Lughnasa Honey Moon
We renewed Kate’s medical license today for another two years. She’ll almost certainly not use it but a career defining document like that, woven tightly into her daily life for several decades, is not surrendered lightly. Wrestling with who we were and who we are now is a defining stage of the third phase.
Lughnasa Honey Moon
BTW: Kate finished bottling this afternoon and we have 85 pound jars of honey with two supers and some honey still on the colony.
Our hive patroness, Artemis.
Lughnasa Honey Moon
Even though the heat blazed down like mid-July today, the twilight comes much earlier. The wind moving among the trees in our woods sounds like the voice of autumn, not the return of mid-summer. May it be so.
My heart has already begun its turn inward, the work of Loki’s Children and Changes, a novel after the trilogy is done, beginning to dominate my early morning and post-nap moments. No, I’ve not made the complete transition yet, the bells have not yet rung, but soon, soon the night will begin falling earlier, the state fair will be finished and Michaelmas just around the corner.
September 29th is daughter-in-law Jen’s birthday and Michaelmas. Michaelmas was the date that began school terms in England and can be seen, as a friend once noted, as the springtime of the soul. It is the holy day of St. Michael, the archangel, the warrior of god. A complicated day with many threads woven into to its tapestry. All this is within a month or so now, the year has begun to change.
Lughnasa Honey Moon
Darwin has a clear, strong voice in On the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man. After reading three chapters of his work, I came away with my jaws far apart in amazement at this guy’s mind. He looks at things to which we all have access, but he sees them. In this quote he does fall prey to a bias of his British Imperial time, but the point is brilliant: “He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation.” (Chapter xxi, p.1, Descent of Man)
(Punch, 1882)
Also, I loved this from a couple of pages further along: “I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to shew why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance.”
(Editorial Cartoon, 1871)
When on the voyage around South America, I read some of Darwin’s journal entries from the voyage of the Beagle. The more I learn about him the more he seems to belong to the category of inexplicable genius, a quantum step forward in human understanding: Newton, Einstein, Aristotle, Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama, the early Vedic thinkers, those sorts of folks.
Lughnasa Honey Moon
Perk-up soil drench and showtime for insect protection this morning. Got up too late to do the brix blaster and qualify. Tomorrow. As the gardening season moves toward its end, I feel less urgency. We’re on top of the tasks right now; we’ve already got a substantial harvest in and preserved.
BTW: A lot of this gardening info is for my reference next year and in years to come so I apologize if it seems repetitive.
Cut down the broccoli this morning and picked a few more tomatoes. We have 17 pints of tomatoes canned already with many more on the vine.
Kate’s taking advantage of her birthday present this morning and learning how to use the long arm quilter, a three-hour, one-on-one class. When she gets the quilting side of quilting down, she’ll be able to take a project from start to finish. Many can’t because the long-arm quilters are expensive take up a lot of space.
Lughnasa Honey Moon
Got my second pneuma-vax since I got one before age 65. That was fun.
Loki’s Children has begun to occupy front space in my mind, turning to it in the morning now when I’m at my best. Work in the garden early, while it’s still moderately cool, then inside for the a.m.
After Missing has gone through its final paces with beta readers and Robert Kleim, I’ll begin seeking agents. In fact I plan to develop a list this week, so I’ll be ready when a final draft is.
Two things to do this week in addition to others: 1. Make candles. 2. Finally install our CD changer that we filled up a couple of months ago.
Lughnasa Honey Moon
“Feels like I’m getting married before the wife is in the ground,” I told Kate at Hell’s Kitchen. I always eat at Hell’s Kitchen after visits to my primary care doc in the Allina Clinic in the Medical Building in downtown Minneapolis.
(Hell’s Kitchen decor)
Today I had a consultation with Dr. Massie, an establishing care visit they call it. My previous doctor, Tom Davis, was still working just down the hall, but, as the receptionist said, “You know Dr. Davis will not be with us anymore?” I did.
Not sure why but I’ve always felt it important to have a primary care doc and get annual physicals; the third phase only reinforces that feeling. If I don’t have a doctor, one who knows me, I feel uncovered, sort of naked. So I wanted to find a new doctor even before Tom left the building. But not much before. His last day is August 30.
Dr. Massie will be my first woman doctor, except, as Kate pointed out, “The one you’re sleeping with.” Dr. Massie is quick, easy with information and question answering, and personable. Also, she’s young. No retiring on me. Although, I thought the same about Charlie Petersen and he pulled up stakes and moved to Colorado. You never know.
Lughnasa Honey Moon
Bees make several products in addition to honey: propolis (the sticky stuff bees use to seal up the hive), royal jelly (fed to larvae to turn them into queens) and bees wax (the six sided honey comb). All of them have various uses, but the only thing I’ve gathered after the honey is bees wax. Up until this year I had never rendered it, but after reading and watching a few videos, I hit on the easy method I’ve shown you in previous posts.
Here is the result:
Beautiful. The smell is one you’d like to have in your house year round sweet, fresh, clean. Next stop, candles. I might make some furniture polish, too.
Lughnasa Honey Moon
The end of August is less than a week away. Labor Day is the next holiday. Once again a year has progressed from spring to growing season to the beginning of harvest. Do you remember that feeling you had, as a kid, when summer vacation was in its last moments? You got in one more baseball game, one more forbidden trip to the pit, one more search through the alleys for pop bottles to sell at the grocery store. You may have gone to a county fair or the state fair, had cotton candy and looked at the pigs, seen the new car models.
Then the supply list for the new school year would show up. Those lists were, for me anyhow, like the reading of marriage bans, the announcement that something wonderful was about to happen. Yes, I loved school and I loved the paste and the number 2 lead pencils and the watercolors and the rounded scissors. Shopping for school supplies was a joyful time. I know it wasn’t for everybody, but all I could see ahead was another year of learning, of time away from home, of lunches and recesses with friends.
In fact, I still love it and the little frisson of something amazing just around the corner still tickles me as the weather begins to cool (I know, we’ll skip this year right now) and Back to School flyers start showing up with the newspaper. (I know, lots of folks don’t read the newspaper anymore.) I’m feeling it now and this year it seems to run in tandem with the harvest, as it used to in the days of agriculture’s direct influence on our school year.
As the harvest has peaked, the fallow time has begun to insert its presence, a golden leaf here or there, plants dying back like the sugar snap peas and garden beds emptied of their onions, garlic, beets and carrots now mulched. These are clues, just like the changing of the sun’s position in the sky, that stir up that old hunger, the part of me that thirsts for new learning, new ideas, new facts, new ways of looking at the world.
I’m ready. Let the bells begin to ring.
Lughnasa Honey Moon
The environmental community has a new addition, Arthur Levi Neilsen, born today. 8.5 pounds, 21.5 inches to Greg Neilsen and Margaret Levin. Margaret is the executive director of the Northstar Chapter of the Sierra Club. Congratulations to Greg and Margaret!
Grocery shopping today for the first time in a long time. Kate’s been handling that for a while, seeking deals quite successfully and saving us money.
It’s been a domestic week for team Olson-Ellis with the honey extracted and partially bottled, excess books taken to Half-Price books and sold and multiple cans of paint and other hazardous waste accumulated over many years taken to the Anoka County hazardous waste pickup.
Now kicking back and enjoying the slow ride toward misplaced heat. The heat has, however, made rendering the wax from our cappings a breeze. We have a tupperware container full of bright yellow, clear, wonderful smelling wax. A treat.