Daily Archives: October 4, 2013

Aging, Asia, Friends, Latin, MOOCS

TGIF

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Fall                                                                     New (Samhain) Moon

Rain washing away the drought, ushering in cooler, more fall like weather.  Gray skies and a general chill in the air.  Familiar to anyone from a temperate latitude.  I like it.

Busy day today.  Up early and out in the garden in the cool before dawn, working with my hands spreading fertilizer, raking it in to the top couple of inches of soil.  Back inside to write my 2nd essay for ModPo, this on a William Carlos Williams poem, identifying its imagist qualities.  After that, a nap.

Greg and I took my creaky Latin back onto the track.  I pumped the handle hard, but the little car moved pretty slow.  We set some goals per two week period, 60 verses per through next May.  If I can go faster, I will.

Immediately after Latin over to Kyoto Sushi, an all you can eat Japanese restaurant in Maple Grove just off Weaver Lake Road.  Bill and I had lunch and he passed some bio-till to me along with some reading material.  As old guys sometimes do, we also discussed hearing aids.

Back home for a second nap.  Back up and two lectures on Emerson, Self-Reliance and Experience.  Emerson as a proto-Nietzsche and Baudelaire influence as well as a post-Kantian precursor to the modernist critiques of the early twentieth century.  Whew.  That confused me, too.  Basically, he emphasizes active personal experience, moving forward into the future, letting the past be the past and your self be its Self.

Workout.  OK. Time for TV.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

The Universe At Work

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Fall                                                                      New (Samhain) Moon

Lunch with Bill Schmidt.  Bill says “the universe works” and means in part by that that problems have solutions even if they’re not evident through the usual channels.  His working example is his own experience with a milking herd for which he was responsible.

The herd came down with pseudomonas.  As he said, bad news.  The Wisconsin state vet advised him to kill the herd and start over.  No, he thought to himself, someone out there knows the answer.  So he kept himself open to an answer as he worked the land in Door County.  It came through a soil tester who knew a guy who might know something.

Sure enough, this person had a solution that involved colostrum.  Mammals produce colostrum in late pregnancy.  It is a milk that contains antibodies to protect the infant animal against disease.  It saved his herd.

The larger lesson, Bill believes, is that we need to keep ourselves in a constant state of openness for answers, for new information, for ways of thinking that might seem strange, yet have real value.  He practices this in his daily life.

 

Garden

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Fall                                                             New (Samhain) Moon

Out this morning early, before the rains come, laying down broadcast in the remaining vegetable beds.  Now all but the leeks, raspberries, strawberries and herb spiral have fertilizer already at work, nourishing the soil critters and spreading into the upper soil layers.  Those remaining are still active beds and will remain so until a heavy frost.  Then, I’ll cut the raspberry canes to the ground, pull the leeks for potpies and Kate will finish the herb spiral.  The strawberry plants will die back and I’ll be able to get the fertilizer into the top soil.

Planting garlic will finish the gardening season.  We still have fertilizer to lay down in the orchard, more ambitious undertaking as I said earlier this week, but I’m sure we’ll get it done in the next few days.  After that the bulbs go in the ground and with the exception of closing up the bee hive, we’ll be set for winter.  Bring it on.