Monday LOLcat

Laura may kill me if she sees this, but it's hilarious.  Zooey jumped up on the roof and couldn't figure out how to get back down.  Life is made up of small moments, mostly.  NB: Zooey normally never meows.  To get a meow out of her means that something is important.  To get repeated meows like this means that she is FREAKED OUT.

Please ignore my talk-to-Zooey voice because yes, I know that I sound like an idiot.



(I got her down just fine. She retreated to my office and stretched out like a tube.)

A Moment in Time

Zooey helps me harvest in the garden for the evening's scalloped potatoes.

Sometimes it's nicer to be alone, though, in a secluded spot.

Later, homemade corn tortillas for fish tacos, in the tortilla warmer.

I'm sitting here tonight eating an enormous pile of sugar snap peas from my CSA share and feeling rather happy about my new alpine rock garden, which is entering its final stages of completeness:

If you click on that image, you'll spy down on the right-hand side a little example of artemesia absinthium.  That's right, the hallucinogenic plant that was used to make Absinthe, which is now banned in the USA.  I'm rather proud of that, because I grew it from seed.  Neighborhood covenants are stupid things, and so although I am forced to comply with them, I'll do it my own way.  Like, by planting psychoactive plants in my garden, for example.

At any rate, this rock garden is kind of cracking me up.  Time was a few years ago that I was constantly driving myself to climb harder, and bigger, and more often.  If I didn't get on a 6000m+ peak twice a year with numerous smaller training climbs added in, I considered the year to be a loss, and I still have many friends who think that way.  One of them wrote to me recently to see what was up, and asked if I would be interested in a pedestrian climb, like maybe Mt. Adams.  I laughed and told him that I wasn't sure that I remembered which end of the rope is the sharp end, anymore.  And now my token bit of alpinism in this home are a few pictures of former-me in some daredevil situation, and a pretty alpine rock garden.

I've been systematically getting rid of arbitrary goals in my life, like those aforementioned climbing goals.  So what if I don't climb a lot anymore?  I like my rock garden.  I like playing guitar in the evening.  So that's what I do now.  Some of my friends are beating themselves to pieces, thinking that they MUST be pushing new routes, climbing harder, being more whatever, and I think: would you feel this way if you were all alone, cast away on an island?  Because so much of that stuff is ego, and just fuel for conversation.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I sure do love that exhilaration of thousands of feet of exposure, of sunrise high up on a truly high peak, of doing something that is right off the pages of national geographic.  But I don't like the inevitable sickness in the camps; nor the machismo of people (men and women both) who are driven to one-up each other, daily; nor the overall senselessness of a life in which one is always looking for the next thing.  There are a lot of good things to be said for sitting in one's garden, planted and tended with one's own labor, as the sun sets.

Which is not to say that I won't climb and adventure again.  Just that the focus on arbitrary isn't something that I think I'll care much about, anymore.

Tuesday Music

It's been a long day and I need to relax, what between a stressed-out Laura, a feuding family, and work that is making me want to bite things, I just want some alone-time.

Look right.

Look left.

RAWRRRR!

Focus on what is important

Zooey is our calico.  Or, should I say, Laura's calico.  But I've kind of claimed her as mine, too, since we have become boon companions.  She tours the garden with me when I go outside, she sleeps on a cushion in my office when I work, and she grumbles and growls at me when I don't pay her enough attention.

Tonight, I just finished practicing some songs, and she came in the room to say this:

After she made herself known like this and was satisfied that she was the center of attention, she proceeded to deal with pressing cleanliness matters:

That being done, she wrote in that all was cool and I was free to do my thing, and that she would stretch herself out as a compliment to whatever the hell useless work it was that I was doing:

What really matters?

Stupidity

Uh Huh.

So I've got this huge train of thought going about free will and automata and what constitutes independent thought, free of biological or environmental imperatives, as I should, being an overeducated AI researcher -- a train of thought that I've been fermenting on trips to the store and back, while skiing, when pulling rocks out of the garden beds, and....

Well, and then I come inside and the cats look at me like I'm a goddamn idiot.  "We're in front of the fire sleeping, my man," they seem to say.  "Do not disturb."

Being human seems to mean being an idiot.  I got an email that read "So guess what Venus is up to," and I read it.  The cats, at this point, would roll their eyes and say "idiot writes, idiot reads." 

What is it about us that leads us to follow those toxic people in our past that we have left behind?  Seriously, what is it?  That's something that will never make sense from a neurological model.

Oh, No You Don't

Exhibit A: Infinite Depth of Kitteh

So, I had a huge rant ready to post about the latest Mt. Hood climber disaster and the usual laymen response to it (blah blah "they're insane" blah blah "ought to force climbers to pay for rescue insurance" blah blah "ZOMG MAH TAX DOLLARS!" blah blah "danger to themselves and the valiant rescuers!" blah blah Blah BLAH), but after about ten pages of fuming I got it out of my system and decided: be it resolved that (a) daring people aren't going to stop pushing their boundaries, and (b) whiners aren't going to stop whining, and (c) there are enough infuriated people around already: then, why, I suppose I'll just shut up. Perhaps have another glass of wine and ponder how spaghetti is harvested:

UPDATE 12/18/2009: Here ya go, Wombat--