da | Entries tagged with quaker

This morning I took my usual route to Quaker Meeting, the rail-to-trail from my house to downtown. It was looking like kids were playing with some heavy machinery on it- there are gashes in the pavement, sometimes the width of the trail, all perhaps an inch deep and wide. They were wavy, occasionally straight, sometimes parallel. Many going dozens of feet down the path. By the time I'd run over the 20th one I was fairly miffed. Who did they think they were, ruining the path?...

They certainly didn't get tired of doing it, since the gouges ran at random intervals all the way to the park. Augh!

...And then I realized who they thought they were. (Did you figure it out already?)

City pavement repairers. Who stopped part-way through repairing cracks. Cracks which I surmise require widening before they can be filled. I guess I'll find out in a few weeks, since I'll be gone the next two weekends.

--

I just received my birthday present from

melted_snowball. It is a beautiful stained-glass panel, mostly in shades of white and clear, with a tree-branch motif. The artist came to install it yesterday. While we were admiring it, I realized... it has holes! There are three-dimensional aspects, which include some pointy bits of glass, and some shapes that are the absence of glass. I like it a lot. :)

--

So I was thinking about these both: holes that had to be made worse before they could be fixed, and holes that make something beautiful ("that's how the light gets in", thank you Mr. Cohen) and about a phrase I've been wrestling with, "standing in the tragic gap." I first heard the phrase in a book by Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. He is talking about living a nonviolent life, a life of integrity, when he defines the term:

a gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be. It is a gap that never has been and never will be closed. If we want to live nonviolent lives, we must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility.

I harbor no illusions about how hard it is to live that way. Though I aspire to be one of those life-giving people who keeps a grip on both reality and hope, I often find that tension too hard to hold--so I let go of one pole and collapse into the other. Sometimes I resign myself to things as they are, sinking into a life of cynical disengagement. Sometimes I embrace a dreamy idealism, living a life of cheerful irresponsibility that floats above the fray. [1]

He talks about how examples of standing in this gap can be seen in the lives famous peacemakers like Gandhi and MLK Jr. And also in the everyday, the lives of any parent of a teenager; the parent sees their hopes for the child, as well as what is happening in the child's life. And if the parent fails to stand in the tragic gap, they can cling to an idealistic fantasy or fall to cynicism.

He continues:

Deep within me there is an instinct even more primitive than "fight or flight," and I do not think it is mine alone. As a species, we are profoundly impatient with tensions of any sort, and we want to resolve every one of them as quickly as we can. [...] Ultimately, what drives us to resolve tension as quickly as we can is the fear that if we hold it too long, it will break our hearts. [...]

The heart can be broken into a thousand shards, sharp-edged fragments that sometimes become shrapnel aimed at the source of our pain. Every day, untold numbers of people try without success to “pick up the pieces,” some of them taking grim satisfaction in the way the heart’s explosion has injured their enemies. Here the broken heart is an unresolved wound that we carry with us for a long time, sometimes tucking it away and feeding it as a hidden wound, sometimes trying to “resolve it” by inflicting the same wound on others.

But there is another way to visualize what a broken heart might mean. Imagine that small, clenched fist of a heart “broken open” into largeness of life, into greater capacity to hold one’s own and the world’s pain and joy. This, too, happens every day. We know that heartbreak can become a source of compassion and grace because we have seen it happen with our own eyes as people enlarge their capacity for empathy and their ability to attend to the suffering of others. [2]

That sounds incredibly terrifying. And none of his examples are ones I can relate to. Being like Gandhi?

OK, some readers of this are parents, and some are (or have been) parents of teenagers, so maybe you've got a handle on this...

But while I was sitting in Quaker Meeting this morning, I had the realization that I have certainly been there. I started coming out, half my lifetime ago. Anyone who's done so will recognize the risk of a broken heart there. The closer the person to us, the greater the risk when coming out to them. While it was half my lifetime ago, I remember how terrifying it was. And yet how necessary. And coming out never ends- though, I am so thankful that at this point in my life, I have little risk to coming out to anyone at all, which is partly by my choices and partly circumstance. I know this is not the case for some reading this- either people in their lives who will not accept what they are told; or living in a much more conservative environment. I'm so grateful.

And I know that I have privilege that many do not- I can duck out of standing in the gap in a number of arenas. I'm relatively wealthy, I'm male, I am not visibly gender-variant, I'm not a visible minority.

I'm not sure where this goes. I am still working on it, just having made one connection. I wonder what you think?

Two Parker Palmer links:

[1] Hidden Wholeness on Google Books

[2] An essay by Palmer on living in the Tragic Gap

Bless me LJ, for I have been quiet. It has been two weeks since my last post.

Hey, I'm 36! My birthday was low-key; bookended by food: takeout BBQ one night and yummy home-cooked shrimp scampi. And ice-cream on my birthday. 36 so far feels like 35 with more things falling apart.

I've lost track of how many times I've had bike flats in the last month. It's at least five.
Tomorrow morning might be exciting; I'm biking to work by way of the bike shop, to replace the rear tube (again) and tire (overdue). The tube/tire on the bike might hold long enough for me to get there.

On Saturday morning, I went to reinflate my bike tire to the recommended pressure... and didn't notice a hole worn in the tire sidewall. "Hey, that side's bulging. Hey, maybe I should let the air out before it - " BAM! My ears were ringing for a while. I had to laugh out loud at the absurdity. I immediately pictured birds flying in circles around my head.

In the last week, I've had high hopes for a long bike-ride after work, or on the weekend, but with the different flats, it just didn't seem like a good idea. Hindsight, at least two of the flats were caused by wearing through the tire sidewalls. One was glass, one was a bad patch (over a seam) and I don't remember what the rest were. At least I can still say Rapid Flat-Fixes Я Us.

The odometer did roll over another 200 km, Friday evening just after I replaced the n-1th flat on my way home from work; exactly 30 days after the last 200km.

Other stuff falling apart? Goodness. My laptop has been crashing (though I now have Time Machine running backups, so at least that's automated), my phone/camera has been acting finicky, my iPod has been refusing to update again, our front stoop has lost a chunk of stone and now looks a bit gap-toothed, and I think the front doorknob is possibly loose. Whee! Oh, and we're probably going to replace the car reasonably soon, as upkeep costs begin to approach trade-in value. I feel super-lucky, though, that none of these are dire situations, as long as everything doesn't fail simultaneously. (*glares menacingly at laptop, phone, iPod*)

Anyhow, this weekend included a batch of errands, a wonderful walk with

roverthedog and

melted_snowball in a leash-free dog-park along a river, and a fairly recuperative Pilates session that made me feel all stretchy.

Work recently has included a foray into writing some C code, which is quite challenging for me. So many ways to screw up! But I've hopes that I (and colleagues I can rope into helping) will end up with a minor contribution to OpenSSH. Srs!

Since I last posted, I also went to Philadelphia for a Quaker thang, which was useful at unsticking some "how should I do this" sort of questions I'd been stuck on (and perhaps will post on eventually) and also for some good news about the Quaker Quest program- there will soon be funding to hire some number of additional staff. And then I spent a wonderful afternoon with friends in the Philly area, and we romped in the park with their dog and their 5-year-old, AND had a visit from NJ friends who came into town for the afternoon; and then they fed me soup and brownies and sent me on my flight back home with a big smile on my face.

What with current weather (mid 80s) and the wonderful lilac smell in the air, Ithaca is reminding me of Key West. All it needs is fewer Volvos and more chickens. Any chickens, come to think of it.

I saw the brand new Quaker meeting house-to-be. It's an abandoned restaurant in the middle of a downtown residential neighborhood. It looks great from the outside. It will need many hundreds of thousand dollars of work inside. The Meeting had a work party as soon as they got possession. 50 adults and 20 kids. The general contractor says they did approximately five thousand dollars of cleanout work. In a day.

Ithaca's traffic is just as much a mess as ever. Wegmans is just as awesome a food store as ever.

There was a May Day concert on the Commons, with pretty good music, but which looked almost unmoored enough to become a protest march led by the socialists, judging by the signs against the racist immigration stupidity in Arizona and a few other worthy causes around the country. (which as always, have zero connection to things that a local protest could expect to affect). Am I cynical? Maybe a bit. I lived here eight years.

The conversation in the coffee shop at the old used bookstore today was about how in the old days, we didn't call them glass shops, they were head shops. And did the town need quite so many, after all? I did not weigh in.

Spent a lot of time catching up with my hosts. We went to Viva Taqueria for lunch (super basic burrito with black beans and mole sauce), which gave us the strength to start an evening Settlers of Catan game, and nearly finish before we were hungry for dinner. Plus I was teaching them the game at the same time.

This won't mean anything to anyone but

melted_snowball , but I walked right by Unemployed Community Activist Fay Gaugacis at Wegmans.

Tomorrow: Quaker meeting, followed by goodbyes as I head home with Rover, while one of my hosts heads north... To my parents' house. Yeah. Weird. :) But very much good weird.

... On the drive down I listened to the TAL episode about Michael Poyzner, who made fairly exaggerated reporting errors writing a book which became the basis for his California governor's election platform. About the grim urban schools. Which were possibly much less exciting in real life than his story. With an eye to that, I consider and conclude that everything I wrote here was at least as exciting before the retelling.

Current Location: Ithaca, ny

After Manhattan, I met up with F/friends [1] and we set off for Peekskill on the train. By that point, my back was still in quite a lot of pain; I took some pain drugs, but not enough. I spent nearly all of the trip lying down, but there were lots of amazing views of the Hudson when I did sit up a bit.

Thence to car, thence to the Catholic retreat center for our Queer Quaker gathering. Oh, the iconography at the Catholic retreat center. It was something. I took photos, but I haven't had time to do anything with them. Other people during the weekend were talking about their various relationships with Catholicism; I can say my reaction was mostly puzzlement. Whatever.

The retreat center was a seven story building on the top of a large hill, so there were great views of the Hudson and surrounding hills. The Appalachian Trail ran nearby, and there was apparently very good sledding. Not that I went outside.

The gathering went well; there were about 100 of us, including a huge number of newcomers who seemed excited about coming to next year's (in North Carolina).

I spent most of the first few days on my back. On the day we arrived, I got acupressure then acupuncture from my friend Amy, who had taught me the very effective headache acupressure points this last June. She has been practicing for 17 years; "by now, I sometimes even feel like I know what I'm doing." I will say it made a fairly big difference, and dramatically. Some of it was sort of like an ice pack, without the cold.

In the first day I also gained +1 in Pain Management skills from other friends [2]. I can be fairly stubborn about asking people for help, but this was a substantial lesson in asking. And feeling so restricted in what I could do for myself. And feeling so frustrated at not knowing how I'd be doing in an hour, or the next morning.

Very early on, lying on a couch, my eyes fell on a wall containing the Serenity Prayer ("Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; The courage to change the things that I can; And the wisdom to know the difference.") I had to chuckle, because that was indeed one thing I needed.

With all the lying-on-hard-floors and moving-mattress-off-squishy-frame and pill-popping as necessary, I did start feeling better, very gradually. I could go on for a while about how great people were; apart from when I've been home sick in bed, I had never needed that much help before. I got all the help I asked for and lots I hadn't specifically asked for.

I had a group activity each day in the center's Chapel, which had amazing stained glass (and a comfortable carpet).

The gathering itself was a combination of work and a joy and occasionally frustrating but felt overall, graceful. I think I learned more about working with people and asking them for their best and trusting in that. I helped where I could.

I missed friends who couldn't make it this time. I missed catching up with people because they were across the room or across the building and I couldn't get up to talk to them.

I didn't sing enough. I didn't play nearly enough. I'll go back.

The train back to Manhattan was wonderful- watching the Hudson and getting to know a long-time attender and talking about life experiences. He is 60; he used to travel the world, and felt at home everywhere. Now, he doesn't feel at home anywhere, and wonders what he should do about that. But he's lived in the same Midwest US town for the last six years, and may move soon for work, which hopefully will help. ...I have felt the opposite experience. I don't think I've ever felt at home "everywhere" when I'm traveling, though really I haven't ever traveled for extended periods of time. And right now I certainly feel settled.

But when we arrived in Grand Central again, I had tremendous wistfulness for not being able to spend any more time there on this trip. Oh well, it will still be there too.

The flight and drive home were uneventful, and much less painful than the other direction. I had drugs, and I had a gel ice pack, which actually was as good as advertised on the box ("stays cold eight hours": I froze it overnight and put it in my luggage, which I checked, and it was still cold at the end of the car trip, eight hours later)

And seeing

melted_snowball and

roverthedog was about as great as you might guess. :)

[1] that is, friends who are Friends.

[2] The details are probably boring to everyone but me, but: Alternating Ibuprofen and Acetaminophen at two hour intervals; Taking 3 or 4 Ibuprofen at the outset, with food (always with food; it's supposed to do bad stuff to the stomach without food at the same time); how effective an ice-pack can be; and laying on the floor with lower legs on a shelf/chair, parallel to the floor, to remove all leg weight from the spine. These are all probably basic things that I had been told before, but this time, it's internalized, y'know?

Oh! And I learned another acupressure point from Amy! I couldn't turn my head to the right because my neck was sore. She put my thumb against the muscle on the top of my lower right arm, and had me push hard ("as if the thumb was a coathanger hanging off the back of your arm"). To find the point: put your thumb in the crook of your elbow, fingers wrapped around the top of the arm. Note the crook of your thumb and second finger, on the arm. That's more or less the pressure-point; it should be the middle of a muscle. Move the hand so the thumb pushes into that point. She had me turn my head a bit to the right, and if the neck still hurt, move the thumb around a bit and try again. I was dumbfounded that I was able to find it, and find the same point in my left arm, and they both worked! This might have made the difference between being able to safely drive home, and not.

I've been listening to Lady Gaga / Bad Romance on loop for the last few hours. It's a catchy song. Video's sort of weird. OK, really weird. [1]

This morning I dropped off

melted_snowball at Toronto City Airport, for his flight to Chicago. He's gone for a month- but I'll see him in three weeks on a visit. I'm... not sure how this will go, keeping myself on a sane eating/sleeping schedule; at least the dog will remind me to go to bed on time.

Since I was in downtown Toronto on a Sunday morning, I went to Quaker Meeting. I can't claim to be a stranger there, despite only having visited for a wedding once many years back- I was surprised to discover I knew half a dozen people. I was introduced to a friend's house-guest, visiting from Holland, who was surprised I had visited his hometown in the north of the country. (him: "But nobody visits Groningen!" me: "Ah, but we did." him: *shrug* "...OK." [2] I also met Steven, whose partner is a Master's student the department where I work. (They moved to Canada for his school, and they're from Rochester NY. It's a crazy small world.)

And then I excused myself for the second part of my plans, to see the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Royal Ontario Museum. Even though it was just three blocks away, I wasn't sure how I would get to the ROM, given that until I got there I had overlooked the Santa Claus Parade between me and the museum. (The Dutch guy said, "How long is the parade? Maybe you can just wait." I told him it's over two hours. Deadpan: "Two hours? It's just one guy!")

So I dashed across Bloor Street, narrowly missing being trampled by Elves. [4]

And can I just say, November 15 is too early for a Christmas parade. (December 15 might be too early for a Christmas parade, if you were asking me- but nobody did.)

Right. No trampling, though the clowns were scary, and there were too many people in general, but at least the crowds outside the ROM meant the museum was comparatively empty for a Sunday afternoon.

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit was neat (if pricey- $28 for my ticket). The ten fragments of the scroll were text from various books of the Bible, apocrypha, and non-Biblical texts, from 2000-2500 years ago. The fragments are quite fragmented- on the one hand it's amazing that paper scrolls have lasted this long; on the other, you were often looking down at a smudge on a dark frame and only really seeing the text in a reproduction. The light was quite low, in order to preserve the fragments. There was a fascinating video of how badly the fragments had been treated over the last 60 years. Early after discovery, they were taped together, which just makes my jaw drop. They were pieced together in a brightly lit room, people ate while handling them, and so on.

The uncertainty behind how the scrolls got stashed in the caves where they were found is also neat. One theory was the nearby hilltop town was a religious community of Essenes. Another justifiable theory was that the town was a commercial center occupied by stone-masons and potters- which doesn't explain the cache of 600 scrolls hidden in jars in the caves under the town. The exhibit did an OK job putting out the evidence, showing videos of archaeologists arguing about it, and leaving the mystery for the visitor to consider.

I mostly liked the rooms of context they provided before the actual scroll-bits- how the civilizations in the area had been living for the prior hundreds of years, and how they lived in the subsequent centuries.

I was having a bit of a grin at the context, as well, because I'm in the middle of reading Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Right. Fiction, history. Fiction, history. But "Lamb" mentions many of the same pieces of daily life. Such as the Mikvah ritual baths, which involved a joke I won't try to explain but involves the frustrations of being a teenager and needing to take lots of ritual baths.

The ROM certainly could have done better with sound-insulation. The space is tall and echo-y, and a few videos have loud sound, meaning that visitors will be talking fairly loudly throughout the exhibit, making it a bit hard to concentrate.

And the gift shop had some truly special items, like Aveta (sp? can't be bothered to google) brand Dead Sea Mud in 4 different varieties. Also some odd book choices, including "God's Little Princess Devotional Bible" and "God's Mighty Warrior Devotional Bible." [5]

I also saw some modern art on the theme of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which partly worked for me- it had text sliding off glass plates onto the floor, written in rainbow glitter; the text might as well have been "Lorum Ipsum" for its lack of meaning, though the visual effect was interesting.

The ROM also had an exhibit on the 10 Commandments, but I wasn't particularly impressed- the historical info didn't seem well explained and the modern art part of that exhibit wasn't very interesting.

Oh- and food- I went to both restaurants, just for kicks. The 5th floor was too pricey for me, with $5 coffees , $9 fries, and $50 lunches. But the basement restaurant was surprisingly good- I got poutine, made with "hand-cut fries", with real cheese curd, and with chicken gravy. In the past I have mostly avoided poutine for two reasons: fake cheese curd, and beef gravy. This poutine was awesome. Oh, and their meats are from Cumbrae farms, so they're local and free-range and very tasty. $5 for a lunch-size portion. The other dishes there looked quite good as well, and they had tasty looking deserts too.

And that was my day, more or less.

[1] this version has a cute guy in it though. Not that Lady Gaga isn't attractive too- but flaming breasts don't really do much for me.

[2] in case it's interesting to anybody else, the reason I went to northern Holland was to visit Barbara Katz Rothman (who has come up in various friends' discussions on inter-racial adoptions and childcare)- her son was a friend in college. [3]

[3] which is why I know the Dutch proverb De een zijn dood is een ander zijn brood,
One man's death is another man's bread, a grim saying, but what the guy I met on the train to Groningen wanted to share with us.

[4] at the beginning of the day, while dan was driving us downtown, I saw a partially lit sign, and I joked on facebook about renting "Elf Storage." Which was all fine, and I joked with ~~araleith~~

insaint [oops!] about stashing my elves there, but I think the elves were unimpressed with the joke.

[5] Don't follow this link to God's Little Princess Devotional Bible unless you are less annoyed by gender-typing nonsense than I am. *shudder*

[I've not posted this partly because I don't want to jinx it, but at the same time- good news!]

Excellent news even- I have a non-drug remedy for my headaches.

It may have had something to do with:

- a bunch of physio appointments to un-stick a few vertebrae in my neck;
- a few (possibly ineffectual) acupuncture visits with same physiotherapist;

And it definitely had to do with:

- 9 days away at the Quaker confab, including some sort of "stress reset button" when I got handed an entirely different things to fixate on for the time there;
- five minutes with my friend Amy, who is an acupuncturist/acupressure practitioner.
- other factors, such as the very mellow massage I got from

peaceofpie.

But the real biggie was Amy's accupressure points- on Tuesday morning I mentioned to her I was disappointed that the acupuncture back home hadn't had any positive effect, and she said, why don't you try pressing your thumb fingernail on your other hand right [here] in the web next to your thumb? On the right hand if the pain's behind your left eye, and vice-versa? So I did, and blam, the headache went away in under 5 minutes of pressing on my hand! Woah.

I got goosebumps. And the headache came back, and I did it again, and it went away again.

I had read about those pressure-points before, and tried them, to no effect, but I wasn't pressing hard enough, and I didn't have the right part of my hand.

All week I expected the migraines to come back just as bad. Instead they came milder and easier to get rid of. Like magic. And maybe there was magic involved; I don't know what all my friends were doing for me there... :)

All the old triggers are still triggers: not enough sleep, stress... But the pressure-points win over both of them. Wow.

Wednesday as an experiment I spent the afternoon in sun without sunglasses, and I got a dull headache. Yes, a boring dull headache- the kind I remember getting before the migraines took over a few years ago.

The other big factor is stress- on Saturday morning I was feeling quite stressed about travel and having to re-enter normal life again- and the migraine went away with the pressure points, but I found I could affect how it came back, by doing bits of meditation and by telling myself sensible things like "I don't need to do everything on my todo list on the day I get back." "I won't forget my passport again, I've already checked it's in my pocket." And so on.

This has felt like a successful science experiment- at this point I'm dealing with figuring out what I should do with the stress-factors so that they don't even get me to the headaches.

And also, it still feels like magic. And I have yet another thing to be grateful for.

My bike odometer just rolled past 215 miles, which means it's gone a total of 6,215 since I put the odometer on the bike nearly exactly 9 years ago. As

melted_snowball pointed out, that's 10,000 kilometers, so I'm going to reset to kilometers.

I wonder where the next 10k will take us.

Tomorrow, I'm off to IAD (Dulles) and ROA (Roanoke) thence to Virginia Tech for Friends Gathering. This year, as last year, I'm not taking a workshop, as I'm helping out the community instead. The week promises to be very full, very warm (Virginia! Summer! Oy.) and hopefully with surprises of the good kind.

It's been a while since I've made a proper update.

Last weekend's trip to Philadelphia was fairly intense. I have a lot of respect for the organizers of the workshop; they packed a lot into our 44 hours on-site at Pendle Hill, yet it didn't feel rushed or overloaded. We learned more about the nuts and bolts of leading Quaker Quest training workshops, worked in small groups on articulating our own paths with regard to Quaker outreach, and talked about how the group of 30 of us can make the overall project work more smoothly. In the balance, I feel just as strongly that this is a worthwhile project and a good place for me right now.

The only parts of the weekend which were bad-intense were entirely my doing, because sometimes I'm a space-cadet who loses things wot aren't clamped down. *sigh*

One high-point to the trip was meeting some really neat people, some even roughly my age, from all over North America; and reconnecting with other 'Quakes who I've gotten to know and respect more over the last few years.

Another high-point was being picked up at the airport by Carrie G., who introduced me to Alma, who's now 4 5 months old. We went downtown and met up with her partner, Kathleen, and we had some wonderful time together (with ice-cream, plus also really cute sleeping infant) It was great to catch up for an hour; an hour which I thought I'd lost when I missed my first flight- making the meeting even more sweet.

But that was my 48 hours in the Philly area.

And when I got back, dan made us a lobster dinner, because he has an inside scoop with our favourite fish place, and heard they had excellent cheap lobsters. Yummy surprise, that. Go, dan!

Work has been rewarding, for the most part- I'm dividing my time between three software-design projects, and right now the balance is good. One project involves integrating our department's inventory system with the campus DNS, to simplify provisioning new equipment and make less work on updates. Another involves properly synching SSH keys so (among other benefits) instructors can more easily access their course-accounts from off-campus. The third is an Engineering Computing project of doom, which may be able to massage data from across campus into one place, in the formats needed by faculty to apply for grants, prepare their annual activity reports, and a few other creeping features. It may succeed, or it may collapse into a pile of brittle sticks; given the non-standardized data provided (and required) by the different faculties. We'll see.

I've just passed the one-year mark from coming back to CS, and I still like my work, I still like my work environment. Quite a bit, actually. The end of this calendar year will be five years I'm on campus, or more than half my time since moving here. Wow. I hope I can keep being as valuable to the U as I feel like it's been to me.

What else?

I'm going to be trying acupuncture. I met with my physiotherapist last week over coffee, and she pointed me in the right direction. I'll schedule it just as finish as I finish with the next bit of travel in May. I will be sure to report back, since I know some of you are practitioners. (or practitionees?)

For my birthday (which is next Wednesday),

melted_snowball and I are going to Nova Scotia. We're leaving on Tuesday, back the following Wednesday. I'm very much looking forward. The plans are: two nights in Halifax, one night in Baddeck, three nights on the north side of Cape Breton in Pleasant Bay, one night in Truro. d's been patient with my impulse to arrange EVERY LITTLE BIT TO SEE IN THE ENTIRE PROVINCE in just a week. And I'm... actually quite OK with dan's desired agenda of seeing a few sights, doing some road-tripping, eating some excellent food, taking some hikes, and mostly relaxing. (Relax? How's that work?... Heh. Anybody have any tips here? Is there a class I can take on it?... Um. Joking, I think.)

I won't have my laptop, so don't expect much from me next week, even if 3G from my phone happens to work. I'll be too busy eating seafood to post, anyway. :)

The following weekend we're off to Denver to see The Three Bears, and also Other People. Long-planned trip, finally happening. I've never been to Colorado!

And a week after, with a weekend at home again, I'm taking a 3-day Project Management course, way far away at the University's extension office just a few blocks from my house. It should be useful, and there will be two colleagues in the course to trade ideas with also.

I have been keeping up with my friends-list, even if I'm not posting or commenting much. I do appreciate hearing what's up with you all; you inspire me and also give me great stuff to think about; as well as grounding me a bit. So, thanks.

So I'm preparing for my portion of a presentation on Quakers and Equality tomorrow. I did a text search on my computer for something, and it found me this quote.

Bill Hicks:
""I asked this guy, I said, 'Come on man, Dinosaur fossils. What's the deal?' 'Dinosaur fossils? God put those there to test our faith.' 'I think God put you here to test my faith, dude. You believe that?' 'Uh huh.' Does that trouble anyone here? The idea that God might be fuckin' with our heads? Anyone have trouble sleeping restfully with that thought in their heads? God's running around, burrying fossils: 'Hu hu ho. We will see who believes in me now, ha HA. Im a prankster god. I am killing me. Ho ho ho ho.' You know, you die, you go to St. Peter, 'Did you you believe in dinosaurs?" "Well, you know, there was fossils everywhere.' [Bill makes sound effects with his mic] KOOM Aaaahhhh. 'What are you, an idiot? God was FUCKING with you! Giant flying lizards, you moron! That's one of God's easiest jokes!' 'It seemed so plausibleeeee! Ahhhhhhhh!' Bound for the lake of fire. . . .

While I appreciate your quiant traditions, supersitions, and, you know, I on the other hand am an evolved being who deals soley with the source of light which exists in all of us, in our own minds, no middle man required. [laughs] But anyway, I appreciate your little games and shit, you putting on the tie and going to church, a de da de da. But you know there's a LIVING GOD WHO WILL TALK DIRECTLY FUCKING TO YOU-- sorry --not through the pages of the Bible that FORGOT TO MENTION DINOSAURS!" - Revelations (1990's comedy routine)

Maybe I should just play that.

Not figuratively, literally. My bike has developed a (dangerous) tendency to lose its gear, often when I'm starting up from still, and also when I'm coasting. Not the chain, but likely the freewheel, according to

elbie_at_trig, who was conveniently going home at the same time as me, just as I was thinking, "if only I could ask someone to jog along next to my bike..."

So, yeah. Tomorrow morning, cycle shop is my first stop on the way to work.

Otherwise, I feel like I'm not spinning wheels, quite the opposite.

Work is going, and the three active projects are interesting, if potentially long. But the structure of things allows me to interleaving the work, and I can't imagine getting bored with it. Really, this still feels like perfect job for me. And hey, I missed my boss, who was gone a week on vacation, but I can hardly fault her for that.

Life feels adequately social, these last weeks. Care and feeding of my introverted self- it sometimes feels like I need a push, but I'm getting most of what I need.

This Thursday evening is the third and final Quaker Seekers at Laurier session we have planned; we're speaking on Equality. I think there's an LJ post sitting in my brain, to help me organize what I'm saying in my two 6-minute pieces.

Last week I had a conference-call with co-organizers for the Quaker Quest Traveling Team. A month from now I'll be one of two presenters to a regional Quaker gathering, and in early May they're sending me to Pendle Hill for a weekend conference with other trainers. This work feels both like something I'm pulled to do, and a big side-order of "what the hell was I thinking when I said yes?" Where it goes nobody knows, but I am loving the finding out.

In late May

melted_snowball and I are taking a vacation to Nova Scotia for my birthday; it's our first time to Atlantic Canada and I am already having dreams about rocky shorelines and whale-watching.

This week has featured two meals with duck (breast; and burgers), and two meals with pesto. It is a good life, my friends.

I'm midway through installing linux on a mac mini. I'm in love with this hardware; it's so quiet, runs cool, and is barely bigger than my hand. I'm putting Xen-enabled debian onto it, so alongside the web and email services it can run virtual servers such as Asterisk, or possibly freePBX. Anyhow, my coder.com server will move over some time in April, I hope.

Also in April, my geek crew of Perl Mongers are doing a hardware hacking workshop with Arduino microcontroller boards. So far, I've tested sample programs that play a simple tune; flash LEDs; and (sort of) replicate a Clapper but send a signal over USB to computer. My goals are to control a 600x200 pixel LCD display, and to precisely control a stepper-motor to... well, it'll be cool if it works, that's all I will say for now.

So, all you folks who haven't posted about yourselves recently- what's up with you?

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Mambo Taxi

Daniel Allen's Journal

Entries tagged with quaker

It's how the light gets in

Neither Russian, nor Orthodox.

Ithaca

Last Weekend, part 2 of 2

a ramble

On ending migraines

10,000

Days and weeks

Dinosaurs

Spinning Wheels...