Good bye to such a dear friend and mentor and thank you to all the people that read this blog.
The Ranger left behind many different essays and poems that were never published and I intend to slowly add them to this blog. MT
Friday, September 5, 2014
Good bye to our dear Ranger
Good bye to such a dear friend and mentor and thank you to all the people that read this blog.
The Ranger left behind many different essays and poems that were never published and I intend to slowly add them to this blog. MT
Thursday, May 15, 2014
More Like Three Months in Beijing
No, there is certainly no way an exhausted health caregiver extraordinaire named Marianne Tremblay is being summoned to provide information to the health care industry that it already knows is there. That would be like an elementary school teacher doing his pupils' homework for them. I do need to say that my rowing programme is is yet to fall in place, partially because of the chemical drugs that were still in my body as a result of the treatment, and otherwise my exercise schedule has been much more challenging than I first believed it would be. Diet has also been a huge problem. The chemical drugs were as much a mask as a solution, if not more so.
Nonetheless, for weeks now the herbal medicines have been doing their work. As from the beginning, I enertain the household first thing in the morning with lining up two little piles of finely ground bayberry bark on a teaspoon, in order to in-hale them, like cocaine, through a very short straw. Once in my nasal membranes they cause an awful bout of sneezing and snotting the mucus up out of my lungs. I love being able to participate in the process. Awfully good for morale. Shawn has a trick for washing out the oversized handkerchiefs.
Then breakfast, which for weeks has been a full cup of porridge, half bran, half five other grains or so. One of the greatest tastes I know. And quite a few weeks the only one I was interested in. Milk usually warmed, and a bowl of fruit.
Getting the chemical drugs out of my system it seemed to me took a starvation diet, so for some weeks there was no normal appetite. This situation is improving, along with hints of more appetite and capacity for exercise. I sure need it. My upper arms are mere sticks, and yesterday morning my wife sent on a walking tour of the yard by informing me that my butt muscles had disappeared!
Nonetheless, for weeks now the herbal medicines have been doing their work. As from the beginning, I enertain the household first thing in the morning with lining up two little piles of finely ground bayberry bark on a teaspoon, in order to in-hale them, like cocaine, through a very short straw. Once in my nasal membranes they cause an awful bout of sneezing and snotting the mucus up out of my lungs. I love being able to participate in the process. Awfully good for morale. Shawn has a trick for washing out the oversized handkerchiefs.
Then breakfast, which for weeks has been a full cup of porridge, half bran, half five other grains or so. One of the greatest tastes I know. And quite a few weeks the only one I was interested in. Milk usually warmed, and a bowl of fruit.
Getting the chemical drugs out of my system it seemed to me took a starvation diet, so for some weeks there was no normal appetite. This situation is improving, along with hints of more appetite and capacity for exercise. I sure need it. My upper arms are mere sticks, and yesterday morning my wife sent on a walking tour of the yard by informing me that my butt muscles had disappeared!
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Three Weeks in Beijing
No, I did not actually go there. Of course not. In the computer age, and living where I do, I think of travelling as a complete waste of time unless it is absolutely necessary, and it was not at all necessary for me because what I needed from the unique genius of Beijing I already had in Nelson, albeit somewhat shape-shifted because the Oriental half of my medical treatment was primarily Ayurvedic, with a little Chinese phys ed thrown in.
You see, I had a heart attack, or if there is a subtle difference, congestive heart failure, something I had actually never really heard of. As I said to our GP, except for literature on fitness, I've never been fond of medical studies. I thought what I had, after a profoundly unusual and painful physical attack two years ago, was something called bronchiolitis, inflammatiion of the bronchial tubes, a situation that invites water into the bronchial tubes, thus interfering quite substantially with one's oxygen supply. I lost about a third of my habitual efficiency for striding up and down the hills of Nelson. I did not learn this from my doctor, I learned it from the Net, and it seemed to answer my questions even unto its return the next year and again the next. I never even thought of going to my doctor, because as mystic in the seventh and final mansion I assumed that the extreme pain of the two full days' exercise was simply part and parcel of my spiritual life. The 48 hours of agony had immediately followed a lengthy discussion with a young Jehovah's Witness person, dealing with that religion's teaching that the Cross was simply a single stake, and lacking the cross-piece.
Also, I was aware of the stigmata that was given to Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio, from whose order, the Capuchins, comes our present bishop, John Corriveau, once a year at least, a most welcome guest at our dinner table. When I first read Jorgensen's Life of the medieval saint, in the 58-59 winter of my conversion, I totally believed not only in Francis' affliction. but also that there was no problem at all with getting the same thing myself. It was not that I could think of myself as that holy - far from it - but I had only weeks before been given the spiritual experience of being drawn into the spiritual womb of the Blessed Virgin. I prayed mightily that God would leave my hands alone, as I was a guitarist and folk singer and could not see how the stigmata could in any way improve my musicianship. To this day, bless Him, God has listened to my prayers. In fact I am at the moment designing the opening segments for fretted instruments on Microstation Minstrels, simply because I had such a triumphant first lesson ever on the five-string banjo with my grandson Nathan when he was here with his parents last weekend, come down from the Cariboo to see how I was doing. I don't think we're going to see any blood.
It turned out that my oldest and her husband and son were and essential part of what we can now call the Beijing Experience.
About a month ago Marianne had made up her housekeeper's mind that it was high time that the eastern wall of this very study, covered by a very loaded bookshelf, should get the hell out in order to make room for the Concept 2 rowing machine. When she heard that Mon and Matt and Nathan's young adult muscles were showing up the weekend after I got out of KLH, she decided to take the bull by the horns, or the rower by its fly wheel, and have the Concept 2 moved to the study, a much warmer and convenient place than the attic. 'Twas done between breakfast and lunch on the Saturday morning. A ton of books went to the attic, and the rower came into its own. It was on the following Monday morning, after reading from Drs. Michael Murray and Julian Whitaker, that I - and the Holy Spirit - took myself off the prescription drugs.
I do not exagerate the importance of the rower. I had a problem with sporadic irregular heart beat until Thursday night or so. A little scary admittedly, but the rower has definitely been part of the solution. I possibly put on more Henleys than I needed to (a Henley is the rower's equivalent of 2 kilometres, or 105 calories), pushing for four or five Henleys a day, or rather a night, as that is when most of them are done, but the evenings with the radical heartbeat are gone. I am now a nice, steady, 80 at rest, which means I can keep up a modest 100+ on the machine. I row in 15 calorie reps, taking lots of time to read in between segments.
And as the first Chi Gong exercise Marianne showed me as soon as I got home from KLH was basically Looking Back at the Moon, from The Eight Brocades, which is fundamentally a massage for the heart, I was able to realize that rowing is also an excellent, natural, massage for the heart, just like bending foward from the waist while sitting and reading the Summa or MT's spanking new Douai-Rheims Latin/English Bible.
How do we know about that hospital in Beijing, where they have the western medicine side-by-side with the Traditional Chinese? Because it so happens that the aunt of The Economist's Beijing correspondent is a business woman in Nelson and mother of a former girlfriend of another grandson. Ted's wife own's the hospital combo.
As I said, living here, I don't need to travel.
I'll deal with MT's wonderful herbal medicine and diet solutions in Part Two.
You see, I had a heart attack, or if there is a subtle difference, congestive heart failure, something I had actually never really heard of. As I said to our GP, except for literature on fitness, I've never been fond of medical studies. I thought what I had, after a profoundly unusual and painful physical attack two years ago, was something called bronchiolitis, inflammatiion of the bronchial tubes, a situation that invites water into the bronchial tubes, thus interfering quite substantially with one's oxygen supply. I lost about a third of my habitual efficiency for striding up and down the hills of Nelson. I did not learn this from my doctor, I learned it from the Net, and it seemed to answer my questions even unto its return the next year and again the next. I never even thought of going to my doctor, because as mystic in the seventh and final mansion I assumed that the extreme pain of the two full days' exercise was simply part and parcel of my spiritual life. The 48 hours of agony had immediately followed a lengthy discussion with a young Jehovah's Witness person, dealing with that religion's teaching that the Cross was simply a single stake, and lacking the cross-piece.
Also, I was aware of the stigmata that was given to Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio, from whose order, the Capuchins, comes our present bishop, John Corriveau, once a year at least, a most welcome guest at our dinner table. When I first read Jorgensen's Life of the medieval saint, in the 58-59 winter of my conversion, I totally believed not only in Francis' affliction. but also that there was no problem at all with getting the same thing myself. It was not that I could think of myself as that holy - far from it - but I had only weeks before been given the spiritual experience of being drawn into the spiritual womb of the Blessed Virgin. I prayed mightily that God would leave my hands alone, as I was a guitarist and folk singer and could not see how the stigmata could in any way improve my musicianship. To this day, bless Him, God has listened to my prayers. In fact I am at the moment designing the opening segments for fretted instruments on Microstation Minstrels, simply because I had such a triumphant first lesson ever on the five-string banjo with my grandson Nathan when he was here with his parents last weekend, come down from the Cariboo to see how I was doing. I don't think we're going to see any blood.
It turned out that my oldest and her husband and son were and essential part of what we can now call the Beijing Experience.
About a month ago Marianne had made up her housekeeper's mind that it was high time that the eastern wall of this very study, covered by a very loaded bookshelf, should get the hell out in order to make room for the Concept 2 rowing machine. When she heard that Mon and Matt and Nathan's young adult muscles were showing up the weekend after I got out of KLH, she decided to take the bull by the horns, or the rower by its fly wheel, and have the Concept 2 moved to the study, a much warmer and convenient place than the attic. 'Twas done between breakfast and lunch on the Saturday morning. A ton of books went to the attic, and the rower came into its own. It was on the following Monday morning, after reading from Drs. Michael Murray and Julian Whitaker, that I - and the Holy Spirit - took myself off the prescription drugs.
I do not exagerate the importance of the rower. I had a problem with sporadic irregular heart beat until Thursday night or so. A little scary admittedly, but the rower has definitely been part of the solution. I possibly put on more Henleys than I needed to (a Henley is the rower's equivalent of 2 kilometres, or 105 calories), pushing for four or five Henleys a day, or rather a night, as that is when most of them are done, but the evenings with the radical heartbeat are gone. I am now a nice, steady, 80 at rest, which means I can keep up a modest 100+ on the machine. I row in 15 calorie reps, taking lots of time to read in between segments.
And as the first Chi Gong exercise Marianne showed me as soon as I got home from KLH was basically Looking Back at the Moon, from The Eight Brocades, which is fundamentally a massage for the heart, I was able to realize that rowing is also an excellent, natural, massage for the heart, just like bending foward from the waist while sitting and reading the Summa or MT's spanking new Douai-Rheims Latin/English Bible.
How do we know about that hospital in Beijing, where they have the western medicine side-by-side with the Traditional Chinese? Because it so happens that the aunt of The Economist's Beijing correspondent is a business woman in Nelson and mother of a former girlfriend of another grandson. Ted's wife own's the hospital combo.
As I said, living here, I don't need to travel.
I'll deal with MT's wonderful herbal medicine and diet solutions in Part Two.
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Music Instruction Bulletin
I desperately need to inform those good souls who read both the Ranger and Mr. Cameron's Conservatory that there have been some radical changes made to chapter seven of MCC. The old version has been much chopped at the end. Much too much information for starters, and worse, the real simplicity now available in the rewrite was much obscured. Part of this complication and confusion is due to my too great a reliance on triads as a discipline in themselves in one piano hand, as I had not yet applied number theory to converting the triad into a pair of intervals, one for each hand, and certainly had not yet realized in myself that sort of study in all its applications, thus enabling me to become didactic with the most basic basics.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
The Launch
So, this Wednesday I did not have to scoot downtown after my afternoon nap to buy a new flapper, or drain valve, for the toilet. A week ago we were set to film some keyboard method, but the bathroom emergency blew that intention out the window, and it looked like my hope of getting some of the scheme out to the children and other beginners of the universe before Christmas was not going to be fulfilled. A household primarily given over to the prayer life simply cannot get creative just any old time it feels like it. It's not easy to find a time slot that works as well as Wednesday afternoon. Oh, well. Patience, jackass, patience, as the old joke says. And anyway there was still some consolidating to do with the busted triads, as I call them, which are turning out to be the most mellifluous and meaningful "arpeggio" studies I have ever seen and heard. It's taken 23 years to get there, but the journey was worth the trouble. Just imagine being able to contemplate the Trinity and practice your scales and harmonies at the same time. On this earth, you don't get much closer to heaven. But there were no surprises today, and at two p.m. I was summoned to the studio by Madame Producer/Director, and everything went reasonably smoothly for a beginning.
There's nothing like arpeggios or indeed any kind of harmony on the first episode of Microstation Minstrels. Just the D mode, mode one, in its 11 note range, in four segments, with some historical chatter by myself, the first words of which actually came to me as I was walking back up the hill with the new flapper in my pocket. (Two days later I bought a back up. There is no negotiating with a malfunctioning toilet.) MT, of course, valiantly, oversaw the raconteur and handled all the controls. I realized recently that on and off, she and I have worked together in a variety of performances for 40 years. We always wondered about a time when we would record the old Bluemantle Trio, but never thought about putting the music scheme on the Net until this summer, when Garry Waldie told me he would film the keyboard segments and send them privately, on YouTube, to a journalist at the Vancouver Sun, my old employer. Thus the spark of the ultimate connection was born, and the ultimate technoklutz realized he'd have to acquire some sophistication with the audio-visual aspects of cyber world. Then came the equipment I have mentioned before, some trial runs, and finally, this afternoon.
And then the good clean fun of sending the message to family, friends, selected media, and even a well-placed soul in the American film business.
There's nothing like arpeggios or indeed any kind of harmony on the first episode of Microstation Minstrels. Just the D mode, mode one, in its 11 note range, in four segments, with some historical chatter by myself, the first words of which actually came to me as I was walking back up the hill with the new flapper in my pocket. (Two days later I bought a back up. There is no negotiating with a malfunctioning toilet.) MT, of course, valiantly, oversaw the raconteur and handled all the controls. I realized recently that on and off, she and I have worked together in a variety of performances for 40 years. We always wondered about a time when we would record the old Bluemantle Trio, but never thought about putting the music scheme on the Net until this summer, when Garry Waldie told me he would film the keyboard segments and send them privately, on YouTube, to a journalist at the Vancouver Sun, my old employer. Thus the spark of the ultimate connection was born, and the ultimate technoklutz realized he'd have to acquire some sophistication with the audio-visual aspects of cyber world. Then came the equipment I have mentioned before, some trial runs, and finally, this afternoon.
And then the good clean fun of sending the message to family, friends, selected media, and even a well-placed soul in the American film business.
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