Misc

Move over Osmond Family here come the Weeks Kids:

Noah singing Santa Claus is Coming to Town (MP3 352kb)
Noah saying Grace (MP3 928kb)
Noah and Clay singing Jingle Bells (MP3 336 kb)

Woke up with this song in my head today. I'm certainly looking forward to the summer when the light of love will be burnin' bright!

(M. Jagger/K. Richards)

And it's sure been a cold, cold winter
And the wind ain't been blowin' from the south
It's sure been a cold, cold winter
And the light of love is all burned out

It sure been a hard, hard winter
My feet been draggin' 'cross the ground
And I hope it's gonna be a long, hot summer
And the light of love will be burnin' bright

And I wish I'd been out in California
When the lights on all the Christmas trees went out
But I been burnin' my bell, book and candle
And the restoration plays have all gone 'round

It sure been a cold, cold winter
My feet been draggin' 'cross the ground
And the fields has all been brown and fallow
And the springtime take a long way around

Yeah, and I wish I'd been out in Stony Canyon
When the lights on all the Christmas trees went out
But I been burnin' my bell, book and candle
And the restoration plays have all gone 'round

Sometimes I think about you, baby
Sometimes I cry about you
Lord well well well

Sometimes I wanna wrap my coat around you
Sometimes I wanna keep you warm
Sometimes I wanna wrap my coat around you
Sometimes I wanna burn a candle for you

Just threw together a quick flickr set of some lake photos:



The larger slide show can be viewed here

 

The first cold nights of fall arrived last weekend. When I woke up on Sunday morning it was 39° which is pretty cold for this part of North Carolina at this time of year. One of the weekend chores was to refill the firewood rack on the front porch. In the winter we keep half a cord of wood on the front porch and we try to have another 1 1/2 - 2 cords of wood by the big shed, away from the house, stacked up between three big pines.

When we first moved out to Bahama we had a guy who delivered our firewood. I'll call him D. D always helped me stack the firewood he delivered and he always made sure to bring us some cedar kindling. He liked to talk a lot while we were stacking wood onto the large piles. He had worked at Nortel during Nortel's heyday and he seemed to be really effected by the downsizing. He used to tell me that he was retired but he didn't seem any older than I was. I knew he had a wife and kids and that he was divorced or separated from his wife. Being away from his kids seemed to bother him the most. Now that I have children I can imagine how he felt. From what I could tell first he lost the job, then he lost the family. I read at canadianencyclopedia.com that Nortel had "hacked away nearly two-thirds of its staff" starting in 2000. I've met a number of people who were pink-slipped by Nortel and they all had that same deer-in-the-headlights look about them.

D always seemed pretty depressed but he was talking about how he felt so you figured that he was ok, maybe he was going through a rough patch but that things would turn themselves around eventually. The last time I saw him he was delivering a load of firewood to us a few years ago. He had had an accident with his chainsaw and had cut the backside of his arm up pretty bad. I think he said he had over 100 stitches and that he had almost bled to death. This time things seemed bleaker than they had been before. He had a lot of physical pain on top of the mental pain.

The next fall when it came time to call him I had a feeling that something wasn't right and I was scared to find out. After a while I asked my neighbor if she had heard from him since I knew that she got her firewood from him also. She said that she had called his house and his son answered and told her that he had killed himself over the fourth of July weekend.

It's been a couple years gone past now since we got that news and we get our firewood from another person now. But as I was going through the big pile of firewood I recognized some of the wood that D had brought us. I have a feeling that I'll think of him every year at this time of year. The firewood D brought us got us through a terrible ice storm when my oldest son was just a baby and we had no heat or electricity for over a week. As soon as the ice storm was over I remember D checked up on us and brought us some more wood since we had gone through most of ours trying to heat the house with a drafty old fireplace.

I'm not sure what I want to say here but when I was looking at that old firewood I got the feeling like I needed to say something. You think, maybe I could have done something, then you think maybe not. Maybe I should have tried a little harder to have been a friend to D the firewood guy but then again maybe it just wouldn't have mattered. I'll never know.

This has been a particularly hard summer with me being sick almost constantly and when I haven't been sick it seems like one or both of the kids were. Anyway this seems an appropriate quote / lyric to describe how I've been feeling. Score one more for the Drive by Truckers:

What used to be is gone and what ought to be ought not to be so hard
So I'll meet you at the bottom if there really is one
They always told me when you hit it you'll know it
But I've been falling so long it's like gravity's gone and I'm just floating

Mike Cooley / Drive-By Truckers ©Wayward Johnson's Music (BMI)

Here's a video of the acoustic version of the song and more proof the Mike Cooley is the coolest:

I've moved over to here for a while:

http://www.white-weeks.com/

Y'all come on by and visit sometime.

Robert

I'm thinking maybe its having two small children and a full time job that makes me feel like I'm swimming in tar these days but maybe its not. Maybe its just me. I feel like Eeyore when I hear myself reading this back to myself. Its just that I don't know how some people do it. Every time I read the author bio of a new computing book the author's list of accomplishments (past and ongoing) is staggering.

When Jane Q Author isn't writing books on the latest web programming technologies she runs her own highly successful award winning web development shop. In her spare time she is on the steering commitee to make the web a better place, is a champion Polo player, celebrated concert pianist and throws absoultely smashing bi-weekly networking parties in Soho and the Hamptons.

Or something along those lines. I, on the other hand am full of good intentions but have no time or energy for any sort of follow through.

I was thinking tonight of all of the things I've been meaning to write about, but every night after the kids (I still am slightly taken aback by the plural when used in reference to my situation) go to bed (which to be honest, my wife takes care of) I have the dishes to do and laundry and all the mundane crap that will never make it into some stupid article about bloggers. By the time that's done, I'm pretty much done too. I get up early in the morning so I can ride my bike to work to try to get in some exercise and then there isn't much time after that for personal pursuits.

So anyway, I figured if I wrote a list of the things I wanted to write about, maybe I'd get to writing about them someday. So in no particular order, here it is:

• The Harvard Classics - I found these at the dump and they are so much better than t.v.


• Why this story terrifies me: Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job


• Living in the South or the Myth of Southern Hospitality


• A Doula Story - Why this is the coolest thing I've heard of in a long time


• The guy I met in the bike shop today who got nailed by a car on his way home


• More general Quaker, bicycling, parenting, gardening, middle-age weirdness

Well, that's taken care of, now off to tackle the dishes and the laundry. If I ever write a book I'll need to put that in my bio.

Tonight I found a few entries I wrote on my web site almost 10 years ago. This one came up in conversation tonight with Laura when we were having another in a series of "is it us or is it north carolina?" discussions. I think my writing was better 10 years ago but then again I had a lot more time to spend on it.

---

11/21/96

".....slug....."

i'm suppossed to be out of the house right now, i told my friend danny that i would meet him and his girlfriend claudia in front of crunch at 7:50.

8:38.... 8:39.... 8:40.........

the way i figure it, i'm 50 minutes late, but they aren't in front of crunch anymore anyway. among my small circle of friends, my not showing up isn't considered as rude or something to be taken personally. i think that they have come to accept my weirdness, even to the point of telling me where they will be during different points of the evening in case i decide to join in later.

we were going to go to cbgb's gallery (the vh1 section of cb's) to see a friend play acoustic guitar and sing.

sounds pleasureable enough, but here i sit....

i work really long hours, often-times all night long. so i've adopted the thomas edison system of "cat naps". usually one around 4:00 in the morning and one around 6:00 at night. they generally don't last very long but it takes me a while to come out of them. by the time i came out of my evening nap it was 7:40. ten minutes to get to crunch, oh well....

i remember when i was growing up in suburban nj, i had some friends who lived on the other side of the town, a good 5 mile walk. my desire to hang out among my peers was so great that i would fight with my parents, (just a little strict, 10:00 curfew), and storm out of the house vowing to never return. this was generally countered by threats of what would happen to me if i ever did dare return.

with anger, rage, and teenage angst pulsing in my 15 year old body, that 5 mile walk would seem like nothing. these were what i like to call the "joni mitchell years". punk was just beginning to happen but i wouldn't discover it until a year later, 1976. my main focus in high school was art and music, and all of my friends were, well, i guess you would call us hippies. but it wasn't like it is on tv.

we would sit up all night, drink herbal tea, smoke a little cheap mexican pot, and talk.... i don't know if i have ever felt closer to a group of people in my life. nothing has ever quite felt so warm. this was my first group of friends ever in my life. i met them through the art program in school. most of them were seniors when i was just a freshman. after being a solitary person all of my life i finally had friends, real friends.

i didn't realized how devastating it would be when it finally hit me that these friends would be leaving for college while i was stuck at summit high. i had thought that through having friends, my life had changed, to be stuck with me again was disappointing to say the least.

do you remember your first true love? the one where you promised each other that no matter what happened to you over the years, you would always save a place in your heart for them? did you feel a little part of you die when that love ended? perhaps that was the piece of your heart that you promised to that person....

the losses in our lives are cumulative, we rarely notice them adding up as we go about our daily activities, we call this growing up, becoming mature. but every once in a while we have that rare moment where we realize that we just don't look at the world with the same sense of wonder anymore.

robert

Oh its been such a weird time lately. There is so much to write about and I just don't know where to begin.

Do I start with my 46th birthday and my bizarro trip to and subsequent flight from Pendle Hill last week, or should I go into the extreme frustration I feel almost every minute of every day after having not lost one solitary pound after pedaling more than 2000 miles in the past 10 months. 1000 of those miles being in the last 3 months as I mistakenly labored under the false belief that there had to be a tipping point somewhere? Or should I go on about the religious nuts who are out to remake America, or maybe I could try to get off my chest how weird and depressing it is to have lived here for nine years and still not feel like I have a single close friend here outside of my wife and son?

Urgh, where to start?

Well, I'm gonna wimp out and instead direct our attention to something I found while reading Dave Matusiak's weblog because I'm too tired and this has been a really long day.

I don't know why I find profanity to be so amusing. There is something about a cuss word used well that just gets to me every time. So that said, I?ve got to get me one of these pins:



Sometimes when you just feel so beaten down, all it takes is one good idea to put a little smile on your face..... (Don't forget to come on back after ordering your pins. Give 'em out to the folks at your church, they'll love 'em).

There is this one other weird thought that has been going around in my mind for the last week or so. I've been thinking about how I'm just a regular guy and how weird that is. I don't me "regular guy" as in someone who watches sports and has lots of friends and owns a Bass boat, but more in the sense that I don't really fit in anywhere or excel at anything and I somehow always thought that I would have one thing that I was really good at. For a while I thought it might be music, or woodworking, or programming or reaching some sort of enlightened spiritual state. But on the way back from Pendle Hill last weekend the thought came to me that I am just what I am, and that my life would probably be better if I learned to accept that.

Concurrent with this "realization" was a nagging feeling that there was a quote somewhere that I knew related to this perfectly but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. Tonight I figured out what that quote was:

"This is a world where everybody's gotta do something. Y'know, somebody laid down this rule that everybody's gotta do something, they gotta be something. You know, a dentist, a glider pilot, a narc, a janitor, a preacher, all that. [sighs] Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things that I don't wanna do. All the things that I don't wanna be. Places I don't wanna go, like India, like getting my teeth cleaned. Save the whale, all that, I don't understand that."

That quote has always been one of my favorites and so perfectly expresses the way I feel somedays. I haven't thought about Bukowski in a long time but damn, damn, damn that is one fine quote. I always thought that if I was was as talented as Bukowski or Tom Waits that I'd have stayed out there and made more of a go at being a dive bar drunk, but I'm not really that good at anything and never looked as half as good as Mikey Rourke does in Barfly so what's a guy to do?