Monthly Archives: January 2014

Aging, Family, Third Phase

Mature Adults

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Winter                                                                 Valentine Moon

Necessary but not necessarily pleasant work this morning.  Kate and I went through our health care directives, making sure they still reflected what we wanted.  Mostly.  We then read through our wills with a similar purpose in mind.  They’re seven years old.  We need to ask the boys what, if anything, they might want in our estate so we can enter that in a list for them.  We knew this seven years ago and somehow haven’t gotten around to it.  Is that Denial I hear rushing by?

We looked, too, at our trust instruments.  They, too, are mostly ok, but I still haven’t added Kate to our Vanguard account.  Again, I’ve had seven years to do it.  I promised I wouldn’t take any more than that amount of time before I got it done.

We also discussed funeral/celebration arrangements, coming to no firm conclusions, but with progress.  Asked some time ago to donate my body to medical science so they can investigate my inner-ear bones–no, seriously, I intend to but haven’t gotten around to filling out the forms.  Can you hear the beautiful blue Denial in the background?

After this we made a list of matters around the house that need attention.  We’ve lived here 20 years and though we’ve kept with major things:  new furnace, air conditioner, roof, siding, dishwasher for example, there are many smaller things.  Our outdoor trim needs painting and in some places replacement.  A lock here.  A light fixture there.  Handyman sort of things.  We have a guy.  A few garden things.  Laying down woodchips in the vegetable garden.  Pruning the orchard.  Javier work.

Painting living room, kitchen, hall and master suite plus repairing that settling crack we’ve had for, what?  20 years?  Finishing Touch painters.

Changing light bulbs and cleaning out the garage.  Kate and me.

After all this responsible adult stuff, we went for lunch at Azteca, our favorite Mexican joint.

Friends

Schafkopf

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Winter                                                                    New (Valentine) Moon

Sheepshead is a very culturally specific card game, favored by German descended or influenced persons who have spent time in eastern Wisconsin.  It’s a German game,  Schafkopf in the mother tongue.  My brush with it came during a year or so residence in Appleton, Wisconsin where I played with my father-in-law, my wife, Judy, and her brothers.  We would buy a case of cheap beer and sit in Judy and mine’s living room.

(the perfect hand)

Picking it up again almost 40 years later meant relearning most of its rules, though some of its quirky nature had stuck with me.  Queens are the high cards:  clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds followed by the jacks in the same order and after them kings.  These cards are all trump as are the remaining diamonds:  ace, 10, 9, 8, 7. (the ace of diamonds is higher than the king of diamonds).  And, all tens are higher than the kings of their respective suits.  Must have been a matriarchal bias in here somewhere.

If nobody chooses to play their hand with a partner, the dealer has the option of calling a leaster.  In a leaster each player competes for a trick with the least number of points. The dealer can also call a doubler which means everybody throws in their hands and the next hand is worth double.

As I said, quirky.

Tonight my cards were bad in the first half of the evening, as they’ve been for a couple of months, then picked up in the last half although not well enough to lift me very far out of the point deficit I created in the first half.

As usual, the company is the point, but the cards are fun.

General

Daily Rhythm Right Now

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Winter                                                              Seed Catalog Moon

Wednesdays (Woden’s Day) and Thursday (Thor’s Day) find me immersed in the Climate Change MOOC.  Wednesday all day, Thursday as long as I need to finish the week’s lesson.

That means no Latin or writing on Wednesday, Latin on Thursday and back to writing and Latin on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.  Wrapping up the day is P90X, which I just finished, legs and back.  Pretty winded, but at least I could do everything, even if, in some cases, only for 2 or 3 reps.

After that it’s time with Kate, supper.

Health
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Yoga.  This will take a while to get.  Difficult for me, co-ordinating the various moves and it requires stamina and strength as well as flexibility.  I probably have the most to gain in yoga of all the work P90X has to offer.  Which means, of course, that I’m starting the farthest from where I want to be.

A few poses here.  It will require real work to do them well.

Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate, World History

Flood Narratives

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Winter                                                          Seed Catalog Moon

Hmmm.  I do like it when I’m scratching my head and I turn to the commentary to find, “Medieval and modern Latinists could make nothing of this.”  Ah. At least I’m not alone.

Today I’ve started in the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha.  This is an ancient flood narrative with parallels in Greek authors.  In Ovid Deucalion and Pyrrha end up on the top of Mt. Parnassus and have to rebuild the human race after the flood.  Right now Ovid is still describing the earth as the sea and extensive plains suddenly become water.

I don’t remember if I mentioned yesterday the image of dolphins swimming among the trees.  Nice.  Ships scrape their keels along the tops of hardy oak and mountain peaks.

There is controversial, but not crazy geological evidence for a flood in ancient, ancient times involving the Black Sea, sometime around 5,600 b.c.e.  That’s this corner of the world and, of course, the Middle East is nearby, too.

Interestingly, in earlier translation work I ran across the Latin word, ararat.  This is the pluperfect singular of a verb which means to plough or to till.  It can also mean to cultivate land.  Could the “flood” have been a period of wandering due to some natural disaster, maybe a flood, that resulted in Jews ending up on new land to farm?  Don’t recall enough of my studies in Genesis to know if this is probable or not, but the Latin is suggestive.

I don’t know enough about the hebrew word or the Latin translation of it either.  This is probably a coincidence, but it’s a weird one if it is.

GeekWorld, Great Work, MOOCS, Politics, Science, Weather +Climate, Writing

Back on Tailte, Peering Into the Climate Future

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Winter                                                        Seed Catalog Moon

After a frustrating morning with a balky computer, I got into Robert Klein’s work on Missing.  He’s good.  Careful, detailed.  I’ve only rejected one of his edits so far and that one I understood what he did, but chose my construction over his.  I didn’t get far, but I’ll keep at it.

I wrote a private post earlier about my anxiety as I approached this stage.  It’s still there, but the anxiety decreased as I worked.  I hope that continues to be the case.

As I mentioned on Great Wheel, my computer is running a climate model with its unused processing power.  This is part of an Oxford Study to determine the results in a particular model if it is run many times with slight variations.  These slight variation can be very significant (think butterfly flapping wings), but without running these complex models over and over, tweaking them in slightly different ways each time, it’s impossible to know for sure what a particular adjustment will do.

Climate and weather modeling are big users of super computer resources and the work on my computer is part of a massively parallel processing strategy to, in effect, mimic super computers without having to buy them.  The concept is simple.  Each home computer has many times the computing power necessary for almost, if not all, the tasks it performs and, in addition to that, most of them sit idle most of the time.  By downloading parts of larger task onto many, many home computers use can be made of both the idle and under-utilized processing power.  The first one of these projects was SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence, and I was part of that one, too.

They are resource intensive, however, so some of my computer frustrations might have come from it modeling global climate in the background.  I’m 95% with the task the Oxford folks assigned to me (well, my trusty Gateway is 95% done) and it may be a while before I take on another one.  This run takes approximately 350 hours of processing time.

I can and do shut it off at times.

 

Health, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Doing Stuff

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Winter                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

I have a ways to go before I get up to 7 or 8 verses in an hour.  There’s still too much to learn, too often.  This is not a bad thing, just the way it is.  But I’m pushing myself, trying to get faster and more accurate at the same time.

P90X will be the same.  Right now I’m having to hit the pause button a lot.  The various exercise require precise movements and I’m not exactly quick at picking them up.  Even when I get the form right, I have to monitor myself.  Today, in the shoulder and back workout, there were a lot of moves I had never seen:  Congdon curls, for example.  Still, as with the first resistance day, I found this much easier than the plyometrics.  Much.

Tomorrow is yoga.  Right now all these exercises are new and that makes the sessions take longer.  That will pass; the sequence uses twelve different workouts so the repetition’s a bit slower than I would like.  Still, I’ll get there.

Tomorrow Missing shows up on the computer screen.  Looking at Bob’s work, making decisions.  Just as soon as I get it finished, it starts going out.

Health

Plyo, Oh Myo

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Winter                                                         Seed Catalog Moon

 

On Saturday afternoon the P90X program kicked into plyometrics.  This involves jumping, twisting, turning, lunging.  The chest and back resistance work of the day before went ok.  It was a challenge, sure, but I expected that.  Wanted it, in fact.

Plyometrics on the other hand.  To use buddy Frank Broderick’s favorite epithet, “It kicked my ass.”  These workouts are 60 minutes long with little downtime.  I made it through the full 60 with the resistance work, but the plyo?  30.  I. Couldn’t.  Do.  Anymore.  That will change over the next few weeks.

Tony, that’s Tony Horton as I mentioned before, says you can get 8 pack abs.  8?  I can’t find any.  Always thought the highest you could go was 6.  Sounds like he’s setting me up to fail. Doncha think?

Variety is important in workouts and this is a great change from my previous routines.  It’s cold outside, but I’ll be warm in just a few minutes.

 

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

Spring Rolls Over in Bed, Goes Back to Sleep

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Winter                                                                     Seed Catalog Moon

On occasion now my eye drifts out to our raised beds mounded with snow, our fruit trees 06 05 10_wisteriaandfriend670asleep and bare, the bee hive.  It has begun, that quickening, the part that knows even these low, low temperatures will not hold off the approaching spring.

The bees need checking, to see if they’ve survived the winter, but it’s just been too cold.  At some point Javier will come out and prune the orchard.  Seeds and plants must get ordered.  Mostly now though there is that still young feeling, the quickening.

Perhaps it has always been so in the temperate climates.  Perhaps this sense of delight, not really eagerness, but palpable change, is part of what caused the Celts to celebrate Imbolc, the next Great Wheel holiday.  It celebrates the freshening of the ewes and the triple goddess, Brigit, of hearth, forge and poetry.  Perhaps this is all part of the waking up.

Pagans, I’m increasingly unhappy with this word, but can’t think of a better one, have our 10002012 05 12_4288great waking up morning every spring.  We don’t have to wait for the apocalypse, the fallow time of fall and winter is enough for us.  The greening comes with the joy of life triumphant, life resurrected, life everlasting.

No, this isn’t cabin fever, not yet.  It’s an awareness, a tickle, perhaps a single blade of grass brushing against my foot.  But, it’s a start.

 

 

Great Work, MOOCS, Science, Sierra Club

Carbon on the Go

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Winter                                                                  Seed Catalog Moon

This am in the climate change mooc listening to lectures about the international policy dimensions.  Boy, there are very real dilemmas.  Let me mention just one.  Coal.  To get emissions down coal use has to drop and drop a lot.  But.  Energy use in a nation has a linear relationship to the country’s wealth.  So.  If country A significantly reduces its coal consumption, two things follow.  1.  It will have to use a lot more of some other kind of energy unless it wants to beggar its citizenry.  2.  Country B, perhaps with less financial resources, now discovers that a lot of coal is available, cheaper than ever since one larger user has stopped or greatly diminished its use.  Result?  Country B buys the coal and uses it to generate electricity, thus increasing both its wealth and its emissions.  Hmmm.

There’s a knock-on here that amplifies the problem, embodied emissions.  Sounds like a horror movie premise and that’s not far off.  An embodied emission is when one country produces a product using a polluting energy source, say coal, but instead of consuming the product sells it on the global market.  Which country is responsible for the emissions?  The producer or the consumer.  That’s an embodied emission, when the product you consume sent up its production emissions in another country.

(international movement of coal)

Guess where that happens a lot?  Yep, China exporting to U.S.  So, while our emissions have fallen modestly thanks to first the 2008 great recession then the increasing use of natural gas, China’s been scarfing down coal reserves, many from Australia, then selling the furniture, electronics, appliances here in the U.S.

Embodied emissions have become a big problem since 1990.  Over that time international shipping has undergone a remarkable transformation lowering, then lowering again, the price of shipping even bulk goods like coal and, then, the products created by its use.

The solution to this happens to be simple but politically very unpalatable:  border tariffs. Tariffs are a big no-no to free market ideologues and they do raise the specter of tariffs used as weapons not just to balance the embodied emission problem.  Makes my head ache.