Tag Archives: Kate

Family, Garden

Andover Chain Saw Butchery (of a Cedar)

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Beltane                                                                      Full Last Frost Moon

Taking the local this morning meant cutting down the second cedar trunk and limbing it.  Mark worked very hard yesterday moving the downed and limbed trunks and branches in the front yard.  He went to bed early and slept hard.  Kate, too.  She weeded and weeded yesterday.  Her body mechanics have gotten better so her glutes tire instead of her back becoming painful.

This run of warm days will accelerate the growth in the garden.  The first planting of lettuce is recognizable now and the spinach almost so.  No potatoes coming through yet but they need a soil temperature of plus 50 degrees, so they’ve probably been tool cold.  Just hope they haven’t rotted.  The beans are up, the onions, carrots, beets and asparagus, too.  A lot of yard clearing work, weeding, maintenance chores have gotten done and will get done over the next few weeks.  Having Mark to help really moves things along.

Now I go see Leslie for our last visit, then a couple of Sierra club meetings in the evening.  The legislature has begun to wind down, but there’s a distinct  possibility that it is not all over.  Not quite yet.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Great Work

Real Religion

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Beltane                                                     Waxing Last Frost Moon

“The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men – from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Especially true if you insert mother earth for mothers and nature for women, viz.  The real religion of the world comes from nature much more than from men-from mother earth most of all, who carries the key to our souls in her bosom.

I am just back from seeing Leslie give her final presentation at Groveland.  Ran into Bill Mate.  He’s been doing work for the Methodist Church in New Orleans.  Sounded fun.

Wow.  No nap yesterday plus 5 hours driving, then up early for going into St. Paul to see Leslie.  Got hit by a sudden need to lie down and sleep.  Did so.  Better now, less foggy.

When I got back, Kate was in the front, raking and planting, earth mother to mother earth.  I made pizza, then crashed.  Still waking up.

Light rain, warm.  80’s in the forecast.  Spring, it seems, may have finally arrived, well after it has come and gone as a Celtic season.

Aging, Memories, Politics

Women. Still Advancing.

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Spring                                                          Waning Bee Hiving Moon

During my first years of seminary the women’s movement, already rolling when I left college in 1969, had begun to pick up a solid head of steam.  Half of the women in my class (one), went to consciousness raising with the wives of male students.  By the time I graduated from sem in 1976 the entering class was mostly female.  At some point in the 1980’s there was actually a junior (first year) class that was all female.

Kate is a pediatrician only recently retired. My ex, Raeone Loscalzo, runs Women’s Advocates, the nations oldest provider of shelters for abused women.  In terms of traditional marks of male success both of these women have out achieved me by a long way:  more money, more prestige.  This would have been strange and aberrant when I grew up; now, I’m happy to say it only reflects the increasing ability of women to lead lives based on their ability and not limited by sexist stereotypes.

Among the many cultural changes our generation has nurtured, none was more wrenching and more life changing than the women’s movement.  It is a great joy to me, at this stage of my life, to see the advances women have made, really in a short time.  It is testimony to the hard work, the steel will, the insightful analysis and the dogged persistence of women at all ages and stages of our culture.  It is no easy thing to leave the cocoon of stereotyped safety for the responsibility of life on your terms.  But look at the huge number of women who have achieved it.

That’s why this excerpt from a news article reveals only the present crest of this still moving wave.

WASHINGTON – For the first time, American women have passed men in gaining advanced college degrees as well as bachelor’s degrees, part of a trend that is helping redefine who goes off to work and who stays home with the kids.

Census figures released Tuesday highlight the latest education milestone for women, who began to exceed men in college enrollment in the early 1980s. The findings come amid record shares of women in the workplace and a steady decline in stay-at-home mothers.

Art and Culture, Family, GeekWorld, Humanities

Using Tech Tools

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Spring                                                Waning Bee Hiving Moon

This morning Kate and I had our weekly business meeting.  Those Amazon books add up.  We’re well into the first growing season with Kate retired.  It makes the whole process seem less urgent, more manageable from my perspective.  I like that.  Having Mark here right now helps, too.

After that I checked my translation on Diana and Actaeon, the 10 verses I’m preparing for my reading/translation lesson on Friday.  The second time through I found several things I missed the first time.  I believe my translation is improving, improving quickly right now.  Some sort of developmental break through, I suppose.

After that I fiddled with Firefox 4.0.  It’s the latest version of the favorite non-windows browser though I understand Chrome (Google) has begun to catch up.  It seems to be a bit slower with g-mail and the MIA website, but it makes up for it with its cool new feature, Panorama.  Panorama allows you to group frequently used tabs together in transparent collections accessible through a small tab at the top of the browser.

This way, when I move into Latin, for example, I can click once and up comes Perseus with my section of the Metamorphoses already loaded, along with the word find tool.  Another example, a weather tab holds my Andover NOAA page, Paul Douglas’ blog, Chanhassen NOAA weather story and a moon phase calendar.  All one click away.  Pretty neat.

It’s also time to start working on my Spanish tour for next week.  I called up Microsoft Notes, a program I wonder how I worked without now.  I opened a new notebook, titled it Art History Research and put in a tab, Spanish Tour May 5, 2011.  Now I’ll have my tours all in one handy place with talking points beside each piece.  Pretty neat.

A guy like me, who switches between diverse interests with regularity throughout a day and a week, finds work accelerated in pleasant ways with these organizational tools.

Family, Garden

Workin’ Outside

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Spring                                                                Waning Bee Hiving Moon

The bees buzzed around their new homes while Mark, Kate and I worked in the garden.  Mark cleaned up a bunch of junk that always seemed just a bit too much after finishing up other work.  Place looks less like we’re the poor cousins of the Beverly Hillbillies.  I finished the early spring planting, adding a succession planting of spinach, golden beets and Fordhook kale plus lettuce and Early Blood beets.  Kate did her weed destructor thing clearing out space for transplanting gooseberries.

A good morning’s work.  We ate lunch at the Panda Buffet, a sort of thresher’s breakfast.  Now it’s time for a nap.

Family, Humanities

If You Can, Speak

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Spring                                    Waning Bee Hiving Moon

More fun with poor Actaeon.   I translated this short speech of Diana’s and it really gets to the point of what Ovid had in mind.

Diana has just sprinkled Actaeon with avenging water and his transfer to a stag is complete, though he doesn’t know it quite yet.  She says to him:

“Now let me show you the garment you saw set down,

If you can tell about it, you may.”

When he tries, all that comes out are a groan and tears, “only his pristine mind remained.”  Ouch.  You want to stay on the good side of any goddess in your vicinity.

We’ve decided to change my tutoring sessions to a reading course format.  I will prepare several verses, translate them, but on the day of our session, I will read the Latin out loud, then translate as much as possible from sight.  This should speed up my learning.

On Friday’s Kate goes to the bank to get our weekly cash, goes to the pharmacy which is close by (our credit union is at Mercy Hospital and the pharmacy in the medical office building across the street) and often comes home with lunch.  When she gets home, she says,  “I’ve got money, drugs and food.”  Those little domestic rituals.

Bees, Family, Weather +Climate

Week’s End

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Spring                                                          Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

Kate and Annie (her sister) are off to Omaha, Kansas City and various quilt shops in between.  When asked what they do on the bus (she’s done this before), she said, “Talk.”  Me, “No quilt-road-tripsinging, no poker, no beer?”  Nope.

Brother Mark is here, decompressing from a tough six months, and inhaling American culture, “Something there, but being brought forward from far back in the mind.”  He’s not been back to the US in over 20 years.

Today is the first day I’ve had any lengthy time to myself this whole week.  Gonna spend it doing Latin.

The kale and chard starts have germinated; the tomatoes have yet to break the surface.  All this is under the lights.  I’ve not checked the beets, spinach and lettuce planted outside earlier in the week, but they should get started in the not too distant future.

Next weekend the bees should arrive, so there are bee related chores this week:  cleaning frames and hive boxes, moving everything to the orchard, checking the honey supers.  The smoker needs cleaning out, too, a lot of soot collects over the course of a season.  Tomorrow I have advanced bee keeping, open only to those who have kept bees at least a full season or two.

But, since this is Minnesota, first we may have to have some snow.

Family, Garden

Garden Diary: April 10, 2011

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Spring                                                                Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

The outside gardening season has begun.  Kate and I worked in the vegetable garden together this morning.  She (I’m in destructo mode) cleaned out beds, cut down raspberry canes, weeded and  pruned.  I worked more composted manure into the beds, then planted American Spinach, Golden Beets and Lettuce.  I also prepared beds for the leeks and the potatoes.  potato planting 2010The leeks will go in the next week, already begun inside, and the potatoes will go out a bit after they arrive, probably late week after next.  The garlic, strawberries, rhubarb, asparagus, raspberries and a few stray onions have a jump on the season, as do a couple of perennial herbs.  When they come, I’ll drop in the carrots and beans and peas.  Feels good to have the outdoor garden started.

I plan to be more conscientious about planting successive crops of beets, lettuce, spinach, kale and chard, so we can harvest, preserve and eat those throughout the year.  We’ll also pay more attention to the harvesting of beans, peas and asparagus especially.

Mark went to bed around 6:00 pm last night and is still asleep.  No wonder since it’s midnight in Bangkok right now.  He’s had a tough last six months, but I can see he will get past it.

Bees, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

We Inch, Slowly, Toward Spring

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Spring                                                                 Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

Kate comes home tonight.  Yeah!  I miss her when she’s gone. I’ll follow our usual procedure and pick her up at the Loon Cafe, conveniently located at the end of the light rail service 650-herb-spiralfrom the airport.  Makes the drive much shorter and I get a good meal in the bargain.

After the biting and the barking and the adrenaline I figured out a somewhat complicated solution to the Rigel/Sollie problem.  It involves making sure that one set of dogs is in their crate before admitting the others to the house.  This way nobody trespasses on anybody else’s territory.

It demands a careful watching of when Rigel and Vega are away hunting so I can let Sollie, Gertie and Kona inside.  Or, alternatively, when Rigel and Vega are on the deck and the others are out hunting.  A bit baroque I know but I have no more indentations in the leg.

(pics from April of last year)

As the Bee Hiving moon goes from New to Full, our yard will lose its snow and we will have several species of flowers in bloom, a few vegetables in the ground and as it begins to wane we should have our new bees hived and happy in their new homes.  There are things that need to happen before this last, not the least moving the hives to the orchard, cleaning all the frames of propolis and burning the old hive boxes and frames I got from Mark, the bee mentor.650-apple-blossoms

Seeing the bulbs planted in the fall begin to emerge always heartens me because it reminds me of hours of labor spent in the cool air of late October or early November.  We won’t be here for that time next year, so probably no new bulbs this year.

In fact, I’m declaring finished to our orchard, garden, vegetable, bee expansions.  We’ll stick with no more than three hives, the raised beds and other beds we have in the vegetable garden, the trees and bushes we have in the orchard and the flower beds we have in place now.

We’ll always have to replace dead plants and put in new ones in their place.  We have to care for the fruit trees and bushes, plant vegetables and maintain the bee colonies so we’ll have to plenty to keep us occupied.  I just want to get good at the stuff we have and begin to slowly limit the work we do over the course of the year.

Aging, Dogs, Humanities, Politics, Writing

Habitus

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Spring                                                                   New Bee Hiving Moon

The dogs, that is, Sollie and Rigel, still have energy for the fight.  Damn it.  I’ve not yet figured out a foolproof strategy for keeping them away from flashpoints.  I will.

Kate called and she says both Ruth and Gabe have had a change in habitus.  That’s pediatric speak for body change.  Gabe is taller and thinner.

Ruth’s face has begun to elongate, moving from pre-school to school age.  This means, Kate says, that Ruth will hit puberty early.  Uh-oh.  She’s already lost a tooth.  This is stuff that usually happens around 6 and she was still 4, turning 5 on Monday.  Ruth is bright, athletic, blond and blue-eyed.  Can you imagine that combination in junior high?

Meanwhile I have a quiet weekend to devote to the novel and to Latin.  Novel first, then Latin.  Probably a trip to the grocery store and definitely another go at seed starting.  I still have some tricks.

A conference call at 5:00 pm about making a Sierra Club endorsement in a special election, the seat, Senate District 66, vacated by Ellen Anderson when she took a position on the Public Utility Commission.