Daily Life: Three Dreams

I woke this morning from three consecutive dreams about writing in my
online journal. I had thought about writing last night, but my
thoughts were not fully formed, so I opted to wait. It would seem that
my subconscious mind objected to that decision! So I thought I would
write a quick morning entry to calm that part of the need to write at
least as this morning unfolds.

Sent from my iPhone

Phtography: The Crocker Art Museum

Daily Life: Parrish at the Crocker Art Museum

I'll write more later, but a wonderful exhibit at the Crocker Art
Museum. Well worth the drive up from San Jose.

Daily Life: I Wake Rebellious

Last night I dreamt of Orisha's, the iPhone, and the Guadalupe of the
Eastern Mountains. I awoke rebellious.

Sent from my iPhone

Daily Life: One Minute Writer Award

Oh, and I am very proud to have won another award from One Minute Writer.

Here is my entry, about a talk show.

I get a lot of enjoyment from the One Minute Writer contests. I enjoy participating and I enjoy reading the submittals by the other participants.

Daily Life: A Beautiful Friday

Today was simply a beautiful day. I woke to a beautiful dawn and the symphony of birds, all riding on a cool breeze. I moved smoothly through the day. I lounged in the morning. I went to lunch and a movie (the new Star Trek - very good, I was actually impressed), then a light dinner with my nephew. A quiet evening at home, a simple phone call, then an episode of Myth Busters I had stored on the DVD. I am going to watch Doll House in about twenty minutes and then curl up with a book and read into the night. I am planning on heading up to Sacramento tomorrow AM, then back to San Jose in the mid to late afternoon, with a planned dinner with friends on Saturday night. The weather is perfectly beautiful California spring here in San Jose and the night is equally as beautiful. I love this kind of day.

Photography: Thea Mediterranean - Santana Row

Poetry: All I Know

Sitting in the darkness
Inside the coolness of the night
Watching the clock spin down
Gleaming in the stereo light

I hear the sound of a voice
Rising into a simple song
I remember the taste of her lips
Has it really been that long

The memories we carry with us
All the things we recall
The glory of the rising
The pain of the fall

Sitting in the darkness
Inside the coolness of night
Watching the clock spin down
Gleaming in the stereo light

Sometimes love is a tangle
Equal parts rose and thorn
Sometimes love is dying
Even as it's born

The best that we can do
Is let love softly flow
Over the stones of the river bed
It's all I know

Sometimes love is a tangle
Equal parts rose and thorn
Sometimes love is dying
Even as it's born

The best that we can do
Is let love softly flow
Over the stones of the river bed
It's all I know

Sitting in the darkness
Inside the coolness of night
Watching the clock spin down
Gleaming in the stereo light

Daily Life: Anticipating A Timeless Weekend

It has been a very good week, all in all. It has been quiet and productive and now the day is spinning slowly down. I came into work early this morning, precisely so I could leave in the middle of the afternoon and start the weekend a little early. I just wrapped up my last formal meeting of the day and I am now spending the time cleaning up those odds and ends of bureaucratic life that are always necessary. They are as pointless to rail against as the weather - like the rain, like the sun, they just are. You learn to adapt to them or they make your days miserable.

It is my three day weekend and I haven't quite decided what I am going to do. I am mulling over a run up to Sacramento (about a two hour plus drive) to see a Maxfield Parrish exhibit that opened up today at the Crocker Art Museum. If I do I think I will probably spend the night up there and drop over to the Indian casino at Cache Creek and make a donation to the local tribe. I downloaded a little video poker game to my iPhone a couple of weeks ago and it has been a constant source of amusement in those quiet moments of the day that fall in between other things and has made me want to go spend some time sitting in front of a real video poker machine.

I am contemplating dinner but I haven't decided which direction I am going to go. I was thinking about going out, over to Thea Mediterranean or one of the other restaurants in Santana Row, but then my brain started swinging toward opening the apartment up wide and ordering a pizza. I have Yojimbo on DVR and I have been waiting for a window to watch it and tonight might be the perfect evening.

On the technical front I may have finally figured out what has been causing my connectivity problems at home. The personal laptop was acting up over a couple of days this last week, with intermittent connectivity problems. I was blaming my personal laptop so last night I fired up my personal desktop, which I rarely use except for big things, and that sent me in the direction of a bad router configuration. So I fired up my monitoring tools and my network monitoring tool couldn't pick up my wireless router (even though the other tools said it was up and running properly) so I purged the router, restarted it, and reconfigured it and as of last night - it was working like a charm, so I suspect it was a corrupted configuration file somewhere along the line. Of course, sometimes, with all computer equipment , you just have to reboot everything.

I am nearly to the end of "Spook Country" and it has been excellent - William Gibson at his finest. (He has written a couple of works that just did not impress me. "Virtual Light" was basically a movie treatment and way too Hollywood and "Idoru" was basically incoherent.) I see Clive Cussler has a new one coming out for the summer markets, so I am looking forward to that. My step-dad Bill turned me on Cussler a couple of years back, so I enjoy reading him.

I'm enjoying going into the weekend with all my options open, with nothing outside of a load of laundry or two that has to be done. I could be really lazy and bag the laundry and drop it off at the cleaners, but I happened to enjoy the Zen aspects of doing laundry. That timeless sense you get when you are doing an essentially simple task and can concentrate on the task itself. I think it is going to be a Zen weekend, just going with the flow.

Observations: Pocket Change & The Necessity of Reinvention

I think it is periodically necessary in our lives to reinvent ourselves. As I was wandering through my morning rituals I remembered one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare:

"Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!"-Wm. Shakespeare, Henry V

As we move through our lives we are often changed by those experiences. Think of each experience of life as a coin of change. We have many pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollars* that we accumulate and put in our change jar.

In time, that jar becomes heavier and heavier with the coins of our lives. It can begin to weigh us down. Since it is a gradual process we often do not even notice it at first, but we eventually reach the point where we realize the weight of life that we are carrying.

Each of those coins represents the sum total of us and each holds some value - but, clearly, some hold more value than others. We reach points in our life where were need to sit down and sort out our coin jar, if for no other reason than to lighten our load a bit.

But we tend to save memories and experiences for a rainy day, for a "just in case", and as we sort through them we can often think of more reasons to keep them then to spend them and let them go.

It would be nice if there was a CoinStar** for our lives, where we could take the change jar of experience, pour it in, listen to the whirring and the clanking, watch the experiences get totaled up, and then the device would return to us a slip of paper (light, convenient) that was the sum of us, that we could then take to the cashier and restart the entire process of refilling our coin jar with new experiences. Just simply cash in the old experiences and start over gathering new ones.

I am a huge advocate of the necessity of taking a personal inventory periodically. In my case, I do it very literally. I will take a month of time (for me, a month is sufficient detail to truly look at my patterns and habits) and then keep a very detailed running journal of what I am doing, usually in hour long increments. Do it for thirty days and it will give you a surprising view of your life. (At least it always seems to surprise me.)

Then, once you have your personal daily inventory in hand, you can compare "what you do" and "what you want to do". If you can close the gap between those two, you will find you have reinvented yourself and have moved much closer to the core of happiness that resides in all of us.

*I think I am the only one who really likes the dollar coins. I like them so much I will often buy a roll of them at the bank, just so I can have dollar coins.

**CoinStar fascinates me. If you think about it, it is an entirely successful business model built on one thing. We are basically to lazy to count and roll our own change.