“Technology has altered our flow of time.... So many of us have the sensation that time’s arrow is pointing everywhere and nowhere at once." --- Abha Dawesar

"Curiosity is the spark behind the spark of every great idea. The future belongs to the curious." --- Author Unknown

"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds." --- Georges Lemaitre

Kris Delmhorst - "Hummingbird"

A tune I find myself repeating and repeating and repeating this summer is Kris Delmhorst's "Hummingbird" from her album "Songs for a Hurricane."

Besides the soothing vocals, it's the universality of an unrequited love / crush that every human being has had at some point and the simple lyrics that make this song so great.

Blood from a Stone

By James Dufresne

All forms of the expression I have read
make mention of not getting life from something dead,

Not being able to tax or borrow from emptied accounts,
or are flowery words from a heart that's been pained.

But to have the thing happen as forces of gravity and physics collide
and a stone 'neath the stone picked up, with fingers twixt the divide

Provides a moment of expletives, rue, and hurt in goodly amounts
as upon the wanted boulder, the sanguine fluid drained.

You can get blood from a stone.

Have you ever had a moment where you thought you were about to die?

I've had four.

Two involved driving in snow. In one, my car skidded toward the side of a steep hill on a busy road on my way home from classes at UConn and stuck in a drift of snow just a couple of feet off the pavement. Oncoming traffic was such that anyone behind me couldn't avoid either hitting me or crashing head-to-head into them. My car was a 1988 Ford Taurus with All-Wheel-Drive that I'd bought from a man who lived across the lake and was an elder in the church I went to through my childhood. He would sometimes give me and my brothers rides home in the car, one memorable one being when I had an orthodontist appointment after school. He was an emeritus professor in brain research, the hippocampus to be exact, and when he asked if I intended to play football on the high school team and I replied no, he let out a quick, "Good!" well before concussions and traumatic brain injuries were a topic of discussion anywhere. But here I sat in the self-same car with an 18-wheeler barreling downhill in the rearview mirror, promising to deliver a harder tackle than any defenseman could dish out. I truthfully don't remember how the car got unstuck --- whether I backed it out quickly, punched on the gas, or if divine Providence stepped in. It truly was a blur. In the other accident, I was a young driver in a cream-colored Ford Escort station wagon, stupidly trying to return some library books in the middle of a 3" storm, hit a patch of ice at the start of a downhill where wind-squalls had covered the road over, started skidding, *very* nearly smacked side-to-side with a red sedan climbing uphill, and ended up kissing the guardrail at the bottom of the V-dip in the road before coming to a stop, surveying the damage to the fender and sheepishly driving home.

Another involved a minor medical issue that suddenly became a pretty big problem. I've gotten spring allergies pretty bad starting in 2005. Never had them prior to that. I have my own botanical theories about it, but this is neither the time nor the place.... I had fallen asleep in our rocking chair and woke up suddenly, out of breath and unable to move. My thinking mind's toggle switch had flipped but the corporeal one was still being paralyzed by the pons of sleep, and my nasal passages felt swollen. I was aware that I hadn't breathed and was running out of air and could pass out or simply suffocate if my body didn't wake up. And then maybe 10 seconds later, it did, I breathed slowly and purposely through my nose, and the my mouth came on line and joined in the nitrogen/oxygen/etc. feast and I really felt glad to be alive at that moment. It's a feeling I've tried to hold on to during tough times.  I have no hesitation in taking an OTC anti-allergy medication ever since, when needed and when pollen counts are elevated because of all the tree sex.

Lastly, there were a few minutes on 10 May 2011 when I thought there was a good chance I was going to either get seriously maimed or killed in a dog attack involving what I've come to understand was a Cane Corso and a boxer. I haven't written about this before because I reached a settlement just last May (nothing earth-shattering). I was walking my dog, Ruff, on a dirt/gravel back road when the two aforementioned dogs ran across the road and started in on us, pinning us down against an embankment and going for Ruff's throat and chest as I tried to alternately push them off of us. This strategy wasn't working very well, against the main instigator who was easily 100 pounds and tenacious (in the bite report, it was listed as a "Rome X" = Cane Corso = dogs that were used in the ancient Colosseum against the gladiators. I had never planned or prepared to be a gladiator. Who knew?!!?). I yelled out for help. I had my hands up, trying to keep this dog, especially, from imminently crushing my dog's throat. I felt the bite into my finger. It felt like it went on for 10 minutes, but it was probably closer to five. The homeowner came out and had to lay on the Cane Corso as Ruff and I limped away and I started assessing the damage. A 3-inch flap of Ruff's chest was hanging down and this upset me even more than my own injury. We called the local animal control officer, hopped in the car, and drove to the vet, where Dr. Gardner took in the situation and exclaimed that it really said something to her that here I was holding a bloody gauze to my elevated left hand, but the vet was our first stop. Damn straight! Ruff got five stitches, I actually got none despite the depth because, as the ER doctor said, stitches trap in bacteria in dog bites. Followed up a few times with a specialist to make sure there was no more severe damage. I later learned that our brush with the business end of this dog was the fourth --- and most severe --- incident of aggression and that as I had urged in my statement to the ACO, the homeowner had it put down. I can't say that I'm happy about that because I know what it is to lose a dog you're attached to. But it's a relief that no one else in the neighborhood, most not my little niece, will ever be at risk from it. Once a dog bites, it gets easier for them to bite again and this was a breed that epitomizes the latter part of the phrase, "All dogs can bite. Some dogs don't let go." What truly saddens me is that incidents like this are almost totally avoidable, and with this dog's pattern of incidents it was entirely predictable for some poor schmoe who was walking down that road at wrong moment.

And so, there they are. The four times I thought there was a good chance I was going to die. Perhaps this chance in each case was overblown in my mind. Perhaps not. The fear was real. Each event, however, gave me a little taste of mortality, left me grateful for a new day, and imbued a touch of rare grace. I'm not sure how long this kind of afterglow lasts and I surely do not desire refreshers, but all most of the aphorisms about escaping from the reaping scythe and finding renewal on the other side, even if only briefly, are true.

"When the conventional isn't working, start trying the unconventional." --- James Dufresne (me)

The 2013 Oscars

Unless I go on a serious bent over the next two hours, watching all the Oscar Best Picture contenders in fast-forward, I'm not going to be able to get to them before the ceremony tonight or write up reviews as I've done the past two years. What can I say? It was a hectic year --- and it was an especially hectic last few months. That said, I can't really think of any movie last year where I thought, "I have to see this in the theatre!" [Shrug.]

Catching Up

Well....

[awkward pause]

It's been a while since we talked. The entire summer, fall, and most of winter as a matter of fact. Let's catch up a little!

First, the garden was a lot more productive last year, especially in the squash, cucumber and tomato harvesting. I do think the tomatoes suffered a bit from trying to fit more in at the behest of certain people residing in this house; that will need to be ameliorated next year. The trellis system with poured concrete buckets with metal poles held up, but I definitely need to construct some cross poles at the top, because the weight of the bean and cucumber vines caved in the lattice fencing somewhat. It was my intention to do this, but I just didn't get to it. There is now about three feet of snow over some winter rye I put in again in late October. I can't be sure if the increase in production was owing to that nitrogen boost from the rye or the 10-10-10 fertilizer put in during rototilling (probably a little from Column A, a little from Column B) but I'm happy with the results, so I'll repeat them next year.

In early August, a crew contracted by Connecticut Light & Power took down a huge red oak tree in the front yard. It was a double-trunked behemoth in the shape of a V. There was a sizable cavity right at the split, though, filled with water and debris all the time, which worried us and our neighbor (the base was actually mostly on their property, but the tree itself lorded over about half of our front yard) about the core rotting or freezing and splitting. That "October Suprise" storm in 2011 really woke people up about the need to cut overhanging limbs and suspect trees from power lines.

I've also been doing a little kitchen updating, finally getting to rehabilitating our cabinets and doors and various little things. I cleaned the insides and outsides of the cabinets with some TSP (I am nicknamed "Felix Unger" and strive to keep a clean house and it was unbelievable how much grime there was). Most of the cabinetry structure was in good shape still, but a number of things weren't conducive to being able to sand/strip and refinishing the cabinetry itself, not the least of which was particle-board sections, serious gaps and uneven plumb between cabinets that had to be filled. I decided to just paint them in a gloss white. I then sanded the cabinet doors, which are solid red oak and stained them in a deep Minwax red oak color that I've used for wood and furniture through the rest of the house. With the trim molding through the upstairs being white, this color combination really helps to tie the place together. Some of the cabinet doors were in good condition or able to be repaired, but there were several that were too far gone through about 40 years of abuse and the stiles and rails had unfixable damage. Hiring a carpenter to make these doors was cost-prohibitive. And then, at someone's suggestion I looked online and found a place (barkerdoors.com) in Arizona that fabricates cabinet doors to specification. It cost about $500 for seven doors of various sizes. But I'm happy that I was able to just pick out the door style details online and get just about an exact match (I had to do some minor routering around the edge that the company didn't have an option for) and that the project could go forward without wasting all the time I had put into refinishing the undamaged doors. And the price on the replacement doors isn't all that unreasonable when factoring in how much just the grade-1 red oak raw wood boards cost at the store. Hiring someone here --- nevermind trying to find someone who has the tools and can do it and then having to wait on their schedule --- would've easily cost two or three times more. I also went to Lowe's and ordered a new countertop to replace our old puke-yellow Formica counters that are in seriously bad shape. We selected a white solid-surface Corian (TM)-type. The contracting company templated the new counters with a laser system and it was installed about three weeks later. I am a big-time DIYer, but a countertop is something that's a little beyond my ken.

Otherwise, it was a subdued holiday season given the shooting in Newtown in mid-December. There really is no way to make sense of it. As with any tragedy, all that remains is to remember with grace, and try to hold the light of humanity higher and make it shine brighter.

I don't want to be divulging too much in a public forum, but to explain the absence of blog updates a bit, my mother was diagnosed with a stomach/pancreatic cancer in October, had successful surgery in late November and and is currently undergoing a lengthy course of chemotherapy and possibly radiation.

But here is to 2013! It's already holding a lot of promise and I feel like there are many good things to come this year.