Monthly Archives: July 2011

Aging, Art and Culture, Retirement

Clay. All Day.

Leave a comment

Mid-Summer                                                      Waning Honey Flow Moon

Turns out making cylinders is hard.  In clay.  Kate and I are rank beginners at this clay thing, but we are taking a class with others who aren’t.  This makes life difficult for the teacher and for us rank beginners.  Near the end of Day 2 today I think I got how to draw up the wall of a cylinder.  Light touch, right hand and left hand equal pressure for pressure, move up, relax and the lip, repeat.

Kate’s arthritic thumbs gave out about 3 pm today.  Now that she has the new hips and the back fusion, her pain load is less, but the arthritis moves around, finding new joints to bug.  The hands have been less bothersome up till now because the hips and the back were worse.  Now though…  She also wears out after about four hours.  She did the other day (did I write this already?) how surprised she is at the effect major surgery has on her stamina.

We’re both having fun though, trying out new modes of expression, learning new things together.

Aging, Art and Culture, Woolly Mammoths

Bees, Clay, and Prints

Leave a comment

Mid-Summer                                                                              Waning Honey Flow Moon

Long day.  Up at 7:00 to get a head start on the bees.  Hive inspections done, then get ready for Northern Clay.

At Northern Clay Kate and I tried to make cylinders.  Not as easy as it sounds.  Especially since come of the clay was short.  This means damned hard to draw up without breaking it off at the wheel.  Kate was pretty worn out after the first day.

I went on to Bryant Lake Bowl after a quick stop at the Sierra Club, right across from Northern Clay.  At Bryant Lake Bowl I waited for the Woolly folk to show up.  Warren and Sheryl, Frank and Mary, Mark and Elizabeth, Bill, Yin, Charlie Haislet and I ate a nice meal at the Bryant Lake Bowl, then adjourned to Highpoint Print Co-operative where we each made 2-3 monoprints.

I found myself in a primary color, color field mood and produced a couple of prints that are not too bad.  It was a fun process and everyone had a great time.

Bees, Garden

Bee Diary: July 18 2011

Leave a comment

Mid-Summer                                                                   Waning Honey Flow Moon

The six new honey supers did not prove necessary since I’m still two supers ahead of each colony, but it does look like colonies 2 & 3 have already stored a lot of honey, especially in the two supers that went on in place of  the third hive box.  In colony 1, the colony I will overwinter, they seem to still be at work filling up that third hive box which will constitute their honey supply for the winter.  In 2 & 3 we will harvest the honey from the two super equivalents to that third full hive box.

Looked at the garlic, which I’ve been harvesting as its leaves brown.  When two leaves are brown, I pull them and I have about half the crop out now. It looks like the best garlic crop I’ve ever had.  Nice fat heads.  I’ll save a couple to plant next year, continuing this garlic’s acclimatization to our soil and weather.

We’re harvesting more frequently overall this year, getting beans, peas and lettuce before they over grow.  This part of the July is the hump part of the growing season.  From this point forward it’s either harvesting or making sure plants stay healthy until they are ready to harvest.  The bees are in mid-honey flow, storing and working like, well, like bees.

Artemis gardens and hives is having a good year.

Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

To Bee, To Do

Leave a comment

Mid-Summer                                                             Waning Honey Flow Moon

Out to the bees in just a few minutes to slap on two more honey supers each, the six I finished varnishing yesterday while Mark put foundations in the frames.  This will find six honey supers on colonies 2 & 3, while colony 1, the parent colony for next year’s only divide, will have four.  Not sure if I’ll need more than these.  I’m having to do this in the early morning, not the best time, but the only time I’ve got today.

At 9:15 Kate and I take off in separate cars for the Northern Clay Center.  Our clay intensive starts this week, 10:00 to 4:30.  I hope to learn how to make Japanese style tea cups and salad sized plates.  Like tai chi working clay puts a premium on hand-eye co-ordination and sense of touch as well overall design skills.

A good while ago my spiritual journey had gone stale in the reading, meditation, contemplative modes I knew best. The next stage of my spiritual practice became gardening, working with the rhythm of flowers, soil, spades and trowels.

That practice went on for many years when Kate and I decided to add vegetables and the orchard with permaculture principles in mind.  That added a good deal of oomph to the tactile spirituality, deciding to keep bees put animal husbandry into the mix.  At this point my spirituality has become more and more attuned to the rhythms of growing seasons, plants and bees, all within the context of the Celtic Great Wheel.

With tai chi and clay my spiritual practice comes closer in again, my hands, my feet, my hips, my arms.  Both clay and tai chi are paths on this nature focused ancientrail, though for me they are quite a bit harder.  But that’s the push I need to grow.

After our first day at Northern Clay, I have my Woolly meeting tonight at Highpoint Print co-operative where we will make prints.  One more step down the ancientrail of the mind/body link.

Aging, Asia, Family, Health, Travel

Sunday, Sunday

Leave a comment

Mid-Summer                                                                            Full Honey Flow Moon

More fun with the alarm system.  Back and forth with ADT.  On the phone, pushing buttons.  Still the chirping.  Service call.

Business meeting.  Scheduling a Denver trip for sometime in September.  Looking at buying some more mulch for the vegetable garden.

Practice tai-chi.  Sand and varnish for coat number three six honey supers.  They need to go on tomorrow morning.  Mark put foundations in the frames today, so we’re ready to go.

Out to tai-chi.  I’m still the slow student in class, but I’m learning.  Slowly.  A challenge for this guy to connect body and mind, but a challenge worth keeping after.

GeekWorld, Travel, Weather +Climate, Writing

Ancientrails

Leave a comment

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?

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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.