Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Dogs, Great Work, Politics
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Lughnasa                                       Waning Harvest Moon

Yesterday and today were full of new information, new faces.  Both days challenged my capacity to sit in one place for a long time.  The 40+ Aeron chairs in the Minnesota Foundation’s board room made finding a good chair easy and did make the day more bearable than the plastic backed metal chairs in the Northstar Ballroom.  Both days were long and challenging mentally.  A good thing.  But tiring.

Tomorrow Kate and I go see our financial planners, I call it visiting our money.  We want to discuss how they will generate cash for our payouts and have them run them run our projections using a 4% drawdown rather than the 4.6/4.7% they used.  This will give us a new and hopefully longer time horizon before our money runs out, but it will also shrink the amount of money available each year.  This is a trade-off than another consultant, Ruth Hayden, says is necessary since we’re all living longer.

Unless you are very wealthy, living large and living longer are incompatible.  That’s not to say we will, in any wise, be hurting in retirement; it does mean the cruises, trips to Hawaii and expensive purchases will have to be truncated.  Bearable.  Our life does not revolve around luxury.

The solution to our fence jumpers, according to Junior Lehman, the breeder and caretaker for a large pack of hounds, is an electrified fence.  I thought this was most likely the cheapest and easiest solution, but until I heard from somebody with some experience I didn’t want to spend money on it.  Now it will be off to Fleet Farm and hopefully we can begin letting Rigel and Vega outside again to romp and play, develop as dogs.

Aging, Garden, Health

Surgery and Rigel Back Home Pics

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Lughnasa                                     Waning Harvest Moon

Kate’s decided to have surgery.  A scheduler will call tomorrow or Monday to set up a date, probably mid-to-late October.  She’ll have 2 days in the hospital and 4-6 weeks of basic rest for recovery.  The surgeon believes this will alleviate up to 80% of her current lower back symptoms.  The neck will remain for now.

Kate used our dehydrator last night, drying roma tomatoes.  We’re experimenting right now, seeing what we like dried.  All part of the grow it, store it, eat it plan.

Rigel minutes after her return home.

rigelathome

Vega and Rigel, happy to be together again

rigelaround-vega

Vega has a swimming pool, but she likes the watering bowl, too.

vegainwater

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Writing

After Action Report

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Lughnasa Waning Harvest Moon

Reality meets prejudice and anxiety. I was the only person in the church with a tie on. In fact, the worship leader for the meeting greeted me as I came up the walk, “There’s our speaker. He’s the only one with a tie on on Labor Day Weekend.

At the end of the presentation I got applause and several people wanted to hear part II.

Note to me for part II: expand on Adam Smith and his works impact in our time, also spell out positive/negative liberty and freedom, plus pay more attention to critiques of the enlightenment like Marx, Romanticism and totalitarianism. Also, the congruence among liberalism and its allies: science, liberal education, liberal democracy, human rights work et al.

Aging, Politics

Still Thinking Out Loud

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Lughnasa                         Waxing Harvest Moon

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

Einstein’s notion reminds me of the definition of insanity:  trying the same thing over and over expecting different results.  Of course, any one familiar with computers knows that sometimes this works just fine.

It also gives me some pause before I write my liberalism series.  An article in this month’s Dissent asked, “Does liberalism have enough resources to re-energize itself?”  I like this question because it focuses my thinking.  This is why I’m interested in pursuing liberalism.  Does it have enough historical and philosophical oomph to make a difference in this and tomorrow’s world?

10 years ago I would have said no.  Absolutely no.  As a card carrying member of the New Left, liberalism was as much the problem as conservatism, perhaps even more since it was liberals who got us into the war in Vietnam, who ran corporate america and the government, aka the System and, BTW, Ike Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex.  Hard to recall a time when the liberals were in power at this point in recent American history, but I grew up under a liberal hegemony.

Now, I’m older and less convinced of drastic, sudden change as either possible or workable, too much risk for too little reward.  At least right now.

If we’re not gonna have a revolution, then we have to consider the hand we’ve been dealt and it’s our peculiar brand of American liberal democracy.  That means looking for all the possibilities in likely and unlikely places.

At night the trees dwarf the houses, their bulk massing up against the sky.  During the day we can pretend they are just plants, but as dark falls their true nature emerges.  We are the Lilliputians in their Brobdingnagian world.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Our Land and Home

Life Busting Out All Over. Much Better Than the Alternative.

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Lughnasa                           Waxing Harvest Moon

My thoughts on Enlightenment were cut off mid think by this world, Rigel on an adventure outside the gate.  Now I’ve secured the gate (I think.) until it can be repaired and I’m about to return to research for the Liberalism series.

We have many tiny strands of life breaking out:  Kate’s spine, Rigel’s venturesome spirit, Vega’s big gallumphing crashing presence, a gnarly conceptual piece that needs to be written by September 6th, the oncoming harvest, driveway seal coating on September 8th and the next round of Ecological Gardens work starting on September 9th.

I also have a tour today at 1:30.  Thank God, it’s only Sin and Salvation.  Ha, ha.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Friends

Barriers and Transitions

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Lughnasa                               Waxing Harvest Moon

The day so far.  Bought 55 granite blocks to use in constructing barriers to the dogs.  Bought 10 straw bales to reinforce a barrier to the dogs.  Do you see a pattern?

A nap, then a workout and some Sierra Club work.  The day has sped past with work and play, now winding down toward the evening when I sit with the dogs, read or watch television.  Eat supper.

Kate’s in a definite transition mode this year, perhaps even in the next few months.  The pain causes her increasing difficulty, sometimes she spends her non-work hours recovering from work.  Literally.  Not a situation that can go on forever.

The neighbor whom I have mentioned in the past, though, has bigger issues.  His mental decompensation seems to track with his physical.  He grabbed his daughter’s arm and bit her.  His wife had to call the police to come take him to a psych ward.  He returns home tomorrow with nothing different.  A sad situation.

Aging

Young Man

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Lughnasa                                New Moon (Harvest M00n)

Oil change today for the Celica, now at 255,000 miles and still nimble.  Then a drive up to Elk River to buy straw.

The guy who runs Martie’s Feed and Seed is about my height, 5’7″, wears a ball cap like I do.  I have maybe 15 years or so on him.  As I went up to the counter, he said, “What can I do for you, young man?”  Again, this young man.  I seem to have reached a point where people find me in need of assurance that they still count me among the able, which, of course, in the perverse way of such assurances, does the opposite.

The mirror shows a gray haired, gray bearded guy with significant balding and some wrinkles.  The Keatons, my mom’s side of the family, age early in the face and I’m no exception.  This is another of those invisible border lines, reinforced by multiple responses.  Soon, I’ll start thinking of myself as a “young man,” that is, an old man in need of a jocular boost from those in the know.

Aging, Family

Happy Birthday, Kate

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Lughnasa                            Waning Green Corn Moon

Kate turns 65.  Once in our culture this birthday was as important as 21.  It meant the date when retirement began for most workers.  Now it is another birthday since the retirement date has been sliding gradually forward as one of the “fixes” for social security.  Kate and I both have a social security retirement date of 66.  Those born after 1960 have a retirement date of 67.  The consensus of things I’ve read suggest that age will have to get pushed to 70 in any new fix.

It still seems like a milestone of sorts, halfway between 60 and the three score and ten of a good life in the Jewish tradition.  Wonder if they’ve upped the age, maybe to three score and fifteen?  I read a great sermon on aging by a rabbi.  He is 92 or so.  When asked how he felt about having lived so long, he said, “Surprised.”

It will be good when Kate comes home for good.  Her back needs the rest and her heart can use the freedom.  We have a life here that is full and complete, one that needs the both of us with our increasing gardens alongside our creative and volunteer work.  She’s worked hard all her life and earned good money, so our retirement will be fine from a financial perspective.

Early on when she told me how money she made, my mouth dropped open.  It didn’t occur to me that people I knew might make that much.  Now I know she’s on the low end for docs, but it’s still a lot, plenty.   I said then and believe now that taking care of children is a morally unambiguous way to earn a living, one of the few I know.  So there are no regrets with her level of income for either of us.

Her gifts are much larger than that however.  She’s kind, generous, imaginative and patient.  She’s a great cook, a highly skilled seamstress and quilter and has a green thumb.  I’m lucky to have found her in this big world.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Health

Eureka!

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Lughnasa                                 Waning Green Corn Moon

Got some sleep.  Feel better this morning.  A busy day ahead.  Groceries, recycling, straw, more weeding.

Kate comes back from Denver today.  I  had a bit of a snit yesterday when she wanted to stay an extra day.  My Woolly meeting is on Monday and she’s a big part of the get ready for it plan.  Also, her birthday is Tuesday–65!–and I have an evening ready for us.  I wanted her back her with me, but felt conflicted because she wanted to stay with Jon.  He had a bad ride home from the hospital.  A moot point as it turns out, since it would have cost around $500 to change the ticket with $150 airline fee, $30 Orbitz and $320 in additional ticket costs.  Not proud of myself over this, but I’m glad she’ll be home today.

Vega or Rigel, remember them?, ate my pocket moleskine diary and a current novel I’m reading, Consider Philebas.  By eat I mean shred and coat with drool.  The diary’s pages are recoverable and Consider Philebas, though badly mauled and wet, contains the pages I’ve not yet read, which is good enough for me.  Just one more of the V&R stories.

Over the last few days I have dutifully filled the large rubber water container we have outside.  And refilled it.  Those big dogs, I thought, drink a lot of water.  Then, shortly after I filled it yesterday morning, I put the hose away, turned around to see Vega curled up in the water container.  She was happy.  Archimedes could have had his eureka moment watching her.  90 pounds of puppy displaces a lot of water.

The Denver Olsons have had a rough summer.  Hirschel their 6 year old German Shorthair developed cancer and died.  hirschJon’s surgery has created the kind of upset recovery from any surgery always does.  Next up is Gabe’s surgery to install a port for his prophylactic factor.  That comes on the 27th.  Not to mention that they started back teaching two weeks ago.   A lot for a young family to absorb.  Why I was conflicted.  (pic:  Hirschel)

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Yucky Day

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Lughnasa                                Waning Green Corn Moon

A funky day.  This morning found me on my hands and knees, on a garden pad plucking weeds from between the bricks on our patio.  The whole back perennial garden has taken last place in the maintenance department as Kate and I have learned how to keep up with the vegetable garden and the orchard.  That means it got a bit overgrown and weedy so I’ve spent a lot of time this week putting it back in shape.  The Woolly meeting is a good spur, but I felt bad about neglecting it anyhow.

While doing this, I  misplaced or lost a Japanese hand held weeder I bought Kate at the Seed Savers Exchange conference.  When I say lost or misplaced, I mean I went upstairs for my cell phone and when I came back down, I could not find the damned thing.  It was as if it grew legs and ran off into the garden or developed roots, turned green and hid itself among the lilies and the clematis.  Very weird.  Felt like I’d lost my mind.   I have no idea what happened to it.

It was hot, too.  I finished that work, fed the dogs and tried to get a nap in but the dogs began whining.  They got me up at 6:30 a.m., about an hour to an hour and a half before I normally get up.  I’ve felt sleep deprived all day, too.

I’ve not gotten as much work done so far as I wanted.  A yucky no good no account day.  On that note, I’ll get some sleep.