Imbolc Cold Moon
For Kate, an early valentine:
- Tag Archives Kate
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Turned the Face Away
Winter Cold Moon
Business meeting this am. Then more picture organizing. Out to lunch at Osaka’s for the sashimi appetizer. Over to Home Depot for a tour of the warehouse of the American Dream.
Sunday is a slow day. When Kate and I went to Osaka on this Super Bowl Sunday every one of the booths had women occupying them. I was the only y chromosome among the customers.
In the last year I’ve given up football, cable tv and carbs. I say given up, but really what I’ve done is turned my face away from them. I don’t feel a sense of denial in any of the three. Strange, they all occupied such a substantial part of my pre-65 life. And now they don’t.
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Auntie Biotic
Spring Beltane Moon
Kate is home and her arm (cellulitis) looks much better. Still a ways to go both on the antibiotics and healing, but the right direction. Among the vagaries of strong antibiotic treatment is its kill all nature. Like Round-up can’t tell the difference between weed and grass, most antibiotics can’t tell the difference between the pathogens and the friendly flora and fauna of your gut.
As a large symbiotic organism with literally billions of helper one-celled creatures throughout our body, it’s not a good idea to kill the guest-workers. It would be sort of like throwing all the immigrants in jail (or deporting them) that you need to do the work in agriculture, manufacturing and domestic services. Oh, wait…
How does the old song go? You don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone. The digestive tract needs these wee beasties, needs them bad. When they get killed off in sufficient quantities, the intestinal tract can get thrown way outta whack.
Now, I’m not sayin’ the cure is worse than the disease, but at certain points in time it can feel like a toss up. This very problem can cause cancer patients to push away chemo-therapy, concluding that in this case, in spite of a terrible disease, that the cure is worse.
A lot of medicine relies on harsh chemicals, the internal equivalents of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides. It’s popular in some circles to acknowledge this and give a blanket condemnation of Western medicine. This kind of criticism only makes sense in a world where dying from an infection triggered during gardening seems impossible. Why impossible? Because we have the harsh chemicals to combat the even harsher outcomes of untended infection.
Overuse has begun to erode our edge against infections, so we might again have an era when the yearning will be for the time when we could beat stuff back.
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A Serial Watcher
Spring Beltane Moon
A gorgeous day. Sun, warm. Daffodils in bloom. Bees buzzing in the orchard. Dogs playing in the woods. Kate’s on her way home.
Ruthie told Kate she was her favorite grandma. I told her she was my favorite grandma, too. She’s coming back a happy gal.
During the grey cold days of the weekend I did something I’ve not done before. I wrote here sometime ago quitting Comcast cable tv. Too damn expensive and a time suck. In it’s place we have dvds, netflix and hulu. Hulu (and Netflix, too for that matter) has whole TV series from beginning to end. For instance, it has the entire Battlestar Galactica Sci-Fi channel series. And many others.
That means you can do what I did on Saturday and Sunday. I found a new series, Grimm, that tells the story of a descendant of the fairy-tale compiler. Turns out the Grimms can see and hunt all manner of thought-to-be imaginary creatures like the big bad wolf, pied piper and a whole menagerie of others.
So I watched 1-12 of an 18 episode run. That’s the thing I haven’t done before. You can watch TV serials as if they are, in a sense, a video novel with each episode as a chapter. Now I wouldn’t defend this as a way to increase your brain power, might have killed a few gray cells, but it sure was fun. Felt very decadent though.
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Dogs and Granddaughters
Spring New Beltane Moon
Homes have needs. This one needs Kate to feel full and she’s gone. I’m lucky I have the dogs or I would feel lonely.
The dogs get up very early, thanks to Gertie, usually around 5:00-5:30 am. Kate, with her residency experience of sudden waking, working and going back to sleep handles this if only because I sleep through it. She gets up, feeds the dogs and comes back to sleep. Most mornings all four dogs come inside after their meal and then wait quietly until we get up.This morning Vega and Rigel, our two coon hound/Irish wolfhound dogs, decided, as they occasionally do, to stay outside. Vega will bark, sometimes 30 minutes later, to come back inside and Kate will get up and let her in. Well, I slept through it this morning, letting her back in.
When I finally got up, I let Vega and Rigel inside and Vega was so happy she came in, spun
around, jumped up on the window seat (her place), back down and spun around again.Talked to Kate last night and apparently Ruthie, 6 year old granddaughter, really liked her rhinestone studded belt I picked out for her at the Stock Show this January. “Are those real diamonds?” she asked. She has the hat, the vest and now needs only the boots to be a real Jewish cowgirl.
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The Quotidian
Spring New Beltane Moon
Kate has taken her still healing cellulitis off to Colorado for a weekend with the grandkids. Gabe’s fourth birthday is tomorrow. Her arm looks much better than it did on Monday, swelling much less pronounced and the area of red, heated skin has reduced considerably. It took four doses of IV antibiotics and the follow-up oral meds to get this infection under control. No fun at all.(Gabe and Grandpop, January, 2012)
Meanwhile back at the apiary, I’m going to check the bees tomorrow for larvae, need for syrup and pollen patties. A few garden chores tomorrow, too, notably digging up the potato patch and amending the soil. I can’t plant potatoes in the main vegetable garden for a couple more years because the beetles found them last fall. Too many to pick off and drown in soapy water.
Also, I really need to fix the tire on the Celica, get it started and get the tire repaired or buy a new one. Then, I’m going to give it away one way or another. Know anyone that needs a car? I may have a taker, but I’m not sure. If not, I’ll pass it on to someone for free. It has 280,000 miles on it, but it runs well. We’ve decided to go with one car for financial reasons and it’s the one with the most mileage, so it has to go.
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Kate is Home!
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
The home is full again. Kate got home at 7:00 pm. Four of us were wagging our tails and I hugged her. She took off for the doctor yesterday and never came home until just now.
Her arm looks better, not well, but better. Her spirits are good; though she says she’s “going to play the invalid tomorrow and Thursday. We’ll see. She’s not too good in that role.
We had grilled chicken, chard (from last year’s garden) and whole wheat spaghetti with olive oil and butter. After the meal we both scratched our heads during Tree of Life.
It evoked the era of my childhood so well: kick the can, swimming, roaming in the fields, running down alleys, getting into mischief. I pulled back from understanding and went with the flow, the feel of things. I liked it. Don’t know that I’d want all the films I see to take that form, but in this case, well done.
Tomorrow. Some errands.
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Ah.
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
A much better sounding Kate called a couple of times this AM. The swelling has begun to recede which means she’s responding to the IV antibiotics. Which, thank God, means it’s not one of the resistant strains of strep infections. She will have her fourth IV infusion at 4 pm, then she’ll come home.
She ordered grilled chicken breast and vegetables for dinner tonight. The chef is on duty.
She has to keep her arm elevated at or above her shoulder, will have oral antibiotics, but, and this is the really important part, she will be able to go to Denver. She would not have been a happy camper if she had been unable to see Gabe and Ruth (grandkids).
So. A big whew here.
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In the Hospital
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Mentioned Kate’s cellulitis the other day. Got worse. She went to the doc today, her regular doc for over 30 years. Kate called at noon, “I’m going to the hospital. IV antibiotics.” Oh.
This had me worried because not long after we were married Kate developed a very serious infection, it turned out to be her first ever herpes simplex to which her body way overreacted. She damn near died with that one.
So, I’m relieved she’s getting full bore attention for this.
Only one problem. She has our car. We talked about my taking a cab in but decided it was too expensive. I don’t have anything until Wednesday since I passed on the Woolly’s tonight. If they can knock this back in a day or two, I’ll stay here and take care of the home front.
If she needs me, she’ll call and I’ll get in there. I could take the Northstar in tomorrow or Wednesday morning.
An unforeseen occurrence in our one car plan. Weird, huh?
She leaves Friday for Denver, at least that’s the current plan. Hard to say now.
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Book of Revelations
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Weather guru Paul Douglas (a Republican who accepts global warming and climate science) said this morning, “I feel like a weather forecaster for the Book of Revelations. If the 7th day of my 7 day forecast doesn’t appear, head for the hills.”(our cherry blossoms)
This because he had to assure us that the SNOW today would not accumulate. Over the last two weeks I’ve gone from furnace to AC and back again twice. Never before in my memory.
As I ate my delicious Swedish pancakes, thank you Kate, the snow blew and whirled over the bee hives, through the branches of our blooming cherry and pear trees and gathered on the tips of the onions stalks I planted a couple of weeks ago.
Interesting. As my Norwegian brethren might say.