12-30-04
Drove up to Seattle yesterday to spend my Christmas money on a revolutionary new Hohner Harmonica. The old blues harmonicas I've been playing since 1969 are only able to bend notes when you draw (suck) on the holes. This new Hohner XB-40 allows me to bend notes on both the draw and the blow. They did it by putting extra reeds in the holes that only respond to a bending air flow.
    I won't get into the technicalities of how they created the first new idea in harmonicas in 30 years, suffice it to say it works. I was able to play it from the first blow in my old style, but now I need to spend some time learning how to put to use this amazing doubling of the bendable notes.
    My old buddy Mark H. accompanied me up to Seattle and it was great having someone other than my wife to talk with for a while. He's an entertaining guy to hang out with as we have so much in common: we both have rebellious teenagers of almost identical ages, and we both enjoy an adventurous, aerobic lifestyle. We were both off for at least a week with time on our hands and had planned to have a bike riding adventure around Seattle. Unfortunately mother nature had scheduled that day for watering the plants.
   It was fun walking up the hill through Seattle's artsy Fremont district blowing on my harmonica like old times. There was a time when I used to think that was as good as it got: music, some friends and the time to enjoy. Thirty six years later, I've realized life is much more complicated; so complex in fact that at times it can be overwhelming.
   My buddy Mark H, and almost all of the relatives on my side of the family get a lot of comfort from their religion. Sue and I are the rare unbelievers of the family and have chosen to go through life one day at a time, without wondering about the big questions that trouble philosophers like "why am I here?" and, "how can a living being be so complex?".
     There was a time in my life when I used to ponder those weighty questions and looked to the church for answers. I can remember working my way though the "confirmation" classes back in high school and believing with all my heart that Christianity had an answer for every question. What began to change my mind was meeting the philosopher father of a girlfriend in high school.
     I met Devi Unsoeld in my sophomore year of high school while bicycling across town. We didn't like riding the bus, thinking it was a symptom of our overly industrial society. When we became close friends, she took me home to meet her parents. Her mom, Jolene Unsoeld was just a housewife then, but would become, in short order, a state representative and then a very popular congresswoman in Washington DC. Her father was the world famous mountaineer: Willi Unsoeld, about whom there have been written half a dozen books concerning his incredible 1963 ascent of Mt. Everest via the previously unclimbed West ridge. I'm thinking this may have been the first time Americans had reached the summit, although Jim Whittaker (one of Willi's teammates) was actually first on top via the easier South Col route.
    At the time I met him while dating his daughter he was in semi-retirement and working as a philosophy teacher at Evergreen State college. Devi must have looked long and hard to find someone as completely different from her father as I was at that time. What a surprise that must have been for the devout believer of Buddha to meet his daughter's new boyfriend and find that he was a Christian!
    The dinner table conversation was stunning. Here was a guy who had traveled the world, met the president, climbed the highest mountain and worked in the Peace Corps talking to little old wide eyed innocent Mark about the meaning of life. He totally blew all my beliefs out of the water by presenting Buddhism to me as a completely valid alternative to Christianity. Within a couple weeks I had a major confrontation with my brother (involved in college Young Life) and my father (son of a missionary) about the relative merits and logic of Christianity and Buddhism.
    When my dad couldn't answer my questions, I went down and talked to our pastor who eventually conceded that the answers were based in faith for both religions. In other words, when you got right down to it, there were certain questions that simply couldn't be answered with logic in both belief systems. You had to BELIEVE in order to get the reward of eternal life...which sounded better than simply turning off the lights after 90 years.
   At that point, I said to heck with all religions and decided to simply live my life one day at a time. I do believe that the ten commandments are a good idea, and I also believe that karma is quite possibly a real player in our lifes: what goes around, comes around. Over the years I've become more and more convinced that too many people have too much faith in things they've read, or learned from their parents, to the point where they are willing to kill people who believe otherwise.
     Instead of living as simply as possible and raising their families with love and respect, too many people think they need to convert others to look at life exactly as they do. If you don't believe this, you are dirt and unworthy of living. Everywhere you look from today back through recorded time there is example after example of otherwise intelligent people who were brainwashed by their tribes or society and thought they had the only RIGHT way of living. Their minds lost the ability to appreciate the simple beauty of life and they became driven to pursue the agenda of their dogma.
    I can't change all that, but I can choose to not participate. I lead my little life, pursuing beauty and happiness where I find it and sharing my love for that beauty with the people I meet though kindness, my little paintings and maybe a song or two. It's enough for me and mine.
    Now for the bigger question: what to do about my aging parents. My brother and my sister are up in arms about the increasing poor health of the folks. They were planning to have a big confrontation this week with them, but I refused to participate, advising a more gentle approach. Now they've given me the ultimatum instead: get dad to agree to do something very soon, or else.
    

12-28-04
Skiing down the ridge from the base of Panorama Point, I spotted an unusual looking dome in the snow. It was perfectly symmetrical and seemed quite out of place, perched as it was on a windswept ridge right at the tree line overlooking the Nisqually glacier. It occurred to me that it might be an igloo, but only a madman would build one in such an exposed location.
    I hollered at Sue and Lisa to follow me and skied over for a closer look. Sure enough, it was an igloo and a very nicely built one at that. I cruised to a stop at the front door, being careful not to ski off the edge into the long drop to the Glacier. I pulled off my skis and crawled down into the entry tunnel. The builders had quite properly built the entry hole lower than the floor to keep warm air from escaping.
   Inside, everything had a blue tint from daylight filtering through the thick snow blocks of the wall. It was also very quiet, with no sign of the frigid howling wind outside. Sue and Lisa soon joined me inside and we hammed it up for the camera. I was pleased to see that my Canon G5 is unaffected by cold temperatures.
   I should have jumped on my skis and moved off the exposed ridge crest out of the howling frigid wind, but instead I shot a couple more pictures of Lisa putting on her skis and posing by the igloo. By the time I was snapped into my cross country ski bindings and ready to move off, my hands had both turned into frozen blocks of ice.
    When I tried to put my mittens on, my hands simply wouldn't cooperate. It requires two hands to put on mittens, and you have to fit your thumbs into the thumb holes. Instead, I held the mittens in my teeth and roughly jammed the wooden blocks of ice on the ends of my arms into the openings on the mittens. Fighting off the rising wave of panic I prayed that my skis wouldn't pop off and started down the hill after Sue and Lisa.
     Having done all this before, I knew that the only solution was to get my heart pumping again with vigorous exercise to chase away the approaching hypothermia. Twenty minutes later, and a mile downhill I could feel enough to get the glove on and knew I'd be OK.
     We had a great run down to the car on 7 inches of fresh over a 3 foot base. Many of the trees are still showing, making for some challenging tree skiing on what are normally blank white slopes. Driving down the icy roads in our '91 Toyota station wagon, I missed the ABS braking system our old van used to have.
    We could have taken our new truck, but it only seats two comfortably, and has rear wheel drive on a light back end, not good for snow. As we motored toward Tacoma I reflected on the fact that we had spent 6 hours in the car for 3 hours of skiing. Still, it was a fun family outing, and free, not counting ten bucks for gas.

12-24-04
Instead of spending half the day writing at my computer on Christmas Eve, I've simply cut and paste the text from my annual Christmas letter. I'm sending a few out in the mail, so you may get one via snail mail, depending on whether you send me one. Here is the Xmas letter:

Another year has gone by and it’s time for Christmas letters. How the time flies by as we get older! We’re still living in the same house in beautiful Lake Holiday here in Gig Harbor.
     We are all still as healthy as can be expected, considering that 2 of us are over 50 now. Age is slowing us down a little here and there, but nothing too serious. Sue and I did quite a lot of bicycle riding this summer, both because we were a car short for a while, and because Sue bought a mountain bicycle.
     In August we sold our aging minivan. During the three weeks it took to replace it, I found commuting to work by bus and bicycle surprisingly enjoyable. One memorable day the bus was stuck in gridlock. I simply got off the bus and pedaled home in the sunshine past all the frustrated motorists.
     Because the summer break from my teaching job didn’t coordinate with the family school schedule, I spent a week batching it out of the back of our new pickup truck down on the northern California coast. In 7 days I was able to paint 5 paintings which now hang in a gallery in Olympia.
     Despite the vacation complications, teaching in a technical college is the best job I’ve ever had, beating printing hands down on all counts. Like any teaching job, I spend a lot of unpaid hours at home creating lesson plans, but the pleasure they bring to the students makes it all worthwhile.
     Clint graduated from high school this summer with a 3.8 average for the entire 4 years. He just finished his first quarter at TCC and was pleased to find he can easily maintain his high standards in college as well. He is aiming at being a radiologist or a PA, although that may change. For now, he is taking preparatory classes like math and English to get those out of the way. He finished his kayak in May and has put it to good use, going out every couple of weeks as time and weather allow. He has an amazing ability to cover long distances in a short period of time...something about big arms and a long waterline. After graduating from high school Clint and two buddies took a one month road trip touring all the skate parks in the country, sleeping in the back of his pickup truck. We worried a bit, knowing he’d never done that much driving, not to mention the dangerous nature of BMX riding. Still, he had a grand adventure: fulfilling a childhood dream. We were surprised to hear they enjoyed seeing all the beautiful scenery as much as the great riding. We’re hoping next time he calls home more than once a month.
    Lisa has been working at a dry cleaners 4 days a week for almost 6 months now, trying to save up for a used car. She doesn’t particularly love the job, but considers herself lucky to be working at all since many of her friends were unable to find after school jobs. Because we’ve lived here her entire life, she has a lot of friends...the poor ringer on the phone is wearing out. She is doing great in school, no doubt inspired by her big brother who got a free two year college tuition based on his academic record. We are pleased to see the kids taking education so seriously, unlike their vagabond dad...or perhaps because of. They’ve seen the price I paid from not taking my studies seriously in high school.
    Lisa (and Sue) went climbing half a dozen times this year. She seems to be a natural climber and does well even on the high cliffs. Lisa experienced her first epic while climbing a 400 foot cliff in Leavenworth. The rope got stuck in a crack and neither Sue nor I could easily reach her to help pull the rope free. Some friendly nearby climbers came to the rescue.
    My dream of living off my muse is still with me, although life forces it to take a back seat much of the time. I was lucky to be asked to teach drawing twice this last year at the college. Sharing my love for drawing, and creativity in general with the students helps to keep my muse alive. The class forces me to draw even when I don’t want to, and I’ve come up with some keepers while simply preparing for the next days lecture. Love that class!
      One great benefit of teaching is all the time off. We get seven weeks off a year, with 4 of them during the late summer/fall break. I take advantage of these breaks to work on my freelance web design projects, and when those are done, I go painting. For Christmas presents this year I created a twelve month calendar from scratch, featuring one of my paintings on each of the 12 months. I was able to make them quite professional due to the software I’ve learned in the course of teaching at the college.
    In the last week before Christmas I found I could get the calendars printed at one of my old print shops for only $7 each. This opens up the possibility of selling them in local gift shops. One of my dreams as a pressman was to finally get good enough at computers to bring in a high quality job to print, instead of simply being the blue collar pressman printing other designers jobs. I could tell my old boss was very impressed with my design skills as he wrote up the job order for my calendars. In the words of Tony Curtis: “I’d like to live my life so completely that when the grim reaper creeps into my house like a thief in the night, there will be nothing left for him to steal.”

12-20-04
"Click the button each time you hear a sound", the audiologist said after sticking the two odd looking pipes into both of my ears. He closed the door to the sound booth and walked over to his computer in the outer room. I could see the side of his face by looking at a mirror through a small pane of insulated glass. Clearly they didn't want me to be able to watch him pressing the buttons on the hearing tester.
    In my right ear (the one unaffected by Meniere's disease) I heard a very high pitched warbling sound and clicked the button. I immediately heard another tone, slightly higher and clicked the button again. It soon became a pattern, only varied by the timing of when he sent the sounds to my ear. He was clearly trying to do the test in a reasonably fast period of time, yet still have enough variation in timing between the sounds so I couldn't simply press the button once a second.
    After covering the entire spectrum of sounds from very high mosquito sounds to boom box lows he tested me on voice recognition. This test involves him speaking a long series of words at various volume levels: dog; bog; time; rime; job; bob, etc. I had to repeat each word back to him.

After a long series of tests on my good ear, he switched to my bad ear. I heard nothing for a while, then, very far away I thought I might have heard something. Not being sure, I waited...maybe it was just my heartbeat. There was a pause, a slightly louder sound and I clicked the button. I clicked a few more times and then there was a long pause without any sounds. Having learned the testing pattern on the other ear I knew he was sending me sounds, but all I could hear was the ocean roaring.
    I sat there for a few minutes as he ran through the test, my finger ever ready to click the button for a sound that never came and experienced a few moments of mourning. We hope to stay healthy as long as possible, but inevitably life wears us down and our fine tuned bodies, so strong and perfect in our youth begins to show the cracks of age. Disease hits everyone sooner or later and Meniere's disease moved into my ear 5 years ago. I write about the whole story here.
    Having tested me on all the normal frequencies, with only occasional clicks in response, he began zeroing in on exactly what frequencies I still had left. Over the tinny speakers his disembodied voice told me that he was going to send a static noise to my good ear, then test my bad ear's ability to hear sounds while the good ear was filled with static.
    I heard a sound like radio static in my good ear as he began sending tones to my bad ear. It was a tricky business, but I faithfully clicked the button each time I heard a sound coming through to my bad ear. He had clearly zeroed in on the remaining hearing in the bad ear and was testing to see if a hearing aid could help.
    Later, my ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat) doctor told me that I would respond well to a hearing aid and asked me to hang around for 10 minutes until the audiologist could sit down and answer all my questions about hearing aid technology. The audiologist explained that I would need to spend between $1200 and $1800 for a digital hearing aid. When I asked him what kind, he brought up what looked like a powerpoint chart showing the frequencies my bad ear could hear. Overlaid on the jagged line showing my bad hearing was a thick gray line showing the frequencies that the hearing aid could "hear". The smaller and more concealed the hearing aid, the thinner the gray line.
   It was clear that the large BTE (behind the ear) hearing aid was the most effective. When I got home I did some research online and found that people with Meniere's disease were getting good improvement from hearing aids. I tend to never trust my doctors when it comes to this disease.
     Five years ago this same ENT surgeon had recommended a $40,000 brain surgery. When I went online, I discovered that the surgery was only 50% effective. Many people with the disease had chosen to simply wait until nature ran it's course. After the first year, the disease burns itself out and you are back to normal, with the exception of a 60% hearing loss in the affected ear.
    Anyway, I'm surviving with my 60% hearing loss on the left side. I always warn my students about it and they are very understanding. They know that if I don't respond to a question, they simply have to wave their hand until I see them. There is nothing wrong with my vision. Frequently I'll hear the question and look the wrong direction. Whichever student I'm looking at will point at the right student and I walk over.
   There is no money for a hearing aid in our budget. Already, I have a car payment on top of our mortgage plus two credit cards we're paying down. One credit card has the truck canopy balance, and the other has the clutch balance from our station wagon.
     On the brighter side, I have 2 weeks off. I've been spending my time building a Christmas present. This year I'm giving calendars featuring my artwork. I've been studying Adobe inDesign in my spare time and have learned enough to put together a twelve month calendar. I built it in the standard eight and one half by eleven size, with a coil on the eleven inch edge. It hangs eleven inches by seventeen inches, just like a real calendar. Everyone has been totally shocked that I was able to put together an authentic calendar in full color, printed both sides on glossy paper. This project has brought together all of my various computer talents in one very cool package. I printed them at home, but it's very slow, taking about 4 hours per calendar.
   When I asked Kinkos how much they would charge me to print a dozen, the quoted me $35 each. I'm going to swing by my old print shop today and see if they have a proofing printer that could do it any cheaper.

12-10-04
Winter break is coming up and I'm trying to decide how to spend the 16 days. My choices are:

• Study Adobe inDesign in hopes of designing a press ready lesson plan for submission to a publisher
• Study the programming language called PHP and learn how to connect it to a SQL server database.
• Work through my newest Photoshop book in preparation for teaching an advanced digital design class next quarter
• work on some drawings out in my garage/studio
• Drive to California to paint in the sunshine
• Drive to California to climb in the sunshine (oops, don't have a partner)

     I've already begun my first choice, which is the most fun and least painful: drawing in my studio. I have a drawing going at the easel of a wine glass on a pillow case with a rose. This is the first time I've drawn a rose in 30 years. They are incredibly hard, much harder than glass or metal. The number of petals on a rose is overwhelming, and each one has a shape unlike anything I've ever drawn before. To draw just one petal would take me a couple hours, and there are over 20 petals on this fake silk rose. I guess it might be easier if it was a real rose...but it would be dead before I even got it roughed in.
    If I was just interested in making money, studying PHP would be my first choice. Programming is where the money is in web design, and I certainly have an aptitude for it, however, I think life might be too short to spend it all staring at letters and numbers. I might as well be programming the logic chip in a cash register. Ecommerce sites are all about making money, and the programmers who build them make big bucks but stare at pages full of code all day. Letters, numbers, ampersands, percentage signs, semi colons and parenthesis are the tools of the trade.
   Yeah I could learn it, and I suppose it could be as satisfying as printing, but it's a step down the road toward living a life in search of money instead of living a life in search of beauty.

12-5-04
Gave my last lecture of the quarter last week. Insert big sigh of relief here. My Thursday class, Dreamweaver, had never been taught before. I went to Borders but the books were all over the top. Every book I looked at was was all starry eyed over how magical Dreamweaver was, how it was another FrontPage and you didn't have to learn a lick of code.
   Dreamweaver has been taught here before of course, just not by me. Our full timer teaches it as an incidental tool to learning advanced html. But this class was created for students who may never build a web site. They may go into video, or 3D animation instead of web design and just needed some exposure to the software.
    Fortunately I knew the students after teaching them html with notepad last quarter in an "intro to web" class.  This quarter in our new Dreamweaver class we basically repeated what we did last quarter in notepad, but in much greater detail. Because Dreamweaver can write javascript, we were able to put together some very nice pages indeed featuring pop up windows, javascript rollovers, drop down menus and linked style sheets.
     But the hard part for me was building the 8 page handouts every week. Each Monday I'd have to (1) come up with a concept: "what am I going to teach this week"; (2) work through the process so I understood it front to back;  (3) write out each step and capture screen shots, importing them into Adobe inDesign; (4) draw the call outs and point them into the screen captures; (5) proof read it, checking that each step was numbered and there were no typos; (6) print them out and create 33 stapled copies.
     But I got it all done and the students learned a ton of cool stuff, walking away with a web site and free mini-book written by your truly. During the break I may see if I've come up with something marketable. I'm still teaching myself inDesign, but creating the handouts was a great way to use my fledgling design skills.
   While I was doing all that I was teaching 3 other classes: two drawing classes and an "into to web" class, not to mention serving 3 freelance clients. No wonder I was feeling stressed!
     But now I've got time on my hands. I've been thinking about doing some drawing or painting, but it's hard to tear myself away from this laptop. Whenever I'm home, it sit's here singing it's evil little song: "Turn me on, there's something you need to learn or study, you'll never make any money at art anyway, give it up! Study inDesign, build a new interface, study php, brush up on Flash...on and on."

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