LEGO Meditation

Wear non-binding clothing. Sit in a comfortable but erect position. Focus on a single thing. As thoughts arise, distractions, let them pass, always returning your attention to the here and now. Suspend judgment. Have faith. Concentrate on the quality of the process, not on the outcome. Naturally, I'm talking about assembling LEGO kits.

Last week, while building the Star Wars LEGO "walker" shown in the previous post, I suddenly realized how meditative the process is. The big LEGO kits (thousands of pieces) require a certain state of mind to assemble successfully. One can neither be jittery nor tired, over-excited or bored. What it takes is a sort of meditative state where the builder is acutely aware and alert, but extremely relaxed and with a certain clarity of mind.

The instructions contain not a single word, freeing the mind from the vagaries of language, and allowing the process to flow from a part of the brain that is non-verbal. For me, the process is so enjoyable and relaxing, the end product is just a bonus.

Bugg vs. the LEGO AT-AT Walker

Bugg is pretty non-plussed by the whole thing...

Yet more snow...

Well, we got like another foot of snow over night. We're officially snowed-in and our trip to California is canceled. Bummer. We came to the conclusion that we'd rather be stranded at home than somewhere in the Siskiyous - especially with Austin and the pug aboard. We had baked about 500 cookies to take with us. Hope the neighbors like gingerbread.

It's interesting how a relatively little thing like bad weather makes the world suddenly much smaller. We'll make the rounds later today to deliver cookies and check on our neighbors - particularly the older ones who have a hard time getting out on a good day. We're fortunate to live in a neighborhood that was built before cars were common - where it's easy to know one's neighbors and have a sense of community.
For now, at least we have all of life's necessities: coffee, baked goods, Internet access... coffee...

The photo is of the BBQ grill. Hmmm... maybe we'll have a luau. Leis might be hard to come by, but we're pretty resourceful. To any of you living in places like, say, Boulder or Denver: yes, we are snow wimps. But then, this kind of snow doesn't happen very often here - not since the winter of 1949/50 anyway. If it keeps up, the snowfall record before that was in 1870-something.

Dammit - just as I went to publish this, a big branch broke off one of the (very) big trees and hit the house. Guess I had better go look...


Update: Some advice - If branches start breaking off a tree, don't go stand under the tree and look up like an idiot. Almost got smooshed by a second, much larger branch. Heard a loud CRACK! and ran for the porch. Boom/Crash/Cloud of snow, etc. Some Russian guy trudging by, pulling a sled with groceries on it, laughed and said, "Heh heh! You move just in time, no?" Um, yes, actually, but whatever. Thanks for your concern. Enough excitement for today. Back to hibernating.

More snow...

On second thought, shopping can wait until tomorrow.
Or the next day.

Goofing around in the snow...

Snow

We've been getting an unusual amount of snow for the past week or so. Now that I'm officially on vacation and don't have to drive in it, I'm much more enthusiastic about it. It has been pretty blizzardy all day today; not that much actual precipitation, but blowing around like crazy with dark skies and poor visibility. Our poor Christmas yard animals have experienced blowing snow, freezing rain and high winds, and probably wish they could go back to the store where it was nice and warm and dry. The moose has stood his ground admirably against the wind, but all three reindeer have embarked on brief flights immediately followed by rather graceless crash landings. Fortunately they're pretty easy to bend back into shape.
We're planning to drive to California in a couple of days. Hopefully some of this mess clears up by then. I'm not so concerned about us driving - it's all those other people that worry me. We shall see.

Holiday Arts and Crafts

We bought these cute "ABC" gingerbread man cookie cutters from Amazon that have teethmarks and a leg, arm, or head missing. They're so fun we can't stop making them. There's something awfully entertaining about gingerbread men in various states of shock and horror. ABC stands for Already Been Chewed. They're pretty popular at the office now that people have figured out they're supposed to be that way.

Rudy made a rule somehow that if we don't make a Christmas stocking every year, we don't get anything. Here are ours this year. As usual, "Pa" wins the decorating prize.

Austin and Rudy made the mini-stockings and gift tags for our extended family. Cute, huh?

God - Part 3

I have wanted to believe in God my whole life. The universe is just too vast, too dark and too cold for me to be comfortable as an atheist. Sooner or later the sun will burn out or explode. Long before that, the Earth will become uninhabitable. Even if humans take to the stars, escaping the eventual demise of our solar system, the galaxy and the universe itself appear finite in nature. The inescapable conclusion is that all man's endeavors, hopes, dreams, fears, sins and triumphs are ultimately futile. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. (See Mom, I did read my bible - especially Ecclesiastes.) When I was seven or eight, I asked Grandma Metz about this - about how people go on knowing it's all kind of, you know, pointless. It was an honest question but she seemed pretty irritated that I should ask such a thing. Come to think of it, we grandchildren probably asked a lot of annoying questions, like when Cari and Shari asked her what the definition of "renege" was. If you're curious, I'll tell you sometime. Suffice it to say that Grandma was not amused.

God - Part Two

When I was a kid, we went to College Church of the Nazarene in Olathe, Kansas. The pastor, Paul Cunningham, was a good speaker in a Garrison Keillor kind of way - pleasant, amusing, and entertaining, if a bit somnambulant. I think he gave the congregation a sense of well-being, orating in inoffensive metaphor and ministerial hyperbole. The services went like clockwork. Folks gathered in the foyer, shaking hands and chatting amicably before taking their seats. The program started exactly on time (and exactly five minutes prior to the arrival of the young Metz family), and a schedule was rigidly observed. In Sunday School we memorized John 3:16 and listened to bible stories. Jesus was a blue-eyed white guy, and God was sort of a cross between father time and Jor-El - not an actual person or being, but a nice idea anyway. No one at College Church spoke in tongues or fainted in the aisles. Or stood up or sat down when they weren't supposed to. Or said, "Hallelujiah" or "Amen" out of turn. Coughing was frowned upon. Breathing was okay as long as it wasn't too loud. At least that's how I remember it.

God - Part One

This time it started Thursday night when Rudy brought home a CD from Starbucks, of all places. It has mostly classic Christmas songs by people like Frank Sinatra, Lena Horn, Dean Martin, and others and a couple of newer recordings by Diana Krall and Portland's Pink Martini. Anyway, I was enjoying the light and jolly music until I was, um, seized by the last song, Silent Night, sung by Mahalia Jackson. I'd heard of Mahalia Jackson, and had probably heard her sing, but this time I was really paying attention and, well, wow.
Mahalia Jackson is the one singing How I Got Over in the YouTube video in my previous post. Find a time when you can give it your full attention. Listen to what she's saying. See if you're not moved somehow. It's a bad recording of a poor transmission, but light shines through her like a beacon, like she's standing in a shaft of sunlight on a dark day, holding a big mirror aimed at your soul. It is startling and powerful.

Rain Barrels

The neighbors probably think I'm nuts, watering the heck out of the azaleas and rhododendrons in the semi-solid rain, with sub-freezing temperatures and probable snow on the way. What I'm really doing is emptying 1,000+ gallons of rainwater from our four rain barrels before it gets cold enough to freeze and break something.
We put in a new lawn and a bunch of ornamental plants this summer and thought it was silly to pay to water everything in a place where it rains all winter. So, we bought four 275 gallon rain barrels (well, they're not really barrels, they're actually food-grade industrial containers for storing large quantities of things like vegetable oil or detergent) and daisy-chained them together thinking we'd store up some water for summer. Barrel number one can be seen to the right of the house in the picture above. The only problem was a slight underestimation of how much rain actually comes down the downspouts. After two days, they were full. Wow. Also, while I did consider the effect of sub-freezing temperatures on the hoses and valves, it doesn't get that cold here very often or for very long, so I figured no big deal. Naturally, the forecast calls for the coldest cold snap in a decade with the possibility of sub-freezing temperatures for several days in a row. It's hard not to view water as a commodity. Dumping so much water seems wasteful even if it did just fall from the sky. Oh well, there will be plenty more where that came from.

Wish we'd gone to this church...

Rube Goldberg meets Mythbusters at Christmas

In case you somehow missed this...



Merry Christmas!

Austin's Blog

There's not much there yet, but Austin is starting a blog at http://auzyboy.blogspot.com/

Scrooged

"Don't put that there, you'll scratch the table!" I cringe for the umpteenth time as I hear the words come out of my mouth. It's all wrong, you see. The ornaments are in all the wrong places; unbalanced, too far out on the branches, too close together, too far apart. The LEGO train is assembled incorrectly, not that the casual observer could tell - even upon close inspection. But I know it's wrong and it's driving me crazy. The whole tree is crooked, for God's sake! We may as well cancel Christmas right now.

"I'm sorry Austin. Put it wherever you want," I say weakly. "Are you sure?" "Yes, I'm sure. Look, I don't really care if the table gets scratched and the LEGO choir looks fine there. I'll be back in a minute." Upon returning to the front room with a glass of wine, I realize that everything actually looks great. I mean, really great. Austin and Rudy (Pa) are decorating and the whole scene is just joyous and beautiful. Rudy loves the holidays and Austin is just giddy, singing and twirling in circles. And here I am in the midst of it with nothing better to offer than criticism and complaints. What kind of jerk shoots down a kid in Christmas' thrall? Bah! Humbug!

Well, that was last week and hopefully today I've redeemed myself somewhat by arranging a small herd of animated, lighted animals in the yard, plus a few extra points for the skiing polar bear on the roof. I am making a sincere effort to be cheerful, or at least less glum, but it takes tremendous energy - for me anyway - so I can only manage it a bit at a time.

It's important to me that Austin have some happy holiday memories. I (rather arrogantly) thought that by adopting Austin I might be able to erase or at least ameliorate some past trauma. What I didn't foresee was the extent to which he would change me. To paraphrase a Christmas cliche, it's not what you get from a person or situation, it's what you give. I guess in that respect, Austin has taught me more about Christmas than I'll ever teach him. So maybe I'm not really Scrooged after all.

Rube Goldberg

Rube is one of my heroes. Born over a hundred years ago, he had the foresight to see how technological complexity tends to increase to ridiculous and sometimes self-defeating proportions, and he had the artistic talent and good humor to allow us to poke fun at ourselves through his drawings. This picture is of a typical Rube Goldbergian "labor-saving" device: an automatic toothpaste dispenser.
As it happens, my day job is all about dreaming up ways to automate things in ways that are ideally both highly labor-saving and also reasonably reliable. But, at least once or twice a day someone comes to tell me that the toothpaste isn't coming out and I then spend painstaking hours figuring out that the weight isn't falling on the teeter-totter because the cuckoo isn't popping the balloon any more, or that the egg flew through the air as expected, but missed the frying pan. Or that the cat, finally realizing the mouse is fake, got bored and wandered off instead of pouncing on the lever that releases the trebuchet that hurls a banana at the trained monkey who slides two abacus beads to the left which debits your credit card and sends you an acknowledging email. It's like that, except that the reality is far more complex (though equally bizarre). For your amusement, here's a good one from someone with way too much time on his/her hands.

Robots-R-Us

I hadn't realized how many "robots" we have around here until I started counting. There's the mini Lost In Space robot (left), the LEGO Mindstorms robot, the Dirt Dog in the garage, I suppose the iDog counts (marginally), assorted R2D2s, many Star Wars LEGO bots, and the one I just tried out for the first time today and which prompted me to write about robots, the Looj gutter-cleaning robot.
The Looj has some issues. First, it's not really a robot. Unlike iRobot's other products, the Looj is merely a remote control toy, having no internal logic whatsoever. It's kind of a long, skinny tank (the Sherman kind, not the gas kind) with a big rotating auger/flapper at one end that's supposed to flip all the gutter debris out of the gutter and onto the ground where it can be safely ignored. The videos on the website are pretty convincing. It did emit one giant rooster-tail of pitch and pine needles - for about two seconds; just long enough to give me a nice gutter-crud shower before flipping on its side and refusing to go forward or back. I climbed the ladder and righted it, getting another brief muck bath, at which point it ejected one of its treads and leaped from the roof, falling to its death on the rocks below. As this was our first robot suicide, I'm not sure how to react. (Our other iRobot robot, the Dirt Dog, has gone about its business faithfully. Well, there was that one time that it inexplicably darted in front of the car...) What Looji didn't realize is that it will be resurrected tomorrow. We can rebuild him. We have the technology. Better. Stronger. Faster...

Pessimism

It's Thanksgiving, so I thought I'd write a few words about how bad everything sucks. Just kidding!
OK, here's the thing: In the past year or two, I've come to realize that I have a talent, if you can call it that, for finding flaws in things. I have had this since childhood - maybe since birth. I'm great at those tests where you have to figure out what's different in picture B, or what's wrong with X. This ability/habit/curse is so dominant and pervasive that my world view is, and has always been, a sort of negative image of reality, like how a photographic negative shows you where the light isn't. This comes in handy at work for things like debugging code, or figuring out where some internal (computer) process ran amuck and crashed. It's not so handy for things like making friends or maintaining personal relationships. It seems that some people don't like having their flaws pointed out regularly, even when I'm just trying to be helpful. Weird. In elementary school, I was on a first name basis with every principal I had (and there were many). This was mostly because my teachers had low self-esteem and couldn't deal with a 7-year-old pointing out things that were probably obvious to everyone, but which, for some reason, no one else actually said. Things like, "I don't think it's fair to be held accountable for missing words on our spelling test that you can't even pronounce correctly due to your speech impediment." Or - I remember this one clearly - when my teacher said, "You got a smart mouth!" I replied, matter of factly, "The word is sarcasm." (Then rolled my eyes slightly as if to silently add, "Duh!") I swear I could actually see steam rise from her forehead in the brief moment before being whisked off to the office. Unfortunately, in the intervening 30-plus years, I have not grown significantly more emotionally intelligent. If I had a dollar, well maybe a hundred dollars, for every person I've royally pissed off in my life so far due to my big mouth and chronic lack of empathy, I'd probably never have to work again. (Hmmm... could being a jerk be lucrative somehow? I could get a radio show where people call in and I tell them how stupid they are. Oh wait, that's been done.)
OK, now that I've had this revelation, what to do? I figure that if I can somehow turn this ship around and be hopelessly optimistic for the second 40 years of my life, then by the time I'm dead I'll be basically even. Is such a thing even possible? Comments? Suggestions?
Oh yeah, Happy Thanksgiving!

Charter School Conundrum

I went to Austin's school today for the fall parent-teacher conference. His teacher is nice enough and the school isn't terrible, but I can't help but wonder if he might be better served somewhere else. We live in a typical (if there is such a thing) urban neighborhood and the student population reflects this demographic diversity. Hypothetically, cultural diversity in a school is a good thing, exposing kids to other cultures, languages, and points of view. In reality, finite resources are expended disproportionately on bringing everyone up to a common but low standard and there's not much left for those who would excel.
Before I became a parent, the idea of charter schools enraged me. That some group would siphon money from the public school system to set up their own flavor of school, following whatever agenda they may have, seemed outrageous. I thought those people should put their efforts into making public schools better rather than withdrawing what little support they have, effectively sending public school into a downward spiral of reducing revenue and diminishing value.
Now that I'm a parent, I realize that good parents will do whatever they need to do to provide the best possible education and experiences for their kids. If this means starting or joining a charter school, homeschooling, or moving to a better public school district, then so be it. Plus, charter schools are public schools, and what could be more democratic than communities organizing into groups where their children's needs can be best served. Interesting what a little perspective does for one, huh? Friends of ours put their son in a charter school this year and are quite happy with the results. I would not have believed it, but I must say we're leaning in that direction too.

Outliers

So, I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers about why successful people are successful. (I could write a book about how to be unsuccessful, but that's another story.) The premise is that while we all grow up believing that with a little intelligence, perseverance, and lots of hard work, any among us can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and rise to super-stardom, the reality is that by far the prime ingredient in success is just dumb luck. Depending on how you look at it, this news can either be seriously depressing or wonderfully liberating; explaining both why some people work themselves to death and just can't seem to catch a break, and also how George W. could be president of the United States - twice! (thought I'd just get the political thing over with in my first blog!) Anyway, I'm only halfway through the book but I'm not sure I quite buy it. Cynic that I am, I think Mr. Gladwell's primary intent is to make money by selling a lot of books, and not many people would be interested in pure facts if they were not sensationalized somehow. Hmmm... somehow this turned into a book review. Oh well.
Tune in tomorrow when Uncle Wiggily gets cream cheese on his ear and Skeezicks goes in search of fresh bagels...