Generalismo

Hallo, guten tag. Wie geht’s?

This is going to be short but I figured I’d say hello to you all

We’re in Erlanger right now and plan to be in Bonn later on. I’ve been learning to most German from playing with the children. Wir spielen und singen!

No pictures at the moment but there should be some shortly

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But I didn’t know what to say.

Next time I blog, I’ll probably be in Germany. This is when I need an iPhone like Lincoln has

Um…I think there’s too much running through my mind to write an intelligible blog post. Life has interesting curves, and you never know what’s around the bend. I guess I feel a bit as if I’m going a little too fast around a curve on a motorcycle and I get that momentary “uh-oh” feeling. Hopefully, as has been the case on the motorcycle, I can slow down or correct my path of travel to enable a safe exiting of the curve.  Or sometimes the feeling of loss of control around a curve is just mental and if you ride it out everything turns out fine. You do have to finish the curve, though, and if you stop in a turn the bike can tip over. So I’m off to finish! Tschuss.

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I am leaving for Germany tomorrow, if God wills it. This is the trip I mentioned on the first of November :)  This is going to be my first brush with trains and the longest travels on a bus that I have ever taken. Not to mention my first flight in a commercial plane, and the first time across the ocean. Carol, my sister, is going with me and we’ll be gone about two weeks. I am hoping to get access to computers so I can blog and things.

And the reason I am not bringing my own laptop; I have been backing up my data in order to reformat my computer - then when I sat down to do the deed I remembered that my DVD drive is broken and I couldn’t play the reformat disks. Yesterday I was restarting because I couldn’t connect to the internet anymore and for some reason the drive started to work.  So, then I decided to go ahead with the format. About 3 seconds after comfirming “Yes, I want to delete my data yadda yadda” it said “Error.” So now I am unable to get my computer started and I won’t be able to take it with me as planned. I am planning on seeing if I can work out something with the guy down at the computer store if he has an external drive. Vincent pointed out that it might need drivers to work.

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I might blog again later today if I get the time. Off to make lunch.

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I have been having an extremely hard time buckling down to do anything that requires concentration. I overslept this morning - 1.5 hours! Thankfully I wasn’t expected at work or anything. I especially have not seemed to be able to get anything organized in my room. It seems as if over the years of purging “fluff” from my room that I don’t need, I’m getting down to the stuff that I really want to keep, or need and I can’t think of many things to get rid of without considerable hesitation. I have four guitar cases in here now, plus two gigbags with guitars in them and a banjo. I have some computer related stuff, tons of books, and the speaker for the keyboard is kind of big also and has to sit kind of in the middle of the room.

“How can you say that you’re lonely, and say for for you that the sun don’t shine?” (Streets of London, Ralph McTell) Very good question - that is one of the songs I would like to learn to sing. It’s a moving song and the melody is beautiful.

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Carol got a new camera that is incredible. However, as might be obvious, the picture below of my bottle of Java Pop (coffee soda! It reminds me a lot of the kvass I made a few months ago) was not taken by her camera I noticed I haven’t had any pictures up in a while, so it’s time. Even if they are rather random.

Here is Hannah and Carol’s rabbit (used to be Timothy till we found out it was a girl, I sometimes call it Timothea and the general name is now Cookie, I think.)

She is lovely to hold

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So now, I have to clean up. I have to have to have to. As an inspiration to having things looking nice and orderly, here are some rose hips I “picked” this morning when I was on my run.

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I couldn’t decide which way to spell it, so you get both. Grey looks a little more formal for some reason. It also looks a little colder and bluer.

The day hasn’t been all grey, though, and I see sunshine now on the tops of the trees out my window. It’s interesting to live in a hill that extends upwards towards the west because the sun disappears faster on this side of the hill while you can still see sunshine in the valley that is far away enough not to be in the shade from the hill.

I tried to climb a mountain yesterday; looked for someone from my family who wanted to go with me and no one wanted to go. So I decided I’d set out myself, despite my clutch having decided to start slipping more on my way home from work on Friday. About a mile into the trip out I figured out two things; the sun was setting a lot faster than I thought it was, and it was a lot colder outside than I had thought. So I decided instead to just go for a ride, and when I passed a friend’s house, which is surrounded by a lot of woods they own, I decided to stop and asked them if I could just wander around in their woods for a bit. It would be a lot easier to get help from them in case my motorcycle broke down, too

I once listened to a sermon by Paul Washer (need to listen again!) in which he described going out in the woods and calling on God for several days with no food, sometimes crying and screaming at the top of his lungs. These woods weren’t big enough, unfortunately. The mountain might not have been, either.

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I moved a keyboard in my room last week. It’s been interesting to try to apply the same things I’ve learned on my guitar to the piano; playing over modal (mostly mixolydian right now)  progressions in different keys. It does get tiring after a long while though because I start to fall into the same patterns of improvisation. Maybe I need to learn some new scales that can be played over 7 chords.

The sounds I’m making on the piano could be akin to a baby’s screaming and whining, and cooing and all the sorts of noises a baby makes. I don’t know the language well enough to articulate what I feel. If you want to communicate through music, having feeling is not enough. You have to have a voice and know how to use that voice, whether it be piano, voice, or anything else musically oriented. Some are more easily communicative than others.

I cannot imagine what the great composers *felt* when they wrote and performed their music! It must have been so much more indepth than the feeling we get when we read the notes on the page.

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The sun is gone from the trees now.

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A friend got me thinking about why I blog.

So I thought back to when I started to blog, in August of 2003. My first posting was a short writing about modesty. If I rewound a few weeks from there, I was sitting in a church listening to Izzy Lyman that came to speak on homechooling - in a cute outfit that included pants and boots. And she blogged.

I remember that I barely knew what a blog was, at that time. And little while after I met Mrs. Lyman, of the late (wah!) The Homeschool Revolution blog, and found out what blogging was, I decided to keep a blog.

I’ve always liked to write and I realized if I published things online, people could see them. I had my own website up, but nothing like a blog. It got updated every year, if that. (It’s still online, believe it or not, and the last substantial update was probably in 04). So I decided to make a blog and it become a hobby or sorts, something I’d do for fun at the end of the day. Oftentimes I’d have a thought or two in my head and I would expound on them and end up much more sure of where I stood on the thought or question when I was done - maybe it’s a form of therapy or something Like having a conversation with myself.

It’s been a mix of personal news, summation of things I’ve learned, random rants and raves, and a few lectures thrown in.

Sometimes I’ve complained because hit counter has gone down, but when I stop to think about the 20 hits a day I do get, I’m pleasantly surprised that so many people come every day. I think it has slowed due to the move to a new site and the fact that I no longer visit (and leave comments) at as many blogs as I used to.

I enjoy reading my old posts more than I did living them sometimes, just as childhood memories can be sweeter than living felt at the time. I’m not sure what that means - if I have sugar coated what life was like or if I’m just forgetting details.

This post in itself is a perfect example of what happens to me when I sit down to blog - say a little bit in a lot of words

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One thing I noticed is that I never used to be afraid of writing too much. I’ve looked at old posts of mine that are in a wider format and much longer in length than anything I post here.

How do you feel about long posts?

What does it take to get you to stay long enough to read the whole thing?

Which makes more of a difference; the reputation in your eyes of the author, or the interest you find in the first few lines? Sometimes I will sit to read a long post and find the beginning rather uninteresting or hard to focus on but because I’ve read material from the author before and liked it, I’ll stick in and read the rest just to see if my initial impression wasn’t wrong. Or other times I will just assume because it’s a long, hard read, there must be something good for me in there

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Your result for The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test…

Pure Nerd

Take The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test at HelloQuizzy

Self tests are sometimes hard to take - it is hard to assess yourself objectively and be neither too generous or stingy.

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I wrote some notes on facebook today and decided to post them here. They ended up rather long together and I know I have a tendency to skip over very long posts unless I’m really intersted in them.

Childhood Friends and That Sort of Thing

This afternoon I was walking to work through downtown and I was rather lost in thought when I recognized an old friend who used to walk up and down my street when we were younger. I remember the friendship started off well - he would say strange (to me) things and I remember calling him to myself Retardo (I thought his last name was Ricardo, so it fit to me.)

Then one day when he walked by I decided to be nice and asked him how he was. And then we were friends of sorts and we talked about guitars a little, since we both played and I would sit out on the porch with my guitar some days. And one day when he walked by me on the street he said “Hey, will you go out with me?” and I laughed and said no.

Then we parted - I think his life took him to a place that no one wants to go to. Unless you are trying to get free room and board from the state and have the nuisance of a lock on your room door.

And I bumped into him sometime last year, and then this year again I saw him just now, and we talked for about 20 minutes.

Now as I sit to ponder this, I’m recalling other childhood friends and acquaintances - Chelsey, who watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and couldn’t go out of her house because of the bugs (so she told me. So I watched TMNT through the screen of her livingroom.) And there was the one who nicknamed me Bunny, and had an older brother who looked just like him.

I suppose I could list a bunch out, but they wouldn’t be of particular interest to you. We grew up in the same neighborhood, though we rarely hung out together. They all knew us, though. We are somewhat of an anomaly on our street. Some of them were 14 and 15 when I knew them, and I’d watch them walk up and down the street in big groups and I’d wonder about them. And now they have boyfriends and babies, some have been in and out of jail, and now live in apartments somewhere else and I hardly ever see them, if I ever do.

I wonder what they remember of me.

Did you have any notable childhood friends? Who do you remember?

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I remember an old man who lived with some friends of ours - a couple and their daughter - who used to be a trucker. He used to tell us stories of evading the police with his brakes wired to his gas pedal, and driving overloaded through weigh stations without getting in trouble. He came to one of our concerts, once, and his shoe had a big hole in the end of it. He said he was a nickel short when he went to the store to buy them. He thought I could think, and I admired him so that was a huge compliment to me.

And Mrs. Tillburg is a feeling and a voice. I remember what she looks like, but I remember better what she sounded like. She used to do a lot of cooking at the church we went to and the best images I have of her are of her in an apron.

Mrs. Kellog used to give me Reeces peanut butter cups after church. I don’t remember anything of what she looked like except that she was old, and I couldn’t believe she gave me peanut butter cups!

I’d better stop here because I’m starting to fall into general church memories, and I’m guessing most of those will soon feel stale and boring even to the most patient reader, if I have not bored them already.

There are way too many to list, and these people that I’m thinking of have all passed away. I wonder what people will remember of me when I’ve passed away.

Memories are very strange. So ingrained, yet so fragile upon further examination.

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Boy, my titles are not very descriptive, are they! Maybe descriptive but boring.

I am wading through mountains of spam. Wait, can you *wade* through mountains? Make that rivers. Wading or swimming. I’ve just gotten around to looking through my entire email box for comments and I have approved those I deemed not-spam. So forgive me if you commented long ago and never saw it appear on the site. Once you comment and are approved, you can comment away with moderation. (Or should I tell people that?!)

We only have two more days on the road. I’m slowly becoming ecstatic. It’s going to be WONDERFUL to be home after five weeks out. I know I’ll be looking forward to being on the road again in January, but right now I don’t really want to think too much about that trip

It’s been a good trip. A few rough spots here and there, but that’s to be expected. I got to drive twice, and I’m itching to do it again but up here in the northeast the roads are a lot curvier than in the South/Westish.

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I’m planning on a trip in a few weeks that I’ll let you all know about before long. It’s exciting, and it involves a plane. A rather large one!

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Dat is weah we is.

In the last few days, I’ve read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Hobbit, and Skin (Ted Dekker). The first was a book that had preaching mixed in with it - the author would repeatedly admonish readers, and some of the narrative was a bit sarcastic. No, a lot sarcastic. And it included plenty of dialect type (Dere mus’ be a name fu’ dat). It was an interesting, emotive read.

The second was one (The Hobbit) I’ve read probably 4 or 5 times but was different this time. I’m not sure how to explain it - it just was.

Skin is not defineable on paper, I don’t think. About a third through, and after the 14th murder, I started thinking Do I really want to read this? But by then, there was little to no choice - what, leave Wendy and the other guy (already forgot his name!) in the middle of the desert with that terrorizing nobody who doesn’t seem to exist? Well, I had to finish it, and it certainly had a twist at the end that I didn’t expect. After the last Dekker book ended with a skitso who was both being chased and doing the threatening himself, I told myself to be wary of Dekker books. But then I let down my guard, read one, and now I’m back in a state of not really wanting to read another. Though if I do *start* one, I’m pretty sure I’ll finish!

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