Whither dicipline?

Strap in. This is gonna be goofy.

I began this post a while back. It's been a busy time. Cattle stuff, moving into my new house, family stuff. Busy. Crazy busy. Which is fantastic.

As I write this on the morning of August 14 I'm emerging from a whirlwind of viral illness. It began on Monday and worsened steadily. Cough, sore throat, congestion, fever and chills, myalgia and arthralgia, the works. By Thursday I was very ill and had to take the day completely off. Yesterday I was improving but still quite ill. I also had more back imaging scheduled in Scottsbluff and I didn't want to have to reschedule. So I power slammed aspirin and tylenol to tamp down the fever, and when I went through the boolsheet federal jobs program of wuhandromeda screening I denied all. And passed the screening. I doubt the screeners can actually work their thermometer ray guns, and I doubt the thermometer ray guns work to begin with.

The CT scan and full spine x-rays went quickly and perfectly, executed by well trained, professional, and cheerful staff. It's important for me to remember that there's a difference between professional medical staff and bureaucratic staff.

It's also important for me to listen to my body and use my brain when I'm ill. I hear all the wuhandromeda terrorism too, and I'm no different than any other ape-lizard when it comes to fear of the unknown. What if I really have it? What if all the terrorism is true? What if I die from this? I feel so sick and weak and vulnerable, why don't I just go to the ER for some reassurance and hand holding? Just to make sure?

At the same time I know my body, I know how viral illness works, and I realize that as sick as I am, it's clear that my body is fighting hard and winning. It needs real support, not bureaucratic hand holding. Fluids. Fuel. Hot baths. Aspirin and tylenol. Mucalytics and cough suppressants. Rest.

It takes discipline to do the right stuff in the face of fear. Spitting in the eye of bureaucratic terrorism provides just the spark of rage required to get me over the hump. I will not allow those people to drag me into their bucket of terror. I have a mind and I'm a real, live, ape-lizard, not a herd monkey.

I win because I have the tools and the discipline of the ape-lizard. It helps enormously that I've put in the work to learn and know medicine and to become physically fit. My pulmonary/cardio-vascular system is in tip-top shape. Were this not the case such a viral illness could be bad business for me. It's a reality of life. I made the choice to get fit and I've done the hard work required. I win. This round anyway. When I reach the end of the road I reach the end of the road and there's nothing I can do about that. In the mean time though, I can be tough and disciplined and enjoy the freedom and wonder of livin', rather than existin'.

On this lovely Saturday morning I'm well on the mend. I'm still recovering, but it's time to get back in the game of livin'.

I am blessed.

And that's a fact. 

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Last month. July 18.

At the park with the kids, I enjoyed watching the littlest try to catch birds. She was going for Robbins and Brewers Blackbirds.

She seems to be certain that she'll succeed in catching one, and if she persists she probably will, though it'll probably play out somewhat differently than she imagines.

Later she hopped on the merry-go-round with some newfound park friends, another three year old and a seven year old, both girls. They were having loads of fun, spinning round and round, laughing and shrieking. Then she got quiet and the color drained from her face. Her gyro had tumbled as her eyes and inner ears argued over exactly how her body was navigating the universe.

I stopped the ride and picked her up. It might be more accurate to say that she launched herself into my arms. She likes to spin around and play with wobbling dizziness -- that's fun! But this was something new, different, and unpleasant. Motion sickness.

She clung to me tightly, holding on for dear life with her eyes closed. I murmured reassurances and stroked her little back. After a minute or so she relaxed a bit and I imagined she was beginning to feel better. Then she retched a bit.

"It's okay to throw up," I said.

So she did.

As I was holding her and her face was pressed against my chest, you can imagine where the effluent ended up.

Perhaps I'm different than most (perhaps?!?), but my reaction to being puked on was not what you might think. The important thing was to comfort the little one and make sure she knew without question that I loved her unconditionally. It's a little hard to describe, because that kind of love doesn't translate to words. It's too big and too important for words.

I wasn't a bit surprised, but I never expected to find that being puked on is a transcendent, precious moment.

We got ourselves cleaned up and got a little bit of water down her neck, then we went home. It was supper time and the (almost!) five year old boy and his 11 year old brothers were ravenous. The littlest continued to cling to me as we sat at the table, and within only a few minutes collapsed into a hard, hard sleep. She had played hard -- three year old hard -- and then experienced a brand new life lesson. Her body needed the restorative power of sleep, and sleep she did.

Sitting there at that table with Grandma MeMe and the boys and a three year old snuggled safely in my lap was, again, an experience impossible to put into words.

Sublime comes close.

Summer Day In The Garden, by Littlest.

Littlest reacts to a critical review of her work.

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I hope the title doesn't scare anyone away; readers who might imagine this missive will be a ranting screed (or screeding rant) against the manifest indiscipline of my fellow ape lizards!

For this is not about that.

What this is about -- at least initially and in part -- is the curious nature of my own indiscipline.

How, I wonder, is it that I can exercise iron discipline in realms which make many of my peers shudder to even consider, while in other areas I drop the ball completely? With such ball-dropping areas being realms where my heretofore shuddering peers operate at the master level of discipline?

I suppose some examples are in order.

I can exercise when it hurts. I can endure severe pain and drive on. I can work hard and well and execute jobs and tasks properly in the face of adversity and the perversity of foolish and vindictive people. I can deal with disappointment and the deep hurt of grief and loss without sinking into victimhood or morose childishness. I can give my time when it's the last thing I want to do but is the right and proper and principled thing to do.

I can and do strive to live up to Kipling's immortal pathway to being a man.

On the other hand, I can be slovenly and slothful and gluttonous at the drop of a hat. I can think deeply evil thoughts and hold resentments and invented fears close to my heart. I can slack off when slacking off is not the proper thing to do at all. I can push at edges and boundaries just because I want to, and not because it serves any but my own selfish purposes.

It's easy to be selfish. It's hard to drive on through egocentrism and arrive on the plane of proper being.

But that place, the plane of proper being, the plane of true livin', is the place for me to be. I need to be centered to properly live; one foot in chaos and one foot in order.

Perhaps that's why the indiscipline remains even when I wish it wouldn't.

With a foot in chaos and a foot in order there can be no stasis, only constant movement. I imagine it as a kind of Brownian motion, vibrating, vibrating, vibrating -- back and forth all over the place. Unlike molecular Brownian motion, however, an ape-lizard has the capacity to chart a course and steer this improbable contradictory/complimentary contraption of life. For certain values of steer, of course. Life, the Universe, and Everything gets a vote too.

It seems to me that at one level and in one sense, a fundamental choice facing all of us ape-lizards is whether and how we conn our individual ships of life. If we let the Brownian motion of the chaos-order dichotomy decide where the ship goes, we live a life of existence. If we purposefully decide to plant our feet in the sweet spots of chaos and order, and then do the hard work and heavy lifting of steering, then we are livin'.

The second option is where discipline comes in. Discipline and all the other hard stuff that makes livin' -- as opposed to existing -- possible.

Whither discipline? A vital question, methinks.

The options are whither discipline or wither discipline.

It's a choice. The good news is that so long as we draw breath we have the option.

It's always good to have options. In the present delightful times, with the Zeitgeist being overwhelmingly one of self-indulgent victimhood, the options look like this: I can let the Brownian motion drive the boat while I moan about "everbuddy pickin' on me," or I can suck it up, grab the tiller, and do what I can based on doing what I should according to a solid set of principles.

It's good to have the choice, although even recognizing that the choice exists takes away a great deal of the deliciousness of supping from the self-pity pot.

Does any of that make sense?

Was it a screed? A rant?  

##########

Last month again. July 24. The four year old turns five (two days early so that the celebration can be on a Saturday and more family can attend). At age five two days early is cool. Next year he'll have a year of formal learnin' under his belt and he may be more inclined to hew to the calendar. We'll see. At any rate, he had a nice celebration with lots of love and presents (CARS!!!) and a humongous cake.

The cake says "Zeke is 5" and represents a work of love if not a work of art. Two "funfetti" cake mixes and about two pounds of real live buttercream frosting. Z-man is a frosting dude, and he wanted blue and yellow, so that's what he got. With cars! Cars are important.

What's behind that shared glance? Only the kids know. But it's awesome!

And now the grownups wanna take pictures!

I wish I had the words to properly describe the wonder of the day. It was epic.

##########

Still later in July. The last day of the month, July 31.

Nona greeted me first thing in the morning, then lay down beside me and proceeded to die. The process took about thirty minutes. It looked peaceful from my perspective and she didn't appear to suffer. It was a blow. I was there when she was born on July 13, 2011, and I was there when she expired. She brought an indescribable quantity of love into the world and shared it. I buried her in the doggie graveyard at the ranch. It was hard digging but worth the effort. The next morning an old, dead elm tree had fallen directly across her grave. Kind of makes you wonder. Nona's little "brother" Tommie, a dog Alex rescued, has done reasonably well. He paced the yard for a few days, perhaps searching for Nona. He's been a bit more, I don't know, touchy? Clingy? He's still full of happy enthusiasm and loves to chase around and nip my heels. So he's doing fine and we're coping.

##########

Tuesday marked a year.

Something I've figured out but haven't really written about. In my life Alexzandra is an Angel. What do I mean by Angel? It's a very interesting thing. Her presence is with me always. Most of the time it feels like she's in the next room, and she's paying attention to what I'm doing and how I'm doing. It's a very loving, reassuring feeling.

And then sometimes she offers up suggestions, or points out options, or something like that. Let me give you an example.

Last month the Jewelers from whence we purchased her engagement ring sent me a letter reminding me that I still had the wedding band on lay away. I had utterly forgotten. When I explained the circumstance to the clerk and apologized for not coming in sooner, she quickly told me I could have store credit for what I'd put down on the ring. But I wanted the ring, so I paid the outstanding balance and took it away. My plan was to thread it on my dog tag chain with another of her rings and some other baubles. It was a good plan, but it didn't feel quite right for some reason. As I drove home it occurred to me that the proper custodians for the ring are Alex's sister and her mom. That felt right, and that's what we did.

Alex and I did that. The proper solution came from Alex. And from me, enthusiastically, because it was the right thing to do. But I'd have never arrived at the solution without my Angel's loving guidance.

She steers me in the proper direction whenever I need the assist, which is not infrequently.

How does all this Angel stuff work? I have no idea. But I do know that God does for me what I cannot do for myself, and I'm convinced that He employs Alexzandra in the role of primary adviser and ass-kicker.

The me that can love the way I love today -- that dude ain't me. Not without God and Alexzandra it's not.

That's what I know. It's ground truth even though I can't answer the why or the how. It just is, and that's good enough for me.

I am blessed.

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There are many more things to write about, and I will, but for the moment I've run out of free cycles. There is more moving to do, with lots of lifting and carrying and good, purposeful, physical labor. Every bit of it is a labor of love, and I do none of it alone. When Uncle and Auntie and MeMe and the kids help, which they do a lot of, we don't do it alone either.

We are blessed, and it feels right and proper that we are blessed.

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A year ago I read in comments at another blog -- regarding the tragedy I had suffered, you understand -- that a commenter disagreed with the old saw that it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved. The commenter was rather vociferous in their disagreement.

I have a different take. It is infinitely better to have loved and to continue to love.

Perhaps this is the most beautiful truth I've found in my journey. And I almost missed it!

Maybe the most important words I can ever share with my fellow ape-lizards are these. Turn that heart loose and love unconditionally. Don't sweat the details. They'll work out as they are supposed to. Just love. Yeah, just love.

##########

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

I won the lottery!

What's better than a picnic?

Trees are for climbing. The artsy looking soft filter effect is a result of having grubby three year old finger slime applied to the phone camera lens.

##########

"Why," asked the little one, "do you have water running down your face?"

I explained that it was sweat. "I just finished working out and when I work out I sweat a lot. Sweat is good, it keeps you cool and shows that you're working hard."

"I don't like it," she said. She's at a place in her life where she makes major and important pronouncements about whether she approves of things or not.

I am so enormously blessed. I never had any idea what loving children was like, and never would have known had I not met Alexzandra.

I had no idea what loving another human being unconditionally was like until I suddenly found my world completely changed by loving Alexzandra completely and without condition.

These are things I would never have experienced had life not put them in my path, and had I not taken that path and instead chosen the other fork.

Which reminds me of an old post I found while searching for a different old post. It's titled as a Corpsman Chronicle yet it remains a formerly lost post which does not appear in the CC Sidebar Pantheon.

Searching blooger via the search feature is a hopeless task. Therefore I did not yet find the post I was looking for. But I did find a lost and largely forgotten post about forks in the road. Perhaps you'll enjoy the tale. I enjoyed the living of the thing.

##########

I may or may not have mentioned that Alex's birthday was June 13. I didn't expect it to be as hard as it was. I was nearly frantic as seemingly fresh waves of grief washed over me. To my great good fortune I do my livin' in a place where I can easily convert hurt energy into physical exertion. And I can do so in a place where, in mid-June, nature displays a gentle and beautiful canvas of her circle of life work.

Baby Mourning Doves.

Scarlet Globemallow(Sphaeralcea coccinea) or Cowboy's Delight.

Baby Lark Buntings. Or Larks Bunting?

##########

I've been on an incredible journey of discovery these last few months. The immediate, shattering shock of losing Alexzandra has eased. That's not the right word by any means, but I'm at a loss to find a right word. Anyway, I'm finding myself doing actual livin' these days, especially since weathering the emotional storm of her birthday. Actual livin' (the proper phrase I think) as opposed to reactin'. The indescribable shock of loss will always be with me, but I'm beginning to understand that the presence of the thing will be bearable.

##########

I've written at length here about the first and foundational principle of America; that all men are created equal. That all human being are equally human; that none of us are "other." None of us are airplanes or tomatoes or wuhandromeda viruses. The contract we Americans have with our government -- the Constitution of the United States -- stipulates that not only are we all equally human, we are each and every one of us sovereign human beings. We are not the property of the government.

But this argument isn't about the government. It's about the principle of human equality and the responsibility which attends this principle.

In simple formulation we're talking about the Golden Rule. "Treat others as you would yourself be treated."

A lot of people I encounter -- many of them having achieved full adulthood and some having extensive higher education (there's your problem!) -- read that simple dictate differently than I. Their golden rule reads something like, "you have to treat me the way I demand you treat me, because I am me and you are not me."

Another way to write the concept is the way Emanuel Kant did in his Categorical Imperative, which says that one should always seek to treat oneself and others as an end only, and never as a means to an end.

Trolls stop by this place from time to time. Mostly to tell me how wrong I am and how victimized they are by my writings. I guess being a professional victim is hip and cool. 

I mean c'mon, what do you even do with that?

The Golden Rule comes to mind.

The other thing that comes to mind is how very blessed I am to not be mired in a nasty pit of certainty and resentment. My days are filled with livin', and in livin' my life I find myself loving people in a way I didn't even know existed not so long ago. I've won the life lottery. Blessed.

The point of livin' seems to be to keep exploring and discovering new and important things, regardless of the quantities of shit sammiches you encounter along the way. Finding and learning about life's important lessons is the proper path, and along that path is indescribable beauty.

Walking dogs.

Doing the slide the hard way.

##########

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

    

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Learning and driving on

Nature in springtime is a beautiful thing.

In this part of the world the transformation from winter to spring is delightful. Cold and drab seem to last a very long time, and I kind of get used to the world looking and feeling like winter. It's not a bad thing, but it is winter. And then spring arrives in a rush of rebirth. In the wake of boring old winter springtime is sensory overload. Delightful sensory overload. Pretty flowers, pretty green grass, pretty leaves, pretty babies. Pretty everything.

Since waving goodbye to Uncle Sugar's Yacht Club I have been blessed to spend a great deal of time out of doors and away from the ape-lizard accommodations where most of us spend nearly all of our lives. Mind you, my daily explorations of nature's reality have been limited to a very local area. I'm familiar with this area and the rhythms of this place have seeped into the core of my being. I feel intimately at home here.

Now you might think that I'm an expert on nature's work here on my familiar stomping ground.

Ha!

Nature surprises me every single day. She is always changing things up and showing me things I've not seen before. Sometimes things which have been certified as impossible by The Committee For Excellence In Ape-Lizard Certification.

The video above is a case in point. This lovely bouquet of breeze-ruffled tickseed appears to be threadleaf coreopsis, Coreopsis verticallata. According to The Committee, it's not allowed to be here. We're allowed to have Coreopsis tinctoria, but not verticallata. Nevertheless...

An important lesson -- for me at least -- is that what exists in nature's reality is truth. Nature doesn't exist in television or film or books or VR video or in this blog. What I can see and touch and smell and taste an hear is real, the other stuff is a poor and incomplete imitation.

Where am I going with this? I'm not entirely sure. Just a reminder, perhaps, that all of the things we see in various magic image machines are woefully incomplete representations. The actual people, places and things they mimic are fundamentally different in reality than they appear in two dimensional dress. This is probably a good thing to keep in mind.

Now where was I?

Oh yeah, springtime!

Spring is a time of rebirth, but death is also part of the process. Predators consume prey, even when the prey is cute. The bullsnake will seek out, find, and consume recently hatched Say's Phoebe chicks. Doesn't matter whether we like it or not. Nature does nature stuff on her own terms.

 

One way an ape-lizard can describe nature is to say it is round. It is round and full and closes a continual circle of birth, livin', death, and rebirth. Nature's holistic cycle is the place in which we live, and we are part of it whether we like it or not. Whether we believe it or not. To paraphrase an oft butchered quote, you may not care about nature, but nature cares about you!

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This spring has been a surprisingly hard time for me. There have been moments, minutes, hours, and even strings of days where the sledding has been impossibly hard. Looked at and analyzed intellectually, my path is curious and interesting. Where do some of these roadblocks come from? What is their true nature? Why is the struggle so hard at times?

Many if not most of the what and why questions are simply unknowable. In a very real sense they do not matter. My job is to suck it up and drive on.

None of that makes sense, does it?

It's not all hard all the time though. I get slammed with beautiful life adventures every day.

I paused while writing this to capture some video of the pre-dawn morning. Another microscopic slice of beauty, even though my phone camera lens had a slight coating of three year-old fingerprints.

The last couple of days have been filled with adventure and I have some fun things to share in the next couple of posts.

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty. 

Doc's Monthly(ish) Dump

I have so many drafts started. Ideas flower but life and inertia spring (get it?) to the fore, and the ephemeral beauty fades.

Looking back from today, June 5, I can now see with clarity how hard the winter was. The combination of physical and emotional pain is a tough one. Over much of the winter I was in a sense barely hanging on, shuffling forward haltingly. But I did shuffle forward. I had to bring grit and determination but the table was set by God's grace and the love of family.

It'll be 10 months on Thursday. Alexzandra walks with me, day in and day out. Sometimes I get quite cross with her. "Leave me alone! No more hurt!"

She ignores my bullshit whining. Of course.

Thank God.

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Okay, here we go with some funny stuff and pondering. I posted this a while back and I recently experienced a bizarre echo of a similar but completely different experience.

To set the scene I'm thinking about, early in my recounting the tale of Grease's interesting day, there was a point where Grease was having a seizure on the deck of the tiny fighter squadron Maintenance Control space on the boat. The squadron's Maintenance Master Chief -- a very senior, very skilled and experienced sailor who had been sailing the briny years and years before veet-jam was even a thing -- had tried his best to help out by finding a large tablespoon. Back in the day "everyone" knew that if a person had a seizure you had to stick a tablespoon in their mouth to keep them from swallowing their tongue. I can remember being introduced to the concept in elementary school -- perhaps in second grade.

There's a story behind that introduction. During a high school basketball game one of the local players collapsed and perished on the court. As you can imagine this was a significant emotional event for our small town. The word that we second-graders got was that the lad had swallowed his tongue, and if only someone had stuck a tablespoon in his mouth he would have survived.

What really happened? I have no idea and I'm probably not going to to try to research a tragedy half a century gone. But there could be a grain of truth in there. His tongue might have blocked his airway during a seizure and he might have expired from suffocation. Opening the airway by lifting the tongue with a tablespoon might indeed have saved the day. There are better ways to clear an airway though, and sticking a tablespoon in there is quite a risky thing to do, so I can't come down solidly on the tablespoon side.

Anyway, there I was the other day assembling widgets at the widget foundry. Across from my work station is the work station of another olden duffer. This guy has the old-duffer diabetes and doesn't appear to take it seriously. It's not unusual for him to zone out with low blood sugar, and the local ambulance has responded such incidents several times in the recent past.

Now I don't know the old guy's story, but I do know that I find it irritating when he has an attack of vapors. That irritation is all on me; no one else in the universe is responsible for for me being selfishly irritated. In my incomplete world view he should be taking better care of himself so as not to put me in an uncomfortable position.

That uncomfortable position rests in the perspective of a former first responder who still feels responsible for responding. And also knows he's long out of cert. And also knows that it's not his job to super-corpsman his ass into every sniffle that appears in the world.

On the one hand I still want to be the man, on the other hand I don't want to be bothered, especially by the antics of an olden duffer who in my judgement needs to step up to the plate and execute some personal responsibility.

Yep, you got it in one! I'm an asshole!

Now where was I.....?

Kay. Olden duffer begins to zone out. There's a flurry of activity as line leaders, the foundry's self-certified medical response team, bored widget assemblers, and most of the community's dog population converge and begin milling about smartly, shouting advice and encouragement at each other. The crowd makes it impossible to work, and impossible for me to help, unless I decide to use my super-corpsman command voice and take charge. Which I do not want to do.

A fleeting thought is this -- being unconscious and at the mercy of such a bizarrely remarkable crowd is an awful thing. I try to imagine myself in the olden duffer's place and decide that I must, at my very next opportunity, visit my favorite tattoo parlor and have "DO NOT RESUSCITATE" inked across my chest. And across my forehead.

I also think -- again fleetingly -- that the price of not taking care of oneself is sometimes its own reward.

Crap! It has been a hard winter!

At this point it's nearly break time and I have a date with step running, so I slide past the circus and get on with some cardio. Within a couple of minutes I have a good sweat going and my heart rate is up to 180 or so. Feels good.

Then the plant PA system erupts with a call. "Anyone who knows CPR please join the circus immediately!!!"

I'm internally pulled in a couple of different directions. What are the chances that CPR is actually required just now to save olden duffer's life? If so, what are the chances that he can be resuscitated? What are the chances that an out of cert paramedic will be savaged if the circus goes south?

Tiny. Essentially impossible. Highly likely.

I keep running steps.

The plant door bangs open and a circus member rushes out. "Shaun, come quick, olden duffer needs CPR!"

Oh, firetruck me.

Inside the circus crowd has grown and now includes most of the population of the nearby villages of Dix and Bushnell. There are even a few latecomers from Fort Morgan, down in Colorado. It's a festive circus. No ambulance yet though.

I eyeball the situation. Olden duffer is leaned back in his chair. He's clearly breathing and I'm reasonably certain his heart is ticking along. One of the circus acrobats has thoughtfully stuffed an ink pen in olden duffer's mouth, because it's what you do.

I return to my cardio. The best thing I can do to shield myself from the tender mercies of the circus is to stay fit and healthy. Sucks to be olden duffer, but at least he's presenting an object lesson in how not to do it.

Man, am I an asshole or what?

Postscript. The ambulance arrives. Olden duffer gets glucose gel under the tongue. He comes around, signs AMA (against medical advice) for the fifth or sixth time in the last 60 days, and goes home for beer and pretzels. He's back at work the next day.

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And now for something entirely more funner.

The first of the cattle arrived yesterday. What's better than cows savaging fresh grass in early June?

Earlier in the day I came across an earless lizard. More properly a Common Lesser Earless Lizard, Holbrookia maculata. Beautiful lizard. If the herp experts are correct, the golden hue on this one identifies her as a female ready for egg laying.

Speedy!

After that adventure I came across a Pronghorn giving birth. I was a quarter-mile away and the optical zoom wasn't quite up to sharp images, especially with shimmering heat waves in the mix.

I left the new pair alone for about an hour and a half, then drove back by just in case I might be able to get some decent video of the baby.

Which I did!

Quite a beautiful springtime day which included lots of physical labor and bumping into nature's springtime rebirth.

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Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

   

Doc's Daily(ish) Dump : Thursday, May 6, 2020

I was working on some thought experiments but I'll save those for another day.

Thought for today: If it's such a struggle to hold on to a mad, why do I often fight that fight? I always lose, thank goodness, because if I win that battle I will die. Little ones teach me beautiful lessons when I'm teachable.

Losing the mad battle.

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Physical therapy is proving to be extremely helpful. The hands on soft tissue work, dry needling, and instruction for stretching and exercise are making me more flexible and able to move much better. The process is also reducing radiculopathy. All in all a very good thing.

Sunlight kisses Scottsbluff National Monument through decomposing morning fog.

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Friday and Saturday I was able to get out and train. They were sunny spring days and the lichen encrusted rocks were particularly fetching to my eye. 

Couple of pics from Friday...

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On Friday as I hiked I was buzzed several times by a Swainson's Hawk. There are several mated pairs living above and around this particular slice of heaven, and it's not unusual for them to follow me around while I hike. Sometimes they buzz me, but that's usually rare.

The reasoning part of my brain tells me that they follow me in hopes that I will scare up a tiny, tasty morsel for their dining pleasure. Makes perfect sense. To them I'm nothing more than a feature of the ecosystem which they might be able to leverage to their advantage. Their lives are a constant battle for survival, after all.

On Friday, though, one hawk buzzed me more than a dozen times. I began to wonder if she was exhibiting a Jonathan Livingston Seagull-esque delight with livin' and flyin'.

And then, having shared beautiful moments with another in this place, watching these hawks, I began to wonder if something else might be in play.

At one point the hawk buzzed me and then disappeared into a gully. I didn't see her come out, so I thought she might have made a kill. It would be cool to see and capture in images a hawk kill, so I hurried over. I spied the hawk in the bottom of the gully. I didn't see any prey in her talons as she sat there in the sandy gully bottom, so I eased closer. And closer. And closer still. She let me approach to within about 10 feet, something I've never experienced before. I paused there, camera forgotten, and watched her watching me. Slightly (more than slightly) embarrassed, I asked, "Is it you?" She didn't laugh. She just watched me watching her. Finally she lazily spread her wings and floated aloft on a warm updraft. Where she had perched was a Pronghorn leg bone, bleached white from time and sunshine.

Alexzandra's sister is an artist and loves to work bone into sculpture. I picked up the bone, intending to give it to her. I was surprised by the heft. I looked closer. Pronghorn bone without question. But this one was a fossil, completely mineralized.

What do you do with an experience like this?

I delight in the thing, delight in livin' such an experience.

I am so very blessed.

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We all know how very serious the wuhandromeda threat is. We'll all die from it. Unless the gubmint saves us. We all know the drill; no need to think about it because tee-vee. Very, very, very, serious business.

Meanwhile, outside the tee-vee...

It's a very good sign in my estimation.

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Here's a recycled corpsman chronicle. I selected this one because in a comment Tom made via email, he described having chest tubes placed during a hospital stay. I too have had a chest tube, and I've also placed chest tubes. Re-reading this one gave me a lift and reminded me that while I get mixed up in serious stuff all the time, that doesn't mean I should take myself too seriously. I may be a unique ape-lizard, but more importantly, I'm exactly equal in my humanity to all other ape-lizards, past, present, future..

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Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

Doc's Daily(ish) Dump

Thought for the day:

To embrace the blessings of liberty one must first embrace the responsibilities of liberty. What are these non-enumerated responsibilities? Good question.

Hint:

They're not what the tee-vee tells you they are.

Good luck and good hunting.

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How 'bout a bunch of baloney...

Or should that be Bologna? Or Bologne?

Which calls to mind a non-sea sea story. One day in the distant past our crew caught an R&R hop across the Adriatic to Venice. We didn't like the Venice vibe at all so we rented a Fiat and drove to Bologna to try the sammiches. Bologna was very cool and the sammiches were wonderful. Then on a whim we decided to drive the 850 kilometers (530 miles) to Bologne (not Boulogne! There are about 5,000 Boulognes' in France, one around every corner it seems) to see if the two cities were clones of one another. Our drive through the alps in high summer was spectacular. We'd left Bologna after local noon and overnighted in the tiny Swiss town of Russ, part of the municipality of Silenen, which had nothing to offer except clean beds in a quaint and creaky inn, spectacular beer and a home cooked meal, and locals who were hugely amused at our attempts to converse in Italian, French, and German. Fortunately for us, everyone we talked to spoke much better English than we did. And the waitresses were spectacular examples of Swiss Alpine beauty. Bologne was not a clone of Bologna, and we didn't come within 400 kilometers of Boulogne-sur-Mer, which is up by Calais. We stayed in Russ on the return and were greeted like family. All in all it was a wonderful bit of rest and relaxation. Then it was back to Venice, hop on the VR-24 Greyhound, and back across the lovely Adriatic, where we had work to do.

Those were the days!

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Saturday was the very last day the little one would ever be two years old.

Sunday morning she woke up and it was her third birthday!

A year ago I was sitting on a couch in a crowded living room in the midst of a grand second birthday party. In the middle of all that chaos and excitement and love I got blown up by a smile and the most spectacular eyes in the universe.

In that moment I realized that I was orders of magnitude happier than I'd ever been in my life.

Today happy is still a thing for me, and I'm kinda surprised that that's the case. As it turns out, happy is a choice I make, and it's up to me whether I go to happy or not. Surrounded once again by chaos and excitement and love it's an easy choice to make. I wish my Alexzandra were physically here, and I'm forever crushed by her physical absence, but I know she's here in spirit.

As I left off writing this to go do birthday party stuff I was feeling pretty sad. I asked God to give me strength and lift my spirits. I didn't want to be a big crybaby raining my chosen misery on everyone else. As always, God hooked me up. I asked Alex to be with me, and she was. Everything was okay after all.

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What's better than playing outside on a beautiful day?

The four year old taught his great-grandma his favorite song. It's the theme song from a computer game (properly a video game I guess) that had something to do with Freddie. I believe the lyric is actually "fire, fire, fire, I'm dancing with my deepest dark desire." That makes sense to me, but the Z-man says I'm wrong. It actually goes, "fire, fire, fire, I'm dancing with my deepest Doctor Zire." He's more likely than I to be correct. In this video there's a bit of three year old finger slime on the camera lens.

 

Later it was time for presents.

And cake.

The cake was made by our local bakery, and Mary Sue's cakes are awesome.

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Physical therapy has been super. My muscles and joints are working better every day and increasing flexibility is making me feel and move like a much younger me. This all makes cardio, strength, and endurance training so much more pleasant. It's hard and joyful work and it pushes me farther and farther away from old-guy land.

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Here's a Corpsman Chronicle re-run. This one got missed when I fixed (?!?!) the numbering scheme and put CC's on the sidebar.

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Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.