Category Archives: Family

Family, Woolly Mammoths

All Ha’il

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Fall                                              Waxing Harvest Moon

First communication back from Mark in Saudi Arabia.  He says he hasn’t set up his computer yet and that the school seems to have a good connection.  He mentions the school is in Ha’il*.  Guess that’s where he is now.  So far that’s all I know.

Met with the Woolly’s last night at our once and forever location:  the Black Forest.  Tom Crane, Mark Odegard, Frank Broderick, Scott Simpson and Warren Wolfe showed up.  We went around the table, catching each other up on this and that.  Mark’s leaving.  Our cruise.  Tom and Roxann’s trip to Florida.  Mark O’s knee.  Warren’s upcoming article on Medicare.

Scott and I talked about something called latency trading.  Here’s an article that explains some of it.  The part it doesn’t explain is the drive, now well established, to position large supercomputer networks as close as physically possible to stock exchanges around the world.  Why?  To capture the millisecond advantage in data transmission that results from close proximity to the data feed itself.  Each millisecond can mean tens of millions of dollars in trading advantage.  According to Scott, physical proximity can yield as much as a 3 millisecond advantage.  Do the math.

On the drive home, the half Autumn moon hung in the night sky.  The moon roof was open and stars shone down through it.  The air was mild, with just that hint of fall.  Perfect.

*Ha’il (Arabic: حائل‎ Ḥā’il), also spelled Hail, Ha’yel, or Hayil, is an oasis city in Nejd in northwestern Saudi Arabia. It is the capital of the Ha’il Province. The city has a population of 356,876 according to Ha’il Province.

Ha’il is largely agricultural, with significant grain, date, and fruit production. A large percentage of the kingdom’s wheat production comes from Ha’il Province, where the area to the northeast, 60 km to 100 km away, consists of irrigated gardens. Traditionally Ha’il derived its wealth from being on the camel caravan route of the Hajj. Ha’il is well known by the generosity of its people in Saudi Arabia and the Arab world as it is the place where Hatim al-Tai lived.

 

Family

Terminal

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Fall                                            Waxing Autumn Moon

Dropped Mark off at the Delta terminal at 9:10 this morning.  It was a difficult leave taking, conflicted on both our parts.

He’s worried about the flight to Riyadh from New York–too long–whether anyone will meet him there at the airport–they will–and remembering not to shake hands with women, as a last minute communication from English Gate Academy advised.

Leaving him there, with so many worries, left me in a place I imagine parents of troubled kids must inhabit when they launch their child, perhaps again and again, into the world.  I felt uncertain of his footing and have my fingers crossed.

Kate and I feel we did the best we could do over the time he was here to get him ready for today and I feel good about that.  There is, though, that lingering concern, countered by hope.

Of course, my analyst, John Desteian, used to say, “Don’t get me started on hope.”

Anyhow, here’s to Mark, bravely venturing into a troubled region.  He got a good paying job when hundreds of thousands of Americans can’t find work.  He’ll be able to save money, work toward a Master’s degree and put together a good recommendation for future employment.

Family

A Day of License

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Fall                                          Waxing Autumn Moon

Got up at 7:10.  Left the house at 7:30 for Anoka County Driver’s License center to see if we could get Mark a spot for his driving test.  When we reached the site at 7:45, there was already a line of waiters:  teen-agers, Somalis, a couple of older, hard used men whom I imagined were back for a license test after a suspension for one reason or another, a housewife or two.

Mark got in line and I went down two doors to the small diner that capitalizes on the License Department traffic.  It has a large cookie jar collection.  By large I mean a row the length of one wall and another and rows of them two deep over the counter area.  We’re talking lots of cookie jars.  None of them, I’m sorry to say, especially interesting to my eye, but you have to admire the determination.

It also had a sign that only fishermen could love:  Have a crappie day.

While I ate eggs and bacon, a shortstack of pancakes,  a young boy, maybe eleven, blond and the oldest of two others who looked much like him, spun a pancake his hands, flipped it in the air to his brothers’ obvious enjoyment.  Mom didn’t blink an eye.

I’d only just got started on breakfast when Mark came in to say that he hadn’t gotten a slot.

Let’s back up  a minute.  In June Mark went in and tried to get a driver’s license with just a knowledge test.  He could have done so if California didn’t purge its rolls every four years.  He had no record of having had a driver’s license so he had to get a learner’s permit.  At the end of the three month period, he could take a driving test.

September 29th was the end of the three months, so, basically, he had yesterday and today.

Not able to get a slot at Anoka we next went to Arden Hills, much larger facility off Highway 35 and very the exit for 610 we use to get home from downtown.

Long story short.  We sat from about 9 am until 1:30 p.m.  Finally got a test.  Mark failed.  The examiner told him to come back in a week and he’d probably pass.  No joy there.

He got his flight information and he leaves tomorrow morning at 11:30 a.m bound for Riyadh.  Maybe next year.

Art and Culture, Family, Our Land and Home

Saudi Arabia, Here He Comes

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Fall                                        New Autumn Moon

Go, now.  The visa process is ended.  Yes, it’s true.  Mark’s visa cleared the Saudi Embassy at 3pm today.  Hopefully his passport will get here tomorrow via Fedex.  If that happens, Dr. Ahmed will send Mark an electronic ticket and he could be on his way as soon as tomorrow night.

Kate and Mark just came in and said we had wild turkeys in the perennial bed.  Sure enough, 7 turkeys are up on the third tier, eating something, maple seeds perhaps.

Into the museum today for an hour long presentation on Dine blankets by a collector.  He said the Dine always made mistakes in their weaving so as not to upset the gods.  Greeks did the same.  Hubris is a terrible thing.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

Breaching the Walled Garden of the Self

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Fall                                               Waning Harvest Moon

Prepping for a presentation on Spiritual Resources for Humanists.  Reading books, articles, letting ideas slip past as I get ready to sleep, keeping my antennae out for what feeds me now.

The book I mentioned before, All Things Shining, has convinced me of one thing.  It’s important to know why we need resourcing in the first place.

The title offers a rationale, unpacked.  Humanism embraces a world shorn of its medieval metaphysics; the Great Chain of Being has met Nietzsche’s Bolt Cutter, God is dead. God is dead, of course, was not an argument, but an observation, a sensitive man’s awareness that the God drenched era of the ancien regime had been drained by the empirical method, reason and the strangely acidic effect of the Protestant Reformation.

This world, a world with a strangled sense of the sacred, gave birth to the angst and anomie of the existentialist 20th century, a world with no center, or rather, a world with millions of centers, each person a godhead struggling with their own creation.

What can buttress the Self that must navigate these empty places?  Does our supernatural vacuum hold enough air to nourish the isolated self?

We stumble toward wonder, toward joy, hope for a glimpse of the sacred, of the moment that can lift us out of our isolation and put us in communion with others, with the natural world, with the stars which birthed the very atoms which constitute us.

These things we seek not out of some vestigial institutional memory, an anachronistic impulse to live again in a God drenched world.  No, we seek these things because the essential paradox at the heart of our lives is this:  we live alone, the only one with our world; yet we live together, up against galaxies of other worlds, sometimes with other worlds so close that they seem to intersect with ours.  We seek the venn diagram, a mandorla labeled self and other, where the other is another person, a flower, a sky, a lightning bolt.

So, spiritual resources in this context, then, would be those fragments of culture that can weaken or penetrate the walled gardens of our Selves, not in order to breach the walls, but to let in companion armies, allies in our quest.

The quest seems to similar to the one Sir Gawain faced when he beheaded the Green Knight and, in a year and a day, had to bend his own neck before the Green Knight’s sword.  That is, we somehow must will ourselves into a vulnerable, ultimately vulnerable position, to those we have beheaded.  Interestingly, as the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight proposes, this vulnerability is not only, perhaps not even mostly, a human to human one, rather, it is human to the whole Green world.

So we seek allies who will keep us strong in our vulnerability, mighty in our humility.  We seek at least love.

Cooking, Family

Sunday

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Fall                                                             Waning Harvest Moon

A gorgeous fall day.  A little Ovid in the morning, a nap, a flu shot, drop off audio books at the library, help Mark practice parking.

The bonus of the ongoing visa madness is that he may be able to take, and hopefully pass, his driving test.  That would give him a driver’s license, a second i.d. and ticket to an international driver’s license.  He could then rent cars in Saudi, get around on his own.

Kate bought four 10 pound boxes of peaches and has made peach pie, canned peachs, mint peach-raspberry jelly.  She also picked more of our raspberries and made two raspberry pies.  We’re going to freeze these pies.

When I harvest the leeks, I will make chicken leek pot pies and freeze them, too.  That way, when we get back from the cruise, we’ll have some tasty home grown and home made treats ready for us.  Greeting ourselves when we come home.

Time has begun to run down hill, gathering steam heading toward the Port of New York.  I’m excited, eager.  Ready.

Aging, Family, Great Wheel, Retirement

Changes

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Lughnasa                                                  Waning Harvest Moon

May I present Autumn?  It comes to us in russets and golds, grays and rain, with some chill and occasional warmth.  Autumn continues our seasonal review, following the spectacular summer with its heat and its emphasis on differing shades of green, a color wheel of blooms and food.

Autumn, like our earlier season, Spring, is a time of change, the gradual transition from the heat and bombast of the growing season to the bleak outer landscapes of the fallow months.

Autumn also marks the beginning of the academic year, a moment of new beginnings, a springtime of the inner world.  This part of the season has its own holiday, Michaelmas, the holy day for the Archangel Michael, and the traditional opening of the English academic year.

In my life change has blown in with the cold rain.  Mark will leave us sometime in the next few days, before the end of October.  The growing season has wound down with only potatoes, beans, leeks and chard left in the garden.  A long vacation grows closer by the day, less than a month away.

There is, too, a growing sense that a major life change may be imminent.  Just what it will be is unclear, though it feels like retirement may be in the cards, joining Kate in her journey beyond the world of work.  How would that manifest in my life, long ago cast off from the port marked Employment?

Leaving behind the era of productive engagement with the world feels premature for me, but a new freedom may emerge.  It may longer be necessary to lash myself to the mast while sailing between the Charybdis of success and the Scylla of ambition.

Mystery.  The once hidden ocean of mystery lies beyond the current horizon.  And I’ve already set sail.

Family, GeekWorld, Travel

Lemons and Very Little Lemonade

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Lughnasa                                                   Waning Harvest Moon

So.  Yesterday I got up, got ready to go into the museum, got in the car and got no engine love.  Click.  Click.  Click.  Of course, I only had adequate time to get there since I never leave early.  What to do?  I put the charger on it and got back…wait for it.  An error message meaning the battery won’t take a charge.

Anyhow we have that new Rav4.  I hopped in it and made it on time.  Or close enough.

Got home after a long stint at the museum in time that Kate could go to work in the Rav4.

What greets me at the kitchen table?  A nice note from the IRS saying they had checked our 2009 return, 2009?, and now feel we owe the government an additional $45,000.  Say what?  The letter of “explanation” did not communicate in any language I understood.  WTF?  OMG.  Well, a good thing we pay that accountant to handle this kind of stuff.  Could ruin a perfectly bad day.

While I read this cheery note, Mark says, “Rigel’s bleeding.”  Uh, huh.  A small nick on the ear.  Unimportant.

Earlier, I discover, the Saudi embassy wants Mark to take an HIV test.  Good thing we have a doctor in the house.  Kate circles the HIV results on the lab work already sent.  Oh.

Also, some power of attorney for somebody for some purpose seems to be needed, requiring yet another communication back to Saudi, which will produce an e-mail to Mark, which he will then sign and Fedex to Travisa which will then hand it to the Saudi Embassy in Washington.  Geez.

Other than that Mrs. Lincoln…

Family, Garden, Travel

The Visa Quest Nearly Finished

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Lughnasa                                       Waning Harvest Moon

Today we moved from conjecture to certainty.  The top person at English Gate Academy, Ahmed, e-mailed Mark and said he would write a personal note to the Saudi Embassy asking them to speed Mark’s visa application along.

His papers cleared the Saudi Cultural Mission today and are at the Embassy so it should be a matter of days now before he has his passport back with his Saudi work visa in place.  At that point English Gate will send him an e-ticket.  He’ll pack and I’ll take him out the same airport where I picked him up in April, just as spring began to try breaking through the long and persistent grip of our long winter.

It’s been a long and not always straightforward journey for Mark, but he’s got his head and heart in better alignment plus he pulled off the difficult in this US economy; he found a good paying job, better pay than he’s ever made.

We spent the morning harvesting wild grapes, talking through the vine.  With the freeze tonight we had to get the sensitive crops inside.  Kate picked the tomatoes that will ripen over the next few weeks and a small bucket of raspberries while Mark and I picked a rose cone full of the small purple grapes.

That means Kate the jelly and jam maker will appear, working with her alchemical apparatus to strain the grapes, add the sugar and pectin and can the result.  Wild grape jelly has a special and tangy taste.  Great for those cold winter breakfasts.