Monthly Archives: July 2010

Family

Fiery Hoops of Passage

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Summer                                        Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Ruth and Gabe move and do, absorbing, trying, reaching, running, searching, asking.  They are both information and experience Brawny Towels.  Nothing passes them by.

Their emotions are quick to surface and quick to flee.

Jon and Jen face this firestorm of energy and demand constantly, at home and at work.  It’s enough to make a sane person tired and a neurotic neuroticer.  But, it is also the stuff of very stuff of which life is made; the fiery hoop through which we all had to pass on our way to and through elementary school.

The cycle of family life, children, then grandchildren keeps  all ages in touch with the heroes journey on which we have all trod and on which those we love are now engaged.

Here’s to Gabe and Ruth, two pilgrims now progressing on the path.  See the Machado poem in the upper left of this website.

Family, Health

Uh-oh

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Summer                                        New (Grandchildren) Moon

It’s 10 am.  Do you know where your grandkids are?  I do, they’re upstairs.

Ruth has brought her sombre et sol disposition with her.  When sol, her blond hair dances and her smile, often mischievous, lights up the room.  When sombre, she turns her face away or covers it up with her ever present bunny and pretends no one else is there.  When she first wakes up, like her grandpop, it’s all sombre.  Later, the sun breaks out and she starts to play.

Gabe opens cabinets and investigates those things stored just for him, that is, at his level.  One minute he’s playing sword-handler by juggling food processor blades–yikes–the next he’s taking the microwave popcorn out one bag at a time.  One bag at a time, that is, until he tumbles to the fact that he can get them all out by turning it upside down.  As he often says, Uh-oh.

Gabe, as you may know, has hemophilia.  That means, among many other things, that Jon and Jen have to give him infusions of clotting factor three times a week through a port in his upper left chest.  It’s an elaborate protocol.  First the one who  will do the infusing has to sterilize their hands, then put on sterile gloves and prepare the infusions.  They come pre-measured but they still have to be drawn into a hypodermic plunger.

After that’s done one of them, in this case Jen, holds him and the other, Jon, takes a small needle with a butterfly attachment and inserts it into the port.  Hopefully.  Jen said she went several weeks without missing the port, then a long stretch missing it the first time.  Gabe anticipates the poke and is unhappy, fidgety, but not out of control.

Once the stick is in Jon first flushed the port with saline, the switched to the factor (clotting factor), pushed that out with another saline injection and follows, ironically with a fourth and last infusion of heparin, a blood thinner.  Counter intuitive, at least to me.  But, not if you understand.

You’ve just put clotting factor in the port.  It will clot any blood in or around the port, creating a possible source of a clot breaking off and entering the bloodstream.  Not good.  So, the heparin resolves that problem.

As I said at the beginning of this journey, Gabe couldn’t have gotten a better set of parents.  It’s not a drama, it’s not a why me, it’s a we need to do this so let’s get on with it.  That attitude will transfer to Gabe who will have to manage all this in the future.

Family

Grandkids

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Summer                                  New (Grandchildren) Moon

Jon and Jen, Ruth and Gabe rolled in around 6 pm.  Kate fed them all, I cleaned up and Jon and Jen organized their family.  Vega and Rigel, of course, helped.

Ruth went out to her playhouse, looked up at me and said, “I want more toys.”

Gabe is in what I call the unguided missile stage of human development.  His motor is always on and he hits one thing, bounces off and heads off somewhere else, opening this, closing that, grabbing a pair of scissors, carrying his pin-wheel.  Busy, busy, busy.

It’s a pleasure to have them here.  They’re here until Thursday.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

We Call This Place Home

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our-woodsSummer                                New (Grandchildren) Moon

Outside this morning, finishing my tea on the patio, a hummingbird darted in and out of the lilies, gathering the last bits of nectar, passing on final touches of pollen.  Like the possum from yesterday’s adventure the hummingbird shares this patch of land with us, too.  Possum, groundhogs, gophers, chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, deer, hummingbirds, blue jays, goldfinches, red-headed and pileated woodpeckers, a great horned owl, crows, grosbeaks, dogs, mice, skinks, salamanders, garter snakes, garden spiders, wolf spiders, worms, bees, moths, wasps, caterpillars and butterflies and many others, most one-celled or many-celled, I imagine, live here.

They live here as we do,  making a home, finding and preparing food, eating their meals, raising their young, growing to old age, dying.  Our home takes up more space, yes, and our decisions impact the land in dramatic, sometimes even drastic ways, but that we are only one species among hundreds that live here is beyond question.

When we leave, either through death or otherwise, the generations yet unborn of these animals and insectshighrise and other life forms will, perhaps, know no difference.  If fact, if the house became abandoned, many of them would find a use for it as shelter, as a place to raise their families, perhaps as a source of food.

All of us, all of us who live here, are only here for a while.  It is so important that we leave this place a better one for all its inhabitants.  If each of us only took this one objective, a prime objective?, to leave our places better for all those who live in them, wouldn’t the world be safe now and into the future?

Dogs, Family

Mighty Possum Warriors

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Summer                                         New Moon  (Grandchild’s Moon)

From this point forward (if I remember) I’m going to start naming the moons in ways that make sense to our life here at Artemis Hives and the Seven Oaks.  The Grandchild’s Moon is in honor of a yearly visit that takes place most often in this moon’s ambit since Jon and Jen return to work as teachers in early August.

The mighty possum warriors finally gave up and came inside to the cool, flopped down on the couch and promptly went to sleep.  A hard day hunting the wily critter had done them in.  I’m 99% sure that the possum only has shattered nerves.  All that barking.  Right out on the patio.

Jen called today and they leave Chicago tomorrow and plan to be here Sunday night.  They are going to come up on the Minnesota side of the Mississippi, stopping in Winona at the National Eagle Center.

Dogs

Interesting Stuff

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Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

The intrepid opossum hunters have not touched their morning meal, nor have they come back to the house.  This work commands their full and undivided barking, yipping, tail wagging and sniffing.  You gotta admire persistence.  Or, maybe not.  It’s pretty damned hot right now.

Fleet Farm has aisles full of interesting stuff.  One aisle for example had, according to the sign, earth augurs and come-alongs.  Who could resist?  I did buy a come-along.  I mean, who wouldn’t?

You could also buy horse treats, horse bedding, a $1,300 leather saddle (it was nice, with great tooling), feeding bowls to hang on the fence, blenders, shotguns and handguns, red licorice, a cultivator and several styles of wagons.  I got outta there with the following:  an umbrella for the patio, a green outdoor carpet, an outdoor fireplace, two heavy rubber buckets, black, and a small one, pink (for Ruth) and the come-along.

Not bad considering everything else they have.  In fact, only the come-along was not on my list.

Dogs

Vega and Rigel At Work. Again.

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Summer                                  Waning Strawberry Moon

Off to Fleet Farm this morning.  But not before I pass on another Vega and Rigel adventure.

Nope, neither of them escaped.  They were out much of the night, Kate letting them in and out.  When I got up at 7:15 or so to feed the dogs, I let them out as usual, then went downstairs for the whippets.  The whippets ran flat out upstairs, barking, as they always do.  However, when they went outside the big dogs were no where to be seen.

They normally hang around a little bit.

After feeding the whippets and putting out the food for the big dogs, they still weren’t back from what ever had captured their attention, but they were barking.  A lot.07-10-10_hole-under-dead-tree

After I finished my ramen, I set out to discover what was up.  I worried that they were barking at the labs of the surgeon who lives diagonally across the street from us.  His dogs come up to his property line and stop at the invisible fence.  These kind of events incite Rigel to burrow under the fence and go investigate.

Nope, not on the north facing fence.  I still heard them, so I walked the eastern fence line.  Still no dogs.  I turned right at the southern edge of our fencing and headed west.  Oh, I thought.  They’re barking at some dog that’s loose back here.  Nope.  When I got to where I had heard them, they were not at the fence at all, but back a ways in the woods.

Vega has a tendency to lie down and bark, so I thought she may have taken advantage of the cover, laid down and decided to enjoy herself in secrecy.  Nope, not that either.

When I pushed aside the undergrowth and got to the place where it was all happening, I saw a hole in the ground that looked like a fox hole–no, not that kind, the military kind–earth mounded up around a hole.  Vega and Rigel had dug a very large hole under a hollowed out fallen tree.  Rigel was in the hole, her butt up in the air, her nose up in the inside the hollowed tree and barking.  They have something up there.07-10-10_vega-in-the-hole

I was still in my pajamas so I didn’t investigate.  It could be a skunk, a raccoon, a cat, maybe even a groundhog.  Don’t know.  But the coon-hound in these dogs surfaced this morning.

OK.  So I went out with shoes and pants on, camera in hand to record this historic doggy moment.  The first photograph shows the hole with the dogs circling, waiting to see what I would do.  “Maybe he can get it.”  Pant, pant. “Maybe he can get it.  Come on, Dad!”

Shortly after Vega realized I was going to be of no help, she slid back down in the hole, seeing if more loud barking would coax whatever it was outside where she could eat it.  Surprisingly, nothing happened.

Well, Dad couldn’t bend over enough to check inside the tree, but he did have a camera that could.  So, I took this picture, which if I see it right is a shot of a baby opossum.  I know we have opossums because I posted pictures of one that came around the Winter Solstice two years ago.  07-10-10_yum

This shot is with the camera stuck up inside the tree from below.  Well, I just looked at pictures of several babies:  opossums, raccoons, woodchucks and gophers (all critters I know sharing this land with us.).  None of them look like this.  Maybe that’s the snout of a mother opossum?  Or the snout of a maturing young opossum?

I just massaged the photo a bit more.  This is a young opossum staring out from the hollow tree.  The two black spots on either side of the face are eyes, the pink is nose and, oh well, I just enhanced it and here is what I saw.

07-10-10_aha

Aging, Garden, Humanities

S…L…O…W

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Summer                                       Waning Strawberry moon

Engine turning at low  rpm’s.  Latin today and my tutor.  Greg (tutor) thinks I’ve gotten past the barrier I experienced before he took for Portugal.  Getting back up to speed after a two-week lull was not so easy, the mental machinery does not spin up for action quite as quickly as it used to.  So, I’ve got to stay at it to get it.  The new way.  Life changes our learning pace and perhaps our style, but it doesn’t diminish our capacity–or so I’ve read.  It’s also my experience.

Ear infection taking attention my body might otherwise devote to the fact that the grandkids are coming either tomorrow or Sunday.   We’re ready.  Sort of.

The garden will get some attention tomorrow after I buy an umbrella, umbrella stand and a new firepit for the brick patio.  Field trip to Fleetfarm.  I love Fleetfarm.  It’s one of those crazy places you probably don’t know about unless you use the stuff they sell: electric fencing, watering troughs, ivormectin.  Lot of fun.

Well, it may go slow, but I’m gonna get on the treadmill.  Now.

Minnesota

A Blank Spot on the Map?

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Summer                                           Waning Strawberry Moon

I found this on the Minnesota Conservation website.  It is the last of five questions asked of John Camp, aka, John Sandford.  It’s hard for me to get a grasp of what people think of Minnesota since I imagine, and I think Sandford confirms, people often don’t realize we exist.

When you travel to promote books, what do people ask you or tell you (if anything) about their perceptions of Minnesota, its climate, and/or its natural resources?

Mostly people ask why I live there, when it’s so cold. The perception of Minnesota involves climate and a kind of backwoods fishing culture. There’s also a perception that we have good cultural facilities, probably because of the constant banging of the drum for the Guthrie. But that’s about it.

When I talk about it, people are really curious about why anyone would choose to live there. I tell them that we live much better than the average person in California or New York City — that we have much nicer houses for the prices we pay, etc., but they really don’t pay much attention. I’ve told them that I live in a house that if it had the same conditions (size, view, water, dock) would cost $10 million in California, but I bought it for about $400,000…but they really sort of don’t believe it. For a lot of them, I think, the Upper Midwest is a kind of blank spot on the map.