Haiku-ing

Blame E for getting me started.

Scintillating stars
Signposts for spirits' journeys
Glimmer in the night.

Headlights dimly beam
Through the foggy haze of dawn
Workers brave the morn.

Snowflakes drifting by
Heralds of a Winter storm
Muffling all in white.

Monty and Raven,
Jodeo and Tobey two -
A Jack Pack attack!

Multiple Type A's
Wrangling over delusions
Interminably.

Another offsite
Filling the room with hot air
Talking of nothing.

Alone in my car
Thoughts circle like butterflies
Searching for nectar.

Sharks and Minnows

It's interesting sometimes the connections and leaps that your mind makes when you spend a lot of time alone with your own thoughts. Yesterday's train of thought while driving to work started with Michael, Tracie and Jim Cleek's toddler, and ended with reminiscing about swimming underwater as a type of exercise.

Actually, the sequence started with something before Michael, but I don't recall what it was. I just remember thinking about Michael and the Cleek's visit last Sunday. During that visit I had asked Tracie how Michael's Spanish was doing (his day care provider is Hispanic). One of the things she said in response was that she thinks sometimes when they think Michael is babbling, he's really speaking in Spanish and they just can't understand him. This led to thinking about what Spanish phrases I knew and could say the next time I see them.

That led to thinking about the phrase "Marco Polo", which comes from a game normally played in a swimming pool. I spent lots and lots and lots of time playing Marco Polo as a kid, when I spent all my summers at the pool (which leads to all sorts of separate tangents that I'm not going to go at this time). This led to thinking about the Summer when the big game my gang at the pool played was "Sharks and Minnows".

We took over the deep end of the pool when we played. The pool itself was one big rectangle, and the deep end had a standard springboard in the center of that end of the pool. The game started with the "Shark" (basically the player who was "it" for that game) on the diving board, and the rest of us, the "Minnows", on one side. To start, the shark would run off the end of the board, either jumping or diving in. As soon as the shark hit the water, the rest of us dove in from the side and swam to other side as fast as we could. The shark then tried to get the Minnows, by one of two ways: if the minnow was swimming on the surface, all the shark had to do was touch them; if the minnow was swimming underwater, then the shark had to grab them and bring them to the surface. Once tagged, the minnow became a shark. The minnows who made it safely to the other side would get out of the pool and wait until either every minnow was safe or had been turned into a shark. All the sharks would then line up in the middle of the pool, treading water, the original shark would say go, and all the remaining minnows would dive in and try to get safely back to the other side. This would continue until all minnows had been caught. Whichever minnow the shark had caught first would be the shark at the beginning of the next game.

I was good at this game - very, very, VERY good. Not so much due to my excellent swimming ability (though that helped), as most of the pool gang were good swimmers, too, but because I could hold my breath underwater longer than most. And the more we played this game during that summer, the better I got. The pool was 11 feet deep at the deepest point, and I would take a running start, dive in and streak down to the bottom as I began my swim across. It's very difficult to drag someone up through 11 feet of water who doesn't want to come up. Other kids would try to pull me up, but would have to let go to return to the surface to get a breath, and then come back down to try again -- and would repeat this while I was still down below on my initial breath. By the end of the summer, it usually took quite a few rounds and at least 4 other kids, each going to the surface and back at least once, to tag me. By the end of the summer, the rest of the gang wouldn't play Sharks & Minnows with me unless I agreed to play shark the first game. I can also clearly remember, too, how close I came to blacking out sometimes before I reached the safe side and rose to the surface -- chest spasming to take a breath, and black spots before my eyes. Can you say "competitive"? "stubborn"? nah, not me.....

At the beginning of the school year after that Summer, the main activity in gym class was cross-country running, which was a new sport for the school district. What was amazing that Fall was that I was near the top of my class in running times for the course we ran during gym class. This was highly unusual, as running was not my strong suit. Unfortunately, none of the coaches noticed, as they were still figuring out how cross-country was going to work in the school sports system, and the initial focus was on forming the boys' team, not the girls'. An opportunity missed, that may have changed some things in my life; by the time Spring rolled around, and track season started, the girls that I was beating handily in the Fall on the cross-country course (3 miles, I think) were easily beating me in the track mile run (the longest distance we had in track in our district).

I never had another Summer like that playing Sharks & Minnows, as that was the last one when I was free to play all day - every Summer after that I lifeguarded and/or had other jobs. Never again in school was I able to run the cross-country course like I did that Fall, either. I have always attributed my ability to run distance well that Fall to playing Sharks & Minnows to such extremes all Summer long - stressing my lungs almost to the breaking point over and over again; repeatedly, for weeks, forcing my muscles to work under conditions of oxygen deprivation.

Subsequent reading on the subject indicate that I was probably right: not only did I increase my lung capacity, but I also probably increased my blood's capacity to carry oxygen. But those effects wear off if you don't keep working in those stress conditions, which is why I couldn't run as well the next Spring. Ever since, when I have needed to train heavily for an event (the annual 20.1 mile Longstreet run at Ft Bragg, triathalons, Airborne School...), I have included swimming in my training regimen, where after swimming the requisite laps normally, I would swim several laps underwater. I never quite stressed my lungs as much as during Sharks & Minnows (the motivation to stay under is not the same when you're just swimming by yourself, and staying under until you almost black out is a lot scarier as an adult than when you're a kid), but I think it still helped.

Fighting Spheres

Had an unusual dream the other night. For one thing, my point of view kept shifting – I wasn’t always seeing things in first person view, but sometimes in big picture, like watching a movie.

I was on a spaceship, possibly spherical in shape. We were trying to activate our advanced weapons & defense shields, as an enemy was nearby preparing to fire on us. Then my view point shifted, and I could see what was happening on the enemy ship, as if I were a fly on the wall or looking through a security camera. There was the leader, whose name sometimes sounded like Zakhu and sometimes like Zathura, and two henchmen. They had figured out the code/sequence needed to activate the weapons/shields. The “control” was a big, wall-sized panel of small, rectangular tiles. While mostly silver, part of the control wall depicted a vaguely ancient Egyptian scene. The tiles, including those in the picture, were engraved with numbers and symbols: 2-3 digit number in the center, with a smaller letter centered above that, and an even smaller series of unknown symbols centered along the bottom. The numbers were not in sequence.
What I “knew” in my dream was that this technology was new or alien, and unknown to either side. Three tiles had to pushed or flipped in sequence, and each side had figured out only two of them. As I watched, the enemy force pushed/flipped three tiles; the first one I couldn’t read (but my side knew it), the second one was in the picture area; it read “262” and had either an “R” or an “A” above that. The third, the one my side hadn’t figured out yet, was up in the silver area, had “60” on it, and the letter was either “R” or “A”. My view point shifted again, and I was back on my ship, and trying to explain to my folks where the last tile was and how I knew it – trying to explain that I had some sort of psychic vision or a telepathic event. They didn’t believe me at first.
Then the enemy fired, and my view point shifted again, back to “movie mode”. Now I was looking at both “ships” out in space. Each appeared as a globe, webbed with glowing green lines both horizontally and vertically – in other words, latitude and longitude lines. An energy ball from the enemy globe was headed toward my globe. I watched as hit, kind of sinking into the green web before punching through and coming out the other side. My point of view switched briefly back to my ship’s bridge, where we were all reacting to the explosion, and then went back to movie mode. Apparently my crewmates believed me about the last tile, because now my globe grew an arm, also covered in glowing green webbing, and the “hand” morphed into a net just in time to catch the next energy ball from the enemy globe before it hit and throw that energy ball back at the enemy globe. Think lacrosse. And then…the alarm rang. Oh, well.

It’s interesting to think back on vivid dreams like this, and see what my subconscious had drawn from real life: not only was this dream more like watching a movie or TV show than most dreams, but I can easily see things drawn from Stargate SG-1, Charmed, and The Adept (a book series I’m currently rereading), not to mention Zathura, which is a dvd that I had just bought this past weekend (but haven’t watched yet).

Someone's Watching You

I have a birdfeeder in the dogwood next to the house, and Sunday morning there were a lot birds in the area, trying to feed. I kept trying to get pictures, but they flew away when I got close, and from farther away I couldn't get a good picture, even with the zoom on my camera.
Then I found this guy, who cooperated by staying put for the most part. I was still having to use the zoom the whole way, and couldn't get my camera to focus on the dove instead of the branches in the foreground. But I actually like how this turned out, as your eye is not immediately drawn to the dove, you have to look to see him.

Snow Woman

Later in the afternoon Sunday after the storm ended, the sun came out, and the snow was in perfect packing condition. Great for snowballs, snow forts, or for building a snowman. But I decided to build a SnowWoman instead...or at least the torso.

Aftermath...

Well, we had about 12 inches during this past weekend's snow storm. These pictures were all taken early Sunday morning, around 0800 (8:00am), after the worst of the storm had passed. And I was up and out of bed because the 4 fuzzy monsters needed to go out. This is a dogwood tree on the side of the house.

Here is my car. The snow is not too deep around it, because the snow did not initially stick to the black asphalt (see previous post), and because of the direction the wind was blowing (blew the snow around it and up against the garage, which is to the right in this photo).
These next two pictures show the back deck and the puppy/dog pens. It took me an hour to clear the pens and a path to them! I'll be so glad when the dogs start using the new kennels and we get to take these down -- hopefully this weekend!

And finally, here's an overall picture of the back of the house, just to show how much everything was covered in snow.

I'll post more pictures in subsequent posts.

Layout

Hmmm, yes, well, obviously I need to work on layout in my blog when publishing posts. The preview looked better!

And so it begins...

Saturday, 11 Feb 2006, 1752 hours...or 5:52pm for you non-military types. It's been snowing a couple hours now, and the snow has started to stick to the ground, but not yet to the streets or driveways so much.

Adventures While Commuting...

Add to shopping list: flares and emergency warning triangle. Keep in car.

As I was driving home today, I came up over a hill on a 2-lane country road, and there was a small red car partially on the side of the road, facing traffic. The car had clearly been in an accident, as the right front was smashed in, and there was steam rising from the engine compartment. A young woman was just beginning to climb out of the car and look at the damage. As soon as I was a few yards beyond her, I put on my emergency lights and pulled way over, and went to see if she was okay and needed any help.
She was fine, but her car wasn't. She had hit a patch of ice, swerved off the road and hit a traffic sign (hard, evidently, as the traffic sign was bent completely over). The right front of her bumper was broken off, smashed and hanging off the car, the right front headlight and turn signal were smashed and broken, and her windshield had numerous cracks and one big "spider web" on the passenger side. She had already called her boy friend and was now calling 911 (who transfered her to the State Troopers).
The biggest immediate problem was that her car was partiallly in the lane out of site over a hill top on a road where people usually come flying over the hill. I was concerned about her being hit, but she didn't have any emergency marker stuff with her. Neither did I, hence my note at the beginning of this post. I used to, had been meaning to get some new stuff, but hadn't gotten around to it. Now I've got a reason. After I'd been there a few minutes, another call pulled over (I will say that initially lots of people slowed down or stopped and asked if she needed help) as I had done. This turned out to be a young guy who had witnessed the accident, but it took him a while to find a safe place to turn around and come back to help. He went over the hill to warn cars to slow down (he didn't have emergency warning markers either).
The next problem was her boyfriend. He kept trying to convince her (over several cell phone conversations) to just drive the car to auto body shop rather than wait for the police, since she was okay and no one else was involved. I thought that was a bad idea, as her windshield was very bad, her bumper didn't look like it was going to stay on, one head light and turn signal were out, and who knew what type of damage there may have been to something in the engine or steering. Fortunately, the dispatch folks at the State Troopers told her that she had to stay (since she had taken out a road sign) and a State Trooper showed up after about 15 minutes. I wasn't going to leave her until either her boyfriend showed up (he was supposedly on his way) or the police showed. It was 5:30pm, and starting to get dark, and didn't want to leave a young woman alone with a broken car on the side of the road out in the countryside. She gave me a hug when I left, and thanked me for staying with her.

Lullaby for Myself

So I was daydreaming about Idol and practicing my songs while driving to work recently (it’s a pretty drive if you only do it occasionally, but it’s deadly boring when you drive it back & forth everyday – got to do something to pass the time). And that got me thinking of what other songs I could do, which got me to thinking of songs I like singing to myself, in the shower, driving, etc. One of those songs is Lullaby for Myself, from Barbara Streisand’s Superman album. It’s not the type of song that would be a commercial success separate from the album, but it really spoke to me for years – it was almost my theme song (along with songs like the Beach Boys’ In My Room, and Simon & Garfunkels’ I Am a Rock, I Am an Island). I had trouble remembering it at first, because it had been so long since I felt the need to sing it, but eventually I remembered it. I still have the old vinyl LP album; now I may go buy the cd (Amazon has it; I listened to an excerpt the other day). It would not make a good audition song for me, as I don’t have Streisand’s pipes, and the melody is rather sing-song, if you know what I mean (makes it sound like I’m talking more than singing, or singing the same couple notes all the time). Anyway, I think some of you, or your friends, might appreciate the lyrics:

Lullaby for Myself

Self-contained and self-content,
No promises to keep.
I’ve got things so together
That I just can’t fall asleep.
Walked the night and drank the moon,
Got home at half past four.
And I knew that no one marked my time
As I unlocked my door.

It’s really lovely to discover
That you like to be alone;
Not to owe your man an answer
When he gets you on the phone;
Not to share a pair of pork chops
When you crave champagne and cheese;
And your aim becomes to please yourself,
And not to aim to please.

Oh, they sold me when they told me
Two can live as cheap as one;
But I’m learning twice your earning
Doesn’t mean it’s twice the fun
If you spend each dime and all your time
On someone else’s schemes.
I’m not needy, but I’m greedy,
And I live my deepest dreams –
Take an hour in the shower,
Use the water while it’s hot;
In the tub a hand to scrub my back
Is all I haven’t got.

Self-aware with self-esteem,
Is selfishness a crime?
I take the day for quite a ride
And I take my own sweet time.
Time to share and time to spare,
And grateful I would be,
If just one damn man would share the need
To be alone with me!

There's Always Tomorrow Lyrics

Another reason I like this song for an Idol audition, is that the lyrics could speak a lot to those contestants who really can sing or have potential, but aren't quite ready for the competition yet (not to mention all those decent singers who never made it before Simon, Paula & Randy).


There's always tomorrow for dreams to come true;
Believe in your dreams come what may.
There's always tomorrow with so much to do,
And so little time in a day.

We all pretend the rainbow has an end,
And you'll be there my friend, Some day...

There's always tomorrow for dreams to come true;
Believe in your dreams come what may.
There's always tomorrow for dreams to come true,
Tomorrow is not far away!

New Acronym

Heard a new one today: GFY! Usually used when someone is doing/has just said something really annoying. I'll let you figure it out for yourselves.

American Idol.......Senior!

Well, it’s American Idol time again, which always makes me wonder what I would sing if I were to audition for American Idol, and what Simon’s, Paula’s and Randy’s reactions would be to me.

The three songs I usually play around with when I’m daydreaming about Idol are Feelin’ Groovy, by Simon & Garfunkel; an excerpted version of Over the Rainbow; and There’s Always Tomorrow, from the Christmas classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (for those of you who are not Rudolph fanatics, this is the song that the girl fawn Clarisse sings to Rudolph after he’s been out of the reindeer games). I like Feelin’ Groovy because I think you can have fun with it – dressing up to fit the song, gestures/movement while singing, altering the lyrics (e.g., instead of “hello, lamppost…”, you could do “hello, Simon…[or Paula or Randy]”). Over the Rainbow is just a good song for showing range and control (but I definitely sing it at a lower key than Judy Garland!), though there are also great opportunities for showing expression in both your voice and face. There’s Always Tomorrow, in terms of auditioning, is much like Over the Rainbow, but a little easier to sing and, of course, not so well-known (comparison to someone of the caliber of Judy Garland not being a good thing…). But I also just plain love the song, love the lyrics.

This is all, of course, just plain daydreaming. But I think it would be fun if they did an American Idol Senior once (remember, they did a Junior show one year, so the precedence is there). The auditions would probably be just as entertaining as the current show – if you think some of those teens and twenty-something-year-olds are clueless about their real abilities, and upset about being rejected, just imagine how some 30- or 40- or 50-year-olds, who think they were robbed of their dreams in the past, would react. Think about it – people still rave over the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney, and they’re in their 60s, so why not an American Idol Senior?

More Zookeeper fun

Monty had a bad case of diarrhea this week. Unusual for him; of all the dogs I’ve had, he’s been the least prone to diarrhea. Guinness was the most prone; he got it frequently, and when a 155-lb Irish Wolfhound gets diarrhea, that’s a serious matter (if only in terms of the clean-up effort)! Have no idea what caused it, and probably never will (as the vet said, a thousand different things can cause diarrhea in a dog), and none of the other dogs are showing any signs, so that's good.

Anyway, had to wash Monty’s butt several times, and trim away hair, and get up several times during the night to let him out, and wash the bed comforter, and scrub the outdoor pen, and starve him for 24 hours (best way for his system to get rid of whatever was making him ill). Then he’s been put on a plain hamburger & brown rice only diet for a couple days – something really bland and non-irritating to help his digestive system recover. I have also had to give him several doses of pet pectate (Pepto Bismol formulated for dogs – for future reference for you current/future dog owners out there, you can give dogs regular pepto bismol, as long as you pay attention to dosage size versus the size of your dog. Works better with large dogs; for small ones you’re better off getting a pectate formulated especially for dogs), which is always a “fun”, messy job. I may have to give him a full bath this weekend, but I hope I’ll be able to avoid that.

Returned...

Ok, I’m back from skiing. Have been back, for several days. Just finding it hard, both in terms of time and inclination, to get back to blogging - hadn't really gotten into the habit before I left. I may or may not post some of my thoughts while away. They’re almost OBE now, is some ways. For those who don’t know, “OBE” stands for “Overcome By Events”. But I have been working on some draft blogs over the last few days, that are finally ready to post, so you’ll get several new posts here shortly.