Yearly Archives: 2011

Aging, Asia, Garden, Great Work, Health

It’s Illegal

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Mid-Summer                                                                                             Waxing Honey Flow Moon

In to see Kate this morning after making some soup and killing potato pests by hand and soapy water.  Integrated pest management  suggests hands-on management for small crops.  It’s actually pretty straight-forward to keep pests in check if you inspect regularly.  Like the plastic bags for the apples.  The concept also allows that some leaves will get eaten, some plants will get lost, but that if you plan for these and don’t excited, you can keep pesticide use to a minimum.  I haven’t used any for years.

Companion plantings helps.  Crop rotation helps.  Regular surveillance helps. Replenishing soil nutrients helps. Every bit of positive input reduces the hold insects pests can get on your veggies.

Kate’s color looked normal this morning even though her hemoglobin is still a little low.  She’s ready to come home.  Her nurse yesterday tried to get her to wear little footies with a sticky pattern on the bottom.  Kate doesn’t like things on her feet.  “You don’t want to wear them even though it’s illegal?”  I knew who would win this contest.

Back home for a nap, read a little, then got ready for Tai Chi.  Kona had been injured in the morning, but I couldn’t find the problem.  She held up her right front foot, which I checked carefully, finding nothing.  Mark found the wound.  It was a tear in her side just above the right shoulder.

Uh oh.  This is the kind of stuff Kate makes easy. So. I called her and asked her if she could come home.  Nope.  Well, I figured.  Her advice though helped a lot.

After a snappy, biting 10 minutes or so, I figured out how to do what needed to be done, Kona stood quietly and let me put a gauze pad on the wound and wrap it on with a sticky bandage.

I missed the first hour of Tai Chi, but I made it for my class.  Be patient with yourself.  Relax.  Trust the process.  Cheryl, the teacher, is a calming influence in a learning curve that can be difficult.

By the time I headed home I needed some comfort food.  A peanut buster parfait later, I felt calmer myself.

General

Independence Day

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Mid-Summer                                                                                                         Waning Garlic Moon

July 4th.  Kate celebrates her independence from the hospital and from the hip pain she has endured for so many years.  Her recovery has settled into a familiar path and she looks to be back on her feet without aid sooner than you might think.  She’s already walking with the aid of a walker, getting herself out of and almost back in to bed.  And this is just three days post-op.  She’s tough and the procedure makes this early mobility possible; it’s great advantage.

Her color has improved to normal and she got good sleep last night.

The house loses a lot of its warmth and resonance without Kate here.  I’m looking forward to having her back.

Humanities

Curious

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Mid-Summer                                                                                           Waning Garlic Moon

“Inquiry is fatal to certainty.” – Will Durant

Will Durant, a philosopher cum historian, author of a history of the world, has a key insight.  When a seminary student enters biblical studies classes, ones informed by the higher criticism, criticism that treats scripture as literature and literature with a history, inquiry can erode the foundations of faith.  It did not for me, that erosion came later, and under a different form of inquiry; but, the discipline of question asking, of seeking evidence, of pursuing a hypothesis forces the world out of a lock step predictability and into a quantum universe, a place where inquiry itself can confound knowledge.

A while back I bought a book on curiosity.  As latter day children of the enlightenment, we bow the knee to inquiry if nothing else, so curiosity has its own high rank in our pantheon of virtues; but, many cultures, ones also wise to the Durant syndrome, have suppressed curiosity as dangerous.  The culture of the Roman Catholic stood solidly in the anti-curiosity camp during the middle ages and often tips that way even today.  Many authoritarian find inquiry and curiosity the bedfellows of political rebellion.  Curiosity and inquiry are dangerous to dogma, inflammatory to regimes that define the truth in their own way, think the Bush-Cheney Whitehouse.

Inquiry and curiosity, let’s lift a cup to these twins, dangerous and inflammatory though they may be.

Aging, Family

Kate

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Mid-Summer                                                                                               Waning Garlic Moon

Oh, boy.  Mark felt right at home yesterday, but noted, “Well, it won’t last.”  He saw the temporary nature of high temps as a bad thing.  Different acclimatization.  He continues to work through difficult stuff.  We had a long, very interesting talk yesterday.

Having Kate in the hospital raises the stress level.  She’s tough and handles surgery and hospitalization well, but the exposure to hospital based infections bothers me.  Also, every time you have general anesthetic and surgical trauma the risk for complications exists.  Thought we entered that territory, but not so.

I didn’t get a lot done Thursday and yesterday, but I imagine things will get better provided her recovery remains smooth.  I’ll go see her around lunch time.

Aging, Family, Health

Wind, Water, Wound

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Mid-Summer                                                                    Waning Garlic Moon

A groggy Kate called this morning to say she had a temp and they’d done a chest x-ray.  Maybe pneumonia.  The adage after surgery is wind, water, wound.  That is, look for an infection first in the lungs, second in the kidneys/bladder and third in the wound itself.  This seemed to fit.  My mind danced over the possibility of these superbugs, among them pneumoccocus strains. Let that thought dance right out again.  No need to worry about something I don’t know.

So, I canceled my Latin, did the errands and drove in to make sure I did know what was going on.  After a while, Dr. Stein came in, a good doc, a hospitalist we met a year ago when Kate had the other hip done.  He looked at her oxygen saturation and her temp.  O2 sat was fine; her temp slightly elevated at 102.  In his judgement the temp could be the result of the stress of surgery.  Her hemoglobin dropped to 7 though, so they ordered her two units of blood.

We ate lunch together, talked about this and that, the dogs, the bees, Mark, her friends.  She got some new drugs for pain and was about to head into lala land, so I came home for a nap myself.

Everything seems fine, given the trauma of the surgery.  Whew.

Art and Culture, Humanities

Graphic Design

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Mid-Summer                                                                             Waning Garlic Moon

Started my History of Graphic Design class last night.   The guy teaching it has a solo design practice after working first for Larson, then a smaller advertising company.

The class consists of four women, all working or having worked in design oriented professions, and me.

As I anticipated, this is way different from anything I’ve done before, even different from art history.  Graphic Design proceeds, our instructor says, in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary manner.  This differentiates it from art history where styles and movements often appear over against something has come before, abstract expressionism versus the entire representational tradition, for example.  Graphic design, in contradistinction, moves in gradual steps from, say, cuneiform and Egyptian demotic to the Phoenician alphabet which morphs into the Greek alphabet.

Like art history, though, graphic design has one particular emphasis that sets it apart from any other discipline I’ve studied, mark-making.  Cuneiform for example had triangular marks made by a cut reed in soft clay.  This emphasized straight lines, no curves.  The Phoenician alphabet used ink on paper, so curves entered writing, made more easy by the both the substratum, paper, and the mark-making tool, a brush or pen.

There’s much more here than I can recapitulate in a quick summary, but I’ll keep you informed as I go along.

One thing:  we have a project that will take up the last three weeks of the course.  My thought right now is to redesign Ancientrails.  Just how, not sure.  If any of you have ideas, let me know.

Aging, Health, Myth and Story

Kate’s Hip

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Mid-Summer                                                                     Waning Garlic Moon

The ritual masters of the American medical system had us rising with the sun at 5:00 am for the Admittance to the Hospital ceremony, then the Cutting of the Flesh.  By getting us up at a time far earlier than our usual 7:00-7:30 we knew this was a magical moment.  We proceeded through the rush hour traffic to Fairview University where attendants took our vehicle away, out of view.  After appeasing the money changers, Kate received the ritual accessories, bracelets of varying colors including one with the mystical words:  Fall Prevention.

They came for her, the blue-gowned deacons of this mega-church, and led her away where her clothes were removed and hidden away.  She received a lavender gown of paper, marking her as the morning’s sacrifice.  The high priest and his acolyte came in to see her and the acolyte initialed her thigh so the Cutting of the Flesh would be done in a way approved of by the medical gods.

As in many ancient rituals, Kate received a powerful drug that made her smile and seem goofy just before the blue-gowned ones wheeled her away to the secret chapels where the High Priests work their magic.

Satisfied that the gods had received the offerings of insurance and accepted them, I left for home.

Bees, Family, Health, Politics

A Reunion

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Mid-Summer                                                                                              Waning Garlic Moon

As the garlic moon wanes, the leaves of the garlic plants begin to brown from the bottom up.  When half of them are brown, I’ll pull a couple to see how they’re progressing.  I plant more garlic than we use; for some reason it appeals to me as a crop.  Partly because you plant it in the fall and harvest it in the summer.  A contrarian.

A Latin day today, perhaps tomorrow, too, after I see to the queen excluders in the colonies from which I removed them this weekend. I’m looking for movement of the workers up into the honey supers, starting to lay in honey there rather than in the hive boxes.

Into the city tonight to discuss the slightly revised issue selection process for the 2012 legislature.  We’re moving up our process by a month to allow for better campaign planning, gathering of allies.

My exercise commitment, once rock solid, has slipped in these past three weeks with many evening meetings.  I’m going to shift my workouts to the morning, see if I can get a new rhythm established.

At the end of July my sister Mary will travel here from Athens, where she gives a paper, then reverse field back through London to Singapore.  My cousin Diane, who stood up for me when Kate and I got married, also, by chance, will be in town for another reason, so we’ll have a Keaton and an Ellis reunion right here in Andover, star of the northern burbs.  Diane lives in San Francisco where she churns out a weekly newsletter, highly regarded, on the pulp and paper industry.

Family, Health, Humanities

A Day in the Life

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Mid-Summer                                                                                                   Waning Garlic Moon

“God has no religion.” – Mahatma Gandhi

If there is one, Gandhi has it right.

Another day of Latin.  This stuff, at least right now, is hard.  It requires holding several different ideas in the head all at one time, then juggling them to see how they all fit together.   Here are as many of those things as I can name:  word meanings in Latin and English (often multiple), noun declensions (usually multiple), verb conjugations, participle forms, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, clause types, infinitives, word order (often shuffled in poetry for metric purposes.  ovid is poetry.), flow of the narrative, many different grammatical rules and exceptions.  They float in the air like bubbles over a cartoon character’s head, as if, say, Dilbert couldn’t figure out what to say until he mixed and matched the diverse bubbles into a sensible sentence.

On the other hand, at times I’m able to do it, to switch the balls in mid-air and see the sequence fall into place, a sentence emerging from what James Joyce or William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion.”  Then, it’s sweet.

Took Mark down to the Anoka County Work Force center for a morning’s class on resumes.  He seems calmer now, less agitated.

Kate’s in pain because she has to go off all her non-steroidal anti-inflammatories for 5 days before her surgery.  This leaves her arthritic joints free to express themselves, especially in her hip, neck and hands.  This Thursday, S-Day, will find her with a second new hip, a procedure that should reduce her suffering quite a bit by relieving the hip pain and making her body mechanics better.  I’m glad she’s getting the new hip.

Great Work, Minnesota, Politics

Take Action Against Sulfide Mining Exploratory Drilling

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Mid-Summer                                                                      Waning Garlic Moon

This is part of a note I sent to the Forest Service about issuing permits for exploratory drilling in Northeastern Minnesota.  You can take part by clicking:

“Please accept these comments on the Federal Hardrock Mineral Prospecting Permit Draft EIS (DEIS). I have serious concerns about the project’s potential for harmful impacts to Minnesota’s natural resources.

Caring for our wilderness and natural heritage is a huge responsibility and I commend those of you in the Forest Service who have made it your life’s work.  Thank you for your commitment.

This particular instrument, a DEIS focused only on the environmental effects of drilling itself, is disingenuous. And you must know that.

The real environmental impact of drilling, whatever transient effects it may have, will be the mines, if any, that occur in its wake.  To not count the certainty of mining in the case of favorable mineral deposits as the first and most significant environmental impact of drilling makes us all look absurd.  Please, please add mining to the list of drilling’s environmental impacts.  Logic and good policy formation demand it.”