• Tag Archives Mark

  • Running Aces Harness Track

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                          Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

    “Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul.” – Horace

    Horace has an early version here of wherever you go, there you are.  My brother has carried the same soul with him from the soi of Bangkok to the exurbs of the Twin Cities.

    Mark, Kate and I took off through the beautiful backroads of northern Anoka county and made it, after a couple of years of talking about it, to the Running Aces Harness Track.  I’m not kidding about northern Anoka county, much of it is as interesting and as attractive as the northern part of the state.  There are large stretches of marsh land and forest, small lakes, pine trees and surprisingly few development thanks to a generally high water table.  Driving back in the night it was exactly like traveling on county roads in Cook County.

    Running Aces.  A subculture, harness racing has a lovely track here with plenty of seating and parimutuel betting.  When you drive up, there is a big port cochere, much like the entrance to a resort hotel. On the benches around the curve of the drive a man sat hunched over smoking, his peroxide blonde hair mussed, as if he had been running his hands through it.  Just inside the glass doors a floor to ceiling painting commemorates Minnesota’s harness racing legend, Dan Patch.

    Floor to ceiling glass doors allow a glimpse of the harness track off to the left, it’s gravel covered surface banked and curved.   In the middle of a half moon layout and up on a raised floor was the off track betting area where races throughout the country showed up on several flat screens mounted one next to the other.  A woman with bottle red hair, a jean-jacket and sequined cowboy boots passed betting slips to a middle-aged man with an impressive paunch.  They studied them, trying to read the runes.

    At the right lies the card room.  Several Asian folks played Pai Gow Poker, an Americanized version of a game originally played with Mahjhong tiles.  There were black jack tables, the James Bond favorite, baccarat, a Mississippi river boat table and several, perhaps 12 or 14 tables filled with 8 players each engaged in Texas Hold’em, the dominant form of poker played on the professional circuit.

    We passed those by and headed out to the track. (Though I snuck inside later and checked them both out.)

    The betting windows have wood fronts and look much like old bank teller cubicles, save for the How to Bet sign posted below.  The betting windows and three lines of chairs occupy an enclosed area that has a full view of the track, but has either A/C or heat depending on the circumstances.  Outside there were tables, rows of chairs, a few benches right in front of the track and a restaurant with a patio area.

    Kate and Mark had purchased a racing program while I parked and they had it out, trying to read it, figure out the symbols and the information about horses in each of 8 races on the card for the evening.  Post time was at 7 pm.  We missed the first race, but saw the second.  A white Cadillac has a long starting gate arranged like dragon fly wings while extended.  The Cadillac takes off and the horses trot up as the Cadillac heads toward the starting point about half way around the large, 5/8ths mile track.  When the Cadillac hits the starting point the dragon fly wings retract and the horses take off in a flying start.

    Tonight a 3/4 Honey Extraction Moon sat directly over the far straight away as the sky went from blue to dark blue to bruised red then a clear night.  The air temp was about 68 degrees.  A perfect night for racing.

    We didn’t understand much of what was said and even less of what was written, but we did see a couple of races where a horse came from back in the field to win at the end.  I noticed a guy in jeans and a windbreaker come to full attention as the horses pounded down the main straight headed for the finish line.  What happened mattered to him.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Asia Family Sport Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Friday Journal

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                            Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

    Got excited during the Graphic Design class and ordered Adobe Creative Suite 5.0.  It’s cheaper since it’s behind the latest iteration 5.5.  I’ll be able to do my own eBooks, website, manipulate photos.  It’s more software than I need, but I like to have the best tools when I’m ready to use them.

    Mark has had a callback from Target Warehouse and a potential position in Saudi Arabia.  The Saudi Arabia position would be cosh, he says.  After living in Bangkok, Mark has a lot of English slang from British expats.  He’s excited.  This working at looking for a job seems to be working for him.

    Took the last bits of the truck back to its now lifeless body.  We kept the old tail gate, hitch and bumper removed when we added the Tommy lift.

    Kate and I spent lunch yesterday and the time after in a darkened Osaka, choosing shore excursions for our cruise.  I haven’t run the totals yet, but I imagine when we add in dog boarding and the two additional days in Rio we’ll have a heft sum in addition to the cost of the cruise.  All part of the deal.  We still need to get our extra passport photos and start the Brazil visa process.

    Finally got back to the aerobics yesterday.  Slept better.  The clay intensive and family reunion threw me off schedule.  Getting back up one step at a time.  First, aerobics.  Then, resistance.  Meanwhile practicing Tai Chi.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Health Travel 📎and tagged

  • Each Others Lives

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                       Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

    “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” – Lao Tzu

    Five men came together tonight at the Black Forest.  Brothers.  Men who have stood shoulder to shoulder for over twenty years, through marriage and divorce, through conflict and calm.  We sat outside, under a clear plastic roof that sprayed water on us while we talked when the wind blew up.  The usual conversation.  Mark’s knee.  Getting better.  Frank’s trip to Ireland.  Everyone had a great time.  Stefan’s sons.  My brother.  Bill and I talked computers, how to back up ancientrails, whether I might mine it for a book, or two.  How I might redesign it.

    We went over each others lives, we know the history, the background, the context.  We listened and nodded, ate our polish sausages and sauerkraut or lentil and sausage soup, felt the late heat of a stormy day begin to creep out from under the clouds.

    We see each other twice a month at least, sometimes more.  Always we stay alert to each other, exchanging e-mails, funny and serious.

    I’m proud to call these men my friends.


    📂This entry was posted in Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Progress In Tai Chi

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Mid-Summer                                                              New Honey Extraction Moon

    Tai chi.  Finally, I made some progress.  Slow, but sure.  Be patient with yourself they told us at the first meeting.  I’m glad they said that.  I’ve needed it and still get upset, want to quit, but keep coming back.  This is a commitment to a new way of being in the world, a more physical, graceful way.  A way I don’t often associate with myself.

    Mark starts work tomorrow, an 8-hour day devoted to looking for work.  We’ll pay him minimum wage for a devoted effort, an effort which can include looking at graduate programs, looking for work far away as well as for work close to hand.

    Another hot, sticky day.


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

  • Ancientrails

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Mid-Summer                                                     Full Honey Flow Moon

    Talking with Mark today it occurred to me, for the first time, that part of what was going on with him, maybe a lot of it, involved repatriation.  So, I looked it up on google.  Turns out repatriate adjustment has many facets, most of them difficult to integrate, often leading to feelings of isolation, alienation and just plain old bewilderment.  Especially when you return suddenly, as Mark did, from twenty + years abroad, the country of his birth has changed.  A lot.  In subtle and not so subtle ways.  I’m just beginning to understand this phenomenon, but as a brother and as a student of anthropology, it fascinates me and gives me considerable pause.

    Last night, during a violent thunder storm, our power went out and, presumably, our generator kicked in.  But, as life goes, at 4:45 am, our alarm decided it had to begin chirping.  And chirping.  Not the wailing kind of all hell’s broken loose kinda noise, but a persistent annoying chirp.  After muffling it and going back to sleep, Kate got up and called the company.  We had to replace the back up battery in the unit’s central box.  This is a twelve-volt battery with sulfuric acid like your car battery.  Who knew?  Anyhow the new one now rests where the faded one was and all is well with the alarm system.

    My History of Graphic Design course project, redesigning Ancientrails, has got me thinking about why I do this.  Do I do this for you, the reader, or for me?  I have kept diaries and journals since the early 70’s.  They vary in systematics and consistency although over the last 20 years I’ve kept regular journals on matters from spirituality to art history, reading the classics to daily experiences, thoughts.  Ancientrails extends and continues those, which were private, so in that sense this is a public journal, but a continuation of a private one.

    It is not, however, like the private one, unread.  Readership varies from peaks of around 200 a day to a more average 50.  There were some 1100 visits this month.  A small number for most websites, infinitesimal really, but considerably more than the one who read my private journals.  Having readers changes the content.  I’ve made four of five gaffes that have gotten me into hot water with family, lost me a job and caused certain allies to wonder about my discretion.  Each one of those events creates a certain amount of self-censorship, as does the possibility that anybody might read any of this at any time.

    Ancientrails is also a document on the world wide web.  That means html, tags, pictures, news, links.  These features create a more accessible journal, a deeper journal with ties to other webpages and direct access to information about a topic.  Not sure where all this goes quite yet.  Still thinking.  If you have any input, leave me a comment.  Thanks.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld Travel Weather +Climate Writing 📎and tagged

  • The Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Mid-Summer                                                                 Waxing Honey Flow Moon

    The card gods have failed to smile on me the last three months.  Paying me back for that lucky streak, teaching me–again–humility.  But.  Bill Schimdt, with brother Pat over his shoulder, won big tonight.  Congratulations to Bill and Pat.

    Kate walked into the surgeon’s office with only a cane for assistance two weeks to the day after her surgery.  She moves well without the cane and will not need physical therapy.  Soon she will be walking free from hip pain for the first time in 15 to 20 years.  There are miracles and we don’t need the supernatural to explain them.  Skill, pluck and advancing knowledge, they’re enough.

    Brother Mark spent the day slogging it out door to door in his search for a job.  This takes toughness and he admitted it took him some time to work up his nerve, but once he got into it, he applied several places and has a possible call back tomorrow.  Way to go Mark.

    In reading the book, The Death of the Liberal Class, my fire for economic justice relit.  Those of who can must fight.  Socialism is not a bad word.  A capitalist economy that punishes the poor and siphons money from them to the rich has no moral standing.  We need to strike back against it.  Just how, what these times offer as alternatives, I don’t know.  But I intend to find out.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Friends Health Politics 📎and tagged

  • Pick and Plan Eating

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Mid-Summer                                                        Waxing Honey Flow Moon

    Kate and I have decided on a pick and plan eating method.  That is, we’ll pick fresh vegetables, then build a meal around what we have.  I picked this morning, for example, green beans, beets, golden and bull’s blood, lettuce, dill, and 7 garlic bulbs.  We still have onions from an earlier harvest, so there’s the basics for our lunch or dinner tonight.  In addition Mark has picked hundreds, maybe thousands of currants and Kate spent yesterday starting the preservation work.  She’s test drying some, making jams and jellies.  We’re well into the first significant harvest period though we have had strawberries, lettuce, kale, spinach and onions already.

    The tomatoes I started inside, which looked puny early in the season have grown tall and begun to bloom.  That means we’ll get heirloom tomatoes in addition to the two store bought plants.  Through integrated pest management I’ve beaten back the yucky scourge Colorado beetles on the potatoes .  Boy are they gross.  Little fat jabba the hut creatures until they get their wings. The leeks have begun to thicken, not much, but some.  The potatoes have blooms and that signals the beginning of tuber growth underground.  Lots of onions getting bigger, carrots, too.

    Big-Stone Mini-Golf deserves its own entry and I’ll get to that either later today or tomorrow.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden 📎and tagged

  • Capitol Camp Out

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Mid-Summer                                                                  Waxing Honey Flow Moon

    Mark and I drove into St. Paul to help set-up the Capitol Camp-Out action on the lawn of the State Capitol.    We helped set up the sound system, then transferred to pitching tents, ones with which we had no prior experience.  That was fun.  How do these things work?  This cross piece bends and goes there.  Nope.  Over there.  Sigh.  To make things more challenging the tents could not have stakes, State Capitol grounds rules.  When Mark and I left, the area had begun to fill up already with tents.

    After that we toured St. Paul, Rice Park, Irvine Park, Summit Avenue in particular.  Mark took over the wheel when we finished with Summit Avenue and drove us home, preparing himself for his driver’s license test.  He can’t do that until he gets a piece of paper from California confirming his previous license there some 20 + years ago.

    Kate spent the morning entering contacts into her new IPad2.  She’s already learned how to play several games.  She has a definite solitaire jones, playing with care and precision, the same way she quilts.

    Last night, still working out my new schedule, I spent an hour or so throwing out magazines.  Yes, I know.  I keep saving them for that mythical moment of return, which, I’m finally admitting, just never occurs.  Wired, Scientific American, Economist, Sierra Club, Philosophy Now, Dissent, Parabola, Orion.  I love magazines.  And don’t like to part with them.  Until now.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Politics 📎and tagged

  • Bee Diary: July, 2011

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Mid-Summer                                                      Waxing Honey Flow Moon

    All three colonies now have honey supers.  I put two on the parent colony for 2012 today after a full reversal of the three hive boxes.  The other two colonies now have four honey 640flying-bees-july-2011supers on over two hive boxes, the management practice for them will let them die off naturally at the end of the season.  I’m looking forward to a better honey harvest than last year, but we’ll see. It’s still early days.

    Next year I’m going to move all new packages into hive boxes set out at the perimeter of the current location which will put them all in the sun while maintaining their protection from the wind.

    So far this whole season I have had one sting, the result of working all three colonies a week ago with no gloves and only the veil.  These are friendly, or at least incurious, bees.

    Shifting my workout back to the morning, where I had it for many years, has gotten the desired result, more consistency.  The downside is that I wander around in the afternoon and early evening ( like now) not knowing exactly what to do.  I’ll have to mend this somehow, and I will over time as I adjust to this new routine.

    Kate and I went out today while I did the banking and picked up meds.  She stayed in the truck until we got to Applebees, her new favorite restaurant.  Not mine, but it’s not bad.  A little down market for my taste.  Having Kate out a week after her surgery is both amazing and pleasing.  She’s my sweetie and I like spending time with her.

    Brother Mark has begun to get some job nibbles.  He got a haircut and beard trim today that cost him $28.  That seemed high to his Bangkok tuned financial sensitivities.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Family Health 📎and tagged

  • The 4th of July

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Mid-Summer                                                     Waxing Honey Flow Moon

    Independence Day.  Celebrating our ancestor’s victory over the British army and considering how their enlightenment ideals apply to our time.  Happy 4th of July!

    For an unreconstructed radical like myself, these are trying times.  I wonder where the sense of communitarian spirit has gone.  Yes, we have a can do, go it alone spirit, too and I participate in it.  The ethical underpinnings of Western civilization, however, fed by the the deep springs of Athens and Jerusalem have always reminded us that we share this journey.   Our lives are not ours alone, but belong as well to the whole, to the commonweal.  When we establish a government of the people, by the people, and FOR the people, we make this claim a part of our countries essence.

    The rugged individualist, the objectivist, the capitalist have the inclination to see the community as a source for their betterment, which is fine as long as their betterment does not come at others expense.  In that case these same perspectives become exploitative and parasitic, not interdependent, mutual.  A 5-year old knows that if all you do is take and take and take, then the other kids will no longer want to play with  you.

    The atomistic viewpoints of groups like the Tea Party and, in an insult to the Christian faith, the evangelical right, make it clear that they want the government to enforce their bigoted views of morality:  no stemcell research, homophobia and respect for only one point of view in struggle over Roe v. Wade.  They want no government aid to the poor, no environmental review for corporate projects that threaten the long term health of our natural world.  They have a vast umbrella of negatives with which they hope to block the sunshine of equality and shared responsibility.

    They want the constitution, like the bible, to be an inspired document, written not by men and women, but by gods, inviolate and sacrosanct.  It isn’t true of the bible and it is even much less so true of the constitution.  Both of these documents live, that is, they get swept into new eras, with new challenges and demand a hermeneutics for understanding their relevance.  Always.  This is an iron law of human history, no document from the past means the same thing today that it did yesterday.  That is anachronistic thinking at its most damaging, its most infantile, its most destructive.

    My sister lives in Singapore and, up until very recently, so did my brother, Mark.  This makes accessible, in a personal way, the viewpoints of other cultures toward our country.  Many people don’t like us, see us as arrogant, uncaring and ruthless.  Of course, the big kid on the block often has that reputation, deserved or undeserved, but our recent actions, Iraq and Guantanamo among them, have cemented these opinions.

    Even so, I have this urge to celebrate our country.  We are a beacon of freedom, a beloved place of opportunity and real diversity.  We have committed ourselves to constructing a nation not on history or geography, but on founding ideals of freedom and equality and brotherhood. (sic) The number and variety of persons who come to this country from all over the world, the number and variety of them who become part of the patchwork quilt that is our history and our present at its very best, attest to the essential value of our presence.  We negotiate the boundary between sending cultures and our history and, again at our best, we do it with open hands and hearts.

    Have we slaughtered Native Americans and held slaves?  Yes.  Have we engaged in first-strike aggression?  Yes.  Have we often pretended that our nation, defended by two oceans, exists alone and isolated?  Yes.  Have we laid waste to our natural resources in the name of jobs and profits?  Yes.

    We should not be, cannot be, proud of these transgressions, but I submit that we are not the Great Satan.  We are not the only nation whose actions have transgressed human decency.  Further, I would submit that we are not even the worst, not even close.  Look at the Armenian and Jewish genocides.  The pogroms in Russia and the slaughter of the Stalinist era.  The vicious regime of the Khmer Rouge.  This is a long list and it runs deep in our world history.  No, we are a nation that has blundered and made arrogant mistakes, but we are neither all bad nor all good.  We are, rather, an imperfect nation with an imperfect history.

    As I look around the world, I find no country more committed to creating a united states of freedom, no country more committed to embracing the worlds refugees, no country more aware of its errors and no country more able to make amends.  We are a young nation, barely 240 years old, maybe an early adolescent in terms of our development.

    We must not give in to the petty, the self-aggrandizing, the screw the other guy mentality of our rising political movements.  We’re better than that.


    📂This entry was posted in Humanities Politics US History 📎and tagged