red echo

I had another session of kayaking class tonight. This time we went up to the pool in Shoreline and practiced rescues. It's a small class, so there was enough room for us all to paddle around in our kayaks, and enough time for us to practice several rescues apiece. We did both solo and assisted rescues, and finished up the lesson with some work on bracing strokes. It was fun. The water was warm and the atmosphere convivial. Next lesson is tomorrow morning, far too early. The water will be much colder, and the conditions more challenging, but I'm looking forward to it.

My friend Adam and I drove out to eastern Redmond last night and bought ourselves a lawn tractor: a nice, shiny 14.5 hp Poulan. It's not as big a beast as the 20hp Craftsman we checked out on Saturday, but it's in much better shape. We got a really good deal on it, too, since its mower deck has some problem with its drive belt, which scarcely matters to us as we're not planning to do much mowing anyway.

So what is it, then, that a couple of city-dwelling software guys are going to do with a great big lawnmower? Well, of course this is part of a Burning Man project. We're going to disconnect the mower deck and use the tractor as the motive power for a mutant vehicle (aka “art car”). Our plan is to mount a train of papasan chairs on wheels and tow them around behind the tractor. We'll cruise around the city, shuttling our friends from place to place, and making new friends from the streams of random people who will inevitably come to us looking for a ride.

Yes, it's another year and another Burning Man project. After last year's all-consuming rave-o-matic effort I didn't really want to even go to Burning Man this year, much less build another big project, but I think this will be different. For starters, I have last year's experience to learn from, and am prepared with a solid determination not to let this take over my life. More importantly, this time I'm not trying to do the whole thing myself. Adam is even more interested in this project than I am, and we may pull in a third partner as well. This whole idea of collaborating on a creative project is sort of new to me, and I'm looking forward (with some little anxiety) to seeing how it goes.

The music bug is nibbling at my heels again. I'm deliberately ignoring it until it is strong enough to give me a good solid bite.

The season's changing. I pulled my window fan out of storage today after my thermometer passed its maximum reading of 82° Fahrenheit. I'm not looking forward to the heat, but it takes heat to thaw snow, and I'm ready to get back into the mountains.

It's a small world

Rich, my friendly local FedEx delivery driver, used to be a member of the band Funnel Cake, which did a cover of “Jesse's Girl” for the compilation album “Teen Feeding Frenzy”, which also contained a cover of “Baby One More Time” by Doll Factory, for whom I used to play keyboards.

The work day ended, and I found my calendar most alarmingly empty. Six o'clock, half a dozen hours of Tuesday left, and nothing to do that seemed worth the effort. Oh, the horror! So I grabbed a couple of books, hopped in La Bête, and trucked on over to the west end of Ballard where I found a comfortable seat on a park bench at Golden Gardens. Salt water, sunset, a light breeze, and the happy antics of a teenage volleyball tribe renewed my spirits in reasonably short order.

Driving up Denny on my way home, there was a police car at the intersection of with Stewart, just before the climb up Capitol Hill. At first I thought there was an accident; when I got closer I saw that the officer was just directing traffic. Is the signal broken, I wondered? No, it appeared to be working. As I waited for my turn to go, I saw another police car at the top of the hill, its lights strobing. There seemed to be a funny effect; its flashing red and blue lights were reflecting oddly off the roofs of the cars passing on the freeway below. I didn't think much of it until I pulled up onto the bridge and saw all the pedestrians looking down at I-5. Those weren't reflections - that was the President of China's motorcade, every single car equipped with flashing red and blue lights, backed up by a five-car-wide rolling blockade.

It was cold and windy again today, but the skies were clear, so I wrapped myself in neoprene and satisfied some of that urge to get outdoors with a nice long kayak cruise. I started at NWOC, as always, thinking I would try to paddle out through Union Bay and across Lake Washington to the Kirkland marina. I made it as far as Hunts Point before it was time to turn back; the afternoon was getting on, and NWOC closes at six on weekends. It's just as well; I was tired enough at the end of today's trip that an extra three miles' worth of paddling would not have been much fun. Maybe I'll give it another try toward the end of the summer.

Cold and windy it may have been, but it was truly a beautiful day. The sky was clear blue, dappled with thick, puffy, beautiful white cumulus clouds. I sat in the middle of Lake Washington, the horizon low, looking at the gorgeous overlappings of white, blue, slate, and grey in the sky overhead, and wanted to laugh with the glory of it all. This, I thought, is the stuff that makes life worth living.

I saw this weekend's blank space on my calendar yesterday and thought I'd fill it with some hiking, maybe a quick little overnighter. Then I found out that the snow is still down to 2000 feet, and modified my plan to something more like a day hike; which was modified further into a day of sitting around indoors, thinking about hiking, after I saw the cold, grey, steady rain this morning.

Oh, well. The skiing season is over, and I'm anxious for the next season to get under way. I want to hike, I want to paddle, I want to climb. I signed up for a four-day sea-kayaking class in a couple weeks, to learn more about currents, tides, and navigation, and I've just found a climbing class that looks interesting. I feel impatient. I want to get outdoors and do things.

Dawn and I spent the evening working on her theremin project. We built the circuit board a couple of weeks ago; tonight we wired up the switch, connectors, antennae, and speaker, and actually powered it up. A test with a voltmeter and a tweak to one of the coils later, it started making noise! Weird, squelchy, wee-ooo-wrrrrr-brrrrrk noise that sounded very little like music, true, but that's just a matter of tuning. The hardware, much to our satisfaction, works fine. This is the most complex circuit I've ever worked on, and it was great to see it all come together according to plan.

Well, I made my guess, and I feel pretty happy with it. I'm still flailing around, as far as the long term life trajectory goes, but in the meantime I'm pretty much going to keep plugging away like I have been. It's been an eventful year already, and it's really just getting started...

I have a career decision to make, and it's stressing me out. It's one of those aggravating choices that really come down to “which way do you think you'll be happier?”, which of course are specializations of “what is it you want out of life?”. Well, let me tell you, once I figure that one out I'll be most of the way to achieving it, whatever it is. In the meantime, the whole thing seems impossibly complex. I have to decide pretty much now, and I feel such internal pressure that I want to give it all up and go hide in the wilderness instead. Of course, nothing terrible is going to happen, and things will probably work out fine no matter which way I go, but it's the sheer arbitrariness of it that overwhelms me. How am I supposed to know what is going to work out best in the end? Why does something this big have to come down to guesswork? I hate guessing.