Monthly Archives: March 2010

Weather +Climate

March the Lamb

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Spring                                                 Waxing Awakening Moon

All signs point to a historic meteorological March here in the north country.  No snow.  None.  Nada.  Null.  Only 6 nights below freezing and not one day when we claimed the lowest temps in the US.  El Nino is the culprit says meteorologist Paul Douglas.  It’s strange and has the plants and gardeners all confused.

Got a late start today, so it’s almost lunch time and I just had breakfast.  Unusual.  Gotta get my to-do lists in order and revise that presentation for tomorrow.

Bees, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths

Vanitas

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Spring                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

A Woolly brother goes in for knee surgery on Monday.  He’s a bright guy who will select a surgeon with care.  He’s also good at taking care of himself so I’m sure the surgery and the recovery will go well.

These are the years when retirement income and the upcoming procedure can fill a lot of conversation.  The body degenerates, the centre does not hold, things fall apart.  The way of it, this human, animal, mammal, finite life.

I had planned to check on my bees tomorrow, see if they pollen patty needed replacing and put on a syrup feeder, but the weather guy says cloudy, cool and wet.  Not a good bee day.  Like many of us, bees stay home when the weathers inclement and they don’t like uninvited guests.  Really don’t like them.  Sunday or Monday look better.  I’ll wait.

Kate and I are through Chapter 9 in Wheelock, closing in this week on Chapter 10.  We also got a book of readings and now do sight reading in each session in addition to the readings in the book.  This last reading was from Seneca about slaves and masters.  It’s moving.  The issues of slaves and slavery is old, very old and the issues of freedom and the injustice of slavery is also old, very old.

The more we work with the Latin the more I become committed to classical scholarship and the doors it opens into human thought, human thought not in dialogue with Christianity, but with the world of Athens.  This is a world both intimately connected to us, yet very foreign, too.  It is pagan, though that’s an anachronism, since before Christian dogma, there were other religions, not paganism.

I’m still pumped about the health care reform even if it fell short of single-payer.  That’s for later.  Right now, let’s party.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

Why Is This Art?

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Spring                                       Waxing Awakening Moon

Two interesting tours with third graders this morning.  In the first tour two different kids asked why is this art questions?  One wanted to know why the George Morrison was art and the other wanted to know why a piece in the modern gallery, one with parallel lines on a white background qualified as art.  We had significant discussions on both pieces.  On the first we discussed Morrison’s fascination with horizon lines.  Could they see the horizon line?  Could they imagine a beach?  Yes?  Well, that can make it art.  On the second piece we had a long discussion about blank canvas and a canvas with parallel lines.  One boy offered that it looked like notebook paper.  I mentioned parallel lines.  Had they studied them?  Yes.  Do parallel lines ever meet?  No.  Might have something to do with this piece.

On both tours I took them to foot-in-the-door and suggested they might start thinking now about entering in 2020.  Plenty of time to prepare.  They found many things that interested them.  On the second tour when I told them Frank had only two tablespoons of ink on the  whole canvas, Annie, a small girl, said, “Yeah. Right.  If the tablespoon was this big.” spreading her hands wide.  I enjoyed their skepticism.

After that I settled into a familiar role as a future field instructor for a Unitarian student intern.  Church meetings have a tendency to be unfocused, like gangly children, going this way and that.  It was a feeling I had experienced often, but I have little patience for it now.  I’ll have a chance to have my own meetings with Leslie, the student, provided they ever get the details of their contract worked out.  Thank God I have no role in the details of that.

Off to home.  A nap.  Now some treadmill time.

Bees

More Bee Stuff

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Spring                                           Waxing Awakening Moon

The bulk of the bee woodenware has come:  frames for honey supers, honey supers, foundations for honey supers, a bee brush, a feeder for syrup and a bunch of pollen patties and goop to make my own if I need to do so.   While this may seem like a lot of gear, and it is, by next year we should have four colonies with two producing a lot of honey and two ready to divide to create two more good honey producers and two more developing parent colonies that will provide the honey for the year after that.

This system can work with any number of colonies, but if focuses on producing two at a time and can reach a steady state at any multiple of two.  In the first year (last year’s for me) the goal is to create a parent colony that can divide in mid-May.  With the division there are now two colonies, one with an established queen, the parent colony, and the division, which initially has no queen.  The parent colony produces a lot of honey while the division with a new queen builds itself up to three hive boxes and may produce some honey.  Over the winter the parent colony bees die out–the usual life span of a queen is two years and worker bees somewhere between 30 and 90 days on average.  The parent colonies hive boxes get cleaned out and accept the division from the new parent colony and so on.  By adding a new package of bees this year in a new hive box in the orchard, I’m preparing a parent colony for division next year there.

After next year we will have four colonies, two producing a good bit of honey and two strengthening themselves toward division in the upcoming year.  With careful attention to bee diseases, hygiene and good management this can self-perpetuate.

On April 24th or so I get my new 2 pound package of Minnesota Hygienic bees.  They’ll go in the orchard with the fancy new copper hivery top.  We’ll see these two hives out our kitchen window year in and year out so I wanted them to look good.  Mid-may I divide the old colony and start stacking up honey supers.  Then we should be off to the races.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Memories, Politics, US History

Poison Fruit

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Spring                                        Waxing Awakening Moon

Spring has sprung, then it sprang back.  23 today.  Not prime gardening weather yet.

The conservative embrace of right wing populists has begun to bear poisoned fruit again.  They referred to Obama and African-American congressmen as niggers, Barney Frank as a faggot and phoned in death threat to several members of the House who switched their votes on health care reform.  The great irony of the moral majority, Christian right, tea-party tea bags is that by all normal political calculation they should vote Democrat.  They are, in the large part, blue collar folks, some living on minimum wage, many no doubt eligible for the health insurance provisions just passed by Congress, but conservative strategists have intentionally chosen to underwrite their social prejudices against people of color, homosexuals and folks with a college education in order to collect them into the party’s ranks.

This is not a deal with the devil; it is the devil making a deal.

I know these folks because I grew up with them in Indiana.  They first came to national notice in Indiana when 30% of the Hoosier electorate voted for George Wallace for President.  They were first and second generation folks from Appalachia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee and worked in the automobile and other heavy manufacturing centers in the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio area, the area long since identified as the rust belt.  Union workers in the 1950’s and 1960’s, these constituencies voted a straight Democratic party ticket in line with their economic self-interest.

After LBJ and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, George Wallace made an independent run for the Presidency aiming himself squarely at southern Democrats, the diaspora of southerners working in the north and those other bigots nationally willing to sign up.  This came to the attention of Kevin Phillips, then a strategist for Richard Nixon.  He conceived of the moral majority, corralling the Wallace voters and conservative Christians, sometimes the same group into a winning base for conservative Republican politics.  This was the time of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.

Right wing populism has a long and unsavory history in the US.  The KKK, anti-semite, homophobes, anti-Darwinists and love it or leave it patriots are just a few examples.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has made a career for Morris Dees and his compatriots filing suit against various organizational expressions of these folks.  When economic insecurity marries the all-too human propensity for discrimination, a violent firestorm will result.  It is no different now than it was in the post-Reconstruction days, the days during the Great Depression or the years after passage of the Civil Rights act.

True conservatives should be ashamed.

Politics

The Grout Doctor Has Left the House

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Spring                                                Waxing Awakening Moon

The grout doctor has sealed the grout and left the house.  His van has a license plate that reads, The  Doc.  After he finished, Byron from Dorglass came.  He installed the new door for the steam bath.  Now there’s new, clean grout and properly sealed door.  I still have to wait until tomorrow morning to use it, but the process has gone full circle.  There’s something about having strangers in the  house, even if you like them and even if they’re doing something you requested.  It jars the sense of sanctuary.

Now the calm has returned.  Well, almost.  A fan blows to circulate the noxious fumes from the caulk out of doors and I have the patio door open with the screen.  Smells like spring and like an oil refinery.  As  you drive into Denver, Colorado from the east on Highway 70 you pass through a town named Commercial City.  It consists of oil refineries, warehouses, train depots, all manner of smudgy grimy.  Each time I pass it I wonder if the original purpose was to stick all that stuff in one municipality where they wouldn’t be bothered by residential zoning.

The legislative updates and requests to sign on or shout no various things has increased, a symphony of participation that will not reach its full crescendo until the adjournment sine die in May.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Politics

Fall Out?

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Spring                                             Waxing Awakening Moon

The awakening moon has a quarter lit up tonight (though it’s half of the side we always see).  Orion rests below it, sinking down below the horizon earlier and earlier now that spring has come.  He’s a winter time friend, the opposite of a snow bird.  I hope you’ve had a chance to consider the thinks in your life that need a little extra nudge as they grow, parts of you that need encouragement to awaken.  Maybe it’s that painting you’ve always wanted to start.  Buy some canvas.  A garden?  Get a shovel and a seed catalog.  Meditating?  Clear out a comfortable spot and buy a comfortable chair or big pillow.  Whatever it is spring and the awakening moon will push you along.

In my life it’s Latin, the novel, the Sierra Club’s legislative agenda and the new gardening year plus, of course, the bees.

This health care vote will not lose the Democratic party congress or the Whitehouse for the next two generations.  I’ve heard people make comparisons to LBJ’s famous observation about passage of the Civil Rights Act.  He was right.  Passing the Civil Rights Act upended the solid South and kick started the rise of the moral majority.  The result was 40 years of conservative politics from which it will take us a long time to recover.

(The Democrats will not need a fallout shelter.  The party of no will.)

Health care is in no way similar.  The opposition to it is smoke, driven by the disinformation and fear mongering of right wing shock jocks and the little old lady from Stillwater with the big hair and the desire to smooch the Bushmaster.  There is no comparable bloc of votes lost by providing health care to all in the richest country in the world.  Are there mad people, some foaming at the mouth, tea drooling out of every orifice?  Yes, I guess there such people.  They are the party of no we can’t.  Now, at least for this brief shining moment, the Democrats have awakened (see what I mean?) to the principles that used to inform Democratic platforms, principles that demanded a fair shake for the poorest of the poor and made sure that workers got fair wages and decent benefits.

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel

A Warm-Blooded Insect?

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Spring                                         Waxing Awakening Moon

Sunny, but cool though warm weather seems fated to come our way.  Ice out has advanced on Round Lake though there is still rough, weak ice over most of its surface.  Many daffodils have speared their way up through the leaves and other detritus from last falls end of the growing season.  I’ve seen a few hosta roll-ups, too.  I put in my last order of bee stuff yesterday, bringing seven honey supers, 70 super frames and 50 super foundations, a copper hive cover and 75 frame and foundations for the deep hive bodies.

The old machine shed, now to be the honey house needs a thorough cleansing which will be an early task once the weather moves away from soggy and I have some time for outside work.

Today, in just a couple of minutes, I have a call about Matt Entenza’s gubernatorial campaign.  They want my thoughts on environmental issues.  They can have every one of them.  After the call, on to the language of ancient Rome.  Later in the day I may revise Liberal II.  That novel just sits there right now.  Waiting.  Meanwhile my promiscuous creative spirit entertains other guests, a new project, a big project, that will follow After the Hawthorn Wars.

Here’s another jaw dropper that I learned about bees during my bee course.  Over the winter the colony becomes a large cluster with all the bees hanging, literally, together, shivering.  The shivering produces heat and keeps the colony alive during the temperature drops of winter.  This means, said Marla Spivak, that in winter the colony, the whole colony, acts like a warm blooded animal.  The colony is a super-organism that gathers food, births larvae and nurses them, takes diseased and deceased members, defends itself and takes up a lot of time with architecture as well.

Since the cluster happens inside the hive boxes, it is difficult to picture.  I’ve chosen a swarm in the picture here, to show you a cluster, but not like the one I had in my first colony this winter.

Art and Culture, Asia

Awakening in the Dark

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Spring                                              Waxing Awakening Moon

Rolled down the car window–oops, anachronism.  Pushed the button which slid the window down–and the scent of moist earth rolled into the truck.  Peat moss mixed with new plant and freshly unfrozen water carried along by a light spring breeze.  Tonight the awakening moon continues to swell, move toward full, growing in synchronicity with the planet 250,000 miles away; its dance partner in this long running marathon.  We squeeze her, she pulls our waters and squeezes us.  A dancer and her consort.

The world for now, our part of the world, moves in darkness and I find the quiet soothing.  The night calms this exurban area down to peaceful.  Silence does not need to be sought; it comes to us as the hour moves past 9:00 pm or so.  If only for these dark hours, we have a hermetic isolation, nothing visible out the windows except stars and the moon.

The longer I study art history, mix with the objects at the MIA, the more I tend to see much of the world through the lens of art.  It’s not a matter of finding art that fits a moment or an idea; rather, it’s as if paintings or sculpture or movies or prints or masks rise up from the unconscious, suggest themselves as a way, a path into an experience.  Here on the website I often choose, usually choose, literal relationships but in day to day life the moments are more ephemeral, less one to one.

Let me see if I can think of an example.  A train whistle late at night may call to mind Honthorst’s “Denial of St. Peter.”  Perhaps it’s the association of a night scene and a sound transformed by being heard at night.  I don’t know.

This is hard, it doesn’t really happen exactly like that, it’s more suggestive, subliminal.  Evanescent. Like the dying tone of the train as it moves further away into the darkness.

Aging, Politics

OH, Yeah!

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Spring                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

You’re traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop: deciphering Medicare!  I’m not kidding here.  Kate and I have given this day to determining a post retirement budget and one of the most difficult things to understand is not the cost of medicare, but just what goes with what.  If the explanatory booklet that simplifies Medicare, from a local senior citizen organization, is any indication of what health care reform promises, God help us.

On the other hand this is an exciting time for both of us, investigating life when Kate no longer has work demands, figuring out the wonders of budgeting when such terms as dissaving begin to make sense.  Dissaving is, you guessed it, spending money you’ve saved.  That’s the basic idea in retirement unless you’re stuck behind the counter at Mac and Don’s with a silly hat and the smell of grease in your gray hair.

After a while we gave up and went to lunch.  Then a nap.  Now we’re refreshed and ready to get back at the budget process.

Say, did I mention that I’m proud of the Democrats?  Damn.  Gutsy politics.  The last time we had truly historic reform came under a former senator, Lyndon Baines Johnson who gave us Model Cities and Civil Rights.  Remember the Great Society?  I do.  Except for that pesky war in Vietnam Johnson was a great one.