Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Adventure Deprived
It occurred to me last night, that I have developed a bit of adventure deprivation. I have allowed myself to become all wrapped up in the activities of moving Cyndie to Boston and figuring out how to function on my own at home; granted, both adventures of their own, but not the kind I long to explore.
My mind has been busy dreaming about our future on a horse-hobby farm, another good adventure, but right now, entirely virtual. I also haven’t been venturing outside lately, for my back-health-promoting half-hour walks. (Oops.)
Getting the house insulated in the nick-of-time before winter has been something of an adventure, but one that is contrary to the kind of which I am feeling deprived.
Alas, my good friend, and fellow Himalayan trekker, Pam, has alerted me to the upcoming Midwest Mountaineering Winter Outdoor Adventure Expo. After reviewing the talks, and the trailer for one of the films, I realized how far I have drifted from the mindset of plotting such bold adventures.
This isn’t meant to imply that I haven’t been putting a little thought into preparing my Icebox igloo tool for the coming snow season. I have. It’s just that it’s been very little thought. Also, I harbor a fair amount of skepticism based on my inability last year, amid generous amounts of raw material for the project, to successfully complete what I started. I’m missing some of the mojo that is required to push myself to the next level there.
Pam and I will listen to presentations on the subject of adventures in the Everest region and watch world-class movies of extreme adventurists and I will soak up some much-needed inspiration to knock me out of my outdoor adventure complacency.
Come to think of it, I will also have the advantage, this winter, of not needing to shovel off my roof every time it snows. I should have that much more energy available for whatever entertaining explorations materialize on my horizon.
Regular readers here will recall that I am big on the planning. It’s as much a part of my adventures as the events, themselves. Just reading about the Outdoor Adventure Expo –the presenters and their seminars, and planning out what we are going to attend– has energized my mind, awakening the thrill and feelings of well-being that outdoor expeditions do generate.
I thoroughly appreciate this readjustment of my thinking, as I was getting a bit too focused on my upcoming non-adventure: navigating airports on the busiest holiday-travel weekend of the year. Julian and I are scheduled to fly to Boston to be with Cyndie for Thanksgiving.
That… –the airport part– is one more of the kinds of adventure that I have NOT been longing to explore.
Gaining Insight
The day after 11/11/11 and all is well. What a relief. Except for the fact that the laundry needs to be done, and myriad other chores deserve attention, and I would prefer to take a couple of days and just do absolutely nothing for as long as my mind and body would allow. Kind of like rebooting a computer.
It is no surprise that rebooting a computer would be on my mind, because this weekend, I am assisting in a major software upgrade at the day-job. One which I believe we have tried to accomplish twice before, unsuccessfully. Each time, we have reverted to the previous, greatly outdated, version to allow production to continue. Years pass. The need, and reasons to upgrade, increase all the while. Daily, the task becomes more complicated by new records of activity added to the data base.
This may be the weekend that wasn’t for me. Next week will probably be a week of unprecedented struggles at the day-job for me.
On one hand, it is convenient to be living alone while this is going on, because there is no competition for my time or attention. But that is also a disadvantage, because I have little reason to claim being unavailable for this onerous task, and I have no pleasant distraction from the mess occurring at the day-job when I get home.
I’m counting my blessings for all the years I enjoyed living with Cyndie, and gaining insight on how much I have taken that for granted over time.
It’s Here!
Eleven, eleven, eleven. One one one one one one. If I wasn’t already married, I’d get married today, along with all the others who picked today because of the numbers. Make sure to stop everything at eleven minutes after 11:00 and look at the digital clocks!
Isn’t it funny how much attention we will give to things like the numbers in a date? An arbitrary date. Does November 11, 2011 have the same importance to people using the Julian calendar as the Gregorian? What if November 10 was a date of greater significance, and we overlooked it?
It is just a date. An arbitrary number.
We are here, now, in this moment. This is the greatest significance.
Every day.
No matter what the calendar date is.
.
.
Minor Concerns
This is what I learned yesterday after my visit to an allergist: I respond to dust mites, an outdoor mold, and cats. It may, or may not, be triggering an asthma response. My asthma is relatively mild.
There is no longer a cat living in my house. The coming freeze of winter will end exposure to outdoor molds. There are steps I can take to control my exposure to dust mites. I can take a higher dose of control medication, half as often, to control my asthma symptoms. All things considered, my health problems are hardly serious concerns.
The controlled exposure to allergens was not difficult for me at all. I was given the back scratches and didn’t experience any severe reaction. The particular areas of irritation are visible as a reddening, which they measure to record a reading. I hardly noticed any ill effects until I was driving home. Then I started to feel a headache and for the rest of the day felt out of sorts, with some general body aches felt like the onset of illness. It didn’t help my general mood, either. I started to get kind of grouchy, but that might be more a result of the constant clamor overhead at the day-job from workers redoing the flat roof. Everyone was growing weary of the constant drone of the roofer’s radio, tuned to a station that sounded like non-stop mariachi music. But, it is probably the sudden unidentifiable booms and bangs that take the greater toll. What the heck are they dropping up there?
Most importantly, from the appointment with the allergy doctor, there is no indication of my being allergic to horses or to hay. I better get to work on the finishing touches of preparing our home for sale in the spring. Full dream ahead!
Archived Stone
I pulled this archived image from the Nepal trek I did in 2009. I learned about having asthma when I got a physical to determine if I was healthy enough to participate in the trip to the Himalayas, so posting this image this morning sort of ties in with my appointment at the allergist. I will succumb to some scratch testing to check and see if they can identify any possible triggers for my asthma.
Delayed Posting
Wow, speaking of faltering momentum, I totally missed the fact that I hadn’t prepared today’s post! I’ll blame it on the change of clocks back to Standard Time, even though it is probably more a result of needing to readjust myself to my solo routine again. Cyndie packed herself up in a mad dash yesterday afternoon to return to her work in Boston. I was left with a dose of shock that I was on my own again. It really is a different mindset. The things that I manage differently when she is gone are not that significant, but it is just enough to give me the perception that it is a big process. Most of the process is in my head.
I was busy last night trying to plan a couple of days out, as I needed to get ready for Monday morning soccer at the club, then directly to work, from which I will then go directly to meet Cyndie’s dad and we will pick up Elysa and Julian for dinner and a Gopher basketball game. I’ll get home from that in time to go to sleep and then next morning I have an appointment at an allergy clinic to do some testing for a possible cause of my asthma. I don’t know why the question didn’t come up when it was first diagnosed in 2009. It was just presented as a fact, with no questions about what might be the root cause. I was so taken aback by the news that I had asthma, that I didn’t go through what seems to me to be the logical thought process of determining why I had it. Now, almost 3 years later, I am finally getting around to inquiring. I have no idea if this will reveal anything, but I will feel better for having tried.
Faltering Momentum
After days of forward momentum, I am sensing a faltering. The home projects are now whittled down to a level that realistically fits in the realm of “do it yourself.” I am not feeling very inspired to do these next tasks myself, yet it doesn’t feel right to enlist someone else to do the work. Who would I hire? A painter? Well, there is a bit more than just painting that needs doing. I think I will pause for a bit and contemplate the next phase of our home maintenance.
Maybe, once the snow piles up on my roof, I will be so inspired by not needing to climb up there and shovel it off that I will feel emboldened to tackle the final finishing touches, to patch and repair all the scars, stains, and cracks of age on the walls and ceilings of our house in time to put it on the market in spring. Then all I will need to struggle with is, how I will bring myself to part with it.
The Abyss
It ended up taking two days, but the sealing and insulating job is complete. There are still a few finishing touches that will be required, but the house is as tight as we dare make it. As it is, we need to be careful with how many exhaust fans we run at once or we could get a back-draft through the flue of the water heater. That is the kind of situation that causes headaches and makes you sleepy. Permanent sleep, even.
The ultimate solution for this will be to replace the water heater with one that has fan-assisted, induced draft exhaust. In the mean time, we know to not have the stove top vent on at the same time as the clothes dryer, and all three of our bathroom fans, while the water heater is trying to do its thing. We also now have added incentive to bring our house up to code for carbon monoxide detectors. The single unit we have on the main floor is insufficient.
The job of maximizing the efficiency of a home is quite a process. I’m struggling a bit with the fact that I have lived in this house for over 20 years and am just now getting around to addressing these issues. What’s done, is done, and it doesn’t pay to beat myself up over it, but it is something that eats at me. It’s a good thing that I am interested in learning to live in the moment. This kind of thing provides incentive. I really don’t need to dwell on the fact that I didn’t do anything about this in the past.
What was vividly demonstrated by this process of fixing air leaks of our dwelling, is how the area that draws initial attention will be the largest leak. Obviously. It was difficult to clearly detect the smaller leaks when the majority of air is going through the biggest opening. In our case, it was between the second story and the attic, where an exhaust flue passed through the barrier. The opening was huge. It made no sense. Somehow, the blown fiberglass insulation that was put in originally, obscured the opening so that I never even knew a hole existed. The crew setting up to work in the attic were setting down tools and losing them as the disappeared through the insulation. When they moved the bunches of fiberglass away, it revealed an abyss.
Once that huge opening got sealed up, the smaller leaks became more apparent, and the guys would alter their focus to work away at each spot where the thermal camera identified a leak. When the attic leaks were all sealed, new cellulose insulation was blown in to create a proper thermal barrier. After applying foam sealant to the baseboards of the main floor, all that was left was leaking air into the spaces between the joists of the second story floor. Since they had done so much work to fix the top and bottom, it didn’t feel right to me to leave the middle of the house leaking.
Unfortunately, the access point for that fix required drilling 2″ holes in the ceiling, every 16″ for cellulose to be blown in to seal the end of each channel. Now my house is adequately air-tight, and well insulated, but I have sheet rock dust everywhere, and painting that will need to be done.
Did I say it’s a process? It is a never-ending process.
Winter Prevention
I’m playing hooky from the day-job today to stay home and supervise contractors doing work on our home. Regular readers will likely recall the posts I wrote last winter describing my rooftop adventures dealing with ice dams and gargantuan AC compressor smashing icicles. Today’s project is an effort to eliminate those winter hazards.
We ordered a home energy audit and discovered multiple issues that were contributing to the extent of snow melt on our roof last year. I have long suspected we had sub-par insulation, but I learned that I was oblivious to how many air leaks there were. Today, the leaks will be sealed and additional vents will be added to the roof and then a new dose of insulation applied to bring us up to an R50 level of thermal resistance.
Here’s hoping I get to stay off of my roof through the entire winter this year. Of course, there is always the possibility that by having this work done, I will have altered the balance of the universe and there will be no snow in Minnesota as a result. Plus, with Cyndie’s move to Boston, she will probably cause it to snow more there.
It already started with a freak early season snow storm out east while it was nice here. I’m just sayin’.
Join Me
Now it is November. The world’s populations has reached 7 billion people strong, with probably too many of those people thinking we are all in a handbasket on the expressway to eternal doom and gloom. But a little skepticism about our situation would appear justified.
There is just no denying the importance of perspective, in reference to the outlook most folks have regarding the status of our growing population. Compare how two people would parse the milestone of earth’s population reaching 7 billion, if one were from the most densely populated cities of India or the Philippines, as compared to the least dense regions of remote Mongolia or Australia.
In my situation, I am aware there are more people than ever before, (even though my household is now made up of less people than ever before), most often, as a result of the amount of automobile traffic on my usual routes. However, I still enjoy the space of living that allows me to survive mostly oblivious to the long simmering, and continuously growing threat of over-population of our planet.
To me, the most extreme, yet obvious, way of presenting the reality of population growth is by a graph that depicts the number of people over time. If a person were to measure the precariousness of our situation based on the logic that we have adapted thus far, the graph is a great way to present the lunacy of assuming our brilliant adaptation over the last hundred years will apply to the next hundred.
Just like the exercise of repeatedly doubling a sum: 1 + 1 = 2; 2 + 2 = 4; then 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, etc. – …a line-graph of the results looks relatively flat for the first portion, but eventually takes a dramatic upturn. Nothing can ever be the same as it once was.
At the rate things are changing, making plans for events happening in the present, based on comparison to a same such event just one year ago, is becoming an unreliable reference. I know it frustrates those who pine for things to return to the way they used to be. Of course, that really only applies to those who were privileged enough to be in a dominant group, enjoying the fruits of success at the expense of others. Those who have endured years of discrimination share no similar desire to return to “the good ol’ days.”
I don’t expect this November to be the same as all my Novembers before, but I am growing less pessimistic with time, and I sense plenty of reasons to visualize the handbasket that I am in, as headed for wonderful things, with an added bonus of including more people than ever before. Feel free to climb aboard and join me!
