Epistemic Failure

Second crop of arugula getting bigger, 2/10/10

I just spent nine hours up to my armpits in the guts of SNMP agent code, which if you recognize what that is, means that you know the stench inside of my brain at the moment. Consider yourself a blessed child of the universe if that makes no sense.

To get the foul brain stench out, I spent a couple of hours ripping up my lawn. Yup, ripping that sucker right out. For some reason, the landscapers who put it in back when my home decided that a quarter inch of topsoil on top of this pacific northwest clay was just fine, lawnwise. Turns out, not so much. Turns out, rain on grass on a quarter inch of soil on top of clay just kind of pools up, pretty quicklike, and the moss and weeds move in. So I'm ripping that crap out, working ten yards of compost back into the clay, and then I'll put some native grasses on top. Seriously, Kentucky Bluegrass on clay in western Washington? Dare I call those landscapers morons?

So that is what it has come down to: me versus a lawn. And versus Finn, who seems to think that gardens are not for veggies, but rather for pooping. Everywhere. Three and a half years ago I helped forge a new route up one of the tallest peaks in the Andes, and today I'm digging up lawns in the rain and trying to catch our cat pooping in my tomatoes. Methinks I need to get a porch rocker, a knife, and some spare time to whittle.

But seriously, I'm enjoying the hell out of myself. One of my former associates, a woman who is somewhat well known for some solo first ascents up big wall routes ("big" meaning "you sleep on the wall for a few days since it takes that long to climb") and who was a technical assistant on some films in pakistan, climbing routes to run lines and support the camera crews as they hung suspended over voids, is one of my more frequent facebook commenters. About adventures? No. Climbing? No. Mountains? No. Naw, we chat back and forth about the best way to protect tomato plants from wind and cold, how to amend soil, etc. A little while ago, she gave birth to her first child, a little girl who today walked for the first time; no mention of future climbs in her happy announcement. And I was hilling up soil around my rampant potato plants when I took a break from work today, while Finn hunted mice twenty feet away.

I think that I'm beginning to sound somewhat repetitious. At this point, even I get it: yeah, it's nice to have a garden to hang out with, and no, I don't seem to do a whole lot of crazy adventures anymore.

I suppose that I keep coming back to it because I need to understand. This kind of life that I've got going here is not something that I would have pursued not too long ago, nor was it something that I thought I wanted. It's like how we keep dreaming the same dream, over and over, when something is bothering us. And so here I am, feeling pretty good about things overall, and wondering why that is.

I never used to wonder about things when I felt crappy. Seemed like that was status quo.