Be Thankful Everyday

Well it was a very fulfilling weekend, but I think I'm going to touch upon an event that occurred a few days ago. The subject matter is not a positive one, but the end result is something to be thankful for. My sister and my two beautiful nephews were in a terrible car crash Thursday. Blake and Kerri walked away with scratches and bruises and Kaiden had to stay over night at the hospital for observation. He was just in pure shock, so they were concerned he might have a concussion. Kerri was such a strong and loving mother the whole time. She's an amazing lady.

Everyone is now still shaken up and beat and battered some, but overall doing amazingly well. Let's be completely thankful everyday for all the loving family we have in our life. It was so terrifying getting that phone call. All you can do is hope and pray that everyone makes it out alive and healthy. Thanks to good car manufacturing and well structured car seats and seat belts my family is still here with me today. I am so unbelievably thankful. We must continue to talk to and if you can hug the people that we hold deep to our hearts everyday. I love you Kerri, Kaiden, and Blake. This too shall pass and before you know it the bruises will be healed and life will back to its beautiful state.

Growing Your Own Herbs

We're late to this game, but we're becoming big fans. When we planted up our front yard this year, we added, along with our purely ornamental plants, some basic herbs. I think we put in mint, cinnamon basil, lemon basil, dill, and one other that I can't remember. The last two didn't make the evolutionary cut, dying off before they could reach a sustainable size. But the first three are getting to be huge plants!

The obvious benefit is a front yard full of tasty fresh herbs for cooking. We had some family over today for brunch, and we used both types of basil in our breakfast potatoes and the mint in cool summer Southsides.* But here's the cool thing. The herbs look really good as ornamental plants, too. I was a little dubious about placing them right at the front of the yard, but they've become really attractive plants. The basil plants especially get these really nice looking mini flowers all across their heights and they smell amazing. Just walking past them you get strong scents of basil, cinnamon, lemon and mint. To me those smells trump your standard floral scents any day.

Next year I'd like to put in even more herbs so that we never need to shop for spices again. At least not fresh ones. It's a goal.

*Southsides are one of the finest summertime adult beverages you could ask for. Look for the mixer at your local beer and wine store. Not every place carries it, so you'll have to ask around. Trust me, it's worth the search.

Buy what you Love

You got to love impulse buying. I really don't do this very often. The one I did this morning was more like an ironic meant to be purchase.

There's been this lady from FL at the Farmer's Market selling her knitted hats with her sister, who's local, for the past two weeks. The first time we saw her I fell in love with her hats, trying them all on, she thought I was really personable, I gave her my card and everything. Anyways her and this older lady loved this one hat on me. It was more feminine than I'm used too, so I wasn't quite sure about it. Let me also mention the fact that I loved this red hat with a cute rim. I put the feminine hat on again and the old lady yelled out "It even looks good from far away." So I went ahead and bought it, the colors on it were beautiful and I know I would wear it on dressy occasions.

Last week we went to find her out there again. We talked for a little bit, I knew she'd be going back to Florida, so it was my last chance to buy the red hat. Not having any money on me I decided it wasn't meant to be, maybe I would go to her website and buy it.

So I went this morning, she wasn't there, but guess what was - All her hats sitting on a table. Her sister had kept them to sell. The red hat was there! I had just gotten $60 out of my account. Enough to buy the hat, fruit, and breakfast danishes. I finally have the hat I loved from the beginning! Sometimes impulse buying is meant to be and don't let others influence your purchases, only you know what you like.

Good People (It's Relative)

I have to keep today's entry short. I need to leave here in 20 minutes to go pick up a carpenter who lost his license years ago because of DUIs (and therefore works cheap) and take him over to our Stevenson Lane place, where he's going to fix the deck on the back porch, which, in recent months has given up its will to live.

So today's post is all about lucky happenstance, and how it led me to find a good carpenter who works cheap because he lost his license years ago to DUIs and now has to be transported from Essex to Towson to fix a deck that's taken to shedding pieces of itself whenever possible.

Next maybe providence could bring us an good interior decorator forced to work on the cheap to pay for her Methadone treatments.

Motivation through Music

I know I've done plenty of entries on music, but this one is about how music stimulates motivation. We've had the main speakers of our computer off for the past few months to keep the amount electricity the computer was drawing to a minimum. Now that the house electrical work is basically done, Jason reattached the speakers. It's really amazing how much better it sounds with bass and real volume. I keep making new mixes that include my favorites and all the new music we have. It's really helped me to stay focused on my work and get things done more rapidly.

I've also started a seriously dorky ritual. When a really good song comes on that I can't help dancing too, I get up and create an interpretive dance. Since dancing makes me so happy, I'm going to try to make up at least one dance a day. It will be a good workout and keep me motivated. Music is truly an amazing energy-inducing instrument.

Quaint Oddities

This entry is about one of the quaint oddities of modern life. Passwords.

It's probably safe to say that, prior to the advent of the personal computer, unless you were a spy, were trying to get into a speakeasy or other underground club, or were a contestant on a particular '70s game show, you didn't deal much with passwords. Not anymore. Everything, it seems, is password protected. And while that's a good thing, it necessitates a certain mental wrangling around the creation of tracking of said words. You shouldn't use the same password everywhere, and most people know that. To get around having to remember 20 different letter / number combinations people often create one master password and then many permutations based off that original word.

The point of this whole article is that you can end up with some very unique, odd combinations of letters and numbers that are intimately tied to the life experiences of the person who gestated them. Most passwords, considered outside of the heads of their owners, make little sense. I have one that would seem like random, goofy gibberish if I were type it out for you here...which of course I can't. But it isn't gibberish. It's a combination of letters that means something to me. Only to me and no one else.

That's what's cool about passwords. They're tiny communications to ourselves, short inside jokes that we carry with us everywhere. Brief little secrets of hidden meaning that would be an interesting way to understand the inner workings of someone's mind, if only they could reveal them to you.

Choreographer's that blow my mind

We've been watching So you Think you Can Dance again this year. And although the contestants are not all that interesting this season a few of the choreographers are extraordinary stand-outs. This goes out to all the genius choreographers out there. My favorites are Wade Rodson, Mia Michaels, Sonya Tayeh, and Napoleon and Tabitha. The dances they create tell amazing stories and really can get under your skin. I wish I had even a pinch of their talent and imagination. I truly don't know how they come up with such perfect dance numbers and completely entrance the audience. You can check out Wade's piece for Brandon and Janette here:

http://www.rickey.org/?p=19523

This was my favorite piece this season.

Catching Up with Friends, Indirectly

My cousin James and his wife Amy (it's probably more appropriate to say Amy and my cousin James... James: "I'm helping!") have been maintaining a blog ever since their son Caleb was born about seven months ago. The time between their posts ranges from days to weeks (or minutes, in the case of their last giant blogsplotion of babies, bridges, bread and beaches), but they keep up with it consistently, and I'm always glad when I see a new post from them pop up in my Blogger Dashboard. I love the micro-publishing world for just this reason. It makes it so easy to keep up with people, at least indirectly, when you don't talk to them in person often enough. Here's their blog address if any of you are interested:

http://theajduo.blogspot.com

I mean this truly. I know more about life at the AJ Duo Fortress of Familyhood than I do about the lives of many other people that I see in person on a consistent basis. Blogging allows you to grant media-rich peaks into your daily life to many other people at once. My sister and brother-in-law's site for my nephew Jackson is another good example, which I've mentioned in previous blog posts. I don't see the three of them nearly often enough. There's the phone, of course. But the Jackson blog gives a much deeper picture of his life and those of his foot servants than a quick phone conversation can share.

I think personal blogs are a great addition to the paraphernalia of modern life. Along with Twitter, they represent the best in indirect personal communications, and I'd love to see more people I know start their own blogs. I can tell you that, after this year long experiment is over, Kate and I will start maintaining a smaller-scale blog to share our lives with our friends and family.

No more "Lost in Transport"

I got Jae a GPS for Christmas last year and it's truly been a lifesaver. Jae and I would get lost or just go the wrong way at least once a week before we had it. Yes, sometimes the way it tells us to go seems a bit off, but at least it always gets us to where we need to go every time. It doesn't seem to like 83 (the highway that gets you further into the city), it much rather take smaller back roads to get to the Inner Harbor. What's cool is you can go the way you prefer and it will eventually figure out the route your taking and start telling you the way to go. We yell at it a lot as it continues to annoy us, but it's truly a love/hate situation. I've been using it a lot lately to location scout photography locations. Yes, some still believe in the map system, but looking down at a piece of paper is not the safest method when you can listen to a voice and look forward with the right eye glancing at the GPS arrow every once in a while. It was truly invented for dim wits like us who can't seem to get out of our neighborhood without going the wrong direction. This is the GPS we have, I'd give it a 75%, not the best but it does the job.

More Than Halfway There

I was sitting here, brainstorming entry ideas when it occurred to me that eight days ago Kate and I passed the halfway mark in our year-long experiment. That's six months worth of entries for each of us, one entry a day, 362 entries total, without fail. Not to toot our own horns, but I think that's pretty amazing. Not a single entry missed (and only one or two that I'd consider throwaways) in six months is a testament to the power of commitment. I'm not sure I can speak for Kate on this, but for my part, interestingly enough, I never thought we wouldn't be able to do it. But I wasn't operating from the stance that we'd try it for a few weeks and see if it stuck. I was working from the position that this was something we were doing every day, for a year, and that missing a day wasn't an option.

That's why it's not surprising to me that we've kept up with it. I've never doubted that we would. I think it's safe to say that if we had approached this with a "try it and see" attitude we would have stopped writing regularly, if at all, months ago. It hasn't been easy staying up later at night or getting up early to fit in an entry that usually takes at least a half hour to write. The brainstorming process itself can be somewhat taxing. A new original entry everyday, some organically born from that day's experiences but many cogitated out of thin air, is something of an endeavor.

Obviously we're enjoying ourselves. If this process felt like a chore all the time (sometimes it does) we'd have a harder time sticking with it. But taking on a project like this requires commitment. Like many things in life, committing is the hardest step. Once that's taken care of a lot of the rest of the work feels less like work. Quitting goes off the table as an option and no longer looms over your head as a decision you have to struggle with. That constant tension of "Should I continue? Can I continue?" goes away because you are continuing. You're doing it, every day.

If we hadn't committed fully to this project and we hadn't stopped yet we'd likely be counting the days till completion. As it is though, the halfway mark came and went without a whimper, without being noticed. I think that's pretty cool.

Thanks to those of you who have committed to reading us on a regular basis. It makes our work much more fun, knowing that there are sentient people on the other end of this mostly one-sided communication.

Ripe Fruit

I love when the fruit you bought at the store or market are perfectly ripe. I just ate a peach that was only half ripe, I guess I should have waited to eat it, but the part that was ripe was delicious. The summer months you can get ripe cherries, blueberries, peaches, watermelon, plums, strawberries, and many more. It's a great season for perfectly ripe fruit. I recommend going to the market and buying some fresh fruit, it's a great snack to have around the house.

Scratching An Itch

It's one of the sweetest, cruelest tricks of nature, that the more you scratch an itch, the worse it itches, but the better it feels when you scratch it. It's an awful but wonderful feedback loop that unfortunately has to painfully end, but is great / not great while it lasts.

I'm not sure why scratching an itch should feel so good. Is it because the nerve ending around the itch location are excited already, resulting in amplified tactile pleasure sensation from the scratch? Or is there any real pleasure at all? Maybe there is simply a temporary cessation of pain (the itch) which your mind interprets as pleasurable, even though all that's really happened is a brief return to normalcy. I'm not sure. It could well be the latter, but it's hard to quantify it in the moment.

Point is, we all get little phantom itches from time to time. And some less so. Dry skin on your elbow. A rogue mosquito bite. A jagged piece of fabric nestled somewhere deep in your shirt, hidden well enough to keep from being removed but close enough to the surface to continually taunt the skin cells next to it. Those itches happen. It's nice that the Yang to that Ying feels so freakin' good. I'll take the occasional itch as long as I can reach it to give it a good scratch.