Monthly Archives: April 2012

Family, GeekWorld, Health

Auntie Biotic

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Spring                                                       Beltane Moon

Kate is home and her arm (cellulitis) looks much better.  Still a ways to go both on the antibiotics and healing, but the right direction.  Among the vagaries of strong antibiotic treatment is its kill all nature.  Like Round-up can’t tell the difference between weed and grass, most antibiotics can’t tell the difference between the pathogens and the friendly flora and fauna of your gut.

As a large symbiotic organism with literally billions of helper one-celled creatures throughout our body, it’s not a good idea to kill the guest-workers.  It would be sort of like throwing all the immigrants in jail (or deporting them) that you need to do the work in agriculture, manufacturing and domestic services.  Oh, wait…

How does the old song go?  You don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone.  The digestive tract needs these wee beasties, needs them bad.  When they get killed off in sufficient quantities, the intestinal tract can get thrown way outta whack.

Now, I’m not sayin’ the cure is worse than the disease, but at certain points in time it can feel like a toss up.  This very problem can cause cancer patients to push away chemo-therapy, concluding that in this case, in spite of a terrible disease, that the cure is worse.

A lot of medicine relies on harsh chemicals, the internal equivalents of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides.  It’s popular in some circles to acknowledge this and give a blanket condemnation of Western medicine.  This kind of criticism only makes sense in a world where dying from an infection triggered during gardening seems impossible.  Why impossible?  Because we have the harsh chemicals to combat the even harsher outcomes of untended infection.

Overuse has begun to erode our edge against infections, so we might again have an era when the yearning will be for the time when we could beat stuff back.

Family, GeekWorld, Media

A Serial Watcher

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Spring                                                     Beltane Moon

A gorgeous day.  Sun, warm.  Daffodils in bloom.  Bees buzzing in the orchard.  Dogs playing in the woods.  Kate’s on her way home.  

Ruthie told Kate she was her favorite grandma.  I told her she was my favorite grandma, too.  She’s coming back a happy gal.

During the grey cold days of the weekend I did something I’ve not done before.  I wrote here sometime ago quitting Comcast cable tv.  Too damn expensive and a time suck.  In it’s place we have dvds, netflix and hulu.  Hulu (and Netflix, too for that matter) has whole TV series from beginning to end.  For instance, it has the entire Battlestar Galactica Sci-Fi channel series.  And many others.

 

That means you can do what I did on Saturday and Sunday.  I found a new series, Grimm, that tells the story of a descendant of the fairy-tale compiler.  Turns out the Grimms can see and hunt all manner of thought-to-be imaginary creatures like the big bad wolf, pied piper and a whole menagerie of others.

So I watched 1-12 of an 18 episode run.  That’s the thing I haven’t done before.  You can watch TV serials as if they are, in a sense, a video novel with each episode as a chapter.  Now I wouldn’t defend this as a way to increase your brain power, might have killed a few gray cells, but it sure was fun.  Felt very decadent though.

Aging, Asia, Friends, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Moon Also Rises

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Spring                                                           Beltane Moon

The second rainy chilly day.  Perfect.  Tomorrow and Tuesday will be outside days again, planting and other things, but now I have my gas stove turned on, the study is warm and I’m going to have another day of writing, reading and watching movies.

A friend’s mother-in-law, 97, lies at home, hospice care.  A Chinese national, born in Canton, she has created a long and active life, filled with calligraphy, gardening, cooking, writing, reading and family.

Another friend went out and stayed the night with her yesterday.

Moon’s decline underscores the transition for our men’s group.  Death and serious illness has become common, no longer stories of other’s lives.  Perhaps Moon, as well as any other,  shows a way to live into the Third Phase.

She did not give up the things that made her who she was.  She stayed rooted in her tradition, yet took parts of it and made them her own and, in so doing, transformed them from things of yesterday into things of today and tomorrow.  Each of the Woolly’s have our names in Chinese courtesy of Moon.  She wrote poetry and a book of hers was published a couple of years ago by her family.

Many were the meals at Scott’s house in which Moon added her touches to Yin’s work.  She had a quiet way, yet exuded a person who knew who she was, a person complete and whole, a real presence in the world.  No one’s cipher.

Now Moon rises in the night sky.  She will not be forgotten.

Cinema and Television

Ten Canoes

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Spring                                                    New Beltane Moon

A cold, wet day.  Perfect for watching a movie.  So, I warmed up some brie, cut off a cluster of grapes and got an italian flat bread, gathered the remotes, inserted a dvd and sat back for an hour plus.

The movie:  Ten Canoes.  Fascinating.  Important.  Cross cultural.  A real voice, an authentic voice, one you have not heard.  Unless you’ve seen this movie.

A movie told by an aborigine story teller about a mythic time, not dream time, but a time when the ancestors still followed the law, the same law.  In the special features the aboriginal co-director, Peter Djigirr, said they made this movie to show the white man (balanda) that they had laws.  Otherwise, the white man comes more and more, lifting up their laws and the aborigine looks as if they have no culture.

Bees

Bee Diary: 2012

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Spring                                             New Beltane Moon

One of the new colonies is queenright for sure.  I saw the white, curled up worker bee larvae resting in their cellular incubators.  The other colony, I’m not sure.  It looked like there were some very early larvae on one frame, but that could have been my hopeful squinting, too.  I’ll have to check it again on Monday or Tuesday.

I did drop one frame, loaded with bees, during this hive inspection.  They spilled out onto the ground and an angry buzzing commenced as they tried to figure out what happened to their warm, comfortable work space.  Oops.  Haven’t made that particular mistake before.

There was plenty of smoke though and these bees seem, like last years, docile, not overly aggressive.  I’m glad, because I prefer using only the veil and regular garden gloves.  That way I don’t get overheated and my hands are easier to use.

 

Dogs, Family

Dogs and Granddaughters

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Spring                                                         New Beltane Moon

Homes have needs.  This one needs Kate to feel full and she’s gone.  I’m lucky I have the dogs or I would feel lonely.

The dogs get up very early, thanks to Gertie, usually around 5:00-5:30 am.  Kate, with her residency experience of sudden waking, working and going back to sleep handles this if only because I sleep through it.  She gets up, feeds the dogs and comes back to sleep.  Most mornings all four dogs come inside after their meal and then wait quietly until we get up.

This morning Vega and Rigel, our two coon hound/Irish wolfhound dogs, decided, as they occasionally do, to stay outside.  Vega will bark, sometimes 30 minutes later, to come back inside and Kate will get up and let her in.  Well, I slept through it this morning, letting her back in.

When I finally got up, I let Vega and Rigel inside and Vega was so happy she came in, spun around, jumped up on the window seat (her place), back down and spun around again.

Talked to Kate last night and apparently Ruthie, 6 year old granddaughter, really liked her rhinestone studded belt I picked out for her at the Stock Show this January.  “Are those real diamonds?” she asked.  She has the hat, the vest and now needs only the boots to be a real Jewish cowgirl.

 

Bees, Family, Garden, Health

The Quotidian

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Spring                                                            New Beltane Moon

Kate has taken her still healing cellulitis off to Colorado for a weekend with the grandkids.  Gabe’s fourth birthday is tomorrow.  Her arm looks much better than it did on Monday, swelling much less pronounced and the area of red, heated skin has reduced considerably.  It took four doses of IV antibiotics and the follow-up oral meds to get this infection under control.  No fun at all.

(Gabe and Grandpop, January, 2012)

Meanwhile back at the apiary, I’m going to check the bees tomorrow for larvae, need for syrup and pollen patties.  A few garden chores tomorrow, too, notably digging up the potato patch and amending the soil.  I can’t plant potatoes in the main vegetable garden for a couple more years because the beetles found them last fall.  Too many to pick off and drown in soapy water.

Also, I really need to fix the tire on the Celica, get it started and get the tire repaired or buy a new one.  Then, I’m going to give it away one way or another.  Know anyone that needs a car?  I may have a taker, but I’m not sure.  If not, I’ll pass it on to someone for free.  It has 280,000 miles on it, but it runs well.  We’ve decided to go with one car for financial reasons and it’s the one with the most mileage, so it has to go.

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

A Comment-ary

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Spring                                                                  New Beltane Moon

An interesting proposition.  Greg, my Latin tutor, and I have talked off and on about  writing a commentary for new learners of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  Today he asked me to think about it with an eye toward moving our teacher-student relationship more toward collaborators.  It sounds fun and worthwhile to me.

Ovid’s text serves as the headwaters for most of Greek mythology as it enters the Western literary stream.  In that sense it is an important work in the historical study of Western literature.  A great read, too, it’s full of stories, captivating narratives that have a major twist at the end, so it is, as well, an excellent example of Western literature itself.

And commentaries last.  A good commentary on The Metamorphoses, even one that covers only part of the 15 books, could introduce students to this elegant citizen of Augustan Rome for decades, even centuries to come.

Art and Culture, Asia, Sport

On the Tour

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Spring                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

ESL tour was wonderful.  When asked if they recognized any of the objects, the response from the Vietnamese and Cambodians, “No.  The old people, they know about that.  But not us.”  At a Hmong piece, I asked one young woman a question.  Her reply. “I no sprek Engrish.”

Still, it was obvious that seeing these objects from their home cultures resonated with them, and gave a hook, a place to return to later.  I suggested bringing some of the old people along.

My Sports Show tour only had 2 people, but it went well.  I transited backwards, starting with Zidane again and found, again, that it made the tour livelier, more engaging.

Bought a short book on Symbolist art for lunch time reading.  Some interesting insights.  I’ll share them later.