Now is not Then

Hmm... Haven't updated since March. What's new since March? Well, most notably, I have a new fledgling profession: Teaching Yoga. It suits me, but I'll elaborate on it more some other time.

Anyway...

I always have an idea about what summers are going to be like, and this idea never fits with the summer I actually have. I look back to past summers for reference and note: "Man, that summer I did a lot [BLANK]" And you can fill in the blank with things like wake-boarding, hiking in the mountains, playing volleyball, camping, barbecuing, biking, and so on and so forth. And then my next thought is: "Man I really wish I could do more [BLANK]." And you can fill in the blank with the same aforementioned list. The problem is time. I haven't done the arithmetic, but to do all the stuff I want I would need, like, 50-hour days, 16-day day weeks, and might as well make the summer endless too.

This lack of time is fine. It's fine, because time is time and it's not going to change for me, so it might as well be fine. The reality is that this summer I'm doing a lot of what I'm doing. I can't say what will emerge as the theme I look back on, but I know it'll be a nostalgic one, because despite having bouts of thoughts like these, I'm actually doing very well. I just have to get things like this off my chest from time to time. I wouldn't mind an endless summer, however.

Right Kind of Worry

I think about my future a lot, and one thing that baffles me is how much I should worry about it. On one hand, life can be pretty simple. Right now I have plenty of things to occupy my time, and it's possible to just take things as they come. But on the other hand, there are broader things to consider like finding a stable job and being able to support a family and such.

These two views are at odds with each other, but what just recently dawned on me is why it's problematic to plan too far in the future. In making plans, we're able to see general directions we can head in, but we are blind to the immense scope of possibilities. If we choose a long-term path, it's bound to be an obvious and perhaps ill-fitting one, because all the subtle paths aren't noticeable until you're right on top of them.

Let me use myself as an example. I majored in English, I like knowledge, I like people, and I'm good at communicating; becoming a teacher seems like it would be a good fit. But that is just a self-administered aptitude test, and the catalogue of possible professions in my brain is severely limited.

Last summer I was starting to feel the pressure of finding some direction and purpose for my life. If I had let my growing panic make me do something rash like go to grad school in the fall. I would have missed out on so many things. Let me say that again in bold type: I would have missed out on so many things. I wouldn't have become a manager at a coffee shop. I wouldn't have learned how to build a house. I wouldn't have done a yoga teacher training. And those are just the obvious things I wouldn't have done. I feel like I've learned more practical skills in the last six months than I did in five years of college.

So what can we do about planning for the future? Well, I don't think we really can. I think the best we can do is to nourish ourselves now, and cultivate knowledge that will send us in the vague direction we want. And then, when the right opportunity––the one we never expected or even knew existed––comes our way, we'll be ready for it.

First Day of This:

March 1st

A book, a chair, and the sun.

A simple pleasure after all winter's done

Time doesn't cease, and life goes on

But nothing really bothers me

When spring hath sprung.

Ponder this

Today I met a guy who owns a laundromat. He didn't always own it; at one point he was an engineer at Rocky Flats–highly paid and working 12-hour days. Then Rocky Flats closed. He did a little of this, a little of that, then one day in Leadville he went into a laundromat to clean his clothes and came out as a small business owner. I asked him how he liked it, and he said he loved it.

Just something to think about.

Life Pruning

Sometimes I just want to abandon everything and become a monk. Just sit and worry about nothing other than achieving enlightenment. But ultimately, I know that's not for me. I like common life, but I remember when I got back from my last retreat I felt crippled by all the things I had to keep straight to live normally. It's amazing people do as well as they do with so many things to worry about. It's not surprising that they may snap from time to time. The ironic thing about my case is that all my anguish comes from having too many good things in life. I truly like all the things I do, it's just that I do too many things. There aren't enough hours in the day and days in the week to fit all the life I want to live. I've been on a solid hiatus from playing music, because when I sit down at the piano it's hard to not think about all the other things I could be doing and simply enjoy playing the piano. It comes down to prioritizing. For example, I just suspended my subscription to the New York Times. It only took about 30 minutes to read what I was interested in, but then some days I wouldn't even have those 30 minutes and the paper would be a dead, guilt-inducing weight in my backpack. So that's gone, and I feel better for it. The next casualty, I'm afraid, may be climbing. I'm about to begin a yoga teacher training, which will be a major time and brain drain (in a good way), and a climbing gym membership is a time-consuming thing to make worth it. So bye bye, climbing, for now. What else? I have to eat. Reading stays. I've already cut my sleep time down the minimum necessary. It's so odd that time can be simultaneously infinite and in such short supply. I'll just try to remember the wisdom from the Tao De Ching: Nature never hurries, yet everything is accomplished

Done with one thing; onto another

We finished framing today. Around two o'clock I helped Miles with the last piece of fire-blocking between studs, and when I looked around, there wasn't anything else to do. If we were a framing crew, our job would be done. But on this job we're an everything crew. Next week we become plumbers, and after that electricians.


The West Face


The East Face


Interior


Niwot Ridge

Catch and Release

When Pat, Miles and I went up to our garage for work this week, we discovered we had mice. Well, actually, we discovered we had mice poop, and made the next inference from there. Lord knows where they came from. Our outpost is in the middle of a barren wasteland without so much as a blade of grass. If a mouse did find itself in our neighborhood, I can't blame it for wanting to bunk up with us. I probably wouldn't have objected to hosting it, except for its tendency to poop EVERYWHERE. If you want to know where a mouse has been, check and see if there's poop; if yes, then yes; if no, then probably not (but maybe still yes). At this point we wrote on our chalkboard under "Things to get from town": Mouse trap. But the nights are long up there and we don't have many distractions, so catching mice seemed like a nice way to while away the evening.
What did we have to make a trap with? Well, we had a bucket. Maybe if we put food in the bottom, the mouse would drop in for a bite to eat, and then voila, it's trapped. Now what to feed it? It might like some things more than others, so to be safe, we made it Miles's favorite snack: An open-faced-almond-butter-jelly-and-banana sandwich.


Don't it look good?

So then we simply placed the bucket by a ledge that we knew the mouse frequented (it was covered in shit) and waited.


Mouse trap next to mouse thoroughfare

I slept fretfully that night, dreaming of mice. But when I awoke in the morning and checked our trap, there was an adorable little mouse looking terrified back up at me with those black doe eyes. He had hardly even touched his sandwich.


Isn't he cute?

We were somewhat at a loss of what to do. We weren't going to kill it. We couldn't set it free nearby. And we weren't going back down for a few days, so we had to just leave it in the bucket till we could give it a ride back to town. So we put a capful of water in the bucket, tucked it away on a shelf under the sink, and went to work. But at lunch time, the mouse was gone! Somehow the thing had leaped out of a bucket about 50 times its height. We were back where we started.
That night, with nothing better to do, we devised another mouse trap. Because of its trauma the night before, we thought the mouse might have developed a suspicion of the bucket, so we made our trap more clever this time.


Gettin clever

We took the same bucket, but drilled two screws at the top to act as a fulcrum, and then a third screw between them to act as a stopper. Then we cut out a top for the bucket which could pivot on the fulcrum screws, but would be stable on one side. Then we placed a morsel of its favorite snack (almond butter and banana) at the unstable side. The idea was that the mouse would walk out on the plank, and as soon as it passed the halfway mark, it would be dumped into the bucket. In case it tried to make one last leap away, we put a backboard on the bucket too.


Here, mousey mousey

This one worked too! Pat heard the trap trip in the middle of the night and got up to put on a lid. Good thing, because for several minutes I could hear the mouse bouncing around in the bucket, but by morning it was docile and doe-eyed again.


Slaking his thirst (Poop Everywhere!)

This time we were careful about keeping the bucket sealed, and the next day we took our friend down with us.



We put much thought into his new home, and settled on a grassy, dry creek bed many miles from our garage.



I hope he fares well.

Half way

What page was I on?

Was it this one:


or this one: