Not All Who Wander Are Lost

I remember thinking, three weeks ago when we first started up the hand-me-down computer, that it was odd to see a computer fully loaded with software yet bereft of viral protection.

And then I sat down and started loading the iPod. And dumping the camera to hard drive. And surfing the universe after a long absence.

It would be easy to claim ignorance, except I'm a pretty techsavvy guy (and an instructional technologiest). It would be easy to claim a lack of time, except I spent a good couple of nights there burning the midnight oil on shockwave jigsaws and iTunes back catalog retrieval (and, incidentally, using sleeptime I could not spare, but managing the new schedule is a tale for another week).

Instead, unfortunately, it seems the universe of busyness and ADD-rooted procrastination is no match for my tendencies towards high-risk online behavior.

And now the darn thing is totally fried -- spyware laden, bugheavy, stuck at start-up with no access to even the start menu. Now the dead machine looms in the corner like the spectre of last week's lunchmeat in a middle school locker.

And boyhowdy, don't I feel stupid.

Too busy at work to blog this week, really -- it's grading time, I have no curriculum planned for this morning's classes, and as always, I'm a full term behind on paperwork.

Apologies in advance, then. It's gonna be a light week for blogging. Feel free to check out the workblog or, as always, fun randomness from the archives if you need a fix on my voice.

A drizzly Saturday, but Darcie's parents were down from Vermont and we got the date wrong on the church craft material tag sale, so off we went to the harvest festival anyway.

The sixteenth annual Sturbridge Harvest and Scarecrow Festival was a pretty small affair -- a country and western band, a couple of craft tents and local country kitch merhants. We parked behind the Publick House, ate chili and apple pie with local cheddar, and filled the corners in with kettle corn while we wandered the tiny town common, admiring the scarecrow contest entries and dodging the raindrops.

I remain proud of myself for not spending a mere fiver on a minimarshmallow blowgun made of smallbore PVC tubing, complete with candyapple duct tape striping -- ingenious and very tempting, but if I had it, I'd surely use it, and marshmallows bring ants. Sigh. One more sign of adulthood, I suppose.

Back home, Neil (the dad in-law) and I headed over to the local lumber-and-hardware store to fill the trunk with pallets and scrap wood. Neil bought me my first hatchet (nominally for turning cordwood into kindling, but officially because Neil believes that everyone should have a hatchet) and admired the pellet stoves for a while, then it was back to the house to start up the woodstove for the season. Can't tell you how wonderful it is to step out on the porch, smell that great woodsmoke smell -- all must and spice -- and realize it's your own.

Been stacking wood since they left, about four hours. I seem to be at the halfway point, which is perfect, since I left off at the six-foot mark of three of six pallets. Two cords in three days is no small feat for a solo artist with a bad back. Darcie's parents both complimented me on my haphazard cross-stacking; the confidence of two true-blue rural-life expert opinions will get me through the rest of the pile in no time.

Tomorrow I'll watch the baby in our finally-warm house while the wife and three-year try a church outing without us, set up the rest of the pallets for a good afternoon stack, and then it's off to line up early for a good table at the Iron Horse for a night out with Dad. It'll be my first time seeing Lucy Kaplansky perform outside of the folk festival world; the small setting and the novelty of folk music indoors should be a nice bonus to what is always a sweet and poignant treat for ears and heart alike.

Of course, getting in at 5:30 for a 7:00 show means supper beforehand -- the Iron Horse has great pulled pork and salads, but I'm especially pleased at the prospect of eating supper at an actual table. Stay tuned for updates on the foreverquest for furniture...

The new house comes with a plethora of options for heatsource, allowing us to pick and choose our poison to some extent. Which is pretty good, because heat's expensive, New England winters are long and chilly, Darcie's not working, and I'm a public school teacher. Oh, and my wife likes to sleep with the windows open.

Up until now, we've been hitting the pellet stove pretty hard; the roaring fire is nice to wake up to, and the stove itself doesn't get hot enough to burn the kiddies. It takes a few days to go through a 40 pound bag of pressedwood pellets -- they look like the alfalfa pellets we used to feed the bunnies when I was a kid, but they taste and smell like...well, wood. We've ordered two tons. They'll deliver 'em in a few weeks.

But well-insulated house or no, one tiny stove up against an outer wall farthest from stairs and bedrooms isn't going to cut it once the temp drops below freezing. We moved in far too late to lock in oil prices for the winter, and the tank's pretty small; right now, oil's going for three bucks a gallon plus, it usually takes something over a thousand gallons to heat a house this size for the season, and I really don't want to do the math from there because it will make me cry.

Luckily, the furnace is a combo wood/oil, something I'd never seen before. There are two thermostats on the wall, so you can set the wood to kick in when it gets cold, say 64 or so, and then drop the oil settings to 60 just to keep the kids warm at night.

Unluckily, that means trucking wood in all winter. We've got a nifty drop from the garage down to the cellar, but we'll still have to drag the split stuff in all winter. Things don't look good for the herniated disk.

Of course, you've got to stack the wood first. Today a delivery truck pulled up and dropped four cords in our driveway, a mound twice as tall as an SUV and perhaps twice again as long and wide. We stole some pallets from the dumpster at the hardware store and cleared a dirtway for 'em out front. I figured I'd stack the first cord or so, clear the driveway enough to get the cars out, tonight while the kids went to bed.

Fat chance. Though I learned a few things -- for example, it's not a good idea to pull wood from the bottom of the pile if you're wearing soft-toed sneakers, and probably not a good idea to do it at all if everyone else is out of earshot -- five hours later, I've made a dangerously crooked stack about thigh-high on a single pallet, made no noticible dent in the grand pile of splitwood, and severely disturbed my back.

Hauling one piece of wood at a time.

In addition, I'm severely dirty, ended up spending about ten minutes with the wee ones this evening, and never managed to correct those papers I promised my students.

On the other hand, in one form or another, we now own enough wood to heat the whole house for the winter. For someone who didn't own more than what could fit in the trunk of his car just three months ago, you gotta admit, that's pretty cool.

or, Trust Yourself, and the Teaching Will Follow

Three days ago, in between projects with my eights grade classes, but curious to see how far beyond the normative expectations of the preadolescent mind the could be pushed, I loosed the improvisational pedagogist, let myself go all socratic and unplanned.

I suppose some of what I had in mind was killing time. The kids are on a three day on, three day off rotation; the grading period ends next Friday; by then I will have seen them for one more triplet, hardly long enough to begin a project, and who wants to be in the middle of a project when grading comes around?

Instead, somewhere between the top-of-the-head board-list on Monday and today's impromptu assignment, a unit emerged. Over three one-hour lessons, in two otherwise unmanageable sections of 8th grade computing, we moved fluidly from description of common neodigital phenomena blogs, wikis, virtual communities, collaborative productivity tools and interlinked texts, into an online exercise, a half-virtual self-led class assuming an ability to follow directions and focus previously unheard of at this grade level.

Yesterday, after a short introduction to the wiki much too far above their heads, I actually found myself announcing -- with the caveat that it might take us a while to understand what it really meant -- that the new wave of digital technology transforms the way we think about time and space. And then promising that they would actually understand this sometime in the near future under my care, and that the realization would tranform them, empower them, make them all twice as aware, three times as productive.

To a room full of twelve year olds.

And I got so excited, I sent them home to try to break Wikipedia.

These have been my difficult classes. Each section is half-full of special education students from the truly hyperactive to the sloth, and it shows. Add that the usual mix of middle school hormones, mix in the inherent impossibility of trying to teach to a bunch of kids staring at bright shiny screens, bursting with the power of their digital generation.

But today, the kids were with me, en masse, for the first time since I lost control of 'em early in the term. They loved the homework, loved testing the limits of the world of information and ideas instead of simply examining it from outside like they usually do.

They were proud of how silly they were able to make the world look, and stayed with me, sharing and laughing, as we explored the culture and infrastructure that allowed, nay, depended on collaboration for its very existence, yet reverted most marred pages back to their previous, groupbuilt norm within minutes.

Made heady by the sudden realization that they could actually make change in the world, even if only for nine minutes at a time, these kids wanted to know what else they can do.

So, I told them next week, they start projects based around ideas -- each will have to declare that technology changes the way we are and can be in some significant way, and then use analyses of new tools, and interviews and observation of worlds on- and off-line, to prove it.

And for the first time, all of them walked out thinking.

Talk about chutzpah. I've got middle schoolers doing sociological analysis. My head spins with visions of powerpoint presentation on topics from which part of me is my username? to schools without walls to collaboration: how the world works now.

They'll have to do this all as primary-source research, of course. You can't expect a kid to do much with Sherry Turkel's "Second Self" or Howard Rheingold's "Virtual Community."

But, by God, it just might fly. Imagine the potential of a fully self-aware digital generation.

Powerpoint presentations on moments in the history of computing from the seventh graders today -- they were ready yesterday, but I made them spend the time reading each other's presentations and self-constructing a group order, in the hopes that they'd extrapolate from this a better sense of segue and sequence both macro and micro. Ten presentations in an hour will be tight, but if it flows, we'll hit a thousand years of history from abacus to Y2k in no time.

They better be good, anyway. Three weeks in the making, after all -- this generation knows how to use the software, but getting them to do good design takes much UNlearning as careful construction. Here's hoping at least some of them manage to get close to the ideal of simple, elegant, subject-and-substance-driven style, though even I can't aspire to this level of presentational perfection.

Speaking of content, Shaw asks a legitimate follow-up question to yesterday's musiclust post. Implied: if music matters, then which music is no trivial matter.

In this case, however, I prefer the 3k songshuffle. So, this morning's first ten, with a caveat that I've been dropping data onto the iPod in no particular order, and thus some of my favorite tuneage isn't on it yet:

Grateful Dead -- Franklin's Tower
Sam Phillips -- Holding On To The Earth
Mark Erelli -- Hollow Man
Wilco -- Radio Cure
Colin Hay -- I Just Don't Think I'll Ever Get Over You
David Gray -- Long Distance Call
Michael Franti -- Love'll Set Me Free
Daniel Lanois -- Shine
Jeffrey Foucault -- Mayfly
Keller Williams -- Roshambo

As good a sense of environment as any, I guess. Oddly, 9 out of ten male artists, despite the predominance of chromosomal otherwise on the small white 'pod.

In other culled-from-comments news, blogspamming continues at the rate of fifty a day. I am especially proud of this totally piss-into-the-wind response. Well, it made me feel better.

Autumn leaf color variance in vine maples.

Why there is so much color variability in fall leaves. (Short version for non-scigeeks: turning red protects leaves from "the too-rapid breakdown of chlorophyll" in excess light conditions, but variance in exposure --> variance in color.)

From the Botany Photo of the Day blog of the the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden. Posted especially with the mother-in-law in mind, as a long overdue thankyou for the occasional odd link. Via BoingBoing, of course.

Even before the iPod was stolen, my life had grown quiet. No job, no home, no radio show, no rest for the psyche; it was fitting, perhaps, to be musicless in our gypsy mode, bereft of constancy in this like everything else, as if it were symptomatic of our rootless, uncertain existence.

Sure, you say, for most of that time I was iWired. The purewhite double umbillical earcords are all the rage. But most of my love for the 'pod is based on its whole and expandable potential, and no stereo means no speakers, no computer and no new CDs means no rich and constant bloodflow from the everemerging world of hi fidelity.

And how can you select a soundtrack for a coming horizon, an iffy unknown? You can't, and anyway, you can't really play your own music in other people's houses. And you can't sing in public with the damn phones on, and we were living in public.

It takes an environment to build an environment, four walls to build a mood beyond your ears, infiltrate the nearworld with your sonic selectivity until the world is, for just a moment, yours envelopingly. Who knew the sound of constant doubt was silence?

Through most of the long journey to here there was enough music, I suppose, though that's kind of like saying "there was enough air." Still, as long as the car was our home, I had a few moments here and there to roll up the windows and wail, I suppose -- mere pittance, but respite nonetheless.

Then, of course, with the iPod and FM broadcasting attachment gone, even the carspace was somehow less my own. I'd started listening to NPR in the morning -- we're not exactly in station central out here in the woods. But it's not the same.

Then there was the three weeks while, excruciatingly, the gifted iPod replacement (thanks, Dad) sat fallow on the shelf while we waited for a computer. But once we got one (thanks, Josh), it took me ten days to upload the first two thousand songs -- a mere pittance, even with a thousand podcompressed photos lending weight to the gig total. I'm but a third of the way through the CD collection, feeding disks to iTunes as I pass like coins a hotel lobby slot machine. Surfing the the mp3blog shortlist has once again become a daily ritual.

I got to a couple thousand, just to be sure.

And then, oh sweet then, I hit play.

Now I select songs for the moodsetting again, thinking of more than just my own needs, bestowing love through soundwaves once again. I play for the heart -- both mine and others, in every configuration. I feel like I'm in the flow, rediscovering, tracking down the rest of that song I heard on the radio, dropping it in the mix.

The stereo is in fragments, no surface yet to support it. But we dance nightly before bedtime, the baby in my arms, laughing, while her sister and I spin a lurching two-step. Tonight, for the first time since June, I harmonized my way through the laundry. Once again my head is filled with constant music.

Amazing how this tiny white box, this companion software, this small computer in the midst of cardboard chaos, majestically clears the bar, is transformation enough.

My life has its soundtrack back.

I can hear my heart again, and it sounds like everything.

It's hard not to like any weekend that begins with the circus, even if you have to get up early to drive into Boston for it. And it makes things easier if your three-year-old throws up in the car on the way to the circus, thus making room for an entire bag of cotton candy plus a purple sno cone in a plastic elephant --watching that come up would have been much worse; this way, it was easier to help her pace the sugar intake appropriately, and she got to wear clean clothes throughout.

The circus was...the circus, I guess. Darcie and I went a bunch of years ago, mostly because she had never gone; though it was the real Barnumandbaileyringlingbrothers deal, and though the kids seemed awed by the whole experience, something about the surprising thinness of the matinee crowd, maybe the glare of the sunshine seeping in through our psyches, kept it a bit off-edge. The smiles seemed more forced than usual, maybe. The too-sleepy lions and their tamer tried a few halfhearted tricks and gave up mid-performance, though my favorite act (motorcycles in a cage) is always pretty spectacular.

Gotta admit, though -- when your six month old infant wakes up during the smashbang spectacular that is the circus finale, looks around in wonder at the whole suddenlychanged universe of chaos, thinks a moment, and then lights up grinning like a jackolantern, it kind of vindicates the whole parenthood thing.

Spent the rest of the weekend shopping for furniture all across the greater Boston area with Darcie and baby while the 'rents hung with their only grandchild old enough to talk. The head spinds with hardwood. Don't get me wrong, I love shopping, truly -- but you'd think there's be more than a dozen total possible table configurations on the market. It't frustrating when you can describe exactly what you want -- a basic block-legs-with-leaf table, under seven feet, out of wood, not veneer -- and not find it anywhere.

Funny how I didn't realize how much I am absolutely, positively emotionally done with the whole shopping phase of our homeownership until I began that paragraph. I mean, gee, but it's great to be back home.

Pretty cool to be able to say "home" and mean it, too, even though, a month after moving, we're still living in boxes.

Yeah, the place is a mess, but there's hope on the horizon: with a few choice finds (bed, table and chairs, library chairs and an AV cabinet for the corner) this weekend's furniture shopping filled the last hardwood gaps in our theoretical from-scratch redesign, came in around budget targets, and thus promises to be the last gasp in what has become a month-long mission to get our life up off the floor and out of all these damn bozes.

In the meantime, the pellet stove blazes merrily while the dishwasher drycycle steams the air. A newly opened box reveals heretofore forgotten dress shirts and khakis, thus allowing me to blog and iron, and leave laundry for another day. The kids cuddle upstairs, resting up for another wild day in a world where anything can happen. Life is good. And it's getting better all the time.

No work today. Fasting mixes poorly with the effectively hyperactive daily grind, my naturally sage-on-the-stage pedagogy.

But no services, either. I never really got much out of the communal trappings of high holiday worship, especially on an all-day scale. As a kid, the daylong was excruciating and ultimately unproductive, all sense of atonement drowned in the stuffy monotony of the liturgy, the uncomfortable itch of starchy dress.

Last year's temple session with Mom was better paced, more relevant than most. But intellectual interest in new prayers and infrastructures is no substitute for spiritual substance. Instead of finding my peace in the midday meditation session, I fell asleep.

In lieu of formal repentance, then, I choose to spend the day solo, walking the woods, seeking my peace with God and self. The mudpath back acres here are bright with yellow leaves, late mushrooms in vibrant pinks and rainsky blues. Fallen trees turn to mush in the rain. Grey rooftops loom through the low bare branches of a hundred canopy pines and oaks.

Four houses down, the path ends abruptly at the swollen river. I walk upstream for a while, past the fork and along the smaller tributary, skirting long grass and beavercut pine; turn around just before the dam itself.

Just before I reenter the woods for the short hike homewards I speak aloud. I ask God to help me remember the lessons of the past year, that I might continue to learn from them even as our life becomes more stable. To lend me strength as I strive to do and be better, even when Life Is Good. Amen.

I stand for a minute, thankful for another year. My words drift and flow into the roar of the concrete waterfall just downriver, where they become one with the universe.

And then I go home, to sit and meditate in the midst of my family, our tiny community of four humans, two animals, who deserve my best, and help me to be my best. Because they, too, are part of God's agency in my life.

That Yom Kippur is supposed to be about community is no accident. It is through their love, after all, that I am able to open my heart to God. It is through them, after all, that I have the courage to try in the first place.

So although I know my choice to observe in privacy precludes my daughter's attendance, however perfunctory and stiff, at more formal templegoing, I believe this is the right way for now, at least. Maybe some day we'll have them put on their uncomfortable shoes and sit for the day in a big room filled with the smell of old books and old people, listening to the Cantor lead the community through their apologia. When they are ready. When they can listen, to their hearts and their lives.

In the meantime: God bless my children, and I will help them learn to love you, and the world. And I will teach them to cast their own atonement upon the waters, that they, too, may be cleansed. I will help them find meaning in all your houses, for you are everywhere we are.

An important part of the Yom Kippur service is the "Vidui" (Viduy) or confession. The confessions serve to help reflect on ones misdeeds and to confess them verbally is part of the formal repentance in asking G-d's forgiveness. Because community and unity are an important part of Jewish Life, the confessions are said in the plural (We are guilty).
-- High Holy Days on the Net

We are guilty, O Lord
of pride in a job well done,
even when it comes at the expense of others.

We are guilty of playing to our strengths.

We are guilty of selective perception,
and of situational ethics; of faintheartedness
and ignorance.

We choose those tasks more visible
so that we might garner more recognition and praise.

We are guilty of passivity,
of not taking the initiative,
of falling too easily into the role of innocent bystander,
of witholding support and love until we are shamed into offering it.

We protect ourselves.
We pretend we have not heard when we have heard.

We forget that you do not expect us to be perfect.
We get frustrated by our limitations
and neglect to celebrate our differences.

We covet the self we think we should be.

Sometimes, at the end of a long day,
we fantasize about a different life
in a different town.

We dream of paths not taken
when we are supposed to be listening to our inner selves
reflected in the outer world.

We are guilty, O Lord,
of presumption in all things.

We write for others more than we write for ourselves.

We share because it allows us to talk about ourselves.
We pray, and never think to ask
if now is a good time for you.

We use humor as a crutch.
We watch ourselves using language as a shield.

Even now, we are guilty. Our chutzpah shames us.

We do not stop when we should.
We go on far too long, thinking only of ourselves.
Yet we do not take every opportunity to change.

Help us, O Lord, to forgive ourselves
for these transgressions, and for a hundred more.
Help us to remain warm and human in the face of humanity.

May we be inscribed in the book of life
that we may atone for our sins.

May we continue to learn and grow.

May we wander yet another year
in your grace, and in our own.

This Sunday's supplement. From the Onion, where the mockup is the concept.

A dozen times a day can't be healthy. Further signs of overuse after a long absence include a return of the old familiar shoulderache, and tonight's post timing, given that I get up at 5:15 for work.

On the plus side, the iPod's up to eleven gigs, and I'm told I can pick up my new laptop tomorrow. What Happens When There's Nothing Left To Download? Tune in next week for the surprising conclusion.

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America, thus paving the way for a long weekend and a million end of year car sales.

This morning, I discovered Sweden, land of wooden simplicity, high-functionality, and slightly curved design concepts. And oh, it is good.

And forget about the furniture. From the moment you land on its yellow-shirted shores, IKEA's concept takes over on a more organic, environmental level, complete and comprehensive from micro to macro. From the family-friendly parking up agaist the building sidewalk to the conveniently-placed lunch-counter -- featuring 99 cent breakfasts and a thin but clearly gourmet assorment of gravlax, shrimp salads, and swedish meatball platters -- IKEA is a miracle of modern consumerist design.

There is only one way in, one single staircase upwards; from there, following the huge arrows on each of the two floors (you can't walk through walls, so what else are you going to do?) eventually puts you within arms reach of every single item in the store.

When the children get tired, sign them in to the kid's playspace for an hour, where they will presumably be indoctrinated into some weird swedish cult and forever worship at the altar of uncomplicated but elegant hardwood furniture. I swear, the usually loquatious three-year-old was in there for the fully alloted shift, but when she emerged all we could get out of her was a prim confirmation that she "didn't want to go home, just go somewhere else."

And they will get tired. It takes five hours to go through the place at a relatively rapid pace, maybe a little less if, like us, you begin to accelerate your journey as you realize you have been shopping for hours and there's no end in sight.

We ate two meals, both involving a breed of french fries suprisingly akin in look and feel to much of IKEA's furniture, and bought a few tidbits -- a crawling tube and a nifty coocoon-chair for the wee one, a freestanding shirtrack for the laundry room, random knick-knacks for kitchen, bed and bath.

But since this week's trip was for ideas, not objects, we got what we needed. Proof positive: the kids have been in bed for ages, and I'm up in seven hours for another long stretch with the preteens, but for hours and hours, now, the wife and I have been walking through the house, blueprints in hand, envisioning shelving here, couch and loveseat here, a new bed, better chandelier, a TV cabinet.

Which means we'll be heading back the the land of plenty in a week or two. With a truck, no doubt. Maybe next time we'll make it for breakfast. Ask Queen Isabella if she wants anything, will you?

Voluminious rain in the past two days. The run-off from the roof filled the flowerbeds until they overflowed against the concrete foundation, but the levee held: the basemenet remains bone dry, and the wellwater runs clean and pure. Down the street the waterfall roars and foams like the dam's burst behind it. For the first time since we moved in, the sound of water in the runoff stream at the base of our hill drowns out the distant traffic and train.

Wet conditions kept us mostly inside, save for a short excursion to the mall yesterday -- mostly just to get the kids out of the house before we all lost it -- and a first trip to our local UU meetinghouse this morning. The congregation is small and welcoming, and about as diverse as twenty people could possibly be; young and old, liberal and more formal, though the dressing-down trend I've noticed at other meeting houses with the spouse seemed to hold true, what with shorts and sweatshirts the dress of the day. It was St. Francis's birthday or something, so the focal point of the hour-long service was mostly the blessings of the beasts. Some woman even brought her tiny dogs.

Each day the abundant world brings forth more evidence of a centered existence. Darcie spotted a red fox in the trees behind the house today, and we watched it from the bay window as it skulked towards the meadow. This afternoon's walk to the roaring dam overspill brought kingfishers and jays, though the heron we spotted Wednesday seems to have been washed out of his bog. Toads chase shadows in the woods when I step outside. Beasts, indeed, and we have evermore to be thankful for.

Technology, too, seems to be falling from the sky. Thursday we had Internet service but no computer; Friday I arrived home bursting with news of a serendipitous encounter with the district Business Manager-slash-technology director which netted me a brand laptop to be delivered Tuesday and a new projector for the school, all in the midst of an otherwise-drought of up-to-date hardware...and found a stunning almost-new desktop, complete with flat screen and burners, waiting for me in the garage. I've been cranking pix and tunes into the new iPod (thanks, Mom and Dad) non-stop since I set it up.

Of course, I'm typing this on a milk crate, my butt going numb from another, half-hidden from the otherwise bare room behind a leaning tower of bookboxes. And supper was served once again on the tinytable my parents bought the wee one for her birthday last year. We'll head south to Ikea tomorrow for a first crack at resolving the whole "bereft of furniture" thing, a heady hour-away adventure with the possibility of a Connecticut beach luncheon.

In the meantime the feeling of renewal continues to grow within me. I suppose if it weren't, I'd be working harder at it, what with Rosh Hashanah upon us. But I seem to be living the spirit of the holiday this year with little effort, putting my whole self in, shaking it all about, you know, the whole hokey thing. And what a surprise to discover that really is what it's all about.

Too much time and the near history of our newly minted life becomes so much background noise, like the rain outside, our first since we moved into our new house a week ago Wednesday.

From the change in season to the minutia of a fulltilt existence, from work to family to play, the tidbits and fragments of an almost-stettled life fade a little farther into the pile, become unrecoverable. After ten days, the sheer volume of unblogged life far overwhelms the possibilty of backtrack.

Ten days of half-written poems, workplace triumphs and childmoments, town exploration and household quirk discovery -- all faded like the stars fade into each brightening morning as I rise, and sit on the porch with the day's first cigarette and coffee, and emerge from sleep with the day.

The bedraggled, blueheaded wild turkeys that just now walked through our yard, scant inches from our feet, on their way up through the woods to the meadow, seem no more or less recent than our first night here, camped out on camping mattresses on our own bedroom floor.

It's hard to begin again.

Not so odd, I suppose, to realize that I needed the blog both more and differently during the long months of homelessness, nomads on the road, no job or haven to come home to. But hard to recover the trope, and the tendency, and the time. In this brand new day, after a hundred years of uncertainty, it will be a while, surely, before blogging and I can once again find our place in each other.

But still I rise, and so will the blogpart of me, the tiny voice that needs this space to be whole. The outside world only paves the way for the settlement of this one, the world of the mind.

And in that glorious outside world of rain and sunrises, we're finally wanderers in control of our own destiny, able to make our own choice of path, pace, and progress once again. Unfurnished and still packed, but we're home at last.

Thank you, God, for this life is good. The world still spins, but we've got money for our tickets this time 'round, found our seats together for the long ride.

Hold on, hold on as we crest the top of the roller coaster, clutching our purses and shiny bright things, these tiny hands in our hands.

It's all downhill from here, and the carnival never ends.