Yearly Archives: 2009

Family, Health, Memories, Weather +Climate

Fall

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Lughnasa                              Waning Green Corn Moon

Even though summer seems to have arrived, or returned this week, I can already feel social rhythms beginning to change.  Fall has begun to peek up over the calendar.  Ads for school supplies have begun to appear.  I remember getting a  mimeographed sheet (remember mimeographs?) in elementary school of the things we would need:  lined paper, #2 lead pencils, paste, a paint set.  Those are the things that remain in my memory.

They achieved totemic value for me.  These simple items carried the promise of learning, of new areas to explore, a new year away from home and in the company of other kids, at least for most of the day during the week.  Mom and I would go to Danner’s or Murphy’s 5 and 10 cent stores.  To this day I love going into office supply stores.  They bring back that anticipation and wonder.

Many of our vegetables have matured and others are well on their way, the harvest season has begun as the celebration of Lughnasa marks.  The angle of the sun has begun to change and the days have continued to grow shorter since the Summer Solstice.  At the Autumn Equinox we will be halfway between the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice.

Jon and Jen have started their new school years, back with the elementary school kids in Aurora, Colorado.  There’s news in their family, too.  Jon has partial shoulder replacement surgery this Wednesday, still fixing a skiing injury now three years old.

Gabe has had 13 bleeds in the recent past, including a spontaneous bleed on his back and a swollen hand.  In trying to get factor into him he has suffered many sticks.  He has small veins.  He will get an internal port on August 27th so he can  receive factor infusions prophylactically instead of acutely.  This should give him a normal childhood and relieve the anxiety for Jon and Jen.  There is, though, one potential problem.  It is possible the body will develop antibodies against the factor.  That would make things tougher.  A balancing act.

Kate’s going out there on Wednesday and will stay through Saturday.  We go see a neuro-surgeon tomorrow morning, still trying to track down more effective treatments.  She’s done very well with this degenerative disc disease, but it has not been easy.  She’s tough.

Bees, Cinema and Television

I’m Not There

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Lughnasa                               Waning Green Corn Moon

Once again a movie arrived late in the pick-up zone.  I’m Not There, the movie about Bob Dylan, was on view here at the Seven Oaks Family Theatre.  It took a while for the dizzying shifts and the multiple actors to make sense, but they did at last.  Cate Blanchett amazed me, as she often does.  She is one of the finest actors working right now.  I found Christian Bale’s performance less compelling, but good, too.  Richard Gere made an interesting Billy the Kid and the young black kid, Marcus Carl Franklin, in a difficult role, performed with great skill.   Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw, who played an enigmatic, trenchant Dylan giving an interview, also appeared.  I’d give it 3.5 stars.  But you saw it years ago, I suppose.

There was a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in the Izu islands about 100 miles from Tokyo.  It shook buildings in Japan’s capital city, but there was no tsunami.

The bees have been busy, but there is little  honey in either of the supers.  I checked the top hive box and there is comb honey there.  Some of the frames had a long dark streak through the honey cells.  It didn’t look right, but I really don’t know.  I need some help.  I did taste the honey and it was delicious.

Garden, Politics

Sunday Afternoon

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Lughnasa                           Waning Green Corn Moon

The peas have come down and this week the garlic will go in the ground, an experiment suggested by the former editor of Organic Gardening at the Seed Savers Exchange conference.  This is about a month plus earlier than suggested by other garlic growers, including Seed Savers Exchange.  He claims it gives greater yield.   Since my new varieties of garlic will not come until September 10th or so, I’ll have a ready comparison the same beds.

A more summer like Sunday with the temperature here 79.  I have no tours for a while (August 28) and the Sierra Club work will not pick up real steam until late September, so I have a long stretch I can devote to the garden.  Instead of trenching today Kate took the truck.  I need the truck to pick up the Ditch Witch.  The trench will get dug tomorrow morning instead.

Many people have begun to evaluate Obama’s performance so far.  The best article I’ve seen is in this month’s Rolling Stone.  It has David Gergen, Paul Krugman and Michael Moore.  All agree he’s done better than could have been expected, but the problems facing him, especially health care reform and the economy, may require better than that.  Neither one takes well to part way solutions.  Either health care reform achieves universal coverage and cost containment, at a minimum, or whatever happens may not be seen as successful.  Likewise with the economy a tepid recovery or a prolongation of the deep recession past the next few months will be seen as failures.  The economic fixes need to start gaining traction soon and they need to result in real improvement.

Aging, GeekWorld

Declutter, Week 2

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Lughnasa                                  Waning Green Corn Moon

The declutter project has legs.  In addition to the potting bench moved outside last week, we have now cleared out the new food storage/work bench area.  In it we have a six shelf rack for storing such garden items as garlic, onions, apples, pears, squash.  We also have a Swedish shelving system, wood, that will hold additional food storage, perhaps canned and dried foods along with vegetables or fruits that the rack cannot handle.

Just outside the food storage we have a small cupboard that now holds power tools underneath and on top our food dryer. We need a sand storage container, too, for root crops like potatoes, carrots, turnips and parsnips.  Kate worked very hard today, as she always does.

We had an old, non-functional television that needed to get removed from the area.  I could not lift it.  It was too heavy and too wide for a good grip.  So, I took it apart.  It felt like sacrilege, cracking the circuit boards, cutting wires and lifting a heavy copper electrical device off the cathode ray tube.  After the television was in pieces I picked up the tube and stumbled up the stairs with it.  It was heavy, but at least I could cradle it in my arms.

At one point my balance got wonky and I almost teetered over backward with the tube then ready to land on me.  When the guy at the recycling picked it up and put it on the scale, I asked  him how much it weighed, “78 pounds.”   “Geez,” I said, “It seemed heavier than that when I carried up the stairs.”  “Yeah,” he said, “I’m tired and it felt heavier than that to me, too.”  It cost $32 to have them take the tv off our hands.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

Thoughts of Your Own

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Lughnasa                                Waning Green Corn Moon

“To find yourself, think for yourself. ” – Socrates

Gnothi seauton, written over the door into the temple of Apollo, the home of the Delphic Oracle on Mt. Parnassus, means, Know thyself.  How, you might ask?  Listen to Socrates: to find yourself, think for yourself.  This seems so straightforward, but humanity society pushes more toward thought focused on blending in, getting by.  The need to belong and to have respect is so strong it bends our thoughts, often before we know they have been changed.   We change our values so they conform to the group not because we are weak, but because we are social animals.

Our life in community cuts against the grain of thinking for ourselves.  This is why so many people have trouble with finding themselves.  We seek out meditation, religious dogma, political ideology, even scientific certainty in place of careful examination of evidence for themselves.   It is, at first, so pleasing to quiet the anxiety by replacing your own thought process with ready mades that we do not realize we have begun to censure ourselves.

Yet this much is true:  if you have not weighed and considered a matter using your own reason, your own intuitions, your own feelings then you have moved further away from finding yourself.  To do otherwise  is a harsh discipline, often not pleasant, but it has one saving grace: you know who you are.

As you go through the day today, ask yourself if that thought is your own.  Ask yourself if the value you hold comes from your decision making or the pre-cut cloth of public or group opinion.  Ask yourself if you want to be who you are or who others would shape you to be.

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

Time at the Temple

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Lughnasa                                   Waxing Green Corn Moon

A tour with students attending a summer Chinese class went well.  These kids were a bit shy at first, but they warmed up and began to interact.  We investigated the honoring of ancestors, the development and elaboration of Confucian thought and Taoist thought as well as the introduction and spread of Buddhism.  I’ve still not hit on a good way to talk about these three.  In the West we often refer to them as religions, but they’re not, at least in their original forms, religions.  They are philosophies of life, but philosophy of life is an opaque term.  The word religion obfuscates and philosophy creates confusion.  Still a conundrum.

After that tour I spent some time wandering in the temple, as Mark Odegard once referred to the MIA.  The American art tour for the Chilean students this Friday has forced me to investigate new works and revisit in a new way some I already know well.  Jean-Marie told me about a tour she gave called, Picturing America.  Some good tips there.

Lunch with Antra, Sally, Mary, Jean-Marie.  Mac and cheese from the bambino menu for me.  Back home.  Nap.

Now, work out.

Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

A Yellow Moon

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Lughnasa                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

A yellowed moon hung in the sky tonight, almost full.  It made the drive back in from Minneapolis a delight as it sailed in and out of view.

In tonight for the Land Use and Transportation Committee meeting.  What a dynamic group!  They are still fighting the Stillwater Bridge issue after all these years.  They also have transit oriented development on their agenda as well as a new issue called Complete Streets.  In essence Complete Streets wants street planning to have all users in mind (pedestrians, bicyclists, cars and the handicapped in particular)

A crisp meeting that ran on time.

Thunder has begun to roll in so I’m going to have shut down soon.  After the Sierra Club meeting, I drove over to the Black Forest where the Woolly’s first monday meeting had just begun to wind down.  I saw Mark and Frank and Stefan before they left.  Warren and Scott stayed and we talked about Moon, Scott’s 95 year old Cantonese mother-in-law who lives with them.  She’s having a show of her calligraphy and painting at the Marsh.  It goes up on August 16th.  There will also be a book of her work available at the show.  Amazing.

China tour tomorrow for 7-8th graders.  I added a tour this Friday of Chilean students connected with St. Johns who want a tour of American art.

Aging, Garden, permaculture

Other Drivers

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Lughnasa                           Waxing Green Corn Moon

Up early.  Woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I fed the dogs, got the paper and made breakfast.

I spent an hour deciding where to put some extra cash among several spots at Vanguard (I chose a T.I.P.S. mutual fund.), then put  together a China tour:  the Sacred Arts of China.  I’m subbing and wanted to do something I’d already researched.

Kate and I had our business meeting.  More money and calendar stuff.  We decided I should get long term care insurance, so I sent off for the application.  I also bought an orchard rack to store dried fruits and vegetables in the dry storage area Jon built over his vacation here.

A while back I mentioned passing the deaf driver signing wildly and turning, hands off the wheel, to read the communication from his passenger.  A couple of days ago I was on my way into St. Paul; a car in front of me swerved over and back across the center line.  I had an opportunity to pass and took it.  It was a woman wearing a burka, a narrow angle of vision in the fading twilight.

Today I had a small, bitter cherry from a bush in our new orchard.  On another bush across the way, must be different, I picked two (100% of the crop) that were fleshy and sweet.  Someday I have to learn the names of all of these plants.

Got my notice of accepted application from the friendly folks at your social security administration.  This month on the third Wednesday I’ll get my first social security direct deposited.  Hmmm…

Cooking

A Quiet Sunday

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Lughnasa                          Waxing Green Corn Moon

More potatoes fresh from the garden.  Have you ever dug potatoes?  It’s great fun, like hunting for buried treasure.

In addition to the potatoes with parsley I cooked up a stir fry of sorts of sauteed onions and garlic with fresh green beans and potato fruits cut in half, then simmered in white wine.

Sundays remain a day of rest for me.  My workouts are six days a week and Sunday is a complete rest day in regard to exercise.   I did get some weeding in, prepping the flower garden for the month of August.  Next it needs some mulch, wood chips rather than hay this time.

A busier week coming up in terms of away from home activities with the Woolly restaurant meeting, a meeting of the Sierra Club’s land use and transportation committee, a China tour and another public tour of Sin and Salvation.