Monthly Archives: April 2010
A Year of Consolidation
Spring Waxing Flower Moon
Hmmm. Wax. Bees wax, or, propolis as it is properly called. I just did a mid-April reversal of the top two hive boxes per the Minnesota bee-keeping method for a cold climate. This involved taking out each frame, examining it–even though I’m still a bit uncertain about what I’m seeing–putting it back after scraping any queen cells, a few, then switching the top hive box with the middle one. This does something good, though right now I can’t recall what.
A nimble joint future awaits me since I got stung four times today. Each time a little less reaction. The first sting came from a bee that crawled up my pants leg. Another came as I removed a frame. The third and fourth as I took off my bee suit only to discover that on its back were a lot of bees. The bee suit still lies on the floor of the honey house. A lot to learn. These hive boxes, which have lots of larvae, pollen and honey are heavy. Another reminder of why hitting the weights is a good idea.
Next week the Minnesota Hygienic bees come in their little wooden package. They will go into the new hive boxes that Kate has assembled and coated with polyurethane. She’s also assembling honey supers and coating bottom boards, tops and other miscellaneous woodware.
This is a year of consolidation on the gardens and bee front. We’ll make sure we can make good use of all the vegetable beds and companion planting ideas. We’ll shore up our preservation and storage options. I’ll learn about the honey extracting and bottling process as well as colony division and hiving my own package of bees. We have fruits and berries, even a few nuts to learn how to care for, all of which fit in well with the Brenda Langston inspired version of healthy eating.
Inside though there’s still the Latin. No consolidation there yet. It’s an upward curve so far.
I have been wondering recently about my work at the MIA. This is my 9th year as guide and docent. The art world as a whole continues to fascinate me and the research challenges it presents are gifts to my life, not burdens. Touring has become easier and more enjoyable this year. Not sure why. Just has. Should I continue on a sort of emphasis on Asian art, especially China and Japan, or should I really lock myself down into those two and really learn them? Should I perhaps shift my learning focus to prints and drawings, an area not many docents cover and in which the bulk of the museum’s collection of object lies? I think what I’m saying is I want more depth in the experience. I’ve gained breadth and I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity. How to make the experience richer and deeper? That’s the journey now.
Hey, Art Lovers. Check this out.
Spring Waxing Flower Moon
Doing Stuff
Spring Flowering Moon
The netaphim ruined last year by dogs Rigel and Vega has repairs. The repairs sit safely inside fences that Rigel has shown either no interest or no capability to penetrate. They should last.
The bees will wait until a less breezy tomorrow. Wind blows the smoke around and I have to perform a reversal, hive check and clean off the bottom board. The reversal of the top 2 hive boxes encourages the queen to move into the top box and lay eggs there to create an ovoid shape of larva outside of which the nursery bees will complete a ring of pollen and a ring of honey. This makes the planned colony split on May 15th assured of one hive box full of larva, hopefully the top one with new larvae and therefore newly born nursery bees. Nursery bees take more kindly to moving around than the older worker bees.
Irrigation folks have scheduled Tuesday to come out and turn on the irrigation system. A good thing. They usually wait until the second week of May since our average last frost date is around May 15th. I imagine that’s moved up closer to the first week of May on average, but a frost outside the average is still a frost so most planning still accommodates the old date.
Tomorrow the bees and soil amending, that is, putting in composted manure and humus on the raised beds and adding some sphagnum moss (some more) to the blueberry beds. The outdoor season with sun. The great wheel turns. Again.
Home Is Where The Boxes Are
Spring Waxing Flower Moon
At the recycling place I pushed in flattened box after flattened box, a layered batch of cardboard going back to late November, another step in the home as retailer, receiving goods directly from middle-folk like Levenger, Amazon and Williams-Sonoma. Another instance of disintermediation these flattened boxes could serve as both metaphor and symbol of an age shifting old patterns of store fronts and even big box stores to the home, ironically moving back to the days of the Sears Catalog and Montgomery Wards catalog stores.
In many ways the home is now the hub that a business district used to be. We pick up our mail and some of us our newspapers and magazines off a computer screen. We watch movies mailed to us by Netflix or streamed directly into our TV’s by wireless routers. We shop on the internet and have things delivered to our home instead of driving to a store, picking them out and doing self-delivery. An increasing percentage of us now move from bed to office without the interference of a commute. In some instances, like vegetable and flower growing, another percentage of the population has started growing their own. Others keep bees, raise chickens, some have goats.
The times have changed and they have changed in dramatic ways, but like the fabled frog in the pot of boiling water, the changes have proceeded at such a deliberate pace that we scarcely notice all of them.
The cell phone, too, has replaced the landline at home, the old familiar location centered phone call having gone the way of crank phones.
Those of us who are aging will benefit a great deal from most if not all of these changes. We can look forward, I think, to certain tele-conferenced medical services, perhaps rugs that know when we fall.
Home has become more like a subsistence farm without the subsistence level life style. Again, at least for some.
A Sliver
Spring Waxing Flower Moon
It was out there tonight, the flower moon, a small crescent hiding behind the trees in the west, a promise, a sliver of promise, looking much like the cantaloupe I cut up this afternoon.
Plucked out old daylily stalks, cut down liguria and bug bane stems from last fall, stripped away dead fern fronds from the rocks and threw that ugly, didn’t work very well cucumber screen over the fence into the back. It gets moved tomorrow.
Tomorrow is an outside day. Bees, some weeding, some soil amending. I decided to follow a companion planting notion I found, but it requires a bit more thought before I put many seeds in the ground.
Finished Chapter 12 in Wheelock and headed into Chapter 13, but before I get there, I’m diving into Ovid again. The fun part.
S.A.D.S.
Spring Waxing Flower Moon
Shopped at the Wedge. Boy, have co-ops changed. They’re no longer like buying screws and nuts at a hardware store where you have to know the price and quantity. Barcodes, scanners, conveyor belts. The selection includes meats and many items found in other grocery stores as well as drop-dead gorgeous produce, a large line of tofu and tempeh, shelf fulls of various rice products like mochi, sea weed and other sea plants in many different forms. Impressive. I picked up tempeh, mochi, sweet rice wine, nori, coconut oil and sunflower oil among other things.
Made me feel like an aging hippy. I realized there were a lot of folks in there who spent the sixties just like I did, smoking dope and fightin’ the man.
Tour this morning had great kids and a game teacher. We wandered around, stymied now and then by sudden art disappearance syndrome, SADS. SADS happens when curators and registrars start getting creative with the collection. In theory we walk our routes before the tours but I’ve become lax on that score and may have to start again, especially if SADS continues to interfere with my tours.
Saw Wendy this morning, too. I gave her hug and told her she looked great. And she did. It was good to see her. Breast cancer is scary.
A Bold Spring
Spring Waxing Flower Moon
Yesterday the magnolia blossoms fell like snow driven by the wind. This bold spring has leaped right into existence, confounding plants, gardeners and meteorologists. I like it. The transition from winter to summer often happens in the same way with a cold April followed by a chilly May, then June and the heat. Not so now. A real, southern spring with sun and warm breezes.
A tour of Spanish art this morning then a stop at the Wedge to pick up some new items for our pantry.
Goddess of Rivers and Streams
Spring New (Flower) Moon
Oh, what a beautiful morning. 69 degrees. Sunny. Greening. Daffodils waving in the breeze. The smell of moist earth as soon as you walk out the door. As metaphor, This is the day that the Lord has made works well for me.
Which reminds me. I have a pension with the Presbyterian church. I’ve not claimed it yet, won’t for at least a couple of years, maybe more, but still I want the info. Went on the website and it wouldn’t let me on. Sent two e-mails. No reply. Called this morning and the first one hung up just as a person came on the line. Gosh. Maybe they don’t like me since I quit? Turns out that’s partly true. According to the person on the phone inactive, terminated folks like me can’t access our information on the web because there are too many of us. An interesting factoid. Turns out they’ll answer any questions by phone. I hate the phone.
Decided on objects for my spanish arts tour. I start in the arts of the americas where I have chosen a very nice statue of CHALCHIUHTLICUE, goddess of rivers and streams, wife of Tlaloc, the rain god and patroness of women in childbirth and the gold objects from Mesoamerica. Reading about her and Mexica (Aztec/Nahuatl) gods and goddesses got me interested again in the whole pantheon and the elaborate system of sacrifices that made their faith tradition go. With these two objects we’ll discuss the cultural traditions the Spanish wiped out, then we’ll head over to Goya’s wonderful Dr. Arrieta, my favorite piece in the museum right now. From there in to Africa and the Goya inspired Sleep of Reason by Nigerian expat, Yinka Shonibare and after that up the stairs to another personal favorite, Morales’ Man of Sorrows. El Greco follows and after that onto surrealism with Dali and perhaps a stop at the most famous Spanish artist of all, Picasso. Should be fun.
Did some more Sententiae Antiquae, ancient sentences. You know, one of those days.
Oh, one other very cool thing. I figured out how to stream Netflix onto the TV threw Kate’s Wii.
Art. Right Now.
Spring New (Flower) Moon
More rain. Not much, but some, enough to keep the ground moist. The greenness factor has sky-rocketed in the last 24 hours. Grass. Shrubs. Trees. They join the early perennials in optical song. A joy and a miracle.
Walk through today–not tomorrow as I thought–of Until Now, the new contemporary art show at the MIA. Whoa. This is a good show. In 8 galleries it gives an overview of major contemporary art movements like pop art, identity art, art triggered by globalization, art created with media including digital projection as well as two amazing video works. I want to review this exhibition as soon as I complete my research. We’re lucky to have Liz Armstrong. (photo by Robert Polidori is in the show.)
Upcoming. A piece on why the decline in teaching positions and majors in the humanities may not be a bad thing. It may force those of us outside the academy to remind ourselves of historical models like the Chinese literati and the Renaissance humanists, amateurs who nonetheless kept the literary and artistic culture through individual efforts.