Scotland - Day 3: Authenticity

I don't try to explain, after the fact, what these bordering-on-ridiculous blog postings mean.  There are a couple reasons for that, none of which are entertaining enough (for me...) to write about.  This noted, what I do find fascinating is how easy it is to read intent into written words.  That's both a curse and a blessing for folks that write things, even hacks such as myself.  Anyway, I'm going to make an exception to the blog posting interpretation rule.

For example, in my Day 1 posting, I compared how Edinburgh is, well, gritty, dirty, and kind of smells like the Scranton I knew as a kid.  I get that this certainly sounds bad...unless you are me, and you grew up in Scranton in the '70s.  Granted that other folks, outside of fans of the U.S. version of The Office, probably have a negative impression of Scranton, but I don't.  In fact, that gritty/dirty/smells description is, in a word, authentic.  While there are tons of tourists here in Edinburgh, as I noted in the Day 2 posting, this is a lived-in kind of place.  The tourists just seem to be here for the ride.  

Another way to think about this is to consider Edinburgh as a kind of anti-Disney.  This isn't a magic kingdom; this is a place where people work, sieges have been had, and more than a few people hung and/or otherwise dispatched.  In the words of our tour guide on Sunday, Edinburgh had for the longest time a reputation for being one of the most disgusting cities in Europe.  The magic in this kingdom is that people have called this home and fought for it over centuries.  

The above noted, my quota for actually explaining blog postings has been met.  Since this is about the first time since 2008 that I've done this sort of thing (explaining...), if I do the math then I won't have to do it again until sometime in 2038.

On to the day's festivities.

******

Today we did the quasi-common bus tour of the countryside thing.  It was fun, based partially on the fact that my knees appreciated that they weren't responsible for all of the day's locomotion.  To be a bit more specific, the big stops today were Loch Lomond and Stirling Castle.  See the links for more (likely & possibly) factual information.  

As we were headed to Loch Lomond, we stopped to see an attraction known as the Kelpies.  For purposes of picture set-up, know that this is a very large metal sculpture. 

As I alluded to in the first paragraph or so of this posting, Scotland pretty much does what Scotland wants.  Giant horse heads?  Sure, why not.  There actually is some mythology about the Kelpies, which you can get from the horse's mouth HERE.  

From the Kelpies we headed to the Loch, for an all too brief visit.  Photographs don't do it justice, but here's one anyway.

This is an old place, well-used, yet still incredibly beautiful.  Something else to mention?  It smelled wonderful.  Actually, the Kelpies smelled wonderful too.  Just the right combination of flowers were in bloom I suppose, creating a scent that would rival a stand of honeysuckle.  

By the way, I am reasonably sure that there are more sheep in Scotland than there are people.  Without any exaggeration whatsoever.  The sheep we saw driving around the countryside were legion, for they were many.

Granted, I don't want to think too hard about Scotland's sheep, as that results in thoughts about what becomes of the cute little guys (re:  Haggis).

After the Loch and countless sheep-spotting opportunities, we stopped for lunch.  That was something of an adventure (for mundane reasons I will not get into), but what was really cool was the fact that we stopped at a town that was literally at the border between the Scottish lowlands and highlands.  

Foreground = Lowlands.  Background = Highlands.

Our final stop was Castle Stirling, complete with a larger-than-life statue of Robert the Bruce.  Yes, that was a character in the movie Braveheart, and yes, the locals are keenly aware of how inaccurate Mel Gibson's movie really was.  Regardless, it's an impressive statue.

I didn't do the castle tour (Ms. Rivers did), but instead went wandering around the castle grounds, which were beautiful.  The history of this place literally permeates the air.

Finally, I can't let the opportunity pass to take a few critter shots, and today was no exception.  

With apologies for the off-center shot, but in all fairness, 1) He was moving a lot and 2) I was using a cellphone camera.

All of the above noted, it was a long but interesting day.  Now to get some rest.  I think I slept for something like four hours last night, due to a variety of reasons.  I need to do better,.  Tomorrow will be more castle touring and maybe a ghost* bus tour.

More to come.

(*) Ghosts don't exist, but for the purposes of this vacation, I'll play along.

 

Scotland - Day 2: It's Pronounced "Edin-Brah"

A minor mystery has been solved.  What mystery, you may ask?  Well, is this town named...

...Edin-boro?

...Edin-burg?

...wrong on both counts.  According to our tour guide this morning, the very talented Ms. Roisin, it's actually pronounced something like "Edin-brah", where the "brah" part sounds like what a 20-something-year-old dude who vapes a lot calls everyone he knows.  See below.

On a more serious note, I highly recommend anyone who happens to be in Edin-brah (sorry, that's the last time I'll use that gag, promise) to check out Little Fish Tours.  Our guide, the above-referenced Ms. Roisin, was excellent.  In fact, we decided to take another one of their tours later in the week.  I'm not always a big fan of guided tours, but they do work best when you get to know the stories of the place...not just names and dates and assorted facts...but the very human stories of people who lived in a particular place.  That's what we got today.

Today's event was the walking tour noted above, combined with some additional wandering about (sometimes in circles) in and around the castle area of Edinburgh.  One of the things I find most fascinating about places, particularly older places, are the roof lines of buildings. Modern architecture, in my extremely amateurish opinion, lacks a certain kind of distinctiveness when the building hits the sky.  Instead of a kind of crown, many newer buildings just look as if someone arbitrarily just cut them off at some point.  That's certainly not the case here.

New vs. old building rooflines.  See the difference?

One quasi-funny story:  We were near the Scottish equivalent of the Supreme Court.  As our guide was speaking, we were told to move back, and low and behold, the justices of the court walked by us (within about 10 feet), complete with powdered wigs and robes befitting the best of a 17th-century jurist.  It was almost kind of odd in a way; as I mentioned to my stepson Alex if this were the U.S. we never would have gotten that close to the justices of the Supreme Court...it would have been one warning then 20 seconds later a taser shot to the abdomen.

Much of today's walking was centered around High Street/the Royal Mile.  Some of the buildings were spectacular.   

Unfortunately, there is a limit to how many photos I can share in a blog posting, but I'll be adding more to Facebook over the next few hours.

While the buildings seen today are beautiful, what I noted yesterday, which is a certain grittiness, complete with an odd assortment of sights and smells, was sort of familiar.  This is not a clean place.  In fact, you can tell this is a very much lived-in, working, functional kind of location.  The tourists are just here for the ride.

More to come.

Scotland - Day 1: Far But Familiar

Fun fact:  The mountains in Northeastern Pennsylvania belong to the same range that, in Earth's past, also include the Scottish Highlands.  You can learn more about the subject HERE.  Here's a graphic, just to punctuate the point...

This isn't the first time I've heard about the Central Pangean Mountains; that would be something Ms. Rivers' brother, a geologist, mentioned when we were visiting Scandinavia in 2018.  

Based on the title of this posting, and the reference above, it's fair to say that I am visiting Scotland this week.  By way of background, this trip is notable for a few reasons, including the fact that it's likely to be one of the last vacations we take with Ms. Rivers' sons (my stepsons).  This is because they are getting older, we are getting older, and well, everything seems to getting older.  Speaking of getting older, another reason behind the trip is the fact, as we approach an eventual, collective retirement age, it seems prudent for us to take advantage of the fact that we've been prudent with our finances.  Put another way, was can afford to travel, so why not?  In some respects, this is the first trip of what will probably be a few in the years to come.  The downside?  More tedious blog postings from me, but so I digress.

So, why Scotland?  

Well to the best of my knowledge, I have zero point zero connection to Scotland.  This is the honest-to-goodness truth, unlike what I've said about Ireland for decades.  Ms. Rivers?  Well, she does.  The genesis of the trip came after hearing about a similar trip that Ms. Rivers' sisters took years ago.  The thought was that we would travel with them, but that part didn't end up working out.  What did was our end of it, so here we are, about a year after starting to plan this vacation.  

Butterfly knees.

There is a special 1,000-year place in purgatory for people who design modern airplane seating arrangements.  Now if you are of average height, these sorts of things work out okay for you.  Me?  Not so much, so my knees end up being bent at unnatural angles for hours on end, broken up by the occasional trip to the bathroom (which is mostly just an excuse to unfurl my knees...like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis...every now and then).  With 8 hours of travel yesterday, well, my knees were sore by the time I got off the second leg of our flights, here in Edinburgh.  Making matters worse was the fact that we then had about 3+ hours (and associated walking) before we could check in at our rented apartment in Edinburgh's old city.  By the time I was able to lay down (I had gotten about an hour of sleep the night before) my knees felt like they were got to explode and projectile my patellas across the room.  Fortunately, this did not happen. 

So here I am now, writing this on a dreary but more or less wonderful morning in the old city of Edinburgh.  My knees are about 90% recovered, and I think that today's guided walking tour will actually help things.  Or so we shall see.

One observation about Scotland so far:  It sort of reminds me of growing up in Scranton.  Connection via ancient mount range aside for a moment, this place is gritty, has lots of smells (diesel, food, stuff that was once food but now is rotting...), and is generally not well kept.  In other words, Scranton in the 1970's, but sans the three strip clubs that adorn a corner not so far from us.  Multiples seem to be a thing here, as in addition to the three strip clubs nearby, there are at least four barbers within a stone's throw from the kitchen window I am sitting next to at this very moment.  Scottsmen love well-trimmed hair I guess.

Lastly, I did not bring my usual camera gear on this trip.  This is mostly because I didn't want to have to bring another bag with me, and my Google Pixel takes great pictures anyway.  In service of my comment about Edinburgh's gritty-ness, I offer the following...

More to come.

Wind Up (or is that wind down)?

I'm not sure what was going on with me from about early February through mid-late April, other than, in some respects, it wasn't good.  Part of this was definitely physical...I struggle with some digestive issues, no doubt made worse by the "6-year-old eating mentality but with adult money" diet.  However, I know, at least for me, that parts of my physical health are strongly tied to my mental health at any given point.  This kind of makes how I am physically feeling something like a "Canary in a mine" for what's pinging around in my head.

I do have at least one theory.

That period is probably the worst of the year for me.  One of the few things in life I can say that I enjoy, without any qualification, is working outside.  Yet during that period, there is just so little I can actually do.  This is mostly because it's just too damn chilly/cold outside.  And in the spirit of my ability to dramatically over-think everything, I would never want to live anywhere that is warm all year.  I enjoy the seasons...even the advent of winter...but I just wish it would end.  This year's relatively warm late winter was similar to hanging a cupcake just out of reach of a starving person.  

There is a larger issue at play here, namely that I am borderline (seemingly) genetically pre-disposed and always on the lookout for threats, be they big or small, real or imaginary.  The appropriate mental health term is "hypervigilance", and in addition to being tiring, it takes up a heck of a lot of personal bandwidth.  The ironic part is that when viewed objectively, I have a pretty good life.  I suspect though that's all part of the larger set of complexities that reside inside my head.  I am okay, and I wouldn't be me without this stuff, but yet there are times when I would just like less of certain stuff.

I have no grand plan on dealing with the kinds of things that late winter/very early spring brought this year.  Maybe this kind of introspection* is the plan.  Who knows.  What I do know is that I spent a few hours in the yard this weekend, and it felt right.  In the third paragraph of this posting, I noted that I enjoy working outside; maybe an even better term for me is that it just feels "right".

I need to be focusing more on what feels enjoyable and good and right, which is a far harder task than it seems.  But it needs to be done.  There is a kind of hidden guilt inside of me that wants to immediately engage in castigation at the mere thought of not being on the edge, scanning for threats.  It all ties together, and I have some work to do.

Here's to basking in the warmth of the sun, the smell of flowers, and feeling growth all around us.  

(*) Introspection:  Something that requires no real effort from me, but I just wish there were more practical outcomes resulting from it.

Running out of Time

I've had this feeling lately, not based on anything, in particular,*  that I am running out of time.  

Time for what?

That's the real question, I suppose.  And I don't have a good answer.  Maybe this is what people think about as they can see age 60 on the horizon.  Mind you, that's a year plus away for me, but still, like clouds on the horizon, it seems like something is coming.

Now right off the bat, I'm going to note that I'm not bemoaning all of the things I should have done by now.  On the contrary, I think that I've done alright for a kid from a housing project.  I never wanted, for example, to be the CEO of anything other than myself.  And I am very proud of parts of my life, including 3 daughters and 2 stepsons, which ultimately is one of the better measures any of us can have as we take stock of uncertain things.

No, it just feels like there are things I still need to do, but while in the past the future seemed so very open-ended, well, now it seems more closed-ended.  I sometimes wonder just how many other "big things" there are left in me.  

"Big things" has been something of a theme in my later adult life.  I've even had, for a few years in my mid-late 40s and early 50s a goal of "to do big things".  I did some big things by the way, including literally turning one aspect of my life completely around and earning a Master's degree.  None of these big things were easy, but I think most folks acknowledge that, at some level, the most important things in life are seldom accomplished without time and effort.  Part of this whole mental ball-o-string may very well be the fact that I can't put my arms around the next "big thing".

The low-hanging fruit here is the fact that I'll probably retire (for real this time) in about 5 years.  Oddly enough though, that doesn't seem like a "big thing" in the context of the other things I have done.  This is probably because, unlike earning an advanced degree from Villanova University, the retirement thing (for real this time) is going to happen no matter what...I just show up for the event.

That last paragraph isn't without some decision-making and actions on my part.  Some of those actions have been in the works for a while now.  Others are far more recent, including my taking stock of what I am doing professionally and making some adjustments.  There is an element of trust in this whole career thing for me:  Speaking of decision-making, I am making the decision to trust that I am in a relatively safe place career-wise.  Now, this could be an enormous mistake, but sometimes life calls for an act of faith.  For me, well, this is one of those times, and I am prepared to just work hard and spend less time making contingency plans.  I need the bandwidth to (hopefully) do other (big) things.  

I just don't know what those other things are, big or otherwise.  This might be why I feel like I am running out of time, as we humans have a tendency to view time in the context of events and things.  I just need to find the next (big) thing.

(*) For the record, I am not facing some kind of health crisis, although I would trade a kidney to rid myself of a chronically itchy back.

Artifacts and Safety Blankets

Flashback to December 2016, and I was just starting to recover from what was, up to that point, one of the greatest losses of my life.  I know that sounds so very dramatic, but in my mind what I had with a former employer was more than a job...it was a kind of relationship that I expected to last until retirement, based on an unspoken promise of "if you work hard, everything will be okay".  In hindsight, that was a big issue:  What I thought of as a kind of relationship was, in fact, just a job.  Those last three words, "just a job", are easier to type than to actually admit.  In fact, I'll still call it something of a work in progress.  More on that in a moment.  

The above comes from a fairly deep place.  Having grown up on the downside of the socioeconomic spectrum, I wanted nothing more than to have some measure of success, even if I couldn't actually define what success was, well outside of not being poor.  What I could define though was the idea that success came from hard work.  I got that much from my mother.  And I did work hard, at pretty much everything I did.   I earned some of the things that came with my naive vision of success, including more money, leadership responsibility, and decent professional titles.  What I didn't understand though was that along with that version of success came a dependency...a risk if you will...that ultimately and actually had very little to do with hard work. 

Fast forward to the working world of 2023, and any collective sense of employment being an actual relationship is continuously, truly, and utterly false.  A fiction of the most poorly written sort.  This isn't just me being overly dramatic for blog hits; you just need to pay attention to the news.  See HERE for just one of the hundreds of similar articles.  I feel for these folks.  Been there.  Done that.

Part of my clarity has been an ongoing effort to understand that I am valuable over and above what I do to earn a living.  I'll readily confess that this is an extremely difficult thing for me, and I can't declare any kind of victory; at best I can say that I've moved in the right direction.  Heck, by the time I actually do retire, I may almost get it.  The "it" is that "it's just a job".  

By the way, my goal (if you want to call it that) of understanding that "it's just a job" isn't a reflection of my failure to care about what I do.  If anything, I think I am doing better work now than I ever have in the past.  It just means that I try to care about the right things, like the people I work with, and not some amorphous, amoral entity (and to hell with what the U.S. Supreme Court has decided).    Anyway, at almost 59 years old, it's good to know that I can still be learning.

Driving all of this?  The fact that I actually took a big step recently:  I disposed of a ton of old work stuff.  These were like artifacts that I kept of a former life.  I wasn't using them, and they took up a lot of space, but for years I clung to them as if they were a kind of medal for winning a battle.  Or more like a large participation trophy.  They were a kind of proof that "I was someone" once.  Lo and behold, I've always been someone; it's just taken a while to grasp that point.

I probably still have too many things I am hanging on to, too many things that are more of a safety blanket than anything else.  As the song goes, "life is a series of hellos and goodbyes", and it's time to say goodbye to some things.  

Loss is Not Logical

It's probably some inherent facet of human design that we search for meaning in times of personal loss.  That loss could be the death of a family member, a beloved pet, some remembrance of our childhood, or even the end of a long friendship.  At least for me, there has been this desire to somehow, at least initially, try to make some larger sense out of the losses I have experienced.  I write that last sentence full of the knowledge that what I have experienced in the way of loss likely pales in comparison to that of many others.  This noted, I have been an abject failure in my trying to understand loss.

Then someone smart told me something in four words that brought me some sense of understanding:

Loss is not logical

Loss doesn't follow a neat, predictable set of rules that can be analyzed, re-engineered, and re-assembled then placed into a nice little and understandable box that we can put on a shelf when we should be done with it.

Loss is messy.  It lingers.  It has a terrible habit of being open-ended, sometimes seeming as if it will never end.  It overstays its welcome and lives rent-free in our heads.  There are examples of it in my own head where in spite of my best efforts at understanding, it can become, at times, pervasive.

Loss for me sometimes "leaks out" in the form of very vivid dreams.  These aren't what I'd call nightmares.  There is no violence.  There isn't even mourning.  In fact, oddly enough, these kinds of dreams for me almost always involve doing the most mundane of things.  Think traveling with someone long gone.  Visiting with a long-ago friend.  This is, I suspect, the heavy reality of loss that (what I believe to be) my logical mind is utterly incapable of discerning, no matter how much analysis I put forth.  What's left?  That would be what dreams are, namely a kind of biological cleaning of our mental cache.  

John Steinbeck once sort of described this very same idea...much better than I ever could...when he wrote:

"It is so much darker when a light goes out than it would have ever been if it had never shone."*

That light could be a brother, a pet, a friend, or even a place.  The specifics matter far less than just the sense of void that is created.  

So what's the answer?  Where's the solution?  In short order, that would be "nothing" and "nowhere".  I think we just learn to live with the loss, and it becomes a part of us.  Some of us may even view this through a lens of faith, that kind of abstract thing where, in the absence of any real proof, we still believe in something.  I admire faith, by the way.  Well, make that what I consider to be genuine faith:  That which is not driven by or about obedience or fear of punishment.  If faith were only about obeying a higher power, then dogs would be our role models.  Fortunately, that's not the case.

So in the end, what have I accomplished in this posting?  I'd say a solid "not much", other than to maybe nudge myself away from a lifetime of viewing the world through a lens of logic and instead giving myself permission to just experience.  This all sounds so very simple...when typed...but yet still so very difficult.

(*) From The Winter of Our Discontent

I Found A Picture of You...

"I found a picture of you, oh-oh

Well, it hijacked my world at night"

(The Pretenders, Back on the Chain Gang)

If you are a consumer of The Facebooks, you no doubt see these challenge postings, whereby someone posts something and then asks others to do the same.  I really enjoy these kinds of things, by the way.  Well, more precisely, I really enjoy seeing pictures, and it's neat to learn about others I've met or interacted with over the years.  In a world that seems ever so large, complex, and harried, these small acts of connection can, I think, help re-ground us.  At least for me.

The above noted I don't do these kinds of things very often.  That's less about a refusal on my part and more about the fact that, well, I don't get asked to participate.  Trust me, that's not a cry for attention on my part.  I don't have a thousand Facebook connections, so the odds just don't align to make these kinds of things happen.  That makes the times when they do kind of neat.  As such, I was invited to participate in a photo-sharing challenge.  I make it a policy to not reference other (private, as opposed to public) people in these postings, well outside of special occasions, so I'm not going to mention names.  What I will say this:  The person who nominated me is someone I have an incredible amount of respect for, and I am honored that she thought of me.   

This particular challenge involves posting photos that "bring me joy", without any explanations.  This really is a challenge for me (pun intended) for two reasons:

1. I struggle with a concept like "joy".  Struggle as in "what does joy really mean"?  How would I know if something "brings me joy" in the first place?  Now reading this you may think "what the heck is he even talking about?", but it's a genuine thing for me.  In a way, I don't process very strong emotions well.  I know where this comes from...a childhood where a premium was placed on not expressing myself very often.  
2. I also struggle with not being able to describe things.  It almost goes against my nature to not write about things like important pictures.  In a way, I'm using this blog posting to kind of circumvent the rules of the challenge itself.  Yes, guilty as charged.

So, how do I find pictures that bring me joy if I'm not sure what joy means?  Well, I ended up not dwelling on the word "joy" and instead thought to myself "okay, what pictures can I find that have some deeper meaning to me?".  That was easy.  The next step is going through the 10,000+ digital photos I have on file.  

I actually came up with a strategy of sorts:  This is a 10-day challenge, so I decided to pick an underlying theme for each day.  For example, the second day was about my daughters when they were younger.  Day 3 was about some of the vehicles I owned.  Day 4 was about JeanLuc the cat, who meant the world to me and helped me, in a very real sense, get through one of the most difficult times in my life.  Finding JeanLuc pictures to share was a mixture of fond memories and sadness that he's not here with me now.  To the extent that anyone can actually love something other than another person, I loved JeanLuc.  

Today is Day 4, and I'm still thinking about the theme.  Rest assured though, there will be a theme.  I literally can't do the whole random thing.  It's as if my mind is always trying to create some sense of order in everything I do and around me, so the idea of just randomly posting photos seems nearly impossible.  Emphasis on "my mind", as I think an ongoing theme of my life has always been the idea of my trying to make some sense of the constant, bordering on chaotic, noise of thoughts in my head.  As a side note, that's also a damn fine explanation as to why I've never had a really good relationship with sleep...getting that constant noise in my head to quiet down takes some work.

Finally, these postings are shared publicly on Facebook, so if you want to see them, just view my profile.

2022: Time

 Can you teach me 'bout tomorrow

And all the pain and sorrow running free

'Cause tomorrow's just another day

And I don't believe in time

(Hootie and Blowfish, Time)

Seeing as though this is New Year's Eve, and my regular gig of being off the grid at Ricketts Glen State Park fizzled out, I think it's appropriate to reflect on the year that was (or will be, depending on when someone happens to be reading this).

Time

One of the things that became very apparent to me over 2022 is that my very perception of time is changing, literally right before my eyes.  You see, in the past, things like seasons took forever to change, and some seemed to last forever.  Now?  Things seem to be changing in the blink of an eye.  What where hot summer days seem only like yesterday, and their return will seem like tomorrow.  I'm smart enough to understand that the actual passage of time is, relatively speaking, a constant.  What's actually happening is wholly inside my head, and I'm not sure whether this is a good or a not-good thing.  Time, as they say, will tell.

Communicating

I've come to understand something about myself that probably requires some work, specifically in the area of communication.  What might this be, you may ask?  Well, outside of my wife, I probably spend more time talking to my cats than I do my fellow humans.  They have the advantage of either being very good listeners or are even better at pretending to listen to me.  While either way works for me, this may be a sign that I need to get out more often.

Indestructibility

I am increasingly becoming aware of the fact that I am not, in fact, indestructible.  This is another thing requiring something of a sea change inside my own head.  One must understand that over the years I have been something of a walking accident waiting to happen.  In addition to THIS posting, over the decades I have managed to gash the top of my head, filet my leg with a box cutter, stab my hand separating frozen hotdogs, shatter a drinking glass while cleaning it (and shredding my hand in the process), fracturing ribs after slipping on ice and probably a few other things that I won't share (out of fear that I will sound even more ridiculous).  Shy of encasing myself in bubble wrap, I just need to be more careful out there.

Tolerance

There are many things I seem to tolerate less and less as the years go on, such as cruelty to animals and bullies.  It's to the point where I really can't elaborate much more on this point, as it is actually starting to bother me just thinking about the subject.

Health

In 2023 I will turn 59 years old.  Clearly, as I sit and type this, my physical health needs work.  For example, I have the diet of an 8-year-old that hates vegetables and has uncaring parents.  In addition to making grown-up food choices, I also need to exercise more.  Yet though, there has been some progress.  I have spent more than a fair amount of time over the past several years focusing on my mental health.  With a lot of work, I think I have made some progress.  There is still work to do...to be honest, there may always be work to do in this area...but it feels like some of the things I've struggled with for a very long time are now better managed.  

Persistence

I only have one superpower:  Persistence.  While clearly not as cool as the ability to fly or having lasers shooting out of my eyes, I'm still grateful for the gift.  It has served me well.

* * * * * *

My wish for all of us in 2023?  To remember that life is short and time is fleeting, so it's time for more kindness, less conflict, and less fanaticism...about everything.

All this, and a bag of chips

It's been an eventful few weeks.

First, my right hand went from this...

...to this......to this....

The actual healing process continues.  This was an entirely self-inflicted wound, in the truest sense of the word, resulting from my failure to wear work gloves while handling lumber.  Whatever my co-pay ends up being from the surgery will be worth it.  I will note that Dr. Culp and his staff at Geisinger in Pittston were nothing short of terrific.  My only complaint, if you want to call it that?  Getting the stitches out was a bit of a trial, but again, I basically did this to myself.

Second, there was COVID-19, where I went from this...

...to this... .

...over the course of about 3 weeks.  The ironic part was that I had an updated vaccination the Sunday before I actually got sick.  The actual sick part wasn't all that terrible and maybe lasted about 5 days.  As someone with asthma, I was a bit worried about having this negatively impacting my breathing, but all things considered, I did okay.  It didn't actually impact my sense of taste either.  Ditto for Ms. Rivers, who got sick around the same time I did.  As to where/how we got sick, well, we think it happened around Thanksgiving.  

Lastly, we had my taking a bit of a tumble down some steps last Wednesday.  Where "little tumble"
actually means landing on my hip, then my elbow, and then my head.  I now have the honor of having the largest bruise I have ever actually seen on a human being.  It's literally bigger than two of my hands put together (and I have giant lobster-claw-sized hands).  The brush burn on my head actually hurt more than my hip, and if I were a betting man, I'd say there was a mild concussion at work.  Again though, I consider myself lucky in that it could have been worse...and my bruised hip deserves credit for breaking my fall.  

All of the above though is trivia when you think about it.  Life is the ultimate contact sport, and I'd rather suffer some of the inconveniences of trying to live life to some degree of fullness and getting hurt (once in a while) than the alternative, namely sitting around and turning into some kind of gelatinous pile of physical, mental and emotional goo.  I sadly see that alternative all too often, and it truly makes me sad.  All of us have reasons to live, all of us have talents to offer the world, and all of us have important work to do.  If that results in a scrape, a bump, or a bruise the size of Rhode Island, well so be it.  

In the sum total of our lives, the actuality of getting hurt (physically or otherwise) is always less dangerous than what happens when we take no chances.