Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
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.
Frozen Four
What a treat it is to be able to enjoy great sport competition, even when my team isn’t involved. The NCAA hockey tournament is being played locally and broadcast nationally. I’m feelin’ it. Maybe the energy from the recent basketball tournament is carrying over for me. I didn’t have a team to root for in that event, yet enjoyed watching that competition.
Saturday will be the championship game between Michigan and University of Minnesota Duluth. My natural inclination is to cheer on the Minnesota representative, but I’ve just watched that Michigan team upset North Dakota, and their effort made quite an impression on me. I guess I can be happy with either team’s success. That is an added benefit to not having a team involved for which I feel a strong allegiance. I’ve got nothing to lose.
May the better team win. And may the game be dramatically interesting right to the end. That’s all that us neutral fans really want. Especially since the basketball final game was mostly an ugly one, in terms of level of play. I’m hoping for a full game of great hockey Saturday, befitting a championship final.
It’ll be my last hurrah to winter sports. Then it will be time to finally get myself out on my bicycle. Apparently it is springtime out there.
Damage Report
I haven’t talked to our insurance agent yet, so I’ll make this a practice run for that call. With the spring sunshine bringing temps up to 60°F yesterday, I made a brief foray into the yard around the house. I figured I would pick up any obvious trash that had settled out of the season’s worth of snow, and at the same time, capture a few shots of the damage this winter inflicted upon our property. It was a spur of the moment decision to step out, and I did so just after I pulled into the driveway from work, so I was not dressed to get involved in any actual outdoor tasks.
First up is a view of the once-proud juniper evergreen shrub that has been in front of the porch railing for all the 20+ years we have lived in this house. The snow pack has flattened it like never before. It has always come back in the past, but this year I will be surprised if it can return to its former glory.
Still in the front of the house, the gutter has been knocked out of alignment and dented pretty drastically by one of the monster icicles that grew off the ice dam that dominated the edge of the upper eave. Instead of melting away slowly, it let loose all at once with a thundering bang! onto the lower eave and gutter, eventually toppling all the way down to add to the growing mass that was flattening the shrubs.
The same thing was happening on the back side of the house, except, instead of just shrubs and gutters being abused, there was also my brand new, never-been-used, air conditioner in the line of fire. The largest icicle fell from the second story and, without a lower eave to bounce off, directed all of its momentum directly onto the fan assembly, pushing it down inside where the delicate fins of the cooling array succumbed to the pressure and developed flat spots where the fins became compressed.
I finished taking pictures and put the camera in my pocket. Then I noticed the wheelbarrow that had been left from last fall when I was working on building up a new base for the air conditioner. Last time I was dealing with that, it was in attempt to pull the shovel out of it to return it to storage in the garage. I was too late. It had frozen solid into the sand and ice that had formed. I left it underneath the deck for the rest of the winter.
Now it was filled to the brim with water. I stepped up with the intent to just drain the water. Yeah.
Pretty soon, I was slipping and sliding on the edge of the berm I had created last fall to support the AC unit, and the water draining from the wheelbarrow, now faster than I intended, was running right at my feet. In one hand I held paper trash I had picked up and the end of a shovel, the other was wrestling with the tilting wheelbarrow. The shovel had rusted to the extreme and I was quickly collecting mud, rust, water, dirt, sweat, and trash all over my hands, shoes, and pants.
Goodbye winter, hello spring. I haven’t quite accomplished the mental transition of coping with the difference in environment yet. It involves a whole different set of challenges. It certainly deserves a change out of the day-job attire. Especially the shoes.
Confused Logic
I have figured out a way to get over the nagging injury that has been bothering my hand. During my Monday morning indoor soccer workout, I sprained my ankle. It was only a moderate sprain, but severe enough to demand immediate ice and anti-inflammatory doses. It has worked like magic. My hand pain has been hardly noticeable ever since.
I really hope my subconscious doesn’t take it upon itself to do something drastic to help me forget about the ankle pain…
I had one other distraction yesterday. Someone at work pointed out to me that there is a program currently running on the National Geographic Channel about searching for the abominable snowman in Nepal. Apparently, it includes scenes from places I had been while on my trek there in 2009. Her description had me totally fired up to watch it when I got home. Turns out, I don’t get the National Geographic Channel at home. I think we used to, but in the amazing logic of the cable company, they dropped some of our channels during one of the ongoing rate increases that somehow keep happening even though we purchased a discount package of programming that was supposed to be locked in for 3 years.
Believe it or not, they can get me to forget the channel they previously dropped from our package, by dropping one that’s even more popular.
Is this where I figure out that life isn’t always fair?
Fun People
Let’s hear it for fun friends. Think about it. People who you consider fun, you probably also think of as being funny. We all benefit from laughter.
This morning, on the weekly television program, CBS Sunday Morning, there was a feature segment on comedian/actor Chris Rock. As it ended, I was left with the feeling that I wanted to have Chris Rock as my friend. That isn’t likely to happen.
I already have many friends that are fun. In an instant, I became aware of how my regular daily activity, especially when my wife is out-of-town, plays out lacking in the people I appreciate for their characteristic of being fun. People who radiate fun energy, cultivate fun attitudes, and display an artistry for being funny.
I have long known that my sports activities provide much more than physical exercise for me. I play sports with fun people. Beyond that small percentage of time every few days each week, I experience a lack of interaction with people who emit beams of the ‘fun’ mojo.
How much of your day-to-day life is lacking in healthy doses of fun people? It is telling to every so often take measure of our relative environment. It provides a reference measurement to highlight our surroundings and bring awareness to the things that are impacting the water we swim in, the air we breathe, the views our eyes see, the words we hear.
I want to increase my daily exposure to fun people. I wonder, do you think Chris Rock would be interested in taking a job in my industry in Minnesota?
Guess Work
I am stuck in the middle. I try not to be that guy that won’t ever go see a doctor, yet I hesitate to go in for every little cough or bruise. The most difficult thing about trying to be moderate about seeking professional treatment, is that you never really know whether you are making the right decision. I spend a fair bit of mental energy questioning my logic about when to make a visit to the doctor.
If I have full range of motion, and there isn’t a lot of swelling or discoloration, what is my risk? A little ice, rest, a support brace, …healing should follow, yes? It is a waste of both my time and the clinic’s time for me to go in and have them tell me to go home and put ice on it. Whatever it is I did to my hand a few weeks ago, the healing is sure taking a looong time to happen.
People have asked me if I’ve seen a doctor. “No.”
Okay, I made that first decision with relative ease. The problem comes with each successive day that passes. I guess I don’t know at what point a nagging injury deserves to be seen by a professional. Especially when it doesn’t appear to get worse. The problem is that it also doesn’t seem to be getting better. I’m stuck in the middle!
What really bums me out is that I know that college and professional athletes would have been automatically diagnosed at the first instant they noticed a problem. They would be seen by a doctor, whether they wanted to or not. No guess work for them.
I’m stuck in the middle. I wanna be that athlete that gets immediate attention from a professional, and I don’t want to go in for every little cough or bruise.
Not Smart
I do not have a smart phone. I have an antique, by today’s cell phone standards. It’s a couple of years old. I admit I am straggling in the slow lane of the cell phone superhighway. There are people in this country who have never even had one cell phone. I’ve had two. Three, if I count the replacement for the one that was lost when a thief stole my briefcase.
I’m pretty sure that kids today would consider it unthinkable to live without a cell phone. That shouldn’t be a surprise. They have grown up with cell phones. Their parents can remember when such a device was the science fiction of television’s Star Trek. It is a lot easier to live without a cell phone when you have already lived the most impressionable years of your life without one.
I wonder how quickly today’s kids, after they’ve grown past middle age, will adapt to the personal, hand-held ion-neutralizing scanning photon nebulizer anti-radiation healing beam devices with built-in satellite repositioning capabilities that will be all the rage. I’m sure they will have, long before that, stepped up to have their communication devices implanted inside their heads for the truly hands-free texting telepathy that will have become commonplace.
Rusty Sliver
For most of 49 years I enjoyed the gift of clear and focused eyesight. When the muscles and related aspects of my vision reached their limit of function and began to fade, it was all new to me. My natural inclination was to complain, but there isn’t much sympathy to be had from those who have been wearing corrective lenses for most of their lives. I’m now trying to suck it up and deal with it silently.
Back in the fall of 1985 I had a different kind of scare with one of my eyes.
It was a Friday night when I initially became aware of an itchiness in my eye that caused me to rub it. Saturday morning Cyndie & I decide to go out to breakfast. Throughout the morning I was catching myself repeatedly rubbing that eye, but I was mostly oblivious to the obviousness of the indications. It didn’t feel like there was something in there. It felt itchy, like irritation from an allergy.
As we slid into the opposite sides of a booth, Cyndie immediately commented that my eye was all red.
‘Duh’, I thought to myself, and I reacted, “I know,” even though I didn’t, because I hadn’t even had sense to look for myself. “I’ve been itching it all morning.”
When we got home I finally did look in a mirror, and lo and behold, there was a dark speck, plain as day! After a couple of faint-hearted attempts to wipe it away myself, I enlisted the skills of my wife. She is a contact wearer. She knows how to actually touch an eye.
First, she wisely suggested we flush it out with saline solution. It didn’t move a bit. Suspicious? Yes. When it failed her every attempt, we decided to make a trip to the doctor. Of course it was Saturday, and our options were limited to the emergency room.
Upon further review… the diagnosis: metal sliver; rusting.
Metal sliver!?!! How did that git in thar? …Oh oh, I bet I know. It was the previous Wednesday –3 days before! I was scraping the old veneer top off of an antique dresser using a chisel (need I say, without eye protection?). I felt something hit my eye, but I assumed it was a fragment of WOOD. Blinked a couple of times and seemed none the worse for the wear. Kept on working and never thought about it again, even as it began to itch days later. Seems the itching wasn’t the sliver, it was the rusting. Who’d a thunk it?
It is pretty fascinating to me that I didn’t feel any sensation from the sliver itself. When something hit my eye, I just blinked, and then, everything seemed fine. I try not to think about what was happening while I was rubbing. Didn’t Mom teach us not to rub our eyes?
The doctor warned me about what was going to happen next. A drop in my eye to numb it, and then she would extract the sliver. Realize this though, I couldn’t just look away until she is done. I was looking right at this pair of tweezers comin’ at me! AUAAUUUUUGHH!
The drops numb the eye all right. However, that doesn’t eliminate sensations from enough of the surrounding area to stop me from noticing that somebody is pulling on my eye. I can’t adequately describe to you how entirely bizarre this whole process was. Just to make it even more eerie, the numbing drops turned everything a funky shade of yellow.
It only took a few tries before she got a hold of it and proudly presented a very recognizable metal sliver for our approval. I was instructed to wear an eye patch for a day or two and could expect complete healing with no residual damage. Unfortunately, I had tickets to a football game that evening and was made to struggle for trustworthy depth perception, using one eye from up on the second deck.
All in all, a prudent dose of humility served up there, I tell ya. You should see the collection of protective eyewear that I’ve amassed since that incident.
Unfortunately, now I need to get some protective lenses that include magnification so I can actually see what it is I am doing.
Keeping Pace
Is it possible to keep pace with everything life offers? I am not able to do so myself. Somehow, I know enough to navigate a very small amount of technology in my daily life. I don’t tend to double-click live links. There are those who do. However, I have never been one to make full use of all the bells and whistles available in any device I have ever owned. I am inclined to be happy with a power button and a volume control. Good to go.
Recently, our kitchen audio component demonstrated a decisive change in behavior from its previous usual. The onboard pushbutton controls no longer function. There is absolutely no response to pressing any button, or combination of buttons. I have been forced to actually use the remote that came with it. That should be enough for me. It has a power button and volume controls. Unfortunately, there is no way to adjust the clock time by remote.
The tunes box in the corner of our kitchen now continues to boldly display its clock in Central Standard Time, even though we’ve obviously sprung ahead to Daylight Saving Time. How annoying is that?
Maybe if I would just go out and buy this week’s latest version of smart phone, with a prominent power button and volume control, I won’t need any other devices. Do phones display the current time?
