Daily Archives: August 21, 2014

Colorado, The Move

Fun.

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Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

Here’s an unexpected thing. I’m having fun. Complex projects taken from ground zero to functional used to be my main strength. Lots of project elements, interlocking timelines, decisions getting made, things getting done. Once the decision to move was final and the process began to gain headway, old work habits began to emerge.

We’ve got contractors, realtors, family and most of all ourselves committed to a next February put the house on the market date. That means we also have to find a new place in roughly that time, too. Pacing and execution spread over a year, a bit less, has made the work move smoothly and, except for psychic disjunction, the occasional cognitive dissonance of trying to be two places at once, without pain.

There is, of course, the climax of the whole matter governed by the sale price of this house. It’s a big unknown right now and will be for several months. But we will get the whole move finished and become Coloradans by some time in the first half of next year.

Cinema and Television

Marvel(ous)

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Lughnasa                                                               Lughnasa Moon

At family gatherings I was the one with the stack of comic books reading in the corner, or on the stairs, somewhere out of  sight or at least out of the flow of people. As a teen-ager I was one of those who helped Marvel Comics overcome Dell, the Fantastic Four outstrip Superman, Batman pushed aside by the X-Men. As an adult it makes me grin that Marvel has become a force in movie making, too. Irony, subtly, taking the narrative and the illustration right to the edge then happily blasting beyond it, that’s the hall mark of Marvel comics and their best movies.

Guardians of the Galaxy is mainline Marvel. It’s characters have distinct flaws, an arc and even the villain(s) are complex. Funny, too. Vin Diesel is quite the surprise as Groot, the tree creature and Bradley Cooper voices Rocket Raccoon perfectly. Zoe Saldana (Avatar) is smashing (literally) as Gamora. Chris Pratt manages a level of seriousness combined with insouciance that brings to mind Han Solo, but his character, Peter Quill, Star Lord, has more heft.

Worth seeing if you have any schoolboy crush left for out there sci fi.

 

Anoka County, Garden, Great Wheel, Myth and Story

The Season of Harvest

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Lughnasa                                                             Lughnasa Moon

Lughnasa celebrates the beginning of the harvest. Already underway by August 1st, at least here, and continuing through early to mid-October the harvest is concerto after concerto, first the beet and carrot concerto, then the onion, then the garlic. Soon the green beans and the sugar snap peas chime in and the collard greens play their deep green notes and the chard lights up the hall with its rainbow of colors. The opposite of chamber music garden music counts on ancient melodies like the sound of the rain, the wind and thunder of storms, the subtle bass notes of fertile soil.

(alma-tademas-harvest-festival)

We have already passed the allegro first movement and now enter the adagio, the time when various crops come slowly to maturity in late summer and early fall. Around Mabon, the autumnal equinox, the grain crops and corn and beans will begin to peak, the sound of combines and corn pickers, the brilliant blue notes of the September sky, grain falling into golden piles on the wagons, yellow corn piling up. And finally, as October sees the first frosts and the last of the crops come in, the final movement, begun in a frenzy of gathering will trail off, cold and bleak, senescence browning the once vibrant greens.

At the end, summer’s end, is Samain. It marks the end of the growing season and thins the veil between the worlds. As the vegetable world dies again and the fallow season begins, Samain is a time between rich, fruitful life and the darkness and chill of death. It’s an appropriate time for the barrier between the living world and the world of those who have died in it to become permeable, for the dead to come to the living and the living to the dead.

We are now in the harvest season punctuated by Lughnasa, Mabon and Samain, beginning, middle and end. Dance to its music. The music of life renewed and come bountiful.