Daily Archives: November 14, 2010

Aging, Family, Retirement

Getting Closer

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Samhain                                          Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Kate spent 3+ hours at a sewing workshop, creating place mats.  They’re beautiful.  She’s done a lot recently to kick her sewing up another notch, learning how to use the embroidery module on her Bernina, assembling her machine quilter, making more difficult quilts, turning out purses of her own design, going to classes, joining a quilting guild and signing up for road trips to various quilt shops.  She sews a lot, disappearing into her sewing room and working for hours at a stretch, often oblivious to time.  She gets in flow.

She’s a bare month and half + a few days from retirement and she’s ready.  Her casual time will be only 4 work units or so a month with plenty of flexibility.

Our day-to-day lives will probably change little, except Kate won’t be leaving for work at any point during the day.  Once she’s retired, I plan to drive the truck in the winter and let the red car ride out the icy season in the garage.  It’s not the best on snow and ice.  That sort of thing, otherwise we’ll cook, tend the garden, do our creative work, travel some, volunteer here and there.

Living, not retiring.

Aging, Family, Humanities, Literature, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Heavy, Man, Heavy

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Samhain                                           Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

File under the things we do for love.  Kate asked me, as a big favor, if I would clear the sidewalk and a path to the mailbox.  I agreed albeit reluctantly. Never again.  This type of snow, laden with water, dense and prone to packing tight when moved, is just too hard for me to clear.  It clogs up the snowblower, so the snowblower’s out.  Lifting it is beyond my frame’s capacity.  I knew it, but I did it anyhow.  Ouch.

The snow took off the top of the cedar tree’s other trunk, too, so the whole thing will need to come down.  That means the chain saw, sometime soon.  That, I can do.

After pushing some snow around, I harvested the last of the leeks, fine looking vegetables.  The greens, kale and chard in particular, will continue growing until the ground freezes, so I’ll probably have one more harvest from them, too.

Most of the morning I tried to pack in some material not too different from the heavy snow:  Latin participles.  As participles, they share in the attributes of both the adjective–meaning declensions–and verbs–meaning tense and voice.  In addition the participles tense does not follow the verbs because the participle can cue action either concurrent, before or after the action of the verb.  In addition, just to confuse things, the present tense and the passive future tense use the verbs present tense stem to form the participle while the future tense and the passive perfect tense use the participle stem.  Yikes.

I know, I know.  I’m doing this on purpose.  I’m just venting.

Aging, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Politics

In The Right Spot After All

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Samhain                                      Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

“To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Goethe captures the crux of a dis-ease I felt at the dam conference, a dis-ease that probably explains more of why I didn’t end up in academia than other explanations I often give myself.  In short there was more talking than acting and even the references to acting were talking and more it was talking about talking to partners and allies in their language.

Thinking of the caliber in this dam conference is, however, not easy; in fact, it is hard and many of the people who spoke were clever, insightful, giving a new spin to old ideas, my favorite example the delta subsidence problem. People who can take a long held belief and shake it inside out until it reveals it’s underpinnings have my utmost respect.  I hope sometimes I can reach that level in my own thinking; it’s the way change can get started, the reframing of the old in terms of something new.

Who would think, for instance, that sea level rise inundation of coastal delta areas might be alleviated by removing dams upstream?  So, first you have to have the new idea, the problem and its source carefully linked before action can target a plausible solution.

Still, I find myself impatient with just this kind of thinking, that is, root and branch thinking that stops without corollary action.  In the end I’m more of an action guy, much as I love the abstract, the analytical, the historical, the exegetical and the hermeneutical.  I want to change the way dams impact rivers and streams, whether it be by better design or by removal or by prevention.  I want to leverage the way dams have become visible issues into victories for the planet, victories that turn us toward a benign human presence on the face of the earth.

In the end I would have been unhappy as an academic, I see that now.  I would have strained against the confines of the classroom and publish or perish.  As it happens, I’ve been able to continue my learning on my own while engaging pretty consistently as a change agent.  Probably led the life I was meant to lead after all.  Good to know.