Category: grindstone

All about breadwinning.

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like a big girl

Working on being strong.I guess it feels like dinner is so late because I’ve been home from work since around 3 o’clock today.

Yeah, I managed to sneak out and dial-in from the couch for the last couple hours (the boss was out the door just in front of me, and no doubt those who work for me continued the domino).  So, even though it’s only 7 o’clock now, the smell of the roast Sharaun’s got in the crock pot is making me feel like I’ve not eaten in days.  (Trust me, that’s not true at all… just today at lunch I had a burrito that I’m still surprised fit entirely into my insides.)

I gave up on TV hours earlier, switching on the holiday music channel on the satellite instead (I don’t have XM anymore, as I downgraded my TV package to the most basic levels allowed in some strange media protest slash money-saving scheme).  I took the time as an oppotunity to read the new Newsweek that came today… but sometimes news just ain’t where it’s at.  So, bored with that, I instead had a tickle-fight with Keaton.  That can always make a guy smile.

Lately, Keaton’s been coming into our room partway through the night and trying to get into bed with us.  Most times she’s successful, as either Sharaun or I will hoist her up by her armpits and nestle her in between us.  Some times, however, she doesn’t manage to wake either of us.  In these instances, she doesn’t simply give up and return to the comfort of her own bed… she just makes her own little bed right there on the floor next to ours.  No blankets; no pillow; no nothing.

In the middle of the night last week I woke up to find one of Keaton’s baby dolls next to me in bed.  Thinking it odd, and not remembering a baby doll in bed with me at the beginning of the night, I decided to think about it a bit.  “How on earth did Phoenix get here in bed with me?,” I pondered.  I sat up to get my brain working a bit better, and happened to look down.  There, huddled in on herself in a fetal position, was Keaton.  Sleeping on the carpet about two feet below me.

I got out of bed and scooped her up, rousing her a bit.  “Keaton, how long have you been here?,” I asked her, sliding her cold little body under the comforter in our bed.  She mumbled something, but not an answer.  Then, as I took my place next to her, she lifted her head and asked me in her little sleepy voice, “But Dad, did you feel me touch your arm?”  “No baby, no I didn’t.”  Awwww man, I felt bad: Here she had tried to wake me, wanting to join us in our bed, and I hadn’t responded.  So, like a faithful dog, she simply curled up as close next to me as she could.  (Is it wrong to compare your daughter to a dog?)

Anyway, I felt bad.  But, I know that, in the long run, we have stop letting her into bed with us.  I have to admit it’s hard to do, I really like knowing she’s there next to me – sometimes she even puts her little hand on my arm or shoulder, or cuddles her head up to my face.   Alas, as much as I like her being there with us – I don’t want it to become an every night thing.  So, Sharaun and I agreed this morning to take a harder line next time she toddles in clutching Laka or Claudia or Emilia… time to go back to your own bed, like a big girl.

Wish us luck.  Goodnight.

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desert island iPod

Light me up.Tuesday night and the week creeps along on creaky wheels, just a rusted axle away from a breakdown and a gear above reverse… it’s a sorry sight to behold – a lame animal limping towards death.

Sorry for all the negativity lately… work really has me wound up.  I’m throwing silk darts at moving targets, waiting around to do some more waiting around, and trying to build a house on sand.  Hopefully things will solidify in the new year – because despite my normal tolerance for dawdling, this is absolutely draining my soul.  I have faith that the coming week with my folks in town will lift my spirits – so Mom and Dad I’m counting on you.

Sometimes I think my iPod is endowed with the divine.  Seriously, I love to sit back and marvel at the eclectic library I’ve built on this 160GB device.  I put so much stock in the thing, it’s literally become a piece of technology I’d hate to live without; akin to such commonplace conveniences as credit-card purchases and the telephone.  I’m so cloven to this device, that I often find myself thinking about absurd situations involving it.

For instance, you don’t know how many times I’ve imagined myself as the Tom Hanks character in Castaway, my aircraft crashing into the sea and later finding myself washed up on a deserted shoreline.  In my head, my iPod was in my pocket at the time and survives the saltwater bath… whereupon my mind turns to how I can now figure a way to use it on my new island home.

Believe it or not, I have actually done real-life research online in all of the following areas as related to the survival scenario described above:

  • Wave-powered DC generator (I only need 5V/~1A… now to find some natural magnets and wire…)
  • How to make a battery (save some of that power for later)
  • iPod connector pinout (to see what voltage I need to power the thing and where to apply it)
  • How to make speakers (would be nice to rock the island while I’m at work doing things like building huts and whatnot)

Yeah, I’m that serious about the absolute necessity of an iPod as a survival tool – it’s that essential.  Because, after keeping myself alive – first priority would be getting some tunes to motivate me in my raft-building.

I guess… I don’t have much more for tonight.  Think I’ll watch a few episodes of I Love Lucy and wait for Sharaun to get home.  Goodnight.

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tumbleweeds and me

Work is slow.Cold and rainy where we make our home this week; snow just a few hundred feet higher up the hill.

Saturday I forced Sharaun to be complicit in one of my cleaning/organizing jags, and we tore through dusty closet shelves, cluttered and overspilling bedside drawers, and under-bed catacombs.  And, after shifting storage locations for an innumerable amount of useless junk, we managed to actually rid ourselves of a good bit and better hide the rest.  Sunday night I made hot cocoa and we rented a movie.

Keaton awoke that day from her nap and was burning up, carried a fever throughout the night.  She was running hot off and on all Monday, but we keep it down by dosing her with Motrin.  Even when that girl’s got a high fever, she’s bright and bubbly – the day she ever gets really sacked by a cold is the day I’ll be worried.

You know… I’ve never had much need for country music, but if you read here with an regularity you likely remember me softening quite a bit on that position over the last half of this year.  Think of it as a “country awakening” or something; my personal realization that almost no genre or style of music is, in a wholesale sense, “bad.”  Well, I suppose there are exceptions – death metal being the one coming to mind.

Anyway… as the year turns colder and greyer, and the doldrums I’ve been navigating at work persist daily – I’ve decided that some good, solid country crying music suits my mood quite well.  Explains my recent wont for the earlier works of Waylon, Willie, Merle, and the like.  Some of these whiskey-soaked ballads just “click” during downtimes like these… guess country is good for something after all, eh?

The aisles at work are already showing early signs of Christmas evacuation, even ten days out.  It’ll only get worse (or better, depending) as this week works its way into the short one following.  I like it, actually, because it affords me an opportunity to get some work done without interruption.  And, being honest, it also makes for a great “sneaking out early” environment.

When it’s just the tumbleweeds and me holding down the sawmill, I don’t feel as guilty about heading for the homestead to finish the day remotely from the couch and spend some time with Sharaun and Keaton.  A wise manager once told me not to “waste” vacation time on Christmas, advising that most of our customers and we too effectively “shut down” around the holidays – making for some great “short days.”  Since we usually head south for Christmas, this’ll be the first year I’ll actually get to try that advice.  I so desperately need some “don’t care” time, I pray the advice is sound.

Until tomorrow then, wish me luck at shirking work, K?  Goodnight.

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flying, early

Hello Tuesday.

Sunday night I feel asleep on the couch around 8pm, so Sharaun tells me.  All I remember is her waking me around 11pm – I was really out, woke covered in sweat (an unfortunate byproduct of the first few hours of sleep for me).  It’s not like me to crash like this, but the extended slumber really felt great.

Anyway, you can blame that for the lack of writing last night.

My brain of late has been turning to our coming vacation, so much so that thoughts of getting out of Dodge on that appointed day had started to overtake my brain.  Combined with this, work has been in a strange limbo-like state for the past week, with ambiguity and uncertainty as the overriding theme each day.  It’s become somewhat of a drag, bringing me down by the end of each day and sending me home soured for the evening.

And so it was yesterday that I turned to the airline’s website to see if there might not be a comparably priced earlier flight to Florida.  Turns out there were tickets available at less than half what I payed when I bought our flights earlier this year, and they came with a four day extension our our five day vacation.  And, even after paying a whopping $300 in “change fees,” the airline owed us $240.

So, I’m happy to say we’ll be outta here earlier than planned and back later than planned, and will do it all for much less than we planned too – not much more you can ask for from a vacation modification…

It can’t come soon enough.  Goodnight.

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producers of the genre, please heed my call!!

I wrote a whole entry last night and scrapped it around 11:30pm.  Just wasn’t going anywhere.

I’d like to address now my now more-than-obviously clear divergence from my previous posting frequency.  Wasn’t long ago I was hitting every single weekday without fail, day after day (or night after night, as my writing goes).  If you follow this page at all, you’ll know that posting has fallen way off from those days gone by.  On average now, I’d guess I miss two out of the five days I used to post.  I dunno… I still start out each day intending to write… I just don’t always get around to it.  Most of the time this isn’t a sin of omission but rather one of commission.  I choose not to write; usually, I have nothing to write about.  I don’t know if this is the new model or an extended phase.  But, I still have a desire to write… and I’ll continue to do so whenever I feel like I can.

Yesterday and today at work I had a measurably better days than my recent run of stinkers.  Mostly because I avoided thinking about and working on the one set of tasks that is giving me so much grief.  I know, you, being prudent, would dive headlong into those unsavory tasks until they were done – and I considered that too.  Ultimately, however, I found that delaying the inevitable difficulty for some temporary relief was my preferred avenue.  So, I worked on a bunch of smaller tasks that needed doing, and used my personal time well to take care of tasks outside the realm of work (can you tell that getting things done makes me feel happy?).  But, none of this is particularly interesting… so let’s move along.

Oh, the new Kanye leaked recently… and it makes me need to talk about the state of hip-hop and wanna-be hip-hop lately…

Producers of the genre, please heed my call!!  Stop it already with the mother-humpin’ autotune!

I’m not kidding, it was stale so many months ago, and it can only “fix” so much.  I understand you’re now using it as a stylistic element, like the quirky background sounds Timbaland’s production made ubiquitous years ago, or the No Limits sound, or the Neptunes sound, or the Mace sound, or the Nelly sound.  But, look, people, while everyone knows what’s hot in hip-hop is cyclical and the “in” sound typically follows and emulates one producer or a stable of artists  – the autotune abuse needs to stop.  If that means we lose T-Pain forever, so be it.

When every single song on your album (and I’m looking at you, Mr. 808s & Heartbreak West) is sung via autotune it truly grates on ones ears.  In fact, it becomes unlistenable.  When every single song on the radio is “enhanced” through autotune, it’s awful.  If I wanted to listen to a robot “sing” perfectly-keyed click-to-pitch ballads… well, let’s just say I would never want that.

Just stop it.  Stop it.  This has to end.

Goodnight.

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not retiring tomorrow

Tuesday night and the iPod has shuffled up some fine Grateful Dead, an extended jam on “Playin’ In the Band” from early ’73 in Nebraska.  The Dead sound good to me nearly all of the time, and only occasionally do I find myself out of the mood (if I can use that phrase) for some good ol’ noodling around.

And, in other music-related news, I saw this jarring headline on NME this evening: Led Zeppelin to tour with Robert Plant replacement!  Why oh why Zep?  Is this some ploy to get Plant to step in at the last minute despite his public statements he’s not interested?  Some kind of rock ‘n’ roll supergroup “bluff?”  I mean, with Sharaun going to her third New Kids on the Block show this weekend (and this one a world away on the other coast of the dang US), and our agreement that I could pay whatever the cost to see a reunited Zeppelin as turnabout for the money she burned reliving thirteen – you’d think I’d be happy.  But… no Plant?  Argh; just argh.

I didn’t write last night, or, rather, I wrote a bunch of unfinished and disjointed stuff that I just couldn’t massage into a viable post so I scrapped it altogether.  Tonight, I’m hoping for different results.  I’ve just put Keaton down to bed and Sharaun is at volleyball (man, it sure seems like I’ve been getting more than my share of evenings alone lately) – so I have the place to myself.  Although, I have to admit I didn’t use the time doing anything super exciting: washed the dishes from dinner, tidied the kitchen, played with Keaton, and listened to some tunes.  And that brings us to the present…

This past Saturday the college football crowd at the house for the games was a swollen one, one of the better Saturdays of the season thus far.  At some point, being that the majority of attendees are friends of mine from the sawmill, the discussion turned to all things finance and bailout.  Somehow, this led to a “401k-off” where each of us in turn logged onto our retirement portfolios online to look at our “yearly change” percents for 2008 so far.  The game being simple: whoever had lost the least this year wins.

There were seven people who participated, and, of those seven, the winner had lost 39%.  Yes folks, that was the winner; the guy who was only down 39% on the year.  Surprisingly, I took second place by only being off 42.6%.  The “loser” was down a future-mortgaging 48%.  To be perfectly clear, those are all negative numbers.  This, my friends, is what inspired the newest tombstone in our front-yard Halloween cemetery… whcih can be seen accompanying this post.  Good thing we’re not retiring tomorrow, eh?

Sorry for skippin’ so many of my normal dailies lately folks (if you can call them “normal” anymore).  Work is getting progressively busier, and will only get moreso as we move into 2009.  I’m not giving up on blogging by a long shot, I still enjoy it immensely… but if I had to bet I’d say this year brings down my overall frequency average a mite.  Bummer.

Stick with me, OK?  Goodnight.

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i lose, you win

Friday!  Hey weekend, thanks for finally getting here.

I don’t know if it’s that nothing interesting happens to me during the day, or it’s that I’m so totally obsessed with this election at this point that I’m afraid all I can write about is dry old politics – but I stayed away from writing last night for one reason or another.

Today at work I ran one of my best meetings in recent memory.  At the sawmill, I run a weekly “staff” for my team, where we come together and talk about all manner of things.  Since the meeting is typically a clearing-house for topics, and is intended to air out whatever needs airing out for the benefit of all to hear – it can often be a tedious, albeit purposeful and important, use of the team’s time.  Today, however, I really enjoyed myself.

See, today I reviewed my year-end “manager survey” scores with the team.  My employees are asked twice yearly to anonymously complete a very brief survey on how I’m doing as their manager.  The questions are short and meant to be representative of the sawmill’s central tenants of management.  From the answers, you’re supposedly able to tell how I’m performing as a people manager.  And, while I have a couple doubts about just how indicative or accurate the results really are, there is no doubt the data is meaningful – as it came from the people I need most in order to be successful myself.

The cool thing about going over your flaws is that it allows you  to give people a small sense of empowerment.   Let me explain:  When I share where I scored low or unfavorably, I can almost see invisible smiles flicker and then instantly fade as someone realizes that, yes, their feedback was heard.  Some managers would hate this, perhaps, but I really enjoy sharing with the team where the team thinks I need a bit more polish.  Not only is the feedback extremely useful in shaping what I work on as a manager, but it also vindicates and gives gravity to the opinions of the “troops.”

By publicly acknowledging the things they’ve rated you low on, and sharing with them your plans to improve – you’re telling them not only that they’re opinion has an impact, but also allowing them to direct you for a change.  And, for some reason, that makes me happy.

Oh, what’s that? You say you want to know what I scored low on?  Well, without getting into details – most of it had to do with being too awesome, too handsome, and too productive.

Goodnight.