Tag Archives: Kate

Aging, Asia, Garden, Great Work, Health

It’s Illegal

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Mid-Summer                                                                                             Waxing Honey Flow Moon

In to see Kate this morning after making some soup and killing potato pests by hand and soapy water.  Integrated pest management  suggests hands-on management for small crops.  It’s actually pretty straight-forward to keep pests in check if you inspect regularly.  Like the plastic bags for the apples.  The concept also allows that some leaves will get eaten, some plants will get lost, but that if you plan for these and don’t excited, you can keep pesticide use to a minimum.  I haven’t used any for years.

Companion plantings helps.  Crop rotation helps.  Regular surveillance helps. Replenishing soil nutrients helps. Every bit of positive input reduces the hold insects pests can get on your veggies.

Kate’s color looked normal this morning even though her hemoglobin is still a little low.  She’s ready to come home.  Her nurse yesterday tried to get her to wear little footies with a sticky pattern on the bottom.  Kate doesn’t like things on her feet.  “You don’t want to wear them even though it’s illegal?”  I knew who would win this contest.

Back home for a nap, read a little, then got ready for Tai Chi.  Kona had been injured in the morning, but I couldn’t find the problem.  She held up her right front foot, which I checked carefully, finding nothing.  Mark found the wound.  It was a tear in her side just above the right shoulder.

Uh oh.  This is the kind of stuff Kate makes easy. So. I called her and asked her if she could come home.  Nope.  Well, I figured.  Her advice though helped a lot.

After a snappy, biting 10 minutes or so, I figured out how to do what needed to be done, Kona stood quietly and let me put a gauze pad on the wound and wrap it on with a sticky bandage.

I missed the first hour of Tai Chi, but I made it for my class.  Be patient with yourself.  Relax.  Trust the process.  Cheryl, the teacher, is a calming influence in a learning curve that can be difficult.

By the time I headed home I needed some comfort food.  A peanut buster parfait later, I felt calmer myself.

Aging, Family

Kate

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Mid-Summer                                                                                               Waning Garlic Moon

Oh, boy.  Mark felt right at home yesterday, but noted, “Well, it won’t last.”  He saw the temporary nature of high temps as a bad thing.  Different acclimatization.  He continues to work through difficult stuff.  We had a long, very interesting talk yesterday.

Having Kate in the hospital raises the stress level.  She’s tough and handles surgery and hospitalization well, but the exposure to hospital based infections bothers me.  Also, every time you have general anesthetic and surgical trauma the risk for complications exists.  Thought we entered that territory, but not so.

I didn’t get a lot done Thursday and yesterday, but I imagine things will get better provided her recovery remains smooth.  I’ll go see her around lunch time.

Aging, Family, Health

Wind, Water, Wound

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Mid-Summer                                                                    Waning Garlic Moon

A groggy Kate called this morning to say she had a temp and they’d done a chest x-ray.  Maybe pneumonia.  The adage after surgery is wind, water, wound.  That is, look for an infection first in the lungs, second in the kidneys/bladder and third in the wound itself.  This seemed to fit.  My mind danced over the possibility of these superbugs, among them pneumoccocus strains. Let that thought dance right out again.  No need to worry about something I don’t know.

So, I canceled my Latin, did the errands and drove in to make sure I did know what was going on.  After a while, Dr. Stein came in, a good doc, a hospitalist we met a year ago when Kate had the other hip done.  He looked at her oxygen saturation and her temp.  O2 sat was fine; her temp slightly elevated at 102.  In his judgement the temp could be the result of the stress of surgery.  Her hemoglobin dropped to 7 though, so they ordered her two units of blood.

We ate lunch together, talked about this and that, the dogs, the bees, Mark, her friends.  She got some new drugs for pain and was about to head into lala land, so I came home for a nap myself.

Everything seems fine, given the trauma of the surgery.  Whew.

Aging, Health, Myth and Story

Kate’s Hip

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Mid-Summer                                                                     Waning Garlic Moon

The ritual masters of the American medical system had us rising with the sun at 5:00 am for the Admittance to the Hospital ceremony, then the Cutting of the Flesh.  By getting us up at a time far earlier than our usual 7:00-7:30 we knew this was a magical moment.  We proceeded through the rush hour traffic to Fairview University where attendants took our vehicle away, out of view.  After appeasing the money changers, Kate received the ritual accessories, bracelets of varying colors including one with the mystical words:  Fall Prevention.

They came for her, the blue-gowned deacons of this mega-church, and led her away where her clothes were removed and hidden away.  She received a lavender gown of paper, marking her as the morning’s sacrifice.  The high priest and his acolyte came in to see her and the acolyte initialed her thigh so the Cutting of the Flesh would be done in a way approved of by the medical gods.

As in many ancient rituals, Kate received a powerful drug that made her smile and seem goofy just before the blue-gowned ones wheeled her away to the secret chapels where the High Priests work their magic.

Satisfied that the gods had received the offerings of insurance and accepted them, I left for home.

Family, Health, Humanities

A Day in the Life

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Mid-Summer                                                                                                   Waning Garlic Moon

“God has no religion.” – Mahatma Gandhi

If there is one, Gandhi has it right.

Another day of Latin.  This stuff, at least right now, is hard.  It requires holding several different ideas in the head all at one time, then juggling them to see how they all fit together.   Here are as many of those things as I can name:  word meanings in Latin and English (often multiple), noun declensions (usually multiple), verb conjugations, participle forms, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, clause types, infinitives, word order (often shuffled in poetry for metric purposes.  ovid is poetry.), flow of the narrative, many different grammatical rules and exceptions.  They float in the air like bubbles over a cartoon character’s head, as if, say, Dilbert couldn’t figure out what to say until he mixed and matched the diverse bubbles into a sensible sentence.

On the other hand, at times I’m able to do it, to switch the balls in mid-air and see the sequence fall into place, a sentence emerging from what James Joyce or William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion.”  Then, it’s sweet.

Took Mark down to the Anoka County Work Force center for a morning’s class on resumes.  He seems calmer now, less agitated.

Kate’s in pain because she has to go off all her non-steroidal anti-inflammatories for 5 days before her surgery.  This leaves her arthritic joints free to express themselves, especially in her hip, neck and hands.  This Thursday, S-Day, will find her with a second new hip, a procedure that should reduce her suffering quite a bit by relieving the hip pain and making her body mechanics better.  I’m glad she’s getting the new hip.

Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Friday

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Beltane                                                               Full Garlic Moon

Boy, the learning is slow on Latin.  I slogged through conditional counter-factual clauses and how to translate subjunctive verbs within them.  I’m still at the beginning of the Pentheus story but already we know what will happen to Pentheus, torn into a thousand bloody pieces by his mother and aunts, he will be scattered all over the place.  It’s worth waiting to get to the good part where he happens on his mother and her maenad friends.

Kate and I met with Mark over lunch.  He’s done a lot.  He attended a job seeking resource day on Wednesday and an interview tips day on Thursday.  He’s working now on getting info together about a driver’s license and Minnesota Care.  He’s made a lot of strides since he got here in early April.

Back in to the Convention center for another 4 hour shift at the Sierra Club booth.  Back home now.  Bushed.  Some TV, some reading, then bed.

Dogs

Driving to Nebraska. Again.

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Beltane                                                                   Waxing Garlic Moon

Motel 6 with Sollie, Lincoln Nebraska

At 8:35 am Sollie and I took off in the truck.  We drove straight through to this little piece of heaven.

Driving between Andover and Lincoln, a frequent trip, goes through some of the less visually interesting parts of the United States.

Sollie is now in the bathroom blessedly quiet.  He’s a bit much to handle, a lot like a 3 year old.

Kate called with an extreme emergency.  The powers out and the generator did not kick in.  Time and a half to take care of it, but Kate’s there and she’s hot.  Kate hot is not something you want to see.  So Allied Generator has an evening call to rescue my sweet heart.

Ruth is with Jon and they’re on their way.

Art and Culture, Dogs, Humanities

Ripped Apart

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Beltane                                                                    Waxing Garlic Moon

Pentheus gets ripped apart by his mother and her fellow Bacchantes.  The Guthrie’s production of The Bacchantes by Euripides several years ago gave the story a telling I’ve never forgotten.  It gave me a jolt.  I’ve moved on from Diana and Actaeon in Ovid to Pentheus.  His story begins about 250 verses further on in Book III of the Metamorphosis.  I’m not far into it, only about 12 verses, but already Pentheus’ fate has been foreshadowed by the great seer, Teresias.

My tutor says I’ve learned to spot and translate the verbs, a key first move, but I still have trouble picking out the subjects of the sentences. That’s what I have to work on for next week.

(Pentheus and his mom.  Pompeii. Romersk ca. 70 e. Kr. (Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen)

Speaking of getting ripped apart, I came home from a lunch with Justin Fay, the Sierra Club’s lobbyist, to find Kate gone.  She had taken Gertie, our son and his wife’s dog, to the vet.  Yet another scrap broke out and this time Gertie ended up with seven spots that needed stitches.  The end result of this was, of course, a hefty vet bill and a hurried consultation between Denver and Andover over Gertie’s fate.

We resolved it this way.  Gertie has become a liability at Jon and Jen’s, growling at Gabe, 3 years old, nipping four neighbors and going after the postman, not to mention climbing the fence to get out.  So.  What to do?  I really like Gertie; she has a big personality, a bouncy vital way, but she is a mischief maker, a trickster.  Gertie will stay here with us and we’ll figure out how to manage our pack without any one getting hurt.  We’ve had to do it before when one of our Irish Wolfhound’s, Tully, decided that our Whippets were prey.

First step is to get Sollie back to Denver so we can reduce the number of dogs.  After that we’ll probably try letting Gertie and the big girls out again, hoping that the changed dynamics will have resolved.  If we have another spat, we’ll have to go to some management strategy, maybe a dog run outside, or having Gertie and one big dog at a time out.

We have Mark here now and Gertie will stay.  We’ve become a hostel.

Asia, Family, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Weather +Climate

Monkey. Still. But, Making Progress.

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Beltane                                                                     Waning Last Frost Moon

Whoa.  84.  Sometimes I think of the seasons as if we were on a moveable patch of earth.  On a day like today our patch got shifted on the seasonal moving belt to about Georgia.  Last week we were parked above the Canadian border for a while.  Who knows where we’ll go next.

I have passed the 50% mark in reading Monkey:  Journey to the West.   That means I’m somewhere around 1,000+ pages in.  Hard to tell on the Kindle, though I know precisely how far I am in percentages.  This book is funny, wise, rollicking, supernatural and just a bit cynical.  Well, maybe a lot.  Yesterday I bought a book that features English works on the Chinese classics.  It has a lot to say about these favorites, but I’ve still found no commentary that helps me get, say, the wood, water, earth, fire, metal sequence or the names of some characters or the works referenced as if everyone knew them.  Next up, probably next year, is The Dream of the Red Chamber, the best of the six, in the opinion of several writers.

While hunting for a picture to go with this post, I discovered that Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman graphic novels and several fantasy novels started, back in March, on a screenplay for a trilogy based on Monkey.  Should be interesting.

If you feel like you have the time, both Monkey and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms will more than repay the effort.  There’s a different culture at work here, sometimes a radically different one, but, at other times, radically similar.  That’s the power of reading works from other cultures, insights you can’t get any other way.

A slow day.  Business meeting in the morning.  We scheduled a couple of days in July, post Kate’s second hip surgery, to go over our expenditures in the first six months of retirement, check them against our budget, see where we need to adjust.  Big fun.

Art and Culture, Family, Great Work

Clay

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Beltane                                                                      Waning Last Frost Moon

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings  gather   about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps  even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.” –W.B. Yeats

Surprises.  They come unexpectedly.  That’s no surprise.  I had one tonight.

Kate signed us up for a couples clay class at the Northern Clay Center.  It ran from 6:30-9:00 pm.  Matt, a BFA grad from the U, teaching during a gap year before graduate school, lead us clay novices.

( Kiln Prayer)

It was fun.  Maybe more than fun.  The clay had a vitality, a presence I hadn’t expected.  The pieces I made ranged from uh-oh to not too bad.  One, a tea bowl, had some promise.  Since they won’t be fired and ready for two weeks, it’s tough to say just what happened.  But I liked it.

Talking with Matt, who began discussing sodium trees versus calcium trees and how those differences affect the wood ash impact on ceramics, a realization began to dawn on me.  This is clay.  Clay.  It’s part of mother earth.  Part of her body.  Working with clay is not only like working with soil, it is working with soil.  Glazes can be totally organic, using plant and mineral materials available anywhere.  In fact, the properties of the clay differ from region to region.  So do the types and variteies of plant and mineral materials available to fire kilns and use in glazes.

Ceramics, in other words, is a sister activity to permaculture, bee keeping, flower gardening and native plant use.

Every once in a while I like to push myself outside my comfort zone.  Tai Chi and Latin are my current excursions.  I can’t see getting into clay until after our cruise in the fall, but I want to do it.  By that time the learning curve for both Latin and Tai Chi will be manageable.  After that, though, I can see taking a class or two, maybe more.

Manual dexterity is not my thing, at least it hasn’t been, but why not?  No practice as much as anything.  So, if I can learn basic techniques and practice.  Well…