a new family tradition

Yesterday, when I picked my son up from Kindergarten, I asked him if he knew that this was a special day. He said no, and I told him that it was Election Day, just as I would have told him it was easter or Halloween or any other holiday. He immediately latched on to the concept as I explained that today, we were choosing who would be President.

Throughout the remainder of the evening, he asked all kinds of questions about who would be President, he wanted to draw a picture for Barack Obama, and did so, then spent the rest of the evening talking about Barack Obama while coloring pictures of Justice League superheroes.

We all stayed up late watching Obama's acceptance speech, and once he finally got into bed and listened to his stories, he asked me to come in and sit. He likes to have me sing him a song or play one on the harmonica before he goes to sleep, so I went in and sang America the Beautiful and America, songs I remember singing nearly every day in Kindergarten when I was his age, but that he'd possibly never heard before and has definitely never sung before. It was like singing carols on Christmas Eve, or Auld Lang Syne on New Year's, and by gum, I actually felt what those songs were all about last night.

It wasn't patriotism or nationalism or jingoism I was feeling, it was relief. Disbelief, even. It made me feel back to my overwhelming emotional response when Obama promised in his acceptance speech to restore America's light in the world. It felt like we were making things right again. I've come to associate national pride with stupidity, selfishness, and willful ignorance over the past 8 years, and to be able to feel proud of something my country did, without reservation, was an amazing and beautiful feeling that I was ecstatic to be able to share with my kids.

So, because of all this, I hereby declare that Election Day will become a new family holiday in my house, to be celebrated annually and with much rejoicing.

eureka

Wow. I'm either having a stroke or a major epiphany, and I think it's the latter, not the former. I can't quite believe that I am able to type the following with considerable conviction:

I just figured out what I'm supposed to be doing.

Those of you who have had the misfortune of sitting around listening to me complain about my job, my ambitions, my fears for the future, my chronic boredom and dissatisfaction, or my crazy, cockamamie ideas about this or that will recognize that being able to type that sentence is a huge thing for me. Huge. Scary. Amazing. Wow.

I don't even want to type up what it is. It's just too good still. It's still sending out tendrils of "Holy Crap, YES!" into my brain. Maybe it will be unsurprising to you. Maybe not. Maybe, just maybe, you've heard me talking about doing this before (but in a different context), years ago. Maybe it will look like a pipe dream as soon as I post it to my blog, so I'm keeping it for now. I'll let it free when I understand it and can see how I get there. I will get there, though.

I can tell you how it occurred to me. I got an email from my alma mater this morning saying that the organic farm there got torched. That got me thinking about the Sustainable Agriculture program there. That got me thinking about all of the interests I have that are currently hobbies or mental playthings, but that could be brought together into a course of study, a thesis, and that doing so actually has potential for bringing some of these ideas to life. It then occurred to me how Evergreen is probably the only academic setting in the area where I might be able to pull it off.

OK, so now I feel better about typing that I'm going to look into getting into their Master of Environmental Studies program.

This is where those few of you who knew me in High School start to laugh. That is, of course, the plan I left home with 17 years ago, the plan I got distracted from, the plan I honestly didn't understand at the time. At all. So what's different now?

The biggest thing is the real world experience I have. I think about things now in terms of their practical applications, in terms of workflows, relationships, motivations, and dependencies. Back then, I just thought about what seemed like a cool thing to do. I had no focus. I didn't understand any of my friendships, or relationships with professors, or even relationships between disciplines and ideas.

Another thing? The world is a completely different place. Global warming, alternative energy, the widespread availability information through the internet, all these things came into prominence is society after I had already abandoned Environmental Studies.

Another big thing is that I no longer have any illusions about how useful knowledge for the sake of knowledge, or isolated academic pursuits, are in the lives of real people. I'm ready to work. I'm ready to work on something truly Great, and this is the way I get to do that. From where I'm sitting now, it looks like what I want to accomplish could change the world. Maybe that sounds like the old megalomania coming back, but is it really so incredible? Every world-changing idea started with a real person. I try not to get caught up in thinking about predestination, but if there is still some vestige of religion in me, it's there. If I'm meant to do something now, this is it. If all I accomplish is that I change my life, well, that's OK too.

It's going to be hard to get into grad school, to pay for it, and to figure out a way to actually do the work without completely disrupting my family. It's going to be hard to have people hear what I'm thinking about and start poking holes in it. It's going to be hard to wait until I can make even the first pieces of this first step fall into place, and to maintain my vision over the span of time necessary to get it done. I'm ready, though. If there was ever a time to start, this is it.

time, layers, treading water

What the hell is it about this time of year? Why does it screw with me so bad? Am I suffering disappointment that the summer is over and I didn't do most of what I wanted to do? Am I just hitting the Seasonal Affective Disorder wall once again? Or maybe the layers of my life have just piled up in an inopportune pattern, and I'm feeling walled-in again. What does that mean? Let me give you an example:

So my son has been having some problems adjusting to kindergarten. I'm completely sympathetic, because he's dealing with a bunch of the same crap that I've had to deal with in my adult life, to my consternation. He's the new kid, because his class is full of kids who went through daycare and pre-K together, so he feels like an outsider. This makes him sensitive, irritable, and easily frustrated. He not only has to learn a new school and a new schedule, but he has to learn how to break into a tight-knit community that is not particularly welcoming. This is just like when I started managing this team. hard to get in, easy to feel shut out, incredibly frustrating and just..sad.

Anyway, so to help him out, my wife and I have been trying to regulate our behavior, trying to use a positive tone to manage the kids' behavior. This works great, and we've actually gotten results, but after doing exactly the same thing all day at work with supposed adults, it's freaking exhausting. I don't know how long I can keep it up. I mean I'm trying to force myself to completely change my outlook that I've carried around probably since I was in Kindergarten. I knew it would be hard, but why in the world would having an outward positive orientation cause my normal negative orientation to spike? Am I just doubling up on mood disruption because of the season? Because of work? What the hell?

Time has also become a problem. There just isn't enough of it. How did I do so much stuff this summer in any given day. I used to have time to work, then come home, eat dinner, and go for a walk or a bike ride. I used to hike on the weekends. Where did that time go? It seems like now, it's all I can do to sit down for 15 minutes when I get home before I'm off doing something else, cleaning or cooking, or driving kids around. Oh yeah, there's the difference: I'm cleaning. Over the summer, getting outside and moving was the priority. Housekeeping, not so much. I have got to get myself outside. Some corny thing I read earlier this year said that exercise doesn't take time, it makes time. I hate it when corny stuff ends up being true.

Finally, I've ended up treading water again. Or running in place. I'm having the same job-based identity crisis I've had multiple times per year for who knows how many years now. It goes like this: what am I doing in this place? oh yeah, they keep cutting me checks and asking me to solve problems, and I keep spending the money and solving their problems for them. Repeat ad nauseum, plus about 10 years. It's not that I don't accomplish anything. I've done some awesome stuff this year. I tied up loose ends with peer and employee relationships. I've gotten some people off their butts. I got myself off of my butt, and lost more than 60 pounds. I've proven myself to myself, but all on these small-potato accomplishments. I'm successful at a career I didn't want. I've made some progress in a couple of hobbies. I'm approaching a better-than-average degree of fitness (but look at the sad state of the average). I can still look at all that and say, "so what?" I have a thirst for Greatness, and it hasn't gone away. I don't think I want it to. I don't (can't won't) think that Records Management can be my ultimate destiny.

I keep thinking it's just some depression coming back, and then I realize that if it's coming back, it's because I haven't made any fundamental changes to the things that bother me about my life. I regilded the cage, is all, did some chin-ups in the doorway. the door's still closed, and I'm no closer to learning to fly. The answer to all this is the same as it was last year: it's on me to make a change, and it's going to be really difficult. "Not this" is not a sufficient career plan, and never has been. I absolutely must figure out what I want to be when I grow up, and become it. Transcend it. I've become all too familiar with the alternative.

train broken, look for finger

Portland, supposed Mecca of green living and universal mass transit (unless you start looking at surrounding communities, the rug under which Portland sweeps its dirt, but never mind about that), has shut down Light Rail into downtown for pretty much the entire month of August. Now, I understand that they're doing something invisible, yet incredibly important on one of the bridges, and I certainly understand that Tri-Met, the local transit organization, faces the same woeful budgetary restrictions that all local transit organizations constantly wail and gnash their teeth about. What I don't understand is how Tri-Met, along with really the rest of Portland, can be so damn obliviously hostile to pedestrians.

To me, there's a hierarchy in people on the move, with pedestrians, who are getting from place to place emitting only flatulence and having the potential to kill or maim pretty much nobody on that trip, at the Tip Top. Next, bicyclists, who have sacrificed some personal safety, convenience and environmental impact in exchange for speed. Next, mass transit, which generally relies on volumetric measurements to come out ahead on safety and environmental impact, and is scarcely faster that biking or walking, but at least you don't have to break a sweat. At the low end of the scale, of course, would be anyone in or on a motorized vehicle. They essentially don't care about the impact of their transportation (relative to the other options) in terms of environment, cost, or safety, so long as they don't have to come within a foot of another human being on their way in to work.

With all that in mind (and providing the caveat that this hierarchy changes considerably in a city without robust public transportation, biking, and walking infrastructure), I can not for the life of me understand why this project with the train is not designed to encourage people to walk across the river. In fact, aside from having shuttle buses take people from train-to-train, I don't think the project was designed at all. They just did what they did, and figured fuck 'em if they're getting off the train and going across some other way. They've closed sidewalks without reason. They've routed paths through intersections with walk signals that take as long as it takes me to walk half of the distance from my office to the train. They neglected to mark the walkway across the river appropriately for a multi-use path, resulting in dangerous conditions from a-hole bicyclists speeding past pedestrians.

My question is, why? Why, in a country with an obesity problem, are we making it easier to take a shuttle than to walk? If someone can walk, why not reward them for doing so by thinking about the incredibly low-cost measures that could be taken to make it pleasant and easy? Move the barrier around the construction equipment five feet back so the sidewalk can stay open, for example. There isn't even anything taking up those five feet behind the barrier. Instead they "invested" in an employee to stand at the crosswalk telling people not to go that way. Or maybe time the trains according to when there's a dropoff at the start of the walking route, then add a reasonable trip time before departure. I'm the fastest walker on the bridge, and there's always a train leaving about 3 minutes before I can get to the stop. It's probably full of people who have been waiting since they got there after the last train, 15 minutes earler. My solution has been to keep walking, which is great in terms of fitness, but still irks me in terms of being treated as a third-class transit customer.

Screw all that. I'd walk all the way home if it wasn't 12 miles one way.

stout

I got to try the stout last weekend. It's very good again, precisely what I was going for. Amazing how careful design leads to predictable results. It still needs a bit of time in the bottle (dammit, go away, Jim Croce playing in my head) to mellow out some sour tones, but right now it tastes like an austere Imperial Stout. It threatens some sweetness right at the start, but then catches itself and balances things out.

It's so black that the head is brown. That's not the most attractive aspect, for sure, but what can you do? I primed with cane sugar trying to get a white head, but no dice. If the head's going to stay brown, I may as well prime with malt. Some reading on the topic is obviously warranted.

back then

I thought briefly today about going back and seeing what the first entry on this blog was like, but I don't really want to. My life is completely different now than it was then, while my circumstances have changed very little. The difference, of course, is me. I've made changes that caused the world to suck less while remaining exactly the same. How weird is that?

The results, at this point in time:

I've lost 45 pounds since Feb. 4, 2008.
I exercise every day.
I'm taking happy pills (more like not depressed pills, but that doesn't sound as good).
I started making changes in the way I treat people at work, so that I actually have conversations with people. I tell them things, they say things back. I don't know why it would have been so mysterious to me before how NOT doing this would cause me to feel isolated and unappreciated. What was there to appreciate back in January?

This is, of course, not the first time that I have grown to feel revulsion for how I was once upon a time. How long, I wonder, before the me I am today becomes a subject of my loathing and repudiation? At least I've put some delay into the process so that it's not right freaking now every instant.

stout

I've brewed again. It's actually a bit scary how easy it was to pick up right where I left off. I've had the recipe for this batch sitting curled up in its cozy spreadsheet for months now. Some of it didn't seem quite right, but I decided to trust my judgement from back then, as I was way more absorbed in beer design and obviously had some sort of vision I was pursuing.

What I brewed should end up being a strong (Imperial-ish?) stout, no messin around, just straight up unapologetic blackness and dryness.

For about the fourth time in a row, the guy at the brewstore looked at me funny while I was ordering up my grains. I had my spreadsheet with me, though, and I explained in vague terms how I came up with the numbers I had. He ran it through the brewing software they use there and came up with almost exactly the same result I was predicting. This was a relief, as I have given that spreadsheet out as a functional planning tool to others.

Since the lat time I brewed, we've installed a new oven and a new cooktop in our kitchen. You'd think this would have necessitated some adjustment, but aside from having to get used to everything working faster and better, no adjustment necessary. Literally. I brought my water to 170 degrees in record time using the extra-large "turbo" burner on the new cooktop, dumped in 5 1/3 lbs of pale malt, plus smaller amounts of roasted barley and black malt, took it off the heat, stuck my thermometer probe into the mash, slid it all into the oven on its dehydrate mode set to 160 degrees, and worked on getting other stuff set up. No adjustments, no messing around, just set the temp and kick back. Wow.

I have to say, it would be really easy to do a stepped mash in this oven. I think I'm going to have to give it a whirl next time. I still have absolutely no desire to do full grain. Minimashing is just too cheap, too easy, and gives too consistently good results to consider making a bigger, stickier, hotter mess in my small kitchen, especially when I'm getting mash efficiencies like 77% doing what I'm doing now.

I added a small trick to the sparging process, and slid a strainer into the bottom of the grain bag before I sparged it. This kept the bag and the mash from clogging up the entrance to the outlet. I clipped the edge of the bag to the side of the brew bucket at the top so I could pour the mash in without assistance. Two clips would have been even better, but I could only find one, so I used some rubber bands to help keep things in place. Worked great, even if it didn't look too pretty.

From there, I added short of 4 lbs of powdered extract and went into a 60-minute boil, with an ounce of Chinooks from last year's harvest right at the start, followed by an ounce of Willamettes each at 30 and 15 minutes.

It came out at about 74 GU, a little stronger than I expected, but with attenuation from the WLP007 only registering in the high 70s, it will still be on the -ish side of Imperial, maybe 6% or so. That's fine by me, as I was wanting something easy-drinking for the summer.