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?