Archive for April 2011
Once Again
Just one more look at Sunday’s sunny pansies before the next spring snow storm rolls through tonight to paint everything white again for a few hours. The other day, as I picked out the shirt I was going to wear to work, I mentioned to Cyndie that I was going with my “spring” shirt, as I pulled out my flannel black & gray plaid number. It might look a lot like my winter shirt, but it is a versatile one that works just as well for a Minnesota spring. I’m going to be putting my chopper mittens back in the car before I head out to work today.
Quick Change
The nice thing about spring snow is that it doesn’t last long. Saturday was cloudy and snowy, Sunday turned out sunny and nice.
Ian, Cyndie spoke about thinking of you while she was transplanting some pansies she bought from a garden store. I finally got out on the back deck in the warm sun and returned to my long-dormant bracelet sculpting project. As the chilly breeze was moving across my ankles, I thought about the high heat you have described in Portugal already. We are a long way from that. But we will soon be able to work on the landscape around our house.
We can’t get started on planting much yet as our forecast for the coming week calls for low temperatures overnight near or below freezing. Cold morning temperatures like that are enough to keep me from wanting to start riding my bicycle to work yet. Luckily, I’m prepared to return to exercising my ankle with morning indoor futsal matches starting today.
That isn’t really a quick change, but at least it is change in the desired direction.
Ahhh, Spring
Spring in Minnesota does often look like this. Yesterday morning we awoke to the much more monochromatic vista of snow, instead of the bursting colors of spring.
I find it interesting to witness what it does to people’s psyche. I’m not sure if it is that they fail to understand the inevitability of such weather or just allow themselves to be bluffed that snow is done when the first days of sun and 70° finally arrive.
I do admit, that even I have caught myself wanting to remove the chopper mittens and window scraper from my car on those hot, sunny spring days that cause so many people to think snow is done and gone. Full disclosure: I took the mittens out… but, left the scraper in.
It’s not so bad if you mentally prepare yourself for the inevitable weather back-slide that briefly interrupts what we perceive as truly defining spring. Spring snow is incredibly beautiful. Depending on your perspective, I guess.
Explain the incredible beauty to the worm…
Memory Party
It’s like a high school reunion, only different. Every year around this time, a group of people who once worked at the same company gather at a pub to check out where the world has taken everyone and to revisit a range of memories. I left that company over 12 years ago after 18 good years of employment. I met some of the smartest people I have ever worked with during those years and I experienced valuable friendships. It is very rewarding to again be able to see some of the people from that time in my life.
I find it puzzling that my memory comes up so absolutely blank on a person that I recognize; someone who I know I had a fair amount of interaction with, and especially for someone I particularly remember liking. I wonder if it had anything to do with the name not being unusual. Last night, it was Jeff, from the Software department. I needed to ask, as embarrassing as that can be, but then we were able to relive some fun, shared recollections of a project we worked together on.
I found myself telling the story of recently cutting off my dreadlocks, and sharing details of Cyndie’s and my adventure of traveling to Portugal to work with Ian and his family at their Forest Garden Estate. I fear that my stories, which are so darn much fun for me to relive, probably go on a little bit longer than my audience really cares to hear. Kind of like my writing sometimes, I suppose. At least here, you have the ability to skim over segments of my excessive verbosity. In person, people have to resort to excusing themselves to use the restroom or needing to go get another beer at the bar.
My memory got some good exercise last night, which is just what I needed. It’s the only exercise I’ve had since I sprained my ankle. It also was the kind of party that provides a real energizing afterglow; also something I needed to help break the sense of exhaustion that the long, hard days in the trenches of the day-job have been dishing out lately.
Speaking of which, even though it’s Saturday, back in the trenches is just where you’ll find me today. Workin’ another Saturday.
My memory tells me there was a time I had weekends off. Ah, those were the good ol’ days.
What Routine?
I have taken a break from playing soccer for over a week and a half to give my sprained ankle time to heal. Yesterday, I noticed the ankle was feeling mostly pain-free and decided it should be ready to do a little running and kicking again.
When I sat for a short while last night, upon finishing a late dinner, after a very long and taxing day at work, I was overwhelmed with exhaustion. I could hardly keep my eyes open. So, my ankle feels ready to go, but the rest of me is too fatigued to give it the support it needs, especially in a return effort from injury. I elected to sleep the extra two hours and wait until Monday to start playing again.
It is amazing how much effort it takes to maintain the routine of staying fit. A little hitch in the program and it can be like climbing mountains to get back to my pre-injury regimen.
Meanwhile, each day that I delay beginning my cycling season, makes me feel more anxious about getting that passion re-started. Sometimes I wonder if I will remember how to ride a bike. I’m hoping it’s been more a function of the weather than my body’s readiness. A nice, calm, warm sunny day will do wonders for my motivation. It will be really helpful if that occurs on a Saturday or Sunday, too. The day-job is consuming a lot of the daylight hours, and most of my energy, lately.
I think I’ll just go back to remembering when I was a boy, and the oodles of free time I enjoyed, riding my bike for hours and hours of care-free fun. Wasn’t that a healthy routine? Too bad thinking about it doesn’t do anything to strengthen my legs and harden my butt to the pressure of that saddle.
I’m clinging to the wisdom that, once over that initial mountain, it is all smooth, pleasant sailing.
What routine? That routine!
Cyndie’s Home!
And you didn’t even realize she was gone. Even though she travels often for work, this last week and a half away from home seemed like a long absence to me. It included a spell where she was off the communication grid, unreachable through all our usual electronic means. Cyndie spent a week in Arizona studying for an apprenticeship in Epona Equestrian therapy techniques. Last night she shared amazing stories of energy interactions with horses. I am awed by her intuitive abilities, and pleased to hear about her connections achieved with the horses and the new friendships she made with other people studying at the ranch during the week.
Her tales consumed my attention and left me short of conjuring up any other writing of my own. I don’t know if I can do her stories justice, but I’ll take a crack at one to give you a taste of what I heard.
Here is a picture of one of the horses she worked with in Arizona. Coincidentally, this horse is named, Cindy. Does it show that the horse is 35-years-old? During an exercise of meeting the herd, Cyndie was instructed to approach the horses at the door of their stable and non-verbally connect with them to gain information about the horse or about herself. The horses had fly-screens on their heads at the time, which covered their eyes from view. After human-Cyndie conveyed her thoughts to horse-Cindy, non-verbally asking if there was anything else to know, Cyndie felt a very clear headache across her forehead and a pain in her eye.
After each person shared the information gathered from their initial meetings, the trainer responded with details about each horse. It just so happens that horse-Cindy had recently banged her head into a door and had a swollen eye.
What a treat it is to have Cyndie home!
More Remembering
Continuing on a theme I started yesterday, I am enjoying remembering being a little boy. Also, I like inspiring my siblings’ memories with snapshots from our past. In honor of the start of baseball season, I dug up this little gem.
I think I was being groomed early on to be a Twins fan. Don’t I just look extraordinarily excited for the season to be underway? My family will remember that spot as the stairs leading up to the center circle of the driveway on the farm. They will also probably recall that my apparent glee of that moment was likely short lived, and I would have found something to brood about soon after.
I loved playtime of my youth. And what a playground we had on that farm. Riding my tricycle on that long driveway. Digging in the dirt of the center circle to play with my toy trucks. Going on adventures down to the chestnut tree or the old tennis court. The chicken coop that had been turned into a clubhouse. The barns. The back yard where we had worn out our own ‘home plate’ into the grass.
I guess I’ll reveal, I’ve been working on the old slide show of the farm that I set to music, converting it from video tape to a digital file I can manipulate and post, and it has contributed to my recent reliving of the past. Maybe someday in the near future I will be able to trigger more memories with a revised version of the farm slide show that can be seen online. It all depends on my ability to hurdle a few technological obstacles that lie in the path toward my goal. I’m not feeling as spry as I once was with these kinds of projects, and my much more new-tech savvy son no longer lives at home, so the odds of succeeding in a timely fashion right now are low.
Time Passing
The passing of time happens faster than I can keep track of, yet change often comes very slowly. Perspective, perspective, perspective. I suppose a person who masters living entirely in the moment has a more consistent impression about the passing of time than I am able to achieve.
The common opinion around my region is that winter has been hanging around for a long time this year. However, even though we accumulated some huge piles of snow, and the prolonged cold temperatures and additional inches of new snow carried on into the first weeks of spring, it seems to me like the return to being able to see the ground happened rather fast.
What is fast? If someone takes steps to consistently eat healthy and begin doing regular exercise to lose weight and improve fitness, would the weight loss and increased fitness happen fast? Well, if they held to it for an entire year, and you hadn’t seen them in all that time, it might appear to you that their change happened fast. To the person making the effort to eat well and exercise toward a goal of making such changes, a year would seem like slow change.
I am wondering if my hair is turning gray at an increased rate. When I cut off my dreadlocks at the beginning of 2011, it had been 5 years since my last haircut. There was plenty of evidence as to what color my hair used to be on the ends of those dreads. I assumed that cutting it all off would leave me with a much higher percentage of gray, but I was surprised to find it didn’t appear to be the case. Now, 3-and-a-half months later, my hair is growing out a bit, and seems to be graying as it grows. Seems like fast change to me.
For some reason, I have neglected to get my bike down from its winter perch in the garage yet. I expect that the next 2 months until my annual week-long bike trip will pass very quickly. Of course, the sad truth is that when that week of biking with friends arrives, I want it to last forever, but it passes by real fast. Scary fast. Well, unless the weather is incredibly miserable. That can change things a bit.
I’m a little shocked that it is approaching the middle of April. It boggles my mind that we are in the year 2011. How did we get here so fast? Just a little while ago, I was an 11-year-old boy, running out the front door of our house on Cedar Ridge Road to hop on my orange 3-speed bike with the banana seat, to ride down the neighborhood road to see if I could find anybody out and about.
I wonder how fit I would be right now if I had started eating smart and doing strength exercises for life, back then. Heck, for all the healthy things I do do, I still don’t eat as well as I should, nor have I ever done regular strength exercising.
Not that any of that would do anything to slow down the rate of my graying hair.
Time passes slow, and time passes oh-so-fast.
Spring Love
Subtle as it may be, spring continues to make inroads. Winds blow. Thunderstorms blossom. Snow fades from view. Hockey season ends and baseball begins. And Paris-Roubaix, the queen of one-day professional bicycle races, one of cycling’s oldest races, held yesterday, in what turned out to be an incredibly exciting competition, brought out the ultimate in springtime emotion. Belgian, Johan Van Summeren, riding for the Garmin-Cervelo team, won the race, got off his bike, and asked his long-time girlfriend, Jasmine, if she would marry him. She said, “Yes!”
Spring is doing its thing.
Relative Something 