This week was supposed to be a vacation week, and in some ways it still is.
I had planned maintenance work around the house and two or three rounds of golf. Or maybe only one if I play as badly as I have done the past few times I’ve been out.
All that changed over the weekend. It has been wet and miserable here, and everything was damp. And, as I learned to my cost while walking the dog, slippery.
My right foot skidded on a curb. My left ankle rolled and there I was lying on the ground with the dog looking at me, and wondering why I was down at her level.
The ankle hurt, and swelled up nicely, and a day later, still swollen but with some beautiful colored bruising, I was at the Urgent Care for an examination and x-rays. I left with a support boot, a referral to the orthopedic doctor, and a suspected broken bone.
Over the last two or three days, it hasn’t felt broken, but any walking without the boot quickly becomes uncomfortable.
Hence the rethinking of plans.
There’ll be no golf this week, but I should get to some of the small maintenance items I’ve been avoiding for a while. I think I’d have preferred the golf!
Tag: #Family
I first learned about labyrinths when I lived in San Francisco, and walked the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral. It was a difficult time in my life, and the slow measured pace as you wend and weave along the paths to the center was calming, and helped put some issues into perspective.
After I moved back to the east coast, I lost the habit of labyrinth walking until this past weekend. I’m not sure what motivated me to do a search, but I found an outdoor labyrinth here in Auburn at Village Christian Church, and decided to pay a visit.
Around ten on a Saturday morning, I was the only person walking through the trees to the clearing where the labyrinth is constructed. Stone walkways lined with brick to mark the way. It was surprisingly quiet given the busy road on one side and housing on the other side. I cleared my mind and decided to focus on one thought as I walked – something never easy for me at the best of times.
It worked, in a way, and for the first few minutes, I found myself having to forcibly slow done. None of the quick walk I usually have when going from one place to another. For me getting the most from the labyrinth experience is a slow measured pace with just the birdsong, the soft rustle of leaves in the light wind, and the occasional bark of a dog.
On the return circuit back to the entrance. I realized the sun dappled patches of light and shade were very much like our lives. We cycle from the good times in the sun to the darker times in the shade, and then back again. In my own life I’m feeling that transition from a dark time to good.
It’s wonderful to feel the sun again.
Last month, I wrote a piece about the persistence of the birds who built a nest on the fan blades in our courtyard Ingenious Persistence – Richard Freeborn
We have watched the parents in their daily feeding cycles coming to and fro to the nest, and counted three chicks. We held our breath during a storm earlier this month, as it was a wild storm that led to the death of the chicks last year. This storm was nowhere near as bad and the chicks continued cheeping, chirping, and demanding more food.
At one point I thought we were down to two babies, and then this past weekend, they changed from scrawny spike-haired chicks too real birds. And there were four of them not three.
On Sunday morning we spotted one of them venturing out of the nest and onto the fan blade. There was a flurry of movement in our house as the cat and the dogs were bundled inside and all doors closed.
This was not a popular decision, especially with our cat, Roon, who despite closing in on 16 years still considers himself to be the rambunctious wild-child he was in his youth (don’t we all!).
Almost like that was a trigger, the first bird fluttered out of the nest and onto the ground. The others soon followed, settling on branches, guttering, or the top of the brick wall.
They spent maybe fifteen or twenty minutes getting the feel for their wings, making practice flights across the courtyard, and from the gutter to the ridge line of the roof.
And then they were gone. Off into the line of trees that follow the creek behind the house, and indistinguishable from all the other birds flocking and foraging for the afternoon.
There was a feeling of disappointment that they were gone, but also a sense of wonder. Days and weeks of nurturing and in twenty minutes they are gone and off to a life of their own.
I wonder if there’s a lesson there for humans?
Our homeowners association is in the process of having community owned street lamps replaced so they can be managed by the City and our local power company.
This afternoon, despite all the paint lines and marking flags, the contractors managed to hit a gas line, and I’ve never seen workers move so fast!
I called the gas company and reported the leak, and by the time I got off the phone, the fire department had two units in place and closed the road into our part of the sub-division. It wasn’t long after that the gas company arrived – four trucks and vans and lots of equipment. Within an hour or so, the leak was fixed. Work resumed on replacing the street lamp, and the fire department went off to do other things. Most of the gas company trucks remained, I’m guessing just in case there was another leak.
I often complain about utility and emergency service responses, but this time, they did a great job, and kept us all informed.
There are six more lamps to replace, and hopefully those last ones will go smoothly.
About this time last year, we returned from a trip to discover a pair of birds had nested on the blades of a fan on our patio. The nest was well established and one of the birds looked very comfortable, presumably keeping eggs warm.
I never managed to identify the birds, but the eggs hatched and we had three babies poking their heads up and cheeping urgently.
Unfortunately, we then had three days of rain, thunder, and high winds. The parents couldn’t get to the nest, and the chicks died. I also learned that sudden and loud noises can kill birds that young. And we had loud noises. My neighbor is still trying to fix electrical and plumbing issues after a lightning strike!
When it was clear the chicks were dead, and the parents weren’t returning, I removed the fan blade, and laid the birds to rest on an east facing slope.
This February, as we prepared to make a trip, I decided we didn’t need a repeat of last year, secured bird repellent spikes to the fan blades, and off we went.
We had been back about a week when I noticed a pair of birds ducking in and out under the roof toward the fan. Waste of your time, I told them smugly. And then I looked, really looked at the fan blades.
You guessed it. I had left about a six inch gap between the fan housing and the start of the spikes, and that was enough for the birds – I think they are finches – to build their new home. I don’t think they’ve laid eggs yet, but I am going to keep my fingers crossed we don’t have a repeat of last year’s rain and thunder.
Next year? I’m still working on that plan.
While jotting down some ideas for 2024 plans and goals, something drew me to the website here, and with it a certain amount of surprise that I realized I haven’t posted anything since July of 2023.
At the same time was the realization that maybe it was not so much of a surprise. There was a definite tilt in our world over the summer, and that contributed to 2023 being the lowest word count year since I started keeping track in 2017. I am looking to change that substantially in 2024, and over the next few weeks I’ll share some of the goals and the plans to reach those goals.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom in 2023. I finally finished the next Jacob and Miriam novel – Death at a Wedding – and once I get the final feedback from the my proof readers, it will be up on all the usual places. Currently, I am targeting the end of January. The next story – The Corpse in the Courtyard – is already under way and hopefully you won’t have to wait two years for that one to appear.
And the tilt? I’m not sure it has completely finished twisting our lives but we are learning to live with it!
My original thought for this looking back on 2022 blog was Good, Bad and Sad., but that means finishing on a low note, and overall that isn’t my intention for 2022. So let’s begin with the sad.
At the end of July, one of my best friends passed away. Chris had been battling cancer for many years, and seemed to have everything under control until the day after her son’s wedding, her heart decided otherwise. Through all her travails. I never saw Chris anything but upbeat and positive. Like everyone else who knew her, I will miss her smiles and infectious laughter.
Bad really falls into two categories. There’s life-bad and bad-to-good. On life-bad my writing fell off a cliff in July and really only picked up in November. Of course that totally derailed my writing goals for 2022 and has made me reconsider what’s really achievable each year. More on that when I look at 2023.
Bad-to-good covers my day-job world. In late September we signed a contract extension with our current client through the end of 2023. Just before Thanksgiving here in the US, the company decided we should be full-time employees or we were gone. I’ve been humbled by the number of people who suggested options when they knew I might be available in January, and now I have a contract that covers all of 2023, which is a good segue into the good part of 2022.
On the writing front, even though I won’t reach all my goals for 2022, I did publish five story collections and converted Thieves in the Temple to AI Audio as I mentioned previously.
Finally, at the beginning of this month (December), my daughter got married and I had the privilege of walking her down the aisle.
Overall a good year.
I spent last week visiting family and friends in England. It’s two and a half years since I last went, with several trips canceled or rescheduled because of COVID. apart from the requirements for more documentation, and a negative PCR test before returning to the US (I’ll talk about the International Terminal in Atlanta later), the biggest thing I noticed was the closed stores and lack of people.
I can count on the toes of one hand how often in the last twenty years, I’ve flown and had empty seats around me on the plane. On both flights with Virgin Atlantic, I doubt the aircraft was more than two-thirds full, and in both cases, I had my section of the row to myself. Inevitably there’s a downside to this, and I think Virgin needs to look at going back to serving wine in bottles, not from cans, but my sister says I’m a snob, and in this case, I plead guilty.
And then there’s the International Terminal at Atlanta Airport!
The domestic terminal at Atlanta has long had a justifiable reputation for crowds, chaos, and confusion. That might be why the planners built the International Terminal on the far eastern side of the airport.
The terminal is well signposted from the three main highways in Atlanta – I-75, I-85, and 285. However, the moment you leave the highways, the signs disappear. I was “fortunate” to have used the International Terminal on my last trip to England, so there were some memory tags that helped get me there.
Getting out is another issue. The moment you pass the sign thanking you for visiting Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport, the signs disappear. GPS is also confused. How do you manage a “U” turn on a four-lane divided highway with no gaps in the barrier? It was probably the most stressful part of the whole trip.
Despite the airport, it was a great trip, and I saw my eighteen-month old grandson, Milo, for the first time.
I’m traveling again at the end of the year for my daughter’s wedding, and this time I think I’ll park off-site, and let the shuttle bus find the International Terminal.
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