Monthly Archives: August 2013

Writing

Finished. Again.

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8/10/2013   Lughnasa                                                         State Fair Moon

With the site down I forgot finishing the putzy work for the third revision.  Ended yesterday.  That means Kate will take it now and read it with an editor’s eye for grammar, spelling, sentence construction.  My chief concerns for this revision lie in the main character’s voice, is it unique enough, in action, is there enough of it, and in the overall narrative arc, is it tight?  In this version Missing is around 110,000 words, right in the sweet spot for novel length.  Not too long, not too short, but just right.

Next up writing wise is research and writing on Loki’s Children, volume 2 of the Unmaking trilogy.  I look forward to it.  It represents a different challenge than book I in which world building, character introduction and development necessarily absorbed a lot of space.  There will be new characters in Loki’s Children, but the core characters are now in the story:  John, Leth, Graham, Constance, Merlin, Cromarty, Bragg, Gullen, Arton, Cernunnos, the Wyrm.  The map of Tailte is clear to me, though it needs to be put on paper by someone who can draw.  It will have additions in Loki Children, but the main continent is there, plus the oceans and islands.  Loki’s Children will step up the action with various quests of critical importance.

Volume III, the Unmaking, remains fuzzy to me, but I’m sure it will become more clear as work on Loki’s Children goes forward.  When the editing and rechecking is done on Missing, it will be time to start shopping it to agents.  I’m ready to do this, even eager.

Garden

Harvest Home

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8/10/2013  Lughnasa                                                                   State Fair Moon

Kate canned carrots and beets yesterday.  She also made a wonderful meal with a tomato and cucumber salad, cooked greens and carrots, all from our garden.  Turkey breast was IMAG0651the protein.  It was colorful, fresh and tasted amazing.  It’s very satisfying to eat produce you’ve grown yourself.  As Kate said, “It’s hyperlocal.”

The Asiatic lilies have one last representative, a beautiful white with red interior, all the rest have dropped their blooms.  Now it is the time of the daylilies, the wisteria, the clematis and the liguria.  This is also the peak time of year for bugbane, a shade lover that produces a flower with a sweet, ethereal fragrance.  The hosta, the ferns, the pachysandra, lilies of the valley and the monkshood all provide green backdrop.  The monkshood and the asters will begin to bloom later in the month.

Our raspberries have begun to produce, too.  Over the next few weeks it will be raspberries, tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, peppers followed by leeks and the fall crop of beets and carrots.  Kate just told me that our pear crop, which has to ripen off the tree, is mature.  That means she has to do something with it right away.  Today.

No harvesting of the remaining greens right now.

This is the payoff for the work begun in late April.  Worth it.

Bees

Extraction Plans

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8/10/2013                         Lughnasa                                                 State Fair Moon

Honey extraction coming up on August 20/21.  We’re going to get ready on that Tuesday, IMAG0705which means cardboard on the kitchen floor and plastic all over, too.  It also means bolting our extractor stand to a piece of plywood with 2×4 lengths nailed to it for the stand’s braces, getting the uncapping tank set up and all the filters and bottling equipment cleaned out and ready for action.

On Wednesday I’ll begin by using honey robber to move the bees out of the honey super, one super at a time.  This involves putting a bit of a chemical on a felt backing contained in a super-sized wooden box and putting that box over the super.  This drives the bees down and allows me to get a bee free super off and onto a pallet I’ll have waiting on my truck dolly.  I’ll repeat this six times, covering the stack of supers each time I add a super to keep the bees away.

Once all six supers are off, I’ll wheel them into the garage and carry them, still covered, into the kitchen.  Kate will have the uncapping knife warmed up and will start uncapping.  When we have six frames uncapped, they’ll go in the extractor where they will spin as centrifugal force pulls the honey out of the comb.  This process continues until all frames, as many as 54, certainly 40, have the honey drained from them.  That’s when filtering and bottling begins.  A big process, lots of steps, but easier each time we’ve done it.  Practice makes lots of bottled honey.

After all this, of course, there’s selling it.  This is going to be a crop well beyond our needs so getting some cash out of it to defray the considerable money we’ve already sunk into bee-keeping makes sense.

 

GeekWorld

Take it to the limit, one more time

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Lughnasa                                                              Honey Moon

8/9/2013    Lughnasa                       State Fair Moon

Take it to the limit, one more time

Ancientrails has been down for a day plus now.  I hit my limit, my storage limit on my host 1&1.  They allowed, under the old rules, 100 megabytes of data.  I had 149.8 which, it turns out, is where the train stops.  I had to call cybermage Bill Schmidt.  He’s on it and will fix it as soon as he can.  It sounds complicated, but the gist is that he has to copy the whole website, then put it in a new folder, this one capable of holding 1 gigabyte of data, the new limit.  A rough estimate is that I have around 1,000,000 words plus thousands of images.  That’s a lot of data, although, as data goes, it’s really not much to store in these days of terabyte hard discs.  I have two on this computer, one for the work and one for backup.  Hey, they’re cheap.

 

 

Friends, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

Gratitude

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Lughnasa                                                               Honey Moon

In the now long ago a spiritual director told me that the key component of spirituality is gratitude.

Let this first post after our hiatus be one of gratitude.  Bill Schmidt, thank you!  This wasn’t easy as it turned out and I’m grateful for the perseverance and skill.

I’ve known Bill for over 25 years as Woolly Mammoth and friend.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

At The Limit

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Ancientrails hit its size limit on my host, 1&1, and has to be moved to a larger venue.  Bill Schmidt is working on that right now.  It took a bit of time to realize what was wrong.  I’ll be back online as soon as possible.  Thanks

 

Soul

Lughnasa                                                                      State Fair Moon

The soul. As probably understood most of the time (in the West):  a non-material component of the body-mind-soul combination that makes up all human beings.  This third component floats free at death, off to any number of possible outcomes depending on your belief:  heaven, reincarnation, nirvana, Elysian Fields, Valhalla or hell.  Usually the soul’s journey after life is believed to have some correlation with adherence to one moral code or another.  Might be karma, might be sin, might be courage and bravery, might be heroic stature.

If your belief aligns with any of these understandings, then the third phase, as the one we know for certain ends with the terminal phase and the terminal moment, becomes critical, a blessed time when spirituality and spiritual attentiveness prepares you for the afterlife.  Not gonna say how you might do this because it entails too many variables but the menu certainly includes:  retreats, meditation, reading, prayer, perhaps engagement with a community of fellow travelers. It also includes attention to the past if you feel making amends or restitution or penance is part of your journey.

And if you’ve been so engaged prior to the third phase, congratulations.  Now this kind of personal work can become a key thread in your life.

The soul:  As I understand it at the moment.  Roughly equivalent to the Self, a holistic view of the you that is body-mind-soul.  Now.  In this understanding the third phase stands as a blessed time when you can become more of who you already are.  It can mean jettisoning the persona-pack you’ve carried in the world of work for a persona more consonant with the Self.  If you’re lucky enough to come into the third phase with a persona and Self in healthy dialogue, you’re in good shape.  This time can then be an extended exploration of the unique gift you are to this world.

Soul work:  These two perspectives, one tied if loosely to religious tradition, and the other tied closely to the humanist tradition in Western culture are not exclusive of each other.  That is, both ancientrails can overlap in any one individual.

Next time:  what then might we do?

Third Phase

The Afteroffice, or Retirement? Really…

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Lughnasa                                                        State Fair Moon

Suppose tomorrow someone came to you and said, “From now on you no longer have to use the education, skills and experience you’ve accumulated over your lifetime.  Good luck.”  They might have added, “And here’s a gold watch to keep track of time until, well, you don’t need to anymore.”

Our received understanding of retirement remains that of a life period where the things you worked and sacrificed to learn all of a sudden become so much baggage better left at the station.  It’s what our financial counselor Ruth Hayden calls the finish line model of retirement.  “Whew.”  We wipe our brows.  “Glad that’s over.  Martha, my slippers.”

It’s no longer like that.  Hasn’t been for a long time.  Some people, many people, will have to work a lot longer.  Others don’t, but still shuttle into the afteroffice with no idea of what comes next.  Perhaps when life expectancy after retirement was shorter, it was typically 18 months among working class retirees in my hometown of Alexandria, Indiana, the no plan might work.  Some television.  Some fishing.  Some cards.  A few beers.  That trip to Las Vegas.  Then, that trip to Happy Hill Cemetery.   Even then I suspect there were many long nights and longer weeks, weeks of wondering what on earth I’m doing still on earth, for heaven’s sake.

Now, with healthspan increasing and lifespan reaching 20-25 years post-retirement, it definitely won’t be enough.  This next phase, call it the Afteroffice or the third phase, has as many years as the other two phases, roughly, and certainly enough years that it needs to have a plan, a what I’m up to now contract with yourself and those around you family, friends, community.

After a first phase which emphasized preparation and a second phase which underlined practice, what is the third phase or the Afteroffice theme?  There could be many answers and there will certainly be a vast diversity of paths, but it seems likely that the dominant motif will be soul work.

Define soul however you want.  Which is just what I’ll try to do in my next post in this series.

Bees, Great Work

Bee Diary: 8/7/2013

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Lughnasa                                                                State Fair Moon

Oh.  My.  Just came back from a wrestling match with an angry superorganism.  Bill Schmidt noticed the height of my tower ‘a honey and wondered about wind knocking it over, but the height produces another kind of problem as well.  A happy problem in the end, but a sweat inducing, sting evoking problem in the here and now.

Out of 6 honey supers on top of the three hive boxes, four are full.  Honey, basically water, weighs more than 8.5 pounds per gallon.  Each of these full supers weighs in close to 50 pounds. Therein the happy and the sad of it.

The happy is 200 pounds of honey!  The sad is lifting 200 pounds of honey!  Plus some.

Here’s the deal.  The recommendation is to treat for mites and to do it now in August, with the honey supers on.  That means using a food grade miticide, one that won’t harm the honey in any way.  Which means less potent.  Which is good as far as I’m concerned.  The idea is that we rid the colony of mites in August, then the brood turns over after the nectar flow and produces mite free bees for overwintering.  Mites reduce the bees capacity to overwinter.  By a lot.

So.  O.K.  I decided yes. I’ll do that.  When I went to buy the one treatment and done product, miteaway, my dealer was out.  He had instead hopguard.  Hopguard requires two strips in each of three hiveboxes (the big ones on the bottom that hold the colony and its honey stores for the winter).  That’s one week’s treatment and the full treatment requires three weeks.

(taken today and the point of all this hooha)

Now we get to the problem.  Each of those honey supers has to come off and sit somewhere while I put the hopguard strips in the hiveboxes.  So, that’s 200+ pounds off and set aside.  It also means moving two of the three hiveboxes off and back on.  They weigh substantially more than a full honey super.

Thanks to the Canadian leakage as Paul Douglas calls it the weather is about as good as it’s reasonable to expect:  70 degrees with a dewpoint of 50.  But.  By the time I finished schlepping honey supers the sweat had begun to run.  Down into my eyes.

Physically moving these boxes is right at or a bit more than I can do easily.  That’s ok, for the most part, but it does mean that I can’t make the slow, deliberate motions that keep the bees calm. So, by the time I got to the hiveboxes I couldn’t see out of one eye and had to squat and lift with my legs to budge them.  I’m not even going to mention the slippery hopguard strips that would not slide easily between the frames.

(an improvised super holding device.  also taken today)

Anyhow, I got all that done, got the honey supers back on and was feeling good.  Until I saw the queen excluder resting on the hiveboxes.  The queen excluder goes between the hiveboxes and the honey supers to prevent the queen from laying eggs in the supers.  Oh. My.  You can insert here words you use when you realize you have shot yourself in your own foot.

That’s right.  I now had to remove the supers a second time, put on the queen excluder and put them all back on again.  Well, that’s all done and finished until next Wednesday.  When I do it all over again.  Except, I hope, for that queen excluder part.

Third Phase

Can’t Get No Traction

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Lughnasa                                                                          New (State Fair) Moon

Didn’t start my day outside yesterday and found myself feeling aimless after our meeting with Ruth.  Bounced around from this to that, never got traction until later in the day when I finished reading Rousseau’s On Inequality and watched the last two of the week’s lectures.

I don’t like feeling aimless.  It’s different from either relaxing or being focused, aimlessness occupies a nowhere land in terms of motivation, a sort of desert of intention where this happens, then that and then another thing.  It’s not the zen of the moment or being in the now, it’s not being in the now or the moment or anywhere else.  An uncomfortable feeling.

A large motivation for stopping the Sierra Club work and the MIA work was to allow a natural rhythm to surface and it has.  I work outside in the early morning, do some work on Missing until noon, nap, then take up Missing again.  When I tire of it, I work on the MOOC’s.  After that I either workout (MWF) or finish up and go upstairs to read or watch a movie or a some Netflix TV.

There are times though when that flow gets interrupted and I find it difficult to get back on track.  Yesterday was such a day.