A Perfectly Ordinary Day

It was a supremely easy day today.  I slept in. I had breakfast at the Hickory Pit. I wandered Fry's Electronics and bought a pair of movies for my collection - "In Bruges" and "The Guard". From there, I did a couple of loads of laundry, stopped at the market and then wandered home.  The afternoon was spent watching "Hope Springs" on the DVR, followed by an alternating afternoon of napping and reading "The Elephant Vanishes".  Dinner was a simple ham and potato salad, followed by an easy evening online and a few pleasureable hours with T.R., during which I learned a lot about computer keyboards and the quest for a silent keyboard. All in all it was a perfectly ordinary day. Sweet.

Movie Review - Lockout

So, we went and saw "Lockout" this morning at Cupertino Square theaters. It fell into the category of movies that I call "pointless but amusing" - and that is actually a positive thing.  Sometimes people take film to seriously, they can forget that one of the main purposes of a movie is to entertain.  It doesn't have to have deep meaning, it doesn't have to rock the foundations of your world, it simply has to entertain you.

Lockout, with Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace certainly fell into that category.  The plot was simple and entirely contrived as a vessel to amuse you with likeable stars and a full array of special effects.  The basic story is - the President's daughter, played by Maggie Grace, goes on a humanitarian fact finding mission to an orbital prison, but there is a prison riot and consequently she is taken hostage.  Guy Pearce's character is the wise-cracking and cynical super-soldier with a heart of gold, trapped in a government conspiracy. He sneaks onto the space station. He shots people and blows things up.  He rescues her. He wisecracks. He finds his heart of gold. They escape.

Just sit back, enjoy the popcorn, and watch the entertainment unfold.  If you are up for a movie that is pure entertainment - this one delivers all across the board.

The Legion of Chicken

Saturday morning is starting low and slow. The plan today is breakfast with friends at the Hickory Pit, followed by a trip to Cupertino Square to see the movie "Lockout", starring Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace.  I have my expectations set at the appropriate level and I am looking forward to the movie.

I slept well last night, it was the last of the rain storm that has been flowing through the area and the weather today is supposed to be cool and pleasant, so I am looking forward to some successive days of sunshine. 

I had one of those strange dreams last night.  You know the ones?  The ones where you wake up and think "what the hell"?  Well, last night I dreamt about a chicken restaurant on 8th Street called "The Legion of Chicken".  They has a very simple menu of roasted chicken and three or four sides and the place was decorated in a faux Roman style.  What I woke this morning one of the first things that ran through my brain (after thinking that it was a strange dream) was "What the heck do the Roman's have to do with chicken?"

A Bit of Wisdom, A Bit of Strangeness

A Bit of Wisdom, A Bit of Strangeness

“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.” –Haruki Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore”.

“You know those thundering sounds you get when it rains, what are they called?”  “Uh, those thundering sounds are called…thunder.” – (From a real conversation at work this morning.)

A Tranquil Rain

There is a tranquil rain falling tonight.

I can hear the quiet hush of it on the roof, hear the soft drops and streams as they cascade off. It has been a good night, rich in conversation, rich in contemplation, rich in the experience of life - which is never anything less then dazzling in its beauty and mystery.

So, tonight, amid the tranquil rain, I am seduced by the dazzling beauty and mystery of life.

The Stream and The Lake

I often find it challenging to slow down.  There seems to be an inner drive that keeps me moving forward, so of like a shark. (Okay, granted that would be a rather harmless and lazy shark, but let me have the metaphor!) I have a real tendency to fill the days with stuff, while at the same time I am struggling to fill the days with less stuff. It certainly creates its own form of dynamic tension.

Today is a classic example. I’ve had a highly productive day at work.  I should take the quiet afternoon and try and work on some of the long term things that I need to pay attention to, but I keep finding myself drawn to the endless stream of small things. What I need to do is turn my back on that stream for a while. I need to focus on those items that require deep thinking, as opposed to just shallow and reactive thinking.

But, for reasons known only to the universe, that is a much harder challenge for me than it should be. Phones, email and instant messages always draw me back to that shallow stream that bubbles along, full of turbulence and air, when I desire to spend time at the edge of a great, vast, and still lake. Well, as difficult as it is, I am going to give that a try right now – I am going to step away from the stream and focus on the lake.  Wish me luck.

Movie Recommendation - The Perfect Game

I saw a great little movie on cable this weekend.  If you haven’t seen it, see if you can find “The Perfect Game”, about the Little League team from Monterey Mexico that wins the Little League World Series with a perfect game.  It is a wonderful little drama.

 

A Semi-Rambling Morning

Friday turned out to be an efficient day.  I started the day lazy, made it a point to linger in bed and then linger around the apartment watching a few programs on the DVR.  As I watched the TV, I started a running list of all the things I needed and wanted to do for the day, then simply worked my way down the list.

It turned into a good day, including a visit to optometrist for my yearly exam and a new supply of contacts. The appointment was originally scheduled for later in the week, but since I was in a productive mood, well, I did my best to be productive. The exam went smoothly, no problems, no changes in my prescription.  They did dilate my eyes for a check, which meant I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering around wearing my dark sunglasses and with no close in vision, which made it tough to read labels when I was trying to differentiate among products.

I had lunch at Sushi Boat in Westgate, then spent part of the afternoon looking for a small table or desk to fit in one corner of my living room, so I can use it for my work laptop. I want something that is highly stable - one of the problems with a lot of the smaller desks in they are not the most stable platforms and any sort of wobble can be irritating when you are trying to work.  We have some small desks at work, which are heavy L frame computer desks, that would be perfect in size and stability, so I may take the opportunity today and stop at a used office furniture place up on Kifer, in order to see if they have that particular type of desk.  There were some near misses at OfficeMax - most of their small desks and incidental tables were just a little too wide or not quite stable enough.

Last night was a quiet evening at home, which I split between watching the Finder and Fringe (both among my favorites), and then writing well into the evening. I wrote a little over 4,000 words, which was a pretty good output for a single evening.  I think, for me at least, it proves the importance of having the imagination and creativity engaged and having a plot. Because I knew fairly well where I was going with the writing, what all the necessary elements were, it was smooth writing.

I had trouble falling asleep last night, for no real reason that I could think of. This morning I wondered if it might have been a side effect of the drug used to dilate my eyes, because that is about the only thing different that I can think of from yesterday. A hot shower and a cup of coffee and I feel pretty good today, but we'll see if I suddenly run out of energy midway through the day.

A Spring Evening

Tuesday was pure chaos.

Wednesday was simple and productive.

There is a lesson about balance wrapped in there somewhere.

It's Wednesday evening now and I am settling in, watching Once Upon A Time on the DVR and planning a quiet evening reading and, hopefully, a conversation with T.R.. 

I like the simplicity of it all.

Having spent the first quarter of the year attempting to be more deliberate and observing the flow of things, one of the things I was coming to understand was that I needed to make the choices that would slim my life down - make it more simple, make it more slender. 

That is not always an easy thing to do.

But, it is worth the effort.

Four Dreams in One Night

I slept well last night. During that sleep I had four vivid dreams.  In the order of occurence:

1. Why I Don't Play Lacrosse

In this dream I was in a heated discussion with a friend of mine.  We were in high school and my friend (who was not a person I recognized, but in the dream I knew he was a friend) was trying to convince to go out for the lacrosse team, applying the varieties of peer pressure, ranging from convincing to shaming. I was adamant in my refusal that I simply didn't have time to play lacrosse, since I was involved in football, basketball, baseball and boxing.  It was not a question of will or desire, but simply a question of not having enough time.

2. I Dream of Elevators

In the second dream, I dream that I am traveling for work. There are a whole bunch of work related people at a hotel in Washington D.C., where we are all attending a meeting to go over some design issues for a new system.  The people the dream are a mixture of current co-workers, past co-workers and, for no apparent reason, my friend Dean Yellow Hawk from St. Francis. In the dream, Dean is their as a consultant on the user experience.  We are doing an assortment of pre-meeting type of things, dinners and discussions in the hotel lounge.  Besides the presence of Dean, there is also one other unusual thing.  The elevators in the hotel do not have doors - and they do not stop.  If you want to use the elevator you have to wait and then step in and onto the moving elevator.  The same thing to get off the elevator, you have to time it.  The elevators are not traveling too fast, so it is not a difficult task, but it is still a question of timing these elevators that never stop.

3. I Dream of An Escaped Psychotic

I am not sure if this dream was a different dream, of it it was a continuation of the business dream.  In this dream I am with a bunch of people and we are sitting in a restaurant with glass walls, on the second story of a building (possibly the same hotel from the previous dream). Across the street, about sixty or seventy feet away, is some sort of institutional building. In the dream, I know that is it a mental institution. Suddenly, there is a commotion and a giant man in a hospital gown runs by (his is over six foot and three hundred pounds) and is pursued by multiple people in scrubs. He gets so far and the people in scrubs are closing on him, when he suddenly pulls a small silver revolver and starts shooting people.  I distinctly recall that he kills at least one person by shooting him in the forehead over the left eyebrow at point blank range.  Then, he shoots two more who are running (both fall to the ground and I cannot tell where he has shot them).  Then, he wrestles with a fourth person, throws them to the ground, and presses the revolver into their diaphram and shoots them. About that time he is swarmed and overwhelmed.

4. I Dream of Apocalyptic Snow Storms

In this dream I am with a group of refugees walking down a highway somewhere on the great plains.We are traveling west.  Across the plains we can see a rapidly approaching snow storm.  It is a turbulent rolling mass of blowing snow, similar to the vast sandstorms that you see sweeping the Middle East. We were racing into the storm, toward a farmstead.  We arrived at the edge of the farmstead and everyone rushing into a small abandoned house.  We got the women and children in first, and then the men were going in. There were still three men outside just as the wall of snow came cascading over the house, but we were able to reach out and pull them in.  The storm did not last very long, thirty minutes or so, but it dropped about three feet of snow.  As the storm stilled I went outside to look around - and discovered the other buildings on the farmstead were occupied.  An older man came out to talk to me and tell me that we needed to move on.  As he was telling me this he pointed out a bunker on the overlooking hill.  Several people in the bunker stood up so I could see them.  It was pretty clear that we had to keep moving on.