Lughnasa Eclipse Moon
Trying to seat a new work habit. Write ancientrails, then my 750 words for Jennie’s Dead and after breakfast, do my 30 minutes on reimagining. Still cutting and filing posts. Workout. Lunch. Nap. Then, Latin and reading. After the writing, and before breakfast, catch up on the news. Worked yesterday. Ha. Takes awhile to get the body and mind to expect what I want at certain times of the day.
Kate went in to Jon’s new house on Tuesday after I got my hair and beard cut. New look! She took bedding for the kids. But going down the hill right now is fraught because our air conditioner has decided that above 85 degrees is just too hot for it to work. It blows, but it doesn’t cool. Denver, in the late afternoon, has been hitting the mid-90s. Kate’s not a warm weather gal. Not in any way. She got overheated and it’s taking her a bit to recover. And, yes, the ac goes to the shop on Tuesday.
I went over to Rich Levine’s house last night for pizza and a salad. He’s the lawyer who did our estate work and a member of Beth Evergreen. He has also put lot of work into the new Beth Evergreen preschool project. The old preschool was about to shut down, taking with it not only the service provided to the kids, but a revenue stream for the synagogue. Rich and a few others, including Hal Stein, the new board president and Rabbi Jamie, who was a preschool teacher, led the effort to keep the preschool going under Beth Evergreen’s aegis.
The evening was cool and his beautiful house, which sits above Evergreen on the aptly named Alpine Drive has a mountain lawn; that is, one filled with boulders and native rock. After supper we walked up from his house, first on a short boardwalk, then on a trail over exposed rock, the mountain side, really, to a large open deck with an enclosed room where he does his academic work. Rich teaches constitutional law at the Colorado School of Mines.
The preschool’s Bee Alive theme this year correlates to Rich’s bee keeping project, which he began a year ago. We looked at his hives, he wanted my advice. His bee hives hang from a steel cable attached to a roof beam for the deck and about 50 feet away, a large ponderosa pine. This is a novel set up, mimicking, but with beehives, the way many people suspend bird feeders. Bears create the need. They love bird food and honey. A pulley system allows him to raise and lower the hives. Having their homes hanging in the air is just fine for bees.
I’m now, I think, an unofficial consultant and fellow worker in the preschool Bee Alive program. A lot of bee related work ahead. I have to do some research about mountain beekeeping.
I’ve not written about politics here for awhile. A welcome relief to both me and, I suspect, you, the reader. My political energies have become subdued, mostly as I decided to turn my focus to reimagining work, Jennie’s Dead, Ovid and Beth Evergreen. That feels right to me now, though the news pings me daily. What are you going to do about Charlottesville? What are you going to do about climate change? What are you going to do about Korea? What are you going to do about electing a new representative to the Colorado House of Representatives? Of course I know I can do nothing about them alone, the nature of politics is communal, so the choice is to remain isolated.
Next Tuesday those worlds, the political and the Jewish communal, conflict because I volunteered to set up for the adult education events all year, Tuesdays with Morim. At the same time at Grow Your Own, a nearby wine bar cum music venue, Tammy Story, a candidate for the Colorado House is going to speak to the Conifer Alliance for Action. Her opponent, Tim Neville, doesn’t believe education should be public among other strange notions. I’m going to set up chairs and tables at the synagogue.
Trump is still there, of course. Over the course of the last couple of weeks he’s given aide and comfort to white supremacists and neo-nazis, pardoned a sheriff who broke the law and engaged in inhumane treatment of immigrants. He also made Hurricane Harvey a campaign event. He’s a child, maybe 8 or 9, going off instinct, refusing history and decency. He is the greatest test our democracy has faced in my lifetime, more dangerous to our national fabric than the war in Vietnam and the Cold War. He must be challenged, over and over again, until he final slinks away into the dark place from whence he came. I’m glad there are many engaged in doing just that. I’ll do my part here from time to time, but that’s the balance of my political work for now.
Kepler has kennel cough, caused by the same organism, a bordetella variety, that causes whooping cough in humans, especially children. He got the bordetella vaccination, as did Rigel and Gertie, but he either got less of a dose-he didn’t want it-or he contracted a strain resistant to the vaccine. His racking, barking cough produces tenacious. Kate says this is a medical term designating a stringy, hard to clean up secretion. Well, it’s accurate. A visit to the vet later he’s on the mend, but the symptoms may last a while, depending on whether the organism is a virus or a bacteria, longer with the virus, shorter with bacteria.
He has a “multi-stage development plan” that involves shipping containers, changing door jambs, cutting out concrete in the back, creating a master suite. It will take a lot of time, but he really enjoys designing and then building. His home will become a work of art, too.
Took off yesterday morning about 7:30 am and drove west (or south) on Hwy 285 headed toward Park County, Bailey and Fairplay. I stopped at Grant, a place made visible only by its single, as near as I can tell, business, the Shaggy Sheep. There’s one of those yellow diamond signs just after it with a black silhouette of a bighorn sheep. This is one of several instances of displaced chefs seeking less frenetic lifestyles in the mountains. I mentioned the Badger Creek Cafe in Tetonia, Idaho in my eclipse post. There are others.
