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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.

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to grunt & sweat under a weary life

Today was fine, finer-than-fine, in fact, right up until about half-past five.

I was sitting at my desk at work, contemplating leaving.  Thinking about what Sharaun might be making for dinner (I am one who is blessed with a home-cooked meal nearly every night); wondering what thing Keaton would be proud of and want to show me the moment I walked in the door (she’s fiercely creative and is in that phase where she learns something incredible to her every single day); anxious to see Cohen (who sprouted his first tooth overnight and thus had something to show me which rivaled sister).  My exit strategy involved a quick trip to the restroom after packing away the laptop (always have to lug that thing home… my lifeline to work), swinging back by the desk to grab my things and don my hat, and heading out into the cold darkening evening.

Anyway I did all that.  Then when I got in the car I remembered it had nagged me on the way in about being low on fuel.  Bummer, almost six already and I wanted to to get home.  I wish Sharaun would keep the thing filled instead of asking me to take it on the day rivals the bones in Ezekiel’s valley.  But it’s not her fault, I could’ve filled it on the way in in the morning but I was too lazy.  I just have this thing about unscheduled stuff and I was really in the mood to get home.  The gas thing wasn’t the problem.  It was the e-mail that dink!‘d into my phone at the stoplight in front of the UPS store.  I know, I shouldn’t be reading e-mail on my phone in the car.  Certainly now when I’m operating the car, even stopped dead at a light while and old Russian couple crosses in front of me.  But I do.  I read mail when I’m stopped.

That mail bummed me out though, man.

And then I stopped for gas and the gas cost like $70.  That much for gas seems dumb.  And then as the garage door pulled open before me I saw Sharaun had parked on the “wrong” side of the garage, meaning I’d have to swap the cars around (it’s a long story).  When I walked into the house I decided I was too tired and my late arrival would compress the evening enough that I’d not be going to the gym again.  Dinner wasn’t in the oven yet.  Cohen was crying.  The coffee table was a mess.

In other words, that one stupid e-mail tainted my whole outlook.  Turning normal non-things into the annoying and cumbersome.

Thank God for Keaton’s smile and Cohen’s outstretched arms and Sharaun’s welcome-home hug.  E-mail can suck an egg for all I care.

‘Night.

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200% in love

As an engineer steeped in the culture of my Fortune 100 sawmill, I am data-driven.  In fact, I horde data.  Collect it in raw form because I know that, through the power of pivot tables and frequency analyses and causation/correlation studies, it can be an endless pool to draw conclusions upon.  Interpreted the right way, data can justify spending, get people hired, get people fired, win arguments and lend credence to points.

In fact, at the sawmill we place so much emphasis on data-backed execution that it’s become part of my life.  I can’t stop seeing data, craving data, generating and storing data.  I do it for things like my finances, my diet and exercise, my personal time.  I try to make decisions based on data, and work to capture and store useful data for that very use at a later time.

I guess most folks, analytical folks, do this sort of thing anyway.  It’s pretty much a subconscious human behavior.  Going to a new restaraunt, ordering the fish while your wife goes with the lamb.  Realizing, after the inevitable sharing-of-bites from each other’s plates, that the lamb is fantastic and that the fish is, even without comparison, nothing to write home about.  Realize it or not, you’ve just created a file on this in your brain.  You have a piece of data which says that, based on prior experience, it’s better to go with lamb than fish at the Overton House.  Maybe later along you have an opportunity to talk to someone, whose opinion you value, about their dining experience at the Overton House and they, unlike you, thought the fish was fine.  In your brain you may file a “minority report,” or some “note of doubt” against your personal fish-at-Overton-House experience.  It’s all data; we all do it; I just think I see it for what it is because it’s what I breathe all day at work.

I spent those paragraphs setting up my data-driven nature so I could talk about Keaton turning five.  It happens before the month’s out, and the milestone has been on my mind more and more as the day approaches. Five years old.  Wow; I find that… simply amazing.  I was writing a mail to my mom the other day and had the occasion to muse, “When I was fifteen or so I can remember thinking it seemed like forever until, as a kid, you turn eighteen and get to go out on your own to college.  Now I find myself thinking eighteen years is a pittance to spend with my kids, and get downright sad when I realize my little girl is already almost 30% to that point.” It’s that bit about 30% that got me a-thinking on the data-driven nature of my thoughts (great sentence, that one).  At the time, I hadn’t actually done the math – but my mental wizardry told me that five was at least a third of fifteen, so it must be something close to 30% of eighteen.

Turns out five is actually about 28% of eighteen (check my math, I’m not so good at it).  And, for that matter, 28% is pretty close to 30% (uh-oh, I’m heading down that slippery slope of strategic-estimation to make things appear better or worse; my brother used to be able to convince himself that his birthday was “tomorrow” by deciding that the day before, the current day, maybe tomorrow, and other chosen days simply “didn’t count”).  So, I wasn’t that far off.  My little girl is some 30% through to that arbitrary age where we think of “kids” as”adults.”  Without having their first solo lion hunt and kill; without getting the tenth ring around their neck or walking across the hot coals; without being proven in battle or bedding the village wise-woman. Coming of age tied to naught but the right to vote and serve in the military (poor gits can’t even drink in most states).

I’m not really sad about it; I know we still have a lot of great time together to be had… I’m just intrigued by the statistic of it.  With any luck, I’ll live into my nineties and therefore still have the better-side of 50% to spend with this family we’ve created.  God knows I’m pretty much 200% in love with them all.

Goodnight.

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the underground kingdom of SMUD

This intensely gorgeous Sunday afternoon finds me typing on my laptop in the garage.

I’ve set the music to shuffle “all songs” for the Dead, and Jerry is dreamily noodling behind me, “Playing in the Band.”  I’m drinking a Downtown Brown and smoking my pipe; I broke into a old tin of Dunhill’s London Mixture for the occasion – to this American it’s a lavish tobacco and it works perfectly against the brown ale.  My feet are bare and I’m wearing shorts and a t-shirt.  The baby is sleeping inside and Sharaun’s about to leave for the gym.  Keaton is playing in the front yard with her next-door neighbor friend.  I brought my book out here with me so I can read when I get tired of writing, or “wake up” to the fact that everything’s going on around me whilst I stare at a damned screen like I do every day at the office.

I’ll bet you didn’t know, friends, just like Keaton and the neighbor girl didn’t, that there’s a secret underground kingdom beneath our front yard.

Yes, I know, it’s hard to believe – but it’s there; I have proof.  You see, we found a door.  It’s been there all along, right in the corner of our yard!  And to make it more obvious, the name of the subterranean lands which lie hidden beneath its hinges is stenciled right on front: SMUD.  The secret underground kingdom of SMUD, hiding in plain sight all these years and we’ve never thought to think about it.  But no more!  Today the scales fell off and we got interested.  Keaton, the neighbor, and dad went into full-on explorer mode.  By jove if there’s a door to a secret kingdom right in our own front yard we are duty-bound to make contact with the inhabitants and establish neighborly relations (even if these neighbors are underneath rather than to the left or right).

At first we tried knocking, but no one answered.  Silly explorers, we forgot that our daytime is the darkest dead of midnight in the kingdom of SMUD – everyone must be sound asleep!  But we couldn’t wait until nightfall, there had to be another way.  Keaton had an epiphany and ran inside, double-timing it back a minute later with an array of keys we could try in the door.  Nothing worked.  Perhaps, dad pondered, there might be a secret password!  Like in the story of the forty thieves or when Gandalf gets the crew into Moria.  We try several guesses: “abracadabra,” “SMUD,” etc.  Dad offers up “open sesame,” and we even speak the most magic of all magic words: “please.”  All to no avail.

Presently, I’ve left the girls to the chore of waking or breaching – and they’re a dedicated duo!  I, on the other hand, am taking a break.  Every so often they run over to test a new thought, “Maybe we need tools!?”  “Good idea,” I encourage, “Here take this wrench and look for some kind of bolts or something!  Let me know how it goes, explorers!”  And they run off again into the sun.

And this, friends, is how to spend a Sunday.

Goodnight.

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perestroika

Awww gods; reduced to communicating like this.  Morse code eyeblinks and underhanded semaphores.  How did it get so bad?

Once the Party was all we had and it was so bloody good to belong.  The party was it man!  The party was de rigueur! You and me and everyone we knew, like a fraternity.  Why fear affiliation?  Time was there was naught but affiliation.  Time was, but time’s gone.

The landscape changed around us and we got pulled along.  No, willingly we went along.  Forsook our allegiances, let the Party and the idea of the Party slip.  Bit by bit we changed alongside each other, moss growing around the wheels and fog rolling in drifts to obscure.  Even me, as staunch a Party guy as there ever was!  A Party straight-man and poster-kid!  Even I welcomed it.  Headlong into assimilation!  And why not?  It has so many wonderfully appealing aspects.

O’ but it’s still there!  Buried; deep.  Party’s still in you; Party’s still in me.  Isn’t it?  Isn’t it?!  I see it when we sit close, in your eyes when I look beyond the shiny.  You got the Party in you!  You and me, maybe driven underground, maybe so – but I haven’t forgotten the secret handshake.  You didn’t either, did you?  Oh, oh I see it in the bend of your wrist and along the lengths of your fingers!  Somewhere in there you remember the Party and our time-in.  I can’t be imagining, right?  With the Party so long-dormant maybe I’m looking too hard, but I swear I hear it in your voice and see it in your face and in the way you carry yourself alongside me.  Careful though; Party’s not so popular as it once was…

You trying to resurrect the Party?  Kindle from the cold, wet and dry and wet and dry again ashes?  Pssssh… good luck.  But… what if!?  Secret handshakes and pig-latin and morse code eyeblinks and underhanded semaphores!  You stretch out that hand and you offer that secret shake and turn your head just so, just so.  Would we welcome it back?  The Party; back?

Bah!!  Party’s over.  Party may still be in you; Party may still be in me – but the days of the Party-in-power are gone.

… right?

‘Night.