Category Archives: Family

Family, Memories

Mother’s Day. Not A Happy Day.

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Beltane                                                                        Beltane Moon

Mother’s day.  Every year.  Since her death.  1964.  A long time to be motherless.  Almost a life time.

Her stroke changed all our lives.  We went on but not well.  I often stumbled, not picking myself up and shaking it off, not turning the pain into a gift.  Instead, I experienced it as pain.

(Morristown Post Office)

She was a small town girl. Morristown, Indiana.  800 people.  Many of them our kin.  A rural town right where Indiana breaks into full on country as you travel south, the big cities and heavy industry behind you.  Lots of corn and beans (soy beans), tractors, barns, cows, pigs, a few horses.  Still that way.

Might have been a small town girl her whole life, except for WWII.  Signal Corps.  Mom was a WAC.  She went to Rome, Naples, Capri, Algiers.  After, she married Dad.  She had an A.A. degree in teaching, elementary.

Never learned to drive.  Can you imagine?  A midwestern country girl who never learned to drive.  Didn’t stop her from an active life. In our small town, Alexandria, Indiana, there was no spot you couldn’t reach by walking.  So Mom went everywhere on foot or riding with Dad.

Warm and quick, kind, loving.  Compassionate.  You know, the mom you see on the cover of Saturday Evening Post drawn by Normal Rockwell.

Since 1964, she’s been a memory.  At times she almost seems to slip away, a murmur, a rumor from the past, like an imaginary place I used to visit as a small boy.  Then I recall the garden spider at our kitchen window.  Her taking insects in a kleenex to release outside, something I still do.  Her voice breaking as she learned her father, Charlie Keaton, my namesake and grandfather, had died.

So, mother’s day has not been a big favorite of mine, not for a long time.  Not a happy day with dinner out, flowers and a big hug.  No, “remember when?”  No, “you’re just what I hoped.”  No, “oh, you.”  Just not. Absence.

Family, GeekWorld, Health

Auntie Biotic

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Spring                                                       Beltane Moon

Kate is home and her arm (cellulitis) looks much better.  Still a ways to go both on the antibiotics and healing, but the right direction.  Among the vagaries of strong antibiotic treatment is its kill all nature.  Like Round-up can’t tell the difference between weed and grass, most antibiotics can’t tell the difference between the pathogens and the friendly flora and fauna of your gut.

As a large symbiotic organism with literally billions of helper one-celled creatures throughout our body, it’s not a good idea to kill the guest-workers.  It would be sort of like throwing all the immigrants in jail (or deporting them) that you need to do the work in agriculture, manufacturing and domestic services.  Oh, wait…

How does the old song go?  You don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone.  The digestive tract needs these wee beasties, needs them bad.  When they get killed off in sufficient quantities, the intestinal tract can get thrown way outta whack.

Now, I’m not sayin’ the cure is worse than the disease, but at certain points in time it can feel like a toss up.  This very problem can cause cancer patients to push away chemo-therapy, concluding that in this case, in spite of a terrible disease, that the cure is worse.

A lot of medicine relies on harsh chemicals, the internal equivalents of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides.  It’s popular in some circles to acknowledge this and give a blanket condemnation of Western medicine.  This kind of criticism only makes sense in a world where dying from an infection triggered during gardening seems impossible.  Why impossible?  Because we have the harsh chemicals to combat the even harsher outcomes of untended infection.

Overuse has begun to erode our edge against infections, so we might again have an era when the yearning will be for the time when we could beat stuff back.

Family, GeekWorld, Media

A Serial Watcher

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Spring                                                     Beltane Moon

A gorgeous day.  Sun, warm.  Daffodils in bloom.  Bees buzzing in the orchard.  Dogs playing in the woods.  Kate’s on her way home.  

Ruthie told Kate she was her favorite grandma.  I told her she was my favorite grandma, too.  She’s coming back a happy gal.

During the grey cold days of the weekend I did something I’ve not done before.  I wrote here sometime ago quitting Comcast cable tv.  Too damn expensive and a time suck.  In it’s place we have dvds, netflix and hulu.  Hulu (and Netflix, too for that matter) has whole TV series from beginning to end.  For instance, it has the entire Battlestar Galactica Sci-Fi channel series.  And many others.

 

That means you can do what I did on Saturday and Sunday.  I found a new series, Grimm, that tells the story of a descendant of the fairy-tale compiler.  Turns out the Grimms can see and hunt all manner of thought-to-be imaginary creatures like the big bad wolf, pied piper and a whole menagerie of others.

So I watched 1-12 of an 18 episode run.  That’s the thing I haven’t done before.  You can watch TV serials as if they are, in a sense, a video novel with each episode as a chapter.  Now I wouldn’t defend this as a way to increase your brain power, might have killed a few gray cells, but it sure was fun.  Felt very decadent though.

Dogs, Family

Dogs and Granddaughters

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Spring                                                         New Beltane Moon

Homes have needs.  This one needs Kate to feel full and she’s gone.  I’m lucky I have the dogs or I would feel lonely.

The dogs get up very early, thanks to Gertie, usually around 5:00-5:30 am.  Kate, with her residency experience of sudden waking, working and going back to sleep handles this if only because I sleep through it.  She gets up, feeds the dogs and comes back to sleep.  Most mornings all four dogs come inside after their meal and then wait quietly until we get up.

This morning Vega and Rigel, our two coon hound/Irish wolfhound dogs, decided, as they occasionally do, to stay outside.  Vega will bark, sometimes 30 minutes later, to come back inside and Kate will get up and let her in.  Well, I slept through it this morning, letting her back in.

When I finally got up, I let Vega and Rigel inside and Vega was so happy she came in, spun around, jumped up on the window seat (her place), back down and spun around again.

Talked to Kate last night and apparently Ruthie, 6 year old granddaughter, really liked her rhinestone studded belt I picked out for her at the Stock Show this January.  “Are those real diamonds?” she asked.  She has the hat, the vest and now needs only the boots to be a real Jewish cowgirl.

 

Bees, Family, Garden, Health

The Quotidian

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Spring                                                            New Beltane Moon

Kate has taken her still healing cellulitis off to Colorado for a weekend with the grandkids.  Gabe’s fourth birthday is tomorrow.  Her arm looks much better than it did on Monday, swelling much less pronounced and the area of red, heated skin has reduced considerably.  It took four doses of IV antibiotics and the follow-up oral meds to get this infection under control.  No fun at all.

(Gabe and Grandpop, January, 2012)

Meanwhile back at the apiary, I’m going to check the bees tomorrow for larvae, need for syrup and pollen patties.  A few garden chores tomorrow, too, notably digging up the potato patch and amending the soil.  I can’t plant potatoes in the main vegetable garden for a couple more years because the beetles found them last fall.  Too many to pick off and drown in soapy water.

Also, I really need to fix the tire on the Celica, get it started and get the tire repaired or buy a new one.  Then, I’m going to give it away one way or another.  Know anyone that needs a car?  I may have a taker, but I’m not sure.  If not, I’ll pass it on to someone for free.  It has 280,000 miles on it, but it runs well.  We’ve decided to go with one car for financial reasons and it’s the one with the most mileage, so it has to go.

Family, GeekWorld

Video Phone a Reality At Last!

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Spring                                                            Bee Hiving Moon

Technological victory today.  Mary (Singapore at 10:00pm), Mark (Ha’il, Saudi Arabia at 5:00 pm) and myself (Andover 9 am) on the same video call.  Three little screens with our talking heads beaming in real time (or whatever you call time in the instance where all of us are in different times).  Skype premium at $99.00 a year allows for up to ten individuals on one call with no additional charge.  Even when separated by thousands of miles and the International Date Line.

(screen looks something like the pic above)

That was my entire nuclear family on one video call.  Remember when video-phones were sci-fi what ifs?  Not any more.  And, there’s no phone.  Nothing but net.

Over the last year Mark and Mary and I have moved closer together, seeing each other in person last July and now communicating more regularly than we ever have before.

Mark describes Ha’il as like northern Arizona, Flagstaff/Dine homelands/Grand Canyon/polygamist Mormon country.  Come to think of it Islam allows 4 wives.  Maybe it’s the weather?

Mary says Singapore is hot.  When asked how hot, she said, “Oh, I never know.  But it’s really hot.  I know that.”  According to Weatherunderground the current temp in Singapore is 81 with a dewpoint of 77.  That last is the kicker.  By contrast it’s 84 in Ha’il with a dewpoint of 14.  Just to be complete it’s 54 here with a dewpoint of  48.   Of course that’s a daytime reading for Andover, a night time reading for Singapore and an early evening reading for Ha’il.

Both Mary and Mark are at the ends of their terms, with exams and grading and all that fun stuff on the other end of the teacher-student relationship.  Mark has a classroom full of cement workers.  Mary teaches students at Singapore’s National Teacher’s University.   Mom would have been proud.

Forgot to mention on the call, but I have a tour for ESL students tomorrow.  Both Mary and Mark have ESL backgrounds.

Cinema and Television, Cooking, Family, Health

Kate is Home!

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Spring                                                              Bee Hiving Moon

The home is full again.  Kate got home at 7:00 pm.  Four of us were wagging our tails and I hugged her.  She took off for the doctor yesterday and never came home until just now.

Her arm looks better, not well, but better.  Her spirits are good; though she says she’s “going to play the invalid tomorrow and Thursday.  We’ll see.  She’s not too good in that role.

We had grilled chicken, chard (from last year’s garden) and whole wheat spaghetti with olive oil and butter.  After the meal we both scratched our heads during Tree of Life.

It evoked the era of my childhood so well:  kick the can, swimming, roaming in the fields, running down alleys, getting into mischief.  I pulled back from understanding and went with the flow, the feel of things.  I liked it.  Don’t know that I’d want all the films I see to take that form, but in this case, well done.

Tomorrow.  Some errands.

Family, Health

Ah.

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Spring                                                          Bee Hiving Moon

A much better sounding Kate called a couple of times this AM.  The swelling has begun to recede which means she’s responding to the IV antibiotics.  Which, thank God, means it’s not one of the resistant strains of strep infections.  She will have her fourth IV infusion at 4 pm, then she’ll come home.

She ordered grilled chicken breast and vegetables for dinner tonight.  The chef is on duty.

She has to keep her arm elevated at or above her shoulder, will have oral antibiotics, but, and this is the really important part, she will be able to go to Denver.  She would not have been a happy camper if she had been unable to see Gabe and Ruth (grandkids).

So.  A big whew here.

Family, Health

In the Hospital

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Spring                                                        Bee Hiving Moon

Mentioned Kate’s cellulitis the other day.  Got worse.  She went to the doc today, her regular doc for over 30 years.  Kate called at noon, “I’m going to the hospital.  IV antibiotics.”  Oh.

This had me worried because not long after we were married Kate developed a very serious infection, it turned out to be her first ever herpes simplex to which her body way overreacted.  She damn near died with that one.

So, I’m relieved she’s getting full bore attention for this.

Only one problem.  She has our car.  We talked about my taking a cab in but decided it was too expensive.  I don’t have anything until Wednesday since I passed on the Woolly’s tonight.  If they can knock this back in a day or two, I’ll stay here and take care of the home front.

If she needs me, she’ll call and I’ll get in there.  I could take the Northstar in tomorrow or Wednesday morning.

An unforeseen occurrence in our one car plan.  Weird, huh?

She leaves Friday for Denver, at least that’s the current plan.  Hard to say now.

Bees, Family, Garden, permaculture

The Outdoor Season, Well and Truly Begun

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Spring                                                    Bee Hiving Moon

Kate got a nasty cellulitis on her left arm.  Probably from scratches incurred while vigorously pruning and weeding.  Spring clean up.  It swelled up, got hot and sent her to the urgent care last night, the doctor visiting her own clinic for treatment.  They gave her a couple of jabs of rocephin, prescribed some sulfa and sent her home.

After a restless night, she got up and drove out to the arboretum (today) for a class on fruit tree pruning.  She’s a Viking, moving past the pain, just as she has from the first days of our life together.  I’m no where near as stoic.

Later on today I’ll check on our new colleagues, making sure they’re clustered under the feeder pail, then I’ll leave them alone until next Friday.  Next Friday I’ll go in and check for larvae.  Finding larvae means the queen has gone to work laying eggs and the colonies will be queen right.  After that, it’s the normal hive checks, hive box rotations and following their life as the colony builds up to full strength.

The outdoor season is well and truly underway.  Got 2.5 pounds of potatoes from Seed Savers yesterday.  I’ll supplement them with sprouts from leftover potatoes of last year’s crop and, possibly, a few from Green Barn, up the road a piece near Isanti.  That bed has to be dug and amended.

Also on today’s docket.  Move the large limbs I pruned a month ago onto brush piles, clear out the work Kate did yesterday, clean off the AC and do some weed prevention.  That’s enough for today.