numb

Growth is coming.

It is happening.

It is not pretty.

It hurts.

I cannot avoid it.

It has been a really shitty day.

This morning we came to the conclusion that while we love each other very much, we cannot be partners any longer.

And now we are both aching.

Not angry.

No shouting.

Just enormous sadness.

We are not able to be for each other what we need.

And it hurts.

God but it hurts.

Don't leave a comment dissing Laura, I'll delete it and block you. This is not about her.

Don't leave a comment dissing me. I'll delete that and block you as well. This is not about me.

It is about two people who love each other but who cannot match any longer. We have grown in different directions and at different rates, and we no longer fill in each other's empty spaces.

I ache.

With my whole heart, I ache.

I am so sad, I really don't have the words for it.

I stepped into the fear place and this is where I ended up.

I don't know what's next. We're both still in shock, I guess. There will be some figuring out that needs to be done, I guess. One step at a time. One day at a time. I'll be as honest and open about it here as I can.

Stay tuned.

evolution

I missed yesterday. My apologies to the three of you who were reading and hoped to find something here.

I am in flux.

Emotionally, I am in a weird space.

I don't know what's wrong, but something is off. I don't know what I want or what I need or what I don't want or might not need. It's a tough thing. It leaves me at loose ends and I don't like it. I feel like I am ready for some kind of transition, some kind of change or some kind of movement. I don't know what shape that might take, or how soon it might come about, but today was spent in self-care in an effort to get at the things that are bothering me most deeply.

I met with a friend for coffee.

I went to a meeting (topic: anger) (coincidence? you guess!).

I got a sandwich and went to visit some friends.

I soaked in an old-fashioned cast iron and enamel, claw-foot bathtub with hot water and essential oil of lavender.

I talked about love and life and emotions and communication and poetry.

I dipped artisan bread with herbs and feta cheese in olive oil and munched while chatting about all kinds of things with the cute baker.

I collected some bricks for a wee project.

I drove around the coast of Maine, got a little lost (both physically and metaphorically), but made it home OK.

There is growth coming. I can feel it. It may not be pretty as it happens, but there's not much I can do about it. I must do what needs doing. And I won't know what that is until I step into the fear place and take a look around.

Stay tuned.

food porn

What you see above are Cheesy Sage Biscuits. They were (are) absolutely wonderful.

I got the recipe from my friend Louise over at Pam's House Blend, and she credits fellow blog barista Keori with the recipe

"Weary Outrage Biscuits"

Makes 9-12 biscuits depending on the size you make them

2 cups flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
5-6 tbsp cold butter or margarine, cut into pieces
3/4 cup of milk
1 cup Parmesan cheese flakes
1 cup cheddar cheese crumbles
2 tbsp minced garlic, more or less as desired
1-2 tbsp rubbed sage (optional, to taste)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F

Mix flour, baking powder, and salt.

Add butter, in pieces, to flour mix. Do not allow butter to melt. Mix butter into flour mix with fork until mix is dry and crumbly.

Add cheeses and sage, mix well. Add milk, mix well.

Add minced garlic. Do not add garlic to dry mix, or it will be quickly coated by flour and you will not see whether or not it is evenly distributed!

Mix dough until garlic and cheese is spread evenly throughout. Add flour with a coated hand until dough become elastic and can be removed from bowl. Move dough to floured surface, knead and roll out. Cut biscuits with a glass or biscuit cutter, place on greased cookie sheet.

Bake 9-11 minutes, until tops are golden brown.

split and grilled in the morning with a scrambled egg, some fried ham and a slice of cheese, that's the breakfast of champions, my friends!

pictures!

OK, so these are not whiz-bang beautiful shots like some of my friends make, these are just pictures I took today of places I shoveled yesterday.

First, I had to get out the door. This was problematic.

The first place I shoveled was the church. It has a ramp, some sidewalks, and some paths through the yard. Take a peek.

And these are the front steps. They are daunting when covered with snow, trust me.

After the church was done, I went to visit a lady who used to ride my bus and whom I help out with chores like snow removal and trash pickup and such. She has a short walkway, but I did have to rake the snow off her roof as well to prevent her from getting whacked by one of the growing icicles along the eave.

Last place I went to was the place with the metal roof and the big deck that I had such a time clearing from accumulated snow and ice last year. Here's what it looked like after 24 hours of intermittent rain and warm temperatures.

Today we went to the big box hardware store to pick up some conduit and then I came home and did some really cool geometry like I showed you the other day and tomorrow I might do some puttering in the basement.

Stay tuned.

ouch (snow, part II)

Oh man.

After I got home from shoveling last night, the skies opened up and dumped a solid foot of heavy, wet snow on this island.

When I woke at 5 a.m., wet snow was still falling, mixed with spatters of rain. I shoveled out the truck, got it started and warmed it up and packed my thermos of coffee. I was at the church by 6 a.m. The plow guy had not arrived yet to clear the parking lot, so I parked my truck across the street and waded through the heavy berm of snow left by the municipal street plow.

The snow was so wet and heavy I had a hell of a time moving it. You would never have guessed by looking that I had cleared all of the sidewalks and paths just over 12 hours earlier. I started working, and before long the plow guy arrived. I used my large push scoop, which is easier on my back than a shovel, but the snow was still heavy and it was work.

Before an hour was out, I was sweating heavily in my turtleneck, hoodie and Columbia rain shell, so I stashed the hoodie back in the truck. With intermittent rain and snow still falling, I wanted the rain shell as opposed to the hooded sweatshirt, which would get wet, cold and heavy in short order.

I have advice for anyone who plans on depending on Columbia gear to keep them dry: don't. The shell was only moderately water-resistant. I was soaked to the skin by 8 a.m. As long as I kept working and was warm, I was OK. If I slowed at all, I started to get chilled. I drank my coffee when I could and kept moving.

I had a helper this morning. Interesting guy, named Ian. I don't know much about him other than he is a young, kind of loosely-wrapped hippie kind of guy with baggy pants, funky crocheted beret/beanie thing that mostly contains his dreadlocks, and he has a female partner and a two-year-old daughter. I met him once at one of the local organic/natural foods places when his daughter was expressing her free spirit by running up and down the aisles at full speed and volume. She was a cute kid and was not doing harm to anything beyond my nerves, so what the hell, right?

I was shoveling yesterday afternoon when he walked by with a shovel over his shoulder.

"Need some help?"

"You mean that?"

"Of course" he said, with a huge grin.

OK, I said - go clean off the front steps of the church.

Incredibly, his grin got wider and he trotted off toward the front of the church. For the record, HERE is the link to the church's website. It has a picture of the church and most of the front steps. They're about 25 or 30 feet wide, with two sets of steps and two large flat areas. In other words, it's a lot of real estate to clear of snow. I figured it would keep him busy for a while.

And it did. I finished up the rest of the paths and walkways, then brought my scoop around to help Ian finish up the front. He'd done an admirable job, and was still cheerfully tossing snow hither and yon. I invited him to return in the morning, and he gladly agreed. I think my promise of cash in the morning may have helped fuel his enthusiasm.

So this morning in the rain and snow, Ian comes loping cheerfully down the sidewalk, shiny shovel over his shoulder. He started immediately on the front steps, then cleaned them up really nice and salted well.

Together we got it done and parted company with a pledge to call him if I needed help again. He's a good guy, and his perpetually cheerful demeanor was really kinda fun to be around.

So, after we parted company, I went and did my other two residential places that I take care of. More heavy, wet snow, and raking of roofs to prevent ice dams and dangerous icicle development. By the end of the day, I could barely stand upright. There was so much heavy, wet snow, and it was sooooo wet and sooooo heavy, there really was no good way to move it that did not involve lots of back muscles.

I brought home Chinese take-out and peeled out of my thoroughly soaked clothes. Even my socks inside my boots were wet. Everything I have hurts. Every muscle aches. My left shoulder is giving me fits. If I move just so, I get a sharp pain. I tweaked the thumb on my left hand as well, and it's stiff now.

It was a very, very long wet, cold, miserable day. The Congregational Church people were delighted with the job we did, and my other two customers were pleased as well. I have to go back tomorrow to clean off the roof of the church and put some calcium pucks up there to melt away any ice dams.

If the weather and the roads are clear, I might go get some conduit for my metal project, and then do some more cool geometry and pattern-making. I have tried to make a technical drawing of the thing I want to make, but it always looks bad. I'll see if I can work up something better to share.

Stay tuned.

snow

It's been snowing for three solid days now. It is Saturday, and I finally went out to clear some snow from my accounts, and spent the better part of the day at the business end of a push-scoop. It moves snow quickly and efficiently and with a minimum amount of wear and tear on my back, unlike the old-fashioned shovel I used last year.

This is really the first BIG storm of this winter. Oh, we got a few snowstorms in November and December, but they dumped maybe 6 or 8 inches and then left. This bad boy? Well, let's say he's settled in and has his feet up on the coffee table. It started snowing on Thursday, New Year's Eve. We lost electricity briefly that night, but they were restored and then it kept snowing all day Friday and Friday night. Now it is Saturday, and it has been snowing and blowing all day again today. It is forecast to continue through the night and all day tomorrow, tapering off sometime Sunday night or Monday morning. Ugh.

My sermon for tomorrow morning has been postponed until next month due to the bad weather. See, UUs have the good sense to cancel services when the weather turns to shit.

Congregationalists? Not so much. I have to be at the church nice and early to get the paths and steps cleared so people will be able to get in for the 10 a.m. service. My plan is to arrive at around 5 and start clearing. When I was there this afternoon, the walkways I shoveled first were already covered with an inch of snow by the time I finished the last ones. I expect tomorrow morning will offer a similar kind of exercise. It feels like a WPA project, only I clear the path and nature fills it back in again. Grr.

With any luck, I'll get some pictures of what I'm doing, but those may have to wait for Monday's final clean-up round. Stay tuned.

the new year

I guess it might be a good idea to make a resolution to write something here every day for the year 2010 (which is VERY weird to type, I want you to know), but I am not sure that is a thing I can commit to.

Funny.

I am scheduled to preach a sermon in two days' time, and my topic began as "resolve" as in New Year's Resolutions, but it morphed into something about failure being a necessary part of the learning process and success. That morphing came about as a result of many conversations with lots of people about their resolution-making habits. Seems we don't make resolutions any more, because we don't want to make promises we can't keep. Or, in more plain (and less pretty) language: we don't like to fail. And failing once means it's over. We weren't perfect.

Which is bullshit, of course. None of us really expects to be perfect. But somehow we get this thing in our heads that says that we must do everything perfectly or it's a total failure.

OK, I resolve to write something here every day for 2010. I do not expect to do this perfectly. That's OK. It's a tall order, but hopefully I can break it down into pieces I can handle. Like days, maybe. That works in other areas of my life, so why not?

Wow talk about diversions.

I sat down to write today to talk about some of the cool geometry I have been doing and the metal work that goes with it. I'm working on a little project, and what I have so far may or may not work, but at least I've got the math down.

I'm welding pipes together to create a structure that will have multiple uses, none of them polite. Yeah, it's another one of those projects. So anyway, I want this thing to be made of conduit, easy to assemble and easy to take apart and stash behind the couch when the party is over.

In order to join two pieces of round pipe together, they have to be cut on a specific line so that they will match up. If the lines don't match, then the angles will be skewed and that would be bad. So, here is a picture of one of my patterns and one of the pipes I have been working on. The pipe, for the record, has been cut wrong.

Now I know that looks like a lot of squiggles and weirdness, but let me explain. See the triangle in the upper left of the pattern? It has one leg that is the farthest left vertical line, and another leg coming down from the apex at something less than a 45 degree angle. See it?

OK, that's the angle of the joint that I want.

Notice how this pipe fits neatly into the angle.

Only it's not supposed to do that. The angle is based on an isosceles triangle with a base of four feet and two legs of seven feet each. The pipes I want to weld together will serve as the corner piece for the top of the triangle. So, to get the angle I want, I have to have TWO pieces of pipe in that space. Now when I move the pipe down to show how I bisected the angle of the triangle, you can see how it does not match what I need.

So I drew out my pattern, which is that hill-looking sort of thing to the right, and marked the curve with those old-fashioned French Curve gizmos. Then I cut out the pattern and wrapped it around the pipe to see what my cut should have been. Ooooohhhhh. Yeah. It's off by a bit.

I brought the pattern down to my basement workshop and marked the pieces anew and set to cutting and grinding them into shape. It worked like a charm! I tack welded the pieces together and they look great. And then I left them downstairs to cool off from the welding.

But I did bring up another of the joints I was working on for this project. As part of the base, I need two equilateral triangles, with legs of four feet each. This triangle will lie flat on the ground and one of the legs will serve as the base to the triangles whose apexes (apii??) brackets I just created. To make them easy to assemble, I created six (three corners times two triangles = six corners) corner brackets like the one below.

Pretty sexy, huh? Yeah, I'm a metal geek. I know. And yes, for the old-school journalism majors out there, that is a pica pole in the upper corner of the picture. I used to be an editor, remember. I think I've even got a reproduction percentage wheel around here somewhere too. Not much call for the wheel any more, but the pica pole makes a dandy straight edge, it is marked in inches as well as picas and points, and it's a bang-up back scratcher.

Oh, in case you had not figured it out, the corners are made so that I can slip the four-foot lengths of conduit( one size smaller than the angle piece) into the openings and secure them with either a set screw or a pin or something yet to be determined. I'll keep you updated as to my progress.

On New Year's Day in this corner of Maine, we are snowed in. We got snow last night, it snowed again today, and it is expected to snow again tomorrow, with a vengeance. I don't think my preaching gig is going to happen on Sunday. The forecast calls for unmitigated nastiness right through Sunday afternoon. So I will start shoveling tomorrow, do more on Sunday, and then hunker down with some cocoa and the football games on Sunday afternoon. Maybe I'll get some good snow pictures, too. That might be nice. Stay tuned.