Tag Archives: Mark

Family, Health, Humanities

A Day in the Life

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Mid-Summer                                                                                                   Waning Garlic Moon

“God has no religion.” – Mahatma Gandhi

If there is one, Gandhi has it right.

Another day of Latin.  This stuff, at least right now, is hard.  It requires holding several different ideas in the head all at one time, then juggling them to see how they all fit together.   Here are as many of those things as I can name:  word meanings in Latin and English (often multiple), noun declensions (usually multiple), verb conjugations, participle forms, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, clause types, infinitives, word order (often shuffled in poetry for metric purposes.  ovid is poetry.), flow of the narrative, many different grammatical rules and exceptions.  They float in the air like bubbles over a cartoon character’s head, as if, say, Dilbert couldn’t figure out what to say until he mixed and matched the diverse bubbles into a sensible sentence.

On the other hand, at times I’m able to do it, to switch the balls in mid-air and see the sequence fall into place, a sentence emerging from what James Joyce or William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion.”  Then, it’s sweet.

Took Mark down to the Anoka County Work Force center for a morning’s class on resumes.  He seems calmer now, less agitated.

Kate’s in pain because she has to go off all her non-steroidal anti-inflammatories for 5 days before her surgery.  This leaves her arthritic joints free to express themselves, especially in her hip, neck and hands.  This Thursday, S-Day, will find her with a second new hip, a procedure that should reduce her suffering quite a bit by relieving the hip pain and making her body mechanics better.  I’m glad she’s getting the new hip.

Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Friday

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Beltane                                                               Full Garlic Moon

Boy, the learning is slow on Latin.  I slogged through conditional counter-factual clauses and how to translate subjunctive verbs within them.  I’m still at the beginning of the Pentheus story but already we know what will happen to Pentheus, torn into a thousand bloody pieces by his mother and aunts, he will be scattered all over the place.  It’s worth waiting to get to the good part where he happens on his mother and her maenad friends.

Kate and I met with Mark over lunch.  He’s done a lot.  He attended a job seeking resource day on Wednesday and an interview tips day on Thursday.  He’s working now on getting info together about a driver’s license and Minnesota Care.  He’s made a lot of strides since he got here in early April.

Back in to the Convention center for another 4 hour shift at the Sierra Club booth.  Back home now.  Bushed.  Some TV, some reading, then bed.

Dogs, Family, Garden, Sport

Sollie Goes Home

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Beltane                                                                         Waxing Garlic Moon

Tomorrow I leave for Lincoln, Nebraska.  Sollie will head back to Denver with Jon.  Our goal here is to calm the dog situation down by getting rid of the extra dog and getting to work integrating Gertie into our pack.  She has a Jekyll and Dog personality; sweet and friendly, cuddly 90% of the time and all gnarly teeth and dog for 10%.  Trouble is, we can’t predict the 10%.  Outside humans seem to raise her hackles, at least sometimes, but there’s something between her and the other dog’s, too.  Our hope is that Sollie’s presence, a male among females, may have tipped the balance toward aggression in the doggy world for Gertie and that with him gone, she’ll calm down.  That may be wishful thinking.

Mark finished a first course of granite blocks for our firepit. Now I have to find a steel fire ring.  It’ll be nice to have a place for a fire just in time for summer.  No.  Kidding.  It’s nice to have it done and ready for fall.  Mark’s helped out a lot.  I’ve found it much easier to do my work here if I don’t have to do the heavy work on both ends of a project.  (This will be the Agni fire pit by Mark Ellis.)

I’m awake.  In addition to getting up at 10:40 I also had a 2 hour nap.  Staying out late is possible for me, but I have to have time to recover.

Watched the NBA finals with Mark tonight.  Two Hoosier boys watching the big guys play ball.  We didn’t have the sound on.  Basketball is the one sport I know well enough to watch without commentary.  I decided, early on, that I wanted to see Miami win, so tonight’s decision pleased me.  It was a game right down to the final 4.0 seconds.

Bees, Dogs

Bees and Dogs

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Beltane                                                        Waxing Garlic Moon

Bee check this morning.  Colony 1 is about a week ahead of 2 and 3 due to my late release of the queens in those two colonies.  None of them have brood in the top box, though there is 400_honey-extraction_0225new pollen stores and honey.  They’ve only had the top box on for a week, so I’m not expecting much until the next hive inspection.  If I don’t see brood then, well, I don’t know what.

All three colonies look healthy, plenty of bees and plenty of room.  These bees, too, are so gentle.  I can inspect the hives with just a veil, a long sleeved t-shirt and gardening gloves.  So much better for the heat.

Each colony still has stored honey in the frames I put into the top boxes, the first one less than the rest, but they still have some.  I may need to get some feeder pails and some syrup, just to be sure.

I feel more confident this year, more sure of what I’m doing and what I’m looking for when I do a hive inspection, but I’m still a long way from a  knowledgeable bee keeper.

Mark has started a second round of work on the fire pit, a project stalled three years ago by lagging energy on my part.  He squared off the walls, has cut landscape cloth to put behind the granite paving stones I bought from the guy on Round Lake Boulevard and also put landscape cloth on the botton of the fire pit and covered it with sand.

Gertie went outside this morning and wandered around the front yard.  She moved slowly, feeling the trauma today probably more so than yesterday as the vet’s pain killer subsided.  She’s still on two pain meds though, tramadol and rimadyl.  I think she’s gonna be fine.  We’ve seen battle wounds before.

As I went to sleep last night, I said to Kate, “Just like an episode of Combat Hospital.”

Art and Culture, Dogs, Humanities

Ripped Apart

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Beltane                                                                    Waxing Garlic Moon

Pentheus gets ripped apart by his mother and her fellow Bacchantes.  The Guthrie’s production of The Bacchantes by Euripides several years ago gave the story a telling I’ve never forgotten.  It gave me a jolt.  I’ve moved on from Diana and Actaeon in Ovid to Pentheus.  His story begins about 250 verses further on in Book III of the Metamorphosis.  I’m not far into it, only about 12 verses, but already Pentheus’ fate has been foreshadowed by the great seer, Teresias.

My tutor says I’ve learned to spot and translate the verbs, a key first move, but I still have trouble picking out the subjects of the sentences. That’s what I have to work on for next week.

(Pentheus and his mom.  Pompeii. Romersk ca. 70 e. Kr. (Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen)

Speaking of getting ripped apart, I came home from a lunch with Justin Fay, the Sierra Club’s lobbyist, to find Kate gone.  She had taken Gertie, our son and his wife’s dog, to the vet.  Yet another scrap broke out and this time Gertie ended up with seven spots that needed stitches.  The end result of this was, of course, a hefty vet bill and a hurried consultation between Denver and Andover over Gertie’s fate.

We resolved it this way.  Gertie has become a liability at Jon and Jen’s, growling at Gabe, 3 years old, nipping four neighbors and going after the postman, not to mention climbing the fence to get out.  So.  What to do?  I really like Gertie; she has a big personality, a bouncy vital way, but she is a mischief maker, a trickster.  Gertie will stay here with us and we’ll figure out how to manage our pack without any one getting hurt.  We’ve had to do it before when one of our Irish Wolfhound’s, Tully, decided that our Whippets were prey.

First step is to get Sollie back to Denver so we can reduce the number of dogs.  After that we’ll probably try letting Gertie and the big girls out again, hoping that the changed dynamics will have resolved.  If we have another spat, we’ll have to go to some management strategy, maybe a dog run outside, or having Gertie and one big dog at a time out.

We have Mark here now and Gertie will stay.  We’ve become a hostel.

Family, Garden

Andover Chain Saw Butchery (of a Cedar)

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Beltane                                                                      Full Last Frost Moon

Taking the local this morning meant cutting down the second cedar trunk and limbing it.  Mark worked very hard yesterday moving the downed and limbed trunks and branches in the front yard.  He went to bed early and slept hard.  Kate, too.  She weeded and weeded yesterday.  Her body mechanics have gotten better so her glutes tire instead of her back becoming painful.

This run of warm days will accelerate the growth in the garden.  The first planting of lettuce is recognizable now and the spinach almost so.  No potatoes coming through yet but they need a soil temperature of plus 50 degrees, so they’ve probably been tool cold.  Just hope they haven’t rotted.  The beans are up, the onions, carrots, beets and asparagus, too.  A lot of yard clearing work, weeding, maintenance chores have gotten done and will get done over the next few weeks.  Having Mark to help really moves things along.

Now I go see Leslie for our last visit, then a couple of Sierra club meetings in the evening.  The legislature has begun to wind down, but there’s a distinct  possibility that it is not all over.  Not quite yet.

Family, Great Work, Politics, Writing

The Great Lake

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Beltane                                                  Waxing Last Frost Moon

Have you ever had a love affair that ebbed and flowed like embers in a fire wavering between bursting into flame and dying out?  I have.  Today I visited that other lover in my life, Lake Superior.  A bookshelf full of books rest in a room not ten feet from here, each one of them related to Lake Superior in some way.  An entire file drawer of a vertical file drawer contains carefully organized files, each an eco-region in the area around Lake Superior and its watershed.  In another spot sit the maps, some USGS, some others representing the land around the Lake.  There are, too, files of notes from two circle route trips I took, each time stopping in various county historical societies:  Ontanogon, Marquette, Thunder Bay to pursue research about this phenomenon less than 2 and half  hours from my front door.

My brother Mark and I drove up there.  He wandered Park Point and hiked all the way up Lake Street to the top, turning then for a magnificent view of the lake.  While he discovered Duluth, I attended a conference on Sulfide Mining on the Mesabi Range.  This was a large group, 70 plus folks, gathered to hear experts discuss various aspects of sulfide mining’s impact on the waters of three watersheds and the communities of people, trees and wildlife that would share the land with this toxic producing form of mining.

It was one of those clear northern spring days.  The sun flashed off the lake, bouncing off the crests of waves made by lakers going in and out of the Duluth Harbor.  The temperature was cool by the lake, warmer up the slope of the hillside where St. Scholastica sits; it’s fortress like main building dominating the surrounding the area.

The drive was long and the stay short, a combination I try to avoid, though this is my second time recently.  The drive out to Lincoln, Nebraska to get the dogs was also a long drive, short stay, quick turn around.

Not sure where Lake Superior and I stand.  The old spark was there as we crested the hill and looked out over the St. Louis River toward Superior, Wisconsin and the lake spread out below us.  My research, though, sits unused, as it has for several years.  What’s the status of this relationship?  Not sure.

Art and Culture, Asia, Bees, Commentary on the news, Friends, Garden, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

A Garden, Some Latin, Ai Weiwei

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Beltane                                                     New Last Frost Moon

The potatoes are in the ground.  The lettuce has two leaves, as does the spinach, a few beets have emerged.  The leeks look a bit droopy, but they’ll pick up.  The garlic is well over 6 inches now as it makes the final push for harvest in late June, early July.  None of the carrots have germinated yet and most of the beets have not either. The onion sets we planted havecropped-free-ai-weiwei mostly begun to show green.  The bees show up now around the property, working as we do, tending the plants in their own, intimate way.  The gooseberries we transplanted look very healthy.  The daffodils are a carpet of yellow and white.  A few scylla out front brighten up the walk with their blue.

Most of today went into Diana and Actaeon.  I’m down to verse 227, the finish line is 250.  I’m close and moving faster now than I was.  One of the things I’ve learned is that doing this at a pace which would allow you to complete a project in a reasonable time frame would require real skill.  I’m a hobby Ovidist, to be a Latin scholar would take decades.  Who knows though?  I might make it.  When I finish this first tale in the Metamorphosis, I’m going to have some kind of celebration.

Buddy Mark Odegard has come up with three remarkable designs for a Free Ai Weiwei t-shirt.   Here’s an example and the one most seem to prefer:

Bees, Garden, Writing

Gooseberries and Bees

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Spring                                                                                 Waning Bee Hiving Moon

Yet more work on Missing this morning.  Still at play in the Winter Forest, up in the Dark Range, around the shores of Lake Arcas and on the waters of the Winter Sea.  It is so difficult 640cranes-photographto know what the quality is of your own work.  Very difficult.  Some say impossible.  May well be.  This one feels, however, like the best work I’ve done to date.  But, hey, that’s just the author speaking.  What does he know anyhow?

(photograph by Tom Crane)

This afternoon Mark and I transplanted four gooseberry from their shade sheltered residence along the west facing side of our hour to an east and south facing slope in the third tier of our perennial beds.  As we worked digging the holes to receive the shrubs, then digging the gooseberry plants prior to placing them in their new homes, bees buzzed around the deck, drawn, I imagine, by the residue of last year’s honey extraction.  Now long over as far as we know, last August, fall rains have pounded the deck.  Snow has piled up it over two feet high and that has washed away with spring rains, yet the delicate sensory apparatus of the honeybee knows that something was done here, something relating to honey.  Perhaps bees have their own CSI crews.

Cinema and Television, Family, Great Work, Politics, Writing

In A World Far Away

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Spring                                                                   Waning Bee Hiving Moon

Spent the day in the world I’ve created, Tailte, a sister world to earth, but separated by several thousand light years.  It’s strange to spend time there, a place that exists only in my mind, yet populated with people, creatures, landscapes, mountain ranges, oceans, islands, gods and goddesses.  Strange, but in a good way.  It’s one of the joys I experience in writing fiction.  It takes me to a place I can’t reach in any other aspect of my life.

I’m still typing in work I did at Blue Cloud Monastery though I’ve also advanced the word count by a few thousand words.  Plugging away.  Just have to keep at it.

We only have a month left to go in the 2011 session of the 2011-2012 legislature.  The number of bad bills, outrageous legislation and outright strange bills (like cutting down walnut trees in State Parks to save the State Parks continues to pile up as the party out of legislative power for years flexes its muscle.  The callous disregard for the future of our rivers and streams, lakes and forests, wildlife and prairie’s just doesn’t make sense to me.  I don’t understand the political calculus that trades temporary economic gain for permanent disfigurement and toxification of wetlands, cutting down old growth forests, polluting the Minnesota, the Mississippi and wetlands around and possibly within the BWCA.

Mark and I watched Salt, an Angelina Jolie spy flick.  Not bad, not great, but entertaining even with the cliches.  We also started watching a three part made for tv movie called Archangel.  It was good; we’re about half way through.