First, let me just assure you that there’s nothing ominous about my silence. Life is good; I’m taking tons of pictures and learning about the craft of photography and even doing some photo work. My family is good. The spring is beautiful in Santa Fe. My old dogs are getting older, which I worry about, but it’s very good to remember to love them as much as I can as often as I can. I’m still writing, but just not posting a lot of stuff to this dumb quasi-diary. No crazy car accidents. It remains incredibly good to not be playing music, it’s still one of the kindest things I’ve ever done for myself, and I’ve even started selling instruments. I’m cooking all the time, and I’m trying to figure out how to best combine my interest in Southeast Asian food with my interest in outdoor cooking now that the weather’s nicer. Whatever. I’m having fun and most of my online silence is me living away from the computer. A good thing.

The other component of my online silence is that I’ve basically lost interest in the “unfocused blog” idea, and I’m exploring ideas about doing something that’s a little more pointed. Now that I have some very nice and “realer” outlets for the parts of me that used to cling to music, an “unfocused blog” is just not enough to scratch any real creative itch. Part of me craves a different or at least more specific challenge. When I’m “between outlets,” then this rambling, unedited and unfocused writing outlet is better than nothing, but “better than nothing” isn’t a gap I need to fill right now. Photography provides me with a lot of the challenges that attracted me to music. And, even more importantly, I haven’t learned enough about it that I’ve stopped enjoying it. 

So, on the very unlikely chance that someone’s actually reading this – if I shut this down, I’ll be back. Some ideas I’m juggling:

• I’m more likely to craft a “real” photography website before I get back into any blogging. It’ll be a nice challenge, and Buddha knows that nobody’s going to do it for me.
• I’m already offering my help to some people with projects that I believe in, including a little charity in New York that provides birthday cakes for kids when their families can’t afford it and a permaculture landscape design startup in Santa Fe. So while it may seem outwardly unimpressive for me to just do the work my 2-3 full time jobs and family life require, I’ve got other stuff going on. Always.
• I’m thinking about starting up another little company of my own, or at least blogging about something that might generate some kind of audience. If I can craft an idea that represents an attractive-sounding challenge for me, I’ll give it a try. I’ve got the energy for a startup but haven’t convinced myself of the right idea yet.
• I’m going to put together at least one, probably two, photo books in a small run for friends and family now that they’re so easy to create and so affordable. (And on-demand is cool! I don’t have to print 500 of them and wonder what to do with 499, I can create 5 and if someone else wants one, turn that into 6 without breaking the bank.) It’s not because I think I’ve arrived at some epic level of achievement, but rather because I’m excited about what I’m doing and want to share my excitement with people I care about.
• I’m getting into printing photos a little more; this is weird for me, a departure from how I treated music. When I wrote my own music, I almost never recorded any of it. I liked the noncommittal aloofness of it, kind of like “there’s no way of capturing the brilliance of this concept in a recording, so I’m not even going to bother trying.” (Yeah, right!) So anyway, me actually printing photos out represents a type of commitment that I rarely exposed my music to, and it’s nice. Nice to get it out of the way, to work past it. In some weird way, it may even come full circle and help me feel differently about music one day. But for now, I don’t actually care; it’s enough for it to be what it is. And again, it’s not because I feel like I’ve “arrived,” it’s because I’m excited about what I’m doing and want to do more of it, and the best way to do more of something is by doing more of something. Sounds simple, hard to put into practice.
• I’m dabbling with a lot of learning for work and updating my skillset. Partly so I can do good work for my clients, partly to keep myself challenged, and partly because “you never know.” 
• I’m slowly – SLOWLY – scribbling out some backbone ideas for a novel. I may never put enough effort into it to finish, but it’s an enjoyable challenge and even when it leaves me frustrated, I find that it opens up creative channels I didn’t know about or had forgotten about. So even if it remains nothing but a creative exercise, I learn from it and grow.
• There are lots of even un-sexier things I need to handle, like projects around the house and taking advantage of several contiguous broken-toe-free months to get out and run again.
• Geocaching; good, dumb fun that I want to do more of in the spring. It gets us out of the house and takes us places we’d never find on our own and exposes me to odd places and things to photograph. It’s a great way of getting out of your own head and coming up with something to do that isn’t laden with expectations or burdened with familiarity. Even just hiking more has been great. I really like New Mexico. No, I love it. On one hand, it feels familiar, like home, but on the other hand, it’s still 99.9% undiscovered to me. So without any financial or spiritual or personal goal attached to it, it’s just great to get out and see and hear and smell and live the experiences that are here right in front of me.  

That’s the short list; if I sat and brainstormed for 20 minutes, I’m sure I’ve left large blocks of things out. Things that I’m planning and may never finish, things that I haven’t even planned. But I’m in an exploring mode, and trying out Stuff is what keeps me entertained these days. It’s not that I abandon everything I start, far from it. But I don’t pressure myself about it; I have so many ideas and so many areas to explore that there are bound to be some false starts. 

I’ve had people ask me what I’ve been doing since I quit playing music, and my answer comes across as sarcastic. (Imagine!) “I’m pretty busy not-playing music.” And for most people, that’s an underwhelming response; I’ve heard, “I’m not impressed,” several times recently, and in almost exactly the same way, so I noticed. But here’s the thing about it: 1) it’s true, and it’s great. Not-playing has been very good for me. 2) I don’t actually care if my life sounds impressive or not; what I was doing when I was playing wasn’t impressive either, and I’ve spent my “artistic” career choosing unimpressive paths. If I’d wanted to be impressive, I wouldn’t have stuck with piano and I wouldn’t have played jazz. (Well, that’s not strictly true, I’m stubborn. But the point is valid; it’s easier to be a rock star by playing rock music, so to speak.) If I wanted to take impressive photos, I’d forget about cliche sunsets and common birds and find some naked chicks or something. Whatever.

“I’m walking around outside” is probably not any more impressive, yet hiking and being in nature is fundamentally nourishing to me. “I grill food behind my house a lot” isn’t impressive, but I love it, I learn from it and improve, and I’m getting pretty effin’ good at it for some things. “I’m taking pictures of common birds and treacly sunsets” is probably not that impressive, but taking dumb, cliche pictures of this barren landscape has become important to me and so has my work on getting better at it. It’s probably not impressive that I live with all these big, dumb, ugly mutts that I love being around. (Who, by the way, aren’t dumb or ugly or even necessarily that big.) It’s probably not impressive that I have a charming kid or that I’ve been married for a decade and a half or that I’m learning the difference between Western and Mountain bluebirds, or that I know the difference between an ocotillo cactus and a cholla and a prickly pear. Or that I spend more time reading about comparative religion issues than most people spend watching TV. I could go on about all the unimpressive stuff that I do, but that defeats the purpose – it makes it sound like I’m trying to make it sound impressive. And I’m actually not. My point is that – impressive or not – I’m quite busy just being alive, and from where I’m sitting, that’s more than good enough. 

I know I’m getting wordy and rant-y. (Imagine!) I guess I’ve just heard, “Hmm. That’s not very impressive,” too many times recently to consider it just a joke. It’s actually kind of funny to me because I’m more content with more things in my life than perhaps ever before, but I have to admit that it still gets me thinking. I guess I’m not even sure if I wanted to set out to do something impressive what it would be and if it would be Suitably Impressive to others. And impressive compared to what? Or who? What is it that I’m being compared to? Me, 10 years ago? (I can’t imagine why.) Strangers? Which ones? Imagine my shock at realizing that I’ve never even taken the time to learn what or whose Level of Impressiveness I’ve been competing against lo these many years!

I’m actually smiling as I write all this; partly because I’m enjoying my own rambling more than I should, partly because I really, really like my life and find it very funny to get glimpses of how other people might see it, and partly because I’m catching myself in my old Suffering Artist role – like if the world was never impressed by my music, it was surely because it was so brilliant. So if I’ve now reached beyond Too-brilliant Music and actually achieved an entire life that “the world” (or 2 or 3 people in it, to be more accurate) doesn’t “get,” then Suffering Artist thinks we are most assuredly on the right path. And partly because the me that’s making fun of all this secretly still thinks this way.

It’s all pretty funny, just as it should be. But maybe I won’t stop pointless blogging after all. I’d hate to not-impress someone by giving up another pointless activity. (Heh…)

Monday was hard; 50 things to start the week with, all due at once, Anette home vacuuming and blasting television while I’m on conference calls, my daughter and her friend running around. It felt a little overwhelming early on, and I was having a hard time just getting anywhere. I think a little of my practice kicked in, and I stopped screwing around and just started and finished one thing. And then moved on to the next thing to start and finish. It sounds stupid, I’m sure, and it probably is. But it’s so easy to get mired when we’re multitasking that doing the first thing first just doesn’t occur to us.

What’s mindfulness got to do with it? Well, that’s kind of what the practice is, ignoring the pointless distractions and getting back to the matter at hand. If I’m practicing being mindful about, say, breathing, my mind will absolutely, definitely wander, and the practice is to gently bring my attention back to the breathing as often as I need to, over and over. Having been practicing this lately, I found myself using the same kind of quiet discipline and turning my focus to my work, over and over, as often as necessary. When my mind wandered, something kicked in and gently brought my focus back to the task in front of me. Suddenly, I was cranking out the work. Temporarily liberated from “not knowing where to start” by the simple act of starting. 

About an hour ago, I had another “moment.” My daughter’s got a cough and was laying between us; Anette had been up with her an hour or so earlier getting her some Children’s Cough Placebo or whatever the ineffective kid’s medication was called, and she’d still roll over every 3 or 4 minutes and cough freely in my face. (And then back the other way to cough in Anette’s face. We’re all going to be sick.) This kept me awake, as might be expected. I mean, almost everything keeps me awake, so it may as well be my kid coughing in my face. I was laying facing away from her when I heard The Sound – a dog pissing, very close to my head. I yelled something like, “Arrrrghg!” and I squinted around to see what I could. My wife and kid jolted out of whatever half-asleep state they were in. Loki, the puppy was bolting away, I could tell his shape and gait even with my advanced myopia thanks to the fairly bright backlit clouds that cast a glow into our room. I was instantly out of bed and had one foot in a dog pee puddle. My rage flared.

Anette asked what was going on, and I told her Loki had peed on the floor. I used a different vocabulary to describe the situation, of course. I grabbed the pillow he’d peed on – I think he was marking it because the guest dog, Gracie, had been laying on it and he’s young enough to still be kind of possessive. He really never does stuff like that, it’s pretty out of character. That didn’t make it piss me off less. I started to walk toward the other side of the house with the pee-pillow and Anette turned on her nightstand lamp. Loki was slinking ahead of me in the dark hallway, and I was going to shoo him outside when we got to the living room. But mid-hallway, he slunk back around and headed back toward the bedroom even when I tried to stop him. I was furious, and I howled with anger and turned back around, half crouching in the totally dark hallway and trying to grab his collar with my right hand. He’s very quick, but he was only going just fast enough to stay out of my reach, mocking me.

Back in the bedroom, Anette and Sydney were fully awake. They were both propped up on pillows, and Loki smashed over them to avoid my grasp. He was carefully avoiding the spaces between and around them and instead stomped squarely on their bodies, which spiraled my anger even further. (Kind of a “How dare he!” type of outrage.) I notice myself still holding the pee pillow in my other hand, which infuriated me even more (“How dare he?” Part II, or something), and I was cursing like a cabbie and trying to grab him as he stomped over my human family, back and forth.

Anette and Sydney didn’t budge as he evasively smashed them, and some part of my Hulk-mind noticed them just calmly watching the back and forth, only moving their eyes as though following a tennis match. Anette shifted out of the bed and quietly said, “Why don’t I take him outside? Everyone in the house is shaking.” I sort of froze to take assessment. I took a look around me and saw my other dogs nervously circling around, noticed the pee pillow still in my left hand and extended away from my body, felt my Popeye grimace of a half-asleep-glasses-wearing-angry-guy trying to grab a puppy in a mostly dark room while holding a pee soaked pillow in one hand. Denied the chance to implement my “put the dog outside for a little while” plan for justice, I stomped out of the room, still cursing and grumbling, threw the pillow in the laundry room and slammed the door.

The insanity of it all hit me as I walked back to the room with Dog Pee Smell Remover and a roll of some kind of paper product so I could sit and mop dog pee out of the carpet next to where I put my head when I “sleep.” My daughter watched me and made some small talk. (It’s weird to catch your 4 year old making small talk.) The anger totally faded, and it only took a couple minutes once some part of me allowed me to let go of it. This is a new thing for me; I used to pride myself for being able to maintain a grudge for years at a time – and I don’t mean some weak, part time conceptual grudge, I’m talking about all consuming constant sleep-depriving single-minded anger for months and years. I took my freshly lucid non-angry state and used the pleasant clarity to dig up a humidifier and some kid’s Vick’s Rub to try to help with her cough. It was then that I became pretty aware of how my mindfulness practice had facilitated my quick shift.

What’s meditation got to do with it? Everything. My imperfect and human initial reaction of anger, not so much, but the ability to let go of it, 100%. In the practice of mindfulness, emotions and distractions are permitted and even expected, but you’re not expected to follow them – that’s the discipline, that’s what you practice. So after having practiced watching emotions like anger pop into my mind and then working to not let my attention be carried away by them, I found myself doing the same thing in real life. I had pee to sop up and a daughter to talk to, and my attention quietly and automatically went there and the anger dissappated since it was no longer needed or relevant. 

Again, it probably sounds dumb or  even imaginary, but for me, just letting go of my anger over a minute or two is a big deal. It wasn’t like some automatic saintly response, nothing like that. The effects of mindfulness practice are not dramatic for me, they’re subtle. It was like driving very quickly toward a tree, and rather than hitting the tree as I normally might, I made a tiny course adjustment early enough that I easily cleared the tree. Not a last minute swerve, either, just a tiny correction. Little differences that result in a greatly different outcome. Nothing more complex than me catching myself doing stuff that I’ve always done but haven’t always caught myself doing. 

Wide awake, I sat and did zazen for 15 minutes. I was pleased with my focus, normally it knocks me out at the end of a day, and while it should have bugged me, I found it pleasing to be distracted by laughter instead of stress or anger or frustration. I caught myself chuckling and snickering at the ridiculousness of it all during and after my meditation. I’d caught a little glimpse of how funny life really is and how silly my own actions are even when I’m not being silly. My half-asleep wife wanted to know why I was snickering, and I couldn’t quite get the words out to explain how funny it struck me to see how seriously I take myself in such matters as dog night-peeing, or the weird fun I was experiencing at having caught myself in it.

So it’s been a full night. Face-coughing, dog pee, rage, laughter, meditation, humidification, Children’s Placebos, a mini-satori, and now blog-rambling. Maybe I can get some sleep now.

First, it’s been great. It’s been one of the best things I’ve done for myself for as long as I can remember. I hadn’t really realized just how must of a burden my involvement had become. An old friend and mentor asked me a little about it and “what I had been doing” lately. When I thought for a second, I realized that one important thing I had been doing was not-playing music. Not some passive activity, but actively and enthusiastically not playing.

Second, there’s space. My work schedule has picked up again and I’m spread very thin. Eliminating music from my list of things to worry about has taken some of the worst edge off the pressure. Now, instead of using all my energy for work, then using even more for music, then using whatever’s left for me and my family, I have a little space left in my life even during my crazier times. (I won’t say crazy-est because I never know what’s coming up…)

I’m reading, cooking, taking my daughter hiking, washing my dogs, learning some new dumb internet stuff for work. I’ve basically freed up enough of myself to circumvent what I call the Vortex of Despair; it’s the bad cycle where work creates stress and free time creates stress and since there’s no escape it spirals. If work is already stressful and I also know I’ve got 3 rehearsals coming up and music to learn, it’s even more stressful. If music is stressful because I’ve got so much other work to handle, and on top of it I have to spend time I don’t have to do things I don’t have the energy to care about and also learn new music and also disrupt my office to move gear around, and also I’m not spending enough time with my family, then my non-work time makes the stress even worse.

It’s such a relief to spend some time away from the Vortex. I probably ought to be embarrassed to admit to my limitations, but I never was able to do everything for everyone all the time. I’m still plenty busy and pack plenty into a week. But music was the thing that put me over the top so I wasn’t able to work well OR enjoy my spare time. Now I’m more effective at work and freer in my non-work time. Win-win. For a guy who thinks of himself as pretty smart, it sure took me a long time to figure this out and give it a try.

Third, I’m almost interested in playing again. Almost. I’ve had the computer on and tried to sit at the piano, and it just feels forced, so I mess around and then leave it alone. Partly, when I sit and screw around for 5 minutes, I do exactly what I would have done 6 months ago, and it’s not satisfying enough to keep at. And taking a break has made it clear how twisted my head was about my own music; I never, ever do anything just for me any more, and I don’t know what that would even be. I make stuff with my friend Pete in mind, he likes certain kinds of beats, or for approval from certain family members who actually don’t like anything I’ve ever been involved with (and in case there’s any doubt, that’s not a reference to my wife), and for my old mentor Andrew Hill who was very anti-convention, and for my friend Curt who knows every soul album (actually just every album) ever made, and for New York hipsters who need to include drum n’ bass and Indian night ragas in everything so it’s “cool.” Not much room left for me in all that. Jazzy non-jazz advanced-accessible noncommercial-commercial simple-complex personal-generic trendy-classic music for the masses that only I like. Tricky. If I get back into it at all, ever, I’ll have to either spend some time finding myself, or glimpsing a piece of myself may even be the little foothold thatpulls be back to it. Until I get that glimpse, I’m happier being me rather than playing music and spending time being not-me. (Or is that even possible; who else would I ever be?)

I still don’t know if this is honestly just a break or a permanent departure. Since it’s my own decision and rules and motivations, I’m free to interpret it as I like, and I’m open to re-evaluating where I am with it whenever there’s a reason to. But again and again, it feels so right to be away from it that I can’t picture going back. Playing music comes with a heavy personal cost to me, and without some kind of corresponding reward – and not even necessarily a material reward, even just some cute intangible like “fun” or “happiness” would be sufficient – I can’t think of any reason to start up again. I’d be nuts to seek out an activity that only serves to make me unhappy and stressed out. The idea that keeps popping up that one of the best reasons for me to quit music is that I can’t think of a single reason not to. 

So there you have it; until an reason to not quit music occurs to me, I’ll remain uninvolved. And I’ll enjoy every minute of it. My wife is of the opinion that if I go back, I should tackle my own projects and not passively join other peoples’ stuff. I’ve done the sideman thing, and I’m OK at it, but I have to admit to feeling pulled in other directions. But these days, the idea of finding musicians, writing music, scheduling rehearsals, booking gigs, even recording, sounds like so much of a pain in the ass that I’d rather just do something else. Actually, almost anything else. I’ve been there, I’ve done it, and without some specific reason to keep on doing it, I just don’t see any reason.

I’m lucky in so many ways to live in New Mexico. I mean, it’s not blind, dumb luck, it’s the kind of luck I sought out and it actually turned out to have been worth looking for. One very cool thing about New Mexico that not everyone knows about is Michael Reynolds, the innovative architect who creates Earthship communities up in Taos. If you don’t know about Earthships, he’s got a pretty comprehensive website on them. They’re handmade, self sustaining homes made out of recycled materials. They create their own electricity, cache their own water, and maintain an internal temperature in the 70s all year without any heating or cooling systems other than windows and walls. They’re wonderfully eccentric, with spires and walls with wine bottles in them that let in blue and green light and hand-molded bathtubs, and the south-facing windows are always lined with plants because they cleanse the air, the filter out UV rays, they and provide food, and their roots help cleanse the greywater. It’s a cool setup.

I stayed in an earthship over the summer, and it was eye opening. It really does give you a weird, empowered feeling to be totally off the grid, and you don’t realize how much noise is in your life until you live in a house without a HVAC system and with a silent refrigerator. (Since the houses are solar, refrigeration usually comes in the form of motor home appliances, so they’re either 220v, or they’re propane. This one was propane powered, and it was silent.) My wife ended up waiting to brush her hair in one afternoon because she thought the nearly-deafening racket would wake our daughter up in the other end of the house. I was grilling outside the first evening, and I wondered what the gooshy roaring sound was that I heard – after looking around a little for evidence, I realized it was the sound of beer foaming in the bottle in my hand. You can hear bees 50 feet from you, and dogs from 10 miles away. (When it’s not windy.) So, the house itself is quiet, and together, it makes for a quiet neighborhood.

There’s a newish movie about the guy who started it all, Mike Reynolds, called Garbage Warrior. I committed to my copy before it was even released, and I was one of the first people to get a copy. So of course, it sat unwatched for several months. I finally got around to watching it, and man, what a powerful movie. It’s probably the best-written documentary I’ve ever seen, and definitely most engaging. ”Garbage,” in the sense that an earthship is made with recycled automobile tires and wine bottles and plastic soda containers and aluminum cans, and “Warrior,” in the sense that this guy has passionate beliefs and has put everything he has on the line to defend them.

The story is pretty simple. Boy meets architecture. Boy grows distant from architecture when his needs change. Boy meets new ideas and runs off with them. Government comes in and shuts down the boy. Boy goes to India to help monsoon victims and to Mexico to help Katrina victims. Government allows boy to operate again. That old chestnut.

Reynolds started out with pretty traditional architecture training, and instantly realized that everything in contemporary architecture is based around obsolete ideas. (Bear in mind that I’m not an architect, and I don’t know if every architectural idea is actually obsolete. But he does make a convincing case.) From early in his career, he instinctively explored thermal mass in his construction and water caching and sustainable building practices. He tried things out. He failed. He improved. He tried again. He succeeded. Sometimes. After years of trying and failing/succeeding/growing, he had 2 communities launched and had attracted worldwide interest in his work. But with that global attention came the attention of regional authorities, and then the problems began. To start with, they stopped all his development efforts. Then he lost his architecture license because he was violating so many building codes. Mostly not in terms of safety or building quality, but rather red-tape issues. For example, “communities” are defined as “individual deeded lots with power and water and phone hookups,” and to apply that kind of code to a house that’s designed to be off the grid is short-sighted. He battled New Mexico’s legislature for years, and the movie documents the red tape and hoop jumping with excruciating detail.

This is juxtoposed with other experiences his company has had. For instance, after the big earthquake and tsunami double-whammy that India suffered in 2005, he was invited with his team to go help out. They inspected the debris, and the area was just wrecked. The 35,000 person town he visited had been reduced to 7000 inhabitants. The survivors lived in shanties made of corrugated metal, single room structures with dirt floors and 3 walls, often housing families of 7. Exposed wells with human remains inside, water was actually being transported in in trucks. 

He was horrified and awed by how nature can take the work of mankind and undo it in a matter of minutes or hours or days. They got to work. The spirit of the locals was incredible, and over 14 days, Reynolds showed them how to build an earthquake-resistant, self-cooling, water-caching structure using mostly dirt, cement, and locally found recycled materials. (He sent kids out to collect plastic bottles, for which he paid them 1 Rupee each.) The community dove right in and was mixing cement and hammering dirt into the tires with Reynolds’ core team, and the local engineers and architects were amazed and thrilled. With 100+ inches of rain a year, they’d never need to rely on wells, and the first structure could cache 10,000 liters of water. Instant independence. Suddenly, they had hope. In a perfect world, 4/5 of their population wouldn’t have been stamped out in a matter of hours. In the imperfect world the lived in, they took what was in front of them, and with just a little guidance, made something out of it.  

Taos, NM as seen from the back of the Earthship we rented

Back in the states, the fumfering New Mexico legislature repeatedly blocked his experimental housing bill, and were it not for one enlightened soul on the government side who eventually took up his cause and pushed it through person by painful person, it would still be blocked. His “experimental housing” bill wasn’t asking for money, it was asking for the right of individuals to designate specific housing sites as experimental so they’d could be free to innovate outside the limitations of current housing code. One telling moment in the movie was when he was bemoaning his first big government shutdown and, “They took away my right to try and fail.” In post-disaster India, no red tape. In disaster-free New Mexico, hemming and hawing, and Reynolds seems genuinely bugged that it might take another Katrina-level catastrophe to convince people in government to allow any changes to how we’re permitted to house ourselves. He’s not talking about a forced, universal change that would be imposed on others, all he wanted was the right for interested individuals to explore options in how they housed themselves and their families. Doesn’t sound that controversial, but it’s apparently a pretty threatening notion to some people. Personally, I would have quit in frustration less than 4 minutes into the process; I don’t have the patience for red tape that he exhibited in the film, but he might not have either were it not for his conviction. Watching someone fight for what they believe in can be an awesome sight.

Rather than just being a pedantic hippy-treehugger sermon to our culture of consumption, this was a snapshot of a real American and his very real spirit. He’s a crusty individualist determined to survive in the wild and wooly West using his brains and his backbone and his ingenuity. He is a think-different character who practices what he preaches, and rather than just lofty, academic lectures to get his point across, he’s got his sleeves rolled up, his face sunburnt, and dirt under his nails. Like a lot of so-called environmentalists, his concern is humanity, our kids, our kids’ kids, but with him, it’s far more than just words. He’s trying to come up with mostly compromise-free ways of addressing the concerns he has. He’s not saying “stop using electricity!” or “there’s no water, panic, panic!” When he identifies electricity as an issue for the future, he works to create his own solution and creates housing that both creates its own power and also requires less. If water’s the concern, he attempts to address it by creating built-in caching systems that lead to complete independence from municipal connections. He envisions a world where housing not only has a lower environmental footprint, but could actually have a reverse footprint – surplus energy output, home-grown food, impactful use of materials that need to be recycled anyway. Taos, New Mexico gets something like 14″ per year in annual rainfall, and if a house up there can cache enough water to be independent of municipal systems, there are pretty big chunks of the rest of the world that could pull it off, too. Taos can be -13F in the winter, and an Earthship, with no HVAC systems, maintain a constant interior temperature in the 70s just using construction techniques and windows. It’s hard to watch the presentation without occasionally thinking something along the lines of, “Why wouldn’t you do this?” (Much of the movie is spent addressing this; fighting The Man to get one built is a bigger challenge than many of us would bite off. But that might be the only obvious obstacle.)

The movie is inspiring, not in a polarizing “liberal” or “greenie” way. I’d be lying to avoid mentioning that it hits some of those buttons, but it’s the spirit of the movie that really moved me, the independence, free will, celebration of the individual, the pit bull determination, the brazen balls to fight the system when someone believes the system is wrong.

The houses are amazing, Mike Reynolds is a genuine character, and the hope that the presentation instills is invigorating. I know from actually being in one of the Earthship communities up there that there’s an almost giddy naughtiness in the designs – you look a some eccentric spiral or a wall with blue wine bottles in it or a semicircular building shape, and you wonder, “Can you really do that? Is that OK?” Between this movie, my own research, and sampling the real deal firsthand, I know I’d love to live in one of his houses. The film is far from a thinly-masked marketing tool for his company, it’s a film that leaves the viewer fired up to want to make a difference. Somehow. In one’s own way. The feeling you get when you see some of the eccentric spires and rounded walls and blue-wine-bottle inlays is, “Wow… Can you do that? Is that OK? Can you get away with that?” Our ingrained conformity goes deeper than we realize, and seeing someone refuse it provides a strange and uncommon thrill, and knowing you could take part in the refusal – if you wanted to – is even better.

I’m left with the feeling that I’d never force someone else to build or live in housing like his, but I think it’s tragic that more people don’t have the option to because of archaic and inflexible building codes. Or simply because too few people even know to consider them as an option. Ultimately, it’s about expanding our choices, and protecting our freedom to make them. Regardless of your personal stance on global climate change, manmade or otherwise, it’s hard to argue with the idea of letting people be free to live as they choose.

I’ve got a new hero. A highly recommended documentary.

Hey – aren’t you That One Guy?

Anyway, hi. I have a few questions about stereo equipment and I realized you would be a good guy to ask. 

Here is my situation and my questions: 

I have a stereo system whose components I bought in 1998 for around $1000 total. The speakers are connected to the amplifier using standard speaker wire. My problem is that the wire is very finicky. Even if the wire moves a little bit, the speakers stop working. It’s hard to get behind the stereo to fiddle with the wire because my place is small and the stereo is wedged in a corner of the room.

I am therefore wondering if newer speakers use digital connectors that are much easier to use than speaker wire. For instance, do any of them use USB connectors for speakers like computers do? I would think that would be much better.

I also know there are cables called HDMI but I have no idea if they are used for speakers.

Anyway, I’d appreciate your thoughts on these matters. Thanks in advance for your reply.

What I thought was cool was that the inaugural staff has not only posted the menu itself, probably as expected, but also the recipes! I’m probably not going to make me any pheasant any time soon – you really ought to hunt your own if you’re going to eat pheasant, and I’m not going to hunt my own –  but I’m pretty tempted to scale down that seafood stew/puff pastry recipe my damn self. (The recipe calls for 6 Maine Lobster tails. I’m thinking of a quantity that is more in the zero-to-one lobster tail range.) My kid will probably make “that face” at me if I offer her some, she’s not big on seafood or creamy soups, but if it’s good enough for the leader of the free world (am I supposed to capitalize some of that?), it’s durned well good enough for my family. No matter. More for the grownups.

As far as the article went, it was followed by the expected “Obama’s so cool for invoking Abraham Lincoln, I can’t wait until he’s in office and fixes everything!” and “Obama’s such a phony for invoking Lincoln, I can’t wait until he’s in office and shows everyone what a big, Lincoln-invoking phony he is!” blog comments. Almost totally polar, just like everything political over the last 8 years and beyond. Oh, well. 

Meanwhile, in the midst of the expected Tastes Great/Less Filling blog comments, there was a rational, non-partisan comment: a person pointed out what should have occurred to every reader right away – basically, what they ate in Lincoln’s time wasn’t really a matter of fashion, in Lincoln’s day, they ate what was local, and they ate what was seasonal.

(I guess you could say it was partisan in the sense that the post was about sustainability and eating local, stuff that is usually attributed to the left, so the person who wrote the post was probably a so-called liberal, but the whole left/right thing has gotten so twisted these days that I hesitate to use the terms to label actual values, and without the blog commenter either praising Obama or slamming Bush, I’d be guessing anyway.)

I can’t say Lincoln wouldn’t have loved him some kiwifruit, but we’ll probably never know. Meanwhile, in the brave new world we live in, the whole localvore movement is preaching the same thing: eat what’s local, and eat what’s in season. I can dig it. Not just foodwise and nutritionwise and environmentwise, but local-economywise. And personally, I can dig the localvore thing a lot more than the organic movement, well intentioned though the organic movement may be. Those organically grown strawberries from California aren’t helping the environment too much if  they have to be transported to New York City, not to mention the nutritional wrinkles that long distance transportation of food introduces. I’m not anti-organic, don’t get me wrong, but I like organic stuff for easily debatable health reasons more than anything related to sustainability. Free trade goods? All for it. Local? Fantastic. Organic? Well, maybe. That’s a whole ‘nother area to explore. Please note that I didn’t use this as an opportunity to make a single milk-hormone/breast size joke. I’m all sensitive about stuff like that now that I have a daughter, so you’re welcome.

Another aside: I’d feel a whole lot more enthusiastic about embracing the localvore thing if I didn’t live in New Mexico. New York City is surrounded by verdant farm states that provide endless variety. Portland, Oregon residents could “buy local” until the cows come home. Here in New Mexico, I’d have to pare whole limbs off the FDA food tree if I stuck to eating what was grown within 50 miles. My wife has had pocket gophers literally pull plants out of her hand and into the ground, so there aren’t a whole lot of gardeners in our immediate area, and living in a mountainous/rocky/high desert area takes care of some of the rest. We do what we can, of course, but you can’t live off piñon nuts, honey, organic soy candles and green chile forever. (“I’m on the Santa Fe diet – please pass the smudge sticks. “) I exaggerate, of course. We also have red chile. (“Nurse, this man has the worst turquoise deficiency I’ve ever seen – get me 20ccs of Cerillos Green, and fast!” I’ll stop now.)

Anywhoo… This inaugural dinner was not crafted in a vacuum. OF COURSE they were aware that the Lincoln tie-in has solid PR value. And why not? They’re very aware that fans and enemies alike will be reading meaning into his hat choices and what kind of Blackberry he carries and what kind of shirts he appeared in in college photos. And his menu choices at inaugural dinners and such.  Haven’t come across too many anti-Lincolnites in my travels, so it seems to be a pretty safe gesture, and the naysayers always were going to say nay to whatever got picked anyway. 

Obama’s decisions are more closely scrutinized than any other single person on the planet right now. If these decisions have to be made, why not make them with some thought, and when they’re made with some thought, why pick on him for it? His choices continue to be encouraging to me for the most part. His campaign won largely because he assembled a strong team and let them do their thing, and it seems like he still has a good team and they’re still doing their perspective things. If I was him, however, I would have been tempted to add some lamb shawarma or basmati rice or hummus or something to the menu just to let the “He’s an Arab” types squirm a little. But then again, I can be kind of a prick.

If you’re a Mac user, virtualization is a pretty neat way to run Windows; sure, Boot Camp is cool, it’s fast and free, but these programs here will allow you to run Windows in a, uh, window; just like launching Safari or Word or something. No restarting to switch between OSX and Windows, both available whenever. The software can be fussy to set up, although I’ve been lucky. If you’ve been holding off testing Windows-on-a-Mac because of your VirtualPC experiences “back in the day,” your time has arrived, it’s a whole different ballgame. Very little compromise. And, it makes the Mac a pretty safe bet for PC switchers – 10 years ago, Mac enthusiasts would wax enthusiastically about how everything is just like Windows, but easier, and the Windows user would get suckered in and be lost and switch back. MacOS may have once been easier to someone starting from absolute scratch, but changing OSes is not the same. I mean, I’m sure learning to drive on the left side of the street is just as easy as learning to drive on the right, but I’d be willing to be that it would require at least a little adjustment for someone with years of experience doing the opposite.

Anyway, if you’ve secretly wanted to take the Mac plunge but were worried about what you’d be giving up from Windows, worry no more. You can have it all. 

I was a Parallels user from August 2007 until this Christmas, almost to the day. Parallels was basically OK. When it works fine, it works fine. Every once in a while I’d have a hiccup or belch that would require hours of work to figure out, or more accurately, to fix without really figuring out. (You can replace a flat tire on a car without knowing why the tire went flat to begin with. Same kind of deal.)

Between the little things, weird slowdowns, subtle quirks, etc., and the big things, like increasingly frequent crashes that required more and more of my ‘free’ time, I started thinking about exploring other options. The Parallels Desktop 4.0 Update promised to right all the little wrongs. Honestly, version 3.0 wasn’t too bad, but the promise of a leap in speed and greater reliability was too much to resist, so I took the plunge. 

I installed the 4.0 upgrade after an unbelievably hassle-ridden purchase process. It took like 14 hours to actually get the software I’d purchased because everyone in the world wanted their update at the same time, and apparently Parallels was caught with their pants down, so to speak. The optimist in me figured that that was actually a good sign – so many people fighting download cues to get the software must mean it’s good. 

When I finally got it, I was very cautious, though. I backed up everything, read all the warnings, followed all the early adopter tips. Unlike some reported, I had a totally hassle free setup. The process of upgrading from version 3.0 to 4.0 redoes your disk image of Windows. It creates an alternate version, of course, so for a while, you have the option of going back. I used the new version for about 2 weeks and then tossed my old one once I was comfortable. It took up a huge amount of hard drive space, otherwise I would have kept it. Anyway, big mistake. Total commitment to the new version, and within hours, I had my first big crash.

Since it was a brand new version, there was very little support for the issues. Lots of people complaining about the same stuff on their support forums, and none of the answers worked for everyone. For myself, after randomly trying things like “uninstalling” and “reinstalling,” and that old Mac tech support trick, “restarting,” I got back up and running something like 7 hours later. As they say, failure was not an option – this is what I work on, so I had to keep at it until it was fixed. Not a great way to spend a Sunday, especially when you don’t know that there’s actually an end in sight. It’s one thing to start a task that you know is going to take 7 hours, it’s another thing to take on a task that you cannot quit until it’s done. It could have been 70 hours. 

Which it was, the day after Christmas. For the first 6 hours after the failure, I tried all the same stuff as I’d done before. I was not initially worried since I’d gone through the same thing 3 weeks earlier. Surely, there was some learning curve that would shave hours off of my fight this time, right? Nope. I spent about 11 hours wrestling with it the day after Christmas because I had work the next day. No dice, and luckily things were slow at work and I got away with the down time. But after 11 hours fighting with it, I thought, “It’s time to try something different.” I jumped through the hoops of converting my Parallels desktop disk image to one compatible with VMWare Fusion. That was its own set of hassles, and while the process actually worked pretty easily and hassle-free, it took something like 60 hours. (I distinctly remember the feeling of alarm when it estimated 58 hours remaining.) So from late Thursday to late Sunday, it was grinding away. I still had my Parallels image, VMWare created its own copy and left the original Parellels stuff intact. And, wise as I’ve gotten in the last 3 weeks, I’ve kept it, just in case.

During the last hour or so of conversion, I downloaded a trial version of VMWare and installed it. It was very easy. With any virtualization software, there’s a little learning curve so you can get keyboard shortcuts working just so, and share the right volumes and get the drivers right, but it was mostly very painless. As of 2 days ago, I got my final couple tweaks figured out, and it’s been great. 

So, my first couple reactions:

Fusion has been dead reliable. Not a single hiccup or crash. I’ve experience Windows slowing down a little after hours of use, but nothing compared to the tragic slowdowns I’d predictably get in Parallels. And as with Parallels, if it gets too bad, a reboot of Windows takes care of it for a while. Advantage: Fusion. (This one is enough for me; give me reliability, or give me something else.)
 
Fusion still works after you shut down your Mac and turn it back on again. Parallels did not always do this. Having to uninstall and reinstall a program several times a month seems pretty unreasonable in the year 2008, now 2009. To be fair, this happened much less with Parallels 3.0. Advantage: Fusion. (If the 2 programs had been equally reliable, this would also be enough to make me switch.)

“SUSPEND” works in Fusion. You don’t have to totally shut down and restart Windows. Parallels had this feature as well, but it did terrible things when I tried to use it. 

If I “sleep” my Mac, Fusion doesn’t cause horrible system crashes. I had bad luck with this with Parallels, even in 3.0. It’s awfully handy to be able to sleep your mac instead of restarting, and it’s nice to let it take a break for the night rather than letting a screen saver spin all night.

Parallels 4.0 felt faster, and Fusion seems to actually be faster. Launching programs, screen redraws, resizing large files in Photoshop, gave the impression of greater speed in Parallels; the mouse was more responsive, etc., just the little things you feel when you’re used to a computer. In Fusion, you can actually feel the effort the machine is making when you’re pushing it with large files or lots of programs at once. But if something “feels” faster and actually takes longer, it’s sort of a wash. Bear in mind that this is pretty unscientific. My work has me doing the same tasks over and over, and I’ve done them for years, so I notice the difference between 5 and 10 seconds; it took me a little while to realize that Fusion was actually taking less time on some operations because it felt slower. Neither program is a dog, per se, they’re as fast as anything I ever need when they run right. Advantage: none – in a perfect world, the software would be fast AND feel fast.  

Features: Parallels seems to offer a lot more little goodies; I haven’t made a chart and counted them, but it definitely feels that way. I also never used any of them, so I don’t remember what they are. I’m sure there are people out there who have done great things with them and revolutionized their workflow, but all I really ever wanted or needed was a reliable platform that ran Windows XP fast enough for me to work on. Everything else is icing. So I’d probably give the icing advantage to Parallels. The cake advantage, not so much.

As far as the mundane day to day stuff they both have to do in order to do what they do, like sharing volumes between the Mac and the PC or sharing an internet connection with the Mac, they both did fine. They’ve both shared my printer just fine, although it took more steps in Parallels – Fusion worked right out of the box. They both see my Wacom tablet just fine, and they both politely try to figure out what to do if I plug in a camera or iPod, and they both remember what my preference is when I specify one. And with persistence, I eventually got both of them to support all my favorite keyboard shortcuts.

(Valuable tidbit for Fusion users: it may be common knowledge, but it took me a long time to sort out that turning off all the mouse-button options will allow your keyboard shortcuts to work in Photoshop, or for ctrl-clicking selected items from a list. I hated living without them, and Parallels didn’t remap CTRL-mouse out of the box so it was a new issue for me.)

I liked Parallels OK, and if it weren’t for the major time-suck it had become, I’d still use it. Software virtualization isn’t that sexy in the big scheme of things, so this isn’t a Porsche vs. Ferrari choice, it’s more like picking a new brand of milk because the old brand makes you break out. Fearing that you’re not going to be able to work, and not knowing how long it’ll take to get back to being able to work are deal breakers for me, I’ve got enough to worry about without dreading the next inevitable big software crash.

A casual perusal through the Parallels support forums has an embarassing number of “I asked for help on this 11 days ago, and I still can’t run Parallels” kinds of messages. Downtime with current, commercial software releases should not be measured in days; partly, it’s the software testing and QA and all that, partly it’s their support, and however you slice or dice it, downtime is not attractive, and downtime without an obvious path to remediation even less so. I am not a casual computer user, and keeping Parallels running had become larger than my interest in learning enough to do so. There are absolutely smarter, more experienced people than me all over the world, but in my opinion, you shouldn’t have to be one of them in order to purchase and use a piece of consumer software. That’s all I’m saying. 

If I had to guess without knowing anything about either company, VMWare seems to be the more cautious company; they seem to test their software more thoroughly and since they have far fewer devastating bugs, they have far fewer maintenance releases, and their marketing sheet probably has 30% fewer selling-point bullets as a result. Parallels takes risks, pushes the envelope, but in my own experience, represent bleeding-edge rather than cutting-edge progress. The result is jagged progress; additional features and claimed extra performance, but at the tragic expense of reliability. I mostly love using Windows in virtualization, it’s the best of all worlds when it works right, and I remain hopeful that both companies will continue to improve their products and advance the state of the art. But as someone who NEEDS the software to just work, Fusion’s my answer for now. Once you take reliability off the table, as Parallels has for many people, none of the other improvements matter. 

I’ve read of frustrated Fusion users who have switched happily to Parallels and found their bliss with exactly the opposite move as I’ve made, so your mileage may vary. All I can say is, thank goodness for options.

If you’ve been on the fence and want to test the water without gambling a lot of green, you should check out Sony Eyetoy for Playstation 2. Best Buy has them for $4.99 plus applicable local tax. (Order it online and choose “pick up at local store” if it’s available, you save shipping.)

Even though it’s technically for Playstation 2, it’s just a USB camera. You don’t need a Playstation 2, they’re just phasing them out since Playstation 3 is the current model. Enterprising individuals have written drivers for them for Windows and for MacOS. I’ve tried it myself on Windows XP and OSX; Vista users may want to sniff around a little, I don’t use it or have any way to test, and I don’t know anyone who uses it yet so I haven’t bothered.

It’s no Apple iSight, but iSight is more than 5 bucks. It’s a decent camera, works with Skype and Google Talk just fine, and until you’ve got some kind of specific need that it doesn’t handle (whatever that would be), it’ll do the job.

If you don’t know why you’d want a web cam, I’ve got 3 words for you: Video conferencing. Well, that’s 2 words, but they’re pretty cool when they’re paired. Although I wouldn’t replace a simple phone call or quick email with a video chat, there’s nothing like it for checking in with people you know every once in a while. I’ve used Skype for video conference with friends and family for free, and it’s fine. But my weapon of choice these days is Google Talk. It’s simpler, and it seems to require a lot less processor power, so it runs more smoothly for more people. Sort of comes down to what the people you know use, though, and since they’re both free, you don’t really have to choose. If you’ve got a computer and any kind of bandwidth other than dialup, you really ought to give video chat a try, and for $5, there aren’t many excuses left. 

On the off chance that Best Buy sells out, which they eventually will, they’re available every day of the week on Amazon or eBay for about 10 bucks. Still not bad for a decent, name-brand web cam. Oh, and if you happen to actually have a PlayStation 2 as I do, it’s actually pretty fun to have 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.

 My 3 old dogs are from the New York City area, and they carry with them a certain kind of attitude that seems worrisome but works out really well. (Some New Yorkers are like this; a tough or daunting exterior when you cross them on the street, but incredibly helpful, kind people if they see that you need something. It’s not a facade, there’s real toughness, but there’s a lot more under the surface.)  

Watson is a pimpish character from Brooklyn. A cool, distant-to-strangers Rottie/Shepherd mix, he’s actually very sweet with people, but won’t take any shit from other dogs. (He was actually great with other dogs, too, until we got a second one and he had to “protect” her one time. After that moment, he wouldn’t take any shit from other dogs.) He was remarkably patient and kind to all our visitors. Ruby’s a neurotic beauty from Staten Island, and she walks around and grumbles to herself. If she were a person, she’d smoke, drink coffee, and be on her cell phone while she was getting her nails done; she’d probably take diet pills and and be a hypochondriac. She ended up chewing on the head of Tiger to scold him for getting too close while she was eating. It was a warning, there was no real malice behind her head-chewing, and the big, young hundred pound puppy just stood there while this lanky, 40 pound dog in her later years made terrifying noises and bit his head. He was very patient about the whole thing, no hard feelings. (Dogs are so cool.) He comes across as a little slow sometimes so we kept an eye on them, and it was just fine.

Sheba is from New Jersey, and she’s got a big mouth. She looks and sounds like a junkyard dog because, well, she’s a junkyard dog. If you were to poll strangers, 10 out of 10 would say she’s the scariest when they first enter our house. But she’s really all bark, and is the sweetest, most affectionate soul in the house. Even knowing that, we are surprised at how gentle and cool she was with the visitors, and on more than one occasion, she would quietly get in the middle of our dogs and the visitors if they started barking. The noisy, terrifying Jersey Girl is actually a natural peacemaker. Loki’s our puppy, he’s quickly becoming our biggest dog, but he’s a big goof. He makes scary noises at strangers sometimes, which is mostly OK with me, and there’s not a mean bone in his body.

Burt the Burd was really cool, a pleasant surprise. He’s not hand trained, but he likes being in the middle of things so he’d chatter as loud as the noise floor in the house encouraged him to. We’d drive up to the house, and all the dogs would be lined up in the window barking at us, but over the top of them all, we’d hear Burt tweeting away right along with them in the piccolo range. It was nice to have a happy little bird in the house just doing his thing. I thought our house might be too cold for him, but a trip to the zoo in Albuquerque right after Christmas alleviated my fears – their budgie exhibit is a walk-in cage totally exposed to the elements, and those plucky little characters were flying around and chattering in 28 degree weather. 

Bijou was a little sweetheart. She’d sit with me while I worked. She’s needy, in that she CONSTANTLY wants up, but she’s so small it hardly matters. My daughter loved being near the little dogs. Marley’s actually a sweet little guy, but he barks at tall people. I’m not short. There were little issues with him, I guess, but he gets along with my puppy, Loki, really well even though they’re 90% different in size. They’ve known each other since Loki was tiny, so it’s only natural. It’s very different having small dogs around, I’m not totally used to it, but I’m not complaining, they’re sweet little monsters.

There’s no pretty way to say that 8 dogs makes for a lot of dog shit. It snowed and froze and melted and froze and snow, and we had to really make an effort to keep things halfway under control. Also, hundred pound dogs leave much bigger evidence behind compared to, say, 50 pound dogs. Or 7 pound dogs. These are things you sort of understand but don’t fully grasp when you agree to take on 4 extra dogs for a little while.

The only real hassle was the smallest dog of all, Marley. He pissed all over our house. He’s probably 2 years old, and he’s tiny, and he’s unfixed. He’s the kind of dog that will jump up under a bigger dog and bite his wang and hang there, and the bigger dog will stand there, unsure what to do. If you were at a bar, and a guy who was a foot tall jumped up and bit your groin, you’d have to be careful how you handled it. On one hand, you could probably stomp him out without much fuss, but then you’d really seem like a jerk for kicking some 1-foot-tall guy’s ass, or you could let him continue to hang from your wang by his teeth, and that’s not sustainable. You’ve got options, but none of them will make you look cool in front of chicks.

So this little dog was marking all over my house, and the big dogs that live here were all a little confused. The day after Christmas, I caught him pissing on one of my daughter’s gifts, and before I could get some paper towels and the anti-dog-piss stuff, I caught Watson marking over the little guy’s mark. I scolded him, and he obviously felt bad and didn’t do it again; it’s probably been 10 years since he’s had an “accident” of any sort, but he was also like, “Oh, come ON! This little dude is jacking up my whole scene! He’s making me look bad!” Watson’s the alpha dog here, and he was as powerless to stop this little dude from muscling in on his territory as we were. His looks of informed frustration are always heartbreaking, and this was worse than usual.

One afternoon, we came home from town, and I was carrying my daughter into bed. She’d fallen asleep in the car. While I was trying to cover her up and take off her shoes, that little dog ran in and started barking at me. It annoyed me a little, because a) it’s my house, b) my daughter is asleep, and c) this little dude is getting territorial on me. (Me!) So after Sydney was secure and snug, I turned around and raised my arms and ran after him. I do it to my dogs all the time, and we bark and growl and wrestle and it’s all good dog fun, and everyone gets riled up for a couple minutes and then we all calm down again. I do it just to goof with them sometimes, and sometimes to break the ice if they seem like they’re getting too serious about something, and usually a little chasing and playing burns off their extra energy and they have fun and we bond and everything’s pleasantly calm afterwards.

Evidently, this little 7 pound dog hadn’t played with a person in quite this way before because he bolted off with his tail between his legs followed by a 30-foot trail of pee, ending in a pee-circle by the front door where he finally stopped. Anette picked him up and he looked pretty shaken up, he was shivering a little. As she held him, he lifted one paw up and looked at me as though to say, “NO MORE!!! PLEASE STOP!!!! I CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE!!!!!!!” I felt horrible, I was just trying to play a little and get him to burn off a little energy because he’s such a spunky little dude, and it sort of wrecked his day. It seemed like a pretty big reaction to 2 seconds of half-hearted chasing, but I still feel guilty.

He wasn’t at all mad at me, he let me hold him and calm him down, and he wasn’t extra-edgy with me later (little dogs seem to be good at holding grudges when they want to, and he was perfectly sweet). I’m not convinced that it wasn’t just an act – he instantly stopped shivering when we put him down and went off to attack my big puppy, Loki – and he was back to normal just that quickly. But he pretended to think twice about barking at me next time I left and returned. It didn’t actually stop him, mind you, but he pretended to have thought twice at least. And he may not have peed in the house any more after that. It’s hard to tell with a little guy like that. 

I don’t think he’ll actually learn anything from it since it’s probably the first and only time he’ll ever get chased by an arm-raised 6 foot guy in cowboy boots. His reaction was way out of proportion to what I had in mind, and I really felt bad for shaking him up, even if it was only for 30 seconds and then he instantly got over it. Me, I got a pretty valuable lesson in “a little bit goes a long way.” Poor little guy.

If you’re going to have 8 dogs in your house, the more of them that are housebroken the better.

Batting .500 really isn’t good enough, and in this case, two out of three IS bad. Don’t ask. 

Software virtualization is only as good as the host application AND the host OS.

Feel free to use that for your Christmas cards next year. You’re welcome. And goodbye, Parallels Desktop, I’ve given you my last weekend if the 28 hour process of exporting my stuff to VMWare Fusion actually works.

I’ve never met a barbecue sauce I didn’t like.

That’s not a challenge. 

If you’re thinking about buying a big American pickup that will later turn out to be a lemon with which you cannot seek remediation through your own state’s Lemon Law because you bought it in a different state to save money and nobody wants to touch your case because of the complexity, it’s easier to just not buy the future lemon. 

It’s hard to not have strong feelings about the auto bailout if you’ve purchased a lemon from one of the Big 3. *cough… Dodge… cough… and Ford… cough*  For me, saving Dodge sounds a little like preserving a vial of polio or smallpox to maintain the noble heritage of polio or smallpox, but I’ve come to realize that my permanent dislike for the company is based largely on my dealership experience and not the manufacturer itself, so I really ought to just let go of it. Maybe one day. I’m not that mad at Ford any more, and for what it’s worth, they started turning themselves around months before the real collapse around election time. And despite their constant strategic gaffes, I actually like GM OK. If they acquire Chrysler, that feeling may change.  

Car insurance is occasionally handy, and your provider may be better than you think they are.

Thanks, GEICO, seriously. I was filled with dread at needing to interact with you after The Big Accident over the summer, and you delivered in every way. Next time I almost die in a spinning, flipping, rolling car accident, I’ll have one less thing to worry about afterwards. It’s truly good to find out that interaction with a giant faceless corporation can actually be  far better than the worst case scenario you’ve imagined – or in my own experience, far better than I would have expected. 

If you’ve been involved with something for years, say, oh, music, that you’re supposed to enjoy, and you suddenly recognize that it has become like this horrible, crushing punishment and you dread every second of your involvement with it, maybe you should either fix it so it’s not so bad or stop doing it altogether, and if you do stop, you might find instant, enlightenment-level relief that affects your every waking moment.

I envision this on a bumper sticker. A dense, nigh-legible bumper sticker. Or something. Anyway, the “fixing it” may provide the same kind of relief, but I may never find out if I’m lucky.  I look forward to trying out tons of new things and filling the music-sized gap in my life, if I even need to. After all, when you remove a bee stinger, do you really worry about the gap that’s left?  

Chinese curses are OK for Christmas cards. 

I’ll be creating a line of them for next year. The first one will be “May you come to the attention of those in authority. Happy Season.”

If you regularly break your toes, try to alternate feet so when you get crippling arthritis in your later years because of earlier repeated toe-mashings, you’ll keep your limping more even.

If I survive, I’m definitely going to have tolio at some point. 

The things you give others can mean far more than you think they do.

Like on Tuesday, this one lady, Natalia, came to our house and it had snowed a lot the night before and the side streets were pretty bad and we were going to meet her at the local grocery store in our pickup and take her and Tyra, my daughter’s best friend, the rest of the way here. But she didn’t bring our phone number so she tried to tough it. Tyra came to the door and came in and started playing, and after about 4 minutes, Anette asked Tyra where her mother was. She said, “Oh yeah, she’s stuck in your driveway. She said she needs your help. She wants you to come out and help her. Both. Both come help.” So I went out first and me and the Fedex guy who just happened to drive by started to push, and we eventually got her partly into my driveway but with the front tire stuck in my drainage culvert and one rear tire 6″ off the ground. The Fedex guy apologized for not being able to help further, and we thanked him and he drove off. Then as we were digging, he came by again with a Christmas gift from one of my clients – the reason he was originally on my street. (He went by the first time because my mailbox had been knocked over again, so he didn’t see the street address.) He offered to loan us a tow strap he had, which we gratefully borrowed. (“Just drop it off at the mail drop at the store, they’ll know me.”) We used our pickup to pull the car out, and everything was good. We don’t have anything that would have worked for towing, so the Fedex guy’s “accidental” or coincidental appearance was actually a direct result of my client’s gift, without the magical appearance of the towing strap, it would have been a whole lot more trouble to get her out. They saved Christmas.

I might post more as I witness the violent transformation of hard, little kernels of experience into the delicious, fluffy popcorn nuggets of wisdom. 

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