To sum up – develop competence, produce value, exhibit good character if you wish to be respected in the workplace or any other place.

All anyone is entitled to in the workplace is common courtesy and compliance with lawful directives.

Anyone who aspires to serve in a leadership role should remember and think about these things many times throughout the workday.

Stepford rain is falling – a squall line passed through here in the early hours of the morning.  I’m thinking about the things I can’t do today, not just because of the rain but because of the disorganized manner in which I have organized my living lately.  Sure, I do have legitimate obligations to fulfill each day, but there’re things I’m not getting done, and engaging in self-actualizing activities while failing to attend to various details of everyday life has the effect of a mildly narcotic recreational substance in terms of reality-escape.  Gotta quit that.

Here’s something I came across day before yesterday:

Flee those minds that can never rise above their academic rules, that are the slaves of their work instead of doing it in the fullness of light.  It is a mark of inferiority plainly in contradiction with an intellectual vocation to allow oneself to be tied down by narrow prescriptions and to have one’s mind benumbed into bookish forms.  Helots or eternal children:  such are those pretended workers who are out of their element in any higher region, in face of any broad horizon, and who would like to reduce others to their narrow elementary school orthodoxy.  ( p.139)

I recall that when I was a kid, I used to imagine what it would be like to live past the year 2000.  Turns out it’s a lot different than what I expected; so far, so good.

October 2011

I had a job interview on the Umpteenth Floor of a large, downtown buildingg.  Back at the office, I worked it out, and the expense associated with the job for which I interviewed would have required many more dollars per year to make the change worth the difficulties, in terms of travel and parking, worth my while.  On the other hand, the thought of working with the people who interviewed me, capable and intelligent people for whom I respect, held appeal for me.

I’ve tested for some other jobs and have more testing to get done.  Hopefully, soon, I will have found other employment.  Sad thing is, I thoroughly enjoy the work I do and am pretty good at it.

November 2011

This past Thanksgiving we spent at my wife’s family home with her relatives, and had a pretty good, if very brief visit.  The kids enjoyed tractor rides and combine rides, running around the inside of an empty grain bin, climbing on gravel piles.  I went along on these activities to keep an eye on my young son and take pictures for my wife’s scrapbooks.  I snapped self portrait; I look less misshapen in the Plexiglas reflection than I do in real life.  Funny how that corrects for asymmetry of feature.

December 2011

Early in the month my wife’s parents stopped over on the way to and from a visit with friends and family in a couple of neighboring states.  My father-in-law and son spent some time on a cold day riding around in the driveway.  Here’s my father-in-law on the Trek Navigator 1.0 I bought in August.  This was taken before I got a set of SKS fenders with mudflaps for my birthday and a Planet Bike rear rack for Christmas.

December was an eventful month.  Ron, employed longer by may agency than probably any other person at the time, retired.  Ron’s the guy who taught me how to witch for water, about synthetic motor oils, in addition to being the one person I respected enough to let use my office as a hallway from time to time and who, when he flared up at some ass-hatted thing I said or did, I listened to without anger.  Our unit misses him, and I am grateful for his participation in my real-world education.

The weekend of Ron’s retirement party, my family celebrated the birthday of one of my favorite relatives, a cousin who resided in the town where I work and with whom I visited pretty regularly.  The day after her party, she took ill and was transported to the local hospital where she died early the following morning.  The week after that, I marked another year closer to my own half-century.

Last Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we spent at home with friends and part of my extended family.  On the day after Christmas, we again traveled to my wife’s family home where we remained about a week.  My son and I threw snowballs at each other, he made snow-angels and kicked the little snow-men I made for him to destroy.  We had a good visit.  While there, I rode a 40 year-old Raleigh Grand Prix and really liked it.  I started thinking about buying a really old, really cheap road-bike pedal longer distances than I can reasonably cover in limited time on my Trek Navigator.  My son (not yet four years of age) enjoys making pictures with my camera when he can get his hands on it.  He took this and other pictures of things of interest to him -

Paddling

2011 was a bad year for paddling.  I think I may have canoed and kayaked about six or seven times, if that.  My son’s old enough to really miss me when I’m away on a Saturday or Sunday, I’ve had family obligations to fulfill, my summer was busy with deadline work, I had trouble with my E-68’s hullskin fitting properly on its frame and wanted to throw the kayak into traffic or burn it.  I guess, mostly, time spent with my family is more important to me than recreational activity away from them, although I do still need solitude.  I skipped congregational worship less in 2011 than any year in recent memory, probably because I have really enjoyed being a part of the small congregation.  Smart people, real theological discussion and teaching of the sort that character in Fiddler on the Roof imagines he’d have if riches were his.  Lately, I’ve started “teaching” a secondary Sunday School class.

Cycling

I’ve mentioned elsewhere, maybe in this space, that I’ve enjoyed bicycling more than almost any other fitness activity because it’s something I can do right from home; I don’t have to load up a bunch of gear on my car and drive some place to bike.  It doesn’t sound like much, but I’ve been pedaling about 25 – 30 miles a week.  Several times I’ve ridden to Sunday service.  Probably the greatest distance I’ve biked in one day has been 12 or so miles.  Takes a long time on my bike.  I’ve ridden whenever I’ve had the chance, whatever the weather.  I bought a couple pairs of cold weather cycling tights.  I got bicycle clips to keep my cuffs out of the chains when I pedal in jeans or sweats.

Here’s a picture of my bike that I took today at a local nature preserve.  Bike needs cleaned-up, and maybe I’ll get to it this week.  That rack bag is a Zefal that came with an apparently out of production seat-post rack – both in nearly new condition for $10.00 from the local bike mechanic.  The rack on the bicycle is a Planet Bike Eco Rack, the fenders are SKS, and the lights are Blackburn Flea USB rechargeables.

Usually in the Fall of the year I find myself busy with:

1. family activities (√)
2. deadline work (√)
3. yard work (√)
4. reading (√)
5. some miscellaneous time-consuming recreational activity (√)

Back in August I purchased a couple of bicycles – one for me and one for my wife.  Mine is a low-end Trek Navigator I and my wife’s bike is an Electra Townie with step-through frame.  I’ve had more fun cycling than I’ve had kayaking simply because I can cycle from my driveway whereas I’ve got to load up gear and rack the boat then drive someplace to paddle.  Pedal.  Paddle.  Odd how similar the sounds.  A couple of Sundays I’ve pedaled to worship service – not a long distance, but it feels like a longer way because I’ve got a destination in mind when I set out, as opposed to monkeying around riding through the neighborhoods hereabouts.

Last Saturday, I plug-aerated my lawn after mowing and overseeded with rye-grass for winter.  If the weatherman ever calls for rain again in these parts, I’ll spread some granulated fertilizer on the lawn.  But I’ll try to get my overlaps right to avoid the striping I achieved back in the Spring.

Saturday evening my mom came over to the house and as a family we burned hotdogs and marshmallows over a cheap ceramic “fire-pit” I picked up last year.  We ate dinner in the rebuilt sunroom at the back of the house.

These sorts of activities have taken precedence over writing about them and, although I continue to develop insight and understanding about the order of the universe around me and in which I find myself embedded, there’s just not a lot of time or energy left over to present that material here.

My low-end Trek Navigator 1 parked in the congregational meeting place window a few Sundays ago. I've got some lights for it, now.

I think it was Thursday afternoon that my 3 ½ year-old son and I had been riding bicycles in the driveway. He got tired of this activity or wanted a snack. Usually when we eat a snack outside, we climb into his playground tower and eat it there. I’m not sure whether that’s why we were in the tower Thursday evening, but we were up there. The tower’s got a steering wheel, and my son said, “Daddy, you drive.”

“Where are we going?” I said.

“I don’t know; you tell me,” he replied

“Let’s go to The Moon.”

The steering wheel is made of molded outdoor plastic. If I’m picturing it aright, it’s got three spokes and a central hub. The hub is the button that makes the vehicle stop. Each of the steering wheel’s spokes has circular depressions or spots molded into them. I pressed these in a particular sequence that I won’t be able to remember again, and, after we’d fastened our seatbelts, we drove to The Moon.

After about 30 seconds and some rocket-sounding noise, we landed on that satellite’s unfamiliar selenic crust. “What do you see?” I asked my son after we’d looked around a bit from the tower.

“Doggies!” he said, and “Get them!”

So I exited the lunar module via the handy attached slide and promptly captured two juvenile specimens, or moon-puppies. Probably because the only natural satellite orbiting the Earth is about a quarter of the planet’s size, all of the animals living thereon are much smaller than their Terran counterparts.

The small beasts were easily gathered; puppies, one in the palm of each hand. I held them behind my back as I stood looking back up the slide at my son standing in the lunar module’s airlock, looking expectantly out.

“What’ve I got behind my back?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

Bringing my hands back around slowly I told him, “Two moon-puppies – Enu and Nanu.” And I handed them to him. The names were not my own invention. My father, I recall from my own childhood, whenever he wished to describe by mimicking the sounds made by infants, would have them voice, “Eenoo-Nahnoo.” Odd, and I never understood why he thought those were the sounds made by the very young, but I never forgot them, either.

Certainly, my son was delighted by the appropriate-for-space-dogs names. And of course, he’d heard me make those sounds to him from the time he was very small, so they must have been familiar to him, if only subconsciously.

I handed the small, invisible, and entirely imaginary dogs up to him. Taking them, he held them up against his face in a sort of hug, and petted them. When I clambered aboard the spacecraft using the ladder on the other side, he said, “Let’s take them home with us.” So we did.

The following day, we returned to The Moon where we allowed the dogs to visit with their parents, siblings, and friends. Also, because they are from The Moon, they needed to consume special moon-food in order to remain healthy. When my boy slid down to the lunar surface he held the imaginary creatures in his hands, palms up. With a sad face, a slight upward motion and a glance at the sky, he indicated that his spaceling pets had flown up and that he would miss them.

“That’s okay,” I said, “We can come back and visit them again tomorrow.”

And the next day, we did, bringing them back to earth again for another visit.

Yesterday we took them back to The Moon so they could again visit and consume sustenance with their kin. My son’s demeanor was as sorrowful as upon the last occasion he had to let imaginary Enu and imaginary Nanu go home.

“No problem,” I said knowing that the rules of time are altered for the smaller creatures of The Moon and also because time in space for those traveling from their backyards is malleable according to the felt needs of the moment, “They will be done feeding and visiting in a couple of minutes, and their parents don’t mind them staying with us for awhile.”

They’re here now, and are the only dogs I’ve ever known who don’t make me allergic or render by their defecations the backyard unusable.

(8/31/11) I’ve been thinking about my occasional tendency to make extreme statements, and find I’m less comfortable with them lately and have therefore made fewer of them.  Maturity?  Perspective?  Struck sensible all of a sudden?  Who knows?  What I do know is that I’m not “trying,” and that the phenomenon is genuine, while it lasts.

What I want to know from you is the standard by which you judge someone Facebook “friend”-worthy.

I went back through and re-read pages 1 through 119 to complete the list.  Now, I’ll have to see about creating a Google map that marks all the addresses found and will have a look at Street View feature to see where these people came from and the condition into which the nation has fallen since (most of) these men and women served in World War II. 

Names and addresses found:

Pyle, Ernie. Here Is Your War. 1. New York: Henry

     Holt and Company, Inc., 1943. Print.