• Tag Archives winter

  • No Title

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    8  bar rises 30.11  0mph WNW  windchill 4   Samhain

    Full Moon of Long Nights    Day  8hr  47m

    I hear you saying often that you’re not turned on to politics. Well let me bring to bear the lessons of history. If you’re not turned on to politics the lesson of history is that politics will turn on you.—Ralph Nader, Countdown

    Yes, Nader is right, but I wish he’d take his own lesson to heart.  Quixotic campaigns that drain the vote of the left and left independents have had their day.  Until or if the left can mount a credible candidate we should support the Democrats.

    In this and many other ways I can tell I have reached old fogey status.  Twice in the last couple of weeks I’ve sent notes to the Sierra Club’s legislative committee that reveal, to me later, and probably to each member at the time, my more conservative approach.  With a $5+ billion budget deficit I think we should pitch our stuff in light of savings to the state budget.  Instead my colleagues queue up to decide which expletives are more appropriate for sulfide mining.

    Used to be me.

    We’ve had a cold December so far, considerably below normal.  This is the weather most of us here yearn for and miss as the winter’s have grown warmer.  The snow stays on the ground; the air is crisp.   Sleeping becomes a treat, a warm bear-in-the-den snuggle.

    I have finally caught up, again, with my various chores including all the outside ones.  That feels great, but it does mean I have to reorient my daily activities and I’m still in the in-between place about that.  Soon.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Politics Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Home As A Political Statement

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    15  bar steep rise 30.05  5mph NNW windchill 11  Samhain

    Waxing Crescent Moon of Long Nights   Day  8hr  56m

    Below are photographs of recent work underway along the wood’s edge here.  Almost done for this year.

    orchardinwinter350.jpg

    The fruit trees as winter takes hold.

    marshhay350.jpg

    Marsh hay before use.  AKA hay without seeds or straw without seeds.

    plasticandmulch1350.jpg

    View along the wood’s edge facing due north.  The straw in the foreground and mid-ground covers the black plastic.  The area covered is approximately 15 feet wide, that is, 15 feet between the truck path and the beginning of the forest proper and extends perhaps 150-200 feet from end to end.  This whole area will have shrubs and small trees planted in the spring.

    progress350.jpg

    This gives you a better picture of what’s going on here.  I ran out of hay on Sunday and had to get the new load visible in the first shot.

    Do you remember how you felt when you first realized you loved someone?  I have that feeling over and over with the land here.


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work permaculture Politics 📎and tagged

  • Put on the Mad Bomber, Baby. It’s Cold Outside.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -3  78%  27%  0mph WNW bar30.16  steady  windchill-3  Winter

                First Quarter of the Winter Moon

    “Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, or accept another’s dogmatism.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

    La Ñina, el ñino’s cooler sister, has forced the jet stream to the south, leaving us without atomspheric protection from the frigid arctic air.  There is nothing but water and tundra between us and the North Pole, so when this happens our temperature plummets.  It was -9 at 7:00 AM this morning.  Though no one who doesn’t share our winter understands it, this is the weather that defines us as Minnesotans and most of us look forward to it.  It requires coping skills passed on from generation to generation and from natives to newcomers.  In the old days we brought our car batteries inside, bought engine block heaters.  Now we buy wicking thermal underwear, Mad Bomber hats, Sorel boots and put our cars in garages if we can.  When I moved to Minnesota in 1970, the seminary housing had electrical outlets in front of each parking spot in the student residence parking lot.  I thought, oh, my.

    The snow cover has faded, though it’s still there. If we don’t get more snow, I’m going to have to lay down straw in a few spots, though the areas I had concerns about, mostly the newly planted garlic bed, already have their mulch.


    📂This entry was posted in Our Land and Home Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • A Snow Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    14  83%  25%  3mph  WNW  bar 29.60 steep rise  windchill11  Winter

                                          The Full Cold Moon

    Snow began in the early morning and it has kept on steady since then.  The winter brown where grass had begun to peak through our first snow cover is gone, replaced with a carpet of white.  Most of the boulders in our garden tiers have disappeared.  It is quiet.

    From where I sit as I write this the magnolia, the grey dogwoods, the red and white oaks have changed from their summer green clad to a seasonally appropriate white.  These days, the essence of what it means to live in northern latitudes, change the landscape from the faded browns of late fall to a soft and fluffy world of unexpected joys.  The bird feeders have small caps of snow. 

    It may be, at our house,  a year without Christmas, but it is not a year without joy or holiness.  Both have come today, the second day of winter.   Blessed be.


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