Asia, Garden, Health, Humanities

Better…And Not

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Beltane                                   Waning Planting Moon

I’m still deep in the The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, following the exploits of Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei among many, many others.  Still not a third of the way done with it.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll do more weeding. Weeding and pruning.  Those are the main tasks at this point in the gardening year.  That and finding some weedless straw for mulch.  It’s hard to find.

A week and a half past my colds onset I feel pretty good, back to normal with the exception of  remaining sludge.  I feel like an engine in need of an oil change.  I even went back to the ramped up work outs  today and had no repeat of the dizziness and nausea I experience a couple of weeks ago, the last time I did this workout at the new pace.

Feeling a bit of a let down, not sure why.  Maybe it’s just the push, push of garden, Latin, dogs, food or, more likely, it’s just a cycling through of a bit of melancholy.  Whatever it is sleep will help.

Dogs

Emma Elopes

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Beltane                                  Waning Planting Moon

Emma took off on a tour of the neighborhood.  Our housekeeper Lois opened the front door and Emma slipped out, using her fourteen years of observing human behavior, not speed, as her ally.  By the time I got to the front after Lois alerted me, Emma could not be seen.  I hollered a bit, mostly fruitless since Emma hears about as well as most nearing the end of their natural life.

I felt sure she would return on her own, but hearing Kate asking me if I did everything I could, I got in the car and drove around the neighborhood (which, by the way, uses the term very loosely).  No Em.

Came back home, made myself some noodles, came downstairs to get ready for Latin.  Halfway through the noodles Emma sauntered by garden patio doors.  Knew she would.

Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Compelling Writing?

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Beltane                                      Waning Planting Moon

Each morning I get up, let the dogs out, open the garage door, wander down the driveway, pick up the newspaper, open it and read the front page on the way back, make breakfast, read and finish the paper (a geezer thing to do if I read the cultural tea leaves aright), the come downstairs.  When I get downstairs, no matter what else I have planned, I end up here, writing in this blog.

(medieval blogging)

I read a quote from Carl Jung the other day which said that any addiction, no matter what it is, is bad.  As much as I admire Jung, I had to wonder.  Perhaps the question is where does habit begin to bleed over into  compulsion?  My exercise habit, strong enough now that I feel a push to do it rather than not, is that an addiction?  Writing here in the morning, is this habit compelling me?

My TV watching in the evenings comes very close to addiction, perhaps presses over the line.  In the Monty Python skit the comfy chair, a member of the spanish inquisition uses a comfortable chair with which to torture the suspected heretic.  “Seet here,  you scuum.”  My repose in my own comfy chair, literally, and in the pillowy bosom of broadcast television, occurs at my own doing, yet has a culturally activated and market reinforced quality, too.

The other two?  Not so much.  I say this, Mr. Jung, from the vantage point of a former smoker and a recovering alcoholic now 34+ years sober.

OK.  I can go now.

Weather +Climate

Cooler, But Dry

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Beltane                                           Waning Planting Moon

Ah.  Those of us who prefer the northern to the southern breathed a sigh of relief today as the weather pattern changed and the jet stream bowed to the south.  A dew point of 47 feels pretty good, too.

No one finds drought as interesting as tornadoes and hurricanes and snow, but nothing impacts those of us who garden and care about our landscape as personally as drought does.  The yellow on this US Drought Monitor Map covers all or almost all of Anoka County.

The state climatologist says:  “Portions of east central Minnesota are…depicted as experiencing Moderate drought. This is the result of long-term dryness that began in June of 2008. This long-term precipitation anomaly is responsible for very low water levels in larger lakes and wetland complexes across portions of Anoka, Ramsey, Chisago, and Washington counties.”

A large portion of the Arrowhead has extreme drought conditions.  In fact, streams up there are at the 5th percentile for drainage into Lake Superior for this date.  That’s low water.  Superior is six inches below last year and well below historic levels.

My vegetables have required some extra irrigation to keep them on schedule and able to endure the heat.

Dogs, Health

Off to the Warehouse

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Beltane                              Waning Planting Moon

A trip to the warehouse for the temple of Mammon, Costco.  Dogfood, dog treats and propel for Kate.  Escaped without extra items or involuntary confinement.vegarigel400

Felt great yesterday, today not so much.  That they left the shredded paper insulation behind in my sinuses feeling.  Anticipating thunderstorms this afternoon and a cool down tomorrow, I’m going to work inside today, outside the rest of the week.

Bees

Bee Diary: Memorial Day, 2010

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Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

Hive inspections today.  A rhythm to the process has begun to set in, not jelled quite yet, but getting there.  In the honey house, the converted machine shed where we parked our various internal combustion contraptions, off come the hat, the gloves, sweatshirt.  Pick up the smoker, toss two handfuls of hamster bedding in it and light.05-31-10_beeyard Open the package of dense cotton clumps, tear off a piece or two and shove them into the  side of the smoker, being careful to keep the flame going.  Pick out a square of cut-up cotton cloth and set it on fire next to the dense cotton, hit the bellows a couple of times to make sure the thing gets stoked.

(bee yard)

Put on the bee suit, being careful to tighten the velcro around the wrists.  At this point it would also make sense to tuck my pants into my socks, but it seems I still require the sight of a bee on the ground.  Then I do it.

Pick up the hive tool and stick it in my back pocket, close and pick up the smoker and head out to the package colony, #3.  I do them in the order of orneriness.  The package bees are very calm, the divided colony less so and the parent colony, #1, can be downright aggressive.  This way I leave fewer excited bees in the air as I get closest to the end.

After a little smoke under the copper top on #3 and dash at the entrance, I lift the copper top off and put it standing up against a baby oak tree nurtured by Jon.  This reveals the empty hive body that protects the syrup bucket positioned upside down over the opening in the hive box cover.  Today it was not significantly down so I left it alone after removing it.  A little more smoke and the hive box cover comes off, the frames and foundations of this new colony now are visible.  Being careful to keep the frames over the hive box (in case the queen is on the frame and should fall off she’ll land back in the hive), I look at it with the sun to my back, then flip it over and do the same with the other side. I find larvae, so we’re still queen right and work has proceeded on several frames, but  there’re no where near the 80% needed to add another hive box.     (colony 3)

05-31-10_colony3

This colony had eaten through the pollen patty I provided, so I had to interrupt my visit with a trip inside, down in the basement to get a pollen patty from the small refrigerator we have down stairs.  Made me think it might be nice to have a small fridge in the honey house.  I could keep pollen patties in there along with water and Sharps.

Looking at the bees at work, once you get over your fear of getting stung, counts as one of the pleasures of bee-keeping at a hobby level, so I indulge myself.  Nursery bees go head first into comb to clean it out, or add more height, do something hygienic for a larvae.  Worker bees are adding pollen to combs and honey, too, creating a food supply around the colony’s nursery, ensuring food for the long haul. Close it up and move on to

#2 has a lot more bees.  With its copper top off the hive box cover has a solid mass of bees.  The new hive box, on top of the divided box with the new, marked queen, has a number of frames with drawn out comb, but several are still empty.  This means the colony has plenty of room and I see no swarm cells on the top box.  Should I reverse them?  I couldn’t remember.  I don’t, figuring that the crowded bees are in the divided box and the more roomy box is on top.  Since the queen tends to move up, it makes more sense to me to leave this hive in the status quo.  Everything gets put back together in the reverse order from which it was removed.

Colony #3, the package Mark and I hived last April in his surplus equipment he loaned me to get started, is mature.  It has a year plus old queen still in her peak fertility years, a full contingent of workers, two hive boxes with drawn out comb, larvae and plenty of food for the colony.  From a honey production perspective this is the point of the whole process.  As I lift the outside hive cover, metal topped to protect the colony from the elements, there are not as many bees here as there were in #2.  That makes sense because the hive cover here is over a honey super, not directly over a hive box.

Just by looking I can see the honeycomb drawn out on almost all of the 10 frames in the honey super.  This is exciting.  When I lift this honey super off, it’s heavy.  Heavy05-31-10_filledhoneysuper with honey.  More smoke.  The second honey super does not have as much honey because they had to draw out comb for it, but there is still a substantial amount, maybe half of the frame sides.  It comes off, lighter than the top one.

Below the honey super is the queen excluder.  It has bees all over it and experienced bee keepers assure that many times the queen, just out of contrariness, will be on the underside.  So, I’m careful to lift the excluder over the hive.  I look for the queen but cannot see her.  She could have been right in front of me and I’m not sure I would have known.  She’s longer, that’s the most obvious difference.

(a full frame of honey)

Today colony 3 seems calmer.  Maybe it’s me, getting more acquainted with the work.  I can’t tell.  These two hive boxes are full of bees.  The U says to reverse them every 7-10 days, so I’m reversing them.  What do I know at this point?  Both the hive boxes are heavy two with stored honey, larvae and bees.  Since I’m not turning pink and sweat is not blinding me as I make every move, I’m slower, use my legs.  Not a problem.  After reversing them and checking for swarm cells (maybe, but there’s not much I can do at this point except put on more honey supers which I have with me.), I put the honey supers back, starting with a new pair just constructed by Kate and beautiful to see.  This means I have chosen, not sure why, to put the heaviest box on top.  This could get unwieldy pretty fast. (see picture)  The hive box cover goes on over the top honey super, the metal covered top and another hive inspection is in the books.

Hilo, who lay at the edge of the bee yard as I worked, and I go back to the honey house, open up the smoker so it can burn out, put the hive tool away, hang up the bee 05-31-10_colony1suit and head out to the chair sitting on the bricks in front of the honey house.  I finish off the Sharps, look at the trees, marveling at these unique living beings and watch a sparrow gathering material for a nest.  Until next week.

(new honey supers on colony 3)

Cooking, Holidays, Humanities

A Holiday Sunday

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Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

What the hell, I thought, I’ll just cook a chicken.  And I did.  With onion, walnut, Paul Prudhomme poultry seasoning and sesame  oil.  It’s cooling off on the rack right now.  I also cooked up a pot of wheat berries.  Both are moves from the Brenda Langton course I took on healthy eating.  She had a few tips for the week.  One, pick a meat and use it for several meals.  So, you bake a chicken and have it as a meal.  That’s today.  Later on for sandwiches or in a salad.  At the end the week you through the carcass and left over meat in a soup pot and make some sort of potage or the other.

The wheat berries go into cereals, smoothies, ontop of waffles or salads.  Can be eaten alone, too.  She also recommends having nuts around the house for use as condiments and snacks.  None of this is rocket science but it is nice to have a framework.  Add in fruits and veggies and there’s a healthy week of meals.

Had to go upstairs to let a dog out and had some of the chicken.  Moist with a crunchy skin.  Delicious.

Got part way through ch. 17 in Wheelock, too.

Finally, I watched the last of the Indiana 500 mile race.  This race and high school basketball have as much to do with being a hoosier as the lakes do with being a Minnesotan.  Danica finished at #5.  Ashley Judd looked cute running down pit row, clutching her straw hat and trying to keep her sun dress decent.  Her husband, Dino Franchitti, just won his second 500 and she seemed very happy for him.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

One or Many?

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Beltane                           Full Planting Moon

Finally.  A morning with no other responsibilities so I can go out and plant the remaining veggies.  After that, it’s time to get to work on all the things I’ve neglected, the flower beds.  We have more flower beds than we do vegetable garden, so I’m talking a lot of stuff to do.

I’m not yet feeling great, but I feel better.  Sluggish, tired, but not wasted.  The sun will feel good.

Here’s a weird idea.  It may have no basis, but it flitted through my head the other day.  I’ve been reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the most popular books of Chinese classical literature.  The Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West are two others, both on my list and in my house.  This is a long book, really long and its narrative style takes some getting used to, not to mention the Russian like propensity for having way more names than this guy can recall easily.  But. It does show a clear thread of Chinese culture, that is, obedience to the state is the norm, the heroic “side” in a conflict.  If you’re a rebel in the Three Kingdoms, you’re a bad guy.  If you convert from being a rebel to being a loyal follower of the Emperor (the last of the Hans in this case), then you’ve taken a step toward redemption.

I’m reading this literature to get a sense of the Chinese geist, the recurring themes that define and shape their sense of themselves.  Chineseness, I guess you could call it.  This has been a long project, lasting many years for me, and engaged in a very unsystematic way, but I have covered a lot of history, film, art, literature including poetry and even a tiny bit of language.

OK.  Let’s juxtapose this rebel bad, obedient good theme to a consistent thread in American film and literature, that is, rebel good, obedient bad.  Our founding story after all is one of rebellion, foisting off the cloying grip of mother Britain.  Think of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter where Dimsdale pales morally when compared to Hester Prinn.  An anthropology professor of mine, David Scruton, said Americans are infracaninophiles, lovers of the under dog.  Unions against big business.  Slaves against masters.  Women against men.  Incumbents versus challengers.  Rebel Without a Cause.  Twelve Angry Men.  The American individualist.

This seems to be a fundamental polarity between the Chinese, submit to family and state (a Confucian ideal), and Americans, the rugged Individualist, Self-Reliant, Don’t Tread on Me types.  Right?  I’ve always heard it put something like this.  Admittedly these are sweeping generalizations, but that’s what I’m after here, the broad stroke that has some anchors in culture and history.

Here’s the weird idea.  What if the broad strokes mean exactly the opposite of what we take them to mean?  In other words, the Chinese emphasize in literature, film, Confucian thought and political rhetoric obedience to the state and family because the Chinese are, in fact, a nation of rebels, individualists.  I know this seems like an odd position, but it comes from a surprising encounter I had with MingJen Chen about a year ago.  Jackie Chan had just said that he thought the Chinese people needed to be controlled.  I asked Mingjen about this and she surprised me by agreeing with Jackie Chan.

What if American’s emphasize individualism in literature, art, film, novels and political rhetoric because we are, in fact, a nation of conformists who use the veneer of rugged individualism to cover a submissive spirit, one that will not struggle with what Emerson called the establishment.  Or, at least, won’t struggle so hard with it that it fears its foundations in jeopardy?

A weird idea, I know, but perhaps a useful one nonetheless.

This idea comes in part from the Jungian notion that we often emphasize in our reading, our writing, our attempts to interpret the world those things that are missing in our life, the thing we would like to live towards or into.  It also comes in part from the realization that, like most things, the notions of individualism and collectivity are not unrelated, isolated realities, but ones that bump up against each other in everyday life.

Garden, Humanities, Writing

Planting Done As Planting Moon Wanes

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Beltane                                              Waning Planting Moon

Almost all of the seeds and transplants have gone in the ground with the exception of succession plantings of beets, lettuce and carrots.  I have butternut squash to plant and that will go in today.  After this point, the key lies in mulch, weed control, water, plant management (pinching, pruning), continuation of integrated pest management and regular attention.

This means I have time now for the flowers, the poor flowers which have suffered from my inattention, crowded out by grass, not dead-headed and generally neglected.  Starting yesterday I’m working on that.

A little time this morning in the tiered perennial garden just to my right outside the patio doors, then into Wheelock for chapter 17.  I realized yesterday that I’m four months or so into re-learning Latin and have already begun the task for which I took this up in the first place, the translation of Metamorphosis.  It’s nice to be able to learn and work on the translation at the same time.  It’s motivating.

I’ve said here that my goal is translation of the Metamorphosis, but that’s only the vehicle for my true purpose.  Ovid’s many recountings of transformations occasioned by the Gods and by exigent circumstances in human lives has served for centuries as the chief repository of Greek myth.  What I want most of all is to integrate Ovid’s sensibility about transformation, mutation, metamorphosis into my own thought and apply the lesson in my own writing.

Before that I have to work on transforming my weedy flower beds back into their former beauty.  Bye for now.

Cinema and Television

Goya’s Ghosts

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Beltane                                 Full Planting Moon

I often see movies well past their sell-by date.  Tonight, for instance, I got around to seeing Goya’s Ghosts, a Milo Foreman piece from 2006.  This has Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgaard as Goya.  It must have been so named because the character Goya seems to have a very slight role in the movie, a go-between role between the church and the daughter of a wealthy family arrested by the Holy Office, aka the Inquistion, aka the predecessor office to the last job held by the current Pope, Benedict.

How dangerous it is to have dogmatic or ideological people in power.  With no need for evidence or facts, with no system of truth seeking committed to verifiability the church, the monarchy and the aristocracy can be confident in their decisions with no checks or balances.  Goya’s Ghosts shows that much better than it shows much about Goya either as a man or an artist.

It does show the suffocating nature of unchecked, self-righteous power as it also shows the dramatic political and military events through which Goya lived, again without illuminating Goya’s life.  A strange set of choices.

As a costume drama focused on the turmoil of Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century, the movie worked for me.  As anything about Goya, it did not.

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