• Tag Archives August
  • For Everything

    Lughnasa                                      Full Artemis Moon

    A full day today and another one tomorrow.  Late August through early September are busy times here at 7 Oaks and Artemis Hives.  Kate’s worked like a Trojan, the Norwegians of Greece, pulling weeds, making piles, churning through task after task.  She wears me out.  And she’s older than I am.

    Each month has its own qualities, tasks appropriate to the time of year.  August’s tasks include harvest, weeding, ordering bulbs for fall, considering the garden for next year, mulching, honey extraction.  It also includes getting ready for the busy season at the MIA, the school year when students come through the museum in amazing numbers and the special expeditions go up.  This year we’ll have the Thaw collection of Native American Art, Embarrassment of Riches, a photography show curated by David Little and the Titian Exhibition.  The State Fair begins, kids get their last fond looks at the lake or the backyard or the baseball field, and adults take advantage of the heat.  In Minnesota we know that often the best month of the year lies ahead, either September or October.

    Just finished a book, Blind Descent, that narrates the search for the world’s deepest cave.  The story line gripped me from the beginning, especially the technical descriptions of work in super caves.  It recounts the culmination in 2004 of two of the most promising super cavers of the current era:  Bill Stone and Alexander Klimchouk of Georgia.  It was Klimchouk’s work in the Arabika highlands that yielded Krubera, the world’s deepest cave, at over 7,000 feet below the surface.  Worth reading.

    Vega and Rigel have a new project.  They have dug several holes, some of them deep enough that their heads disappear in them.  I can only assume they’re chasing something that burrows, probably a gopher.  They seem to be doing a good deal more digging than catching.  It was this kind of behavior last fall that led to the two fences that we have now.  Seeing them dig as Kate and I worked in the orchard, inside one of those fences, I was so happy we had them.  Right now Vega barks in her crate, ready to go back and hunt some more.  We’ll wait her out.