Relative Something

Even though it was a bit cool Saturday morning and at times, very rainy, it feels a lot like summer around here.

We took in a movie while it was still rainy and then stopped by the Musky Festival craft vendors on Main Street, sneaking in some fair-type of food and ice cream from West’s Dairy before returning to our place. Hung out on the deck as the sky began to clear up and some sunshine made an appearance, then played some games and grilled dinner. The night turned out beautiful and after eating more than we probably should, we took a walk on the grounds and visited some neighbors.

Finished the night with a card game and then called it a day. It may not have been the quintessential summer-like day, but it was a pretty darn worthy representation of summer here.

This was no regular trip to the lake, three convertibles and three couples in the bright sun and high heat of our summer days, mixing and matching at multiple stops along the way. We prolonged what normally takes 3 hours into an all afternoon affair with a stop for dinner after 7 p.m. in Hayward, so that we didn’t get up to the lake place till something like 7 hours had passed. Little did we know, the town is celebrating the 60th annual Musky Festival this weekend. We wandered briefly through the midway area to see the rides and the carnival games. It did feel festive.

We stopped in Hudson to see art and have a snack and drinks, then stopped again in Osceola for fried cheese curds and ice cream at the DQ. Paused in Barronett for more refreshments and discovered a risque arcade game at the bar and won a few dollars on pull-tabs. We made it to the Angry Minnow in Hayward for dinner. Guess what I had.

Fish!

It was Friday night in Wisconsin, what else would I choose? I think I only had to endure the birthday song one time in public. That’s not too much to suffer. It was a special day and I appreciate all of you who have shared your well wishes. It worked. I had a very happy day.

For most people of the world, today is just another day, albeit a Friday, which can be special in and of itself. For me, today is special because June 26 is the date of the day that I was born many years ago. Other than that, nothing is different. For those who see a lot of value in marking a milestone, this is a fair one to mark. To me, it doesn’t mark anything significantly different from yesterday or last week or even last year.

In my younger days, with brother, David, my greatest of pals at that age, when having a birthday 6 months from Christmas was about as good as it gets... (His is in early January, poor guy.)

They all feel the same to me. Wait, there is one change I just learned about yesterday… my health insurance premium is jumping up around $97/month now that I’ve entered the next age bracket. I’m thinking I want to get my money’s worth and show them a thing or two by needing to make all sorts of visits to the doctor now, but maybe that’s not in line with reaching my highest potential for optimal health.

One of the very sweetest gifts I’ve received thus far is being granted the entire day off work, at a time when I was worried I wouldn’t get another day for months due to my recent spat of vacation days. We’re headed to the most precious place I have been blessed to have access to, Wildwood Lodge Club, in the area of Hayward, WI, where Cyndie’s family have membership in a private association of vacation homes; one of the best of my many valuable communities of friends. This trip is to involve several convertibles which will likely mean choosing back roads and making stops along the way for food, drinks, and visits to scenic spaces.

I’ll bring my travel guitar and my hammock that folds into a little pouch and of course my camera. I just may capture something worth sharing here, either in story or by image. But really, what is any different about all of that? Kinda seems like the same old, same old to me.

I’m a lucky guy. Happy Friday!

I went to a movie theater Tuesday evening and was pleased to find tickets at half-price. Yahoo! On the way out I saw barriers up for the queue of people for a new movie opening at midnight that night. Young folks were already waiting there. The feature I was seeing was attended by about 7 other people. It is strange to be in big theaters with hardly any people in them. It is harder to be lost in a crowd when there is no crowd. I felt like every time I shifted in my seat or made noise with my bag of popcorn it was much more irritating than if there were a hundred other people contributing similar sounds. And of course my chair ended up being a squeaky one. I had just complained to Cyndie that my car door had developed an irritating squeak since I returned from my bike trip. Now the seat in the theater. It feels like the squeaks are following me.

The movie was all gun waving drama and threats and for the umpteenth time I found myself frustrated by the victims automatic response to criminal demands. Maybe I have a death wish, but from the spectator seat I find myself much more inclined to want the victim to choose not to give in to the threats. I completely accept the possibility that I would feel quite different if I were to find myself actually in a real life threat, and if so, that is probably a good thing. However, maybe as a result of a life-long practice of thinking about my death and feeling quite comfortable with the prospect, when I hear, read, or watch scenes where a criminal gets whatever they want, I can’t help wondering how things would change if the victim becomes more of a participant in the situation and less of a puppet in the criminal’s plot.

The scenes that are much harder for me to tolerate are when the criminal turns the threat of harm to someone else to get their subject to comply. If I was commanded to do something I didn’t want to do, with the threat of death, I can see myself challenging the order. “Go ahead, shoot me. Then where does that get you?” But if they threaten me by offering to injure or kill my family, I can’t picture myself being able to refuse to cooperate. When that happens in the movie, then I squirm.

I’m one of those movie viewers that notices peripheral details. I find it very distracting when they are brought into a scene and then not used, like pulling out a suitcase to pack, but leaving without taking it. Or when the focus is on ordering a drink, but then the character never drinks it. Drives me nuts, but doesn’t even make it onto Cyndie’s radar. Cyndie’s movie watching quirk is her involuntary tendency to blurt out questions about what she sees on the screen before the scene is allowed to play out and present the answer… “Why did he pick up that broken bottle?”

We are quite a scene of our own walking out of the theater bickering over our different issues we have watching movies. Go ahead, shoot me.

When a message comes at you from three different sources in a short span of time it tends to get noticed. When this happens to me, I find myself assigning an increased level of significance to the subject and become attuned to anything that relates, but I often struggle to identify myself as the target audience. It usually goes something like this in my mind: “Oh, this subject matter is exactly what so-and-so needs to hear based on what they were just telling me the other day…” However, it usually turns out that one of the three sources I have credited with bringing the message to my attention, is the same individual I am now interpreting as the one more likely to benefit from hearing the lesson it holds.

I can’t count the number of times the ultimate lesson turned out to be one that I benefited from. So it is on my mind to unravel a current lesson that feels like one with which I already have a good grasp.

We have a little flip book in a bathroom at home with, I think, a year’s worth of pithy little Zukav (as in author, Gary) messages that I notice on a regular basis; especially when it turns out that no one is bothering to advance the page for days on end.

From page 32:

“Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect. If we participate in the cause, it is not possible for us not to participate in the effect. In this most profound way, we are held responsible for our every action, thought and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention.” Zukav,Gary. Thoughts from the Seat of the Soul. Meditations for Souls in Process. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

So I come home after having a discussion where this very thought was triggered in my mind and I suddenly find the tidbit from Seat of the Soul waiting for me as reinforcement.  Maybe it had more impact because that same message was waiting for me for days in a row. But that’s not the point. Later, I log in to catch up on my online community conversations and see they are making reference to a “Thomas Theorem” (W. I. Thomas, 1863–1947): The classic aphorism, stated by Thomas, is, ‘When people define situations as real, they become real in their consequences’.

Accurate or not, we interpret the world around us and the situations we find ourselves in, and then we react accordingly and ultimately experience the consequences. There is always opportunity for correction along the way, but ideally, the correction would happen all the way back at the front end of the chain of events. Since we establish how things are going to develop, and they develop whether we were accurate in our initial interpretation or not, it is in our own best interest to become aware of how we are perceiving situations and choose to frame them in the healthiest way.

I thought I was already cognizant of all this, but for some reason, the message is continuing to arrive for me. The consequences are real in self-fulfilling prophecies. If I want different outcomes, I can choose to see things differently at the outset. It is taking the idea from mountain biking, of watching  the trail and not the rocks I’m trying to avoid, and expanding it. It is another version of smiling to become happy, or imagining, visualizing, and expecting the best outcomes for myself to achieve consequences of my choosing.

I’ll be paying attention to this in my life with a little more intent in the near future as a way of heeding a message that has returned three-fold in the last few days.

After returning to only one day of work, I am able to proclaim the greatness of the past week’s Jaunt with Jim bike trip. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that a day of work was required to establish that perception, it’s just that it cemented my opinion that much more emphatically. And the return to work wasn’t all that bad, either.

About 2:30 in the afternoon yesterday I was distinctly ready for a nap. I was reminded of the day in Grand [Portage or Marais… Oops, I forgot which one. Bet it’s in my journal] when I barely got my tent set up and found myself sitting at its door with my legs out and then just leaned back and laid down to rest and took a little impromptu nap. Heavenly. I think we should add a nap room at work.

With the Twin Cities currently suffering a dew point of 71°F, I miss being on the shore of the greatest of Great Lakes, Superior, and reveling in the coolness it provides. I am so happy that we had the good weather we did last week. Many people in town were worried about us since it was rainy at home and stormy to the south of here, but up on the north shore we didn’t get a storm until Thursday night. Brought the nerves to an edge to be laying out on a football field in a tent when overhead there is a flash-BOOM! with little pause between, but it was a refreshing experience that reminds me of days gone by when we weren’t so isolated in our buildings behind closed doors and windows under the spell of our central air conditioning luxuries. By morning it had moved on and we didn’t have to ride in the rain, just some spotty fog that included an instant drop in temperature of what felt like 10° or more. Hardly worth framing as a hardship.

I am happy to report that the rest of my pictures from the week of biking are now available at my Picasa Web Album. Maybe having my pictures available like that will help inspire some stories from the trip. It just doesn’t feel like this trip lends itself to the retelling in the same way that the Himalayan trek did. It seems to me that a lot of what I would be inclined to write about ends up being that kind of story that ‘you had to be there’ for. Stories that really only pertain to those people who were there and would share the laughter of how Bob fell trying to change into his shorts while Steve held Bob’s sleeping bag wrapped around Bob’s waist or how I rode up to Gary to marvel over his not falling when his crank became disconnected from his chainring but the pedal remained clipped to his shoe, and then watched him roll over the edge of the pavement into soft gravel that was entirely unforgiving and caused him to go down and break his mirror before I rode off in fear I was creating an unsafe distraction. Or how I had been teasing Scott about being a moose and when he later shouted back at Gary and me to look at the tracks beside the road, Gary asked how he knew they were from a moose and I quietly said to Gary, “It takes one to know one.” Suddenly from the distance, Scott hollers, “I heard that!”

I don’t know if I can adequately describe coming down the steep drop from Devil’s Track General Store to Grand Marais in a soaking rain that lasted only a brief time but left standing water on the road as I glanced at my computer to see I was at 39 mph and afraid to touch my brakes as my tires hydroplaned and the bike got squirrely in the gusts of wind and spraying water before the pavement suddenly became dry and the wind effectively dried everything but my shoes by the time we got back down to the school where not a drop of rain had fallen on the tents. Speaking of the General Store, the gal working at the time our little sub-group of cyclists popped in for lunch was seen walking down the aisle of her store grabbing a bag of buns, some produce, meat and cheese when I walked in, and preparing fresh sandwiches for us which she asked us to eat first and come back and pay for later, after the rush was past so she could better spend her time making more sandwiches for other riders showing up. A beacon of trust and efficiency, she was.

Maybe you didn’t have to be there to understand, but those of you who were, you can’t help but smile over the additional details you hold in you minds, can you?

In the last 3 months, I have taken two different trips. One lasted 3 weeks and took me to the other side of the world. The other lasted just 1 week and took place in one of my favorite parts of my home state. I’m wondering if somehow the combination of the two trips is causing me to feel more disoriented than I otherwise ever have upon returning from the annual bike trip. The best word for it really is “disoriented”.

The harsh reality of a Monday, first day back at work, ought to do wonders to shock me back to ‘oriented’.

But I won’t give up easily… I’ll still have this on my mind:

I’m suffering a major dose of withdrawal from the energy and activity of the bike trip. I want to talk with so many people that just a couple of days ago I was seeing everywhere I turned. There are all these precious people and so many opportunities to engage with them all week, that to suddenly have them removed creates quite a void. It’s unfair to my wife, but she just can’t replace the conversation potential that that many people provide.

There are also the riding comrades that for one week are plentiful and guaranteed. Now each of us fall into our individual schedules and concerns, and riding together becomes an exercise in organization and communication. I truly value the privilege of being able to ride with so many great people

Steve

Gary

Laura and Rich

Gary

Mary

I am experiencing some other lingering after effects of the trip. Those souvenirs I received from the biting bugs just may be mixed with bit of a reaction to poison ivy. I wasn’t really needing to scratch all that much Friday, and now suddenly, new itches are appearing. I already looked like I was suffering from chicken pox. I may be paying for becoming a bit careless about limiting my chances for exposure. It’s been a few years since I’ve experienced an outbreak and I guess I have grown less vigilant about avoiding suspicious locations. I did tell Rich that I wouldn’t search for geocaches with him because of the risk of poison ivy.

I don’t seem to be having a bad reaction yet, which is a big thing. The last couple times I was dealing with poison ivy, it became systemic and I would find reactions all over my body, not just at specific points where oil touched my skin. My doctor prescribed a steroid to conquer it those times. The time delay of my skin to react always frustrates me. I was a little unsure during the week because of all the bug bites, and honestly, I think all the ones I was wondering about did turn out to be from bugs. Then on the day after I get home, the first new blisters appear on my hand. I was wondering if the oil might be on my tent or bike or something that I have been handling while I was unpacking and putting things away.

Oh well, it is helping to take my mind off of the withdrawal symptoms I have been experiencing. Also, today offers its own new distractions: Happy Father’s Day all you dads out there!!

I am experiencing a bit of post-vacation stress disorder. I am not clear what the specific symptoms are, but along with the overall strange feeling that I am lost or not where I am supposed to be or something is missing or I’m not really awake, right now I am very aware that my fingers appear to no longer have any idea how to locate keys on the keyboard. I think the *delete* key is starting to give off smoke from overuse.

Here is a sneek preview of a picture from this year’s ride to the Canadian border along the north shore of Lake Superior. This is the High Falls on the Pigeon River in Grand Portage State Park. That is Canada on the right side of the river. I was in a group of riders that were smart enough to turn around before we went too far and would be forced to face the border patrol inquisition, unlike someone else who was on our trip last week.

I got home about 4:30 p.m. Friday evening and opened up the tent right away to dry it out. Most all other clean up and put-away chores are being saved for today. We had a great week of riding and socializing and eating and exploring northern Minnesota and giving our blood to gnats, mosquitoes, and biting midges that people call no-see-ums. I’ll review my journal entries and try to capture some of the week’s adventures in posts here in the coming days. In the mean time, what little lawn there is here to mow is desperately in need of a haircut.

Hopefully, I will find that to be good therapy for post-vacation stress disorder. My *delete* key could use a break.

The grand finale! Today we eat our last breakfast together and start saying our many good-byes. Then we all start hustling to ride back to our cars in Tofte where we parked a week ago. Usually there is a lunch spot where we will see some folks that ride about the same speed as ourselves, and say good-bye to them once more, but Jim doesn’t ask us to wait for the whole group to arrive (like we usually do all week) so we can get back to cars early enough to drive home before too late in the day.

I wonder what stories I will bring back with me from this year’s trip?

Playin' and singin' by the luggage trailer a few years ago.

Hopefully, I had plenty of opportunities to play my new travel guitar this year. Here is a shot of me from a year I hauled my full-size guitar along. Of course, I don’t really do much in the way of actually hauling it. The kind gentleman in the background did that in the trailer that carries all our duffle bags while we peddle away. I rewarded him with a little concert on the edge of our tent city. It looks so big to me now, compared to the little one I have been playing.