Category: general

This was a good weekend.  The weather was perfect.

Sundays are even more fantastic when you’re not thinking about the fact that they’re the capping days of the weekend.  Last week I barely wrote; work, work, work.  But this week: this week is vacation.  And that means that right now, as I write this on Sunday afternoon, this day is even sweeter and more appreciated than usual.  With no coming week of work to look forward to all that’s in my head is what has to happen to prep for the time off.  We’re spending a week at the beach down south; roadtripping our way down through the valley tomorrow.  I’ve got the laptop loaded with Disney movies and the screen hooked up in the car for Keaton… and Sharaun’s getting the requisite road snacks.  I’m excited to get out of town and spend some time with the family.

Because I’ve been having such a difficult time writing lately, I decided the best sure-fire way to get some content, any content, up on the blog was maybe to do a picture post.  So I took a gander at a couple weeks or so worth of pictures I’ve taken on my busted iPhone and found a few worth talking to.  Below is what I decided on.  A nice collection of random images from the phone.  Each picture comes with a caption.  Even with an entire weekend at my disposal, this is seriously the best I could come up with.  I mean, this is some awful writer’s block I’ve got going on… anyway enjoy the pictures.

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And now it’s after dark and I’ve spent the day in leisure.  Time to pack and prepare for our week away.

Goodnight.

Tuesday and the week already blows.

Tomorrow I rise before the sun, get on a plane just as the sun is showing up, and get back home on that very same plane sometime after the sun is gone again.  Who knows, if there are no windows in the conference room I’ll call home for the day I may not even see the sun for a whole twenty-four hours.  I suppose day-traveling like this is somewhat redeemed by the fact that it’s not commercial.  No parking garages; no security lines; no taking off shoes; no burned-tasting airport Starbucks.  Just a sleepy hour or so with other corporate commuters I plan to iIgnore, buried in the music.

It’s a quarter till ten at night.  A have a meeting at ten that’ll burn forty minutes or so.  After that Sharaun wants me to get out the ladder and climb into the rafters and pull down a bunch of old books and picture frames and other stored-and-forgotten who-knows-whats for some junk-swapping party she has tomorrow.  I take this to mean that, even though I may temporarily cheer the removal of some amount of junk from our house, an equal amount of different and new junk will come back tomorrow night to take its place.  The new stuff then, will enter the rotation, and something else will no doubt move up into the rafters where it will await next years junk-swap.  This is a very suburban-American thing to do.

After the romp in the rafters I need to hit the shower and shave my head.  Yes; I shaved my head.  Bald.  100% bald.  I called it my “last haircut.”  Something I’ve been thinking about for a while and went through with just this last weekend.  “Last haircut” is a misnomer, though, as I find myself shaving the thing every two to three days to keep it nice and slick-shiny.  And since tomorrow I’ll be holed up with the various high mucky-mucks at the sawmill I feel a need to look my slick-shiny best.  Shaving at night seems safest, even though I’ve yet to cut myself having done it solo twice already.

All this means I won’t be in bed before midnight… leaving me with a scant five hours to sleep.  Not enough by at least two hours if you ask me.

Finding time to write at all was hard.  Goodnight.

I used to be scared to death of walking on piers.

It was a thing related to scale; not a fear of tiny docks you’d moor a fishing boat to but of the large above-ocean boardwalks of Southern California.  There were a few near-ish our house when we lived there in my youth, and occasionally we’d visit.  I’d walk so cautiously, all the while looking down through sometimes inch-wide cracks between timbers at the waves rolling slowly in so far below.

The whole construction seemed to tenuous to me.  Here’s these stupid overly-confident humans… they are going to cut down trees and build a stick-bridge out into an environment they cannot natively survive in.  Like I shouldn’t be walking there; like the whole thing was just a bad idea.  The bravado of our race is summed-up by things like piers.  Fleeting instantiations of sentient meat that do ridiculously stupid things like shoot themselves into space and invent fireproof clothing and build roads though hulking mountains of stone.  The cocksure novelty is perfectly human.

The cries of gulls wheeling above, the creosote pungent in the air, the stiff breeze off the water – all doom-inspiring to me.  The farther I walked out to sea the more certain I became that a fall would mean death.  No one could save me down there.  If the fall didn’t take care of it I’d surely be washed into the barnacle-encrusted pilings and shred to bits; if not that then a simple drowning.  It all felt so… so creaky.  Like the whole thing was held together with spit and mud and every wave withstood was another miracle.

Who challenges the sea?  A fool, that’s who.

Goodnight.

Hi internet.  How’re ya doin’?  Good.

This past weekend Sharaun and I decided we’d use Saturday as a “spring cleaning” day.  With the new baby on the way I suppose we are both getting a little “nesty.”  The plan goes like this: 1) clean out our 3rd bedroom, which is currently serving as Keaton’s “toy room,” 2) get a new “big girl” bedroom set for Keaton, complete with bed, dresser and some more storage in the way of bookshelves and likely a toychest or something, 3) move Keaton’s existing convertible crib/bed and changing-table/dresser into the now empty toy room.  As the toy room is currently bursting, however, we practiced the art of reduction quite liberally first before any of this musical furniture business could begin.

What’s more, there are things in the toy room that aren’t toys (at least not Keaton’s toys) which’ll need a new home.  Take for example dad’s Pac Man cabinet… or the bookshelf full of books and CDs and DVDs… all that had to go somewhere.  The plan for this was also multi-phase.  Again we began by simplifying and donating everything we could part with from the bookshelf, including the bookshelf itself, and old Wal Mart job we’d had since moving here.  After that the Pac Man machine moves into the family room, where it fits almost-like-it-was-planned tucked away into a little cubby intended for an in-wall entertainment cabinet.  Problem is there’s currently a huge old-school tube TV in there right now, so that’ll have to go.  That means dad gets to get a new slim, small HDTV which’ll get mounted above the cabinet (a nice bonus).  Alongside both the Pac Man machine and TV will go some shelves to hold the few books, DVDs and CDs we’ve deemed keepers.  The homeless tube TV and it’s cheap Wal Mart stand also go to charity.

In our modest home any “cleaning” that doesn’t involve a good deal of stuff-elimination is something like squeezing a balloon: you might reduce the size of the part you’re focused on but you’re really just moving the problem around and inflating another part.  And to you “Dave you’re gonna break down and buy a bigger house” naysayers I’m happy to say that my focus (stubbornness) on not up-sizing to accommodate a collection of things we don’t really need (not counting the new baby) remained strong even throughout the trying exercise of finding places to put more things than we have places for.  Shockingly, for the time being Sharaun shares my staying-put mentality – also in the face of the same “where are we going to put this?!” frustration.

I mean, I’ve been so successful at sticking to my guns on things like this in the past… what could go wrong?

Goodnight.

We will miss you dearly Mimi.