000 in our state slogan is that it “sounds like more than 16,000,” the rough count of Minnesota’s lake sized water bodies.  Whoever made the decision was right.

With the completion of the state’s first ever August 10th primary we stand now on the precipice of another silly season, campaign ads clogging the air waves, phone calls to support him or her and mailers in the box.  Kate and I, because we both have the appellation Dr. in certain places, often receive mailings to gauge the feelings of Republicans like us in our district.  I vacillate between pitching them and sending in disinformation.

In some ways the electoral process is politics at its purest, retail politics in which candidates use whatever means they can afford to convince individual voters to fill in the oval for them in November.  In another way the electoral process  is politics at its most foul as candidate use whatever means they can afford to distance themselves from their opponents:  attack ads, push polling, deceptive mailings, outright lies and, the worst of all, in my opinion, pandering.

Let me give you an example of pandering.  Tim Pawlenty entered Minnesota politics as a centrist right Republican.  As he attempts to position himself for a Presidential bid (Yike!), he keeps edging closer to nutty right wing tricorn wearing  Tea-Hee Party folks.

“Gov. Tim Pawlenty has rejected a yearslong effort to update Minnesota’s rules for lakeshore development.

Pawlenty says the revisions overreach, and undermine local control and property rights. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported Friday that he has sent regulators back to the drawing board.”  Fox News (sic) Website.

Quick now.  Who builds oversized lakehomes right up to the edge?  Right, your neighbor on Social Security and all those folks recently tossed off GAMC?  Not hardly.  Folks who receive $40,000,000 severance packages like the naughty CEO of HP, that’s who.

Aging, Family, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Whew

Leave a comment

Summer                                      Waxing Grandchildren Moon

OK.  This will be last of this.  But.  Kate reminded me of her surgery on June 30th.  Which preceded preparation for and the arrival and stay of Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe followed then, as I said yesterday, by our too inclusive preparations for the Woollys. No wonder I wore out yesterday.  Let my prop it up and keep going inner coach have the day off.  Better rested and more clear-eyed today.  Ready for ancient Rome.

These two paragraphs came my way in the last two days.  Their conjunction speaks for itself.

“Speaking of heat, NOAA reports that June was the hottest  month in recorded history, worldwide. That is the fourth
month in a row of record warmth for planet Earth. June also marked the 304th consecutive month “with a global temperature above the 20th century average.” The last month with below-normal temperature worldwide? February, 1985. 2010
temperatures from January to June were the warmest ever recorded for both land and ocean temperatures, worldwide. Stay tuned.”
Check out Paul’s blog startribune.com/pauldouglas

(I imagine it’s photoshopped, but still…)

Mark Odegard found this quote in a book he’s reading about walking with caribou:

Henry Beston in the beginning of book.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of wild animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, greatly err, For the animal shall not be measured by man, In a world older and more complex than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethrern, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Aging, Dogs, Family, Health, Memories, Travel, Weather +Climate

Route 66

Leave a comment

Summer                                           Waning Strawberry Moon

Rain beats down and Rigel whines.  We’ve had a couple of dogs with phobias about thunder.  Tira was the most problematic.  She preferred to climb through open car windows in the garage for some reason.  I still have claw marks on the Celica’s leather interior and the Tundra has scratch marks from a frenzied Tira trying to climb the gate closing off the back from the garage and getting hung up, her paws scraping on the hood and her teeth gripping the license plates.  Rigel is not that bad.  Thank god.

Kate’s tired tonight, her muscles aching from a lot of walking and standing.  She’s pushing it, but it’s good.  The doc said no limits, so the more she works it, the faster her muscle tone will firm up and her stamina increase.  Having the hip replaced takes general anesthetic, deep tissue and bone bruising and swelling, so painful  trauma occurs from a bodily point of view, but from a psychic perspective she can tell already that it feels better, way better.

We had our money meeting, discussing the coming of the kids and grandkids next week.  Makes me think of the trips my family used to take from Alexandria, Indiana to Oklahoma City.  Route 66 covered most of the territory, taking us, I remember, right through downtown St. Louis, a bit fearsome for small town folks.  Mom would go in to the motels, inspect their rooms and give them a passing grade or tell us to get back in the car.

Along the way the barns had signs for Meramec Caverns.  Don’t believe I ever saw them.  Sort of the Wall Drug equivalent on Route 66.

There were games involving license plates, 20 questions, word finds and generally gazing out the window as the Illinois, then Missouri landscape rolled by.  I still enjoy that part of traveling, sitting by the window, watching the scenery.  One of the reason I like train travel.

Art and Culture, Bees, Family, Friends, Great Work, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Hooray for the Red, White and Blue

Leave a comment

Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

Hooray for the red, white and blue.  That is, the blueberries, the raspberries and the white clover among which I picked them this morning.  Worked outside for an hour and a half, moving an outdoor table back to its original place on the brick patio outside our garden doors, a plastic table into the honey house for some  more space.  Can’t set the smoker on it though.

(Georgia O’Keefe, 1931)

This all has two purposes, getting the house nicer and in better shape for our own use as the summer begins to take up residence and for our guests in July:  Jon, Jen, Gabe and Ruth and the Woolly Mammoths.  I also moved some potted plants around and am mulling painting a post I stuck in concrete a few years ago.  Painting it some bright, contrasty color that will make the green pop.

Only 83 this morning but the dew point’s already at 67.  Glad the bee work got done yesterday.  On the bees.  The president of the Beekeeper’s Association lives in Champlin (near us, sort of ) and has offered to come over himself after the fourth.  I’ll be glad to have his experience looking in on my colonies.

While I picked mustard greens this morning, I noticed a bee making a nectar run on a clover blossom near my hand. “Keep up the good work.  Glad to see you out here and hard at work,” I told him, rather her.  She jumped at the sound of my voice.  One of those workers best left to her own initiative.

Haven’t heard yet from Kate but the plan is for her to come home today at some point.

Politics, US History, Weather +Climate, Writing

What is the Midwest?

Leave a comment

Summer                                           Waning Strawberry Moon

A focus on America hits me about the time the summer heats up.  Something about the lazy, hazy, crazy days tickle my American gene. ( apologies to Carreen, but it’s the adjective of my youth )  I’ll read a novel or history of the American Revolution, look more deeply into some aspect of the civil war, that sort of thing.  Not this year.

May be my immersion in ancient Rome, Kate’s surgery, the bees, the garden, I don’t know, but this year I haven’t got that Fourth of July feeling.   And here we are almost on the date.  My firecracker lilies have more patriotic oomph than I do this year.

Over the last year I’ve watched the HBO series, True Blood.  Yes, I have a thing for horror novels and horror movies that don’t involve slashing, screaming college girls and chainsaws, which, admittedly, pares the crop down pretty far.  OK, there may be the occasional screamer in true blood, but they are adults for the most part.

Anyhow, True Blood is Southern Gothic.  It trips the divisional biases about the south, the bayous and the culture of Louisiana which Ann Rice exploited in her novels like Interview With The Vampire.

Which leads me to my point.  Whew.  Took long enough.  The culture of the south, or the sub-cultures we describe as Southern are well known:  confederate flag, shotgun, pick-up truck with rust or plantation life with mint juleps and chattel slavery or a misty Cavalier life with belles and beaus courting among live oak trees and traveling to Savannah or New Orleans or Mobile.  You know.  The stereotypes, and that’s all they are, are clearly formed and ready for plucking in a fictional setting.

If, however, you wanted to draw on similarly clearly formed stereotypes, let’s say archetypes in both cases to get off that word, of the North, or the Midwest, my home for all my life, what would they be?  I’m not sure.  Farms with cows.  Basketball.  Factories and factory workers.  None of it has the same, pardon the expression, bite.  This is the kind of thing my American jones often picks up on and runs with it.  Maybe I’m not all that far off from the fourth of July after all.

Aging, Art and Culture, Family, Garden, Weather +Climate

Here Comes The Sun

Leave a comment

Summer                                       Waning Strawberry Moon

After weeding Kate and I took off for lunch–at Benihanas, not nearly as good as our own, much closer, Osaka–and a visit to Lights on Broadway.  A bit of dithering about where the order was, where the paperwork was, who was on third and who was on second I picked up the track lighting fixtures that had fritzed out on us.  Nice to have light the full length of the kitchen table now.

Then, a nap.  A long nap.  Two hours.  I got up earlier than I wanted to this morning thanks to dogs barking.  Even earlier tomorrow.

After so many days of rain, a very soggy June, we have a run of yellow suns on all the weather forecast sites through Sunday.  Tonight the temperature should hit 46.  Good.

Kate has no anxiety about the procedure tomorrow.  She does, she says, “surgery well.”  I’d have to agree.  The back surgery was in January and that’s been behind us for several months.  I still want her out of the hospital as fast as possible since hospitals have a lot of iatrogenic disease and a lot of it is very intractable, super bugs, all studied up on the antibiotic armamentarium.

The perennial beds now look like a gardener lives here.  That feels better.

Spoke with a woman about a spirituality in art tour for July 8th.  It’ll be my first tour in a while.  Looking forward to it.

Aging, Family, Garden, permaculture, Weather +Climate

The Day Before

Leave a comment

Summer                                              Waning Strawberry Moon

A beautiful day.  64 degrees with a dew point of 41.  Got more weeding done.  Finished the second tier, went after some returnees on the first tier and got through much of  the third tier.

While doing this it occurred to me that gardening is the process of removing plants willing to grow where you are and replacing them with plants that don’t want to grow where you are. An odd task. Permaculture is an attempt to turn this process on its head and utilize plants that want to be where you are, grouped in companion plantings of plants that compliment and co-operate.  Makes sense if you think of it.

Kate’s out doing a bit of last minute gardening, too.  She straightened up her large table downstairs and I’ve printed a copy of her health care directive.  Throwing a bag together and taking two special showers to disinfect are the next big tasks.  Then, around 5:30 am or so tomorrow, we’ll take off for Fairview Hospital, the East Building.  We’ve discovered that Kate’s procedure is not until 8:00 a.m, so I’m going to get her settled, then go home.

Garden, Weather +Climate

Weed

Leave a comment

Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

Nice weather for weeding so I took the opportunity and finally got into the second and third tiers of our back perennial garden.  Out go the raspberry canes.  Out go the stinging nettles.  Out go the dogwood suckers.  Out go the switch grass and and other weedy plants.  In stays the poison ivy (one small plant) because I kill them.  Out goes the slumped daffodil stems.  I’m not finished, but it already looks a hell of a lot better.

Kate planted marigolds this morning in the kitchen garden and in long narrow window boxes.  This all nourished by last nights meal from the garden and the currant jam this morning.

Paul Douglas had a big happy sun on the forecast for today, but so far all I’ve seen is  clouds.  I’m glad.  It kept the air cool enough for a good session outside.

Bees, Dogs, Great Work, Health, Weather +Climate

Kidneys and Bee Stings

Leave a comment

Summer                                Full Strawberry Moon

The dew-point and the temperature are one, 67.  That means a cloud hangs not above us but around us.  It’s a drippy, soggy Saturday fit for neither garden work nor bees.  And I have work to do in both places.  There’s always Latin.

Hilo now takes naps with me every day and sits upstairs with me longer at night.  I want to have as much time with her as possible before her kidney disease takes over.  Kidney disease is strange.  As long as there is at least some kidney function, the disease doesn’t manifest itself much except in heavy drinking of water.  The creatinine level and other measures of kidney function reveal a different, starker picture.  They show the gradual, then exponential depletion of effective kidney reserves.  Once the body tips over into renal insufficiency, things can get bad quick.

As the universe would have it, at the same time Hilo had her labs confirming her problem, I had to go to the lab at Allina Coon Rapids to get my creatinine levels.  Witnessing the steady and relatively rapid deterioration in Hilo’s situation, I awaited my lab results with somewhat more intensity than I might have.

Mine remain unchanged from December and not appreciably different for several times in the past.  Looks ok for now.

After my thumb got all black and blue following my last sting, I began to investigate bee defensive behavior.  I learned a lot of interesting things, a few very practical that I hope I remember the next time.  It seems that when a bee stings it releases an alarm pheromone that attracts others to the location of the sting.  So.  I should scrape off the stinger (not pull it out because that causes the stinger to pump more venom into the wound), then smoke the area stung to mask the pheromone.  I also learned that the same alarm pheromone expresses when a bee gets crushed during hive inspections.  Of course I try to avoid this but it happens.  That situation, too, calls for smoke.  Last, and most obviously, if the bees are ornery on a particular day, put on gloves.  Oh, yeah.