Tag Archives: Kate

Aging, Family, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Whew

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Summer                                      Waxing Grandchildren Moon

OK.  This will be last of this.  But.  Kate reminded me of her surgery on June 30th.  Which preceded preparation for and the arrival and stay of Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe followed then, as I said yesterday, by our too inclusive preparations for the Woollys. No wonder I wore out yesterday.  Let my prop it up and keep going inner coach have the day off.  Better rested and more clear-eyed today.  Ready for ancient Rome.

These two paragraphs came my way in the last two days.  Their conjunction speaks for itself.

“Speaking of heat, NOAA reports that June was the hottest  month in recorded history, worldwide. That is the fourth
month in a row of record warmth for planet Earth. June also marked the 304th consecutive month “with a global temperature above the 20th century average.” The last month with below-normal temperature worldwide? February, 1985. 2010
temperatures from January to June were the warmest ever recorded for both land and ocean temperatures, worldwide. Stay tuned.”
Check out Paul’s blog startribune.com/pauldouglas

(I imagine it’s photoshopped, but still…)

Mark Odegard found this quote in a book he’s reading about walking with caribou:

Henry Beston in the beginning of book.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of wild animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, greatly err, For the animal shall not be measured by man, In a world older and more complex than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethrern, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, Memories, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

A Herd Remnant

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Summer                                               Waxing Grandchildren Moon

The thundering herd of 11 Woolly Mammoths had dwindled to 5 by the time it found the outer reaches of urbia, the ex part.  Tom, Bill, Frank, Mark and Stefan joined me to make 6 of us for the July 2010 meeting.  Kate put together sandwiches, hor d’oeuvres, her rhubarb pudding with nutmeg cream sauce and various vegetables.  The food kept us all this side of the tar pit for another 24 hours.

We had a pre-meal excursion through the dog-proofed garden and over to Artemis Hives.  Various questions were asked and some were answered.  Most kept a respectful distance from the now upwards of 100,000 total bees at work.  It was fun to share the bee keeping work and the colonies with the crew.

Since I learned the cut comb method of honey extracting from Linda’s Bees, I gave each Woolly an aluminum foil square with the first ever Artemis Honey to leave the hives.  It was a signal moment for me and a highlight of my evening.

We checked in, discussed the natural world and listened to a couple of excerpts from “Hair”, reminiscing as we did about the 60’s, that moment in our lives, the unusual and powerful forces at work then.  Woolly Scott plays drums in a rendition of Hair directed by his son in Carbondale, Colorado.  He will be out there the whole month of July and shared some powerful emotional moments he has already had mounting this late 60’s classic musical.

The second picture itself took me back to those times.  I had forgotten the pure, animal joy of having long hair and flinging it around to the Doors, or Led Zepplin or the tunes from Hair.  Being stoned helped, too.

Mark Odegard, our only dam lock keeper, reported on his 7 pm to 7 am shifts at the #1 lock and dam.  There is a peregrine falcon nest nearby and he has observed the rearing of two peregrine chicks, including a late phase in which they peck so fiercely at their parents that the parents stand outside the nest and drop food into the razor beaked young.  I have known parents of adolescents who might have benefited from the example.

He also saw one chick’s first flight, a tumbling, gliding, clumsy landing affair.  Night on the river casts a spell, he says, and all down there succumb.

Kate and I, introverts by nature and preference, have just finished a week with the grandkids and their parents followed immediately by several days of preparation for visitors.  It wore us out.  We got up, ate breakfast, went back to bed and got up again around noon.  I’ll probably get another nap in before workout time.  Next time we’re going to have a cook, a cleaner and a gardener.

It is quiet here now.  Blessedly so.

Garden, Woolly Mammoths

Ray

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Summer                                    Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Ray, the Andover High School junior who mows our yard, came over today and we moved the shredded bark into its home on the beds and walkways of the vegetable garden.  He’s 15 or 16.  I’m not.  Nap time will be important today.

We discussed his swimming.  He swims for the Andover High School team.  “Is the Andover team any good?”  “Well, it’s a young program.  Not like Anoka’s.”  He admires Michael Phelps and has that swimmer body with the developed upper chest and broad shoulders.  He came here from swimming.  5 days a week during the summer, 6 during the school year.  Dedicated.

We found him courtesy of a copied flier he put in our mail-box.  It was good timing since Kate, our mower, had hip surgery scheduled in June.  Ray also does other yard work, like helping me re-mulch the vegetable gardens.  He works hard, thinks ahead and is generally pleasant.  A testament to his kind.  The teen-age boy kind.

The Herd rumbles into Andover around 6 or so.  Kate’s worked hard to get the food ready.  She also did a lot of weeding over the week-end.  It’s nice to have her home and I’ll be glad when she retires in January.

Garden, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths

A Snap. No, Really.

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Summer                                             Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Started the morning with my favorite kind of work, mechanical.  Question:  how to get the mower deck off the lawn tractor.  It is, I recall the salesman saying 14 years ago, “A snap.”  Well, he should have been here.  Nuts and bolts, screws and hammers don’t respond well to my ministrations.  If it can be done the easy way–a snap–and the hard way–my way–guess which I end up pursuing?  Yep.  Same deal with the bagger.  So easy.  Hmmm.  The best that can be said is that, in the end, I figured out that the easy way was also the only way to get them off, but it took a good while to realize that.  Plus some words I wouldn’t use in a polite blog.

After that, hooking up the new wagon to our 15 year old Simplicity was a snap.  No, really.  One cotter pin, insert bolt through wagon tongue and tractor hitch and away we went to the 5 cubic yards of shredded mulch.  A few pitchfork moves later I was back in the front yard delivering shredded bark to Kate who toiled away in the vineyards (literally) of our long untended front flower patches.

Much better than the wheel barrow method I’ve used all these years.  I took the weeds back to the woods and put them in their very own pile.  Nice.

After the nap I’ve spent time recovering wooden steps and slabs from eroded sand, sweeping, piling, that sort of thing.  It’s hot, but not too bad outside.

All this in service of the upcoming Woolly Mammoth meeting.  We have visitors out here twice a year and this year they came within two weeks of each other.  Great planning on our (my) part.  Well, I shouldn’t say in service of the meeting.  This work really prompts us to do things we’ve neglected over this year and they’ll stay done for a while.  One of the many positive functions of friends.

More meeting related work later on, too.  Groceries.  Start cooking. (helping Kate) Cleaning furniture.  Those sorts.

Family, Travel

Travel Days

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Summer                                          Waxing Grandchildren Moon

As the grandchildren moon waxes, Ruth and Gabe are somewhere south of Andover, headed back home to Denver.  They left about an hour ago taking their parents with 07-12-10_ruth-and-gabethem.  Like most leave takings, this one was bittersweet.  We will not see Ruth’s smile, nor hear her mischievous giggle; the house no longer rings with mymamameee as Gabe, eternally seeking his mother tries to orient himself to the star of his young life.

We will not be able to talk with Jon and Jen about their lives, their joys, the things that matter to them and therefore to us.  The playhouse has lost its enlivener and no one will run up and down the slope in our front yard, shrieking and reveling in the sheer pleasure of walking barefoot in dewy grass.  No uh-oh or banana grabbed and eaten, one half in one  hand one in the other.

There is, too, though the truth of lives disrupted by travel, part of its purpose, but also part of its drain.  The dogs lives changed, and they could not see why.  Everyone’s lives are not at their smoothest because routines become difficult to realize and routine soothes, calms.  So, for Gabe and Ruth, Jon and Jen, they now head back to the garden, to the plans for renovation of their home, to the friends both have made over their years in Denver.  Familiar beds, couches, dogs, food, neighbors.

When Kate and I traveled in Europe, we hit on the idea of a travel day (p.s. Kate reminded me that was her idea.), a day when we just rested, weren’t trying to see some new destination, this museum or that market, this famous street or the Opera House.  This kind of intense, in the home up close visit could, as Kate said, use a travel day.  We’re getting ours today, but when we wake up tomorrow, there will be no mymamameee or Ruth crawling down the hall in her blanket.  And we will miss them.

Family

Families

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Summer                                              Waxing Grandchildren Moon

 

Gabe and Ruth have broad palates.  Tonight Ruth ate sushi, tempura shrimp and a whole dish full of tempura vegetables as did Gabe.  They also wolfed down tempura ice-cream.  Afterward, Ruth wanted to put on a play in an ampitheatre located behind the Osaka Restaurant.  We waited awhile for her to decide on a performance, but the show, in this case, did not go on.  Maybe tomorrow in her playhouse.

Families are magical and mysterious, the vessels proven to travel through time intact.  We create them often with little realization of the long tail such action has, but consider the genetic chain linking you to the generation before you and the one before that and the one that crossed the ocean and the one that came out of Africa and the one that links you to mitochondrial Eve.

They find us at our most intimate, most troublesome, most winsome, most ugly.  The family collects bad acts and good, favors and betrayals, puts them in the alembic of an extended web of relationships and distills out the future.  Miracles are never more than this.

Our own family, gathered in part here right now, is no different, not special or unique, but no less special or unique than any other.  Ruth laughs, Jon wonders, Jen ponders, Gabe opens and closes, Grandma hugs and Grandpop writes.  The things we do, the people we are.

Bees, Health

Strummed

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Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

I have a pediatric illness:  an ear infection.  Well, of course, if I have it at 63, it’s not technically a pediatric illness, but my in-house pediatrician recognized it with her very own otoscope. I have a lot more empathy for her young crying patients now.  The damn thing hurts.  And right in your ear!

It’s in my left ear, which is deaf already, so it can’t do any damage to my hearing.  But wow.  When the pressure strums the nerve, it gets your complete attention.

I’d felt off for the last couple of days and the ear ache presented itself this morning, just as the bee guy came and the electrician who restored power to the honey house and the playhouse for Ruth and Gabe.  Kate’s really good with managing pain and illness.  I’m not.  I’m more like a dog; I want to crawl into a kennel and sleep until its over.  Fortunately, it began to drain this afternoon which relieves the pressure.  No strumming after that.  At least for now.

I forgot to mention that Dave Schroeder also said, “You’re not a beekeeper until  you’ve been stung.”  I’m a beekeeper several times over!

This afternoon and evening passed in a haze with pain and narcotics.

Aging, Family, Health, Memories

Oh, Yeah? How’d It Go?

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Summer                                                  Waning Strawberry Moon

We keep our walkin’ around money at the Credit Union, Associated Health Care Workers.  I like credit unions because they’re small and friendly, unlike our mortgage holder, Wells Fargo, who has shafted us time and again.  The credit union knows who we are.  I went in today to pick up our weekly cash and the teller said, “I’m used to having Lynne pick up the money.”  She doesn’t Lynne goes by Kate, but otherwise.  “Yes, she had surgery.”  “Oh, yeah, how did that go?”  “Well.  She’s walking around.”

I grew up in a small town and I value personal interaction with merchants.  It makes me feel known and welcome in a broad, perhaps shallow way; but a wider net of personal connections away from work or friends gives a sense of density to life often, perhaps usually, lost in the city.

The electrician, Jeff, who works on our stuff from time to time was out today.  He lives here in Andover and we talked about bees and hemp while I tried to identify where the fence guys cut the wire to the sheds.  Again, personal.

alexdowntown

In Alexandria, where I lived from age 2 to age 17, most people knew who I was and I knew who they were.  Alexandria had about 5,000 citizens, but the families were much fewer and knowing a family member meant you had some sense of the rest, too.  Yes, it can be suffocating, perhaps more so as an adult, but as a kid, it meant there was no where in town I felt anonymous, a cipher, just a person paying 4 bucks for a latte or buying a new computer.  Neither of which we had of course when I grew up in the 50’s and early 60’s.

You can take the boy out of the small town, but…

Aging, Dogs, Family, Health, Memories, Travel, Weather +Climate

Route 66

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Summer                                           Waning Strawberry Moon

Rain beats down and Rigel whines.  We’ve had a couple of dogs with phobias about thunder.  Tira was the most problematic.  She preferred to climb through open car windows in the garage for some reason.  I still have claw marks on the Celica’s leather interior and the Tundra has scratch marks from a frenzied Tira trying to climb the gate closing off the back from the garage and getting hung up, her paws scraping on the hood and her teeth gripping the license plates.  Rigel is not that bad.  Thank god.

Kate’s tired tonight, her muscles aching from a lot of walking and standing.  She’s pushing it, but it’s good.  The doc said no limits, so the more she works it, the faster her muscle tone will firm up and her stamina increase.  Having the hip replaced takes general anesthetic, deep tissue and bone bruising and swelling, so painful  trauma occurs from a bodily point of view, but from a psychic perspective she can tell already that it feels better, way better.

We had our money meeting, discussing the coming of the kids and grandkids next week.  Makes me think of the trips my family used to take from Alexandria, Indiana to Oklahoma City.  Route 66 covered most of the territory, taking us, I remember, right through downtown St. Louis, a bit fearsome for small town folks.  Mom would go in to the motels, inspect their rooms and give them a passing grade or tell us to get back in the car.

Along the way the barns had signs for Meramec Caverns.  Don’t believe I ever saw them.  Sort of the Wall Drug equivalent on Route 66.

There were games involving license plates, 20 questions, word finds and generally gazing out the window as the Illinois, then Missouri landscape rolled by.  I still enjoy that part of traveling, sitting by the window, watching the scenery.  One of the reason I like train travel.

Aging, Family, Health, Memories

Changing Time

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Summer                                         Waning Strawberry Moon

Now that Kate will be home for at least  two months, I’m shifting my going to bed and waking up time.  Got up this morning at 7am and plan to keep that up with a bedtime of around 11:00pm.  This gives me more good hours in the morning, plus it allows me to use the cool of the day for garden work.

Kate’s walking on her own, with a good gate.  She’s so happy, I can see her float as she walks.  It makes me feel good, too.

I went to a CVS pharmacy this morning to pick up a few things we needed.  I don’t go there often;  the combination of heat and dew point with the familiar but still not often experience lay out made me feel, for just a moment, that I had entered a Long’s pharmacy.  Long’s is familiar to those who travel to Hawai’i because its everywhere and carries a lot of stuff tourists need desperately, or feel like they do.  It was a good memory, happy it popped up.

Well.  Went looking for a Longs photo and discovered that, guess what, CVS bought out Longs.  Sigh.

Back to continue house cleaning, garden work for the upcoming July guests.  Not stuff I like, but, hey, it needs to be done.  At least once a year.