Dogs

Interesting Stuff

Leave a comment

Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

The intrepid opossum hunters have not touched their morning meal, nor have they come back to the house.  This work commands their full and undivided barking, yipping, tail wagging and sniffing.  You gotta admire persistence.  Or, maybe not.  It’s pretty damned hot right now.

Fleet Farm has aisles full of interesting stuff.  One aisle for example had, according to the sign, earth augurs and come-alongs.  Who could resist?  I did buy a come-along.  I mean, who wouldn’t?

You could also buy horse treats, horse bedding, a $1,300 leather saddle (it was nice, with great tooling), feeding bowls to hang on the fence, blenders, shotguns and handguns, red licorice, a cultivator and several styles of wagons.  I got outta there with the following:  an umbrella for the patio, a green outdoor carpet, an outdoor fireplace, two heavy rubber buckets, black, and a small one, pink (for Ruth) and the come-along.

Not bad considering everything else they have.  In fact, only the come-along was not on my list.

Dogs

Vega and Rigel At Work. Again.

Leave a comment

Summer                                  Waning Strawberry Moon

Off to Fleet Farm this morning.  But not before I pass on another Vega and Rigel adventure.

Nope, neither of them escaped.  They were out much of the night, Kate letting them in and out.  When I got up at 7:15 or so to feed the dogs, I let them out as usual, then went downstairs for the whippets.  The whippets ran flat out upstairs, barking, as they always do.  However, when they went outside the big dogs were no where to be seen.

They normally hang around a little bit.

After feeding the whippets and putting out the food for the big dogs, they still weren’t back from what ever had captured their attention, but they were barking.  A lot.07-10-10_hole-under-dead-tree

After I finished my ramen, I set out to discover what was up.  I worried that they were barking at the labs of the surgeon who lives diagonally across the street from us.  His dogs come up to his property line and stop at the invisible fence.  These kind of events incite Rigel to burrow under the fence and go investigate.

Nope, not on the north facing fence.  I still heard them, so I walked the eastern fence line.  Still no dogs.  I turned right at the southern edge of our fencing and headed west.  Oh, I thought.  They’re barking at some dog that’s loose back here.  Nope.  When I got to where I had heard them, they were not at the fence at all, but back a ways in the woods.

Vega has a tendency to lie down and bark, so I thought she may have taken advantage of the cover, laid down and decided to enjoy herself in secrecy.  Nope, not that either.

When I pushed aside the undergrowth and got to the place where it was all happening, I saw a hole in the ground that looked like a fox hole–no, not that kind, the military kind–earth mounded up around a hole.  Vega and Rigel had dug a very large hole under a hollowed out fallen tree.  Rigel was in the hole, her butt up in the air, her nose up in the inside the hollowed tree and barking.  They have something up there.07-10-10_vega-in-the-hole

I was still in my pajamas so I didn’t investigate.  It could be a skunk, a raccoon, a cat, maybe even a groundhog.  Don’t know.  But the coon-hound in these dogs surfaced this morning.

OK.  So I went out with shoes and pants on, camera in hand to record this historic doggy moment.  The first photograph shows the hole with the dogs circling, waiting to see what I would do.  “Maybe he can get it.”  Pant, pant. “Maybe he can get it.  Come on, Dad!”

Shortly after Vega realized I was going to be of no help, she slid back down in the hole, seeing if more loud barking would coax whatever it was outside where she could eat it.  Surprisingly, nothing happened.

Well, Dad couldn’t bend over enough to check inside the tree, but he did have a camera that could.  So, I took this picture, which if I see it right is a shot of a baby opossum.  I know we have opossums because I posted pictures of one that came around the Winter Solstice two years ago.  07-10-10_yum

This shot is with the camera stuck up inside the tree from below.  Well, I just looked at pictures of several babies:  opossums, raccoons, woodchucks and gophers (all critters I know sharing this land with us.).  None of them look like this.  Maybe that’s the snout of a mother opossum?  Or the snout of a maturing young opossum?

I just massaged the photo a bit more.  This is a young opossum staring out from the hollow tree.  The two black spots on either side of the face are eyes, the pink is nose and, oh well, I just enhanced it and here is what I saw.

07-10-10_aha

Aging, Garden, Humanities

S…L…O…W

Leave a 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.

Minnesota

A Blank Spot on the Map?

Leave a comment

Summer                                           Waning Strawberry Moon

I found this on the Minnesota Conservation website.  It is the last of five questions asked of John Camp, aka, John Sandford.  It’s hard for me to get a grasp of what people think of Minnesota since I imagine, and I think Sandford confirms, people often don’t realize we exist.

When you travel to promote books, what do people ask you or tell you (if anything) about their perceptions of Minnesota, its climate, and/or its natural resources?

Mostly people ask why I live there, when it’s so cold. The perception of Minnesota involves climate and a kind of backwoods fishing culture. There’s also a perception that we have good cultural facilities, probably because of the constant banging of the drum for the Guthrie. But that’s about it.

When I talk about it, people are really curious about why anyone would choose to live there. I tell them that we live much better than the average person in California or New York City — that we have much nicer houses for the prices we pay, etc., but they really don’t pay much attention. I’ve told them that I live in a house that if it had the same conditions (size, view, water, dock) would cost $10 million in California, but I bought it for about $400,000…but they really sort of don’t believe it. For a lot of them, I think, the Upper Midwest is a kind of blank spot on the map.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Memories, Myth and Story

An Entrance to Faery

Leave a comment

Summer                              Waning Strawberry Moon

My cards were good.  I won some hands.  But.  Boy, did I screw up when I took a chance on a hand where winning would have offered double points, but losing, as I did, with below a minimum, quadrupled the penalty.  Ouch!  Sigh.

The night was glorious.  A warm summer night, a clear sky, the kind of night when everyone is a child, just waiting for the other kids to come out, to play one last game, perhaps wave a sprinkler around or sit down and talk.

A night much like the one I experienced in New Harmony, Indiana when I walked down a lane past the only open air Episcopalian church in the country, designed by Phillip Johnson.  This astonishing church is on one side of a lane that runs back into a woods.  Just across the lane, behind a wonderful small restaurant, The Red Geranium, is a grove of conifers planted on small drumlins.  Inside a modest maze created by these trees lies, improbably, the grave of one of the 20th centuries finest theologians, Paul Tillich.

It was just after dusk, night had come softly, but definitely.  The lane only ran for no more than half-mile on past the church and Tillich’s grave.  As I wandered back, moving away from the main street and toward the woods that lay at the end of the lane, I began to notice the fireflies.

Right where the lane met the woods, fireflies congregated, blinking off and on, creating an arc of bioluminescence.  Then others began to blink, further back in the woods.  There were thousands of them and as the ones further in began to blink they created the effect of a tunnel of light, blinking on and off.

(this pic is similar, not the night I describe)

Walking toward this between two holy places, the possibility that this was an opening to faerie seemed very plausible, even likely.

I stood there for over a half an hour, neither entering the woods, nor leaving the lane, captured as I was by the sense of a veil between the worlds opened where I was.

Asia, Humanities, Literature, World History

Still Reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms

1 Comment

Summer                                              Waning Strawberry Moon

“if your vision is for a year, plant wheat. If your vision is for ten years, plant trees. If your vision is for a lifetime, plant people.”- Chinese Proverb

Ever have days that just happen, disappear with little trace?  The last couple have been like that for me.  The ear, the fuzz from the infection and a slow take on things.  That’s the extent of it.

I’m now in the last quarter of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  I’ve been at it since sometime early June, late May.  Now, I’ve been a little slow, I admit, but it is 2,340 pages long in print.  I’m reading it on the Kindle.  It carries a slow, but steady course in Chinese logic, especially as related to war and politics, Confucian and Taoist influences on Chinese culture in general and the courts and military in particular and a careful rendering of the demise of one of Empire, the Han.  The Han Empire, the Tang, the Song and the Ming have pride of place as golden ages of the Chinese people.

(this is the entry way to the tomb of Cao Cao, the arch villain of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Chinese archaeologists discovered it last year and opened it on Chinese television last month.  this stuff is still very relevant.)

It’s interesting to consider that the Chinese have not one golden age, but four when culture flourished and the nation was at peace.  I don’t know the whole well enough to say for sure, but one of the long lasting appeals of this 14th century (Song dynasty) novel may be the dissolution of the first of those.

My interest in China will never be more than that of a journeyman’s, perhaps no more than an  apprentice, but it fascinates me.  Part of that fascination is imagining what it would be like to live in a culture with that much depth, where a person in Shanghai today could read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and recognize not only names, but the culture of this ancient past.

In one view those of in the United States can look only as far back as 1776, in another 1602.  If we stretch our gaze back further, we can cross into European history and follow it back into the world of ancient Rome and further back yet, ancient Greece, but there, for the most part, it stops.  Yes, you can argue the history of the Jews and the Egyptians are also our history and they are in terms of influences intellectual and artistic, but I don’t have a personal bond even with the ancient Greeks.

The closest I can get in experience to that of the contemporary Chinese is to follow my Celtic line back into the mists of Celtic myth and legend.

Anyhow, it’s been an interesting read and I’ll be sorry when I’m finished.  Not sorry enough, however, to pick up another Chinese classic for a few months.

Art and Culture

To the City and Back Again

Leave a comment

Summer                                      Waning Strawberry Moon

Back from the museum.  A quiet Thursday.  The women from Salem Covenant said they found the tour interesting.  We didn’t get to all the Chinese material because I took too long on the Matteo Ricci.  There is   so much to talk about.

It was nice to get back to the museum after a hiatus.

Still feeling a little punk so I’m off for a nap.

Art and Culture, Bees

From Bee Hives to Art Galleries

Leave a comment

Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

Today I’m back to the world of art.  The bees will work on now until next week without me.  Probably what they prefer.

A tour today on my new tour day, Thursday.  I have a group from Salem Covenant Church.  They wanted to see the Matteo Ricci map and the Old Testament prints.  Based on that I decided to take them on a tour of art at the time of Matteo Ricci and the late Ming dynasty.

We will see a Ming dynasty painting, Towering Mountains and Fantastic Waterfalls, the Wu family reception hall and then move upstairs to the Old Testament prints.  We’ll finish with Morales’ Man of Sorrows and Honthorst’s Denial of St. Peter.  The late Ming dynasty coincided with the Counter-Reformation and Reformation era in Europe.

Later on, Sheepshead.

Oh.  My ear.  Much better this am.  Thanks.

Bees, Health

Strummed

Leave a comment

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.