Archive for the ‘My Weird Life’ Category

It’s wonderful.  Everywhere, so white.
The river has frozen over.  Not a soul on the ice.
Only me skating fast.
I’m speeding past trees, Leaving little lines in the ice,
Splitting, splitting sound, Silver heels spitting, spitting snow.
– Kate Bush

It’s not like you ever think you know everything.  It’s just that sometimes it’s hard to go so far back to the beginning that you feel like you don’t know anything!  That’s what it was like this weekend when we decided to give cross country skiing a go.  Every single step I took during those first days of kayaking I am reliving with cross country skis, right down to being pretty sure the sales guy thinks I am much less athletic than I am capable of being.  Oh well, some things never change.  After a day on the trails I’m not sure this is my thing, but when it’s January in Wisconsin you’ve got to do something. -  I wrote a bit more about day one on the skis here.

I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news – With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypoten- potenuse!!!!

My black & purple Rockpool Alaw Bach is sitting quietly in the shed behind an old wooden door blocked by a snow drift about as high as the recent waves have been in Hawaii. Meanwhile the clock is ticking away. Normally this time of year I feel at a bit of a loose end. I’d find myself simply digging to find something fresh to write about. Not this year though. No, this year I’m just trying to get caught up and I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

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I will be king /And you /You will be queen
Though nothing will / Drive them away
We can beat them /Just for one day
We can be Heroes
Just for one day
– bowie

A man sits down on the grass to tell a story about a tree.  A tree may not seem like much of a topic but with a little observation everyone realizes there is a lot to learn about a tree.  Over the weeks, months and years the man keeps extolling the virtues of the tree.  He describes every overlooked detail, and points out every new branch and every falling leaf.  In time some began to think he most know everything there is to know about a tree.  Of course he knew that was far from the truth.

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The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold….
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sunburned hands, I used to hold
– jacques prévert

Sorry for disappearing.  Well, I’ve not actually disappeared, in fact I was probably walking along the shores of this lost little lake.  Maybe I was taking pictures of a caged lion or hiking through the dark woods of my local park under the glow of a harvest moon.  Maybe I was nursing what seems to be a little stress fracture on my foot , while watching the local team get taken to school.  Maybe I was working on a website.  My work list recently has been growing exponentially. Maybe I was sitting right here being amazed by how well my move from Windows XP to Windows 7 actually was going. The techies will appreciate that most all of my shareware, emulators, and other old or odd software worked.  Quickbooks 2000 didn’t… But whatever I’ve been doing, I’ve not been kayaking recently.  That will change of course.  In life we wear many costumes.  The difference between love & obsession is in the pauses we take.  For the moment I’ve simply paused to watch the earth slide into the oncoming deep freeze from the vantage point of dry shoes.

No kayaks in this story.  We spent the weekend going native.  Well, I didn’t shoot a deer or anything like that but I did go to the local apple orchard.   It’s sort of  classic rite of autumn to road trip through the local hills taking in the fall color, carving pumpkins, visiting an orchard, visiting a winery and hanging out at a local state park for a Halloween Hike.  If you can do it all in one day, all the better!

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The monkey sat on a pile of stone / And stared at the broken bone in his hand
Strains of a Viennese quartet rang out across the land / And the monkey looked up at the stars
And he thought to himself…
– r. waters

So how are YOU doing today? No, really. We spend so much time on these blogs telling stories, selling products, raising money or just shootin’ the breeze (as they say in these parts), that we rarely come down to earth. It’s funny too considering we’re all spun from a love of the outdoors. Well, I for one am just thankful the outdoors is out there. Without the outdoors we’d have to spend all our time dealing with what lies in wait, indoors. Yeah, sometimes the outdoors seems scary, but it’s indoors is where all the crazy sh*t happens. ( Can I use that word??)

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Baraboo Interactive Services is now Skillet Creek Media.

When I started my business in 1996 I really had no idea what I was doing.  I was just asked to build websites for a couple folks who heard I knew how.   Well, sort of.  I mean I bought a cheap Packard Bell computer at Wal-Mart because even though we were very poor then, I didn’t want my kids to fall behind the future that I thought was coming.  Of course what I ended up using that first computer for was drawing pictures, editing photographs and generally learning to make things.  Along the way, I learned HTML, later Flash, and so on…  Over a dozen years later I’m still just doing whatever I do.  Only now am I really starting to see a theme.  At 44 it’s about time, eh!?

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