• Tag Archives Vega

  • Eyes (and nose) on the Prize

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                      Waning Summer Moon

    I’ve now pressed into mush several deposits from both Rigel and Vega, hoping to retrieve my wedding ring.  No joy so far.  Kate says I should put on gloves, pick it up and feel carefully with my hands.  Hmmm.   I mean, the wedding ring is worth it, but the search methodology?  Yuck.

    Right now Topline fence guys are about half-way through installation of a fence around our orchard.  Vega the wonder dog has proved an expensive $200.  She also chewed up my best hose.  I had it attached to the sill cock to run the sprayer when I worked on the air conditioner.  I forgot to remove it after I finished.  Vega did not.  This morning one of Kate’s tennis shoes lost a heel. Even so, Vega has an irrepressible personality, a joyful exuberance that makes the worst she’s done forgivable.   A great trait.

    I have to get a picture of this animal in action. The one’s I have so far are not so hot.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged

  • Vega. Again. Bees and Permaculture.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                           Waning Summer Moon

    Vega the wonder dog continues to amaze us.  While I worked on the air conditioning earlier today, she picked up the small box I had to reserve the screws removed from the cowling.  I heard the screws clinking as she walked away.  When I got to the box, she had set it down and not a single screw had gone missing.  She continued to help me during the whole process.

    Also earlier Kona, a whippet who opens doors, opened the back door and let everybody inside.  When Kate came out of her shower, Vega had sprawled out on our bed.

    After I put the whippets to bed, Vega and Rigel come out in to the living room for a bit of human time.  Vega promptly hops up on the couch, rolls over on her back and relaxes her legs over the edge.  Then she goes to sleep.

    The hive stands pretty tall now with its two honey supers and the queen excluder.  hivebody500

    I’ve been very lucky to have Mark Nordeen as a mentor in the bee-keeping.  He’s gotten me through the rough spots for beginners:  equipment which he let me use, hiving the package of bees, how to examine frames and what to look for, when to put on the honey supers and when to use a queen excluder.   All of this stuff would be easy to stumble over in even the first few years and Mark has walked me through it.

    The bees have added another element to the permaculture work Kate and I have begun.  The bees live and work in our garden just as we do.  They have a stake in a healthy garden just as we do.  Working with bees feels very collaborative; we are two species working and living together, sharing our needs and our specialized skills.

    We have two apples coming along in our orchard as well as blueberries and currants.  I also found a huckleberry today, a plant I have never grown before.  The garden has begun its arc toward full productivity.

    Now we have an orchard filled with fruit trees and plant guilds to support the trees, bushes that bear berries, even a hazelnut.  The orchard complements our expanded vegetable garden.  The playhouse Jon put together for us will go with the finished firepit (someday) as a family outdoor recreation area.  This is all part of the permaculture idea, having various zones of the landscape for specific purposes and each zone located optimally for its needs.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees permaculture 📎and tagged

  • There is one ring

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                   Waning  Summer Moon

    Day 1:  the one ring that binds her passes further through Vega’s digestive track.  This evening the hunt for the prize in the Cracker  Jack box begins.

    Kate and I ate breakfast at IHOP before going to the grocery store.

    While at the grocery store we refilled our pantries after the kids visit and found foods for Kate’s work lunch tomorrow.  Kate takes special foods on Sundays that she works.  Her mission is to expand the culinary imaginations of her co-workers.  By the disappearing food in her basket when she returns home it is clear she’s achieving her goal.

    My first two pre-Raphaelite tours are under my belt.  I learned from companions:  Joy, Antra, and Allison, who contributed to the tour.  Joy convinced me of the utility of a good flashlight.  Gotta find mine.  The three of them also helped me see that the reason guards admonish me a lot about getting too close to the paintings is that I get too close to the paintings.  All three added observations, commentary and good humor.  Thanks, gals.

    On my tours I tried to take folks on Hunt’s journey as a person and as an artist, focusing as much on a works biographical locale as its specific art historical significance.  Since Hunt had a long spiritual journey that began with an early work,  his most famous piece, The Light of the World, and since that journey was a dialogue with 19th century understandings of Christianity, my seminary training helped me.  I was comfortable discussing the theological implications of his paintings in a way others might not be.

    Both tours were well-received and I felt good about them.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture 📎and tagged

  • The True Generational Transition

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                   Waxing Summer Moon

    Jon and Jen moved around the house this morning, packing and stowing, wiping Ruth’s tears–the wrong cap on her bubble bottle–and feeding a smiling Gabe.  It was the deliberate preparation of seasoned parents, checking this and that, getting ready.  As I watched, I realized this was the true generational transition.  The birth of grandchildren seems to represent the moment when the grandparent’s generation gets legs in time.  It’s not.  It comes when those children integrate into their family.  It comes when their parents take responsibility for them in a functioning, dynamic family.  It comes when tears are soothed, food comes to the table, when boundaries are set, when imagination is nurtured.  It comes when love creates a new family.   I saw all this over the last two days.

    Jon put together Ruth’s playhouse.  We bought it a year and a half ago on sale at Costco.  It’s actually a utility shed, but a very cute one with windows and peaked roof.  We’re going to put white lights over the whole area and dress up the inside so other grandchildren can use it too.   Permaculture focuses not only on the plant life in an area, but on the human use of the land as well.  The playhouse adds generational nurturance to the built environment here.

    Meanwhile the attacks on our new drip irrigation continue.  Vega seems to have taken a particular interest in where the netaphim should be.   She is not content with things as they are; rather, she sees things as she would like them to be and acts.  She apparently sees the netaphim with multiple holes, disconnected from its sources of water and distributed not where the plants are, but where she sees a better design.

    Life has vibrancy here.  A good thing.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family Garden 📎and tagged

  • New Puppies Make Selves at Home

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                          Waxing Summer Moon

    So I spent a couple of hours this morning lining the base of the chain link fence with used wooden fence railing, then wiring those rails to the bottom of the chain link.  This is in an attempt to prove that I am human, Vega dog.  Me smarter.

    Tonight Vega looked around the living room, hopped in the Stickley arm chair, made herself small and occupied the same space usually taken by a whippet about a third of her size.  Quite a performance.  No wonder she can slither under the fence.  Later, Vega hopped up on the couch and plopped herself down, just like the whippets.  I used to have a firm no dogs on the furniture policy, but it went by the wayside long ago.  They like a good chair as much as I do and the couch, well, hey, that’s for all of us, right?

    Research today on the pre-Raphaelite show.  The more I learn the more I respect the work and thought of these guys as it pertained to the purpose of art and the craft of art-making.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Family 📎and tagged

  • Houdini Inhabits a Canine

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                 Waxing Summer Moon

    Each penitentiary or prison warden fears the convict who can identify a weakness in the multiple barriers to escape.  So do dog owners.   Our puppy Rigel wiggled under the gate leading down to our perennial garden, an impressive feat considering the narrowness of the opening and the size of her body.  When I blocked this one, she wriggled through a slat in the gate as far her rear hips which just would not fit.  I had to pry the gate apart to free her.  I nailed another slat diagonally across the gate and she quit trying.

    Now, however, we have a dog of a similar color, Vega, but different strategy.  A good strategy.  Good for Vega, that is, but bad for us.  I went outside this afternoon to work in the perennial garden in back, overlooked by the deck where our dogs spend much of their time when relaxing.  I looked up there.  All five dogs up there.  Rigel did not try the gate.  Ah.

    Oh. I turned, walked around the side of the house and suddenly, standing beside me, Hello!  Hello! I’m here!  Look at me! was Vega.  At first I thought she might have vaulted the gate.  I had put a concrete block down and inadvertently left the solid side up.  I had to know how she did it.

    After 13 dogs I have some window into the canine mind.  After finally coaxing Vega  back onto the deck inside the fenced in part of our yard, I left her out there, let the rest of the dogs out and returned to the perennial beds.  Sure enough, only 3 minutes passed and I caught sight of Vega, not on the concrete block, which I had guessed, but near the fence that borders the perennial garden about 100 feet or so from the deck.

    The fence is chain link and has contained all of our dogs except for the occasional whippet who follows out some animal that dug to get in the yard.  I have a regular routine of walking the fenceline, checking for breaches and filling them with old tree trunks, fence rails I no longer use, rocks.

    Back to Vega and the fence.  She looked at me, looked down at the area where the fence met the ground, crouched with her doggy butt up in the air, tail wagging and dug.  At first I thought it was just a feint, that she had really jumped as I imagined.  Nope.  She got up, then crouched down again, put her nose under the fence, then squeezed her 70 pound puppy (a really big puppy) body under the fence and Hello!

    Sigh.  Now I’m going to have to harden all the fence line that borders the perennial garden against these escape attempts.  Instead of the bird man of Alcatraz we have the man dog of Andover.


    📂This entry was posted in Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • Take That Hose And Grab It

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                              New Moon

    A bit of a disconnected afternoon.  A long nap followed by working for a while in the heat trying to figure which zone on our irrigation clock corresponded to which actual sprinklers.  This was necessary because we got a new clock and the guy joined the wires in roughly the same order as the old one.  Roughly.

    The stimulus for this work came from Kate’s discovery that our new puppies get excited when the water comes through the netaphim line we just had put in our orchard.   By excited I mean grab the netaphim and run with it, chewing all the while.  Netaphim is a plastic tube about half the size of a garden hose through water drips onto plants rather than sprays.  It works great, but better without teeth marks.

    Tomorrow I’ll put all the netaphim lines on a schedule separate from the rest of the sprinklers and start them early enough in the morning that their work will be done before the puppies get up.  That should solve it.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden GeekWorld permaculture 📎and tagged

  • Growing

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                       Waning Dyan Moon

    “Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.” – Remy de Gourmont

    Don’t you suspect Remy de Gourmont considered him(her)self a complex mind?  It’s the simplest explanation for this quote.

    Our two puppies are six months old, so they’re past that OMG they’re cute! phase.  They still play like puppies though. Rigel ran circles around the cedar just off the deck while Vega lay in wait, pouncing on her sister as she made each circuit of the tree.  They slept outside in the garage, just as we had always intended the wolfhounds would.  Never happened.

    We have a five stall doggy home in the garage custom built by Jon.  Each stall has a layer of insulation below its floor and an opening in the front where feeding bowls can be set.  We did feed the wolfhounds out there.  The doors lock.  Perfect for containing these big (68 pounds) puppies.

    We’ve decided on Rigel and Vega as their call names, though which is which we have not decided.

    Still gimping along with a less than stellar inner world, pressed down, slow to motivate.  The saving grace of these periods of melancholy, as my analyst pointed out, is that they are a prelude to a creative time.  I’ve been turning over ideas for a new novel and possible new, online, ways of marketing.

    The garden continues to develop.  All the squash have emerged, ditto all the bush beans.  Carrots and beets have begun to show their presence, too.  The garlic is close to harvest.  The potatoes have really taken to this sandy loamy soil we have in the raised beds.  Strawberries, tomatoes, sugar snap peas, chard, mustard and collard greens, kale, cucumbers, asparagus and onions are all growing, especially now that we’ve had a little heat.

    Time to hit the grocery store.  After that, I need to work on the computer set up which has some problems that need addressing.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Garden permaculture 📎and tagged