General

Back in the books

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Imbolc                                Black Mountain Moon (new)

Back into Caesar and the Gallic wars. Better than I expected, worse than I hoped. I’ve not lost the corpus of knowledge I’ve gained working with Greg, but retrieving it and using it is far from facile. I remain a committed classicist in training, so I’ll get back to pre-move skill levels and move beyond them. Lots to read and think about. My goal is to integrate my work in the classics with my work in art history and literature, mostly around the work of Ovid. Just how I’ll do that is not clear. Yet.

It was the same last night at my workout. Sustaining it proved difficult, especially when my fitness tracking watch refused to function. This may seem like an odd problem, but the feed back from the watch: calories burned, average heart rate, maximum heart rate, training load reinforces my work. No reinforcement, less incentive.

Fitness, classics, art history, writing and political work have been my focus for many years now. They will be here, too, along with traveling the West, the mountains, high altitude gardening and bee-keeping. And all of this woven into the fabric of inter-generational family life, the missing component of our life in Minnesota.

 

Colorado, Jefferson County, Weather +Climate

Snow Falls Twice Here

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Imbolc                                                         Black Mountain Moon (New)

With each snow here there are two separate snowfalls. The first happens when the snow begins, floating down to blanket the earth and the trees. The second snowfall may happen soon after, or be delayed by a day or two. When the weather pattern shifts, the winds come. They dislodge the snow gathered on the sloping branches of the lodgepole pine, a white mist of snow fans out from the branch, following the wind and a large clot of snow falls to the ground.

This second snowfall is more gradual and more idiosyncratic than the first. It depends on how much snow stuck to the lodgepole’s branches, which direction the wind comes from, the sun’s melting the snow and obstructions that divert the wind through the trees. It happens in bursts of white, sometimes many in sequence, as if dominoes had toppled over. Sometimes only one branch dislodges its snow.

 

Travel

Why I Still Don’t Own Any Nihau Jewelry

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Imbolc                                                                                               Settling Moon II

From this day a while ago:

Why I Still Don’t Own Any Nihau Jewelry

WRITTEN BY: CHARLES – FEB• 17•08
Clouds with sun.  Kauai weather has more fluctuation than Maui’s.  I like it.  Rain, sun and volcanic soil are a potent combination for plant growth.  The evidence is everywhere.

Kate and I noticed an egret in a profuse plant.  He stood on a branch, launched his sinuous neck down, into the foliage, as if he were hunting in a pond.  He came up with a white wriggly something caught in between two orange halves of his beak.

I had ahi sashimi last night, the third or fourth time I’ve had this treat.  The Garden Salad had jicama and grapefruit with peanuts. Tasty.  And plenty.  Yet, we went ahead and ordered pad thai, which we did not need.  It came wrapped in a flattened, cooked egg.  Most of it came home to our in-room refrigerator.

The Big Save market in Port Allen was interesting.  Grocery stores always reveal the culture as clearly as any other institution.  Here you could find Korean and Japanese foodstuffs, plenty of fresh produce, lots of beach paraphernalia and an interesting collection of fresh fruits:  papaya, ron baton lychee nuts and apple bananas.

I had forgotten how curvy the road up to Waimea Canyon is.  Fun to drive.  The view coming back down lays out the Pacific for miles and the small communities that about it.

We passed the Waimea Plantation Cottages on our way yesterday.  We stayed there in 1998.  The cottages are old plantation homes made by sugar cane workers and have a unique single board construction.  Kate said she’d go back there if they added air conditioning.

At the Waimea General Store I admired the Nihau jewelry.  Lei’s, necklaces and earrings made from tiny, tiny shells and matched for color.  I remembered wanting some of this, but I forgot why I hadn’t bought any the last time we were here.  A nice lei, the lady told me, was 19.95.  I thought, great. I’ll buy that one, then.  She turned it over and the price was $1,995.00!  Oh, yeah, now I remember.

We’re headed for a day exploring in a different direction from yesterday.
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Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Friendship

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Imbolc                                                                                Settling Moon II

Friendship, like so much that is truly important, is ordinary. Common. Well-known and documented. Not a surprise at all. Not really. As an idea, that is. But in practice? Friendship is rare, extraordinary, uncommon, little found and infrequently documented. Often a surprise.

Tom Crane dropped by yesterday afternoon, driving a black rented Kia SUV. He looked the same as when I saw him last, the day I dropped him at the Denver International Airport, December 20th. Then, we had driven straight through from Minnesota to Conifer, three dogs sleeping quietly in the back of the Rav4.

I took him on a brief tour of our still being put together new home. He talked with Kate, suffered the dogs to come unto him. We went to Brooks for dinner, a birthday dinner. We both had hamburgers while we spoke of family, of the Woolly Mammoths, his work the next day. Propane related.

He brought me back to Shadow Mountain and then went on to his hotel in the Boulder/Lafayette area. Over the course of our time together in the Woolly Mammoths, some thirty years, we have learned how to be friends, how to listen to each other, to support without invading. It was an ordinary, extraordinary time.

Colorado, Weather +Climate

Lucky

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Imbolc                                                                                   Settling Moon II

Black Mountain becomes obscured during a snow. That massif over 10,000 feet high disappears behind a fall of frozen water. Knowing it stands so close, so big, yet absent from its usual place on the horizon amplifies the silence. Even while following my yellow Cub Cadet snowblower up and down the driveway, its engine’s noisy violence preceding me, even then the quiet dominated. Now, finished, the driveway showing black against the white, snow continues to drift down, filling in behind the noise of the snowblower, sopping up the disturbance and returning the cushioned world.

Living on a mountain. In a small forest of lodgepole pine dusted by that great flour sifter. (Kate’s image) Lucky we live Shadow Mountain.

Mountains, Poetry

Mountains

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Imbolc                                                                            Settling Moon II

Phillip Levine died yesterday. Here’s a stanza from his poem: Our Valley. Seemed apt to me.

“You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.”

Weather +Climate

Snowy Day

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Imbolc                                                                          Settling Moon II

This is more like what people have told us about the snows here. We must have had 8-10 inches already and it’s still snowing steadily. Jefferson County plows have already made several passes and it’s only 6:15 am.

Over the last week I contacted the Denver Post to get a newspaper tube for our morning paper. Why? Because I’ve chewed up two of them in the snowblower. This morning would have been the same. The carrier throws the paper on the driveway; it gets snowed on, then the plows come and the paper disappears. Tube went up on Sunday and I retrieved the first paper from it this morning. Handy.

The dogs prance and roll in the snow. Play, bounding up and out of it, like porpoises.

Annie leaves late this afternoon, wanting to get to a motel closer to the airport because of the snow. She and Kate visited one of the ten best quilt shops in the U.S. yesterday. Parker, Colorado. They plan to see the Golden Quilt museum today, weather permitting.

Colorado

Fire and a Book

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Imbolc                                                 Settling Moon II

Spent the afternoon in front of the first fire since we seasoned the refractory glass in December. It’s been too hot for a fire up til today. A winter storm outside, snow falling all afternoon, forecast to keep on until 8 pm tomorrow.

Reading a book on my kindle, following the flame. A slow time, peaceful, like the snow itself.

Holidays, Weather +Climate

Heart Shaped Weather

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Imbolc                                                                         Settling Moon II

Valentine’s Day will be warm here in Conifer, around 60. Andover is at -2 with a -28 windchill. A contrast.

A persistent ridge of high pressure has dominated the weather pattern here in the west while an equally persistent trough of low pressure has dominated the east. Minnesota has been in a colder than normal pattern as a result; we’ve been warmer.

As each warm spell arrives, it feels as if spring has arrived. Later, as will happen Sunday, the weather cools down again. Not cold, but markedly cooler. That’s when the snow comes. So far each recent snowfall has been followed by a warmup. And our south facing asphalt driveway responds by melting the snow, though I did have to blow it once this week after a 7 inch or so snowfall.

And that’s all the weather for now.

Colorado, Great Work, Minnesota, Myth and Story, Writing

Superior Wolf

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Imbolc                                                    Settling Moon II

Began filing today. Deciding how to organize files to support what comes next. And what does come next? Damned if I know. I’ll pass the post for the 68th time tomorrow and what is past is gone, all 67 years. That means tomorrow I start fresh. No entanglements, no regrets. Another day, the start of another year’s trip on spaceship earth.

While taking files out of the boxes used to transport them, mostly plastic rectangles with supports for hanging files, a sudden thought about a next project did come to me.

The file on the wolf hearings at the Minnesota State Legislature a few years back when de-listing the wolf (from the endangered species list) and the file on wolves as part of Minnesota’s eco-system were among the first ones I retrieved and placed in the horizontal file cabinet. They were fat with government documents, maps and material from a wolf course I took even further back at the Wolf Center in Ely. (where friend Mark Odegard’s exhibit still greets visitors)

These files, along with several books on wolves and Minnesota’s Northwoods, supported a project I’ve had in mind for a long time: Superior Wolf. Several chapters have been written, many rejected. But for some reason I could never find the right line to continue.

Superior Wolf. That’s one I really want to finish. Or, better, one I want to discover how to write. It occurred to me that the distance between those files, those early chapters and now the literal distance between me and the Minnesota Northwoods might help.

I’d like to get a novel going again and the Latin. I’m close on both counts, I think.

Once I get that filing done.