Monthly Archives: June 2010

Family, Health

First Day Post Op

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Summer                             Waning Strawberry Moon

I went into see Kate this evening.  The first day post surgery can be brutal and it is this time.  A lot of pain.  She’s a stoic and the pain went well beyond her threshold .  It was hard to see, but I talked to the nurse and they adjusted her pain meds.   I’m going to call around 10:45, near the end of Clare’s shift, Kate’s nurse.  I want to know if things have gotten any better.

On stupid things people do:  I saw a motorcyclist riding his bike, his mobile phone pinned to his ear by his left shoulder.

Wanted to know what was going on in the head of the older red haired woman I passed.  She was behind the wheel of a bright yellow late model Volkswagen bug with plates that read:  Manilow.

Drove behind a new Cadillac with the license plate:  NINES.  Won it in a poker game?

Family, Health

Good Medical Care

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Summer                           Waning Strawberry Moon

Ah.  Some sleep.

As we age, Minnesota becomes a better and better place to live.  In spite of the rigors of the winter months, the high quality medical care creates a sense of safety and security that I’m not sure I could find in other states.   With Kate I’ve been through many hospitalizations and procedures, each one handled with professionalism, leaving me more and more confident as do the results.  I’ve only had the one instance of hospital based care, the achilles repair, and it was out patient, but that one time was as the others with Kate.

Given my perspective on this life, that is, barring some information I don’t have, this is it, having good medical care is important.  We have it here.

Family, Health

Kate’s Out of Surgery

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Summer                               Waning Strawberry Moon

Kate’s out of surgery and in recovery.  Dr. Heller said the procedure went well, “Perfect.  Just what we like!”  He’s an upbeat guy with a bald head, lots of confidence.  Better than a melancholy doc filled with self doubt.  I wouldn’t make much of a surgeon.

Fairview hospitals seem interchangeable with Abbott-Northwestern friendly, well-laid out, competent staff, procedures that make sense.  Comforting.

A new University Children’s Hospital is under construction and it has a poster in the elevator:  Bold, Inspiring.  There are images of Minnesota and the Twin Cities in the tunnels leading from the Gold Parking Ramp into the main campus with East and West buildings.  Surgery is on the third floor of the East Building.

Here’s a new wrinkle.  Just when I thought parking validation was dead, the surgery lounge validates my parking.  That’s not the new wrinkle.  The new  wrinkle is that I paid for validated parking.  $6.  Unvalidated it would have been $15.  So, validation now gets me the rate I would have paid back when validation made parking free.  Hmmm.

Anyhow, I’m gonna catch a nap since 5:00 am comes earlier in the ‘burbs.

Family

Quiet Here Again

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Summer                                     Waning Strawberry Moon

Kate’s surgery is in the morning and can’t come fast enough for her.  Her hip makes walking painful, painful enough that she uses a cane and on occasion, a walker.  What was it like when this type of pain had to be endured?  Otherwise healthy and mentally acute people must have suffered terribly.  Kate certainly has and there is at least an option for her.

Life will veer from busy to slow over the next month, with taking care of Kate my priority.  The bees continue to need care too, as do the dogs and the garden.  Museum life slows down in the summer and that’s good for me right now.  The Sierra Club legislative work has modulated, not finished because there’s always next session and the upcoming elections.

Well, early start tomorrow.

Aging, Art and Culture, Family, Garden, Weather +Climate

Here Comes The Sun

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Summer                                       Waning Strawberry Moon

After weeding Kate and I took off for lunch–at Benihanas, not nearly as good as our own, much closer, Osaka–and a visit to Lights on Broadway.  A bit of dithering about where the order was, where the paperwork was, who was on third and who was on second I picked up the track lighting fixtures that had fritzed out on us.  Nice to have light the full length of the kitchen table now.

Then, a nap.  A long nap.  Two hours.  I got up earlier than I wanted to this morning thanks to dogs barking.  Even earlier tomorrow.

After so many days of rain, a very soggy June, we have a run of yellow suns on all the weather forecast sites through Sunday.  Tonight the temperature should hit 46.  Good.

Kate has no anxiety about the procedure tomorrow.  She does, she says, “surgery well.”  I’d have to agree.  The back surgery was in January and that’s been behind us for several months.  I still want her out of the hospital as fast as possible since hospitals have a lot of iatrogenic disease and a lot of it is very intractable, super bugs, all studied up on the antibiotic armamentarium.

The perennial beds now look like a gardener lives here.  That feels better.

Spoke with a woman about a spirituality in art tour for July 8th.  It’ll be my first tour in a while.  Looking forward to it.

Aging, Family, Garden, permaculture, Weather +Climate

The Day Before

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Summer                                              Waning Strawberry Moon

A beautiful day.  64 degrees with a dew point of 41.  Got more weeding done.  Finished the second tier, went after some returnees on the first tier and got through much of  the third tier.

While doing this it occurred to me that gardening is the process of removing plants willing to grow where you are and replacing them with plants that don’t want to grow where you are. An odd task. Permaculture is an attempt to turn this process on its head and utilize plants that want to be where you are, grouped in companion plantings of plants that compliment and co-operate.  Makes sense if you think of it.

Kate’s out doing a bit of last minute gardening, too.  She straightened up her large table downstairs and I’ve printed a copy of her health care directive.  Throwing a bag together and taking two special showers to disinfect are the next big tasks.  Then, around 5:30 am or so tomorrow, we’ll take off for Fairview Hospital, the East Building.  We’ve discovered that Kate’s procedure is not until 8:00 a.m, so I’m going to get her settled, then go home.

Family, GeekWorld, Politics

Night Time, Summer in the Exurbs

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Summer                            Waning Strawberry Moon

Night.  A couple of nights ago I went down the driveway to the mailbox.  As I came back up, I looked up as I often do and saw an object scooting from SSE to NNW.  At first I thought it was a plane.  Without my glasses distance observing for me turns into a game of analyzing tantalizing bits of information rather than direct scrutiny.  As it came overhead though, I could see what I thought were lights were blurs owed to my faulty peepers.  No, it was a satellite.  It was bright and moving fast.

At heavens-above.com I tried to look it up, but the tables for satellite passes only look forward, not backward.  I don’t know what it was, but I know it was man-made.  Whether it was a communications satellite of the International Space Station, it’s still something up there because humans put it there.  An amazing and still almost science fiction notion to this boy of the 1950’s.  I remember Sputnik.  Well.

Kate’s a day away from her surgery.  The vicodin she has to take now makes her dull, “stupid” as she puts it.  She doesn’t like that feeling and looks forward to the time post-op when she can return to her NSAID.

Obama.  As a political leftist, I find things wrong with Obama’s record.  He supported off-shore drilling, he’s ramped up the war in Afghanistan and he’s accepted weakened regulatory legislation and weakened health-care legislation.   The Gulf oil disaster and McChrystal give an air of chaos to his administration, though neither one is his fault.  Here’s my prediction.  A year from now Obama will look very good in all the areas in which he looks very bad right now.  Her’s pulling troops out of Iraq as promised.  The economy will improve.  The public will get clear about the Obama administration’s role in the Gulf oil disaster to his credit and his firing of McChrystal will be seen as what it is, a necessary assertion of civilian authority.

He’s working as a politician, not an ideologue, a necessary ambit if he  wishes to govern, which he does.  Bush was a right wing ideologue and no matter how charming or gritty he appeared it was clear his decision making was in thrall to the neo-con view of the world.  Ideology puts blinkers on the best of us and Obama seems to govern without ideology, though he’s clearly a left-liberal.  Kudo’s to him.

Bees, Dogs, Garden

Pictures

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Summer                                                 Waning Strawberry Moon

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
– Mark Russell

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.
– Al Capone

I didn’t know there was another theory about Saturn’s rings.

That Al, what a kidder.

06-27-10_beekeeperastronautBeekeeper as Backyard Astronaut

06-27-10_smokerReady to add the third hive box to the package colony

06-27-10_package-colonyAfter the addition

06-27-10_inthehoneyhouseSupplies

06-27-10_hiloHilo

Garden, Weather +Climate

Weed

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Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

Nice weather for weeding so I took the opportunity and finally got into the second and third tiers of our back perennial garden.  Out go the raspberry canes.  Out go the stinging nettles.  Out go the dogwood suckers.  Out go the switch grass and and other weedy plants.  In stays the poison ivy (one small plant) because I kill them.  Out goes the slumped daffodil stems.  I’m not finished, but it already looks a hell of a lot better.

Kate planted marigolds this morning in the kitchen garden and in long narrow window boxes.  This all nourished by last nights meal from the garden and the currant jam this morning.

Paul Douglas had a big happy sun on the forecast for today, but so far all I’ve seen is  clouds.  I’m glad.  It kept the air cool enough for a good session outside.

Aging, Art and Culture, World History

A Way of Keeping Aging in Perspective

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Summer                                      Waning Strawberry Moon

A week ago last Thursday I got my ticket in Roseville.  I want to pay it, but the damn thing still hasn’t shown up on line.   This is past ten days (usual maximum time for a ticket to get into the system).  Is this another revenue builder?  I get frustrated, forget about it and get picked up later for a bigger buck item?  I’m tempted to say yes, but that accords a degree of intentionality to our courts system that I doubt exists.  So I’ll wait.

“We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.”- Will Durant

Though I can’t say why I have had an abiding interest since junior high–yes, that’s what we called it back then–in the ancient past.  Anthropology/archaeology scratched that itch in college and even much of the work I did in seminary had ancient history as a living part of the discipline:  biblical studies, greek, hebrew, (full disclaimer:  I had the short course in both), early church history, even some of constructive theology.

Art history allows occasional forays into the arts of the ancients.  The bronze collection of the Shang and Zhou dynasties at the Institute is wonderful as is our small collection of Greek, Roman, Cycladian, Near Eastern and even Paleolithic art.  I’ve read with great interest many classics, in part because they give a picture of ancient cultures that it’s not possible to get any other way.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in spite of its provenance in the late 14th century, is about the much earlier Han dynasty and its demise around 220 a.d.  Celtic early history is seen through either the eyes of the Romans, the Catholic Church or the British, so it has filters put on by its detractors, yet the ancient Celts shine through anyhow.  Of course there’s the Odyssey, the Iliad and for me, as you know by now, Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

I loved the history of Egypt lectures from the teaching company as I did the history of China and the history of Rome.  You’d think with all this that I’d have some idea of what went on, but I don’t have much of a gestalt yet, not even after all this time.  My gestalt about the West has better form than mine of, say, China or India or Japan, but still, it’s pretty weak.