Posts

Posted on

feeling old fashioned

Happy coming weekend to us all. Tonight I went all blitzkrieg and wrote four full blog entries. For a second I contemplated just combining them all into one but instead chose to prepare them all for auto-posting a day at a time. Boom; all done for tomorrow and half of next week. Beautiful.

This morning, for the first time in my life, I sat and blacked my dress shoes. I suppose people still polish their shoes, but it seems somehow arcane. An activity of yesterday. I vaguely remember my dad shining his shoes. He had a fancy “kit” with a brush and a rag and he looked like he knew what he was doing. Probably learned proper shoe-shining protocol in the service; toned boots to see the CWO’s face reflect in the gloss. Me, I had no idea what I was doing. The instructions on the back of the Kiwi can verified that I already know everything there is to know about the basics: it’s just like waxing a car – put it on, buff it off. But the mechanics befouled me on my first time.

Even getting into the can was initially a mystery until I figured out the little rotating key is to be used as leverage in lifting the lid. For some reason this made the whole thing seem more old fashioned to me. This simple little tin with the clever lever action turnkey thing, it all seemed like an example of the brilliant-simple engineering from the war years. Everything now is overkill. Garbage cans that need to be plugged in so their motion sensors can see you approaching with your refuse and mechanically open and close the lid for you and machines that “clean the air” with negative ions. Over-engineered in the name of modernity and “cool.” Stupid. Here was a little formed tin with a blob of black junk inside and a little key to help you pop the lid. Function without excess. Like I said, made it all seem the more anachronistic an activity.

But I made do. I stuck my hand in the shoe and made what fist I could to hold it tight so I could move the cloth around it and paint on the black. I don’t have a fancy kit with brushes and rags like my dad, so I just used an small microfiber towel (I bought a 10,000 pack, or some such ridiculous example of excess, of them from Costco nine years ago and I’ve since found a multitude of uses for the things). I’d darken the surface with the stuff using one end of the towel, and then go back over it and rub it in with the clean end. I sat at the kitchen table using the light from the sliding glass door to help me see my work. Afterward, I was pretty happy with things. I managed to obscure all the scuffs and little lines and improved the overall “blackness” of the things. I turned the shoes around in my hands admiring them before slipping them on and getting on with getting ready.

Made me feel old… sitting in pinstriped dress pants and a blue dress shirt and black socks shining my shoes.

Like I’m at that point in my life.

Posted on

sun dried tomatoes

Today I write non-linearly. Or, every day I write non-linearly. But today I tried to write non-linearly. Happy Thursday.

I hate to say it because I’ll probably jinx it, but I do believe I’m back.

Writing is coming to me more easily than it has in months, and the blog has benefited from it with a return to the daily posting heyday of years past. Honestly, I think it’s taken me getting back between the pages of some good books for this to happen. When I read more, I want to write more. Seems backwards since both take time and time is scarce, but allot budget for both. I’ve come to conclude, then, that being involved in a good book is key for me in terms of my motivation to write. I read words put together so nicely, see concepts created with sentences, and I want to rush off to the keyboard and do the same. I’m fairly transparent, so you’ll see my “style” shift to the style of what I’m reading at the moment… but that’s OK with me.

Yesterday’s fog lifted today, made for a slightly warmer but equally as gray day comparatively. At night the solid blanket of clouds distributes the light from the moon (now waning gibbous and just slightly out of round) throughout the sky. You’d think that the diffusion would waste some of the brightness, but going to bed last night whole of the sky was like a pale lighted sheet. It was so bright, in fact, that I said something to Sharaun about it as we climbed into bed. She said something contrary; “It isn’t all that bright,” or similar. “Sure looks bright to me,” I thought silently, not rising to the moment.

In the morning when I woke up the pants and shirt I wanted to wear were in a crumple on top of the dryer. I had to pull out the wad of clothes currently in there, add it to the bigger crumple on top, and give them a ten minute whirl before I was even halfway comfortable wearing them. While I waited, I paced the house in my boxers.

I looked out the window in the front room, the one that looks out onto the garden box. I never did plant a winter crop this year. I even had Cynthia donate all her wonderful organic seeds to me before moving out of the country. She and I went as far as to pick out and bundle up a selection of winter crops to plant. Never got around to it. The garden is a massive tangle of dead dried tomato bushes. Amazingly, though, although everything else has returned to the dust from whence it came I spotted some green sprigs. Imagine my surprise when I pulled four well-developed carrots from the soil. Plants, they want to grow.

After getting dressed I roused Sharaun, my chauffeur at present. Keaton was in the bed with us so she woke too. Almost every night she calls from her bedroom and asks if she can come sleep with us. We deny her gently almost always, and she goes back to sleep. This is actually a vast improvement from her older M.O. where she’d simply wander up to the bedside and tap your shoulder to wake you, asking to join us under the covers. It was harder to say “no” then as “no” involved walking her back to her bedroom and re-tucking her in (I know, it didn’t have to involve that… but it did, to avoid complications). Not sure why she started calling from her bed instead, but she’s effectively solved that problem for us.

She got invited in last night because she called out around 3:30am saying, “Dad, I have to go potty!” I sometimes wonder how I’m always able to wake and post-process what I’ve heard when it comes to Keaton. Other noises and other voices would likely go by unnoticed. Must have something to do with what’s good for the species; genetics; God. But I do wake and my brain replays for me what did the waking. I sat up slightly and re-heard, “Dad, I have to go potty!” “Go ahead baby. Get up and go potty.” She was wearing a pull-up. “Just pull down your pull-up.” Light flooded into the hallway and I heard the tinkle and the flush and the faucet. When she was done the light flicked off and I heard, “Dad, can I come into your bed?” It was Sharaun who answered.

“Yes baby, come on in.” This surprised me a little, although not much in my half-awake state. Sharaun’s usually a big proponent of Keaton staying in her bed for the nights. She came to my side. I hoisted her under her arms and rolled her over me into the canyon between Sharaun and I. “I’m so proud of you Keaton,” Sharaun said. Now I get it. Maybe this is a reward for her waking to use the potty. “Yeah babe,” I said, “You woke up and used the potty just like we talked about. That’s great!” We snuggled us three. I took one last look out the window to marvel at that glowing fleece of a sky, the moon’s glow doled out even across the suspended droplets of cloud, before sleep took its revenge on us all.

Even though there was still pee in the pull-up come morning, I can’t help but see it as progress. Tonight we’ll reiterate the get up if you need to get up thing, see if we can provoke a repeat performance. One step at a time.

Goodnight.

Posted on

room for small luxury

Fog never really lifted today. Dissipated a bit, but it only served to hang the misty drifts near the horizon rather than the head-level of 8am. Sharaun’s still taking me to work. The GMC hasn’t come back from the shop. The accident was a month ago come Friday. A month.

I’ve gotten used to being down a vehicle, it has its upside. Sharaun can park in the center of our tiny garage affording passengers on each side a wide enough berth to enter and exit the vehicle comfortably. What’s more, I’ve been able to reclaim some of the space with one of those pop-up camp chairs. Turned it into my own little smoking lounge. Sit out there in the cold and read my book and smoke my pipe and listen to music. No room for that sort of small luxury when there’s two cars shoehorned between the shelves of old boxes and air compressor and bicycles hanging from rafters.

I suppose I could use this as a sort of period of adjustment.

When the second child comes I’ll be hard pressed not to forfeit the new car to Sharaun and our progeny. It’s larger and it’s safer. I should be steeling myself for that day during this period of absence. Too bad you can’t get an iPod integrated into her Saturn. If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t too much mind trading vehicles. I can get on with a smaller passenger car OK, I don’t really mind – it’s not the sports-utilitarianism I’m beholden to. I guess I could put in an aftermarket head unit, but it seems like an awful amount of trouble. I’m so irrational about it that I’ve considered ditching her car and leasing something newer to drive. This is how ridiculously my brain holds to it being “her car.”

The gym is full of new-year-resolution folks. Packed. I remember it like this when I myself resolved to start going shortly after the start of 2009. Like many other good-intentioned people my fervor ebbed in the later quarter of last year. Not to say I stopped going completely, but I did backslide. Late 2010 travel and holiday don’t-cares saw me put back on a good ten pounds of what I’d shed earlier in the year. So I, too, am back with a vengeance.

Before I go… recently there was a comment on a blog I wrote way back in 2004. The “satanic flier” post was my recounting, supplemented with media, of a rather juvenile, yet still pretty funny if you ask me, prank my friends and I pulled back in high school. The comment led me to re-read the post again and remember the event. But I’m not writing now to rehash the entry but rather to laugh at the string of comments its collected. They crack me up:

harmony ponders…

i wonder how santinic people do there richals and thing’s like that cause i have a friend named shadow and he’s only about 14 and i wonder how much he would know at he’s age?

disaster asks nicely…

please send me a photo 4 the satan

Blake isn’t satanic or anything, but…

wow that was amazing. my nickname is SATAN so i think its kinda funny story, im not satanic or anything i think i might do this at my school would u mind if i used a copy of the same flyer?

DarkJoeri warns me…

yow mutherfucker dont mess whit evil

And finally, Anonymous says…

we flier of ot good

Guess the devil really does bring out the worst in people, huh?

Good stuff. Goodnight.

Posted on

the pitch, the timbre, the tone

Good morning world. Welcome to blog.

O what a productive Monday! No, really. No sarcasm to be found. Dust rose around my desk as I set up then knocked down to-do after to-do. Vacation tried to make me soft, but I came back with a heat in my eyes. I left the office dizzy at five, the sun already down past the horizon in this idiotic light-deprived time of year. Ruined bodies of undone tasks cast away in my wake, nothing more than bloodied shells of their one-time threat. Work lost today.

Sometimes I slow things down and just listen to my daughter’s voice not for the words but the sound alone. The pitch, the timbre, the tone. Small and almost miniature feeling. But confident and well-versed for her age, her vocabulary seeming overmatched to the sound of her own voice.

Sometime in the earlier days of our dating relationship, Sharaun and I were going through a box of old things in her room to kill time. In there was an audiotape her folks had made of her reciting the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme around the age Keaton is now. I can remember thinking how amazing it was to have her voice on tape at that age… to be able to hear the youth of it and try to reckon it with the voice I knew at the time.

I think having heard that tape is partially why I record Keaton as much as I do. Even though we’re really bad preservationists when it comes to video, we’ve got audio and still images down I think.

Yeah I love her voice. Talking, praying, singing. I just love it when she sings.

Too bad most of the stuff she seems to parrot is the Top 40 junk Sharaun listens to. I did, however, catch her singing the hooks to a couple catchy tracks the other night and made her repeat herself for the iPhone so I could capture the verses for posterity. Here, then, is our little songbird flexing her pipes on her own takes of some popular tunes. Enjoy.

[audio:MeetMeHalfway.mp3]

Keaton sings the Black Eyed Peas’ “Meet Me Halfway”
(direct link for those on mobile devices without Flash)

[audio:NewYork.mp3]

Keaton sings Alicia Keys’ hook from Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind”
(direct link for those on mobile devices without Flash)

And yes, I do some minor editing for continuity’s sake – she’s not that perfect. But for really though, isn’t that something to hold on to? I’ve locked it away in my head as a memory, but the aural reminder these recordings may offer in ten or more years will surely be acutely appreciated. I can’t remember everything, you know. Humans fail.

Oh and before I go, a note about some small enhancements here and there to the blog. If you view any individual entry (not sure many regular readers do this, as, if it was me, I’d just be checking the homepage every so often or reading via RSS) you’ll now see a list of other entries written on the same date in the past. With more than six years of blogging-past to exploit, I figure these “also written on this day” links might be a neat window into the past.

I also tinkered last night at getting a running list of what I’ve been listening to on my iPod for the sidebar, but gave up when it proved to be too stupid to deal with. Maybe I’ll give it another go on an evening when I have a little more patience. Always looking to make this place more readable… shoot me any suggestions.

Goodnight.

Posted on

a saturday to remember

Two-thousand ten.

Hard to believe that Sharaun and I will be married ten years this year. Veterans. Pillars. So long together now, if you count the years we dated (subtracting that self-imposed “break” around ’95 that she won’t let me talk about much), that I’ve been with her as long as I haven’t. Sixteen years without, seventeen with. Something to be said for longevity – and perhaps forgiveness and long-suffering too – I suppose.  I know, this paragraph reaches for continuity… but those ten years are the first thing I think of when I think about how it’s now two-thousand ten.  That, and that Keaton will be four and I’ll have been ten years at my job.  Or, is a “career” now?  When does that line get crossed?

Ten years.

I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises for the first time over the weekend. Made me half wish I could spend a year drinking my way around Europe, bankrupting myself halfheartedly chasing fleeting passions, having impossible conversations with a cadre of equally sloshed and disenfranchised comrades. But in addition to daydreaming about being part of the perennially-tight “lost generation,” reading the book piqued my interest in good literature again.  I found myself once again wanting to read.  I made a trip to a couple used book stores in town on Saturday, but came up short.  A visit to the library was disappointingly equally unsuccessful.  Not to say there wasn’t plenty of good reading to be had at each stop, just that I couldn’t find a single one of the ten or so tomes I’d set out to acquire.

Then I wondered about downloading books… maybe reading them on my iPhone or something.  At first, I wrote off the idea as stupid.  Who’d want to read from a screen, let alone a screen as small as the iPhone’s?  But, later that night as I lay in bed I decided to re-download the Stanza application for the phone.  As a test, I grabbed a free book from Project Gutenburg – Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.  At right around 100 printed pages I figured it’d be short enough to use as test.  Stayed up reading it in bed and, as I finger-flipped the last “page” I realized that, yes, I think I could read books on my phone.  I immediately set about finding some of the stuff I’d been out amongst the brick-and-mortar searching for.  Oh, it’s all there, but unfortunately most of the works carry a prohibitive pricetag.

In short order, however, I found a way “around” that and was able to load up my phone with all manner of classic  and “modern classic” literature.  I’m actually pretty excited to have a pocketful of good books with me at any time.  Now to see if I can truly adapt to reading things this way… I’ll keep you posted.

A couple paragraphs I wrote on the iPhone over the course of the weekend, to round things out:

Saturday we woke with an idea at grand plans on the day. Something as a family, something fun for Keaton. We took our time in the morning. I made coffee and Sharaun and Keaton had cereal. I read a little. By and by it was 10am and we thought we’d better firm up plans. 11am and some discussion later and we were no closer to anything material. We ate lunch and after that everything fizzled. We played a few games of memory together and ended up running errands and shopping for dinner. A Saturday to remember. Maybe next weekend.

Work begins back this week after what feels like a fantastically drawn out hiatus. I’m not exactly eager. I feel a bit too disconnected from what’s going on. I’ve felt this way before and it always passes naturally as I wade back in. Not sure where to get started, but it’s coming up on annual review time and I guess that’s about as important a piece of work as you can dig into. A good start, I suppose, to numb me back into the day-to-day of corporate infinity.

Goodnight.

Posted on

sore loser

Greetings, year of our Lord two-thousand and ten.  Greetings indeed.

Tell you what, you let the passing of the 00s help ease the memories of the worst of the mistakes made therein and I promise to make less in the 10s, OK?  Deal.

Wednesday Keaton and mom were playing Memory.  Remember that game?  Little tiles with pictures on them, always in matching pairs, that you flip over and then hunt through looking for matches?  Of course, Keaton’s set the Disney® Princess™ version; need you even ask?  First game went to Sharaun and Keaton was not happy.  Her reaction was unlike anything I’ve seen from her before.  She got immediately frustrated.  She denied her mother’s win loudly, started grabbing for Sharaun’s pile of matches.  She then tried to deny her defeat.  “We weren’t even playing for a winner!,” she declared.  “I didn’t lose because there is no winner!  We weren’t playing it like a game!  We were just playing it!”  At that she stomped off back to her room and slammed the door.  Odd, irrational, and seemingly unprovoked.  She stayed back there pouting while Sharaun and I looked at each other, considering.

Yes, I’d never previously seen this behavior from our little angel.  I have, mind you, seen it before though.  From me.

And so I said silently to myself, “Lord… please help us teach Keaton patience and sportsmanship.  Please help her to best the me in her in this regard.”

While my folks were here they recommended a book called The Road to me, said they thought I’d dig it.  I bought it, and read it through, on Tuesday.  Powerful book; hard to put down and as such a quick read.  Well written and came nicely to life inside my head.  Apparently there’s a movie now.  After my birthday, I told myself that I needed to shake this fantasy-only book kick I’ve been on since… oh, I don’t know… twenty years gone now…

See, I got the latest novel in the Wheel of Time series for my birthday.  You know, the massive fantasy series I’ve been reading, off and on, since college?  Yeah – that long.  I’ve re-read the series once in its entirety to catch up when a new book is released… but at 10,000+ pages it’s more than a quick effort as a refresher. I devoured it, feeling accomplished at finally coming to the end while there are yet books to be published.

See, this last one was supposed to be the final book, was supposed to end it all.  But the author died before he could bring it to a close.  His wife, who’s also his editor, asked a young fantasy writer at the same publisher to take up her late husband’s extensive and detailed notes and finished his unfinished masterpiece.  Only, the new guy, upon seeing the original authors final story arc, deemed it impossible to fit into a single volume and so now we have three final volumes, spread over three years.  So, even though I thought I’d be done, turns out I’m still only through twelve volumes of an eventual fourteen… and have at least another two years to wait.

In the meantime though, I have to diversify my reading material more than I have in the past years (thanks Ham On Rye, Vonnegut, and On the Road).

Goodnight.  Happy New Year.

Posted on

fleeting festivity

Last day of 2009.

Goodbye year.

Still 50% zeroes though. Another year until positive numbers regain the majority; a-hundred-and-one more and I predict the zeroes will be nearly extinct altogether.

I took down the Christmas stuff today. House-hung accoutrements, tree and all the trimmings, and various knickknacks. Did it all by myself; motions mirrored and reversed from my lonesome assembly only weeks ago. Sharaun was alternately busy and sleeping, and so couldn’t lend a hand. Boxed it all up and moved it back to its resting place high on a garage shelf. It’s good to put the Christmas high, you only need to reach it once a year so it’s not a pain.

It had to go, though. If you don’t get the Christmas stuff out early enough, give it enough life during December, the festivity is just too fleeting. Like going camping for one night it’s all setup and teardown. I’d have preferred this not to have been a solitary thing, but the tree had been goading me and I broke under the strain. Just sitting over in the corner glowing cheerily and multi-colored, growing more out-of-season with each passing minute, taunting me that it’d still be standing come 2010. Not this year tree. Not this year.

Someone needs to sweep up or vacuum the fake plastic pine needles now, though. They litter the floor, both the new hardwood and the carpet in the adjacent toy room.

The floor. Sharaun’s dislike for it seems to grow stronger by the week. I finally said to her today, “I don’t think you know how bad it makes me feel to hear you constantly ‘tsking‘ over each and every minute surface mar on this floor. I need to let you know that it pains me to think we spent this much on something you might hate.” Earnest appeals fell on deaf ears, however, getting something crushing in return like, “It makes me feel bad too; I wish we would’ve spent the money on something else or got laminate instead of this ‘soft’ hardwood.” Ouch.

I try not to make it a fight but it’s hard. Instead I settle for saying, simply, that I really like the floor. I comment often on how much better I think it makes the place look. Maybe I can at least keep the scales level if I say enough positive things. Balance it out. Some yin for some yang.

I don’t know why, but I take her disliking the floor so much almost as an affront to my ability to “provide.” I know it’s not like I felled the trees, planed out boards, scraped and stained the planks and set them down in rows myself… yet her derision makes me feel a poor decision-maker. Maybe it’s the ostensibly misdirected investment. Maybe it’s that she asked for wood floors for so long. Maybe it’s the fact that, personally, I really do like the floor. I guess it’s complicated, or stupid. Probably stupid. I hold hope that she doesn’t just plain hate the floor. It helps me feel less of a failure.

Yeah; stupid.

Goodnight.