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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.

 

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stupid weekends

Stupid weekends are never long enough.  I needed this one to deliver, too, as I couldn’t quite push work out of my head in the alloted 48hrs.

I’ve been watching a lot of old episodes of The Rifleman with Chuck Connors lately.  One of the original western serials, AMC has been playing it, in its original airing order, in fantastic-looking HD at like 3am on Sundays or something.  I’ve been DVRing each episode as it runs, and Keaton and I have started to enjoy watching them together.  Sharaun, at first not too happy with how “appropriate” Western shoot-’em-ups are for kids, has relented after watching part of one with us and realizing how awesome they are.

There is a lot of shooting though, she’s right about that.  Like a any five year-old kid back in 1958 could, though, she’s able to tell the “bad guys” from the “good guys” and she doesn’t seem too disturbed when Lucas and Micah have to off some bandits for the good of North Fork.  One thing about the show that I find curious is how if often ends with McCain killing the bad guys.  You’ll get twenty-eight minutes invested into the show, Lucas will shoot three or four scruffy-looking ne’er-do-wells, their bodies will laying strewn about the street at the center of town, and he’ll clap hands with the marshal, smile, and offer some show-capping comment.  Despite the fact that there are people just feet away bleeding to death and full of lead, the show never fails to end “happily.”

Let’s hope that the gunfights of my last couple weeks, and the corpses left in the sawdust to be dragged away, tie-up just as nice and tidy as those days in the New Mexico territory.  I could use a neatly-resolving ending where I ride back to the ranch and live to fight another day.

‘Night.

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8 of 10 agree

Friday finds me feeling excited for the weekend.

As usual, Saturday and Sunday are scheduled to the hilt, much like the work week.  Mind you, the weekend schedule is full of sport and leisure (well OK, leisure at least) while the week is filled with sweat and toil – so it’s a more welcomed allotment of time.  Despite my midweek pep-soliloquy, I still found my daytime thoughts drifting too often to the coming RV odyssey.  In one of my more out-there daydreams, I imagined finding a plot of land somewhere on the cheap.  Buying it and getting the government to pay me to not grow corn.  My conscious would get used to it, perhaps.

Tomorrow Sharaun is running/biking in a duathlon.  If Cohen’s fever stays away I plan to take the kids down and cheer her along Tour de France style.  I admire her for doing this, and hope she’s happy with her finish.  Me, I’ve fallen completely off the wagon.  Haven’t been to the gym in weeks, gave up caring about what I dump down my gullet, and am hovering around where my metabolism thinks my “stasis” is (which, unfortunately, is not anywhere near where the AMA thinks my weight should be).  Eight out of ten doctors agree: I’m fat again.

Goodnight.

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call in the cavalry

For Christmas Keaton got a new big-girl bike.

When I purchased it online it didn’t have an option to ship with training wheels.  Though I knew she’d likely still need them (she’s only ever ridden with them), I suppose I was hopeful that maybe we could rush right to the dad-runs-alongside kind of learning to ride and perhaps forgo them.  A few weeks back, when the government gave me sunlight after work and the weather warmed enough, we tried this.  Results were as expected: she’s just not ready to try without training wheels yet, especially on a bigger, more daunting, bike.  So I took a “to-do” item on my phone to purchase, or borrow, a set of training wheels for her new ride.

That was three sets of unusable training wheels ago.  The first set, hand-me-downs from her good friend Jake, wouldn’t fit on her bike – a theme which would come to repeat itself.  See, the frame where it rests on the rear wheel axle is all thick stylized tubing… and most training wheel attachment and stabilization hardware assumes some standard frame construction.  That being the case, the borrowed wheels wouldn’t work.  I purchased two more sets from the local big-box joint, and the hardware for both of those was also a bust.  No way to get them attached to her crazy new-fangled frame.  Worse, in the process of trying set after set I managed to strip the axle nut so badly I almost couldn’t remove it.

Last night, however, we happened to be at the Wal Mart and I noticed they carried a type of training wheel I’d not yet tried.  Now familiar with the specifics of my daughter’s bike which caused the incompatibility, I quickly inspected them for feasibility.  Hooray!  My visual inspection said they were at least plausible, but I’d have to buy them to be sure.  So we did, paid something like $13.  Tonight I attempted to put them on the bike, and, what do you know – it actually looked like they’d work.  At least that was the hope until I managed to crossthread the axle nut onto the bolt – permanently ruining and hope of reattaching the wheel again.  With the first 1/8th inch of thread simple sheared flat, I’m out of luck.

Soundly and thouroughly defeated, I removed the entire back tire and will be taking it into the local bike shop tomorrow to see about either getting a new axle bolt, re-threading the current axle bolt, or getting an entirely new replacement tire if neither of those options is (are? – man I always mess this up) possible.  Keaton made sure I wasn’t given a pass on this – in fact she told Sharaun immediately that I “broke her bike again” (the first “break” being the stripped nut).  Oh yeah Keaton?  Well… dad can… pay to have someone else fix his mistakes.  How about that, huh?  How about that.  Hopefully the bike store dudes won’t laugh me out as I walk in with an 18″ pink and purple bike tire…

Goodnight.