Archive for August, 2011

Got a Habit?

Lughnasa                                      Waxing Harvest Moon “We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” – Aristotle Good old Aristotle.  A subtle mind, tutor to Alexander the Great and foe of Platonic idealism.   His work is dense to the point of impenetrability, at least to me, which did not augur well […]

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Harvest Home

Lughnasa                                                 Waxing Harvest Moon Tomorrow the season’s honey harvest.  Kate and I will haul out the extractor, fasten it to the deck and begin uncapping our honey. The process goes like this.  Each colony with surplus honey, 2 & 3, has at least two full honey supers and a third with some honey.  The bees […]

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Fall-ing

Lughnasa                                                  Waxing Harvest Moon As August slides away and the sky shifts its colors toward deeper hues, an inner barometer detects higher emotional pressures.  The atmosphere weighs more, cuing those momentary pauses, breaks in attention.  It may signal a storm ahead, but more likely the prediction carries gray skies and mist, perhaps early morning fog. […]

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A Stroll Down Memory’s Lane

Lughnasa                                              Waxing Harvest Moon Took a stroll down St. Paul’s living museum on Monday.  That’s the way Emily Shapiro characterized Summit Avenue, the western end of it that turns sharply, avoiding Ramsey Hill and heads off toward the state capitol. We visited the first SPA building (complete with a bronze sculpture of a young Fitzgerald), […]

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All Visas All the Time

Lughnasa                                                  Waxing Harvest Moon Visas.  All visas all the time.  Got a fluttery batch of e-mails and phone messages, all received after Travisa’s office’s had closed.  OMG.  We won’t get the documents to you in time.  OMG. Solved by reminding them that we sail on Oct. 16th, not Sept. 16th.  Oh.  All better now. Mark […]

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Finishing the First Third

Lughnasa                                       New Harvest Moon Tai Chi.  We have now officially learned the first third of the short form.  6 months.  Wonder how long the long form would take?  We went through the first third three times tonight, an amount of time equivalent to the whole short form. We ended with a toe (turned all the […]

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New Theme

Lughnasa                                              New Harvest Moon Trying out a new website design.  May try out two or three more over the next three weeks.  I’m looking for something a little cleaner, new.  A change. The graphic design course I took prompted me to think about this.  I’m not sure this is the direction I’ll go, but I […]

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Is There a Prophet In the House?

Lughnasa                                                                                                  New Harvest Moon NB: prophet is a gender neutral word as I use it. Kate.  Always ahead of her time.  When Kate was in high school in Nevada, Iowa, she arranged a deal to take most of her senior classes at nearby Iowa State.  She’d run out of classes in the high school, at […]

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Unstoppable

Lughnasa                                                                                       New Harvest Moon Just watched a movie, Unstoppable, that featured Denzel Washington.  This guy can act.  He’s a lunch bucket worker, very able to project blue collar seriousness.  The story concerns a real runaway train story, an Ohio train rather than one in Pennsylvania.  Here’s a news clip on the actual incident. “Like it […]

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Brother and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Lughnasa                                                                         New Harvest Moon Took Mark over to Walmart where he shopped for work clothes, slacks and button down shirts.  He bought 5 of each, a set for each day of the week.  Here’s the weirdness.  Bangladeshis made the clothing.  They came, most likely, by container ship to California, then by truck to a Walmart […]

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