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days and videos

Hey what’s up internet somehow it got to be Thursday and I need more days before it’s the weekend OK?  How about we make some kind of deal.  You give me a day between today and Friday, or even between Friday and Saturday.  I need this extra day because I still want, and furthermore feel I deserve, two days of weekend yet need another day of work.  We could compromise, call it Tweenday or Foreday or something like that.  Just another eight hours.  But don’t really do it, because I want Friday to be here.  OK thanks.

Tonight I wanted to shoot a practice video to test out both the new point-and-shoot camera as well as the ease-of-use of the new Windows 7 updated Movie Maker software.  Since I’m planning to try upload video content during our trip, specifically a video diary series featuring Keaton’s road-trip commentary, I was hoping that the new version of Movie Maker was as easy to use as the previous one.  Turns out it’s easier and faster, and I threw together a montage in short order.  After uploading to YouTube and linking to Keaton’s webpage, I’m super happy with the results.  You can check it out here.  Best case is we can upload videos like these as our travels bring us to places where we’ll have connectivity (most proper RV places now have wireless, and I’ll be serving IPs from the phone’s connection wherever we have data service, so I feel the chances are good).

I am going to go now.  Give me a break; I did a video.  Goodnight.

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ninety-six hours

Today at work I sat down to make a list of all the things I want to get done, or get to some defined state, before leaving for our trip.

As part of this, I mapped out exactly how many working days I have left to accomplish these things.  Like any analytical person, I then tried to divide the estimated hours of work into my available working hours to see how much of a challenge I have ahead.  Shockingly, I have a scant twelve working days before I’m gone for six weeks.  Upon seeing this, I was struck with two emotional reactions: panic and guilt.  Twelve days is not going to cut it.  And I am working fast.  I’m going faster than I’m normally comfortable with, fast to the point where I sacrifice some of my meticulousness for raw results.

Twelve days is not just scant, it’s impossible.  I changed the name of the column on my spreadsheet to read “Desired leave-ready state” instead of “Estimated date of completion;” it’s not all going to get all done.  I decided that I’m going to start going in at 7am to get an extra hour on each day, I have some false hope that this will make a material difference – and some real hope that it’ll at least ease my conscience.

I don’t know why I feel guilty.  I describe this to some of my friends and they look at me sideways.  I can’t help it; I want to leave things in perfect order and leave without feeling like things are unfinished.  But things at work are in a state of high-flux; fluid, changing around me and some of it beyond my control.  Too many times I feel like I talk about work like it’s more stressful than it is, but really it’s just what I make it to be.  Right now I’m making it to be really, really difficult.  But I do feel guilty about leaving when things are so up-in-the-air.  I feel bad for dropping things and running, and then at the same time feel good about taking advantage of the opportunity to do just that.  Someone told me, “Don’t worry Dave, the sawmill will be here when you get back, just the same as it was when you left.”  I know this.  But the waning days have me sweating nonetheless.

I suppose like I feel like I’m letting my boss down.  Because things haven’t gone according to my supposed-to-be-spotless plan.  Hell, things have gone 180° out from that plan and continue to slide from bad to worse.  Maybe it doesn’t matter in the long run, except it does.  I hate feeling like my image is besmirched.  That guy who always packs exactly days+one pairs of clean underwear when he travels, who never pays a bill a day late… that guy’s plan went to pot.  What happened to that guy, anyway?  I heard he let the wheels fall off then split.  You sure that guy is of the mettle we want?

Goodnight.

 

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barrier to entry

This evening I looked up how much the people who walk around Disneyland dressed in-character make per hour.

It’s a mite.  A pittance.

Not only that, but the “audition” process involves learning a small bit of choreography before you can move on to the improvisation scene.  If the peanuts for pay wasn’t a barrier to entry, the dancing likely would be.

Guides on the internet suggest taking an introductory dance class and working on your “flexibility” before auditioning.  Not the kind of “flexibility” I put on my resume, either; the literal kind which might’ve enabled me to touch my toes back in 7th grade.  Might’ve.

I don’t think a man could support a family as Goofy.

Guess I’ll continue the computer engineer gig for a while.

Goodnight.

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all i can stands

Hey there Wednesday internet people.

You guys watch old animated Popeye episodes?  As a teenager I got into all things “old.”  If it predated my own era I assigned it extra cool points.  A form of hipsterism even then, no doubt, it led me to do things like using the VCR to record reruns of the original-cast Saturday Night Live, shows like I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and Leave it to Beaver.  Even then I was obsessed with things one or two generations removed from my own.  Anyway, I used to enjoy watching the old Popeye animated shorts – especially the WWII themed ones.  Even today I still use the phrase, “That’s all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more,” when the situation warrants.

And o’ Daniel in the lion’s den did the situation warrant today.  Today was all I could stands, and I can’t stands no more.

I feel like I shouldn’t complain about work… you know the whole “I’m so blessed so why sweat the small stuff” thing… and I suppose that’s right.  Yes I suppose that’s right.  Anyway my beef really isn’t with the work part of work.  I’m killing the work part of work; I always do.  I think stress lately is compounded by the looming deadline of our RV trip.  Four weeks away and I feel like I have to get so much in motion before I drop everything and run.  I know I won’t be able to do it all, and things are complicated by a host of unsavory workplace goings on.  So maybe I’m not complaining about work.  I’m complaining about some kinda crap at work.  Or… man I don’t know… I just know that I’ve got these stupid feelings of guilt creeping in around the edges of the anticipation I’ve been feeling around our coming trip.  I want to get it all done and make it all perfect before we split and it’s not going to happen.

It’s going to be a race.  RV trip vs. my waning sanity.  I have to bet a certain way.

Goodnight.

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just us part ii

Sharaun’s mom was in town for a long Easter weekend.  I took Monday off so I could spend an additional day with her in town.

We decided to head downtown and bum around the little historic district.  I don’t “get” most of the shops in these places.  Full to the point of clutter with stuff that looks like junk yet is priced like finery.  Because the stores are packed tight with towering hoard and I was pushing Cohen around in the stroller I often couldn’t navigate the pathways and was forced to find something else to do while the ladies, Sharaun, Keaton, and Ami (what Keaton calls Sharaun’s mom), browsed.  This meant that he and I spent the better part of an hour wandering the shopfronts.

It’s nice to have that time where it’s just you and your kid.  With Cohen most of our father-son time has been at home; we haven’t gone much anywhere just he and I.  While I was pushing him around listening to him chatter, I remembered one of the first times I had the same kind of solo outing with Keaton.  In fact it was in the same place, when I took her down to a chili cookoff on a nice Summer Saturday.  I wrote about it here, actually.  And, like that time before, I enjoyed every smile directed into the stroller and every, “He looks like his dad” themed comment.  It was a nice little break from work where things are run-away worthy right now.  I need to do my absolute best to focus, working double-time between now and when we leave in four short weeks.

But that time, that time where it’s just you and your kid(s)… that’s the stuff right there.  The mother lode.

Goodnight.

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in gray contrast

I had a triumphant day at work today.

Well, a half-day at work, as I spent the morning working from the kitchen table while we got a whole-house fan installed.  But man, I got tons done and it really improved my outlook – which has been somewhat sour and dire of late.  I pride myself on my planning, call my anal or whatever but I truly enjoy preemptively solving problems that will never happen because I understood and accounted for them through my prescience.  Today that’s what I did, flexed my planning muscles, played some what-if games and wrote some contingency plans.  Tried to cover as many of the bases as I could dream up on my own, paint in all the corners, plug up every hole in the dike.  I like days like that because I walk away feeling accomplished.  And with this and that to tarnish me lately, feeling accomplished is what the doctor ordered.

Been working a bit here and there cribbing down albums and thoughts for my annual best-of-halfway post.  Sara, I’m counting on you, at a minimum, to read and enjoy it.  OK, you don’t have to enjoy it.  Just read it.  Funny first half for music, most everything up until April was pretty underwhelming.  Glad for some later entrants to buoy the front-end.  If you like music, maybe of the softer, feyer kind, you could do yourself a favor and go ahead and check out the new Fleet Foxes record before I finish writing that it rocked January through June.  Took a few days to grow on me but I can’t get it out of the rotation to save my life.  Even Sharaun is singing along at this point.  But I don’t want to give away the ending…

I’m going to be random today, Sorry.

Tonight, Sharaun came into the living room a little freaked out saying she was experiencing what she called “odd visual disturbances.”  I asked her to describe what she meant, and she said there was a “shimmering sliver arc” in one of her eyes which was obscuring her vision.  She said it was “lattice-like” and had “wavy rainbows” and she could hold up her hand and it would disappear behind the thing.  I was intrigued and did Google search for “rainbow visual disturbance” to find the following description of something called an “ocular migraine” or “retinal migraine:” An arc shaped sliver that is wavy, almost mirror-like in appearance and has rainbow colored shimmers. She was shocked by the accuracy of the description, almost as much as I was that what she was experiencing is a for-real, well-documented visual anomaly which is extremely consistent from person to person.  No really, a Google image search brings up at least ten folks’ recreations of what they see (the image heading up this post was the one closest to what Sharaun said she saw).

Craziness.  Goodnight.

PS – Today’s title is a holdover from an old draft which had nothing in it.  Rather than delete the draft, I decided to reclaim the database space with this entry.  I liked the title and, not knowing what I was on about when jotting it down, decided to leave it.  So yeah, “in gray contrast” to something… apparently.

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it’s a real thing

I write over and over again how it gets harder to write as work gets busier.  It’s true.

When things heat up at work my brain has less time to wander.  With less time to wander, I have less time for those creative thoughts to stop and take root.  Those thoughts are what fuel my blog.

I wonder how things will be on the road in a month, while we’re out on the RV.  I’m committed to helping keep Keaton’s blog up to date while we’re road-tripping, and I’ll make it a priority to update there. This doesn’t mean I am planning to neglect sounds familiar, well, anymore than I already have been for the past few months, but I do wonder how it’ll be keeping up with both pages.  Maybe since Keaton’s is mostly for video and pictures, it won’t be so bad.

Speaking of the RV trip, here are ten things I’m looking forward to about the coming odyssey:

  • Brewing my own coffee each morning and drinking it behind the wheel
  • Stopping at roadside farmer’s markets for fruit and veggies
  • Playing boardgames with the family around the table in the evenings
  • Doing some really deep listening to the music collection while on the road
  • Driving into a sunset in someplace I’ve never been before
  • That womb-reminiscent feeling of being safe in a self-contained environment amongst the wilderness
  • Spending full days with my son, over and over again, morning to evening
  • Grilling meat outside the front door while Keaton and Sharaun toss a Frisbee
  • Riding bikes around an RV park, saying “hi” to old people
  • Falling into various road-trip routines, the best of which I can’t even daydream about

Some of those may not happen, but in my head I am sure anticipating them.

Goodnight.