Things that are glad. Truly glad.

Note:  Duhh … in the last blog, I forgot to first paste in the short section on items truly sad, like hungry children in our own overendowed country, cruelty to animals/pets who love us uncondtionally, ugly babies (I’m kidding, ok?!  ~ just seeing if you’re paying attention) and  urban sprawl that’s begets dull homogeneity and is sucking away our national character.

So, here’s a mixture of Glad items, both real and imagined by moi:

·         My friend Joni, who’s just endured her second nose operation.  No complaints or self-pity, nope, but instead a reply to my recent post that said, “Thank you for LIVING your LIFE!  It's magickal and I'm grateful, you share pieces of it, with me......” 

·         Happy little dogs, like our 3-month-old Daschie-poo/Doodle fella Charlie.  He’ll likely not get bigger than six pounds.  I’m glad he’s healthy, happy and has an active bladder that usually makes it through the night and finds the training paper as well.

·         Those folks who work on the historic train rides, like the Western MD Scenic Railway.  What an amazing gig.

·         Another friend – Ellen.  There isn’t enough of anything in our world that her faith in God and people won’t overcome.  A passionate power of quiet conviction to find the gladness among all the noisy threads tangling up our over-extended lives.

·         Having a VA certificate for house purchase.  No down payment.  We likes that…

·         Beater and Biter.  Those are the my names for our former neighbor’s yappie poodle thingees ; I think they disliked me immensely.  I don’t know why ~ don’t dogs like to celebrate Christmas with their own chocolate Ex Lax bar?  Anyway, THEY surely are glad not to see my face anymore…

·         Football Jose is both glad and bummed.  Glad I’m finally shelving my passion for the Buffalo Bills; I’ll instead glance at that erratic franchise from a cool distance.  But bummed that we won’t have Fox Sports Soccer network, so no direct rooting for the Arsenal Gunners in the English Premier League.  But … NFL Ticket!  Life really is good!

·         Lastly, I am glad.  Seriously.  It has been an amazing summertime of house renovation sweat, mental endurance our last few weeks in MD ,and dogged determination here to find The Right House.  I’m certainly glad to see my family actually prosper with the change of environ and the resulting upbeat moods.  Truly glad.

Things that are sad. Truly sad.

·         Having the supposed standard cable package and NOT having the ability to watch, on even a dull Thursday night, this marquee football matchup:  Wayne State vs. Western Saginaw State.  Seriously, folks.  Forget about Thursday Night NFL football – are you kidding me?!

·         Scouring a furniture store – an Ashley Furniture store, the country’s largest furniture builder – and not taking the time to write down each of the nice leather sets we lounged on … “Ahh, we’ll just look them up online later on.”  HAH!  Go ahead, you think that will work online? 

·         How the Federal government partitions my head.  No, not during duty hours but during non-duty hours.  My person-centric medical care portfolio has gotten so bureaucratically partitioned that my poor partitioned head has spun dervishly into splatter-matter:

o   Medical:  area-based and you can only begin/end the premium payments through your employer’s HR office.  No, you cannot send in a check/online payment even if your account is behind, even if your coverage may be terminated due to HR ineptitude.

o   Dental:  that’s on a website run by government but you can’t figure out who participates, so just ask around

o   Vision:  same website as above but managed by a different set of administrative folks than Dental.  Different policies. 

o   Bottom whiny line:  stop breaking my head into pieces at such a cost each payday.  I can

do it fine my myself for free.

·         Having to race ahead of folks [disclaimer: me, today] just to get one car ahead of folks [disclaimer: a pissed off me, today] while entering an Interstate highway construction zone.  Can you say, “Mooor-on!”  And his Idaho license plate was matched with a window sticker lauding the driver’s adoration for the Boston Red Sox.  No more said.

·         People (like me) who watch shows like Extreme Homes because I’m not gutsy enough to move my family to Peru and enter a seven-year odyssey of building a natural stone house that’s blended in with nature.  That has stone slabs for bedframes.   OK, maybe the sad thing would be to actually think it’s worth doing?  That, my friends, is in the eye of the beholder and is the end of this odd rant against things that seriously, or frivolously, sadden me.  Feel free to toss me a zinger back if I instead should rejoice!

Wheels on the Van go round and round

That’s what Idaho has felt like, though we’re happy to be off the treadmill our Maryland lives had become.  700+ miles alone while househunting our first two weeks here!  Having just replied to a couple of you via email, and thinking about what’s up in the new year, gets me to posting some new stuff.  That, and several of you have encouraged me to again write.

It’s interesting how you can shift your perspective by trying new ideas or shaking old ones around.  For example, Mrs. TMM has to deal with my rants about politics, esp. my feeling that the President’s role in managing day-to-day governmental ops is vastly overrated; he’s just one person whose guidance takes so long to filter into actual policies.  And where is the accountability on Congress to do its basic job – field a budget?  And, we reap what we sow when Congress is allowed to formulate budgets down to the program level, unlike many European countries where bureaucrats like me would translate an entire department’s funding into specific programmatic actions not subject to the vagaries of election cycles.  Pro’s and con’s, and I’m not advocating anything here, just looking at the issues from a different lenses!

Idaho and the West.  Much less controversial and more interesting to many of you?  I cannot believe we live in the land of Sonic and still have drive-in theaters here; that’s the benefit of such predictably dry and warm weather so much of the year, with nary a mosquito in sight.  And the Sonics’ ATM readers here are so polite – “Do you know your PIN?”  “Ahh, duhh, no, can I have it for free?!”  And they have ‘home-tending’ here, whereby a realtor can allow a buyer awaiting a home sale closure to stay dirt-cheap in a house that’s up for a short sale.  So, we’re paying but a fraction of the cost of a rental house and have a very simple lease whose term ends only when the bank sells this house (but we'll close on our own house Oct. 15).

My annual autumn sojourn to the C&O Canal trail is no more, to be replaced this year by simpler trips (and a short campout?!) to eastern Oregon’s national forests.  Oregon because we’ll live but twenty minutes from the state line.  In two hours flat, mostly along I-84 at 75 mph, we can arrive at the trails around 7,100-ft elevation Grande Ronde Lake or the superb fishing at Phillips Lake; or nearer to home, we can do see songbird and hawks capture-and-releases at the Idaho Bird Observatory.  Like DC and other cities, Boise has its own river walk and we hope to do a couple hours’ walk after Saturday’s observatory visit (then some slices of pizza nearby before heading home).

Oh, did I mention last weekend we did six hours round-trip drive to Craters of the Moon National Monument?  What a surreal and fascinating place to behold, something I highly recommend for anyone who’s in the area and interested in how our earth continues to form.  Windy but quiet, strange flora and even folks camping among the cinders underfoot.  Next year we’ll camp just to see what it’s like.

Enough pent-up thoughts for today as I type from bed on a sick leave day.  See – work is so interesting and family life so energized that I can’t find time to write in the evenings!  Be good to yourselves as the eastern seaboard considers cooling off and autumn festivals are just around the bend!

TwoMedicineMan becomes NewPlymouthMan

Several folks have pinged me on our status, so here’s a fairly brief update.  (FYI, New PlymouthMan refers to our new abode in New Plymouth, Idaho)

Rearview Mirror:  we do miss DC in some ways, mostly friends like you who make sense to us!  Folks out here are neat but different; we got invited to a party last night (aren’t I now the Extrovert?!) and had a great time, but we sure had to focus on the conversations, ones very unlike southern MD as they centered on ‘rural’ and hunting topics.  But so cool – and we had a blast.

Briefest of updates:  nothing in life is great forever, but our summertime journey has been remarkably positive, though the wildlands fires around us in central ID, and eastern OR and WA have caused many days of hazy daylight and air quality that’s problematic for those with respiratory conditions, like our daughter.  But that hasn’t kept us away from the nearby dog park and from trips around the area.  We moved Friday into a rental house, our temp digs as we finalize our house deal for closure on Oct. 15.  The rental house is 1,400 sq ft, has a good layout, and is dirt-cheap since we’re ‘house-tending’ a short-sale house.  Sleeping on air mattresses in a house, and eating off card tables, is a simple adventure I recommend for anyone who’s gotten too comfy in their lifestyles…

New home:  it’s got [details sanitized , and has nice and is nice.  HAH – details got sanitized!  Did you really think I would share those details and perhaps jinx us?  Not, Spot.  However, I did create a slideshow I’ll later share with you, but (with my apologies) only after we close!

Work continues manageably apace.  My elevator job description is, “I’m a project manager for computer systems that fight wildlands fires.”  That’s as simple as I can make it.  It’s a heady and humbling experience to work with these folks, some of whom (even IT folks) go out to fires and put their lives at risk.  I’m giving flat-out 100% this interim period to both family and work, and truth-be-told, I’m pumped-up even when I collapse onto the air mattress at night.

So, I’ll stay mostly off the grid until after we close the house.  I then look forward to closing my TwoMedicineMan blog soon and beginning a new one, so will be asking you next month who wants to stay along for the wild ride…

                Take Care ~ Jose

P.S.:  Here’s an extra feature for those of you who hung around this long into the email … My Top X Observations:

·         16 days of no clouds/rain/anything but mid-80’s broke today and I see moisture!  I heard there’s been no measurable precipitation since May (!!), so this is a blessing to the farmers here-about.

·         Young Turks drive the same here as in metro DC, but the rest of humanity mostly sticks EXACTLY to the speed limit.  That takes getting used to, but Jose wants NO tickets!

·         At this point in my culinary lifespan, I’d rather do Stouffers frozen meals than look at another menu

·         “All we want is some peace in this world”  Wise words in today’s background from Steve Winwood’s song.  Reminds me of the National Interagency Fire Center: 5 agencies from USDA and Dept. of Interior and people act like an extended family (mostly a great thing!)

From Shadows to Frivolity to some kind of Light

Now where is this blog going?  Mars, the home of my people who live in their own freak shadows? 

No, I’d saved this post title for future use and it now strikes me as spot-on for our move out west.  Or is it “out West,” given the imposing contiguous expanses of prairie grass and high desert coniferous forest?  It involves all my energies, senses and wheelbarrows of thought to comprehend what I’ve gotten us into.

God has a plan.  I’ve always believed that, and am reminded constantly of it as we swim in our life lanes, effect change (chaos in my case), and exercise the free will given us.  I leave it to my friend KJ and other philosophers to work out the twists of predetermination theory, and I just roll with the ebbs and tides of my life.

Recently, a weird habit again surfaced:  cloud watching.  I discovered many years ago that the wind talks -- if you’re willing to take the time to listen.  The clouds become a compelling overlay onto the day’s story, one I intensely take to heart, so I cannot wait to resume that relationship.  It’s on the wind’s terms, though:  once my younger son was wind gust-knocked over, flat on his back(!), along an open ridge in the northern Rockies.  After the shock wore off, we laughed our butts off as we hurried back to the Suburban, clearly getting the message to vamoose!

To my  memories of  southern Maryland, the Eastern Shore, Lyman’s Run SP in PA, Moomaw Lake VA, Cass Scenic Railroad WV, and most poignantly Green Ridge SF/C&O Canal Trail, I bid ye “Adieu!”  Bye bye love – but your trails and songs stay in my heart.

(Hey -- stay tuned for a recap of tales from the Interstate trails, and life-to-be in Boise)

Too much Chorus – I need more Cowbell!

Ever try to write something and the music in your head won’t stop?  My problem this morning must be like those folks who can’t sleep because their brains are moving a mile a minute and won’t shut down.  I don't have the sleeping problem -- I don’t give myself that much credit for smarts, being just a struggling troubadour of words in the blogosphere. 

Today music-that-won't-stop is Buffalo Springfield, circa 1967.  They sang of women and questions.  Funny how the same topics resonate in guys’ heads century after century.  Must be because they’re both unsolvable mysteries...  How uplifting to hear the fellas of B. Springfield talk about freedom, of both the mind and the emotions swirling within.  Picturing them in an old studio crunching through songs and demo tapes reminds me of how Mrs. TMM and I have been planning our move; we huddle round the plans and dreams, then just pull something together and say it’s gonna work, no problem!

Analogies run rampant this morning.  Seeing the power lines is analogous to the clutter of my DC life, noise and distractions that I hope get buried underground next month.  Sure, there will be different problems and things to gripe about, but maybe that’s the ebb-and-flow of it all, what keeps us in the game.  Bang the bell and give me something new to get energized about!

Just saw a small sailboat calmly tacking upstream along the Potomac river, near Reagan National Airport.  A pretty sight and a fitting exclamation point to this post…

Take me away, take me farther (a poem)

To tear down the pieces, blast the halo

Taken away and taken farther,

                into an uncertain void

                before the harsh crowd

                toward a prayerful precipice.

Is  there light in his eyes, fireflies of wonder?

Taken away and taken farther,

                about a vengeful swirl

                like holy water

                toward an uncertain absolution.

Wondrous primal instinct, emotions just under skin

Taken away and taken farther,

                into kaleidoscopic Video-8

                about his Spider-vision

   toward his answerless appeals.

Time to buy the ticket.

Thoughts along the Pavement

Went running yesterday, the first time in two weeks and something all too infrequent since I got this ‘walking pneumonia’ back in April timeframe.  I had a couple thoughts:

·         Taking an alternate route through an alley is fine, unless you’re dumb and choose one behind the restaurants – at lunchtime.  Talk about scrumptious BBQ!  I even pondered what type of wood they used – hickory, I think.  I was ‘a sliding around on my own drool…

·         It was a four-mile loop, but I made myself stop three times so I’d pace myself and stretch a bit.  I think that frustration was the toughest part; panting while Oompah-Loompah’ing down the road is a lot easier.

·         As I huffed and puffed up a hilly road, here comes this guy, running backward a minute to show off.  Where’s a missing manhole cover when a guy (as in - him) needs one?!

·         I feel like Bilbo Baggins, already saying wistful goodbyes to my favorite running routes.  And I don’t even like DC.  Interesting.

It’s Time to Ramble On

We’ve been awhile in DC, my friends, almost eight years of watching the pale morning become the light of a new workday.  But I’ve never been caught up in the Governmental Lights of DC, and now a neat opportunity came up. 

Where are we going?!  Well, it’s a relaxed city of 205,000 that sits at 2,700 foot elevation and gets but 19 inches of snow per year.  We’ll also be six hours from two legendary national parks (Yellowstone & Grand Teton NPs) and ten from another amazing swatch of wilderness (Glacier NP).

Did you figure it out?  Yep, you’re right – Boise, Idaho. 

We report Sept. 10 to my new position:  computer information systems administrator and project manager with the US Forest Service’s Fire and Aviation Management division at the National Interagency Fire Center complex.  There’s big changes afoot, so I don’t know my exact duties but they’ll involve bringing together federal and state firefighting and emergency prep offices as we thirty staff members help develop and run fifty computer systems.  Helping protect people and their property, as well as the firefighters and their aircraft -- talk about a meaningful job. 

Wow!  BAM!  It’s been a long time coming and I’m so grateful to ALL of you because you each bring something unique to the mosaic of my life.  Seriously, folks.  My life journey means all that much more for it, and I carry on with humility and (yes, Mom) a determination to live up to my potential.

If any of you would like to adopt one of our cats, please call me ASAP.  They cannot come along and we really want to have a good home for each one of these neat little folks!

And, If you want to contribute more to this conversation and unfolding story, email or ring me sometime to share your wisdom/advice (work: 202-690-7245, cell: 301-751-5921).  The TMM blog, and my emails to you, will continue awhile so I can share with you my wonderment of this upcoming adventure.

Best Wishes ~ Jose

Down in the Honky Tonk

I’ve come to a mini-realization:  designing a Microsoft SharePoint environment is just like herding cats.  Not really talking about work or anyone in particular (superb job, splendiferous co-workers).  No, it’s more about the vagaries involved when you bring folks together for what’s supposed to be the common good. 

It becomes a lesson in human nature.  There’s the Self-Preservation Clan who just can’t stand cleaning out the cupboards.  There’s the Invaders from the Eighth Dimension who want to blast apart the old and start anew.  And in-between we have the Romantics, dreaming of what could be but without the day job to buy you that nice ring.  Lastly, I see the Blue Collar Guys who grab the pickaxe and get to moving files without caring about what the Spiral Architect, the system designer, envisions. 

At home we have cats, we all have some of those same personalities, eh?

And, speaking of my home, here we herd cats.  Kind of hilarious that our tones of home become those of my workplace . 

Cat people rule!