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i’m sorry but i killed your hops

Hey Pat I’m sorry, but I killed your hops.

I know you entrusted them to me while you’re overseas for a couple years, and I’ll admit the task really wasn’t that hard.  Two big buckets of dirt that need water and sunshine so the hops growing in them don’t die.  Well I gave them a prominent spot on the sunny-side of my backyard, you know the side I plant the garden on?  Yeah, and they are also within reach of the sprinkler’s throw so I know they got enough hydration.  I even weeded them regularly to ensure they weren’t being choked out.

Heck, for the entire first year you were gone the actually grew like gangbusters (whatever that analogy is supposed to mean, I have some doubts about “gangbusters'” potential for growth myself (look close, there’s a plural possessive mixed into those quotes, it makes sense but it’s hard to see)).  They climbed out of their buckets and found the twine I’d strung upward to the fencepost and trained around it.  They wound up all green and leafy (but never actually flowered, so their viability for brewing was questionable even before the matter was finally settled upon their brown and desiccated death).  They made it to the top of the fence and struck out for freedom; ran out to the sideyard and entangled with the decorative shrubs out there, all harmonious-like.  I kept checking them for flowers, thinking maybe I could “harvest” a couple for you and freeze them or something… as a lark.

Sometime after that first year one of the pots was colonized by ants.  I knew it had happened, but not only was there not much I could do about it but I actually figured it might be beneficial for the root system. I’m not saying this ant manifest destiny is what did that one pot in, but I guess they could’ve been feasting on the roots and I’d have been none the wiser.  The anted pot did seem to turn first, though.  It never grew as vigorously, was less leafy and overall healthy-looking than its partner.  Were I one of those vegan connected-to-the-earth types I might think that the vibrant one missed his runty friend and simply wasted away in despair after its loss.

And now it’s just one big sad funeral scene out there.  We had some bad wind last week when a storm blew through and it toppled the pot of what used to be the stronger of the two.  It’s now laying on its side halfway down the slope, threatening to spill its contents, which probably didn’t happen only because the roots of the weeds growing within held the stuff together.  Later today I’m planning to go out there and right the poor thing, say some benediction and get on with the grieving period so I don’t feel too bad reclaiming the soil for other purposes.  Like the Bible says – dust to dust.

I’m shrugging.  It happens.  I owe you some hops.

Goodnight.

 

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the only constant is

Back from the rainy, windy, cold Oregon coast.

We had these richly-appointed rooms at a brilliant little seaside resort.  There were fireplaces and deckchairs on porches and tiny little nautical touches.  Very bed and breakfast feeling.  Too bad, then, that most of the weekend felt like being aboard a trawler hunkering out a winter squall.  The rain was sideways and the wind howled outside the conference room.  I got only one small chance to get out and walk on the beach, during some God-aligned moment where a thirty-minute break aligned with a slackened downpour.  I had my black dress shoes on with jeans (I really need new shoes) and my coat buttoned tight against the wind.  A cold gray beach can provide for a really decent moment of solitude and contemplation.  I imagined that near-end scene from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

The “work” bits of the days were good, but I realized something; hear me out.  I propose that the fundamentals of “how to be a great manager” were more or less identified, let’s say 90% pegged, sometime in the 1950s.  You know sometime after Harvard Business School really hit its stride and research there and elsewhere coalesced.  Sometime back then in the 1950s we collectively managed to categorize what makes a good people-manager, along with how best to train and grow those skillsets.  Since then, many people have made much money re-packaging, re-wording, and re-branding that initial revelatory philosophy.  They’ll assign new mnemonics, write tenets onto diferent geometric shapes or use new analogies for processes –  but it’s the all pretty much same thing once you boil it down.  Maybe some temporally-aware nuance gets added along the way to account for things like the internet, but the underlying physics of the management universe remain.

Don’t get me wrong; I love it.  I really do.  I eat up the practice of trying to draw conclusions from trends and data; man I get a kick out of looking across some disparate set of happenings and stuffs and having that light bulb flick on where you go, “Oh!  There’s a pattern here; there’s some truth.”  And that’s what these conferences always are: a bunch of managers taking a few moments to feel self-important (it’s a good thing, a little self-acknowledgement with moderation) and talking about things like goals and actualization and Lord knows what.  Maybe you think it’s silly but I find it affirming.

Got to see good friends too; spend some time enjoying good company.  And now I’m back home and back to a busy couple days of the remaining week.

Goodnight.

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but it’ll do

Tomorrow morning early it’s off to Oregon.  It’s not a cross-country trip with my family.  No, not yet; but it’ll do.

We’ll be posted up on the beach, a gaggle of managers (I don’t know what the right term is for a group of us).  I catch the plane at 5:30am.  On the drive over to the Oregon coast I hope to stop at this former logging camp place that’s now a killer breakfast spot.  Have some eggs and bacon and coffee and enjoy the smaller parts of conversation.

Once we get to the hotel I can maybe put a little piece of the past week behind me.  Take the three days to conference and network and wine-taste and come back to things which have progressed a bit.  I’m brining some cigars and I like to think we might be close enough to the beach that I might walk along the strand in the Oregon mist and smoke one.  One day at a time anyway, right?

I expect another slow week for writing, but I’ll try.

Goodnight.

Posted on

reeked

Awful day.  Just awful.

At work it was annual review time and there’s never enough money or accolades for those deserving of money and accolades.  At one point during the week I actually thought I might be cracking up.  Like, there’s too much to do cracking up.  Because I had a full eight hours of work every day, I have not checked email (no, like really not touched it) since Monday.

When I last checked, there were close to nine-hundred unread messages in my inbox.  I’m not exaggerating.  Nine-hundred.  I have allocated the first six hours of tomorrow morning (this week I have been arriving around 6am to get some extra hours) to killing the inbox.  I will find a private place where people can’t get to me and I will respond to mail all morning.  Six hours of email.  This is how I make bread.  This is my worth.

The day reeked.  Reeked.  I hated it but I struggled through it with folded hands, propriety, and a smile.  Tonight was beer with an old friend.  Reparations, perhaps.  It was a welcome nightcap to the day, and set me in a much better mood for the end of the evening.  Actually I feel great.  I am eating potatoes out of a ziplock back with a fork.

Sorry no writing this week.  Remember, it reeked.

Goodnight.

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cohen’s first word?

Sometimes I think it’s impossible to describe how busy I am.  I often say stupid meaningless chauvinistic things to Sharaun like, “I wish you could be inside my head for a day” to try and convey what sort of rat-race is going on up there.  Yeah sometimes I think this, then other times I think I’m just a wimp.  I think about the rat-race going on in some CEO’s head or a Obama’s head and know that whatever troubles me is paltry in comparison, I walk in the proverbial park alongside that mountain of responsibility.  So, I’ll try not to complain about how very busy I’ve been and how it’s been keeping me from writing.

Instead I’ll write a short bit about Cohen.  For nearly two weeks now I’ve been wondering if Cohen’s been saying his first word.  At first, like we did with Keaton, I dismissed it as phonetically-lucky baby talk.  But more and more he’s able to speak his word on demand, with startling clarity, and, then, in the past few days, without prompting and seemingly in response to a visual connection.  What word is it, you ask?  Well take a gander:

OK it’s short and cuts off, but what do you think internet?  Yeah… eight month old kids don’t really say words, I know.  But I couldn’t be happier.

Goodnight.

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which thought is it that counts?

I took a “to-do” note on my phone last week.  There, snug between other terse and cryptic items like “2×4 bed,” “wisdom teeth,” and “401k review,” I wrote the words Betty Jonhston.

I didn’t know any better at the time, but want I meant to type was Betsey Johnson.  Google it.  I’ll wait.

You probably got some pages about womens’ clothing or something, right?  Strange thing for me to be taking a to-do note on the phone about, but let me explain.  See, each morning at work I go through my little routine.  Get to the office, walk to my desk and dump my stuff.  Dock my laptop and get it booting while I grab my coffee mug and head downstairs to fill up and grab a banana or two.  While downstairs in the cafe, I often run into a set of “same timers,” folks who have a similar cafeteria-run timeframe to mine (and are regular enough about it to be consistent).  I say hello to a few of these folks, some only because I see them most mornings and some because we’re friends “outside work.”

The other morning one of those same-timers stepped in to say “good morning” and, when she did, her freshly spritzed perfume wafted across to me.  “Dang,” I said, “you smell rad.”  (Note: I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was long those lines.  Smooth, to-the-point, slightly inappropriate for the corporate environment, and delivered with some sort of outdated slang for just a little comedic impact).  “So many people have told me that,” she replied.  I sniffed conspicuously, asking, “What is it.”  I thought she said Betty Johnston.  I complimented the scent again as she went on her way, and after she left I typed those words into my to-do list.  (Hey, HR-types, don’t worry – I know the woman well and I don’t think I’ll be facing harassment charges anytime soon.  Don’t think you’ve not trained me well; I know that I’m a chauvinistic demon for wanting to compliment my female employee’s new hairdo or nice coat; I’m well indoctrinated.)

Women must know what motivates men to buy perfume, right?  We smell it, it smells good, we buy it.  But women must also know that (most) men aren’t just stopping by the perfume store and doing a bunch of comparative sniffing to determine what smells good.  Nope.  Those places are overwhelming anyway, those scent superstores.  The “din” of smells is so thick that my ability to distinguish individual scents flies from me, and any sort of shopping around in that environment becomes pointless.  No, no siree.  The only place I ever smell perfume, the only place I ever notice it, is on other women.  I smell it on someone, and if I like the smell enough I try and find out what it is so I can look at maybe getting some for Sharaun.

I hope this isn’t bad.  There’s no notion of fantasy here or anything… no concept of making one woman smell like another as some mindtrick or anything like that.  It’s just how I encounter and decide I like fragrances.  (OK, OK, just as long as anyone who knows the real story behind the star-shaped bottle of Thierry Mugler’s Angel I bought her sophomore year of college – you keep your mouths shut.)  It’s not like I’m saying, “Hey, I bought you this perfume so you can smell like the blonde I see every morning at work.”  It’s more like, “This perfume smells rad and I think you’d smell hot in it, so I bought it for you.”  I think that’s OK, yeah?  I guess it’s too bad if it’s not, because it’s how I do it.  She uses perfume so sparingly, anyway, that I rarely have a reason or opportunity to get her more – so it’s not like a regular thing.  Yeah, that’s OK.

Goodnight.

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deadbeat baker

For a lark on a bored rainy Sunday Keaton and I decided to bake together.

I don’t know who likes baking together more… because, man, I get some serious enjoyment out of it.  I like “teaching” Keaton how things go together to make other things, and we enjoy experimenting with recipes by brainstorming what might taste good as additions.  This Sunday we kept it simple and made sugar cookies.  Partway through rolling out more dough-balls and baking the ones we’d already put on sheets, she wondered if adding cinnamon might be good.  “Let’s try it,” I said.  I let her work a liberal sprinkling into the remaining dough.  When we’d rolled a few more balls, Sharaun got home and suggested we use cookie-cutters to make some cool shapes.  Keaton chose hearts.

In the end, the hearts were too thin and burned in the time it took to cook the regular cookies.  Even that was OK, though.  Gave me a chance to explain about the beauty of trial and error.  Next time, we know that rolled-out cookie-cutter cookies are too thin and only need to bake for about half the time.  Live and learn.

Now if only the recipe hadn’t made five-thousand cookies.  Sharaun, the more diligent of us in the realm of calorie-limiting, has been steadfastly ignoring them.  Meanwhile I feel I have an imperative to consume them… I’m responsible for their existence, after all.  I don’t want to be a deadbeat baker.  I’ve got the Tupperware thing right next to me, a little glass of milk on the arm of the couch to my left, and I’m wondering how many times one person can lie to themselves about “Just one more.”

Gosh, I sound like a chick in this thing.  I’m gonna go smoke a cigarette and drink beer and watch sports.

Goodnight.