Maybe he’s not really crying, doesn’t matter, I’m already walking up the stairs.  I leave the door to my son’s room slightly ajar to allow a small beam of light through.  Once Nathan, sitting on his bed, sees me, he lies back down; he’s ready for sleep.  I think: Why can’t you just fall asleep yourself?  I don’t say anything the entire time, just re-cover him in blankets and gently play with his hair.  Head massages are so nice. sometimes while watching television, Janine will play with my hair and it puts me right to sleep.

It’s three in the morning and I don’t sleep very well most days.  That is, I am awake late into the night.  Sometimes it’s fun but sometimes it sucks monkey chum.  Before I heard Nate crying I was contemplating bottling some beer I have sitting in a carboy downstairs.  I thought: well, I might be done by 5am, should I?  Ugh, that would make it so late.  I think I’d almost decided to just go to bed.

Nathan’s lying in his bed while I sit beside it, rubbing his hair.  I’ve recently changed his bedtime routine to actually take place in bed instead of sitting in the rocking chair to have his milk, story and song.  (The chair had to move to the room being prepared for our new baby.  I didn’t want the baby’s arrival and the disappearance of his chair to happen at the same time).  So instead of Nathan nestled into my arms as we sit in the rocking chair, his head now lays in my lap and I give him a head rub and play with his hair while singing a bedtime song.  Routines help kids (and adults) know what to do.  Repeating the head rub part of the routine sends Nathan’s elastic kid brain the “go to sleep” message.  We swaddled him as a baby and I’ve been singing “The Rainbow Connection” to him since we brought him home from the hospital.  That kid’s going to fall asleep if he ever watches the Muppet Movie.  Ha!  That would be funny.

Janine’s mother gave her back-scratches as a baby and to this day she likes it if I scratch her back a little before bedtime.  As I coax Nathan back to sleep I wonder if my mother played with my hair as a baby.  I wonder if that’s why I always end up asleep on the couch when Janine plays with my hair.  Which can be annoying (“oh, it’s 9pm and I’m asleep.  Well shit, I’d expected to get a few more things done!”).  Then I wonder if I’m normally up until 3am because my mom addicted me to hair rubs and that’s the only way I can fall asleep now.  And I’m doing the same thing to Nathan!

Oh my god, I’m a horrible parent!  Nathan is going to have the same bad sleeping habits because of me.  I quickly stop playing with his hair and rub his back.  Well that won’t work, now he’ll just need someone to rub his back.  I rub his cheek.  No!  Hair rub.  Shit, have I woken him up with my confused parenting? 

I resolve that, starting tomorrow, I’ll change his nap routine to a different one.  I begin running through scenarios like rubbing his hands with my hands, because he could learn to do that himself.  But how annoying would that be to a future spouse “Nathan, would you stop fidgeting I’m trying to sleep!” Maybe I could teach him to rub his feet together to fall asleep.  No wait, that doesn’t even make any sense.  I suppose he could just play with his own hair to fall asleep.  But a boy playing with his hair is a little effeminate, maybe I shouldn’t think that way but is that really the kind of man I want to raise. One that plays with his hair?

Well clearly the only good routine is one where I don’t touch him at all, then he’ll learn to sleep all by himself.  Except wait, that won’t be very fun.  Cuddling with your children is one of the perks of being a parent.  To forgo that?  Nope, doesn’t matter, I have to be strong willed, for the good of my child’s sleeping habits.  If I never get to cuddle with him at bed time, it will be a small price to pay. 

Then I realize giving him a bottle of milk, reading a story and singing to him are also going to have to disappear, or else he will have to find a very accommodating spouse.  Then I realize I’m an idiot, because of course routines do change over time, we used to swaddle him and now we don’t.  All the babies of all the other parents all had bed time routines that changed over time.  Yet at some point, one’s bedtime routines become fixed, or less flexible.  Janine loves backscratches and they drive me up the wall.  But Nathan’s only two.  I breathe a deep sign of relief as I realize it’s not too late, I haven’t permanently damaged Nathan.  I can still fix my mistake! 

I begin mapping out an imaginary timeline in my head and imagine dots sliding back and forth along it.  Each dot representing a different transition in bedtime routine.  The ending of head rubs, the removal of the milk bottle (perhaps with an intermediary stage the bottle being replaced with warm milk drunk downstairs in the kitchen, once he can handle non-sippy cups), maybe even the removal of songs.  I slide each dot back and forth on this imaginary scale.  Is head rubs at four years acceptable?  It seems a bit close to five and I worry I may need to terminate the behaviour sooner.  Better too soon than ruining Nathan’s future sleep.  My gut tells me stories naturally last a lot longer, plus, reading is good, but when do I stop reading to him?  I’ll think about that one later I guess, it’s a long way off.  Songs probably need to end sooner, because after a while, it’s kinda gay, isn’t it?  I mean I wouldn’t sing to a ten year old, would I?  The worrisome one is definitely the head rub as that imaginary dot is closest to his current age. 

I pause.  Then again, I may just be overthinking this a little.  I look down at Nathan.  That dude is asleep.  I wonder how much time has elapsed.

I rise from kneeling on the floor beside his bed, tip toeing out of his room back into the brightly lit hallway.  The dog is staring at me with eyes that expound how appreciative more ear scratches would make him.  The mental fog of analytical overdrive begins to fade away and I think: Yup, overthought that just a bit.

Only: I’m going to think more about it.  And the best way to set good hygiene habits, and the pros and cons of ad-hoc versus scheduled baths, and the best way to brush his teeth, and the best kind of child toilet seat to get, and how I can change this, and that.  The mind keeps churning and churning and churning. 

If you haven’t heard, there’s an additional brand new twelve minutes of Lost goodness that comes bundled with the DVD set.  A search engine fairy also told me it was available via torrents, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I discussed the Lost finale at length in Violent Aggression podcast #7, but in case you haven’t got ‘round to listening to it the quick version is that more or less, I liked it.  I wasn’t completely happy with the lack of resolution.  It was disappointing that many of the questions they teased us with were just that: teases.  Something to trick us into watching.  Although that said, I liked the challenging finale and was happy with all that it implied, even if it showed and explained too little.  Leaving us viewers to fill in the blanks seemed an ending most apropos.

I did not expect, nor need, to hear anything more from Lost.  Then along came an epilogue.  I liked it.  It was a very small serving with very meagre ambitions.  Perhaps knowing it was a DVD extra in advance calibrated my expectations at just the right level.  I recommend viewing it, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I don’t plan to give it a full discussion; at twelve minutes it doesn’t warrant it.  I also don’t want to give anything away.  So I shall couch my reactions in hyperlinks.  Do NOT click/hover over them unless you want to be spoiled.  And if anyone cares to comment on this article, let’s call the comments a spoiler zone.  Say anything you want.  You’ve been warned.

I was so glad something made a reappearance, it’s been a long time, it made me giggle, especially the audio.  The surprising re-appearance of someone was kick ass.  My reaction was to smile and clap my hands like a two year old.  The explanation of that thing they explained was unnecessary, sure, but I like how it implied a network of other such things. 

I can see how not everyone might agree, but I gotta go with my gut.  It made me smile.  A lot.

I just wanted to point and laugh at fat Americans.  Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution concerns his journey to Huntington, the unhealthiest city in all of America, where he plans to convince the whole town to, y’know, stop being fat bastards.  I’ve been to America and there are some fat fatty fat fats walking the streets and malls.  Does living south of the Canadian border cause one to automatically gain 50 lbs?  Or do they have to give you injections?

Indeed, Jamie visits a family where the deep fryer is the most used appliance (Jamie throws a “funeral” and gets them to bury it in their yard).  He backs a dump truck full of fat and pours it into a dumpster, telling horrified parents “This is how much fat you eat in a year”.  He encounters some prickly personality, including a radio DJ and some outspoken lunch ladies, who tell Jamie they flat-out do not want him there.  He takes a family of fatties to get diabetes tests and — surprise, surprise — they are all on the verge of getting diabetes if they don’t have it already; I think the boy is about eleven?

That said, will you think me horrible when I say it was surprisingly good television?  Good enough to watch the next one at least.  I shook my head at the stupidity of these ignorant Americans.  The elementary school was feeding the children pizza for breakfast every day.  How stupid are these people? My Fucking God!  You idiots!  No wonder you’re all going to die early.  The next morning I made breakfast for Nathan and myself, reheated some frozen pizza from last nights supper—

I mean, wait... wasn’t I just, last night?  Yeah, I was making fun of...  No, I mean, it’s not like I feed my child this every day.  It’s just that we had it last night and there’s leftovers and...  I’m not a bad parent, am I?  No, I’m not. 

Am I? 

Mind you, none of the idiots on the television think they’re bad parents either.

Within a few episodes I stopped seeing the kids as stupid fat Americans and began seeing them as what my son could be like ten or fifteen years from now, if I wasn’t careful.  Militant even.  The people of Huntington aren’t stupid, they were just short on time and/or didn’t know any other way (not unlike myself).  It is so easy to ignore the consequences of processed food, ready-made meals and eating whatever they serve at the drive-thru window.  Like those in the town of Huntington, Jamie had invaded my home and was making me a bit squeamish.

There are no villains in the Food Revolution.  It’s a documentary (in reality tv format) of Jamie’s arrival in a town where he meets a bunch of normal people.  A few rush to see the celebrity and get free cooking lessons, most are indifferent, others are pissed off he’s there.  Imagine someone doing a documentary on the town/city where you live that focuses on what a terrible place it is as a result of the terrible choices everyone living there is making.  Or some asinine celebrity coming to where you work and making your life and job annoying difficult because he’s got a television show to make.  What a prick, eh? 

At the heart of the show is Jamie Oliver.  His demeanour is the opposite of the article you’re currently reading.  At no point does he call anyone a fatty fat bastard.  Truthfully I don’t get much joy out of that either.  It was the amazing person that is Jamie Oliver that caused me watch more than a single episode.  He’s just like, this guy, y’know?  Not a pompous ass, just some guy that I can easily see going for a pint with.  Nice bloke.  But also driven.

It becomes very clear, very quickly, that he’s there to improve people’s lives.  To save lives, like that of the obese 16 year old girl diagnosed with 6 years to live.  He cares deeply about trying to make a fundamental change in the people he meets and have that change spread to everyone and everything.  He did not do this to make another television show.  He made an Emmy-award winning television show because he felt it was the best way to reach people.  It must’ve worked; it reached me.

It’s a documentary about a man trying to start a movement.  I said there’s no villains in the Food Revolution but there are people who oppose him. This is actual reality television; no eat-the-live-insect challenges.  When the radio DJ rips Jamie a new one on air, he really meant it and that really happened.  The weeks march on and what happens with that radio DJ cannot be scripted.  The Food Revolution touches many lives but even as opponents become allies change remains elusive because they find themselves trapped in “the system.”

French fries are considered a vegetable.  Government incentive programs make processed food cheaper than the raw food stuffs they come from.  They cannot keep flavoured/sugary milk out of the cafeteria, even when everyone wants this, because of “the rules.”  Rules created with the intent of ensuring that quality food reaches children.  Even the rules aren’t the villains.  Although I still don’t quite understand why teaching children to use forks and knives was so scandalous and possibly not allowable. 

That’s right, I said teaching children to use forks and knives.  Six years old and older.  You don’t need utensils if all the school serves is fries and pizza and at home you eat chicken nuggets for supper.  Marvel in amazement as children fail to properly identify basic vegetables.  Most of these children are three or four generations removed from anyone who’s cooked from scratch and the results are terrifying and deadly.  That’s not hyperbole, they are literally dying because of what and how they eat. 

I don’t live in Huntington and my mother cooked from scratch.  But would my children?  I saw a vision of that future and it scared the shit out of me.  I know I shouldn’t eat so many potato chips but willpower is an exhaustible resource so I often do.  Huntington and the potential future it represents is what keeps the emotional and logical parts of me pointed in the same direction.

I’ve almost certainly built this simple television show up too much.  Can it really be good as I’ve depicted it?  Likely not.  For one thing, the reality tv format leads to too many “previouslys” and “next times” but I just fast-forwarded through those.  I’m not claiming to be objective and consider the words I’ve written more diary entry than review.  Many things led to where I am today; this adventure with food upon which I’ve embarked.  But I give a lot of credit to this show, especially seeing as I had no loftier aims than being entertainingly diverted.  Now I’m part of the Food Revolution.

Want to join my cult?  You can torrent episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6.  That’s right, there’s only six.  Would you rather watch on YouTube, because you can!  Seems like the sort of thing that’ll get yanked, but all the episodes are currently there.  I’ve embedded episode one below, someone else made a playlist of all the episodes, and failing that you can always search

Behind Jamie are photos of 1000 Huntington residents taught to cook at the school he opens there

Next time I’m going to a proper nail salon and getting a proper fake nail put on, just like my wife suggested.  Superglue just doesn’t bond to human nails as well as it does to human skin. 

I am an inexperienced chef.  N00b city.  I’m not content to just overcook pasta or permanently blacken the interiors of our pots.  A month or three ago I hacked my finger good enough to require stitches.  I was in shock and thought I calmly turned to Janine and said we need to go to the emergency room.  I was informed I also yelled quite loudly...

 
Definitely in shock.  After wrapping my hand in a towel and waiting for Janine to get Nathan and the car ready, I cleaned the knife and continued to chop the mushrooms.

Thanks be given to Kyle’s brother Dr. Tyler, who helped keep my emergency visit short enough that I returned home just in time to eat the dinner I had started preparing, finished by Janine and Sandy, one of our dinner guests.  Phone call I made: “Hey Mike, are you on your way?  If you get there and we aren’t, it’s because I’m and the emergency room.”  Mike: “Oh my god? Are you okay? Should we still come over?”  Me: “Oh yeah, totally, I’ll just be a little late, you guys start without me.” 

The moral of the story: If you want to get out of cooking dinner, stab yourself with a knife.

Oh wait, no the moral was get a fake nail.  So I get stitches, I wear a bandaid, flesh heals, nails grow. It occurred to me that once the still severed nail reached the end of my finger a large triangle portion would easily catch on some stray fabric and rip off.  See attached diagram.  This is where I ignored my wife’s stellar advice to get a fake nail professionally attached and went the manly (stupid) route and decided to just super glue it together.

Sunday I was squeezing a lime with my nail and the superglue attached to the nail route came unglued.  Thankfully the triangle of potential pain remains firmly attached to the large mound of hard crusty glue now covering my finger.  I used a box cutter to cut back as much of the shell as I could and spent an hour or two calmly applying more superglue a drop or two at a time, waiting for it to dry, then adding adding another drop or two (when gluing glue to itself, it is strangely un-super).  This is about the fourth or fifth time I’ve had to do this.  A contributing factor to the day of Sparticus was the need to spend the duration of Nathan’s nap re-coating my finger.

Words with a ‘w’, ‘s’ or ‘x’ exert an unfamiliar force against my hand as the nail, so much longer than the rest, clicks against my laptop keyboard.  I obsessively check my finger nail throughout the days to check it’s structural integrity.  I need to be careful next time I squeeze a lime.  I did not picture this scenario when deciding to improve my culinary skills.

"Yo Cliff, it's James"

"Hey man, what's up?"

"Umm.... so I been doing this new hobby and y'know, it's really been going good.  Anyway, I was wondering if you might be interested in joining us?"

"Us?  Who? what are you talking about?"

"Oh, I forgot to mention, Chad's doing it and Kelly said he'd be up for it too.  So if you joined that'd be four guys.  I mean, it'd be epic.  Really it works better if there's more guys."

"What? You still haven't told me what you are inviting me for."

"Oh, right, sorry.  It's like, well everyone does it a little differently but it's like having pretend sex with different things.  Like, I'm really partial to grinding on the sofa.  Chad's got this thing where he just lays the hammer down on the edge of the coffee table.  Kelly figures he's just going to grind against the floor, or maybe just hump the air."

"...."

"So there's a love seat, but also there's the satellite chair from the computer room we could move into the living room during rehearsals.  You could totally just fuck that thing crazy."

"I'm not sure I understand the words you are saying to me at the moment."

"Yeah, I'm putting together a dance crew, where we just lay some pipe on the furniture, y'know?  I know it sounds weird but a bunch of other guys are doing it on youtube and we could totally do it too, doesn't look that difficult.  And these guys, once they get good, they are pulling in the benjamins.  I'll send you a link to the video, these guys are loaded!"

"So you're getting paid to have sex with furniture?"

"Well no, not yet.  But once we get better at it.  It's like band practice!"

"Who is paying you to have sex with each other, this makes no sense!"

"Oh, well, I must have explained it bad.  We aren't having sex with each other, that'd be totally gay.  No, we keep our clothes on and we only sex up the furniture.  Well maybe when you're kinda into it you rip off your shirt or something, but no it's nothing weird."

"This is sounding pretty fucking weird."

"No it's awesome, you gotta come over Thursday.  We're gonna gang bang the office chair, it'll be Kelly's first time.  You can join in.  Plus, we keep practicing, mad benjamins, I'm telling you"

"So you share furniture?  This sounds very very wrong.  I don't want to join your hobby."

"You don't know what your missing.  And like, you gotta develop your own style.  If an office chair's not your thing, Chad's got an ottoman he's been talking poetically about."

"Oh wait?  I can fuck an ottoman?!  Why didn’t you say that immediately? I’m in, see you Thursday!”

fin.

This all started the video Cliff’s shared a few days ago.  Here it is, Peer Pressure in all their glory:

I've been laughing about this all day.  I keep wondering “how did this happen?”  They take such pride in this that you know this likely wasn’t the first take.  They have been practicing a lot.  In fact, there’s another video of them featuring synchronized “dancing” near a Christmas Tree.  There actually is a vid where they wave hundred dollar bills, talk about how much money they make and dissing another crew (skip to 3:45, the first bit is completed unintelligible).  The crew they dis also has a video (skip to the 2:00 mark to stave of boredom).  So yeah, this is a thing.  People do this.  I still don’t know why.  Maybe the answer is in one of those videos, I skimmed the ones I linked to.

It leads me to wonder how does it all start?  What phone call leads to these events.  How does this happen?  Are they all gigolos?  Has male prostitution just gotten really competitive?  Oh man, this video  broke my brain.

Cliff’s got his vivisectionist wit and mockery on full display in the post that led to this one, so I suggest you check that out.  Maybe I shouldn’t be linking to Cliff, maybe I should be cursing him.  It can’t be a good thing that I spent all day thinking of the Peer Pressure crew.  Although, as Cliff’s fond of saying, Peer Pressure Works ;)

I've only got fifteen minutes.

I deeply identified with Erron's "Why I do it".  Like her I want my website to be an amazing collection of nothing but top quality articles, I want brilliant presentation, pictures sounds and videos.

I've only got ten minutes.

I believe this is what they call a cop out post, right?  I'm just typing something to type something.  I've got ideas for bigger and grander things but pretty soon I have to put on the shirt and suit I spent an hour ironing, tie a tie and go to a wedding.  I'm going to break my rule and have more than two drinks at dinner.  But not write something today?  Fail to feed the dragon?  That I don't want to do. I won’t be in the mood for writing after a long night of wedding enjoyment

seven minutes.

Seriously: that paragraph took me three minutes to write?  Chad and I had a wonderful visit yesterday and one topic that came up is how much time it takes to do all this.  Why do I want to do it?  Why does Liam want to spend all that time writing a novel.  Once you start calculating 50K~300K words divided by whatever your word count goal is (150? 500? 2000?), nevermind plotting, outlining, character development.  It takes huge chunks of your life.  Why do I want to do it too?

three minutes.

I’ve got to go get ready very soon.  When I was passionate, the quality of writing and presentation on Feelings of White rose to such staggering heights that I didn’t want to, y’know, sully such a beautiful website with crap posts.  Posts like this one.  My internal editor shut me down before I even started typing.  I don’t even have time to respond to the brilliant comments left on my last post.  I didn’t even think that was last good, and I stole lots of it, and look what happened.  I am weeks behind in reading what everyone else in this Summer Blog Challenge is writing about.  Because I’m making myself write instead.

zero minutes.

Shit, I’ve got more to say.  I don’t want to quit typing because now I’ve got points to make.  Creativity is like a plant, or a dragon.  I dunno, maybe both.  You’ve got to feed it every day.  If you do it grows huge and large and it’s capable of amazing things.  If you don’t it withers but it doesn’t ever die.  It can shrink so small you forget it’s there.  Afterwards you can always edit.  I went through years of my old website and picked the best.  But if you don’t type there’s nothing to edit

minus four minutes

Okay, now I’ve really got to go.  I’m glad my tie is pre-tied and Windows Live Writer makes it easy to wysywig blog (I was going to do a whole post on that once… but I dunno, would it live up to the lofty heights of my other entries).  Shit!  I forgot the upper-right banner. Okay added.

minus seven minutes

I just made “zero minutes” be big and bold, I gotta stop now.  Fuck! Jimbo out!

nine minutes past my deadline

I never was good with deadlines

I beg you grant me a liberty for the duration:  Allow me to assume you’re an average person.  I’ll also be assuming you’re American.  Maybe you’re a Canadian so you say “eh?” a lot more but who cares.  The “Western Diet” you’re eating (remember, you’re an average person) originated in America.  America’s the sign of things to come. 

Why are you eating so much soy?  What little tofu you eat is barely measurable but you’re eating more soy every day than someone following a traditional Chinese diet. 

75% of the vegetable oils you eat come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories).  Over half the sweeteners you consume come from corn (around 10% of your daily calories).  These two plants are among natures most efficient transformers of sunlight and chemical fertilizer into carbohydrate energy (corn), fats and proteins (soy).  Doesn’t hurt that the government subsidizes those crops (in the U.s.; not sure about Canada).

The food you’re eating is getting emptier and I’m not referring to the twinkies.  You have to eat three apples to get as much iron as a single apple would yield in 1940.  Milk from modern Holstein cows (breeders have tripled output since the 1950s) has considerably less butterfat and other nutrients than older less “improved” breeds.  The USDA has tracked forty-three crops since the 1950s: on average vitamin C is down 20%, Iron’s down 15%, riboflavin’s down 38% and calcium’s down 16%.  Wheat, over the last 130 years of improvements (during which yields have tripled) has seen it’s iron content down 28%, zinc and selenium are both down 33%.

The people growing your food are selecting for high yield, not nutritional content.  It’s been working.  The average American farmer, since 1980, produces an average of 600 more calories per person per day.  The price of food has fallen and you are consuming 300 more calories per day than someone would have in 1985.  Overwhelmingly those are in the form of sugars, fats and mostly refined grain. 

Your daily diet: 554 calories from soy, 257 from corn.  If we include wheat (768) and rice (91) then two thirds of your calories come from only four crops.  Most of the remaining calories are meats (primarily beef, chicken and bacon, perhaps?).  More plentiful meat than we’ve ever had before as a species.  Only 20% of children and 32% of adults eat their recommended veggies.  But who’s got room after all that delicious soy and corn. 

We’re feeding people cheaply alright.  You spend the least amount of your income on food than any other person in history (9.9%).  I said “history” but modern people eating non-western diets still spend more.  The Italians (14.9%), for instance, or the French (14.9%), or Spanish (17.1%).  You also spend the least amount of time gathering, preparing and enjoying your meals than any other person in history.  Those numbers are falling still.

To me, the saddest part is that you didn’t even choose to do this, you were born into it.  If you’re like me you didn’t realize you were eating soybeans in your bread, in your soda, in your crackers, your pasta sauce, and nearly any food that you eat.  I mean, it all looks so different.  But so we’re clear: food scientists don’t just add “soy” and “corn” anymore than you pump raw crude oil into your automobile.  They are the building blocks to new levels of alchemy unknown and untested.  You are a guinea pig.

You didn’t make the food less nutritious and you grew up in a culture where rapidly changing food science is the norm.  This has been taking generations to happen.  Processing food started when some clever ancestor started grinding wheat into flour; before then, really.  The pace has quickened these last few years.  What used to look like the miracle of technological advancement is, on closer inspection, well... you already read the stats.

Anyway, I don’t know how to end this.  I’ve written and re-written various paragraphs.  I really did want to work in the “90.1%” number.. the amount of money you and I, on average, are not spending on food.  Or 23hrs 29min: The 1995 average of time not spent preparing and cleaning up after them.  I think about those number a lot some days.  Thanks for your indulgence as I realize you obviously not an average person.  You’re an individual, just like everybody else.  Thanks for letting me throw some statistics at you.

Pungent smoke wafted from the cigarette in his hand to Sal’s nose.  His nostrils flared slightly as he became aware of the smell.  Raising his hand to look at it, he had neglected it long enough for the last half to turn to ash, burning all the way down to the filter.  He could really use a fucking cigarette right about now. 

He dropped the filter to the ground and pulled the pack of cigarettes from his pocket to his mouth.  Extracting one, it was lit before the pack returned to his jacket.  He felt like his hands should be shaking but it was too practiced a motion.  He inhaled deeply.  Then again.  Then without the cigarette; a trace of cool air was present from a nearby window. 

To his right was Johnny, standing a respectful distance away in the hallway.  Ostensibly watching the hallway to make sure they weren’t interrupted.  Yet turned just enough that Sal could easily catch his eye.  His hands were clasped in front of him, emphasizing his bulky shoulders.  His head tilted just slightly forward.  A comfortable pose, useful for intimidation, standing watch or paying respects at a funeral.  Why have different body language when all you need is a single word.

“Johnny?  How are we?”  Sal didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, his instincts were to reacquaint his bearings.

Johnny’s feet remained planted in the hallway as he turned to face Sal.  “We’re tight.  We got boys watching the entrances and so forth.  Nobody comes calling we don’t got the drop on.”  Johnny’s head returned to its former position of not quite looking at Sal.  How expressive Johnny could be when he chose: Take all the time you want, Sal.

Lying in front of Sal was what was left of his brother, rolled slightly to one side.  A dark pool of blood had formed under his gut where the first or second bullet had blown through him.  A thinner trail of blood traced from the middle of the room, near a discarded gun, to the larger puddle underneath him.  Looking up at the door to the hallway it seemed pretty clear that someone had shot him from that angle and he’d fallen or dragged himself to where he now lay.  Another bullet pierced his right shoulder but there didn’t seem to be an exit wound.

There was a smaller gun in Vince’s left hand.  It was the one he kept in his ankle holster.  Sal tried to imagine his brother’s final moments.  He had pulled the gun out, did he have it pointed at his assailant?  He looked around the room for a bullet hole.  Did he have the chance to fire a shot? 

He looked at where Vince’s face should be.  Blood, brain matter and bits of skull were splattered along the floor.  A disgusting greasy mess.  After he’d been shot down someone had come to finish him off at point blank range.  Did they exchange words?  The gun in his hand made that unlikely.  Maybe they traded insults and then Vince made a play for his gun, ending it.  “Cocksucker.”  Vinny would’ve called him a cocksucker.

Sal looked at his cigarette, full of ash and almost down to the filter.  He brought it to his lips and inhaled deeply before tossing it to the ground.  He walked out of the room and down the hallway, Johnny effortlessly fell into step just behind him.

“Take him out of there.  We gotta put him in the ground properly, Johnny.  This isn’t for the somebody to complain about the smell two weeks from now.”  They reached the end of the hallway and turned to go down the stairs.

“Brad and Tony are bringing a van, they’ll take Vince.  Then we torch this place.” 

Sal nodded.  He knew there’d be evidence of them somewhere; like the cigarette’s he’d tossed on the floor.  Sal stopped walking.  “Fuck my mother, I tossed butts on the floor.”

Johnny held up his hand.  “You dropped three.  I saw where they landed.”

“You said you know the dead man that did this?”  Sal’s eyes burned with intensity.  There was a passion for bloody revenge that even startled Johnny.  Sal didn’t say anything more.  They were going to paint the town with intestines of Vince’s killer.  It was going to take days for him to die.

Johnny nodded. “Macks.  A detective.  Had to be.”  Sal turned back the stairs and continued walking down them.  “Vince had in his pocket or something.  Anyways, they were meeting tonight.  Hence the abandoned building and what not.”  Johnny waved his hand toward the stairwell the two of them occupied.

The exited the stairway and walked across the decrepit lobby toward the entrance way where two of Sal’s men stood guard.  “There might be a problem, Sal.”  This caused them to stop again.  Sal turned to face Johnny.  This time that intensity was directed at Johnny.  It caused him to take a step back, holding up his hand again. “No, I ain’t saying no to anything.” 

Sal turned his head slightly, like a cat toying with a mouse it just caught.  “It’s just, you should be aware, see, of --”

“What?”

“It-- his father.  Detective Macks is the D.A.’s son.  It could cause a lot of heat.”

Sal remained where he was.  His gaze focused squarely on Johnny clearly aware of the power he had to make people squirm.  Without moving his eyes, Sal reached into his left jacket pocket.  He withdrew a box of cigarettes and held it up to his mouth.  His eyes still locked on Johnny.  He bit the end of a cigarette and pulled the box away.  The package slipped back into his pocket while his right hand pulled a lighter from the right pocket. 

Sal held the lighter up to the cigarette and waited.  His eyes burrowed into his lieutenant for a few moments longer before finally shifting to the lighter.  Cigarette lit, he turned back toward the lobby door and started walking.

“I don’t care if Mack’s the son of the fucking Pope, Johnny. You take that cop out.”  One of the lobby guards opened the door and Sal walked out into the cool night air.

Johnny, still standing where he was, pulled the phone from his pocket and made a call.  He unconsciously glanced at the roof, imagining the scene two floors above him.  He had to get his hands on a lot of gasoline.  Tonight.

I must insist that you click on the video above. That video is exactly how I feel about my new job.  It makes me laugh but also, hell yay! I’M A STAY AT HOME DAD!

Spoon practice with chocolate pudding

Fennel tastes good

The Day of The Fish Bracelet: One morning Nathan made a bracelet out of foam fish and proceed to run around like a crazy thing.  When did he get so tall?

In January my wife and I switched roles.  Her year of maternity leave ended and she went back to work.  I’d arranged for my contract to end in December and I stayed home.  I’d never spent an entire day alone with my son until then.  I remember dreading coming home from my office job because infants are terrible conversationalists, they just cry.  Binary communication: 0: Okay; 1: Scream and Cry

That first month or two is a complete haze of memories.  It was pure survival mode as I acclimatized to my new life.  Discovering when it was okay to ignore his cries and when I needed to stop whatever I was doing and pay attention.  I remember staring at the clock thinking when is Janine coming home? and regretting all the times I didn’t immediately rush home from work.  Sometimes you need backup.

I’ve gone on record saying the stay-at-home parent’s job is the hardest but it’s also the easiest.  Some days all I do is play with Nathan, we laugh, we giggle and I’m nothing more than a tour guide as he explores the world around him.  Shopping at Wal-Mart becomes a fun adventure and Ikea roxors because I let him out of the shopping cart and he runs around playing with all the display toys.  I play too.  Every dad should force their baby’s mama out of the house on a regular basis and just spend some one on one time with their kid(s).  It can be frightening and scary and the complete opposite of fun, for many many days in a row even.  But it’s worth it.  There’s no other way to get that parenting confidence then having absolutely no backup.

Parent’s complain, a lot.  If you listen to them it’s like they are constantly bitching about their child(ren) or how difficult their life is.  The other way parents behave is a polite nod and say “everything's good” with a smile; that just means you don’t know them well enough or they can’t complain just now because if they did they would have a complete melt down. Something’s always bad.  When you get into a good bitch session about parenthood the conversation can go on for hours.  Some of the stories about the stupid thing your child did take minutes of conversation just to set up, they require background information, geographic details and in-depth descriptions of your state of mind with caveats like how they’d been keeping you awake all nights for many days in a row.  It also keeps us sane, letting vent on these problems, knowing that we are not, in fact, alone.

One day Nathan decided to line up his ducks in a row.  I’d never seen him do that before.

We brush our teeth together.  Not wearing a shirt is a nice perk of my job

This is the razor I made for Nathan using a food clip

So now we can shave together too.  I got self conscious and put on a shirt for the photo.

I theorize we, as parents, complain because the good things about parenthood are so minor in their details.  Because, actually, something’s always good.  Every single moment is what makes it worth it.  Tiny little moments like watching him spill less yoghurt all over himself as he gets better with a spoon.  Watching him play with a dinosaur instead of just chew on it.  When he learned to give us kisses.  Practicing high-fives with him and the moment where he got it.  Listening to him say “bye” to everyone we pass in the store.  Handing me a rock he just found on the ground like it’s the most awesome thing he’s ever seen and he just needs me to hold onto it for a moment so he can investigate the hundreds of other rocks nearby.  Being so proud of his sippy cup because he can carry it around and drink water whenever he wants (I mean, that’s technology).  Playing with the remote control for the fan.  Watching him in his sleep grabbing for his soother. No details, no setup, see… not really great conversation. 

But they are really great moments.  Those are some of the moments that warm my heart.  I mean where do you go from “Nathan tried to put on my shoes today”  maybe you can add “it was sooo cuuute.”  Sometimes with fellow parents you get a knowing smile as you share a mutual bond.  They say “she’s been pulling herself up on the couch lately” and you smile because you remember that moment, or you know that moment will happen someday for your child, and they smile because they are so proud of their child’s brilliance.  We parents smile at each other, as we both think of our own child.  It is a deep warm smile that I cannot really describe.  Sometimes you nod a little bit as you look at the other parent because, well, yeah, exactly.  It’s those small little things.  They’re like crack cocaine for parents.  We will endure so much just to make it to the next little hit.  Watching Nathan grab handfuls of rice and shove it into his mouth because, clearly, that is more efficient than a spoon (he’s right, y’know, it works much better).  Pointing at a stuffed animal he’d never seen before and saying “duck” (and it was a duck! How did he know?!).  Time spent with children is the potential to experience those moments. 

I get to experience more of them now.  It is a wonderful privilege.

Before and during the switch people always asked me if I was going to do computer programming from home, in the evenings.  But no.  Not even tempted.  I can barely keep up with life as it is.  I don’t have to fill out time sheets, attend meetings, or work on something I know will be completely useless to the client but is the pet project of a manager or business analyst.

I’m a stay at home dad and the core of what I do is directly relevant to raising my child.  In ten years the software I wrote will be a crumbling legacy system.  In ten years my child will still be developing into a fully fledged human being.  At some point I’ll have to go back to the office world and chances are high that I’ll never again get to spend months in a row just reading books and taking baths and going to the library and wrestling and dancing and singing.  I’m so blessed.  You’ll hear me complaining a lot, I’m sure.  It makes better stories and sometimes this is the hardest job in the world (and I’ve only got one child).

But sometimes it’s the easiest.  It’s the most rewarding work ever.  I know what Nathan’s favourite book is and I know his favourite page in a book and they’re different books. I’m going to say something now that I’ll don’t think I’ll ever be able to say again for the rest of my life, not with the same conviction:

I love my job.

I recently finished watching the entire run of Firefly, plus the follow-up movie Serenity, and I’m here to tell you a few reasons you should consider doing the same.  Let’s start with how it’s only going to take you 13 hours to do it (15 episodes x 43min + 119min movie). 

Perhaps this show was destined for an early grave.  It’s science fiction.  It’s a western.  It’s serialized.  It’s got a large cast.  It aired on Fox.  That was just out of the gate.  Then Fox didn’t air the pilot (which introduced characters/explained the world) and aired the episodes out of order.  Yet the brief run and DVDs created a small cult devoted to it, enough that the major questions raised in the series were answered in a theatrical movie. 

So let’s get to why you should watch it.  It is a rollicking good time.  I don’t use the word rollicking that often but this show earns it.  It is a relaxed bunch of fun from start to finish and featuring more than a few bits of action.  It makes me smile to think of it.  Most television shows need time to get their bearings and stumble around trying to discover what they are and what they are about.  Firefly explodes onto the screen knowing exactly what it is about and the stories it wants to tell. 

Years before the story begins, Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds fought against the Alliance, the central government, for independence.  They lost and now he pilots a Firefly class ship (named Serenity) taking whatever jobs he can find.  Usually this means crime.  If there’s a chance to stick his thumb in the Alliance’s eye while he’s at it, all the better.  He and his crew have created a firefly-sized place where they get to make the rules and that’s something he’s willing to fight to defend.

The western bit comes in because, well, it’s also a western.  Which is what kept me from watching it for a long time.  How can I put this... it doesn’t suck!  The inner planets, home of civilization and wealth, are the base of the Alliances power.  The outer planets, where the show spends more of it’s time, are neglected impoverished places.  Recently terraformed most of them, they have the bare minimum and are basically the old west.  Farmers, cows, cowboy hats, whore houses, flintlock rifles. 

Except, y’know, the odd guy has a laser pistol.  At one point they smuggle contraband from one planet to another and the cargo is cows.   Also they swear in Chinese.  Trust me, somehow, it works.  It really does.

I have no idea how Joss Whedon managed to pitch this show to any network because it just shouldn’t work.  But it does so brilliantly.  Firefly is easily one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.  Even more amazing for how much it accomplishes in such a short amount of screen time.  Maybe that’s even why.  Perhaps episode 16 would’ve been where it all turned to crap.  Instead we’re just left with this nearly perfect jewel of television.  Just watch the pilot, you’ll see what I’m talking about.  Rollercoaster of fun.  That’s a good phrase.

A small section of the pantry, featuring mason jars

One of the aspects of who I am is a computer programmer.  I’ve spent years and years finding ways to organize things (pieces of code, data entry fields, processes involving humans and barcode scanners, you name it) in ways that make things flow better.  Changing environments to be more conducive to a desired outcome.  My most recent environment/programming project is our kitchen.

I want to make bread more often.  So I moved the breadmaker off the hard to reach top pantry shelf to a kitchen cupboard (causing other things to move about).  It removes an obstacle to homemade bread, making the change easier.  I like using the vegetable steamer so I moved that off the top shelf too.  The top shelf now has breakfast cereal.  We just don’t eat that stuff, never have, although I lived off it as a child.  The vegetable steamer is an easy healthy way to cook, so make it easier.  Meanwhile the plastic bin full of snack items has been pushed to an inconvenient to reach back corner.  I built some under-the-sink bins to store recycled items to promote easier recycling (going all the way to the garage means some recyclable items just end up in the trash during a busy day).

But wait, I’ve got to slow this down and just talk about mason jars for a few paragraphs.  I went out and bought a shitload. Well mason jars and some other types of jars, there’s a lot of variety available.  If I’d purchased exact matching sets then at some point in the future we would’ve needed more and they’d stop matching so I decided to go intentionally eclectic from the start.  Some from Ikea have build in handles.  Some acrylic ones from bed bath & beyond (I call that place my mecca) include an absolutely huge container suitable for flour but it was quite expensive.  The cheapest and most versatile are simple mason jars (walmart.ca is atrocious, sorry no linkage).  Big 2L ones, little 250 mLs and everything in between. I even found some alternate solid plastic lids.  I decided wide mouth mason jars are absolutely the way to go – especially if I’m hoping to get a measuring spoon in there.

Buying bulk is cheaper and having attractive (at least to me) containers to put them in is an incentive to make a trip down the bulk isle.  It also seems many organic ingredients are easier to find in bulk (I’ve become a big fan of Save-On-Foods).  You can buy hot chocolate mix and M&M’s in bulk but typically bulk means healthier more primitive ingredients that I wouldn’t be ashamed to put on display, even if no one else is looking in our pantry but Janine and I (and Nathan if he can get to the dog food.  Kid loves dog food for some reason). 

Before the mason jar revolution, I knew that if I hunted in the back of the pantry somewhere I would find cornmeal, a plastic bulk bag of raisins, a huge bag of skim milk powder.  At the front of the pantry was boxes of rice mix, instant mashed potatoes along with boxes of healthy stuff too.  Don’t misunderstand me: we had a good & healthy pantry.  I wanted to find a way to emphasize those good cooking ingredients, make them easy to handle and find, as well as deemphasize the easy to stack boxes.  Some boxes contained organic whole wheat pasta, some were more questionable. 

Now, I can see everything.  The jars are easier to rearrange and sort through than plastic bags with the result that I find things quicker.  If I don’t know what it is, I turn it upside down.  More obscure jars have masking tape on the bottom with the contents written on them.  I’ve never purchased lentils before this week.  I’ll probably know what they are two months from now, but maybe not.  Same for pot barley.  And I feel so stupid asking my wife “what’s this?” because sometimes I like the illusion that I’m independent. 

Some jars have instructions from a package taped to their side.  Last week I briefly wished I hadn’t tossed out the how-to-cook rotini instructions when I’d transferred them from box to jar.  Y’know what?  I still don’t know how long to cook them but I kept tasting the pasta and I figured it out.  Boil salted water then add pasta.  The rotini I replaced it with came from the bulk isle and I’ll feel a little more confident when it comes time to cook those. 

Thanks to Kim proselytizing the virtues of oatmeal, especially vis-à-vis weight loss (“love the mush”) I was buying quick packs of premade oatmeal.  Now I’m using 250mL mason jars to store my own premix: oatmeal, raisins, brown sugar, cinnamon, and a Slap Chop is great for chopping nuts (I wish I’d got a Graty ).

Also I bought bulk Maynard wine gums and they’re in a jar too.  I need to make sure the record clearly states I am no perfect granola crunching preacher.  The best way to avoid the bad stuff is not to bring it into your home… but if you never bring the wine gums into your home, then how will they ever enter your stomach?  Clearly, the wine gums needed to be purchased.  Logic dictates.

The wash cloths and tea towels were always badly stacked and falling out of the shelf conveniently located above the stove on a shelf even I (at 6’0”) couldn’t reach.  So I moved them down to a drawer at waist level.  The drawer of Tupperware was too full, causing them to break and get stuck when opened, so they moved to a bin in the pantry.  Some of the lesser used pantry items, like tins of coffee beans and a 10lb of rice have moved to the basement (there are smaller mason jars and acrylic containers in the pantry that are periodically refilled). The good china was rarely used, so Janine’s just moved them from a primary kitchen cupboard to an inconvenient top pantry shelf (the shelf didn’t exist last week, Janine installed a new one).  Now that’s a good thing because we’ve got a bunch of new free space in the kitchen and I’ve been noticing how our gadget drawer has gotten too full of gadgets and it would be nice to move those somewhere…

The kitchen remains in constant flux but my hope is that each time it becomes a place that’s a little closer to perfection.  Like a good piece of software or an exquisitely designed website.  One that subtly guides you to find what you need exactly when you need it.  Where the things you’re supposed to be doing, like cooking with organic flour, are easily located on the toolbar button.  It will still support obscure unadvised uses, like providing potato chips, but accessing those functions requires a little more work.  This is where a witty one-line sentence should go that summarizes everything.

I don't go in much for reality television.  I ain't no purist and occasionally a show will grab me for a while.  I got curious enough to watch Jersey Shore and it hooked me good; I may even check out the second season.  Both The Apprentice and Hell's Kitchen had me for almost three seasons before I tired of them.  That's inevitably what happens, I get tired of seeing the same thing over and over.

There is one show that always always sucks me in and it keeps getting better every year.  I love me some America's Got Talent.  I had no plans to watch it and this year then I happen upon an episode and somehow it migrates to my PVR recording and as it rounds out the quarter finals I am watching almost every minute of it.  The part where show nervous contestants wait as they spend 45 seconds between "the act advancing to the next round is...." and the actual announcement.  Yeah, I watch that. Ever single thing the judges say to the contestants.  One of the best parts.  Although in the early rounds, I skip over all the contestants back stories, just show me some quick change artist accidentally falling off the stage – now that’s entertainment!

I love the variety of this show.  It's not all singers, nor dancers.  It's the only show I can see a magician shoot fire from a staff all the way across the stage; then a band that plays with of volts of electricity in chain mail suits (they stand between giant tesla coils); a harmonica player; belly dancers; dance numbers that are off the hook; a weird cross dressing fop with an amazing voice; rock climbers who “dance” on the climbing wall (it’s beautiful); Haspop a dancer who’s body moves like jello; and some crazy blacklight matrix-style I don’t even know what to call it that’s awesome.  As the final rounds get closer, it usually boils down to a bunch of singers and a dance act or two.  Then again, a ventriloquist won the second season, so who knows.  My favourite memory from last year is Recycled Percussion.  Check out the video where the stage on rotates 90 degrees forwards.

Who can’t love that shit?

Here’s a recipe I’ve made many times.  It’s delicious, simple and cooks from scratch.  Everything cooks in one pot, steaming the salmon and couscous at once and it tastes delicious.  I keep almost all the ingredients in stock including frozen fish and a basil plant; all I need is a fresh fennel bulb and tomatoes and I’m ready to cook – now that’s simple.  (if cooking with couscous is new to you, as it was to me, don’t worry you can find it everywhere.  Buying bulk is better but you can start with boxes you’ll find at Safeway.  Edmontonians: Planet Organic is actually the cheapest source)  This recipe comes from Jamie Oliver’s 20 minute meals iPhone app although don’t believe the hype: it’s never twenty minutes.  I had to write it up for my mom and got carried away.  I made a video tutorial and afterwards I’ve got the full text write up if you don’t fancy watching me cook.

A common theme among my commenters has been how do you find time.  I’ve struggled with this as well, so I wrote up the ingredients showing how you can prep this a night or two before but it’s also pretty fast to do all at once.  If you’re doing it in one go, you’ll soon realize for yourself that you could be chopping tomatoes while the other vegetables are cooking, or chopping chillis while the onions soften, but let’s start simple.

1. Boil 2 cups of water
2. Place pan on medium heat.  Once hot add a splash of olive oil.  Add basil stalks, onion, fennel, fennel seeds and bay leaf.  Cook for 5 minutes until vegetables are soft
3. Place couscous in a mixing bowl, pour 2/3 cups of boiling water over it.  Stir with a fork to break up any lumps
4. Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and add to the rest of the vegetables. Season with salt and pepper.  Flatten everything out
5. Add couscous to the vegetables, flatten everything out.  Add another 2/3 cups boiling water.
6. Add salmon fillets on top of the couscous.  Grate zest of lemon.  Squeeze the juice from 1/2 a lemon
7. Cover pan with a lid and cook on a medium heat for 10 minutes until couscous is fluffed up and the salmon is cooked
8. Drizzle some olive oil over top of everything, take some basil leaves and tear them up, scatter over everything
9. Serve with lemon wedges and, if you made it spicy, a bit of plain yoghurt can be alright

A few days ago Shaun posted something about dream stealers and like a lot of Shaun’s recent activity it really got me thinking.  Chad already wrote a great follow up that in many way said everything I’d want to.  This is my second attempt to put my thoughts to words because I’m not entirely sure... oh hell, Jimbo, just start typing:

I worry about the Guthries.  They’ve joined the cult of Amway and Shaun’s blog is occasionally incomprehensible without a glossary. In childhood my mom went in for a lot of make money at home schemes and I vividly recall the financial outcomes of all of it.  She still goes in for questionable business schemes now and again and the outcomes, to the best of my knowledge, have never been financially rewarding.  I worry so much about Shaun and Lindsay.  Are they’re headed down a rather thorny path built to look attractive but perhaps less prosperous than the motivational seminars claim?  I believe in the dictionary of terms, I’m part of Camp Comfortable, in league with the Dream Stealers.  I will most certainly not be making Double Eagle unless I make my own costume.

Dream Stealer

Expeditions of Truth also contains some occasionally brilliant stuff.  His blog is one that has friends saying to one another in meat-space “OMG, did you *see* Shaun’s latest post?”  The man can generate buzz.  Exactly such a conversation occurred last Sunday.  I hadn’t read about the dream stealers so I whipped out my phone to read it, preparing to shake my head in bewilderment, when a funny thing happened.  I totally got every word Shaun was saying.  I empathized with his plight because I vividly recalled dreams that I allowed to be stolen away by other people’s negativity.  Feelings of White represents a dream of mine that I have had to fight to keep alive.  Tammy, in another reaction to Shaun’s post (see what I mean about buzz?), described my current dream as “cooking better food and contributing to his families health” which is spot on.  Many days I want to give it all up and then I think of my son and I realize I must keep trying.  Plenty of haters hatin’ on that dream but I’m still plunging away. 

Chad already touched on a flaw in in the everyone’s a dream stealer approach.  If by definition anyone who suggests you are on the wrong path is a dream stealer to be ignored, then you have closed yourself to rational discourse.  If the only people you associate with are other people “in” the business then that is what will seem normal, whether it’s deeply unhealthy or the best thing in the world.  Shaun: I worry you won’t be my friend any more because I don’t fit your definition of a successful person or because I don’t want to buy XS Energy Drink. This is the fear in my heart when I think about direct selling.

Dream Stealer

But also Shaun: I want you to pursue your goals to the fullest.  Drink all the Kool-Aid and make some of your own.  Two years ago I was so crazy focused on my website I began viewing every email and every conversation as an opportunity to get people to check out my blog.  I spent every bit of spare time working on content, including the outline of a novel and the first two chapters.  I don’t regret it; I’m proud of the focus I had and everything I learned and created.  Anyone who told me I shouldn’t’ve let my dreams absorb so much time would be politely ignored.  It’s not the only time in my life I’ve been so focused, I have similar feelings today.  Looking back I never remember the hard work or sacrifices, I observe the results in bewilderment and wonder who did this? who was the person I became that accomplished all of this?  Maybe the person I became was Shaun.  Shaun’s blog is a little crazy and more than a little interesting because it’s represents a tiny fraction of the overall man Shaun is.  It’s the fraction that’s getting shit done.  It’s passion.  I can’t stop reading because I want to know what the hell he’s going to say next (even if I disagree).  His writing has a naked honesty that I very much respect as he shows you how he thinks about his goals.

A few months (Janine’s birthday) I was talking about my lack of writing progress and Shaun quietly interjected “Have you made it part of your daily routine?” or something along those lines.  It stopped me cold because I knew he was right.  Shaun’s all up in the motivational stuff and the building your dreams and then actually making that airy fairy shit a concrete reality.  He’s making his dreams happen.  When I accepted this summer blog challenge look what happened: I’m writing. Every day. Trying my damndest to reorder my life so it’s part of my routine. Ahhh… the power of routine.  I was bitching about dreams and The Guth quietly showed me the errors of my way by just living his life and being an example of a better way. 

Dream Stealer

I think Shaun will keep being my friend which is a good thing.  He is an example of awesomeness.  The path he’s chosen will likely continue to give me trepidation but life isn’t about everyone being the same.  He plans to move to B.C. and then maybe I’ll never see him again.  I worried the same about Vlad when he moved to Mississauga, or my brother when he moved to Calgary, or the Andersons when they moved to Chicago.  I still see all of them.  Following your dreams means leaving some things behind.  I don’t ever see Sam anymore (the best man from my wedding) despite the fact that he’s in the same city and that makes me sad.  What makes it more palatable is knowing that he is pursuing his dream to the fullest (he’s a drug addictions counsellor).  Love those you can, while you can.

Ideas and dreams can be fragile little things that require privacy or protection from the outside world until they’re strong enough to survive on their own.  Turning dreams into reality inevitably pushes other parts of your life to the side as you make room for the new thing.  Is that change good or bad?  You’ll never know unless to make a go at it.

Dream Stealer

I once wanted to quit everything and go work with growing green things and I let that dream be stolen from me.  My life continued on as usual.  It makes me a little sad that I didn’t even pursue it.

I once wanted to quit everything and go be a truck driver and I did that.  I thought I was going crazy and so did many other people, parents included, but I did it anyway.  Six days a week I was not in the city and I ate hamburgers out of convenience stores.  It was a fucking awesome once in a lifetime experience and it gives me inner strength to this day.  

Shaun: Don’t let anyone steal your dreams.  Even me.

I have a Harmony 890 remote.  If you haven’t heard of these beautiful universal remotes (there are other good remotes in the Harmony series), they are simply amazing.  Like any universal remote they control multiple home theatre equipment but unlike most they are activity based.  Meaning when you press the “Watch TV button” (It has an LCD screen allowing infinite activities, custom buttons, etc) it can do things like switch the television to HDMI 2, turn on the receiver, turn off the DVD player (because you had previously been watching the DVD player so it knew it was on), change the audio receiver to the correct input.  You press one button, it does all that.  It’s smart.  It’s hooks up via USB to your computer allowing you to program it with a nice GUI computer app and the 890 model can use an RF extender which is a fancy way of saying you don’t even need line-of-sight (pointing a remote at the device you want to control now strikes me as very quaint)

I got one years back and it’s a been simply great, until now.  Looking to upgrade my media room, I sprung for my first Z-Wave device: a wall dimmer switch.  Z-Wave devices are how you can do things like have the lights dim to 25%, turn on the fireplace and have the window blinds close, all with a single button.  The switch paired with the Harmony remote and, technically, it can indeed do all those things.

But you can’t map any buttons to Z-Wave devices?!?!  The remote can clearly control the light dimmer, but not easily.  After turning on the TV, you must then press “Activities -> RF Control -> Individual Lights -> Ceiling Light -> Brighter (continue clicking “brighter” until desired brightness)  then if you want to go back to controlling the television press Activities -> Watch Television.  FUCK YOU HARMONY!!!  I can map any remote button to any function on any device… except z-waves, apparently.  I can make channel up adjust the tv aspect ration and channel down pause my dvd player.  But if I wanted, say, to make channel up + down increase/decrease the brightness?  Harmony doesn’t let me do this.  FUCK YOU HARD IN THE ASS HARMONY!!  AND BY A WELL ENDOWED BLACK MAN.

There’s a snazzy feature where I can map a “scene” to an activity.  Let’s say when I press the “Watch TV” activity I would like to set the scene to “lights at 50%”.  This I can do and it’s would melt a girls panty’s off, that’ show hot it is.  Then I press the “off” button.  The TV, the receiver, the etc, they all turn off.  But not the lights.  They stay at 50% because it’s not possible to map a scene to the off button.  DOUBLE FUCK YOU WITH A METAL BLADED DILDO HELD BY A MUSCULAR MAN WITH PARKINSONS!!!!  That’s was my dream!  When I go to bed press one button and everything turns off, but NO!  You fucking goddamn dream stealers! 

Okay, let’s say I decide I can live with pressing “Off” then Activities -> RF Control -> All Off (or y’know pulling my ass of the couch and pressing a physical switch like some uncultured luddite).  Okay, I’ve decided I could live with that.  I turn on my television and the lights go 50% automatically.  It’s late evening and I’d like the lights just a tad brighter.  Now since I can’t map buttons to change light intensity I go to Activities -> RF Control -> Individual Lights -> Ceiling Light -> Brighter (continue clicking “brighter” until desired brightness). Ahh, okay, perfect.  Now I’d like to bring up the list of shows on my pvr, so I press Activities -> Watch Television AND THE FUCKING LIGHTS GO BACK TO 50%.  there is a non-obvious work-around, but that's not the point

*eh-hem*

We are done with the raping, harmony remote.  Oh wait, no we’re not.  AN ENTIRE CHAIN GANG MAKES ROUGH SEX IN ALL YOUR ORIFICES WHILE DONKEY PUNCHING YOU WITH A SLEDGE HAMMER DIPPED IN PIG SHIT!@!!! FUCK YOU!!!

The entire thing just screams “demo feature”  Some project manager had “Z-Wave support” on their matrix and the bare minimum was done to ensure they could place a check mark next to that feature.  The basic usability is completely absent and it’s such a startling contrast to the rest of the remote.  It’s clear the remote has the technical ability to control the Z-Wave devices, so why isn’t it better integrated into the whole experience?  Googling revealed people complaining about this back in 2006 so I won’t hold my breath for a fix.  It is just not good. I rate you the fail at z-wave, Harmony.

Harmony remote, you may be wondering why you’ve been strapped, naked and prone, to this table.  Additionally, you may be wondered about the gorilla with hotsauce smeared on his penis giving you a very evil look.  Yeah, you’re going to get raped by a gorilla.  No, no, I’m sorry, there won’t be any discussion, you brought this on yourself.

Last night we hosted a lovely dinner for some good friends.  Not one “set” of friends but a wide mixture that didn’t know each other that well.  My mother-in-law dropped in unexpectedly too and it was lovely to be able to say “do you want to join us?” and know there’d be plenty of food.  We didn’t invite so many people that we had to bring out a second table - a total of nine (including two infants).  Someone asked why we were doing this and Janine summed it up perfectly “James felt like cooking.”

I picked a recipe that required baking so I could visit with guests instead of being in the kitchen until the last minute.   I spent a lot of time Saturday shopping and planning.  I spent a lot of Sunday cleaning, cooking and chopping.  I also watched three episodes of television.  Janine was a great help both in the kitchen and later keeping Nathan away from me while I worked. 

Food is more than nutrition and health.  It’s an ancient rite of community bonding.  I give thanks that we have friends to join us.  The conversation’s a bit awkward since nobody knows everyone that well.  Awkward conversation just means your at the beginning of something and it’s better than none at all or the same conversation a hundred times over.  Friendships and family are meaningful things and time spent building them is worthwhile.  I miss going for coffee on a Friday night but these days it’s just simpler to merge families for an evening or more and enjoy each other’s company.

I want to start a tradition of Sunday dinners.  Historically, if supper guests were either one family/friend or else a huge production number where we invite practically everyone we know and do a huge barbeque (feeling guilty if we missed someone).  A few months back a Sunday dinner happened by accident and it was a small mixture of a different people.  Something felt right about this middle way and I knew I wanted to do it again. 

It’s not healthy to spend so much time focused on fixing all the bad stuff.  A better approach is finding the bright spots, the times and activities that feel right, and doing more of that.  Now that I think about it, going for “coffee” every Friday night with friends was similar... we all ate together or sipped ice tea while others ate.  We talked and laughed and there were definitely coffee regulars but new people would come and go.  If we tried to do a coffee now, it would require half the restaurant because there’s a lot more spouses and children then there used to be.  Homemade tastes better anyways.

Food is more than the nutritional and chemical composition and how it affects our digestive tract.  It enriches our souls with it’s ability to bring us together.  To pull us out of our respective blogging caves, put down the mobile phones, stare across the table and think shit, what the hell should I say next?Ummm.....

We started praying a while back. I like it more for the ritual of giving thanks than a specific religious belief.  I’m still a bit timid in what I say around guests but when it’s just my immediate family it’s an excuse we both use to also say whatever’s in our hearts.  Sometimes it’s serious and solemn and sometime it’s “Rubba-dub-dub-n-thanks-for-the-grub”.  Just a tiny moment spent thinking of the farmers, the truck drivers, the grocery clerks, the stock boys, the cook, whoever set the table and whoever cleans the dishes.  Bless the hands that brought this food before us.  Bless the people with whom we break bread.

I told myself that I’m not a connoisseur.  I’m really not a fancy guy and I’m not that particular about what I eat.  Food is fuel.  Wine is a sophisticated man’s game and it’s pricey and who cares.  I’m happy with just about whatever’s put in front of me; to be honest, I don’t really taste the difference.  When you chef television, like Hell’s Kitchen, and they taste a sauce and smack their lips and the chef throws a fit screaming “oh my god, you forgot the parsley! Far to salty!” Yeah: not me.

I didn’t mean for it to happen.  Honest.

It’s just, see, when I started cooking, I had to taste stuff.  Was the risotto done?  Uh… actually, what is risotto even supposed to taste like? Enough pesto in the pasta?  A bit more and definitely more cheese is required.  After making supper I had to decide if I liked the dish enough to make it again.  If I’ve made three new recipes in a row I could at least pick a favourite.  Y’know, form opinions.  Like some kinda connoisseur. 

Tonight’s lasagne was good (maybe a tad salty and I know why that happened) the salad was a bit meh (glad I tried the experiment) and the beans turned out amazing for some reason (a total improvisation… everything tastes better with butter ~ thanks Julia Child).  Oh my god, I must be one of those horrible bastards.  The kind that’s been cooking for a few months and now judges everything he eats like he’s God’s gift to the culinary arts.  Oh fuck me, can we ever eat with him in peace? 

Yeah, that’s not really what I’m saying.  I didn’t think I was capable of forming opinions on food.  How could I possibly cook food when I don’t know the first thing about it and I can’t physically taste the difference.  How the hell do I know if it needs more… uh… I dunno… I don’t even know what spices I’m supposed to use to make it not taste like it currently does.  It’s like some inherent part of me, my tongue just isn’t built like Chef Ramsey.  I used to throw random spices into dishes just to see what would happen.  My wife still “teases” me mercilessly because years back I went through a phase where I added cinnamon to my food.  So I really liked Dune, sue me.

But I wasn’t trying, see.  I was just preparing and eating food, something I will do approximately three times per day for the rest of my life.  Without mean to I’ve discovered one of the phrases in my head was wrong.  I am a connoisseur, if I want to be.  It’s just paying attention to what I’m eating.  And practice. Well fuck, I can eat.  I’m capable of doing that.

But wine? I’m going to buy what’s cheap. Actually, I’m just going to make my own, my wife’s going to teach me and probably tease me about cinnamon.  I bought a beer kit from Save-On-Foods the other day.  It probably won’t taste that good but what do I care as long as it’s drinkable.  It’s not like I’m some connoisseur…

My kitchen, sometime today

Some times, things just pile up. 

• Mountain of dishes – Janine’s been installing a garbarator.  A side-effect is many days of non-working dishwashers and sinks. Also last night I spent my excess energy video recording my cooking for a future post, instead of cleaning.
• Groceries to put away - I went to the St. Albert Farmer’s Market for the first time (holy fuck that place roxors!).  Tammy also went to the market and did a lovely write up about it.  I wonder if we walked past one another?  Then Save-On-Foods, then Safeway. 
• Repack raspberries – I mainly mention this to say if you’re freezing fresh raspberries, put ’em on a cookie sheet so they don’t freeze together in a big clump.  Once frozen transfer to a ziploc.
• Cook Supper – Janine took Nathan to the lake last night & this morning giving me time to myself (apparently to record myself cooking and go to the farmers market.  Food’s on the brain) .  Anyway, I wanted to have a nice meal for their return

How to make this a bit more fun?

I turned on the television.

Well, my laptop.  I’ve also used my iPhone, propped up with a StickyStrap. I love doing this.  It turns drudgery into watching television, something I really enjoy.  Cooking from scratch means a lot more dishes.  So why not watch a show while I’m at it?  I can’t always watch tv when I’m cooking but tonight’s recipe wasn’t mentally taxing (chop cauliflower, grate cheese, cook pasta).  Dishes on the other hand?  It’s the only thing that gets me through.  I actually like doing dishes now.  After Nathan went to bed Janine & I watched the first two episodes of Party Down while trying to put a dent in the mountain of pots and pans that had accumulated over the week.

• I find procedural shows, like Bones or Lie to Me, work quite well.  I prefer my scripted dramas to have more depth and serialization but since I’m only half-watching the show something less mentally taxing works better. 
• I watched Persons Unknown today and when it finished I immediately re-watched the same episode, too many twists and turns to really follow it (and it doesn’t end every week with catching a bad guy). 
• I’ve found In Treatment works well too because it’s basically two people talking for 30 minutes.  Really, it could be a radio show (although I am definitely missing some of the subtleties and I’ll miss whole important bits because a particularly troublesome pot needs heavy duty scrubbing). 
• Something like Breaking Bad, with it’s highly visual story telling doesn’t work so well.  I mean, I can always go and hit the rewind button but that gets old fast.
• There are other shows, like Stargate Universe that have straddled the line.  Honestly I’d prefer to watch that one on my big fancy television screen and after a few episodes it hooked me enough that I thought I’d do exactly that.  A month later I realized that wasn’t happening and I went back to watching it over dishes.  I hit rewind a lot, which is better than not watching at all.
• Comedies can work pretty good too.  I watched a couple of season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia while cleaning the hell out of a bunch of dishes.  It kind of falls into the Stargate Universe realm for me… it’s not the best dishwashing show, but I wouldn’t’ve made time for it other wise.

I also like that I can only work so long before a show ends and I’ll think to myself “really? have I been working in the kitchen for two hours? maybe it’s time for a break.”

I don’t even know how I did dishes before thinking up this plan.  Oh wait, I didn’t.  They sat in the sink and things grew in them.  I want to get an iPad or a touch-sensitive pc and wall mount it just so I can watch television shows more easily.  Honestly, I’m a fucking genius.  It’s like, if I was being interviewed by Jay Leno and he’s all like “where do you get your ideas?” I’d be all like “yo mama! beeeach!”  See, like that.  This shit just comes to me.

My Grandma's Freezer

Have you ever seen a freezer looking like that?  I took that picture last week, during a trip to my Grandma’s home in Saskatoon.  I was so amazed at the lack of processed foods I had to immortalize it in photo. It was full of berries and frozen vegetables, most picked fresh from her farm.  I’d never conceived of using a fridge freezer like that.  I used to believe they designed fridges wrong. The fridge part should be the small bit, large enough to hold a few cases of beer and mustard.  The freezer part was where all the pizzas and microwavable burritos and pre-made lasagnes went (y’know, the “food”) so why wasn’t it the largest?

My Mom's Back Yard, featuring raspberries in bloom

We went raspberry picking yesterday in my mom’s raspberry bushes and came home with an ice cream bucket full.  We’ll eat some but most will get put into a ziploc bag or and placed in our freezer.  The fridge side is full of fresh local organic vegetables I bought two days ago from a farmer’s market (I’ll be planting a garden of my own next year). I'm starting to understand classic fridge design.

Advertisements and constant news programs about “healthy eating” have corrupted what used to be basic common sense about eating.  An easy rule to adopt is don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food because side-stepping the existing system is the easiest. When I arrived at Grandma’s place, she was making marshmallow-rice-crispy squares.  Well, maybe my great grandma then.  After telling grandma I’d shopped at a Saskatoon farmer’s market, a day or two earlier, she couldn’t understand why.  She’d never shopped there because she knew the prices were crazy expensive.  Not unlike Janine, yesterday, balking at the price of organic free-range chickens — “I can get two chickens for that price!”

Nathan helps Grandma pick raspberries & Grandpa eat them (with ice ceam)

My Grandma’s 90 years old and the concerns I have about Safeway’s food are virtually incomprehensible to her.  The industrial food industry, using questionable chemicals and raising animals for slaughter like Henry Ford would’ve, simply didn’t exist when she was growing up.  She assumes when buying tomatoes or steak that it was grown or raised like her neighbour would’ve done it when she was a child.  And it tastes the same, maybe even better.  After all, it’s been engineered by professionals to delight our taste buds.  Crack feels good too; our senses can be deceived.

I should let Janine speak for herself, but like me, she’s much younger than Grandma.  Like me, she’s been raised from birth in a culture that has long since given up my Grandma’s ways as “quaint” and “unprofitable”.  Cheap food is good value and saving money is an admirable quality.  Cheap food represent economies of scale and shortcuts.  Economies of scale give us things like mad cow disease. And most of those shortcuts contravene nature, evolution, millenniums of accumulated cultural knowledge and common sense.  But how do we prove which ones? Much like “proving” smoking is harmful, “proving” baby formula isn’t as good as breast milk, “proving” hydrogenated fats are bad, or “proving” global warming, it’s up to us to “prove” that what the majority of the food industry does is unhealthy.  Why the burden of proof rests with us individuals is simple: they have more money.  Learning if or why it matters takes time, and effort and I mean, fuck it, marshmallow squares taste good, right?  I ate three.

In my youth I remember we went to pick berries at Grandma’s farm… or maybe it was one of my aunt’s… but all I remember is burning my finger on the car’s cigarette lighter and the incredible pain -- but don’t tell anyone because I shouldn’t've been playing with it so I sucked on my finger and it hurt for days.  Yesterday I kept asking my mom questions about how do you know when to cut the raspberry bushes back… learning that you have to look under the leaves because that’s where they hide… remembering that they are prickly little trees.  This is work and the kind I used to avoid.  It’s not like I wanted gross fruit from my mom’s disgusting garden.  It was better if it came from a store, at least then I knew it had been grown properly, not that I would’ve bought fruit anyway, hamburgers taste better (and not those disgusting homemade ones my mom would make).

What I've done: I used Yahoo Pipes to combine all the Summer Blog’s 13 Challengers into a single rss feed.  (Call it a roll yer own AnalogCoast) .  This complex wizardry took me around an hour.  I’ll give you the link, talk about why Yahoo Pipes is awesome, then a tour of how easily you too can be an internet wiz.  Go on…   inhale!

You can find the feed at:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/feelingsofwhite/summerblogchallenge2010

Clicking that link will give you a nice warm’n’fuzzy page that’s nice to look at (click the List button if Image is selected).  If you’re not familiar with rss feeds, I suggest you play with google reader.  If you are familiar with rss feeds, you’ll likely prefer the direct rss feed for the Summer Blogging Challenge 2010

Yahoo Pipes is pretty fucking amazing and it can do tons more than a simple aggregation.  Examples.

• There is a website which occasionally publishes pictures of hot girls.  You would like to filter it, creating a feed which only includes hot girls.  I made one called Bike Babe of the Day.
• An awesome site’s feed only includes links the articles, while you’d rather have the entire article displayed inline so you can just read the damn article in your reader.  May I present Penny Arcade inline (rss) and What’s Alan Watching inline (the yahoo pipes GUI doesn’t display it for some reason, but the actual rss feed does work)
• I didn’t make those last two pipes… which is actually the best part: you can search for other peoples genius pipes and you can clone & edit your own copies!
  • If a pipe doesn’t quite suit your tastes, you can change and tweak it
    • Your Homework Challenge: create an SBC feed that includes random lol cats were mixed in.
    • Hint: you could edit my pipe or use it as input into your own
      Caveat: While creating the pipe this morning, I did encounter some.  The easiest workaround was saving, exiting back to “My Pipes”, then re-entering the editor.  In Prior sessions I’ve never had problems and Pipes is so generally awesome I’m just going to cut them some slack.  It also appears a new Pipes engine is very nearly hear, promising quite the overhaul.
  • Learn from people who know more about pipes by seeing exactly how they did it
• Much much more.  But they ain’t payin’ me, so I’ll stop here

Yahoo Pipes contains an visionary promise.  It lets you slice & dice content from anywhere and pull it together.  You can filter things out, you can remove ads, you can mash-up the internet, because almost everything has an rss feed.  And if it doesn’t, you could even turn a static page into a feed.  And I really do mean you.  More advance things will require someone with a programmer-type-mindset, or someone who’s spent far too much time with spreadsheet functions and macros.  But the basics are within anyone’s grasp. 

You don’t even need to read my words, just look at the pictures that follow…

1. Go to Yahoo Pipes and log in (creating a yahoo user account if needed)
2. Click
3. Drag & Drop (or click the + button) for a fetch feed
   
4. Type in a feed address.  You must use the actual rss feed addresses, not simply the blog address.  In Firefox, you can determine this by clicking on the rss feed icon in the address bar.  In IE8 you can press Alt+J.
   
   There’s an item called fetch site feed who’s description suggests you could just use the site name, but I’m just guessing.
5. Add a few more feeds.  Notice when you click any box, a debugger panel at the bottom shows you the exact contents of the feed in all it’s geeky glory
   
6. We want to change the article titles so each article is preceded by the author’s name.  To do so we must Loop through each article in the feed
   
7. Add a string builder inside the loop.  We want the title to be “Brad: ” + {the article’s title}.  A drop-down list supplies helpful suggestions and you can usually figure out what field you want by looking at the lower-pane debugger.  Speaking of which, notice how (because the loop has been clicked on) the debugger is showing the feed with the altered title.
   
8. Repeat the process for another feed, take the output of each and union them together.  Afterwards we’ll need to sort the results by publish date.  With the pipe output (a standard always-present item) selected, notice the results in the debugger.
   
9. Repeat for 11 more blogs, click that “Layout” button a lot (which moves all your boxes into a nice & neat arrangement) and you’ll have re-created the SBC2010 feed I made myself.
10. That’s it!  Just to throw another simple example at you, here’s the entirety of the Bike Babe pipe I made a while back.
     

When I learned that self-control is an exhaustible resource, insight flowed into me regarding my recent emotions and behaviours.  I’d been too keen to pile on more and more things to do, constantly reorganizing the kitchen and pantry; put out the latest podcast; completely change the way I shop for groceries and cook our family’s food; pack and un-pack clothes for endless trips; build physiotherapy into my daily life (I buggered my foot up, again, a few months back); much more I’m likely forgetting.  All new things requiring self discipline and none of it on auto-pilot.  When I needed my self-control, like dealing with a screaming irrational infant or not telling Janine the first thing that came to mind, it wasn’t there.  I’d used it up.  I must realize I’m not an automatic machine; I may fool myself for brief stretches but no matter how convenient it’d be if I were, I’m not.  The illusion collapses when the self-control reservoir is gone.  And when it’s gone, quite unlike a machine, I go batshit crazythe mighty oak snaps
in the storm, willows survive
they have learned to bend .

I was short on sleep and carving myself into smaller and smaller pieces.  For our recent anniversary, Janine sent me to a spa for a relaxation massage (Have I mentioned lately how much I *LOVE* my wife?) and I was required to fill out a form that included the question “What are your relaxation activities?” I laughed out loud.  Then I thought that’s probably a bad sign.

Even as my worst day was happening, I was self-aware enough to write “I am pulling myself in too many directions at once and the attachment to all these things appears to be causing me some deep deep suffering.”  I’m feeling better these days.  Things are better.  I need more energy to tackle these new projects, so where will this energy come from? What will I give up?  When I sat down this morning to write out how I’ve been trying to be different, these six things emerged…

1 Only one or two drinks a day, only at the supper table, from now until the end of 2010.  (With advance permission to ignore this rule at my brother’s bachelor party)

As Cliff told me, you’re going to have days where that depression gets the best of you, and honestly, THAT’S fine as long as it doesn’t take a bottle of Jack to climb back up.  *eh-hem* Yes, well. *eh-hem* It’s not always Jack Daniels?  Yeah… there’s a reason I’ve already told this rule to my spouse*, and now I’m writing this publicly.  Moderation isn’t one of my strong suits and drinking to excess when I’m not well is not a good combination.  James likes beer.  Beer doesn’t give a rat’s ass about James. Nor does scotch

Some days that wine glass might get really full.  But only one or two.  Never three**. Attachment to alcohol has been causing me suffering.  Time to fix that.

* On our anniversary, the day she sent me for a massage; it was lying on the table being forcibly relaxed for an hour, with time alone to think and reflect, that I decided to make this step and just be brave about it.  Thanks Janine, for giving me time and space to heal myself.

**In less than two weeks, I’ve blown it twice; once involved cheese, the other ribs.  Doesn’t change anything. 

2 No cigarettes.  No weed.

Never set an end date on this.  Well, clandestine runs to the convenience store to buy cigarettes late at night was just one more obligation.  An addictive and habitual one.  Imma let go of that whole bullshit thing and find a bit more time for myself.  Hopefully remembering that one cigarette always leads to another. 

Now, if anyone passes me a joint, I’ll smoke that thing ’till the filter.  But I’m not going to seek it out.  Weed is like an alternate form of meditation for me.  It mellows me out and keeps me level.  It’s my Xanax.  Hardly a coincidence that my recent mental breakdown was preceded by exhausting my cannabis supply.  It’s also a bit of a crutch some times.  It’s too easy to lean on cannabis instead of correct inherent imbalances in my life.  So I’m gonna work on keeping myself mellow and level sans the sticky icky for a good long while and see where that leads me to

3 During Nathan’s nap meditate then watch Firefly

I’m half finished re-watching the excellent tv series Firefly and I suppose I’ll need to find a new series once I’ve run through it. (Sepinwall's summer rewatch prompted my choice)  When I had an office job I was good at maintaining a work/life balance.  Only now work and life have blended in weird new ways and I need to make some time for myself.  tv’s also addictive and habit forming and eats time but I deserve some time where I’m not trying to accomplish any minor nor grand goals.  I currently get extremely anxious while doing this thinking of all the things I’m not doing; I’m working on it.

I need to meditate.  It’s so easy to put off, but if I’m not smoking weed, I must meditate.  Mediation is the mental equivalent of going to the gym: do it regularly and you build muscles.  Maybe you’ve never meditated but I’ll bet everyone knows why people avoid the gym.  It’s hard and it’s not fun – same with meditating.

Watching a show of my choosing, like mediating, seems only to happen when I am alone and/or the house is asleep.  Nathan naps once per weekday, which means I have the opportunity to recharge once per weekday. 

4 Try to go to sleep when Janine goes to sleep.  Get more sleep

This is difficult.  I’m an insomniac and Janine goes to sleep around 11.30p.  My natural rhythms prefer 2a.  Additionally, the previous rules now preclude having a few drinks before bedtime, or a quick marijuana cigarette to help me drift into the land of nod.  Last night I tossed and turned for hours, wide wide awake.  The summer blogging challenge might help, though, as I’m striving to rise early and write.  Early mornings might help me go to sleep early.  And public humiliation via non-blogging might be just the incentive I need to resist the snooze button (because my true alarm clock is a screaming infant two doors down the hallway)

5 A few points less formal

Learn to say no more often.  Learn to stand up for myself a bit more.  Keep things off my to-do list instead of putting more on.  Just chill the fuck out a bit more.  Go for a walk, hopefully with Nate & Janine, after supper every day.  Cultivate an awareness that I need to move life in a new direction.  As Erron advised, I need to let it take over slowly, becoming a crazier hippy (re: food) doesn’t happen over night, it’s going to take a lot of practice.  Probably a lot of other little thoughts float around my head too, but there’s already a lot of words in this here list.

6 Realize that my job is hard, I have made it harder, and I’m on my own

So I can stop feeling sorry for myself on nights where it’s 10.30 and I haven’t had a break yet, because I’m choosing this life.  Not every day ends at so late, and I am supported in many ways, by many different people.  That includes my wife and my family and my friends and just talking about my life online turns out to have been the right thing to do, because of everyone who talked back to me.  Y’all make me feel much less alone than I thought I was.  Thank you.

By blazing a new path for our family, however, I am by definition going to spend more of my time pursuing things only I currently see to be of value. Spouses are not obligated to read my book, nor feel the same way about bread or meat or potato chips as me.  That’s not going to change, so I best stop resenting it.  I’ve chosen to work against the easiest path, which is buying pre-made sauces, dressings and main courses and not thinking to hard about how our meat is raised.  Hell, I barely know any vegetarian recipes other than “salad” and I want to reduce my mean consumption to less than once/day?  Dear self: for fuck’s sake, this is going to take time! There are new things I need to learn, and do, and this all take time and energy.

What am I going to do instead?  Watch television? If all went to plan I already did that, during Nathan’s nap, as well as meditate and have a pleasant stroll after supper.  If those things didn’t happen for some reason then I can reasonably expect them to happen tomorrow.  And it’s almost bed time.  I no longer have to wait for everyone to go to bed so I can stay awake hours more and drive to get cigarettes and then smoke weed and watch hours of television and feel guilty about not blogging and it is no longer an obligation to force drinks down my throat just so I can fall asleep.

In fact, all that shit is against the rules, right?  Rules you went and posted on Feelings of White.  Haha... yeah, I rhymed on purpose.  I’m a dork ;)

The origin of suffering is attachment.
By shedding attachments I ease my suffering.

You have agreed to participate in a few studies.  You were asked to show up to the center a bit hungry.  Entering a room your nostrils are delighted by the smell of fresh baked cookies wafting through the air.  In a bowl you see moist chocolate chips, slightly melted, nestled in a golden puffy dough.  The cookie shapes are slightly irregular, clearly homemade deliciousness in baked form.  As if everyone’s grandma’s baked cookies, and then only the best of those cookies got together and had a big orgy and had baby cookies and then only the best of those were placed before you.  The bowl of cookies is sending tingly eat-me-now signals directly to the chocolate cortex of your brain.  The other bowl contains radishes.

Quick, roll 1d100! The researcher leaves the room for a few minutes.  Of course, because this isn’t your home and you’re part of a study you don’t cheat.  You eat the assigned food.  Hope you were assigned the cookies.  Mmmmm. 

Okay, that test is finished.  It’s explained to you the next test is to determine who’s better at solving problems, people of your educational background, or people who have completed less education that you have.  You are given a series of puzzles requiring you to trace a complicated geometric shape without retracing any lines and without lifting your pencil from the paper.  You’re given more paper and pencils than you could ever use and you can keep trying as long as you’d like.

What they don’t tell you is that the puzzles are designed to be unsolvable.  There is no way you can possibly ever complete this test.  The other thing they neglected to mention is the two tests you’ve been given were related.

What’s going on?  Both complex geometric problems and resisting the chocolate chip cookies require self-control. Radish eaters had to do both while chocolate eaters had more self-control to spare for the geometric problems.  Not self-control in the narrowest sense of the word (e.g. resisting cookies, cigarettes or alcohol) but in the broadest: think of assembling a new bookshelf or learning a new dance.  Contrast that with mental-autopilot behaviours like brushing your teeth or a daily commute to work.  This is a scientific, repeatable experiment that’s actually been conducted. It turns out that self-control is an exhaustible resource. 

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Last year around this time a bunch of fellow bloggers decided to unleash a torrent of awesomeness upon these internets known as the “Summer Blogging Challenge”.  They’re at it again and I’ve decided to join.  At least that’s what I told Liam at the last minute… I don’t think anyone but him knows I’m a participant.  I’ll be like the funny kid playing catch by himself next to the soccer match. 

A minimum 150 words per day x 31 days.  It sounds easy right?  Then how come I’ve never done it.  I hope to build some word-producing into part of my daily routine instead of what I usually do: wait until I feel motivated or desperate to unleash some sort of bloggery.  Usually starting after midnight after everyone else in the house has ended there day.  Yeah, any wonder that blogging fell off after my 9-5 job ended?  Oh, and related to that I will be defining “day” as “before I go to sleep”.  Not that I’m requesting any special treatments from the powers that be.  I fully accept whatever wordcounts are granted to me by the automated scripts Liam has concocted.   I’m just talking about how I plan to start running this marathon.  Like meditating, I’m going to focus on my attempt.

I’m excited.  I’ve been wanting to write so much on FoW and it keeps not happening. I can’t believe my last post was two weeks ago.  I really intended to follow that up, so maybe this is a good time to step up to the plate.  Plus, finally, finally, finally, we have no plans for the weekends coming up.  Okay, well, no out of town plans.  Janine’s already tried to make plans and I’ve told her to go ahead, but I’m staying here.  My sanity needs to rebuild itself and that involves not adding more obligations to my to-do list.  But isn’t blogging every day itself an obligation? A rather persistent and potentially overwhelming one?

Haha… well, perhaps so.  But even if it is, it’ll should be good reading, eh?