Category Archives: Sport

Cooking, Garden, permaculture, Sport

Harvest and Preservation

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Lughnasa                      Waning Harvest Moon

It changed.  The game.  After half-time most of the time, I expected to see showed up.  How about that 64 yard run by Peterson?  Wow.  Still, it concerned me that we didn’t get more pressure on Brady Quinn.  I’m looking forward to the analysis.

Kate has made grape juice, a lot, from the grapes I picked this morning.  Next is jelly.  I have a role in the preservation process this week.  We discovered last year that gazpacho is a perfect canned soup.  When chilled, it tastes like it was made that day.  A great treat in the middle of winter, a summer vegetable soup.

We also several Guatemalan blue squash.  They run about a foot and a half long and 7-8 inches wide.  Heavy, too.  Taste good.   We still have parsnips (next year), turnips, carrots and potatoes in the ground, probably a beet or two hanging around, too.  Above ground we have lettuce, beans, greens and some more tomatoes.  Kate’s put up 36 quarts of tomatoes so far.

Kate also made use of our dehydrator.  Cucumber chips.  I know, but they taste wonderful.

There’s a lot of room for improvement in next year’s garden, but we feel good about the production this year.  Next year we should get more fruit from our orchard.

Garden, Sport

What Will They Do Next?

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Lughnasa                               Waning Harvest Moon

It appears life as a Vikings fan will continue as a pilgrimage through a wasteland of frustration and dashed hopes.  In the first game of the season, at Cleveland, 4-12 or something like that last year, this supposedly Super-Bowl ready team is behind 13-10.  Behind.  Aaarrrrgggghhh.  Each pilgrimage must perforce visit the slough of despond before rising to the heights of the heavenly city (Miami this year) so we’re there early.

On a different note.  After getting groceries this morning, I picked grapes.  Kate makes a wonderful grape jelly from our wild grapes.  They grow all over the woods, but have chosen the six foot fence for a nice run.  As I had my small shears out, cutting the purple bunches from the vine, the Rosetti painting, the Girlhood of Mary Virgin came to mind.  In the background Mary’s father, Joachim, tends to a grapevine.

The harvest is a good time of year and I enjoy the wild harvest as well the domestic one.  This is hunter gatherer behavior, imprinted on us for millennia.  It satisfies a deep need.

Faith and Spirituality, Sport, Writing

Writing Can Wait

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Lughnasa                                  Waxing Harvest Moon

Geez.  Took the whole day to organize my notes and quotes, tweak the ideas and find a thread.  Now the intellectual journey about liberalism has to contend with the Vikings 3rd pre-season game.  The starters will play the first half at least.  Hmmm.  What to do?

Writing can wait.  The y chromosome has its mysteries and football is among them.

Dogs, Sport

Post-Op Pups

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Lughnasa                            Waxing Harvest Moon

The need to constantly monitor our two post-op pups and Kate’s difficulty with her neck and back has made me feel trapped in the house.  If I leave one of the pups in the kitchen too long, they chew up and ruin something I’d rather have.  If I let them outside, they run the risk of opening their incisions and getting an infection.  Kate’s pain has made her less able than normal to help with them.  So, I stay close, listen for chewing sounds and rotate the pups, one inside and one outside.

While Kate was here this morning, I made a quick run to the temple of the cost conscious consumer, Costco.  Got dogfood, dog treats, kitchen trash bags and two large jugs of Tide.  I discovered a while back that if you go right at 10 a.m. when they open, the chances of getting in and out in a reasonable time rise dramatically.

OK.  That’s enough whining.

How about that Favre?  He was in for two sets of downs, did a bit of this and a bit of that, nothing spectacular.  The paper claimed season ticket and jersey sales have almost made up for the money they spent on his contract.  Geez.  Here’s a bit of irony.  Tavaris Jackson followed Favre and played well into the fourth quarter.  He looked great.  His passes were crisp; he didn’t hesitate.  Seemed to know what he was about.  Then John David Booty stepped in and looked good, too.

It made wonder if the coaching staff has picked Favre for an additional reason to the apparent one, that is taking an already good team deeper into the playoff season.  Maybe, just maybe they hope his play and presence will elevate the work of Tavaris Jackson and/or John David Booty.  Maybe, just maybe Favre plays a couple of years, these guys apprentice from one of the best to play the game and become our quarterbacks of the future?  If I can think of it, someone else can, too.

Cooking, Sport, Woolly Mammoths

Debrine and Chill

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Lughnasa                                 Waning Green Corn Moon

Kate made banana bread and cut up vegetables.  I went to the grocery store and returned.  In the average year we may entertain non-family members once or at most twice, family sometimes 3 or 4 times.  We’re far away from the center of things here in Andover, true, but we’re not big entertainers or party goers in the first place.  Kate is comfortable cooking for guests while I’m not, so I’m glad to have her home.  We make a good team.

Tiger Woods is a competitive guy.  He chewed nails today when he made a couple of bad shots near the end of the PGA.  They ensured Ye Yang’s victory, the first Asian born PGA champion.  Tiger also said some bad words.

I have to go debrine the chickens and put them in gallon freezer bags with olive oil.  They’ll stay in the fridge over night.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Sport

Wish They All Could Be California…Wines

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Lughnasa                                 Waxing Green Corn Moon (99% illuminated)

Kate and I watched Bottle Shock, a movie about the U.S. Bicentennial year taste test between French and American wines.  California’s Napa Valley wines won.  The British oenologist who created the test redid it in 2006 anticipating that the French wines would win.  They did not.  Napa again.

It’s a bit difficult for me to tell whether I don’t get it because I don’t drink alcohol, but the whole veneration of vinculture and its products seems overblown.  Just sayin’.

Tonight the almost full Green Corn Moon is a yellow orb hanging high in the southeast sky.  It makes the evening enchanted.  The Japanese have moon viewing platforms.  Seems like a good idea to me.

More medical visits tomorrow with Kate, trying to track down the elusive next and hopefully better treatment.

Not sure whether I wrote anything about the whole Favre who-ha, but here it is:  thank god it didn’t happen.  Any superbowl won by the Vikings with Brett Favre at the helm would have tainted the experience and us long suffering Viking’s fans deserve a clean win, straight up with no cross state retired quarterback in the mix.  That said, it does not appear to me that either Tavaris Jackson or Rosenfels have the stuff, but I hope I’m wrong.

Art and Culture, Friends, Great Work, permaculture, Sport

Superman

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Beltane                           Waxing Dyan Moon

“It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.” – William G. McAdoo

Boy, is that true.  Look at Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, oh my.

Had lunch and a by the seat of the pants tour with Mary and Frank Broderick.  It was fun, wandering around the museum looking at art with friends.

Obama is such a smart guy.  Speaking to the Muslims yesterday, visiting Buchenwald today.  He does not allow the dust to settle in any one place before he moves on, readjusting the tunic of America’s presence in the world.  In such a short time he has restored my feeling of good fortune in living here.  Geez, just to have a President who can string together a complex sentence is enough to make me cry.

Following the low bar of the Bush presidency has eased Obama’s transition, but he would have looked good at any point.  Now he looks like superman.

The first phase of the growing season, planting and amending soil, has come to an end.  Almost.  Now mulch goes down newwork09and surveillance for pests.

This is part of the new work we had done last week.  The vegetable garden area has no more grass, just chips.  It also has new beds with flowers, shrubs and space for some more vegetables.  We have made another step toward a permaculture suburban acreage.  The small white form in the upper left is the bee hive.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Sport, Weather +Climate

An Existential Cry?

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-8  falls 30.32  SW0 wchill-8 Winter

First Quarter of the Wolf Moon

The Great Horned Owl who lives in our woods calls tonight, right now as I write.  Whether he, or she, speaks to a lost love or wayward children I do not know.  On a night this cold it could be the existential cry of the world, proclaiming the season at its depths.  I often imagine this owl whose wingspan extends longer than my body and whose talons can lift a small dog or a young child with ease; I imagine this owl perched on a top limb of our tallest poplar.  The gaze of this fierce predator, the apex predator of our woods, rakes the Wolf Moon, perhaps blinded by the light, but looking just the same.  Because, like us, the moon attracts the eye.

The Vikings lost to the Eagles.  I don’t feel as let down as I have when the Vikings have lost other playoff games.  Not sure why.  Maybe because they did not come into this game a prohibitive favorite, then give it away.  Perhaps because they played with heart and made some young team mistakes.  I don’t know.  But I’ll watch again.  Peculiar, eh?

Writing Homecomer took up the writing juice today.  Little left over for this blog.  I’ll let it sit a day or two, then read it with a red pen in hand. Go back to the computer and revise it.  Then let it be.

Now, back to The Given Day by Dennis Lehane.  If you have not read it, and enjoy period pieces with rich characters and real historical drama as I do, then you’ll find this a treat.

Friends, Sport, Weather +Climate, Writing

We Got Sizzle

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24  rises 29.89  NNW0 wchill 24   Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

The Internet is a strange phenomenon.  It functions as a time machine, bringing the future just a bit before it arrives and churning the past as old acquaintances find you again through one of the search functions or social networking sites.

It’s a good thing for me, because I was not such a good communicator before the web arrived.  I wrote a few letters, but I’ve never liked the phone much and the only reunions I ever attend are those of my high school.  Now though with Facebook,  Myspace and e-mail those old acquaintances are not forgot and often brought to mind.

Wrote about three pages of a new Homecomer.  Much better.  I needed to make it a continuation of the first two pieces in the Heresy Moves West series.  I had conceived of them as a set from the beginning, but I hadn’t begun the other one as if it fit with them.

We have some kind of frozen precipitation coming down right now, but I don’t what to call it.  Snert.  Sleeze.  Maybe sneeze?  Frozen drizzle is so uninteresting.  Fizzle?  Hey, I got it.  Sizzle.

I bought two new snow shovels.  I have an unfortunate adventuresome spirit in the purchase of snow shovels.  This time I bought one of a kind I saw used on the U.P.  You figure they have 3 to 4 times the amount of snow we have, they must know something.  The other one has a blade made of a tough (I hope) plastic that won’t snag on the nails on our deck–at least that was my conclusion.  I may find out as soon as tomorrow morning.

Just finished a lower body work out and aerobics. Tomorrow AM all morning I’ll write, then watch the vikings.  May Johnny Unitas have mercy on my soul.

Sport

Half-Time

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23  bar steep fall 29.90  0mph SE  windchill 22   Winter

New Moon (Wolf Moon)

Vikings played well the first half against the Giants.  67 yard touchdown by Adrian Peterson.  Yeah.

Order in to Seed Savers.  Baker Creek next.

A sunny, warmer than last week day.  Shadows from the south in early afternoon.