The end of November marks the real beginning of the Christmas season. With Thanksgiving being so early in the month there was a nice lull in activities this week. The hustle and bustle is starting up again, I ended up getting a lot of the decorations out and about yesterday, it always feels nice to transform the house for a little bit. December is also the home stretch of the year, any big projects should have already been completed and it’s time to make plans for next year. While this year had it’s share of adventures, next year is shaping up to be even wilder. We’ll probably be moving next year and hopefully upgrading to a bigger plot of land. The last time I stopped doing my blog was because I had just bought this house and the amount of work that needed to get done was beyond my childish comprehension. Speaking of, I had never in my life considered having a child before moving out here, it wasn’t until we got established and life began to get quiet that I sought to mix things up. The internal change those decisions sparked was that I seek out those disturbances as I’m getting comfortable for continued development. I know taking on more responsibility makes life more difficult, but I akin that thinking to adding weight makes the bar heavier; I want to lift heavier weight. When I was in highschool we learned about the renaissance and a “renaissance man”. Afterwards I wrote down a list of what I needed to learn to be a renaissance man. That list is long gone, but I’m satisfied in who I’ve become, there’s even a number of activities from reading to music that I didn’t think I had any hope in. After decades of accomplishing goals, I don’t see any limit on what I can achieve, slow and steady wins the race.
29 November 2023
Lately my writings have been biographical, I have to continue changing my style. The form will be formless. Rigidity provides stability and overtime those stable walls become a prison. What’s called stable stops being what provides support and becomes what is recognizable. Any given day and maybe a couple times a year we will wake up to news that changes the way we live. In the constantly changing world familiarity feels like comfort, even that becomes co-oped for nostalgia purposes. There are countless remakes providing a somewhat similar character and story hoping people will consume the content with no promise of quality. Nostalgia is bait, people take it as the devil they know, I accept 40 years in the desert without seeing the promise land. We must push forward, looking back is only a pillar of salt. The individual needs to know their self outside of group interests. Groups don’t exist in nature, by that I mean they are social constructs. Pointing to a human, most humans will be similar to that, but examining a group doesn’t provide information on all groups. The group creates it’s own parameters, socially constructed, that provides the stability to know what is inside and what is outside. The danger is when an individual doesn’t have a sense of self and begins to believe their defining characteristics are the group’s characteristics. A person can grow and change while remaining the same person, a group with different parameters is a different group, so a person without a sense of self adopts group traits as their own defending any change to the group parameters as an attack on themselves, growth stops and everything under that umbrella decays. The answer is to accept change, not rush into it or refuse it, time marches forward and things will happen. We choose to view events as half full or half empty, continuing find the good in our current situation is how the cup overfloweth.
28 November 2023
I’ve probably slept more in the last couple days than I have in months, it astonishes me that the body can work in such a way that there is some sort of reserve energy which isn’t calorie based that I can pull from. Hopefully things go well today with daycare and I can continue catching up on sleep though I’m prepared for them to recommend in the first couple days to only leave a child for a couple hours. One is more than zero, I’m grateful for whatever I can get. After that my work focus will be fencing though that’s a project that will be stretched out over Winter and even then I’m hoping to finish before Spring. We went out together with my Army buddies to get a Christmas tree and now it’s time to decorate, my long term storage for things like annual decorations is in a barn down the hill. In the back of my mind I’m planning how to get the decorations into the house, whether I need the wheel barrow or I’ll carry boxes individually over time. Some day it will be good to have a utility vehicle like a John Deere Gator, a weak link in my chain is the ability to carry weight over distances and it’s compensated with my sweat. About a month ago I made a video picking up rocks, there was a pile of rocks on my land I wanted to clean up and was repurposing the rocks to build a dam for the pond. With the rocks I hit a ceiling for what I can do with my wheel barrow, there were more rocks than it can hold in a single trip and when full I struggled to move it. There was a lot I learned from that experience as I do from all the work I take on. “I asked for strength and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.”
27 November 2023
That was an exhausting weekend, everything went well, I just need some rest. The baby starts daycare tomorrow, that will be my chance, so I only need to make it one day and a wake up. There’s so much to process it will take me at least a couple days, but my wife invited our guests to stay for Christmas also, maybe I’ll be processing all month with new information at the end. I told my Army buddies it was surreal having them here, it’s been almost 15 years since we were in Iraq together. Back then the three of us did in fact sleep side by side, I try to provide better living conditions, but they’re happy to set up in the garage. I’ll have to furnish my garage for future visitors. The way I structure my life is to make pretty the house and whatever is on display for my wife and visitors to appreciate while I am happy to spend time in a shed. My garage buddies enjoyed the shed and the 17 year old nephew even said it was “cool” in there, it must be true because he barely said anything else. There was an episode of Black Mirror where the husband dies and is brought back as an AI with a realistic body, he ends up sitting patiently in the attic until he’s needed, that’s often how I feel in my shed. All of my thinking revolves around the baby so when I have free time, I end up waiting until I’m needed. Hopefully with daycare I’ll be able to get back to work again. There’s a fence project that’s high on my list, removing a chain link fence and setting it up else where. There’s also Christmas decorating to be done, the boys went with us to get a Christmas tree last weekend.
24 November 2023
Thanksgiving went well and I hope the same for everyone else. We were building towards a perfect meal until the dish one of my buddies was making hit a snare. He was excited to make a macaroni casserole, everything was good until he was sliding it into the oven and the disposable aluminum tray got a tear in the bottom. There was a cheese sauce that started pouring into the bottom of the 400 degree oven. No body was hurt, we opened the windows to air out the smoke and will clean the oven today. All of that added to a memorable holiday. I feel bad for the guy that wanted to share his family’s recipe, these sort of events pattern his life. When I went to visit him for a Forth of July barbeque he had a great spread planned, but hours before people arrive a tornado passed by knocking out the electricity and knocking over his grill, the fall broke the cap off the propane tank. A tough life has made him strong. My pattern for tripping at the finish line ironically has to do with words. I think there’s a little dyslexia in my family, I don’t know what causes dyslexia, but when it comes to important documents or decisions I never trust myself with the final submission. No matter how many times I reread every word, I will miss the silliest mistake. Computers won’t process if it receives a syntax error, then it’s a struggle to get a hold of another human to correct the mistake. I wanted to say computer errors can’t hurt you, that’s not true though, lives are ruined by clerical mistakes. Still, I’m grateful not to have any serious damage done to anyone and we can continue enjoying the time with have with each.
Thanksgiving 2023
This year I have a lot to be thankful for, not least of all my health and for the most part all those around me are healthy. All the hustle and bustle seems important until someone is ill and that’s where real life begins, not when when people are relaxing and enjoying themselves, but when it hits the fans. Stressors reveal who we truly are, I’ve always been happy that under pressure I act the way I thought I would. I’m thinking now about a time our convoy was hit by an IED, there is protocol to follow and that’s what I did. Later I confirmed with my gunner that my actions were justified. I’m thankful to not have to deal with that mess anymore and that my gunner is also doing well in life, he continues to grow and gives me someone to compete against though indirectly. I’m thankful for the people I’ve been privileged enough to be around, they’ve shown me there’s more going on than my little world and provided companionship along the ride. Everyday I’m thankful for my daughter and that she’s doing well, growing everyday. She’s been the biggest competition of my life, there are no more days off. As she gets bigger the weight I carry around the house increases, I would not be as strong as I am today without her. I’m thankful for all the delicious foods we’ll have today and that I’ve been able to provide my guests, having something essential to life no longer worry me is a gift. Receiving the same gifts everyday like health and food allow them to seem like background noise, but without them everything else I’ve built doesn’t stand. I’m thankful for the life I live and will do my best to honor it.
22 November 2023
With having a Thanksgiving dinner last weekend and another one tomorrow it has felt like a week of Thanksgiving. There’s a common joke that the Christmas season begins the day after Halloween, the joke used to be that it started the day after Thanksgiving, but Black Friday sales have crept forward to the entire month of November. Having a longer period to focus on this month’s holiday has been nice. Today might also mark the beginning of my Army friends visiting. I’m not sure when they’ll arrive, that’s part of dealing with these guys. There’s two veterans, one is bringing his pet wolf and the other his nephew, they’ll all be riding to my place together. After that who knows what’ll happen, it’s not like when we were younger blacking out getting into fights, I’ve actually been doing a weekly Bible study with these guys. The mayhem will be more like herding cats, we each have very individual personalities and hard heads, so everyone is doing whatever they want whenever they want. There’s a lot of yelling and push ups in the Army because it takes a strong hand to get everyone on the same page. We have a lot of experience together, hard to believe it’s almost been 15 years since we slept side by side in Iraq. While hard to herd them, giving them a wide berth of personal space and repeating our current objective will eventually get us there. A thick skin is require, in my normal life if someone were to treat me like them there would either be an altercation or I’d walk away, we still might have some wrestling. For the most part I’ll work to go with the flow and let everything wash off me like water. If they’ve tied me up and I’m unable to make to my keyboard until Monday, have a happy holiday.
21 November 2023
Someone was asking why do people journal thinking it’s obsessing about the past. They then went on to talk about how it can’t change the past etcetera, my first thought is that writing about the future would be fiction, but still journaling about the future can be beneficial. At many times in my life I’ve written about things I want to happen, I’m a big believer in positive affirmations, the world is mind. As for journaling about the past there’s certainly benefits to a person laying out as much information as they can about a past event they’re still struggling with. Often a piece of information will be under others, but we have to go through or disrupt our thoughts to uncover a new path. My blog is not necessarily about the past and I struggle to say what it’s about other than my thoughts. I started writing these sometime around 2017 as I was going through the book The Artist’s Way, that book also started by writing positive affirmations ten times over which was exactly what I needed at the time. Continuing to write now is not about processing my past, writing is a skill or a muscle, I exercised yesterday and I expect that work will improve my future. Continuing to write continues to sharpen the skill and improves the ability to articulate myself. Blogging isn’t the highest form of writing, revisions are essential of quality work, but blogging everyday is in line with my mindset of try to improve by 1% a day. There are several tabs open on my web browser for different writing ideas and hopefully I get to others through out the day. Writing the blog is seen as my minimum maintenance and serves as a warm up, like everything else it can be slow to start until settling in a groove.
20 November 2023
The weekend went well, we had the first of two Thanksgiving dinners, this one with my wife’s family. Later this week I’ll have some Army buddies over for dinner, they might effect my ability to write this blog for many reasons, but I’ll do my best. One of the guys is bringing his wolf, I couldn’t say how much of its genetics are wolf, that stuff is mostly marketing anyways and I don’t think “wolf” would appear in DNA and “dog” is written elsewhere. Some day I’ll have to get into genetics talk, but I haven’t done enough research on the topic. The crux of the argument being that humans can talk which is unlike anything else in the universe we’ve encountered. The basic argument against evolution with that is that a random mutation for language wouldn’t afford that creature anyone else to communicate with. Darwin was aware of this flaw in his theory at the time and today the “Origin of speech” wiki says in the second paragraph that while many have attempted to scientifically explain the origin of speech, “no theory has generated agreement”. Five years ago I wouldn’t say such things because myself like many others put our faith in modern science, the only problem is that science runs on skepticism. Faith is for religion. The media abused people’s faith in science by making claims and then often within a year making claims contrary to the originals, expecting their audience to have the attention of a goldfish. That in large leads to this blog, because who do you trust? I rarely trust anything written in the last 50 years. My education comes from the classic, it can be said those are curated by people with something to gain, first I don’t have time to deal with contrarians. Second, I’m old enough and educated enough to judge quality craftsmanship. The spirit shines through works a person cared about.
17 November 2023
Finally Friday, this week felt longer than normal thanks to a fussy baby. She may have gone through a cold, had a stuffed nose, cutting new teeth, or all of the above. I had to go to the post office a couple time to chase down a package delivered to the wrong address and the baby was fantastic. Some adults can’t wait in line for a half hour without throwing a tantrum, though we did have plenty of pens to stay entertained. The post office is a strange beast, some how everything there seems incredibly slow and broken yet modern mail is a marvel. In letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson they were writing about their hopes for the post office in the future, people might receive mail 2-3 times a week. There is a cynical attitude in the modern age, my theory is because so much has been accomplished for humanity at this point that the difficulty in attempting something new scares people into not trying at all and sarcastically claiming it’s stupid. People from the past, who were also human, it’s easy to think of past figures from a different world, those people would be amazed at the wonder that is the modern west. And that everything is working all the time, the electricity almost never goes out, clean water flows from the tap, we even have internet in the woods. When I study America’s founding fathers, I feel Newton’s quote that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Not only were their limitations greater, but they did more with what they had. Ben Franklin started the first library by collecting a list of books he and others owned, so they could borrow from each other and it was a subscription service. Some people tear down giants of the past because they’re an uncomfortable reminder of our short comings, my pursuit is to overstep them. First I learn from them.
Chris' Morning Pages 