Things you never thought you'd hear yourself say, vol 1.2

Here are some of the more recent ones:

- Don't put the monkey in your eye!

- My son is helping a beetle play accordion. (related to a very cool online kid's site: www.poissonrouge.com)

I'm baaaacccckk....

Things got crazy there for a while, and no brain cells were working that wanted to work on the blog. We'll see if summertime perks things up a bit.

perseverance

this daily poem
is getting kind of boring
but still I write on...

hot chocolate, with
kahlua and some yummy quiet.
Ahhhhh, feels good.

Role reversal...

Phone rings - can you help?
It's odd to be tech support
for your own parents!

My Forrest Gump moment

Life is like installing flooring...

On a good run, all the nails go in!
On a bad run, two out of five nails run into some unseen obstacle beneath the surface of things and you have to take them out and start over.

Either way, you need a lot of ibuprofen to recover. :)

Tom Petty - Crawling Back to You (Wildflowers, 1994)

I'm so tired of being tired
Sure as night will follow day
Most things that I worry 'bout
Never happen anyway....

---------

A good thing to remember on a day chock full of deadlines, lots of stuff to get done, and general grumpiness...

bells singing, fire
playing drums, ice cream fire truck
I love toddler speak!

not a lot to say
nothing special saturday
still, it's the weekend!

remembrance

The death of a library colleague after a long struggle with cancer has left me searching for words and thoughts that are more profound than the silly attempts at senryu I've been able to come up with so far.

So I return to an old favorite, Rainer Maria Rilke, and his poem "Remembrance". It's a good reminder to live in the now before the now becomes the past that you appreciate too late. I much prefer the original German, so I've included that at the end as well, after the jump.

And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, uniquely uncommon,
the awakening of dormant stones,
depths that would reveal you to yourself.

In the dusk you notice the book shelves
with their volumes in gold and in brown;
and you think of far lands you journeyed,
of pictures and of shimmering gowns
worn by women you conquered and lost.

And it comes to you all of a sudden:
That was it! And you arise, for you are
aware of a year in your distant past
with its fears and events and prayers.

(Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming)

Erinnerung

Und du wartest, erwartest das Eine,
das dein Leben unendlich vermehrt;
das Mächtige, Ungemeine,
das Erwachen der Steine,
Tiefen, dir zugekehrt.
Es dämmern im Bücherständer
die Bände in Gold und Braun;
und du denkst an durchfahrene Länder,
an Bilder, an die Gewänder
wiederverlorener Fraun.

Und da weißt du auf einmal: das war es.
Du erhebst dich, und vor dir steht
eines vergangenen Jahres
Angst und Gestalt und Gebet.

(From Das Buch der Bilder)

I want one of these!

even IT managers get the blues

I'm calling in well
spend time at home with my boys -
too bad, a nice daydream...

about yesterday (for Van)

really a bad day
when you can't friggin' think of
three short lines of verse

I will pay for this tomorrow

my night owl has
beaten up my early bird
morning comes too soon!

just what I needed

cuddly toddler, yummy food
gentle breezes, nice long nap
o lovely Sunday

habit forming

Hmm. This daily poem thing is harder than I thought.

Determined I am
ev'ry day a poem to write
help me Obi Wan

update: this has to be just about the lamest "poem" ever written. But at least I got something written that day. :)

"come to Jesus"

so who's in charge here
what are your goals anyway
we'd like to know, too

against complacency

I have occasional reason to rant or scratch my head about complacency, or -more broadly- fear of change, in instances where change might well be warranted (or at least worth exploring) but the force of inertia or unexamined assumptions & fears prevents anything from happening.

With this in mind, the prayer below, posted by a member of an educational technology discussion list --in a thread about Second Life & campus reactions-- seems really appropriate. Thanks to D.I. Von Briesen for posting it:

Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

attributed - sir francis drake -1577

in California
I am not
silly Blogger clock

wind in our willow
beautiful frondy presence
felled by today's storm

And away we go...

New blog, first post, new approach. Not such much child blog for the grandparents, more musings, attempts to reconnect with creativity, and the like. We'll see...