• Tag Archives Latin

  • The Day After

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                                Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    The grandkids went to see Hermann the German in New Ulm, then dropped to Le Mars, Iowa, the home of Blue Bunny Ice Cream and the National Museum of Ice Cream.  Sounds good right now.  Their parents plan, bravely, to camp out in Nebraska.  I would not be surprised if they decided to go ahead and spring for a motel room.

    Finished translating my sentences from English to Latin.  I’m a bit rusty.  I can tell this will have to be an every week thing as long as I want to get better.  I suppose there may come a time in the distant future when I may have it embedded somewhere, but that day seems a long way off right now.

    Lack of sleep and general grandchildren induced exhaustion made me feel a little down, but two naps today seem to have perked me up.

    On the morrow I return to the bee hives, have my phone meeting with Greg the Latin tutor and begin prepping for the invasion of the Mammoth herd here at Artemis Hives.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Bees Family Humanities Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • S…L…O…W

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                       Waning Strawberry moon

    Engine turning at low  rpm’s.  Latin today and my tutor.  Greg (tutor) thinks I’ve gotten past the barrier I experienced before he took for Portugal.  Getting back up to speed after a two-week lull was not so easy, the mental machinery does not spin up for action quite as quickly as it used to.  So, I’ve got to stay at it to get it.  The new way.  Life changes our learning pace and perhaps our style, but it doesn’t diminish our capacity–or so I’ve read.  It’s also my experience.

    Ear infection taking attention my body might otherwise devote to the fact that the grandkids are coming either tomorrow or Sunday.   We’re ready.  Sort of.

    The garden will get some attention tomorrow after I buy an umbrella, umbrella stand and a new firepit for the brick patio.  Field trip to Fleetfarm.  I love Fleetfarm.  It’s one of those crazy places you probably don’t know about unless you use the stuff they sell: electric fencing, watering troughs, ivormectin.  Lot of fun.

    Well, it may go slow, but I’m gonna get on the treadmill.  Now.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Garden Humanities 📎and tagged

  • I’ll Be Glad When She’s Home.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                     Waning Strawberry Moon

    Tomorrow hive inspections, then into see Kate.  The original plan was for her to come home on Saturday.  I hope that  holds up.

    Having her away, yet close, seems almost more distance than when she was in San Francisco.

    We have a lovely summer night, warm but not hot, a clear sky, the drinking gourd poised in its summer position, the bowl headed north and the pointer stars, as they always do, showing the way to Polaris.

    I finished my review of my Latin, mechanically locating the verb, the subject and the object in each of the sententiae antiquae I had translated in the last three chapters.  Greg’s right, this approach makes grabbing ahold of the sentence’s intent much easier.  That’s why he’s the tutor.  I’m going to go ahead and finish chapter 20, which will put me half-way through Wheelock.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Catching Up

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer’s Eve                                  Waxing Strawberry Moon

    More weeding along the fenceline.  It feels like I’ve beaten back both the weeds and revealed the now minimal amount of repair still required to bring the vegetable garden area back to where it began last fall.  I planted another round of beans, doing so at weekly intervals.  Took some photographs.  A full morning.

    Having put on sunscreen first today I don’t have that slightly queasy feel I got yesterday.  Us Celts have a delicate situation when it comes to sun.  We have fair skin and burn easily.  Might be why I’ve never liked the beach.

    Kate planted coleus and marigolds, did some weeding and put in some annual grasses.  All of this work is a little behind for us, but we’ve begun to catch up in the last few days.  I believe we’ll be on top of it by the end of the week.

    Greg, my Latin tutor, is in Portugal the next two weeks with his sweetheart, so the Latin will slow down.  We decided I needed to go back over the last two chapter’s sententia antiquae, ancient sentences, and work them carefully.  If I have time, I’ll go on to Chapter 20 which is, in fact, halfway through Wheelock’s 40 chapters.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Garden Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Minnesota: Where We Are

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                   Waxing Strawberry Moon

    Had another bowl of strawberries fresh from the patch, grown under the Strawberry Moon.  There’s something special about food that comes from your own land, nurtured by your own hands, a something special beyond the nutritional and taste benefits.  It relates to be who you are because of where you are.  We’re a Seven Oaks family and you can’t be a Seven Oaks family if you live in Ohio.

    I had another frisson of this yesterday when I sat in the Minnesota Environmental Partnership offices and looked across the conference table to a black and white photograph of a boundary waters lake.  Since I shifted my political work to the environmental and away from the economic four years ago, I have sat in meeting after meeting (the unglamorous fact of political life) dedicated to making this state’s overall environment better in some way.  Seeing that photograph as we discussed initiatives for energy in Minnesota, the context for our work snapped into place.

    We’re talking about our home, this place, the place where we are who we are because we are here.  You could say a gestalt of the work gelled.

    Been a little down since yesterday’s stop by the policeman.  It embarrasses me, as it is supposed to do, and calls the rest of my life into question, which it is not.  Then, my Latin tutoring session today found me floundering, wondering where my mind had been when the rest of me engaged this week’s translation from English to Latin.  Mix it up with the fact that I missed my nap yesterday and my exercise.  Result:  glum. In spite of the sun.

    So. Exercise now.  It always makes me feel better.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Work Minnesota Politics 📎and tagged

  • A Pruning Dervish

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                            New Moon (Hungry Ghost)

    Kate became a pruning dervish this morning, clearing a pathway to our front door, giving the draping yew apruned-old-salvia hair-cut and generally wrecking havoc with weeds and overgrown shrubs.  Yeah.  Now I’m moving the detritus to a resting place where the grape vines, columbine and raspberries will grow over it and make it a productive part of our property instead of a house-hider.

    I have gotten through the perfect passive system for all verbs, interrogative pronouns, interrogative adjectives and a new  vocabulary.  Later on we’re going to skype with the kids and the grandkids.  How Sunday’s going around here.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Garden Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Globe Circling Teens

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                          New Moon (Hungry Ghost)

    A Latin day except for periods outside.  I’ve found doing the chapter of Wheelock that’s next up on Sunday, at least most of it, lets me finish the chapter on Monday or at the latest Tuesday morning.  That gives me Tuesday and Wednesday to work on Ovid.  My tutor says I have to be very mechanical at this point, hunt for the subject, object, verb first.  I have a tendency to get lost looking for meaning in all the wrong places.  Just like life.

    Abby Sunderland, the 16 year old girl who would circle the globe, had her main mast broken in nasty weather.  The South Indian ocean, which gets a lot of its weather from the interaction of the cold Antarctic air with the warmer air from the tropics has a nasty reputation among sailors.  Jessica Watson, the 16 year girl who did circle the world, passed through the Southern Indian Ocean about a month ago and she had rough weather there, too.

    To say that 16 year olds should not be allowed to do this kind of thing is stupid.  Perhaps most 16 year olds, or nearly all 16 year olds, but you have to leave open the option for the prodigy or the merely very competent.  Jessica Watson makes the case.  So does Abby Sunderland.  Having a mast broken would put a stop to any sailor, no matter their level of experience.  Abby did not die.  She had emergency gear and plans.  They all worked.

    Might there be a tragedy someday?  Yes, I imagine there will.  Probably already has been.  Alexander the Great was 20 when he set out to conquer the known world.  33 when he died.  How many of today’s risk averse adults would allow their children to set out, even at 20, to conquer the world?  I thought so.

    My point is that teen agers are individuals, not cookie-cutter imitations of each other.  Over much of history teen agers had the bulk of the babies, fought the wars and were even leaders of their families and communities.  Our complex cultural environment now trends toward longer and longer periods of pre-adulthood, an article in the paper today said many Gen-Xers and Millenials will not marry, have kids or get started in their careers until they are in their late 20’s or early 30’s.

    It does not change the fact that some teen agers–you know who you are–have the capacity to handle individual efforts beyond even most adults.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Bees, Latin and Learning

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

    A sleepy, rainy day.  After a very busy Monday, I settled into the Latin and finished off chapter 18 in Wheelock.  It took most of the day with a couple of instances (well, maybe more than a couple) of head scratching and paging back and forth to find out what I was not understanding.

    Kate and I have settled into our familiar and comfortable routines.  She went out today to have her nails done while I labored in the scriptorium.

    Tonight is the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association meeting at Borlaug Hall.  I feel both mildly competent and wildly confused with both the beekeeping and the Latin.  I’ve now overwintered a package of bees, made a divide into parent and child colonies and hived a package of bees by myself.  The smoker stays lit for the duration of my work in the bee yard and I have not repeated my various stings event.

    Yet.  When I pulled the frames from the parent colony and moved one to the package colony and one to the divide, I felt very unsure of what I had done.  Still am.  I look at the frames and I can tell the pollen filled cells from the honey filled cells.  I know what larvae look like and I can identify a drone cell and its unique domed structure.  Queen or swarm cells are also apparent to me.  Even so, I cannot tell healthy frames from troubled ones.

    I get addled about what I’m doing because of the bees buzzing around and forget what I’ve done like I did yesterday with the reverse of the parent colony.  I have no clue about what to do with the honey the bees are making, I’m just imagining that I’ll learn about that in time to do it.

    In the Latin I miss obvious things and pick up on some obscure ones like word meanings, verb forms and case endings for nouns and adjectives.  I have two index cards filled with words, mostly adverbs and conjunctions, that I can’t remember.   I puzzle over a translation, no luck, no luck, no luck, then a bright light.  Ah ha.

    Learning has this daunting vulnerability to it.  Without placing yourself in a situation where you don’t know what you’re your doing, you cannot learn.  It keeps a guy humble that’s for sure.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Bees Family Humanities 📎and tagged

  • 1:1-20

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                            Full Planting Moon

    This morning I had scheduled for Ovid.  I’m down to verse 20 of the first book, about 14,980 verses to go.  I’ve not checked 10-20 with my tutor, so my translations are tentative until tomorrow.  Still, I made sense of the Latin in a way that seems right.

    Now, my cold and I are going to bed.  See if we can sleep this miserable rhino virus into the afterlife.


    📂This entry was posted in Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Staying Inside

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                        Waxing Planting Moon

    Heat exhaustion put an end to my outside work today, so I came in and did Latin.  I’m done with ch. 16 in Wheelock, so I can move on to Ovid.

    Kate got her nails done, did some laundry and has organized her packing.  We’ll leave around 9 for the airport.  After I drop  her off, it’s over to the MIA for a lecture on Japanese Samurai Armor and lunch with the docent discussion group folks.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Family Humanities Travel 📎and tagged