Once again, with feelings

Welcome back, gentle readers.  I hope you enjoyed the period in which I slacked off and failed to write anything break.  I want to tell you about a friend of mine, and reflect on my thoughts following her death.

In one's life you have many opportunities, 25,550 days worth if you live to 70, to make a difference in people's lives.  To enrich your friends, to help and inspire, to give and receive love.  To help others with their money, help them to learn, to bring beauty into their life.

I have the pleasure, or perhaps treasure, of knowing quite a few people who really matter to me, and who matter to a lot of others too.  I hope that I matter to a lot of others as well.  You get a finite chance to matter.  I hope that by the time my time is up, that I have brought as much joy, shared as much love, and inspired people as much as my friend Surrey.

Many thanks to my friend Dave who took this sweet picture of Surrey and Gregor.

Surrey had an amazing life (to me it was) which started out in World War II in England and ended just a few weeks ago in sunny California.  She was an artist, a writer, a mother, a bank manager, a teacher, and many other things.  Above all else, she was a doer - she shrank from nothing and stopped at nothing to make her dreams come true and to give to others.  In the process, she made a palpable difference to so many of us that it was standing room only at her memorial today in a very large school auditorium.

My dear friend Gregor spoke lovingly of his wife, not of how he missed her, but of what allowed her to cut through the noise and get things done and make a difference.  She had seen violent death up close at an early age and she knew what mattered, and she felt the naked urgency of mortal life.  She knew deep down that she, like all of us, didn't have all the time in the world and that if she was going to make a difference she had better set aside her fears (if she had any) and get started and never stop.  Her daughter told us how even as she was near death in hospice, she was remarking on and caring about the hospice workers and their acting troupe - and that she was writing all of this down to express it because she couldn't speak for the oxygen mask she was wearing.

Take the time to make a difference; to love, to appreciate, to create joy and beauty.  Appreciate what you have and the richness of your life and your friends.  Set aside your fears and take the risks that are the bridges to your dreams.  Do this for your friends and loved ones.  Do this for yourself.  Don't wait.

Taking a night off

Those of you who are feeling well can rest easy in the notion that when you get up in the morning to go to work, or to look for work, or just go fishing, that your throat probably won't feel lousy when you get underway.  Tonight, I'm taking it easy (almost indistinguishable from my usual routine) in order to stave off feeling bleagh.

But I posted anyway.

No taxation without administration

Taxes are complicated, no matter what they tell you.  If you run a wee business from your house, or if you finally scrape up enough dough and elbow grease to get a place in the woods that you can rent out, you can be sure that you will be soon digging for the numerical answers to numerous inquiries so you can enter them in the magical software that makes sense of all of it, does all the math, and checks your work.

I don't mind paying as much as I mind filing.

The long and winding road

Working is, the saying goes, for people who can't fish.  I've been fishing a few times.  I didn't really warm to it.  Now work, on the other hand, I seem to keep going back to repeatedly.  I think I actually like it more than fishing.

So, now that the company I work for has been bought, all sorts of things are coming down the pike.  Since I'm now an employee of a publicly traded company, I'll be circumspect.

Looks like in the coming year we'll be growing, a LOT, in the current facility.  Since I'm in charge of the a lot of the parts that will be growing, I think it's going to keep me pretty busy.  If current conditions are a guide, I'll be well rewarded.

Let's just say I'm OKAY with all of that.  If I need fish, I can get it at the grocery store.

Bits and Bobs

Apparently, there is no end in sight for the merriment around here.

We had a wee party with some but not all of the cast of the Naughty French Postcards cast; maybe there was 45 of us.  These people, it is written, can party with the best of them, or at least as long as the best of them.  At 5:55 AM, I told the last three guests that it was time to stop playing naked Twister and go to sleep.  Leading up to the end, we had lots of fun singing and playing along to Rock Band; actually, only four of us did.  The others appeared to be content snapping NSFW pictures or simply rolling their eyes.  For my part, I learned that standing there singing, even very heartily, without a stitch on, allows you to get cold in short order.  I suppose if I had lots of stage lights on that things would be different, though I doubt that would be any more flattering.

I can only post this one picture:

All the rest are much more "artsy."

Then, wouldn't you know it, a certain mother-in-law of mine had an anniversary of her 39th birthday. Decorum dictates that *which* anniversary is left to the reader's imagination but let's just say that it was the sort of anniversary that you would expect there should be a big ass celebration for. Now, of course, there was an element of surprise and danger to this; the party was a surprise and the danger was that the birthday girl would find out. We, being all crafty and stuff, kept the whole thing on the down low so there was only a scintilla of a hint about ten minutes before. At the fateful moment, is was indeed a big surprise, and everybody said it was just about the best party they'd been to. Of course they hadn't been there the week before with all the topless women.

I can only post this one picture:

All the rest are much more "artsy."

When I'm not partying, I often get up and go to work in the morning. Our little company is getting a big upgrade in the structure department. We are being acquired by a much larger company. This event is often viewed by the employees of the acquired company with great skepticism. To date, I have only heard good things, and I have a pretty optimistic outlook on the many changes to come. In one view, it is a fantastic growth opportunity for me. I know that I am ready for it.

Poster Child

Once again, well you know...

Why do I write this blog anyway?  Well, over time it's changed reasons.  At first I wrote it to emulate a friend of mine.  See the very first post or two (~550 posts ago).  Then I really kinda liked the writing.  I thought I was clever.  Then I sprinkled in some sappy poetry.  Very sappy.  Hey, we all have our lousy writer moments, eh?  Then I switched to a more event-driven model, with more remembrances sprinkled in there.  That was better, so I thought.

I had lots more page views in the earlier days.  Probably a big drop off due to my lack of posts.  With your help, I can turn that around!!

I'm setting out to write more regularly and spend less time on that social networking site that sounds like placebrook.  I think a session on Friday evening will maximize things.  No work the next day, plenty of readers bored with placebrook, a good time to reflect on the week.

Now, how about some juicy postage!?

Remember that Suburban I drive.  It now has a new Pittman arm, power steering pump, pan gasket, and shift solenoids, as well as transmission fluid, and a filter.  Its tires have been rotated, and its front end aligned.  The engine is now clean, thanks to a lot of steam.  I'm sure I missed something in there.  All told, it cost a little bit more than the blue book value of the beast.  It no longer leaks oil all over itself like a toddler, and it handles a lot like it did when it was new.

Needless to say, I intend to keep it until the doors fall right off.  It meets my needs for getting there and back, and it holds all my things.  Would you believe it's long since paid off?  There also seems to be about 225,000 miles on it.  If you told me that I was going to drive a quarter-million miles in 1996, I'd have called you a republican.

It really needs a bath, though.

At Last

At last I have a weekend free, well mostly. I've been busy on weekends since last winter. Wow.

So now it's Christmas time, which I really love. I'd like to share some Christmas thoughts.

Christmas means a time of rest for me. Mental rest anyway, because there is always something to do that needs doing. I always get a few more moments to reflect on family and how fortunate I am. I think about my friends too; not just witty things to say to them, but really what their friendship means to me.

Even though I go a long time between listening, I really like music. Christmas music goes with the season and I often find a new thing to hear in pieces I've heard many times over. I relish those tiny sparkles of discovery. I think as I've aged, I listen to music more in its parts than I did before; I hear the individual players and listen to what each one is doing.

For example, I heard a Boston song (Yes, that Boston, from the 70s) today and discovered that one of the things that made them sound that way was playing guitar in unison following a pair of brief solos. I find myself remarking that a lot of songs have brief iconic parts that are really bold in retrospect. I imagine the young artist in the studio laying down that hook, probably one that they had practiced a thousand times to make it perfect. It's like looking back in time.

Round Christmas, we get lots of cards. I always imagine all the effort that went into sending them all. Wow, that's a lot of work. I'd like to individually thank each of you for all that work. It's a labor of love. I love reading the cards and the annual letters and hearing how everyone has aged and grown and achieved. Really. It's cool.

Christmas for us immediately follows the Dickens Christmas Fair. This year was really great, with tons of people attending, lots of acting opportunity and practice, and remarkably good shows. Once again, the Naughty French Postcards cast sang Happy Birthday to me, topless. The first year (7 years ago) it was really stunning - I didn't remember the singing. This year it was just sweet.

The Oliver Twist scenes went extremely well. This season I really hit my stride with the most difficult scene, a dramatic confrontation with Nancy where she tells all about Fagin and everyone else allied against Oliver Twist. The scene has to be fluid because it's essentially a heated interrogation of Nancy by my character Mr Brownlow, and it has to be very believable because it sets up Nancy's impending murder. We usually had a good crowd, we held their attention and it always played about as tense is it was supposed to.

This coming year at work is shaping up to be one filled with lots of excitement. I'm looking forward to it. I'll tell you all more later. I'm also looking forward to having weekends free from now till May. Whee!