Samhain Christmas Moon
If this doesn’t make you laugh, it’s too cold where you are.
Monthly Archives: December 2015
Flour Sifter Snow
Samhain Christmas Moon
Flour sifter snow has fallen steadily since early morning. We’ve had several inches, maybe 6. Slowed down for now, the weather forecast has another storm coming on Tuesday. Sitting in the lower room looking out over the backyard all that can be seen are lodgepole pines and snow drifting down in thin columns tracing their way to the ceiling of the sky.
In to Sushi Harbor this evening to celebrate Jon’s birthday, as I said yesterday. The traction law is in effect for Hwy. 285: snow tires, 4 wheel drive, AWD, or chains for passenger vehicles. If you don’t have them and get stopped, the fines are hefty. A new law in effect this year. Colorado is trying to cut down on poor equipment caused traffic accidents and backups during snow season. We’re fine. We have Bridgestone Blizzaks and 4WD. Plus forty years of Minnesota driving experience.
Might haul out the Cub Cadet, the yellow snow eater. Haven’t decided yet.
A lazy Saturday here on Shadow Mountain.
Moonshine
Samhain Christmas Moon
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below
Friend Bill Schmidt found this bit of lunar trivia:
“The last time there was a full moon on Christmas, Jimmy Carter was president and a gallon of gas cost 65 cents. But this year we get to party like it’s 1977 when the moon is shown in its full glory on Dec. 25, theWeather Channel reports. It’s an event that won’t happen again until 2034, and then every 19 years after that for a few cycles…” Newser
I began giving full moons my own names a couple of years ago, trying to bring them into the present. This year I think I’ll change my name to the Christmas moon in honor of this event. My usual name, shortened this year, for this full moon is the Moon of the Winter Solstice.
Smart
Samhain New (Winter) Moon
The wind was calmer today so I got more tree trunks cut into logs. Used my smart holder for the first time. It works pretty well, but I’ve got to get more facile with placing logs on it. A learning curve. Lots of fireplace size logs stacked between two trees, three stacks in all. This is the last step in the fire mitigation process for this season. Now the wood will dry for a year, be ready to split next fall. As soon as I get all the front tree trunks cut into fireplace size, I’ll move to the back and begin felling and limbing.
Getting my regular hour of Latin, but boy it’s coming hard right now. Not sure why. Struggling. Back to regular exercise, too, though most of my resistance time is still spent with arthritis alleviating exercises from Dana. I backed off a bit on them, tried to work in some other resistance, but the tingling returned, the left shoulder began to ping. Struggling a bit here, too. Not anywhere near my pre surgery levels.
Tomorrow we’re going to Sushi Harbor with Jon and Jen to celebrate Jon’s 47th birthday. I met Jon when he was 21. 47. Realized another milestone birthday must be when your first child turns 50.
Our neighbor Jude came over to wish us a Happy Hanukkah. Sweet of him.
Lights by the Lake. With Latkes
Samhain New (Winter) Moon
Watched several different people, a rabbi, a politician, a cantor, a newspaperman and a Chamber of Commerce woman struggle with lighting a menorah on the shore of Lake Evergreen. We’ve had chinooks for the last few days and though muted at night they still made the bic auto-match flicker and the temporarily burning wicks blink out.
The politician, Tim Neville, is a conservative Republican. He had real difficulty getting the shamas lit. It was as if the winds were saying this one has no light within him. To be fair, others had difficulty, too.
This was a pan-Judaism event with Beth Evergreen, where Kate and I have attended educational classes, Judaism in the Foothills and B’Nai Chaim reform synagogue collaborating. It was not a huge crowd, maybe 75 to a 100 people: a few boys with prayer shawl fringes dangling beneath their t-shirts, two rabbis and a cantor, tables with Hanukkah gelt, dreidels, a two table set up for the latke cookoff* and an adorable two year old girl whose body posture said she was ready to rule the world.
The evening was enough for Kate to say, “I want to join.” She means Beth Evergreen.
I was happy the event took place to a giant fir tree festooned with many lights. That’s my religious tradition, Germanic paganism.
*Kate’s latkes are superior, in every way, to the ones I tried last night.
Mountains and Menorahs
Samhain New (Winter) Moon
A public menorah lighting at the Lake House in Evergreen tonight. Kate and I are going. There’s also a latke cook-off and I look forward to helping assess the entrants. Evergreen is a downhill ride, 7,200 feet to our 8,800. We take county 78, which starts out at county 73 as Shadow Mountain Drive, changes, very near our house to Black Mountain Drive, and then, 2 miles further down mountain toward Evergreen, becomes Brook Forest Drive. It’s a curvy, forested, rocky road with the Arapaho National Forest on both sides for much of the way.
A joy of mountain living is that the quotidian can be extraordinary. On these drives we often encounter mule deer, elk, occasionally fox. Kate saw what must have been a mountain lion, long and catlike, slink away from the road. In the spring snow melt fills Shadow Creek, Deer Creek, Cub Creek with water churning and roiling. As the snow melt wanes, these same creeks become lazy wandering streams and must, in drier years, lose their water altogether at some point.
The flora, seemingly sparse in that only two species of tree, lodgepole and aspen, live in any numbers at our altitude, changes once in the fall to a minimalist palette of gold and green. Once the golden aspen leaves become skirts, the trunks of these trees become bony fingers, white and twisted. In the spring the green leaves return and the mountain views become more uniform for a time.
Black Mountain, Shadow Mountain, Conifer Mountain and all the others around our neighborhood change, too. The flora goes up and down them, different with the seasons, but on display in often vertiginous falls and in huge rock gardens where outcroppings are bare but surrounded by trees. At night the mountain sides light up with homes also up and down, a sort of external dwarfheim, often invisible in the day. Precipitation, especially snow, alters the mountains immediately, sometimes obscuring them, most often painting white over their peaks and valleys.
We have found a new place to live, our mountain home. It suits us now.
2015 Home Project Year
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
A father and son team came over Monday morning to do a site survey. Their task is to create a reliable internet connection between the modem and the garage. Might be wi-fi. Might be hardwired. Hardwired is the preference and that’s what they’ll work on first. Hopefully they can make all the ethernet jacks live at the same time. That would make positioning things in the future much more flexible. They’ll be back next Monday to work.
The kitchen remodel is on hiatus right now, waiting on the countertop’s creation and the arrival of various doors and a large cabinet injured in the first shipment. Kate’s got great ideas for color once the remodel is done. Slowly, slowly.
The December 29th date for switching on the solar panels has me a bit twitchy. The new rule promulgated by IREA (Intermountain Rural Electric Association) goes into effect on January 1st. It makes demand charges for peak load times, evenings here, so high that the result is solar panel investments will not pay out. IREA needs to install our net meter before January 1st for us to be grandfathered in under the old rules, rules that allow our solar investment to go positive in about 12 years. Having the same people in charge of installing our net meter who benefit if it’s done late doesn’t seem like the best thing, but it’s the way it is. And the 29th. So close.
Back to the fire mitigation today. I have some free time and warm weather has melted snow cover from downed trees I need to limb. This is an all winter project, taking advantage of various windows of acceptable weather conditions.
We’ve had a long string of projects this year. Makes sense since we’ve moved into a new house. After 20 years in Andover we’d adapted 153rd Avenue to our peculiar needs and values. Now in some sense we’re starting over. Each step, the bookshelves in the loft, the generator install, the new gas lines, the new boiler, the new stickley table, sealcoating the driveway, fire mitigation work, solar panels, the new bed and tempurpedic mattress, the kitchen remodel and now the loft internet connection have met some priority or another.
A few, the generator, gas lines and boiler, were driven by necessity. The seal coating was timely. The bookshelves, the kitchen remodel and the solar panels on the other hand are projects designed to make our home more responsive to our values. The new bed and mattress made sense given aging bones and joints. The fire mitigation is necessary, but also enjoyable, something I can do.
We are in these ways becoming native to this place, learning its contours and possibilities and just as important, it’s limitations. Home. Black Mountain Drive. On Shadow Mountain.
Bloody Marys at Breakfast
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Into Denver in the morning today. Unusual for us since our city excursions are usually in the evening.
We went to Lucile’s, Denver for breakfast. I mentioned Lucile’s, Littleton a short while back. The Denver site, at Alameda and Logan, is hip. Full at 8:30 am with whip thin Coloradans, men and women, young families and a few older guys sitting at the bar eating scrambled eggs and drinking Bloody Marys.
Kate had rice pudding porridge with currants. I had red beans, poached eggs and cheese grits. We shared a side of collard greens and finished the meal off with beignets. Tasty.
After breakfast, we made our way through Denver, navigating north and east toward the old Stapleton airport. Jon and Jen live near there. We were bearing those Hanukkah gifts.
On the way home we made a complete circle, taking I-70 to Evergreen, then Brook Forest Drive to Black Mountain Drive and home. This particular route gives us a view of snow covered peaks to the west and lets us drive through more mountains on the way to our house.
Tonight we go to Domo’s, the rural Japanese cuisine restaurant Jon and Jen introduced me to long ago. Scott and Yin Simpson are in town and we’ll meet them there. Lot of driving.
8 Nights of Illumination
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Hanukkah begins tonight. Another Holiseason festival of light. We have several packages wrapped in the blue and silver colors of Hanukkah, dreidels and the Star of David scattered across them. They go to the grandkids this morning.
144 candles for the 8 day festival since each night a new candle is added and all are replaced. We have several menorahs ranging in design from very traditional to crystal and metal. Like many Jewish holidays this one is home based with a regular nightly ritual involving lighting the candles in the menorah and reciting certain prayers in Hebrew.
Kate and I plan to attend a public menorah lighting on December 10th in Evergreen. There is a latke cookoff as part of the ceremony. Latkes with sour cream are one of my favorite parts of Hanukkah.
We decided a while back that our Hanukkah gifts to each other are the solar panels and the remodeled kitchen.
So. Happy Hanukkah to one and all.
Sad
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Routine disrupted. My loft computer is now downstairs where I can hook it up to the internet. On Monday I have a serious computer service company coming out to create a wi-fi or hardwire setup. Calmed down after I made a decision to get it done once, then forget about it. My problem is that I obsess about these things until they get taken care of. If I’m trying and failing to fix things, then I keep obsessing. Tiring.
Sad about guns, about the killing, about terrorism, about the obtuse beliefs of NRA fanatics, about climate change deniers, about the too slow pace of change toward a sustainable future. Angry, too. Yes, angry. In the past sadness and anger have pushed me into political work. Got started when I was a freshman in high school and found the school itself a barrier to learning.
Today, though, I find myself on the sidelines watching a circus where the acrobats miss the trapeze, where the fire eater gets consumed by his element, where the animals smash the cages and trample the crowd. The world has once again sunk into madness.
Yes, the world is always mad. War began thousands of years ago. Slavery, too. People without power did terrible, unthinkable things to break free. So, in a way, the diagnosis of madness, of chaos and insanity, is a tautology. The world is. The world is mad.
It’s also true that any one action, any one person, even any political movement has little chance of creating change systemic enough to bring sanity. Yet, as Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” It might be this action, this person, maybe you. It might be this political movement, this one you choose to support.
Where am I going here? What I want to say is that the only way to avoid despair is to choose to act in some way. I won’t be on the sidelines much longer, the projects of our making this home ours will finish and I’ll find somebody to team up with. Somebody to shake a fist with. To make what strangled sort of cry we can. Fatalism just doesn’t work for me. Might be about the third phase and our lives in it.