Category Archives: Family

Family, Writing

Kate

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Winter                                             Full Cold Moon

Kate goes back to work on Monday, February 1st.  Right now I believe she’ll do ok.  Her hip injections–cortisone–have helped.  Her neck has been fine during this period, but she will have to return to odd angles while looking into young eyes, ears and throats.  The computer ergonomics in the office are not ideal for her either.  She’s gotten more and more exercise in over the last few weeks and I hope that means that her stamina is sufficient.

We’ll take it, as they say, a day at a time.

I wish I didn’t have the Woolly Retreat coming up over the weekend, but she’s not working weekends, at least not right now, so there will only be Thursday and Friday nights when I’m not here.  Of course, if she experience difficulty, I’ll give it a miss.

The novel keeps on coming.  In retrospect I think it was the novel that kept me up the other night.  Since I write without much of a plan, it’s quite easy for me to write myself into a corner, or to realize that early ideas, some woven into much of what I’ve written, no longer work.  Both happened with this one.

Since I’m nearing what will be the middle of the book in number of words, the arc of the story has to reach a certain dramatic point here and I had to fiddle with a good bit of the already written material to make that possible.  Part of the change, inevitable really, involves pruning excess characters, locales and plot lines.  When I did this, I reduced the plot lines to three, much easier for a reader to follow.  I also created a key  plot point that will allow all these plot lines to converge further along, and I hope, diverge again as I set up the second book.

Family

A Guy Thing

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Winter                                        Full Cold Moon

Tires for our 4WD Tundra, knobby tough guys, weigh a lot.  Guiding them onto their small, threaded mounts required three tries and two different efforts with the jack.  Finally, they were on.   They have a nifty device to prevent rust, a washered nut with a stainless steel crown that projects out from the wheel.  Made me wonder why all vehicles don’t use the same system.

When I picked up the tire at Carlson Toyota, I thought about telling them that the accelerator pedals on both of our vehicles work fine.  They might need a little bucking up right now.  Forgot.

Composted the potatoes that froze and thawed, perhaps three dozen altogether.  Next year’s potatoes will stay inside.

When we had our garage door opener in the first bay replaced a week ago, the old one stayed behind and needed dismantling before it  could be taken by the trash man (solid waste professional).  I did that, too.  It was a guy morning which had me wondering once more about how genitals predispose us toward particular tasks.

The cookies Kate made have white chocolate and macadamia nuts.  So good she’d better not make them again.

Family

Awake

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Winter                            Full Cold Moon

Every once in a while, not often, say every two-three months I can’t get to sleep.  I’ve not discerned any pattern in this over the years.  I’m not ruminating.  I’m not anxious.  Sleep will not come.  Last night was one of those nights.

Around 2 am, I gave up, got up and read.  I like the quiet late in the night, the sense of isolation and a sort of sneaky pleasure in doing something  off normal.  At times I think I should turn my days around and sleep in the morning and stay up very late and write.  Perhaps I will someday to see how it works.  Could be hard on Kate though.

Kate’s upstairs using our new Kitchen-aid to make special cookies for me as a thank-you for help during her recovery from surgery.  Not needed, but welcome.  They have white chocolate in them.

My 63 birthday comes on Valentine’s Day.  We’ve made plans for a meal at Azia, an Asian fusion and sushi bar at 26th and Nicollet.

Now I’m off to mount the new tire and replace Kate’s license plates on the truck.

Family, Writing

Oh, Boy! The truck jack is in!

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Winter                                         Waxing Cold Moon

Hacking away at the keyboard.  I’m up to 32,500 words and still chugging along, having fun.

Good news!  The truck jack we ordered came into Carlson Toyota.  That means I get to go out in the garage, jack up the truck and remove its left front tire and take it over to Carlson for repair.  Then, reverse the action.  Big fun.  At the same time I can disassemble the garage door opener replaced last Friday.  That way the trash will pick it up.  Oh, and while I’m out there I may as well disassemble all those boxes.

Kate’s back from seeing Dr. Bewin.  He’s her physiatrist, the doc who treats pain, recommends physical therapy and acts as her overall signal caller when it comes to degenerative disc disease.  The bursitis, which he thinks also has some tendinitis and myofascitis as companions, is, according to him, difficult to treat.  Cortisone injections and increased anti-inflammatory may help.

Family, Weather +Climate

Rain? In January?

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Winter                                               Waxing Cold Moon

These are the ten coldest days of the year on average.  And we have rain.  Whass’ up?

A full day back from the Mile High City, where it was spring, and I return to sloppy, icy gunk.  This is the stuff I moved out of Indiana to avoid.  I like winter when it’s winter.  I like fall when it’s fall.  Spring and summer I’m not fussy about, let’em come however the winds dictate, but winter and fall, my two favorite seasons, I prefer as I imagine them.  Rain in the third week of January is not as I imagine it.  But, of course, the weather gods do not listen to me, or to you for that matter, so we have to just shut up and take it.  I guess.

(Freyr:  Norse god of fertility and weather)

I mentioned Ruth several times over the last week.  Here is a picture of her at the rodeo:

ruthrodeo

Mostly back home now, better rested and ready to write and watch the Vikings on Sunday night.

Art and Culture, Family, Travel

Leaving Denver

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Winter                          Waxing Cold Moon

The decompression has begun.  My suitcase awaits only my dopp kit to be ready to go.  A shower, final packing and I’ll be ready.  Ready, that is, to drop off the rental car before noon then spend three hours at the Denver Airport before my 3:00 pm flight back to the Twin Cities.  When I arrrive around 5:45, I’ll still have one more leg to go:  Super Shuttle, in a ride on which I will be the last one delivered home.  All in all it will probably be between 7 and 8 hours before I get home after leaving the hotel.

I’m reading a book called Stealing the Mona Lisa, discussing it comes next, at a gathering of docents, dining at the Namaste Restaurant.  I would describe it as a difficult book, written by a psychoanalyst for whom style seems an afterthought and clarity a bother.  Having said that though, it is a profound book, digging deep into the meaning of art and, surprisingly, into the meaning of art’s absence.

Why I mention it this morning is an aha from the section I read over breakfast.  In describing psychoanalytical attitudes toward drives the author, Darian Leader, makes clear that sublimation is NOT a replacement for the act of sex, fucking as he so baldly puts it, rather it is an expression of the individuals need to fulfill the same desire as sex fulfills, that is, in Freudian terms, a return to the pleasure of direct bodily manipulation, pleasures lost as we adapt to cultural definitions of who and what we are.

Also, and most interesting to me, for Lacan, drives are an attempt to get to the state Freud describes as pleasuring the body, but Lacan describes as The Thing, a vast emptiness that exists just outside our capacity to reach.  Therefore our drives are attempts not to fill this emptiness, but to reach it, to find it, to discover what was lost when we became creatures of culture.

Lacan’s emphasis on emptiness as the defining state for our humanness, and as a state forever beyond our reach, yet felt and desired in every moment, struck me as a link to both existentialism on the one hand and Taoism on the other.

In existentialism we admit the reality of this emptiness, admit it’s definition of life as meaningless, then proceed to construct our life both in spite of and because of this emptiness.

In Taoism, we recognize the creation of the universe to have come from emptiness, the Tao, and we also recognize it as a vivifying impulse behind each moment.  It may be that Lacan’s more tortured and dark view of emptiness as The Thing exactly misses Taoism’s great point about emptiness as the very reason for a door, a cup, a vase.

There is, too, one other important thread that I don’t find so far in the book and that the is the realm of rationalist philosophy.  In this idea we construct our reality through sensory data, but our sensory data is not reality in the same way that a map is not the territory.  This means, according to Kant, that we can never know reality, the ding an siche, the thing-in-itself.  Sounds pretty Lacanian to me.

Family

One last hug, Granpop!

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Winter                               Waxing Cold Moon

Ruthie ran down the drive and said, “One last hug, Granpop!”  We had come back from an evening at the childhood sensation, Chuck E. Cheese.  I hugged Jon and Jen, kissed Gabe, under a crescent moon and took for the Marriot for one last night in Colorado.

Chuck E. Cheese, for those uninitiated, is a bunch of booths spread out among many games of chance and skill.  All the games take one token, available with purchase of the meal.  The food is unremarkable, but the music is loud, the place safe–it has rules against gang colors, signs, weapons (which made me wonder)–and there’s a video camera where your kid can go and perform, broadcast on in-house closed circuit TV’s.  Ruth performed.

It’s been a good six days here.  Family requires time and this is probably minimal but it was important, for me and for them.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, Travel

Trappin’

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Winter                   Waxing Cold Moon

Got to the stock show at about 7:30 am today.  I was early enough that there was no one checking passes or tickets, exhibitioners had not yet come and there was only one place serving food.  And it hadn’t opened for business.

Reminded me of the trips I used to take to the Indiana State Fair with my mom.  We went by Greyhound Bus because Mom never learned to drive.  That’s strange, isn’t it?  Just resurfaced as I wrote this.  Because of the Greyhound schedule we would get to the State Fair before the crowds.  Clean up crews would still be sweeping up from the night before and stock exhibitors would be getting their animals ready.  It’s a good memory and one I was happy to revisit.

While I admired a badger pelt, the man who trapped it came out and we got to talking.  He explained a host of unintended consequences from such things as eliminating the spring bear hunt and limiting trappers in what they can do.

Colorado’s Dept. of  Wildlife now kills as nuisance bears the same number as bear hunting did.  When the bears were hunted, the populations stayed steady, but with no hunting pressure and the growth of outlying development, bear numbers have skyrocketed. According to this guy, who seemed very balanced. The result is bears forced to forage in urban areas or suburbs because the wild territories have dominant adult animals in them.

In addition, this guy, a trapper who lives in Summit County, where Breckenridge is, said when he began trapping there were few to no raccoons in the whole county because winter was cold and long, eliminating food sources for enough of the year that it was not good habitat for them. Summit raccoons are now abundant, “You should see a mid-winter Breck raccoon, lotsa fur and fat.”

He makes his living trapping nuisance animals, mostly wild animals living high off pet food, garbage dumps and even purposeful feeding.  Animals that, again according  to him, could still be managed by trapping as it was practiced.

I watched Simmental Cattle judging and a junior showmanship event for hogs.  As the place began to fill up, I packed up my purchases, boarded the bus and came back here for a nap.

Family

Young Family

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Winter                       Waxing Cold Moon

Next to last day in Denver.  Last night Jon and Jen and I went to Fogo de Chao, a Brazilian steakhouse.

They have two young kids, Gabe and Ruth.  Gabe got his hemophilia diagnosis not long after his birth a year and 8 months ago, so they have had to cope with it; never more so than in the middle of this year when he began experiencing spontaneous bleeds.  This meant a port and every other day infusions of clotting factor, given by Jon and Jen at home.  In addition, Jon’s shoulder, crushed in a skiing injury a few years ago, got worse and required shoulder replacement surgery.

This is a pretty high stress level for a young family and they have handled it with real grace.  Tensions, of course.  But they have remained positive and forward looking, not giving in to despair or hopelessness.

They have also raised Ruth into an exceptional three-year old, bright and funny and wise.  Gabe’s a happy boy and really beginning to move around now after a slow start.

They needed some adult time and we got it.  I told them how much I respected the way they had handled all they’ve had in their lives this past year.  Worth every penny.

Family

I Want My Mommy.

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Winter                  Waxing Cold Moon

Ruth and I went to see the Superdogs.  This was our third day at the stockshow.  She surprised me several times.  The first time was on the sidewalk heading to the shuttle.

“My legs are asleep,”  she said.  Then she added, “Sometimes my legs wake up when I’m asleep.  They go to back to sleep when I wake up in the morning.”

On the bus to the stockshow, she looked out the window a long time. I thought she was enjoying the ride, but she said, “Granpop, I want my mommy.”  Her voice quavered.  Uh-oh.  We were almost there.  I offered to call Jen and did so, but the bout of homesickness passed.

At the superdog show,  about an hour + into it, she said, “Granpop, I don’t want to see this anymore.”  So we didn’t.

We also went in the stock barns and after getting a bit of a way in she said, “Let’s go back outside.  I don’t like the smell  in here.”

It’s easy to forget that young senses are so much skilled than ours, especially when ours are 62 plus years old and had to live through a bout of cigarette smoking to boot.

Just another day as Granpop.