Category Archives: Weather +Climate

Family, Garden, Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate

Winter Happy

Leave a comment

7  rises 29.48  WNW2  wchill 5  Winter light snow

Waxing Gibbous Wolf Moon

The seeds for the 2009 vegetable garden sit on my desk beside me in piles according to growth habit:  viny, climbing, bushy, root or leafy.  When I get the chance, they’ll go in my homemade database with pertinent data and places to record germination, first bloom, first fruit and eventual production.  I’ve gardened for years, but never taken this much care.  Why now?  Not sure.

Kate’s off to see the physiatrist in Elk River.  I hope he suggests some things that help her. She’s going to stop by Cottage Quilts on the way home.

I’m off to the cities this morning to count ballots for the ex-com and see Michelle.  Michelle liked my first draft of the legislative updates, so it will go out Sunday evening.   Many more to follow.

A light snow this morning, enough to make the outdoors beautiful and wintry.  This kind of winter makes me happy.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Sport, Weather +Climate

An Existential Cry?

Leave a comment

-8  falls 30.32  SW0 wchill-8 Winter

First Quarter of the Wolf Moon

The Great Horned Owl who lives in our woods calls tonight, right now as I write.  Whether he, or she, speaks to a lost love or wayward children I do not know.  On a night this cold it could be the existential cry of the world, proclaiming the season at its depths.  I often imagine this owl whose wingspan extends longer than my body and whose talons can lift a small dog or a young child with ease; I imagine this owl perched on a top limb of our tallest poplar.  The gaze of this fierce predator, the apex predator of our woods, rakes the Wolf Moon, perhaps blinded by the light, but looking just the same.  Because, like us, the moon attracts the eye.

The Vikings lost to the Eagles.  I don’t feel as let down as I have when the Vikings have lost other playoff games.  Not sure why.  Maybe because they did not come into this game a prohibitive favorite, then give it away.  Perhaps because they played with heart and made some young team mistakes.  I don’t know.  But I’ll watch again.  Peculiar, eh?

Writing Homecomer took up the writing juice today.  Little left over for this blog.  I’ll let it sit a day or two, then read it with a red pen in hand. Go back to the computer and revise it.  Then let it be.

Now, back to The Given Day by Dennis Lehane.  If you have not read it, and enjoy period pieces with rich characters and real historical drama as I do, then you’ll find this a treat.

Friends, Sport, Weather +Climate, Writing

We Got Sizzle

Leave a comment

24  rises 29.89  NNW0 wchill 24   Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

The Internet is a strange phenomenon.  It functions as a time machine, bringing the future just a bit before it arrives and churning the past as old acquaintances find you again through one of the search functions or social networking sites.

It’s a good thing for me, because I was not such a good communicator before the web arrived.  I wrote a few letters, but I’ve never liked the phone much and the only reunions I ever attend are those of my high school.  Now though with Facebook,  Myspace and e-mail those old acquaintances are not forgot and often brought to mind.

Wrote about three pages of a new Homecomer.  Much better.  I needed to make it a continuation of the first two pieces in the Heresy Moves West series.  I had conceived of them as a set from the beginning, but I hadn’t begun the other one as if it fit with them.

We have some kind of frozen precipitation coming down right now, but I don’t what to call it.  Snert.  Sleeze.  Maybe sneeze?  Frozen drizzle is so uninteresting.  Fizzle?  Hey, I got it.  Sizzle.

I bought two new snow shovels.  I have an unfortunate adventuresome spirit in the purchase of snow shovels.  This time I bought one of a kind I saw used on the U.P.  You figure they have 3 to 4 times the amount of snow we have, they must know something.  The other one has a blade made of a tough (I hope) plastic that won’t snag on the nails on our deck–at least that was my conclusion.  I may find out as soon as tomorrow morning.

Just finished a lower body work out and aerobics. Tomorrow AM all morning I’ll write, then watch the vikings.  May Johnny Unitas have mercy on my soul.

GeekWorld, Travel, Weather +Climate

After the New Year, Backup

Leave a comment

orchard-inwinter300.jpg-3  bar rises 30.00  SW0  windchill -3  Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

The Orchard in Winter

2009 has well and truly begun.  The new year crept in on snow shoes, covered in a snowmobile suit and holding a cup of hot cocoa.  This was a Minnesota new year.

We’ve had a cold winter so far and it looks like it’s going to continue for a while.  Somewhere around the end of January most of us begin to have fantasies of being somewhere else.  Many fantasize someplace warm, but I tend to go with just another location.  My escape this year may be to the UP or Ashland, Wisconsin.  Still gathering information for that Lake Superior book.

Bill Schimdt suggested I back up this website onto my own computer since it hangs out in the cloud most of the time. I did that.  It was an interesting excursion into the bowels of the system.  It comes out in a form determined by mysql, the open source data base used by many servers.  The format is strange, made up of tables with columns of numbers.  They all make sense, once you begin to read carefully.  Anyhow, this is a once a month operation Bill suggests.  After I do it, then the regular backup I do every day will collect it and convey to my external hard disk.  I actually have two, but I still have to configure them the way I want.

Today I start writing Homecomer.  Look for it to be posted on the Liberal Faith page sometime after January 11th.

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Weather +Climate

Home and Heart

Leave a comment

winter-solstice-08cbe2.jpg1  bar steep rise 30.42  WSW0   windchill 1  Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

Oh, man.  To get the trash out I had to blow the snow.  Underneath the snow is ice.  The snowblower with its knobby tires spun out and the only reason I stayed on my feet was the firm grip I had on the snowblower.  Never before had taking out the trash had a hint of danger to it.  Tonight it did.  After the snowblower and I went slip sliding away, I still had to roll both the trash containers down the long slope of our driveway.  Risky business.  Made it ok.

In doing research for Homecomer I looked back over many of my sermons for Groveland and noticed that I’ve written several that deal with home as an idea.  Home has a certain poignancy for me, since my estrangement from my father and his subsequent marriage to a woman who made the problem worse.  The town and the house where I grew up seem faraway to me, as if the warm and comfortable feelings associated with home got eaten away by the acids of my family quarrel.

The rightness or wrongness of it all has long been moot, yet the hollowness with which I’m left when it comes to home and nuclear family must have lead me to consider this theme.  It is a rich concept, one with so many layers and metaphorical possibilities that I have not tired of it.

Perhaps out of this search of mine for home I’ll  find ideas useful to others.  The current environmental crisis both has its roots in and is made more intractable by our American sense of mobility, of looking over the next horizon for a new frontier.  This makes it hard to learn about the home that greets us each evening.  Well, more on that in Homecomer.

The cold has come again and that will make the sleeping even better.

Weather +Climate

Snow and Blowing Snow

Leave a comment

12  bar steep rise  30.18  W9  windchill 5    Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

We have had snow and blowing snow most of the day.  Do not know how much right now, but the weather reports indicate as much as 6-10″.  That means snow blowing in the AM before Lois comes to clean the house.

Maybe tonight.  Forgot the trash goes out tonight.  Hmmm.

At 5:30 the webinar (new word I do not like much.  It feels clumsy.) on posting to the StarTribune weather blog set up.  Don’t imagine it will be too tough.

Did my upper body resistance before the call.  Aerobics after.  Yesterday my pulse rate stayed higher longer than usual.  Hope that is not a trend.

Still working on Homecomer, may start writing on New Year’s Day.

Art and Culture, Weather +Climate

Icons and Prints

Leave a comment

Snow.  Blowing snow.  Blowing snow onto the lawn.   Snow blowing.  Into my face at -12.  Whoa. That’s a wake-me-up.

I’m alert and ready for the day.

The icy stuff we got yesterday during the day came down before the snow.  Now it’s ice beneath the snow.  Slip slidin’ away.

After this a long lecture of prints in the MIA collection, then icons from the frozen steppes of mother Russia.  Seems right.

Art and Culture, Friends, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

A Cold One, Please

Leave a comment

-8  bar steep rise 30.33  0mph  S  windchill  -10   Samhain

Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights          Day  8hr  45mn

A cold one today.  This week will have the same kind of weather we usually get in late January.  Just fine with me.

A very busy day today with the Joan Herried Lecture at the MIA, then lunch at Butter and a tour of the Transcendental Icons exhibit at the Russian Museum.   This evening it’s the Woollys at chez Schmidt.

Realized I’ve been setting myself up to get tired today.  Thinking, oh, man.  Long day.  Geez, I may have to cancel something on Tuesday night. Well, I don’t have to think that way and I’m going to stop right now.

I’m going to wait just a bit to get at the snow on the driveway.