Daily Archives: August 15, 2013

Health, Our Land and Home

It’s not you

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8/10/2013  Lughnasa                                                 State Fair Moon

Chainsaw man appeared today, cutting whole ash trees into firewood size chunks and moving limbs long distances.  When this gets back on Ancientrails, I’ll show you the Back IMAG0739to the Future safety goggles I bought.  German.

So.  In order.  My physician got sanctioned by the state medical board for over prescribing pain killers.  So, I then went to my next physician who, after a couple of years or so left to become medical director of an hmo.  Found Charlie Petersen, who was my physician for many years until he and his wife moved to Steamboat Springs, Colorado to live the horse and skiing life.  He recommended Tom Davis whom I’ve now seen for some years.  From whom I just got a letter saying he’s retiring.  Is it me?  They all say it’s me, not you, but I’m beginning to wonder.  Except for that first guy.

 

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.