• Tag Archives Vikings
  • The Day So Far

    Fall                                       Waning Blood Moon

    Over to Joann Fabrics this morning to pick up some butterfly brocade for a dress Kate will make for Ruth.  As the only guy in line to have fabric cut, I had a chance to observe the female of the species in one of her traditional habitats.  The woman in front of me had on a pink fleece and nice pink bow in her hair.  She also stood about thirty feet behind the cutting counter, making those of us behind her stand right smack in the aisle where people pushed their carts.  I see this same behavior sometimes at traffic lights where someone (gender not at issue) chooses to wait three car lengths behind the next car.  What’s up with that?

    When I got home, I plucked the decorative squash from the vine, then went over to the black beans still on the vine and gathered them into one of our large woven harvest baskets.  That’s the end of the harvest.  As the WCCO weather guy put it in the  paper this morning, the growing season is over.

    After this I made a sugar cream pie, a Hoosier recipe I learned.  It’s a childhood favorite and it pops up in my need to have box once in a while. It has four ingredients:  flour, sugar, butter and cream.  Easy to make and no nutritional value at all.  But boy is it tasty.

    Spent a couple of hours watching the Vikes beat the Rams.  They looked pretty good.  Won 38-10.  Tavaris Jackson passed for a touchdown late in the 4th quarter.  That’s a hopeful sign.


  • Dogfood, O.D. and Football

    Fall                                                    Waning Blood Moon

    He loaded 10 bags of 40 pound dogfood and the straw boss said, well bless my soul.  This is what Tennessee Ernie Ford would have sung if he’d been with me on my trip to Costco this morning.  I like to make fewer trips when I run errands so this time I stocked up on dogfood.

    The nice lady that counts the objects against your receipt took a look at my cart and my gray hair, “Do you need some help?”   Nope, I could handle it just fine.  A few years back I used to resent this kind of heavy lifting, in particular rock salt for the water softener and dogfood.  Now I look on it as an opportunity to tone up the muscles.  It’s part of my resistance work out for the day.

    I shifted today from the garden to the desk, spending a couple of hours puzzling over how to organize a conversation for a congregation that wants to consider its future.  This is very different work from harvesting potatoes or planting garlic.  Not finished yet.  It has to set a bit.  Percolate, as Kate likes to say.

    In addition I have to put together an Asian tour for next Friday.  At the same time I’ll design a Southeast and South Asian tour since I’ll be able to use some similar objects.  That’ll be tomorrow morning.

    The Vikes play the Rams  tomorrow.  The Rams now have the longest losing streak of any NFL team.  Detroit won last week and lifted that burden from their franchise.  No team in the NFL is a push over because the NFL has only elite athletes, some a bit more elite than others, some a bit younger, others more experienced.  The combination means that on any given sunday (yes, there was a movie.) any one team can beat another.  I hope the Vikes win convincingly and shore up their pass defense while getting Adrian a 100+ yard day.

    After the Rams, the Vikings play the Ravens at home, then go on the road for the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers.  That will be a tough stretch.  If they do well in those three games, they will move up in the power rankings.


  • The First Time in the History of the World

    Fall                                     Full Blood Moon

    Appropriate that this Vikings-Packer game will be played under a full blood moon.   If one could, in some fantastic realm, collate all the words written and spoken, each image reproduced either moving or still that focused on just this game, you would have a tome and a webpage of impenetrable length and size, compared, that is, to the time an individual would take to parse it all.

    Then place the weight of this event, referred to by an announcer tonight as the “first time in the history of the world,” against the weight of the slightest child in Darfur, the gradual build up of gases in the atmosphere, the plight of any American citizen without health insurance and the game deflates to the size, perhaps, of a football.  Which is where it belongs.

    All that said, I will be on the couch watching it and not out stopping starvation in Bangladesh, working on the Sierra Club’s upcoming legislative priorities or pressing my congress people for a decent deal on health care.  No, I will take part in an even more ancient human activity, competition between rival clans, competition engaged by the healthiest and the stoutest of each side.  Tonight it will be the Cheesehead versus the Viking.  In all fairness, now, in a battle between a piece of cheese and a valiant Scandinavian pillager, who would you picke?


  • A Win

    Fall                           Waxing Blood Moon

    Oh my.  With 2 seconds left on the game clock, Favre hits Ray Lewis in the end zone for a touch-down.  That put the Vikes ahead by 2.  The point after made it 3.  They’re now 3-0, but it was a good game.  Not sure what it says about the quality of the Vikings offense, though the 49ers played very tough defense.  A W as they say is a W.


  • Vikings Game Day

    Fall                             Waxing Blood Moon

    The Vikings have not looked great against the 49ers, but they did get started in the first half this time.  A blocked field goal in the closing minutes of the half gave the 49ers the lead.  We’ll get’em in the second half.


  • Putzing

    Fall                               Waxing Blood Moon

    More putzy stuff this morning.  Lug the 280 pounds of salt down stairs and put it in the water softener.  Wire up the fencing around the compost bin built from straw bales and create a make-shift gate.  Reset the irrigation clock.

    Then the 49ers hit the MetroDome.  My sense is that the Vikings run defense will step up big against Gore, a challenge that will inspire them.  Favre will throw a few longer passes to break up the run blitz and Peterson will have a big day.  Again, he has a challenge because he had the worst game of his young career against the 49ers, 0.2 yards per carry.

    A slow day, Sunday.


  • One More Day

    Lughnasa                                    Waxing (Blood) Moon

    The fence continues.  Today I strung the rope and checked that none of it touched anything except the yellow plastic insulators.  1,200 + feet of fence now has a yellow insulator every 10 feet and white rope laced with wire.  Tomorrow I’ll do the electrifying.  That means connecting the energizer to the fence itself and sinking two ground rods.  I would have finished today but I realized late in the day that I needed PCV to keep the live wire safe and a different blade for my reciprocating saw.

    It will be good to allow the puppies outside again where they bump and run, pounce on each other’s necks teeth bared and hunt each other again around the lilac and the cedar.  They’re big dogs and have a lot of energy; they need the outside to grow.

    Projects like this tax my patience.  I never learned even rudimentary fix-it skills, so anything requiring manipulation of the physical world–the inanimate physical world–defies me at every turn.  So far, I’ve figured out most of the problems on this one which leads me to suspect it must be pretty easy.  Even so it has taken four four hour segments which is about as much time as I give to any one outside project.

    The Vikings beat the winless Detroit Lions.  Again, they did not come alive until the second half, then they looked good.


  • Harvest and Preservation

    Lughnasa                      Waning Harvest Moon

    It changed.  The game.  After half-time most of the time, I expected to see showed up.  How about that 64 yard run by Peterson?  Wow.  Still, it concerned me that we didn’t get more pressure on Brady Quinn.  I’m looking forward to the analysis.

    Kate has made grape juice, a lot, from the grapes I picked this morning.  Next is jelly.  I have a role in the preservation process this week.  We discovered last year that gazpacho is a perfect canned soup.  When chilled, it tastes like it was made that day.  A great treat in the middle of winter, a summer vegetable soup.

    We also several Guatemalan blue squash.  They run about a foot and a half long and 7-8 inches wide.  Heavy, too.  Taste good.   We still have parsnips (next year), turnips, carrots and potatoes in the ground, probably a beet or two hanging around, too.  Above ground we have lettuce, beans, greens and some more tomatoes.  Kate’s put up 36 quarts of tomatoes so far.

    Kate also made use of our dehydrator.  Cucumber chips.  I know, but they taste wonderful.

    There’s a lot of room for improvement in next year’s garden, but we feel good about the production this year.  Next year we should get more fruit from our orchard.


  • What Will They Do Next?

    Lughnasa                               Waning Harvest Moon

    It appears life as a Vikings fan will continue as a pilgrimage through a wasteland of frustration and dashed hopes.  In the first game of the season, at Cleveland, 4-12 or something like that last year, this supposedly Super-Bowl ready team is behind 13-10.  Behind.  Aaarrrrgggghhh.  Each pilgrimage must perforce visit the slough of despond before rising to the heights of the heavenly city (Miami this year) so we’re there early.

    On a different note.  After getting groceries this morning, I picked grapes.  Kate makes a wonderful grape jelly from our wild grapes.  They grow all over the woods, but have chosen the six foot fence for a nice run.  As I had my small shears out, cutting the purple bunches from the vine, the Rosetti painting, the Girlhood of Mary Virgin came to mind.  In the background Mary’s father, Joachim, tends to a grapevine.

    The harvest is a good time of year and I enjoy the wild harvest as well the domestic one.  This is hunter gatherer behavior, imprinted on us for millennia.  It satisfies a deep need.


  • Writing Can Wait

    Lughnasa                                  Waxing Harvest Moon

    Geez.  Took the whole day to organize my notes and quotes, tweak the ideas and find a thread.  Now the intellectual journey about liberalism has to contend with the Vikings 3rd pre-season game.  The starters will play the first half at least.  Hmmm.  What to do?

    Writing can wait.  The y chromosome has its mysteries and football is among them.