• Tag Archives Jon

  • Live From the Front Range

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                   Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

    Ancientrails hits the road tomorrow, coming to you cyberlive from Denver, Colorado in the new and rapidly expanding area around the old Stapleton Airport.  There will be wonderful grandchildren stories, important updates on children and a report on the interior of the Denver Mint.  Don’t miss anything.  Especially those grandchildren stories.  I can already tell you how they begin:  Ruth is the most amazing 4 year old I’ve ever known and here’s why.  Same for Gabe only 2 year olds.

    We’ll be there a week, the newly liberated Kate and the still liberated me, easing in to this new full-time togetherness thing.  We took a reluctant Vega and Rigel, along with old hand Kona, over to Armstrong Kennels.  Like always, once they got out of the truck and into the lobby, ok, the entry area, they started sniffing around and seemed quite alright with us leaving.  So we did.

    Lunch at Azteca which was on the way home, a nap, a business meeting.  This had good news.  Our finances are in the best shape they’ve been in since ever.  A propitious moment at which to retire.  We sorted through the various tasks remaining before Kate’s big party on the 20th, considered the positive news of Kate’s retirement again, and finished.

    I’ve been putzing around on various computer related matters since then.  I’ve managed to create or acquire three nagging problems, ones I’ve not been able to fix and it annoys me, but we’re leaving tomorrow and they will wait until we get back.  Fortunately, my netbook, which travels with me, isn’t one of them.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Retirement 📎and tagged

  • Whew

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                      Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    OK.  This will be last of this.  But.  Kate reminded me of her surgery on June 30th.  Which preceded preparation for and the arrival and stay of Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe followed then, as I said yesterday, by our too inclusive preparations for the Woollys. No wonder I wore out yesterday.  Let my prop it up and keep going inner coach have the day off.  Better rested and more clear-eyed today.  Ready for ancient Rome.

    These two paragraphs came my way in the last two days.  Their conjunction speaks for itself.

    “Speaking of heat, NOAA reports that June was the hottest  month in recorded history, worldwide. That is the fourth
    month in a row of record warmth for planet Earth. June also marked the 304th consecutive month “with a global temperature above the 20th century average.” The last month with below-normal temperature worldwide? February, 1985. 2010
    temperatures from January to June were the warmest ever recorded for both land and ocean temperatures, worldwide. Stay tuned.”
    Check out Paul’s blog startribune.com/pauldouglas

    (I imagine it’s photoshopped, but still…)

    Mark Odegard found this quote in a book he’s reading about walking with caribou:

    Henry Beston in the beginning of book.

    “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of wild animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, greatly err, For the animal shall not be measured by man, In a world older and more complex than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethrern, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family GeekWorld Great Wheel Great Work Politics Weather +Climate Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Home Again

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                           Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    The grandkids have returned home to Denver.  Their parents only have a couple of weeks now before they return to their teaching jobs, Jon in elementary art and Jen in EFL elementary work in an experimental school.  Ruth and Gabe will return to child care at Humphrey’s, across the street from their house.  Ruth will only be there two weeks because she starts pre-school this year.  Watch out pre-school.

    (Denver at night from space)

    Gotta go.  The weather’s reasonable and the bees need attention.  See you on the backside of the hive inspections.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged

  • Travel Days

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                          Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    As the grandchildren moon waxes, Ruth and Gabe are somewhere south of Andover, headed back home to Denver.  They left about an hour ago taking their parents with 07-12-10_ruth-and-gabethem.  Like most leave takings, this one was bittersweet.  We will not see Ruth’s smile, nor hear her mischievous giggle; the house no longer rings with mymamameee as Gabe, eternally seeking his mother tries to orient himself to the star of his young life.

    We will not be able to talk with Jon and Jen about their lives, their joys, the things that matter to them and therefore to us.  The playhouse has lost its enlivener and no one will run up and down the slope in our front yard, shrieking and reveling in the sheer pleasure of walking barefoot in dewy grass.  No uh-oh or banana grabbed and eaten, one half in one  hand one in the other.

    There is, too, though the truth of lives disrupted by travel, part of its purpose, but also part of its drain.  The dogs lives changed, and they could not see why.  Everyone’s lives are not at their smoothest because routines become difficult to realize and routine soothes, calms.  So, for Gabe and Ruth, Jon and Jen, they now head back to the garden, to the plans for renovation of their home, to the friends both have made over their years in Denver.  Familiar beds, couches, dogs, food, neighbors.

    When Kate and I traveled in Europe, we hit on the idea of a travel day (p.s. Kate reminded me that was her idea.), a day when we just rested, weren’t trying to see some new destination, this museum or that market, this famous street or the Opera House.  This kind of intense, in the home up close visit could, as Kate said, use a travel day.  We’re getting ours today, but when we wake up tomorrow, there will be no mymamameee or Ruth crawling down the hall in her blanket.  And we will miss them.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Travel 📎and tagged

  • OK. Here’s The Guy To Blame.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                            Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Ruth and Gabe have napped, like Grandpop and Granma.  This means they have considerably more energy.  Gabe covered a complete circuit of the patio to front door run, moving as fast as his stubby little legs and slightly forward leaning motor could take him.  I was in hot pursuit.  By hot I mean dew point that is absurd from a Minnesota perspective.  Gabe did not seem deterred.

    Ruth and Grandma, in other news, had feathered boas and performed various short versions of 1920’s flapper era music.  The show moved upstairs only a moment ago.

    Jon has the trailer attached to his car.  It will travel to Colorado and not return except under unusual circumstances.  He needs it for his remodeling and his fledgling custom ski business.  It’s absence frees up space in the third garage bay.  I know, I can’t believe we have three garage bays either.  If you come to our house from the west, it looks like we are pets of three internal combustion driven machines who have the big home.

    Due to a spotlight event tomorrow and an America’s public tour immediately after, I’ve had to study while the grandkids are here.  This morning I read the material on the butterfly maiden kachina and this afternoon I read about Tlingit culture and house screens.  The Hopi faith tradition fascinated me as I learned more about it.  They have a tradition of peaceful living, living that consciously seeks a balance with the natural world and all living things.  The Tlingits have a similar perspective.

    In listening to a set of lectures titled Religions of the Axial Age, I’ve learned that it may have been Zoroaster who pushed Western culture away from a natural, earth centered faith and toward a pantheon, adherence and propitiation of which had a direct correlation to eternal life.  Which was, at least according to this guy, also a Zoroastrian notion.  By developing the notion of a messiah, an end-times judge, and, along with it, the idea of an apocalypse, Zoroaster stuck us with the linear understanding of time.

    (a tower of silence where zoroastrians exposed their dead to vultures and decay)

    Give me the kachinas who come back from their home in the San Francisco Peaks for a six month period beginning around the winter solstice ready to help out.  Makes much more sense to me.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Asia Commentary on Religion Family 📎and tagged

  • Families

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                              Waxing Grandchildren Moon

     

    Gabe and Ruth have broad palates.  Tonight Ruth ate sushi, tempura shrimp and a whole dish full of tempura vegetables as did Gabe.  They also wolfed down tempura ice-cream.  Afterward, Ruth wanted to put on a play in an ampitheatre located behind the Osaka Restaurant.  We waited awhile for her to decide on a performance, but the show, in this case, did not go on.  Maybe tomorrow in her playhouse.

    Families are magical and mysterious, the vessels proven to travel through time intact.  We create them often with little realization of the long tail such action has, but consider the genetic chain linking you to the generation before you and the one before that and the one that crossed the ocean and the one that came out of Africa and the one that links you to mitochondrial Eve.

    They find us at our most intimate, most troublesome, most winsome, most ugly.  The family collects bad acts and good, favors and betrayals, puts them in the alembic of an extended web of relationships and distills out the future.  Miracles are never more than this.

    Our own family, gathered in part here right now, is no different, not special or unique, but no less special or unique than any other.  Ruth laughs, Jon wonders, Jen ponders, Gabe opens and closes, Grandma hugs and Grandpop writes.  The things we do, the people we are.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged

  • Fiery Hoops of Passage

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                        Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Ruth and Gabe move and do, absorbing, trying, reaching, running, searching, asking.  They are both information and experience Brawny Towels.  Nothing passes them by.

    Their emotions are quick to surface and quick to flee.

    Jon and Jen face this firestorm of energy and demand constantly, at home and at work.  It’s enough to make a sane person tired and a neurotic neuroticer.  But, it is also the stuff of very stuff of which life is made; the fiery hoop through which we all had to pass on our way to and through elementary school.

    The cycle of family life, children, then grandchildren keeps  all ages in touch with the heroes journey on which we have all trod and on which those we love are now engaged.

    Here’s to Gabe and Ruth, two pilgrims now progressing on the path.  See the Machado poem in the upper left of this website.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged

  • Uh-oh

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                        New (Grandchildren) Moon

    It’s 10 am.  Do you know where your grandkids are?  I do, they’re upstairs.

    Ruth has brought her sombre et sol disposition with her.  When sol, her blond hair dances and her smile, often mischievous, lights up the room.  When sombre, she turns her face away or covers it up with her ever present bunny and pretends no one else is there.  When she first wakes up, like her grandpop, it’s all sombre.  Later, the sun breaks out and she starts to play.

    Gabe opens cabinets and investigates those things stored just for him, that is, at his level.  One minute he’s playing sword-handler by juggling food processor blades–yikes–the next he’s taking the microwave popcorn out one bag at a time.  One bag at a time, that is, until he tumbles to the fact that he can get them all out by turning it upside down.  As he often says, Uh-oh.

    Gabe, as you may know, has hemophilia.  That means, among many other things, that Jon and Jen have to give him infusions of clotting factor three times a week through a port in his upper left chest.  It’s an elaborate protocol.  First the one who  will do the infusing has to sterilize their hands, then put on sterile gloves and prepare the infusions.  They come pre-measured but they still have to be drawn into a hypodermic plunger.

    After that’s done one of them, in this case Jen, holds him and the other, Jon, takes a small needle with a butterfly attachment and inserts it into the port.  Hopefully.  Jen said she went several weeks without missing the port, then a long stretch missing it the first time.  Gabe anticipates the poke and is unhappy, fidgety, but not out of control.

    Once the stick is in Jon first flushed the port with saline, the switched to the factor (clotting factor), pushed that out with another saline injection and follows, ironically with a fourth and last infusion of heparin, a blood thinner.  Counter intuitive, at least to me.  But, not if you understand.

    You’ve just put clotting factor in the port.  It will clot any blood in or around the port, creating a possible source of a clot breaking off and entering the bloodstream.  Not good.  So, the heparin resolves that problem.

    As I said at the beginning of this journey, Gabe couldn’t have gotten a better set of parents.  It’s not a drama, it’s not a why me, it’s a we need to do this so let’s get on with it.  That attitude will transfer to Gabe who will have to manage all this in the future.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Health 📎and tagged

  • Grandkids

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                  New (Grandchildren) Moon

    Jon and Jen, Ruth and Gabe rolled in around 6 pm.  Kate fed them all, I cleaned up and Jon and Jen organized their family.  Vega and Rigel, of course, helped.

    Ruth went out to her playhouse, looked up at me and said, “I want more toys.”

    Gabe is in what I call the unguided missile stage of human development.  His motor is always on and he hits one thing, bounces off and heads off somewhere else, opening this, closing that, grabbing a pair of scissors, carrying his pin-wheel.  Busy, busy, busy.

    It’s a pleasure to have them here.  They’re here until Thursday.


    📂This entry was posted in Family 📎and tagged

  • Mighty Possum Warriors

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                         New Moon  (Grandchild’s Moon)

    From this point forward (if I remember) I’m going to start naming the moons in ways that make sense to our life here at Artemis Hives and the Seven Oaks.  The Grandchild’s Moon is in honor of a yearly visit that takes place most often in this moon’s ambit since Jon and Jen return to work as teachers in early August.

    The mighty possum warriors finally gave up and came inside to the cool, flopped down on the couch and promptly went to sleep.  A hard day hunting the wily critter had done them in.  I’m 99% sure that the possum only has shattered nerves.  All that barking.  Right out on the patio.

    Jen called today and they leave Chicago tomorrow and plan to be here Sunday night.  They are going to come up on the Minnesota side of the Mississippi, stopping in Winona at the National Eagle Center.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Family 📎and tagged