Yearly Archives: 2011

GeekWorld, Travel, Weather +Climate, Writing

Ancientrails

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Mid-Summer                                                     Full Honey Flow Moon

Talking with Mark today it occurred to me, for the first time, that part of what was going on with him, maybe a lot of it, involved repatriation.  So, I looked it up on google.  Turns out repatriate adjustment has many facets, most of them difficult to integrate, often leading to feelings of isolation, alienation and just plain old bewilderment.  Especially when you return suddenly, as Mark did, from twenty + years abroad, the country of his birth has changed.  A lot.  In subtle and not so subtle ways.  I’m just beginning to understand this phenomenon, but as a brother and as a student of anthropology, it fascinates me and gives me considerable pause.

Last night, during a violent thunder storm, our power went out and, presumably, our generator kicked in.  But, as life goes, at 4:45 am, our alarm decided it had to begin chirping.  And chirping.  Not the wailing kind of all hell’s broken loose kinda noise, but a persistent annoying chirp.  After muffling it and going back to sleep, Kate got up and called the company.  We had to replace the back up battery in the unit’s central box.  This is a twelve-volt battery with sulfuric acid like your car battery.  Who knew?  Anyhow the new one now rests where the faded one was and all is well with the alarm system.

My History of Graphic Design course project, redesigning Ancientrails, has got me thinking about why I do this.  Do I do this for you, the reader, or for me?  I have kept diaries and journals since the early 70’s.  They vary in systematics and consistency although over the last 20 years I’ve kept regular journals on matters from spirituality to art history, reading the classics to daily experiences, thoughts.  Ancientrails extends and continues those, which were private, so in that sense this is a public journal, but a continuation of a private one.

It is not, however, like the private one, unread.  Readership varies from peaks of around 200 a day to a more average 50.  There were some 1100 visits this month.  A small number for most websites, infinitesimal really, but considerably more than the one who read my private journals.  Having readers changes the content.  I’ve made four of five gaffes that have gotten me into hot water with family, lost me a job and caused certain allies to wonder about my discretion.  Each one of those events creates a certain amount of self-censorship, as does the possibility that anybody might read any of this at any time.

Ancientrails is also a document on the world wide web.  That means html, tags, pictures, news, links.  These features create a more accessible journal, a deeper journal with ties to other webpages and direct access to information about a topic.  Not sure where all this goes quite yet.  Still thinking.  If you have any input, leave me a comment.  Thanks.

Art and Culture, Bees

Does It Play To or With Our Cult of Celebrity?

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Mid-Summer                                                                    Waxing Honey Flow Moon

So.  Attended a political meeting in the morning, came  home, took a long nap, got up and put Helmsman varnish on the honey supers, six, then went up and watched some TV after a conversation with Mark and Kate.

Today had one weird announcement.  This statue of Marilyn Monroe in Chicago.  Only time will tell if it is really in as bad a taste as it seems to be.  Not sure quite what to think of it.  Guess I’d have to see it in person.  No, I would have to see it in person.

What’s good.  It’s a famous image, made bigger than lifesize in a believable way.  It’s either saucy or sexist, or both.  It puts the whole 1950’s/1960’s era right there, in the midst of 21st century Chicago.  It’s pop art, I suppose.  It is a joyous image, a woman apparently secure in her sexuality and having fun.  It is a heroine sized sculpture, a monumental tip of the hat to Marilyn, a complex figure for 1960’s era boys and girls.

What’s bad.  It invites the pictures I’ve already seen posted of men standing between her legs and looking up.  Of course, that’s on the men, yes, but still.  It draws us into a stereotypical display of woman as object, as object of desire, of silly non-chalance as an antidote for prurience. (which, come to think of it, maybe it is.)   It plays to our cult of the celebrity. (or, does it play with our cult of celebrity?)

If you’ve seen it, I’m interested in what you thought.

Politics, Weather +Climate

The Deal. The Old Deal, Not A Big Deal.

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Mid-Summer                                                               Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Apres deluge.  Drove into St. Paul this morning, a long chunk of the ride behind a pick-up with Louisiana plates.  Felt like the bayou during the tail end of a hurricane.  Driving in Minnesota seems to perplex our citizens when there is a significant amount of precipitation.  Makes the whole driving experience a little like pin ball.

Big political news.  A deal.  Done on the backs of the poor and the K-12 education system.  Brilliant.  A Republican coup for which they need to be held responsible come 2012.  Of course, any election results next year may have a null effect if the world ends in December before the victors can take office.  I’m not counting on the end of the world however.

The Star-Tribune ran an article that said, and I believe it to be true, that the Republican focus has shifted from balanced budgets to smaller government.  Evidence for this in the article was the Republican agreement to a Federal budget that didn’t balance for three decades.  The same tone has sharpened and polarized the budget debate here in Minnesota.  To the extent that this focus remains and clarifies for Republican pols the situation becomes a struggle over the meaning and purpose of government.

It is arguable though, and I would agree with it, that electoral politics are so broken in the United States that our two parties are twiddle dum and twiddle dee.  That is, both parties have become lapdogs for the corporate oligarchy that runs America, bending policy and legislation to suit the flood of money that washes over each election cycle and that gets rinsed in the legislative session that follows.  Finally, the public is hung out to dry.

Still, I find it important to engage party politics because there are so many short term issues effected by the differences between dum and dee.  Read the details of the budget compromise and you’ll see the kind of things I’m talking about.

To engage party politics as a long term political solution, however, will not get us where we need to go.  We need to pick up the banner of economic justice and push equity in every venue we can.

Aging, Family, Friends, Health, Politics

The Day

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Mid-Summer                                                                 Waxing Honey Flow Moon

The card gods have failed to smile on me the last three months.  Paying me back for that lucky streak, teaching me–again–humility.  But.  Bill Schimdt, with brother Pat over his shoulder, won big tonight.  Congratulations to Bill and Pat.

Kate walked into the surgeon’s office with only a cane for assistance two weeks to the day after her surgery.  She moves well without the cane and will not need physical therapy.  Soon she will be walking free from hip pain for the first time in 15 to 20 years.  There are miracles and we don’t need the supernatural to explain them.  Skill, pluck and advancing knowledge, they’re enough.

Brother Mark spent the day slogging it out door to door in his search for a job.  This takes toughness and he admitted it took him some time to work up his nerve, but once he got into it, he applied several places and has a possible call back tomorrow.  Way to go Mark.

In reading the book, The Death of the Liberal Class, my fire for economic justice relit.  Those of who can must fight.  Socialism is not a bad word.  A capitalist economy that punishes the poor and siphons money from them to the rich has no moral standing.  We need to strike back against it.  Just how, what these times offer as alternatives, I don’t know.  But I intend to find out.

Art and Culture, Bees, Family, Garden, Great Work

Love Is Not Only For the Animal World

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Mid-Summer                                                           Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Kate’s put up ten jars of red currant jam and put together six honey supers.  She’s a great ally in estate management with her skills.  She keeps saying, “I’m surprised how much major surgery slows me down.”  Oh?

When I ate dinner at the Java yesterday, the waitress said, “That was quite a storm last night.”  “Yes,” I said, not remembering much.  “It blew a big tree down, right at my house.  It stopped less than a foot from my roof.”  “Wow.”  “Did you hire someone to cut it down?”  “Yes. I’m going to miss that tree.  It turned red in the fall.  I knew I should take it down.”

Love is not only for the animal world.

The MCAD class has moved into Graphic Design history with an emphasis on posters, especially in the 19th and early 20th century.  Some very striking pieces.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Queen of Relaxation

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Mid-Summer                                                            Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Our new pack Kona, Vega, Rigel + Gertie has begun to calm down.  There are fewer tense circling moments, fewer snaps and growls.  Life with dogs has its rhythms, just like life with vegainwaterhumans.  Vega, our biggest girl, lays on the window seat, tail thumping, watchful, inviting me to come down and sit beside her, enjoy a moment of relaxation with her.  She is a great role model for relaxation.  The 4th of July fireworks season has moved into the  past, or the future, and Rigel no longer barks at the night sky.

Our tiered perennial garden and its brick patio have gotten neglected in our push toward the orchard, vegetables and bees.  It was my focus for so long and now it grows on its own, almost, with little help from either of us.  It looks that way, too.  I began this morning a three or four day project to clean it up, weed it, mulch it, arrange and clean up the furniture and potting bench.  This involved, today, pulling the lovely green chive like grass that volunteers everywhere, then putting down a heavy blanket of birch leaves, sweeping the bricks and clearing litter off tables and benches, killing weeds growing in the brick crevices and emptying old pots into the compost.

There’s still plenty to do and I’ll get on with that tomorrow.

Aging, Humanities, Politics, US History

Check My Logic, Please

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Mid-Summer                                                  Waxing Honey Flow Moon

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Cicero

Not sure where this is headed with gadgets like the Kindle, but Cicero and I have something in common.  In fact, this room in which I write has a lot of soul.  Piles of it.  Shelves of it.  Open and closed soul.  Big and little soul.  Profound and silly soul.

Check me on my logic here.  Banks and hedge funds almost sink our economy, the largest in the world.  Through dogged work of two administrations, one Republican and one Democrat, the looming depression did not come to pass, but in the process the government had to shovel billions and billions of dollars (and as Everett Dirksen famously said, “A million here, a million there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.) into the sink holes that so-called premier banks had become.  The banks took the money, then promptly began foreclosing on all the loans they themselves had sold, blaming the purchasers for making unwise investments.  Scroll forward a bit more than a year and the Republicans in Congress, with a straight face, demand a deal because of the sky-rocketing national debt.  Created by those very same bankers who bankroll the Republican party and, oh by the way, sunk the economy.

How would we deal with the national debt created by the government bail outs?  Cut programs that help the poor and the elderly.  This whole scenario beggars the imagination.  It is the most corrupt, venal, embarrassing, immoral action possible.  Bail out the rich, then use the bail out created debt as an excuse for trimming Medicare, cutting back on social welfare programs?  The ninth pit of hell.  Dante’s inferno.  Look it up.

Art and Culture

Artists at Play

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Mid-Summer                                                       Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Big Stone Mini-Golf.    Is a rocky, quirky, beautiful, rambling, homey chunk of land where two artists play.  He, Bill, a motion metal artist, successful in his twenties and she, Heidi, a sculptress, moved to this plot of land in Minnestrista several years ago and set about adding a 13 hole mini-golf course that includes huge slabs of granite sprinkled here and there around the holes, a metal dragonfly bench, a hole with stone pumpkins and metal leaves for seats, a covered hole created by an upturned Chris Craft metal hull and lit by the colorful, extruded remains of a old eyeglass frames.  This last is oddly peaceful and chapel-like.

The fire pit consists of chunks of granite maybe 10 irregular feet in circumference and ten to twelve feet high, all arranged in a circle ala stone henge complete with a capped pair.  Kids rent it out for birthday parties.  On around Bill has placed pieces of unusual rusted farm equipment on granite slabs, a sculpture park with Bill and Heidi’s work spaced out over a large area.  Bill designed and built their mutual gallery and studio, a tightly-fit log construction made from yard thick trunks.  He also created a whimsical garage from stone with a rounded wooden roof.

It’s a place you need to see to appreciate.  Follow this link and click on photos.

Garden

Pick and Plan Eating

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Mid-Summer                                                        Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Kate and I have decided on a pick and plan eating method.  That is, we’ll pick fresh vegetables, then build a meal around what we have.  I picked this morning, for example, green beans, beets, golden and bull’s blood, lettuce, dill, and 7 garlic bulbs.  We still have onions from an earlier harvest, so there’s the basics for our lunch or dinner tonight.  In addition Mark has picked hundreds, maybe thousands of currants and Kate spent yesterday starting the preservation work.  She’s test drying some, making jams and jellies.  We’re well into the first significant harvest period though we have had strawberries, lettuce, kale, spinach and onions already.

The tomatoes I started inside, which looked puny early in the season have grown tall and begun to bloom.  That means we’ll get heirloom tomatoes in addition to the two store bought plants.  Through integrated pest management I’ve beaten back the yucky scourge Colorado beetles on the potatoes .  Boy are they gross.  Little fat jabba the hut creatures until they get their wings. The leeks have begun to thicken, not much, but some.  The potatoes have blooms and that signals the beginning of tuber growth underground.  Lots of onions getting bigger, carrots, too.

Big-Stone Mini-Golf deserves its own entry and I’ll get to that either later today or tomorrow.

General

Mini-Golf, Cruising South America, Driving Too Much

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Mid-Summer                                                  Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Up at 7:15.  Worked out.  Grabbed breakfast.  Showered.  Drove to Big Stone Mini-Golf for a unique experience with two very experienced artists, at work in a large play ground for their ideas.

On the way back stopped into Minnetonka Travel in downtown Wayzata to finish paying for the cruise.  Wrote a big check.  Fussing with details like visas, changes to air transportation and setting up  a couple of nights in Rio took 2 full hours.

By that time there wasn’t enough flex in my schedule to drive back to Andover (in rush hour going the wrong way), then turn around and make it over to the Sierra Club by 6 pm for a meeting, so I drove into Minneapolis and had lunch/dinner at the Java Restaurant.

Just got back home.  Weary.  Tomorrow.