Monthly Archives: December 2008

Health, Holidays, Weather +Climate

Happiness is low total cholestrol and high HDL

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19  bar steady  29.95  0mph ENE  windchill 16  Samhain

Waxing Gibbous Moon of Long Nights      Day   8hr 50m

Moved more snow this am.  My third favorite internal combustion engine and I hit the slopes this morning (our sloping driveway, that is) blowing yesterdays fluffy stuff away from the driveway and onto the yard.  Over time this process can create impressive snow  walls along the driveway, but none so high so far that the arc of snow our Simplicity puts out can’t clear it.

Then on to the grocery store for baking supplies.  Kate is in hyper-cookie drive.  We have cookies of this kind and cookies of this kind and cookies of prize winning kinds.  I have cookies, especially cookies of the sugar cookie kind, currently at work becoming part of my body.

Speaking of my body.  Got my lab results back from my physical.  Total cholestrol 144 and hdl 46 (highest ever).  All other numbers were, in the words of my physician, “Great.”  This made me happy.

Missed my nap on Friday and Saturday.  Took a two hour nap yesterday, then went to bed at 10:30 last night (I’ve turned that corner) and got up at 7:45.  Guess those two days made me need the sleep.

Now I’m outside for the last–the very last–of the mulch.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Politics, Weather +Climate

A Magical Effect

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26  bar steep fall 29.56  0mph NE  windchill 26   Samhain

First Quarter Moon of Long Nights       Day  8hr 53m

At last snow has begun to fall.  Already we must have gotten an inch or so and it may well snow through the night.  I have the patio light on so I can watch it fall.  The reindeer, lit with white l.e.d. lights, turns its head back and forth, its wire frame body now sketched in fluffy snow.  The lit holly and berries on the patio table also have snow cover, the lights blinking up through small mounds of white.  We only have lights in the back and few at that.   They do a touch of whimsy to the long winter nights.

A gentle snow has a magical effect on the heart as well as the landscape.  It is one of mother nature’s outright expressions of joy.

Tomorrow I have agreed to go to a workshop on dismantling racism as I wrote earlier.   When I was in seminary, I participated in anti-racism training seminars run by James and Mary Tillman.  I even traveled to Atlanta and went a weekend long seminar with students from Morehouse University, one of the south’s premier black colleges.  With Wilson Yates, a professor of sociology at United Theological Seminary, we created an anti-racism training kit complete with videos for rural congregations.  At one point I worked with a professional program evaluation company, Rainbow, and evaluated the work of the James and Mary Tillman programs in various institutions.

Institutional racism and the unearned advantage of being white and male have been part of my political analysis ever since.  That first round of work was now over thirty years in the past.  It is a testimony to the intransigence and institutional nature of racism that now another generation has taken up the fight.

Part of me does not look forward to a long day on a difficult and unpleasant subject while another part of me is eager to get back to practical, political work on the issue.  We’ll see how it goes.

Kate’s neck bothers her today.  She has improved a lot in the last three weeks, but she has quite a ways to go before she can go back to her full time work schedule.

Art and Culture, Great Work

Long Day

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22  bar steep fall 29.71  1mph SSW  windchill  22   Samhain

First Quarter Moon of Long Nights

Two tours.  2nd graders.  Fun, but not as much fun as the dual language immersion kids.  A home-schooling group.  Some of the boys looked like they might go all Columbine except they had no school.  Could not get them to talk.  The moms, however, enjoyed the tour.

A long day, from 9am-3pm, long for a home boy like me anyhow.  I took an Alleve before I went and that seems to have worked well.

Tomorrow Sierra Club anti-racism training.  Now it’s about the inner work, the soul work of organizing.  Hmmm.  We’ll see.  The budget numbers for the state will make the next session pretty interesting.

General

Middletown and Tinseltown

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Erik Estrada returns to Muncie for police patrols
Dec 4 05:42 PM US/Eastern

MUNCIE, Ind. (AP) – Erik Estrada has returned to Muncie to take part in overnight police patrols in the city where he starred in the short-lived reality series “Armed & Famous.” The former star of the 1970s motorcycle cop drama “CHiPs” is a reserve officer on the Muncie Police Department.

The 60-year-old actor plans to work the midnight shift for three nights this week, patrolling city streets from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

He took target practice at the police gun range on Wednesday. On Saturday, he plans to help officers at a charity event.

Estrada filmed “Armed & Famous” for CBS in Muncie in the winter of 2006-07. He and several other celebrities patrolled the city as reserve officers.

He also returned to Muncie last winter to keep up his reserve officer status.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends

Cyber Apocalypse Averted

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Oh, boy.  Thought I had a cyber apocalypse here.  Opened up AncienTrails and there were no blog entries.  Yikes!

A quick e-mail to my cybermage, Bill Schmidt, apparently frightened the devil in the bytes to flee.  When he turned on AncientTrails, everything was there.  After his e-mail telling me the same, I looked again and there it was.  Whew.

Annual physical today, oh, boy.  Also, prepping for a Renaissance/Reformation European painting tour.

Great Work, Hydroponics, permaculture

A Prolegomena to All Future Gardens

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17  bar rises 30.08  3mph NNW  windchill 13  Samhain

Waxing Crescent Moon of Long Nights

The black plastic has been laid down; the marsh hay rests on top of it in fluffy abundance.  A good snow right now would marry the two until early spring.  May it come soon.

This was a long project.  I had to cut down weeds, trees, raspberry canes and shrubs, pull vines and dislodge a deadfall. All this was prolegomena.   The black plastic had to be rolled out, made to conform to the odd shapes created by various impediments, then cut and staked or held down with logs.  After a piece of plastic was cut and laid in place, then the marsh hay went over it.

This process, too, is prolegomena for the next phase.  In that phase we will plant serviceberry, hawthorne, and other shrubs and small trees that produce food edible by and interesting to birds and varmints.  That phase ties in with the orchard as a distraction from the human edibles, in the hope that more–or enough–will end up for us.  It is this linkage of one piece with the other, all in the service of creating a sustainable enviornment for people and animals, that excites me about permaculture.

I have also mulched all the bulbs I planted and/or transplanted at the end of August and the middle of September.  These are daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, snow drops, lilies of many kinds and iris.  I have both mulched and not mulched over the years and find that mulching the first year for all new plantings and after for those plants sensitive to cold increases the germination rate considerably.

There are also many peppers now in the hydroponics.  Only one is large so far, but they keep sucking down nutrient fluid at a rapid pace so they are growing.  I have not yet convinced any eggplant blossoms to move on to fruiting but I imagine that’s only a matter of patience.

Great Work, permaculture, Politics

Home As A Political Statement

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15  bar steep rise 30.05  5mph NNW windchill 11  Samhain

Waxing Crescent Moon of Long Nights   Day  8hr  56m

Below are photographs of recent work underway along the wood’s edge here.  Almost done for this year.

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The fruit trees as winter takes hold.

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Marsh hay before use.  AKA hay without seeds or straw without seeds.

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View along the wood’s edge facing due north.  The straw in the foreground and mid-ground covers the black plastic.  The area covered is approximately 15 feet wide, that is, 15 feet between the truck path and the beginning of the forest proper and extends perhaps 150-200 feet from end to end.  This whole area will have shrubs and small trees planted in the spring.

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This gives you a better picture of what’s going on here.  I ran out of hay on Sunday and had to get the new load visible in the first shot.

Do you remember how you felt when you first realized you loved someone?  I have that feeling over and over with the land here.

Friends, Memories

Seeing and Being Seen

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37  bar rises 29.59  0mph SSW  windchill 37  Samhain

Waxing Crescent Moon of the Long Nights   Day  8hr 57mn

Lunch with Lonnie.  We ate in Gallery 8, the first place in the city of Minneapolis I saw when I came to seminary in 1971.  I met Lonnie back during the Leadership Minneapolis days, probably 1983/1984, sometime in there.  She was a consultant to the program and did a good deal of work on creative leadership.

My fellow committee chair, Gary Stern, and I were so creative in our response to the question of defining leadership that the entire board got fired the next year.  Although I don’t recall the process, Gary and I facilitated that years class as it sought to understand leadership in its terms.  We all came up with love, justice and compassion as the key qualities of leadership.

Turns out the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, sponsor of Leadership Minneapolis, did not think those terms fit their idea of leadership and cleared out the whole board the next year to start over.  They never did give us their definition, but they must have felt a little stupid when Neal Pierce, a national columnist who focused on urban issues, wrote up our effort and commended its results to a national audience.

The chair of Leadership Minneapolis that year was Sarah Strickland.  Not long after I finished my year as a participant with a year on the board (the one that got fired), Sarah’s husband, Paul, and Lonnie’s husband, Stefan invited me to join the Woolly Mammoths and the rest is hysterics.

Friends of diverse backgrounds and from different facets of life make life richer, like a soup with several ingredients.  There is the comfort of being known and knowing, of seeing and being seen.  Lunch today with Lonnie gave us both.

Today was mild.  Pleasant.