I haven’t posted much lately, partly because not much has been going on that would be interesting to write about, and partly because I’m probably going to shut the blog down and rethink it. I may not, also; I may work on something in the background and the “flip the switch” when the new project is ready. But it’ll probably change before long up in here. Continue reading
I continue to notice little changes that I attribute to my meditation practice. Good ones. My current practice revolves around mindfulness, the attempt to just be aware of and notice thoughts as they happen. When you get into semantics, this is usually considered at least a notch or two down from concentration, where you intend to more absolutely control what goes on in your head. Mindfulness doesn’t attempt to do anything other than return the focus of the mind back to what’s going on in the present, right here, right now, and for a chronic overthinker for myself it’s a really liberating process. It’s a little weird – Zen masters like Nishijima and even Brad Warner have written anti-mindfulness rants, so there’s something about the notion that’s anti-Buddhist to some Buddhists. But my favorite guides to mindfulness are from different sects and it would be difficult to describe zazen without introducing some element of mindfulness, so your karma-mileage may vary. In any event, the word “mindful” has become loaded in a Zen context, and I’m just a guy trying some things out to see what works. Continue reading
Over Christmas, we watched 4 dogs for a friend. (And her parakeet.) I have 4 dogs already. That makes 8 dogs. That’s a whole lot of dogs. The Danish person and the little girl are sort of givens in this house, and they weren’t unusually difficult over the holidays. Probably. I had 4 extra dogs and a bird around here, so I might not have noticed anyway.
I was a little scared of it, but my house is big enough and we’ve got decent, walled-off space outside for them to play, and the neighbors on both sides have dogs that bark at least as much as ours, so as long as things were reasonably under control – which they were – it wasn’t going to generate any controversy. The 4 extra dogs were in pairs, 2 little mini-dogs (Bijou and Marley), sort of Wiener-dog mixes, and 2 maxi-dogs (Shush and Tiger) that were bigger than any that live with us, hovering around 100 pounds. Continue reading
It’s been a year with a lot of small but important changes. Sometimes the most impressive changes are the ones that are easiest to see – new house, loss of job, new pet, kid – but those sort of take care of themselves. They don’t happen all the time. For me, I find that I sort of coast through the big changes and it’s the apparent doldrums in between that get a little tricky. I could ramble about how my kid’s in preschool or recap the car accident I had in the summer, but my kid was in daycare before, and I didn’t get hurt in the accident and ended up with a very similar car afterwards. They make up events on the timeline of the linear version of my life, but they don’t make up real change. Continue reading
Since I work at home, I wouldn’t easily get snow days anyway, but I feel cheated sometimes when people around me are off and I’m in my lair hunched over a keyboard and pushing pixels around. My clients are still in New York City, and it’s 60 degrees there right now. Me, I have half a foot of snow on the ground and it’s under 30 degrees, so I feel like I ought to get snow day. Locally schools are closed and people are staying home in some cases; 6 inches of snow is not exactly like armageddon, but it’s a nice excuse to take it easy when that’s what’s going on anyway. I’m not actually having any trouble working (remember being in school and trying to focus when it was snowing outside?), but it would definitely be fun to sneak out and play with my daughter for a couple of hours. Continue reading
I offer now my own Dave Barry style contribution to Murphy’s Law; nothing scatological need be implied by the title.
I don’t know what cosmic law of attraction is involved, but as a mostly private person, I’ve found that the best way to abort a lonely fugue right at the onset is a quick trip to a bathroom, wherever I live, whoever I live with, and whatever I’m doing. Continue reading
This isn’t about computers, but a computer issue I had today got me thinking. I spent about 6 hours working on a dumb but crippling computer problem; seemed like it should have been minor, but minor or not, it would have stopped me from working come Monday so I needed to fix it. I have a Mac, but I run Windows XP on it, too, using a program called Parallels. It’s pretty cool when it works, and it usually does. But it introduces some new wrinkles, and occasionally I have to work for 6 hours to get things running again. (All things given equal, it’s been easier for me to coax a fussy program like Parallels back to working every once in a while than getting a Windows machine back up once things have gone awry. Virtualization is mostly cool most of the time. Your mileage may vary.) It’s a little sad to spend a Sunday doing stuff like this, but a) I’m kind of sick today, so I was sitting around anyway, b) some of the time I spent was just waiting for the computer, so I played PS2 while I waited, and c) better Sunday than during the week when I have real deadlines.
Anyway, after a bunch of trial and error – mostly error – I found a magic combination of stuff to fix it, and now I’m more or less in the same position I was in at the end of last week. Half of the last day of my tearfully short weekend spent just getting where I used to be. Continue reading
I love living in New Mexico, and I love the seasons. Autumn has gently started; we still have mild weather and quiet nights, but the leaves are changing. It’s beautiful. I’ll trick myself into ignoring that it’s what precedes winter – not my favorite time of year – and enjoy what is usually a long and enjoyable autumn. Continue reading
I’ve confirmed that a new generation of angst dreams have started. My family’s in them now, but I don’t know why it should change now as they’ve never been in them before. They still don’t cause the angst for the most part, just typical “But that’s not what I want to eat” type stuff. I’ll probably figure out something. Continue reading
I’ve been a pretty enthusiastic outdoor cook for the last couple years; I’ve always loved it, but living in New York and New Jersey in apartments limited my opportunities. Not as much as I would have thought, but that’s another story. Continue reading