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6-30-03
Climbed a route in a lightning storm yesterday. While not an especially bright idea, it seemed safe enough at the time. The route followed the crack formed by a concrete railroad bridge tower built onto the side of the cliff. Perhaps some explanation is in order here: We were climbing at some cliffs up on Snoqualmie Pass near a freeway exit off Interstate 90. Both the Freeway exit and the cliff are known as Exit 38.
There is an eighty year old abandoned railroad track that runs along the South side of the freeway. Why the railroad track was placed high above the valley floor I have no idea. Perhaps it has something to do with the grade requirements of the locomotives. This track, now graveled over and known as the "Iron Horse" bicycle trail runs precipitously along the cliffs for a couple miles near Exit 38. At several points it leaps across 150 foot canyons on old rusty towers.
8 years ago, one of the spans had fallen in, and one of the other bridges had no railings. It used to be a hair raising experience walking across the huge ultra high span as bicyclists whizzed by. I used to worry that one of them would accidentally crash and send someone over the crumbling concrete edge into the stream far below. But that's all fixed now. The government built a new bridge (for pedestrians...imagine that!) and put railings on the old one.
Getting back to the lightning; Dave had led the route in good weather, but by the time he had rigged the anchor, rappelled down and put me on belay the wind had come up, the sky had darkened down and lightning was striking the nearby ridgetops. With the steel railroad bridge above us as a lightning rod I felt reasonably safe climbing the short 2 minute route to clean our gear off. Still, it was an exciting climb, lightning and thunder booming off the cliffs around us, the wind howling down the canyon, and drops of rain smacking against the warm rock as I placed my hands in the crack, my feet on the holds and walked up the route.
At the top I removed our carabiniers from the anchor, untied and tossed the rope down to Dave. A couple steps led me to the main railroad bed of the bridge where I was surprised to see a dozen climbers nonchalantly climbing the cliff as if it was perfectly normal to expose oneself to electrocution. As I walked quickly across the open area to the trail leading back down to the relative safety under the bridge, a particulary close strike exploded on the ridgetop a couple hundred feet above us and the climbers looked around uneasily.
Dave and I sat under the bridge for half an hour, watching the storm blow through before he decided he'd had enough. I thought it would dry out if we were patient, but he was anxious to bail. It could have gone either way, but by the time we'd hiked down to the car the sun was out again, cooking the water off the warm rock.
When I got home I hopped on the mountain bike and worked out my frustrations on the hilly dirt road nearby that runs under the powerlines. I'm in pretty good aerobic shape this summer, although I've not had much success getting below 160 pounds. I keep forgetting that hunger is a good thing.
6-25-03
Finished converting a half inch thick book full of tabular data into html yesterday. That short little sentence can't begin describe how tedious it was to spend 44 hours cutting and pasting from Word tables to Dreamweaver tables. Still, it paid well and I shouldn't complain. Yesterday I stepped outside for a ten minute break and was struck by the beauty of the puffy blue clouds marching across the sky in stately grandeur.
The clouds reminded me of huge cruise ships, complete with rows and rows of windows on the many decks. They were light gray on the bottom, but as my eye wandered up the side of the cloud, the muted gray tones would change depending on how the light was reaching around the side of the multi level cloud. Some of the light was coming from the cloud next door, reflected as it were from a nearby ship.
I wanted to paint them very badly indeed, but knew it was quite impossible. I had another 5 hours of work to complete the project waiting in my office. As I stared hungrily at the beauty sailing slowly over my head, a heard a couple people giggling nearby and looked over to see two of my students from last quarter aping my actions.
They stood about 40 feet away, midway between the building and their cars, looking straight up at the sky, then over at me.
"Whad'ya see up there?"
"Oh, I was just enjoying the clouds," I said.
"Oh, we thought there was something up there"
"Well, there is. Do you think they are as pretty from above as they are from down here? Wouldn't it be cool to be able to fly around through them?" I wondered aloud.
"Oh, it's really fun, " D said, and began doing a very convincing job of flying an airplane through the clouds, complete with racing engine sounds, running around, climbing and diving in tight little circles on the lawn. We watched him in amusement for several seconds before the other student commented,
"Did you know D is a licensed commercial pilot?"
"Well, I knew he had taken flying lessons," I said, "but I didn't know he had a commercial rating."
"Oh yeah," D said. "I got my rating, but then they told me I could only fly between these certain cities, it was very restricted. About then, my wife decided we needed to buy a house more than I needed to keep pouring money into my flying hobby, and shortly after that, Boeing laid me off....and here I am in the Video program."
I'm actually enjoying writing here in the journal, but I need to get serious about getting my resume ready. I'm only teaching 2 days a week this quarter and I can't even begin to live on that. I've got my new business card looking pretty good. I figure about a day spent tweaking my resume and my web site ought to be enough to get me ready for looking for some additional income.
I don't think I'll finish it today. I worked right through the weekend, so an afternoon painting trip sounds like a saner use of the sunshine than more computer time. I try to keep my work and play balanced...don't always suceed, but I make the effort.
6-20-03
Rode my bike with a teacher friend from University Place down to the Intel plant in Dupont, a distance of 18 miles one way. I should have known from the multicolored bicycle jumpsuit that he would be a serious rider. I've seen his bike before, but made the assumption he was a casual rider. Wrong! This guy is in his fifties, but rides like a 17 year old on steroids. He totally blew me away. Oh I followed along at my own pace, and he would wait at the top of the hills, but it wasn't the same as riding with my pilot friend and his son, who are casual riders like myself and simply out for a good time and some aerobics.
I've been riding bike paths, or the quiet country roads out here by my house, but this trek was along a busy 2 lane commuting arterial, with long stretches of narrow rode built before anyone ever heard of wide shoulders. Ugly, noisy and dangerous are the terms that come to mind. Still, I loved getting the exercise and doing something different. It took me away from the computer, and that's always a good thing. I'd have rather been painting, or climbing, but it's overcast, and Dave bailed on me. Not that I can blame him. I bailed last weekend with a bad cold. We may still go Sunday, weather permitting.
I'm teaching Illustrator next quarter twice, at least until I find something more lucrative. I've been reworking my business card as an exercise. It's a far more robust tool than Publisher. With Illustrator I can make just one card in a vertical, easy to read and edit format. I drag it into the Symbols palette, then drag a symbol out onto the artboard. I rotate it horizontal, then do the usual multiplying procedure (Object>transform, transform each) until I have 8 up on the sheet.
Because I built the trim marks and bleed margins into the symbol, and stepped the symbol 2.25x4 inches apart, they are easily cut out of the sheet using my trusty old matt cutter. Another benefit of using a Symbol is that if I decide to change something on the card, all I have to do is edit the symbol, and all occurrences of the symbol on the artboard are instantly changed, just like in Flash. Very very cool!
I've been reading a great book on web design called "Son of Web Pages that Suck," by Vincent Flanders. He has opened my eyes to all the bad habits I've developed in my short career as a web designer. I use too many bevels, and my pages are too fat. I built this look back when I was working in web design. It was done just for fun, and not meant to be a vehicle for attracting web design customers. I'll have time this quarter to build a new one, but I need to get some cash flow immediately. There is no time for creative thinking.
I have been thinking about the passage of time. We are blasted with advertising that focuses on the beauty of the young. Get in any checkout line and all the magazines in the racks by the cashier are featuring the hot young starlets of Hollywood, in various stages of undress. Typically one sees about 4 to 6 inches of cleavage per magazine. That's all fine and good, and I'm happy they grow them good down there, but what does that have to do with me as I stare at 50?
I can remember being that young, and I mentioned something about the "good old days" to one of my students the other day who is my age. His response rocked me:
"These ARE the good old days!" he said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, 20 years from now, you'll be looking back just like you're looking back now, and you'll be saying 'those were the good old days', so you see, THESE are the good old days. You're living them right now. You've always been living the 'good old days'."
The guy had a point. Each year we live, we get older, but so what? What are you gonna do? Keep on living, and keep on doing the best you can every day. Don't sweat the numbers. Can't change em anyway. I stopped yesterday to see one of my old artist friends. She was one of the people who encouraged me to take up painting seriously back in 1989. She lives a quite life with her disabled husband, who fortunately has a decent pension that allows them to pay the rent on a nice 2 story home in town.
Recently her landlord raised the rent $100 a month, and when you are retired on a fixed income, that hurts. She had to drop out of all three art clubs, and couldn't even afford to have her paintings photographed. We went down to her studio where she has hundreds of paintings and drawings piled against the walls and on every table. She has been painting for a good 50 years and is still getting better. She used to always work in oils, but showed me some awesome pastels done in the last few months. Her handling of grass and trees is breathtaking. The pastel medium suits her perfectly. She avoids the muddy look oils can get if they are overworked.
6-17-03
Woke up coughing again. I've been fighting a cold for 4 days now. Maybe I should call it bronchitis or asthma. Sue handed it off to me a couple weeks ago. She was able to work through it, but the way I felt Saturday I think it hit me harder. Today I felt good enough to go bike riding and powered up my hills at about 75 percent power, blowing stuff out of my nose the whole way.
I thought I could sleep, but as soon as I got horizontal, on came the tickle in my throat that turns into a chest racking cough at 5 minute intervals. I went into the bathroom for the Nyquil, but the bottle was empty. We have an old bottle of codeine cough syrup with a few doses left, but I hate to use it on a relatively minor summer cold like this.
Today one of my friends came over to help me with the 85 pages of html work I've been plowing through. He's always kidded me about joining him for a smoke break at school. I think I surprised him when I told him I wanted to buy a cigar. I launched my dentist's site over the weekend. It felt like a small birth in a way and a cigar sounded like a good idea.
It was ironic walking into the smoke shop down by the water, a place I usually smirk at as I drive by. Today I was buying one of the evil cancer sticks. We stopped for a brief lunch break on the spit to smoke and watch the bikinis roasting in the noon day sun. The cigar was fun for about an inch until I began to feel more buzz than I needed. I ground it out and left it lying on a log. Dumb way to spend 6 bucks.
I feel sorry for smokers. Such a senseless way to shorten your life. Of course, if I fall off a rock someday, they'd say the same thing about me. I guess we all choose our own path. What's dangerous to one guy is normal to another. It's grading day tomorrow, then I have 5 days off, including the weekend before next quarter starts. I might even have more time off than that depending on when my classes are. I'm thinking about a painting/camping trip somewhere pretty. I'd like to get away from it all.
6-9-03
Before I "punch in" for the day I want to take a few minutes to describe the great day I had yesterday. It didn't start out very auspiciously: I woke, turned on the laptop and began transferring tabular data from Word to html. The process works like this:
- set your resolution as high as it will go (1400x1050 on this Dell)
- open two windows side by side, Word on the right, Dreamweaver on the left
- Line up the two tables with the scroll bars
- Put your fingers on the two lines in question and proof read
- If it looks the same, move both hands down a line and repeat
- If you find any changes, cut and paste.
- If it's totally different, delete all the data in the table, add or delete rows and cut and paste
- When you're done, back it up and open the next one
- 74 two go.
- The joys of web design...or should I say web maintenance?
It was my third day on the project, and a Sunday at that. After 2 hours the sunshine outdoors got the better of me and I unplugged. Sanity prevails over the almighty dollar. I waited a while for Sue and Lisa to return from driving practice and shopping, but by two they were still out and I drove up to the trail at the Belfair salt marsh. After a twenty minute hike I found my favorite spot just as I had left it last fall: wide open views across the Southern tip of Hood canal, and miles of empty salt marsh.
The tide was out, but I was carrying a winter's worth of pent up creativity and ready to take on the mud. The initial rough sketch went quickly, but then I came to the color. What color is mud? Because I was looking West into the afternoon light, the wet slimy goo was reflecting the sunlight, which was filtered by a light misty haze. When I looked straight up, the sky was blue, but there was that misty haze all around...or maybe I just needed to clean my glasses.
The mud looked blue, and I grabbed a light blue pastel stick and painted in the mud almost the same color as the sky. When I squinted it was like a black and white Xerox, the mud, the distant water and the sky all white, with the grass covered land black. As I balanced the colors, I began to despair of ever getting the mud to look right. People walked by every 20 minutes or so, and while they didn't say anything, I could imagine what they were thinking: "This guy hasn't got a clue!".
Right before I was ready to rip it up, I grabbed a few sticks of color that had nothing to do with the color of what I was seeing and stroked them on. Yellow! ....uhhh...Ok, never mind. Pale pink...no, that doesn't work either. How about pale orange? Hmmmm. The juxtaposition of the pale orange and the blue mud got some magic going. Soon I was grinning as I stroked on the colors, following the curves in the muddy bottom of the inlet.
Soon it was like taking candy from a baby. Every stroke was perfect and I was totally relaxed and "plugged in" to the work. While one part of my mind painted, the other stepped back and observed, thinking: this is what you were meant to do. All that other stuff is just a job. You've never been as good or as fast at anything as you are at this. Look at those colors go on! Step back and take it all in...Oh my God. That is beautiful! Who would have known those colors would work to draw mud? It's so much more than paper, paint and a view...it's a creation.
Artists are visual storytellers, in the tradition of the 10,000 year old cave painters in France. We create something bigger than ourselves that lives or dies on it's own merits.
The next person to walk by, a sixtyish lady in shorts doing the aerobic walk, elbows pumping, slowed down as she went by and called back, "Gorgeous colors!". I always know when a painting is getting good; the passersby begin to offer compliments and/or ask how long I've been working. "I've been here a couple hours," I say. "A couple hours?" they reply incredulously, as if they thought painting well takes days. If a painting is really good, even the dedicated bird watchers put down their binoculars and say something nice.
I'd love to show the painting here, but my 3 year old digital can't do justice to my work. I'll borrow a digital at school in a few days. It's nine AM, Monday morning, time to punch the time clock.
6-7-03
The weather has been very hot for the last week. The heat was so bad yesterday that I almost had a panic attack getting out of the car. I felt like an over done turkey in the oven, and the 6 things I had to grab before I could retreat to the cool tree shaded house were simply too much trouble. Despite the heat, I've been diligent about getting my aerobic exercise, but less so about staying hungry.
I'm back up to 165, after staying around 160 for a month or two. It's simply bad eating habits: too much snacking. Aerobically I'm in awesome shape. I can ride up all my hills without getting out of breath. Lisa accompanied me on one of my recent dirt rides, and even her 15 year old lungs couldn't keep up with the old man.
She's so pretty now I feel like buying her a doberman. Ah the bloom of youth...we thought it would last forever. Those long decades of perfect fitness, then the big birthdays begin to roll by. Still, like I told Sue the other night, it pays to count your blessings.
I should be out painting or climbing, but I have 85 pages of freelance work to do. It pays very well for simple Word to html converting, and though the hot sunny weather is tempting, we need every penny I can earn to balance out this part time teaching gig. Maybe tomorrow I can get out and do some painting.
Clint's been enjoying his new truck. We've been pleased to see he is still behaving responsibly now that he doesn't have to beg for transportation. Had we known better, we would have figured out a way to buy the truck on layaway until after school was out. A new truck is far more interesting than laboring over his final projects in science and english.
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