July 3rd, 2009 § 1
In my refrigerator right now I have just shy of a pint of cherries, an overflowing pint of strawberries, a pint and a half of raspberries, and at least a gallon of blueberries.
Ben, who is in California, suggests by phone that I either bake a pie or or make a smoothie. I don’t know.
June 30th, 2009 § 0
Tonight I committed genocide against a tribe of ants. The ants were just trying to survive, though perhaps they dreamed of more, of parent ants passing on a better world to their offspring. Instead, an entire society was wiped out. Dozens of insects drowned in cleaning fluid and were crushed alive at my command Genocide is normally something I take a strong stand against. But when nature enters my home, my staunch moral compas points south.
Perhaps the vigor with which I dispatched the tiny beasts was born of a need for revenge. On Sunday, nature had attacked me.
Do you know about juniper? I’m not sure I could distinguish a juniper bush from any other coniferous shrub, even after Sunday night. Any child who has ever run wild in the Pacific Northwest already knows about this dastardly plant, however, I’m told. Juniper looks benign, but is covered in a million prickly spines.
There was trash in the juniper bush. I was wearing a small dress - no sleeves, hemmed a foot above my knees. I jumped up, grabbed the litter, disposed of it. Fifteen minutes later I was covered in pink pinpoints of pain. Water didn’t make it feel better. Taking of my clothes didn’t help. Neither did hiding under blankets. Finally I found the calamine lotion. I spent more than an hour of my weekend wearing practically nothing, covered head to toe and shoulders to fingertips in a cake of pink minerals.
Thinking about it even now, two days later, I want to squirm. Ben says my reaction was particularly bad. He’s volunteered to retrieve any future juniper litter.
Good idea. Nature and I don’t seem to be on good terms at the moment.
June 23rd, 2009 § 1
I went back to the office tonight after everyone was gone, and got organized. I went through weeks worth of notes, responded to each as appropriate, and either filed or recycled everything. Next I tackled clutter, then my expense report, and finally I went through my calendar and pondered my use of time. I’ve been busy!
Some day, I hope, all these tasks will be embedded invisibly in my everyday routine, not an every-few-weeks exercise. Yet how far I’ve come. A few years ago, I’d have lost the expense report, recycled the notes without closer review, and told myself that the clutter was a sign of my creative mind.
My next organizational challenge, I think, is going to involve difficult decisions. I need to figure out how better to balance long-term and short-term demands, when the short-term demands are a constant, while long-term demands and personal-time-spent-working are both variables.
June 22nd, 2009 § 1
Rules that guide me at work:
1 – Never pass the buck. Accept full responsibility for failures as soon as possible.
2 – Don’t volunteer for everything. Just because I CAN do something, that doesn’t mean that doing it is the best use of my time.
4 – Always have a least one secret fun work project that I can turn to when I need to procrastinate.
5 – File notes regularly. Update contacts regularly. (I’m good at notes, not as good with contacts.)
6 – The boss is the one in charge. Once I say my piece, it’s time to back down.
7 – Never back down when ethics are involved.
8 – Set small easy goals every day, write them down, and cross them off when they’re accomplished.
9 – When heading to an interview, leave at least 20 minutes earlier than I think I should.
Nonfiction books I’ve read this year:
“The Tipping Point,”
“1421: The Year China Discovered America,”
“In the Beginning … was the Command Line,”
“No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith”
Fiction books I’ve read this year:
“The Eyre Affaire”
“Y: The Last Man, Vol. 5″
“Gilead: A Novel”
“Light in August”
New Years resolutions, revisited:
1. Do a pull up, or give up on this forever.
2. Build back up to running slightly longer distances (5 - 10 miles).
3. Maintain my six months of savings.
4. Read at least 26 novels and five nonfiction books.
5. Buy at least five new albums.
6. Learn fancy eye-makeup tricks, including the application of eye liner.
Progress on New Years resolutions:
1. Lifting upper-body weights, but not really gaining much strength.
2. Running four miles regularly, just started a program to get me to 10 miles w/in a few weeks.
3. Could be doing better here, but I’ll recover from the car repairs by year end.
4. Four of each so far.
5. Just one so far.
6. I’m getting pretty good at eye liner. Now I need to play with false eyelashes, maybe?
June 16th, 2009 § 2
June is a big month for my youngest and oldest brothers.
Chance, 18, graduates from high school tomorrow. He marks the third of the five Sherwood offspring to march across the stage, and firmly puts diploma holders in the majority and GED holders in the minority. Either is an accomplishment, but I’m proud that Chance was able to stay on top of everything and get through high school the old fashioned way.
Morgan, 28, competes in the first EVER Unicycle Polo World Championships on June 25. The event has been written up in several local papers, and it’s sure to draw a crowd. Morgan’s come a long way since his syncronized Wheels of Wonder troupe took the family to a rural East Coast trailer park for a costumed performance one Halloween in the early 1990s. Unlike the Wheels, there’’s nothing staged about Unicycle Polo. The championship bouts promise to be intense. I’ll be cheering Morgan on.
Austin and Darcy are doing well, too, I’m sure. But today the spotlight shines on Morgan and Chance.
June 10th, 2009 § 0
Paid $1,400 for the honor of continuing to drive my saggy old car, after the alternator failed, the brakes faded, and a few other pieces began to leak and sway. I made it home OK, but there’s a red light bulb behind the steering wheel that’s glowing. This is not a dash board warning light. Just a little red bulb. It glows when I’m driving, glows when I’m not, glows, as far as I know, when it’s alone in the dark in the garage. Hope that’s not something to worry about.
June 6th, 2009 § 5
I’m daydreaming about putting out a newsletter at Burning Man, with original reporting and photographs every day or two. I’m not sure, logistically, how to pull it off. Seems like I’d need some kind of printer, and a bunch of paper, and some source of electricity to power this all. Not sure how possible it will be. It’s fun to daydream, however.
May 31st, 2009 § 1
In a bit of a funk this weekend, and to top it off it’s hot and sticky. The cats and I are all laying about on our backs, as Ben practices his saxophones upstairs. Enjoyed sucking up some Vitamin D, at least, and drinking smoothies and baking and eating banana bread.
May 26th, 2009 § 4
Elizabeth Kolbert, in this week’s New Yorker: “It is now generally agreed among biologists that another mass extinction is under way. Though it’s difficult to put a precise figure on the losses, it is estimated that, if current trends continue, by the end of this century as many as half of earth’s species will be gone.”
Mass extinctions have been happening every 50 million or hundred million years. In the past, they’ve wiped out more than 70 percent of all life forms. This one’s different than the ones we’ve seen before. It wasn’t caused by massive volcanic action or a devastating meteor strike. It started slowly, 50,000 years ago or so, as human beings ventured slowly across the surface of the earth, changing the world as they inhabited it. It began to pick up speed. In the 21st Century, it is still accelerating.
Kolbert: “Currently, a third of all amphibian species, nearly a third of reef-building corals, a quarter of all mammals, and an eighth of all birds are classified as ‘threatened with extinction.’ These estimates do not include the species that humans have already wiped out.”
We can’t really blame the Baby Boomers or the Industrial Revolution. If all of this is right, the extinctions of the coming century were preordained millenia before we taught ourselves to read or write. They predate history. When men and women first used tools they sealed the planet’s fate.
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