Running Again

In more ways than one. Seems like I just got home and I'm gone again. Last trip was more than 40 hours door-to-door and it's only been 29 and change at the windy old homestead. Something's wrong with this picture.
The only thing I can do with all that time away is run on the treadmill at the hotel and play around in their gym. I was hoping to keep some of the winter fat off but I still seem to be gaining. We're gonna get that bike trainer soon and start spinning it off but for now...Run boy, run!

...I better run or I'll be late for work. 0100 call and here I am pecking on the keyboard. Run!

To Do...

I'm about tuckered out. There just seems to be so much to think about these days that it's wearing the old guy down. Weird hours...long trips...constant turmoil at work...worry about the home front...it all adds up. Just keep plugging away and try to do one more thing...one thing at a time. The To-Do list is long and figuring out where to start is the hardest part.

One thing at a time...

...And Now The News...

I know, it's been a while. I haven't forgotten the Wayward Home, it's just that life kicked in and pretty much brought things on my laptop to a standstill. I looked at my last post and thought, "Wow, that was weird" but a whole bunch was going on and that was all I could muster at the moment. I'm not going to elaborate too much but lets just say that the last couple weeks have been something less than idyllic and let it go at that.

I guess it's been a rough start to 2010...the weather has seemed a little colder, darker and nastier than normal for January, there've been some medical issues around the homestead and work has been all out of kilter with lots of hours in the hotel and on the road. To put the icing on the cake, my faithful old Canon Powershot died. I took about 150,000 shots with that camera and dragged it through everything from ground-level macros to panoramas but I guess the bouncing and banging finally did in the sensor. I've recorded a lot of memories at 4 megapixels but I guess it's time to either upgrade or go back to the ancient Kodak. The last shot I tried on the Canon was colorful but not exactly what I was looking for. Maybe I should keep it for psychedelic effects...

In between all the uproars this month, I've been trying to think of the warmer times that are hopefully on the way. It's snowing big fat flakes right now on top of the slush from the last couple of days so it's kind of a long reach but hey...I can wish can't I? The forecast for further crummy weather is making it pretty hard to see spring on the horizon anytime in the immidiate future but I guess there's always hope. January has 12 days to live and February has only 28 so March can't be that far away. Even the annual season of mud that comes at the end of winter is better than the snow and cold wind.

March is sort of the round-the-corner month to me. It might still dump a blizzard on us but it can't last long and the peepers will soon be singing in the evening. A man's mind might even turn to dragging the Harley out of it's privileged parking spot in the kitchen and maybe blowing the dust off. I always used to figure that if I didn't have the SuperGlide out by the tenth of March, I was way behind schedule but these days, I'm lucky to ride much before May. The cold and wet gets to us old guys a lot more than it did when we were 25 and much warmer blooded. I'll leave the forty degree days and late spring snows to the young bucks out to prove how tough they are and the Gold Wingers with heated lowers and windshields who don't really care. I suppose if I keep getting old at this rate, I'll have to break down eventually and get a fairing of some sort. Either that or I'll end up only riding about two months out of the year at this latitude.

I'd like to get out on the leg-powered bikes too but have developed a strong aversion to frozen fingers and the multiple layers of clothing required. It's about the same thing that keeps me off the Hog this time of year. It just takes too damn long to get ready. Chris and I did manage to go out and push the pedals on one of those 'Fooled Ya' days last week. The sun was peeking out and if you were standing still, it was pretty nice. Hit the road though and I soon realized that I was severely underdressed. Fooled Ya! I nearly froze by the time we got home much to my partner's amusement as she had done a better job of preparation and so was toasty to the point of perspiration. I on the other hand, was dripping icicles from my nose and lost the ability to speak clearly or feel my extremities after about 5 miles. Besides, my tires turned white from salt even thought the road was mostly dry so I knew I was throwing high-powered corrosives all over the bike. It sure felt good to ride but I think I was wishing just a little too soon. I guess there's still a while until any of the two-wheelers get out very much. I'll still need my windshield scraper for a while and my heavy Carhartt isn't ready to retire to the closet to hibernate just yet.

I suppose there's nothing to do but dig in and hope for an early spring as I do every year. The nights are slowly getting shorter as they always do and with any luck, the worst of the winter will soon be over.

With any luck at all, these that have been the darkest of days will soon be past.

Dark Days II

There are days when you just wish you didn't have to get out of bed. Suffice it to say that this last few have been such days. Without going into details for now, it's been a tough go.

Cold

Another deep-freeze today around This Old House. There's probably a whirlpool in the fuel tank for the furnace it's running so hard trying to keep up. And I've only got it set on 62. This is ridiculous. I know it's now January and all that but come on. I didn't venture any farther than the back door to let the dogs out all day and even they weren't very enthused about that. This is when the crazy, fixed-female pooch Angel wishes she could have a litter box like the Blue Eyed Demon cat so she wouldn't have to be on her run at all. The fur-ball ex-male Cosmo on the other hand...he may not like the cold but he goes out, rolls in the snow and toboggans around the yard on his back anyway. No accounting for taste.

Yes, it's bitter, nose-dripping, finger-numbing, beard-freezing, miserable cold and the wind is screaming straight out of the west again; probably by way of Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell as raw as it is. It pretty much goes in one side of Old Breezy and out the other by way of the insulation-less gaps in the planks, except for some more determined drafts which take a shortcut through the single pane window glass, helped along by the holes the cat tore in the shrink-wrap. I guess the varmint wanted to see out better but I sort of wish he'd help with the oil if he's going to take liberties with what little wind barricade there is.

This is just too much house for one guy to bang around in, especially with weather like today's. I can't wear enough sweaters and woollies to keep warm in this creaky old wind tunnel alone.
Chris and the kids are en route home from their travels and their absence makes the hearth even colder than that west wind. There just isn't any life in the four walls without them, only a big empty hole in the storm that just barely keeps out the snow. Come to think of it...whenever I'm away from them, it doesn't matter if it's a hundred in the shade, it gets damn-awful cold in the house and soul. Even when we pass each other in the night as we so often do when I'm on the road trains, just knowing we all pause at the same home and share the same roof in our sleep keeps the family fire burning.

Time away from each other truly does 'make the heart grow fonder' as the saying goes and God knows, we get plenty of it in our world. The cold hangs around and hopes to stay whenever the time starts to get long. Even so, we usually manage to meet in our journeys often enough to keep the coals glowing and our toes toasty. But too much time away and too often apart can bring even a warm summer breeze to whisper of frost and falling leaves. We all go our separate ways day by day with a common place to call home and that's as it should be. Without that coming and going though, when it's just gone, there's nothing here but a stack of wood, nails, dog hair and dust.

Maybe that's why even a new house falls apart so fast when a family moves out and leaves it. By rights, a place old or new should last for years, completely empty, without much fixing. I should know since 'deferred maintenance' is defined by ours. But somehow I think the life goes out of it, the cold creeps in and before it's time, what used to be a home just falls in on itself and dies of loneliness. I think home can only be a home when we all make our way there and call it our own.

All I know for sure is this old place is way too big to fill with just me...it needs the brothers extraordinary, the wife of my life and the noise of the four-leggers to drown out the freezing west wind. To live, it needs us all.

Last Of The 'Aughts'

New Year's Eve...just prowling around the house not doing too much. To my surprise, the railroad did in fact decide not to run my job today so it looks like I might have a few days off before I have to hit the road grind again. Sure is weird not to be working and even stranger to be here on a real holiday by myself. This stuff of being alone isn't what it used to be...wait a minute...it never did have much going for it. I'm playing my metal way too loud and eating far too much. The cat is having apoplexy over the roar and the dogs want to go out in the snow to take the edge off. I almost wish I had worked today so I wouldn't think so much. I miss the kids and Chris and I just don't like this. So it's just me and the music again for New Year's and the first decade of the century ends...with Alice In Chains and DP's '37 Stitches' to keep the pain in. Spin the dial up to 10 old man, stare in that Black Steel Mirror and pray for the glassware...

Up Early

Got up at 4 am today for some reason. Could have been the wind banging the loose downspout on the corner of the house or the furballs barking at every gust against the shrink-wrap storm windows. Could also be that it's still weird to kick around this old place alone. The creaks and shudders of the big barn sound a lot bigger when there's nobody here but the four-leggers and me. Someday I think the moaning and groaning will end and the place will just fall over from exhaustion. One of these days when the west wind hits the kitchen wall there'll be a crash and a pile of wreckage but so far, it's still hanging in there. I myself crashed pretty early last night (without the wreckage) just because there wasn't much of anything else really constructive to do and besides, it seemed like a good night to finish an old book I was re-reading for the umpteenth time.


I usually have a book or two stashed on the nightstand or one propped open on the floor where I dropped it when I rolled over to kill the light. I can't stand TV at night (or much of any other time really) but to dig down in the covers and read a while usually unwinds most of the leftover insanity from the day and gets my lids heavy enough to conk out.

I've been chewing away on a long-ago book club selection that was looking kind of dusty and neglected on the shelf. I hate to see them in that state so I picked it up. Even the paper jacket went missing somewhere along the line so it's just a plain, black cover with 'Prelude To Mars' and 'Arthur C. Clarke' in used-to-be silver lettering on the spine. It's an old sci-fi omnibus made up of a couple of novels and a section of short stories sandwiched in the middle that was mostly written in the late '40s and early '50s. I think I got it when I was in Junior High because it has that goofy looking loopy signature I used back then on the title page. Anyway...it's interesting to read again and look at the way they saw things back then before dot.coms and derivatives. Nuclear power was still new and wonderful, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound...that kind of thing. Clarke talks about a miles-long launching track for atomic rockets across the Australian desert and how we would be happily lighting off radioactives in the upper atmosphere. Quaint in it's own way but not exactly how things really went. It's like a snapshot of the time to read his take on how the 'conquest of space' would take place; a private enterprise based in London, launching from Australia with mostly British leaders. The future in 1947 had us jetting between continents on huge airliners (which worked out), running a space program with it's first stop as the moon on a nuclear powered rocket (which didn't), and still broadcasting it over the radio and the morning papers (hmmm). And in the end, merry old England sort of missed out on most of it.

Clarke's description of the offices of 'Interplanetary' in London is a hoot. It's just plain fun to read about a place bustling with typists and mimeograph machines, engineers with slide rules; not a laptop or Blackberry in sight, astronauts doing orbital calculations with paper and pencil while nursing a brandy and listening to a 'light orchestra with soprano'. I guess 'The Right Stuff' was still a ways off.

It all looked so hopeful through old Arthur's eyes back then. The book is full of those uplifting 'we're all in this together' moments that I suppose were the post-WWII, pre-Cold War way of seeing the future. Mars was a real possibility before the turn of the century to him and the moon was just a hop and a skip for those big atomic rockets. Too bad it went a little bit differently in the real world. First there was Sputnik, then Yuri Gagarin, then all the Mercuries, Geminis and Apollos that I watched in black and white. A few footprints on the moon and we never stayed long enough to call it much more than a fare-thee-well.

I actually remember being very much younger, sitting on the steps of the old empty church behind my house looking up at the sky and wondering. We sat out there and looked at the stars on summer nights and dreamed of rockets. I figured out that I'd be 40 years old in the year 2000 and at the time, I couldn't help but imagine I or a whole bunch of others like me would be living up there by now. It seemed so promising. Now I'm 50, 2000 came and went in the Y2K scare and we still haven't even been back to the moon...to say nothing of Mars. Even living in orbit is reserved for a select few zillionaires willing to pay the Russians for a seat on a Soyuz or U.S. astronauts and payload specialists with a ticket on the shuttle. It just didn't play out the way old A.C. Clarke envisioned it...but then forecasting is a risky business even for weathermen. It very often doesn't go the way we thought it might but it's always pretty interesting no matter what. I never made it into being an astronaut and I guess I'm probably a permanent fixture on the ground but thanks to my friends like Arthur, I can still see the way things might have been. In a lot of ways, I guess I'm still looking up from the front steps of that unused white church...and hoping.