4 bar steep rise 29.72 4mph SW windchill 0 Samhain
Full Moon of the Long Nights
Vikings came up big time against Arizona. Yes, I watched it. I guess you could say I’m conflicted about football. I like it, but I don’t think I should. Just like TV. I like it, but something tells me I shouldn’t. Still, I do. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, said Emerson. A rationalization for every situation.
A day I was glad to be home with domestic tasks.
15 bar steep rise 29.50 5mph W windchill 9 Samhain
Full Moon of Long Nights Day 8hr 45mn
It’s 4:48 and the sun has been down for 20 minutes, twilight almost run its course. We are a week away from the Winter Solstice, the high holiday in my personal calendar.
There is a simple pleasure, at once profound and straightforward. Grow a vegetable. Save it in the fall. Use it in soups in the winter. Today I made bean based soups with white and black beans from our garden. Onions and garlic went in each of them, too. So did some Swiss Chard grown in our hydroponics.
Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired Magazine, had a column this issue titled Urban Food. He said to heck with the 100 mile meal, I’m talking about the 100 yard meal. These two pots of soup are 100 yard pots of soup.
Feels great.
35 bar steep fall 29.22 omph WNW windchill 34 Samhain
Full Moon of Long Nights
A dreary, rainy chilly day, heading toward downright cold and, hopefully, some snow. I’ve made two pots of soup, created an e-mail address for Kate and read a bit. Now it’s time for a nap.
38 bar steep fall 29.49 2mph N windchill 36 Samhain
Full Moon of Long Nights
Another TED video worth watching: Where Have All the Bee’s Gone? In it apiarist Dennis vanEnglesdorp gives a brief overview of the honeybee disappearances in the U.S. We have lost about 1/3 of the total hives each year for at least the last two years. Beekeepers have prevented this from reducing our total bee population by splitting hives and buying queens, but the price of doing this year after year will become prohibitive.
Just this year I saw some honeybees in our garden for the first time since we’ve lived here. They surprised me.
At the end of the video he diagnoses the primary problem behind the bee disappearances as NDD: Nature Deficit Disorder. We have become, he says, too distanced from the natural world and no longer pay attention to how our lives influence the rest of the nature. His solution? Replace lawns with meadows. Works for me.
This is an example of the followers of the old faith. Each beekeeper, amateur or professional, is in the community of the saints, necessary in large, large numbers for this old faith to survive.
18 bar steep fall 1mph SSW windchill 18 Samhain
Full Moon of Long Nights
How do you stretch out the creative muscle, let the reins loose on the resources hidden somewhere beyond or under the rational wall? When the Pegasus of new thought tries to rise from its tether inside the amygdala, the fear raiser of the brain, what can be done to smooth its way? To calm the nakedness of the soul?
There is, I am sure of it, an old faith taking on new raiment. It says nothing new; it proclaims nothing that is not obvious; it offers no new wisdom. It cares not for written texts, for prayers or priests, for churches or temples. It does not require protection under the first amendment or any amendment of any laws of humankind, for its law is writ in the language of the stars.
It has holy places. Places we know by their Torii or their thick ropes. Places we know by worn paths that lead us through forests, along rivers, up mountainsides, into the garden. Places we know by the trembling sense of wonder they evoke in us. A crashing waterfall. An erupting volcano. An opening tulip. The birth of a howler monkey among the ruins of ancient Angkor. Places we know by the care others have taken: paintings, poems, cairns and prayer ties.
These holy places were not decreed in some council or by a guru or selected by a committee. No, they were decreed by the hand of Pangea, sculpted by the artisans wind and water. They were discovered, not made.
This old faith has so many followers, so many who take its truths with them into the fields, onto the lakes and oceans, alongside them in struggle, carried in wicker baskets into the flower and vegetable gardens. So many followers.
There is no common book, save the verdant field. There is no common book, save the flowing stream. There is no common book, save the vasty deeps. There is no common book, save the azure sky. There is no common book, save the dark night sky filled with stars. And these are more than enough.
If you are a member of this faith, you know it. You need no congregation, you require no chant or hymn. You need only a quiet moment beside a brook or a butterfly.
13 bar steep fall 29.92 0mph SSW windchill 13 Samhain
Full Moon of the Long Night
Davis Vantage Pro2 Weathersystem
My new weather gadget has arrived. It’s a datalogger that will allow me to post information from my weather station to the internet. As a result of that capacity, I have just signed a contract with the Star-Tribune to contribute to a weather blog. Basically, I agreed to give them all the information, my postings and pictures in return for them having the right to do anything they want with it, in perpetuity, without my being compensated. Sweet deal, eh?
The weather stuff is a hobby and I’m glad to have the opportunity to help other folks get a more complete picture of what’s going on around the state.
Right now my weather report is: cold with snow on the ground. Forecast is more of the same.
I’ll let you know when it’s all set up so you can check out weather from the northern exurbs of the Twin Cities metro area.
12 bar falls 30.03 0mph SSE windchill 12 Samhain
Full Moon of Long Nights
I had an ok 4th grade tour, a highlights. They were responsive, curious and it felt adequate.
Then there were the 2nd graders from Marcy Open. Whoa. Many of them had been to the museum before and had very clear ideas about what they wanted to see. Japan. Europe. Rooms. Sculpture. Each thing we saw they asked questions, saw more stuff to go see. I sort of followed along, answering questions and encouraging their curiousity.
About midway through we took a group photo and they asked for me to be in it. I sat down with them. At that point a young girl named Isis latched onto my hand and did not let go. We wandered through the building looking at various rooms while I tried to keep up with their energy.
One little girl, Amelia, kept wandering off and I kept having to corral her back toward the group. At one point I asked her if she wanted to go back to the beginning and wait for us. No, she didn’t.
At they end she came up to me and said, “Charlie, you’re the best!” Meanwhile I had to detach Isis. It was a peculiar, mostly random, but very fun tour.
-1 bar falls 30.19 0mph NW windchill -1 Samhain
Full Moon of Long Nights Day 8hr 46m
“Take anything and everything seriously except yourselves.” – Rudyard Kipling
As I get ready for two tours today, Kipling strikes a note I need to hear more often. With all the news about happy people spreading the love out three degrees of separation I wondered about those of us who go through life somewhere in the muddle. Yes, muddle.
Happiness comes to me only rarely, then for brief moments. I’m not usually gloomy, but I’m not usually sunny either. I come from a family with manic-depression, so a tendency toward the melancholy probably came with the helix. Melancholy is an old friend, in fact, some of my best writing ideas and creative work comes when he pays a visit.
In fact, I distrust happy people to some extent. It always seems to me that they willfully ignore a large part of what goes on the world. Spoken, I know, like a guy who takes himself and his world too seriously.
I am one, I am many. Whitman and I have our melancholy, but we also have our quiet joys, raucous moments, times of abandon.
Well, this is a bit of a downer, but I’m gonna leave it in anyhow. How I felt this morning.
8 bar rises 30.11 0mph WNW windchill 4 Samhain
Full Moon of Long Nights Day 8hr 47m
I hear you saying often that you’re not turned on to politics. Well let me bring to bear the lessons of history. If you’re not turned on to politics the lesson of history is that politics will turn on you.—Ralph Nader, Countdown
Yes, Nader is right, but I wish he’d take his own lesson to heart. Quixotic campaigns that drain the vote of the left and left independents have had their day. Until or if the left can mount a credible candidate we should support the Democrats.
In this and many other ways I can tell I have reached old fogey status. Twice in the last couple of weeks I’ve sent notes to the Sierra Club’s legislative committee that reveal, to me later, and probably to each member at the time, my more conservative approach. With a $5+ billion budget deficit I think we should pitch our stuff in light of savings to the state budget. Instead my colleagues queue up to decide which expletives are more appropriate for sulfide mining.
Used to be me.
We’ve had a cold December so far, considerably below normal. This is the weather most of us here yearn for and miss as the winter’s have grown warmer. The snow stays on the ground; the air is crisp. Sleeping becomes a treat, a warm bear-in-the-den snuggle.
I have finally caught up, again, with my various chores including all the outside ones. That feels great, but it does mean I have to reorient my daily activities and I’m still in the in-between place about that. Soon.
20 bar rises 29.94 3mph NNE windchill 13 Samhain
Waxing Gibbous Moon of Long Nights
Snow falling again. 3-4 inches or so by morning the weather folks say. Winter has come in earnest.
Each year over the last three or four Kate and I have moved further and further from the mainstream Christmas culture. We have little in the way of decoration. We give small gifts if any to each other. The kids and kin still get holiday related presents but our home is an oasis.
This pleases me for the most part since my focus at this time of year is on the Winter Solstice and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I say for the most part because there is still a sentimental side that likes the songs and the lights and the presents under the tree. Mostly though I find this time of year most conducive to introspection, meditation and creation.
The areas in which we will plant new shrubs, a shade garden and all the bulbs planted this fall are now under mulch, the first two under black plastic and mulch. Finally done. Feels good.
Finished the Host. It’s a strange, thin book with many pages. I liked it, but the veiled theology and the conceit wore thin as I got further into it. A lightweight read.