Spring is Here | Happy Monday, March 20, 2017

Today is the first day of spring here in the northern hemisphere. That is of course a matter of the relative angle of The Earth to The Sun, your individual weather experience may vary. Traditionally it’s a time for clearing out the cobwebs and looking forward to new beginings.

I’ve not been well lately, either physically or mentally. One most assuredly has to do with the other, though it is hard sometimes to tell which is the chicken, and which the egg. The details of this are not interesting to me in the least, so I won’t go into it I have been finding glorious unproductive solace in playing video games, which have long been a favorite on the escapism front. Now, by some small coincidence of time, I’ve decided to poke my head out of my den, examine what I am looking forward to and maybe shake out the clutter a bit.

I recently found it in my budget to finally replace the computer that died some months ago, which has facilitated my recent foray into Sunless Sea, and Long War 2. This also means that I am able to pursue my sideline interest in game development. I have been making a small hobby of learning a bit of C# programming and using the Unity engine for a while now, which got benched when the old computer crashed. Now I have in mind a long but, manageable project that I am quite excited about working on in the coming months.

A coworker purchased a large number of role playing game books, with the intention of getting into the hobby. He has, however, found it hard to find a jumping off point. I have been convinced/ magnanimously offered to run a short campaign for him to get his feet wet. So I can add that to the list of projects for the coming month. It has been a some years since have sat around a table menacing people with a set of dice, so it seems like it should be quite enjoyable. The group I’ve tentatively assembled is fairly in experienced in gaming so it should also be educational, as well as very geeky.

There are a scant few weeks left of the school year and, my daughter will start summer vacation relatively soon. My work schedule is opposite her school day and I don’t get to see her much most of the year. I’m thinking about a couple  of passes to the community pools and some ice cream dates to catch up with each other. Maybe we’ll get around to building some slingshots in the back yard too.

Lastly I am just glad to see the back of the cold, erratic, and sunless weather of winter. It will be nice to enjoy my late morning coffee and journaling from the comfort of my front porch enjoying the sunshine and warm breezes, watching the flowers bloom.

That’s what I’m looking forward to anyway. I am sure that I have plenty of upcoming things to dread, but it’s nice not to focus on those for a bit… For a change.

How about you?

Happy Monday.

P.S. As a bonus, because I’m in such a good mood I’ll leave you with one of my favorite spring time tunes.

 

 

Dwindling Pages

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been keeping a handwritten journal since about mid October. I have been dutifully entering my morning thoughts, story ideas, and poetry drafts into it every day since then. This is the first time in nearly twenty years that I’ve bothered keeping such a book and am faced with a relatively new dilemma. It is running out of pages.

I mean I have another one to go to, provided once again by my amazing friend Catastrophe Jones¹, so that’s not the issue. My problem is, what to do with it once it is full?

Do I just spend my days collecting piles and boxes of spent journals? If I do that, how many years should I spend toting them around? We are talking about several thousand words per journal. Most of which didn’t bear pursuing in the first place. I wonder what the gross weight of my idle, and nonsensical thoughts would come to after a decade or so?

I could burn them ceremonially on my barbecue grill after a specified, or perhaps very unspecified amount of time, in order to signify some sort of emotional something or other like some angst ridden schoolboy². That seems a bit esoteric for my tastes these days, mostly because I gave up being an angst ridden school boy years ago.

I suppose what I could do I take masking tape and label each detailing the dates they span. If I place the labels on the front cover I could set them up along the top of a dresser like one might do with Christmas cards. I could place them in neat little rows like little tombstones. A tiny cemetery where my unused thoughts can take their final rest.

I think all in all it might be important to keep my journals for reference. There might be the nugget if a story buried somewhere in there that, after some reflection and quite a bit of polish, could be brought up to nice finish. Besides,  there’s no telling if my dull and humdrum notes on the day may suddenly morph into a grim survival journal written by conscientious dissenter and serve as a warning for future generations.

In other news I have found my Henry, who has now been repotted and moved from my  wife’s collections of plants out in the front of the house and taken his place as a desk plant. He seems very happy to be in his own pot soaking up the sun streaming through my bedroom window. I think he livens up the place quite nicely and gives the space a touch of class. Also, I realize that I continually use the pronoun “he” in reference to Henry. I suppose it could be short for Henrietta, which is some thing that we might all want to take into consideration.

Let me know what your thoughts on the matter are.

Happy Monday.

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1. Also my most ardent support of me keeping up this little nonsense of mine. ↩
2. We’ve all been there ↩