Category Archives: Family

Family, Friends, GeekWorld

The Printing Press Today

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83  bar steady 29.68 1mph SE  dew-point 67  Summer, hot and clear

Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

“What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Another late milestone here.  Kate has lunch tomorrow with an old friend she hasn’t seen in a while.  She asked me to print some grandchild pictures.  In the process I selected several photos, including some of her.  The milestone is this.  They came out printed on our Canon Pixma.  The first color work I’ve ever done.  We’ve had many computers over the last 18 years, but only one printer, the HP Laserjet 4.  It has served me very well and still does.  Like the red car I can’t imagine daily life without it.

We bought the Canon as a copier and fax machine, but it also has the capacity to print photographs and other color images.  I got out the manual, the paper and cracked open the usb cord I bought for it January before last when I purchased it.  Worked like a charm.  Technology amazes me and delights me.

Off to feed the dogs and read through the Sierra Club material.

Family, Friends, GeekWorld, Writing

Back In Its Own Stall

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79  bar falls 29.84 1mph ENE dew-point 61   Summer, hot, moving toward muggy

Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

The cracks in the red car’s head were tiny.  I saw them.  They ran, in one instance, down the threads that hold the spark plug in place.  While threading in a spark plug or under pressure, these cracks could have broken loose and allowed oil and exhaust gases to invade the spark plug and generally foul things up.  Carlson was thoughtful in showing them to me.

We’ve sunk almost $5,000 in this car this year.   That’s almost a year’s car payments.  Even so, we could put in the same amount next year and still be ahead of the game.  It runs quite well now, though there is that piece that fell off on the way home.  No kidding.  A big chunk of something fell off.  I’m going to take it back and ask them about it, but not today.  It looks like a shield or rock barrier, not metal, rather some kind of composite, tarpaper like material.

It’s 31-32 miles per gallon on the highway alone justifies keeping it in our two vehicle collection.  The pick-up we’ll park for the most part in the not too distant future.  $90 a tank to fill it up.  Ouch.  And it sucks the gas down, too, with its v-8.  What were we thinking?  It is, though, a useful vehicle for errands and landscape chores.  Another advantage is its four-wheel drive.  (Oh, come to think of it, that’s what we were thinking.  In 1999, when we bought it, Kate still had call and  hospital duty.  She had to be able to get to where she was needed.) That makes it potentially important in a severe winter situation.  Besides, pick-ups and SUV’s have lost significant value.  We could get nowhere the value it is to us.  So, it will stay, too.

Our neighbor went to bed apparently healthy, then woke up the next day with MS.  A striking and sudden life change.  It has occasioned a major alteration in their lives.  They went from the salary of a 58 year old career civil servant at the peak of  his career to a fixed income household.  This was six months ago.

How it will affect their family dynamics over the long haul is an open question.  The prednisone  makes  him cranky.  He’s gone from an active guy who built his own observatory and sailed Lake Superior to a wobbly man who can no longer read.  His mental acumen seems fine, but for now he wanders, lost in the bewilderment of this rapid change, as well he might be.

Today is an inside day.  I’m going to write on Superior Wolf, get ready for my research on Unitarian Universalism in the Twin Cities and, maybe, crack the case and clean off my cooling fan.

Family, GeekWorld

Ethics Escaped Their Heads Long Ago

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73  bar falls 30.07  1mh ENE  dew-point 48  Sunny, pleasant

New Moon (Thunder Moon)

The little red car has its new head.  Phhew!  Even so, new heads require inspection to be sure their connections are good, so it won’t come home  until Saturday.  Too bad we don’t inspect the heads of decision makers as well.  Say, hmmm.  Bush. Cheney.  Rumsfeld. Each one of this trinity of corruption and incompetence has a bad leak somewhere, for sure all their ethics escaped their heads long ago.

Kate and I had lunch at Saji-ya in St. Paul.  This is an old hangout for me, but I hadn’t been there in several years.  They had redecorated.  When I mentioned it to the host, he said, “Oh, 3-4 years ago.” Sashimi is a great lunch, light and healthy.  Kate had her usual tempura.

We both agreed that if we ever moved back to an urban area that it would be St. Paul.  It has leafy streets, older homes, distinct neighborhoods and a generally laid back approach to urban living.  The main large avenue, Summit Avenue, has a long, relatively intact stand of Victorian homes, many large enough to qualify as mansions.  Rice Creek Park, which has the Ordway Center (music and performing arts center), the central Public Library, the James J. Hill Library, the St. Paul Hotel and the Landmark Center (former federal building) remains my favorite urban space.  The center city is compact and contains many buildings from the turn of the century (the last century) so modernism has not stained its skyline as it has Minneapolis.

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra plays the kind of classical music I love.  The state capitol and the main government offices are just up the hill from downtown.  The Mississippi river winds through its heart and, as a result, the street system has a charming eccentricity.  Many people from Minneapolis claim they can’t drive in St. Paul.  Too confusing.  I have the same problem in the western suburbs.

We’ve had another money meeting with the woman I think of as our financial strategist.  She helps us with the practical side of money management and she is very good.  After a period of lackadaisal attention to the financial aspect of our life, we have developed a steady routine, a consistency that has allowed us to build up cash reserves, save plenty of money for retirement and still enjoy travel, taking care of our family and our home.

Family, Garden, Writing

Garlic Harvest

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77 bar steady 29.93 5mph N dew-point 49  Summer, hot and sunny

                      Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

Wrote this AM.  Appended chapter 3 of Superior Wolf to its page on this website.  Next week I’ll take down chapter 1 and put chapter 4 and so it will go until I have written myself to the end.  We’ll see where it goes.

Moved mulch, created by renting the super chipper from Home Depot and grinding up branches, tree trunks and chunks of shrubs.  The mulch goes on the perennial bed first, keeping the weeds down as we move into high summer and also cooling the soil just a bit.  This involves a wheel-barrow, a pitchfork and a lot of moving from one place to another.

After a nap I unburdened the kitchen table of a couple of months of magazines, catalogues and desparate fund-raising pleas.  This involved a paper-sack, a lot of sorting and moving from one place to another.

Now I’m gonna cook supper, red beans and rice with some prime rib left overs thrown to make it interesting.  The now standard fare of lettuce, onions and cilantro from our gardens inside and out will join store purchased tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers for a colorful salad.  Later in the season we will have all of these ingredients. 

I also learned from a piece of paper recovered from the literary overburden of the table that I can  harvest the garlic now.  Somehow garlic has become my favorite crop.  Don’t know why.

Family, Garden, Great Wheel

Cool House Plants

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69  bar rises 29.73  0mph NNW dew-point 57  A summer night

                   Last Quarter of the Flower Moon

This time period, after the iris bloom and the lilacs have died back, we have annuals like petunias, begonias, geraniums and vinca plus the odd Siberian Iris and peony, not many late June perennials in our garden. We await now the Asiatic lilies.  My favorite among our flowers many of the lilies in our garden came from lily fanciers who live in the upper midwest.   Purchased at a lily growers special season sale at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, they come in beautiful colors and many, like the Star Gazer, have scents that beguile.  A bit later the hemerocallis, day lilies, will begin to bloom. They will take us into September along with the Liguria, the bug bane and the bush Clematis.

It is a clear night.  Stars light the sky, ancient messengers of events and objects of long past. They are deep history, a counterpoint to the now.  Insects chirp.  The occasional owl hoots.  Maybe the sound of some small animal scurrying through the grass in search of food.  A bats quick, furtive flight crosses the moon’s half lit face.

These nights offer a softness and elegance found only in the natural world.  There is no need for fancy dress, cocktails or dance music.  All you have to do is walk outside and share the company.  Your clothing or lack of it will not matter. Some of the party may find you irrestible, of course.  Yes, unwanted attention sometimes mars a quiet night.  It does show, though, that you have a niche. You are the canape.

Kate and I spoke to Mary on Skype today.   Arranging a physical connection with Singapore has its modest challenges.  She called us, for example, at 11:00 PM today, though it was 10:00 AM here.  Today has long since turned into tomorrow there.  She’s off this week finishing the revisions to her dissertation.  Then it heads out to her supervisor for one last check, then onto external readers.  More revisions likely.  Finally, the oral defense sometime from now.  Later, awarding of the doctorate.  Pretty cool.

She may visit the temperate latitudes building at the Botanical Gardens as a treat for finishing.  That’s where they have trees and plants adapted to cold weather, a mirror to our conservatories with their palms and philodendrons and other tropical vegetation.  A strange notion from the perspective of Minnesota.

Family, Politics

The 13th Amendment

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70  bar steady 29.87 0mph SW dew-point 53  Summer, night and warm

                     Waning Gibbous Flower Moon

Grocery shopping this afternoon.  There is nothing as grounding for me as grocery shopping.  It’s something I’ve done since college and I continue to enjoy it.  A domestic task.

Pulled the tulip’s dead leaves and stalks out this afternoon, too.  Some annual can go in their place now that the bulbs have stored energy for next year’s growth.

Watched a movie, Human Trafficking, with Donald Sutherland and Mia Sorvino.  The last scene grabbed me because Mia’s character gives a speech at the very end referencing the 13th amendment which outlaws slavery or involuntary servitude.  After 48 lectures on the Civil War that particular amendment stands out with neon lights. 

Kate had a late night at the office and I’m up later than I want to be, so I’m off to bed.  Taking the red car into Carlson’s in the morning for a head gasket and having the heads ground.  Pricy.  But important.

Family, Travel

Home

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63  bar rises 29.95  0mph NNE  dew-point 54  Summer, night and cool

                           Waning Gibbous Flower Moon

Back home.  The corn is past knee high; the garlic has finished its growth; the tomato plants that began from heritage seeds have fruit; the beans have begun to bush out and the onions have sky rocketed.  A wonderful pastel copper/brown bearded iris has bloomed and the Siberian iris have thrown up dark blue flags all over the garden.  There is, of course, the occasional weed, but that’s Monday’s task.  Perhaps Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s, too.

Driving as I did, a bit over 3,000 miles, movement dominates.  Even in Montgomery I drove to Maxwell four times, an equal number of times out for meals.  In the car.  Out of the car.  Stop for gas.  Now the movement slows down.  A walk in the garden.  Up and down stairs.  To the refrigerator. 

Here Kate welcomes me.  At the various motels slightly aware receptionists said how can i help you.  Here I get a hug, a meal, a smile.  An “I missed you.”  “Me, too.”  The dogs jump up and down, lean against my leg.  This is a place I know and where I am known.     

Family, Woolly Mammoths

A Radical Individualist

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58  bar rises 29.69  0mph S  dew-point 51  Beltane, night and cool

                   First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Woolly’s on Wildness.  Some of us thought wildness was wilderness, or being in wilderness.  Others of us thought wildness lay in the the natural, the natural state, unconstrained by civilization.  Yet others believed wildness was one aspect of our psyche that needed integration into the larger, mature person we become over time.

I realized in the middle of the conversation that I am a radical individualist, along with Emerson and the Existentialists.  More on this at another time.

How to make another see the inherent worth they have, the beauty and the glory of their person?  The depth of their soul and the bounty they represent in the world?  I don’t know right now and I wish I did.

Family, Garden

No Impairment of Our View

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71  bar steady 29.64 0mph SE  dew-point 51  Beltane, Sunny and warm

                  First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Ah, Costco.  A vast and cavernous market, as much a temple to the American obsession with stuff as store.  Two 40 pound bags of mature dog dogfood, Kirkland, and a box of dog biscuits plus $100 on the Costco gas card, a sort of futures market in which I bet that Costco prices will be under those of the competitor gas stations.  After a trip in which each tankfull of 11 gallons or so cost over $44 in my compact Toyota Celica, it seems like a good wager.  Through the lines with others and their carts, as American as fast food and credit cards, I spent $161 dollars on dog nourishment and car nourishment.

Back home I put the dogfood in the container we use for it, then went out to the shed that Jon built.  It houses the chainsaw.  When I found it needed gas, I had to schlep out to the further shed where I store the sharp and mechanical tools as well as gas and oil. 

Filled up I hiked out to the front yard and began pruning branches off Amur maples.  The first one to go was the one I mentioned yesterday, broken in some storm or another.  Then a couple that had long impinged on a spruce and a Norway pine.  At another clump of Amur’s I pruned some large dead branches, small trunks really all of these, and a few low hanging live ones.

While Kate mowed, I moved these cumbersome items down the hill and into the huge storm water drainage depression we share with our neighbor.  This wise feature is as far across as our lot and goes back about three hundred feet.  It slopes on all four sides down to a level bottom.  This ensures that the run off our roofs and yards soak into the soil, rather than into nearby wetlands or Roundlake.  Since it has no other purpose and is large, it can hide many branches, even tree trunks with no impairment of our view.

Kate’s finished mowing and I’m taking her out to lunch.  Bye.

Family, Politics

Cast Out Your Doubts. Carpe Diem.

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68  bar steady  29.67  3mph NE  dew-point 56  Beltane, cloudy and warm

               Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon

“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

A wise thought from our third  greatest president (after GW and Abe).  What we doubt we can do today will not happen tomorrow.  It may even fade from the horizon line of possibility altogether.  A terrible example is the 3/5’s compromise.  The generation which founded our country had many leaders who knew slavery was a burden too great for the Republic to bear.  Among them were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.  Too many, though, doubted a solution to slavery was possible at this time and so agreed to count 3/5’s of the slave population when it came to census figures determining congressional representation.  This doubt obscured slavery’s tragedy, a holocaust of freedom, in a nation founded on the principles of freedom and liberty for all.

The payment for these doubts came due in 1861 with the Confederate shelling of Ft. Sumter in  Charleston, South Carolina’s harbor.  The next four years would exact a price in blood so high and a rent in the body politic so deep that this nation has not recovered.  The tragedy compounded during reconstruction as freed slaves became tenant farmers, sharecroppers in states with Jim Crow laws.  Lynchings.  The KKK.  Segregation.  Limited practical voting rights.  Employment discrimination. 

Think how much further along our society would be in a movement toward a common culture, one shared by all Americans regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual preference or national origin if our founding fathers (yes, fathers) had set aside their doubts and made real the full promise of the American revolution.

With Obama’s candidacy we may be ready for a third movement forward toward such a culture.  The Civil War was one.  The 1950’s and 1960’s were another with Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Civil Rights act and the struggles of Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, the Black Muslims–especially Malcom X, CORE, the NAACP, SNICC and grass roots uprisings in many American cities.

Take stock of the doubts you have today about what you may realize tomorrow.  They are the great barrier reef in your psyche between the ego’s fears and the manifestation of your full Self.       

Some time outside this morning laying down weed preventer.  This is prologomena to a thorough weeding this week before I take off for Alabama.  A major focus this week will be helping Kate.  She’s going to be here with the dogs for 10 days, again, after 6 days last week.  Anything I can do now to make those days easier will be good.