• Tag Archives Orion

  • 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

  • My Friend

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                   New (Thanksgiving) Moon

    Thursday night around 9 pm I went out to the mailbox to drop The Book of Eli in the mail back to my buddies at Netflix.  It was not a cold night, a slight chill, but the night was clear.  From nowhere in our house can we see the eastern horizon, neighbor’s houses and woods block our view, so it came as a surprise to me to see an old friend there when I opened the mailbox and glanced to my left.

    Orion’s brawny left shoulder and his glittering belt had begun to emerge.  Back a long while ago, the winter of 1968 and 1969, my last year in college, I worked at the magnalite corporation as a week-end night watchman.  I had a round leather clock with a shoulder strap and a key hole and every hour I had to walk a circuit in the factory, find a key hung from a metal chain, insert it in the clock, turn the key, remove it and move on to the next station.   I had no protective duties, rather I served at the leisure of magnalite’s insurance carrier who insisted on hourly inspections when the plant was empty.

    When I was not on my ten-minute round, I spent time in the guard shack at the entrance to the parking lot.  I often divided my time between studying and dozing off since I had the 11:00 pm to 7:00 am shift, but when I left the shack for my rounds or to wake myself up, Orion was there.  Being in a large factory complex alone, at night, on the weekend, is lonely duty.  I liked it for that reason, but I found Orion’s presence companionable, and it gradually grew into a friendship.  He and I could talk.  We both stood watch in the night.

    Since those days, now 41 years ago, each fall when Orion rises, I greet him as an old friend, a true snowbird, one who returns when the snow comes and leaves as it does.  My old college friend has come for his annual months long visit.  And I’m glad.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Friends Great Wheel Memories 📎and tagged

  • TV, Movies, Sports

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                            Waxing Wild Moon

    The moon hangs, almost full, high in the southeastern sky tonight, Orion off to the west, heading toward his fade out from winter, small glints of ancient light on an equally ancientrail through the universe.  He’ll be back next year.

    A little bit of short track, a hunk of bobsled and that was all the olympics for me tonight.  I watched State of Play, a not too bad movie with Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Russell Crowe and Helen Mirren.  It had its convolutions, turning around near the end, coming out headed in the reverse direction of its beginning.  That was fun.

    I also watched the pilot for Caprica, the show set 58 years before the Cylon destruction of the Colonies, the beginning of the recently ended Battlestar Galactica series.  I was skeptical.  The clever plotting and strong characters of its parent would not be matched in this spinoff.  I was wrong.

    In the pilot they show the origin of the Cylon centurions and the “skin-job” robots of which there are many copies. It comes from the arrogation of creative power by a young girl and her charge ahead without thinking Dad.  She’s killed and he wants to be bring her back through use of a software program she designed to replicate a person.  It’s in that process that the Cylon’s begin.  It’s a good, believable and original way to get to the revolution that began Galactica.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television Sport 📎and tagged