Category: general

I stayed up too late last night.

Anything past midnight these days for me usually results in punishment come morning. So it was that I had a hard time rousing myself today. I snoozed the iPhone at least three times and only finally pulled myself from the sheets after I saw the time was well past seven. As I dragged to the bathroom for my pre-shower morning sit-down I could hear the rain tink-ta-tink-tinking on the windows. Through the tightened blinds I could tell the morning light wasn’t quite as light as the hour should have allowed. Sitting, flipping through the online news and working the dry out of my eyes, I noticed the sound of the wind on the roof. It wooshed and sang through the various attic vents. I could hear it against the outside wall, gusting. All omens of another stormy day.

The weatherman says it’s supposed to rain here for something like two weeks straight. That’s a long time. I have these cameras setup in the front and backyard of the house; they are mounted into the eaves, tucked away from the weather. They broadcast live video wirelessly. Originally I put them up with some notion of “security.” A misguided notion, to be sure, as they really serve no purpose above allowing me to randomly view what’s going on at my house via the internet. Sure, they can send me a note when they detect motion – but they are incredibly imperfect at detecting motion. Such as, they do nothing positive and have been reduced to novelty usage. For instance, I logged onto them today to watch the wind and rain I mentioned above. From my desk at work I spent a few minutes hypnotized, watching it bully our big empty garbage cans and rattle the spindly limbs of our fruit trees. Watching the video of home really made me homesick though, so I had to turn it off and get my brain back on sawmill-stuff.

But I had a meeting with someone. At work we have these hallways between the many buildings, we call them “breezeways.” The suits have setup little tables and chairs there lining the long ceiling-to-floor windows that look out. I’m on the third floor so this view is actually pretty nice. I can see a bit of the city and I can watch people walking to and from their cars in our huge parking lot. For cubicle folks like myself, windows are something of a fascination. Imprisoned so at the computer these snatches of the “world outside” become filled with some sense of nostalgia. “Oh dear it’s really beautiful ‘out there,’ isn’t it? Makes me remember the times when I was outside.” Maybe this is just me. Either way I enjoy having meetings in the breezewere where I can look out the windows. Today I sat and watched the storm during the hour I was there talking office politics, annual reviews, and technical crap. That kind of stuff is a lot more palatable when you have a visual reminder that a real world exists just beyond a thin pane of glass.

Cold and wind and rain dampen not only the ground, but my designs on productivity as well. I’ve been meaning to go out in the backyard and do some colder-weather cropping. Planting, tearing down dead summer stuff, arranging, etc. I thought on this yesterday after work, as it wasn’t raining – but the outside temperature in the car on the way home read 46 and I couldn’t muster the go-get-‘em required to go to work in the soggy outdoors in those conditions. Yes I know it’s not like I’m in Wisconsin or something… but the warm house was too inviting and I once again pushed the work off, mentally, to the weekend. Perhaps feeling a bit guilty, I changed the air filter in the house. Had to get out the step-ladder and everything. Even this little bit of productivity improved my spirits, likely because I’d also mentally pushed it off more than once.

Goodnight.

Happy coming weekend to us all. Tonight I went all blitzkrieg and wrote four full blog entries. For a second I contemplated just combining them all into one but instead chose to prepare them all for auto-posting a day at a time. Boom; all done for tomorrow and half of next week. Beautiful.

This morning, for the first time in my life, I sat and blacked my dress shoes. I suppose people still polish their shoes, but it seems somehow arcane. An activity of yesterday. I vaguely remember my dad shining his shoes. He had a fancy “kit” with a brush and a rag and he looked like he knew what he was doing. Probably learned proper shoe-shining protocol in the service; toned boots to see the CWO’s face reflect in the gloss. Me, I had no idea what I was doing. The instructions on the back of the Kiwi can verified that I already know everything there is to know about the basics: it’s just like waxing a car – put it on, buff it off. But the mechanics befouled me on my first time.

Even getting into the can was initially a mystery until I figured out the little rotating key is to be used as leverage in lifting the lid. For some reason this made the whole thing seem more old fashioned to me. This simple little tin with the clever lever action turnkey thing, it all seemed like an example of the brilliant-simple engineering from the war years. Everything now is overkill. Garbage cans that need to be plugged in so their motion sensors can see you approaching with your refuse and mechanically open and close the lid for you and machines that “clean the air” with negative ions. Over-engineered in the name of modernity and “cool.” Stupid. Here was a little formed tin with a blob of black junk inside and a little key to help you pop the lid. Function without excess. Like I said, made it all seem the more anachronistic an activity.

But I made do. I stuck my hand in the shoe and made what fist I could to hold it tight so I could move the cloth around it and paint on the black. I don’t have a fancy kit with brushes and rags like my dad, so I just used an small microfiber towel (I bought a 10,000 pack, or some such ridiculous example of excess, of them from Costco nine years ago and I’ve since found a multitude of uses for the things). I’d darken the surface with the stuff using one end of the towel, and then go back over it and rub it in with the clean end. I sat at the kitchen table using the light from the sliding glass door to help me see my work. Afterward, I was pretty happy with things. I managed to obscure all the scuffs and little lines and improved the overall “blackness” of the things. I turned the shoes around in my hands admiring them before slipping them on and getting on with getting ready.

Made me feel old… sitting in pinstriped dress pants and a blue dress shirt and black socks shining my shoes.

Like I’m at that point in my life.

Merry Christmas out there peoples.

Our gift-opening rush (which was really more like Keaton’s gift-opening rush) just wrapped up. I cleaned up the mess while Sharaun got started on the roast. Looking forward to a nice dinner with the family.

Hope your day is/will/did go/going well and that Santa was kind. Again, merry Christmas!

The blog failed me last night.  The Christmas tunes entry should’ve auto-posted Tuesday at midnight, like most of my entries do.  Welp, it didn’t – and I only noticed late in the evening my time Tuesday.  Regardless, it’s published now and should fall just below this post for your reading pleasure.

Construction began last night.  Keaton held the walls steady as Sharaun fixed them with a sturdy bead of royal icing.  Before long, the roof was on the gables and iced down.  To ensure compliance with California’s stringent earthquake-rating building codes, we let the hull of the house sit overnight, roof propped on cups to  avoid slippage.  Tonight she was ready for gale force winds… and the finery began.  Gumdrops, peppermints, licorice sticks, jelly beans and fruity Cheerios were stuck here and there (under Keaton’s direction) to make for festive, icing-drenched gingerbread house.  Are we really supposed to be able to eat this thing, too?

I saw a study online the other day that really tickled me.  It stated that, due to the amount of food they consume and associated resources needed to produce it, dogs have double the carbon footprint of an SUV.  This means that, if you’re in favor of the environmentalist concept of “trading” or “offsetting” environmental impact, it’s half as bad for Mother Earth if you drive an SUV than if you own a dog.

I love when real science proves to be antagonistic or contrary to popular psuedo-science (or Oprah-fueled public misconception).  Organic food leads to obesity; sunblock contributes to cancer; anti-bacterial sanitizers actually weaken your natural ability to fight off germs, and thus make you more likely to get sick; etc.

I think it would be hilarious to see a bigger comparative chart of activities that are thought of as environmentally-conscious vs. those that have garnered a bad name.  For instance, the impacts of the massive fleets of recycling trucks burning fuel nationwide on a weekly basis graphed against the regained-resources we get from the materials they collect.  Or, cloth diapers and the water and energy they consume vs. disposables.  Maybe showing, unit-for-unit energy, that a landfill is actually the most efficient way of dealing with waste.

By the way, I don’t know if any of those things are true, but contrary science is fun.

Have a good Christmas Eve eve, folks.  Until later.

Been a while since I wrote.  Should be a slow week; writing should pick up.  All over the place today.

Tonight (Sunday) I got a wild hair and wanted to cook dinner for the family.  At work they make this roasted red pepper tomato bisque that I could eat ten bowls of, and since it was a nice chill gray day I figured it’d be fun to give it a try.  After some internettin’, I had cobbled together a recipe that sounded good and we picked up the raw materials on the way back from church.  Turned out to be dead-simple and pretty tasty, and the family approved so I felt accomplished.

Saturday morning my mom called and said that she and dad were considering a last-minute trip down for Christmas. A few hours of deliberation later and we got a copy of their itinerary in the inbox. Sharaun and I are both excited we’ll have family around for the holidays after all. We can cook a real-sized dinner now without feeling wasteful or overly-gluttonous (until we sit down to eat, at least), and we’ll be able to share gift-opening with Keaton. We were just lamenting the other day about not being able to spend the holiday with any extended family, and now we got that on lock. Thanks guys.

Cleaned out the computer desk area this weekend, found the DMV notice that Sharaun’s registration needed to be renewed… back in August.  With the fees, it’s nearly 200% what it would’ve been four months ago were it done on time.  My fault; I’m the one who’s responsible for doing “those kind of things” around here and it must’ve just slipped through the cracks.  Bad thing is, I’ve been giving Sharaun a hard time for the past month, contending she’d lost the renewed stickers they must have sent when I (surely) paid on-time.  I’ve been reminding her to call the DMV to get new stickers on an almost daily basis for weeks now.  Dang.

As a blogging-mecahnics sideline, I’ve become quite good at blogging on the iPhone WordPress application. In landscape mode I can tap out the paragraphs at an alarming pace, with relatively few typos or rewrites necessary. Best of all, the prospect of tackling a full-sized entry via the phone is no longer too duanting. In fact, everything you’ve read up to now, including this very sentence is iPhone-birthed. Not bad as a handheld tool.

Don’t really have anything more.  Goodnight.