Christmas Delayed
Due to flu at the Nies household.
But Janowiec family here for afternoon fun and dinner.
Getting Ready...
...and then Mexican with the neighbors followed by Sequence.
Heron
Paxton
Nice and Cold...
...and, although it took all day, the wind finally quit. Chiminea got a bit of a workout burning up everything that came down (in our yard and Vi's) during the blow. Tonight we have the wrapping of presents since this year we are celebrating a bit early, in anticipation.
Making Ice?
Possibly, if the wind ever quits.
Cookout
Walnuts on the table
Conditions this morning on our walk through the park conducive to watery eyes and drippy noses—thankful for mittens rather than gloves. Above freezing for a bit in the afternoon, but, with a clear sky, dropping well below tonight. And the wind finally seems to be subsiding. The recipe for ice is calm with cold, so we may see some forming.
And, possibly the first race of the season next weekend, on Lake Puckaway, sponsored by the Puckaway Ice Sailing Society, or....for short.
Roaring Wind
Gusts enough to knock a person sideways. And cold. I do believe winter, long delayed, is hurrying back. I'm trying to imagine what it's like over on the west Michigan shore.
Last night
Freakish Weather
Sixty five, with fifty mph wind gusts, rain squalls, and thunderstorms—winter supposedly arriving later tonight.
Day spent down south, with Sue helping Jayne, and me helping Irene install shelving and and hangers, and then beginning the organization of her new garage. Thai takeaway for dinner. At dinner Irene brought out a few relic photos she uncovered in her move (from 1977).
Writer’s Block
It is hard sometimes to come up with things of substantial significance, especially when not much of significance happens.
We did have a good dinner last night—chicken with lemon over maple syrup enhanced home-grown squash.
Another repeat of the weather pattern—cold last night under a clear sky, warming into the 50s by afternoon. The forecast, however, has the pattern finally breaking.
Bright super moon in the backyard.
A Quiet Day...
...in noisy village.
No wind, few cars, few people, few dogs, and not a single siren. Quiet, for some reason. Pax and I had a good, long ride.
But, a work stoppage in Santa's workshop while holiday decorations were installed. We are festive now, with no sign of a war on Xmas.
The Glass Remains High...
...and the pattern holds—cool nights, pleasant days, with no sign of winter. Good for bike riding.
Shagbark
When the Winter Chrysanthemums Go
by Matsuo Basho
When the winter chrysanthemums go,
there's nothing to write about
but radishes.
```````
by JBN
When the autumn hydrangeas go,
there’s nothing to write about
but lack of snow.
~~~~~~~
Recommend Radio Free Vermont, by climate activist and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben. Quick, fun "eco-activism" novel, in the vein of Edward Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang.
Pax’s Prairie
Another cloudless, unseasonably pleasant day.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pax’s Prairie
You can get lost in a prairie. Well, Pax can’t because he can “see” with his nose, and being in very tall grass does not inconvenience him. But I could get lost if this prairie were just a little bigger and I wandered off the paths. Early settlers to this part of the world sometimes did get lost on the tall grass prairie, the sea of grass, and had to be careful. If you were in the thick of it, you had to be up on a big horse to see over the top to where you wanted to go.
Pax and I like being within walking distance of a real prairie, and we like walking through it (mostly on the paths) and around it. From the top of the ridge left by the glacier 12,000 years ago it’s a wide open space with a marsh in the low part. No trees except a few burr oaks here and there. If you took 120 football fields and stuck them all together that would be about the size of it.
While it feels rather big, our prairie is really just a remnant, a little scrap of what used to be. Back before European settlement, the whole middle part of North America was prairie—from Indiana to Colorado, from Texas into Canada. People who saw it for the first time just about fell off their horses—they’ed never seen anything like it.
Who ever heard of grass seven feet tall, or saw the wind sending waves of color across miles of flowers?
The prairie biome is a unique one, caused some by climate but more by fire. Prairies like fire. Almost all prairie plants are perennials and have very deep roots. In the fall, after the seeds are dispersed, all the dry vegetation above ground becomes tinder. Once a fire gets started, it burns hot and quick, and depending on the wind, can move fast—faster than a person can walk. But this fire doesn’t bother prairie plants at all since their essential parts are below ground, sometimes extending down twelve or more feet.
All that’s left after a fire are cinders and blackened stubble. Any invading species that don’t have prairie-style roots, and any tree saplings, are toast. But come spring rain, the deep prairie roots send up new shoots, and within a few months the prairie is back better than ever and tall enough to get lost in. If it weren’t for fire most prairie would eventually turn into forest.
Lightning sometimes starts prairie fires, but actually Native Americans were responsible for much of it. They would have “fire hunts” in which they would “set fire to the grass everywhere around a herd of bison except some passage which they leave on purpose and where they take post with their bows and arrows.” (said Father Louis Hennepin in 1680)
Tall grass prairie is called tall grass because of all the tall grass, but a prairie is really a mix of grass and other kinds of plants called forbs. Forbs are non-woody, broad-leaved plants with flowers, and there are hundreds of different kinds in a healthy prairie. Some forb or other is always in flower—from earliest spring until hard frost—with blooms of yellow, blue, pink, lavender, indigo, coral, gold, magenta, crimson, and orange.
One interesting forb is rattlesnake master, which has spiky, white globes for flowers. Supposedly a decoction of leaves and roots is useful in treating snakebite. Some folks claim that snakes avoid areas with rattlesnake master, while others claim that if you see the plant you need to watch your step to avoid getting bit.
Another broad-leaved member of the prairie is the compass-plant. It has a big yellow flower on a long stalk that towers as high as ten feet. It’s called the compass-plant because most of the time the flat part of its big leaves face east and west while the narrow blade part points north and south. This is handy if you tend to get lost.
Well, I’d better stop writing, The afternoon sun is getting low, and Pax, who always knows what time it is, is poking me with his nose. This means—time to go for our prairie walk.
Running Low...
...on daylight.
Seem to have fallen into the assumption that most forms of productivity need to be accomplished in daylight, and that the dark hours are for things like contemplation, reading, watching episodes, and reading. With daylight diminishing toward nine hours out of twenty-four, not much is getting done except expansion of the "to-do" list. I asked Pax if he was willing to cut back on outdoor time now that we were getting close to the winter solstice, but he declined. I appreciate where he's coming from.
This and That
Another warm day, perfect for iceboat trailer refinements and other pre-Xmas activity.
Neighbor across the street has spent the past two evenings grinding up the thick carpet of leaves dropped by his old, front-yard silver maple. While this neighbor only comes out at dusk, he seems to have pretty well completed the job, which means his leaves will no longer be our leaves. This is quite different from the year when, on a very windy day, he used his rake to fling piles high into the scattering breeze.
But, hey, we live in a neighborhood and that means neighbors.
It’s a Pretty Simple Platform...
...so let’s use it.
Pax prowling prairie.
Paul Krugman, economist, professor, and NYTimes columnist, posted a Thanksgiving column called, "On Feeling Thankful But Fearful." The column inspired lots of other people to contribute their thoughts along similar lines. (And with NYT, as I've said before, the comments are often as good as the column.) Below are two, which I think come close to the mark—only missing is the idea of national service, in the footsteps of the Civilian Conservation Corps(CCC).
John Babson, Hong Kong
In terms of privilege and opportunity I share so very much the observations and sentiments reflected here by Paul Krugman. Indeed I am very thankful. Having sensed some of this while young, I started my career as a U.S. Army Officer. That experience taught me that in a democracy such as ours, the first line of defense is not the military but education.
Harrison Howard, Manhattan's Upper West Side
In addition to defending the gains of the recent past, we should support (1) the transition in coal country to green and other jobs, (2) the coordination of corporations with community college students to smooth their path to employment, (3) the ongoing training of people already employed to increase their flexibility in a world that is in ever greater flux, (4) new trade pacts in which labor leaders have a seat at the negotiating table and specific guarantees of the environment and labor rights are hammered out, (5) increased government aid to college students for tuition, room and board, (6) a massive infrastructure program to be carried out over a ten year period and which would include the modernization of our urban water systems, (7) a tax reform that would help reverse the thirty year trend of growing income and property inequality but would also simultaneously address the problem of the long term deficit, (8) comprehensive immigration reform, (9) public financing of national and presidential elections, (10) redistricting of election districts by nonpartisan commissions, and(11) a gradualist plan towards universal health care. These measures could support the principles of equality of opportunity and self reliance.
Afternoon at Fox Point
A Sunday drive on a beautiful day.
Iceboats On The Asphalt...
...which may seem odd, but really is quite necessary. Especially when there's a new boat in the fleet. A missing pin here, the wrong kind of bolt there, shrouds too slack, runners out of alignment—and that sort of thing, Fix it now, or miss the first day or two of sailing, which in iceboating may be the only days of sailing.
And it's difficult to do this sort of thing this time of year. Today, although the weather was mild, the amount of daylight was decidedly limited.
There are lots of variables in iceboating—mast rake, shroud tension, mast bend, runner alignment, runner sharpness, plank flexion, sail cut, batten tension, race weight—not to mention the cut of your jib. So it does behoove one to get set up ahead of time.
No Black Friday Here
Windy, warm, and golden. On top of that, turkey soup (with dumplings) for dinner.
Happy Thanksgiving
Nies family plus Irene. Good times and lots of music.
Preparation...
...including a Pax bath.
And six gallons of spring water for morning coffee.
Shipping News...
...a book by Annie Proulx that I found worthwhile.
And here is her speech at the National Book Awards ceremony, recognizing her "lifetime achievement." Note the age when she first began writing.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Although this award is for lifetime achievement, I didn’t start writing until I was 58, so if you’ve been thinking about it and putting it off, well…
We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. This is a Kafkaesque time. The television sparkles with images of despicable political louts and sexual harassment reports. We cannot look away from the pictures of furious elements, hurricanes and fires, from the repetitive crowd murders by gunmen burning with rage. We are made more anxious by flickering threats of nuclear war. We observe social media’s manipulation of a credulous population, a population dividing into bitter tribal cultures.
We are living through a massive shift from representative democracy to something called viral direct democracy, now cascading over us in a garbage-laden tsunami of raw data.
Everything is situational, seesawing between gut-response “likes” or vicious confrontations. For some this is a heady time of brilliant technological innovation that is bringing us into an exciting new world. For others it is the opening of a savagely difficult book without a happy ending.
To me the most distressing circumstance of the new order is the accelerated destruction of the natural world and the dreadful belief that only the human species has the inalienable right to life and God-given permission to take anything it wants from nature, whether mountaintops, wetlands or oil.
The ferocious business of stripping the earth of its flora and fauna, of drowning the land in pesticides again may have brought us to a place where no technology can save us. I personally have found an amelioration in becoming involved in citizen science projects. This is something everyone can do. Every state has marvelous projects of all kinds, from working with fish, with plants, with animals, with landscapes, with shore erosion, with water situations.
Yet somehow the old discredited values and longings persist. We still have tender feelings for such outmoded notions as truth, respect for others, personal honor, justice, equitable sharing. We still hope for a happy ending. We still believe that we can save ourselves and our damaged earth — an indescribably difficult task as we discover that the web of life is far more mysteriously complex than we thought and subtly entangled with factors we cannot even recognize. But we keep on trying, because there’s nothing else to do.
The happy ending still beckons, and it is in hope of grasping it that we go on. The poet Wisława Szymborska caught the writer’s dilemma of choosing between hard realities and the longing for the happy ending. She called it:
Consolation
Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If he happened on something like that,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.
True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.
Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough with dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggle to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its micro-scales.
Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Just like Pax.
Warm and Windy
Prep for T’giving, a little Santa workshopping, etcetera. Iceboat 351's mast repaint declared finished, although the result does not meet expectations. Iceboats #10 and #165 pulled out of the barn they have been inhabiting since March. Meanwhile Pax and I enjoyed a big loop walk, amidst everything else. Fine day to be outside.
