Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • Hummingbirds Squeak under a Waning Moon… and Other Observations

      Cool enough for a fleece this morning. It seems summer is tilting away faster by the day. The white noise buzz of crickets fills in. Other sounds penetrate. Cars in the distance getting an early start. Birds like my old friend the Brown Thrasher announce their presence, if further away than in July.

      The mornings are especially active now. The bees and hummingbirds flitter from honeysuckle to basil gone to flower and on to the next. Each have a unique sound; not shockingly bees buzz and hummingbirds, well, their wings hum as they zip by you. I smile when the hummingbirds squeak at each other, a chorus of animated bird banter filling the yard. They largely ignore me as I sip coffee and take in the show. As if to mirror them, the squirrels are jumping tree to tree dropping acorns and hickory nuts that thump to the ground for collection later. Two scratch around my favorite white oak tree on the planet, chasing each other in young squirrel frivolity with their own chirping chorus.

      Looking up, the Waning Crescent moon greets me in a crisp blue sky. This is September blue, always embedded on my mind these last 18 years, a reference point anyone around here that day will understand. A reference point from New England to New Jersey. That day remembered in random moments like this, then gently put aside. There’s a collective joy about September in New England, with an undercurrent of sadness for the summer fading away and change in the air. But it’s still August, even if it feels like we’ve crossed. Seasons come and go, and it feels time for summer to move along too.

      Back on earth, there are a few more tomatoes to harvest, a thriving and ironic grape harvest after my public shaming in the spring, fading flowers and herbs to contend with. Like the squirrels I’ve got to get my act together and do some work to prepare for the cooler days and changes ahead. My fingers are cold from sitting outside a layer short of comfortable. Time to move. So much to do and it stirs a restlessness inside of me. But first another coffee.

    • Breaking Free of Spreadsheet Travel

      “Buddhists believe that we live our everyday lives as if inside an eggshell.  Just as an unhatched chicken has few clues about what life is truly like, most of us are only vaguely aware of the greater world that surrounds us.” – Rolf Potts, Vagabonding

      I’ve been re-reading Vagabonding again.  It’s been about ten years since I read it the first time, and I’m discovering it anew.  At first glance a travel bible, on further review there’s a good dose of stoicism and hard-won pragmatism in this book that I appreciate more now than when I read it the first time.  As with re-reading Walden, it offers something new with every stage of life.

      When we confirmed an upcoming trip to London and Scotland in late October, I immediately started scanning the lists of things to see in each place, lists of experiences others felt worthwhile enough to put at the top of a list. Then came planning the foundational stuff like hotels, Airbnb and traditional Bed & Breakfast reservations, which put us in specific places at specific times. Then came the logistical stuff like car rentals, trains and ferries, amount of daylight at that time of year, the hours of distilleries and let’s not forget the typical weather. Not so much London, where other than the hotel I’m planning on winging it and relying on my daughter to show us her favorite places, but Scotland… Scotland has been heavily researched. I’ve watched just about every YouTube video you can imagine, plotted travel times and scrutinized street views, until finally I’d had enough. It was sucking all the joy out of the anticipation this trip offered.

      “With escape in mind, vacationers tend to approach their holiday with a grim resolve, determined to make their experience live up to their expectations; on the vagabonding road, you prepare for the long haul knowing that the predictable and the unpredictable, the pleasant and the unpleasant are not separate but part of the same ongoing reality.” – Rolf Potts, Vagabonding

      I’m not this way with other travel. When I went to Newfoundland I didn’t plan my every move on a spreadsheet, I booked a place to stay, went to the meetings I needed to go to and asked the locals where they recommended I visit beyond that. Simply talking to the locals about what their favorite place is has led me to some amazing waterfalls, restaurants and historic sites I might not have seen living off a spreadsheet.  But Scotland…  Scotland holds a dear place in my heart.  And so I over-planned with eager anticipation.  Vagabonding woke me up once again, and having done what I had to do with the rough framework of our trip, I’ll leave the rest to the whims of the road.  I’m eager to give driving a stick with the opposite hand.  Hopefully that doesn’t distract me from actually staying on the road.  There’s so much to see.

       

       

    • Songs That Jolt Me Back to Vibrancy

      Life can be measured by the songs you pick up along the way.  The soundtrack of our lives, as the saying goes.  I’ll always remember moments in life when I hear a specific song, because to me the soundtrack of your life makes the moment itself.  DJ’s know this of course, and play specific songs to as a highlight real moment or to get the party kicking into another gear.  I play the DJ in my own life party.  I’m always listening for the song of the moment.  There’s magic in that moment, if you’ll only embrace it.

      Give It All You’ve Got will always remind me of the 1980 Winter Olympics, just as Oh Very Young will always remind me of a pinning ceremony for graduating nurses in 1986, and Change the World will always remind me of an old building that used to be a movie theater where I saw Phenomenon with my wife well before we had kids.  And these are largely tangental songs in the march through my time on this planet.  The highlight reel songs are more profound still, and offer insight into our lives at any given moment on the timeline.

      So it’s with great excitement and joy when a new gem of a song comes into my life.  If travel and reading history reminds you of what you don’t know yet, hearing an incredible song that is new to you reminds you of how many great songs are out there, waiting to be discovered.  A great song punctuates the moment, as whatever the designated “song of the summer” does for many.

      Complicating things for me is that I don’t rely on whatever the Top 40 cotton candy hit of the moment is.  In fact I actively avoid it, searching instead for the truly great songs that are just below the surface, or hidden in some dive bar juke box.  The songs aren’t always new, just new to me.  Appearing in random places in my travels, they grab hold of your ears and won’t let go.  The reaction is generally “wow, who is THAT?!” which leads to an immediate Shazam to lock it in.  These gems become a part of the growing soundtrack of my life from that point on.  Here an eclectic mix of five songs, old to relatively new, that smacked me in the forehead and demanded I listen:

      Madness, Muse – First time I heard this song two jobs ago on an early sunny morning in Las Vegas, just me and this song and a Venti dark roast, with the occasional slot machine bell ringing in the background.  But it was this song and me, locked in until the end before I moved on with my day, but not on from this song.  It stays with me still.

      Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home, Keely Smith and Louis Prima – Heard this in a big, open public space in Manhattan, maybe not for the first time, but hearing it for the first time.  I Shazam’ed and downloaded it on the spot and it has appeared on certain playlists ever since.

      still feel, half.alive – First saw this just last week on Tiny Desk and absolutely had to know more about this band.  Watch all three songs on Tiny Desk and you’ll be smiling.  Their music video is worth watching even if this isn’t your style of music. For another treat watch them perform still feel on Jimmy Kimmel.  Songs like this is like a double espresso for me, jolting me back to vibrancy and giving me hope for the future of music.

      Johnny Wants to Be a Matador, Rene Lopez – First heard this in a hotel lobby in Nashville, Tennessee, confirming for me that Nashville is indeed a great music town if I was hearing a song this good in some random Hilton hotel downtown.  A song like this makes me look at Top 40 as the scam it is.

      Lucky Man, Courtney John – From the soundtrack of Chef, this song is ten years old as I write this, but feels timeless.  I wish it had been in my life for that decade, but sometimes you need someone to bring it to your attention (Thanks Jon Favreau).

      There you go, five songs on the ever expanding playlist.  As long as it continues to grow life will be vibrant for me.  And vibrancy is what it’s all about.

       

       

    • Empty Nest

      Sunday night. Terminal E, shipping off our daughter to London.

      Bags checked.

      Checklists checked.

      Dinner done.

      Last minute advice.

      Hugs and love expressed.

      Pictures.

      It’s time.

      Fly.

    • Falmouth Road Race

      The race started at one bar and ran to another bar seven miles away. It’s started in 1972 with less than 100 runners and has grown massively popular, with a lottery to get in. The bars have changed, but they’re still there. I used to visit the Captain Kidd before it changed, but never got to the Brothers Four before it became British Beer Works; a place I’ve been known to frequent when down here.

      For the fifth year in a row I drove runners to the Lawrence School in Falmouth to catch the bus to Woods Hole for the start. I’ve experimented with staying in Falmouth and going to a local diner, but three hours is a lot of time to kill and this time I end up coming back instead. Today I came back to Pocasset for breakfast with my son before returning to watch the race. Each year I stand near the Falmouth Heights Motor Lodge, which offers both an excellent view of the runners and a quick walk to the finish line where you can see your favorites again as they cross the finish line.

      This year was hazy, hot and humid. The crowd supporting the runners ebbed and flowed in enthusiasm (try clapping for an hour straight), spiking for larger clusters of runners, wheelchair competitors, children, and cheerleader runners (the runners who raise their arms and prompt the crowd, igniting roars). I tracked my favorite runners on the app, and helped others to my left and right find their favorites on the course. What did we do before apps? We waited and wondered, that’s what we did.

      Runners train all year for a race like Falmouth. Spectators don’t, but maybe we should. Spectaculars shuttle those runners to the buses, fight the crowds for a glimpse of their favorites, then try to find them in the sea of humanity at the finish to shuttle them home. There’s no glamour in being a spectator, but it has its rewards. For me it was the swim after we returned. Hours of madness to earn a ten minute swim in Buzzards Bay. But it works for me.

      So another Falmouth is in the books. It’s become quite a family tradition, as it is for so many others. I’m not a runner, but if I were going to be this would be the race. Seven scenic miles, throngs of cheering spectators, elite runners mixed with the couple next door. Yeah, this is the race I’d run, if I ran. Maybe next year.

    • Dog Days

      This is the big weekend on the Cape, with the Falmouth Road Race pulling in thousands of runners. It’s big in Pocasset too this weekend, bursting at the seams. The house was full of dogs this morning. And people. But the dogs steal the show as usual.

      Beach work and gardening to earn a swim. Tread water for 20 minutes, bobbing like a buoy on the rollers. Summer days of salt, sun and sand. Sailboats quietly cruise by. Power boats buzz by too, with too-loud conversations over the engine noise. Yes, sound carries over water.

      A moment of quiet now, waves lapping on the beach, deck umbrella creaks as it twists to and fro, runners gone to check in and pick up numbers. Half the dog population and their people have gone home. A few of us remain, holding down the fort. Witnesses to the parade of boats floating back and forth. Sun warming all. These are the dog days of summer. They never last, and changes are coming too soon. Today is all we have, and with that in mind, it’s a lovely place to spend it.

    • Pizza Box Magic

      Pizza is a wonder food for the delight it brings in such a simple formula. A little dough, a little sauce. Top it with a few favorites and you’re on your way to blissful eating. But the most extraordinary, magical thing about pizza is the preservative effect it has on the whole. Think about it, if you left a dish full of cooked meat on the countertop all night you wouldn’t eat it cold the next morning. More often than not you’d throw it away! But not so that same meat on a pizza. You’d eat it without blinking an eye, sometimes cold, and sometimes a second day later. Try that with a piece of bread left on the counter.

      Maybe it’s pizza’s version of the Holy Trinity. Instead of onions, peppers and celery it’s dough, sauce and cheese preserves a pizza indefinitely. But then again maybe it’s something else, hiding right under our noses. I think maybe the box holds the secret. There’s magic in that box; fending of bacteria, staleness and hungry cats alike. A cardboard force field keeping evil at bay. Want to live forever? Move into a pizza box. But please, hold the anchovies.

    • A Successful Repetition

      I was chewing on a page in an old book last weekend that’s stayed with me.  The words don’t flow, but the concept is profound.  Consider:

      “What is a repetition?  A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle….  Nothing of consequence would have happened because [something] was exactly as it was before.  There remained only time itself, like a yard of smooth peanut brittle.”  – Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

      This concept of what Percy calls a repetition interests me.  In a generally accept it as fact because I’ve experienced it myself sort of way.  Something of a time warp, it places you and an object of focus together at two moments in time, sometimes decades between.  It’s visiting the neighborhood you grew up in twenty years later and seeing things are largely the same, but knowing there’s been millions of changes in the world in between previous and present time.  The reaction of walking into a room and saying “wow, this place hasn’t changed at all.”  Cleaning out the attic and coming across some object of affection from thirty years ago that immediately reconnects you to that moment as if the previous you reached through the object and pulled you in.

      This isn’t a same time next year phenomenon, that’s too short a time span. No, better to have a couple of decades elapse and then boom! It hits you. Serendipity plays a part – there are many places I envision as they were, and going back to them now only highlights the changes. No, this is the realization that smacks you in the forehead as you look at something and fly back in time to that previous you that experienced it then. A bridge between times if you will.

      I’m working through this theory as a couple of catbirds mock me with their cries. Nothing is the same of course!, they cry.  We change both physically and mentally, and even an object of focus has changed at some molecular level. More brittle perhaps. But, I counter, on the whole the same. The same in relation to the rate of transformation in the world.

      The catbirds grow louder. Bear with me I want to tell them (I’ve learned they pretend not to care what I say). Think about a moment when you’ve seen an old friend you haven’t seen in decades, at a funeral or wedding. You’ve both changed in countless ways, but in that moment of reconnection nothing has changed. It’s as if you were resuming the conversation you ended on way back when. And that moment of reconnection becomes a successful repetition. Time evaporates, things are as they were, and will be forever… or at least until the next successful repetition.

    • Felling the Tree

      “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to be.” – James Clear

      This morning the snooze alarm went off well before I was prepared to get up. I don’t use the snooze button mind you; don’t believe in it. You’re either sleeping or you’re getting up. But my wife uses the snooze button often as part of her wake-up routine. Thankfully most days I’m up well before her alarm would go off. Today was an exception. Feeling a bit worn out I was going to sleep in, until the second snooze convinced me it wasn’t possible.

      This morning I operated in slow motion. Foggy and some aches and pains. I slowly dressed to work out, walked downstairs and drank a pint of water. The internal dialogue trending towards bagging the morning workout and doing it later in the day.  I’ve heard this song before and point my feet towards the basement door, down thirteen steps and onto the erg for a row.  I row 500 meters to warm up and assess my overall condition.  My assessment isn’t good, but I stand after 500 meters and warm up the shoulders.  More aches…  but I ignore them and drop down for the burpees, slower than usual but complete, row another piece and call it a workout.  I’ve done the bare minimum, cast my vote and I’m back upstairs.  I hear the snooze going off upstairs and look at the clock.  60 minutes of snooze buttoning.  Yikes.

      On to reading stoicism, a bit of an article on Ben Franklin in London, and a bit of writing this before my wife is downstairs and off for her commute.  Habits carried the morning for me even as the mind rebelled.  The James Clear quote above stays with me more than anything else in his excellent book.  Simple, memorable wisdom in a bite-sized chunk.  I wish I’d written that.  Instead I write other words, casting votes for the type of person I wish to be.  I’m closing in on 100,000 words written in this blog, and a few thousand burpees.  I need to move beyond the bare minimum workout, which means changing other habits later in the day.  Win the morning, lose the evening and it’s a wash.  Life is too short for a wash.  With only 142 days left in 2019 there’s so much to do still.  Why settle for the bare minimum?

      I joined a group challenge with co-workers.  We all travel, and we all struggle with the balance of exercise versus caloric intake that the job seems to demand.  We’ve all agreed to lose ten pounds by the time we reach a trade show in Chicago next month or pay $20 bucks and hear about it from those who were successful.  Nothing focuses the mind like peer pressure, so I’m all in on this challenge.  But I noticed I gave myself a pass last week (after all I had five weeks to complete the challenge).  I recognized this trend – it reminded me of pulling all nighters to complete papers in college.  Wait until the last minute, then put yourself through hell to reach a goal.  You won’t fell the tree with one swing of the axe…  I like the more intelligent approach of consistent, daily action and the compound effect, and so an incremental increase in daily workload to reach the goal is in order.  Keeping it going for the rest of the 142 days offers a head start on 2020, a nice round number with some big moments scheduled.

      I’ve always been intrigued with the concept of accelerating through the curve.  In racing that means slowing down in the first half of the apex and accelerating in the second half. Using momentum to your advantage.  In life momentum starts with casting consistent, daily votes.  That applies in your career, with exercise and weight loss, and writing.  The lack of momentum also applies in each of these areas, so why build anchors when you can build kites?  Or to return to that zen philosophy, you need to chop for a long time to fell the tree, you can’t do it with one swing.

    • State Change

      Everything has changed. Well almost everything. New sounds; I’ve never heard that dog bark before. The rumble and back-up beeping of construction equipment is new too. Seems to be road work happening at the top of the hill. A young squirrel is working the oak tree in the neighbors’ yard and there’s a constant drip of acorns plummeting through the leaves and thumping onto the ground.  Seems early for the dropping acorns but the squirrel seems to know more than I do about the matter.

      Some birds remain, like the brown thrasher I spent all summer trying to figure out. But the bluebirds are gone, and with them the feeling of early summer. Some new birds sing but I can’t place them. Migrating from someplace to another destination, with a quick stop in my neighborhood. I don’t know birds like I know some other things. But the more I know about anything the less I seem to know about that very thing.  Such is the way of the world.  I’ve learned to respect the journey of self-education, and hate myself for falling into the trap of thinking I know everything about anything.  Worse still is acting so.  Better to be open to the world around you; a sponge not a bullhorn.  There are far too many bullhorns already.

      Autumn is in the air. I felt it on Buzzards Bay as the winds shifted. This is first day of school bus stop air, and we aren’t yet halfway through August. And here in New Hampshire with the cool, humid air and white noise background buzz of crickets singing their late summer song.  Getting outside away from media opens the senses and the mind alike.  But other changes are in the air. A quarter of the family flying to London soon state change kind of air.  Another quarter entering senior year in college kind of air.  And what are we doing in this big house with all this stuff kind of air.

      Gone for a week and everything is different.  It would have been different if I’d been here too, but the daily gradual change isn’t noticed the way it is when you step away for a bit. Everything changes constantly. And so do I. A little for the better in some ways, a little for the worse in others, but generally more growth than decline. We all know what the ultimate end game is, but that doesn’t mean you have to live like you’re dead already. I know too many people who live in virtual bubble wrap, watching the world pass them by. I want to shake them loose, and whatever cobwebs I’ve grown myself, and shout “Embrace the changes; there’s magic in the air if you’ll only feel it!”

      I have a drive to Connecticut to get to.  That drive brings me from New Hampshire through Massachusetts to Connecticut, then the reverse this evening for the drive back.  Four hour round trip drive time, and more like seven hours with meetings thrown in the mix.  I could probably stay overnight in Connecticut, but there are compelling reasons to get back home this week, and so I’ll do the round trip instead.  My state change is both literal and figurative today.  But I do enjoy the journey.