Relative Something

The first day back at work after the weekend always feels a lot like a Monday, doesn’t it? Yesterday morning I found myself sitting in my car for an extra ten minutes outside the front door of my workplace, delaying the inevitable. It was a beautiful morning, and I had a beautiful weekend. I was able to enjoy it for a few extra minutes.

One of the highlights of the day was entirely unrelated to work, and directly related to relatives. I received a new message via Ancestry.com from a descendant of my great, great-grandfather, Stephen W. Hays. This person discovered my records at Ancestry.com, where I have uploaded some images of our ancestors. She had the very same pictures and was able to name people in one of them that I had only been able to guess about. My guess was wrong, according to her. Now I know.

One of the low points of the day was also entirely unrelated to work. I guess that’s good. I discovered another broken finger nail. That’s 2 in the last few days. I keep my nails long on three fingers and the thumb of my right hand for fingerpicking guitar, even when I haven’t been playing for a month or two. I have had a very good run of long, strong nails until, ironically, I finally actually want to use them to play guitar. Now, days away from my bike trip, I’ve had two different nails tear. I guess I’ll be relying on my flatpicking technique next week. 

If it is true that it takes an average of 6 months for a finger nail to grow from the base to the tip, does recent failure of my nails reveal a deficiency in my diet originating in January? When they are feeling solid and strong, does that mean I was eating a well-rounded, healthy diet 6 months before?

When you do this long enough, the changes in strength of the finger nails becomes noticeable, and if you pay close enough attention, it can offer an illuminating reference for the varying quality of your diet. If I were obsessed enough about it, I could log my food choices and 6 months later, match it with a grade on quality of my nails to see what I’m eating that is good or bad for them. My guess is that it would reveal the obvious. Healthy food choices are already common knowledge. If I just stuck with healthy food choices, I’m betting the quality of my finger nails would be high. It’s not rocket science.

I don’t do so well with taking action today for results 6-months down the road. It’s one of my downfalls in writing for magazine publications. Their lead time is so dang long, I have difficulty managing the time shift required.

How do you remain in the moment when it takes finger nails so long to grow? When they are strong and solid, I’m enjoying both moments; the current one and the one 6-months prior.

You may have noticed an absence of posts related to planning for this year’s annual summer bike trip. That is, unless you’ve been reading closely enough to pick up on my uneasiness of late. In 4 days I will be leaving for my annual week-long bicycle trip with about 150 of my good friends. I think I gave a little more attention to planning for the trip last year because I was plotting on having a song I wrote for the group memorized in time to share during the week. My goal this year is to try to develop callouses on my fingertips before I leave. My bike is ready. I am not aware of needing any change in tent / sleeping gear. I just need to be sure to have clothes clean to pack, and then check the map for details on getting to the starting point and I should be good to go.

The only thing remaining after that, if the previous couple decades of doing this serves any pattern, is to have a dream or two in which I find myself showing up without a front wheel or standing in my socks with no idea where any of my gear is, just as the group sets off for the day. You know the dream. I haven’t had any of those classic scenarios play out in my REM sleep yet, so I remain on guard for that unconscious release to drain some of the preparation anxiety that looms in the days ahead.

I know it is the responsibility of the writer to make sense of the subject being written about, but under the structure of publishing something every day, there are moments when attempting to sort it all out becomes more than time allows. Maybe it is related to the ongoing nature of the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It defies mental capacity to fully fathom something that continues to soil at the rate and scope of what BP has unleashed on our world.

At the same time, something relatively inane, a baseball game, or more specifically, a “perfectly” pitched game, was foiled by an umpire’s error of perception. A moment’s decision with dramatically significant influence on the subset of people with interest.

A Gaza flotilla is attacked and people killed, followed by a duel by media, as both sides compete to persuade world opinions in defense of their position.

Simple and complex get entangled with important and unimportant, as well as with universal influence and personal impact. Little details of my plans, short-term and long-term, get tangled within the issues my children are facing, and then are painted by recent successes and failures of friends and families near and far, and even impacted by continued vagaries of the weather.

If I wasn’t venturing to write about my experience, I would pause, do some breathing (as much as my lungs allow) and just be in the moment. All which is, is right now. I don’t have to communicate anything. I guess the truth which that reveals is, regardless all the things newsworthy and not, I don’t really have a point. No wonder I find it difficult to sort out.

The joy of celebration is all about! Yesterday was Cyndie’s birthday. In the past, I tried a few times to broadcast birthday news for friends or family and mostly come short of my intent of flooding their inboxes and voicemail with greetings. I made no mention of Cyndie’s day, and she was inundated with messages. My powers are inverse!

Today, celebration is all about our 2nd college grad. Open house this afternoon and evening means beaucoup food! The kitchen is being utilized, full tilt. Chocolate, sugar, salt and fats will be available in abundance! Imagine how great it would be if we actually needed those calories. Far be it from me to spoil the fun. When celebrating, we don’t eat for sustenance, we eat for pleasure.

I will try not to enjoy myself too much.

We’re not going to let gray skies and intermittent showers spoil the fun. The floor can be washed when it’s all over. Let it rain. We have much to appreciate today and we will do so. It is all combined, grief and pain along with joy and happiness. What a crazy world.

Happy Saturday!

I have no idea what it would be like to watch the NHL Stanley Cup Playoff series with my team playing, but I’m finding it incredibly exhilarating watching this year’s battle between Chicago and Philadelphia. I’m pretty sure I’d be a nervous wreck if Minnesota was playing.

In a little over a week, I’ll really be suffering anxiety as I try to watch the USA soccer team in the World Cup. It’s one of those things that I wish to happen, but then when it does, it’s almost more than I can bear. The World Cup tournament lasts until July 11. Before we get to the end of that event, the Tour de France bicycle race will be under way. It’s an embarrassment of riches for this sports fan.

It just occurred to me that I will likely be unable to watch the first soccer match between the US and England as I will be on riding on the 36th annual Jaunt with Jim bike trip that day. What’s a boy to do? I wait for years to see the World Cup, and then when the first game of the tourney for my team finally arrives, I am not available to watch. I don’t know what the moral of that story is, but I’ll learn something from it eventually, I’m sure.

If it weren’t for life’s little challenges, I’d only have major dilemma’s to learn from. I’m a fan of the more gentle approach to learning.

If it is true that people need to reach rock bottom before they are willing to choose to take on the hard battles of facing their demons, it might appear that the logical thing to do to help people is assist them in reaching rock bottom, no? That brilliant inspiration arrived courtesy of the character, Michael Scott, in a rerun episode of the television series, “The Office.” I know it doesn’t directly relate to what I was writing about, regarding life’s little challenges, but sometimes you gotta go with the flow of what pops into your mind. Free association. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is. Before you know it, you’ve got a ‘stream of consciousness’ exercise happening.

It’s like a little vacation adventure for the mind. One of the most affordable vacations imaginable. It also works as an aid in diffusing the mounting anxiety when your team is under extreme pressure in the biggest tournament in the world. Personally, I think England is under much greater pressure than the US. If they lose to us, it just might push their fans to rock bottom. It would be the least we could do to help them along with life’s more difficult battles.

Go, Chicago! Go, USA! Go, Team Radio Shack! I’ll be watching, in between a few mental vacations.

After a mildly irritating drive home, we are here, safe and sound. It was incredibly difficult to leave when the weather was so fine, but duty calls. Man, there were a lot of drivers, the majority pulling trailers of some kind, that needed to pull over on the shoulder of the freeway. It created slowdowns and backups that made it very rare to be able to travel at the posted speed limit.

The yard was in dire need of attention, so it was out of the car and right into the chores. Just as I suspected, it was a cruel dose of reality following such a magical weekend in paradise.

One special moment for me, that occurred over the weekend of seeing all the great friends with whom we share the property up there, happened when I heard from someone who found the igloo my friends, family, and I made in February. They didn’t know who had built it. The excitement they expressed in describing their wonder over what they had found was just priceless.

The weather reduced the igloo to liquid a long time ago. This year the lake is both lower and warmer than we have ever experienced in all the years we’ve been going up there. It felt like a 4th of July weekend more than Memorial weekend at the end of May.

Before we left yesterday, Julian and I walked down to the tennis court to see of we could spot the eagle in its nest and I captured a distant glance with my little pocket camera. It is one part of many things about the weekend that I am taking with me this week. It’s the least I can do to honor the precious moments we enjoyed for three days up there.

It is interesting that we call the Memorial weekend, “work weekend” up here. It might better be described as “workday.” With Saturday’s chores behind us, Sunday becomes a day for play. I snuck out early, before everyone was awake, and rode my bike around the lake. It takes about an hour. It was beautiful out and I came across many others walking, running, and biking in the early light of day. I got back to our place and took a quick swim to clean up and then made it to the breakfast table just in the nick of time to clean up the last of the eggs and bacon. The whole crew was up and at ’em by now.

Next, Julian invited me to play tennis. He schooled me. We have a new attraction at the tennis court this year. An eagle has built a nest in one of the giant pine trees right over the court. I was able to take solace in the scenery and beautiful weather as my tennis game was being systematically dismantled by my son. We followed up that sweaty activity with more swimming in the lake.

After a quick sandwich for lunch, Steve’s boys returned from their golf outing and we enlisted them to head down to the field by the lodge to play a little soccer. Yeah, I’m getting a little tired by now. It didn’t take long after sitting down and putting my feet up to realize I could use a nap. Then I showered up in preparation for our community feast at the lodge (Chicken Cacciatore this year) and played some guitar until it was time to go eat.

It’s a shame to have to leave paradise and return to the real world of a day job, but that is on the schedule for today. I will be enjoying the memories created this weekend as an antidote to the reality of the rest of the work-week ahead, you can be assured.

It is opening weekend at the lake and we set about readying the beach for a summer full of fun. That includes preparing a few toys to play on.

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Now I’m going to sneak off and do some biking before the predicted rain showers move into the area. It’s a tough life, I know, but I’m trying to make the best of it.

We waited and waited to leave town until most of the masses planning to do the same had already set off yesterday. That allowed time to eat dinner at home and then I tinkered with mounting my bike carrier on the car. Julian is home from Chicago and so the three of us stuffed into the WRX and headed up north in the dusky light just after sunset. There was absolutely no traffic backed up at any of the usual hot spots. What a pleasure that is. Unfortunately, the bridge was out on our favorite route so we stayed on the freeway up to the Grantsburg exit. Only one close call with deer on the edge of the road. Luck was on our side because they jumped the other direction as we came upon them. We made it up in just under 3 hours and then unwound a bit before finally hitting the sack after midnight in order to get up for the annual work day. Gotta sweep away the cobwebs, pull out the beach toys and lounge chairs, clean up the boats and sweep off the tennis court. The loons are talking on the lake and it is time to begin the summer season, even if summer doesn’t show up on the calendar for almost a month. It’s always great to be at my favorite place. Happy Memorial Weekend.