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for sitting

This Saturday dawned with a blissful five hour preview of Spring.

I was up early and had the house thrown open entirely, every window and every door, before the big hand was on the eight.  Around 9:30am, having lounged about the house for a few hours and enjoyed a few cups of coffee, I decided to fire up the compressor and put some air in the bike tires.  You know you’ve not been riding your bike enough when every time you want to haul it down and go for a roll you’ve got to inflate the tires.  By 10am I was bidding the family farewell, my headphones already on my ears and my helmet in hand.  I hit the road with a vague idea of a two hour loop I wanted to do.

I always try to go somewhere new.  This morning I rode alongside a large undeveloped ridge northwest of our house.  I was riding through neighborhoods and along developed trails, I kept looking at that ridge, all green and full of trees.  It was blocked from the subdivisions by a high wall, but I wanted up.  I decided to ride the length of the wall.  I did this for maybe a mile, not long, and found a way around.  Through a No Trespassing sign and around a gate and I was on a dirt access road, obviously intended for future home construction as there were completed drainage systems and buried sewer lines with manholes.  Didn’t look like there’d been any work done for quite a while though.

At the top, after one huff and puff of a ride (where, I admit, I hopped off and walked for a while it was so steep), the dirt road followed the ridgeline into the distance.  I was rewarded with perfect solitude and some amazing vistas of town, city, lake, and forest.  I rode leisurely along the ridge I stopped near a big oak where the view was particularly impressive.  That’s when I saw that someone else had been here before me, and had a great idea.  They’d built a series of sitting platforms into the oak with castoff wood.  There was a crude ladder leading up, and footholds nailed in along the way.  I felt like Tom Sawyer, and thanked the resourceful teenagers I imagined laboring on the thing out loud.

I dropped the bike and climbed up to take the perch with the best vantage.  I brought my water bottle and my music and just sat there swinging my legs.  I sent a few texts to a few friends, sending pictures of my explorations.  The ride was so awesome.  I saw a turkey and a coyote and “found” a waterfall and the treehouse thing and a charted a whole new awesome loop-ride I can do on another day again.    I made it back to the house just a little more than two hours after I’d left.  Now I want to go again.  Bring Keaton, maybe a sack lunch.  A little secret wildnerness (well at least a few acres worth) in the middle of suburbia.

It rained the rest of the weekend.  Goodnight.

 

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new headphones again

I ordered a pair of new headphones for work.  My old ones are beginning to disintegrate, or biodegrade, or simply disassemble themselves to protest the long working hours.  Every few years I need a new pair.

I would estimate that at least 60% of my workdays are spent in meetings.  I’ve written about it before, but meetings are a large part of what I do.  Of those meetings, probably 75% are taken via phone.  This means that I sit at my desk with a little wireless headset, muted, often only distractedly paying attention, listening for keywords while trying to get real work done at the same time.  Sometimes I have to give 100% attention, maybe 40% of the time.  That’s a lot of percentages, and it makes me think there’s an equation in there which could give me an idea of the ROI I get from these things.  But I digress.

When I’m not on meetings, I’m listening to music.  I log onto the Subsonic server I have running at home and I stream tunes right from the machine in my closet.  While it never really happens, you can bet that if there were a day where I had zero meetings that that’s also be a day where I listened to nearly eight hours of music.  There are no moments, aside from meetings, where I’m not listening to music.  Because music is so ever-present in my working day (heck, in my waking day, for that matter), a good pair of headphones is essential.  I paid $80 for this latest pair.  German jobs; an audiophile rig although I didn’t realize this when I bought them.  They just looked comfortable and I like comfortable.  I don’t want active noise cancelling, but they have to be over-ear (“circumaural,” says the package) and they need to have padding at the top so they don’t dig into my bald head.

I am trying them out right now as I write.  Sharaun is watching American Idol but the room is dead to me.  I’m using Grooveshark to evaluate a bunch of new records which I’ve heard people say are good. They are comfortable and they sound good so I’m happy I bought them.  I’m not happy I spent $80 but I suppose if you amortize that over years I hope to use them before the biodegrade or disintegrate or whatever it’s not bad.

Why even publish this?  Makes the month count look better.  Goodnight.

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home from oregon, that is

Hey happy Tuesday internet.  Or Wednesday.  Whenever this gets posted.

Spent most of the night working on the blog I setup for Keaton to document the RV trip.  I get pretty silly about making it look and feel just so, and tend to spend way yonder too much time tweaking.  I think, however, that I got it just how I want it.  I also spent time mucking with my cellphone and laptop, getting things just right so we’ll be able to use the cellular signal/network to post from the road when there’s not a proper internet hookup available. I like to think that I’ll have energy and desire to update the page as we travel, but I also have doubts.  And again, yes I am obsessed, quite so.

Flying home yesterday we were the Van Winkle family. Each one of us, from the biggest and strongest down to me took advantage of the snap-quick flight from Portland back home to sunny California.  Cohen napped in Sharaun’s arms and Keaton fought it as long as she could, long enough to get her apple juice – you better believe that.  I was out with my paperback in my lap, I never even cracked the cover, and Sharaun with her head on my shoulder.

Three times on planes now I’ve had a front row seat to a guy having a stroke.  It didn’t happen yesterday or anything, but when I fly now it almost always crosses my mind sometime during the flight.  It’s a horrible sight, the muscled rigor and robotic vomiting and bulging full-of-fear prisoner’s eyes, stuck in a body that’s plain-out short-circuited.   I once watched it happen to a gentlemen just behind me and across the aisle, his wife was seated next to him and was first to notice something was amiss.  I turned to look as I heard her calling his name, at first with simple curiosity and later, by the fourth or fifth time unanswered, with panic ’round the edges.  You know that special “thing” you have with your mate, the “thing” where, with just a glance or maybe even conversation over the phone, you can tell something’s not right.  I imagine this wife having that feeling about as intensely as one can as she began to realize her husband was stroking out.

The poor guy was as stiff as a board, muscles standing out in knots like his whole body was a Charley horse.  His fingers were clutched in claws, and I could see his slacks straining against his clenched thighs.  His teeth were clamped shut but his lips were parted just a little in this confused and pained expression.  And his eyes, maybe that’s why the memory is so clear in my head, I can see his eyes.  I remember at the time, as I stole my quick glance at the poor man and his wife, that there were two likliehoods behind what I saw in those eyes.  One, the man’s eyes were the only part of him still “connected” and outputting the right readings.  Two, his brain had shut down and frozen them as they were, stuck.  Either way, they bulged and just looked terrified.  At the time I could almost read them, “Oh dear God what is happening to me?!  I can’t talk; I can’t move; there’s an electrical storm in my head.”  He vomited copiously through clenched teeth.  All this I saw in the span of one or two quick backwards glances; I didn’t want to treat it like entertainment.

Once in the third grade Sarah Bean had an epileptic seizure in class.  I was off to one side of the room and only heard the commotion, not really seeing the action.  I can remember Mrs. Forinash talking to the aide in the room, hollering about, “Hold her tongue!  She’s choking on her tongue!”  At the time I thought choking on your own tongue seemed about the most impossible notion in the world to me.  Everything turned out OK, however, but it’s another one of those indelible things scored into my gray matter.  Sometime shortly after Sarah’s mom came into the classroom and talked about epilepsy and what a seizure is; I remember being fascinated.  Poor Sarah Bean, whose body had turned against her, just like these unlucky fellows whose relays and synapses revolted on them while we shared a flight together.

I honestly have no idea where this all came from.  Something about flying home from Oregon.  So… maybe I meant to say, “We’re home from Oregon.”

And… we are.  Home from Oregon that is.  Goodnight.

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can’t really avoid airplanes

I’ve been taken by this vision, fantasy really, of one imagined morning on our coming RV odyssey.

We’re in Yellowstone and the morning is cool.  Or maybe we’re in the grand canyon and it’s warm and the dust hasn’t yet been kicked up into the morning air.  Come to think of it, it doesn’t matter where we are.  Maybe it’s better in Yellowstone because we’re there so early in the season and we’re posting up at such out of the way campgrounds that there’s a good chance we’ll be the only ones there.  Maybe not, but I see it that way in this daydream.  It’s just us parked in the middle of some sprawling wilderness.  The kind of place where there’s a stream and maybe you see a moose wandering around in the morning mist.  But it’s just us.  Three or four little parking skirts on dirt loops, no hookups no wifi not even vault toilets.  It’s true, we’re staying two nights at places like this.  The ranger I called and spoke to said there’s a good chance we’ll be lonesome out there, since the spots only open that same week we arrive.  Maybe that’s what planted this seed.

Anyway it’s early morning and I’m awake and the family is awake and maybe I’m standing outside the RV smoking my pipe.  The scenery is enveloping and the silence is like when my buddies and I used to wake in the morning while camping – not a modern city sound to be heard.  Birds and condensation dripping and a stream rushing and maybe the rustle of a breeze.  But no engines and no sirens and no airplanes.  Can’t really avoid airplanes these days I suppose, even period-piece movies get shots fouled by airplanes missed in the editing room.  You’ve got Sir Gawain on his steed charging up a pastoral green hillock and real faint way off in the background the contrail of 747 bound for LaGuardia.  The bored passengers have no thought for their unintentional anachronistic cameo.  Some jerk on the internet first noticed it in the theater and then someone screencapped it from the Blu-ray.  So maybe there’s a plane; you can’t get away from them as well as you can everything else, but it doesn’t really matter.

I’m standing outside, the door to the RV is open and the family is knocking around inside.  Their close and I’m glad we’re here together but I’m having what they call a “personal moment.”  Gazing out into God’s country and thinking about how small I am how the stuff I worry most about in the world is some of the most insignificant in the world.  E-mail and human resources; paltry compared to the glacier-cut granite slopes hemming in our private campsite.  I’m out there marveling and puffing my pipe and – listen this is the important part, the part that makes the fantasy, the daydream capstone  – from out of the RV’s front-cab windows pours the Grateful Dead.  Yeah I said no noise but in this case it’s not noise it’s all compliment.

It’s not just any Dead.  It’s the 1976 New Year’s Eve show from the Cow Palace.  It’s one of my personal favorite shows; the band was so hot, 100% on and soaring.  I think it’s an underrated show.  If you haven’t heard it, you should go listen to it.  Sharaun says she finds the Dead repetitive; it’s actually a pretty fair criticism as criticism goes so I can’t really fault her.  But in the morning of this fantasy maybe “Eyes of the World” is blaring and it’s just blending perfect with my morning in the middle of everything and nowhere.  Tobacco always makes me salivate, so I’d be spitting on the very landscape I’d be adoring – maybe that seems contrary but it has some sort of old-country charm in my head.  Anyway, the Dead are just burning with a fever through the cab’s windows and for those ten minutes everything is about as perfect as things get.

It’s me and the family and God and the wildness and the Dead.  Oh man how silly.  But that’s the fantasy, that’s it to a tee.  I see it all the time and I’m the kind of foolish that’ll try and make it happen when that morning comes.  I’ll put on the Dead and light my pipe and stroll around and it’ll be good.  Kind of silly to pre-see it like that, though.  The best mornings will be the ones I haven’t pre-seen.  Those, those’ll be the knockouts.  I sometimes think I have too much time to think about this trip; that I better cool it with all the daydreaming or I’ll ruin the thing for what it can actually deliver. We’ll see.

No proofread; go.  Goodnight.

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cowering

Mid-week we flew to Oregon, the whole family.

I had to be here for an all-day meeting Friday (today, as you read this), and had planned on spending a full day Thursday in the office pressing flesh and networking (it’s a verb).  But, none of that (including Friday’s all-day manager-moot) happened, or is going to happen (this writing about the future knowing it’ll be the present is hard).  See, Portland got some snow.  A dusting, really; a winter’s pittance.  It melted, in fact, completely away by a few hours before noon.  While it stuck, however, it made for a beautiful morning.  I love the way snow lines up on the limbs of trees, thin little piles.  Keaton woke up and looked out the large picture windows at the front of my folks’ place in wonder.  We made plans to make a snowman if it kept coming down, if it stuck around long enough.

But it didn’t.  By noon it was sunny and the snow had melted off the roofs and was dripping off the eaves and down the downspouts.  By noon it was a perfect day for walk outside or a pickup game.

But there was snow.  It did snow.  And Portland doesn’t do snow.  The powers that be at the sawmill, the same ones who flew me up here to spend two days meeting and greeting and talking, called off the whole deal.  “Don’t come into work,” they said.  “Stay at home where it’s safe and don’t get on the death-trap skating-rink roads,” they said.  So I did.  I mean, why wouldn’t I?  Every trip to Oregon is double-your-pleasure for me anyway – half work and half weekending with the folks (the benefit of your folks living near the local sawmill).  Now this one becomes no work and all weekending.  Not a bead deal.  I’ll still have to work, but not a bad deal at all.

But really; people flew here from halfway around the world for this meeting to instead stay inside and cower at the melt-as-they-fall flakes.

Owell.  Goodnight.

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a fundamental misalignment of world-view

Once I wrote about eating lunch at a Subway and watching a distracted mother verbally box her child into a sad zombie.

I felt bad for that kid because his mom took away all his options; he was to sit there and be still and be quiet; all being, no doing.  I didn’t think much about the mom, because that day I had time to sit and watch and put my un-distracted un-stressed self in her shoes.  It’s always easier from the outside.  I thought about that mom today, wondered maybe if what she was doing with her phone that day was something important.  Maybe transferring enough money from one account to another, enough to pay rent that month or buy dinner.  Maybe answering an e-mail about a job interview.  Who knows.  Maybe she was under pressure, feeling stressed, not wanting to deprive her son but feeling out of options under the circumstances.  Maybe she’d had a rough morning.  Been dumped; lost a job; had a relative go to meet their Maker.  Who was I anyway?  Some dude eating a sandwich looking down my nose at her “bad parenting.”  Give me a break.

I thought of the entry because, as I sat at the dining room table in a rush to complete an important e-mail (today, for some foolish reason, I thought I could work from home in the afternoon in preparation for tomorrow’s flight; maybe I was thinking I could have a “easy” afternoon… but I was wrong), I was that mom to Keaton.  She was bored, and she was bugging me.  Prancing around my seat, harping into my ear, asking me to play or telling me she was bored or asking if she could do this or do that.  I didn’t want to ignore her, but I just needed five minutes of concentration, just five minutes.  If I got that, I could go right back to being #1 dad.  No doubt about it, just five minutes.  So I did the old parent-stall and hit her with the, “Just a minute, babe,” or “Hang on one second, honey;  Dad has to finish this work,” or even the more sternly delivered, “Keaton; please.”

And I guess that’s gonna be universal.  There are some times when we all just need those five minutes.  Just that and we’ll be back in business; back to parenting and doting and playing dollhouse and reading The Hobbit.  Those five minutes are how it always starts.  And sometimes we do need them.  Need them badly and need them urgently; to do the business of adults.  Kids aren’t interested in understanding this, nor should we expect them to.  To them the world is all dollhouses and doting and fifteen pages of The Hobbit.  They don’t know about your job, your mortgage, your busted taillight or what your boss said at work that got under your collar.  Don’t know and don’t care and shouldn’t either.  It’s a fundamental misalignment of world-view, and it is what it is.  I’m gonna be that mom.  You’re gonna be that mom.

So, mom at Subway last May: I’m sorry for my one-sided presumptuous blog that day.  I hope whatever had you busy passed and you, too, went back to being parent-of-the-year.

I know I did.  Goodnight.

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if i ever get it by the collar

Sharaun’s at the gym, pre-dinner.  She cooked half of it, readied.  Then she caught her spin class.  I tried a spin class once and found it daunting; I had to fake some of the effort, I couldn’t hack it.  Never went to another one; prefer self-motivated gym activities (laziness, to be sure).  Keaton and Cohen are on the nursery floor, rolling around playing with each other.  Well, as much as a four year old (one week left, I’m gonna count every day before the Lord takes another year) can play with a seven month old.  She’s wonderful with him, really, keeps him entertained and watches out for him.  I’m listening to a 1968 record called Salvation by a band of the same name.  A San Franciscan outfit that lasted long enough to make two records of psychedelic rock, had one hit with an A-side called “Think Twice.”  Obscure, but pretty good.

What a squandered three-day weekend.  A buddy asked me to go camping with him and his son in Death Valley, said to bring Keaton and the kids could have a blast.  The drive would’ve been long and the time in-country short, which is just the sort of “camping” trip I despise, but now I wonder what we might’ve missed.  Oh I had a lot of fun.  Hung out with friends, spent time with the family, a lot of good times.  But maybe camping in Death Valley would’ve been spiritual or removed from it all.  That stupid leave-it-all-behind nirvana I’m always after.  The same nirvana that I’ll be chasing to every day’s horizon behind the wheel of thirty foot RV come June.  Maybe that same nirvana I’ll be hunting until the end, or maybe not.  I’ll let you know if I ever get it by the collar, I sure will.

Friday night we did dinner and games with friends.  Had an old-man’s fill of beer, four, and woke the next morning with a headache.  Sad stat of affairs, that.  Saturday Sharaun was working a race (like taking official times and handing out water or something) with a friend, so the friend’s husband and I took ourselves, and the four children left in our charge between us, out to an early breakfast.  Breakfast turned into a day of leisure hanging around the house together, even once the ladies got back.  That afternoon we took the older kids over to the college practice field and launched model rockets.  They played on the softball field (it was muddy and loose from all the recent rain) while we packed up the equipment.  Sunday we gave a little praise to the Creator and had another fine home-cooked meal courtesy of friends.  Monday, Monday we did nothing.  Met friends for lunch, attempted to take the family bowling (place was packed, every lane taken and an hour wait), and read a lot of my book.

Been a while since I wrote something like this… the boring “what we did” thing without flair or fiction or whatever.  At least it’s words and words are what make this site go.  Goodnight.