Fun on the road?

As pointed out by my infrequent life-coach, I typically write the most amazingly depressing things in this space during my road trips. Let's count down some awesome then, just for a change:

22 and 4: That's the pounds I've lost so far, and the inches off my belt. Wow and wow.

3. The number of amazing songs I heard on the radio today...starting with:



2. Meals I had that involved the words chicken schwarma (sp?) or drunken noodles over the weekend. Denver was actually pretty awesome.



That song is great.

2. Funnel clouds (pre-tornados) we saw dropping down out of the unholy sky as we made our way out of Denver on Sunday. Fortunately, we were headed 80 mph in the opposite direction.

3. The number of wins that the Orlando Magic have laid on the Cavs so far. Tonight's game may have been a coming out party for Dwight Howard, who was on the receiving end of LeBron's "I'm taking over" moment, and responded by turning into early-Shaq for overtime.

4. The number of times my Uncle and I agreed the game was over for the Cavs before LeBron made a ridiculous shot that brought them back.

1. The number of birdies I had last week on the golf course. More than I'd had in the last three years combined.



Yeah, Franz Ferdinand! Not the 3rd great song I heard, but good still.

Pilot Speed isn't my favorite, but deserves more attention than they get...so...



I've done my part.

Goofy.

Where is that other song I heard????

Still not it, but yes awesome:



Was it the Raconteurs (you know, Kurt Cobain's new band)? It could have been, it has now been several hours since I heard the song, and I'm sorta forgetting what it sounded like:

Musik

Children are a trial

My son has been epically sick this winter.  From basically October until May he had something.  There were brief, week-or-so-long respites from this reality, but they would soon be over.  For the last three weeks-ish, the boy has had a cough and a cold.  I'm not sure he's one-hundred percent over it, but I can tell he's feeling better, because he's starting to eat.  Like, eat a lot.  As in, half a plate of sweet potato french fries and a bowl of green beans and a bunch of crackers and raisens and it is actually kind of starting to become a concern.  

When the boy's been sick, he won't eat much.  For several stretches of a week or so this winter we've been struggling to get the kid to eat anything (which is borderline amazing considering his parents as well).  His sudden re-discovery of the joy of eating is probably the best sign we've had that he's healthy.  

I don't really know why I'm compelled to share this information.

One step after another...

Sometimes you have to be tireless.  You have to push the rock up the hill, watch it roll down into the valley below, and run down the hill to get it going up the next one.  

Clair Patterson was a graduate student in Chicago whose major advisor said "Here's a method for measuring the age of the planet.  It's simple.  Go for it."  And he did (Clair is a he, for reasons his parents hopefully explained at some point).  Along the way he discovered that the atmosphere was so full of lead that modern humans had 800 times the amount of lead in their bodies as humans from the 1800s.  So after 10 years of slaving away on his professor's "simple" method, Clair gave us the age of the earth, turned around, and spent the next twenty years waging a single-minded and relentless battle to erraticate lead from our lives.  

And he succeeded to some degree.  The EPA probably exists in large part because of him.  The lead is out of our paint, our canned goods, our children's toys and our books (yes, even the books).  

Suggesting that this was an easy accomplishment is ludicrus.  I can only imagine, but what I do imagine is nights spent wondering whether the harrassment from media, industry, politicians and other scientists was worth it.  His funding was cut.  His livelihood was at stake.  I imagine late nights at the desk reading papers on lead poisoning, while his kids were getting older.  

But sometimes you have to be tireless.  Sometimes you have to put aside the exhaustion and simply do better.  

I feel like that is the only option left to me.  I have 40 hours during a workweek, which is shockingly few, and around 49 when my kid is awake and at home (typically, I'm cooking, cleaning, giving baths, playing, and walking with the kid during almost 100% of this time).  That leaves 79 hours.  10.5 more hours for working out and subsequent showers.  A minimum of 63 hours for snoozin'.  5 hours for lunch breaks.  That leaves me with half an hour.

Half an hour to write papers, edit the special issue of a journal, try to think about a new job, write my books, think of new ideas, and seek out new ways to do things.  

And somehow into 40 hours I have to squeeze 40 or so project reviews, a dam removal program, a T&E fee fund program, re-writing a mitigation document that governs the whole state, try to figure out a way to improve all the T&E evaluations, keep up on current literature, and, oh by the way, solve every other problem that comes up in my vicinity.

Sometimes you just have to be tireless.  

But I'm getting really tired.

A Night in the Little Apple

Again I greet my loyal readers and subsequently the emptyness of the late afternoon on the occasion of my work-related exile to a hotel room.  This one should be nice, but the elevator is geologically slow, and the whole place feels...old.  I don't like old.

Garden:

Hardly any of the latest seeds I put in the ground have taken off.  I see no little leaves poking through the dirt, and that drives me crazy.  Plus one of our tomato plants is struggling.  Right now we have 11 cabbage/broccoli, 48 onions, 4 tomatoes, 3 cucumbers, 4 cilantro, 4 rosemary, 4 thyme, 6 sweet corn, 6 green pepper, 3 summer squash (yellow), another 20 or so thyme, 10 strawberries, 20 green-bean and peas and probably 40-ish spinach plants.  But only the spinach, cabbage, and strawberries are really doing well.  I guess the peas that have come up look ok.

The thing is, I can't spend enough time in the yard/garden.  There's no limit to the amount of time I want to spend out there.  Apparently, for me, giving up means gardening.

Death to the EverGreens:

You know the little evergreen 'shrubs' that so many people have in their front yard?  On Monday I had the supreme satisfaction of ripping mine out with my bare hands.  Admittedly, my hands were a little cut up by the first two, so I used gloves on the last three, but the point remains:  My shrubbery is no more!

Thank god.  In place of the shrubs we now have an assortment of native flowers and grasses.  Big bluestem, liatris, coneflowers, salvias, brown-eyed susans, spiderwort.  We've also got an assortment of interesting rocks I've found over the past year and a half all over Kansas.  I want this stuff to look amazing.  I can't wait for 7 foot tall flowers next to my front door.

Denver-Dallas:

Boy, that stepped up a notch didn't it?  Wow.  

Food: 

Bison t-bone steak.  Manicotti.  Good times...good times...

Weight Loss:

Over halfway there....over halfway there...over halfway there....gotta stay focused.  Must have Kindle....

I don't wish to alarm you...

...but this comic is hilarious.  However, I'm recommending that unless you're a big fan of ridiculous penis jokes, the rest of that comic's archive should be avoided.

Once again...

...I am sitting in a hotel room.  Quasi-drunk off of cognitive dissonance because, so far as I can tell, I have always made the right choices in life yet am never satisfied with the outcomes.  

I'm also a little weirded out because I'm reading "Discarded Science" by John Grant, which purports to discuss scientific theories that have been discarded, yet in actuality presents them with a borderline-serious delivery that is hard to distinguish from the tone used when describing actual reality.  

So yeah, the idea of Venus originating as a comet spewed forth from Jupiter's massive (and non-existant) supervolcanoes, only to bounce around the solar system and subsequently causing all of the otherwise inexplicable Biblical miracles (flood, parting of red sea, etc.) seems a lot more plausible when delivered in a calm and reassuring tone.

Chuck is dead.  Long live Chuck!

Today I stood on top of progress and economic development from 50 years ago.  Abandoned mine strip pits.  Sheer-sided sinkholes stuck betwixt slag-berms.  Fifty years of trees and honeysuckle working to reclaim it all for modern life, with ticks, birds, turtles, a dozen species of frogs, deer, and at least one very startled garter snake as the beneficiaries.  Yet all about to be undone so that we can dig a new pit and fill it in with broken concrete and metal.  

Yes, and I definitely feel the appropriate place to put our trash is in the holes we leave in the mountains from which we dragged the coal in the first place.  I'm just not sure why we're throwing away metal and concrete.  Which one of the three R's are we forgetting here?

It's all of them isn't it?  Why is this so hard?  Or, to put it more appropriately, why is this so easy to get wrong?

Because we give up.  You can't find a kid under 12 who will tell you he wants to kill the world when he grows up.  You can't find a person under 21 who thinks "I can't do it better!"  And I don't know anyone over the age of 30 who hasn't sold out at least some of what he/she believes and dreams.  The reality is that it is so easy to just put up the white picket fence that matches the neighbor's one.  And then, you know, not eating meat is such a hassle when you go visit your farming family...how many times do you want to explain why you're eating cheese ("It's like heroin, I can't stop") and not eating beef ("Environmentally stupid.").  

Giving up isn't hard to do, its easy, and once you do, you can really make some money.  Where am I supposed to put these ideals when I decide to cash in?  Will they fit in a shoebox at the back of the closet, hidden next to other forgotten items that no longer seem to serve as anything but a reminder of what isn't?  They certainly seem to have diminished in size and importance.  

Yadda yadda yadda.  I spent my evening meal sitting in a resturant called On the Route, the 'Route' being the Mother Road, Route 66.  There I consumed an entirely delicious and not as healthy as I'd hoped dinner that made me think of how surprisingly easy it is to make something fantastic:  Just stick it in oil.  Which is how I ended up eating fried potato salad.  If you think french fries and a 'mustard sauce' doesn't sound fantastic, well, join the club.  My story is that the waitress insisted on it since I asked "What do I have to try here?"  And I assure you, she was totally right.  But that meant I spent over an hour on the treadmill afterwards....in addition to the other hour I was going to spend on it anyway.

The reality is that today I got to observe a part of the world almost nobody has ever seen.  I got to watch a sunset unimpeded by monstrosities or trees.  I stopped at the side of the road, and was rewarded by seeing a wood chuck.  How lucky am I to get to discover new things all the time?  I stopped by the side of the road today to vent my frustration with being cooped up in a car, and saw through a cluster of trees two blue herons working their way upstream through a riffle catching fish.  

I'm exhausted a lot.  And more and more I just don't care.  

Twisting

Those of you who think my musical taste is awesome, allow me to further that perception:

Frightened Rabbit  Twist  (link goes to NPR's site, scroll down to the Frightened Rabbit song).

Blitzen Trapper  "Black River Killer" (...you'll have to search the NPR site)

Weight loss frustrations:

Halfway to goal #1, and I'm stuck.  I'm mostly stuck because every weekend I completely ignore the whole 'eat healthy' thing, and then I spend the week making up for it.  I think I'm going to have to go anti-social for a few weeks to get moving in the right direction again.

The Sickness:

Lyme disease...or maybe a brown recluse bite?  Not sure, but I had a huge knot on my lower back from some kind of bite.  I'm on antibiotics because the doctors thought it might be lyme.

NBA:  

Can anyone see the Mavs pushing past the Nuggets?  Dirk's gotta play better, if that's possible, but the bigger problem is that Denver has depth and Chauncy Billups.  The Mavs have just 1 'traditional' big-man.  How ugly is this team without Dampier?  The sad thing is that Dirk has never, in his entire career, played better than he has this year.  And his best teammate is a 400-year old Jason Kidd.  Yikes

Is anyone else suddenly wondering if the Rockets are a lot better than we thought?  I'm looking at this matchup with the Lakers and I'm doing a little bit of a double-take.  Who's winning the point guard battle here?  The Rockets right?  Would you take Yao and Scola and Landry or Gasol, Bynum, and Odum?  I mean...the Rockets are winning that aren't they?  It's at least a push.  And then, you're talking about Ariza and Bryant against Battier and Artest.  That doesn't seem quite as one-sided when you consider how well Battier and Artest have done against Kobe in the past.  Am I missing something....don't the Rockets have a significant advantage in terms of personnel?  The biggest problem I see is on the offensive end, where Ron Artest is fully capable of killing his team by shooting the ball like an idiot.

As for the East...That was a cute Bulls-Celtics series, and for the record, 5 of those games were better than ANY CONTEST in the entire season of college hoops, but ultimately, that Boston team is going to get destroyed by the Magic.  And I can't see anyone beating the Cavs at all...maybe not a single game.  If LeBron wins it all this year I'm inducting him into the All-Time team.  My All-Time team reads like this:

Starters:

Magic

Jordan

Bird

Duncan

Russel

Subs:

Wilt

Zeke

Shaq

Dr. J

Kareem

LeBron

Oscar Robertson

  Doesn't that seem like we're leaving out a lot of great players?  Because the All-Time team has 12 roster spots...that's all.  Honestly, I have a hard time leaving The Dream off of there, as well as the Mailman.  And Kobe?  I'm not even sure he's the first SG that's not on the list (Jerry West, Pistol Pete, Walt Frazier?).   But if LeBron dominates the playoffs the way he dominated the regular season, he's officially knocking The Dream off my list, and making this team a little more balanced.  And that's your starting spot he's got his eye on Legend.