Monday, June 29, 2009

Double up and secure. Ring off main engines. (But don't let the boilers cool)


That was one helluva ride. It started in early August last year and didn't really settle to a stop until yesterday.

Along the way there was buying one house in one city and selling one in another, all in a market which suggested one shouldn't be buying a house until the market bottoms-out and facing the reality that other buyers were thinking and acting exactly the same way. Treating the situation with my usual "It'll work itself out" approach didn't work. Given what was happening - everywhere - a fixed level of stress set in.

Couple that with a physical move of several mountain ranges and a body of salt water. That would have been enough of a challenge except that right at that time I found myself travelling, unexpectedly, to get a crew ready to deliver a ship from Europe. That translated to Cheryl pack everything, I'll deal with the other end when I return.

Didn't work that way.

Owing to a series of rapid and radical changes in training requirements I ended up staring into the very breech I'd been hoping to avoid for several weeks. That meant arrive in new locale and start a frenetic pace the very next day. That's not a cry for sympathy - just a part of the ride I was on.

Then, in one of the only places in Canada where you can actually grow citrus fruits, "it" decided to be winter. You must understand that winter weather doesn't bother me. It's winter weather in a place where snow is looked upon as quaint for the first 24 hours and then acidly evil after that that creates the problem. Observers watch snow plows with a sense of amazement and then hop into their cars, replete with deliciously worn summer tires, and engage in a region-wide demolition derby of excessive speed and a blissful lack of awareness as to extended stopping distances. Perhaps worse though was having to tolerate the seemingly endless stream of local comments which all ended with, "What global warming?" And becoming bored with explaining that, while this area gets blasted every 10 years or so with a touch of "real" winter, what was happening was actually more related to warming than cooling... snow is actually water... aw, just skip it and go back to your cheap coffee and the complaints about how your taxes are too high - just quit demanding a snow plow where one doesn't exist. I digress.

The result of "winter" was that the already stuffed schedule was now compressed until February.

That was when I thought things had settled down a bit. Having accepted that things were simply too frantic and stressful to pursue what amounts to a hobby, I had retreated from intertoobs. I got back to visiting other blogs and producing bits for this one when I could actually see a horizon I though was permanently fixed by my height of eye. I was wrong.

Things managed to get even hairier and plans to complete alterations to new home were set aside. And something else would have to give - blog and other forms of toobal interaction. From then until now it has been sporadic. While I had wanted to write more, the obligations of life prevented it. I don't like doing "short-form". While others do well in that format, I'm not very good at it. I watched an issue build in front of me which I consider important to me and others which I had no time to address. It's still an issue. It still needs some light shed upon it.

So, today, as a long erratic schedule supposedly ended, I was prepared to contribute more to TGB. Then about half-way through writing this I received word that I'm still not done. Make no plans, suffer no schedule.

So, there still might be a bit of a wait for that series of postings I so want to do. So it goes.

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