Monthly Archives: July 2012

Feelings, Garden

More Doing

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Summer                                                      Hiroshima Moon

More doing.  A couple of weeks ago our dogs, imagining we were bored, I think, decided to dig under the orchard fence rather than vault over it where I had put the electric fence.  Thing is, they succeeded.

(a 2010 effort, getting ready for the Olympic digging)

The first route underneath resulted in a shallow cave under the second of two blueberry mounds that we have, leaving them in danger of collapse.  That was when it was too hot to move, so indolence carried the task through until today.  Got out the shovel and reversed the dog’s action carried out with their two front feet.  If it was Vega and Rigel, and I’m sure it was, then they probably took turns, as I have seen them do numerous times.  One gets tired, the other steps in to continue the task.  Two big dogs can move a lotta sand fast that way.

Digging underneath the fence requires a different strategy than electric fence since I don’t want to run a low wire-rope.  Too much trouble with plants, snagging, that sort of thing.  My method in this instance is to bury chicken wire after having wired it to the larger mesh we have between the wooden rails. This works.

The California fence that we had put in for the vegetable garden, five foot tall chain link in
black with red cedar posts, top rails and bottom boards, would have worked better here, too, but we didn’t choose it.

(California fence)

Also collected the onions whose tops had fallen over, the sign for harvesting, put up the old screen door on supports in the near garden shed and laid out this year’s yellow onion crop for drying.  After about a week they’ll go downstairs into our small root cellar simulacrum.  The yellows keep best.  Reds don’t keep at all; whites in between.

Finished weeding the mounds around our fruit trees and the blueberry patches, helped Kate start the mower and came in.  Kate came in a few minutes later to say she had disturbed the ornery bees.  Two stings.  We have one hyper-vigilant colony and one almost somnolent.  Odd.

 

Family, Retirement, Third Phase

An Annual Visit to our Money

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Summer                                                                 Hiroshima Moon

Back from visiting our money at Bond and Devick.  Turns out the corpus breathes.  RJ Devick, the owner now of a firm started by Kate’s friend, Penny Bond, is a sharp guy with a keen understanding of finance and politics, a necessary union of skills.

We have our money in a largely conservative portfolio, one aimed at doing a little better when the market goes up and not so bad when the market goes down.  We’re trying to stay within 4% as our drawdown, so that plus pension (mine) and social security (both of us) represents our income stream.   We have some savings outside of the IRA, but the amount is small compared to the IRA.

Managing this money towards our retirement has required and requires our mutual attention.  We got a lot better at all of this about ten years ago, when we had a rude, unpleasant episode with a pre-collapse (of the US economy) debt load.  The message got through however and now we are fine in retirement.  Not fat, but not needy either.

Our situation is so much more fortunate than many of our contemporaries who will head into the post-retirement world with little savings.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, US History

The Growing Season Begins to Wind Down

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Summer                                                             Hiroshima Moon

On Wednesday we move from the growing season emphasis of early summer to the harvest emphasis of late summer.  The Celtic calendar marks that change on August 1st which begins the season of Lughnasa, a first fruits time.  Yes, harvesting has happened before this, but now the inflection is on crops for sale, trade or preservation.

[ in precipitation in during the growing season (after Meehan et al. 2004 and Bowen et al. 2005)]

If any of you saw the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the first, agrarian phase of Great Britain before the industrial revolution is the time the Celtic calendar marks.  It is not a calendar for an industrialized or a technological society though it has an important place in both.  Industrialization and technology both move us away from direct experience of the
natural world and especially from the source of our food.  The Celtic calendar gets its seasons from the botanical and meteorological rhythms, not the work day or the academic year or the never asleep world of the internet.

Those other rhythms, the Taylorized day or the instantaneous cyber world, lead us away from natural rhythms into a cultural space dominated by rationality, science and human control.  In the Celtic calendar the natural world rules, just as it does yet today, though we hide ourselves from it with thermostats, electric lights and high speed broadband.

This is not an either/or situation; there is a dialectic between the world of human artifice and the world which brings the thunder and the lightning and the rain, which grows the food, which gives us night and day.  Yet.  So many of us, in our air conditioned, wired, well-lit by electricity homes, obscure or forget or ignore that our food grows in the soil, the flesh of mother earth.  That it depends on water either from rain or from irrigation, this dependent of rain and replenishment of hidden aquifers.  That the sun which gives food the energy we need does so without human intervention or assistance.

All of our civilization has as its foundation, its literal without which nothing support, the vegetative world.  And we do not control it.  We can help it, nurture it, bless it, curse it, but we cannot make plants grow.  We can only provide or protect the conditions under which they do so.  In our amnesia about this simple, stark fact we pave over farmland, alter the chemical conditions under which plants grow, change their genetic patterns trying to extend our control, but all this begs the question.  How did the vegetative world get along without us?

The answer?  Just fine.  This is not a rant, this is a reflection of our current reality.  It is the hope of ancientrails that it can serve as one reminder.  One reminder of the essential, unique and healing power of the world beyond our control.

Faith and Spirituality

Reefed Sails

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Summer                                                       Hiroshima Moon

Not sure, after decades, how melancholy creeps up on me, or descends on me, or floats up from within, but it always comes as a surprise, a worrying intrusion, slowing things down and making the day seem long.  Often the night is longer, though this time, sleep has not been a problem.

A heaviness, a pushing down from the head, into the arms, weighing down the limbs, making them slow to move.  A sensation of molasses, of inner opacity.  Clarity gets lost and motivation seeps away, down, down, as though a drain were in the floor, eagerly taking the will, the drive and venting it out through a series of pipes, sewer pipes no doubt.

My eyes downcast, as if burdened by shame.  Even breathing labors.

Where did this come from?  Where will it go?  Why used to matter, but the repetition and the suddenness and the inexplicability have left me more with resignation.  This is the inner weather of the moment, a low pressure center moving through my soul at its own pace and with its own agenda.  Reef the sails and stay below deck.

 

Dogs, Garden, Health

A Bike, The Orchard, Gertie Wounded

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Summer                                                       Hiroshima Moon

Got a bike and a helmet today.  Ready to ride.  This bike’s a fixie which means it won’t coast, though it has a hub that can switch out so it rides like an old timey Schwinn.  Not expensive, my helmet cost almost as much as the bike.  Wanted another aerobic alternative, something to get me outside for exercise.  This’ll do it.  Bought the bike on line and had a local bike shop assemble it.

Kate and I worked in the orchard today.  One day a week she says where and what she’d like to have me do outside.  Think it’ll be two days this week.  I like to work outside for an hour to an hour and a half, then I’m done.  She likes to work until she’s finished.  Commendable, but not my style.  I parse tasks over time.  Needless to say Kate gets more outdoor work done than I do.

Gertie has wounds again.  This is the third time since she got here and the second time in a month.  We’ve not seen it happen so we can only speculate, though they look like canine bites and tears.  Fortunately pediatrics has a lot in common with veterinary medicine–that is, the patients often can’t talk–so handling doggy trauma at a certain level is well within Kate’s capacity.

I held Gertie while Kate put hydrogen peroxide on and into the punctures.  The punctures went all the way through the dermis to the muscle fascia.  She debreeded, then put an antibiotic ointment under the skin around the wounds.  Then, some bandages that lasted for a bit.

We started her on antibiotics we have here from other doggy misadventures, gave her some rimadyl for the pain and let her sleep in our room.  Where she is right now.

 

Cooking, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Health

A Dream, Become Real, Become Dream

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Summer                                                Hiroshima Moon

“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.” – Anais Nin

Horticulture.  When we moved in here now 18 years ago, we decided to spend money upfront on landscaping, figuring we could enjoy it over the life of our tenancy rather than putting in as an amenity at the time of a sale.  We hired a landscape architect from Otten Brothers and he put in a basic plan.  Two wild prairie patches on either side of a manicured lawn.  Norway pines, a spruce or two, some amur maples, a genus maple, an oak, some river birch.  Near the house he put on narrow beds planted with shrubs like euonymus, a dwarf lilac, shrub roses, viburnum among others.

A boulder retaining wall in the front shored up a long bed like a peninsula into the green ocean of our yard.  In the back we had them cut a three tiered garden, each tier marked off with boulder retaining walls and divided near the house by steps made of rail-road tie size square lumber.

The rest of our property, all now that is our “backyard”, was part woods and part scrubland covered with black locust trees, thorny and not visually appealing though very good for fence posts.  The first two years after our move I spent cutting down trees, using a commercial wood-chipper to  grind them up and hiring a stump-grinder to come in and rid us of the stumps.  The scrubland became, gradually, a place where we could build a shed, plant a vegetable garden and I dreamed of making it an expanse of prairie, as I had wanted to do with the entire property when we moved. Continue reading A Dream, Become Real, Become Dream →

Commentary on the news, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., US History

To Eat or Not to Eat? That Is Not a Question.

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Summer                                                     Hiroshima Moon

When they announced the demolition of the Bennigans at Riverdale Mall, it surprised me because it felt like the whole mall just arrived a year or so ago.  It surprised me, but I wasn’t sad, because the Bennigan’s menu had gone from interesting to boring over the last couple of years.

As a result, the imminent arrival of a Chick-fil-a to replace it intrigued me.  I’d never eaten in one of these deep south fried chicken sandwich places, but I looked forward to the opportunity.

Not now.  Now I plan to walk in when they open, tell them I live close by, that my wife and I eat out once a week or so, and that they will never get our business, in spite of the fact that I love chicken.  Bigotry has no place in our community.  None.  Just ask the Anoka-Hennepin School Board or the Anoka High School.

GeekWorld, Weather +Climate

A.C. Not Run A.C.

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Summer                                                  Hiroshima Moon

When I have to keep calling a repair service to fix the same thing over and over, I begin to feel weird about it.  Not guilty exactly, but weird.  Case in point:  our a.c.  I called yesterday because it had stopped.  The first time I called it started when I turned it back on for the repairman.  Yesterday it started just as the next guy called to say he was on his way.  WTF.

(Just put Kate in mind with the sword.  Our house.)

Last night it went out again.  OK.  Evidence.  Kate asked if I had a recorder.  No.  But, she said, how about a movie on the phone?  Oh, yeah.  I can do that.  [after checking]  Then, it does its dead a.c. thing and I’m there.  With my hand-held computer.  (phone is incidental, let’s admit it.)  Click on video.  And, voila, I have 26 seconds of humming, thrumming and then OMG I can’t stand it anymore thunk just before the whole thing stops. Again.

Also, we counted.  Well, Kate counted the number of times it performed this same activity.  17 times in one hour.  So.  We have empirical evidence quantified over time.  That should do it.

So, now I don’t feel weird.  Maybe it’s a man thing, not wanting to admit I don’t know, can’t fix it?  Nah.  I can’t fix anything, so an air conditioner?  Well above my fix-it paygrade.

Then there’s that damn shower door.

 

Friends
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Summer                                                Hiroshima Moon

Fortuna smiled on me tonight, but not in an excessive way.  I had some hands, some good cards.  Made some points.  Enough to come in second this time as opposed to dead last last time.

We had a guest for sheepshead, Dave, Ed’s sort of brother-in-law.  That is, he was formerly married to Ed’s wife’s sister.  Dave worked in Germany for the NSA. First puzzle palace sort I’ve ever met.  Majored in German, minored in Russian in college.  That’s all he would say about his work.  Classified.  A very bright guy.  Looked more like a rotund aging hippy than a former spy.

 

Translating Metamorphoses

Nose in the Book

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Summer                                                Hiroshima Moon

Spent the day translating Ovid.  I’m pleased with my progress and now am impatient for the next breakthrough.  That one will only come with a vastly expanded vocabulary and many more hours of translating, but I can see it there, off in the distance.  Then I will be able to set about the task of translating the Metamorphoses, the project I’ve gone through all this learning to accomplish.

There are, too, other texts that would be fun to work on, especially, for me, some of the historians like Tacitus, Livy, Caesar, Plutarch.  I know.  Some fun, eh?  Works for me.

Interrupted late in the process by air conditioner repairman.  Ours cut out again sometime last night.  But, as it did last time, it started as the repair guy got here.  Go figure.  We’re rebuilding the damn thing one part at a time.  Last time the capacitor, today the relays.  Educated guesses without a particular problem to diagnose.  90 day warranty on repairs through Center Point.  No extra money paid today.

Later, sheepshead.