Category: general

I don’t know if it’s a temporary side-effect of seven weeks away from the sawmill, but I’ve been consciously less “over zealous” about all things bread-winning since returning.  I realize that sentence stretches the limit of structure and comprehension so I’ll re-phrase: It’s hard to see the return on working as hard as I was before I left.

I think this has always been the case, it’s just my natural tendency to “fill-up” on work.  I’m no workaholic, in fact I’m inherently quite lazy, but I do tend to take on work as it comes with very little selectivity.  Put simply, unless I determine a task has zero value, I’m apt to accept it and find a way to get it done.  At the sawmill this trait is received well, and has earned me both dollars and accolades.  In the grand scheme of things, however, I feel it’s both unnecessary and potentially unhealthy.

One can achieve workplace success in eight hours daily; it most certainly can be done.  Modern cubicle-bound jobs, however, have transcended the physical and geographical boundaries which governed our jobs of yore.  I don’t need to be anywhere in particular to do my job, nor do I have to work during any prescribed timeslot.  If I have an internet connection and a computer I could work in 23min bursts from midnight to 7am and no one would care if I was on the moon.  The unbounded nature of these jobs in the tele-presence age makes for easy “infection” into what, historically, has been non-working hours.

And that’s where you get burned.  It’s so easy to do mail on your phone, take one call at 11pm, work on that presentation after church on Sunday.  I don’t go to a steel factory, a refinery, a coal mine, or an assembly plant.  I don’t punch in at 8am and clock back out again when the dinosaur pulls that bird’s tailfeather.  Work happens on my terms, and as great as I believe that is for productivity and flexibility it can be lethal to the concept of real free-time.

Being away for seven weeks reminds you of this.  Truly severed time is precious and should be savored.  I vowed to myself that I’d be vigilant about this sawmill-sprawl.  Better guarding my 5pm and 8pm and Saturday mornings.  It may seem like this theme is one that dominates my writing, or that I devote a lot of time to it.  So maybe I do.  I suppose I started writing four paragraphs ago simply to comment on how I’m less-busy, and happily so, since returning.

Don’t worry, though, I’m sure work will fix that… it has a way of filling in the cracks and I have a way of letting it.  I’ll remain on alert for encroachment, though, you can bet on it.

Goodnight.

Hit every green light this morning on the way to work.  I love that.

Cohen had his one-year pediatric check-up visit this past week.  At this visit the doctor takes stock of your child, taking inventory of their development and reporting back to you on such arbitrary things as head-size as compared to average, weight compared to average, mobility, verbal skills, and the like.

Whether it’s always been this way or not, these visits are also a time for parents to sit back and revel in the uniformity (or non-uniformity) of their progeny.  I suspect that many modern, rat-race respecting, parents could, in fact, digest the findings of these check-ups with some amount of heartburn.  I try not to allow this; for the most part I don’t care if only my kid and two others globally have heads of a size.  For someone overly concerned with benchmarks and milestones and having their child be “on schedule,” however, I understand this could be a nervous moment.

The suspicious among you might say that all my cool aloofness is perhaps born out of necessity.  Cohen, you see, is all out of whack with where Keaton was at this time – and where most other kids are, to boot.  A year old and he’s not crawling, not walking, not even showing the slightest interest in flexing his leg muscles.  While we were home in Florida during the RV trip, his cousin, three months his junior, was crawling circles around him while Cohen looked on, unimpressed and apparently uninspired.  Heck, he only just started pulling himself up to sitting under his own power just a few weeks ago.

The doctor was interested in this.  Sharaun explained that he’s far from immobile.  In fact he can scoot with some mean velocity, so quickly that I’ll often turn away for a second to find he’s inched off into another room.  At the same time, the majority of attempts to get him to stand on his own, clutching your fingers in that way babies do, are met with his pure indifference.  In the bouncer he simply tucks his legs up and rests his weight happily.

Testing his reflexes, all things appear to be assembled correctly, so that’s a relief.  Initially, the doc wondered aloud if she should have him “evaluated” (whatever that means, I assume by some developmental/physical therapy person).  Hearing this, Sharaun said she could feel her heart rate double in her veins.  As soon as she’d considered this, though, the doctor reneged on the thought and instead opted for the much more parent-palatable advice to, “Call if he’s not crawling on his knees by fourteen months.”

This seems ultimately reasonable to me… I mean exactly whose schedule is the kid on, anyhow?  Not mine; not Keaton’s; not the world according to the WHO statbook, as far as I’m concerned.  While I want little man growing and advancing as expected, I’m not really in any great hurry for him to start toddling around the house.  It’s seems funny to dedicate five paragraphs to saying something like, “I’m not concerned in the least,” but… I’m not concerned in the least.

As far as words go, he’s got “uh-oh” and sometimes what I think is a cognizant “thank you,” but not the apparently expected “mama” and “dada.”  To be fair I don’t remember when Keaton’s then-otherworldly vocabulary developed and flourished, so I’m not sure if Cohen’s is behind or even with her or what.  I do know, though, that he’s entirely doomed if I’m going to hold him up to her as the example of development in the talking and vocabulary department.  So, again, I’m not that uptight about it.

Milestones… pffft.  Whatever.  Goodnight.

I’m getting older.

It’s a fact.  Despite how I may look to myself in the mirror, it’s there.  I see it most in my forearms.  This might sound strange, but sometimes when I’m driving I’ll look at the bare stretch of arm between my cuffed sleeve and the back of my hand.  That hair-clad length, announced by a fancy shirt rolled to look casual and broken by a watchband and finally topped by a gold wedding band… it’s a picture of how I must look on the outside. Old; established; a family-man; company-man.

One of the more interesting phenomenon around getting older, at least to me, is the way getting to know your friends’ parents changes.  When we were younger, friends’ parents could be imposing, scary.  Authority figures but not your authority figures.  Old people who do dinnertime a little different than it’s done at your house.  Old people who let their kids watch different movies than your folks allow.  As far as relationships go, as a kid mine with my kid-friends’ parents were surface and cordial.

In my thirties now myself, I suppose I’m grown up.  Sometimes there’s a moment where you realize that parents (not just your own, necessarily) are a pretty great thing.  Meeting the parents of your peer-group becomes something different entirely. See because you’re all adults now.  Yes different ages, but past a certain age the field gets leveled a bit and now you’re all just humans watching the clock from different places.  Friends’ folks can be a window into what made a friend what they are today; gave them the feathers that now makes you flock together.

More, though, and what I wanted to write about, getting to know your friends’ folks is reminder of that generation’s mortality.  And, by extension, the mortality of your own parents.

As adults you can relate… at this point the twenty-to-thirty year delta between you means a lot less than what it did when you were diapers or on training wheels.  No you’re probably not going out for drinks on Friday, but it’s a lot different than what you had as kids during sleepovers.  A dad of a friend gets cancer and you can feel that; you feel for his wife, your friend’s mom, for your friend, your friend’s family.  Your friend’s mom dies unexpectedly and it’s not only sad but scary; stings doubly because you know this: moms are starting to die; dads are starting to die.

And amid sharing in the grief when a friend loses a parent, you can’t help but be reminded of that.

“You hear about Mitch’s mom?  She passed away last weekend.”
“What?!  She was just out to visit not a month ago, right?  We did that barbecue… she seemed great.”

Moms and dads are dying and that, man, is a bummer.

See ya.

It’s Friday.  Huzzah.

Listening to Nirvana’s In Utero, a kind of underrated record if you ask me.  I think when it came out I had already decided Nirvana was passe, being all cool and hip and sixteen and driving.  I bought the cassette, probably from good old Omni music in the mall (where just a few years later I’d be assistant manager), and listened to it in my read Nissan Sentra.  Aww crap, now you guys can verify you’re really me when logging into my bank account.  You just need to know what highschool I went to and where my dad was born.

Sharaun bought this little baggie of candied pecans from the bulk section at the local supermarket.  She put them into a salad with dried cranberries and some raspberry vinaigrette dressing.  Normally I would turn up my nose at such a sweet, feminine concoction.  Who can expect a man to eat something like this?  Fruit and nuts to complement a salad?  No thanks.  But I tell you internet, that salad was delicious.  And those candied pecans?  Those were the icing on the cake.  The bulk aisle done good.

Speaking of the bulk aisle, that place is awesome.  Bulk anything.  Why buy anything in packaging anymore?  Fill a plastic bag with flour or dogfood or steel-cut-oats or trail mix or candy.  Heck they even have bulk honey.  No, I’m serious.  You know those white beehive-box things you see in fields?  Like the picture accompanying this post.  They have a row of those very things right there in the store, with freakin’ taps on them.  Three kinds, clover honey and some other stuff I can’t remember.  You walk right up to these beehives, twist the lever on the tap, and out flows a slow stream of awesome honey.

I was marveling over these things on a rare joint-shopping trip with Sharaun when I noticed large signs posted on each: “Warning – Do Not Lift Lid.  Live Bees Inside.”  Wait… what?  The bees are actually in the thing making honey?  Right there inside the store?  I had to ask Sharaun, “Hey babe, do you think there are really bees in there?!”  “Of course,” she answered, as if it were obvious, “It says so right on the sign.”  Still though, I was tempted to not buy it… I mean there were no locks or straps or catches or anything on those wooden lids.  From what I could tell I could’ve just lifted one up and been attacked by a hivefull of bees.  Seems like a liability.  I thought it must be for the effect… because… live bees in the grocery store?  (I’m not the only one.)

Write some kind of witty wrap-up here.  Goodnight.

 

This evening I looked up how much the people who walk around Disneyland dressed in-character make per hour.

It’s a mite.  A pittance.

Not only that, but the “audition” process involves learning a small bit of choreography before you can move on to the improvisation scene.  If the peanuts for pay wasn’t a barrier to entry, the dancing likely would be.

Guides on the internet suggest taking an introductory dance class and working on your “flexibility” before auditioning.  Not the kind of “flexibility” I put on my resume, either; the literal kind which might’ve enabled me to touch my toes back in 7th grade.  Might’ve.

I don’t think a man could support a family as Goofy.

Guess I’ll continue the computer engineer gig for a while.

Goodnight.