Lost in OK

I wasn’t sure if I was going to say anything on the sad passing of the Rev. Dr. Everett Lees. It feels presumptuous to say words about someone you haven’t been close with for a long time. However, his passing has been sitting in my mind and left me with a small thought on strong character.

Everett and I became friends my senior year in high school along with his other dear friend, Steven Anderson. We were all in debate club together and spent a good amount of time both in and out of school for that year. We were an unlikely set of friends, especially Everett and I.

The nice thing about new journey is that you can set your own baselines. For the first day I got up early enough to take Heidi out for a walk. She is working on her manners and I’m working on loosening up my ankle. Neither makes for a rapid pace, but it does make for a pleasant walk through a pretty town. We took a nice stop at the Guthrie Scottish Rite Temple and another to see what silent film was playing at The Mini Melba Cinema at the crack of dawn. Did 1.83 miles at a 25'49"/MI pace.

Well, it’s September and now approaching my birthday. And of course, as a middle-aged man, I can predictably start getting those little pangs of anxiety at another year’s passing which lead many down the dark path of impulse sports car purchases or hair plugs. To be honest, I’m actually in a very good place in my life and have little to push me towards these darker parts of men’s hearts. I have a job that is rewarding, a loving family, a nice house and a relatively tolerable dog. All in all, things are looking bright. However, I suspect, that my experience is not uncommon with those suddenly finding themselves wrestling with how to make a payment on their new Corvette. I suspect, most midlife crises have more to do with the sense of time’s rapidity than with legitimate complaints with one’s station, and in that, I’m certainly feeling the results of accelerating decrepitude.

A great practice day, even got a chance to sneak in some Elvis, which is never a bad thing.

Satie Gymopedie No. 1

Pretty close to note perfect here, just a few notes that didn’t sound out. Also, I’m still having some issues with keeping those opening chords with even dynamics. If I can get that done, I think I will finally be happy with this one. Trying to pick out my next piece that everyone else learned in lessons, but somehow I didn’t. Thinking maybe Moonlight Sonata?

I got stuck; no other way to put it. This has happened a few times, but for the last couple of months, I have just felt that my progress has kind of ground to a halt. I’m flubbing different notes in the same piece each time I sit down. A few of weeks ago, I kind of threw up my hands and walked a way for awhile. At the same time, my daughter started to learn the violin and her teacher provided me some accompianing sheet music, so I basically stopped practicing my pieces for a few weeks and played around with that.

A personal website has just been a thing I’ve never been able to let go of. I’ve been horrible about updating them, but I’ve always kept a site around. As such, I realized recently that I’ve had a website continuously for almost 30 years. I got my first website around 1995 or 1996 when I headed off to college. Let’s just say, none of us knew what we were doing. We coded our sites from hand and filled them with every animated gif we could find and no background image was too busy. The flaming logo still remains my personal favorite touch on my websites.

So Christmas this year was a bit more eventful that we had planned. It started as expected, with an excited five year old getting out of bed well before dawn and shrieking with joy when she discovered her milk, cookies, and carrots had all been consumed by Santa and his helpers.  Coffee was made for the bleary eyed parents and the opening of presents was comensed and finished by 7:30 AM.  

Scientific American has now asked and answered the questions you were either to afraid to ask or never wanted to know. How fast is the bowel movement of an elephant and how does that compare, to say, a dog? Which species produce “floaters” and which “sinkers”?

A true gem from the article, “The Physicics of Poop”:

Together, this meant that defecation duration is constant across many animal species – around 12 seconds (plus or minus 7 seconds) – even though the volume varies greatly. Assuming a bell curve distribution, 66 percent of animals take between 5 and 19 seconds to defecate. It’s a surprisingly small range, given that elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog’s, at 10 milliliters.

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