Monthly Archives: February 2011

Bees, Dogs, GeekWorld, Humanities, World History

Carpe this Diem

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Imbolc                                                 Waxing Bridgit Moon

OK.  Today is a new day.  I do not plan to torture my computers anymore today in regard to my legacy laserjet printer.  It has been a faithful companion throughout the last 19  years and I do not plan to give up on it yet.  Even so, I’ve experienced my tolerance level of geek futility since I tried to convert it from parallel processing to usb, so it will rest on the sidelines for a while as I install the new multi-function printer later in the day.  If I can find a new laserjet printer for under $300 I may just get one with a native usb connection.  Not sure I’d do with old faithful.  I might bring it in here (the study) and see if I can convince it to mate up with the Gateway in here.  I might give it to somebody with a parallel printer port.

I know, too, that losing colonies is still common for beekeepers and that my experience is not unusual.  In fact, as I said a bit earlier, I was not surprised by the deaths of two of the colonies. Only the package colony’s demise surprised me, since it seemed to have plenty of honey and a healthy group of bees.  Another year is another year.

With temperatures above freezing the dogs are frisky, staying outside longer, bumping, running, tails held high.  They both hunt between the honey house and the play house, noses to the ground, body alert.  Kona still finds the outdoors a bit too cool and no wonder, she no longer has any hair on her butt.  I know how it feels when there’s no hair on the head, probably a similar sensation.  And it is hard for Kona to put a hat or a scarf on that particular location.

I’m inclining toward a Renaissance theme for the Titian tours.  This exhibit showcases the High Renaissance in Venice from its beginnings in the early 1500’s through its end in the 1580’s.  Venice held on to the Renaissance longer than the rest of Italy, though even its extension ended well before the Renaissance limped toward its end in the 1700’s in northern Europe.  The Renaissance gave shape and content to our era, actually doing what those embroiled in it thought they were doing, ushering in the modern age, shifting from the ancien regime to the days of democracy, individualism, capitalism and science, days within which we still live.

Not often do we have the chance to experience such a clear visual record of this dramatic change in the lifeways of Western civilization, a record written not in words, but in the brushstrokes and vital imaginations of artists who distilled the time and painted it.  On canvas.  Using oils.

Bees, GeekWorld

A No Good Day

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Imbolc                                          Waxing Bridgit Moon

Some days.  You know.  This was one.  I got the printer cable.  Spent another 2+ hours fiddling with the printer.  Nothing positive.  Still.  I know it’s a breed fault, but I do prefer to be competent.  At everything I do.  Every time.  Not perfectionism.  It’s competencism.  Things don’t have to be perfect, but they have to display my general competence, or else.  Well.  You may have been down that hole, too.  It can get deep.

Then, I went out to check on the bees.  I suppose I might have missed something, I did last spring, but I don’t think so.  All three dead.  Geez.  I didn’t stop to diagnose the cause.  I just closed the hive boxes up and walked back inside.

I tried yet one more time on the printer.  Well, actually, several more times, flailing at different solutions suggested by this website and that.  Even went into DOS, foreign territory for me.  I got in and got out of DOS unscathed, but no closer to a solution.

If I had any hair left, I’d be pulling it out right about now.  Guess I’m gonna have to call Steve again.  See if he say some words over the machines, toss some holy byte water at them.  I don’t know.  An exorcism?

The good thing is.  Worked out.  Got my endorphins buzzing around the old synapses.  Sweat.

Now.  I can be philosophical.  Never to fail is never to do.  Never to do is to be dead.  I want to be alive.  I want to try things that challenge me.  Guess failure is part of that.  Gotta be.  Otherwise no forward progress.  So, I’ve got two challenges ahead:  get the packages installed in early April.  Do the due diligence before hand to find out what killed the bees.  Fix what I can fix.  Get the printer installed.  One damn way or another.

Grrr.

GeekWorld

No Joy

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Imbolc                                                       Waxing Bridgit Moon

Hmmm.  Spent an hour + last night with the network guy.  He took over my PC through a remote connection, a free app called showmypc.com, fished through my network settings, my printer settings and did a number of things I’d never imagined doing.  In the end though we still had no more luck than I’d already had.  None.  This cheered me up since I didn’t feel quite so inept afterward.

Heading over to Radio Shack for another try on the printer parallel to usb cable.  I avoided buying the Radio Shack cable because it was more expensive, but I’ll try it now anyhow.  As soon as I get this one set up, I’ll put the new printer online, too.  I’m not expecting trouble with it since it’s plug-n-play.  Each problem is a learning opportunity and I say that with no tongue in cheek.  If you pay attention to the problem solving, it’s true.

So, among other things on external Saturday, I’m headed for every geeks favorite store, Radio Shack.  Always good to have an excuse to go there.  At some point today or tomorrow it looks like the temps will rise above freezing, so I will have a chance to check on the bees.  Bee season has begun in active way, as has the growing season.  I have a few other things to accomplish over the weekend, get a system repair disc made for each of the new gateways, crank up the chainsaw and get my Titian tour together since I have my first tour on Thursday, the 17th.

Aging, GeekWorld, Humanities

68. My Driver’s License Will Be Good Until I’m 68? Hmmm.

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Imbolc                                                      Waxing Bridgit Moon

There are those moments.  Drove over to Ramsey city hall (municipal center sounds much more… what?), walked through the glass doors and the 20 foot high atrium, all in stone and glass, followed the signs and found the License Center.  I filled out a form, missing four questions, handed to the nice lady and she clipped the ear off my current driver’s license, collected my $24 (a fee, not a tax) and took me over to the vision machine.  Wonder of wonders, for the first time in 8 years, I passed.  How about that?  Up against the blue wall, smile.  “Great picture!” the nice lady said.

The real shocker?  This new license will be good until I’m 68.  68!  How did that happen again?

Tonight I’ll get a call from the network guy to see if he can walk me through the problem that’s keeping my printer from shaking hands with my two new computers.  Well, sorta new.  Decided I’m going to RTFM the backup stuff.  I really oughta know how to work this stuff, otherwise, what’s the point of backing stuff up?

End of the week.  Another legcom meeting under my belt, the Titian walk through and some quality time with the exhibit yesterday and today Latin.  My Ovid work drew nice remarks from my tutor.  He essentially agreed with my translation.  As a rough draft.  Which it was.  My English to Latin was a little more fuzzy, showing that I whipped through it faster than is required to do good work.  I’m still working on Diana and Actaeon.  I’d like to finish it before the show leaves.

Each segment, the legcom, the Titian preparation and the Latin, requires serious prep work.  Makes me feel good, sorta like exercise.  Which, by the way, I gotta go do.

GeekWorld, Politics, World History

Fire in the Streets

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Imbolc                                                     Waxing Bridgit Moon

See.  It helps to share your pain.  Woolly brother and cybermage Bill Schmidt gave me the number of his son-in-law, Steve Johnson, who runs a part-time business called I-tech.  He knows networks and backups, doing that kind of thing during the day for 3M.  I’m gonna give him a call.  Time to stop banging my head against this stuff.

I’ve not kept on top of the Tunisia, Egypt coverage and have missed a lot of the analysis, so this may be ill-informed; but, it all sounds pretty healthy to me.  Dictators may seem more stable from a US foreign policy perspective, yet they often/always? do disservice to the people(s) and the nation which they rule.  Whether kept in power by US aid and good will or by their own ham-fisted acts, dictators lack a key ingredient for legitimate power, the assent of the governed.  By definition in a dictatorship there is no consent by the citizenry, yet their rule could work if the people assented to their government.  And they may.  At first.  Especially if the dictator rose to power by throwing off a corrupt state government or overthrowing a sitting tyrant.  In the end though dictators dictate and no matter what the political philosophy of the whole, no one likes being told what to do time and again with the force of arms behind it.

It should come as no surprise when people in such situations say, enough.  In fact, to old political hacks like me, it’s more surprising people take as long as they often do, fearing the consequences of action.  Of course, from our North American vantage point, it seems the outcome of these people’s movements must be radical Islamist states, but I think it too soon to tell.

An even more intriguing bit of analysis will come from discerning the true role of social media.    They are, of course, a new player in politics and one few people understand very well.  Except maybe those that use it for these purposes.

Whatever the outcome, whatever the analysis, these uprisings have clear public support.  What happens next could determine the fate of the unfortunate Middle East for years to come.  One less:  beware the lure of wealth from natural resources.  They destabilize as much as–more–than they stabilize.  Just ask residents of Minnesota’s Iron Range or any of the First Nations in either Canada or the U.S.

GeekWorld

A Purple, No, A Cyberhaze

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Imbolc                                                  Waxing Bridgit Moon

I have all my files from 3 computers backed up.  Only problem?  I don’t understand the back-up software.  I wish it would just let me call up the files in the same way I do on this machine.  I’m in a cyberhaze right now, machines too complicated for this guy’s savvy.  I may have to call in some help.  Hell, I can’t even get my computers to talk to my printers.  Ah, well.  It’s important to know when to say uncle byte me.  Not quite there yet, but I’m close.

This stuff bothers me.  Why?  I guess it’s like the guy who fixes his own car, but suddenly faces something he knows is beyond his skill level.  Seems like he oughta be able to do it, but he can’t.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Writing

A Novel. Again.

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Imbolc                                           Waxing Bridgit Moon

Signed up for 8 nights at Blue Cloud Abbey, Feb. 28 to March 8.  My goal is to push Missing at least to the 2/3rds mark for a rough draft, maybe more if I get on a roll.  I’m considering getting up into time for the early morning prayers, 6:45 am, just to get the day started and feel that living connection with the 5th century.  Since Missing has a medieval feel, an abbey carries a lot of that time in its essence.

Missing is the first novel I’ve written that could, conceivably, be a series.  It has a range of characters and its rationale will make it easy to introduce new plotlines and new characters. In the world of fantasy the series has good traction, a way to build an audience.  Who knows?  Maybe this is the one.

I do have two other novels, Superior Wolf and Jennie’s Dead, that are a good way along, too.  If this process works, maybe I’ll head out to Blue Cloud from time to time.  We’ll see.  There are, of course, those other novels:  Even the God’s Must Die, The Last Druid, The God Who Wanted It All and, believe it or not, two whose titles I can’t recall.  Each one could use a revisit, a revision.  So much work to do.  Glad I still feel excited about everything.  Life could get long otherwise.

I’ve been at this, more and less, since 1992, so it should be no surprise that I have some production.   Several short stories along the way, as well.  Still, I’ve not pushed them out there, perhaps its fear, perhaps its indolence, perhaps its reluctance to discover my ability outside my own head.  None are compelling reasons, though all are, at least to me, understandable.  I’m back to the writing, wonder what it would take to get me marketing?

Art and Culture, Bees, GeekWorld, Humor

Disassembled

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Imbolc                                         Waxing Bridgit Moon

Looks like I’ll get a chance to peek into the colonies this weekend.  Got my fingers crossed on survival.  Best guess?  Two dead, one alive.  Very glad to be wrong.

Got my second Gateway part way disassembled and still not sure I can get at the pint sized disc I stupidly inserted into the DVD drive vertically.  It fell out of the holder, as I could have guessed it would.  Have to get this in though to make the computer recognize the cable to USB cord.  That will shift my old HP printer to the new gateway, making it accessible directly from the network rather than through my old, now terminally ill, Dell.  Once I’ve accomplished that I can bring online the new HP multi-purpose printer.  When that’s up, I can scan in my Ovid commentary and send it to Greg so we can both have the same info.  I need both of these printers working, but there are these other steps I have take.

On to Latin.  This chapter, chapter 27, contains this section heading:  Adjectives Having Peculiar Forms in the Superlative.  Peculiar forms, eh?  Maximus peculiar.

More Latin today, some Titian, too, in advance of the walkthrough tomorrow with Patrick Noon, the painting’s curator.  I’m looking forward to this since I haven’t seen the paintings yet.  In the evening there is a lecture on Ukiyo-e prints, another favorite genre for me.  A feast of art education, tomorrow.

Bees, Great Wheel, Great Work

Bee Diary: 2011

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Imbolc                                                           Waxing Bridgit Moon

Out in South Dakota, near Hecla, the ewes have begun to swell, an ancient, very ancientrail.  They will give birth, lambs.  Around that time, lambing time, the fields, too, will freshen with grass, food for the little ones.  Think of the shepherds at Jesus’ birth.  Jacob and his twelve sons.  Shepherds rescued Oedipus, Romulus and Remus.  The shepherd became a metaphor for closeness to nature, a life untrammeled by the woes of civilization, watching over flocks in difficult places, protecting the sheep from wolves and foxes and dogs.  Sheep provide wool for cloth, milk for cheese and meat for the table.

Similar, I suppose, to beekeeping, another very ancientrail.  In both cases the shepherd and the beekeeper are partners in a collaboration between, in one instance, fellow mammals, and in the other, with insects.  In both cases the primary goal is to maintain the flock and the colony in good health, free from disease and predators, and in return receive wool and honey.  It is, to me, a special case though, to enter into an intimate partnership with insects, and not just insects individually, but insects in community, a colony.

This last, this partnership between humans and bees, crosses not only a species barrier, but phyla, both animals yes, but with very different evolutionary paths.  I don’t believe there is much fellow feeling between the bee colony and the beekeeper, at least from the bee’s side, yet the collaboration demands each do their part and I find it entrancing that, when I work in the garden and the bees are there, too, dipping into the flowers, that we are colleagues here at 7 Oaks, the bees of Artemis Hives and the humans of 7 Oaks.

When the weather warms above freezing, I will go out and inspect my three colonies, see how many have survived the winter.  Just a quick check, the only purpose to discover if the colony is alive.  If not, I will order a package for each dead colony.  Also, I will remove the bees and try to diagnose cause of death; since a diseased colony, especially one with American Foulbrood, may require burning of all the frames and scorching of the hive box with a flame thrower.

I hope they’re alive, all of them.  It was a good feeling last spring to find a thriving colony.

Aging, Holidays, Writing

At The Midnight Hour

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Imbolc                                                     Waxing Bridgit Moon

Reading the pages from Missing, making marks here and there with my pencil, amazed at the material that has come from me, from some part of me, a part I may not know well myself.  A strange feeling, as if a new relation were to be discovered in a family, familiar, yes, but whose origins are unclear.

The night has fallen and the temperature has dropped to zero, an odd idea, it seems to me, a place between high and low, a balance point below which we know cold lurks, a point of no temperature, zero.  Odd.

Kate worked tonight, as she did last Wednesday, seeing 19 patients.  That’s her old pace, back before the pains began.  If she did it night after night, it would debilitate her, but now she doesn’t return to work until the 14th.

Valentine’s Day is my birthday, as it has been for 63 years, soon to be 64.  Inching toward the 65th, still one of those birthdays, a turning point, a bridge.  One more year to go.