On the Cusp of a Real Breakthrough

I’m just about over my cold. For the last couple days I’ve felt mostly like myself, although there is still a bit of gunk in parts of my head that ought to be clear. Yesterday I felt recovered enough to go out for my daily walk again, after spending a few hours working at one of my remote offices.

Today started way too early with a loud drumming sound. We have a fireplace in our bedroom, and at the top of the chimney belonging to that fireplace is a stainless steel chimney cap. There is a bird in our neighborhood that has decided it is the perfect spot for a bit of morning Gene Krupa impersonation. This morning, sadly, its inspiration struck a good bit before its human audience was ready to wake up.

Whether this is some mating behavior, or merely a variant on the concept of ‘dawn chorus’, I have no idea, but it has become a nuisance. After failing to scare the bird away by rattling at the bottom of the chimney, I stumbled bleary-eyed out the back door. When the culprit saw me, he took off.

I’ve been attempting to find his description among the mug shots in our Peterson’s Western Birds to no avail. Of course, I was bleary-eyed and half-asleep, so I’m not sure my memory of what I’m looking for is all that good.

I’m hoping I don’t have a chance for a better look tomorrow.

When I left California for Seattle nearly seven years ago, I brought with me three rose bushes. These had lived in pots on the patio of the apartment Kimberly and I shared in Menlo Park, and I had no idea how they would withstand the trip, or the Seattle climate, but I brought them anyway. Their pots were set out in our front yard, near some pre-existing, in-ground bushes planted by the previous owner of our house. At that point, I made a mental note that, when I got a chance, I would transplant the roses from the pots to the ground. Assuming they survived the first year.

Each rose plant was different, and each was potted rather inexpertly by me, before I really knew anything about roses. One had a miniature yellow flower, another a standard size pink, and the third was a specimen of the Double Delight cultivar, with both lovely multi-tone flowers and wonderful fragrance. The first two were in terra cotta pots, the third in a redwood one, and each had a different, haphazard mix of soil in its pot. I had no idea what I would see happen to these plants in their new home.

Surprisingly, though it is much wetter and colder, they didn’t just curl up and die. In fact, they managed to survive quite a while during a time when other things in my life were taking priority over my roses. The plan to put them in the ground was temporarily suspended while waiting for a grand front-yard re-landscaping that, in fact, never happened. Yet they survived in their pots, and lived through occassional “random drive-by attacks” of care involving trimming, fertilizing and spraying.

Still, it was clear the yellow miniature wasn’t truly happy here. Perhaps the climate, perhaps the pot, perhaps it was never really meant to be a real outdoor rose. It gradually succumbed, its flowers pale, almost white, and after a few years it stopped even putting out the sad little leaves that seemed only good for attracting black spot. Fini.

The pink rose, which started bigger and stronger anyway, also never thrived here, but it took longer to fail. I think that, if I’d been the gardener my grandfather was, I could have saved it, but I lack his discipline and regularity about tending my yard. I can go long stretches without really paying attention, and the pink rose would have needed more attention than it got.

Finally, just the Double Delight remained. Despite the reputation that its type does not tolerate wet weather, and is susceptible to black spot AND mildew, this rose loved it here! Every year it grew stronger than its mates, and bloomed almost compulsively, several times a year. Despite my lackadaisical care, it survived.

A couple years ago, we realized that it was doing more than surviving. Having grown impatient with my inability to find time to plant it, it had taken matter into its own, well, roots. Burrowing their way through the moist wood bottom of the pot, roots had crept down into the soil beneath, and started to expand in several directions. Gradually, the pot itself started to lean to one side, as the roots pushed and pulled it off-center.

Still, I must confess, this did not spur me into action. (In my defense, the last two years haven’t been full of excess physical energy for me.) Yet, each day that I would leave the house, I would have to see the tilted pot, and think, “Man, I’ve really got to get that rose in the ground,” and feel simultaneously guilty, overburdened, and increasingly ashamed. Sometimes I would try to imagine how the process would go. Would I have to cut an enormous tap root? Would that kill the plant? Was the bottom of the pot completely gone? How would I cope with the fact that the base of the plant was a foot above the surrounding soil, if there were roots everywhere? And then I would go off to do whatever I’d been on my way to do when I left the house in the first place.

Today, the weather was sunny and relatively warm in Seattle. It was perhaps the first good day for working in the yard, unless you are one of the diligent ones like my grandfather used to be, or our neighbor down the block is. I went out to survey the overgrown disaster that is our yard. In California, if we ignored our plants, they just died. It was fairly self-limiting. However, as we are fond of saying to each other, “Stuff just grows here.” If you ignore your yard, it doesn’t die, it becomes overgrown and mangy. But today, before I could notice the overgrown grasses, or the dead stalks of daisies from last year, my eyes fell upon the valiant Double Delight and its woeful leaning pot. The sun was shining, it was warm, and the time had finally, finally come.

In the event, the process of planting it was easier than I had imagined. I started by digging a hole next to the pot, approximately big enough to hold the contents of the pot with the base of the rose sitting at the proper height above the soil. Then, I gradually shoveled small bites of soil out around the base of the pot, and got down to investigate. Though shattered, there still remained pieces of wood that had been the pot bottom, and there were aslo a variety of small-to-medium sized roots extending down into the ground. I cleared soil away from a number of these, and cut them some distance from the pot. This allowed me to lean the pot even further to ones side, so that now the bush was at 45 degrees off vertical.

A quick trip to my tool bench and I was back with some snips which allowed me to cut the metal straps holding the boards of the pot together. I removed the boards one-by-one. After sprinkling some transplanting fertilizer mix into the hole, I was able to gradually roll, push and finagle the clump of soil from the pot, with the rose root structure within, and various of the previously trimmed ground roots into place. A bit of back filling, and it was done!

It was only then, as I gathered up the fragments of redwood pot, that I was struck by the symbolism of all this. Kimberly and I have been talking, now that we’ve decided not to move to Oakland, of really investing more effort into making our lives here what we want. We’re committing to stay. And now the rose is in the ground.

I feel pretty optimistic that it will survive the move. There are some roots in the ground that made it intact, though they now run sideways instead of down through the bottom of the pot. In the years since I first potted it, I’ve studied up on roses, and I had good success transplanting some others left us by the previous owner. I know what I’m doing now. Most of all, this has been a very strong plant, and has shaken off quite a lot. It strikes me as resilient and durable, like somebody else I know.

Now, instead of having a twinge every time I go down the driveway, I will have a little burst of pride. My rose is starting a new, and hopefully happier, phase of its life, and so am I.

Kimberly and I spent the weekend in California, and came away with a ton of information to cope with. I was not a very successful do-bee about taking care to eat properly and take care of myself, which I am paying for today. I probably shouldn’t have hiked around the Oakland airport quite so much yesterday after having spent two days eating erratically and sleeping in a different bed than usual. I’m pretty wiped out today.

After a beautiful flight home yesterday in the bright sunshine, we began our descent into Seattle and plunged into a cloudbank. When we landed, it was dark and rainy, and cold. (Just in case I was leaning toward discounting the weather in Oakland.)

However, as I drove home from the airport, I realized that it was just that they were a bit behind schedule with washing the city. The clouds moved away, and bright blue sky appeared, and a beautiful vista emerged into bright sunshine. So there, Oakland.

As if to emphasize Seattle’s attractions over Oakland, I woke up to snow this morning. It was just a light dusting, just enough to be decorative. Not something you get in Oakland. By midday it had melted in the bright sun. Frankly, I think someone should tell Seattle that if it really wants to persuade me, it ought not to give me the string of cold days that’s predicted, though I do appreciate the sunshine. Keep the sunshine.

It’s really too bad we’ll never know which team would have won the game had it been officiated properly. It’s true the Seahawks looked bad at times, particularly at the end of the first half, and the final drive. But I know I didn’t see offensive pass interference, nor the ball crossing the plane for Pittsburgh, nor the holding that called back our reception at the 2 yd. line. I don’t understand how Hasselbeck got a penalty for illegal blocking when he was in the process of legally tackling the guy with the ball, either, but that was just insult to injury.

The Steelers are a good team, and I’m happy for them, but I wish their victory had been unblemished by such officiating, so I wouldn’t wonder.

‘Nuff said.

It’s been nearly 2 years now since the doctors disassembled my jaw, cut out a chunk of bone and diseased flesh, and put things back together. It’s been long enough that I’ve mostly gotten familiar with the peculiarities of the ingenious arrangement of titanium and ‘borrowed’ muscle that they left me with. This week, however, I learned about a new aspect of it.

There was a break in the weather over the weekend, and while the sky was still cloudy, there was considerable sunshine. I lured Kimberly out for a walk around the neighborhood, hoping to get my minimum daily requirement of both light and exercise. It was fairly cold, as happens here when the cloud cover lifts and there is a breeze.

I’ve learned to speak pretty clearly most of the time using my ‘new equipment’, but by the time we’d been out only a few minutes, talking intelligibly had become really difficult. With the cold, the right side of my mouth had quickly stiffened up. It was like having a rock tied to my tongue. I couldn’t make my mouthparts form the sounds I wanted. They just wouldn’t move properly. I found myself paring my sentences down to the most important word, and even then it wasn’t always clear.

I didn’t spend much time out of doors last winter, I guess, or maybe I wasn’t talking as much. It’s odd that I’m noticing it now. It’s not painful, but it is frustrating. Not that I wanted a job as a commentator at skiing competitions, but … I arrived a few minutes early for a meeting this evening, so that I’d have time for my mouth to warm up before I had to talk. It feels weird to have “mouth temperature” as a parameter to consider in my life. I guess that’s just another thing I’ll be getting used to.

I’ve read that the most common New Year’s resolution involves getting in better shape. For some, it’s “work out more”. For others, it’s “lose weight”. For some, it’s just “take better care of myself.” Raise your hand if it’s on your list.

Whatever form it’s in, it seems to also be the most commonly broken resolution. Granted, it starts from behind. It’s pretty hard to start living healthfully with a holiday that involves staying up past midnight and drinking. And New Years Day happens at a time of year where going outdoors is less inviting, limiting the appeal of a quick walk around the block to burn off calories. But I don’t think these are the main reasons this resolution fails for so many people.

I have some tips from my coaching toolbox that some of you may find helpful.

All too often, this resolution is born from a sense of failure or self-criticism. Honestly, how many people decide to make such a resolution because they like their bodies and their looks just the way they are? For many people, thinking about working out is associated with beating themselves up. It’s no surprise that you avoid it and quickly forget about it. How do you get past this?

One approach is to make a choice. You are where you are. You’re as heavy and as out-of-shape as you are, and that’s just a fact. It’s not a judgment, and it’s not a sentence, and it says nothing about you as a person. It’s just the way it is now, and it’s something you want to change in the future. And you can. If you want to, and you commit to changing it, next year you will be different. You have that power.

Working out can either be a way of exercising your power to change yourself or it can be a reminder that you aren’t who you think you ought to be. You get to choose. Which attitude do you think will prove more successful?

Learning to think about working out in a new way can be a real challenge. One way to support yourself it to build in frequent rewards, and one of the strongest is getting a feeling of accomplishment. Create some specific, measurable and achievable mini-goals to provide frequent opportunity to feel proud of yourself.

It’s hard to get a boost from “I should work out more.” What counts as “working out?” How much is “more?” How will you know you’ve actually done it? There’s no motivation in vague.

Instead, if you say “I will spend 20 minutes on the treadmill on Wednesday” (and then you do it), then you will have some concrete evidence that you are a success! And while it may feel a bit silly to make a big deal out of “something so little”, get over it. How much would that critical voice in the back of your head be quietly beating yourself up if you hadn’t done anything about your resolution? The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, as they say, or a single session on the treadmill. When you get right down to it, your resolution means nothing if you don’t do anything about it. It’s only fair to feel proud of the fact that you are, actually, doing something to improve your life.

Imagine how much easier it would be if, instead of being a frequent reminder of how fat you feel, or how lazy you are, “working out” was associated with a sense of power and frequent successes? What if, instead of an added obligation and burden at the end of a bad day, the trip to the gym became a way of getting at least one good thing for yourself?

For many people, the key to fulfilling their resolution is about learning a new habit of mind, not of body. It’s the mental work, not the physical work, that is the hurdle.

Getting into the habit of celebrating small successes will also help you get past another problem with starting a new program, keeping it up. A lot of people sign up and visit the gym in January, but far fewer are still going in April. At some point in the future, even if you’ve gotten started on your workout resolution, you’ll start to feel frustrated with how its going, and disappointed in your results. Be prepared.

Even if doing 20 minutes of exercise a day had the power to make us all look 10 years younger and enable us to leap over tall buildings at a single bound, physical training has the same kind of peaks, valleys and plateaus as life in general. There will be times when you are working hard, and it won’t seem like you are getting anywhere. Worse, you may feel like it’s getting harder. This is when many people’s best intentions from New Years Day fail them. Particularly if the only thing motivating them is a negative self-image that isn’t changing fast enough.

This is when it helps to be motivated by a sense of your own power to take action, and to have the habit of celebrating little successes. Yes, today’s workout felt awful. But you did it! You overcame all the distractions and you chose to work out again. Just doing that much would have counted as a win on the first day, right? It still counts. And, doesn’t it feel a little good to be able to add another session to your growing string of unbroken workout appointments? Some days, that’s all you get. Success is about showing up.

The good news is that on other days you’ll be noticing your clothes fitting better, and discovering that you don’t notice the stairs anymore. After a while, there will be pounds missing, and muscles growing, and all kinds of changes. Overall, you’ll feel better about yourself and your life. Your shift in attitude will have ripple effects in other parts of your life. It may surprise you. And, at the very least, next year you won’t have to have this same resolution again!

So, what short, specific, achievable action are you going to do today? What will you do tomorrow?

Five minutes ago, the drizzle outside the window turned into small white floating objects which past experience leads me to believe are snowflakes. It’s snowing, though there are fewer words in the Seattle dialect for intensity of snowfall than rainfall. It’s merely a snow drizzle at this point, what back East we called a light flurry, or didn’t even really mention. But in Seattle, any snow is exciting.

The thermometer by the kitchen window says it’s 40 degrees out, so I’m not counting on accumulation, though in various parts of the region they may get some. And, as I’m writing, the snowfall is getting heavier and the flakes bigger, so maybe the temp will fall. It would be fun to have one of our occassional coverings of a couple inches, just for decoration.

I guess I’d better get out to buy supplies before we get snowed in. Ha.

I was one of the last babies born in the 1950s, so I grew up in the 60s. Many of my musical foundations were laid by the twin giants of Top-40 AM radio, New York’s WABC and WNBC. Even as a brainy white-boy in a privileged Connecticut suburb, I absorbed the hits of the Motown artists that dominated the airwaves, and every bassline and horn riff became an element of an almost unconscious stored musical vocabulary.

My musical tastes started veering away from pop in high school, and I’m now several parsecs away from hip, or even current with new releases from artists I like. But today I finally got my first full listen of what is the best CD I’ve heard in a very, very long time. It’s Motown Remixed.

Motown recruited a selection of producers and mix-masters I’ve never heard of (since I’m not familiar with hip-hop, dance, or any other recording style since 1990) and gave them access to the original studio tapes from many of the Motown classics. The result is phenomenal.

The album starts with a new version of the Jackson 5′s ‘I Want You Back.’ It introduces a weird state of ambiguity: you’ve heard this guitar riff and bass before, but not quite this way. It’s the original, which resonates with your deep inner memory, but it’s different. And it’s more than just the change from tinny AM-on-a-transistor-radio sound to modern CD. As the intro comes back around, we hear an anonymous producer (Berry Gordy?) give a heads-up to Michael, that still-young, not-a-weird-alien-creature Michael who you can still bear to listen to.

The mix feels somehow more “real” than the original. It’s missing the slickness of the original hit – Michael hits a few slightly off notes, which are left in, giving a nice texture that got removed before.

Each of the songs has a different producer, who does different things, and proves that mixing and production is an expressive art all its own. For someone who has the originals hardcoded in his brain, this album is an experience in being in two places at once. The 8-year-old riding in the car to the beach listens over the shoulder of the 46-year-old sitting in his living room.

Marvin Gaye’s sexy classic ‘Let’s Get It On’ is remade as a happy, la-la song that more than anything else reminds me of the cheerful sound of Donny and Marie Osmond’s versions of similar hits. But it doesn’t feel like a violation – it’s funny. I laughed. It’s as if “get it on” was Mormon church-group slang for holding hands, or something. And you can tell the producer intends to shake you up: the opening riff stops two-and-a-half notes into its run.

Stevie Wonder’s ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours’ is stripped down, and reveals a note of world-weary repentance hidden in the original. The Jacksons’ ‘ABC’ gets some odd minor keys, and a psychedelic harpsichord accompaniment that makes it sound like there was bleed-through from a Doors recording session next door.

There’s not a bad track on the album. ‘Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone’ comes anew as a documentary of the breakdown of the urban family. ‘My World Is Empty Without You’ goes from a make-up song to something disturbingly funereal, and makes you hope they’ve got this alternate-world Diana on suicide watch.

Sometimes, the original is taken all apart and put back together with everything in a different place. ‘Tears of a Clown’ returns sounding like a time-portal had opened up inside a European techno disco. The essential groove withstands the time-space distortions.

Other times, as with ‘Just My Imagination’, the mix is remarkably close to what you remember, but with just enough changes thrown in here-and-there to remind you that it didn’t have to be the way you remember it. It’s the version that would have been recorded had the ‘older and wiser’ Temptations revisited their catalog the way Joni Mitchell did a few years ago.

It’s a remarkable achievement, to monkey with these timeless tracks and not ruin them. It’s enough to make even a relatively old fart like myself start looking around to see what else these mixers have been up to. But first, I’ll have to listen to the other album I bought, the Standing in the Shadow of Motown soundtrack. That’ll wait for another post.

This post is being created in Flock, a new browser built on the Mozilla codebase. It aims to incorporate some of the new social technologies of the web, such as blogging and del.ico.us tags. I’m writing in the built-in blog-post interface, which allows me to choose which of my several blogs I want to be writing for. It provides a WYSIWYG interface for the text, which I find a bit weird, since I’m an old-fogey who likes looking at HTML tags.

Sadly, Flock is extremely early beta software. Maybe it’s my finely honed instincts as a former browser QA person, but I’ve already crashed it about 4 times while trying to get my blog accounts set up and this post written and published.

Promising, but for now, I’ll stick with Firefox for my real work, and not Flock around.

Wallace comments on the new blog.