Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Friends, Great Work, Health, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

When Do Many Avocations Become a Vocation?

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Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

Beekeeping, it seems to me, must always fall under the avocational** rather than hobby* definition, because it engages one’s time in a manner similar to an occupation, only perhaps not in as time intensive a way.  Under the latter definition I have an avocational interest in gardening, writing, art, religion, politics and now Latin.
Add them all together, as I do in my life, and the result is a vocation composed of many parts integrated through my particular participation in them.

I like the idea of a hobby as an Old World falcon, that is, engaging the world with grace and speed, stooping now and then to pluck a prize from the earth below then returning to some nest high and remote to enjoy it.

Whoa.  Worked out last night at the new, amped up level, after advice given to me by an exercise physiologist.  My polar tech watch which monitors my heart rate began to fade so I didn’t have a reliable way of checking my heart rate.   Guess I overworked myself because when I finished dizziness hit me and nausea soon followed.  Kate was home last night so she took care of me, eventually giving me a tab of my anti-nausea med.  That calmed things down, but didn’t put me right.  So I went to bed early.  Even this morning my stomach was sore, like someone had removed it and wrung it out like a dish rag.  Kate says I may have too little fluid during the day yesterday combined with salty foods.  Combined with the more vigorous workout it upset my body’s homeostasis.  It put me temporarily in the same place as the benign positional vertigo.  No fun.  No fun at all.

Lunch today with Paul Strickland.  He still doesn’t know for sure why his hemoglobin levels dropped so far.  He had a five-hour iron infusion last week and his color is better as are other symptoms.  We talked about his and Sarah’s place in Maine which has the possibility of a large LNG port being created nearby.  This is Eastport, Maine, roughly, and borders Canada, so the Canadian government has a voice as well as environmental groups.  Sounds horrific, an example of big corporate power taking on a relatively weak local government.  Bastards.

More sleep after.  I have returned to near normal but I’m going to skip the workout tonight just to be sure.

I have never sought nor do I plan to seek retirement though most folks would call me retired and I so call myself at times in order to give folks a handle easily understood.

At 6:00 pm I’m going to my first meeting of the Minnesota Hobby Beekeeper’s Association. It raises an interesting question for me about the difference between a hobby and an avocation.

The first two definitions here are of the word hobby:

*1. Etymology: Middle English hoby, from Anglo-French hobel, hobé
Date: 15th century

: a small Old World falcon (Falco subbuteo) that is dark blue above and white below with dark streaking on the breast

2. Etymology: short for hobbyhorse
Date: 1816
This one comes from an entry on avocation:

: a pursuit outside one’s regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation

** Etymology: Latin avocation-, avocatio, from avocare to call away, from ab- + vocare to call, from voc-, vox voice — more at voice
Date: circa 1617   : a subordinate occupation pursued in addition to one’s vocation especially for enjoyment
Art and Culture, Family, Great Work, Politics

A Gray Monday

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Beltane                                Waning Flower Moon

Business meeting.  Over to a flooring store to schedule the replacement of carpet in the small bedroom that will become Kate’s long-arm quilting room.  Lunch at Chili’s where the music was so loud I could barely hear myself think, literally.  When my one ear gets crammed full of noise, I find processing  thought difficult. Would be a good hell for me.  Lots of interesting conversation happening next to a loud waterfall.

Grocery store, too.  I’ve done regular, that is weekly, grocery shopping since seminary days when I used to cook for the whole floor of students.  Most of the time I’ve enjoyed it, something about being able to make choices and the diversity of a supermarket.  These days though I’ve begun to find it a nuisance, a repetitive task with little to commend it.  Maybe that will change, or perhaps I’ll be able to reframe it.

How bout that world out there, eh?  Oil pumping into the Gulf where it has begun to tar birds, clog up the wetlands and ruin shrimping and oyster farming.  Volcanoes in Iceland wrecking havoc with airplanes.  Snow in Minnesota in May.  A frost, too.  Gov. Pawlenty’s cruel cuts in the state’s budget overturned by our Supreme Court–with two weeks left in the legislative session.  Big fun at the capitol.  Enough snow on the East Coast over the last winter to confuse the debate in the Senate over a climate bill.   Not to mention the usual run of human misery and suffering.

I’m impressed right now with a political approach that takes into account particulars, that is individual suffering, the Gulf shrimp, the passengers and airlines troubled by the Icelandic ash plumes while acknowledging the need for universal abstractions like equality, justice, human rights.  I’m impressed with this approach because it doesn’t exist.   More on this at another point.

Art and Culture, Family, Health, Humanities, Letters

Transformations

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Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

A calmer day today.  After the bee work I planted bok choy and monkshood, finished raking the potato patch level, dead-headed tulips and daffodils.  A productive day.  The stuff I protected last night survived the frost well, though some of the coleus got nipped a bit the night before and I forgot three coleus plants in the park.  They don’t look great, but I think they’ll survive.

I said the other chapter 14 in Wheelock was half way through the book.  Not quite.  Chapter 20 is halfway.  It’s still a steep learning curve and that’s what I like.  Even the 9 verses of the Metamorphoses I’ve translated have already given me a deeper appreciation for the whole project Ovid set himself.  He correlates the painful and often vindictive transformations he records in the book with the kind of transformations the Gods have made to the whole of creation.  A dark thesis.

Kate’s hip is giving her fits.  I’m really glad she has the surgery scheduled for June 30th.  Won’t come too soon.

Bees

Bee Diary: May 9, 2010

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Beltane                                        Waning Flower Moon

A new feature on ancientrails, the ancient trail of bee-keeping.  This diary will serve as my record of work with my colonies and a way to review the year’s learnings and prepare for next year.

colony2colony1

From left to right is colony 1, the parent colony of bees started with a package a year ago.  The parent colony has two honey supers on it now, the gray boxes, and a queen excluder which you can see as an unpainted strip of wood between the honey supers and the top hive box. The bottom hive box sits on a bottom board which rests on a leveled foundation, in this case bricks.  Colony 2, with the silvery metal cover, is the hive box, painted gray, and an empty honey super covering a plastic pail of 1 to 1 sugar syrup.  The green board underneath is the bottom board and the foundation in this and the next instance are a heavy plastic decking plank cut into small pieces.  Colony 2 was the third hive box on the parent which I divided a week ago and to which I introduced a new Minnesota Hygienic Queen on Monday.  The third box, with the copper top, which all the colonies will have eventually, is the colony started a two weeks ago from a 2 pound package of Minnesota Hygienics.   In the final frame I’m smoking the top hive box of the parent colony preparatory to an inspection of the frames.  Kate took this picture last Monday and the other pictures were taken on May 1.

Today I started by preparing the smoker, the metal object you can see in the picture with me.  This has taken a long time for me to learn and I finally have found a way to colony3keep it working for the 30-45 minutes I need to do my inspections and whatever work I need to do.  I now use hamstermebee670050210 bedding to start the fire, throw in some compressed wood pellets, pumping the bellows to create a flame and embers.  Then I put in smoker fuel, a cotton product that I assume is leftover material from spinning cotton into thread.  Once this has established itself I put on the suit, zip up the headpiece, cinch up the sleeves and put my pants into my socks.  I learned this last one the hard way when that bee crawled up my pant leg and stung me on the butt.

Each time you start work on a colony you smoke the entrance, which is to the back in the colony 1 photo and to the right side in 2 & 3.  Then, each you time you lift something, like the top or a hive box you put smoke under the object you’re lifting before you take it completely off.  The smoke calms the bees and, it just occurred to me, the beekeeper.  Often when you crack a hive box you have to use a hive tool to break the propolis the bees use to seal up their hive.  It’s a sticky, brownish substance that sets to a somewhat pliable but sturdy joiner.

Each time you check the hives you look for several different things:  swarm cells, which are really new queen cells indicating that a swarm is imminent, larvae which mean the current queen is at work and present–this is a situation bee-keepers call being queen right, disease, this one is tough for me since I’m not sure what I’m looking for and pest invasions like mice or ants. In addition to this general inspection there are also specific tasks related to each inspection since the goal is to disturb the hive as little as necessary while maintaining a good weather eye.

Today

Colony 1 (the parent colony with a year old queen):  I checked the honey supers to see if they were full.  They weren’t.  Had they been I would have added two more.  I also removed the queen excluder and checked a couple of frames in the top hive box and underneath it for swarm cells.  After setting the top box on the ground, I did a similar inspection of the bottom hive box, then reversed the two by putting the top box on the bottom board and the bottom box on top of it.  Queen excluder.  Honey supers.  Top board.  Hive box cover.  Done.

I noticed pancake shaped cells constructed on top of the cells on the frame foundation.  I have no idea what this means.  I saw a few swarm cells and what looked like a large number of drones, fat bodied male bees.  I also found larvae which meant colony 1 is still queen right.  You can kill the queen during an inspection.  That’s a buzz kill.  Ha.  If a colony is not queen right, it will not produce worker bees or honey.  This is one of the reasons you stay out of the hives as much as possible.  In addition, the bees know much more about being bees than you do.  Let them handle it.

Colony 2 (child of the parent with a few weeks old queen):  There was pancake shaped cell structures in this colony, too.  Again?  I did see larvae here and an empty queen cage, so colony 2 is queen right.  It looked to me like a lot of these guys were drones, too, but what do I know at this point?  There were a lot of bees and they did look and sound crowded–a lot of buzzing–so I added a hive box with ten frames and foundations, left the original hive body on the bottom board and put the empty on top.  Then I closed colony 2.

Colony 3 (package with few weeks old queen):  I lifted the copper hive cover, found the syrup pail still had plenty of syrup, smoked the hive box and lifted out a few frames.  There are larvae and the  beginning of the ovoid structure of brood, then pollen, then honey.  The pollen patty has had little activity, but I left it in just in case they need it.  After hiving a package, the population of the colony declines for the first 21 days as the queen lays and workers go out seeking pollen, many of whom will die.  After the brood begins to hatch and the nectar flow begins in earnest, the population will ramp up.  When 80% of the frames have brood, I’ll add another hive box on this colony.  Both colony 2 and colony 3 have the same task this year, build a strong parent colony, three hive boxes, that will over winter and divide next May.

Colony 1, if all things go well, should produce honey this year.  Next year and from then on, again assuming things go well, we’ll always have two parent colonies producing honey and two child colonies in the process of becoming parents.

Under any circumstances I go the Minnesota Hobby Beekeeper Association meeting on Tuesday, May 11th, and found what those pancake things are.  Until the next entry in the bee diary.

Aging, Family, Holidays, Memories

Mom

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Beltane                              Waning Flower Moon

Already down to 33.  Bound to head lower.  Glad I covered all the tender plants.

Mother’s day has little resonance for me.  Mom has been dead now for almost 46 years, meaning she’s been dead as long as she was alive.  I passed her 17 years ago.  It feels strange to have lived into areas of life which my mother never experienced:  near retirement age, grandkids, dealing with the inevitable losses of friends and loved ones other than your parents.

It’s not that I didn’t love my mom.  I did.  It’s just that home faded away for me the year after she died.  I went off to college, then got involved in the political radicalism of the 1960’s and became estranged from Dad.  In essence that meant I became estranged from Alexandria, Indiana, too.  I grew up there from age 1 and a half on, experiencing those magical years of pre-teen life when the world has not much larger compass than your street, your friends, your parents, but after age 18 I returned only very occasionally, for ten years, not at all.

Of course, Mom was important in my life.  She loved me and believed in me.  She and my aunt Virginia nursed me back to health after a serious bout with polio.

What we remember and what actually influenced us, of course, are not always (ever?) true to the lived experience, but they are true for our psychic life and I have a particular memory of Mom that was formative.  One year a garden spider built a web over the window in our kitchen, the window next to the kitchen table where we ate breakfast.  All spring and summer Mom and I watched that spider, watched her repair the web, spin up her prey, eat them.  What I recall most from that was the sense of wonder, of awe that came off Mom in gentle waves.  She also took insects outside in a kleenex and let them go.  I do, too.

I also remember times when she took to me an ice-cream parlor when I got straight A’s on my report card, which was all the time so I got a lot of ice cream, but more than that, I had the attention and time with Mom.  I was close to her side of the family, the Keatons, growing up and have continued my close connection with them over the years.  In part it was my way of staying connected to Mom, to her values and to the people and places that shaped her.

But Mother’s Day?  Nope.  Doesn’t work for me.  Too much Hallmark, too little real sentiment.

Cooking, GeekWorld, Humanities

Going for the Circuit

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Beltane                                                  Waning Flower Moon

So much for a quieter day.  I group errands until I have enough time to do many at once. Today I hopped in the car and took off for the post office where I got my long delayed Oxford Latin Dictionary.  It now stands right next to my OED.  Can’t wait to use it.

Next stop, Lights on Broadway in Brooklyn Park, trying to get the halogen light fixtures we bought there a couple of years ago repaired.  Got great assistance from Adam, but no joy on an immediate fix.  He’s going to see if we can get a warranty replacement.

When I left Lights on Broadway, I gritted my teeth and prepared to encounter that most oxymoronic of all terms:  Comcast Customer Service.  Whoa.  Big surprise. Went smoothly.  Talk about disintermediation.  I pick up, deliver and install all of my electronic devices for them.  I’m old enough to remember the smiling gas station attendant who would offer to check under the hood.  Sigh.

Next stop Teavana where I picked up 4 ounces of Copper Hongcha and 4 ounces of Jasmine Pearl.  After tacos at a place next to the Sleep Comfort bed folks, I headed back home.  2 hours plus round trip.

Bees, Garden, Politics, Weather +Climate

A Quieter Period of Time

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Beltane                                            Waning Flower Moon

We had a light frost last night.  Many flowers are now gone, tulips mostly, and a few leaves have that sickly green color that comes from burst cells in the stem.  The weather service has predictions of 29 tonight, that means I’ll for sure have to cover the sensitive plants this evening.

A really busy week last week with several trips in and out of the cities, meetings or events at various times of day and three days in a row at the MIA.  It’s nice to have a few days where I can organize my time on my own.  Not like there’s nothing to do, of course.  My three bee colonies each will need inspection today or tomorrow and there’s weeding and other gardening chores.  Latin, chapter 14 in Wheelock, will put me half-way through this text, usually used for a year long college level course.  Then I’ll tackle my next four verses in Ovid.  There is also a tour to prepare.

This is supposed to be the last or next to last week of the legislative session, but the Minnesota Supreme court’s ruling on Pawlenty’s unallotments of last fall has thrown the whole situation into a big mess.  We may end up with a special session, in which case the legislative committee’s work is not yet done.  You may have seen that the Minnesota House voted to lift the moratorium on nuclear energy though with some important provisions.  Until such legislation is also passed in the Senate, worked out in conference committee, then signed by the Governor, it is not law.

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden

The Garden, The Bees, And Touring

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Beltane                                            Waning Flower Moon

After closer checking, all of the vegetables I’ve already planted can stand a light frost, most even a heavier one.  So, no worries there.  The herbs will require a blanky tomorrow night, as will the coleus Kate planted in the front.  Otherwise, we’ll be fine.  A few flowers will die, but that doesn’t kill the plant.  This is, again, a way that the world outside my door keeps my attention.

I will delay planting the potato/bush bean combination bed until this cold snap passes and the tomatoes and peppers haven’t come yet.  Oops.  I did, though, plant one potato670050210pepper plant come to think of it.  It will need a cover.  (the potato bed after soil amendment)

The Minnesota Hobby Bee Keepers Association does educational evenings once a month and allows new beekeepers to interact with veterans.  I plan to start attending on Tuesday night.  They will be discussing colony division, not discussing only, but also dividing a colony at the UofM’s on bee yard at the intersection of Larpentur and Cleveland.  We have to take our bee suits so we can watch up close.  I need a mentor, perhaps I’ll find one there.

The first tour of the day today, a group from St. Paul Central organized by Vitris Lanier, never showed up.  They never called.  Weird.  My second tour, my first ArtRemix tour, had eleven young women and a teacher.  These were students for whom the world of art was foreign territory, at least at first.  As the tour went on though, their curiosity got the better of them and they wanted to see how the Wu family reception hall was reassembled and what was in the Scholar’s study, then the garden.  We went upstairs to the Salon and Shonibare’s dress, then onto the dec arts gallery at their insistence.  All in all these kids developed an interest in what was in the museum and I went along to help them explore.  A successful tour, though it had little to do with ArtRemix.

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, GeekWorld

Every Life Is A Universe

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Beltane                                      Waning Flower Moon

As you can tell, cybermage Bill Schmidt has contributed again to this blog.  He set me up on WordPress and has updated this software from time to time, including the new photograph.  The old one has only been retired, not eliminated.  We would like to find a couple of more photographs I could rotate over the course of year, perhaps a seasonal array.  Thanks again, Bill.

In the docent lounge today I saw Wendy talking with Linda.  This was a moment to remind us that we can never tell what lurks in the life of people we see casually from a distance.  These two women talking, not remarkable.  A woman recently treated for breast cancer and another whose son recently died of an overdose of oxycontin talking, more remarkable.  It took my breath away.

I’ve spoken with both of them over the last few weeks and I can only say that the resilient and yet unblinking attitude they both have is a testament to the human spirit.  We never know the full story of those we meet, even those closest to us, because the inner life exists encased in an impenetrable place, the mind and heart of another.   Still, we do get clues, signals from the interior and they often come in moments of tragedy.

(Pissaro:  Conversation)

One of the truest things I have ever read is that each death is an apocalypse for an entire universe dies each time a human dies.  This makes these encounters with it more telling, for the stakes are so high.  So, the next time you see two people engaged in casual conversation, pause a moment to celebrate this oh so simple, oh so magnificent act.

General

Friday

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Beltane                             Waning Flower Moon

The waning flower moon goes out on a cool to cold night with snow in our forecast for tonight and a possible frost on Sunday night.  A cold rain all day today.  This is good for the cool weather vegetables I planted last weekend.  Not sure, but I’ll probably have to cover some things on Sunday evening.

Off to the MIA for two tours and a conversation with Tom Byfield.  A weekend of bees and plants.