Alexandersmap

    Month: January 2019

    • Control

      Control

      Some things are in our control, while others are not.  We control our opinion, choice, desire, aversion, and, in a word, everything of our own doing.  We don’t control our body, property, reputation, position, and, in a word, everything not of our own doing.  Even more, the things in our control are by nature free, unhindered, and unobstructed, while those not in our control are weak, slavish, can be hindered, and are not our own.” – Epictetus

      Know what’s not in my control tonight?  The Internet connection is down.  My reaction?  Type this abbreviated blog post on my phone and save the big stuff for another day.

    • Empty Houses

      Cape Cod and other places that are chock full of tourists in summer are incredibly empty in the dead of winter.  Last night I drove to the Cape for a quick night in Pocasset before driving to Providence, Rhode Island for an early meeting this morning.  I noticed a few things in my drive last night.  First, there were very few cars keeping me company on the highway.  Second, almost every business was closed by 10 PM, when I was driving through.  And finally, I noticed the empty houses.

      Cape Cod in winter has thousands of empty houses.  All of them dormant and patiently waiting for the return of their tenants.  Empty houses are dark, cold and lonely soldiers all lined up along the side of the road.  Coming across the few houses that are lit up with life adds a little cheer to an otherwise drab January commute.  Entire neighborhoods are empty, giving a lifeless, end of days appearance to what I’ve usually acquainted with on these streets.
      For one night, I had the family house lit up as a beacon to those who would look for life on a dormant street.  Tonight the house returns to stillness, like the rows of houses around it.  I’ll be back again soon to bring life back to the street, and hope that next time I won’t be carrying the torch alone.

    • The Price of Time

      The Price of Time

      Foggy mist is socking in Bristol, Rhode Island tonight.  I’m here to watch a basketball game, or more accurately see Ian for a couple of hours and talk to him for a couple of minutes.  The time investment is always significant when you have active kids, but I don’t mind the price.

      I remember my mother commenting on the hours she invested to watch me row by for a couple of minutes.  I didn’t really factor in the time they were allocating to watch me row by and grunt at them afterwards, but I’ve learned in the years since.

      Hopefully the temperature drops or the precipitation dries up and the drive to the Cape isn’t 50 miles of white knuckle.  But I’m here and committed either way.  People don’treally understand what you’d do for your kids until you have them.

    • Warmer Winters

      We happen to be having a relatively mild winter this year.  Last year was a different story.  Next year may be the coldest ever recorded for all I know.  But on the whole the trend seems to be towards warmer winters.  I read once about the early settlers in the New England region ice skating on the Merrimack River from Newburyport up to Haverhill.  The river in the stretch is tidal and brackish water.  It’s hard for me to comprehend a winter, or a series of winters, when this stretch of river would freeze enough to safely skate.  But then, our winters are different now than they once were.

      I’ve contemplated the impact of obliquity on the winters over the last 300 years.  If settlers were skating on a frozen Merrimack River in 1719, what is the impact of axial tilt on our ability to do the same in 2019?  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer in the impact of mankind on climate change, but how much is that impact exacerbated by obliquity?  I ran into this quote on NASA’s Earth Observatory site that describes the impact over time:

      “As the axial tilt increases, the seasonal contrast increases so that winters are colder and summers are warmer in both hemispheres. Today, the Earth’s axis is tilted 23.5 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the sun. But this tilt changes. During a cycle that averages about 40,000 years, the tilt of the axis varies between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees. Because this tilt changes, the seasons as we know them can become exaggerated. More tilt means more severe seasons—warmer summers and colder winters; less tilt means less severe seasons—cooler summers and milder winters. It’s the cool summers that are thought to allow snow and ice to last from year-to-year in high latitudes, eventually building up into massive ice sheets. There are positive feedbacks in the climate system as well, because an Earth covered with more snow reflects more of the sun’s energy into space, causing additional cooling.” – NASA, referencing Milutin Milankovitch 

      The question I have is whether 300 years is enough time to have the dramatic impact, or whether we’ve sunk our own boat through carbon emissions?  The impact of obliquity takes thousands of years.  And yet there’s a significant difference in the types of winters we have today versus what we had roughly 15 generations ago.  These are the questions that stir the inner scientist in me.  Far more than whatever my teachers were dumping on me in school ever stirred me.  It’s all about the questions you ask yourself when it comes to learning…  or life.

       

    • Rail Trails

      Rail Trails

      Today I took an eight mile walk on the Windham Rail Trail with my wife.  The trail segment is four miles long and cuts through ledge and over low areas that were built up to level the rail bed.  This section of railroad was originally opened in 1849 and stopped running in the 1970’s.  At the time the technology was by far the most efficient mode of travel, and in some cases it still is.  That efficiency made it worthwhile to undertake the massive manpower project that was the laying of this rail bed.  Just the blasting and moving of ledge must have been a massive project.  Add in miles of building up low areas to that and it must have been backbreaking work.

      Today the trains are gone, replaced by power walkers, joggers, families on bicycles and dog walkers. The occasional house peaks through the trees, but for the most part you’re out in the woods, and it feels like a world away from the strip malls of Route 28.  The highlights of this trail are the long cuts through granite ledge, the water views of Flatrock Brook and Mitchell Pond, and the ghosts of the working railroad that still exist in the quiet forest.  Railroad ties stacked on the side of the trail are slowly returning to the earth as moss and wood rot eat away at the timber.  Walls made from the ledge kept a hill from creeping onto the railroad bed for decades, and now serve that purpose for the trail.

      The segment of rail trail that we walked on was once part of the Manchester and Lawrence Branch.  Eventually Boston & Maine picked up this segment in 1887, but eventually the entire branch was abandoned.  Nonprofit corporations were formed to raise funds for paving and maintaining the segments.  Today there’s a great stretch of paved rail bed from Methuen, Massachusetts all the way up into Derry, New Hampshire.

      Rail trails are popping up everywhere.  Candidly I rarely think to use them, and wish I’d done so years before.  I remember walking along old railroad beds long abandoned in other parts of New Hampshire and Massachusetts.  Re-purposing those beds into rail trails is a great way to make open space accessible for everyone.  The stretch in Windham is a beautiful example of that and that’s opened my eyes to the opportunity to explore more of these trails.

    • Late Bloomers

      I was doing some yard work this week and stopped to consider the roses.  I have these tea roses that bloom constantly throughout the summer and well into the fall.  It’s got these masses of light pink, fragrant blooms at its peak in June.  With a relatively mild autumn, we had blooms much later into the season than usual.  But some of the rosebuds waited too long to bloom, and were frozen in place.

      We hear a lot in culture about late bloomers.  Colonel Sanders comes to mind.  And there’s a place for late bloomers in culture and in nature alike.  But there’s a lesson in the roses too.  Don’t wait too long to bloom, or you may die with unfinished potential.

    • Time Travel

      As we speak cruel time is fleeing.  Seize the day, believing as little as possible in the morrow.” 
                                                                                            – Horace

      “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” – William Penn

      January 4th.  Working this week is almost as challenging as working last week was.  Short weeks are always tough, but add in that most people are on vacation or working on their plan for the year and the productivity in a given week goes out the window.  Working the tools of the trade – Salesforce CRM, bullet journal, Getting Things Done methodology – helps but some weeks are more off the rails than others.  I’ve entered the Friday afternoon Bermuda Triangle of productivity.  I look up and it’s after 3 PM and I’ve checked one out of five boxes on my bullet journal to-do list.

      I’ve tried many methods, but to me the Bullet Journal combined with GTD methodology is working the best for me.  If I had all the money I spent on productivity tools over the years I’d be able to retire early.  Best to keep it simple.  Right it down immediately in a bullet form, cross it off when you finish it, move it forward if you don’t.  Keep it simple…

      For a short, unfocused week, I’ve managed to get a few things done.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty to do, but you need to celebrate the small successes when you achieve them.  After all, there’s always something else that needs to be done.  If you waited until it was all done you’d never celebrate anything.

    • Coating to an Inch

      There’s mental math that you do when you live in New England.  When the forecast calls for snow followed by temperatures above freezing, you need to decide the cutoff point where you ignore or clear the snow accumulated on the driveway.  Today is a classic case of just enough accumulation – more than a coating – to consider scraping it off the driveway and deck.  My default after years of experience is that you clean the driveway and enjoy the warming trend later.  Don’t count on a melt-off, because New England weather can dash your dreams quickly.

      I’ve had plenty of coating to an inch storms that I’ve decided to let Mother Nature “just melt” that have haunted me later.  That warming trend doesn’t materialize, the meteorologist shrugs and marvels at the way the front came through and I’m left with a skating rink for a driveway.  No, best to clear the driveway and deck and just call it a light workout.

      There have been some business trips where I’ve come home and the residents of the home have determined that the math worked in their favor.  That’s when ice melt becomes your ally.  When the equation turns to despair, you introduce ten to twenty pounds of salt to the driveway.  This is a safety net, but not the preferred way of doing things.  This paragraph is curmudgeon talk.  Best to just keep your mouth shut, clean the driveway as best you can and wait a day to three weeks until the next warming trend melts off the discretion.

    • Robert Rogers

      Robert Rogers

      Robert Rogers was born in Methuen, Massachusetts – twenty minutes from where I currently live.  His family moved to what was then the wilderness of Dunbarton, New Hampshire a few years later.  Rogers is famous for leading a group of colonists in the French and Indian War.  There are some who will point to his debts, drinking and war atrocities committed against women and children.  These are very much the darker part of his story.  But Rogers was very good at what he did, which is taking the fight to the French and Native America populations during war.  In war you need strong leaders, and Rogers was certainly that, leading Roger’s Rangers to fame that lasts to this day.

      I first learned about Roger’s Rangers when I was a kid watching the movie Northwest Passage.  I haven’t seen that movie in 40 years, but I’ve read up on Rogers, and everything I read makes me want to learn more about this guy.  Rogers and his Rangers wore green uniforms and did epic raids and scouting missions across vast and hostile wilderness.  Roger’s Rangers were the origin of what is now the United States Army Rangers.  Live off the land, shrug off hardship and discomfort and get the job done.

      Perhaps the most epic story I read about Rogers Rangers – and there are many – is a mission when they skated across Lake George, switched to snowshoes and trekked across snow covered forest for miles.  These were tough, athletic and versatile men who never saw a mission that they didn’t want to tackle.  On another snowshoeing mission they ambushed the enemy deep in hostile territory, only to be ambushed themselves.  Rogers and many of the Rangers managed to escape by holding off the French and Native Americans until dark, separating into smaller groups and melting into the wilderness.

      By all accounts, Rogers was a brilliant soldier who adopted Native American tactics to create his own form of fighting.  Today people talk about Navy Seals with awe.  Frankly I do as well.  Rogers Rangers would hold a place of honor at the table of military heroes in America’s history.  Many of the tactics used in the armed forces today originated with Robert Rogers.  In fact, Rogers “Rules of Ranging” are still followed by the U.S. Army Rangers of today.

      Rogers was a hero of the French and Indian War, but like many soldiers he struggled after the war.  Debt, scandal, alcoholism and war crimes muddied his reputation after the war and in the years since.   During the Revolutionary War he took the British side, and it’s said that he was the one who recognized Nathan Hale (“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”) when he was spying on the British in New York.  Hale was hanged soon afterwards.  New Hampshire, which Rogers did as much to protect as anyone during the French and Indian War, expelled him as a Tory.  He would die in poverty in London.

    • New Year’s Day

      2019 has begun in earnest and there’s no time to waste.  Things to do, places to see, books to read, people to meet, friends and family to reconnect with, work to accomplish.  The flipping of the calendar signifies many things but it does mark change, if only in a number.
      “I will begin again” – U2, New Year’s Day
      The morning after the celebration, for those who didn’t celebrate too much, is chock full of promise.  New habits or the banishment of old habits, goals to accomplish, changes to make in the way you live your life.  Really, every morning offers this opportunity.  Every day you wake up is a clean slate, and offers the promise of the coming day.
      “When you see the Southern Cross for the first time
      You understand now why you came this way
      ‘Cause the truth you might be runnin’ from is so small
      But it’s as big as the promise, the promise of a comin’ day”
                                          – Crosby, Stills & Nash, Southern Cross
      Those lyrics remain burned in me like cattle prod, and poke at me now and then to get out in the world.  Just as the movie Local Hero does.  They serve as a catalyst and travel and some form of adventure must follow soon after each taps me between the ears.  I need to pay penance first with work to do at home, in Pocasset and in my job, but sure as the calendar changes on January 1 I’ll be off somewhere again, finding adventure where I may.