Sidetracked Charley

I was an adult of middle age before I encountered the phrase argue for your limitations and they are yours . Until that point I had seen my limitations basically as those forced upon me by others. If you are female you are most likely familiar with most of those beginning with nice girls don't do that . And I usually responded with, Who wants to be a nice girl?  And in my youth I wasn't even sure I wanted to be a girl.  Who wants to be labelled a second class citizen at birth. I was raised in conflict on so many levels from a father who told me I could be anything I wanted to a mother who sent me away on my freshman year in college to earn my Mrs. degree. I was encouraged by society to go along to get along. And it wasn't until and it wasn't until I was teaching adaptive skiing to adults and children with perceived limitations I encountered the concept of arguing against your perceived limitations. I learned to not see them in my students and in my role of teach...

First blooms of 2019 The new year thus far has be like herding cats. I read somewhere once that more people die in February, when the ground is too frozen to dig new graves, than any other month. I also think more mechanical and technological things also fail in February. That is particularly sad because it usually is the time we are most short of funds. I usually avoid sweeping New Year's resolutions in January because so much else is going on. But this year I unconsciously was swept up in some life changes. It was not unlike standing on the edge of the White River below Table Lake Dam when the alarm goes off signalling release of water. I didn't get swept away but I gathered up my fishing tackle and made a hasty, maybe too hasty, retreat. I am just beginning to find my footing again, and be able to quietly take stock of anything I might have missed in my haste. Some changes we have a modicum of control over like cutting back severely on coffee, upping water consumpti...

Lying seems to be all the rage these days.  We are told so many lies in a day it is hard to know what the truth is. Alternate facts are not the truth regardless of what the spin doctors tell you. I recently got involved in a conversation about the nature of truth and lies and when lies become your truth. As a child I was an excellent liar. My brother got the blame for a lot of things I did because my version of the truth was believed over his. In my early years I was a military brat. Military brats lie. There is even a comprehensive study of the phenomenon. John Irving in Cider House Rules points out orphans lie too. His reasoning in the book is because it is the only thing in their lives over which they have control. I believe that is true of military children too. Three bases in the second grade is definitely out of your control. But it can be really freeing because you are never held accountable. You could reinvent yourself and your history every new school or house. My ...

I usually slide between seasons easily with no regret beyond being a bit unprepared when it comes to winter. But this year I have totally resisted it. I want to lay the blame on everything which was going beginning in October. My focus was definitely in a very different place. The first snow came as a shock. The whole fall into winter knocked me off balance. I overate. I binged on coffee to excess. I try to live in a delicate balance. I feel better when I do. But suddenly I was not feeling good. I had gotten dehydrated from not drinking enough water and drinking too much coffee. And my blood sugar was all over the place because I was not eating on my schedule but the holiday schedule of friends who wanted to do lunch, etc. And I had gained nine pounds. Since that rude awakening a couple weeks ago I have been trying to be better. Since healthy living was a previous habit it was not difficult to get back to it. But I did not get the immediate results I expected. But I have cut my...

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world  the master calls a butterfly . - Richard Bach When it appeared, or I accepted, that we were going to be in this horrid shift in the paradigm for longer than was comfortable I just wanted to scream. No white knight was going to ride in and slay the dark lord and his minions.  There are games like Monopoly and Chess I came to loathe early on because the end was always so painfully long and torturous. Being burned at the stake has its appeal because it is said you lose consciousness when the fire gets to your knees and friends of the victim help out by bringing more firewood to the pyre. But we are living in the political model of the inquisition.  I could not turn away from the news because I figured I had the Watergate experience to do battle in this far worse situation. But I was going to have to figure out a way to survive it. The steps I took seemed so small at first. It began with watercolor note...

Aero/hydro garden First let me say I am not even sure I like celery. At least not the celery you buy in stores. But I had the same reaction to beets and carrots. Then I discovered carrots are not necessarily orange. They are yellow and red and whitish and purple. Beets can be the same. I particularly like orange beets and they don't stain my clothes like beet red beets. Chard also comes in colors beyond green and white. I began my hoop house garden to raise lettuce in varieties the local market did not carry like red leaf. Summer is when I eat lettuce and winter I don't because it is all green, comes in plastic boxes, and sometimes with e.coli. This year I got the aero/hydro garden and have had two salads from it already. You will notice from the photo above it has red lettuce. Wishing I had bought the 9 cell version instead of 6 but spring is like only 78 days away. So time to begin planning for the garden. Yesterday I sat down with my packages of seeds and a chart on...

I have blogged numerous times about the artificial quality of marking time. The end of one years is but the beginning of the next and where we set that day is capricious at best. But civilization seems to want to do it. And there are many proofs of that from Stonehenge to Mayan Calendars to hash marks on prison walls. At one time in my time clock days I was a cost and scheduling engineer. And we had elaborate computer programs which laid out complex industrial building projects over the span of years to be printed out in charts and put on the conference room wall so everyone could debate if we were ahead or behind schedule. Life and living takes what it takes. In my retirement from the scheduled world of construction only last frost and first frost seems to matter. But I have purchased a new propagation system and find myself trying to walk back, with help of the garden journal, when I should start my broccoli and Brussels Sprouts to be put out in the garden the first of May...