Monthly Archives: November 2014

Health

Do You Know Where Your Sleep Is?

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Samain                                                                              New (Moving) Moon

3:30 a.m. Do you know where your sleep is? I don’t know where mine is. Occasional middle of the night insomnia makes me think.  Before the electric light a normal night’s sleep consisted of sleeping 3 or 4 hours, then getting up for an hour for a bit of food, sex, reading, then back to bed for another 4 hours of sleep or so. Tom Crane brought this to my attention.

Sometimes I wake up, hit the bathroom, then, for some reason can’t return to sleep. Or, no reason. Not ruminating tonight. That is, thinking through stuff in a manner that does not lead to action. Chewing the psychic cud I suppose from one of our mental stomachs where we store not fully digested experiences or fears or projects ahead.

Just. Awake. The rhythm of waking up, not sleeping for a period of time, then returning to sleep till morning may well be the normal one. We assume, because each of us need 8 hours or so of sleep each day, that we should get it all at one whack. Maybe not.

My afternoon naps supplement my nightly sleep, for example. Perhaps 3 to 4 hours at a time is what our bodies prefer.

Art and Culture, Holidays, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

So Did the Divine Right of Kings

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Samain                                                                                    New (Moving) Moon

Holiseason has begun to gain strength. Thanksgiving preparations are underway in millions of households across the country. Tickets have been bought; cars checked; phone calls and e-mails made. America’s festival of gratitude has a lot of momentum. Yes, the earliest Thanksgiving (at least the one projected back into the founding history of the English colonies) has a negative image. Perhaps deservedly so, I don’t know the history well enough.

Since Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday though, the family focused day has united Americans of diverse backgrounds and religious orientations in a secular celebration of extended family and friendship. Whatever form of Thanksgiving works for you, it is a day to remember the blessings we each have in our lives. No matter how great or how small they may be.

Of course, there is the dark pall of Black Friday, a habit so twisted in its mercantile logic that Best Buy tried to come out the good guy by saying that they were letting their employees go home to sleep.  Not many sales, the spokesperson said, were made late at night anyhow.

Ursula Le Guin gave a wonderful speech at the national book awards last night. I heard it on NPR today. She made several striking points and I’m embedding her speech in the next post, but she took a cut at capitalism that sunk the knife in deep. We live, she said, in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So, she went on, did the divine right of kings.

Whatever your plans I hope they include gratitude for the gift of life and for the wonder of this earth on which we live. What a privilege it is to be alive now.

 

Colorado, Dogs, The Move

Mike the Fence Guy

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Samain                                                                         Closing Moon

Mike the Fence Guy (as he identifies himself on his card) has had his travails this week. While enroute to our property, his truck’s fuel pump failed. This meant he not only had to get the truck fixed; he had to shift all of our fencing supplies to another truck.

When he got to Black Mountain drive, his assistant did not show up and had left his phone turned off.

Too, he had asked me yesterday for the code to the garage door opener key pad. Hmmm, I thought. Didn’t get one. So, I called the realtor who called the second realtor who discovered that the key pad had never been activated.

Kate suggested I figure out how to set it up and perhaps Mike could set it himself. Would work except you have to be inside the garage, with the lift motor, to engage the switch that allows you to enter a new code. A good safety feature and one I was glad to discover, but not helpful to Mike.

He did solve the storage problem. There is a shed on the property which had combination locks but also exposed screws. He simply backed them out with a drill, opened the door and stored the concrete. Good deal for him. And for me. But it does mean that lock hasp will either have to be reinstalled or not used for locking the shed. There’s nothing in there except window screens anyhow.

(This is roughly the sort of fence Mike’s installing.)

When I talked to him this afternoon though, he said six holes were dug and posts set. The ground is only a little frozen in some places, mostly not. And, the temperatures will not plunge as they did last week.

Health, The Move

More Getting Ready to Go Stuff. (medical)

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Samain                                                                            Closing Moon

Went to the Nicollet Mall today to see Dr. Corrie Massie, my third internist in the last seven years or so. Charlie Petersen moved to Steamboat Springs with his wife. Tom Davis retired to collect native American pots and otherwise enjoy life. Corrie is a good doc, one I would have been happy to see longer.

Instead, this morning she printed my annual prescription refills so I could carry them a new pharmacy in Colorado. She also explained my stage 3 kidney disease diagnosis. “I get the most questions about that diagnosis of any I put on patient’s charts,” she said. Turns out that with the most normal kidney functions you qualify for stage 1 kidney disease. Stage 2 kidney disease is the domain most folks inhabit most of their life and Stage 3 represents a situation not unusual as we age. “It’s a filter. As the filter gets used, various insults degrade its function. Disease. High blood pressure. NSAID’s.”

As we get older, our kidney function deteriorates. The third phase sell-by date. At some point the universe follows the dictates of my long time ago grocery store boss who always reminded us to “rotate the stock.”

As became my practice when I transferred back to the Nicollet Clinic to start seeing Tom Davis, I went straight to hell from my doctor’s office. Hell’s Kitchen that is. A good breakfast, no matter what time of day.

 

Colorado, The Move

Change of Narrative

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Samain                                                                          Closing Moon

IMAG0773In a month this story I’ve been writing since April will cease to be about moving and shift to the act of settling in to a new home. It’s a narrative we had originally planned to take two years and instead it will have taken only seven and a half months. The process picked up speed at its own pace, one decision seguing into another and that one into another until on October 31st, we bought a house and set a moving date.

I don’t know whether the speed is good or bad, probably neither, but I do know that once the decision was firm, the desire to execute it swiftly grew. At the same time we have wanted a measured pace, one that allowed us to pack easily, look for a new house without getting frantic and determine an actual day without angst.

We have, for the most part, succeeded in that. We have a Thanksgiving reservation at the Capital Grille for ourselves and Kate’s sister, Ann. This will be our last Thanksgiving here and we wanted a nice meal to remember it, but not one that required us to cook.

Finishing up our part of the packing before Thanksgiving has been my goal and I’ve decided that no matter where we are on Thanksgiving, that that’s where we’ll stop. After that A1 movers can complete the work. There won’t be much more. We’ve already contracted with them to pack up the garage, the tools and the kitchen. Whatever’s left will be minor. (We both will pack the stuff we need to use till then. Computers, sewing machine, that sort of thing, but the rest. A1.)

 

 

Colorado, Mountains, The Move

Leave the Viking in Minnesota. (seems right, eh?)

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Samain                                                                                    Closing Moon

Breakfast at Keys, then over to Sears Outlet to talk ourselves out of taking our Viking stove with us. Looked at Warner-Stellian for a bit, stoves like Thermador and Viking are tres expensive! Considering an induction cooktop and a wall mounted electric oven for Black Mountain Drive. The point is we decided to go for more flexibility in Colorado.

Back for an early nap. Then, more packing. I’m really close on the study, but packing the smaller stuff is harder than the books. Books I’ve packed so often that I understand them intuitively. Smaller things I have to think about some, make sure things are secure and don’t rattle around.

Mike the Fence guy called for the code for the garage door. Good idea, but I didn’t know it. So I contacted Ann Beck, the realtor. Turns out I never got the code because it was never activated. Don’t know where Mike’s going to store his concrete now. He’ll have to figure something else out.

Things feel chaotic, not out of control, but easy to tip over in that direction. Then, there’s the I can see the other side from here feeling and things tip back into balance, or as much balance as this part of the move allows.. Shadow Mountain looms closer and closer each day, becomes more tactile.

 

 

Colorado, Dogs, The Move

Dog Gone

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Samain                                                                          Closing Moon

IMAG0810This day a month from now we’ll be getting ready to collect the dogs from Armstrong Kennels, Kate in the rented cargo van and me in the Rav4. I’ll pick up Vega, Rigel and Kepler while Kate will take Gertie. We’ll drive together to Shorewood where I’ll pick up my co-driver, Tom Crane. Then it will be good-bye to Minnesota.

That thank you for visiting Minnesota sign at the border with Iowa will have a different IMAG0805signification for Kate and me. We’ve lived in the Twin Cities a similar amount of time, Kate coming in 1968 and me in 1971. So, ok, it was a long visit.

Don’t know why I’m writing about this except that the sense of abbreviation to our time here has begun to increase. It has become palpable, as if the future is pressing back against the present, calling us forward. As I wrote a day or so ago, the closest analogy seems to be the anticipation of Christmas for young children. Not so much in the sense of eagerness, though there is that element, but in the way a particular future day and its events can dominate a present moment.

Now even the small world between my desk and my bookcase, punctuated at one end with the computer and at the other by the gas heater, feels impermanent. I can see it stripped down, bare, then gone. That’s new.

More moving business today. Buy a new stove for the kitchen since we’ve decided to take our Viking with us. Take hazardous waste to a dump site. Perhaps deploy the bagster to clear some space in the garage.

Colorado, The Move

Oh.

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Samain                                                                       Closing Moon

Packing takes a toll in these last days. Not sure why, but each day I spend a good deal of time packing really wears me out. Not physically, but emotionally. It’s not resistance to the move itself, as I’ve said here before, rather I think it feels as if the packing has gone on too long.

Let me see if I can sort this out. I’ve been packing, with many generous breaks, since May. The bulk of the summer I packed books and sorted files, then packed them. I made an effort to get all the art and objet d’art packed before Labor Day, along with all the books in my study except those I use regularly. That was successful.

We’ve decluttered, thrown away, donated a lot of stuff. Some has gone to recycling. Then there was the search for the house, finding it, my seeing it, then the closing.

You can’t control the Universe. You are the water, not the rock
You can’t control the Universe. You are the water, not the rock

Living in the move, an idea I developed early on, has helped me see all this as the liminal space between our decision to move and our eventual settling in Colorado. But now living in the move is breaking down as we get close to the actual date. We are now having to live the move itself.

This seems like an understandable, normal response at this point, as I consider it. We’re neither completely finished, nor are we actually moved. So we’ve entered a time when planning and reality are about to collide. A part of me wants to rush through this, get on with it. Why is there this teaware and ceramics to pack? Why are there still these boxes of files to sort? Well, precisely because they are the things I chose to pack last. Oh.

The trick is to just stay in the moment. Let the day’s packing be sufficient there unto.

Great Work, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Will Steger

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Samain                                                                 Closing Moon

Woollies met tonight at the only house owned by Warren and Sheryl in Roseville. They’ve been moved in for about a month and a half. Bill, Frank, Warren, Mark, Scott, Stefan and myself met with Will Steger. Tom is in Kansas City and Charlie H. decided he was unable to be in the same space as Will. Charlie H’s loss.

Will’s story is an interesting one. He had, from a young age, a clear vision. He wanted to live in the wilderness where there was no road. And become self sufficient. He achieved that goal by buying a piece of property two lakes away from the nearest road outside Ely, Minnesota.

Continuing what he described as a vocation for teaching through many venues, he almost quit exploration until the internet allowed him to connect school children with his journeys.

He described great enthusiasm for and confidence in the young generation, folks in their twenties. “They want purpose and are willing to work with their hands. They have not shut out the older generation like we did when we were young.” Will’s 70 this year.

His foundation, the Will Steger Foundation, focuses on educating kids. The Steger Center is an ambitious plan to open a topflight center for leadership education, in a building designed by Steger during his 222 day journey across Antarctica the long way.

The building he designed is under construction, getting built by interns who work with master stonemasons, tile-workers, wood workers in a master/apprentice relationship and volunteers who come up for weekends during the growing season.

He has a clarity of personal vision that is rare and the humility to share that vision with others. An inspirational guy, working at 70 toward a dream that he knows will outlive him.

 

Art and Culture, Colorado, Friends, The Move

Pickles on a Stick

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Samain                                                                                Closing Moon

Thanks to Allison, Morrie, Sally, Mary, Joan, Wendy, Vicki, Bill, Carol, Antra, Joy, 0 (4)Kathleen, Merritt, Tom, Marcia, Sharon, Cheryl, Ginny, Florence, Carreen, Jane, Lisa for a wonderful, sweet, sad afternoon.

The hot dish, the pickles on a stick, the bundt form jello, the wild rice soup, the selection of desserts and the lefse with butter and sugar, all culinary masterpieces of Minnesota home cooking. There will be nothing like any of this in Colorado, I’m sure.

Friends for life, you all. My time at the museum became a place to see you, catch up on interesting lives and have conversations about art. A good life.

As I said this afternoon, this event was sweet and sad and those two in direct proportion to each other. Very sad, very sweet. Here are a few more pictures taken by Ginny:

0 (1)a Minnesota memories dish towel

0 (3)

Mary and Tom and the pickle tray

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Wendy and Joy

0 (2)

notes from everyone written on the back of these Pre-Raphaelite cards. Antra (on the left) also did the calligraphy for a beautiful card.