We sat on the bench enjoying the soft ground and the cool fresh air that last night’s storm brought — and look what else.
Eat a Peach
Wed, 27 Apr 2016, 08:23 PM (-06:00)
We went out with the dogs, she and I, just as evening spread out against the sky, as the heat of the day lifted, leaving a cool breeze behind.
We walked across the soccer field and around the track and back. And when we got home, as she stood in the kitchen reading her phone, the fair and industrious Trudy asked me, “Wanna eat a peach?”
My taste is coming back, but nothing’s quite right yet, although it must be said that it’s much better than it has been. And so, I thought I might take her dare and eat that peach.
And I can just tell you this: that peach let loose the most wondrous sensation in my mouth that I have ever in my life experienced.
Teamwork
Wed, 27 Apr 2016, 08:09 PM (-06:00)
Vyas and I had just finished testing our software. It was an end-to-end test of some automated data flows: moving data about, transforming it, passing it on to other systems and finally modifying the output of a web application. The two of us had worked closely for a couple weeks, and we were in a mood to congratulate ourselves.
“Did you ever watch Fractured Fairytales?” I Skyped him. I knew the answer, but I asked anyway.
“Ha ha. No. Why?” he replied.
“There used to be this two-headed dragon,” I explained. “It (or they) would get into all kinds of trouble, wreaking havoc and so on. And when their pillaging was thru, they would look at each other and say (in unison)… Teamwork! Teamwork! That’s what counts! And as they shook hands, they would say (again in unison), Yeaaaaaaah!”
“Lol,” Vyas wrote. “Yeah!”
Blossom and Bird and Berries and Bird
Mon, 25 Apr 2016, 09:48 AM (-06:00)
And just in case you don’t quite understand the aforesaid fascination of blossoms and bees and berries and birds, I submit the following for your consideration.
Cast Party
Mon, 25 Apr 2016, 01:47 AM (-06:00)
As Trudy and Izzy celebrated the last show of Legally Blonde, I sat in the front yard watching the afternoon sun light up the orange and pink blossoms of the Coneflowers. I was feeling guilty, having participated not one iota in Miss Izzy’s stage debut, leaving the training and logistics to the fair and industrious Trudy.
I sat in guilt-ridden silence watching the bees on the Coneflowers, enjoying the cool breeze and the smell of BBQ blowing over from the neighbors’ backyard. The show had long been over. The day was coming to an end. And in the silence of my self-imposed solitary confinement, it occurred to me that perhaps Trudy and Izzy had gone to the cast party.
Then, as I was huddling over a blossom watching a bee, a Mockingbird flew by and landed in the Agarita. I looked over to see it gulping down the red berries that had ripened overnight. I watched the bird. The bird watched me and then flew around to the Lantana beside the mailbox where a week ago there were pink and yellow and white blossoms but now there were… ripe berries.
What would you rather be doing on a Sunday late afternoon: celebrating at a cast party or contemplating bees, birds and berries? Wait — don’t answer that.
Ruler of The Queen’s Navy
Thu, 21 Apr 2016, 05:36 PM (-06:00)
We used to play a game in our family in which one of us would sing the first word of a song, and the others would guess what song it was. I know it doesn’t sound as if it would work, but it did. If no one got it at first, we’d go around again with two words. Then three. And then four. Eventually someone would guess correctly; it was just a matter of time.
The challenge was that if you were singing, you had to remember the lyrics, you had to remember the melody and you had to sing loudly. Or not. Which was of course what made it so entertaining. There was inevitably much gut-wrenching laughter, and much poking fun.
I remember, however, only one particular song and the singer who sang it.
It was my grandmother. When it was Nani’s turn this one evening, she thought only briefly and then, with a wicked smile on her face, sang out a single syllable “King!” in an ambiguous tone that gave us little hint of the melody.
We were, of course, stumped. All of us… except the three Sisty Uglers, who knew their mother and were able, thru some incredible act of time travel and musical extrapolation, to deduce the specific song: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The First Lord’s Song, the first verse of which is
When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an attorney’s firm.
I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.
He polished up the handle of the big front door.
I polished up that handle so carefully
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navy.
He polished up that handle so carefully
That now he is the Ruler of the Queen’s Navy.
Now, you will notice that the word king appears nowhere, as it indeed appears nowhere in the song. And even if you allow for the substitution of queen for king, you will see that the royal title does not occur as the first word. Yet in spite of that, her daughters guessed the song. They guessed the song from the wrong word sung in the wrong place to virtually no tune at all!
We laughed so hard, our sides did ache. And my grandmother won the game!
Happy Birthday, Nani.
Taken Back to Michigan
Wed, 20 Apr 2016, 10:10 PM (-06:00)
I worked late today. The fair and industrious Trudy had taken Miss Izzy to the university, where she (Miss Izzy) has a speaking role in a musical version of Legally Blonde. It’s been a lot of work training Miss Izzy and carting her off to campus to hang out with her theater friends, and I have helped not a bit I confess, today being no exception. Instead, I worked late knowing that I wouldn’t be missed at home.
It was absolutely quiet when I finished. The office lights clicked on as I made my way to the outside door. A vacuum cleaner blocked the hallway where it had been positioned by the cleaning staff who were working diligently in some other area of the building. All the desks were empty.
Outside, it was that time of day when the sun has set but it hasn’t begun to get dark. The sky was broken clouds with pastel blue showing thru, the rain having gone. The air was glowing, something about the color of the green in the trees. And there was a clean freshness about, maybe because of the rain that had fallen. Some birds were singing in the trees: a Titmouse nearby and a Mourning Dove somewhere far away.
As I walked across the parking lot, these sensations all hit me at the same time. The glow in the sky. The warmth of the air. The dampness from the rain. The birdsong.
And for a brief moment I was taken back to Michigan. It was a summer day. I was young. Wait! Where in Michigan? Where was it? Where was I? What was that feeling, again? How old was I? Dang, I lost it. Maybe if I close my eyes and breathe in the sweet air again. Nope. As quickly as I was transported there, I was back again in a parking lot in Central Texas.
Watching the Rain Come Down
Tue, 19 Apr 2016, 05:55 AM (-06:00)
The rain started falling lightly just at the moment of maximum entropy as I was digging in the dirt and emptying the rain barrel and moving heavy rocks and landscape timbers and carting around wheelbarrows of dirt. As it started falling harder, I slowly began to reassemble the furies I had unleashed and one-by-one put them away. But this took a while, because I was tired and moving slowly. And because it wasn’t cold and the rain frankly felt good.
Around the corner, Izzy sat under the bench, tied onto her long rope. She was watching me dig in the mud in the rain, no doubt wondering why I didn’t have more sense. She was quiet, didn’t say a word, but I could see the look in her eyes. For heaven’s sake, what are you doing? Can we just go in now, please?
As it happened, after the dirt was safely piled up and the wheelbarrow was stowed and the tools were put away, we found a dry spot (such as it was) on a chair under the eves in front of the garage.I grabbed a mostly clean rag and dried the two of us, and I held her tightly for a moment.
And we sat for a while — she and I — and watched the rain come down.
The Better Day
Mon, 18 Apr 2016, 10:03 PM (-06:00)
Boston was today. What you have been training for over these many months. And from a distance, from a long distance with a hot cup of coffee on the desk beside me, I brought up the race-tracker and prepared to follow your trek from Hopkinson to the finish line.
What was it? Wave 3? And which corral was it you started in? 9:30, you said. You said you’d be off at 9:30. So at 9:50, I entered your bib number and up popped the table charting your progress. Except, yeah. You had started just 20 minutes before, so you were unlikely to be at the 5K mark, yet.
And so I took a sip of coffee and ran a few database queries to try to figure out why my messages weren’t showing up in RabbitMq. And the queries led me to make a few changes to my XSLT. Which led to some scratching of my head. Which continued for hours, until it was lunchtime and I was famished, and the code was still not working, and then the code was working, but something was still missing, and I had to insert some reference data into a lookup table… until there was a clap of thunder outside and it was late afternoon.
I uncovered on the race-tracker window to see that it was long since over. You had indeed finished.
So this is how it went: As you ran. I sat. As you kept your steady pace. I puzzled over my messages. And as you climbed those hills at the end, I confess I was sitting in the comfort of a desk chair with a coffee cup beside me long-gone-cold.
Who had the better day? The race-tracker tells no lies. I saw your splits. You did. Congratulations.
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