Tag Archives: Kate

Aging, Family, Friends, Health, Politics

The Day

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Mid-Summer                                                                 Waxing Honey Flow Moon

The card gods have failed to smile on me the last three months.  Paying me back for that lucky streak, teaching me–again–humility.  But.  Bill Schimdt, with brother Pat over his shoulder, won big tonight.  Congratulations to Bill and Pat.

Kate walked into the surgeon’s office with only a cane for assistance two weeks to the day after her surgery.  She moves well without the cane and will not need physical therapy.  Soon she will be walking free from hip pain for the first time in 15 to 20 years.  There are miracles and we don’t need the supernatural to explain them.  Skill, pluck and advancing knowledge, they’re enough.

Brother Mark spent the day slogging it out door to door in his search for a job.  This takes toughness and he admitted it took him some time to work up his nerve, but once he got into it, he applied several places and has a possible call back tomorrow.  Way to go Mark.

In reading the book, The Death of the Liberal Class, my fire for economic justice relit.  Those of who can must fight.  Socialism is not a bad word.  A capitalist economy that punishes the poor and siphons money from them to the rich has no moral standing.  We need to strike back against it.  Just how, what these times offer as alternatives, I don’t know.  But I intend to find out.

Art and Culture, Bees, Family, Garden, Great Work

Love Is Not Only For the Animal World

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Mid-Summer                                                           Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Kate’s put up ten jars of red currant jam and put together six honey supers.  She’s a great ally in estate management with her skills.  She keeps saying, “I’m surprised how much major surgery slows me down.”  Oh?

When I ate dinner at the Java yesterday, the waitress said, “That was quite a storm last night.”  “Yes,” I said, not remembering much.  “It blew a big tree down, right at my house.  It stopped less than a foot from my roof.”  “Wow.”  “Did you hire someone to cut it down?”  “Yes. I’m going to miss that tree.  It turned red in the fall.  I knew I should take it down.”

Love is not only for the animal world.

The MCAD class has moved into Graphic Design history with an emphasis on posters, especially in the 19th and early 20th century.  Some very striking pieces.

Garden

Pick and Plan Eating

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Mid-Summer                                                        Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Kate and I have decided on a pick and plan eating method.  That is, we’ll pick fresh vegetables, then build a meal around what we have.  I picked this morning, for example, green beans, beets, golden and bull’s blood, lettuce, dill, and 7 garlic bulbs.  We still have onions from an earlier harvest, so there’s the basics for our lunch or dinner tonight.  In addition Mark has picked hundreds, maybe thousands of currants and Kate spent yesterday starting the preservation work.  She’s test drying some, making jams and jellies.  We’re well into the first significant harvest period though we have had strawberries, lettuce, kale, spinach and onions already.

The tomatoes I started inside, which looked puny early in the season have grown tall and begun to bloom.  That means we’ll get heirloom tomatoes in addition to the two store bought plants.  Through integrated pest management I’ve beaten back the yucky scourge Colorado beetles on the potatoes .  Boy are they gross.  Little fat jabba the hut creatures until they get their wings. The leeks have begun to thicken, not much, but some.  The potatoes have blooms and that signals the beginning of tuber growth underground.  Lots of onions getting bigger, carrots, too.

Big-Stone Mini-Golf deserves its own entry and I’ll get to that either later today or tomorrow.

Aging, Family, Garden, Retirement

Changes Comin’

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Mid-Summer                                                            Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Mark and I transplanted hemerocallis (daylily) from the tiered gardens in the back to a front bed defined by a bur oak now in its 17th year and a Norway pine equally old.  What we’re 06-28-10_earlyliliesdoing is gradually filling in spots on our grounds that seem to always require weeding, maintenance with plants that are hardy, go it alone types.  The hemerocallis, like the hosta, receive scorn from landscape designers and permaculture folks, but like all God’s creatures, they too have a place.  And their place is to grow in those places you don’t want to have to worry or fuss about.  As we get older, we plan to retire more and more beds to this kind of planting, reducing the ongoing work until we have only some vegetables in a raised bed or two and the orchard.  The rest will be in asiatic lilies, hemerocallis, hosta, bugbane, grasses, ferns, bulbs like tulips and daffodils, monkshod and various shrubs.

We don’t want to nor do we need to get there all of a sudden.  We still love the bees, the vegetable garden, the orchard and the perennials, but realistically there will come a time when weeding, planting and transplanting will no longer be fun, but will turn into chores.  At that point we want to have grounds that correspond to our willingness and ability to care for them.

Kate’s retirement has brought up a lot of these questions.  We love her retirement and the success she’s shown in recovering from her recent, second, hip replacement.  That means a lot of things that were too painful in the past, like long car rides and train trips, may become more possible.   So, we’re not shuttling back into the shell until the end, just trying to be realistic about life’s changes that are ahead and inevitable.

Family, Politics

Capitol Camp Out

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Mid-Summer                                                                  Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Mark and I drove into St. Paul to help set-up the Capitol Camp-Out action on the lawn of the State Capitol.    We helped set up the sound system, then transferred to pitching tents, ones with which we had no prior experience.  That was fun.  How do these things work?  This cross piece bends and goes there.  Nope.  Over there.  Sigh.  To make things more challenging the tents could not have stakes, State Capitol grounds rules.  When Mark and I left, the area had begun to fill up already with tents.

After that we toured St. Paul, Rice Park, Irvine Park, Summit Avenue in particular.  Mark took over the wheel when we finished with Summit Avenue and drove us home, preparing himself for his driver’s license test.  He can’t do that until he gets a piece of paper from California confirming his previous license there some 20 + years ago.

Kate spent the morning entering contacts into her new IPad2.  She’s already learned how to play several games.  She has a definite solitaire jones, playing with care and precision, the same way she quilts.

Last night, still working out my new schedule, I spent an hour or so throwing out magazines.  Yes, I know.  I keep saving them for that mythical moment of return, which, I’m finally admitting, just never occurs.  Wired, Scientific American, Economist, Sierra Club, Philosophy Now, Dissent, Parabola, Orion.  I love magazines.  And don’t like to part with them.  Until now.

Bees, Family, Health

Bee Diary: July, 2011

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Mid-Summer                                                      Waxing Honey Flow Moon

All three colonies now have honey supers.  I put two on the parent colony for 2012 today after a full reversal of the three hive boxes.  The other two colonies now have four honey 640flying-bees-july-2011supers on over two hive boxes, the management practice for them will let them die off naturally at the end of the season.  I’m looking forward to a better honey harvest than last year, but we’ll see. It’s still early days.

Next year I’m going to move all new packages into hive boxes set out at the perimeter of the current location which will put them all in the sun while maintaining their protection from the wind.

So far this whole season I have had one sting, the result of working all three colonies a week ago with no gloves and only the veil.  These are friendly, or at least incurious, bees.

Shifting my workout back to the morning, where I had it for many years, has gotten the desired result, more consistency.  The downside is that I wander around in the afternoon and early evening ( like now) not knowing exactly what to do.  I’ll have to mend this somehow, and I will over time as I adjust to this new routine.

Kate and I went out today while I did the banking and picked up meds.  She stayed in the truck until we got to Applebees, her new favorite restaurant.  Not mine, but it’s not bad.  A little down market for my taste.  Having Kate out a week after her surgery is both amazing and pleasing.  She’s my sweetie and I like spending time with her.

Brother Mark has begun to get some job nibbles.  He got a haircut and beard trim today that cost him $28.  That seemed high to his Bangkok tuned financial sensitivities.

Aging, Family, Retirement

And, She’s Off…

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Mid-Summer                                                    Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Kate now moves short distances without her walker, without wincing.  Her color is great and her recovery seems, to me, faster than last time.  Just checked.  She walked without a walker about 5 days post-op last time, so she’s right on schedule.  She has always done surgery well, knows how to recover, how to push herself, when to rest.

I’m up a little slower today after a busy time since last Thursday when Kate went in for her surgery.  Decided to change my exercise routine (again) to one hour, but including time for resistance work, which I unwisely abandoned some time ago.  My back ouching means I need to get back at it.

Today is a garden, bee day, once I get exercise done.

Health, Humanities

More Art Than Science

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Mid-Summer                                                                              Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Gotta get back to those core exercises.  Back went ouch again today.  Sympathy for the Doctor?

Healing is much less science and much more art.  Most of us see medicine covered in the glittering wrap of science, tested hypotheses, proven procedures, well-understood drugs, but in fact the science is often in deep background during a patient-physician encounter; where the most important work, diagnoses, is done often without the patient’s awareness.  Diagnoses, taking a given person with a particular list of symptoms and identifying what’s actually causing a problem, begins a this/not that path that then includes various treatment protocols.

Will they work?  No certainty.  My former internist, Charlie Petersen, used to say, “We’re all  a bit of a black box inside.”  The difficulty faced by the physician is not only the variability in human bodies, but the inexact reporting of patients.  We often don’t know how to express ourselves to the doctor, aren’t always aware of what’s important and what’s not.  Ask anyone who thought that headache and funny vision would pass, then ended up in an ER getting treated for a stroke.

I experienced this dilemma with Kona.  She presented with a right front leg held gingerly and a real grimacing when it moved.  I checked her front leg, feeling up and down its length, pressing at each point to see if there was a sprain or a break.  Nothing.  I felt no scars, found no blood.  I wasn’t sure what had happened but could find nothing wrong.  I never looked up and under her right shoulder where the wound was obvious.  I took her lead, followed the symptom she presented.  Doctors, of course, look beyond the first symptoms we present, but if we don’t mention something, they’ll not know to check.

It occurred to me, given all this, that practicing medicine is an incredibly brave thing to do.  No one knows the limitations of western medicine more than physicians, yet they show up in exam rooms anyway, willing to use what they know to benefit the rest of us.  They work with us as knowledgeable experts, of course, but also as skilled listeners, both to our stories and our bodies.  The older I get the more respect I have for this, one of the oldest professions.

Aging, Dogs, Health

Medicine

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Mid-Summer                                              Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Kate showed up at the breakfast table this morning, the Zimmerman walker nearby.  Her friend TJ Zimmerman gave her this fancy cherry red walker before her last hip surgery.  It’s a speedy contraption, should have flames and streamers.  When I went upstairs a moment ago, she was at her computer, old habits at work.  I bought her an I-pad2, an early birthday present, and it’s right by her bed.

The last few days have had a lot of this and that, into the hospital and back again, Kona’s injury, groceries, gardening.  Now with Kate home at least all of them have a home-based locus.  Much easier.

Kate’s hospitalist called, delivering what he thought could be seriously bad news.  She has a nodule in her lungs.  But.  We had our anxiety over that one several years ago when we thought it might be cancer.  Nope.  Some kind of hardened mass.

Medicine much on our minds here right now.  Will be happy when it subsides to the background where it belongs.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Health

Bandaged

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Mid-Summer                                                                                 Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Picked Kate up at a very quiet Fairview-University.  She got into the truck cab under her own steam, stands on her new hip and walks short distances with the aid of the walker.  Her progress from last Friday amazes me.  She tires quickly, of course, but she’s already on the mend.

Now the fireworks.  Rigel, who hates thunder, doesn’t distinguish between thunder and fireworks.  She becomes agitated, barks.  No fun for her.  Or us.

I discovered a new sensation with Kona’s injury yesterday.  I put the bandage on, wrapped the coban around her thorax to hold the bandage in place, and the dog who had been snapping and biting, shrieking and limping, bounded up the stairs as if nothing was the matter at all.  Today, after Kate got home, I checked it for heat or tenderness, both signs of infection and it felt cool, plus she didn’t flinch.  Being able to help her move from a limping, snarling state to a normal carefree state in just a couple of minutes gave me a lot of satisfaction.  Made me realize what Kate feels in the urgent care.  It’s a rush and a pleasant one.

Gertie, who almost certainly bit Kona, is asleep at my feet, looking innocent.  In this instance my guess is that Kona snapped at Gertie and Gertie bit back.  Kona has become a bit crankier as she ages.  I don’t think this will be a long term problem.

It’s going to be a busy July.