flexible

Plan to head to White Sands on Wednesday with the boys.
 Conveniently forget about work Wed and Thur.
 We'll finish by eleven and head down then.
 On the way up to Los Alamos to work Ben sees the sign for Bandelier national Park.
 He is all excited and so is Soren
  Parental genius. "Hey do you guys want to go to Bandelier instead?" "YEA!!!"
 In LA see another client "Are we on for tomorrow?"
Silently "S$%#T" "Yup we'll be here!"
  We have no shoes and socks in the truck because we were going to go home before heading south to White Sands.
 I decide to buy an LA Ouch. One Million dollars! for admittedly quality gear.
  Halfway through lunch the lady from the store shows up with our shopping bag.
  Somehow she tracked us down and made the time to bring us our stuff we forgot.
I feel better about spending money at their store.

Boys!?

Soren "I need to wipe my but and wash my hands!
  Dad "I don't want to know!"
Soren " pooped outside!"
 Ben  " I did teensy tiny throw up because puppy was eating Soren's poop!"
  Dad"............................"

Insanity

Do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results!


Santa Fe; Doing the same thing over and over again and getting different results!

perspective

Miami heat fans. "The referees are being paid to screw the heat!"
 Indiana Pacers fan "The refs are being paid to screw the pacers!!"

goals

About three days into running everyday I made a goal of running everyday for 21 days. A few days later I decided it had to be 5k not just running.
 Since then I have been waking up at 5:30 every morning.  Last night I went out at 10:45 and finished 5k for the 21st day.
  This morning with no conscious decision I slept till 7:45. Interesting.....

21 days

Of course I did not even bother to google the research behind the idea that doing an activity three weeks straight creates a habit. I just unconsciously( later consciously) decided to do it.
 Later it became run at least 5k. It seemed pretty easy till a mean rock attacked my left foot.
  Steve and Alessandra encouraged me to treat running like yoga . I did a lifetime supply in six weeks in 1985...
  Of course this got me thinking about motivation. I remember years ago telling a friend that I did not like to do dishes or housework because the dishes and house just get dirty again. She thought that using that logic one needn't bathe either... I like bathing, don't like housework so one seems a waste of time and the other seems necessary.

priorities?

Could have cleaned the house yesterday.. luckily two clients called with "emergencies!!!" Managed to waste time with those till it was time to come home,drink a gin and tonic and go to bed.
  Today had to leave at 6 to "volunteer" as "farrier in residence" at a horse show. Lessons in flirting from St. Augie(don't ask)
 Thanks Alessandra for milking goats! Day 20 of self promise to run 5k 21 days in a row. Get home at five, sore throat legs hurt ready for bed. Foot hurts drag myself through 3.1000 miles one beer... toast

Minor obsessions

Jogging on the road(anathema) two lane paved road weird tracks on the side of the road, kind of like old style wagon? a wagon would not swerve so much.
 I spend the whole run considering the mystery. I get home and still cannot figure out what the heck these weird tracks. A little monkey in the back of my mind worrying away at the problem.
 
the next day another route I see a big wheel with orange conduit... Ah! mystery solved! Of course as I am going to sleep the little guy in the back of my mind mentions that the rims of the giant conduit wheel do not fit in the tracks on the other road. I ignore him. As any victim of OCD knows, once that little guy gets a hold of you he puts you in a full Nelson and the next thing you know you are Monk the nutty cop(tv show)
  A few days later I am running on the side of the road and tripping on all the chopped down shrubs that the giant mower ran over..... Finally! mystery solved! the weird tracks are the little support tires for the county mowing machine.
 Close call averted

Sex ed dad style

Taking the boys to a party the ex is at.
  7 year old Ben. "I don't want to go Dad.:
Dad "Why not?"
"because Kai(apparently 7 year old human female) hates me!"
6 year old Soren"She doesn't hate you, she likes you!"
Ben "well she keeps hugging me and trying to break my ribs!"
 Dad, with the wisdom of years"hugs from girls are good."
 Ben "Maybe hugs are good for girls, But boys..." Very expressive hand and facial signals that hugs are, at best, dangerous
 Dad "Yea no hugs till you are least 16!"
  Ben "Yeah! By then I will be able to run faster then her!"
    I feel I have done my part
Soren"She wants to kiss you!"
 Ben silent look of horror.
  Dad to self" That is a job for Mommy."

New Day

Crazy dreams about cats. I think I am sleeping in. After what seems several hours of restful morning sleep I finally get up and wander into the kitchen and check the clock on the coffee maker,8:54? nope! 5:54 hmm that is odd. Now what do I do? Start the coffee and think about going back to bed. Bummer somebody left a pile of clean clothes on the bed. After a while I decide I might as well get my daily run over with.
  I try a new route up what I thought was a driveway but is a road.
I pass a couple walking their dogs.(Very calm dogs,very unusual) turn left and head up a rather steep hill and a Gelandewagen on the side of the road. There is no room in the driveway because of the porsche suv ...  around the bend and down the hill I am worrying about tie to get home because I have appointments .
About then I see the couple coming the other way and figure I am on a circle whew!

life

Wake early, run on the road because of foot "injury" . Tempting fate as Kevin said? anyway even though the foot does not hurt on the flat I notice a little hesitancy putting weight on it.
  Hard fun work day shoeing 6 horses on a movie set in the middle of nowhere.
Rush into town to pick up Donovan and meet my kids at free soccer camp demo. 2 hours later after serious mauling by "Stichymolluchi"(sp?) Some sort of bone head Dinosaur. Finally unload young Dinos on Ex and head home.
 Now the right foot hurts. I assume because of uneven stride running from left foot. Left foot is swollen and red. I expect bruising to be green or blue or something. Right heel hurts. Lucky for me I got the magic bath.
  Bubble bath while watching a European cop show on netflix on the $200 laptop. Traumeel on feet and crawl into bed

I love my vocation!

So today was shoeing movie horses day! The nutty professor from Los Alamos came with me for entertainment!

Imagine a life where somebody tells you when to get up where to be and what to do all day.
  Sounds horrible doesn't it?
n  I wonder if to some people that sounds good...

Decisions

I hurt my foot running yesterday, it bugged me all night. I wore my steel toed boots today. I usually don't. A horse stomped on my foot and scraped all the leather off the toe. No damage to foot.
 started an exploratory run , stepped on a branch and quickly changed my mind.
  Only a wuss would let pain direct decision making! I felt doubts and judgment but decided to stick to easy only arroyo and road. No pain felt silly until the last 1/4 mile which is rocky and rough. Limped home.
  Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.
  Finally looked at foot at bedtime. not pretty..
  This was going to be a longer post, but it is like almost midnight. LOL OMG and other silly stuff!

Weird

Sometimes I feel a happy little old man sitting at the top of my awareness laughing at/with all the foibles of life...

OUCH!

Darn foot kept waking me up all night. Bone bruise? I am slowly learning about an organized life.
  I remember my Step-dad, a native American almost became a priest instead volunteered for the marines and went to Vietnam ptsd alcoholic telling me two facts of life. 1) No matter how bad it is YOU can survive!  
2)No matter how good your plan,life is F*&(&^^%d up) So I became a survivor. A great skill and goal. Now at 48 I am considering that I missed something in the planning thing . Of course when I look at Cat's life it seems maybe we had something in the just get through today thing. At least that is a start, eh?

Part ll

As I view the huge house, sort of a buzz-kill when you are pretending to be Natty Bumppo or some such.I am thinking about Destiny's post about preparedness and being thorough in terms of  this run late, in a hurry  and freewheeling(on line thesaurus very disappointing by the way).(improvising?)slow brain thesaurus useless adlibbing!) I was considering the idea that there is a reason we use hiking BOOTS rather then shoes for mountain climbing .                                                      (running shoes planned obsolescence )
  I have to get to the top (some sort of OCD?) On the way down I am a little nervous that either some neighbor will freak out and call the cops or even worse I will knock a boulder loose and it (VERY steep hill) will roll down and hit somebody and cause a hullaballoo . It is cool to see how the brain works. As I approached the hill I saw a "path up" that disappeared  as I got closer. It turned out to be the path I followed as I went up. I had no plan going down. As I got near the halfway point I noticed my footprints going up. My mind and or the hill had sent me on the same path. Anyway I had an object lesson in boots vs shoes as I smashed the bottom of my shoe on a sharp rock and felt like I broke my foot at the joint of the little toe. (Prepared?) The pain faded as I forced a normal stride down the hill.
As I got to the bottom. It started to rain and I realized I would be late for twitter interview. So now I am worried about my phone getting wet and being late and my darn foot hurts!

Caught out in the rain?! part 1

It is either day 12 or 14, maybe 13 of run every days three weeks time. Last day this week that I have the boys. I drop Ben off at school and keep Soren(Mom is working and his school got out early for construction) We drop off the truck for repairs and get a ride over to the goat co-op and then home we just hang out till time to meet Mom. Then I run some errands. In the middle I realize that if I don't get home and run now I will miss Destiny's twitter interview.
 I was introduced to this new app,runtastic that tricks you into using your smart phone's gps to keep track of your runs. This means that I have to plug the phone in for a while (If a person runs without gps did it really happen?) Finally head out the door and feel like old shoe...plastic.
 Short quick run across rough terrain to the 9 mile arroyo ready to turn back until I see a mountain(hill) I definitely need to climb it!
  Whoa it is steeper than it looked and I have to take several breaks to "admire" the scenery. It looks like a lovely lonely hill with two houses on it. I have to avoid the houses. As I get near the top Thunderclouds remind me of a conversation I had with Fred Maas about lightning . I was not scared of it because hardly anybody dies of lightning. His reply"Hardly anybody is dumb enough to tempt lightning!" Good point
  Anyway going up the ridge in with lightning and not scared. Of course I get to the top and there is a huge monstrosity of a house. 

Men and Feelings

Colin Cowherd complaining about a TV show full of emotions.
  His wife(Does not mention her name) "You are just not in touch with your feelings,"
  Colin. "I am in touch and they are saying "Stop touching me!"."

Replicator

I finally read the article in the new Smithsonian about 3-D printers. Awesome and a little freaky in that it may change our whole reality like the internal combustion engine or computers. I am surprised that no one in my presence has given Gene Roddenberry Kudos for the replicators. 

Whatever we do is what is important to us

So let's see... My boys, running, blogging, work, reading. That seems to be what I spend my time doing...

The science of oppression

An article in Scientific American about a study on how oppression affects mental and emotional performance.
  If a person is in a group that is considered "less than" That person will perform worse on "Tests of intelligence etc." Oddly if We are in a situation where there is no "judgment" Everybody seems to perform to capacity. So if a woman is given problems that involve math she will perform to training and ability. If she were to be given these problems as part of an "Intelligence test" she will under perform. The same with racism and other organized  oppression.
  Great article!

Caution?

I have had this theory that I should save ideas for later. One for when I run out of ideas. This now seems ridiculous because my main problems seem to be A) forgetting great ideas before they get to paper,er... screen? Cloud? As Hillary Clinton(I swear it should be one L) said, "Whatever!" Anyway I think I can stop worrying about running out of things to say as that has not been a problem since high school...
 The other is that people may not want to read too many posts. I don't actually know what that is about. I guess if the writing is boring it won't get read and if it is interesting it will get read? A conundrum wrapped in an enigma? I guess I will put that in Steve's pretend not to be afraid box. It is true that I went back and looked at some old posts and they were not as bad as I remembered....

Fear? draft

"Stranger Danger" "Don't run out in the road." Many things we teach our children to fear, sometimes with good cause.
   Maybe fear is not the right word? I want my children to respect the road and I also want them to get to the other side like the proverbial chicken when need be.
  I want them to know that it is necessary to work like the little red hen and I want them to go out and play.
 
 Embarrassment. It seems that most of what we consider optional fear is the fear of being humiliated. "What others will think." Of course 

positivity(new word)

Shout out to Barb for sending the idea of "Just toke the shortcut to happiness" and Steve for "Pretend there is no fear."
  From Alessandra and I with the somewhat more pessimistic view on life.
  Seen on facebook optimist "The glass is half full!"
  The pessimist"The glass is half empty?"
  The realist  " think this glass is full of pee."

Courage?

I had been thinking that I should change the nature of my blog specifically to attract "hits". Then I read that article about the most popular blog(in the world??)
 The post of a cute blonde giving a how to put on makeup while drunk got the most hits ever!?
  This helped to remind me that I usually do not manage to bend with the wind so well..,+ this blog is about my process and thinking.
  So back to writing whatever pops into my head and enjoying the process.
  How does relate to the title? It seems that one definition of courage is being different and not hiding it from others. Doing what seems right without worrying about social consequence....
 Although posting anything one did while intoxicated does take a certain kind of courage.
  I know of people who act angry and mean in spite of essential inner kindness. I asked one of them about this(courage?) She said "It hurts too much otherwise." Showing her true feelings was too risky so she spends her days fending off imagined attacks from all sides with pre-emptive strikes and recoils from slights real and imagined. Does it take courage to show caring or softness?
  So courage in showing ,in this case on computer screens my real thoughts and feelings could be a form of courage.

Bachelors

Daddy do we have to take a bath?
Heck no!.......Well at least not until the teacher or Mommy starts to complain.....But you better brush your teeth and floss cause we don't like that darn dentist (bill)

Xenophilia

Or is it just self-hatred/doubt. I just read an article blaming American parenting for ADHD. This article claims( a lot of readers seem to come away thinking that there is no ADHD in France) That there is very little ADHD in France. The reason given is boundaries and no snacking.
  Really? Come on folks! The Japanese were forcing their children to learn calculus at 7 years old,Americans freak out! "We are stupid! Oh my God!" Later we find out that kids forced to learn things before their brains develop cannot problem (generally) and these guys in their early 40's started dropping dead from chronic stress.
 If it is true that the French are much more strict than the Americans(Again gross generalization) How much more creative will our kids be as adults. We claim that children love boundaries, we do not bother to think that people are more comfortable around quiet obedient children. A child that does everything they are told never questions adults always helps out gets straight A's is our current ideal.
  Anybody ever heart of Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Samuel Clemens. ?
 I want my kids to be good hearted ,self starting and creative. Obedience is in there. They damn well better not get run over by a car, deliberately hurt people or be lazy. But they also better be true Americans who think for themselves and problem solve with the best!

The Hill

Last year Brendan Maas told me he had broken my record at ST. John's hill.
  That comment brought back a rush of memories.
 Once a week the track team would jog( Well middle and distance runners would jog. Sprinters would walk lolly gag and whine.Something to do with fast twitch vs slow twitch) from the prep up to the arroyo behind St. John's College.
  There we would run or whatever to the top of the HILL a very steep climb of maybe 30 seconds then walk down get our pulse taken . when we were recovered we would run again. Apparently I held the record for number of hill climbs in one day.
  I think that this is typical of me in that I did not know that. I just remember a lot like those repeat 400s the calm and focus of supreme effort. I also remember waiting with the other kids for a pulse check to do the next repetition. After a while Coach Maas would tell me "That's enough." I knew that this had something to do with recovery times and heart rate
  I also was upset that Brendan(I am sure his brother Dan also broke this record) had broken this record I did not know I owned. Reminding me of a friend who once told me that she was the LEAST COMPETITIVE MOM EVER!!
   Later I went looking for the hill and could not find her. Those days will always be just a memory...

no tv week

So the 7 year old told me that this week should be no tv week. Being the permissive liberal kids are adults  in little bodies parent I agreed. Of course we do not have a tv, we watch netflix on the $220 laptop so maybe it is not too much of a sacrifice?
  At first the little one was very upset and tried to negotiate his way to a few shows(about dinosaurs) Then he gave in . The next day however he told me that no tv week meant no media(no talk radio!) so now we are in a quiet household!
  That brings me to the fairness thing again. Soren got candy and cupcakes at his graduation and Ben did not get to go. Ben thought it would be fair if Soren was not allowed to get anything  at McDonalds. I see this with adults all the time and I try to explain that taking away from someone else does not make things better, but no one listens...

more running

Thought I was sleeping in. Finally roll out of bed and discover it is 5:30. Cool I will do my laps before the kids wake up. Dang slow and cold. Before coffee. Check in after first "lap" boys still asleep. Still feel half asleep. Second lap kids are up working on their sticker books. Survive a 3rd lap and start breakfast

running?

So my carpool buddy Linda, yup I am a Mr. mom Girly man sensitive new age  guy.
  It all started with everybody telling what a great dad I would be, of course I pictured Bonanza or Little house on the prairie where everybody pitched in on the farm (or ranch) I did not picture holiday shows soccer camps kindergarten graduation (at 1:30 of course).
 Anyway after the boys got in the prius(of course) I headed off on my 8th consecutive day of running( an incredible accomplishment for me) still tired and sore, unlike in my youth, I headed up the power lines next to Old Las Vegas highway(don't get me started on people who ,of their own free choice, run on roads next to AUTOMOBILES. Asthma anyone?
  Anyway pretty soon I saw some deer prints. I thought "Hey those look fresh I wonder if I am following some deer!" I crossed a road and dropped into an arroyo and sure enough there were two rather large deer in a bit of a panic trying to finding the source of the locomotive sounds of whatever was crashing through the bush. I do nlt know if they did not see me or just could not believe that a 200 pound human could make the amount of noise they were hearing, at any rate they would do a couple of bounds and look this way and that then bound in anpother direction and look again. Finally the bounded up the arroyo and out of sight

running

7 days in a row running. I am sure I have not done that since high school . A little sore every day.
  I decided to run at least 5k every day for 21 days. So far so good. This week is with the boys so it is more difficult to schedule. Today I just ran laps up the driveway down to the Ponderosa etc. The boys did not seem to mind at all.  

Darn bookstore!

Many years ago my little brother and I took a road trip to visit our colleges ,which we had both dropped out of, UCSC and Humboldt State university. We took the old RX3 mazda station wagon with the Rotary engine designed by some guy named Wankel.
 Anyway I had forgotten how fun that trip was, we camped in Yosemite where the raccoons stole his shoes with his glasses in them(we bought new shoes but he had a much nicer view of the trip after that. We stopped in Santa Cruz and all my city friends were enamored of the baby poop brown car that had to be push started at every stop. I don't know why....
 Anyway we hit Humboldt where Beautiful Sue Johnson fed us like kings then up to Portland to visit my high school crush. We had heard of this bookstore that took up a whole city block.
 We headed home and ended up in Salt Lake City with no money and 400 pounds of books in the back! We did scrounge under the seats and found a few dollars in change and made it home.
  Ben decided that we would do no tv week. Soren Freaked out so I said we could go to collected works and get them each a Brainquest workbook as compensation.
  The whole way to the store they kept reminding me how the bookstore was sooo much better than the library because you get to KEEP the books! $81 later we got work books dinosaur sticker books and dinosaur history books.
  Somehow those darn books always get me!

rules, authority and whining

There are two big events in sports tight now where, in my view , cheating is being encouraged and going to the authorities is being discouraged. The Chicago Bulls basketball team does not have the talent to compete against the Miami Heat, so they are resorting to tackling harassing and pushing the other team around in the hopes that they will get so upset that they will not play well. Pundits and fans are proud of this and even go to the extent of calling the Heat players whiners and crybabies.
  This is why I also will not watch ice hockey because if a player on the other team is too good the worse team sends a player out called the enforcer who deliberately injures the great player. The offender then gets a two minute penalty and his team wins.
 The other in golf is not so clear. Sergio Garcia was distracted by something Tiger Woods did and made a bad shot. Everybody jumped on Sergio because he should be tougher. Of course nobody mentions that Tiger Woods constantly yells at and berates audiences for doing the slightest thing to distract him.
  The rule of "Winning is everything " is at best amoral and at best encourages cheating. If somebody complains about cheating everybody calls them a baby.
  I have two boys, one who believes in authority. "What do you do about bullying?" Soren says "bleep his bleep". Ben says "Find a teacher!" Ben has a good way of looking at situations and trying to make things better but in the world of high finance Soren would be rewarded and Ben would be in trouble for trying to do the right thing.
  This bugs me.
  

Dreams?

I keep hearing "follow your heart!" "Make your dreams come true!" What the heck? As one of my friends said after a divorce,"Everybody keeps telling me to do what I want, I don't know what the heck they are talking about."
  What are my dreams? Well number one was survival. I have now survived almost 49 years on Earth(not counting womb time).I am assured by many that there is more to life than survival. Really? I guess I missed that memo.
  Somebody recently asked me what is important to me. My gut response was "helping people". Oddly i do not think I spend much time or energy on that. Survival mode does not include a lot of programming for helping. It is mostly about...well... um surviving! So life seems easy right now ( although not many would call horse shoeing easy) For the first time in my life I have a small amount of leisure time that is not devoted to resting up for the next "Battle for survival!" To be honest it is a little confusing. I am used to jumping from one task to another without any long term thought involved. Now there is time and energy top consider values and wants as over against needs and emergencies

Sticktoitiveness

A girl I knew in high school( well I did not really no her because I had a policy of not talking another story) anyway the point is that she is currently finishing much complicated long-lasting post graduate education . Another friend of mine is finishing pre-law and going to law school in Oklahoma. One my my riding students is finishing his second semester of law school...
   I am awed and impressed. I dropped out of college when I found out they wanted my to actually study and read all kinds of how shall I put it... boring stuff.  A few years after that I had a lot of people telling me I should be a professional masseur. That sounded great in a lot of ways so I looked into it. \

2 years of study and $4500 before I can start practice?!?!? So I started my horse-training business.

A long winded way of saying I admire you guys sticktoitiveness! go you guys

running

Somebody recently told me that you do not develop new habits till you have done a new activity 21 days in a row.
  IO have run 5 days in a row seems like a good time to go for 21 in a row. I have been sort of running again for 5 years. The last 3 years I have had an online running assistant who keeps track. 3 times a week 2.5 miles average 16 minute miles. Of course it has really been once a week when with the kids and the rest on the other week. Seems to be slow progress partly because of it.
   Of course it has been a lot easier since I accidentally lost 30 pounds.
  We will see how it goes

justification

Somehow one of Ben's soccer cleats did not make it to his Mom's house. I felt really bad and of course the internal homeostasis computer went off trying to figure out how to blame someone for the oversight.
  Funny how quickly our self defense mechanisms kick in.....

Don't drink and run

Long hard work day then stupid errands. Bleep it! I am not running today. Two glasses of wine and change mind.
Start out slow and get worse, every downhill step is a jarring reminder of my age up hill is not so bad but real slow.
  I am a little sore from hard "runs " the previous days so I think that my muscles are exhausted and giving no shock absorption.
  Following the power line lots of up and down after 3 miles of torture I think that maybe it is not tired muscles.... Note to self don't do that again!

life

I got a call from a woman about trimming a horse at the Delancey street foundation. I had heard of them and knew they sold Christmas trees. So after a long morning shoeing 4 horses I head over to trim a horse. Gloria finds me and leads me to a locked gate where we wait for somebody to unlock for ten minutes. We are finally let into a beautiful facility where Fernando invites me in for a tour while we wait for somebody. We see the dining room and the little lake full of giant catfish and he starts talking about the class. He tells me we are waiting for the group and I realize that they are expecting me to give a class on hoof care.
 It turns out that there are 5 horses and  7 people expecting  me to conduct a clinic on horse and hoof care!
  Of course I am a little disorganized and love to create so I cancel the rest of my day(hopefully my clients will understand) and we talk about shoeing and trimming horses and I learn about the program which started in San Francisco as a rehab center in 1971.
  Apparently it is what all us liberals have thought jails should be all along. A place for people who cannot handle life or who cannot follow the rules to get their act together under strict supervision.
  So we spend 3 hours under the shade of a huge cottonwood working with horses and hooves and then they invite me in for dinner. I feel pretty good about myself for giving back or whatever it is ones does when trying to help others with no expectation of remuneration(should be renumeration but Webster says no, must look up the root of that word) Anyway to top it all off the woman who originally called hands $400 and says she is sorry that is all she has. Now I feel really good because some good deeds do go unpunished.
  Of course I also feel some sort of guilt for taking the money. However I now have a plan. Ado not use however or but to start a sentence! B maybe we can set up a program to help the horses and citizens of Delancy street. It is not fully formed in my subconscious computer but we are working on it!

house Elves?

Some jerk came over to my house while I was out and made a bunch of meals and left the dishes undone and food out the he also had the gall to do to do a bunch of laundry and leave it on the kitchen table. Plus all the sheets are in the washing machine !
 When I catch that guy I am going to give him a piece of my mind!

running!

I have been on a food allergy test diet since January, (well I was very restricted until my stomach got better) and because if this i have lost 30# this was no big deal until i finally got the time to go out for a "run" and found out that 196# is a  lot lighter than 226#.
  I ran up to the water tower twice and headed home on Cibola Circle. of course when i saw an arroyo I had to check it out and found that it was on the way home, after the Highway tunnel I was about 3 tens of a mile from home. i recently decided that i wanted to make every run at least 3 miles, and my little gps said 2.3 although the pedometer said 2.7 Anyway I figured I would run down the arroyo till 3 mile on gps. then run home thereby ensuring  3 miles. Of course i did not do the math of .7 miles down then  .7 miles up then over the fence across the scrub brush(in the dark) over another fence up the steep embankment to cross the road then the 400 meter driveway. A little more tired than I expected!

Heroes?

Laying in my bath(cause I do not have a hottub) grumpy and tired. I have noticed that when I am irritable tired or in pain that it is easy to look to the outside world for reasons(excuses?)
 Any way remembering driving by my childhood home the other day and my two boys wanting to go by and see their old house. What the heck do I say to them? I was already tired from a long hard day so tight away the feelings of bitterness and anger come back up What the bleep was my bleeping family thinking?!!!
  In the bath I was getting all riled up again and a voice in my head speaks to me You're a hero aren't you? Of course I answer that being a logical response to somebody asking one a question. "i try to be.." Well heroes don't whine, pout, sulk or brood." Well that sounded kind of like an insult.. "But I am right!"
  Superego or guru or whoever he is answers "And what good does that do you?"
  Two days later I still hear the id complaining about injustice and unfairness and all sorts of perfectly true issues of the day, but with the new turquoise heart and the goldarn voice in my head it does not seem as important anymore..

dreams? part one

Following Destiny Allison's blog (of course computer does not agree with me sharing that I follow. Little button says add blogs you follow. I type it in press "follow" and all disappears. HMPH)
  Talking about following your dreams....
  What dreams? I remember a youthful dream of .... Here is where frustration sets in. How to turn a picture and vision into words in such a way that I express something approximating communication. I guess it was more like a controlled nightmare. I think I was in space trying to create order in the Solar system... or maybe the universe. All these giant balls of energy and mass spinning out of control. I still remember their subjective size texture and speeds. It seems that many times I tried and failed and of course everything imploded... or exploded or something.
  Then one night I remember there came an orderly and predictable series of orbits and interactions in this universe of the night. I had not thought of this dream in many years, but those images are just as sharp and clear (or newly made up) as those nights in the homemade bunk bed( another image I would like to "paint")
  I remember a painting John Cap gave me years ago. I think he said it was a portrait of me that reminded me of those dreams or nightmares or experiences...
  Anyway I do remember wanting to be OJ Simpson. Lucky miss. Now sometimes people say follow your heart or do what you have always wanted to! I try to think of something that drives me in they way I believe they are talking about and come up with confusion.
  

moral development and crude justice

My younger son has always been.... strong willed. I strongly empathize with the older, Ben. He seems to always be trying,often with success to make the world better for everybody he is around. He also seems to expect (naturally)  to be acknowledged and rewarded for his efforts. He will sulk, pout and hide when disappointed or when he feels Justice (with a capital j) is not being served. He also believes strongly in rules and in higher authority. When there is an issue or disagreement you go to Mommy, Daddy, teacher,, policeman and present your case. Rules are rules and must be followed.
  Soren, on the other hand, has tons of empathy when he is aware of others pain. He will go to some effort,sometimes more, to alleviate suffering or create joy. However he seems to be a little single minded in his ideas. I remember him as a 14 month old fighting with Ben(who is 16 months older) Ben hit Soren and got put in the crib as a time out. Ben was crying about his Teddy Bear. Soren went and found Teddy and took him to Ben. On the other hand at nursery one day he pushed his best friend out of the tree they were playing in. When challenged he claimed that Henry was in the way. "well use your words first." His succinct answer " That takes too long".
  Now it seems that Soren has decided that he is the arbiter of Justice. He acts quickly efficiently and decisively when he sees that Justice is not being served. Unfortunately we often call this vigilante justice. He does not believe in going to authority (teacher,mommy,daddy) He proudly serves out Justice with no hesitation. I don't know whether to applaud his audacity or punish his arrogance or both....
  I told my older sister of this and of my sharing Ben's views on the matter. She tells me I was like Soren not Ben as a youngster. More cognitive dissonance!

Soccer Dad?

Younger son play date, soccer game at Santa Fe downs at 9 am, two birthday parties.  older Boy only one game at ten(In Eldorado forty minutes from downs) and one birthday party! 

If a tree flies...?

Heading north St Francis Drive in Santa Fe watching a large Dust devil traveling East. I realize we are going to collide so I slow down a little. Suddenly a fifteen foot tall Russian Olive takes flight and lands in front of my truck. I swerve around it and wonder if I should call 911 or the county or something . Eventually I do nothing. This morning someone has dragged it from the driving lanes and there it lies alone and un-mourned.