Daily Archives: November 20, 2014

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.