• Tag Archives Mark

  • Late June Hive Inspection

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                        Waxing Summer Moon

    Mark and Elise came over today.  We wandered through the garden and the orchard, followed by Rigel and Vega.  They licked and pressed and jumped.  New people!  New people!  Oh, boy!  Oh, boy!  New people!  Rigel and Vega found Leif and Tate and Tate’s twin really, really interesting.  Baby head!  Baby head!  Oh, boy!  Oh, boy!

    Mark and I went out to the hive and popped the lid after suiting up.  The smoker worked better today, but I’ve still not got it down.  There are a lot of bees.  I thought so, but Mark confirmed it.  There are lots of brood, plenty of honey and a few uninhabited queen cells.  We scraped and checked each of the 20 frames, leaving two frames out to insert into the new box we put on top.  The hive is now three boxes high, its maximum.

    Next week or so, the honey supers go on the third box.  About half the size of a hive box the supers fill up with honey.  They are the work product that goes into the centrifuge for extraction.  A typical super has about 30 pounds of honey.  Seems like a lot to me.

    Mark finds the bees fascinating per se, the honey a bonus that sometimes pays for the bees and the equipment in a given year.  I agree.  The hive construction project alone interests me.  The six sided cells, the propolis, drone, worker and queen cells, the making of honey and its storage reveal a life way and a life form unlike any we contact in the usual day to day.  There is more, too: the queen and her squadron of drones, hopeful suitors, all but one of whom will live and die unfulfilled, the solitary life of the queen, moving from cell to cell squeezing out egg after fertilized egg, the workers who build the cells and scout out food, coming back to communicate in a well known  complicated dance.

    Many bee keepers work without suits and gloves.  Honey bees that survive our winters have a docile temperament and are not as defensive as the ordinary person would imagine, though Mark says they get more protective in the fall when the beekeeper begins to take the honey.   This might seem a bit cruel, but in fact the bulk of the honey, say 80-90 pounds, remains in the hive boxes and has enough nourishment for the hives to over winter.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees 📎and tagged

  • At 50, What Next?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    3  bar steep drop 30.16  0mph  NE  windchill 3  Samhain

    Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

    My brother Mark asked me my thoughts on turning 50.  This April 11th he has his 50th.  By then it will be, as it always is, twelve years since I had that birthday.

    Twelve years ago is a long time and when I first started to answer Carl Jung came up.  He should have, but not in the positive way I had in mind.  I began that piece by reflecting on Jung’s notion of life’s  two halves:  an external, career and family half followed by an interior, reflective and calmer half.  Hmmm.  But that was the upbeat spin.

    How Jung came into my turning 50 is less philosophical.  In 1996 I shifted my credentials from the Presybterian church to the Unitarian-Universalist.  In 1997, my 50th year, I had to take an internship to qualify for recognition.  I did.  Unity Church Unitarian (no relation to the Unity movement) in St. Paul and First Unitarian in Minneapolis both offered me internships.

    It felt good to be wanted in a professional capacity again.  I had given myself 5 years to make it as a writer (with no real idea what making it meant) and I failed.  No sales.  Not even any bites.  Instead of the romantic I’ll stick with it no matter what I decided to go back to the trade I had learned.  I felt a need to earn money and to have recognition as a skilled and valuable person.

    This whole episode was a mistake and a big one.  I crowned it with accepting a position as minister of development at Unity, essentially a fund-raising position.  I hate fund-raising and everything associated with it.  But I said yes because I was asked.  Pretty desparate.

    That was how Jung came in.  Early on I could see I’d made a mistake but I needed to understand why.  What did it mean?  My long time analyst John Desteian, a Jungian, and I worked on it.  In the end we decided I had regressed, rather than moved forward.  I had regressed by returning to safe territory.  John said that most regressions occur because we have to go back and pick up something we needed.  In this case I needed to be reminded how much I’d wanted out of the ministry six years before and why full time ministry was a bad fit for me.

    It felt wonderful to leave after the fund-raising goal had been met, an increase of 10% over the prior year.  I did it, but I did not want to do it again.

    I came home and save for one brief relapse when we needed money I learned my lesson.

    What was the lesson?  That the world of work and achievement had come and gone in my life.  Now I needed to pursue life itself.  That did include writing, whether I sold anything or not.  I have not.  It meant I needed to face life as myself, not as a role or job holder.

    So, Mark, turning 50 for me meant a need to go back and relearn a lesson I had not grasped completely the first time around.  I don’t know what turning 50 will mean for you.  Perhaps reflecting on the expat life?  Perhaps following some abandoned or long cherised dream?  Maybe you’ll tell the story of South East Asia as only someone of your particular experience can.  Who knows?  I can tell you this.  Pay attention to what happens around this time because it has deep meaning for the rest of your life.


    📂This entry was posted in Dreams Faith and Spirituality Family Memories Myth and Story 📎and tagged

  • Ex-Pat Life in Troubled Times

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    37  bar falls 29.69  0mph NW  windchill 36   Samhain

    New Moon (Moon of Long Nights)

    2004 Photo SE Asia Trip Bangkok

    As many of you know, my brother Mark lives in Bangkok.  Thailand is almost invisible in the American press, so you may not have noticed the protests that have been going on there since early in the year.  The politics, even to Mark, a long term resident of Thailand, do not make much sense.   One school of thought believes it is the Bangkok royalist elite facing off against the more rural and populist base of recent prime minister and now exile, Thaksin.

    Difficult to say, but this Buddhist country has a lot of unregistered guns and the protests have taken a nasty turn.  Apparently the goal of the yellow-shirted PAD protesters is a coup by the military which they hope would turn the government back to more traditional  royalist influenced politics.

    Mark and Mary, both ex-pats, live out their lives as foreign nationals in cultures far removed from the West.  Even English speaking, British spawned Singapore has a Chinese government and a citizenry made of up of Malays, Chinese, Indians and a few Caucasians.  As non-citizens, even though well established, their daily lives can get upset when the politics turn nationalist as ex-pats are often visible reminders of the other.

    In Mark’s case, as an American and a white man, he is culturally and physically obviously other almost every where he goes in Thailand.  When jingoism gets cranked up, no matter what the cause, the tendency is to notice strangers/farangi when at other times they may well be invisible.  He feels understandably a bit nervous, but he also says, “It’s a rush to be here.”  The politics are an alive moment, a culture trying to sort out its future and its present, searching for the mix of groups that can govern.  We just had such a moment in the last year here in America.

    I respect and sometimes envy my brother and sister.  They have access every day to the unique and the different, to the daily lives of persons who respond to different customs and values than those we learned in Alexandria, Indiana.  Like them, I value those kinds of interactions and find their willingness to stay admirable.


    📂This entry was posted in Asia Family 📎and tagged

  • Read the Writing on the Wall

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    68  bar rises 29.89  omph NW  dew-point 64  sunrise 6:03 sunset 8:35  Lughnasa

    Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

    Another Monday on the treadmill.  In Victorian England they used the treadmill as a punishment in the gaol.  Now I pay big bucks for one so I can do it voluntarily.  How times change.

    Woollies tonight at the Black Forest.  Frank, Bill, Mark, Scott and me.  We discussed the peculiar propensity for conservatives to shut off their otherwise keen intellects when it comes to political matters.  Bill thinks it’s because they have propensity to believe authority.  Maybe so, but they pick the authority that agrees with their bias.  The part that bothers me about most of the conservative rant is their unwillingness to think critically, to evaluate evidence on its merit, rather than its fit with the ideological spin of the moment.

    Mark’s stepson, Christopher, took him to a legal tagging wall.  It’s at Intermedia Arts on Lyndale near 28th Street.  The police have set up this free wall, supposedly the only one in the US (a tagger on an expensive bike with a thick chain worn across his upper body like the sacred thread of the Brahmin told us this.).  Taggers can sign up for a large chunk of the wall.  They then have the right to put an approved design (no porn, that kinda thing) for a month.  Christophers says at night there might be 200-300 people there watching the taggers work on the wall.  There were none at 7:30 PM when four old men stood around trying to read the writing on the wall.

    I took Frank home.  We need to get together again for lunch.  Soon.


    📂This entry was posted in Friends Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • A Houseless Life

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    72  bar rises 29.73  0mph WNW dew-point 62    Summer, pleasant

    Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

    “It is not how old you are, but how you are old.” – Jules Renard

    Elizabeth Odegard has West Nile virus.  She’s lethargic, stays in bed.  Not much to do, but support your body and wait it out.  Mark thinks she may have gotten it in Thailand when they stayed on a houseboat.  Mark has the most unusual current lifestyle among the Woollies.  He and Elizabeth, then real estate agents, sold his house in Marine of St. Croix, pooled their retirement funds and began living a houseless life.

    He often refers to himself as homeless, but what he actually is houseless.   His home is the Twin Cities and he’s rooted here.  He and Elizabeth went to Hawai’i three years ago and got the Cambridge certification in teaching English as a second language.  With that credential and a cash flow generated from investments (managed by Scott Simpson) they have moved from spot to spot:  Buenos Aires, Peru, Shanghai, Bangkok sprinkled with returns home.  Here they housesit for folks they know.

    They leave for France later on this summer, where they will spend time with Mark’s brother and his family before heading off Morocco or Turkey or Chile.  Sometimes they work, sometimes one does and the other doesn’t.  It’s been all ESL.  Mark worked on a healthy sexuality exhibit in Thailand, for example.  They ponder a commitment in Japan, where the English language jobs require a year contract.  Most of their stints have been four months or less.

    We talk about travel often at the Woollies.  We are a well-traveled group.  Paul and Sarah made a round the world trip early in their marriage.  Paul jets off to Africa, Syria and Cuba now and then.  Frank is in Ireland right now for the eight or ninth time.  Bill spent over a year in Japan building a nuclear power plant.  Tom travels the US every week.  Charlie Haislet and Barbara cruise in Europe, go to Africa now and again.  Stefan has been many places.

    Last night Stefan talked about a childhood trip to Egypt.  “It made me want to be an architect.  Karnak.  With those great pillars shaved back and sloping upward.  And the details on the gate.”

    We are atypical as a group in so many ways:  level of education, diversity of employment, life paths dominated by values, intimacy among men that has lasted over two decades.  Our level of income is high.  We lead lives of privilege in the most powerful country the world has ever seen.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Travel Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • A Truthful Christmas Letter

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    A note before bed.  The nights are long now.  The sun set at 4:32 PM today and won’t rise again until 7:48AM.  This is good news for those who like dark, cool nights for sleeping.  I do.

    We’ve received a few of those letters in the mail; you know the ones, dense paragraphs filled with people you don’t know, pets and projects.  One of them stood out.  It was from a former partner of Kate’s.  She wrote of a year filled with her husband’s boss, “and former friend,” indicted for several felonies.  She went on to detail a year with the usual kind of vaguely horrific stuff that happens in all our lives, but usually goes unrecorded, suffered, yes, but not written down.  It was wonderful and made me hopeful for this folk art form.

    We also get a few Christmas cards each year, fewer and fewer since I haven’t sent cards for decades and Kate hasn’t either.  My favorite one so far this year came from cousin Melinda and her husband, Bill, aka, the Hoosier Cowboy.  It had two guys on horses greeting each other in the snow.  The line below them read, From our Outfit to Yours.

    The bookcase consolidation and purging, moving the exercise equipment and downstairs TV project moved closer to completion today.  It would look better with built-ins.

    Brother Mark is back in Bangkok and Woolly brother Mark is back in Minnesota.  Brother Mark had an accident in Phnom Penh. He was hit by a motorcycle, but not injured too badly.  This just before he left for Bangkok.

    Sister Mary, in Singapore, has used all of her vacation days this year to complete her dissertation.  She handed it in and now awaits a verdict as to its acceptability so she can move onto the next stage of the process.  No fun, that waiting.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged