Of Kings and Queens

As I normally do every morning, I was scrolling through the New York Times online and saw a headline that caught my eye.  It said that for the first time in about 125 years, the Netherlands has a king instead of a queen.  To be honest, I didn't even know that Denmark was still a monarchy, not that the now king has any real political power as the queen of England doesn't have any real political power, but still, I didn't know.   This made me wonder how many monarchies still exist in Europe and for that matter, world wide.  So what did I do, I looked it up on our fantastic little technological device called a computer.  Turns out that 8 countries in Europe are still considered monarchies albeit they are all constitutional meaning that political power is not held by the king or queen, they are just a ceremonial figurehead with a lot of money.  All told, there are still 44 monarchies in existence throughout the world with only a small fraction of them actually holding absolute power (the majority of those with absolute power are in the Middle East in case you were wondering).  Also interesting is that the Queen of England is considered the figurehead for many more countries than her own.  So at this point in history, despite being a ceremonial figurehead with a lot of money and not much to do, what is the real purpose of a monarchy?  The ones with absolute power make sense as they are the sole governing body of their country (despite the fact that I don't agree with that type of rule), yet all the others seem to serve no purpose at all.  Perhaps it is just my American oblivion as to why monarchs are still around, but it would seem to me that we could do just as well by abolishing all monarchies.  I'm fairly certain that none of the monarchs in the world are poor, in fact, I would hazard a guess and say that most of them are filthy rich.  So does being a monarch simply mean that you get to parade around doing whatever you want and not have to worry about money?  Seems to me to be that way, but then again, I am biased. 

 

Perhaps it is because I just don't understand the intrigue of having a monarch as a ceremonial figurehead of a country.  Or perhaps it is just my feeling that everyone should reside on the same playing field when these individuals do not.  Yes, I know, we have our own elite in the United States, however, I see a big difference in the fact that in terms of filthy rich Americans, at least someone in their family had to work at some point in their life to get to where they are today.  Do I think that some people have too much money?  No, I believe that if you earn your money, you should be able to keep it.  However, let me say that I believe that if you are filthy rich, you should be giving more back to society than most other people, which as it turns out, usually doesn't happen.  Yet, I could almost see a monarchy in the United States in the ceremonial figurehead kind of way, yet it could never contain only one family, it would most likely hold the most obnoxious self-loving individuals this country has to offer, and I would hate every aspect of it.  That is why I am glad that I don't live in a country with a monarchy.  While I know that in this country the rich get richer and the everyone else stays where they are, at least I can rest assured in the fact that at least they work, even if it is working to keep the rest of the population from getting a piece of their proverbial pie.  It is what it is.  All this makes me wonder exactly how long the existing monarchies will survive.  From what I have heard, or not heard, it doesn't seem like they are going away any time soon, yet how long can they feasibly exist in a growing world that for the most is full of people seeking to level the playing field?  I know, the majority of the people don't have the power to change things, but I wonder if there will ever be a tipping point where it just makes more sense to abolish monarchies than to keep them in existence.  I am sure it won't happen in my lifetime, but you never know, stranger things have happened. 

 

For now, I think I will proclaim myself King of Old Boudro.  That is the name of the trail where my property is located in Vermont and since its mine, I will proclaim myself King of it.  Hardly anyone up there knows me, so I am starting off with a little bit of intrigue, now I just need money to build myself a castle.  I have decided that instead of a constitutional monarchy where someone else gets to make the decisions, it will be an absolute monarchy with only myself (along with my trusted wife) making the decisions.  Anyone who treads on our land without permission will be subjected to whatever justice we see fit including flogging and Chinese water torture.   I will leave out water boarding since that is a specifically heinous form of torture whereas the aforementioned two are more acceptable in my mind.  I must, however, build a dungeon.  It won't be to throw anyone into, but every monarch needs a dungeon, if only to say they have one and to threaten others with it.  I will also need to make a flag with a family crest and some cool colors on it to let everyone know that I am the King and that I have staked my claim (or at least paid for) my property.  Hey, its my little fantasy world so I can do what I want.  If only I had millions of dollars so I could sit around on a thrown and look fancy, I would truly be a monarch.  I guess that last part will probably never happen, but rest assured, as long as I own our property in Vermont, I will be King of Old Boudro.  I hereby proclaim my heir to be my son upon my death, whenever that will be.  OK, I think I have reached my limit here, so I will sign off and get back to painting and living in my own little kingdom in my head. 

Then There Was Nothing

For those of you who write out there or even just like to think and ponder, have you ever had one of those days when you wake up and there is nothing, no thoughts, no ideas, no direction...nothing?  Well, I am currently living through one of those mornings right now.  It's one of those mornings where the alarm starts going off and you felt like you just went to sleep five minutes before and to make it worse, the arm that you normally use to turn off the alarm is completely underneath you, numb, and incapable of being moved.  That was me.  Struggle as I might to pull my arm from underneath my just awakening body, it was limp from the shoulder down and to make it worse, I couldn't even roll over to use my other arm as I had a 75 pound dog blocking my path to the alarm.  I managed eventually to wriggle my way up the bed enough to stretch my left arm over my head and hit the snooze, at least giving me enough time to wrangle my other to life, flopping it to and fro till feeling started coming back.  Thinking back to last night as I lay my head down on the pillow, I had one last thought before sleep took over my weary brain and body and that was, my arm is probably going to fall asleep tonight and end up numb in the morning from the position I have it in now.  Well, I don't often get my predictions correct, but last night's was spot on.  With my arm fully functional now and simply waiting for my brain to lube itself up and crank its gears to life, I am thinking this might be a British accent sort of day.  I, for one, can listen to anyone with a British accent talk for hours on end.  I don't know why, but it fascinates me, and on top of that, I often enjoy speaking in a British accent, fake as it may be.  Cheerio, guvna!  Listen, I'm not making fun of the British at all, in fact, it is said that replicating something is the highest form of admiration or something to that effect.  Whatever the case may be, it is normally when I am tired and in need of self amusement that I break into my British accent, not necessarily accurate by any means and often tinged with a bit of the Irish Brogue or the twang of an Aussie, and I fear that sometimes I worry the people around me.  Well, sometimes I worry me as well.  Not in a serious sort of way, of course, just in a "your crazy today" sort of way. 

This is the type of day where you might find me babbling to myself, replicating my son's far from perfect speech (very primitive at this stage) or bouncing around acting like a lunatic.  Luckily for me, these days don't happen to often or I fear I might actually be recommended for committal to a mental institution.  Also luckily for me, most of those institutions are closed so I should have nothing to worry about.  Which, while on the topic, makes me wonder why I am even writing this right now.  The most plausible reason is that I have no filter on, nothing to stop the fingers from conveying whatever it is my subconscious wants to spew out.  And to be frankly, brutally, and utterly honest, I am not going to get rid of anything I just wrote.  Moving on before I head too far down that road.  My arms, in general, are tired this week.  I have been pushing myself too hard, draining the energy, and still waking up at my normal hour to get another day done.  So I could continue complaining about how my neck is aching, my shoulders are sore, and so on and so forth, but it would do not good and you would probably stop reading this because I would just be one more of those complainers who simply annoy people.  So fear not, dear friend, I will not complain either.  What shall I do instead?  I shall talk I think about my impending trip to Vermont next weekend.  It shall be the first camping trip of the season and I can not wait to get up there.  There is a lot to do if I am ambitious enough, but I know better than to speak to what my ambitions will be like a little over a week from now.  The one thing I will need to do is prep more fire wood for the season.  We have a continuously rotating wood pile up there.  Before the winter, I always make sure that there is a fair amount of chopped wood stacked up so that it can dry out some over the winter and be ready for burning come spring time.  As I go through that wood, I always re-stack it, split more, and stack the newly split next to it so that I know exactly where the dry wood is.  However, I don't think I left any logs over the winter to split first thing this spring.  That only means I will need to head into the woods with my chainsaw to harvest some wood.  Don't worry, I rarely cut down fresh trees unless they are in my way.  Luckily there are enough fallen trees that haven't rotted yet for me to easily chop logs off, send them across my zip line over the stream, and split them into nice small pieces for our fire.

If I get ambitious enough, I will start digging holes for the supports of our eating area.  All told, I will need to dig nine holes as close to four feet deep as possible for the foundation.  The eating area will essentially be a ground level deck with an overhead frame upon which we can drape a tarp for protection from the rain.  It will probably take me all summer to build, if I get started next weekend.  Time shall tell how things will go.  Its kind of funny, normally by this time of writing my eyes have full opened from last night sleep, yet an hour and a half after I got out of bed and they still feel incredibly sluggish like they are being weighed down by sandbags.  If I put my head down on the computer right now, I would probably be asleep within 3 minutes.  Which kind of makes me wonder, what would the screen look like if I put my head down on the keyboard right now.  Lets try...trfdfdrcvggggggh.   There it is, my forehead hitting the keyboard, and rolling to the right.  I somehow managed to pick my head up before my eyes completely sealed themselves shut and sent me back off to dream land.  Third cup of coffee and nothing is happening.  Is that bad sign?  Perhaps, yet I was watching a show the other night on the National Geographic Channel called the Numbers Game.  It went through different scenarios on what helps you live a longer life versus what cuts your life shorter and the statistics behind it.  It was actually fascinating.  However, the reason I am bringing that up now is because one of the things they talked about was drinking black coffee versus juice in the morning.  It has been proven that drinking black coffee is better for you than drinking juice and will prolong your life somewhat.  So will walking instead of running as well as being married versus single.  Check, check, and check. On top of that, people whose first name begins with A have a longer life expectancy than those whose name begins with D.  As for the rest of the alphabet, its not as good as A, but not as bad as D.  If you don't believe me on any of this, check out the show for yourself.  As for me, I will continue to take the advice of drinking black coffee and up my intake this morning exponentially.  Cheerio guvna!

World Wide Violence

In the little over a week that its been since the Boston Marathon bombings, I have heard reactions that run the gamit from non-chalance to deep seated anger and frustration.   I have also heard questions posed that seem to indicate that our world has taken a quick turn for the worse with increasingly frequent episodes of public violence, violence that affects more than one or two people, but dozens and hundreds.  Were the Boston bombings horrible?  Yes, there is no doubt about it.  Yet, outside of the maniacal, mentally deranged individual who goes on a shooting spree seemingly every year now, I think we have fared pretty well when it comes to episodes such as this most recent one which seem to indicate a desire to sow the seeds of terror amongst a population.  Since 9/11, which was an act committed by foreign terrorist groups (unless you are a conspiracy theorist and think otherwise), this is the most public display of violence with the sole intent of spreading fear and terror amongst a population in over a decade.  We have had little mishaps here and there, but most of those were foiled luckily.  Yet the questions persist as to why this happened and what is happening to our world that we must face incidents such as this on a regular basis.  While I don't have all the answers, I do have thoughts as to why incidents like this seem to happen on a more regular basis and why there is a more general concern amongst individuals when something like this happens.  First, I think we need to put a few things into perspective.  Lets consider for a moment how lucky we actually are to live in the United States where these incidents are relatively few and far between.  Bombs going off in a large city meant to create massive loss of life and destruction of property are not that common of an occurence.  All we need to do is take a look at the Middle East, the perpetual religious conflicts that seem to create more violence than peace, and perhaps even take a quick look at Syria which for the past 2 years has been dealing with death and destruction on a daily basis.  When all is said and done, we need to consider where we are and how good we actually have it.  For what its worth, there is no place I would rather be than where I am right now, living in Connecticut in the United States.  I have nothing against other countries, but I'll take my chances right here.  Now on to other plausible explanations. 

The one major factor which would seem to increase the amount of incidents of violence that we have is population growth.  We currently have over 7 billion people cohabitating our planet.  With every year that goes by, that number goes up and with the increase in population comes an increase of people who are mentally unstable or pre-disposed to act out violently against others.  While in general it may seem that our society is becoming more and more violent, I wonder what it would actually look like if we took into account population growth and percentages of violent incidents, including bombings, as compared to the overall population.  I don't know the numbers, but I would have to say that both lines, population growth and violence, would be about the same.  If it seems like there are more episodes of public violence, it is because there are more people in the world and the percentage of "crazies" has increased along with our population.  While it might not seem like much of a consolation, it might at least ease the mind when it comes to understanding things a little better.  We have to remember that violence is a part of human history.  Ever since man became who he is today, he has acted out violently against others.  Look back in history and give me a period of time that was completely peaceful.  I guarantee that you probably won't find one.  The big difference between years ago and now is the advent of media, both news media and social media.  While we have seen the impact that the news media has had on relating information of wars, bombings, violence in general for decades now, it is the more recent creation of social media that brings everything to our doorstep.  We may not want to watch the news because it is full of negative news, violence too close to home, scams, and other crap, and for the most part we can avoid that by turning to our favorite social media outlet, yet not for too long.  The moment something horrific happens, such as the bombings in Boston, every person and their mother on Facebook knows about it.  It spreads like wildfire and within minutes after something happening, half of the population of the United States knows about it and can't turn it off.  Why?  Because its Facebook and how many of us can really turn it off?  There was no Facebook when 9/11 happened, but its here now and it spreads the fire quickly. 

There is also the argument that can be made that we are teaching our children that violence is OK as a way of retaliating.  Parents let their children watch increasingly violent movies at younger and younger ages.  They let them surf the web full of anger and discontent.  We see acts of violence on the news, and in our everyday lives.  Some will take this as a sign that it is OK for them to act violently and as a result, do that.  Its a fact of life unfortunately, and one that is highly unlikely to go away anytime soon.  So what can we do when we live in an increasingly violent world, or at least one that seems that way?  We have two options as I see it, we can react out of fear, shut out the world, arm ourselves, get prepared to take action against whoever might hurt us, or we can choose to live in peace, to not let the violence affect our everday lives.  People think that since the world is becoming more violent, we must prepare ourselves against the possibility that something might happen to us.  We can try all we want to fend of violence, but if someone is dead set against committing an act that will impact our lives, then we will be able to do relatively little to combat it.  If we act out violently in response, we do nothing to remedy the situation.  Its all in our hands, how we respond, and I know most people will respond by not letting the terror or fear set in and going about their every day lives.  However, there are also those who will increasingly live a life in fear of their neighbors, in fear of those who look a little different, and this attitude will only exacerbate the situation.  If we do not treat those who are different or who look like they will act violently with respect and decency, then they will increasingly turn towards their violent tendencies to fulfill whatever it is they are seeking to fulfill.  Violence in the world will increase as our population increases and so to will our knowledge of violent episodes as the media, both news and social, spread the information to every corner of the globe.  We must simply take our stand against it and seek to live lives of peace, we have no other option. 

How Many Toys Should a Toybox Hold?

My wife and I received a very interesting book for Easter from my parents called "Simplicity Parenting".  My wife is reading it first, has barely gotten a quarter of the way through the book, and already the impacts of it are amazing.  The question posed as the title of my blog today is not one of the questions posed in the book, but the answer, however, is contained within.  I have a feeling that most parents aren't going to like the answer to the question, may fight the answer with objections based solely upon their own feelings, and consider it to be rubbish.  So what is the answer you ask?  Is it 10, 20, or 30 toys?  If you guessed any of these you would be wrong.  The answer is actually half of the lowest number, 5.  Before I get into the reasoning behind having only around 5 toys total, let me say that we have significantly whittled down our son's collection of toys (which we thought was already relatively small) but he still has more than 5, I would say between 10 and 20.  So while we are working our way down to that "magic" number, we have not gotten there yet and I don't know if we will ever quite get down that far.  Regardless of whether we actually get down to only 5 toys, the impacts of reducing the quantity of toys available for him to play with has been remarkable already.  Here is the simple answer, too many toys creates anxious children, an inability to focus, and could lead to other developmental issues such as a sense of entitlement.  For some reason, I don't think most parents who are reading this would have thought that the ramifications of having too many toys could be anxiety, restlessness, etc.  Yet they are there, and we have seen a difference in our son's behaviour already.  Before I go farther down this road of explanation, let me first say that removing toys from his collection was actually quite an easy task, perhaps made easier because he is only 18 months old, I don't know.  Yet to take away the toys, we did it right in front of him.  We took the bag from his mega blocks, went up to his room, started pulling all the toys that he rarely if ever played with, and put them in the bag for temporary storage till we decide what to do with them.  We may keep some of them for a potential future child down the road, the rest we will probably donate or get rid of. 

So getting rid of the toys did not create any sort of hysterical reaction from our son, in fact, he didn't even really care that we got rid of all the toys we did.  Yet after those toys were gone, even though he rarely if ever played with them, his behavior started changing.  It wasn't like turning on the light and having a whole different child, but since those toys were removed, his focus in playing with the toys he has has increased.  He is capable of spending more time with specific toys than he was before and doesn't get as frustrated when something doesn't work the way he wants it to.  While he is still a ball of energy, bouncing off the walls like a maniac sometimes, he also has his quiet times of focus, building with his blocks, rolling his cars around, and reading his books (flipping through them).  If you think about it, it kind of makes sense that having too much stuff creates anxiety, especially amongst young children.  A child's mind can only focus on a given amount of things and by putting too many things within the child's world creates a world that is overloaded, crowded, and in the same sense, overloads them to the point where they become anxious.  Anxiety may not seem like that big of a deal, but if it is left to linger within a child, it will become part of who they are stay with them into adulthood.  In addition to creating an anxious child, too many toys stifles creativity because it increases action between all the toys, but doesn't allow a child to focus on one toy and the possibilities that the toy can hold.  Which brings me to another point about which toys are best.  Fixed used toys, such as dolls, kitchen sets, or anything that can not be manipulated for other uses, is a fixed use toy and does not foster within a child a sense of creativity.  Blocks, building sets, train sets, etc, or toys that have open ended possibilities and allow a child to explore them, to make them their own, and to create a world in which the toys bend to their whims, not the child bending to the design of the toys.  Thinking back now, the only toys that I actually remember having are the ones that I was able to be creative with, my Brio trains, my Lego's, my K'nex, my blocks and puzzles.  Almost every other toy that I might have had over the years has faded from memory because I either didn't use it that much or it didn't hold the creative possibilities that I needed as a child. 

A similar limit is placed on books (especially at a very young age) and other child hood objects although my wife has not yet reached those parts of the book.  It is interesting to see friends of ours who have children and how many toys they have.  Most of our friends who have children have a plethora of toys, too many in our minds, and I can only begin to imagine what their children think.  What will be more interesting, especially from a psychological perspective, is to see how those children grow up compared to our son.  I will not make comparisons as to better or worse, but having a background that is part philosophy, part psychology, part English, and part observer of people, I am fascinated by the differences between people, and especially now, children.  I find it amazing to watch different children and how they interact with their parents.  It is fascinating to see how close the apply actually falls from the tree and how none of us are immune to it despite what we may believe.  For the better part of our lives, we resist the fact that we are different from our parents in drastic ways, yet as we grow older and begin to see the bigger picture, we start to realize how we really are our parents children and how much of an influence they have on us when we are growing up.  Even now, I see how much of an impact everything we do has on our son.  Every action made, every word spoken, is absorbed by our son and stored for future processing.  Nothing slips by a child and if we think it does, we are only deceiving ourselves.  Which is why, if we are to reduce the toys and clutter that our child has, we must also ensure that our lives are uncluttered and not full worthless trinkets and un-used items stored in boxes.  Children are very perceptive and can see through anything we do, especially if it goes against what we are teaching them.  There is a lot to being a parent that we need to be cognizant of and I feel that many parents don't go that extra mile to ensure that what they are doing is the best thing they can do for their child.  Yet, its not my place to judge.  I feel that we are doing is right for our son, and whatever other parents do is up to them, I will not hold it for or against them.  Yet, when I come across information that I feel may help some parent out there, I share it, not to put myself up on a pedestal and say look at me, but out of a desire to see other children grow up healthy and happy, that is all.  So how many toys did you have growing up?

Going Diaperless

This past weekend we received a mini potty for our son from his grandparents.   While he is still running around in his diapers, he has been showing more interest in the bathroom and the toilet in general.  There have been a couple times over the past few weeks where he has shown a desire to go into the bathroom and inspect the toilet, lift the toilet seat up, put it down, lift it up, put it down, repetitive as almost anything goes with a child at his age.  I obviously didn't let him lift and lower the toilet seat by himself because inevitably, his hands will end up back in his mouth, but I did lift and lower it for him.  I have a feeling he knows what to do there as I have taken him with me on occasion to go number 1 in the bathroom.  I don't know how comfortable I am having him seated in my lap while I go number 2, so I have refrained from doing that thus far.  In any case, we have read that there are quite a few indicators which signal that it might be ready for a child to start potty training.  Our son has son of them, but not all.  One is obviously recognizing when they need a diaper change and getting that taken care of as soon as possible.  Another, which he is sometimes able to do, is sit in one place for a short period of time.  He is moving slowly towards that, but our goal, since my wife will be off from work for the summer, is to get him potty trained by the time he is two.  It will take a little effort, but I think it is doable.  The main thing that we will need to focus on is paying more attention to his signals and take notice of when he is having bowel movements.  It used to be easy when he was going number 2 as he would get this incredibly funny face, turn all red as he pushed, and then giggle when he was done.  Now, he doesn't do that as much as it has become easier for him to eradicate any excrement in his bowels.  Occasionally, we can still notice when he is taking care of business, it just isn't as easy anymore, especially since he has become more independent and doesn't always need us to be playing with him and his limited amount of toys.  In any case, on the topic of going diaperless and potty training, I read an article about a seemingly new trend amongst a select cadre of parents in which they go relatively diaperless from the start and begin the potty training almost immediately after birth. 

I understand the concept of what these parents are doing and according to the article, some have been successful at getting their child potty trained by the time they are 18 months, however, I don't know if I would have been able to do that.  The whole process involves setting up little toilets all around the house so that whenever the need arises, there is a toilet available to go in, or at least hold the child over so that they can go.  I guess one of the methods involves listening for the sounds that a child makes when they are about to have a bowel movement, either number 1 or 2 and anticipating to a certain extent when they will need to go again.  When they do, a parent will hold them over the toilet and try to mimic the sound to get them to go to the bathroom.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.  But in the end, I guess, it gets them conditioned to use the toilet when they need to go to the bathroom.  Some scientists are skeptical about whether this actually works or not because they don't feel that child can learn something like that until they are at least 1 year old.  However, for this small group of parents, it is obviously working.  A good part of the reasoning behind going diaperless from day one is to keep diapers out of the land fill and to avoid doing excessive amounts of laundry to keep up with cloth diapers.  The reasoning makes sense, however, my wife and I will still stick with our cloth diapers, even when it comes to a second child at some point.  This isn't to say that these parents don't use any diapers, they still do, its just that the diapers are only used for the overnight and for trips to restaurants or other places where potty training in this method would be unacceptable.  Interesting concept, but obviously not for everyone as there are some parents who couldn't even imagine using cloth diapers.  Oh well, we will concern ourselves at this point with working with our son to potty train him on his new little toilet. 

I have a feeling that it shouldn't be too hard to get him potty trained as he picks things up extremely quickly.  It seems that all he needs to do is watch us do something once before figuring out the basic concept of how to do something.  He is observant, curious, and when it comes to trying to figure something out, persistent in his efforts to get it right.  There seems to be a deep desire to understand everything about the world around him.  I am sure that almost every child has this desire, I just notice it more in our son because that is who I am around the most when it comes to children.  His latest thing that he is trying to figure out is how to twist things on and off.  When it comes to bottle caps, or hoses, or anything that twists, he tries to turn it to get it off.  I don't think he fully understands how something needs to be twisted a number of times before it is either tightened completely or loosened, but he will get there in about a week I am sure.  For now, we will simply start the potty training process and hope that he learns quickly so we can eliminate the daytime diaper changes, or at least some of them.  Only time will tell, but for now, it is time to get the day rolling.  Till tomorrow, carpe diem!

Baba and Her Little Star

This past Saturday my wife and I went down to visit my grandmother, Baba, with our son.  The long awaited trip, postponed numerous times due to illness or conflicting schedules, finally took place.  Baba had been wanting to see our son and we had wanted to bring him there sooner, but in a building full of elderly people, its never a good idea to enter when you are sick, regardless of how mild the sickness may be.   The last time we had been down to visit Baba as a family was back in December the same day we got our Christmas tree.  So needless to say, it had been a while.   Our son fell asleep on the way down, but luckily we had one more stop to make in the area so we figured we would do that first and let him sleep in the car while my wife ran into the store.  Well, the idea was good in theory, however, we should have known that as soon as the car was put into park and shut off, our son would wake up, which he did.  So, instead of staying in the car with him, we all went into the store, REI in Norwalk, which turned out to be pretty fun for him.   The whole point of going to REI was to get my wife some new hiking boots, so we all went to the shoe section so my wife could try some on.  Well, the abundance of sneakers and boots hanging on the wall proved to be too much for our son not to play with.  He wanted to take down as many sneakers as he could, put them back in the wrong place, and occasionally try some on his own feet.  It took all my effort to replace shoes where they belonged as soon as he took them off.  One or two sample shoes, not a problem, over 5 and I start to forget exactly where they came from.  Soon after, I re-directed him away from the shoes and we started playing run and catch while my wife tried her boots on.  The game is simply comprised of our son running away from me and me running to catch him.  It gets fun when I duck around a display and surprise him on the other side where he isn't expecting me.  As soon as he sees me, he giggles, turns around and runs as fast as he can in the other direction.  If he goes back to the same spot, he will cautiously look around the corner I surprised him from previously and wait to see if I will pop out again.  Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.  All in all, the trip into REI was fun.  After a little while, my wife found a pair of hiking boots that fit and that she liked and we were off to see Baba. 

 

When we got to Baba's "home", my wife and son remained in the lobby which has plenty of room for our little one to run around while I traveled upstairs to get Baba.  Baba was in her room when I got up there and when she saw me, she cleared one of the seats in her room so I could sit down.  I asked how she was and she said her feet were hurting her.  To be honest, she looked mildly  miserable.  Before she got a chance to sit down, I told her that I brought my wife and son along and they were down in the lobby waiting.   As soon as I said my son's name, her whole demeanor changed and she headed straight for the door.  We just had to find her walker first, which wasn't in her room.  Luckily, she had left it just outside her door next to some chairs in the hallway.  We got the walker and we were off to head downstairs.  It was so nice to see the change in Baba once I said our son's name, and even more so when we got downstairs and she actually got to see him.  It was very interesting to see our son's reaction to seeing Baba.  Normally with older people, he gets a little shy and tries to run away.  With Baba, perhaps because he has seen her picture on our mantle at home, he let her grab his hands, kiss them and then pull him towards her so she could kiss him on the head.  He didn't resist, object, or try to pull away immediately.  As soon as she was down showering him with kisses, he was off to run around play with his blocks, move tables around, and simply explore the lobby.  We sat and played for a while, Baba watching him and talking with us.  About a half hour in, he wanted to take her walker and move it around.  As he had done the same thing when he was a little younger, we let him take it again and walk around the lobby with it.  I followed close behind just to make sure that he didn't run into anything or anyone.  He went back and forth, circling here, stopping over there, going back again.  Then at one point, he was moving the walker from the carpet towards the marble floor, a transition he had just made about 5 times without issue.  This time, however, the front of the walker caught a little bit, and toppled forward with him following close behind.  He slammed his face into the marble floor which resulted in a bloody nose and some screaming.  The screaming was short lived, however, another testament to the hard headed nature of our family, and the bloody nose stopped soon after.   That was the only issue we ran into while visiting Baba.

 

The bloody nose marked the beginning of the end of our visit.  Soon after that, he started getting a little antsy and starting to pack up his bag to leave.  When we wouldn't let him put everything away, he figured he would just go for the door and leave himself.  He has a tendency to know when he is done with something and that is the end of it.  The doors that he went to are heavy glass doors that take a good amount of effort to push open.  I didn't think he would be able to make it through the first set, yet he proved me wrong again.  Determined to get out of there, he pushed and pushed and pushed until he got the door open and he could make it in between the two sets of doors.  I immediately got him before he could try and open the outer set of doors to the outside.  So with that, we really did start packing up to leave.  Baba was extremely happy to see him and grateful that we had brought him down.  I am hoping that we won't have to wait four months to make another trip down as a family to see Baba.  I know that I will try and make it down there once a week and if not, at least every other week.  I am just glad that she continuously remembers who our son is and his name.  It doesn't always happen with everyone, so at least she has that bright spot to remember for now.  One more thing before I finish up for today.  I mentioned that our son likes to leave anywhere when he is ready.  On Sunday when we went to church, he was ready to go right before the end of Mass.  As we were saying the final prayer, he grabbed his diaper bag, put it on his shoulder, and walked out of the pew and to the side door of the church where he proceeded to sit on the ground and wait.  It was the cutest thing he has done in a while.  Well, besides all the other cuteness that comes along with an 18 month old.  So with that, I leave you for today. 

The Good on Craig's List

For all the bad things that have come out of Craig's List, the site where people can sell just about anything, my wife and I have had really good luck on there.  It obviously takes a little discernment to decipher exactly what is a good deal and what is a crock of you know what, but if you are looking for something and don't want to spend a lot of money on it, its definitely worth a peek.  Over the past three years, my wife and I have bought numerous things off of Craig's List and have had really good luck with all of it.  I think the first really good deal we found on Craig's List, which has just recently turned into a benefit for my business as well, is old, used brick.  I know, doesn't sound like a great find, but if you try and buy old brick from a company, you will probably pay between $3 and $4 dollars a brick.  The gentleman I got the brick from was selling them for $1 a brick.  But wait, it gets even better.  I got in touch with the guy and headed over to see what he had.  There was an enormous pile behind his house and he said to take as much as I wanted.  On top of that, he offered to let me use his antique, dump body pickup truck to transport them from his house to mine.  I loaded them into the truck at the bottom of the hill behind his house, and unfortunately, the truck couldn't make it up the hill all loaded up.  No big deal though.  We dumped the brick, and he brought out his ATV with a little trailer and let me use it to cart them up to the truck that was now on top of the hill in his driveway.  Talk about a generous person.  He then let me drive his truck to my house while he stayed home, trusting that I would bring it back (which I obviously did).   All told, I think I took about 800 brick out of his backyard.  What was the total cost?  I bartered with him and painted two ceilings that had some water stains on them.  And the benefit to my business is that he just called me this week to get some work done on his house.  That was perhaps the best deal that we have found on Craig's List so far.  The guy was super nice, generous, and I had never met him before this transaction.  Yet, there is more to the benefits we have found on Craig's List.

 

For those of you who don't know, my wife and I own 12 acres in the middle of the woods in the middle of Vermont.  There is about a half acre clearing on our land that needs to be trimmed or mowed every time we go up there.  To start with, I was using an actual trimmer with the blade attachment to cut through the thicker weeds that grow in the clearing.  I didn't want to buy a lawnmower as it would probably get beat up and broken within a few uses.  With the trimmer and the small blade attached, it would take me hours of painstaking, shoulder crunching swipes to get it trimmed down.  Even then, it didn't look that good and there were plenty of spots that were missed.  We needed something else to get the job done.  So what did we do?  We checked on Craig's List for a DR Trimmer, those beasts that have a 18" cutting width with no blades to bend and simple to replace the trimmer line.  The cheapest one you find brand new is at least $600, way to much for us to spend.  On Craig's List, however, we found a man selling one for $200, and his was a model that normally retails for about $800.  I was a little skeptical, yet the deal sounded really good, so I headed up to his house to check it out and hopefully buy the trimmer.  Well, it looked pretty much brand new when I got there and come to find out, he had only used it for one year before he moved and didn't have a use for it anymore.  Along with the trimmer came all the extra trimmer line he had, plus some other parts, and of course, the manual.   We got it home, and after putting some new gas in it and after a little tinkering to figure out how to get it to start, it fired right up and we have had no trouble with it for 2 years now.  It now sits up in Vermont in our shed and is ready to go whenever we head up there.  Another great deal that has turned into a great benefit for us.  And that doesn't even conclude the things we have found on Craig's List.  My wife also found her potter's wheel on the site.  It was being sold by a lady who had no need for it anymore.  The model she was selling went for about $1K dollars brand new.  We ended up talking her down to $200 because the wheel needed a little bit of work to get it back to perfect working order.  In the end, it didn't even cost us $20 dollars to fix it and my wife can now work on her ceramics at home. 

 

No, I am not done yet.  The last thing we bought on Craig's List, about a week ago, were four 55 gallon food grade plastic drums.  Why did we buy these?  Well, in an effort to conserve water, we want to put some rain barrels around the house to collect water from the gutters and utilize it both in our vegetable garden and for the flower gardens around the house.  If you were to buy rain barrels online, the cheapest you could buy one for would be about a $100 dollars with some going up to $300 and $400 dollars a piece.  Now, granted, these blue plastic drums don't look all fancy and nice, but they are paintable and they only cost $20 a piece, and we got four of them.  Also, they need a little conversion to make them into rain barrels, but for about $40 I could transform all of them into rain barrels.  I'd say that's quite the deal.  I am quite sure that we are not done buying stuff from Craig's List.  In fact, we are currently checking out the site for heavy duty metal shelving and possibly some too chests for my workshop.  While nothing has materialized so far, there is plenty out there to choose from and to be frank, the timing isn't quite right on all of it.  We almost got some shelves for a great price, but we didn't contact the person in time.  Oh well, there will be more deals out there.   So, in the end, would I recommend using Craig's List to find great deals on whatever you need?  Absolutely.  I wouldn't go there to find any services to use, but for products its fantastic.   So for now, I will continue working on assembling our rain barrels and wait till we find our next great deal on Craig's List.  (And no, they didn't pay me to write any of this, I just figured I would share my experiences of what we have bought and how it has worked out.)

Our Day Off

So after yesterday, actually during the day, we made the decision that we will have to take a day like yesterday for ourselves every month.  My wife, as goes with teachers, has a certain amount of personal days that she can take off every year, and being the teacher that she is, rarely does.   However, spreading 3 or 4 days out over the course of a school year won't make that big of a difference in her classes and instead of letting those personal days go to waste, she figures she might as well take them.  So come May, we will have to see where we end up.  But back to yesterday, it really was like we left our lives behind for a while and escaped everything.  We didn't hear the news of the bomb blasts in Boston till the late afternoon and whenever my phone rang, which was only once during the whole day, I didn't even answer it.  So we started our day, as I mentioned yesterday, with dropping our son off at daycare and then dropping my Jeep off to get fixed up.  After that, we were off to the outlets to buy ourselves some new clothes with the plethora of gift certificates that we had saved up.  All told, we bought a little over $200 worth of clothes and only spent $3 of our own money.  That was a pretty good deal.  We tried a few stores but ended up buying the bulk of our clothes at the Banana Republic outlet.  I just didn't care for any of the other stores we walked into or the clothes they had.  We did spend a good 2.5 hours at the outlets and it didn't even seem like it took that long.  When I go shopping, I get serious about the clothes I buy, and sometimes it takes me a while.   The biggest issue I had was with buying jeans.  I found a style and color that I liked, but they didn't have my normal size that I have been buying for years 36/32.  I searched and I searched and the size I wanted just wasn't there.  They did, however, have a number of jeans in size 34/32, a smaller waist than I am used to, but since most of my clothes are a little big anyway, I figured I would try them on and see if they fit.  To my very pleasant surprise, they fit with extra room to spare.  I think the last time I wore pants that had a 34 inch waist was back in high school.  So, I bought them.  Those, and two polo shirts, and one T-shirt.  That's all I needed and all I wanted. 

 

Once we were finished up at the outlets, we had worked up an appetite and needed to make our decision on where to go for lunch.  Luckily with the advent of the smart phone, all the information we needed was at our fingertips.  As I mentioned yesterday, our initial plan was to go to Abbot's in either Noank or Niantic, one of those N towns.  Unfortunately, they don't open until the first Friday in May so that left us with our second option, but not by any means less worthy of our patronage, and that was Bill's Seafood by the singing bridge in Westbrook.  We got there right before the lunch rush, got a nice little table by windows overlooking the water, and got to deciding on what to eat.  Well, we stocked up on seafood as we should have being at "Bill's Seafood".   We didn't even order from the regular menu, everything we got was a "special".  I got the New England Salmon chowder, which was fantastic, and my wife got the fried calamari with olives and jalapeno peppers.  We ended up splitting both of them.  Then came the main lunch course, with my wife getting the swordfish Reuben and myself getting the mixed seafood roll with lobster, clams, salmon, and shrimp.  Everything was really tasty along with the few beers we had.  Also while there, I ran into a gentleman I worked for up in Southbury.  For those of you that don't know Connecticut, Southbury is probably a good hour and a half to two hours from Westbrook.  He was simply with a friend grabbing food before heading out fishing.  We exchanged pleasantries and him being a little younger, will probably end up hanging out in the future.  Amazing how small this world really is.  The more people I end up meeting and forging a relationship through work, the more people I run into randomly in my travels.  In any case, lunch took us a little over an hour, and by the time we were done, decisions had to be made on what the rest of our day held for us.  The two options left for us to choose from were to head out to Bluff Point or to head to Mystic to see the show that my wife got one of her ceramic pieces into.  As Bluff Point will not be going anywhere anytime soon and the art show has a limited time being up, we decided to head to Mystic. 

 

The show was pretty cool.  There were a lot of really good works of art, including my wife's, and as is always the case, there were some that I didn't think should have gotten into the show.  So we walked around, checked out the art work, and then had to start making our way home to pick up our son from daycare.  Yesterday was the first day that both my wife and I picked up our son from daycare.  I don't think he knew exactly what to do, but when we got there, he was playing a form of hide and seek with another boy and screaming his head off with joy as he likes to do from time to time.  He saw both of us, and opposed to running away from one of us as he usually does, he came running over, ready to head home.  Well, we had a few stops to make on the way home, one to our chiropractor which turned out to be a family affair with my mother and brother also being there at the same time.  Then we had to go grab my Jeep.  That was the toughest part for me.  I got out of the car, went to go kiss our son goodbye as I didn't know if I would see him before he went to bed, and he started screaming.  He looked incredibly said that I was leaving and the tears wouldn't stop streaming down his face.  I hate that when it happens.  But as things turned out, I did end up seeing him before he went to bed, which he didn't want to do at all.  As soon as we started getting him ready for bed, the screaming started and it took both of us to change his diaper and get him into his pajamas for bed.  He was squirming so much I don't think one of us alone would have been able to tackle the bedtime change.  But, as soon as we were done, he calmed down.  And, as has been the case for a long time now, my wife put him to bed, reading a story to him three times till he looked like he would fall asleep in her arms, and then after she placed him in his crib and left, he proceeded to babble to him self for another hour and half.  All in all, it was a wonderful day.  By the end, however, I was exhausted from all the driving.  And yes, that exhaustion lingered into today with me getting out of bed 45 minutes late.  Oh well. 

Making Time For Each Other

Today will be the first day in a long time that my wife and I will be getting away by ourselves for the day.   This is technically her spring vacation, however, due to the snow this winter and the numerous days off, the vacation has been shortened to today and today only.  So, knowing she only had one day off this week, we decided a while ago that we I would take the day off as well, we would drop our son off at daycare, and we would take off, get out of the house, and just spend some time together.   We both admitted that if we spent the day at home we could get a lot done around the house, but then it wouldn't be the same as us not working and spending a little extra quality time together.  Yes, it is only one day and we will be picking our son up around 4 in the afternoon as is usually the case from daycare, but it is one day that we haven't had in a while.  This isn't saying that we don't spend time together and talk as much as possible, its just that our conversations usually take place over breakfast, or while driving somewhere with our son, while working on the house, or in the evenings when we are both tired and want to relax.  It will be nice to get away from it all, not worry about anything, and just have a little fun.  So what are our plans for the day?  Well, it starts off with a very exciting trip to drop my Jeep off at our mechanics to get fixed up so it can pass the emissions test.  After that, we will head out to the outlets to do some shopping for clothes.  Trust me, I am kind of excited about this part as I haven't bought new clothes in years and could use a little wardrobe update.   The better part about the shopping is that we both have a bunch of gift certificates that we got for Christmas so it will be very little money out of our pockets towards the clothes.  Once we are done with that it will probably time to get some lunch in us.  Now, we have two options for lunch and I am personally leaning towards the first one, Abbot's in Niantic, a little seafood place on the water with some outdoor picnic tables.   They have fantastic lobster (although I don't know if I will get that) and it is nice and quiet.  The other option that is on the table for lunch (ha, pun partially intended), is Bill's Seafood, somewhere on the post road in Clinton or somewhere in that vicinity.  Both have excellent food so I could definitely eat at either one without any complaints. 

 

Either before or after lunch, depending on which eatery we decide to patronize, we are planning on stopping by an art gallery in Mystic that my wife's work was accepted into for a show.  It's always exciting to see her work on display and see what other kind of work was accepted into the show.  For those of you that don't know, she works with ceramics, both wheel thrown and hand built.  She has been getting into a lot of shows recently and one of these days, one of her pieces will sell.  In any case, the art gallery is in a nice section of Mystic and while we probably won't walk around the town much, it will be nice to drive through.  Once all that is done, and hopefully before we run out of time, we would like to make it to Bluff Point which is near Niantic.   My wife used to go there quite a bit when she was younger and as I have never been there, I would like to see it for myself.  I think all of that will probably take up most of our day.  Even if we don't get to everything we want to, it doesn't matter.  All that matters is that we are spending the day together, alone, without anyone else.  As much as we love our son, we also realize that once he moves out (20.5 years from now (hopefully)), we will still need to know who we are as a married couple.  If we lose touch with each other, there will be nothing left for us when we are back to being all alone in our house.  I can imagine that there could be nothing worse than losing track of who your spouse is because you are too focused on your children.  I know that children suck a lot of time out of your life, and for the most part it is totally worth it, but there is something to be said for making time for yourselves and keeping in touch.  We have tried date nights before, but those seem to be too short and not as productive as we are both usually fairly tired in the evenings from work.  Even on the weekends after a long day, evenings are our time to relax and take it easy, not necessarily go out on a date.  So our little day trip will be our date day instead. 

 

One of the biggest reasons that we are trying to take as much time as possible to get out alone without our son is because we have heard too many stories about parents getting too involved with their children's lives to the point where they forget who they married.  People change over time and that includes the person we married.  Unless we stay up to date, check in regularly with them to see where they are at, then we won't know them when our children move out.  I see personally and hear about regularly how children get involved in too many activities which in turn causes their parents to go a little haywire trying to keep up with them.  What ever happened to letting children be children and letting them grow up slowly, taking in little bits of the world at a time, not diving right into everything and trying to sort it out later.  Children greatly impact the lives of their parents and it can either be in a negative way or positive.  I am sure that almost every parent out there loves their children and would do anything for their children.  With that being said, perhaps the most important thing we as parents can do for our children is to take time to focus on ourselves and not let our marriages suffer because of our children.  Having an 18 month old running around, watching everything we do, I am coming to realize more and more the impact that we as parents have on our children.  If our children see us focus on ourselves from time to time and not just focus all of our attention on them, then they will most likely grow up to lead a similar life with their children.  However, if they see parents lose touch with each other, slowly separate due in part to excessive focus on them, than they will use that as their guideline and perpetuate that path in their own married lives later on.  If we want to keep the divorce rate down, then we need to focus on our marriages so our children can see how to make a marriage really work.  Marriage is not about children, its about spending the rest of your life with the person you live the most, and that shouldn't be your child.  Children only depend on us for a certain period of time before they go out and forge their own lives.  We need to nurture them, guide them, but also step back and take time to ourselves.  If you are married and reading this, when was the last time you went out on a date with your spouse and what did you do?

When Exhaustion Sets In

This week has been an extremely long week for me, not in the sense that time seemed to creep by and the week dragged on, but more in the sense that it was a physically draining week in terms of work, and that made it long.  Its Friday, but it feels like I have worked a whole week and a couple of days already.  I won't go through every day for you, but lets suffice it to say that I bought a forty foot fiberglass ladder this week and as I haven't lifted or moved one in years, I forgot just how damn heavy they really are.  I was going to get a slightly shorter ladder instead, but as it wasn't in stock and I needed a tall ladder that day, I figured I would just upgrade and ensure that I would never have to borrow a ladder again.  Well, back in the day when I used to move forty footers when working for my friend's dad, we always used two people to raise the ladder and move it due to its weight.  As I am a one man show, lifting a moving the ladder was done with one person, me.  I am guessing that it weighs close to a hundred pounds and is definitely the harder way to get a workout in.  On top of buying a forty footer and moving it around a couple of houses this week, I also power washed 3 houses, 2 yesterday.  All told, I probably climbed up a down the ladder yesterday about 75 times.  Its a damn good thing I enjoy what I do or I would probably call up my boss (myself) and quit.  For some reason, I get a lot of pleasure out of pressure washing a house.  Despite the bleach and detergent that occasionally drift into my eyes, there is just something about watching mold and mildew die and get washed off a house leaving it 5 shades lighter than it was when I started.  It always amazes me to see how clean a house gets after I am done with it.  I could power wash day after day and I am still amazed at the end of the day how dirty everything gets.  But enough of power washing, today I take it easy and simply finish up another job.  Tomorrow, after about a 4 month hiatus, my wife, son and I will be going down to see my grandmother, Baba.  I didn't go down there to see her this week as I knew we would all be going down tomorrow.  Baba has been wanting to see our son for quite some time now, its just been a little hard to get down there with all the colds, stomach bugs, and fevers that he has had.  Hopefully we find her in good spirits and if not, at least I am fairly sure she will be after seeing our son.  I just hope she remembers for a few days afterwards that she has seen her. 

Then on Sunday, I have my first kickball game of the season.  Yes, I know, some people still find it weird that there is actually a kickball league, but there is, and I play in it.  This year I guess there are over 400 hundred people in my league with about 16-18 teams.  It should provide for some fun times.  At least I have a few days off between all my power washing and playing kickball.  I haven't run since the last kickball season so I am sure that I will be quite sore from that afterwards.  Such is my life, get my exercise in however I can.  Whether it is through power washing or kickball, my exercise comes in sporadic clumps.  I don't go to the gym and unless I change what I am doing, I don't plan on going to the gym anytime soon.  That isn't to say that I don't work out at all, I do push ups and sit ups at home on a regular basis, I just don't use any sort of weight besides my own body weight to work out.  On to a slightly different track, our son had a few teeth that were coming in stall, and over the past few days they have started breaking through the gums, his last ones, so we have got a continuously runny nose to deal with again and of course his lovely cough that comes along with it.  Compared to the last time we dealt with his excessively runny nose, this time he knows to ask for a tissue when his nose gets bad.  Its cute and we greatly appreciate it.  For now, though, I must go and get ready for my day, my morning meeting, and all the other fun that comes with Friday. 

The Sound of Silence

There are very few times when living in anywhere except a rural area when you can actually hear the sound of silence.  Yes, there is a sound to silence, a very faint one, but it is there occasionally.  This morning as I was walking the dogs in the light mist swirling through the stale air, I heard the sound of silence.  It was the point at which I could hear nothing but my thoughts and the wet slap of my boots hitting the pavement.  There were no car engines, no animals screeching in the early morning, no birds tweeting away, no cacophonous highway sounds perpetually assaulting my sense; there was nothing.  It is very rare, especially where I live so close to the center of our small town with a highway dissecting it, to hear nothing.  There always seems to be at least one car traveling somewhere, either home from a late night partying or the early morning commuters heading to work before the world awakens.  Normally you can hear the incessant buzz of the highway like a band of cicadas perpetually playing their monotonous tune.  Yet, for a brief period, there was silence.  I could barely even hear the dogs breathing.  It seemed like a veil had been draped over our town for a little while, deafening all sound.  For me, the sound of silence brings such tranquility and peace, an easing of the spirit like the soft touch of a baby's hand.  I paused this morning, briefly, and listened for anything.  There was nothing for about a minute.  I sucked it in, let my thoughts drift away, and just walked.  I didn't think about my sore muscles from power washing the past few days, I barely even knew I was walking my dogs, I just let the mist create tiny little drops on my face and kept on walking.  I probably won't get another moment of silence like that for quite some time, but I take them when I can, sucking the life out of them till the noises return.  I listen to my breath flowing in and out, and just let everything be.  I think part of the reason I noticed the silence to begin with was because it was soon after waking, no coffee flowing through my body yet, and my brain still oiling the gears in preparation for the thoughts of the day.  I love silence, not all the time, but I do love it.  Yes, technically there is no sound to silence, but it sounds better in a weird sort of way if you say there is sound to it. 

There are times when I am working that I prefer to work in silence.  I find that while music motivates me a lot of the time, I also enjoy just letting my hands and arms do their work while I let my thoughts drift away, fade into the distance as I let go of any worries or stresses.  People ask me all the time how I can enjoy painting, such a tedious and messy task for so many, yet for me, a meditative action that brings peace and not stress.  Most times, a day at work flies by, regardless of what I am doing, my actions taking care of themselves.  There are times when I wonder how I ended up at the end of the day.  Silence is so hard to come by these days that I cherish it when I am surrounded by it.  Too often there is the incessant buzz of electronics in our home, cars driving, the sounds of life all around us.  I don't think that many people know what absolute silence is actually like.  There are those that can't fall asleep without white noise in the background.  We get so accustomed to the sounds of every day life that it may seem like silence to us, yet it truly isn't.  Even on my walk this morning, I am sure that I automatically filtered out some of the sounds, not because I didn't hear them, but because my brain wanted silence.  When we are surrounded by silence, it can be incredibly disconcerting at times.  Without sounds consistently bombarding us, our brains take over make us hear more sounds, little ones, the ones that can freak us out if we think too much about them.  There are times when I go camping in Vermont by myself that I too get on edge when there are no sounds.  When I am in the middle of the woods with no wind blowing through the trees, no cars in the distance, and only a fire crackling softly, I sometimes start to hear little sounds in the woods.  The silence usually doesn't bother me unless one of my dogs perks up and looks into the woods as if something dark and scary was moving there.  Those are the times I freak out a little.  Yet, I am also grateful at those times when I have my dogs because if they weren't there, I would probably lock myself in my car and not come out for the rest of the night.  Its that fear of the unknown, not knowing what is beyond the dim light cast by the fire, what is beyond that first line of trees at the edge of the clearing that my mind loves to entertain.  Yet I still love the silence, even in the woods. 

How often do we search for sounds to fill up our day, to keep our mind focused on everything other than ourselves.  Silence allows us the rare opportunity to look within for a brief period and see what is going on inside of us.  There are no distractions, just our solitary selves.  How many of us can deal with ourselves in silence and for how long?  How long can we simply sit and be without action or noise to distract us?  I haven't tried just sitting for a long time, but whenever I am engulfed by silence, I take at least a few moments to let myself just be.  In this day and age when we are constantly engulfed by the sounds of life, I think it is necessary to balance out the noise with a little silence.  We would be nowhere if we didn't have balance, and too often we go to the extremes of filling ourselves with too much crap.  Today, I recommend taking 5 minutes, putting your phone in another room, turning off all possible electronics, and simply sit in silence.  It may not be perfect silence, but see how long you can sit for.  I guarantee that if you haven't sat in silence for a while, 5 minutes will feel like half an hour.  Let your mind be quiet, let your thoughts drift inwards, and don't worry or stress about anything.  When the silence is gone, those stresses and worries will be right where you left them, unless that is you decide during the silence that they aren't worth it and you can do without them.  That would be nice, but not necessarily realistic for everyone.  For me, I will be power washing all day so my silence was on my walk this morning.  I don't know when I will get the silence back, but I will make time for it if I don't get it soon.

Family Photographs

Photographs, regardless of their content, tell a story that is unique to the photographer and the subject.  We rely so heavily on photographs to capture feelings, moments of beauty, friendships, family moments, and so on and so forth.  We post pictures on Facebook, email them across the world to share our moments and memories with others, and we store them so we can look back and remember what we did.  I for one, love looking at photos, especially of my family.  I love to see family members and how they have changed over the years, the differences in clothing, culture, hair styles; pretty much how everything changes with the passing of time.  For me photographs are a way of keeping memories of my younger years fresh, of revisiting former versions of my parents and grandparents, and in some ways, wondering how we got where we are today.  I often wonder when looking at pictures what my family was really like when I was younger or before I was even born.  The facial expressions in older pictures tell so much about a person that it is sometimes hard to reconcile those images with my memories when I was younger.  For most of us, our younger years were filled with mostly fond memories of families, we remember mostly the good times and try to forget about any bad times we had.  I have many fond memories from my younger years, but I often wonder what my impression of my parents and grandparents would be like if I had the mentality that I do now when I was younger.  For many young children, at least a few decades ago when I was growing up, there was a certain naivete that came with being little.  We didn't notice as much about our family around us, rather, we were more self involved, caught up with our excitement about the world and learning about everything around us.  We loved our family, but our memories of those years are tilted towards ourselves, not towards the external world and the idiosyncrasies that the adults around us possessed.  Pictures, while at times deceiving in how people present themselves, can at the same time be extremely revealing.  Emotions, while hidden sometimes beneath a facial facade, present themselves in the way we hold ourselves in pictures, the lines in our faces, the distance between people.  Pictures paint a very clear picture of who people are at a specific moment in time.  While never all encompassing, they provide us little snippets of a story that we can fill in the blanks with our memories.

Perhaps what I enjoy most about looking at old family pictures, despite simply looking at family, is seeing the transformation that family members go through over time.  Some change drastically, others just get older.  Yet, through it all, it is the fact that they are family, there is history in the pictures, especially those going back half a century, and I am connected to all of it.  I have always loved pictures, but I think I am growing more fond of them as I grow older because they offer a comparison between my son and my younger self along with my wife.  The simple fact that our son as changed so much over the past year illustrates the fact that pictures are an important method for preserving our history.  When our son was born and for the first year after his birth, people would always say that he either looked my wife, or myself.  It would always go back and forth, one week he looked more like my wife, the next he looked more like me.  It wasn't until a few months ago that we brought out baby pictures of my wife and I from about the same age he is now, and it is perfectly clear that he contains genes from both of us.  There are aspects of both our facial features in him and it is a little uncanny how he looks like both of us.  Yet, what else could we expect?  It is those pictures of us when we were younger than afford us the ability to see the similarities, to show how family genes are passed down through generations upon generations, tweaked here and there as families combine and create their offspring.  One thing I would love to do, if possible, is to get pictures of my parents and grandparents when they were about 2 years old just to see how the faces slowly change over time.  Its even more fascinating to me to see how those family members change as they grow up, to see the differences in styles, cultures, and essentially everything about the world the live in.  Even looking back at my own pictures from when I was little, so much has changed.  My hair styles have changed every few years, never remaining the same for too long, and the craziest is the clothing.  To see what I was wearing when I was 7 years old back in the 80's is to take a trip back to a weird era in clothing.  I don't really know what happened to clothing in the 80's, but I'm glad it changed. 

Who knows what will happen with pictures as we move forward with technology.  It seems there are more and more pictures being taken as all we need with us is our phones.  Photo albums have moved largely online with everything being supposedly preserved digitally forever.  Yet, I still love flipping through those old bulky photo albums, the ones that cataloged vacations, family parties, the start of school every year.  Yes, those pictures could be taken out, scanned in, and stored digitally on some hard drive somewhere, but I will always love the hardcover albums.  In a way, those albums forced us to consider in more detail what we wanted to preserve about a vacation or birthday party.  We had to select the best photos, the ones that best represented to us at the time what our feeling were and how we envisioned each event.  Now we can keep everything  because thousands of images can be saved in a much smaller space.  There are both pluses and minuses in both avenues of persevering our family history and the history of our lives and the people who have come and gone through it.  The ones we hold the dearest are the ones that live on in our photos, the perpetual mainstays of our lives.  Even when some of those cherished pass on, we still have the photos to remind us of them, to bring them back to life in our minds for a brief period of time, to remind us of who they were and how they lived.  Photos do a whole lot more than just preserve images, the perserve our memories, feelings, and emotions and allow us to tap into those anytime we wish to look back and see what our lives were like.  I feel it is important to look back every so often and at least take glimpse at your journey to where you are today.  So I do every chance I get.  I look back at pictures and just remember. 

Forest Maps

One of the many things that I have loved continuously since I was little has been maps.  I love maps of any kind ranging from road maps to topographical maps to nautical maps (not as much).  It could be that part of my love for maps is intertwined with my love of traveling.  Ever since I was little, I used to love to track our trips on a map as we were driving.  The spacial relationship between where we were in the larger world to how it tracked on a piece of paper was fascinating to me.  At times is was definitely discouraging if we were driving through a large state like Virginia and it would seem to take forever to travel just an inch on the map, but it was still fun.  One of the parts I loved was seeing what was around us that we couldn't see from the road, the towns or major cities that we would skirt in an effort to avoid traffic, or just a mountain range that we would be driving by that only a portion of which could be seen from the car.  Whatever piqued my interest in maps when I was little carried on into my years as an adult.  Even now, with the advent of GPS, smart phones, and cars that tell you where to go, I prefer my paper map (or at least a map without directions on my phone).  I prefer to track where I am headed on a map and then just go.  I can find the circuitous routes if I want, the ones that meander through the back country or I can find the most direct route possible.  In either case, I am in control of where I am going and don't have a phantom navigator mechanically telling me where to turn or when I missed a turn.  That inevitably leads to greater frustration for me.  That love of maps transfers to my time off the roads and in the woods as well.  I remember a few years ago I was planning to hike the Quinnipiac Trail in Connecticut, about 26 miles in all, and before I ventured out, I had a topographical map printed of the trail area just so I could see exactly where I was going and track my progress.  It was like I was a little kid again.  These days, with technology, I still love to look at maps, even online, which is what brings me to my topic for today, forest maps.  As I was perusing the New York Times online, I decided to check out their series on climate change to see if there was anything new there.  While there were a few good articles, I feel that for me to talk about them would be like beating a dead horse, pointless. 

I did, however, find a somewhat interactive world map on forests and their coverage in different countries.  Most of us know about the integral part that forests play in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and I thought it was quite interesting to see the current forests as they are, how much has been lost over the past decade or so, and what the ancient forests of 8000 years ago looked like.  For those of you who are now interested to see for yourself, here is the link.  One thing that was extremely fascinating to me, which I didn't think would be the case, was to see how forested New England currently is.  Most of the forests were wiped out for farming in the 17 and 1800's, however, after the farmland was abandoned, the forests grew back and now in some areas exceed the density of the forests as they were a few hundred years ago.  Out of all the United States, the New England area (which includes New York and parts of Pennsylvania for forests) is now the most heavily forested area in the United States and one of the most integral areas for carbon absorption.  For me, I always thought of the West coast being more heavily forested, especially in the mountain regions, yet compared to what the East Coast has to offer, the West pales in comparison.  The only difference may be that the West Coast still has some untouched forests whereas the entire Northeast region of the United States is fractured forests meaning that it is interrupted in many areas by roads and small towns.  Regardless, I think that the heavily forested Northeast region is one of the major factors in my never wanting to move out of the region.  The forests in the Northeast region extend north into a good portion of Canada creating what I would deem as the third heavily forested region in the world after South America and the rain forests there and the tropical rain forests in central Africa.  It appears that to really experience untouched forests that aren't fragmented, one has to travel to either of these two regions to see them.  Outside of South America and Africa, virgin forests are hard to come by.  There is a depressing side to the map on forests and that is to see how much forest we have lost just over the last decade or so.  There is still the issue of excessive logging and deforestation and that is unlikely to change drastically anytime soon.  We can hope for the alternative, but with populations increasing and building materials still necessary, logging will continue for quite some time. 

In any case, my love for maps continues, in any way, shape, or form.  The one aspect of technology and maps that I absolutely love is that at any point, I can pull out my phone and look at maps, anywhere, anytime.  I love to find roads that I have never been on and see if I can somehow get myself onto those roads in the course of my travels.  That is the other part I love about New England; almost any road you travel on will lead you somewhere.  While there are a good number of dead ends, they are outnumbered greatly by little meandering roads that look as if they lead nowhere, yet can take you on a journey that you will never forget.  There are not that many gated communities or housing developments as compared to other parts of the country and a dirt road is never far away, if only you know where to look.  I just wish they identified those dirt roads on maps so I can find them and travel them.  But beyond simply maps on the phone, there are other avenues that I enjoy following.  If I am really ambitious, I pull up Google Earth and see any part of the world.  There is something about Google Earth that is extremely appealing to me.  I love to pull up a section of the Earth that I have traveled to and see if I can track where I have been from satellite images.  It is much harder than you think, yet it is possible.  There are great differences when it comes to looking at a road map on paper versus satellite images pieced together to form what is essentially a much larger map of the Earth as it is.  But in any case, I just mainly just wanted to share the interactive map on the New York Times today for any other map lovers out there.  If anyone comes across any other cool maps, feel free to share them as I will most likely enjoy looking at them!

Opinionation Station

I don't know if its a current trend or if I am just starting to notice it amongst people more, but it seems that a lot of people are extremely opinionated.  I know, not exactly a revelation, but let me explain a little more as I myself have a tendency to be opinionated.  I guess what I am noticing more is not that many people are opinionated, but more that they are inflexible in their opinions, unable to look at the broader picture with an open mind and consider the fact that their opinion might in fact be wrong.   I will be the first to admit that I fall victim to this at times, especially when I believe strongly in something.   However, I also make a conscious effort to look at the broader picture and not just focus on one narrow aspect of a belief to drive my opinion.   I don't know if its the fact that anyone with an opinion these days can find someone or something to support that opinion and therefore believe more strongly that it is the one and only way something should function, proceed, act...or if its just that people are unwilling to entertain other ideas that may fly in the face of everything they believe.  For the latter, I myself have trouble entertaining an idea or alternate opinion if my beliefs are extremely strong about something and if the other avenue is radically different.  Yet, most of the time I find it within myself to at least open myself to the notion or thought and explore it at least briefly disregarding it.  What I have come to realize, and am still working on accepting, is that there is not just one way of doing things, nor is there just one correct opinion.  Yet, I run into a lot of people who feel that their opinion is the only one that counts, the only way to look at things, and that anyone or anything that flies in the face of their opinion and beliefs is wrong.  Which raises the question of at which point do our opinions become beliefs?  I think I will leave that question alone for now and tackle that another day, perhaps.  I have found that by attempting to talk to these people, some of them friends, is pointless, at least when it comes to discussing an opinion of theirs or mine that may be contentious and divisive.  Yet, I also have friends whom I can get into a contentious discussion with over differing opinions and in the end remain friends and perhaps have tweaked our opinions a little through our discussion. 

 

There aren't many friends of mine with whom I can do this.  That isn't to say that most of my friends aren't opinionated, they are, its just that most of my friends are not willing to entertain alternate ideas to their opinions or beliefs.  Even if they can entertain alternate ideas, often times they find it hard to back up their own and discuss them in a meaningful way that will lead to greater understanding amongst both of us.  Perhaps that is why some of them don't want to entertain other opinions or ideas; because their own aren't solid enough.  Perhaps that is why many people don't want to entertain other ideas and stand behind theirs is if it is the only one that matters.  All I do know is that I sometimes wish people were a little more flexible and open when it comes to discussing opinions and ideas.  I find it very disconcerting to get into a discussion in which differing opinions are brought up only to have my opinion outright rejected as if it doesn't matter.  It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, I push back, try to engage in a discussion in which both opinions are laid on the table and a middle ground can be reached, yet often times the conversation ends with an agreement to disagree and there is no further discussion on that topic.  There is one friend of mine in particular who I don't talk to often enough that I can get into a discussion about our sometimes radically differing opinions and push each other to consider why we have the opinion we do and why we believe what we do.  Most people I talk to shut down if a discussion reaches the point of trying to explain our beliefs and opinions in a meaningful way.  Perhaps it is just my philosophical background that likes to question things, get into the deeper meaning of things and explore why people do what they do, believe what they believe and hold the opinions that they do.  This friend of mine is also a philosopher at heart and perhaps that is the reason that we can go where we go in our discussions.  I find it takes a great deal of security in one's self to go down that road, exploring our beliefs in a way that sometimes makes us question if in fact we are correct in the opinions we hold and the beliefs we espouse.  Its not an easy road for often times we find that we are wrong or that we don't have the basis for a belief or opinion that we thought we did.  Yet going down that road leads to a greater self awareness and understanding of who we are and why we do what we do. 

 

Any chance I get to travel down that road of personal inquisition, especially through conversation with a friend, I take it.   We can't travel down that road alone for if we do, it is harder to question our own beliefs and truly see if we are at fault or if we need to tweak our opinions and beliefs.  If we question ourselves, we will arrive at the answers we want, not the ones we need.  It isn't until we engage with someone else and have them bring out those tough questions that sometimes seem to erode the very basis of our self that we can really get to a deeper meaning of who we are and what makes us tick.  I think that perhaps part of why people are so much more opinionated these days and less willing to flex on their opinions and beliefs is that there is a lack of desire to dig deep and see what underlies those opinions and beliefs.  Perhaps there is a fear that their opinions and beliefs are unsubstantiated and wouldn't hold up in a rational discussion.  Or perhaps it is just the fact that a little self exploration is too hard and exposing for them to want to go through.  Whatever the case may be, I think we could all do with exploring why we hold the opinions we do and what is the actual basis of those opinions.  Going further, perhaps we could all do with a little more flexibility when it comes to discussing differing opinions.  There is never just black and white.  There is a whole gray area in between any opinion that warrants discussion, a little introspection, and perhaps a little tweaking of our own opinions.  There is a lot involved with opinions and I purposefully left it a little vague because to talk about anything in particular in a general setting such as this would be akin to opening a can of worms.  Not that I don't like opening that can of worms, its just that its Monday and those worms can wait.  I just wish people would be a little more open and flexible sometimes when it comes to opinions.  That's all. 

Bogus Gun Control

We here in Connecticut are on the verge of having the strictest gun control laws in the nation signed into effect.   They go far beyond anything currently in effect and have the greatest impact on those who are law abiding gun owners.   Here in Connecticut, it is an extremely touch subject as just a few months ago we dealt with the Sandy Hook School shooting that took the lives of 26 people, most of them children.   The act of violence in and of itself was horrendous and affected many people.   It took me almost a week to return to normal after the fact and I didn't even personally know anyone related to the incident.  I cried and I grieved just like many in our state did.  Yet, even immediately following the shooting, I never placed the blame on an inanimate object that was utilized to kill.  I don't own any guns, yet I one day hope to, not for target shooting or home defense; I don't even want to carry a pistol around to protect me during the day.  The only reason I would buy a gun would be to go hunting, not for sport, but for food.  No, I wouldn't be using high capacity clips that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition because as most people know, you don't go hunting with large clips, ever, and if you do, you don't deserve to be hunting.   The ban on clips larger than ten rounds is perhaps the one aspect of the gun control legislation that I actually support.  Outside of that, I believe it is all a bogus effort to try and put people's minds at ease.  While it may placate some individuals, it won't solve any problems.  It does nothing to solve the large issue of illegal gun violence, more often perpetrated by criminals on the streets using either stolen guns or ones bought on the black market.  This legislation will do nothing to curb that trend which in the end results in a much larger loss of life than the Sandy Hook tragedy.  Are we to say that just because 26 children died in a nice quiet community in Newtown, those lives somehow mean more than all those lost in the inner cities in Connecticut due to drive by shootings, accidental shootings, or other means?  Any loss of life is horrendous, no matter where or how it happens, and my biggest concern is that we are wasting time going after the wrong aspect of gun control, controlling guns for mostly law abiding citizens who would never dream of using their guns for anything other than target shooting, hunting, or in the rare case, home defense. 

 

The biggest argument that people might have for gun control is that if Adam Lanza, the shooter in the Sandy Hook tragedy hadn't had large capacity clips, he wouldn't have killed as many people.  Yet, on the same day in China, a man took a knife and killed 22 people.  I ask, what's the difference?  While enacting strict gun control legislation should we also consider putting a ban on knives?  Following that logic, any "weapon" should be heavily regulated and have laws against it, so how about the utility knife?  The common theme in both the killings in Sandy Hook and China is not the weapon used, but the issue that both men were dealing with; mental health.  Even with the added emphasis on mental health included in the law being signed into effect, not nearly enough is being done to address that side of the issue.  Does anyone seriously think that if Adam Lanza didn't have large capacity clips that he wouldn't have committed the tragedy?  I highly doubt it.  I don't think it would have mattered one bit if he had large clips or small clips.  Even with a ten round clip, the amount of time it takes to change that clip is minuscule.  A skilled marksman trained in weaponry could change a clip in a second or less.  That means even if he wasn't skilled in changing clips, he still could have changed the clip in under 5 seconds, hardly enough time for people to react between bullets being fired at them.   Most people wouldn't even notice the pause between bullets while the clip was being changed.  So how is this law going to change anything besides making it harder to buy guns of any kind.  And lets not forget the one minor detail that most lawmakers have forgotten in all of this.  They are saying that everyone who owns a larger capacity clip must now register it.  Yet, no clip has a serial number on it that is unique to that clip.  How are they going to track who registers them and who doesn't?  This bill was rushed through due to high emotions and lack of thought and in the end will do nothing to curb the violence. 

 

A better measure that the legislature could have taken would have been to re-open mental health hospitals and perhaps put more regulations on doctors and psychotropic medications which are a much bigger catalyst than guns.  If you look at any of the mass killings, nearly every single person was on a psychotropic medication of some sort which severely alters your mental state.  Yet no attention is being paid to that end.  Why?  Because the pharmaceutical industry has its hands deeper into the pockets of politicians than the gun lobbyists.  No one wants to talk about mental health for fear of offending someone.  Well, maybe its time we started offending some people and brought that issue to the fore front of the discussion.  If Adam Lanza had been getting treatment in an institution rather than just popping his meds at home with no oversight, then perhaps we could have averted this tragedy before it happened.  Yet we jump to the guns.  Perhaps if people around the Lanza family had brought their concerns about Adam to his mother and other doctors, he could have been treated more effectively to the point where he didn't feel the need to grab a bunch of guns and go kill 26 people.  The more we focus on guns, the more we lose sight of the real issue at hand here, mental health.  My wife, who is a high school teacher, does not support this gun law, and I don't either.  She does not want a pistol in the house or any sort of weapon other than a rifle or a shotgun for hunting, and I agree with her.  Yet we both feel this law goes beyond protection to an infringement of rights.  Anyone who agrees with this law needs to look beyond the mere aspect of guns, get over their fear of them, and start to look at the broader picture.  Yes, the tragedy in Newtown was horrific.  I would never wish that upon anyone and my heart broke for those families as did many hearts in Connecticut.  Yet, to say that this legislation will solve anything is like speaking out of your ass, only shit comes out.