Posts Tagged ‘time’
Fast December
Does anyone else feel like the first week of December has passed in a blink? I’m going to need to start planning my decorations for Valentine’s Day soon. I’m not sure I can remember where my red hearts sweater is stashed. I’ll need to dig it out for all the Valentine’s Day celebrations people will be hosting.
Of course, I jest. February is too far over the horizon today. I’m busy getting ready for New Year’s Day. Meanwhile, Cyndie is getting a head start on some of her holiday treat-making for December festivities.
Cookies aren’t far behind.
I’m biding my time until the weekend bake-athon by working hard to stay awake while trying to finish reading a Bruce Springsteen biography, walking Asher through the snow –which he is absolutely loving– watching big matchups between NCAA & NFL teams in US football (Indiana winning the Big Ten Championship!), and taking photos of scenes that catch my eye.
How about those shadow patterns in the snow on the back deck? Cool, eh?
Today is primed to deliver a fresh batch of flakes if the predictions prove accurate.
…POTENTIAL FOR HEAVY, ACCUMULATING SNOW AND VERY GUSTY WINDS FROM CENTRAL MINNESOTA TO WESTERN WISCONSIN TUESDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH TUESDAY NIGHT…
The forecast map last night placed us in a band indicating a span of possibilities from 1-5 inches. That’s a pretty safe range for them to predict without being wrong, but as they often add, advisory zones may shift as the system advances. We could get more, we could get less.
At least I’ve got the ATV plow finally set up correctly and ready to face the task at hand. If I end up spending a few days clearing snow, I expect to check the calendar and find we are suddenly just hours away from Christmas.
December is flying by in a flash! Make sure you are staying off the naughty list!
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Today Arrived
It’s here! We have arrived to the day Saturday, August 17, 2024. If you haven’t been waiting for this day to happen, it might feel like just another Saturday. Maybe it is simply the first day of the weekend. I suppose a few birthdays fall on this date or maybe a few weddings were scheduled.
While I was walking this morning with Cyndie and Asher and we marveled anew over the grandeur of our surroundings. I asked Cyndie if she thought she would still be able to visualize the views along our Middle Trail in some future situation when we are no longer physically fit enough to walk these woods.
We are in our twelfth year of living on this land and I still feel awe over the fact we own a portion of a forest. This summer has been different than most since we moved here from the suburbs. It has been wetter and for longer than normal. The land reflects that in a variety of ways.
There are new levels of erosion and significant accumulation of the runoff soil downstream that disrupt our preferred flow through ditches. Meanwhile, plants and trees are growing strong. It requires a constant effort to control undesired invasives and keep vines from swallowing trees.
In that regard, today would be just another day for me.
I feel lucky to have the opportunity and the time to tend our fields and woods but I won’t be doing much of that this day. We have a lunch date in the Cities that will fill much of our time. Another luxury we enjoy of visiting with friends, some with whom we rarely spend time.
Our land will wait another day for attention from me.
I have a strong suspicion that Sunday, August 18, 2024, will be arriving soon, and with that, new opportunities galore as time keeps ticking away.
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Reclaiming Fences
In addition to regaining the upper hand on our trails, I think I mentioned that I’ve worked some fence lines, too. Yesterday, after I got home from a successful morning of shopping, I strapped on the Stihl power trimmer and headed to the far side of the hay field to make the fence visible again.
I burned through two tanks of gas but probably haven’t reached the halfway point yet. It’s taking so long because we didn’t get after this earlier and now the grass is so tall and thick it takes twice as long to knock it all down.
The days to departure for my week of biking and tenting are dwindling faster than the amount of work I’d like to complete around the property can be achieved. I’m splitting my attention between tending to things outdoors and gathering my gear in the house to pack. Half attention to each goal tends to result in half-sized results for both.
It is what it is. In the end, time always wins. I’ll get done what I can and pack up and go when it is time to go.
As of last night, my weather app showed this forecast for Saturday through Thursday: an alternating percentage chance of storms or rain each day, 50%; 40%; 50%; 40%; 50%; 40%.
Oh, joy.
Like I’ve said, that’s why we call it adventure!
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Time Flying
It’s not as if anything is guaranteed to turn out the way I expect. I’ve been exercising my opportunity to explore being idle lately between sessions of walking Asher and tending to the horses. No agenda. No goals. Occasional spontaneous naps. A few streaming series, a random movie here and there, a lot of listening to music, watching suggested YouTube videos, and meandering down the rabbit hole of Reddit comments on news or popular posts.
There are plenty of ways to visit worlds completely foreign to my reality. Did you know there are still people who discuss everything that a certain defendant-in-chief says or does? It’s weird how stark the difference is between reading news from other places compared to standing out among our four horses.
Yesterday was the “final four” day for NFL playoffs. This morning there are fans for two of the teams who couldn’t be happier and fans of the other two teams coping with a heaping serving of dashed hopes. I feel their pain.
On the subject of spectator sports, last week, Major League Baseball announced the 2024 Hall of Fame election results. This has provided a stark reference for the passing of time in my life. Twin Cities hometown superstar, Joe Mauer was voted in on the first year he made the ballot. He was born about a year and a half after Cyndie and I got married.
A couple of blinks later, Joe was winning batting titles, Golden Glove awards, MVP awards, and All-Star appearances, all while playing for one team: his home state Minnesota Twins. The next thing I know, he has retired from playing baseball. Now he is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. His entire career seems like just a blip of time to me.
As a kid who grew up with a sports fan dad, I looked up to athletes and their impressive accomplishments as permanent fixtures. Then one day I noticed the lauded draftees and excelling rookies making headlines were younger than me. At least Hall of Famers were still older.
Not anymore.
Time sure flies when you are having fun.
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May
don’t thank me it was bound to happen despite conflicting interests everyone’s got an alibi the cat says she was sleeping behind the pillows on the bed beneath the spread the dog is playing dumb denying any knowledge which forensics verified the mice are laying low who knows where they all go there’s nothing left but crumbs the eggs are all intact no sign of any cracks deliveries haven’t stopped as life just races along don’t bother calling cops April has run out of days and tomorrow turns to May
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Speed Perception
Did the year 2020 feel like it took a long time to transpire? Does it seem surprising that we are past the middle of March already? We all know that time passes slowly or quickly depending on how we consider it, despite the fact it ticks off at the same rate no matter what. It’s our perception that changes.
On my commutes, I find myself surprised by how easy it is to spot a car ahead that is traveling significantly slower than the rest of the traffic. It comes in handy for making lane changes well in advance of needing so to do. Spotting vehicles in my mirrors that are traveling much faster than I am usually provides a lot less time to react.
It is common knowledge that water takes longer to boil if you watch and wait for it to happen.
How fast is the impact of rising greenhouse gases on the earth’s climate? It is occurring right in front of our eyes. We are living it. The thing is, I remember hearing about this threat decades ago from explorer Will Steger‘s first-hand eyewitness accounts of changes in both polar regions of our planet. We know the ice is melting. We know weather events keep getting more intense.
Will climate change take longer to happen because we are watching it? I wish.
Yesterday, I had a meal inside a restaurant for the first time in a year. That was a long time in coming. So long that it exceeded my ability to perceive whether it felt like a long time, or not. It just felt strange.
Let’s hope we are racing at breakneck speed toward a post-pandemic world that includes less poverty, more equality, zero emissions, greater social justice, the end of food insecurities/homelessness/violence/hatred, and reaches record levels of love beaming throughout the world.
That’s something I’d really like to see coming up in my rearview mirror faster than I expected.
I wouldn’t need to get out of the way.
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Fading Clarity
At the very same speed every day, twenty-four hours transpire. It’s our perceptions that produce the variable which makes time appear to pass slower or faster. I’ve described many times that I perceive my years of living in 20-year blocks. I’ve lived to twenty 3 times. For some reason, it is easier for me to process that perception than grasping that I have been alive for over sixty years. (61-and-seven-months at the time of this writing.)
It just doesn’t feel like sixty, except, never having been this old before, I wouldn’t really know how sixty is supposed to feel. The most tangible aspect of aging that I have experienced is my loss of perfect vision. Getting used to wearing glasses has been an arduous and frustrating adjustment for me.
Given lenses that offer a static level of correction for my continuously waning clarity, I add imperfect handling that constantly fails to keep them free of clouding smudges.
There is a benefit to my new norm of experiencing a fuzzy view. I don’t need to spend money on the latest and greatest high-resolution ultra-crisp display screens because they all look a little blurry to me anyway.
If I didn’t have a camera with auto-focus capability, I’d be sunk. Unfortunately, I now have a difficult time discerning whether the resulting images are worthy or not. Auto-focus is a far cry from flawless and I am now a weak judge of the resulting level of success.
Yesterday, we were out walking with Delilah at the moments of both the sunrise and the sunset. The morning was really cold and the wind-blown snow was mostly firm enough that our boots didn’t break through the crust. Delilah, being much lighter and trotting on four feet, had no problem staying on top.
In fact, we could see in her tracks that she was walking on her tippy toes to keep her pads from the stinging bite of the extreme cold.
I suspect that image could have benefitted from better focus.
I have a little more success with the long focus of vast landscapes. Sunset was a pleasure to experience and just enough warmer by that time of day that our urgency to get back inside was reduced.
Still, I perceive that image as falling short of my preference for a much snappier crispness.
There is an interesting dynamic in our house with regard to my slow decline from the glorious pinnacle of 20-20 vision and full reading-distance clarity, because, while this change is new to me, Cyndie has lived with blurry vision and corrective lenses her entire life.
It’s hard for me to ask for sympathy from her, although yesterday she admitted that she sees the difficulty I face since it’s a new adjustment for me that she has dealt with forever.
In the grand scheme of challenges we face in life, my learning to cope with fading clarity is a rather small one and almost universal for humankind. As the saying goes with all things aging-related: It beats the alternative.
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Wandering Nonsensically
In that moment, when the time had finally run out, it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually prepared for the end. The end of the dream. The end of the song. The end of ideas that made any sense. The end of innocence.
One second later, everything else in the universe continued on as if nothing would ever end. Things just continue changing as much as they always have. Memories, merely snapshots holding certain aspects in suspended animation.
Inspiration absent motivation. Ideology of avoidance intent on grasping nondescript constructs. Vested interests in vast expanses of physical voids in intellectual realities.
Fruition that cannot be reached.
So, we drive on, in the offhand chance we might eventually reach an end, rarely recognizing how often we probably already have.
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Contrast
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deep in the recesses
of everyone’s long, long ago
the kernels of familiar
hold a comforting glow
a phrase
or just words
visions of places
unmistakable smells
the chestnut tree
toward the tennis court
beside the barn
where we lost hours of days
both in the sun
and deepest of snows
it stands in such sharp contrast
to the very right now
full technicolor hues
vast barrages of digital things
virtual carnival barkers
hollering uninvited
on phishing expeditions
mining hapless victims
through pocket devices
more powerful
than old fading minds
can hardly conceive
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Relative Something 