Category: Blogging

It’s been a hectic but joyful week and a half around here. Tyson and his family stayed with us for nearly a week, and though the kids spent some nights at Dawn’s house we had five guests and two large dogs for company most of that time. More often than not we had more guests for dinner, including my brother and his wife. Preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner for that many people would have been even more challenging if grandkids hadn’t volunteered when needed. After Tyson and Jen left, we drove to Leavenworth and spent the night with Cory and Margaret and family. After an arduous return Sunday, I collapsed around 7:00 PM and woke up an hour later in time to get ready for bed.

Now comes the hard work — trying to get back on schedule. Though I originally planned on getting up in time to get to the gym for a much-needed workout, we ended up getting out of bed around 8:30, too late for a workout before the mobs hit the YMCA.

With rain forecast for the entire week and heavy rains throughout the day, I decided I would delay my outdoor projects and try to get in some reading and writing. I did manage to finish A House by Itself: Selected Haiku: Masaoka Shiki, a book I purchased a month or two ago. At a hundred pages, I figured it would be easier to finish than The Book Thief which I’ve been reading on and off — mostly off — for nearly a month.

Reading is a constant in my life. I’m more addicted to reading than I am to TV. I can’t imagine not spending at least a couple of hours a day reading something, whether newspaper, magazine or online source. Increasingly, I spend more time reading blogs or stories from Facebook posts than I do reading actual paper books or Kindle books.

Clearly I am not as addicted to writing as I am to reading. Reading is fun; writing is work. Recently, for whatever reason, it’s been hard work. When I started this blog I wouldn’t have imagined reading a book without writing about it here. In the last few years, I’ve skipped writing about far more books I’ve read than I’ve written about books I’ve read. Not sure why that it is, but I’d like to reverse that trend if I can. I’m still convinced that good writing and good thinking got together.

Not sure anybody has noticed but I haven’t been blogging lately for far too many reasons, with one excuse quickly spilling over unto another. The family health crisis, though far from over, has become an ongoing issue rather than an immediate crisis with all we can do is offer occasional help and wishes for the best.

Winter has almost set in and the weather makes it challenging to get out birding on a regular basis. It doesn’t help that there aren’t too many birds out there even when I do get out. Hopefully, the birds that overwinter in Puget Sound will begin to return in greater numbers when it gets colder up north. I am just now beginning to see the Horned Grebes in Port Orchard and have yet to see a single Goldeneye or Merganser.

Long term, I’ve shifted my personal focus from ideas and reading to immediate tasks like renovating the garden and remodeling the house. Lael and I spent most of the 2017 summer tearing out our backyard lawn, making raised beds, and rebuilding the fence. That renovating continues to today. I’m in the process of replacing the blind at the end of the deck. Gavin and I spent a recent weekend replacing the front deck.

I spent most this summer fixing up my woodworking shop in the garage so that I could build new bathroom cabinets to go with the Ikea medicine cabinets and track lighting that I installed at the beginning of the summer. I spent time learning some new tools like a Leigh Dovetail Jig and a Mortise and Tenon Jig. I replaced all the drawers and cabinet doors before hiring someone to replace the countertop and the sinks. That left me with the task of replacing faucets and the under-the-sink plumbing. Accomplishing those tasks reminded why you don’t see too many 76-year-olds still working as contractors.

One of the greatest dangers of remodeling is that once you discover how much you like your new ______ you see other things that could benefit from a quick refresh, things like a shelf between the Ikea medicine cabinets to match the new cabinets below. When it came to replacing the dingy shower — been there, done that— I decided it was time to call a contractor. Kohler will be putting in a new shower between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I have to do some more research before deciding if I want to put in a new bathroom fan or have a contractor do it for me.

Once I finish the deck divider I’ve said I will build a new cabinet for the TV that matches the cabinets I built while living in Vancouver a lifetime or two ago. When I built those cabinets I couldn’t have imagined having a large-screen TV. Now it’s hard to imagine not having one. A new smart TV is a pretty good incentive to make sure I have the cabinet completed faster than might otherwise have been possible.

Many years ago I discovered that gardening and woodworking offered a respite from teaching high school English. The most frustrating part of teaching is that you hardly ever get to see the results of your work. It’s difficult to know if you are doing a good job or a bad job, and it never seems like you’re doing as good of a job as you want to do. Gardening and woodworking offer concrete proof of how successful you’ve been.

I’m no longer teaching, but maintaining this blog sometime feels a little like teaching or, worse yet, talking to myself. I never regretted teaching, though I left the field as soon as I could retire and have never looked back or considered substituting to supplement my retirement, and I don’t regret blogging. It has introduced me to some of the most interesting people in my life, people I share common interests with. I have no interest in or intent of giving it up, but writing has a lower priority right now, and it might take a while for me to rediscover the joy I once took in sharing my readings or my outdoor experiences.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I just missed another anniversary. No, not my wedding anniversary, Leslie me informed me that we both missed that a few weeks back. No, the anniversary I missed this time was the 12th anniversary of this blog. In fact, if I hadn’t been looking back trying to figure out how long I’d been practicing Tai Chi, I would never have known it was the blog’s anniversary. As you’ve probably noticed if you stop by regularly, I’m not much into “Special” days. Other than Christmas, I seldom devote a blog entry to holidays.

Still, it’s hard to believe that I first published a blog entry on September 21, 2001, an entry protesting our invasion of Afghanistan, almost as hard as believing that we are still there fighting a war that will accomplish nothing, despite politicians’ claims to the contrary.

Back then blogs were on the cutting-edge of the internet; now they’re almost ancient history, a mere footnote to the history of Twitter, Facebook, and all those other new medias. Luckily, I didn’t think of myself as cutting edge then, and I don’t think of myself as hopelessly obsolete now. I’m doing what I love, and as long as I can keep doing it as well as I want to do it I’ll be here doing it tomorrow and the days after.

The only thing more important to me than blogging is probably regular exercise, particularly walking and hiking. But I see regular exercise, even when I don’t want to do it, as vital to my health and well-being. Blogging is the mental equivalent of regular exercise. Forcing myself to write here has kept me more alive than I ever thought possible. I suspect I’ve read more for this blog than I read for my undergraduate degree.

Thank you for accompanying me on my journey, no matter how far you’ve walked with me. I sometimes think I bird just to meet fellow birders and to join with them in the appreciation of Nature’s beauty. I keep blogging because I meet the most interesting people here, virtual friends who love literature and ideas as much as I do. I suspect there’s no place in the world where I could find better companions.

and I can’t get caught up.

I am having a hard time balancing my compulsions lately. About the only thing I’ve managed to do regularly is to get to the Y and exercise for an hour or two each day so at least I don’t sacrifice my health to my other obsessions. You need to be healthy if you’re going to try to clean up past mistakes.

My main obsession, as I mention recently, is trying to clear out old photos that are filling up nearly two very large hard drives. I don’t even want to think about how many CD’s full of even older shots I might have waiting on the shelf. And we won’t even mention all the old slides that really should be converted to digital copies so that they don’t get thrown out when no one has slide projectors around to show them.

Conservatively, I’ve been locating and deleting nearly a thousand photos a day. Before I can delete many of them, I need to find them on backup hard drives because they have become disconnected from Aperture over time. Many of them became disconnected when I had to buy a larger hard drive to back them up. If I just delete them from Aperture without first locating them, they never actually get deleted from the hard drive, and that certainly defeats the purpose of what I’m doing.

So far I’m just tackling the easy part, deleting photos that aren’t as good as photos taken the same day or photos of subjects that I know in my head that I have better shots, common birds like Great Blue Herons, American Bitterns, Kingfishers, favorites that I can easily remember.

It will take me probably another 40+ hours just to finish this phase of the job. The harder job will be identifying all the photos so that I can then eliminate all but the very best of the shots, and the ones that have personal value because they remind me vividly of particular experiences.

It’s hard to remember that this is merely an extension of another job I started recently, trying to clean out my office so that I can paint, lay a new floor, and move the furniture around so that I can spend more time doing artwork.

Luckily it’s winter and I don’t have any plans to go anywhere until spring. We’ve descended into the winter rains here, and it’s supposed to get even worse in the near future. So, maybe I will be able to get back to reading and writing sooner rather than later.

Of course, I suspect I originally started this cleanup to avoid writing about Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. I have given both a lot of thought, though, and I’m not willing to throw them out until I have finally written something about them.