Yearly Archives: 2014

Family, Literature

Dragons and Corned Beef

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Summer                                                                 Most Heat Moon

The new Sienna (2011, but new to Jon and Jen) has been loaded. Ruth and I went to the grocery store to buy supplies for the road. There will be pumpernickel and corned beef sandwiches, dill pickle potato chips and Krave cereal for Ruth.

Ruth and I had a talk about dragons and books about dragons on the way to the store. I recommended a recent read, His Majesty’s Dragon. She recommended back the Mysterious Benedict Society. It’s fun to have a grandchild old enough to share books.

They will lift off tomorrow around 7 am, headed west, forerunners to our own, larger move, following in Jon’s now long ago wake. That means Kep, Vega, Rigel and Gertie and I will have the house to ourselves until next Saturday.

Friends, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Woolly Mammoths

Amicus

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Summer                                                                        Most Heat Moon

While the Olson generations have driven north to the world’s largest lake (by area), I remained behind for my regular session with Latin tutor Greg and lunch with friend Tom Crane.

When I work with Greg now, I sequence out loud the Latin words in the order in which I will translate them into English, then offer my translation. Since so much of my work has involved either Greg’s question and my answers or my translating then listening to Greg’s careful parsing of the grammar, silence confuses me.

Today had lots of silence. It turns out that means he’s translating along with me, waiting for me to go on. Silence, in other words, is good. To get to this level of translating still takes a long time for me. I translate the verses, 4-6 in a typical one hour to one and a half hour session. This involves consulting the online classics website, Perseus, the commentaries by Anderson and Lee, and occasionally checking an English translation if I’m hopelessly confused.

After I’ve done a bunch, maybe 50 or 60 or so, I’ll go back over them, making sure the declension and conjugation notes I’ve written down are accurate and making sure as well that the word I’ve chosen is written over its Latin counterpart. I might be done then, at least for awhile. If, however, there is some time before I have a session with Greg, I may go over them again, writing out a new translation as I read, not consulting my previous work.

When I get down to the serious work here, I imagine the process proceeding much the same.  It would differ at the point of my session with Greg. Then I will go through the verses I’m working with and try to create as beautiful an English translation as I can. When I feel I’ve done my best, then I will review other translator’s work on the same passages. At that point I’ll revise again, or not.

I may be at that point this fall. I’m very close right now.

Lunch with Tom is about friendship, about that ineffable, yet essential quality of being known by another and, in turn, knowing. The topics don’t matter, though they do, of course. Today it was grandchildren, visits, friends and, as you might expect, the sixth great extinction on planet Earth.

On this last point Tom and I share a desire to grasp the dilemmas facing the human race right now in fine detail, but also in the larger, broader scope of planetary evolution.  I think we agree on this perspective, being human is natural and the things we do as human are, therefore, natural. That’s not to say they don’t have unintended consequences. Nor does it mean that we have to lie down and say, we can’t do anything about that!

Not at all. But flagellation gets us no where.

 

Faith and Spirituality

Again, Emptied

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Summer                                                          Most Heat Moon

Ah. Can you feel the quiet? The silence spreading out in gentle ripples, absorbing sound, creating an island for us here. The saws and the drills, the dogs and the television, the chatter of Ruth and the pitch of the realtor all gone still. The only noise a subdued whir and rasp from within the computer tower and a strange feedback I get sometimes in my good ear.

This is the time to sink into the self, letting the day’s troubles go, for as Matthew says, “the trouble for each day is sufficient there unto.” Amen. In fact, hallelujah. I hyperbolize because on Monday night I was unable to know this and paid a sleepless price. To experience peace now is a blessing.

 

Colorado, The Move

A State of Mind

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Summer                                                                  Most Heat Moon

The deck is done. The last realtor interviewed and gone. Jon, Ruth and Kate drive up to Lake Superior tomorrow while Grandpop does Latin and has lunch with a friend. This very busy week will slow down on Saturday.

This guy’s estimate on the value of our home, different (less) from the realtor we like best, would still give us enough money to buy a home we like in Colorado. That means the actual value, which is probably between them, should be sufficient. Of course, we’re still 7-8 months away from the 2015 market and we can hope that valuation will pick up some by then.

Our basement is two large workout machines lighter, which has opened up a good deal of space. Just right for green tape and red tape boxes. The Vectra home gym and the leg press left a mark here. About a quarter of inch deep into the berber carpet. The 2nd Wind guys were polite and efficient, with only modest grumbling about the Vectra, which is a complex set of equipment with three different stations all connected by cable to a central stack of weights. The one guy said, “Yeah. I’ll probably have to take it to someone else’s house and set it up.”

With each check mark we move a bit closer to the Rockies. Exercise equipment. Sold. One load of books and furniture. Out of the house. Realtors. Interviewed. A new cedar deck. Awaiting a sealant. Lawn and yard work guys. 1 estimate, 2 to go. More empty boxes in the house. Done.

It was heartening today to read over the list of things we wrote down in May and have already completed. There’s a lot more work to be done, but a lot is behind us, too.

 

Colorado, GeekWorld, The Move

Foregrounded

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Summer                                                 Most Heat Moon

With Jon and Ruth here, the last realtor coming tonight and the 2nd Wind people coming to remove the Vectra and the leg press in a few minutes, the move has been pushed radically into the foreground, right here with daily life. We’re living the move almost all the hours of the day. (This needs slowing down, which will happen when three generations of Olsons pack up on Saturday.)

Jon, Ruth and Kate leave for Colorado then. Kate will meet two realtors out there and see some houses in situ. I’ll be packing books while they’re gone, maybe cleaning out some files, too.

Old computers, keyboards, mice and one printer will also head off to new places. Computer breaking yards are not as glamorous as the ship breakers of Bangladesh (which are pretty grungy really), but they’re vital. In fact, in the near future they may become as important as the mines from which their rare metals came in the first place.

We’ll have at least one more round of furniture (some desks, file cabinets, maybe more bookshelves) and many more books. Probably more this and that, too, all headed to the consignment store. Kitchen items, surplus garden tools.

After the realtor and Kate’s visit to Colorado, we’ll have much more reliable numbers on which to base our house hunting and the overall cost of the move. (not cheap) Then, we’ll go back to puttering the move. Getting stuff done in relaxed, but regular way. March will come in its own time. So will the moving van.

Colorado, The Move
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Summer                                                                   Most Heat Moon

Where to live? It’s not a question most of us ask very often over the course of our life. Kate and I have the luxury of asking it right now. Having settled on a general area, a 40 mile radius of Denver, give or take, we now face the next task, deciding on a particular lot and a particular house.

Knowing that no one site will have everything we want, though it must have everything we need, criteria have come and gone. Broadband, air conditioning, good insulation, room for our creative sides, space for the dogs, enough water privileges for a garden, access to emergency health care, at least a fire wise lot (at best out of the wildfire redzone), a decent house, those are things we need. Whether we purchase them with the house and property or install them soon after doesn’t matter.

The wants have been in more flux. A new want that may transition to need is living around 7,800 feet. This altitude decreases the high temperatures in summer and ensures cool nights. A single story home, which could become a need, too, seems the wisest choice. We would prefer more isolated over less. Mountain or water views add appeal. Having our own well and septic system is desirable, too. An architecturally interesting home with a balcony overlooking forest, mountains or water. Reasonable driving distance to one of the Denver light rail lines.

A pleasant surprise adds something, too. I found one home, for example, that already has a steam bath. Not a need exactly, but I associate a steam bath and the end of a workout. Our one here been a good, immediate reward for staying with my routines.

Yes, we’re open to unusual housing solutions. This one is called a no-shadow home. We saw a geodesic dome we liked. A passive solar home with the capacity to generate our own electricity would be a plus.

How our new home integrates with the land, our lives and the future needs of mother earth, that will determine which place we choose. Oh, and how much it costs.

Family, Minnesota

Rules of the Game

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Summer                                                         Most Heat Moon

Ruth and I played blackjack tonight. I dealt and she still won. Just going into third grade,2011 09 11_1118 her math skills are more than up to the game and her betting showed some uncanny, if randomly lucky, skills, too. She had played some version of the game in school with her teacher, but the real game is a bit harsher, less forgiving. That’s the one I play and the one I taught her.

Cards have been part of my life since I began delivering newspapers. My parents weren’t game players of any sort, so all the card skills I’ve developed came away from home. Starting at age 8, I would gather with ten or fifteen other young boys in a wooden shed where we waited while the old press rumbled through the daily run of the Alexandria Times-Tribune. Sometimes the web would break, the web is a v-shaped piece of metal that folded the newsprint as it came through the press, ready to become a newspaper. This would require much cussing and hurrying on the part of the printers, but it also meant that sometimes our games extended well past the usual half hour or so.

Later, in junior high I began playing poker with a regular group of guys and our game continued through high school. Once in college I veered toward bridge, playing duplicate bridge in a local league and endless hands in an endless game in the student union. After college, the people I knew well, my friends and work colleagues, didn’t play cards, so I set aside that long history.

Only lately, in the past 4 or 5 years, have I picked up regular cards again, playing the five handed version of sheepshead that I report on here occasionally.

Still, I have many hours of card playing behind me and the memory of it has given me an excellent “card sense.” Card sense carries across various sorts of games and refers to an intuitive knowledge of how a hand might develop.

I may not knit or sew, have carpentry skills or fix-it talent, but I can teach my grandchildren how to gamble. An odd realization, but there it is.

 

Aging, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

The Demi-Monde

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Summer                                                                   Most Heat Moon

Yesterday I did an experiment in sleep deprivation. Not intentionally, of course. As I gained back an hour to an hour and a half at a time over the day-necessary because of the sleep lost that night-my mind began to lose track of the sleeping/waking distinction. I would wake up, still clinging to the dream state and still tired enough to be only partially awake. Then, tiredness would take over and push me back to bed, the waking state only partially realized while I was up.

Sundowning.  In a strange place like a hospital, how the elderly could enter a state like the one I experienced yesterday, the disoriented state called sundowning, became obvious to me, sleep disrupted and coming in uneven increments over a 24 hour period. Once untethered from the usual clear demarcation between awake and asleep it could be very difficult to find your way back to it.

It was not unpleasant, at least for me, but if the outside world, the world outside my dreamy/semi-awake state, had demanded normal attention, I could easily have become agitated, unable to understand the expectations. Then, others would have become concerned about me. They would have wanted to “help” me return to the usual way of experiencing day and night. The harder they pressed, the more difficult it would become. At least I can see how that might happen.

Remembering my father-in-law Merton as he neared death, he seemed to float in an idiosyncratic demi-monde most of the time. Near the end he reported angels descending, coming for him. This may well have been his reality, rather than a dreamy experience. Once in this place epistemology becomes untethered too and our ways of knowing enter a different metaphysical realm. In other words our reality becomes different from that of the consensus, though we don’t know that. At that moment we have passed through a portal, not to the Otherworld, but to an Otherworld.

It could be that death comes to us, probably does come to many of us, in a demi-monde of our own. It might come, in that case, in the cliched form of a beloved parent or other relative. Or, angels. Or, depending on your inner compass, a demon from the depths of your own hell. Me, I’m hoping for a slow stroll into Arcadian fields where, bounding toward me, are all the dogs I’ve ever loved.

 

Sport

Germans Rising

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Summer                                                          Most Heat Moon

Stunned. I’m stunned I was shocked when Germany beat Brazil. I’ve not followed the world cup with any diligence, but apparently enough to go, Whoa! And we played Germany to 1-0. Maybe we’re better than we think?

Another international sport I follow with a bit more diligence than the world cup is Formula 1 racing. How ’bout Team Mercedes? Treating everybody else to rear wheel views around Formula 1 tracks from China to Great Britain. First time they’ve been this good since the 1950’s.

Hmm. World Cup. Formula 1. Next, world domination?