Category: general

Sitting on the couch writing on a Tuesday night.  I’m a bit more accustomed to the new room and setup, but all the changes really did throw me off my game.  Too much other than nightly writing to think about, I suppose.  Anyway…

This particular Tuesday was a fitting “makeup day” for yesterday’s work-shirking marathon HDTV install excursion.  I worked hard at work, and came home and worked hard again.  We’re in something of a “cleanup” mode around here in expectation of my folks visiting later this week (shoot, which is tomorrow as you read this, actually).

After last week’s stupid-expensive buying frenzy, I had piled the “spare” room high with empty cardboard cartons and styrofoam.  I had to bust out the carpet knife and do some serious box breaking-down, reminding me of my old days in the fast-food industry (you really got chewed out if you didn’t break down boxes before putting them in the dumpster, let me tell you).  Anyway, in the end it all fit, and the garbage man will magically whisk it all away come his appointed day.

Yesterday, as Keaton and I were playing in the living room, the doorbell rang.  Opening the door, there before me stood a woman I don’t know and three young girls (one of which I recognized as one of our neighbor’s girls).  The woman introduced herself as another one of our neighbors, from down the street.  And, after I introduced both myself and Keaton, she asked the girl to hand me one of their “fliers” and told me not to worry, that they weren’t selling anything. I unfurled the rolled flier as she spoke:

“My husband and I were talking the other day about how most of us have lived next to each other in this neghborhood for five years or so and we hardly know one another.  We got to thinking, we should get the streets together for the Fourth.  Y’know, we all just drive into the garage, hit the garage door button, and hide inside.  We wanted a chance to hang out and meet everyone and talk, so we’re inviting everyone into the circle at the end of the block for food and fireworks.:”

After telling her what an awesome idea I thought she had, she thanked me and said she hoped to see us there.  I closed the door and mused on how Andy Griffith the whole thing was, and then considered how much I loved that fact.  Also, I took pause to consider the “guts” it would take to put yourself out there like that.  Now, practically, it’s really not that big of a deal – just a casual invite to an informal get-together; but, more than that, it requires us modern-day closeted humans to move out of our comfort zone and meet strangers.  I have a lot of respect for them for putting it together, and I am really looking forward to getting down with some Mayberry, Ward ‘n’ June, RFD neighborly face-time.

I mean, what better way to beat the terrorists than to gather with your neighbors at the end of the block to eat food, drink beer, watch the kids run around, and shoot off fireworks?  Yeah, take that Commies.

Goodnight friends.

Sunday night, home from an afternoon winetasting in Napa and Sharaun and I just rearranged the furniture to suit the new TV room.  Tomorrow the HDTV guy comes… so I’ll have fully jumped off this bridge after he leaves.  What’s interesting, our monthly bill actually went down by switching to an HD package.  I dunno.  I told Ben last week that my emotional state after dropping the dosh on the new TV was something like a 60/40 mixture of glee and doubt.  I mean, I love the thing, and I spent a lot of time researching it and all that… but it’s still a purchase a couple notches above size I deem “recreational.”  Anyway, let’s get a move on.

The news in our world this weekend is all about Keaton and potty training.  Sometime late Thursday, she just made up her mind that she’d be potty trained.  We were eating dinner with some friends, and she asked to use the potty four or five times, keeping her diaper dry the entire evening.  The next day, Sharaun IM’d me around 11am at work to inform me that she’d been wearing “big girl panties” since she woke up and hadn’t had a single accident.  And, amazingly, it’s been like that now since Thursday – no accidents and no diapers.  It’s like a switch flipped.  We’re hoping this is it, and are both pretty happy at how sudden it came about.

I’m looking forward to the abbreviated work week this week.  My folks come into town Thursday night and I plan to spend at least one day congregated around the grill cooking some meat and drinking some beer while Keaton plays in the sprinklers.  I think we’ll go down to the city to watch the fireworks.  Should be a good time.

Man, blogging from this couch in this new room is really messing up my routine.  This new arrangement is really gonna have to grow on me… so, until I get a little more comfortable – I’m outta here.  Catch you guys Tuesday, have a good Monday.

Hi friends, happy Tuesday to ya.

The smoke around our burg is even thicker and heavier and nastier than yesterday.  The news says to keep the kids inside or their lungs might bleed.  OK, they didn’t say that – but it’s really bad out there.  The sunlight is all brown and orange and muted and hollow, and everything smells like a smoldering swamp.  We’re wreathed by fire, so say the headlines.  “Fire season,” apparently.  There’s actually a season for that, I guess.

Work was busy today.  Got a lot done, felt accomplished.  Even still, I found time to call and reserve wilderness permits for our planned John Muir Trail “redo” later this summer.  That’s right, in the face of the weather-forced failure Anthony and I had last year, we decided we wanted to have another go at finishing up what we missed last time  So, early in September Anthony and I, with the happy addition of Ben and Erik, will be setting out from our stopping point last time and finishing up the half-through hike.  The idea being that we can maybe complete the entire trail like this in pieces over time, maybe even finishing up in 2009.

Anyway, the acquisition of passes makes it all the more real to me, and I’m tremendously excited about spending five days on the trail hiking through the Sierra backcountry.  Not too long from now, I’ll be posting a detailed day-by-day itinerary similar to what I did last time around here, so those with more than a passing interest can checkout our intended route.  I’m just  elated that we’ve secured the trailhead and are now concrete in our plans.  It’s hard to think that it’s only a couple months off.  With luck, we’ll miss any early snows this time around.

You know, my job sometimes affords me the opportunity to listen to quite a bit of music.  And, on days when there are few meetings (it’s typically a rarity, but today was one such day), I can basically spend my time permanently be-headphoned while I write e-mails or draft PowerPoints or excel at Excel.  Today, I felt like I got to listen to a ton of music.  So, I decided to go back and take a peek at the iPod to see exactly what all had graced my ears.  And, turns out it was easy enough to copy/paste that list out of iTunes – so I decided I’d share it here (for whatever reason).  May I then present to you: What I heard, June 24, 2008:

Started out the day giving that new Wolf Parade album another spin before I switched to my typical random-listening use model.  Some good stuff in there, eh?

Not sure you’re as fast or accurate with figurin’ as I am, but see if you don’t sum that righthand column and get pert near five hours of listening.  Yeah?  Wow, that’s a lot of music for one day I’d say.  When I was in school, I used to dream of a job where I could listen to music all day as I worked.  And, looking at that list, it sure looks like my wish came true.  (Now, to just sit back and wait to meet Tiffany Amber Thiessen and win the lottery…)

Well, that’s about it for tonight.  I’m gonna try and get another set of pictures posted to Keaton’s gallery shortly here (I’m about a month behind).  Keep an eye out for that, OK?  OK.

Big sawmill conference Day One. I presented today. Today and Wednesday. I left home around 5am to make time for the drive over here, and was due to present “around” 11:30am. Arriving around 9am, I had a quick breakfast with my boss and then found my conference-themed polo. I stripped to the shirtsleeves in some abandoned room filled with shipping containers and donned the just out of the box and still wrinkled “official garb.” I walked into the conference room around 9:30am and was surprised when they asked me to present right around 10am; imagine my double-surprise when they told the first presenter had flaked and they needed me to fill an hour of time rather than my planned half-hour.

Great. Not much additional time to prep, but thankfully I’d used the car ride over to do some last minute run-through and tweaks (nothing like editing PowerPoint at 70mph in the passenger seat). Anyway, unexpected as the early start was, and unsure I’d be able to pull out over 30min of talking, I walked up to take my lavaliere and plug in my laptop. One big sigh and a sip of bottled water later, I began.

“Good morning folks, I’m Dave Lastname and I was supposed to have about 30min today to talk to you about ThingX. Turns out they tell me I have more like an hour, so let’s see what I can do. I drove over this morning from PlaceX today, so I’m gonna pass around a little jar for gas money here at the end of my presentation. If you like what you hear, please show me some love.”

And with that I was off. I managed to go for about 50min, and everything went much better than I had envisioned. It still wasn’t the smooth, practiced patter that comes from doing a presentation for the tenth or twentieth time, and they managed to stump me a couple times – but I got some instant feedback that I was the most engaging presenter that morning. That can make a body feel good, y’know? So, after all that fretting, it looks like the medium amount of preparation I did was sufficient. Well, at least for Monday’s session it was… I still have to do it again Wednesday (but typically things get better, not worse). Glad you guys were here to see me through it all.

Anyway, I’m back from the bar now. One too many celebratory beers and I realize I have to cut this thing short for it to make sense. I went fishing at 5am on Saturday in Florida, and I got canvassed by no-see-um bites before the sun was high enough to force them back into hiding. Two days later and I feel like I have the chicken pox or something: my legs, arms, and lower back are literally covered with red itchy welts, and I can’t stop scratching. Please, Lord, help me to stop scratching.

Goodnight

Home from a great-but-short trip to Florida.

Sorry for the lack of writing while there, but the whole vacationing thing really did consume our hours fully.  We did an impressive amount of stuff for such a short getaway, and, on the other side of that coin, I got precisely none of the blogging I had planned done (my halfway best-of list for this year and a new batch of pictures for Keaton were on that list).  So, it’s time to catch-up this week if I can.

While we were gone, the birds ate all my almost-ripe apricots (I was looking forward to picking them upon our return, as they looked almost ready the day we left) and the little ants mounted their annual summer invasion of the kitchen to get out of the heat. I was more mad about the fruit – seems like I’ll never be able to grow anything sweet in this yard, ants are just a nuisance. I may have to think about netting in the trees, as they pecked every single fruit, about six in total, right down to the pits – leaving nothing behind. Y’know, you plant a fruit tree, you wean it, you care for it, and then the dang birds come and pillage your fruit. Stupid birds.

I don’t know how I’m writing right now, I’m just doing it in spurts between fretting and sweating over tomorrow’s presentation. I used the flight home today to work through the material I couple times, honing it , analog-style, with a pen so I could do the touchups in PowerPoint when I got home. And, with about an hour of massage the thing is, I think, where I want it. I’m still freaking a bit on time though, as I have to unpack, repack, and practice the deck a few more times before I’m comfortable with what I’m going to say. It’s just an unusual amount of procrastination on my part, and I’m usually comfortable with quite a large amount of the stuff – so this means I’m procrastinating a lot. By tomorrow’s entry, I’ll be able to either share with you my shame or trumpet my by-threads victory.

But, for now, I really have to get to bed.  It’s going on 10:30pm and I have to be up around 5am to shave and shower and get all coffee’d-up before heading over to the bay for the conference.  I’ve done three “dry runs” of my material now in front of the mirror, using the iPod’s stopwatch functionality to time how long I linger on each slide, and the total time I take for the whole of the material.  And, while I’m still not as practiced as I’d like to be, I’m as good as I’m going to get tonight.  And, I still have the carpool on the way over tomorrow to get in a few more goes.  But, I also need sleep.  So…

Before I go, I noticed that Pat has decided to blog through his sabbatical. Might be something worth checking out when ol’ faithful sounds familiar skips a day or disappoints.  I also added a link or two to the old “blogroll,” if that’s what they still call it (do they still call it that?).  So, poke around there while you wait for me to resume some sort of schedule again.

Until next time though, I love your bones… and, goodnight.

Yahtzee, 10pm and the fleshy part of my forearms is sticking to the table in the humidity.

Yeah, we’re in Florida.  You’ll have to excuse the break from daily (or somewhat-daily) writing.  It’s a short vacation, but so far it’s been a good vacation.  Chiefly comprised thus far of the pool, the beach, and some evening drinks outside by the ocean.  Like we always are, we’re a bit smooshed in the time department – lots of things we want to do and people we want to see and not a lot of time to do and/or see them all.

Our flight out was eventful, with an emergency landing in Denver for a medical emergency which emerged, medically, about two rows behind us and across the aisle.  Some poor soul had a (very frightening to watch) seizure-type thing back there two rows back and across the aisle.  The crew put an open-ended request for a doctor on the PA and a man in a maroon shirt strolled back from the front, feet guided by his Oath.  In the end, the afflicted gentleman walked off the plane in Denver under his own power, and we were off and running again after a brief refueling and visit from the cleanup-crew (this was not a clean medical emergency).  And, with a sufficiently accommodating layover, we arrived in Florida later that evening spot-on time.

Tomorrow we’re off to some new waterpark, another day with sweaty skin and wrinkled fingers.  Sun and water, water and sun – and I have not practiced one single minute for the presentation I’m giving morning-Monday the day after we return.  In all honesty, I’m feeling pretty guilty about my total and complete lack of preparation.  I mean, I’ve been under-prepared before, but this time it’s aggregious: I don’t even have my material finalized yet, and I don’t know when I will… maybe not until Sunday night when we get home.  I’m doomed, I really am.  Woe; woe is me.

I won at Yahtzee, but it’s only because I add so poorly.  Goodnight.