Waiting - Part II

We're still sitting on the tarmac here in SLC. They are stacked up waiting for the de-icing. They estimate a thirty minute delay, but I suspect it may turn into the infamous infinite thirty minutes. I have my fingers crossed that it doesn't, but it very well might. Fortunately, I took tomorrow off from work, with the intention of recovering from the travel day. That may have been a wise decision.

The trip back to SD for Thanksgiving was a good one. The weather was single digit cold, but there wasn't any snow and the wind only kicked in a time or two. So, absent a blizzard, it was simply cold. Butt ass freezing cold, but a simple cold.

Thanksgiving dinner was tasty - a mostly traditional feast centered around turkey and all the assorted trimmings, capped off with a small selection of pies.

In addition to my parents, I saw my sister and several of my nephews and nieces, and one grand nephew. Other than that we watched a lot of the National Geographic channel (my mom's favorite), spent some time reading, some time watching the stray movie, and a lot of time simply visiting.

I left Saturday afternoon and drove up to Rapid City since my flight left at 0610 a.m.. I spent the night at the Fairfield Marriot on I-90. It feels good to be heading home. The pilot announced we're fifth in line to be de-iced, so we should be there in about fifteen more minutes. I have my fingers crossed.
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Waiting on the Tarmac

Sitting on the tarmac at SLC waiting for our turn through the de-icing pad. We've got a good wind and blowing snow. Brrr.
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Salt Lake City

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A Rainy Sunday

It's a rainy Sunday morning and I'm sitting outside the laundry waiting on the dryers, typing with my thumbs. I am not sure where my thoughts are today, but I am in a reflective mood. I am sure part of that mood is due to the season and another part is due to the rain. Both can bring with them a subtly powerful influence.

I don't really have anything major to do, but iit has turned to a mostly busy day, with a morning filled with incidental errands. I suspect that I'll be out and moving most of the day, just because. Enjoy the journey of your day, whoever and wherever you are.
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Pruneyard Tower in the Rain

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The Fruits of Imagination

In life we often carry things. These may be real things, real objects - the odds and ends of things we pick up in our travels. The might be insubstantial things - thoughts, memories, stories, or the other fruits of imagination.

Among them are the joyous things we carry for other people. The things we carry for them, we hold for them, we nurture for them, we remember for them. The fruits of imagination carry with them the fragrance of our love for those who bore those fruits and then gave them to us. It is an incredible gift and we count their treasures among our treasures.
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Thoughts in a Parking Lot

Okay, technically I am not in the parking lot, I am overlooking it as I sit outside Johnny Rockets waiting for the arrival of Tom and Tony for dinner. Tonight is Tom's last night in California. I put him on the plane back to South Dakota, drawing to a close this chapter of Tom's Excellent Adventure. Wish him the best for the next stage in his journey, where ever it takes him.

I had a Monday today for no other reason than it was Monday. Work was about four hours of meetings, a quick lunch, a bit of trouble-shooting and email, then I flexed out early to run a couple of errands (bank, post office, market, and drug store). I never quite seemed to get out of second gear today. I just could not get rolling.

It's a beautiful evening sitting here, watching people wander by, listening to the indecipherable hum of nearby voices. The sun is bright, the sky very blue, and there is a cool breeze blowing over my right shoulder, almost as if the world were blowing softly in my ear.

Crows and gulls compete for the same scraps, foraging the same parts of the parking lot, warily eyeing each other. I watch the people walking by, noting which are absorbed in their own thoughts and which are aware of this beautiful world around them. It's a parade of children, mothers, grandmothers and trophy wives. You have to love it.

I am not sure the mood I am in today, it is as if its a mood of some sort that is constantly sliding out of my vision, constantly slipping out of my grasp, a mercurial mood of an uncertain origin.

And in the mercurial mood I slide into the end of the day, a post-modern Mercutio.
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Why Education Matters

Tranquility

The fruit of silence is tranquility. -Author Unknown
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A Song of Stress or Wolves Surging Through The Door

I woke up this morning and in the few minutes while I lingered in bed, snug inside the warmth of my little comforter cocoon, my monkey-mind started dancing.  My first two thoughts were stress inducing thoughts.  The first was related to my nephew, who is destined to return to South Dakota in about a week.  His stay in California has been enjoyable, but problematic for him. 

I believe that we shape our lives with our choices over time – both the choices to do things and the choices to not do things.  He made his choices and they left him in a place where, at the end of the day, he was dependent on other people for housing, being chronically under-employed. He made enough of an income to keep the wolf from the door, but not enough to actually build a door. 

So, under that circumstances, sooner or later you snooze the wolf comes charging in. My stress arises from the fact that I have an internal debate on what I should do – my nature and instinct is to lend a helping hand, but, when you help people hold the wolf off – they never learn to do it themselves.  Even then, it is not so much that they don’t learn how to do it themselves, but rather than they don’t see the need to do it themselves. 

The wolf never gets them because someone else is always there to hold the wolf off. I think that sometimes in life you need to get bitten by the wolf so that you understand that the wolf is very real and that you have an obligation to make the right choices, the choices that keep the wolves of this life at bay. 

I am, by instinct and inclination, a protector.  I will often hurl myself into battles that other people should be fighting, simply because it is on my nature.  So, making a tactical decision to not engage, in anticipation of a strategic good, is very stressful for me. In the case of my nephew I made the decision not to engage tactically in the hopes that strategically he will learn how to engage.  But, it’s always tough to stand by that decision when the wolves are rushing in.

My second stressor this morning was thinking about work.  One portion of my portfolio is to provide application support to a suite of applications used by a  wide variety of customers.  The challenge arises because, though I can support and influence the application, I cannot support and influence the environment the application works within (the desktop/laptop configurations). Consequently, customers sometimes land on me where I literally cannot do anything to help them and the group that should be helping them isn’t (can’t or won’t, either information of implication). 

This leaves the customer in a tough spot – often caught in a vicious loop where they can’t get any help.  Because of that nature I mentioned above, I am inclined to help these people – in this case, they are trying to fend off the wolf (in this case a faulty desktop) but the bureaucracy and anonymity of a large organization are preventing them.

They are doing the right thing – asking for help, reporting bugs and problems – but the group that is supposed to help them – isn’t.  It’s a struggle for me because I have minimal influence with the other group – I can, through force of will, sometimes manage to hammer them hard enough to take the extra steps of actually helping the customer, but it is emotionally and resource intense – the cost paid is fairly high.

So in both of these stressful cases I am holding a bag full of stressors that I really shouldn’t be holding.  In both cases it is literally someone else’s bag full of stress, and I just can’t figure out how to let go of it.  (I have a scheduled meeting later this day with my manager, as I feel the need to seek their authorization to tell some of these customers – “I’m sorry, I simply can’t help you, you need to go hammer desktop support”.  I hate doing that, but emotionally, in terms of managing the stress – I need some way out from under that particular bag of stress.

As far as the nephew is concerned, I just keep reminding myself that he is an adult, capable of making his own decisions and responsible for the consequences of those decisions.  Easy to say but tough to do when the wolves are surging through the door.