Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Cool ‘Gloo Tool
Members of the Hays clan probably remember the year we miscalculated the dimensions of our igloo and needed to get a ladder, and ultimately add an internal support wall, to finish what became my first-ever two room igloo. Well, someone has come up with a tool that will prevent that and allow us to create a perfectly shaped igloo dome. Check out Grand Shelters Inc’s ICEBOX®!
The ICEBOX® tool in action
Don’t forget, we will be returning to the site of that wonderful winterland getaway where I like to build igloos, this February. Hopefully, the climate will still provide enough snow for such endeavors by the time that weekend arrives. It would be an ideal opportunity to test out such a tool. If I ever get around to creating that wish-list I’ve been asked to make, I will be sure to include information about the ICEBOX® on it. It isn’t an inexpensive tool, but it’s not likely to become a mass-produced, more affordable novelty, so I may merely ask for contributions toward the cost. It would be worth my coming up with the difference, at least to try it out.
What price for snow fun, anyway?
It Looks Different From Here
Things aren’t the same for me as they used to be. I’m the same guy, but the way I saw Christmas as a kid is completely different than the way I see it now. When I became a parent and had the opportunity to establish Christmas memories for my kids, I don’t know that I had a distinct awareness of the situation. I don’t recall overtly nurturing for my children, what my childhood experience had been. Now, from the added perspective of having my children grown and out of the house, I think I’ve become more like Scrooge than ever before. First, I complained that it was too soon to start decorating and advertising the holiday. Next, the focus of it all has become way too materialistic. Yet still, I harbor the greatest memories of the Christmases of my youth.
Memories like the wall covered with Christmas cards and children’s artwork, which is only a memory because of a slide photo my father took. The trees, tall enough to reach the ceiling. The project of decorating the trees, particularly the lead tinsel my sister, Judy, mentioned. The year we put our name in lights –at first it said, “Ho Ho” but for a short time was modified to “Hays”. The morning my father had me easily convinced that he just heard reindeer activity on the roof, moments before we made our first appearance, Christmas morning. He was so sincere, I fell for it, hook-line-sinker. …The time my siblings fooled me by taping the record album to the cover of the box I opened, so I found nothing but tissue paper in the box below. …Andy Williams and Bing Crosby Christmas albums.
It occurs to me that regardless my miserly personal opinions of late, about this holiday, I might want to cut others a reasonable amount of slack, especially kids. I think kids today deserve to feel just as excited about all things Christmas related, as I ever did. They don’t know it’s coming earlier, or been co-opted by the retail juggernaut and broadcast media. Why, it’s as if I have been visited by the ghosts of Christmas, past, present & future. Let’s enjoy chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
Remember Anytime
It may be the contrarian aspect of my character, but for no obvious reason –say maybe a birthday, anniversary, or Mother’s Day– I find myself thinking about Mom today. Not just a passing thought, but a really robust feeling of closeness to everything that comes to mind when I think about her. And it’s all wonderful. I can think of a variety of potential triggers that likely combined to bring this on, not the least of which involves Thanksgiving and Christmas memories of childhood. So, for no other reason than today is the second day of December, I am claiming this a valid day to celebrate the memory of my wonderful mother, Betty.
Goodbye November
Somehow, we have reached the last day of November today. Months just disintegrate, one into another. I try to recall the moments that make up my memories of the 50 Novembers I have been alive and not much comes together for me. Time comes and goes and I can’t reconcile the significance of transition of minutes to days to months. Does that change when one lives ‘in the moment’?
It has me thinking about the things I do thousands of times, or even tens of thousands of times, with little awareness. While at the same time, the things that happen only one time a year, like a month, I likely won’t experience 100 times in my life. With that in mind, I am aware how cheaply the phrase, “once in a lifetime” gets tossed out, but it can probably describe more events for me than I realize. It’s all on a scale. I breath in and breath out multiple times a minute, eat an average of 3 times a day, enjoy a weekend every week, and get only one November 30 in the year 2009. This moment in time is unique in every way and also the same as every last day of November I’ve seen. They’ve all been day number 30.
Tomorrow is another day. And another month. Won’t that be unique?
I Wish
It’s getting to be that time of year when lists appear for all sorts of reasons, most of them intended to help sell magazines. I think the most important list is probably the one we make ourselves. I usually find myself balking over the activity, but sometimes I just give in and go wild with lust for consuming. The ‘Wish List’ is an age-old method of letting your Santa know what it is your heart desires. I’m a bit surprised that some new-age techno solution hasn’t replaced the simple list in this day and age. Why in the heck don’t we register at our favorite stores like engaged couples do? For all the ways that the winter holiday has been co-opted by the retail sales industry, it seems to me we could streamline the whole process even more by just direct-shipping the items to the address provided by the registrant.
Of all the holiday advertising that bombards my innocent efforts to just watch a sports event or crime drama on television, the ones that I find to be missing the target audience by the widest margin are the commercials priming me to purchase an automobile as a gift for my loved ones. Yet, the silver car with a big red bow on the top is becoming the most prolific image I see now in my head. Ain’t gonna happen. I miss the image of the Erector Set, or even, the electric shaver that moves through the snow like a sled.
My wish is for less attention to material things. Slip a little peace on earth in my stocking and I’m good to go for another year. If you wanna slip a little love, with time to share it, into a package under the tree, I wouldn’t find it objectionable.
Working It Out
After the intensity of feasting ferociously on amazing amounts of home-cooked haute cuisine yesterday, this image is an accurate representation of the inside of either my stomach or my head, or maybe both, I can’t be sure. There are some that believe this image is a distant cousin to the Magic-Eye series and if you stare at it long enough you’ll find the guy with the racing goggles that morphs into a kind of Goldy Gopher head in a wind tunnel smirking a kind of Yogi Bear grin that floats there like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon that has gotten away from its handlers.
Meanwhile, I gotta bail on this holiday weekend thing for the first time in my life and go to work on the day after Thanksgiving. Oh well. I’m still thankful for lots of things. That’s a nice carry-over from the day of feasting. A fresh dose of contemplative perspective. Wonder what that’ll add to the visions I get out of this picture.
A Thanksgiving Memory
I can’t help falling into my usual cynical attitude about a holiday that celebrates this country’s good fortune of decimating the tribes of original nations living here and building massive wealth and success on the backs of immigrants, many, if not most, of whom were mistreated as slaves. At the same time, I have nothing but fond memories of this day of family, friends, power lounging, game playing, football watching, over-eating, Christmas-season launching fun.
I particularly recall a neighborhood football game when I was a young teenager. We often played games with whomever was available, usually with limited success on adequate numbers. On this day, not only did we have plenty of players available, since it was a holiday, we even had spectators showing up to watch us. It was the absolute best! Until I got hurt. I don’t recall the exact mechanism of injury, but I bruised my tailbone something awful. At the time, I figured something might be broken. I cried. That is brutal for a teen boy to do in front of such a big audience. As I gingerly walked off the neighbor’s yard, headed for home, my sister, Linda, took a photograph of me that captured the moment, eventually helping sear it in my mind evermore.
That moment is closely followed by a vivid recollection of trying to sit at the dinner table on the hard chair for the traditional Thanksgiving feast. It required a pillow. For some reason, the second memory is a view outside of myself, seeing me try to sit down on the chair. I understand why I might remember how I looked walking off the neighbor’s yard because of the photo, but I find it curious that I have remembered the image of trying to sit down on that chair from a similar vantage point, instead of from within as I experienced it.
This year, I am thankful for all the blessings I am able to enjoy, and I continue to regret that it comes at the expense of others less fortunate than I. It’s as if our society is just another variation of a Ponzi scheme. It’s no wonder that I have always loved and hated this holiday at the same time.
Look at that! I can’t commit to one feeling or the other and a story about my ass hurting, all in one post.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Think About It!
I don’t know about you, but even though I am aware of an incredible potential value within dreams, I usually afford them much less attention than they probably deserve. Why is that?
I guess, in a lot of ways, it isn’t much different than not knowing what my liver and kidneys do toward my health and well being. I suppose there is a range of self awareness that results in a comparable range of how ultimately healthy a person might achieve being. Plenty of people get by just fine, as far as they’re concerned, without ever giving any thought to what the organs in their body are up to. Obviously, there are a fair number who know plenty well what a body needs, yet wear their disdain like a badge of honor as they push the limits of sanity with a limitless array of abuses. But that is an extreme which I don’t intend to address. What seems more interesting to me is the larger number of people who carry out their lives in a reasonable fashion, while barely giving a thought to what is actually happening inside them.
I count myself among that group, for the most part. Again, there is a range, and I may give these types of things more thought than some people, but my attention to the details of what is happening inside me, and what I eat to fuel it, is still pretty superficial. As my “Good Eats?” post of yesterday reveals, I have some concerns about the foods I am eating, yet I don’t read ingredients very often yet and still consume more processed foods than I believe is optimally healthy. All too often, I violate my bedtime target and neglect to achieve the advised amount of sleep. And I rarely consider possible meanings from within my dreams beyond the immediate fascination or humor that I sense upon waking. I don’t know why that is.
I want to think about it. I hope I will.
Good Eats?
All right friends and loved ones, there is something bothering me that needs to be shared. I tend not to fret over the multitude of conspiracies that threaten our security at every turn these days, but that doesn’t mean I’m not susceptible to interpreting the possibilities as viable. I do realize that we face challenges, such as global climate change, extremists who terrorize, money worshiping executives willing to use Ponzi schemes, and scariest of all lately, the Mayan calendar ending in the year 2012. But, my greatest concern of late hits me right where I feel the most tangible, immediate impact: my stomach.
My recent concerns over food started when I was given an opportunity to view the 2007 documentary, King Corn. It raised my awareness of how prevalent high fructose corn syrup had become in the wide variety of processed food generally available in my diet. That initial trigger event was then augmented last weekend by my viewing of the 2004 documentary, The Future of Food. This movie reveals the drive by corporations to acquire patents for genetically engineered plants (and eventually, animals, too) and how genetically modified foods are entering the global food chain, not always with notification on package labeling. The next threat to my former blissful ignorance is one I haven’t even seen yet, 2008’s Food, Inc. I’ve heard enough about this movie that I am concerned that watching it may leave me unable to maintain my intentional naiveté and I will be left unable to find anything I’m willing to eat.
One thing that struck me from the facts and statistics that are presented in the movie “The Future of Food,” is how relatively recent much of the genetic changes have occurred. According to the movie, successfully splicing genes began in the 1990’s. That’s since my children were born! The foods we eat now are different than what was being sold just 20 years ago. I’ve often wondered why food allergies are so much more prevalent in children today than when I was a kid. The fact that the types of food grown on farms a couple decades ago is different than what is grown now is just one of the obvious differences faced by kids today.
It would appear that there is some short-sighted decision making going on that eludes thorough testing and dodges explicit labeling in favor of swift profits and sizable margins. Could there be anyone left in the world who finds such a possibility surprising?
In what I admit is an extremely superficial analysis of the situation, as I see it, the corporations with interests in the seed market or weed-killer/fertilizer industry (quite possibly both owned by the same parent company) are making decisions in the interest of profit that put at risk the health of our global food supply. Won’t this just come back to impact them just as much as everyone else? The corporations and executives may amass gigantic amounts of financial wealth, but then they won’t have much in the way of food worth eating on which it could be spent.
Mountainscape Therapy
.
Monday morning of the Thanksgiving week finds me torn between a busy, busy workload and the after-effects of attending a couple of lectures about camping and climbing over the weekend. My mind would like to linger in the memories of mountains I trekked in Nepal. The pictures say it all for me today.
.
