Snow Day!

Well, I made it to a park and took a walk today. I was supposed to be at home taking down the Christmas decorations. I figured what the heck and took my camera into the woods instead. I found myself at Locke Park in Fridley, a place that I had not visited in a long time.

Click on images to enlarge them
(They will open in a new window)

Me -
This photo taken under instruction from my wife, for what purpose I have no idea. But here I am, grinning like an idiot. I was fortunate enough to be able to use a picnic table under the pavillion as my tripod. I would set the timer and then go scamper to that tree that I was posing in front of.

Trail & Creek Pictures -

The Last Remaining Eligable Bachelor of his kind-
Talk about overstaying your welcome!

Bridge over Creek -
I think as a kid I must have crossed this bridge on my bike a thousand times. But I never saw it in the winter before. Probably the most important thing that I was able to today was to see an everyday object for new, as if for the first time. A beautiful blanket of snow helps.

Wish I were there

A great photo as seen on the Sawbill Newsletter:

The Sawbill Trail seen from the inside of a moving vehicle

According to the weather forecasts we are supposed to get about 3-5 inches of snow tomorrow. Since it won't be all that cold I am optimistic that it will be that cool kind of snow that sticks to tree branches and looks something like the picture above.

Now to just plan my getaway...

What Really Matters

I visited Mom last night. The breathing tube is back in her mouth, not a tracheostomy like I was originally told. She was pretty alert but obviously couldn't talk. That's OK because I talked for both of us. There were some things that I needed to tell her, the sort of things that I would kick myself over forever if tomorrow came and she were gone. You'd be surprised how much can be communicated through eye contact and a squeeze of the hand. Even though she is frail now, the bond between mother and child is strong. I think that's probably one of the greatest gifts that having a child of my own has given me. Watching my son and my wife together has given me better perspective on the relationship with my own mother. Comfort does not come from spoken words. It comes from the other hand squeezing back. It comes from the touch of a hand on a troubled brow. It comes from the other's eyes looking back and wordlessly saying, "Yes, after all these years you and I are still in this thing together."

I told her how much I admired her strength and how I regretted not telling her more often about what a good job she did of raising me and my five siblings.

I told her about my earliest memories, of spending afternoons out in the boat watching her and dad fish when I was not much more than a baby, sitting in the bottom of the boat wrapped up in indian blankets with my books and my toy cars.

I told her what happy memories those were and how I remember the loving look on her face as she would tend to me. I told her what a blessing it was to have known for my entire life that I am loved, and I thanked her for giving that love to me.

I told her that her love lives on in how I am raising my own child because I learned from the best, and that if I do half as good a job as she did my son will turn out just fine.

Before I left I prayed with her as she held my hand and listened. I thanked God that no matter what His will is in the matter of my mother's health that a day will come when we will all be reunited and will be together forever in His grace. She knodded and squeezed my hand to voice her affirmations.

It felt good to tell her some of those things that only words can express. But it felt better knowing that the things that words can never express are right there in the open, and that in that sense at least there is nothing left unsaid between us, nothing to regret later.

Whoops!

As seen on Startribune.com.
Link to the story here

Merry Christmas

I hope that everyone had a meaningful Christmas this year. Getting ready for & hosting a Christmas day party with mom in the ICU was like living a double life. I stayed in all day today, rested and cleaned - Tomorrow it's back to business as usual.

Incidentally, this fellow was quite fearless around Santa:

Big business gets a clue?

OK, credit where credit is due:



Caribou backs off fight over local coffee shop



Caribou agreed to waive their exclusivity clause, which would allow Limu Coffee to stay at Silver Lake Road and 39th Avenue NE in Mineapolis. However, apparently the new lease she has been offered will double her rent. So it remains to be seen if Limu will stay in the same place or be moving.



I'm glad that Caribou got a clue. I retract my earlier statement about the CEO being a slimeball. :-) I hope that Limu coffee is able to work something out with their landlord to keep it's doors open at the same location.

Setback

My mom is back in th hospital again. She was just fine a couple of days ago, and then she started running a fever and not being able to keep food down. The nurses thought that she was just coming down with the flu. This afternoon they found inflammation on her legs and running up her body. She was running a 104 temp and they could hear fluid in her lungs so they sent her off to the emergency room.

I hung around the ER waiting area with two of my sisters and my brother in-law while they prepped her to move up to the ICU. Apparently they had a lot of trouble with the big IV that they are running into her neck, because they were trying to run it for the fifth time when I finally went home at 1AM.

I did get to see her for a couple of minutes around midnight, after they had got her up to her room in th ICU. She was pooped and could barely keep her eyes open. She was wearing the oxygen mask that goes over the mouth & nose so she couldn't really talk. I don't know about my sisters but I was flashing back to spring when she was there with the breathing tube and eventually the tracheostomy. None of us said much about it but I think that we're all worried about mom having to go through all that again.

OK, need to turn in and get some shut-eye. I plan on getting up early and buying a snow rake (Tool for getting snow off the roof). I promised my dad I would stop by and take care of his roof for him, plus I need it for my own roof too. Oh yeah - I gave my sisters & brother in-law the URL to this web site - Who knows I may have just increased my readership by 75%.

A fog in my throat

This morning there was a fog bank straddling the metro area. The cold air caused the fog to form frost on all the tree branches. It doesn't take much window dressing to make this world look like a magical place. I kicked myself all the way to work because I didn't have my camera with me. By noon the magic will be gone.

2004 Photos

To anyone who cares, I just finished resizing the remaining photos for 2004 & uploaded them to the photo album.

I'm slowly catching up. Still a lot to do for 2005.

The 'dregs' of big business

Coffee brouhaha leaves owner miffed

Limu Coffee, a five-year-old shop on Silver Lake Road in St. Anthony is being forced out of it's place of business because the property owner is refusing to renew the shop's lease at the Silver Lake Road Shopping Center. The shop is owned by a woman named Gedam Azeze, who came to the U.S. from Ethiopia in 1989.

Caribou Coffee, which opened a new outlet in May in the nearby Silver Lake Village Shopping Center, negotiated a lease that prohibits other coffee shops at the development.

I have drank at both coffee houses and as a self-described "Hardcore" coffee drinker I personally preferred the coffee served at Caribou. As a consumer I could live with the thought that the independent shop could bite the dust because I preferred the big company's product - To me that is fair competition, even if the indie is at a disadvantage in terms of branding & marketing. But I am sickened to think of how many of my purchasing dollars over the years have gone toward a company that engages in corporate sleaziness at such a level as to eliminate their competition without actually competing with them. The owners of the shopping center wanted this highly recognized chain in their center so that they could pull more people off of Silver Lake Road and they were willing to sign anything to get them. Than my friends, is the insidious power of branding.

Caribou CEO Michael Coles said that the decision to decline Azeze's lease renewal request "had nothing to do with us. If the landlord wanted to keep the tenant, it should not have granted us the exclusive, and we'd still have gone there."

Then why don't you just negate the clause from your lease and let the independent stay, you slimeball?

Over the last couple of years I have turned to making my own espresso drinks. With a little milk-frothing practice I have reached the level where I can say that I prefer my own drinks to anything that I can buy at a shop. Shop-bought coffee has become more or less a once-a-month treat that I will get at a mall or when I am running early for work. But this story has irritated me to the point where I am ready to finally say "no more" to Caribou. Or to Starbucks, for that matter. From now on the only coffee shops I will patronize will be independents.

Am I a activist? No, not even close. I am just a consumer who from now on is voting with his feet.

Freewrite: Here and now

Disclaimer: This was written in one "take" over lunch.

The smell of dead leaves beneath my feet, the bite of the wind against my face as winter, still far off, begins to grow it's teeth. High spirits glide between the trees and my mind throbs in the silence of the forest, voices music and the sound of machinery still echoing in my skull. In their absence I am aware that my ears are ringing.

The wind thrashes the treetops high above, but on the forest floor it is like a conversation overheard in an adjacent room or a crowd as heard from outside a stadium. 100 feet between peace and torment. Somewhere nearby the same wind rips across the open waters of a lake and churns the bottom of a shallow bay, covering and uncovering the rocks in an endless cycle. Elsewhere it flattens the tall grass of a clearcut meadow and scatters the voles and rabbits into hiding. In the middle of a tamarak swamp deer take refuge, and the wind is hardly more than a suggestion that something is going on outside the walls of the compound.

All of these things I picture in my mind's eye as I stand on the path in the forest. There are more places than I can imagine, each alive and vibrant in this moment.
We break down where we are going and where we have been with units of measurement to indicate our movement. A mile down a path, a hundred feet up a tree, 12 feet deep in a lake, etc. But isn't each step of a journey from "Here" to "There" a new "Here?" With each footstep and branch the "Here" changes and is a little different than the previous or the next. Or would you entertain the thought that the entire planet is one giant "Here?" The Superior National Forest contains Three million acres of land, water, rock, and trees. That's more "Here's" than you could hope to visit in your lifetime. And it's just a speck on the map compared to the rest of the planet. Also consider this: Each "Here" has a history and a future. While it is important to study these, I wonder if we spend enough time studying the "Now."

As I listen to the wind I wonder what is happenening below the leaves in a thicket a half mile up the trail at this very moment. I wonder what is happening six inches under the muck in the eastern edge of a duck slough near what used to be my family's farm in western Minnesota. I wonder if anyone is freezing to death on the side of Mt. Everest right now. I wonder how many scorpions per square mile live in the Sahara desert.

I wonder.
I wonder.
I wonder.

I wonder about this world that God has given us, and how we march through it in such straight lines without ever taking the time to enjoy all three dimensions. I wonder about the time that each of us are given, and how we waste so much of our lives worrying over the future and dredging up our pasts. I wonder if any of us ever really learn to use history as a learning tool to prevent mistakes in the future, leaving us free to focus on the here and now.

Early Winter Deer Kill

The November 2005 Sawbill Newsletter describes the aftermath of a deer that fell to a wolf on Alton lake this weekend. A very cool piece of nature reporting. The writer took some early-ice risks that I would not have taken in order to get some choice photos of the kill:

"....the ice was so black and clear as to be nearly invisible, giving me the illusion that I was skiing on open water. My heart was in my throat a few times as I could feel the ice sag beneath me and watched cracks shoot out from under my feet."

Maybe not as bone-headed as the nitwit I saw on Animal Planet this weekend, trying to get close-ups of a Spitting Cobra, but the consequences of a slip-up could have been just as deadly. Nature doesn't care who you are. It'll eat you up just the same, as surely as a wolf will eat a deer.

More PBS Freeloading

Have I mentioned that I am not a contributor to PBS? Yet it seems most of the television shows that I bother mentioning in this blog come from there. Hmmm. Anyway there was a great documentary about Dorothy Molter last night. Don't know who she was? Don't feel bad because I didn't either until I watched the documentary.

For those of us who love the outdoors and the wild, this woman really lived "The life." In this day and age where we are fascinated with stories of success, attend efficiency seminars and read books on how to do more in less time, we really have shifted our perspective on the signifigance of contentment in our lives. The prevailing wisdom these days is that contentment is the end and success is the means. But to Dorothy Molter, success was the end and contentment was the means. She was happy with where she was and what she had. She demonstrated that you don't need to be successful in order to be content, you need to be content in order to be successful. You don't see very many people who can walk that talk, and that makes Dorothy Molter a hero in my eyes.

The documentary is called "DOROTHY MOLTER Living in the Boundary Waters" and according to the PBS web site it's not scheduled to run again anytime soon (At least in the Twin Cities market). You can shell out $33 to buy the video online or you can just stop by the Dorothy Molter museum the next time that you pass through Ely.

Thanksgiving

It's not about giving thanks for one turkey dinner once a year. It's about gratitude every day that we wake up and discover that we are still alive.

What are you thankful for?

I am thankful for my family. I am thankful for the miracles I witness every day in watching my son grow. I am thankful that my parents are still alive after what they have each gone through in the past year. I am thankful for a loving and supportive wife, whose strengths compliment my weaknesses and vice versa.

It's not about remembering the story of the first europeans and the indians having a celebratory feast. It's about remembering that each and every one of us is a pilgrim, passing through this life on our journey to what lays beyond. Who we meet and the provisions that we are given are part of God's design for our lives. How we choose to interact with those people and how we choose to use the material posessions God gives us is up to us.

What are you thankful for?

I am thankful for my friends. I am thankful for the people in life that have taken the time to get to know me and to love me. I am thankful for my home. I am thankful for the opportunities that I have had in the past year to open up my home to people and break bread with them. I am thankful for my thick fingers and broken voice with which I can play and sing songs of praise and worship.

It's not about just giving thanks for our material blessings. It's also about giving thanks to a God that has set eternity into the hearts of men.

What are you thankful for?

Psalm 100

1 Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth.

2 Worship the LORD with gladness;
come before him with joyful songs.

3 Know that the LORD is God.
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving
and his courts with praise;
give thanks to him and praise his name.

5 For the LORD is good and his love endures forever;
his faithfulness continues through all generations.

Deer = Rats?

Strib Article: Deer and people clash in Minnesota

Suburban dwellers of the Twin Cities metro area have similar complaints about Canadian Geese. Who is encroaching upon who's living space seems to be the question. Unless a day comes where people are corralled into the cities, stories like this will continue to get play. America has a Love/Hate relationship with itself - So gleeful about the housing boom, so sad that some mean people want to kill the deer that wander into these new neighborhoods.

Blood Money

Well it looks like the predicted winter weather is about as serious and memorable as a Viking superbowl run. There's about an inch of crust on the ground here. It'll be a bear to drive on in the morning but not even worth shoveling. It will be gone by Saturday.

It's true that I love the snow and the cold weather even more so than the average Minnesotan. This never fails to mystify my Filipino friends and relatives, who left their island paradise to come here and brave the Minnesota winters for the purpose of sharing in this great prosperity that we Americans take for granted. Wearing your clothes in layers, warming up your car in the morning, keeping a survival kit in your trunk, all these things are alien concepts to my compatriots. Winter to them seems to be something to be endured, rather than enjoyed.

But not me. I have always loved winter, always embraced the cold. The fact of the matter is that in the winter of 1994 I actually donated plasma to raise up the $50 I needed to purchase a snowshoe kit. I was terribly broke in those days and I was desperate to get my hands on a pair of snowshoes. Every other day for a few weeks I would go to the plasma center on the East bank of the U of M campus, Near the Arbys and the Oriental garden resteraunt, and wait with the drunks and the other poor students to sell my plasma.

How it works is that they run a needle into a big vein on your arm and they hook you up to a machine. The machine takes your blood, seperates the blood cells from the plasma, sticks the cells into some solution and pumps it back into your arm. It hurts like a bitch when they reverse that flow, let me tell you. My original plan was to earn enough money to buy a set of snowshoes and fish flasher. To this day I have still to realize the dream of winter lake trout fishing & camping in the BWCA. I was really hot for the idea at the time but my enthusiasm for this money making scheme waned after an incident where they couldn't hit my vein straight on with the needle but instead nicked it and I ended up with a large & nasty-looking splotch of blood under my skin from my bicep t about midway down my forearm. I had enough bread to buy the "Build your own" snowshoe kit so I stopped my visits to the plasma clinic and tabled the idea of getting the fish flasher.

It takes several cycles to get the plasma out of you. The blood comes out, the cells and the saline go back in. Repeat. I would guess that you are on the table for about an hour, maybe 90 minutes. Your options are pretty much to read, strike up a conversation with the transient on the table next to you, or watch the movies that they so graciously provide on televisions suspended from the ceiling.

The second to last time I was in there (The last time they got a good harvest from me) They showed "The Bodyguard." I remember that I was reading Love in the time of Cholera and did not pay attention to the video at all, yet somehow the movie must have permeated my brain, because that night when I slept I dreamt that Whitney Houston and I were working together as prison guards. She was guarding the chicks, I was guarding the dudes. (It must have been some sort of Co-ed prison) While I was watching my group out in the yard one of them shivved me. Whitney stayed with me until the ambulance arrived and we fell in love as a result of this simple act of devotion. We went on to get married, buy a house, raise kids, etc. It was pretty messed up. It was one of those dreams where it seems like a really long time has passed, and when you finally wake up you are disoriented because only a night has gone by. The dream has never recurred, and Whitney has never crossed over into my dreams again since. I was never much of a Whitney Houston fan to begin with so why I picked her for the dream never really made sense to me, but I will tell you this: Even though we were only together for a few hours, we loved a lifetime's worth. Dude! Isn't that a quote from the Terminator?

That winter I ended up spending a weekend at my sister's cabin instead of going to the BWCA. Although I did not winter camp or fish for lake trout I did have the chance to put my snowshoes to work. I remember resting by the warmth of the woodstove and following to the Olympics at Lillehammer. It was a good dry run for the winter trip to Eagle Mountain that I took in 2000.

I wish for one more warm day so that I can get a coat of varnish on those snowshoes. I plan on getting some miles out of them again this year. It would be a shame to let them go unused, seeing how I paid for them with blood money.

27-year-old walleye found in Lake of the Woods

Read the story at the strib site.

That fish dates back to the Carter administration and the first Star Wars Movie! It never occurred to me to wonder how long these fish might live if they are not harvested or predated upon. Or Gill netted.


1:00 PM - I removed the photo of Mace Windu and the reference to 'Going out like some sucka." Not everyone might get the Samuel Jackson reference plus I don't want any trouble for linking to a SW.com photo.

Hunkering Down

It sounds like we have a little winter weather headed our way. I took the precaution tonight to get the sandbags into the back of the truck and move it away from the garage wall so that we can all get in easy tomorrow. Space is such a premium in the garage that I usually park it up against the wall, so that we have more room to get in & out of the small car. But tomorrow we will take the truck, just to be safe. It's not that I think that there will be enough snow that we will be at risk of being stuck. Nope, I pretty much just want to surround my family with as much metal as possible when the weather is crappy and we need to drive somewhere. All my other winter stuff is at the ready, too. Coat & gloves, snow shovel, extra boots in the truck, etc. Inside our shelves are full and the fridge is stocked. This isn't preparation due to predicted weather but rather because Sundays are grocery day and we just stocked up for the week. My assessment of my family is that we are hunkered down and ready for whatever nature decides to throw at us.

While I was cooking dinner tonight I monitored a documentary on PBS about WW2 Conscientius Objectors. While I don't have a specific opinion to weigh in on that topic it did get me to thinking about the peculiar window in US history that my life has passed through. Both my Father and my Grandfather were drafted to fight in the world wars. My two older brothers served in the military but were young enough that they just missed Viet Nam. Had I chosen to enlist I would have ended up in the first Gulf war. But I didn't. Our country has not faced a serious threat since the second world war and I never saw the need to volunteer unless the country was threatened.

But as I get older I am finding that the perils that our country faces in modern times are not like those of 60 years ago. We seem to be imploding from within - We're drunk on the oil and other goods that we import. We are gobbling up our resources and outsourcing our jobs. We have restructured our families into dual income entities, yet are mystified as to why the traditional family structure is failing. As a country (Not me personally) we silently endorse the genocide of unborn children as a means to keep the population in check. Yet at the same time we wonder why there are children out there who have so little regard for human life that they are killing themselves and each other.

Before I go to bed at night I like to watch my son sleep. I take a few minutes out of my night and stand over his bed and I study his face, listen to his breathing, and tuck his blanket. I think about what kind of a world I am leaving him and I have to honestly say that I am not comfortable with the thought. There is still a lot of beauty and majesty in it but there is also a lot of ugliness and danger in it as well. I think about how I have never had to go to war, but someday he might, because somehow I failed to act in the here and now. Most nights I pray silently over him, not just for him and what type of man he might become, but also for me and his mother. I pray for what type of parents we will be and for the foundation we will give him to build his life on.

It's like getting ready for a storm that you don't know when it will hit or how bad it will be.

Photo Album updated

I have updated the photo album - I added October 2005 images, Added some previous years of the Fall Classic and added captions to the 2005 Fall Classic photos. Please be sure to clear your cache if you have been there recently or you may not be able to see the changes.

Treestand Confession

Chris weighs in:

Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2005 07:39
Subject: what I got

"OK, so I'm sitting in my stand opening morning and I hear some crashing in the brush behind me, and I know this is a deer. I stand and ready myself. Good news - I saw the deer before she saw me and she will cross my shooting lane. I calmly raise my rifle, aiming down the part in the trees. Then there was another crash Through the brush - I thought to myself, "This must be a buck." Indeed it was, not huge but the largest one I've seen hunting, complete with a well-developed 6 point rack. Well my composure faded as quickly as the doe did into the brush. I followed the buck with my weapon across the shooting lane without taking a shot. If I see the above-mentioned animal again I have a plan - One that doesn't include me choking due to a sudden case of buck fever."

Antler Envy

Miskowic & Cashman each got a buck this year:

Miskowic's deer



Cashman's Deer

These were taken from Miskowic's camera phone.
Not only does Cashman always get a bigger deer than Miskowic, he even gets bigger pictures of deer than Miskowic.

No word yet on how Chris did.

Thunderstick

My shotgun is a Remington Model 11 Autoloading shotgun.
It's serial number tells me that it was manufactured in 1921. It has the old-style safety (In front of the trigger) that they used from 1905 until 1928 when they switched to a more modern cross bolt safety incorporated into the trigger guard behind the trigger.

My father bought it second hand from the hardware store in Underwood for $10 back in 1939. As the story goes it was originally marked $20 and he walked away from it twice. Each time he walked away the price came down $5. The price was right at $10 (Keep in mind that $10 was the equivelent of $133 back in 1939), but my dad still wasn't going to buy the gun because he wouldn't have any money left to buy shells. The shopkeeper threw in a $.75 box of shells and the deal was struck.

66 years later the days of $.75 boxes of shells are long gone,
but the old girl is still knocking down birds.

Where Heaven & Earth Meet

Click to enlarge (Opens in a new window)


Words mean little in the north country. When hunting grouse, an unnecessary word can cost you a shot. It was Sunday, almost noon, almost the end of our weekend excursion. We advanced up a little road with caution, careful to make as little noise as possible. For a brief moment in time we had been able to tune out the outside world. We had replaced the mundane daily tasks of our lives with the excitement of keeping a canoe upright and the serenity of gazing at a distant shoreline. We had challenged our senses to identify shapes in the underbrush and to feel a tap on the line. We had experienced the adrenal rush of flushed birds and the tranquil peace of laying on our backs and gazing at the night sky. We had slept on the frosty ground, drank hot black coffee from tin cups, cooked meat over an open fire, used our compasses in real life situations and howled at the moon. None of these things necessarily in that order, of course. But now it was Sunday, and each man was starting to feel the outside world tugging him back. Each of us had lives that awaited our return: Household chores, Monday morning blues and joyful reunions with wives and children.

Q: So what of this fatal moment in a trip, when our inner mountain men must relinquish their hold on us?

A: We faced the moment as neither a mountain man nor a civilized man but rather as some sort of hybrid.

Such were my thoughts as I made my way up that twisting, claustrophobic little road with my two best friends flanking me. We encountered a set of gateposts and stopped to consult our maps. We advanced into unposted private land. Ahead was a clearing and some blue. The road emptied out onto a undeveloped lot that according to our map was the only access point to a small lake. Respectfully we lowered our guns and made our way to the shoreline. We did this not as hunters but rather as pilgrims, for in front of us was a vision, of Heaven meeting the earth.

A sheltered little bay reflected the sky and the fall colors. The campsite behind me had probably been there for a thousand years, with different men calling it home. And they would have been crazy not to. The blustery wind that had harassed us on Fourmile lake was reduced to a shocked gasp, as though we had stumbled across one of the wood's secrets. The wind weaved through the pines and the stubborn Birches like a busybody at a party, shushing us to secrecy. I closed my eyes and felt the clean air on my face and inhaled the scent of the woods. They smelled sweeter here than anyplace else I had been all weekend. As I entranced myself with the tranquilizing colors of the lake I felt my worries and troubes slide off to one side like butter in a hot skillet. Unencumbered, I reveled in the moment. My inner mountain man had been turned loose for a little longer.

We had stumbled across a site that was the quintessential wilderness to us, a place where earth and sky meet water, where a man and a campfire make a welcome part of an elemental foursome. I turned away with a certain degree of melancholy, because allthough I had felt the exhiliration of discovering this beautiful and unique listening point I also felt a certain amount of guilt, knowing that I had trespassed in order to make that discovery. Our only judge and jury that day were the trees, and they were not returning a verdict to us. Left to interpret my own case I would like to think that the end justified the means, as long as I don't repeat the crime. But I let myself off with a warning. Even though I know that this place exists I do not feel as though I can go back, and that is perhaps the most bitter punishment of all.

As we made our way back to the truck we maintained our silence. We weren't hunting now and could have spoken at any moment. But each step away from that stunning vista was another step closer to our exile from paradise - back to civilization and our 'normal' lives. In an hour we would be eating our last lunch as we broke camp. In two we would be creeping along the edge of Superior, returning to our normal lives like a slumbering child returns from his dreams.

Banjo Moon

I am still working on my "official" report of what happened on my recent fall trip with the guys. I have lots of pictures to sort through, resize and post. I attempted a couple of panorama shots, one which worked great (The campsite) and one which I am not happy with (The lake). I also got one tremendous shot of the moon which still makes me grin every time that I look at it. It's my wallpaper right now.

Fourmile Lake -
Click to enlarge (Opens in a new window)


This is the lake that we stayed at.
This photo set was taken in the morning on Sunday, October 16, 2005. It's knit together from 6 different photos that I took from a tripod. I had a really rough time of tring to match up the middle shots to the end shots, which is why the sun looks like it does. I hope that you like it, because I have already put as much work as I am willing to put into it.

Fourmile Lake - Our Campsite -
Click to enlarge (Opens in a new window)


I got really lucky with the campsite. This photo set was taken on Friday, October, 14, 2005 while Mike and Chris were setting up the camp. It consists of 5 different photos (again, taken from the tripod) that went together practically like a set of Lego's™.

Money Shot!
Click to enlarge (Opens in a new window)


OK, So I am not a professional photographer, so when I take a picture like this, it is a big deal to me. I am posting it with no watermarks in case you want to download it, or whatever. There are probably only four people who read this blog anyway so I'm not worried. If you do decide to use this photo for something online, please be sure to give me credit!

More photos and some writing to come soon!

Gone Fishing

OK, I had a boatload of work to do tonight - Another client meeting that goes right up to 5:00. It pretty much forced me to write work tickets for the changes from home, since I won't be in the office tomorrow and the work is time-sensitive.

No sense whining about it, the tickets are done. Now to catch a quick nap before we blast out of here in 4 hours.

The Dharma Bum & I hit on an interesting topic, that of why fishermen are reluctant to disclose where they fish. I maintain that it is about as natural as giving a buddy your girlfriend's telephone number. Selfish? Yeah. Insecure? Maybe a little. But it is what it is, dammit. I am really looking forward to not seeing anyone besides my friends for a couple of days and I don't want to jinx it by telling everyone from here to Thailand where I'll be. I may be irrational but my heart is in the right place.

Have a great weekend -

Another Knot Tied

Congratulations to my friends Attila & Bernadette who went back home to Hungary a couple of weeks ago & got married.

Two more days

The guy's annual fall trip is set. We met this past Sunday and poured over a map of Superior National Forest and picked our spot. Meals were planned, to-do lists were created.

The plan is to be at our campground by early afternoon. We are bringing a canoe and some rods to try to coax some walleye out of the lake. The shotguns are coming with too, for self-defense against any ruffed grouse that we may stumble across. Guitars will be packed for doing the cowboy thing around the fire at night. I am looking forward to seeing the stars without the interference of city lights. I am praying for some good northern lights. I cannot wait to breathe some air that hasn't been breathed before.

We meet at my house early Friday morning and leave from there.
Somehow I don't think waking up will be a problem like it is on a regular work day.

Idle Hands

I have been back from vacation for quite some time - I have lots to post and many pictures to add to the photo album. The problem was that the Adding process was very tedious before. I decided to de-suckify my photo album and switch to a flash photo album that uses XML to load images and comments. It still needs a little work but I am mostly done with it. Check it out if you care to.

Correction

My wife has requested that I post a correction in regard to a recent post where I mentioned our pending vacation:

It would not be a good time to break into our house. We have dogs. Big, mean, rabid St. Bernards. They take basketball-sized chunks of flesh from the bodies of anyone who tries to enter our home uninvited. Furthermore the captain of our neighborhood watch is an ex-Marine Sniper with 137 confirmed kills. And last but not least we have rigged every valuable in the house with tripwires, which will send poison darts shooting out of the walls just moments before a giant ball rolls down from the attic on a ramp and blocks the entrance, thus sealing you in until you either starve to death or wander into the tiger pit.

So as you can see it would not be a wise idea to break into our house. Don't try it, don't even think of it.

I'm glad that's cleared up.

Afterwards

Respite

One more week before vacation and we fly out to LA. We are going to visit the wife's sister, do the Disneyland thing, etc. We will be gone for two weeks. If ever you were planning on breaking in sometime when we are gone, this will be the time.

This day started with bucketfulls of rain and is ending with sun. Shortly the child and I will go on a bike ride. We need to take advantage of every good day we have left to us in this summer.

I'm glad that we are taking this vacation. Especially because it is forcing me to close out some of my projects at work. It's been a busy summer, which has in no small way been responsible for it going by so fast.

Sorry, I know this is a lame post.
I will try to make it up later and post some pictures.

Rescripting

Summer is wizzing by at breakneck speed. I have not gotten out fishing again and August is halfway over. I spent part of yesterday afternoon visiting with mom at the hospital. There are rumors that she may have recovered to the point where she can be placed in a nursing home. It's hard to imagine that as an improvement on anyone's circumstances but in her case it is. The isolation and the amount of time she is spending alone is making her fuzzy around the edges, in a mental sense. I helped to sharpen her up by quizzing her on her sister's family. Who married who, who had what kids, which ones went to jail for writing bad checks, etc.

Well, I didn't ask about that last part, she just offered it up. The message is loud and clear to me that every day we have this woman around is a gift. She is not going to be able to answer these questions later, they need to be asked now, today. I have always been a bit of a genealogy buff, but this latest onset has come with a greater sense of urgency. The clock is ticking. And really there is no better time than when she is laid up with nothing to do. For a couple hours yesterday my mother had some purpose and was able to feel useful, which is something that she has not been able to do for quite some time.

I didn't get all the answers I wanted. There was a lot of grey area, but then again many of the facts I can get from my sisters. The point was to hear it from the horse's mouth. It is sad that the American cultural norm is to stick our elderly into storage, with little or no real mental stimulation. The mind dies off first, and the body lingers on like an unwelcome guest. I married into a culture that reveres their elderly and looks to them for wisdom and guidance. I get so caught up in my day to day life that more often than not I find myself more an American than the 'Filipino with a skin condition' that I boast of being. When I think of how much time I have let slip by, how many unanswered questions there are that I would like to ask my parents, I feel ashamed.

I thanked her for sharing and I promised to visit her again soon.

I meant it on both accounts.

With Both Hands

Preamble (10:00 AM):
Today will be my first attempt to angle for trout by fly. I have had most of the gear for years and I have never used it. I want to go fishing and there is no boat in my near future, thus today I will combine the traditional joys of fishing with the new challenge of fly casting, framed by a setting of solitude, hiking and QUIET. Well, not exactly quiet - There will be all those sounds that have been there in the background that I have conditioned myself to ignore and/or tune out: The sound of moving water, birds, bugs buzzing around my head, wind blowing through trees, even the sound of my own heartbeat. In the hustle, bustle, hurry and rush of life we lose those things. Well today I am going to grab on to them with both hands and take them back. That is what this day is all about.

Destination:
I am going to focus my efforts on exploring a branch of a large river system in Winona county. There is a lot of bank there for the walking, and hopefully I will be able to avoid the crowds.



Summary (11:00 PM)

Incidents & Encounters
The drive down south was not uneventful; as I made my way through the cities a rather large thunderstorm system fell upon me. Torrential rain and high winds did their best to stop me and did in fact slow me down considerably. Once out of the city and traffic, my journey was smooth. as paved roads gave way to gravel, my spirits began to rise as the reality that my time (for this afternoon at least) was my own. Lost in my thoughts I was barely able to slow down in time when a doe crossed the road in broad daylight. I rolled slowly past where she had come out of and sure enough I saw a confused fawn hiding in the trees. If I hadn't slowed down he might have tried to follow his mother and gotten creamed.

On the water - At last
With my late departure and storm delays, I did not reach my entry point until almost 2 PM. I had chosen a little county road where the bridge had been taken out, leaving a nice little dead-end. As I pulled in my heart sank as I saw three fellows sitting on the tailgate of their truck, eating sandwiches and chatting quietly. After determining that they were on their way out and not in, I geared up and headed down to the bank.

With no prior experience or mentorship with another trout fisherman, I really had no idea what I was doing. But I committed to doing it, whatever "it" turned out to be. I slowly made my way downstream, trying not to make a ruckus. The weeds were thick and almost as tall as me. in chestwaders I advanced with little fear of itchweed or ticks, leaving and rejoining the overgrown trail whenever it suited me. About 75 yards in I found a good-sized pool, about the size of a baseball diamond.

I was standing at home plate, and directly down stream on the opposite bank was second base, a small creek inlet. Third base was an outlet from the pool, a riffle where the river continued on it's way. First base, slightly downstream on the opposing bank, was a large tree with exposed roots hanging into the water. Directly in the center of the stream bed, lying at a right angle to the first base line, was a fallen tree, marking the entrance of the pool like a large exclamation point.

I stood there at home plate and took this all in. That's when I began to notice the risings. Small ones along the third base line, but the largest and most frequent over at first base by that big tree. At last, the game was afoot. I eased my way into the stream and cautiously made my way up the first base line. I stopped on my side of the fallen tree and as I did I noticed a handful of little trout scatter for the safety of the opposing bank. Fair enough. I waitied. I stood there quietly, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. Blend in with the woodwork, be part of the stream. Maybe not a welcomed part of it, but at least an accepted one. In time, the surfacings at first base resumed. So I am still in the game, I thought to myself. With my manueverings, first base was in easy reach.

My casting was terrible, a real mess. I started with a 14 Adams and over the course of 45 minutes or so I started to get the hang of things. Eventually I was able to get get the fly to land where I wanted it, without the tippet and the line crashing down on top of it and creating a terrible ruckus. Well, generally speaking, I guess. Finally I was able to serve one up right down the middle - The fly drifted lazily past first base and out toward second. Out of nowhere there was a small surge and my fly was gone. My reaction was too imediate and too powerful. I set the hook like I was after a dogfish and I jerked the fly right out of the fish's mouth. I repeated the cast precisely, and this time I did not miss. Unfortunately the fish was only on for about 5 seconds before the tippet snapped.

My only other Adams was a 12 and I quickly tied it on. A few minutes later and another solid hit. I was more careful and this time the fish stayed on for 10 seconds before the tippet snapped. As I stared at the stream in disbelief a brown trout jumped straight up into the air, arced about 3 feet above the water and gracefully swooped back into the water, nose first. I may not have been meant to catch that fish, but I was meant to see him and I could live with that. He never jumped again so I assume that he was able to disgorge my barbless hook.

Out of Adams of any size, I tried a couple of imposters with no luck. Remember, I basically had no idea what I was doing. I switched to a black Wooly bugger and afer a couple of casts my luck changed. The bugger was out of site when the strike occurred, but I could see the strike just fine by watching the end of my line. I set the hook carefully, mindful not to horse it too much. After a brief struggle I landed my first trout, a nine inch rainbow. He was hooked up into the eye socket, luckily with no apparent damage to the eye. The barbless hook came out easily.

As I let him go he took a quick barrel roll to the bottom of the stream, landing belly up. I was able to get a hold of him again and I gently cradled him, facing upstream so that the water flowed through his gills. After what seemed like a long time a puff of air came out of first his right gill and then his left. Then he seemed to perk up. His head started to move side to side and his tail started moving. At last he swam away slowly, off toward the dugouts. The game was over for him today. Not long after I caught another rainbow, this one smaller. he went straight back into the rotation with no troubles.

Not too long after that I wrapped my bugger around a high tree branch and that was the end of it. I tied on another and moved up to the pitchers mound to try my luck with second and third base, but they weren't buying what I was selling. Considering myself well ahead in the game, I wrapped it up and made my way back to the truck for some lunch on the tailgate.

Homeward Bound
Afterwards I tried other spots but I was unable to repeat my performance in the baseball diamond. When the shadows started getting long I packed up and headed back up to the city. I was content with the knowledge that for a few hours at least my worries had been pushed to the back of my mind. I had gone into the world and experienced the sensations that I had forgotten about - Sights and smells, not just sounds. Maybe most importantly I had heard the sound of my own heart beating once again.

A new Angle

I remember a time in my life when July was the funnest month of the year. This month has been anything but. My mom is still laid up in the hospital. At work I have several projects coming due at the same time. At home I have doors that won't latch and a steady stream of water coming out of the bottom of my furnace due to some central-air problem. And last friday the fuel pump on my truck went out, preventing me from taking a personal day on saturday to go fishing. It almost sounds like a country song of some kind. If my dog up and died on me I would be all set.

Then I watched a PBS documentary on Beslan this evening. There are many words that can describe the horror and the anguish that those families experienced last September, but I will not go into them here because I feel that by and large they have already been spoken and really it is not my place to weigh in when the people themselves did so very well. As a parent I was more focused on the faces, the voices and even the physical environment of the town of Beslan itself. I saw hard-working people, thin but not malnourished, living in a concrete and all-right angles sort of working class town. No sign of the flabby opulence that we Americans enshroud ourselves with.

If the 9/11 attacks could be summarized as an attack upon America's way of life, then Beslan could be summarized as an attack on the Russian people themselves. The men, women and children who were brutally murdered, the families which were shattered, all of these people were the salt of the earth, as far away from the cause of the Chechnyan conflict as you could ever hope to get. And my heart went out to them, because they were me, their children the same as my own child, just as innocent, just as precious, their lives just as valuable.

In short my viewing experience led to a paradigm shift for me, in terms of my perspective: My mom is getting first-rate health care. I have a secure job at a company with more work than it can handle. I own a home that can be cooled on my whim. In my household we not only own two vehicles so that we are never really stranded if one breaks down, but we also own them free and clear.

In short I got no complaints.

Fresh from the garden

These photos were taken out on the patio earlier tonight:

My job, in a nutshell

I got nuthin'

I tried to write something tonight but it looked like something you'd find dried to the bars on a monkey cage. Work came down on me with full force today and I realized that if I intend to take my job seriously this summer it is not going to be a whole lot of fun. Realizations like that tend to take a lot out of you.

With that in mind I'm going to post anyway and use a photo as a crutch for this anemic content offering. Here's a picture I recently took of the wife and child in the car:

The tendency to remain at rest

I don't use drugs anymore. I watch documentaries. There are more similarities between the two than I would care to admit. We could agrue back and forth regarding self-induced enlightenment and it wouldn't change the fact that I spent a good portion of this evening on my butt in the house, instead of outside enjoying the glorius summer evening with my family. That's a choice that I made and the more that I think about it the more it bugs me that I didn't even really think about it before I made it. I just went with the flow, which in turn washed me up on the couch.

The child is now at the age where he is starting to store long-term memories - More impressions and feelings at this point of course, but then again these earliest impressions are the foundations for how we develop into thinking and feeling people. It seems readily apparent to me that I would much rather have his mental imagery of me to be that of a gentle giant, looking down at him from a sunny blue sky, framed by large cumulus clouds. Not a distracted fixture in the living room, entranced by the incessant drone of the history channel or the like.

I'm probably being harder on myself than I need to be, but I am having a moment of clarity that I would like to carry over into the choices that I make tomorrow and beyond. I want to remember this feeling and carry it into my decision making process, and I resolve to get my body into motion

Angry Skies, Switzerland in flames

It stormed here tonight:







After dinner I tried to lull the child into a false sense of security with a Barney video while I cut his hair. He saw right through it and what followed was nothing short of a wholesale scalping. I think that he has finally reached the age where he has found the notion of me trying to trick him insulting. That or the intrusion upon the sanctity of a Barney video. Like bombing Switzerland or something.

He's in bed now.
All's well that ends well:



Not bad considering he was a moving target.

In the key of "Dee"

An interesting article about some friends of mine:

Study: Chickadee chirps complex code

Can't take it with you

A rare weekend post. This afternoon I showed up early at church for P&W rehearsal. Actually I was right on the money at 3:00 but I forgot to take 'Filipino time' into account and went off to kill a half hour before my bandmates arrived.

I ended up at an estate sale up the street from the church, where I had been lured in by the sight of a 14' alumacraft fishing boat on a trailer. As it turns out that was about the most alluring thing to be found. There were a few power tools but they were borderline antique and genuinely frightening in the condition of their cords - mummified in electrician's tape, no original plugs.

All of the furniture and gadgetry was well-worn and not of any real value. That is to say there were no real treasures to be found there. The purpose of the sale was just the transfer of junk from one person to the next, the distillation of a lifetime's accumulation of crap. Whoever owned all of this stuff was either dead or as good as gone. Either way their stuff was on the block and it was runing out the door in 1 and 5 dollar increments.

I went out back and made my way to the tool shed. There was a nice lawn boy mower in there but there was no price on it. On my way back I looked the yard over - Overgrown and disrepair. Everything pointed to grandma in the nursing home or grandpa buried about three weeks ago. I'll never know the story behind all of that junk because I left without asking.

On my way down the driveway I saw the last thing which really drove it all home: A row of four suitcases, standing at meek attention, waiting for new owners. Whoever lived in this house was long gone, and wherever they went they didn't need their luggage. Death is that big trip we all have booked; and when we go we will all be travelling light.

I went back to the church and jammed with my friends. As we played my mind moved away from morbid thoughts as the music moved through us. Later I went outside and basked in the warmth of the sun. I closed my eyes and listened to the drone of insects and inhaled the sweet aroma of purple coneflowers. Life may be a finite thing, but it is nothing short of glorius.

Iced Mud

Observation:
A Terry-boo(tm) iced coffee is not as good as Starbucks when it is made with Folgers...

Reality:
I am continuing in my low-budget endeavor by taking lunch at my desk. I didn't write a blessed thing yesterday but rather spent my lunch hour surfing, which is something tht I don't do when I am at Starbucks. I did find a new BWCA-related web log called the dharma blog. Add to that Lileks, Seth Godin, Slashdot and the Register, and you pretty much have my reading list. I do skim the top headlines at CNN and get my local news from the Strib. For pinoy headlines I use INQ7.

I like the dharma blog because A) the author seems to be on a similar wavelength in terms of what we appreciate about the outdoors, and B) He's got a lot of back material for me to read. Since the early stages of parenthood have limited my ability to get out to the woods, his writing is a good fix for what I'm jonesing for.

On a related note I think that this will be the weekend that I set up the tent in the back yard and start broadening the child's horizons. Also, I need to set a date with the guys for our all-day fishing trip (Maybe either 7/2 or 7/9). For long term, I need to set in motion the plan for acquiring a canoe. It looks to me like the only way I'll be able to swing it is if I liquidate the truck and get a beater (Not that the truck isn't much more than a year or two away from being a beater now). The canoe that I have my eye on? It's right here.

OK, this has turned into a to-do list instead of a posting. I will write more soon.

Office Observations

A bad work environment is like a captivity narrative, where the workplace is represented by the prison and the boss by the tyrannical warden. Except in this prison there are no bars on the windows and the cells have no doors. What keeps us inside? Our own motives - We need the money to pay for all of our stuff, we need the experience, we need to advance our career, etc. Two things to note here - We keep ourselves locked up, and everyone's motives are a little different than that of their colleagues.

My world war 2 generation parents taught me that you get yourself a job, you stick with it for 30 or 40 years and then you retire. The ongoing trend in today's society is to bounce from job to job, looking for that greener pasture. While it does make sense to me that one should transfer to a nicer prison whenever a cell becomes available, it seems to me that a large portion of the restlessness and unhappiness of my generation can be attributed to the fact that no matter what prison we serve our time in, we drag those bars along with us. The intensification of materialism has made it difficult to find jobs that compensate enough to pay for all of the stuff that we want.

I'm not harping against materialism, because I like stuff as much as anyone, and I'm always interested in accumulating more. But the next time that you find yourself complaining about your job, ask yourself this:

Does the problem really lie with your job, or does it lie with the things that keep you at your job?

Been gone

I have been doing a bit of off line writing which I may post later. It's been a heck of a month for any of you familiar with my mother's health issues. Hopefully I will have more later.

Projecting to the Future

The child and I played last night, one of our favorite games is for me to cover up with a blanket and to crawl around in the living room on all fours while he jumps on top of me. I feign injury and begin to crawl on my belly, still under the blanket. At this point he sits on the blanket and gets towed around, giggling his head off.

He's big enough now that I can let him ride on my shoulders without worrying about him falling off - A healthy respect for gravity is a good indicator for maturity.

I called home shortly before lunchtime and it sounds like the child is well on the mend. His rash (Reacted to antibiotics) is clearing, he is in good spirits and does not have a fever. This is all a very positive change from Monday, when he looked like a pissed off 102 degree strawberry.

Anyway I wanted to get some of this down because I have been failing to chronicle the child's existence and here he is over two years old. I'll never know what I was like as a two-year old, and I will certainly never know what it was like for my dad to be a 37-year old. The files are burned, the tapes are erased, the neighbors moved out with no forwarding address.

Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? All good questions. I may never know all the answers but I intend to kill some trees in the attempt.

Helpless

I cannot think of a good starting point.

I have been trying to define my current emotion and I cannot do it. Concerned for my mother? Yes, even worried. But at her age and at this point in her life I know that her recovery depends on both her will and God's will, far more than the army of nurses and Doctors that are tending to her. Does that comfort me, or put me at ease? Not really. Firstly I don't know about mom. I get the feeling that she has about had it and is ready for the next step. I suspect that she felt like her number was up back in '89 when she beat breast cancer. 'Beat.' Ask anybody who has survived breast cancer (Specifically via mastectomy) and you'll know that you don't really 'beat' breast cancer. Even if they get all the cancer, once those lymph nodes are gone your life changes forever. Mom has had a good life and has been pretty much able to do whatever she wanted for most of it. But now with thetracheostomy it is like the curtain has been pulled back and everyone can see the remainder of her life laid out for her. Assisted living at best, quite possibly a nursing home. But that's assuming that she makes it through the pneumonia. But that's up to God. And mom.

My current emotion is "Helpless."

Boat Dreams

It's been unseasonably cold and rainy -- It's gonna be cold all weekend. Do I wish that I was going to spend it freezing my butt off in a boat trying to catch some walleyes? You bet I do. Whether it's the child growing up or my father-in-law finally getting over here from the Philippines, sooner or later there will be more male fishermen in the family and the wife will no longer be able to put the kibosh on fishing trips. In the mean time I need to obtain said boat. I'm pretty sure that my sister would sell me dad's old boat - I know that she isn't using it and plus she could use the money. The question is how/where do I get the money. I am caught in a paradox where I never go fishing because I don't have a boat and I don't own a boat because I never go fishing. But I do know one thing - Time is flying by at an alarming rate. I can feel my body aging right out from under me. I better hatch a plan soon for getting out on the water, and taking that boy of mine with me. Or else the next thing I know I will be 79 years old and it will be too late.

Mom - Out of surgery

Mom came out of surgery OK yesterday. She now has a tube that goes directly into her windpipe through the front of her throat. What I didn't understand before was due to ignorance and lack of observation. The woman's mouth was open for 10 straight days with a friggin tube going down into her windpipe - Some pretty uncomfortable stuff. When I saw her after the surgery I could see inside her mouth. The whole thing looked like one big wound. One of her teeth broke in the ordeal so there was talk of bringing in an oral surgeon to make sure that she doesn't have any infected teeth. Anyway she is resting today, still heavily sedated.

On top of all that I replaced the water pump on my truck yesterday. GM made it look deceptively easy - Just remove the cowl and the fan and you're home free -- Except that they made the hoses a real bitch by sticking them real close together. Plus the manifolds are obscured by the mounting brackets for the alternator and the air conditioner. I had to clean them off using a mirror. The whole job was so messy that I couldn't really tell if my work was leaky or if I was simply dripping some of the antifreeze that got everywhere while I was doing the job. This is pretty much why I never go into details when the wife asks me how my day went.

Speaking of the wife, she has a huge project launching at work and will be working late tonight, which means that the child and I will be bachelors.

Mom

Mom has been in ICU on a ventilator for 9 days now with no real change - Her lungs are still congested. Tomorrow at 4:30 she is going to undergo a tracheotomy so that they can get that tube out of her mouth.

Sore ears

Resting pulse: 72 bpm

I skipped sit ups again last night. We got a DSL at home and I shunned physical activity for pimping out my information superhighway ride. I got to bed around the same time as normal, and inside sources say that I tossed and turned a lot.

The child is sick. Ear infections, both ears. He's on antibiotics and not a happy camper. He has been on oral antibiotics, which haven't been helping. He was at the pediatrician today - he got a shot and a prescription for some ear drops. We are going back again tomorrow.

It's a beautiful day so I'm leaving work shortly to enjoy the sunshine on my drive home. When I get there I will have a sick boy on my hands but at least after he goes to sleep I will have lightning speed internet access. Have a great weekend.

Slow Climb

Resting Pulse: 68 bpm

I noticed an improvement last night. I still had to walk when my heart reached trip hammer status, but what I noticed was that the acceleration from resting to trip hammer was more gradual. My legs are still sensitive to the trauma when I run, so I am still using the fast/slow cycle that I described a couple of days ago. That seems to have paid off as well, as overall my legs feel pretty decent today.

Uneven Tire Wear

Resting Pulse: 70 bpm

I was lazy last night, didn't do my sit ups. Tonight I will run again.

I have been studying up on the wear of my shoes and see that I am an underpronator.

According to what I have read, how your feet feel and how you walk on them has a lot to do with how the rest of you feels. I am going to set up a meeting with a podiatrist and have my feet looked at.

Stop & Slow

Resting pulse: 70 bpm

Things are still coming slowly. I have slow down to walk during my runs and my shins are sore the next day. I have reverted back to a strategy that got me through 7th grade cross Country- I pick a landmark and run until I reach it. Then I pick out another landmark and continue walking until I reach it and then start running again and repeat the cycle. It's probably not a pretty sight but what it does allow me to do is keep moving and keep my heart rate up there without bursting the sucker out of my chest. Also it allows me to exceed my comfort level with my legs slowly instead of one big cataclysmic sprint which ends in me vowing to never try this again.

Until I get into better shape I'll just have to stick with it and do what I can.

Beat counts

Resting pulse: 72 bpm

I have taken to checking my pulse in the morning at work. I didn't run last night but will tonight. Also now that I don't spend the next day feeling like I was kicked in the ribs, I am also going to increase my situp count.

Quality of Life

I am not going to weigh in on the whole Schiavo deal because most people already have their opinion on the whole thing. One fat white guy's opinion isn't going to make much of a difference. But there is one thing that sticks in my craw and that is the notion that death by dehydration and starvation could possibly be considered a "calm, peaceful and gentle death." Life means different things to different people. Whether or not you view life as a gift from God has a lot to do with how willing you are to throw it away. Don't hold your breath waiting for the Pope's feeding tube to be removed any time soon.

Tonight I learned that one of my former Cub Foods colleagues committed suicide back in February. He was 41 years old, a husband, a father of two, with both parents still alive. I hadn't seen or heard from him in years and obviously have no idea what could have been so wrong that he would have killed himself. And it's not something that I want to understand. Life is just too good right now to even imagine wanting to end it prematurely.

As I spent my spare moments this past winter poking at my flabby white belly, the realization slowly dawned on me that I am carrying around my waist roughly the same weight and bulk as my two year old son. I set two goals for myself and they are simple ones: Fit into my 2002 clothing by spring and fit into my 2000 clothing by fall. I have actually been employing my methods for a few weeks already- I completely stopped drinking pop and started carrying around a bottle of water wherever I go. For treats I will drink green tea or coffee. Also I have seriously cut back on sweets. I have cut back my starch intake (No easy task when you are married to a filipina who serves rice with everything, and most importantly I started excercising. I do situps at night before bed and tonight for the first time in ages I went jogging. As I anticipated, it was quite an unpleasant experience. I irritated portions of my lungs that I forgot that I even had. My legs don't feel that bad all things considered. But then again this first time out I only went .5 miles and had to stop three times. For those of you who are fit & trim and just don't get it, try strapping a 40 pound bag of salt pellets around your waist and then running around the block.

Well I am off to bed now, there's still one more workday yet this week. I imagine by the time I wake up all the joints in my legs will feel like they are constructed of broken glass.

Loose Ends

Sheesh. Another week goes by. March is practically shot, isn't it?

Mom got out of the nursing home last week. She's at home with dad. I don't think things will ever be back to the way that they were, but at least now they are back together. I don't think I could live away from the wife for three months. I think that would be worse than the stay in the nursing home.

We were supposed to get the motherload of snow today. Apparently down south they are, but here in the western suburbs (I'm at work right now) nary a flake. I suppose by tomorrow we will be lucky to find a hard frost on the ground.

After work tonight I am dropping by Mama & Papa Olojan's and dropping off Papa's La'ud. Last night I restrung it for him so that he can sound good at Philipine day at the Landmark Center this coming Sunday.

Mama & Papa are going back to the Philippines in April. When the come back they are bringing me a laud of my own. Hopefully Papa will teach me a few songs.

Have a great weekend.

Surmounted by work

Sorry for the unannounced Hiatus,
I will try to be back in force next week.

Have a great weekend.

Intangibles

I'm glad that I'm writing like this but man, I gotta tell you that there is a lot in my memory banks and I just don't know how to write it down into any context. I am a cornucopia of stories that contain no ascertainable point. Neither concrete starting points nor tangible endings. It isn't really that I don't have anything to write about. It's just that I struggle with finding a centralized point. Kind of like a truck with a bad drag link, wobbling down the road.

Perhaps a nihilist would jump in here and offer this diatribe up as proof that life is full of pointless moments, grouped together into larger, equally pointless coexistences. I am not a member of that camp, although in the past I have warmed myself by their fire from time to time. Most days (and today is no exception) I feel that there is great signifigance not only to to our lives but even to every little mundane moment that the things are made from. It's on days like today that I look at the apparent pointlessness of a nondescript moment in time, any given moment in my day, and say, "OK, so the significance of this moment is not readily apparent, but I trust that it will be revealed to me in time."

I think that most people can agree that this is one of the rewards that we anticipate upon reaching Heaven. We of course dread the moment when our sins are revealed and we are held accountable, but we are also dying of curiosity to see the final numbers on how much time we spent sleeping or waiting for the bus, how many hot dogs we ate, the actual mileage between each and every oil change and how many times we swallowed our gum vs. folding it neatly into the wrapper & throwing it away.

We wonder about things like these because life is cumulative. One of the hardest things in life is when we outlive our ability to maintain our own residence. When you have to get rid of your possessions in order to fit into a nursing home you are getting rid of more than just things. You are getting rid of the physical components of your collective history here on earth. Or perhaps in more direct terms you are destroying the evidence that you were ever here. We are more than happy to replace or upgrade our stuff- Cars, houses, golf clubs, etc., but nobody really wants to take a loss. That's pretty much why nobody wants to buy what nursing homes and planned retirement communities are selling. It's like conceding to our eventual defeat.

This of course is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the Christian faith. I cannot honestly say that I have truly denied myself, not even just a little. I will close this rant today by declaring my intention to confront my own obsession with my belongings by by getting rid of something(s) that I have been hoarding for no good reason. I may not need to find significance in my life by understanding every single moment of it, but I have at least learned enough from the example of my parents to know that the sum total of my life's meaning cannot be defined by how much crap I have in my basement.

All the difference

A fresh blanket of snow today. Just a smidge; an inch, no more. still, enough to foul up traffic. It hasn't really melted yet so today the world is a silver lining to a sky full of clouds.

I think that the most picturesque snowscapes that I have seen have all been up around the north shore. I remember a grouse hunting trip with my friends on an old logging road a few miles west of Isabella, at the tail end of a lake effect snowstorm. About 6 inches of the stuff had come down. It started wet and as it slowly turned cold the snow began clinging to the trees, powerlines and virtually everything that it touched. It looked as if God had cast the likeness of the world in silver and given my friends and me free run of it. We began walking down a promising trail that quickly forked. According to our maps it rejoined, so we parted ways. My friends and the dog continued to the south and I went alone to the southeast.

The sky was clearing as we did this, and as I walked alone I looked up at the trees that towered above me. It was if I had wandered into the world's largest cathedrel, for in every direction that I looked I saw a more breathtaking stained glass window than the last, filled with the blue of the sky, the dark green of Norway pines and the golden glow of sunshine, framed behind the snow-covered branches. This was no man-made temple yet I worshipped there all the same, silently thanking God for the scene around me. Beauty of this kind is no accident.

As I slowly walked along the sun began to gradually warm the branches above me, starting a secondary snowfall in the woods as the trees began to groggily shake off the sediment. Chickadees and red squirrels were on the move now, quickly getting back to the daily business of winter foraging.

As the two roads slowly rejoined the dog came to greet me. A few more steps around the bend and I was reunited with my comrades. As we plodded back to the truck I wondered to myself what their experience had been like. I had no doubt that they had seen the same sunlight, blue sky, evergreens and snow-covered branches, but I wondered if they had really seen these things as I had.

As we pulled away to find another trail I thanked God again, this time for a safe hunt and for good friends with whom to share the beauty of the woods. We'd shared an experience, even if we had walked down seperate paths. I will always treasure the memory of taking the road less travelled that frosty late autumn morning.

Owl be back

I am having more outdoor urges today. Partly because it is sunny and warm, partly because the wife read my desperate plea for help from last friday and suggested that we could "maybe" go somewhere this spring. Wherever it is I hope that they have trees. Of course stories like this also get me itchy to go into the woods. Owls large enough to carry away children and small livestock. Sign me up!

I don't know what it is about owls that captures my imagination. As a toddler the story goes that whenever we drove past a red owl store I would get excited and point up at the sign. My Red Owl obsession was apparently acute enough that my grandmother took notice and made a Red Owl pillow for me. At the farm where my grandparents lived there was a wooded pasture inhabited by a great horned owl. I canot recall if I ever actually saw the bird myself, but what I do recall is that I had some very wild ideas about the appearance of any creature with the words "Great," "Horned" and "Owl" in their name. I envisioned some sort of ultrabird, a super-owl. Perhaps a man-sized owl with horns like a bull. In the mythology of my childhood the great horned owl that lived in my grandparents' pasture was like a flying minataur. Except instead of being mean he was wise, of course. Not just because he was an owl, either. this creature had decided to live on my grandparent's farm and to me that seemed like a pretty wise move on the owl's part.

These days I take in information and it just sits in my head like the wool fluff that you find in a pillow. I look back to those days and I reallize that the way a child can take that wool fluff and spin it into a golden tapestry, designed to suit their entertainment needs. It's a lost art, insofar as we all have it and by growing up we lose it. Day-to-day living, task-oriented activities, and duty-Duty-DUTY suck the creativity out of us, until we can scarcely remember what it was like to think like a kid.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but very soon I will return to the woods and look for my old friend the great horned owl.

Bad Physics, Worse Theology

The midwinter 'Blah's' continue to hang over my head like an apathetic grey cloud. Life has consisted mostly of day-to-day living lately. Oh, I got a haircut over the weekend. Film at 11.

The wife and I went to see "Constantine" last night. My review, in two words: Don't. Bother. It is more or less accepted in this day and age that the world portrayed in Hollywood adheres to different physics laws than our own. And it's certainly not uncommon to find movies with Christian theology that does not match the bible. But to find a movie that uses bad physics AND bad theology, well that is really something.

There are so many ways that I could rip this movie:

-The dialogue (Reeve's deadpan 'reading off a cuecard' voice, reciting moronic lines, such as "God is just a kid with an antfarm")

-The hokey props (At one point Reeves beats the crap out of a demon using a set of "Holy" brass knuckles)

-The character flaws (Satan knows and shows up exactly when Reeve's character is going to die, yet somehow he is unaware of a ritual to bring his son into the world without his consent, taking place in the next room, even though every demon in the greater LA area seems to be in on it.)

Yes, I could rip this movie but I would hardly know where to begin. Plus my midwinter lethergy leaves me not caring enough to really try. But in closing I will say this about "Constantine": I have never seen a movie where the angelic and demonic beings were dressed more stylishly.

Away for too long

I have to say that I miss it outside. Oh sure, you could say that I go outside all the time, if you count each time I scamper from the car to the door of an office or a shopping mall. But that would be like counting mold in your refrigerator as a houseplant.

I miss the sky overhead, from horizon to horizon, the wind on my face and the sound of a lake lapping in the summer or booming in the winter. I miss the jiggle of a peat bog under my feet, the smell of dead leaves and the aroma of pine needles. I miss walking through the woods and witnessing the living tapestry of fugi, lichen and moss. I miss the companionship of chickadees, singing in my ear and hopping from branch to branch as I make my way along the trail. I miss the raucous chattering of red squirrels, the hooting of owls and the chortling of loons. I miss the playful antics of chipmunks and the elusive tactics of the whitetail deer.

I've loved the forests and lakes since I was old enough to walk or swim in them. Even when I was young and the woods were a place full of witches, wolves and monsters I loved them, because they were also a place full of Fairies, leprechauns and dancing gingerbread men. As a youngster lakes filled me with a sense of trepidation as I imagined scaled beasts, swimming through the very waters I swam in. In my adolescence lakes filled me with a sense of thrill at the notion of scaled beasts, swimming through the very waters I dangled my hook in.

I remember the sense of loss I felt each time a weekend or vacation concluded, and how that feeling turned to longing as I waited for the next adventure to begin. Somehow the longer that you stay away from something the more that sense of longing diminishes, until one day you discover that you haven't really been outside in months.

Perchance to Dream

Lately I have been getting better doses of sleep. By and large the child sleeps throughout the night- in the evening after he has given way to slumber you could drive a marching band on a parade float powered by a four-barrel Hemi with an overhead cam and glasspacks through his room and he wouldn't wake up. In the morning when it's time to get up he will actually turn away from me and pull the covers up over his head.

But there is a window between Midnight and 4AM where he will kick his covers off, get cold and then start to whine. If one of us doesn't go and cover him up within a short period of time he will slowly escalate, whipping himself up into a larger and larger froth until he is comforted. This behavior has long since been understood by us and has caused us to hone our subconscious auditory reflexes to the point where we can sense his distress, tend to his needs and (generally) return to our bed without waking up. By "generally" I mean that in this condition we are vulnerable to diversion.

I woke up at 2AM last night in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. Apparently I had decided to get a jump on getting ready for work. I groggily returned to bed, where within 30 seconds another whine came out of the baby monitor.

Wife: "Did you check the baby?"
Me (Uncertainly): "Um, yes?"
Wife: "Was he wet?"
Me: "Huh?"
Wife: "Did his diaper leak?"
Me: "I don't think so..."
Wife: "Did you check?"
Me: "Um, yes?"

More whines from the baby monitor, more insistent this time. The wife lets out a heavy sigh, gets out of bed and shuffles down the hall, muttering. And returns a short time later, with minty breath.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that throughout our conversation I was having a dream that she was Curious George and that child was actually a large pineapple wearing Buddy Holly glasses. That sort of thing never translates well to rational speech and I'm short enough on credibility in this department as it is.

We fell back to sleep facing each other and dreamed of creme de menthe sea turtles, crawling across turquoise beaches.

Routines

One thing about trying to write every single day is that it's sometimes difficult to find a "Jumping in" point. This differs from college days, because now so much of life is routine. Because I am sitting here with a finite number of lunch minutes remaining and I don't have the slightest idea what to write about, I will chronicle my daily routine.

5AM the alarm goes off. Re-set to 5:45, go back to sleep. 5:45, hit the snooze button. 5:56, the bedroom lights go on. Spend the next hour preparing lunches and grooming. Out the door by 7. Remember clothes, go back in the house and get dressed. Out the door by 7:12. Drop the wife off downtown and take the child to Mama & Papa Olojans. Drop him off there, outwardly happy that he is in good hands and quite content, secretly sad that when I go he doesn't share my anguish or engage in any fussing. (That's right, he's well-behaved and it bothers me) Scamper into work around 8:15 or so. Meetings, QA on my projects, assign new tasks to staff members.

Lunch. Coffee or Tea at a local shop and a sandwich from home. Sometimes when I am in the middle of a big project I will take lunch at my desk, hunkered down like I'm in my own private bunker, waiting out a shelling raid. I am trying to make a point of getting out of the office over my lunch hour these days. It's a good time to detach from work and engage in some writing. Like this journal, for example. I can't break free from ink and paper, thus this web log is a transcribed version of my treeware journal.

Afternoons are spent either in meetings or else reviewing staff assignments and/or creating more. When I say that my time is "Spent" in a meeting I mean that it is spent like a roll of quarters in an arcade: Time has passed and I've come away with nothing to show for it. Dilbert says that a meeting is when a group of people that you believe are intelligent and well-meaning get together to prove you wrong.

Come 5PM I desperately try to cram one more hour of work into thirty minutes. 5:30 or so I leave the office and cross town to pick up the wife. Together we go and reunite with our son. We go home and it is playtime, some dinner, a few books or a bath and it's off to bed for the child. An hour or two later and it's the same for us.

I could probably squeeze more time out of the day if I slept less or I did not enjoy the company of my family. But as it stands I need my sleep and I love my family. With that in mind I guess it shouldn't bother me if my entries are a little boring.

I must go now and consider the best possible method to become independently wealthy.

Evil Pods

Winter and Spring are playing chicken with each other. A warm day, followed by some snow, washed down with some rain. Repeat cycle. February is like a bipolar illusionist, messing with our collective minds. All you can do is wait him out. The good news is that we are over halfway to March, so it's all downhill from here.

Last Saturday we took care of our taxes; and by "We" and "take care of our taxes" I mean that I pushed the child around Southdale mall while the wife sat with our accountant. Lest you think that I was the one to get off easy I would mention that the child was in a foul mood; We were in a condition that I will from here on refer to as 'Shark mode' - Stop moving and you die.

I stopped by the Mac store. Every time I'm in that place it's the same thing- I am a leper PC user browsing in their midst. Before I can look around I have to scan the crowd and see if Lileks or any of my clients from Magnetic Poetry are there. I browse with the trepidation of that moment when one of the folks from Magpo appears out of nowhere, pointing at me and shrieking a la "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Lileks doesn't know me so I wouldn't expect him to recognize me. Still if he pointed at me and shrieked I wouldn't be suprised. I reek of PC's.

It's not my fault that I am enamored with the photo Ipod. But for the money I might as well save for this pocket PC. Star Trek never anticipated that the communicator and the tricorder might get morphed into one device. Why do you think that Geordi had one? He needed something to carry around all his his George Clinton tunes.

Raw Determination

Not only is truth stranger than fiction, in this case it is also a better story than anything I could have written on my own. What worries me is that I think Joshua is at least as smart as this kid. By the time he's 4 we will need to keep him away from helicopters and tanks.


(Copied from startribune.com)

4-Year-Old Mich. Boy Drives Mother's Car
Associated Press
February 8, 2005 0208AP-YOUNG-DRIVER

SAND LAKE, Mich. (AP) - A boy drove his mother's car to a video store in the middle of the night, police said - and he's all of 4 years old.

Even though he was unable to reach the accelerator, the boy managed to put the car in gear and the idling engine provided enough power to take him slowly to the store, a quarter-mile from his home, about 1:30 a.m. Friday, Police Chief Doug Heugel said. Finding the store closed, the youngster began a slow trip home.

Weaving and with its headlights off, the car got the attention of police Sgt. Jay Osga, who initially thought he was following a driverless car that had taken off after being left running at a gas pump.

The car turned into the boy's apartment complex and struck two parked cars, then backed up and struck Osga's police car.

That's when Osga discovered the boy inside.

"He knew how to go from forward to reverse," Osga said Monday. "The mother said she taught him how to drive by letting him sit on her lap and steer."

No charges will be filed against the boy or his mother, Heugel said.

"He's 4 years old. His mom didn't even know he was up," Heugel told The Grand Rapids Press. "I don't think he even realizes what he did."