These days, the ones where you work twelve or thirteen hours, these days are going to pay off.  OK maybe not in dollars.  Or maybe not in respect or position or stature, either.  OK what then?  Self-respect?  Don't think so.  Personal satisfaction; yeah that's got to be it.  Some Eagle Scout sense of selfless fulfillment.  Maybe if it was thirteen hours in a soup kitchen.  Thirteen hours, a daily 1/100,000th of a hundredth of a dollar change in stock price.  OK so yeah it's not all toil and not a scrap of enjoyment.  The chase; the race; the smugness of high performance.

More and more I want to steal some time back and writing gives me that.  If I'm sitting here writing I'm not working or thinking about work.  More: I've been wanting to write.  I get home and I think about what I might write.  I email one-line ideas to myself when I'm on the go.  Motivation is a strange thing.  Did you know that during the "break" this year, the one I may or may not still be on, I let the ten year anniversary of this blog pass silently by?  Earlier in the year I had big plans for that September date... was going to do some big self-indulgent "look back" kind of feature... go all out.  Alas, it came and went unnoticed whilst I wasn't writing.

Like I said, thought to day about how I wanted to write tonight; wrote tonight.  To me that's good.

We're off, traveling again for weeks running, this weekend.  Away from work for a while.  Look for me.

Goodnight.

Worked from home today, mostly out of fear that yesterday's stomach bug might'nt have fully passed through my system.  Seems like it was an overly-cautious move, as it's back to normal in the bowel movement department and I'm craving spicy burritos again.  There are times where I've been sick in the past and wondered, "Could that have been food poisoning?"  This time, I knew it was food poisoning.

It's OK.  Despite being on meetings all day, working from home, or "WFH" as we say, can have perks.  Take for example the fact that, until sometime between noon and 1pm at least, I was able to work with the house thrown open and fresh air all around me.  More, I situate myself next to the sliding door into the backyard and get direct sun from about 9am onward.  You know, thinking about it, I haven't had a shirt on all day.  Counting the hours I was asleep last night, that means I've been free from the shackles of the foreign textile industry now for almost thirty hours now - a feat for a modern American (at least from the waist up).  Also kinda rad to have done all my business meetings shirtless.

Cavemen conducted all their business shirtless, too.  Braining other cavemen, spearing fish, dragging cavewomen by the hair for coitus; all sans their Hanes.  Today I talked about frequency domain simulations, shirtless.  Never before have I been so close to my neanderthal kin.  One blood, cavemen; one blood.

Night.

It's not that I was nervous about going back to work... but a bit hesitant about diving in and trying to drink from the firehose.  Didn't matter, in the end, as I came upon a jury duty summons while sifting through the pile of mail which accrued during our holiday.  So I sat there today, reading, working on Keaton's last video, thinking.  I thought a lot about the trip; how lucky we were to be able to take it, how smoothly it went, how it managed to change my perspective just a bit.  To a degree, I think I was wanting to run away from normal... run away and take shelter in the little family we've built.  Being there, hidden away in a box just the four of us, was blissfully awesome.  To function so highly together, to enjoy our own company... something about it was almost therapeutic.  Sorry, I could talk about it for paragraphs.  I'll stop.

So I whiled away the day at the county courthouse.  I met a woman, I figure she was about 300lbs, although I'm not sure how here weight is relevant.  She was complaining bitterly about the whole thing.  "I don't know why they keep us so long," she lamented.  "They ain't never gonna pick me, my husband is a convicted felon and my dad was too."  This left me, not being a guy who runs with many felons, lacking a proper response.  It's so tempting, to slip into some least-common-denominator type conversation.  I could've said, "I watched a Dateline about felons once," or, "I learned about felonies in Civics class," y'know, to establish some common ground.    Instead I just found myself slightly sad that she was registered to vote.  For new readers, here's the part of almost every paragraph I write where I go back and dilute my own writing by playing devil's advocate: In the end I shouldn't be too critical though, I don't know that woman - she could be a heavyset saint who just keeps bad company.

Being on the road and not writing regularly felt odd, good-odd, but I like writing.  Double-down then, back to the keyboard and blank page and trying to bang out some good reading - things have been mundane.  Stupid brain turns vacations into "being behind" upon return.  Fix this and get back to that and do this so that can be all ready.  First-world problems... flowing like the clean, potable water which flows unabated from the five taps in my house's central plumbing.  Malaria?  They cured that, right?  That one president invented a vaccine, I think.

Goodnight.

I can scarcely comprehend it at this point.  It still doesn't feel real.  I went out for beers with a friend tonight, we needed to catch-up, been too long.  We had a few drinks and talked about things and now I'm back home listening to Sonic Youth's "Teenage Riot" on repeat.  A masterpiece of early indie which emotes perfectly where I'm at right now.  Seven weeks! Today the RV place called me to let me know they were "readying" our coach; cleaning, preparing, tuning.  It was just another sign; an earthquake or a plague of locusts or the seas turned red as blood.  The tip is nigh!  Noah knew, so can you!

What's more, around 1pm today I stopped what I was doing at work and took stock for minute to realize... I was done.  My mile-long list, my ambitious pre-trip to-dos, everything: finished.  All done one day early.  A whole day to spare.  A giddy feeling overcame me as I realized that I'd done it - I'd bested almost all of the guilt over leaving by getting things done and readied and left in the best state possible for my absence.  As we shirts at the sawmill are fond of saying, I did my "due diligence."  And I was proud.  Proud that I didn't short-time the whole thing, proud that I gave my best until the last, proud that I wasn't "abandoning" things without at least giving them a push in the right direction.

We pickup the vehicle Friday morning.  Our friends are throwing us a farewell fête that same evening which I am very much looking forward to, and am planning to actually drive the RV to.  Saturday is pack-up the vehicle day.  The plan for Sunday, departure day, is to drive the thing to church for early service and then actually hit the road immediately afterward.  From God's parking lot then, it begins with just one step.  I am nervous and excited and thrilled to have enough time away from work to truly forget and disconnect.  That... that I am looking forward to.

Enough three-beer writing... it never looks as good in the morning anyway.

Goodnight folks and goodbye work.

Next blog here should be from the road... Keaton's blog will be updated before that.

The friend Sharaun had lined-up to watch Keaton and Cohen Monday so I could go into work called Sunday evening to tell me that her own kid was sick.  Fever, up-chucking, the whole nine yards.  Without any time to secure alternate options, I fell on my sword and decided to try and do the whole workday from home with both kids.  This, friends, is not easy - particularly if you have a precious four workdays left before leaving for seven weeks and need every minute to be bursting with productivity.  I did my best, and would say I was about 85% as good as I could've been at my desk.

Keaton, bless her, truly bless her, helped me entertain Cohen.  In exchange I delegated her parenting to Disney cartoons, computer time, and coloring.  I felt bad about it, but I had no choice in the matter.  Thankfully she handled it well and really did manage to keep herself busy (and not all of it was in front of the TV, either... she played dollhouse and colored and even spent some time practicing reading).  She can be an absolute angel when she wants to.  With the exception of the thirty minutes between noon and 12:30pm I had meetings all day.  My ears hurt from the earbuds I use to take calls (Bluetooth is terrible; never works and is too much trouble, wired is where it's at).  Cohen also behaved, napping when I needed to chair meetings and eating well when I could borrow time to feed him.

Around 10am Sharaun called and let me know she missed her flight out of Miami and there was a chance she'd not make it home until Tuesday (today as you read, I know it's confusing but I write a day in advance).  Luckily that didn't happen because, man, I couldn't do another one of these days.  Not to mention, I really couldn't; I absolutely have to be in the office Tuesday through Thursday.  Thursday - my last day.  Holy crap Thursday, which is three day from now, is my last day for seven weeks.  Seven weeks on the road.  Seven weeks to let my mind wander.  Seven weeks.  Oh man, I am ready.  I am counting down.  Battling the mainspring and winning for once.

Goodnight.

It's Monday we are at t-minus 13 days until the big trip.  From a work perspective this means that I'm at t-minus 9 days (I'm taking that last Friday off to pick up the vehicle).  If I find more time to write between now and then, you'll likely hear me come back to this theme again and again.  Y'know, the "Oh Lord I only have X days left to get this all done!" with a , "Oh Lord I only have X-1 days left to get this all done!" follow-up.  I have a feeling that, as the sun sets on those last couple days, and the whistle blows at 5pm as I leave the sawmill that this guilt will begin to fade into excitement.  Already I'm making little lists of things I want to remember to bring.  Sharaun's been doing a good job borrowing things from her Facebook consort... thus helping us minimize our continued investment.

Speaking of Sharaun, she leaves for her New Kids On the Block cruise on Wednesday morning.  Abandoning me to both kids and a full-time job and all the week-before planning madness.  I don't want to devote much writing time to this cruise, because I'm afraid I'll get to riled up.  I'm glad she's going because she wants to so bad... the kind of bad where you might mistake her for a thirteen year old teenie-bopper instead of an established stay-at-home mom of the suburbs.  I'm also glad she'll have some time to cut loose with her friends, so there's that.  But don't ever, ever, try and talk to me about the money thing.  If I think too long about it I get disgusted (probably shouldn't tell her that either, even though she already knows it's not good to kick the anthill).  But let's talk about it just a bit... perhaps...

I wouldn't deny her the experience because of cost, obviously... no.  What angries up my blood is realizing how rational it is in her mind to spend so exorbitantly on something I consider so wasteful.  I think it's that mental disconnect around "return on investment" that irks me.  To her it's a "no duh" to spend so much on something like this, to me it's akin to burning dollars.  But then again, I don't expect to understand it... the ROI for her is something I'll not be able to comprehend.  I'd like to say that there's nothing I would be willing to spend so stupidly on... but I'm fearful of making such a statement and then getting called down with lightning.  I suppose I can leave it at that, because if we go much further down this route I'll begin playing the apologetic and start questioning myself in her voice about the money I'm disposing on this silly RV trip (which, I might schizophrenically add, is a family thing).  I could do this all day... debate with my own consciousness.  Probably as good reading as it is thinking, though, huh?

Anyway it's the kids and Mr. Mom for the latter half of the week, our last weekend in town, and Monday of next week.  Then Sharaun's back and we have five days to get everything together, load it into the vehicle, and hit the road.  It's going to go by in a blur, I already know it.  Wish me luck.

Goodnight.

As part of this, I mapped out exactly how many working days I have left to accomplish these things.  Like any analytical person, I then tried to divide the estimated hours of work into my available working hours to see how much of a challenge I have ahead.  Shockingly, I have a scant twelve working days before I'm gone for six weeks.  Upon seeing this, I was struck with two emotional reactions: panic and guilt.  Twelve days is not going to cut it.  And I am working fast.  I'm going faster than I'm normally comfortable with, fast to the point where I sacrifice some of my meticulousness for raw results.

Twelve days is not just scant, it's impossible.  I changed the name of the column on my spreadsheet to read "Desired leave-ready state" instead of "Estimated date of completion;" it's not all going to get all done.  I decided that I'm going to start going in at 7am to get an extra hour on each day, I have some false hope that this will make a material difference - and some real hope that it'll at least ease my conscience.

I don't know why I feel guilty.  I describe this to some of my friends and they look at me sideways.  I can't help it; I want to leave things in perfect order and leave without feeling like things are unfinished.  But things at work are in a state of high-flux; fluid, changing around me and some of it beyond my control.  Too many times I feel like I talk about work like it's more stressful than it is, but really it's just what I make it to be.  Right now I'm making it to be really, really difficult.  But I do feel guilty about leaving when things are so up-in-the-air.  I feel bad for dropping things and running, and then at the same time feel good about taking advantage of the opportunity to do just that.  Someone told me, "Don't worry Dave, the sawmill will be here when you get back, just the same as it was when you left."  I know this.  But the waning days have me sweating nonetheless.

I suppose like I feel like I'm letting my boss down.  Because things haven't gone according to my supposed-to-be-spotless plan.  Hell, things have gone 180° out from that plan and continue to slide from bad to worse.  Maybe it doesn't matter in the long run, except it does.  I hate feeling like my image is besmirched.  That guy who always packs exactly days+one pairs of clean underwear when he travels, who never pays a bill a day late... that guy's plan went to pot.  What happened to that guy, anyway?  I heard he let the wheels fall off then split.  You sure that guy is of the mettle we want?

Goodnight.

You guys watch old animated Popeye episodes?  As a teenager I got into all things "old."  If it predated my own era I assigned it extra cool points.  A form of hipsterism even then, no doubt, it led me to do things like using the VCR to record reruns of the original-cast Saturday Night Live, shows like I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and Leave it to Beaver.  Even then I was obsessed with things one or two generations removed from my own.  Anyway, I used to enjoy watching the old Popeye animated shorts - especially the WWII themed ones.  Even today I still use the phrase, "That's all I can stands, and I can't stands no more," when the situation warrants.

And o' Daniel in the lion's den did the situation warrant today.  Today was all I could stands, and I can't stands no more.

I feel like I shouldn't complain about work... you know the whole "I'm so blessed so why sweat the small stuff" thing... and I suppose that's right.  Yes I suppose that's right.  Anyway my beef really isn't with the work part of work.  I'm killing the work part of work; I always do.  I think stress lately is compounded by the looming deadline of our RV trip.  Four weeks away and I feel like I have to get so much in motion before I drop everything and run.  I know I won't be able to do it all, and things are complicated by a host of unsavory workplace goings on.  So maybe I'm not complaining about work.  I'm complaining about some kinda crap at work.  Or... man I don't know... I just know that I've got these stupid feelings of guilt creeping in around the edges of the anticipation I've been feeling around our coming trip.  I want to get it all done and make it all perfect before we split and it's not going to happen.

It's going to be a race.  RV trip vs. my waning sanity.  I have to bet a certain way.

Goodnight.

Well, a half-day at work, as I spent the morning working from the kitchen table while we got a whole-house fan installed.  But man, I got tons done and it really improved my outlook - which has been somewhat sour and dire of late.  I pride myself on my planning, call my anal or whatever but I truly enjoy preemptively solving problems that will never happen because I understood and accounted for them through my prescience.  Today that's what I did, flexed my planning muscles, played some what-if games and wrote some contingency plans.  Tried to cover as many of the bases as I could dream up on my own, paint in all the corners, plug up every hole in the dike.  I like days like that because I walk away feeling accomplished.  And with this and that to tarnish me lately, feeling accomplished is what the doctor ordered.

Been working a bit here and there cribbing down albums and thoughts for my annual best-of-halfway post.  Sara, I'm counting on you, at a minimum, to read and enjoy it.  OK, you don't have to enjoy it.  Just read it.  Funny first half for music, most everything up until April was pretty underwhelming.  Glad for some later entrants to buoy the front-end.  If you like music, maybe of the softer, feyer kind, you could do yourself a favor and go ahead and check out the new Fleet Foxes record before I finish writing that it rocked January through June.  Took a few days to grow on me but I can't get it out of the rotation to save my life.  Even Sharaun is singing along at this point.  But I don't want to give away the ending...

I'm going to be random today, Sorry.

Tonight, Sharaun came into the living room a little freaked out saying she was experiencing what she called "odd visual disturbances."  I asked her to describe what she meant, and she said there was a "shimmering sliver arc" in one of her eyes which was obscuring her vision.  She said it was "lattice-like" and had "wavy rainbows" and she could hold up her hand and it would disappear behind the thing.  I was intrigued and did Google search for "rainbow visual disturbance" to find the following description of something called an "ocular migraine" or "retinal migraine:" An arc shaped sliver that is wavy, almost mirror-like in appearance and has rainbow colored shimmers. She was shocked by the accuracy of the description, almost as much as I was that what she was experiencing is a for-real, well-documented visual anomaly which is extremely consistent from person to person.  No really, a Google image search brings up at least ten folks' recreations of what they see (the image heading up this post was the one closest to what Sharaun said she saw).

Craziness.  Goodnight.

PS - Today's title is a holdover from an old draft which had nothing in it.  Rather than delete the draft, I decided to reclaim the database space with this entry.  I liked the title and, not knowing what I was on about when jotting it down, decided to leave it.  So yeah, "in gray contrast" to something... apparently.

It's a somewhat cyclical thing with me.  Work begins taxing me more and more and I have these little Popeye moments where I say to myself, "That's all I can stands and I can't stands no more!"  I start daydreaming about vacation, start thinking towards the weekend, developing a case "senioritis," as they used to call it in those final months of high school.  If I let my thoughts linger there for too long, my productivity is impacted.  I get in some kind of work-depression funk where I start questioning the meaning of it all.  That, my friends, is when I have to give myself a figurative slap across the figurative cheek and tell myself to snap out of it.

My job is awesome; my life is awesome; my family is awesome; buck-up and be thankful.  I told someone today that the first problem on my brain when I wake up each morning is which car my wife is going to want me to drive to work, the big one or the little one.  Some guy in India wakes up in a hovel and the first thing he worries about is feeding his kids for the day.  Perspective.

Also at work today, and not related, I wondered to myself why my team can be so cynical all the time.  I thought about it and realized, I'm a cynical person.  Someone challenged me on this once, saying that if you studied the behaviors you most dislike in your team (as a manager), you'd find that most of them are modeled after the very same behavior exhibited by you.  Ouch.  A damning concept, but one that I think is probably true - at least in the case of my team's cynicism.  I'm a pretty cynical and sarcastic person, or at least I like to entertain all reactions to things, a primary one being cynicism.  So, your team is cynical and you're likely a cynic yourself.  How to fix it?  How to change the collective thread of behavior?  Model it.  You change, they change.  A tough, but thrilling, concept.  Sigh...

Yeah, time to get some perspective.  Goodnight.