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.

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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.