Category Archives: Family

Family, Holidays

Getting Ready

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Samhain                                                          Thanksgiving Moon

This is a two grandma thanksgiving.  Barb, Jen’s mother, and Kate, Jon’s mother motor around the renovated kitchen chopping, boiling, baking, smashing.  Other family members clean house.  Sponges, windex, vacuums, furniture moved in and out.  Smells of turkey and butter and squash and potatoes invade the house, bringing with them the ghosts of Thanksgiving’s past.

Gabe and Ruth help in various ways.  Gabe by taking a bath and sitting around in his bear costume.  Ruth brings down the little table and the little chairs. “This is where the kids will eat,” she says, throwing a tablecloth on made by another Grandma, Zelma, Jon’s dad’s mom.

Purpose and family.  Food and sunshine.  Tables with many places.  Renovated houses.  Traveling.  Listening to stories.

Romanian in-laws.  How Jon made the table, using tools at a custom woodworking shop.  The laying of the sod.  Gertie’s ACL surgery.  Sollies weight loss.  Again.  The sound of football.  Kids laughing.

Happy Holidays.  Happy Holiseason.

Family

Smiles and Grins

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Samhain                                                                Thanksgiving Moon

Kate took me out to dinner last night.  All smiles.  She had a check representing sales of her bags and microwave hotpad bowls.  It was so great to see.  She grinned and laughed.  A lot different from the moans and groans as Allina made medicine increasingly corporate, organization centered rather than patient and physician centered.  A joy.

 

Dogs, Family

Central Dog Time

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Samhain                                                      New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Kate introduced a new bit of nomenclature into our household:  Central Dog Time or CDT.  Dogs are creatures of habit, especially when it concerns getting up, going to bed and eating.

So are we, come to think of it.  Skype calls with my far-ranging sibs prove that point.  In order to connect on Riyadh time, 5:00 pm and Singapore time, 10:00 pm, I have to initiate our twice a month calls at 9:00 am Andover time.  Last week I came downstairs, fired up Skype and neither Mary nor Mark were online.  Why?  Because it was 6:00 pm in Riyadh and 11:00 pm in Singapore.  I hadn’t shifted my time back to Standard.

CDT operates on the same principle, but explaining the shifted time is much harder.  In effect the dogs have to be retrained to eat and go to bed an hour later.  Then, do the same thing again, backwards, in the spring.  Well, we decided to run our house on CDT, at least as it comes to canines.  We’re doing things on CDT year round now.  Much simpler for everybody.

 

Family

Kate Olson, Crafty

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Samhain                                                            Fallowturn Moon

Kate’s an entrepreneur!  Yesterday was the reopening of downtown Anoka after some street improvements, so she went down and took her market bags to several shops to see if she could interest anyone in buying them.  She sold one bag and got two nibbles for selling more, one that turned into a meeting next Thursday at 5:30 pm.  The look on her face when she got the call about the meeting was pure delight.

(Kate on the first day of going very part time)

She’s a skilled seamstress and quilter who works hours at her craft.  She seems to enjoy all facets of it from buying cloth to finished product. Kate also has a growing partnership of sorts with Ruth, our six year old granddaughter, who is something of a design prodigy.  Ruth sketches out dresses and identifies colors; then, Grandma buys the cloth and makes the dress.  Clothes by Ruth made by Grandma.

Family, Politics

A Global President

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Samhain                                                Fallowturn Moon

Got this from my sister, Mary, a long time resident of Singapore:

“Most Americans would not understand or appreciate Obama’s influence overseas-he is admired here in Asia & I have spoken to many Singaporeans who are very happy he has been reelected he’s like a global president.”

Somewhat by accident I was in Singapore in 2004 on election day.  Mary and I went to the American Club and watched the returns live over breakfast.  Dismal.  If you recall.

I still remember talking with a taxi-driver who worried out loud about the effect of a Bush presidency.  “You just can’t imagine how it feels to have your life so impacted by someone faraway, whom you don’t choose.”  No, but I can imagine how it feels close up when I do choose them.

Dogs, Family, Health, Latin

Friday

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Samhain                                                             Fallowturn Moon

Boy, my Latin was not working for me today.  Like I had elephants tugging to keep my thoughts from surfacing.  I failed to go back over it, to check my work.  Over confident, I guess. Anyhow, felt slow, thick.  Not a good feeling.  It does, however, make me want to double down, get more consistent with my work.

Kate’s been gone yesterday and today at a supportive care cme (continuing medical education).  She’s prepping for what we’ll need, hopefully a couple of decades from now.  She wants to renew her medical license when it comes up in three years and she has to have some number, I think 75, of hours of continuing ed to qualify.  Keeps her head in the world of medicine though she’s very happy that her body is out of it.

Gertie continues to improve, bouncing with a three-legged, then a tender fourth legged, gate.  She’s decided to ignore the plastic cone on her head so she just barrels into doors, gates, people, furniture.  This means she’s feeling better and that’s good; it also means she’s cranking her nuisance quotient up a notch.  Not so good.

Commentary on the news, Family

Storm Central

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Fall                                                                             Fallowturn Moon

Talked to BJ who lives in the Beacon Hotel at 74th and Broadway.  She says the grocery stores have begun to empty of inventory; mass transit is shutdown; many cabbies have gone to homes in Jersey or the Bouroughs; and, that Lower Manhattan–Wall Street, Battery Park and World Trade Center site for example-has flooded.  “It’s all landfill,” she said.  She also mentioned scaffolding and construction cranes.  “How well are they secured?”

Right now it’s only misty though she plans to head after things get rolling.  She’s a photographer as well as a violinist.

Tonight’s the night from what I read.  Storm surge intensified by full moon high tide.

 

 

Family, Myth and Story, Politics
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Fall                                                                         Fallowturn Moon

Talked with the grandkids last night, their parents, too, all frozen on the screen after their computer went black.  We had a long distance phone call over the internet, though, of course, it was a phone call in the same sense that a refrigerator is an icebox.

Finished my 4th quiz for the mythology class, the end of the Odyssey material, now we move on to Hesiod and his Theogony.  Also turned in my first essay exam in over two decades.  A blast from the past.

[Hesiod and the Muse, by Gustave Moreau. Here he is presented with a lyre, which contradicts the account given by Hesiod himself, in which the gift was a laurel staff.]

The last presidential debate is tonight and I say it can’t come soon enough.  This campaign began just as the last one ended, it seems, dragging on and on, making our political process captive to so many extraneous influences.  The British system, I think, allows for more focus on policy differences, less on personalities, gaffes, external events like the Libyan embassy security.

We have our system, not theirs, so we can only wait through the last fattening of the television companies, then head into the ballot box and hope that, despite the hanging chads with which many of us baby boomers will enter the polling place, our votes will be counted.

Aging, Family, Garden, Health

Heavy Lifting

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Fall                                                                               Fallowturn Moon

Unanticipated consequences.  Kate’s upper body, shoulders and neck, screamed at her yesterday and are still doing it today.  Why?  She’s had to do all the (more or less) heavy lifting since my surgery.  One of my jobs in our marriage is to do the heavy lifting, literally. Now, I have my limits, too, of course, but they’re much higher than Kate’s.     Singapore

We’ve had to buy dogfood in 20 pound bags rather than 35 so I can carry it.  I made sure the water softener got it in, finally, before the surgery.  40 pounds per bag.  When Kate weeds, she takes the plant out roots, soil and all.  Puts them in plastic buckets.  They get heavy quick.  She had to empty her own this past month, using smaller buckets to empty the larger one.  I had the surgery in late September to be sure I could move honey supers if I needed to.  No need this year, unfortunately.

There’s also laundry and groceries.  Various items to take up and down stairs.  We’re done with our Excalibur (geesh) food dryer so it goes back in the basement.  Jars of canned tomatoes, peaches, apple butter go down, too.

Today I’m going to split a bag of composted manure in half so I can carry it down to the bed where I’m to plant the lilies and iris I have left to put in the ground.  I’ll be glad when this is done and I can get back to doing all these things plus my resistance work.  One more week.

Family, Retirement, Third Phase, Travel

A Year Ago

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Fall                                                                              Fallowturn Moon

 

Fall Waning Autumn Moon

58 nautical miles south of Ft. Lauderdale, headed for Cuba and the strait between Cuba and Hispanola. Today was a quiet, uneventful day thanks to the high winds, including tornadoes, that struck the Everglades…

The promenade deck, our deck, has had few people on it, so I did some exercise tonight. Tomorrow and the next day are at sea as we make our way 1200 miles south to Santa Marta, Colombia. Santa Marta made Wired magazine last month as the site of an international coffee tasting competition. It is where Simon Bolivar died and was buried. We’ll find out more about in a couple of days.

With Santa Marta the South American portion of our journey gets underway, not to end until we leave the Rio Airport the day before Thanksgiving.

Fall Waning Autumn Moon  October 20th  10 am

A warm morning, sitting on the deck chair, watching Cuba roll by to the south/ Clumps of trees, sandy beaches and a few antenna installations mark this place, a testimony ot the overhang of the cold war. If it were not communist, this ship would stop in Havanna. Odd and more alluring as a result, the island seems a forbidden oasis of, what? Egalitarian socialism? Since we’re passing along its length, it will be in view a good while.

We have come approximately 300 nautical miles from Ft. Lauderdale’s Port Everglade. The night, a calm one, unlike the night before, lent itself to a gentle rocking and good sleeping. I checked the national hurricane center and there are no storms of consequence in the western Caribbean Sea.