A small view into a large life

New music, called simply "two". 1.6 Meg, 1m22s.

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2009-12-03 @ 0837: URL fixed - sorry 'bout that, those of you who tried to listen already.

So there are these buttons sprinkled around my local CVS...



What do you suppose "customer push service" is? If you are indecisive, will they bully you? Are they offering something sexual? Maybe something as innocent as taking the labor out of using a playground swing or skateboard? I would definitely want to know what kind of "push service" I was going to get before pressing this button, that much is certain.

Delicous!

This year was my first attempt to brine the bird before roasting. DEFINITELY DO IT. Oh so moist and delicious!

This year was my first attempt to make chocolate mousse. Epic fail. I don't usually have such disasterous results with making food... but evidently this one requires some finesse I do not currenly posesse. I do want to learn, tho. Does anyone within the sound of my text have the necessary skill, interest, and aptitude to teach me?

Out of context quotes for the evening:

"He appeals to women ~ he's a walking penis with a cigarette"
"That's sexy! Whoo!"

"You have a talented orafice"
"You have no idea!"

"Does anyone want to wipe up mine?

"Always go down"

"He's getting deeper and deeper into the ass crack of Dawn"

(just for the record, though other Thanksgivings have occasionally featured partial nudity and other excitement, everyone remained fully dressed and visually presentable to polite company throughout)

Here's something I wrote recently when someone asked me to explain what I meant when I said there was such a thing as "giving too much", in the context of loving, emotional support. I thought it might be of wider interest, so I share it here.

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Simply said, there are some cases where "giving" can be perceived as "pushing" or even "forcing", no matter how well-intentioned the giver. For example, say there's someone whom you believe you can help emotionally. You love this person and would give them as much of your time and energy as you could muster if it would help them. If that person is already working through their hardship and needs time to process, sometimes the best thing you can give them is space. Indeed, constantly asking "can I help?" can be received as nagging. Offering advice/counsel when it is not sought - and especially when it has been expressly declined or asked to be postponed - can be seen as overwhelming at best and overbearing (on the giver's part) at worst.

Having a limitless fountain of energy and love to give is great. Flooding someone with it is not. Let the thirsty come to you to drink. Offer them the drink if they do not know it is there. Lead them if they do not see it. But do not dunk their head in the fountain because *you* think they're dehydrated. That doesn't count as "help". Indeed, it is forcing your will on the unwilling. This is generally a turn-off and a trust-breaker. It sabotages your ability to be of genuine service.

Snippet/paraphrase from a letter I wrote today . . . which I thought was worth sharing.

[I sometimes take the role of] a priest, yes, but an important distinction I make is that one does not require a priest to communicate with the divine or to recognize that we are all part of it. When facilitating, more than anything, I endeavor to help people to shed the obstructions they have placed between their sense of self and their concept of divinity.

Halloween = success, despite some early rain and very high winds (which knocked down my fence, causing me to make some new braces urgently and swap out one section of fence that had busted when it hit the ground).

Photos with story and context coming later, but here's the scene from the street and the cast of characters for now...

( See the 2400px wide photo )

A new stone for the collection. Thanks for the irony, Robyn!



You can make these at home. It's probably too late to cast one and have it fully cured by Saturday night, but if you made it today, you might have a chance. Get a bag of ordinary mortar mix from the hardware store. Mix 2 gallons of that with 80 oz of water - OUTDOORS, with a dust mask on. It will seem dry, but it will be easier to work with if you add mortar to water gradually and mix thoroughly as you go. Pour into simple wooden form. Mine is about 18" wide by 22" high or so. Wait for water to come to the surface. Wait for water to leave the surface. This may take a good long while. . . but don't leave! As soon as the surface water is gone, check for firmness. It should be like wet sand. Duh - it IS wet sand! Press letters (available from your local craft store) into mix. I find that dipping them in water helps ease their way in and out. Rinse each letter quickly after use to prevent crust build-up. My letters are about 1" high and I can get about 13 across. Leave "stone" in form for at least 24 hours. Remove form (note: I made mine with hinges so it could be "unwrapped" from the stone easily). Allow stone to dry another day or two.  Gently remove stone by sliding it (DO NOT PRY UP! It's not cured yet!). Allow to cure for several days in a warm, dry place - but not in direct heat.

Here's the latest progress on construction.

( Show me! )

HEADS UP: those of you going to the Berkshires this weekend: temps down NEAR FREEZING are expected. Pack yer long underwear and your serious sleeping bag.

I haven't been writing much on the subject, but that's because I've been spending what little free time I have doing the actual construction. Here's an update, by the numbers:
1. Drill and cut the horizontal rails for the fence. The partially drilled one goes on top. These were actually drilled first, then sliced through the table saw to produce a family of rails with perfectly aligned holes. The markings on the left are unique for each family of rails.
2. Assembly of the top portion of the fences. One staple top & bottom of each circle. Short pieces of pipe hold the top and second rails in place to ensure correct spacing so when it's time to put the poles in, everything lines up correctly.
3. A stack of ten fences, assembled. That's 10 sets of rails, 10 pairs of end pieces, 90 poles, 100 slices of 3" pipe for the decorative circles, 270 #6 x 1/2" screws to hold the pipes to the rails, 120 staples (holds end pieces to rails, two per joint, 6 joints per fence) and glue for good luck.
4. Paint it black. Shown here just one, but there are nine more just like it. 15 cans of spray paint. A messy job, but plastic-compatible paint only comes in spray cans. And anyway, who wants to paint round poles with a brush?
5. Colum cap assembly (shown before wiping excess glue away) continues in parallel.
Not shown: 48 panels cut for column sides. 48 column corner studs (very similar dimensions as fence rails). 72 mounting blocks (go inside columns to accept bolts for fences or support braces). 12 squares of plywood cut for the column cap tops. Actually, those have already been assembled. There's still more work to do with the columns, but we're getting there! Another week or two and the whole thing - 10 fences and 12 columns - should be done. Then it's time to build the crypt :)

This fugue was written in one sitting. Not highly polished, but still has merit, I think. Careful, now, listen long enough and you may start to zone out... meant to be listened to LOUD.

7.4 Meg, 6m 26s.

Saw two neat things today:

1. A "faerie park" -- you can just imagine them (or see them?) playing in this little area, just a couple of inches wide:



For the record, this is EXACTLY HOW I FOUND IT, I didn't build it, tweak it, stage it ~ nothin'.... this is what is.

2. A fine web with dew. Sure, there are thousands of photos of fine webs with dew... but this one was at my house. Indeed, this web hangs between a retaining wall and that central bit of plant matter coming up from the faerie park.... forming kind of a sail.

This year, at least one new prop: a graveyard fence!

Special requirements: must store easily (translation: packs flat, no sharp edges, must withstand temperature extremes found in attic), must be able to assemble in less than an hour or two, must be able to strike in 30 minutes. Why the time requirements? I always set up on the 31st and strike the scene before I go to bed so when the kiddies walk by the next day, they can't be absolutely sure that it was my house that scared them so.

Here are some preview shots of my prototype fence section. Columns are 8" square, 48" high (before cap). Fence is 39" high and 46" wide.



Red arrows indicate bolts which fasten fence to colum and which fasten column panels to each other. There are actually 16 bolts which hold four identical panels together. Well, okay, some of the panels have mounting blocks to accept the fence and others do not, but otherwise, they're identical. They are definitely interchageable, so I can mix and match to make columns for use as middles, ends, T's or corners.

See inside the column. Marker 1 - panels are stapled to studs (3/4 x 1.5") along their wide face. Two of these face-to-face take up only 1" of height. Marker 2 - bolt through hole to threaded insert, embedded in the stud. The threaded inserts are sleeves which have wood screw threads on their exterior and machine screw threads inside. This makes an easy and long-lived machine screw connection.

Shown here, the assembled column with cap. The cap is held on with four blocks that wedge it against the panels. See inset. The sides of the cap are actually a 2x4 which has been ripped down the middle at 35 degrees bevel (that's the slope of the cap edge) and then mitered into a frame. I then just stapled and glued a square of thin plywood to the top. Ah, I love my new pneumatic stapler! So handy!



Here's a close-up of the fence. Red arrows show: screws which fix poles (3/4" PVC pipe) in place, bolt holding fence to column, and staples fastening 1.5" thick sections of 3" pipe to the top and second rails, forming the decorative circles. You may ignore the glue drips. This was a prototype, no need to be tidy. I also learned that the screw holes will need to be counter-sunk to avoid splitting :)

So where do I do all this stuff.. the digeridoos, the home improvement projects, the Halloween sets? In my workshop, of course! Here's a photo taken just after I finished the prototype fence section. Normally, it's just a little bit less crowded... but, yes, it's a bit cozy in there, even without the fence! Note the odd angles of the machine tools. These allow me to feed large pieces of stock through them without hitting other things... The table saw feeds from the doorway (not shown, behind the viewpoint of the camera). The chop saw can cut just about anywhere along an 8' piece of lumber without hitting a wall. The drill press is angled such that a long work piece just misses the end of the chop saw. You get the idea.

 

"Extra Credit" puzzle fully revealed:

This jig:



Makes these rails:



Which, when fully assembled with the fittings and the ballusters, and painted, looks like this:

Part of my growing "Soundtrack without a movie" series. Called simply, for lack of a better name, "Theme 3" (5.3MiB, 4:35s). One of these days I'll find the movie that goes with all the movie music I've written :) Or maybe someone will get inspired by the music to make one!

Give a listen if you like... as always, I recommend quality headphones or speakers if you have them. Listening through your laptop's built-in speakers or $20 headphones simply won't put out all the music I put in there.

1. So en route for a 24-hour period away from home, I got this vivid notion that the window AC unit I left on low to control the humidity was going to catch fire and burn the house down. It was enough to give me pause. Something about a house fire came up in unrelated (I had kept the vivid notion to myself) conversation just then. I nearly asked the driver to turn around and go back home, so that I might shut off the AC unit. At the last minute, I decided against. Multiple times in the next 20 hours, the specific image or metaphor of a burning house came up. Needless to say, I was very relieved when I got home to find the place still standing, just as I had left it. Any worry was for naught. I will admit that I prayed a little bit that the house would be fine when I returned... so if you believe in the power of prayer, then, well, perhaps I did indeed prevent disaster.

One hears from time to time of people getting "feelings" or "signs" and doing something about them which turns out to save their life / limb / property from disaster. Are these just coincidences, or bona-fide glimpses into the future? And if they are glimpses, how would one know that they're real and not just the fabrication of a fertile imagination, as this particular fire image turned out to be?

2. I have this deck of divination cards that seems to not want to remain in my posession. The first deck I bought turned out to be defective. It was returned and exchanged for a second deck. That deck was fine. I used it successfully several times. Then, the deck still young enough to have marks where it was cut during manufacture, it gets soaked and thus ruined by a deluge*. I go back to the store just a few days ago to get a replacement. When I inspect the cards at home, I discover that there's one duplicate and one missing card. The deck must go back. Question is, do I exchange it or just resign myself to the fact that I'm not "supposed" to have this deck?

I have a real problem with the whole concept of being "supposed" to this or that, where the entity doing the supposing isn't one or more readily identifyably corporeal and sentient being/s ~ i.e., a person or people who exists or existed, in the conventional sense of the word. I do not dispute that there are natural laws and resonances and "low energy states" -- certain things simply work better one way than another way -- but it's hard for me to accept that there are any natural laws that are particularly interested in what I am personally doing in my own private domain of choice.

Anyway, I just wanted to write that down and present it for comment, for those who might be so inclined.

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*it was in a non-water-proof pack which I was wearing during emergency spontaneous hydrological engineering

My first real computer had 640k of RAM in 1984... which was "a lot" but not more than I could put to good use. That computer had no hard drive.

My most well-equipped home computer now has 6G of RAM in 2009.... and although that also sounds like "a lot", it's right-sized for high-rez audio work and image manipulation. This computer has two 250GB hard drives... which are now considered to be of "moderate" size, given you can buy 1T drives for reasonable prices.

How things change!

So I'm sitting there, engaged in a text chat, seeing the "video chat" button and thinking, "Gee, webcams are so cheap now... I could buy one with two week's worth of pocket change, almost... maybe I should get one for web chatting." Then I realize: no, this is not a good idea at all. I'm sitting at my computer in my underwear because it's 90 degrees in here and that is just not the way most civilized people chat with their friends and family.

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...I said most.

Chop Wood, Carry Water

 

 

Place - tap - swing - split - stack

This is my moving mantra

 

Bump - bump - pop - crack - clatter

This is my guided meditation

 

Find - fill - carry - offer - accept

This is my daily practice

 

Share - quench - sate - drench - serve

This is my sacred journey --

 

“Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water;

After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water”

 

What the Master did not tell me

Was that enlightenment comes

from doing exactly that.

 

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DBS 2009-07-30

 

That funky jig pictured a few days ago under "extra credit" is used to assemble this:



Now you know.