Joomla! site syndication http://www.cjcs.com/cj 2008-09-07T22:55:28+01:00 http://www.cjcs.com/cj http://www.cjcs.com/cj/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png text/html 2008-07-27T13:50:43+01:00 http://www.cjcs.com/cj http://www.cjcs.com/cj/content/view/118/9/ Today was a first. For the first time since he arrived as a foal, I was alone with Kenai. With Tess* still away on the East Coast, and with Dale on a two-week break, I've been left to tend to the horse. Two years ago, if you'd even suggested this to me, I'd have smile incredulously. After all, I knew just about as much about horses as your average bloke: i.e. not all that much. I set out in the morning for the stable. Wonder of wonders, considering this is the first time I've actually driven out (all times previously I've been a passenger), I didn't miss a single turn. Wow. After the normal greetings and salutations, I was set to start grooming The Big Guy . Here's were I needed to make a decision: tie him to a post or not? After all, I've spent the past several sessions trying to teach Kenai how to ground tie , which is having the horse stay in place when you drop its lead to the ground. He's still not entirely reliable, but he's about 90-95% there. The proof? During grooming, he stayed in place while ground tied. The only glitch we had was me getting hit in the face by a tail swish (the little snot :-). In the arena, I think we had a pretty good session. Kenai wasn't willing to gallop, and even a canter took some effort, but at least he kept moving. For now, I'm happy with that. As long as he exercises. We also did some practice with the lead back on him. Once, when I accidentally dropped the lead, he stopped—ground-tied. Way cool. After a little more ground-tie practice, we headed back for the stall. For a few weeks, the most problematic aspect of a grooming session has been applying fly spray. The horse isn't happy about having it applied, and frankly, I don't blame him. His usual pattern is to back away from it. I seriously considered hitching him to a post, but I thought I give ground-tying a try. Kenai behaved like a champ. I only had to do one minor correction during the entire process. I think my first solo was pretty successful. Kenai behaved very well, and I think I did in kind. The long term situation with the horse is very much in the air as far as I know, so I'm going to embrace this little treat I've been allowed to have. Hopefully it will go as well in a couple of days when I can see him again. text/html 2008-07-17T22:52:49+01:00 http://www.cjcs.com/cj http://www.cjcs.com/cj/content/view/117/9/ When I wake up in the morning, my immediate thought/desire is: I want to go back to sleep. Yup, I'm one of the sleep-deprived masses--but I don't know why and I can't seem to break out of it. It's frustrating. With only scattered exceptions when I'm totally exhausted, I'm averaging about 5 hours of sleep a night. I don't often augment that with naps or anything, though at least once a week I'll drop off for a half-hour or so without much warning. I can't remember the last time I really felt rested, much less awake. This has been going on for the better part of this year. Yes, yes...some of this is likely an aftermath from my dad's illness. Not from depression, mind you (honestly, I don't notice any mental difference, and I have been paying attention), but from the strain of the past couple of years...and especially the last six months (or so) of my dad's life. It was the second hardest thing I've ever had to go through. The hardest thing was a protracted period of servitude in one of my jobs...a very long stretch of long hours, being on-call, multiple locations, and no days off for months on end. It took me more than two years to recover from that abuse...or mostly recover...so I probably shouldn't be surprised that the months of only getting about 3-4 hours of sleep a day last year might have some lingering effect. Regardless, it still sucks. I've tried most things non-pharmaceutical to try to get the rest I need, but nothing has managed to take hold. I sometimes try to sleep every time that I'm, you know, sleepy; but life responsibilities rather interfere that. For some odd reason, people and businesses tend to not want to interact with you at 2am. Which is a pity, for I'll likely be awake at 2am. The consequences of this constant fatigue are something I'm always mindful of. Driving is a special concern. I do not like driving when I'm tired. When I was younger and foolisher than I am now, I had a few instances where I was so tired I'd either fall asleep at the wheel or see hoards of gremlins dancing on the road in front of my car (that was fun). In a few weeks I'll be meeting a friend from high school at a location about 1.5 hours from my home. Not knowing how long we will be chatting on that day, instead of risking driving back tired, I've already conceded that I'll be fatigued and have booked myself a room so that I can rest before starting back home the next morning. The biggest annoyance has got to be how this is draining my creative motivation. I have paintings to do that I have trouble focusing my eyes enough on for the works to be completed in anything approaching a timely manner. I also have writing projects to work on, but my mind is so addled by the time that I get to them that any effort on my part is mostly a waste of time. Every now and again, though, I'll get a nice 7+ hours of uninterrupted sleep. Sometimes I'll even wake up from that stretch and feel rested for a while. But it doesn't last, sad to say. I'm hopeful that this condition will work itself out. I'm not sleeping quite as lightly as I was a few months ago, and that is very encouraging. I think. text/html 2008-07-01T21:09:35+01:00 http://www.cjcs.com/cj http://www.cjcs.com/cj/content/view/116/9/ Well, it's been a busy few days. We had a couple of new arrivals this past weekend and they have been keeping me pretty busy. Yup, you guessed it. On Saturday we were blessed with the coming of two happy and smiling...laptop computers! OK, I realize to most of you this is ho-hum, but to a geek like me, it's major. I had been struggling for most of this year to come up with a way to replace my aged PDA. It has an internal battery that isn't the easiest thing to replace...in fact, trying to has a fair likelihood of me damaging something beyond repair. I'd thought about smart phones and newer PDAs, but none of them were going to do what I wanted. You see, as a writer, when I'm away from my home base, I'd like to be able to--you know--write. With my PDA I can do that easily since I have this snappy little fold-up keyboard. The the arrival of the new Netbooks (or Ultra-low cost PCs), I thought I might have found my solution. Thing is, they cost almost as much as a low-end laptop. More than cost, though, the small keyboards and the lack of a track record with these machines gave me pause. So I took the coward's way out and decided to get a low-cost laptop. In the end, I bought two HP Pavilion DV6809 computers. Why two? I'd been planning to buy a laptop for general home use (especially the budget) at some point this year, and since I was getting one, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Anyhoo...for the past several days I've been busy installing and configuring and all that other fun stuff. Perhaps the most time-consuming thing after getting the network to place nice between the various OSs was moving my XAMPP installation and my personal wikis onto a UFD (a/k/a a ThumbDrive). I can't depend on always having network access, so the only sane approach to have these oft-needed writing references available is to put them onto a portable format so that they are always available--unless I forget and leave the UFD at home. The excitement of new installations is almost done. The hard work is done. Though I've have a few very frustrating moments, it was nice to exercise my inner nerd. Since I don't really work much on computers that don't happen to be here, that side of me hasn't gotten out too often. Maybe I should start learning a new programming language. Maybe that would help. Python. Maybe I'll learn Python. (Just so you know, the lack of working on computers isn't due to lack of opportunity, but simply the fact that I've done it for almost all of my adult life, and I'm a little bit tired of loaning myself out for that.) My computer has at least finished its first task. I wrote a quick 5,600-word piece on how to fix our education system. You can read about it at http://hubpages.com/hub/Fixingthe-Education-System (http://hubpages.com/hub/Fixingthe-Education-System). It's funny...back in college I would have thought something like this was hard, if only for the length. Now, not so much (obviously, since I do it for fun). text/html 2008-06-08T22:05:20+01:00 http://www.cjcs.com/cj http://www.cjcs.com/cj/content/view/115/9/ For the past few weeks, I've been in sort of a weird place. I don't really know how to describe it...then again, that's been one of the symptoms, the inability to express myself as well as I'd like. Mostly, though, I've been tired. Being that I'm sleeping only 5-6 hours a night when my body would rather have something more than 7 hours might have something to do with that. :-) There really isn't any specific thing that is causing this, at least, that I can tell. One factor might be with the Scotts* not being nearly as available as I had gotten used to. Its sort of like they were all there and then poof, they weren't. I miss having my adopted/adoptive family around. It's a little isolating. C'est la vie...I'll adapt. Part of it may be that I'm getting used to being a fiction writer again. I started back on the final polish of the novel. It had been so close to being done, but then my dad started taking so much time and energy that I had to shelve the book for a while. It's taken a good six months to get my head back to a place where my imagination is starting to roam through the mindscape. The art thing doesn't require nearly as much effort. I can paint for many hours and just feel some fatigue in my hand. When I'm immersed in a world of creative fantasy...by the end of the day I'm just whipped. But I wouldn't miss it for the world. I can't hardly wait to start the next novel. Then there's the heat. You know, me in my late 40s doesn't quite have the stamina for working outside on a summer day that me in my 20s did. With so much to do in order to keep the house in a well-maintained state...well, I get tired. This getting older thing is still sort of new to me, so I haven't quite figured out how to pace myself, yet. Maybe I need to commit some art. I haven't done anything in about two weeks -- either I write or I art...hard to do both. Taking a couple of days to shoot some paint might be a good thing to do....if I could think of what to paint. *sigh* It's always something :-) But I shouldn't complain. My heart is filled with love, which is a very good thing. If I close my eyes, I can hear the soft melody of a Muse...and that is always a very good thing. I have friendships that I treasure, and I think I still have a few adventures left in this old soul of mine. All-in-all, my life is filled with a lot of smiles. And yet, I'm still in a weird place. At least it isn't ennui. I didn't much care for the ennui. Maybe a few good nights of sleep will settle things. Now...how does one do that, again? text/html 2008-05-31T22:53:30+01:00 http://www.cjcs.com/cj http://www.cjcs.com/cj/content/view/114/9/ When I was just a small pipsqueak of a lad, I suffered from a great confusion: why was it that my dad didn't like going into the water as much as I did? My feeling was that life, especially life in summer, was nothing unless it included frolicking in some body of water. Now, I'm perhaps a bigger fuddy-duddy when it comes to dihydrogen monoxide than he was. Finding a swimming pool used to be bliss. Leaving the pool, or lake, or ocean, was worse than someone stealing food from me--and that's saying something. I'd take hideously long baths so I could practice holding my breath in anticipation of the next time I got to have aquatic adventure. It all started going south for me when I was eight-ish. Several rounds of swimming lessons left me with more confidence in the water, but also less joy. While it was bad enough that the joy was becoming work (for a kid, classes in anything can seem like work), but the expectation of us doing a celebratory dive from the 3-meter (10-foot) board was too much. I was less nervous about the deep end of the pool than I was about the height (I've always loathed heights), but it set up the association that water wasn't fun. Even so, I still swam when I could. My parents set up a above-ground pool for me so that I could spend hours each day in the water, if I wanted. As can easily be guessed by anyone who has swum a lot, I started getting ear infections. Many ear infections. Painful, not-at-all-fun, ear infections in both ears. I wasn't really aware of my ear infection legacy until a few years later. We had moved from Southern California, you see, to Maryland, and I no longer had that access to pools that I did. When we did finally go on a vacation, the siren song of the hotel pool was all but impossible to ignore. Also impossible to ignore was the ear-ache I got almost immediately after. Over the years, the effect became even worse. Water, ear-plugs, wind, even cold air would activate my ears' desires to be left alone. Fast-forward to early fall 1979. I'm having to go to classes at college while the remnants of hurricane David deluged everything that ventured outside. No sort of protection helped. All you could do was get soaked. If you had classes in the basement levels of buildings, you waded while in class. Everything and everyone got saturated with water, and the smell of mildew lasted well over a year in some places. While we all seemed to enjoy the bonding experience about having to endure this natural inconvenience , the fact is that ever since then I have not thought of being wet as an enjoyable experience. This acquired loathing of water usually isn't a problem, but it does at times get in the way. People do invite me to events where social dampness is an expectation. When you combine the above acquired antipathy toward watery experience, plus my lousy body image from as long as I was old enough to care about such things (regardless of the reality of the time), and the issue is ripe for conflict. As you might well guess, the Scotts* have a different view of water than I. They like water park attractions, swimming pools, and other moisture-filled bonding social adventures. Understandably, they want me to join them with equal enthusiasm. In fact, just a few weeks ago, Mary tried to entice me to visit with offerings of hot tubs and swimming pools. I, with a huge heaviness in my heart, had to excuse myself from consideration (not from the visit...just the water-filled diversions). Even love isn't enough to make me participate in festivals of hydroxyl acid. In all honesty, I'd rather get kicked in the leg by a horse...it's much less onerous and a lot more fun. So, there it is. As the years have passed, I've become oil. Water and I no longer mix. I've stopped fighting it. The only common activity that involves water that I engage in is hygiene. As I don't take baths, opting instead for showers (surprise, surprise), it's endurable. Not that I enjoy getting wet in either case, but somehow with the shower being like rain, instead of the pool-like bath, it isn't much of a problem. It's funny how the accumulated events in a life can build to have this sort of effect. It really is fascinating to me--and, it's great fodder for human foibles when I write. I can only hope that the Scotts and others with similar hydrophilic proclivities come to understand that there are just some things I don't do any more. Not out of malice, but personal psyche protection. We all have these sorts of walls that none will breech. The trick, I think, is figuring out how all of our walls can fit together to form a solid structure. Or maybe it's just as simple as some people like getting wet, and some would rather stay dry and hand out the towels. I'll leave that to minds smarter than mine to figure out.