It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

Camden Harbor

11 February, 2021

I didn’t realize when I took this that it’s pretty close to the same view in the post before, six months ago. Yes, it’s been six months since I put anything up here, which is lame at best, especially considering all the stuff that has happened!

The interesting thing about this photo is that it makes the scene look pretty bleak, but it actually is not. We’ve had some snow but also a ton of sunny days and in general it is very pleasant… if you don’t mind it being below freezing. Kim and I have somewhat different opinions on whether the below-freezing part is OK.

I have been spending a lot of time trying to work out exactly how to heat our place here with wood, which is actually a lot of fun but very fiddly. Log Management, we call it. Anyway, we have a wood stove which is actually a built-in insert into the fireplace. It produces a ton of heat, sometimes too much… but sometimes I put a log in there and it just dies. There is a whole other blog to be written about obtaining firewood in Maine, watch this space.

Anyway if there is a point to all this it is that the winter here is both exactly the same as and entirely different from my past experience with winter. Let’s just say it is waaay better than Detroit. Being on the seacoast makes all the difference…

My new view

2 July, 2020

As of last week, we live in Camden, Maine. So this is what I get to look at every morning. Not bad, huh?

Some Delicious Coffee

7 January, 2020

GraceNote Maria Ernestina Erazo — Maria Ernestina Erazo espresso from my local roaster Gracenote

I just finished a bag of this, and it was just outstanding — delicious fruit that really comes through. It’s nice to live near a really good coffee roaster.

If I could upload the taste for you, I would…

Goals

6 January, 2020

I blew up my Trello board yesterday. I think this is a good thing — I realized, when I took a good look at it, that the “long term goals” I had on there were really merely ways to categorize (and therefore justify) the work I was already doing.

(I love Trello as a way to organize work, for the record — I just don’t like the way I have been using it.)

The problem with writing down goals is that it’s risky. You might achieve them, and then what? In fact I wrote a whole essay about this back in 1984 when I was applying to college. Hilariously, the essay achieved its goal of getting me into college, even though it was about not being pleased with another goal I had set myself and then achieved.

I’m not also totally sure I’m happy I got into college, but I guess it was better than the alternative…

The other funny thing I have noticed about things like goals and convictions and so on is that they are like time capsules. If you write them down and then look away for long enough, they provide an interesting look into your own thinking at some point in the past. This happens to me all the time because naturally once I write down a goal or my convictions about something I never look at it again seriously for the next two years. I think that’s part of the deal, right?

I Bruised My Piriformis

3 January, 2020

No seriously. My Piriformis. Back in September I fell/slid down the companionway of our boat in France and landed on the left side of my butt. I got a grapefruit-sized bruise on there, and it turns out it included this muscle that is way down underneath the rest of your butt muscles called the Piriformis. I am capitalizing it because why not.

It turns out everyone with hips has two of these things and their job is to open your hips, that is to say pull the outside of your femur back toward your spine. I guess it’s a fairly important muscle although I had no idea I even had one — two, in fact — until I bruised it.

Anyway the tricky thing about bruising your Piriformis is that it runs right over your sciatic nerve, which is really a big bundle of nerves that pretty much operates your leg. When the damn thing gets bruised, it can get scar tissue on it, and this (I discovered) can produce an exquisite little inconvenience called Sciatica. Sciatica is another word for “My leg hurts so bad if I don’t sit down right now I’m gonna fall over, and also all my leg muscles are atrophying.” If you’ve never had it it’s hard to explain how debilitating it can be. Also having it and complaining about it of course makes you feel like an Old Man. It’s just excellent all around.

There’s not a hell of a lot more to this story other than that my Piriformis did eventually heal, with some help from an acupuncturist here in Boston who was truly excellent, and that took care of the sciatica. I still have some leg weakness three months later that I’m trying to train my way out of. I find this particularly disturbing because I’ve always had reasonably strong legs and it’s mildly horrifying to find out one of them can just sort of wither away over the course of a few weeks, because of something as trivial sounding as a bruised Piriformis.

Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras
und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen
wie des Grases Blumen.
Das Gras ist verdorret
und die Blume abgefallen.

A decent translation is here…