My afternoon

I love this landscape.

Acoustics

I have decided that I have an opinion about acoustics that for some reason wasn't there before. And that is a live acoustic with small, not too loud percussive sounds is more stimulating than the kind of quiet you get in some places where there's carpet everywhere and a kind of hush that eats all your thought processes. The kind of place where if you had chapped hands and you rubbed your fingers together you could hear that sandpaper sound. I would become more than stupid in that environment, I think I'd feel like taking a nap.

Plaster walls sound different than ones with sheet rock. A room has timbre.

I have a room in my house where the carpet got taken out and it feels clean now. Partly because of what it sounds like. Rooms with a dead acoustic don't feel tidy. They have the sound of stuff which which absorbs the energy in a room.

Next time you're in a space, listen to the room.

St. Olaf Reunion

So there are only two people in this picture from my 25th reunion I don't know.  What wonderful people.  Rob, Nancy, Kelly, Mary, Vaughn, Lisa.  You're great and it was so good to see you all.

Intuition

So I get back from vacation and at first I pretend to work and then eventually start to do actual work and I got that funny feeling that the problems I've been asked to solve aren't actually the real problems.  Vacation does that to you. See by the time they get to me they've been "talked about" and a funny thing happens when a group passes a thought back and forth in a room:  it gets uniform.  Business problems become communication problems because well, those business problems are just too big to grapple with and here's my favorite:  "the client isn't asking for that they're asking for this".  So I says to the group, "yes, but" and the exhale and tell me they need to get to work which is what I was trying to do with them.  

So much of what we do is often not what we ought to be doing.   Which blurs the line between real work and pretend work.

Countdown to Vacation

So what is the best possible vacation?  The one you need the most and oh, man do I need one. 

This is the first week of vacation where I am not doing any significant travel.  Like with a passport and something to convert electricity to 110 volts.  I'm staying nearby.

Friday, going to see Tony Kushner's new play "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism, Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures".  I just hope I don't feel like the stupid homosexual when I see it. 

Saturday will be my 25th College reunion and I know of half a dozen friends that will be there.  So that's fun.

Then I'm going to garden and do stuff like paint the shutters on the house.  It's like Zen.  You get into a zone and it makes you all peaceful when you don't think too much.

Annual massive party at a friend's condo for Monday Memorial Day Holiday.  Official kick off of summer.

Tuesday and Wednesday I'm going with one of my best friends on a road trip to Iowa.  To visit one of the premier pipe organ makers in the country.  This is exactly the kind of fun I like to have.  On the way home we're visiting an historical site of Native American spiritual importance.

And then I get to come home and paint more stuff.  And maybe go canoeing.  And cook stuff.

It's great when you have a chance to live your life a little.....

Being in the moment

All these people seem to talk about how difficult it is to be "in the moment".  I think it's sort of funny.  I'm in the moment plenty.  It's why I'm late to things.

I think it's a bit like this cat that comes and eats the birds in our yard.  She looks around, takes it all in, reacts to stuff and then occasionally formulates an agenda.  You can see when she decides that it might be nice to jump up into the open window I'm standing in.

I slam the window shut because I was in the moment at that moment.  No evil puss is entering my home.

The Garden Trout season

We cleaned up the perennial beds and I turned over the soil in the vegetable garden before the supposed rain was to come.  I'd say it looks good and I even have a blister on my hand-- it was dumb not to wear gloves. 

More importantly, trout season opened for the Southeastern part of the state.  Sort of sneaked up on me with the strangely cold spring we've had and, I realized, the lack of insects flying around the garden.  For some reason bugs now mean fish food to me.  

Sometimes people look at me and ask what on earth I'm thinking and I just say "nothing" but the truth is I'm usually connecting seemingly unconnected things.  Like bugs and fish.

Happy fly fishing.