Category: grindstone

All about breadwinning.

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elevated

Back from Florida and things are still non-stop.

I do, however, feel the writing bug coming back.  Now just to find time.  Recently work has stepped it up a notch.  Not like those times when I write things like, “Man work was killer this week,” or “Work is kicking my butt this week,” but rather a real sustained uptick in activity.  If I wanted to I think I could make a DHS-like “threat chart” for work, something like a “bandwidth-demand” chart that’d be similarly color-coded for how much of my mental time (not necessarily just at-work hours) work commands.  Right now I’d say things have moved from “guarded” to “elevated.”  Only problem is that the time in between each threat level, moving upwards, becomes increasingly smaller.  So before I know it I’ll be dealing with “high” and then “severe.”  Not surprisingly, like the Department of Homeland Security we’ll never actually get to “low,” and the longest-lasting phase, the one you tend to get “stuck” on, is “high.”

But, since it’s already half-past midnight on Wednesday and I’m tired and need sleep, instead of trying to flex my quill and write a masterpiece I’m instead going to post a video. I took the following a couple weeks ago when Sharaun was in Florida and Keaton and I were alone for an extended weekend.  I had just gotten into the 1981 Human League record Dare (after hearing that’s what Lester Bangs was listening to when he committed suicide) and had been wearing the grooves out of the thing (virtually, of course) all weekend.  Keaton began to pick up on the lyrics and started to really dig the first track.  She even developed her own dance to the song, which is what I taped here.  Her choice of 80s glasses was all solo, I didn’t foist them on her as a prop.  Check out the moves:

Someone call Soul Train.

Goodnight.

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i should be able to pull it off

Happy Wednesday already internet.

I don’t know where this week is going, but I’d like to change the posted speed limit or at least get it to pay attention or something.  I need just a few more than five days this time to get things done but I’m somewhat unwilling to give of my personal time just yet.  Oh that day will come, each project at the sawmill exacts its slow-times revenge with requisite after-hours work at some point… I’m just not ready to yield even bits of my evenings quite yet.

I didn’t have a lot of options this morning.  The laundry situation was dire.  I don’t say this as a marital indictment, our recent travel is to blame.  Feeling creative, I set about scavenging an outfit.  After assembly and a quick mirror test I walked into the house proper where Sharaun was busily preparing breakfast for Keaton and coffee for herself (that’s allowed with a baby in-progress, right?).  My wife then looked at me askew, cocked her head inquisitively while taking in my wardrobe decision and said, quite matter-of-factly, “It’s not your best outfit, but you don’t have to go change.”  To her answer of my unasked question I laughed and said, simply, “Thanks.”

Don’t think this shook me, folks.  No don’t pity me the belittled man.  No way man, I’m the kind who easily suffers a factual judgment or criticism.  You remember that when you really want to tell me something but are afraid to, OK?  I can take a punch.  And anyway, I was actually pretty proud of my creation.  I don’t have a picture so I’ll word it out to you.  Black dress slacks, matching black shoes and socks, and very dark and very bright (if that makes sense) blue button-down long-sleeve dress shirt.  The kind of blue that’s just bang-for-sure primary blue.  As blue as it gets.  Over that blue shirt I donned a white sweater I have.  It has little white braids down it in vertical stripes as decoration or dress-up.  I wore this such that the only place you could see my Crayola blue dress shirt was up top and the neck where the collars popped out from under the sweater.  I’ve always wanted to wear a dress shirt under a sweater in this way… it some how looks scholarly to me.  Like something Professor College would wear.

So I don’t know folks.  Maybe it was the combination of bright white, stark black, and this vibrant blue.  Maybe it was the sweater itself, I got a couple more jabs on it later in the day – I think it’s the white braidwork.  Or maybe just the white in general.  A white sweater is somewhat non-standard I suppose. I see other people at work rocking this shirt-under-sweater look with success (or at least to what I deem success) – I feel like I should also be able to pull it off.

Goodnight.

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no beep. no light.

Back to non-canned writing now.  Have to keep-up real time.  Wish me continued success please and thanks again for the comments.

Work has me hot-footing it; running the pit of hot coals, deftly letting the balls of my feet linger in the red just long enough for a little layer of perspiration to evaporate into a protective bubble of steam before lifting them again. It’s that time of year at the sawmill where we do annual reviews. That blessed time where I get to sum up both my work, and the collective work of my team, with some words on paper.

Sharaun’s still taking me to work in the mornings and picking me up evenings. The broken car is still at the We Fix It In An Inordinate Amount of Time body shop. ETA on that changes every time they call me on the date they last “projected” we’d get her back. Slipped out in week increments at first but, perhaps sensing my growing frustration, they’ve now taken to half-week delays each time it’s “not quite done” yet. It’ll be nice to have a second vehicle back. Just think about it… in China you’re only allowed one child – and here I am complaining about missing our second automobile. Only in America.

One morning this week, arriving at work and kissing both my ladies goodbye for the better part of the day, I walked up to the doors as always.  At work we have to wear a badge and on the way into the sawmill you’re required to wave your badge in front of a badge-reader.  Once this machine verifies you’re badge is valid and that you’re still lucky enough to be gainfully employed a little green light will come on and a happy beeee-eeee-eeep will fill the lobby.  This is your go-ahead signal; you have been validated; and while it shouldn’t be misconstrued as a personal endorsement from corporate or anything – you will be allowed to toil for another blissfully servile day.

So important is our being badged that we hire a security force to further watch for the green lights and listen for the beep.  In this way, the sawmill suits contract out the most severe responsibility of catching the type of masochistic scoundrel who’d want to sneak into a place where one’s soul is robbed hourly of all joy.  These human redundancies take their employ very seriously, and will shout choruses of, “Sir?  Sir?!  Sir!!” after any who dare pass the checkpoint without a beep and a flash.  They are most dedicated.

This morning, however, my badge did not beep.

I stopped dead and attempted to wave the thing in front of the machine again, not wanting to be caught in a hail of interrogatory “Sirs.”  No beep.  No light.  I walked to the next beeper machine (there are three, I assume to ease congestion).  No beep.  No light.

“My badge seems to be broken,” I told the uniformed man.  “Try it again,” he suggested, the sum total of his knowledge regarding possible solutions to my problem now plainly evident.  Like smacking a piece of electronics when it’s not functioning right, I waved the badge again so he could watch it fail. “No beep.  No light.,” he said.  “No beep.  No light.,” I said.  We looked at each other and for a moment I was worried I’d broken the poor man’s brain.  But, with his debug procedure complete, he simply pointed me to the “badge office” and said I’d likely need a new one.

It was already past 8am now and despite the sawmill being extremely lax in holding us employees to appointed working hours I’ve always been an eight-to-five kinda fellow.  I checked my watch, five minutes past.  No meetings to rush off to and with only a slight disruption to my coffee and banana acquisition procedure I decided to see the “badge office” right then and there.  I approached.

“My badge seems to be broken,” I told the man.  He took it from me, verified that it was broken, and proceeded to sit down at his computer to fashion me a new one.

Now, let me tell you that I’ve been at the sawmill now for ten years and that back on that first day of my tenure here, now so misty in my memory, they’d taken a picture of me to use on my all-important badge.  I’ve actually written about this picture before, for it is truly horrible.  For ten years I’ve had this post-college me staring back at me on my badge, looking all beer-fat and sheltered to the realities of corporate life.  Ten years looking down at that Napster-loving, $4-pizza-subsistent, neophyte.

I saw my window.

“Sure wish I could get a new picture on there,” I said casually.  Now I know full well that, for whatever reason, likely cost, the sawmill is strongly averse to re-taking badge photos.  I have a friend who lost a ton of weight and his badge photo ceased to resemble him in the least.  Even still he described his ordeal trying to get the badge photo updated as pulling teeth.  Knowing the ugliness of his travails I doubted my offhand comment would accomplish anything.

“Do you need a new picture?,” he asked.  Oh.  An opening.  Play it cool Dave, don’t let on your excitement.  Think logically.  What would be a logical reason to request a new badge photo?  Aha!  “Just look at how fat I am in that one,” I replied.  Now this is true; I have, over the past year, lost a considerable amount of weight.  Not enough, mind you, that I’m certifiably healthy per government standards, but I’ve at least got myself partway there.  He looked at the old photo, looked at me. “OK come on in,” he said.

Took maybe five minutes and I had my new badge.  I think it’s an improvement.

Goodnight.

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what godless monster?

Monday and we’re off to Portland later this week.  Wrote this entry way back on Thursday last week.  Here goes.

I thought I’d written before about how they give us free fruit at work, but I couldn’t find where.

In the café downstairs there’s this large table under a big reddish market umbrella with four or five baskets heaped with fruit. The umbrella really serves no purpose other than atmosphere, I believe, and it’s high enough that I don’t have to duck to get to the fruit so it’s fine. There’s typically a different type of fruit in each basket, with some that are almost nearly always there and some that rotate through more unevenly. There are always, for example, bananas and apples. And there are nearly always some kind of orange or tangerine or the like. Sometimes there are pears or plums or something more exotic. Like I said, there are always bananas. In fact, they have trouble keeping enough bananas.

From my non-scientific study of the free fruit table, I’ve decided that bananas are far and away the most popular fruit item. It’s always the first basket to go empty in the morning, and it’s often refilled and emptied again before lunch. And then it’s over. I have a theory that they only fill it twice a day and that’s it. That accounts for two big boxes of bananas unloaded onto the table, I’ve seen them doing it. Maybe even free fruit has limits. Thing is, if you prefer the bananas – and who doesn’t, they are my entire breakfast all the working week – you have to make sure you get one early enough or you’ll be out of luck. Sometimes you can even get there too early, and they haven’t even stocked the banana basket yet. Oh there’ll be all sorts of other fruits out, but the banana basket will sit empty. It’s always a gamble with the bananas.

I suppose this is because they are just about the perfect fruit. Come in their own wrapping, aren’t messy, not too sweet, perfectly portioned. What the heck kind of Godless monster wouldn’t like a banana? We’re only supposed to be allowed one piece of free fruit each day, but on Mondays and Tuesdays I actually always take two bananas. I’ll tell you why. Oftentimes the are still green and pretty inedible. I take two and let them ripen on my desk for a day. I’m always a day behind on the banana I’m eating, and a day ahead on the bananas I’m taking. This way, come Wednesday I only have to take one and on Thursday and Friday I don’t even have to grab a banana because Wednesday’s or Thursday’s is now nicely ripened back up at my desk. It’s a system. I have a banana system. I figure it works out to one a day anyway, really. Five days and five bananas so I’m within the rules. May not look that way as I walk to my desk with two in-hand Monday and Tuesday, but I’m on the up and up.

Sometimes I mess up though and end up with an extra banana still ripening at my desk on Friday afternoon. I always feel guilty about this, but I don’t permit myself to take the leftover banana home. Somehow that would be stealing. That said, don’t think I’ll let you take this opportunity to challenge me on what I consider stealing and what I don’t. I’m very well aware of the discrepancies between my banana dilemma and my file-sharing habits and I know a day of reckoning is coming for the latter. As soon as Keaton asks me how I get all my new music, and I’m forced to attempt an explanation. I know it’s a day coming. Extra bananas though, those prick my conscience. So I leave them over the weekend. Although this may do for a rather soft brown banana on Monday, but it’s worth it to stay within the law.

Goodnight.

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the pitch, the timbre, the tone

Good morning world. Welcome to blog.

O what a productive Monday! No, really. No sarcasm to be found. Dust rose around my desk as I set up then knocked down to-do after to-do. Vacation tried to make me soft, but I came back with a heat in my eyes. I left the office dizzy at five, the sun already down past the horizon in this idiotic light-deprived time of year. Ruined bodies of undone tasks cast away in my wake, nothing more than bloodied shells of their one-time threat. Work lost today.

Sometimes I slow things down and just listen to my daughter’s voice not for the words but the sound alone. The pitch, the timbre, the tone. Small and almost miniature feeling. But confident and well-versed for her age, her vocabulary seeming overmatched to the sound of her own voice.

Sometime in the earlier days of our dating relationship, Sharaun and I were going through a box of old things in her room to kill time. In there was an audiotape her folks had made of her reciting the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme around the age Keaton is now. I can remember thinking how amazing it was to have her voice on tape at that age… to be able to hear the youth of it and try to reckon it with the voice I knew at the time.

I think having heard that tape is partially why I record Keaton as much as I do. Even though we’re really bad preservationists when it comes to video, we’ve got audio and still images down I think.

Yeah I love her voice. Talking, praying, singing. I just love it when she sings.

Too bad most of the stuff she seems to parrot is the Top 40 junk Sharaun listens to. I did, however, catch her singing the hooks to a couple catchy tracks the other night and made her repeat herself for the iPhone so I could capture the verses for posterity. Here, then, is our little songbird flexing her pipes on her own takes of some popular tunes. Enjoy.

[audio:MeetMeHalfway.mp3]

Keaton sings the Black Eyed Peas’ “Meet Me Halfway”
(direct link for those on mobile devices without Flash)

[audio:NewYork.mp3]

Keaton sings Alicia Keys’ hook from Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind”
(direct link for those on mobile devices without Flash)

And yes, I do some minor editing for continuity’s sake – she’s not that perfect. But for really though, isn’t that something to hold on to? I’ve locked it away in my head as a memory, but the aural reminder these recordings may offer in ten or more years will surely be acutely appreciated. I can’t remember everything, you know. Humans fail.

Oh and before I go, a note about some small enhancements here and there to the blog. If you view any individual entry (not sure many regular readers do this, as, if it was me, I’d just be checking the homepage every so often or reading via RSS) you’ll now see a list of other entries written on the same date in the past. With more than six years of blogging-past to exploit, I figure these “also written on this day” links might be a neat window into the past.

I also tinkered last night at getting a running list of what I’ve been listening to on my iPod for the sidebar, but gave up when it proved to be too stupid to deal with. Maybe I’ll give it another go on an evening when I have a little more patience. Always looking to make this place more readable… shoot me any suggestions.

Goodnight.

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a saturday to remember

Two-thousand ten.

Hard to believe that Sharaun and I will be married ten years this year. Veterans. Pillars. So long together now, if you count the years we dated (subtracting that self-imposed “break” around ’95 that she won’t let me talk about much), that I’ve been with her as long as I haven’t. Sixteen years without, seventeen with. Something to be said for longevity – and perhaps forgiveness and long-suffering too – I suppose.  I know, this paragraph reaches for continuity… but those ten years are the first thing I think of when I think about how it’s now two-thousand ten.  That, and that Keaton will be four and I’ll have been ten years at my job.  Or, is a “career” now?  When does that line get crossed?

Ten years.

I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises for the first time over the weekend. Made me half wish I could spend a year drinking my way around Europe, bankrupting myself halfheartedly chasing fleeting passions, having impossible conversations with a cadre of equally sloshed and disenfranchised comrades. But in addition to daydreaming about being part of the perennially-tight “lost generation,” reading the book piqued my interest in good literature again.  I found myself once again wanting to read.  I made a trip to a couple used book stores in town on Saturday, but came up short.  A visit to the library was disappointingly equally unsuccessful.  Not to say there wasn’t plenty of good reading to be had at each stop, just that I couldn’t find a single one of the ten or so tomes I’d set out to acquire.

Then I wondered about downloading books… maybe reading them on my iPhone or something.  At first, I wrote off the idea as stupid.  Who’d want to read from a screen, let alone a screen as small as the iPhone’s?  But, later that night as I lay in bed I decided to re-download the Stanza application for the phone.  As a test, I grabbed a free book from Project Gutenburg – Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.  At right around 100 printed pages I figured it’d be short enough to use as test.  Stayed up reading it in bed and, as I finger-flipped the last “page” I realized that, yes, I think I could read books on my phone.  I immediately set about finding some of the stuff I’d been out amongst the brick-and-mortar searching for.  Oh, it’s all there, but unfortunately most of the works carry a prohibitive pricetag.

In short order, however, I found a way “around” that and was able to load up my phone with all manner of classic  and “modern classic” literature.  I’m actually pretty excited to have a pocketful of good books with me at any time.  Now to see if I can truly adapt to reading things this way… I’ll keep you posted.

A couple paragraphs I wrote on the iPhone over the course of the weekend, to round things out:

Saturday we woke with an idea at grand plans on the day. Something as a family, something fun for Keaton. We took our time in the morning. I made coffee and Sharaun and Keaton had cereal. I read a little. By and by it was 10am and we thought we’d better firm up plans. 11am and some discussion later and we were no closer to anything material. We ate lunch and after that everything fizzled. We played a few games of memory together and ended up running errands and shopping for dinner. A Saturday to remember. Maybe next weekend.

Work begins back this week after what feels like a fantastically drawn out hiatus. I’m not exactly eager. I feel a bit too disconnected from what’s going on. I’ve felt this way before and it always passes naturally as I wade back in. Not sure where to get started, but it’s coming up on annual review time and I guess that’s about as important a piece of work as you can dig into. A good start, I suppose, to numb me back into the day-to-day of corporate infinity.

Goodnight.

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something about christmas songs

There’s something about Christmas songs. Well, the traditional ones.

By “traditional,” I guess I mean the ones you’d expect to hear in church. Songs like “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “What Child is This,” “Angels We Have Heard On High,” and, most of all, “Silent Night” knock something loose inside me. If they’re sung right, these songs can illicit the most striking, unbidden, emotional response from me. Especially “Silent Night.” A well-done version of that song and I’ll have trouble holding back tears. I don’t know why this is, or how the association got made in my subconscious, but it’s for-sure there. This Sunday at church they did a run of mostly these holiday tracks and my chest swelled as I sang along. There’s just something about Christmas songs.

Ahem… do I get to keep my man-card? OK, moving on then.

We’re supposed to get our car back Wednesday, but if things aren’t looking good I’m going to rent a vehicle to get us through Christmastime while my folks are here. Something of comparable size to the out-of-commission Acadia, on the off chance we want to do something as a family while my folks are in town (in my head I see us doing a whole lot of nothing, but you never know). The bill came to $6,000 or so of damage… although it was all superficial and the body shop says there’s nothing wrong with the underlying chassis of the vehicle. All the same, I’d rather it never had been in an accident, let alone just a few months after we’d gotten it. But, such is life. We can roll with it.

As predicted, work has slowed considerably this week. As the holidays approach there are less and less cars in the parking lot each morning. By Thursday the place will be a ghost town. All this makes for and environment that’s 1) very quiet, uninterrupted, and work-conducive as well as 2) hard to stick around long in, even being super productive. The desolation and thoughts of everyone else being at home enjoying family or a good book just makes a man want to cut-out early and call a few hours work “good enough.” Maybe, since things come so easy in the silent solitude, I can justify a few hours work as equal to a busy interrupt-drive day’s full eight hours? Yeah… that’s the ticket.

Goodnight.