Umm... WOW

I am not one to turn my blog into a bigger soap box for my political views, but because I believe that the current war which this country is engaged in was unjust from the start and it touches so heavily on moral values and human rights issues, both over there and back home; I feel that this video (found on digg.com) of former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel at the presidential debate in South Carolina speaks volumes... and I completely agree with him on all points.

Whoa, BACK OFF!!!

I'm packing up to head off to a retreat for LGBTQ Quakers this weekend. While I've been looking forward to meeting new people and having some spiritual and mental downtime for learning, sharing, and introspection, there is now a nasty bug going around my workplace and it is carrying pitchforks and torches, pounding on the front door of my immune system. On top of that, I tweaked out my back when I took a bad spill on my before-work hike the other day. I've been giving myself plenty of rest and have been blasting my body with ibuprofen, ginger, echinacea, goldenseal, garlic, and heavily curried dishes in hopes of keeping myself healthy and ready to go away this weekend. The bug now seems to be retreating back into the wild and my back is feeling a bit better. Here's hoping I keep a sound constitution for the weekend and beyond.

I apologize for not blogging more, I have been very busy with spring cleaning and computer repair projects for friends & family. I am also enjoying my new-to-me laptop as well as the enhanced lazy bum capabilities that it brings. Now I can idly surf the internet from any lounging spot in my entire household.

The rains have come and gone, and come again. The snow is completely gone in the low-lying areas around here, the corn field behind my house became a lake for a while, just like last year. Seasons changing, a lot on my mind, much to write about if I can keep my thoughts clear enough to put it all down. I am currently reading the non-fiction novel Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom, recommended by quite a few friends & acquaintances as of lately and oh, what a beautiful story it is. Having been employed with a medical staffing agency and working as a LNA in various health care institutions, I have witnessed a lot of death and various stages of dying so I heavily identify with the author's unique perspective on end-of-life issues. Still, this book has taught me much despite all my experience. I wish I had read it six years ago. Then again, six years ago I might not have had the mental framework to appreciate the book or learn from it.

Well, I need to go finish some housework & packing. I have a bunch of random ideas and pictures which I'd like to chop into my next few posts when I get back.

Movies & A Music Kick

I had friends over to watch Frida this evening. I enjoyed re-watching it, noticing missed plot details from my previous viewing. A while ago my buddy Pasha hooked me up with a copy of the movie Lair of The White Worm and I only just got around to it the other day. Lately I've been watching a lot of films which are either strange and/or artsy/obscure; Lair was a lot of the first and a tiny bit of the second while bordering on being a grade B horror flick. Regardless, I still enjoyed it. I'll also mention that I've been on a British Isles musical kick lately, soaking in a lot of Irish, Scottish and British musical traditions and I can't get THIS ONE out of my head (from the soundtrack of Lair of The White Worm).

I've met my match

For those of you who don't know me, I have three personal creeds regarding food:

1. Maintain a healthy dietary lifestyle allowing for occasional indulgences.

2. There is no such thing as too much garlic (this is subjective I guess).

3. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TOO SPICY!!!! In fact, if it isn't making me physically sweat, it isn't spicy enough.

As the title of this post would indicate, I have now met my match. The third rule may need to be amended. My coworker J decided to try a recipe for ultra-spicy chicken wings that she found in a school fund raiser-type cookbook, fully expecting it to be tame because 'spicy' recipes out of school fund raiser cookbooks typically are. She surprised herself with how powerful their kick was and knowing what a peppery spice aficionado I am, she brought a couple of them in for me. Upon the first bite they actually brought me to the fine line between uber-spicy and physical pain, causing me to pant and sweat profusely for about 20 minutes. I've never enjoyed the feeling of my head being on fire, but this was actually almost pleasant.

Interesting side note: it has been conjectured that spicy food addicts such as myself are actually given to a form of natural drug addiction due to the endorphin-boosting properties of most types of capsaicin-containing peppers.

Oh, so they want to play

Warning: gripefest coming on...

I've been trying over the last few years to be a less reactionary person... taking the 'moral high road' so to speak; going to people who are stepping on my toes and trying to calmly discuss the issue with them and arrive at a resolution, but this approach also assumes that the other party involved has some regard for entities outside of themselves.

The apartment I live in is a tad shabby, but it is in a relatively safe neighborhood, the rent is currently reasonable, and there are good neighbors all around. A minor caveat: the walls and floors are poorly insulated, especially against sound. I can often hear conversations that my upstairs neighbors are having in a normal tone of voice. My roommate and I usually work second shift and we typically sleep until late morning due to this schedule. Lately we have been awakened to the sounds of DMX, Eminem, and assorted gangsta rap artists (think of LOUD REPETITIVE BASS-LINES) starting around 7-9am. I tried to go up there and explain to them that we slept late because of the shifts we worked, the walls and floors being poor sound-insulators, and politely asked if they would please keep their stereo turned down in the mornings. I thought everything was good and no sooner had I gotten back down to my apartment when they TURNED IT UP LOUD ENOUGH TO RATTLE THE PICTURES ON THE WALLS... and they left the volume right there. I took no action because it wasn't worth my energy at the time. This morning they were at it again and lately I have been incurring lots of sleep debt because of them.

The sound ordinances in this town are such that anyone making excessive noise at any time of the day is fair game to have the police called on them, but I really don't enjoy wasting the PD's time with petty noise-wars and other such frivolous issues. So... I happen to have a nice little sub woofer attached to my computer stereo system. I keep it turned all the way down most of the time but when it is at top volume, it outstrips their stereo by at least 30 decibels. So I took the sub woofer, mounted it on top of my entertainment system, pointed up into the ceiling, cranked it all the way up to top volume with a bass enhancement plugin running on my computer's music playing program. I put it on the loudest, most brainless, obnoxious, repetitive club song I could find in my music folder (Noname - I'm Your DJ, Johnny Vicious Remix) and set it to repeat for a good 20 minutes. The trick seems to have worked for now. Time will tell if I need to take this approach again. My next step may be to go down in the basement and start randomly flipping the circuit breakers for their apartment.

Yeah, this probably seems like an immature, retaliatory method for dealing with the issue but I already tried the nice-guy approach and I am heavily dependent on getting enough sleep.

Currently dreaming of the future time when I will have my own house on my own land and not have to deal with things like this.

Thanks for listening to my whining.

Like Damp Earth, Leaf Litter, and Moss...

...was the smell of the woods on my hike yesterday. I forgot what springtime in the woods smelled like and realized how much I missed it. Yet again I caught myself slogging muddy trails after dark, but I don't mind. Again also I will mention that I find it strange that the woods in the night-time was one of my biggest fears well into my teenage years, now it happens to be my biggest source of zen moments and spiritual/mental/emotional epiphanies. I am noticing more and more that life in general and mine in particular is filled with odd paradoxes and like a newly learned word... the moment you grasp it and integrate it into your vocabulary, suddenly it is popping up everywhere, causing you to take note of it; 'prescient' being one of them, and seemingly apropos given some recent life circumstances which I won't expound upon right now.

A lovely quote spotted on a placard in the meetinghouse library today:
"Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark." -Rabindranath Tagore
It gave me some food for thought, even more so than much of the reading I've been doing lately.

I finally got a laptop computer, purchased for $200 plus some mind-numbing computer work for a couple of friends. The model I worked on was a Dell Inspiron 1500 which turned out to have some device driver issues, a couple of viruses, and a bazillion spyware programs on it. The model I received for this bargain price was an Inspiron 1100. Definitely not top of the line, but more than sufficient for my purposes. I also needed to do a bit of work on this one being as it was infected with one of those malicious RIAA rootkits as well as more viruses and spyware. Both machines are now in excellent working order.

Oh yeah, and I know this post is totally going A.D.D. on you, so I should just run with it now... a few random pictures I found lying around on the computer (I can't remember whether or not some of these have been posted here before):

Me (around age 20 or 21?) and 'Little Buster Brown', a baby robin that my sister's dog brought in unharmed after finding it outdoors. He was an awkward-looking little pink blob with quills when I first took him home and brought him up on a diet of meat-based baby food, worms, and assorted bugs. It was amusing for visitors to see me puttering around in the back yard with him on my shoulder or head. I enjoyed making them think I was some sort of ultra nature boy. Raising this little guy was easy, but the problematic part was letting him go. He just kept coming back no matter how often or how far I took him into the woods. The most amusing scenario was when I thought he was finally gone and he came barreling out of the bushes, landing SPLAT! into a bowl of spaghetti that I was enjoying on my parents' front deck.

A nice silhouetted sunset shot that I took while walking to a friend's house the other evening


'Cromwell', a wild turkey who frequents my parents' back yard


A couple of macro shots of a 'Cherry' shrimp, Neocaridina denticulata sinensis, in one of the planted displays at my workplace

Back when I had long hair, not sure what got into my head back then (I drank a lot back then, so possibly too much Captain Morgan???) ;-p

Glamour shot

R.I.P. Gigabyte GA-7DX Frankenstein Box: 02/25/2000 - 03/14/2007

This paragraph is dedicated to my old computer, may it rest in peace. It lived through almost eight years of my repeated tweaking, experimenting, overclocking, obsessive component-changing, power-using, multi-tasking, repeated bumps, drops, poor soldering skills, and a few brown-outs. She lived a long, productive life (considering what she went through) and served me well. I brought her into existence with a mish-mash of parts that I acquired on the cheap from various sources. She lived hard, served me well, and died owing me nothing. Some of her vital organs have been harvested and put to use in my new Lenovo box which I just purchased from a local computer store. With the aid of a new motherboard, the rest of her will likely be resurrected again in the form of another lovely Frankenstein box who I will raise (yet again) as my own, this time being brought up in the ways of Ubuntu and SUSE instead of the corrupt and evil ways of The Dark Side, which eventually hastened her demise in the previous life. I am now in the process of teaching my current little one a balanced, zen-like approach which includes the ways of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Windows XP so that she may learn from all of them and use what each may have to offer. (Though I am secretely hoping that she will gravitate toward an outlook residing on the side of Good).

As you may have guessed by now, old computer = dead. I am not pleased that I had to spend a large chunk of my tax return to get a new one, but I saw this coming a while ago and it didn't take me by surprise. This would also be why I have not updated the blog for a couple weeks. I am in the process of experimenting with Ubuntu Linux, Suse Linux, and Red Hat Linux; trying to decide which one I like more. I've tooled around with Linux a little in the past but never in a serious capacity. So this is a whole new confusing ball game for me but I intend to stick with it, even if it means having to peruse technical books & manuals for hours on end. For moral and ethical reasons, this is a step that I've been meaning to take for a long time.

I am in the middle of a bit of a spring-cleaning surge. The basement is still the final, scary frontier... there are relationship leftovers, abandoned hobbies, unfinished projects, furniture & household items in need of repair, and useless tchotchkes by the hundreds down there, all laying around in unorganized piles and in need of much cleaning before they can even be given away. I am saving it all for a weekend off when I'll likely get doped up on coffee and tackle the subterranean chaos with extreme prejudice. I fully expect that it will result in at least half a dozen trips to the local thrift store and a spate of new items for sale on my Ebay seller account.

Wish me luck folks!

Pride Comes Before The Fall, and I Get Right Back Up

Sorry for taking so long to update. My roommate brought home the most lovely flu bug and it has kept me a bit occupied. I had just been bragging to a coworker that I have a cast iron immune system and I almost never get sick enough to be kept out of work... then WHAM!!! I get taken out by nature for a week. On the upside, I feel much better now and went out for a 14 mile cross country skiing excursion today. I slid on over to the next town and explored a side trail that I'd never been on before. I chased the setting sun up over a ridge of small mountains... only to lose it behind another ridge. The trip up was a heck of a workout and the trip back down was crazy-fun, except for the fact that older cross-country skis like mine are much harder to control when careening down steep, narrow trails at high velocity. So the trip back down, while exciting, was done to the tune of "aaah, ouch, *crash* $%##@!!! *crash* ouch, ouch, *crash* %@#!!! whew! Yeeeehaaaaw!" The sunset was a beautiful shade of peach with touches of pink (curses for not bringing my camera this time) and after the sunset the landscape took on a surreal palette of blues, it almost looked like a cross between Van Gogh's 'Blue Period' and something out of a Robert Frost poem. As much as I am frustrated with the lack of culture in this area, the scenery more than makes up for it.

And as promised three posts back, here are the pics from my last cross-country ski trip.

First covered railroad bridge headed south east, the trail that I follow is part of the "Rails To Trails" program which converts old railroad lines to recreational & nature trails. This bridge is a leftover from the era when there was still a working rail line running through this very spot. Note how high the openings are (about 22 feet), this was to accommodate the high stacks on the locomotives.


Interior of the first bridge


Shot of the river taken through a gap in the boards


The second covered railroad bridge


Interior of the second bridge


Underneath the main highway bridge in Kelleyville/Newport

A Miniscule Bit of Self-Discovery

After Meeting today, I was sitting in a coffee shop idly perusing the Faith & Practice book I mentioned in the previous post. I came across a section on bereavement and loss. I have been through a lot of loss in the past few years and this passage hit me so close to home and so powerfully that I came to tears in the middle of the shop and had to remove myself to the bathroom for a few minutes to regain my composure. I am not normally an emotionally expressive person in public situations. This excerpt very plainly describes the exact process which I endured as well as the much-needed personal growth and understanding that I've gained as a result. It is valuable reading if you or a loved one have recently experienced a harsh loss.

22.81
"Loneliness after loss is a bitter and unproductive fruit that generally has to be eaten, skin, stone and all. Meanwhile the table bearing the accustomed spiritual refreshment has vanished, as though it never existed.

In the immediate shock of loss there is help. Friends rally, nature supplies an anaesthetic, the doctor offers Valium. The crux comes later, just when you supposed the worst was past: companions consider the crisis over and return to their own affairs; the first sharp sting has worn off, and you will have decided to give up drugs. You have no idea what is lying in wait.

But now the real battle begins, the formidable adjustment has to be made. The caring and the sharing will never come back, at least in their past form, and a cold, apparently comfortless, independence has to be shaped to create a life of value. The temptation is to look round for a substitute for the one lost - but people grieving are not their normal selves, they are off balance and their judgment is impaired. A new companionship, if it is to be, is like happiness: no good searching for it, if it arrives it will be as a by-product.

The other temptation is to shirk experiencing the loss to the full when the time has come. A readiness and an openness to the approach of that dark night are necessary. Easy to fill the conscious mind with work, or a contrived 'pleasure-seeking', or do-gooding. The unconscious is preparing the pit, and down into it you will eventually be driven. Better go willingly, with all your armour on. For this is in fact the training ground of your spirit, where you will learn how much, through your own pain, you have to offer to others. And so the first and greatest step out of the dark place becomes recognisable: self-absorption begins to give way to empathy with a world of suffering you previously didn't know existed. People in the first shock of grief will be drawn to you, and you, no longer a newcomer to that world, will have found your listening skills.

As to that delicious and sustaining food you were accustomed in happier times to peck at, why, there it is again, and you haven't recognised it. The former sustenance was only fit for children, and has been replaced by helpings of insight appropriate to your increased maturity."

Margery Still, 1990

Nonsequitur = Oblivious

Today at work I observed a whole family of people entering my department with large bruises on their foreheads... or so it appeared to me. It struck me as very strange how an entire family could have similar bruises on all their foreheads. Were they all involved in some sort of weird accident or strange experiment? I mused over this for a good 10 minutes until the answer hit me while casually glancing at the calendar: Ash Wednesday. Wow, I felt stupid :-p

Just the other day I was chatting with someone about reading and discussed how I can't read more than a couple books at once because I can't keep up if I divide my energy in too many directions... and I immediately go break that rule; just barely finished Angels & Demons by Dan Brown (yet another controversial novel that I would heavily recommend), I'm in the middle of She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb (a spot-on recommendation by my dear sister, as always), and I am also taking in snippets of the '94 edition of Quaker Faith & Practice of the Yearly Meeting of British Friends lent to me by my local meeting. On top of all of that I am reading Time On Two Crosses: the Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. All of them of course are excellent reads so far and I'm actually keeping up with each one despite my attentions being so spread out.

Scientific Discovery of The Decade

Profound epiphany of the evening:
When one is hiking back across town from a friend's house, late at night, in single digit temperatures, with a cheap alpaca scarf wrapped around one's face... the humidity from one's breath creates an olfactory sensation which is not unlike that of a freshly-bathed llama. For the uninitiated... a freshly-bathed llama smells slightly musky and slightly earthy at the same time... Just thought y'all would be incredibly enriched by the description of this experience, heee heee !! :-)

Ranid Posterior

I just got back from the longest cross-country ski trip I've taken in my life... I set out alone from the edge of town and traversed a total of about 10-12 miles round trip... it brought me into the next town over. Methinks I overdid it due to the fact that every muscle in my body now feels like it's made of red hot cement. Pictures of the excursion will be forthcoming, but I really don't have anything else to say or post right now, so amuse yourselves with this picture of a froggy butt that I took at work the other day (he was happily sitting, half-submerged, on the leaf of an aquatic plant in one of our aqua-terrariums).

Perched on the apse between the gaps...

...just an odd phrase that kept running through my head today, I don't know where it came from but it sounds like a line from some sort of existentialist poem.

Word of the day: parsimonious

Witty retort of the day:

I needed to walk to the grocery store for a few groceries after work today. We have a stray shopping cart from the local Wal-mart sitting in our parking lot. The night-time supervisor got wind of the fact that I was hoofing it and asked me if I would care to push it back to the Wal-mart, to which I said,"Now really, I have all these bags to carry and how do you think it would make me look to be pushing a shopping cart around town?" and one of my coworkers chimes in,"In this town completely normal!"

Literature and Banned Books

I finished reading The Color Purple and WOW, it was one of the better novels I've tackled this year... Now getting started on She's Come Undone, by Wally Lamb (yet another wonderful book recommended by my dear sister). One interesting thing I've noted about my reading in the past year has been that many of my selections are on The American Library Association's list of most commonly challenged or banned books. I understand the reason why some of these books are frequently challenged, but some of them are at the least innocuous and at best many of them are exceptional literature. Like my sister I may not agree with some of the content in these books but I fully support one's right to read them if they choose. If you really delve into this issue and find out more concerning the entries on the banned/challenged book list (better yet, read them for yourself) you will note how many stories and tomes are considered to be subversive or dangerous (by a select few); having had formal complaints filed about them and sustained efforts to remove them from the shelves of our local libraries; all because someone disagrees with the theme or messages that they contain. It scares me how many people want a free country yet are unwilling to entertain the notion that consumption of literature and ideas, free of censorship, is part of that freedom. (I will note that I believe there are absolutes here... for example I would NOT advocate free access to things such as instructional manuals which detailed how to make psychotropic drugs or explosive substances from common household chemicals.)

Das Kompost Nazi

Some of my coworkers think that I'm a little weird (ok, probably very weird) partly because I encourage them to give me their orange & banana peels as well as apple cores and I routinely empty the coffee grounds from the break room coffee machine into a used container in my lunch box just so I can take all these things home and compost them instead of allowing them to end up in a landfill. I've even been known to pick fruit peelings off the top of the trash and bury them in the flowerbeds outside. During the warmer months, I also bury the expired fish from the aquarium department. It may seem eccentric and it has gotten a lot of strange looks from those driving by, but let me tell ya, my workplace's flowerbeds have never had such rich soil.

Mt. Ascutney Hike

I had my friend W down for the weekend and we both decided to take a hike up the Weathersfield Trail on Mt. Ascutney on Saturday. The hike was beautiful (if not a bit hazardous due to ice & bad traction in many places). Want a bit of an adventure??? Try hiking in 6-12 inches of fresh snow on a trail where some genius decided that the blazes should be WHITE!!! (I thought that blue was one of the most universal trail blaze colors???) We ended up having to pause every 50-100 feet in order to spot the next blaze... doing this against a backdrop of freshly fallen snow and searching for white blazes on trees which in some cases already had numerous whitish natural coloration from lichens & whatnot. It was a refreshing but slightly taxing hike... we never made it to the summit due to our slow rate of progress, it would likely have been nightfall by the time we made it back down. I don't mind getting lost in the woods in warmer weather (with camping gear in tow), but getting lost in the woods in sub-zero temperatures and with no appropriate overnight equipment is entirely a different matter.

A sampling of the terrain

White Blazes + White Trails = ???

A lovely natural ice sculpture in the 'Little' Cascade Falls Ravine

A perspective on the size of the ravine

W and I

My ever-so-delicious homemade soup, You are now pwned!!! I am teh soupmaster!!!

Harassing 'Spud', my roommate's cat (who is obviously so pleased to be lavished with such attention, hehee). Doesn't he look adorable in that silly sweater that she made him wear!!!?

Wacky Advertisement

I just got a good chuckle out of this advertisement. There's a marketing department somewhere who must be patting themselves on the back over this one.

Pictures and Whatnot

Last weekend I spent some much-needed down-time up in northwest VT with the family and I stayed the weekend with my sister and grandmother, I also got to visit with my aunt, soon-to-be-cousin-by-marriage (?)(sorry, her name escapes me right now), and one of the newest additions to the family, stbcbm's adorable new baby boy, Isaiah. I had a good time while up there and I've gained a lot of insight. For reasons I won't explain right now, my sister & grandmother have been a huge blessing to me and have helped me to understand the rest of my family a little better. I actually owe many positive life changes to these two fine ladies. It is because of their wisdom and example that I am not so much of an angry person as I used to be. Also my dear sister keeps recommending good reading to me which has helped me see a lot of things differently. Speaking of which, I finally picked up the book: The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. It is much better than the movie and I can't believe that I've procrastinated for so long in reading it! I am already about 2/3 of the way through and quite impressed. Further proof that just because a book is frequently banned does not mean that it is literature without high merit.

...and a few pictures from my weekend:

Hats hanging in the entrance lobby in The Lincoln Inn in Essex Junction, VT, where my sister, grandmother, and I went for breakfast (a piece of local color that I would recommend by the way, not as good as it used to be, but still worth having a meal at).

Grandmother and Sister

Grandmother and I

In random other news, I'm still having issues with my roommate's cat, Mr. Spud (previously mentioned in this posting). He is very cute and I have no desire to eject him from the household, but he is still a discipline issue. Please consider that I am very permissive about where I allow cats to roam in my household, but food-surfaces such as kitchen counters and tables are strictly off-limits. He still gets up on the counters and tables regardless of all the discipline he's had. I've tried yelling, I've tried throwing light, noisy objects, I've tried scruffing and light smacking with a rolled newspaper (whenever caught in the act). All of this to no effect. It also does not help that he literally has developmental issues and it generally takes him seven times longer to pick up behavioral cues. So for lack of any other method working, I tried something new. I've noticed that my other cats do the usual cat-thingy and hiss while showing their teeth when his roughhousing with them gets out of hand, and he understands that perfectly well. So now whenever I catch him in the act of doing something which he shouldn't do, I take a threatening posture and bare my teeth, hissing very loudly and it actually WORKS. It looks ridiculous and I hope none of my neighbors ever see me doing this... but I am glad to finally have a working method for training him.