Category Archives: Family

Family, Garden

A Fruiting Body?

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21  bar steady 0mph NE windchill 21  Samhain

Waxing Gibbous Dark Moon (I’ve been wrong on this for several posts)

Kate’s home and likely will be for a while until we get her neck dealt with in one way or another.  She’s read.  She’s sewed.  She’s cooked.   She’s helped out in the orchard work.   Not enough for her sturdy Norwegian work ethic. Her neck is bad enough that work just makes it worse, but when she rests it subsides enough that she itches to get stuff done, a tough place to be in for such an active and alive person.

A bit more garden work to do.  Stake the trees in the orchard.  Put protective sleeves on my 2-year old, toddler trees.  Put down black plastic on the forest edge and the shade garden area.  Still, the end is in sight for this growing season.

This is said sotte voce: I may be a daddy!  My dalliance with the peppers and egg plants seems to have begun to bear fruit.  I can’t tell for sure quite yet, but it sure looks like both plants are with fruit.  If so, I’m gonna be pleased.   I’ll post pictures when I know more.

Paula and Lindsay come tomorrow morning to do some rejiggering of our site plan.  Our work with them feels collaborative and I like that.

Tuesday evening is an event put on by our financial planner, talking about the current market situation.

Wednesday AM, most likely, Kate will have some more diagnostic tests for her neck.
Wednesday night is the Sierra Club political committee evaluation and celebration meeting.  I hope enough folks show up to help us get a good sense of what happened.  How many of our endorsee’s overall got elected.  Why did the four campaigns we targeted win and why did two fail?  What should be a time-line for next year’s political committee?

Thursday morning we see our financial adviser. Thursday afternoon Anastasia, Allison and I will judge the Northeast Minneapolis Art Show.  Friday night we’ll go to the opening.  Friday AM I have two tours and Kate has an appointment with the neuro-surgeon.

A very busy week.

Family, Weather +Climate

A Pain in the Neck

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23  bar rises 30.24  omph NNW  windchill 22  Samhain

Waxing Crescent of the Dark Moon

Change is the future invading the present…  Alvin Toffler

Ready to head outside for some more garden work.  A clear, bright day with a chill in the air.  Good outside working conditions.

Lost sleep last night.  No reason.  Just woke up at 5:30AM and could not get back to sleep.  Oh, well.

Kate got the report back on her cervical verterbrae and the news is not good, though not much different than what we expected.  It highlights the severity of the problem with which she’s labored for so long now.  Now, a few more tests and an appointment with the neurosurgeon.

Life.  It goes on whether you are ready or not.

Aging, Family

Hunkering Down

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33 bar rises 29.77  N 6mph windchill 28  Samhain

Waxing Crescent of the Dark Moon

The October financial storm gathered under the Blood Moon.  Obama’s election comes during a waxing Dark Moon.  Just interesting is all I’m saying.

The red car in the Sandhills of Nebraska.

red-car-trip061450.jpgPicked up the red car from its most recent series of procedures.  This time it got new front constant velocity boots.  They protect the main bearing from wear caused by road debris.  Two new aluminum wheels should solve the slow leak problem the back tires have experienced.  Various bulbs and other smaller matters–oil change, too–thrown in for the trip.  Each visit it comes closer and closer to Theseus’s ship.

Kate continues to suffer with her cervical vertebrae pinching a nerve.  She’s so stoic, so careful.  Right now she’s stopped taking the prednisone which helped because she wants the imaging studies to be unaffected.  She can’t find a way to position herself that doesn’t hurt.  Like hell.

Got tools for protecting the trees in our new orchard.  Later today or tomorrow I’ll install them and begin to put down the black plastic and straw to kill weeds along the forest’s edge.  Much cooler weather now, but it is still a good time to do this kind of work.

This week will be the last for working outside for a while.    I’m ready to hunker down and get some reading and writing done.

Family, Great Work, Politics

An Old Political Junkie

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Made more phone calls.  Liked it not at all, but I agreed to do them.  Now I find out they won’t need me to make calls on November 4th.  Darn.

An old political junkie like me has more information available than I can possibly digest.  The internet brings more and more and more, at finer and finer levels of detail.  When I have the time, I love to read the data, down to the precinct level if I can find it.  Other folks like baseball stats, for me it’s election numbers, political analysis.

Political analysis brought my dad and I close together when I was young.  We would sit up late watching conventions and election returns.  Political analysis pushed my dad and I far apart when I was 19.  Opposition to the Vietnam War and long hair  did not sit well with him.

Tired.

Family, Our Land and Home

A Good Shed, Cleaned

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You know that garden shed that appeared in some of the orchard pictures?  Jon built it for us quite a while back and a good shed it is.

Like most sheds and their smaller inside counterparts, closets, the stuff fairy goes around sprinkling this and that until one day, ten years later, you discover a no longer usable space.  In and out of the shed for the last couple of years I have thought, clean this up.

So, this morning I did.  I hauled out old garden implements, discovered a big pipe wrench nearly dissolved by oxidation, pitched various sorts of garden detritus and opened up a large space in the shed.  I needed to store the six bales of hay I bought last Saturday.  Room to spare.

My right hand has a large bruise where the IV went in for my anesthetics last Wednesday.  As I look at it, it reminds me of hospital patients I visited during my days in the active ministry, especially older patients whose skin seemed to take a bruise and keep it awhile.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Holidays

The Ancient Trail of Gratitude

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quick note:  Boy, the pace of life accelerated with the coming of autumn.  This last week it felt like I’d gone back to full-time employment.  I’m glad the week-end is here.

Mine is a small life, no encyclopedia entries or feistschrifts, no monuments.  Ordinary.  I’ve been lucky so far.  The major stumbles I made got turned around by mid-life.  Kate came along and made the journey forward companionable.  There are few friends, but good ones.  The things I do, I love.  Dig.  Plant.  Harvest.  Write.  Preach.  Tour.  Spend time with the kids and their kids.  Read.

Thanksgiving is not a one-day holiday, but, rather, a life way, the ancient trail of gratitude.

Family, Politics

Fiscal Policy

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Quick note.

We’ve decided to stay the course with our portfolio.   We have decided to cut spending and increase our cash holdings by putting most of Kate’s quarterly adjustments in savings.  This will all have the effect of letting us extend the time before we have to withdraw any money from our various retirement accounts.

The hope is that by that time the market will have recovered enough to cover our needs with Kate retired.  As is  so often the case, we’ll see.

Family, Great Wheel, Politics

Tonight I Was the Stranger

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A quick note.  Did phone calling for the Sierra Club tonight.  This represents both a signal of my commitment and a raging contradiction for me.  A phone call from a stranger, pitching something in which I have marginal to no interest or may find abhorrent irritates the hell out of me.  Tonight I was the stranger.

Some calls I made to other Sierra Club members who might volunteer to call swing voters.  The rest of the calls were persuasion calls to swing voters in a Minnesota House of Representatives district in the general area of Shoreview.  Most of these folks didn’t want to talk.  I’m not good at making nice with people who’d rather be left alone, since I’m such a person myself and respect the inclination.

Oh well, only one more night of calls.  The last phoning I’ll do will be on election day, get out the vote calls.  Those will be easy, straightforward.

I did say these calls were a signal of my commitment.  I felt a need to push myself out of my comfort zone.  These calls do it.   My relationship with mother earth makes it clear to me that irritating some people in order to create a more favorable climate for eco-friendly legislation is worth it.

Kate says she’s feeling sick.  She gets exposed to everything new.  Sometimes the new stuff slips by her otherwise amped up immune system.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

Chop Wood, Carry Fencing

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After years in urban ministry, economic development, affordable housing and responsbility for urban congregations spread throughout the metro area I thought I knew Minneapolis.

Not so.  When I drove over to ecological gardens, Paula’s home at 4105 Washburn Avenue I discovered north Minneapolis, the one that includes Shingle Creek, the Humboldt Greenway, Victory Memorial Drive.  This is a quiet leafy chunk of the city that seems somehow separate, another urban entity, neither suburb nor city. 

Delightful.  I love to drive around in the city, on city streets, to places I’ve never been.  That chance came to me today and I had a great time.

Back home in time for the nap, but no sleep.  A family I know has a terrible weight on them right now and I couldn’t get it off my mind.  What can I do.  What will they do. 

So I got up and moved old wire fencing Continue reading Chop Wood, Carry Fencing →

Aging, Family

Lunch Reminder

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83  bar falls 29.97  4mph NE dew-point 64  sunrise 6:21  sunset 8:11 Lughnasa

Waning Gibbous Corn Moon

Took Kate out to lunch at Bennigans to say thanks for cooking Monday night.  While there we watched a group of wheel chair bound residents of the Anoka Care Center load onto a transit bus after lunch.  A reminder of the ravages aging can create.  A good prod to exercise and healthy diet.

Didn’t get outside yet today and I have to get those daylilies moved so I can move the iris.