Posted on 3 Comments

I’d rather be blogging

I have so much I want to write that it is beginning to clutter my brain. Obligations lay in the way. I have a monstrous deadline this Friday. Additionally, financial planning and bureaucracy are giants to slaughter this week. And finally I need to equip and pack Noah and I for a canoe trip in the Okefenokee.

I keep telling myself my productivity and writing would increase if I would buy a MacBook Pro! I wonder if Apple would grant me one in exchange for giving computer lessons at their store?

Posted on 1 Comment

Knoxville on fire?

Greg's fire

West Knoxville has a strange smokiness lingering over it. Not fog. Not haze. Smoke. It is a faint, woody smell like a forest fire is burning. I first smelled it at the church as I dropped Amy off for preschool and discounted it as construction burning. However, the smell is also at our house 9.8 kilometers* south of the church. What’s burning?

*Conversion courtesy of OnlineConversion.com

Posted on Leave a comment

Children See Art Differently

Sarah's self-portrait

We recently had the pleasure of visiting the middle school’s art show. Sarah had 2 pieces of art and a poem entered. So, we have all seen the picture on the bottle. I did not expect to see it in real life.

Dad, staring at picture asks Mom: "What do you see?"
Mom looks briefly at the middle schooler’s art and replies: "A vagina."
Sarah walks by and Dad asks: "Sarah, what’s this?"
Sarah, nonchalantly: "A flower!" and walks on.

Mind meet gutter.

Posted on Leave a comment

I know I’ll die young

Grumpy Doug

As I child I had a recurring dream that as my mother, father, and brother stood at the edge of some woods across a flat green field of grass to take my picture that I would back closer and closer to the edge of a cliff. At the last minute I would turn and jump then wake bouncing in my bed. It was a rush! I interpreted this as a premonitory warning that I would die by falling from a great height possibly in the mountains.

In college I pushed my limits with everything. There was no limit I was unwilling to try exceeding. We all knew you were supposed to live hard, die young, and leave a pretty corpse.

Now I would like to live forever. I want to always be there for my children and their children. I want to see how the world evolves over the next few hundred years. But stress is going to take me. Sometimes it feels like Death is reaching into my chest and tugging on my heart as a tease. My grandfather passed at 64 years of age. His nemesis was cigarettes; mine is stress and tension.