Greetings from Arizona. I’m trying something new, so this should be a short one. Debbie, Kayla, and I thought we would take a week and come down to Phoenix to attend her brothers wedding, and make a vacation of it sitting by the pool relaxing and not doing much for the rest of the week in one of our resort vacation places.  We’ve talked about taking relaxing vacations before, but we always end up cramming so much in that there isn’t usually much relaxing going on.

I had the brilliant idea that I should take along my wireless keyboard and try to do some writing on the iPad (that I’m using now) as I’m without an actual laptop at this time. It was a good idea for a test, but it never made it into my bag. So far writing isn’t too bad hunt-and-peck style, but it is slow. I’ve got a new idea burning through my mind and I’d like to have some time to start in on it when I don’t have the usual distractions and duties that seem to so easily pull me away from accomplishing anything.  I may have to bust out Monday and see what I can find locally, but I’m afraid I’ll end up with a chromebook.*

The trip down was nice, we took the scenic route down through Kanab, and stopped in at the Glen Canyon Dam visitors center.** We had some good Mexican food for lunch in Paige and pushed on through to Phoenix. In all it was about an 11 hour trip. It’s the first road test of the new vehicle, and I was pretty pleased, but I’m obsessing a bit much over the predicted milage and mpg calculations on the dash. *** Upon arrival, and after checking in at the hotel we had to meet up with my brother-in-law and make some wedding assistance arrangements. We finally got back to the condo around 10:00 tired and hungry having had no time for dinner. It was way too late for me to eat and still be able to sleep, and deciding I wanted sleep more than anything I finally got to bed.

There is a bird in Phoenix that sounds like a cross between a rooster and a howler monkey . Actually, there seems to be a lot of them. Either that or they vacation in the same place I do. In any case they woke me up early. I stubbornly kept going back to sleep until rather late in the morning, but was still pretty punked when it came time to leave for the wedding and I’d not managed to get anything to eat, either.

The wedding was nice, as far as this introvert could see, and people seemed to be having a good time. I survived  enough for the time of sustenance to arrive and had a good dinner. Shortly after eating I got up to go outside to get away from the noise and see what my wife was up to. On the way, a man I hadn’t met who was either with the bride’s party, or with the reception hall, stopped me to ask if I was ok. He said he’d noticed me kind of withdrawn earlier with my head hanging down. In truth, I was probably just surreptitiously checking my phone, but I was kind of out of it, and I think I give off that vibe when I’m in a crowd.

I was really struck by his  kindness and concern. When I notice similar circumstances I find it very hard to make that kind of inquiry, mostly, I think, it’s more of a fear of prying in on someone’s personal space than anything else, but I don’t think I really should be afraid of that. I didn’t particularly want to be bothered, but I stopped and tried to let him know it had just been a long couple of days. Given my insular nature, I’m not sure if I can really change, but I’d like to give it a try.

*which wouldn’t be bad, I want one, I just don’t need one, really.

** Sparking the inevitable “Those Dam <something related to the reservoir>” jokes

*** 24 mpg-ish at 65mph. 21 at 83mph

In an effort to put off any real writing creativity, I give you a social media movie survey. In some cases 2nd favorites got listed to avoid duplicates that fit better in other categories.

Most Hated Movie: Barton Fink
Movie I Think Is Overrated: Avatar
Movie I Think Is Underrated: 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
Movie I Love: Mad Max: Fury Road
Movie I Secretly Love: None, I’ll openly profess my love
Favorite Action Movie: Aliens
Favorite Christmas Movie: Die Hard
Favorite Drama Movie: Stranger Than Fiction
Favorite Western Movie: El Dorado
Favorite Horror Movie: The Changeling
Favorite Comedy Movie: Monty Pythons Life of Brian
Favorite Disney Movie: Rogue One (it counts as Disney, right?)
Favorite Science Fiction Movie: Blade Runner
Favorite Animated Movie: Lilo and Stitch
Favorite Superhero Movie: Captain America: Winter Soldier
Favorite Musical: Paint Your Wagon
Favorite Bad Movie: Mad Dog Time
Childhood Favorite: Star Wars
Favorite Franchise: The Marvel Universe movies
Best Trilogy: The Matrix (yes, I’m one of them…)
Guilty Pleasure: Streets of Fire
Favorite Movie This Year So Far:  Moana
Movie I Have Recently Seen: Lady in Gold
What I Thought of It: Very nice, but disheartening in its current cultural relevance.
Favorite Movie of All Time: Casablanca, I know it seems cliché to say, but it is my favorite movie.

It’s warming up outside and I’ve ventured into my studio for a couple times recently. This weekend I may even turn the water back on. I doubt it will freeze hard enough to have to worry about the pipes. At least not enough to worry hard. I’ve had ideas festering all winter long about what I need to do. I’ve been cursing myself since I ‘moved in’ that I didn’t epoxy the floor before I got started. I think I can move everything out of the back third and at least do the floor on the ceramics end before production starts this spring. That’s the goal at least. But there’s other things, too. My sink is too big and wastes a lot of space. I’m going to sell it on KSL and downgrade to something more reasonable. I’m probably going to get rid of the table my drill press is on and put three or four tools in that place that mostly live on shelves. There’s too many ideas.

Part of the excessive ideas problem is I’ve been spending a lot of time binge watching Adam Savage videos on YouTube. This particular one was motivating/damaging me towards a bigger restructuring of the studio space.

I like the idea of not sorting through drawers for tools, and building something like this would probably let me get rid of a couple of tool boxes, including a big standing one so there would be a net gain in space. Except, maybe, for the fact that it would inspire me to collect more tools to fill it up.

I’m also downgrading my sink from the huge stainless monstrosity that seems to have the primary function of collecting dead wasps and spiders to a ringer washer that came with the house. I admit that part of the force behind the change is to see if I can make the ringer work.

The real crux of this movement came when I realized I probably had one work table too many. I have the big welded steel wedging table I made with a top of 300 pounds of canvas covered plaster that would probably do me as a main table, but that leaves me with the task of getting rid of the lighter work table. And that work table was given to me by one of my mentors, John Shaw. And so I’m emotionally attached to the table. I know I’m attached. I know he was throwing it out when he gave it to me as a struggling student living in a crappy little apartment. I know I had to cut down two of the legs an inch to get it into the room in my apartment, and that it still sits on the cut off stumps to keep it nearly level. It was hard enough to get rid of the old, tattered canvas that used to top it. The one where John wrote, “Erik owns me now” in black sharpie marker and told me to take it home.

I’m really not very sentimental, so I don’t know why I’m that attached. Maybe it’s because our old studio in Bountiful is months away from getting torn down. Maybe it’s because I know that I’m not very good at keeping up relationships and without the studio as an excuse I might very well be able to count the times I see John again on my fingers. That really bothers me, and so far I really don’t have any answers.

I had a bit of an accident this evening, and despite the relatively mild consequences, I can’t slow my brain down enough to stay in bed yet.

I left work five minutes early to get a jump on the evening. I’m usually in at least ten minutes early, but try to not be visible cutting out before the whistle blows. Only I had things to do tonight, and while I wasn’t looking forward to the evening, I figured I needed to make some time to grab a bite first. I got to the intersection at 21st South and 13th East fairly quickly. Traffic wasn’t too bad and the snow was just dusting down. I pulled into the intersection to turn West onto 21st South and waited for the inevitable turning of the light to red to finally allow me to proceed. Traffic, you know. The light went yellow and I took my foot off the brake pedal. I watched the oncoming car slow and stop and I hit the gas to get through the light that had turned red, only out from the occultation of the car I watched come to a halt shot a little silver meteor of a car. In a brief second I thought, “I hope they’re not planning on turning into my lane”, thinking that it was going to turn right onto the two lane street I was aiming for. Only it didn’t turn at all, but plowed directly into the front passenger side wheel, grinding clear across the grill of my truck and ending up coming to rest lamely in front of me. It was one of those slow moment things where I had time to think of so many things.

“Where did she come from?”
“What did she think she was doing?”
“Why didn’t I stop at Taco Bell?”

I sat there for a minute trying to remember where I had my last save point. I got out only to discover that there was a car rammed into the back of my pickup.

The girl in the car that hit me from behind was pretty shaken, as was the one that came through the red light. The red-light-runner had a baby in the car. My heart sank. I got out my phone but my hands were shaking so bad I had a lot of trouble dialing the police. An unmarked police SUV pulled into the intersection and an off duty officer from Park City got out to check on everyone and said he’d called the Salt Lake Dispatch. After talking for a minute to the driver behind I walked around to the front. A guy who had been waiting to cross the street was making sure everyone was ok. He came and gave me his phone number, saying he wasn’t watching the lights, he was just focused on the crosswalk fixing to change, but would tell what he could. I picked up the large chunk of my front bumper that had my license plate still attached from the ground and tossed it in the bed of my truck. Another woman gave me her name and phone number. I paced back and forth in the snow a bit, painfully aware that we were impeding traffic across almost every lane.

I was glad nobody was hurt. I was amazed that no airbags had deployed. But my heart began to sink, because I’m a pessimist. I figured that it was probably going to work out that I was going to get the ticket for failing to yield. Ironically I had priced out new and used trucks earlier in the day and came to the conclusion that I couldn’t afford one, although I wasn’t sure if my ol’ beast would make it through the winter. Coincidentally, I had found the night before when clearing my desk, that I hadn’t put my new insurance card in my truck and had taken it out before I went to bed. Debbie had said I could just wait until morning, but I thought I would forget.

Time dragged on. Cars fought for position, attempting to merge or turn around the wreck against traffic to get on their way, beeping at each other, or maybe us. The temperature dropped. A fire engine showed up and purposefully blocked the intersection allowing fewer yahoo’s to skirt by on the wrong side of the wrecks. I had to sign a primitive digital tablet to the effect that I was ok to keep walking around in the frigid snowy drizzle and not be taken to a hospital. The firemen rode off to their next adventure as the police pulled up. I handed over my info and gave my side of the story. The officer seemed to not buy my (and the third party in the accident’s) story that the light was really red. I gave them the witnesses phone numbers. Another officer had the girl behind pull her car back and into the car wash parking lot. The tow truck drivers began to appear. I grabbed a couple items out of my vehicle. The officer that took my license brought it back and said that the woman who had given me her number was the woman who had stopped at the light. She said as she stopped (while the light was still yellow) the woman who hit me honked at her from behind, wheeled out from behind her and screeched into the intersection as it went red. The officer said he was giving the impatient woman the ticket due to her corroboration.

I was relieved that it wasn’t going to be my fault. And relieved that her and her husband who had shown up and given me several withering looks were not around. The officer dismissed me and I began to walk down the hill. I figured I’d have Debbie come get me, but I’d walk a bit so she didn’t have to get in the snarl of traffic. I dialed her up, and to my surprise she was just across the street from me coming to my rescue.

I’m in one of those places where I know there’s nothing I can do right now. I’m not worried, I have friends and family that are always right there to take care of me. They’re all the best. I’m not sure I let them know that enough, but I try. I’ll work something out with the car. I have to talk to the insurance first and look at the options, but I’m fairly sure the truck is totaled. It’s been in zombie mode for 4 or 5 years anyway. Avenues always seem to open up for me. I just saw the other day that with our last house payment we should be eligible to get the mortgage insurance dropped. That’s at least a third of a car payment there. Funny how my silver linings always seem to be a couple yards short of a first down, but it’s better than nothing.

Yesterday at work I took my usual afternoon break outside, ostensibly to stretch my legs and get away from my computer, but additionally to hit the pokestop across the street. It was surprisingly pleasant for the time of year and I lingered a little longer than I have been since the weather turned. I crossed the street and headed back to my office and found a small dead bird lying on the pavement. I was struck by its beauty and it made me a little sad that what appeared to be a healthy creature had probably succumbed to the cold. Naturally, I felt I ought to take a picture of it. A bicyclist was coming my way and I felt a little obnoxious as I stood in his path protecting the small body at my feet. I’m sure he didn’t see the bird and wondered why I was just standing there in his way. After he passed I crouched down and took the photo, but I couldn’t bring myself to just let the bird lie in the road. I picked it up gently and it was still very limp and must have only recently died. I wanted to take it back and bury it in the back of our parking lot where there are a lot of bushes, and flowers in the spring, but the ground is frozen and I didn’t have any means to accomplish anything appropriate. It struck me as many things do anymore as unfair, or at least needlessly unfortunate, but I know that’s the way of nature. I laid the body down on a clean patch of snow just away from the road, and went back to the office.

The rest of the afternoon I couldn’t really shake the memory of holding the little bird. I thought of when Stan the cat died in the driveway a few years ago and how Debbie and I held him one last time before burying him. I also thought of the death of Carrie Fisher and the pain of losing someone around Christmas. My Dad’s brother had died just after Christmas not many years ago, the same Christmas as a close member of my wife’s Mount Pleasant family. I make a joke that Debbie likes to watch the sad Christmas movies, generally referring to them as “Everybody Dies at Christmas”. To me they seem cloyingly heart-wringing in a melodramatic way that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but I try to be understanding of other peoples entertainment choices. Heaven knows I have my own cinematic guilty pleasures.

But this is a hard season for me, although when I stop and think about it, that isn’t unusual for any season anymore. Maybe that comes with age. When the memories you have  come back unbidden with every little neural nudge it’s hard not to be a little melancholy with memories, good and bad, that pile up over the years. Maybe with certain personalities like mine more than others. I guess the important part is not to dwell on the losses as much as the connections made in the times we have together. Now there’s a Hallmark sentiment if there ever was one. But melancholy as I may be, I do think I remember things fondly that happened, rather than dwell on the fact that they had an end.

And that little bird that came into my life as it left its own and sparked hours of contemplation on the nature of existence and our part in relating to those around us. None of us can see the extent of our influence, I only hope that I can see enough of myself to recognize when the things I do are not being beneficial, and hopefully change that.

Not many people are cut from the IT cloth, but I believe that the hurdles most people face when dealing with computer problems are largely psychological. There is something about computers that seems like it should require some insight more mystical than Google to solve. Now I’m not saying that the average person will feel confident in setting up an LDAP server, but there are a lot of small maintenance tasks that everyone has to go through just to bring these silicon beasts to heel. Nearly every day I’m faced with questions that leave the users looking sheepish over the simple tasks that just took me a minute to do.

On the other side of that coin, IT people sometimes take what is an easy problem and try to solve it through more arcane processes when a “normal” person would easily solve it. While solving a simple problem earlier I was handed one of the wireless handset phones our users carry with them. After a bit of confusion we decided it was one that didn’t belong to anyone present at the moment, so I took it and said I’d find the proper owner. I looked at the number on the phone’s display and compared it to the dead tree directory list on my desk, but failed to find the owner. My next thought was to log into the cisco administration server for the phones, and I proceeded to try to find the number there. Strike two. finally I looked up the phone’s IP address on the handset and started to look up IP’s on the server. It was only then I realized all I needed to do was call my desk phone from the handset and look at the caller ID for the owners name.

So, next time you see your IT guy struggling with some simple task please remember, he’s probably looking for the most difficult way to accomplish his goal.

Music means a lot to me. In high school I learned that it could be used to mitigate aspects of the worst of my mood swings. I’d listen to Judas Priest to burn through my rage, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” as some sort of lyrical commiseration for alienation,  and  Oingo Boingo gave me somewhere to redirect surplus energy. Music got me through a lot of tough times, and still holds a near-mystical power over me as it does with most people, I imagine.

We had a small record player when I was very young and some kids records that I think came from the childhood of my mother. Disney singles of Cinderella’s “Bibbidi bobbidi boo” song and the like. My sister and I listened to them often and eventually we were allowed access to the bigger stereo in the living room and my dad’s LP collection.  Oddly enough, other than the occasional Christmas album, I really only listened to a Roger Miller LP and the soundtrack from “Paint Your Wagon”. Still, it was enough to get me hooked and I began to feel the need to build my own collection.

By the time I was old enough to have an allowance I would usually spend some of it at the record store in Fashion Place Mall when my mom would cart us off shopping. Eventually I had a growing collection of 45’s. I vividly remember approaching the checkout counter at The Music Stop at the mall with the single for ELO’s “Turn to Stone” when I was about 10 or 11. A tall guy* waiting in line noticed what I was doing and  asked why I was just buying a single when for the price of a few singles I could have the whole album. I remember feeling like I got caught doing something wrong. After about a minute I put the 45 back and started looking at the whole “Out of the Blue” album. I think it cost $8 and it was a real hit to my child’s velcro wallet, but I did have that much. I remember kind of sucking it up and making the decision to go with the cassette of the whole album.

You might have guessed that I’ve just finished listening to “Out of the Blue” for the first time in decades. I seem to have a couple of ELO compilation albums, but somehow “Out of the Blue” never made the crossover from cassette to CD. It seems to be beyond my abilities to get over the power of music to transport me across the ages. I haven’t heard (or thought of) “Night in the City” since my teen years, yet I find my mind leading the music by a half a second anticipating the lyrics.

My morning class in my freshman year in high school had a pair of talkative girls, probably seniors, who liked to tease the shy little freshman that sat across the table from them**. One day they asked me what my favourite band was and I told them ELO and they laughed at me. Ever since then when I admit to liking ELO I feel a bit ashamed, and sometimes even apologize.

That one little interaction from those girls as well as the one from the guy ahead of me in line at the record store both had huge repercussions in my life. I’m forever altered by something so seemingly insignificant that happened in passing. I have no doubt that anyone but me involved in those exchanges has any inkling of the conversation’s existence, much less their impact. Listening to the album today brought both instances back to mind and has made me wonder how often I’ve off-handedly reacted to something that’s had similar repercussions for someone else. My thoughts tend to roll off the tip of my tongue without much consideration, and I imagine I’ve done my share of damage, though over the last half of my life I’ve tried to excise any mean spiritedness from my personality.  Hopefully, as clichéd as it sounds, I’ve had a net positive result. Although it’s possible I wouldn’t feel too bad if in 40 years someone feels a little ashamed of admitting to liking One Direction because of something I said.

* He could have been 16 or 36 for all I could really tell at the time
**When they noticed him at all, which, mercifully, wasn’t often.