Egg drop

These two little eggs dropped from the tree this week. I've read that wood ducks can lay a clutch with up to 26 eggs. The Big D reminded me that the momma duck will throw non-viable eggs from her nest. I hope there are plenty more thriving in the nest. Go here to see the momma.

It's fairly amazing to see ducks in the city, even a city known for it's lakes and rivers. We have a big old elm tree in the back yard that must be at least 90 years old. Plenty big to home a number of creatures including squirrels and ducks and even a sleeping raccoon.

We haven't been woken by the momma duck in at least a week. I hope that she hasn't left because she lost two of her eggs. Maybe she's just quiet because she's busy with the business of incubating eggs. It's a lot of work!

a good place

I knew that I was a good place in my life when I realized that all my meetings are scheduled for Wilde Roast Cafe!

She's back!

We woke at sunrise to the sounds of a duck apparently having an identity crisis. The noise was loud and right outside our bedroom window. It was so loud that eventually I had to get up and take a look. Expecting to see the duck on the ground, I was surprised to see it on the roof of our neighbor's house. I crept through the house to grab my camera so that I could capture this odd sight so early in the morning.




Yep, she's back for another season. Last year while we were away at our trailer, our other neighbor saw a bunch of little baby duckies fall from the huge backyard elm tree. She, the neighbor, watched as they came together and made their way to the river. Um, the river is several miles away! So these little ducklings with their mama had to cross several busy streets on their way to the Mississippi.

Looks like she back and scoping out another nesting spot in our tree.




She didn't quit with all her honking and yapping. And I was surprised she didn't wake the entire neighborhood. But then, most people have their windows closed as the temps still go down close to freezing at night. I am so happy that we decided to leave our bedroom window open last night. She's a great alarm clock, but I seriously hope she doesn't plan to make all this noise every morning.




After the sun rose, the duck moved to our rooftop. All the neighbors leaving for work took a few minutes to gaze at the loud, ducky assessment of the future home site.




She knew I was watching as I walked around the house to catch a few more shots. Pacing back and forth on the very tip of our roof, she seemed to be debating location, location, location.

power to the people

I like DIY projects. A couple of years ago I started to make my own garden pavers with concrete molds. It started with Buddha head molds and a small bag of concrete.



[Oops! There's my toes in the bottom of the image. Hey, I think I like that shade of nail polish. I'll have to go find the bottle.]

Then when winter hit, the Big D took over the mold and made some frozen ice sculptures. Last year I discovered concrete poetry kits and started taking quotes and short poems and stringing them together, laying them out on patches of the lawn.

Could this be Art? Lawn Art? art with a capital 'A'? Or just a way to cover the front slope of the yard where the grass is withering away and being taken over by weeds? Whatever it is it sure makes people pause as they walk by our house.

Somehow I'd forgotten about these when they were covered in three feet of snow. This week as the temps rose into the 60's I saw again how people would pause in front of our house. I went out to check what the heck it was and delightfully found again my attempts at art. Ok, now I've decided that it is art with a lower-case 'a'.

It was nice to move on to a project that entailed physical labor - mixing the concrete, pouring into molds, etching letters into the bricks, and experimenting with concrete dyes to find swirly effects. I had spent ten years struggling with the mental labor required to complete my dissertation. Working with concrete brought balance to my life. Sweating out the toxins of stress with the exertion of physical labor was exactly what I needed as I contemplated what to do with my post-doc life. It literally brought joy to my life, something that was in short supply during the graduate school years.



And for me, this project on the front slope was a tribute to Obama and multicultural America. The experimentation with concrete dyes created a range of "skin colors" on the Buddha heads.



I thought that perhaps I would make poetry bricks to pave the path through my garden, or even the paths up at the woodland retreat in Wisconsin. And I made huge progress in making the bricks, but after I laid them out, I realized very quickly that they are very breakable. It only took one step to reveal the fragility. I don't know exactly what to do about making them stronger, less breakable. Maybe I need some different concrete, maybe they just need to weather and age before I walk over them.



See? I broke this one about one minute after I laid it out in the garden. I was pressing down with my foot to bury it down into the dirt. "Love as thou wilt" is the sacred precept from the Kushiel trilogy. Placing it here in the garden adds a new dimension as the garden wilts to its Autumn state of being.

As the weather warms, I wonder what happened with my plans to make lots of poetry bricks throughout the winter. It is a great hibernation project, but somehow that got away from me. I guess sub zero temps make the garden seem like a dream from long ago.

The garden is still a dream that won't come alive for at least another month. Now I will resume my plans. Hopefully it will fill that increasing need to dig in the garden, keep me occupied until Spring comes to stay.

T'ai Chi Ch'uan (Yang Short Form)

Later this evening, I uploaded a different version. I think this one is better.

T'ai Chi Ch'uan

I got this great opportunity this week, a chance to film my T'ai Chi instructor! So, I get to play around with multi-media - don't I sound tech-savvy? - but I'm not, and the quality of this video demonstrates the extent of my abilities. Who knew there were so many different ways to format video clips? I had to create the film in Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 (I know, I know, it's an old version) just to add credits and stuff. Then, I had render the clip to upload for the web...rendering the clip sounds like I'm trying to render some pork fat, jeez, where do these terms come from? So, I rendered the clip as a MPEG2 file and these are the results: fuzzy, blurry, lookin old and tired. Now, I am rendering it to an .avi format which, of course, is going to take hours and hours...regardless here is the blurry version. I'll post a better (I hope) version later today or tomorrow.





The Matrix look to the opening title page? I don't know. There was a lot of talk at the end of class about doing some special effects - matrix style, so that's what I went with while picking through the available templates.

Frozen Minneapolis

The boat launch at Boom Island in Northeast Minneapolis, just north of the lock and dam.




Frozen solid, snow glittering in the sun, the lone lighthouse awaiting the thaw.

Demand for a New World in the New Year

On the road today, we encountered a rally on Central Avenue. It was in the vacant lot next to the Islamic Cultural Center Minneapolis. I think that it was a part ofthe protest worldwide against Israeli attacks on Gaza that began on December 30 and we will continue throughout this week.

We had passed the woman with the stop sign walking down the street. After a quick stop at the library, we drove past the lot again and it was full of people.

The cold didn't stop this community. The temperature was only about 10 degrees above zero. They were blessed with little wind.

There were several police vehicles directing traffic away from the lane next to the sidewalk.






Such a simple truth yet so difficult for governments to understand.

Central Avenue is so full of activity. For me, this is one of the neighborhoods where the city thrives. The area is revitalized by locally owned businesses, and many of these businesses reflect the rich cultural diversity of NE Minneapolis. The drive through the frozen city led us on a trail energized by hope and promise of the new year.