Category: Life

Oh, you know, the usual…

Summer Countdown: Day 13

Posted on by Dale

My brain continued in lockdown mode. There was no point in attempting any composition or painting. I had thought I might get by with the color exercises, but it seemed that this simple—ha!—task would require too much thought.

So since the weather was clearing up, I decided to toil in the earth. I went outside to the labyrinth.

[ed. note: you can skip to the next section if you like]

I began clearing the “planting area” of the patio. This patio is an area on the upper level of the back yard that I plan to level and pave over with stones. The side next to the fence will be a raised planting area with flowering plants. I’m not a big fan of flowers; they require a lot of care to look good, and as the Japanese might say, they “hot up the blood.” The labyrinth is all green. But the patio is Ginny’s area, a kind of a sitting/dining area that is not the labyrinth, and she likes flowers, so flowers it is.

Because of one unexpected expense or the other, we can’t afford the patio this summer, but I have plants that need to go into the ground: the cute little bat-faced cuphea plant known as “Tiny Winnie” (in honor of our late pet), and a couple of gardenia bushes given to us by our neighbor in the same vein. So I figure I will do the planting now and the paving later.

To that end, I mowed down the weeds in the area; transplanted a couple of irises that our former neighbor planted on the bank between our yards and which now sprout in the decline under the current neighbor’s fence; weeded the vinca major from the monkey grass; and sprayed Round-Up on the vinca major on the decline. Kill it, kill it all.

At some point I will have to figure out how to build the retaining wall for the planting area, but that’s for another day.

I also moved the remaining bricks from their perch over behind the firepit area over to the paving brick staging area. That counted as today’s exercise. Then I mowed down all the undergrowth in that area. It’s an area for which I have no defined landscaping plan, but now it’s clear at least, clear enough for me to start looking at it. Also, it reminded me that I need to install the bamboo fencing along that last stretch of the chainlink now that the diseased pecan tree has been taken down in the other neighbor’s yard. (Taken down, yes, but not removed. I don’t know what that’s about.)

All in all, a fun afternoon of sweat and toil.

All this is boring, I know, but it was therapeutic. I regained a sense of purpose and what our 19th century friends would call vital energy. It was fortuitous then that the mail brought the painting DVDs I had ordered a couple of weeks ago, and a book: Opening to Inner Light: the transformation of human nature and consciousness, by Ralph Metzner, ©1986.

I decided to stow the DVDs for the time being and plunged into Inner Light. This is a book that was referenced in a monograph I’m reading, and its author’s thesis is that “metaphor, symbols, and analogies are essential to describing [psychological transformation] and that there appear to be about a dozen or so key metaphors—from dream to awakening, from captivity to liberation, from fragmentation to wholeness—and symbols for tranformation that occur over and over in all major cultures and sacred traditions throughout the world.”

You can see the appeal.

Preface, introduction, first chapter/metaphor: “Awakening from the Dream of Reality.” And there was a quote from fourth-century Christian theologian Gregory of Nyssa:

All who are seriously concerned with the life of heaven must conquer sleep; they must be constantly awake in spirit, driving off, like a kind of drowsiness, the deceiver of souls and the destroyer of truth. By drowsiness and sleep here I am referring to those dream-like fantasies which are shaped by those submerged in the deceptions of this life: I mean public office, money, influence, external show, the seduction of pleasure, love of reputation and enjoyment, honor, and all the other things which, by some sort of illusion, are sought after vainly by those who live without reflection. For all those things will pass away with the flux of time; their existence is mere seeming; they are not what we think they are.

Well. This is not a new idea to me, of course (vid. Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, et al.), but it was a gift from the universe. It enabled me to rethink my state of funk and almost miraculously shed it. (Sorry to be so opaque about the issues which have been troubling me, but this is a blog, not a diary.) I was able to cook supper and build a fire for the evening and peacefully contemplate my perfect life. A good thing.

Phenomenal dessert

Posted on by Dale

I don’t know that I’ve ever posted recipes here, but this was so yummy , and so incredibly freaking easy , that I feel it is my duty to share.

Kaki’s Quick Chocolate Drops

1 14 oz. can sweetened condensed milk
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 stick butter
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon vanilla
sea salt, optional

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°. Spray baking sheets with cooking spray.
  2. In a microwavable bowl combine the milk, chocolate chips, and butter. Heat in the microwave on high for 2 minutes. Remove from the microwave and whisk the ingredients together with a whisk.
  3. Dump in the flour and vanilla and whisk to mix thoroughly. (The dough will be very loose.) Drop by the teaspoon onto the baking sheet. Each cookie should be no bigger than a bite. Bake in the preheated oven for exactly 7 minutes.
  4. Remove the cookies to a rack to cool. Sprinkle with sea salt.

Source: Dessert in half the time, p. 109 | Makes about 60 cookies.

Raspberry Sorbet with Fresh Whipped Cream

1/4 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
1 12 oz. bag frozen raspberries
8 truvia leaves, chopped (optional)

1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup heavy cream

  1. Stir together water and 1/4 cup sugar until sugar dissolves.
  2. Pulse raspberries in a food processor until coarsely chopped. Add truvia leaves if available. With machine running, pour in sugar-water; pulse until mixture is smooth.
  3. Transfer to an airtight container and freeze until firm, about 30 minutes.
  4. Whisk cream and remaining tablespoon sugar until soft peaks form.
  5. Scoop sorbet into 4 classes; top with whipped cream. Insert chocolate cookies into the sorbet/whipped cream.

Source: Martha Stewart Living, July 2010 | serves 4

I don’t think you need the whipped cream at all, actually.

Start the cookies first, then make the sorbet. You can have dessert ready in 30 minutes , or whip it up the day before. It is truly scrumptious.

Summer Countdown: Day 24

Posted on by Dale

Lichtenbergian goals:

I took a stab at destroying Resignation and got one or two interesting ideas out. Here’s where I just need to sit down and crank out crap until something grows out of all the manure.

I had sent the Preludes (no fugue) No. 1 and 3 to Maila Springfield, the insanely good pianist from VSU. Today I heard back from her: she had been practicing them and wants more. In fact, she and her husband and their saxophonist friend are going to play for the jazz majors at GHP the weekend I’ll be down there, and she wants to play them as part of that gig. So there’s a deadline, which is always helpful.

I worked some on No. 4, which is a complete reversal of No. 3: completely still music, mostly fading away, barely sustainable. I like what I’ve done so far. I may have that done by the early part of next week.

Lichtenbergian distractions:

I worked a great deal in the labyrinth. I planted half a tray of St. Augustine grass plugs in the area between the firepit and the labyrinth. I’m going to see how well it grows there and what it will look like before experimenting in the labyrinth itself.

I also moved the logs left over from last fall’s tree fall. They were an attractive grouping, but they really blocked the entrance to the men’s loo.

Since I was already moving those, I decided to go ahead and set one up over at the westpoint, since that’s where it would go eventually anyway. Then I set the great stone on top of it and put the mosaic dish I already had there on top of that. So I have a new westpoint (water) station.

Summer Countdown: Day 38

Posted on by Dale

Lichtenbergian goals:

  • filled some pages of the sketchbook with studies of eyes and noses, both generic/anatomical and specific. It was interesting to me that while I think I was able to capture the specific shapes of various Lichtenbergian eyes and noses, I don’t know that you could identify the Lichtenbergian from his isolated feature. Mike’s eyebrows might be a giveaway, maybe. Or maybe I’m just not accurate enough yet.
  • read some more Power of Now and Art & Fear.

Today I’m working on mouths, and I may try painting some details as well.

Lichtebergian procrastinations:

  • reset the clay pots at the cardinal points of the compass deeper into the ground, so that I can mow over them. (These are the pots I put the citronella candles in.) Having mowed over one of them and nicked it still, I may have to set them deeper.
  • stripped ivy from the trees where it had taken over. This was not as time-consuming as I had feared: all that foliage is produced by very few strands, although on the cherry laurel up by the table the stems were as thick as a sapling. Still, it’s a soft kind of wood and easily cut and easily removed.

Musing & planning

Posted on by Dale

People have assumed, with reason, that my separation from GHP this summer must be emotionally trying for me.

It’s not. From the moment I decided last summer that I needed a break, I have not had second thoughts. I awoke one morning a couple of weeks ago from a dream about the opening meetings during preplanning that caused a twinge, but this past week, as I helped everyone get the program up and running, I had no regrets nor waves of bittersweet nostalgia.

On the contrary, it was a very good eight days, omitting always the glitches that recur every year no matter what we do to try to prevent them. I was happy to see all the returning staff and to meet the new ones. I discovered the pleasures of CJ’s Pub & Pool. The students arrived on Sunday, and it was as marvelous as always. “Good,” I thought, “the kids are here. But they’re not my kids.” And I was totally OK with that.

It was very odd driving out of the campus and passing West Hall as I left Tuesday morning. There was a sense that I was not supposed to be doing that, that strands of my being were being pulled back towards the campus. And of course being at GHP is like the best dramedy series ever, so I felt as if I were turning off the TV in the middle of an episode: you always want to know what happens next.

But that soon passed, and it wasn’t even a major twinge, to be honest. No, my decision to stay in my labyrinth this summer was the right one, and now I’m getting ready to do all those things I said I would do.

It was with some alarm, therefore, that I looked at the calendar in the kitchen this morning and realized that it seemed that many days were taken up with out-of-town duties (some back at GHP), which would preclude my getting any work done at all.

I have exactly seven weeks before I have to report for preplanning at school. Of those forty-nine days, ten are unavailable as work days. (Four more days I’m out of town, but I’m with my painting teacher from GHP: she’s going to teach me all those things I failed to learn forty years ago.)

That leaves thirty-nine days to do my work. I should probably do a daily post cataloging in boring detail what I accomplished each day. It won’t interest you, necessarily, but it will help keep me focused. We’ll call it Summer Countdown. Unless you can suggest a better name for the series in the comments.

I’ve already emailed the director of the Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra to ask if it’s OK for me to include some solo work in our piece, and a piano if we provide the pianist, and he’s already responded affirmatively to both. My plan, in case I haven’t said, is to work up five fragmentary sketches so that he can choose which one would be most interesting and most playable, and then I’ll compose that piece.

Of course, I’ll also have four other sketches that I can eventually turn into full pieces, so that’s all to the good.

Also yesterday I did a couple of sketches, just to keep going with that project. Mike will be glad to know that they actually look like him. Either I’m getting better or Mike is just easier to draw.

So there we are.

Hm.

Posted on by Dale

I awoke at 4:10 this morning, my brain awhirl. It seems that the reality of the summer began to click with me. It’s all been rather Promised-Land-like, a hazy summer of sitting in the labyrinth, sipping Xtabentun and painting, or shambling up to the study to knock out another dozen measures or so on the Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra piece. The countdown app on the iPhone still has another 10 days and 1 hour until my actual summer begins.

But yesterday it occurred to me that it would be necessary at some point today to pack for my eight-day stay in Valdosta starting tomorrow, and I guess that set off my reality alarms.

In my state of semi-sleep, I was surprised to find myself observing some events from this coming week with what was almost a frisson of sadness. You would think that would include the arrival of the students next Sunday, but mostly it was images of the staff meetings on Friday and Saturday that gave me pause. I think perhaps it’s the “drawing of the circle” nature of this week that affects me, both in actual execution and in the prospect of missing it.

It’s not that I’ve gone maudlin on myself. I have absolutely no regrets about taking the summer off, other than that I’ll not be able to stand in front of an audience of parents and say, “Forty years ago, my parents sat where you sit today.” That would have been cool. No, I needed a break, and I have work to do. But it will not do, either, to try to deny that I have given up something that is one of the most wonderful things on the planet, howsoever temporarily.

At any rate, I’m awake way earlier than I needed to be. Might as well blog.

A scathingly brilliant idea

Posted on by Dale

In a dream last night, I had a scathingly brilliant idea. For real. Let’s see if I can remember it.

It’s called STAMP, and that stands for Standard Time, Alarm, and Map Protocol. Here’s my thinking: every gizmo, every application that schedules events or alarms could encode a bit a packet of metadata, the STAMP, that could be recognized and used by every other gizmo or application for its own purposes.

Essentially, every scheduling application does this now, but the STAMP would be the bedrock that would allow the communication between different flavors.

For example, if I sent out an invitation to gather in the labyrinth at 8:00 tonight, and the STAMP included data about travel time, I’d set that to 0. But when Kevin got it and sent it to iCal, it would use whatever GPS was available to it to reset that to 15 minutes. (Heaven knows what Mike would get.)

I can see how if I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled and forgot about it and decided to drive up to Atlanta instead, my iPhone would keep upping that drive time until finally my distance away from PAPP Clinic intersected with the necessary time to drive back, and the alert that would have gone off at 3:45 goes off at 3:15 instead, giving me enough time to get back.

Other kinds of things that STAMP might include would be due dates/times, alerts (multiple, perhaps), etc.

I have no clue why I dreamed such a thing. Does it make any sense? I’ll try to remember other advantages of it if I can.

Grayson update

Posted on by Dale

Grayson and Ginny got home yesterday from Greensboro, and I am relieved to report that his face is mending nicely. Still stitched up, and still clearly the result of a horrific accident, but the swelling is down and daily it gets more normal looking. Nothing to worry about.

We can go back to the natural order of things, harassing him about getting a job.

Labyrinth, 5/20/10

Posted on by Dale

You might have noticed that I was on a roll, posting nearly every day, and then suddenly I dropped off again. Life. Don’t talk to me about life.

Last Saturday, I was basking in the labyrinth and painting sketches of bodies and really getting somewhere when I got the Phone Call, the one no parent wants to hear: there’s been an accident. Grayson’s been hurt.

My son, my child, riding his bicycle down the Creeper Trail with his girlfriend, has taken a two-foot drop off the final trestle and gone straight over his handlebars into the gravel and cinder-covered track, landing squarely on his forehead and nose. Miraculously, he sustains no other injuries but to his face: no neck injuries, no skull injuries, no eyes or teeth, not even a concussion.

But it is enough: he has scraped off his forehead and a great deal of his nose. The plastic surgeon in Johnson City, TN, has a challenge to reassemble what’s left into something that will work. My son’s nose is now about a half inch shorter than it used to be.

I drive immediately to Tennessee. His mother flies from Boston, where she’d gone for a five-day conference. We deal. He’s hurting, but he’s fine. In terms of dealing, it’s all cosmetic. He knows that, we know that. And we try to be grateful. It is hard.

Short version timeline: Saturday–he falls, surgery. We head to Johnson City. Sunday–he continues to recuperate, stays overnight. Monday–he’s discharged, we take him to the hotel. Tuesday–we meet with the surgeon, who [OH MY GOD HE’S WONDERFUL] is pleased with his work and with the healing. I drive back to Newnan. Ginny and Grayson go to her parents’ house in Abindgon, VA, an hour away. Kristin returns to Greensboro. Wednesday–we all breathe. Thursday–today–he has his stitches out in Johnson City. The surgeon is very pleased that Grayson has feeling in his nose.

Now it’s just a matter of healing. We’re pretty sure that there’s more cosmetic surgery in our future. We don’t know where he’s going next. His sketchy post-graduation plans [YES, HE GRADUATED FROM GUILFORD COLLEGE THE PREVIOUS WEEKEND WITH A DOUBLE DEGREE IN GERMAN STUDIES AND POLITICAL SCIENCE AND I SHOULD HAVE BLOGGED ABOUT IT SO YOU COULD HAVE SHARED IN THE HALCYON PERFECTION OF THE WEEKEND] are now even sketchier.

And I am taking advantage of the beautiful weather to sit in my labyrinth, drink, paint, and meditate.

There’s too much going through my head to get it all down, and some of it I don’t want to share anyway.

A fresh bottle of Xtabentun, please. Isn’t it a good thing that I ordered a whole case of the stuff last month?

Here’s the thing. He’s an adult. He must decide what to do with his life, injured or otherwise. I cannot help him other than to provide some kind of health insurance. He has to figure out what it means that in one horrific moment he changed his life forever. I can’t. I can’t even face that decision. I can only be there to hand him a cup of water when he needs it or to be stolid for his sake. But inside, I’m a father who’s ready to lose it at any moment because my child’s life has been changed forever.

I have nothing else to say.