Green Tea and Black Beer

Time:	9:27 am.
Mood:	okay.
Music:	Colin Haye - Sea Dogs.

At the end of my fifth week at the new job we have accomplished far more that I would have thought possible. There is still the unknown decision making process of the capital investment group that now owns the LLC, but since they accepted it as a debt fulfillment I don't think that they will liquidate, there's not enough physical assets to equal even 1/100 of a percent of what they already have sunk into it. The only payoff for anyone in this scenario is making the process work.

Saturday morning this week brought a fishing trip to the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, specifically the beach just south of Sebastian Inlet, (27°51'5.93"N 80°26'34.37"W). I really should have paid more attention to the phase of the moon though. With the full moon, daylight fishing is extremely slow and this trip held true to that observation - we did a whole lot of fishing and no catching. Still, you can't beat sitting on the beach and relaxing. I suspect that next Saturday morning will be better fishing.

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Time:	1:36 pm.
Mood:	optimistic.
Music:	U2 -Stay "Far Away, So Close".

It has been a little over three years since I last posted to the
First Sight story hour. There are many reasons for the hiatus, some connected to daily life getting in the way, some caused by wandering off along other creative paths. Somehow though my thoughts keep coming back to the original story hour thread and the plot arc that was slowly forming, an arc that I think I need to finish. Installment 037 was actually written back in 2005 and at the time I hesitated to post it because it delves into some pretty dark subject matter and per the original guidelines of the ENWorld boards I wasn't sure if it would offend the grandmothers of the world. Hesitation turned to procrastination which opened the door to distraction and First Sight (the story hour form) has languished since. I have gotten fed up with myself for never finishing a project and I always enjoyed telling this story, so with the new year comes a new attention to the old hour. To all the original readers that are still haunting the ENWorld boards and those that followed the story on the Megatokyo forums: my apologies for leaving the story hanging. To any new readers: start from the beginning, First Sight is an organic creation, each installment grows from the previous. I hope that I can still tell an entertaining story and in particular bring Gabe and Mary's story to a satisfying resolution. So, if it pleases you, follow the link...

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Time:	11:27 am.
Mood:	neutral.
Music:	Smash Mouth - All Star.

My younger brother and I inherited a 21-foot classic Mako fishing skiff a few days ago. She needs several weekends of elbow grease and probably more than a couple bucks to get her seaworthy again but she's not in bad shape at all. Definitely a lucky happenstance to round out 2007, which as a whole has been a pretty stressful year for everyone I know. I am very excited, once we have completed repairs I'll no longer find myself beholden to anyone to get out on the big blue fishing. Another great thing is that I have a cadre of stalwart friends who have not only volunteered time for the upcoming project but will chip in fuel money for fishing trips. Just acquiring the boat in and of itself is enough to make the prospects for 2008 seem rosier.

And while I'm on this highly unusual optimistic bent, I finally rebuilt my bicycle. I'll be able to ride to work two or three days a week now which is going to be great exercise and save money on gasoline. There's a load of work to get done around the olde compound in the next few months. The time has come to tackle the jungle in the back yard and get it back to the zen garden that I had for a short time in 2003. Five odd years of bramble is going to be a challenge to the venerated machete. I'm hoping these projects will be prove to be therapeutic and put my brain back in gear for writing again.

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Time:	7:39 pm.
Mood:	cynical, yet hopeful.
Music:	It's All The Blues, on WFIT 89.5.

It's been a while since I've posted to the old journal. I had these cunning plans to post my hand written journal accounts from my week-long camping trip in the Utah desert on the journal before I posted anything else but Ive never gotten around to typing up those entries. Oh well, perhaps over the Christmas break I'll get to it. What follows is a going to be a fairly whiny rant so it might not be that interesting reading.

Before I delve in, this has been a hell of a week and I am already finished with a 751ml bottle of Chimay Ale (Peres Trappistes) Grand Reserve (9% alcohol by volume) so the prose that spews forth may be more than a little random, but that is what journals are for, eh? Stream of consciousness....

What a flipping bloody week it's been. No singular incident is responsible for stress levels going off the scale, rather it has been a cumulative effective of many separate incidents that bring me to the point of quaffing nearly a liter of the finest product of Belgian Monasteries. We are in a do or die mode at the lab, I really think my fate there hinges on the results of the next couple months. We have been given a goal of producing a gallon of biodiesel from non-crop sources by April. To the best of my knowledge no other organization has done that. It's good to have challenging goals set, it is quite another to be in the cross hairs

And this has put our group in the cross hairs, of all the biofuels teams within the Institute, we are the only ones to have actually produced anything. Everyone else seems to be caught up in purely academic questions and cannot jump to a production, workaday-world mindset. We are forging ahead without answering all the questions, if it works, we run it. This isn't to say that these questions don't need to be investigated, but at the end of the day do you want a liter of biologically-derived oil, or do you want a stack of scholarly publications..?

Problem is, within the Institute, we are caught in this political maze from which (on some days) there seems to be no escape. The most frustrating thing is, were we given freedom from towing the corporate line for six months, and I mean complete isolation from the corporate culture, I firmly believe that we could seriously kick ass, and maybe, just maybe, make a real difference in this sad world.

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Time:	7:21 am.
Mood:	nostalgic.
Music:	The Ventures - Caravan.

I had the most vivid dream that I have had in years this morning. In the dream had returned to the old family farm up in West Virginia and things were very much like they were when we left a quarter century ago. It was late summer in the dream and the old apple tree in my grandma’s front yard had apples nearing ripe. The old houses were still standing and for some real weirdness the power was still on. There were several pieces of furniture in the front yard, wardrobe-type things that were filled with blankets. Other than smelling a little moldy they were all in pretty good shape. Down the hollow from the houses, the next farm down had a truckload-sized pile of shiny new barbed wire; I guess he was going to do some fencing soon. The most vivid part of the dream was the intense green of the woods. Maybe it was the contrast of going through fall and winter every year, but I’ve never seen green that intense, that deep, anywhere else other than in the Appalachians. I miss that the most, three hundred acres of forest that was all ours, (no bank notes), at the head of a creek that bears the family name.

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Time:	8:32 am.
Mood:	good.
Music:	rain dripping from the eaves.

I have discovered the most amazing store in Orlando. Well, in a larger sense not entirely amazing since I know from first hand experience that there are larger stores of this ilk in Wisconsin, for Florida however, this one is amazing. In a shopping center on the southeast corner of Bumby and Colonial is a liquor store the size of a small supermarket. There is a rum aisle, a whiskey aisle, a brandy aisle… you get the picture. I found all sorts of odd ball rum and whisky labels that I’ve never found in a store hereabouts. There’s also a respectable selection of import and microbrew beers. Amazingly enough I managed to contain myself and spend under $60, but I now have a supply depot for convention season…

Speaking of conventions… I am not certain how exactly this happened, but I’m on the managerial staff of another con, ASSIMILATION 2007 which is taking place at the Radisson Worldgate Resort in Orlando on September 29th and 30th. Like JACON, I’ll be in the dealers room for most of the convention. My younger brother is also on staff as the overnight events manager. I’m hoping for good attendance at this event, it can be a good outlet for my inner science fiction geek very much as JACON is for my inner anime geek. It should be a fun weekend.

Things at the lab are going as well as can be expected. It seems that I just can’t maintain a proper level of righteous indignation. I think I need to work on that nasty habit of letting things go, a good vendetta is so much more entertaining. I will close out with one major whine: it seems that my old nemesis, The Beer Headache is back and even Guinness is triggering it. Anything over two pints in a day and blam, migraine for 6-8 hours, there are still a few beers that seem to be safe, but the list is getting shorter and shorter. Rum and whisky are still safe so life has not entirely ended.

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Time:

7:03 pm.

16:50
Ah, the dog days of summer… best enjoyed with a cold beer whilst sitting beneath a favorite shade tree. Today I had planned on completing only a couple small chores in the yard and I ended up spending a good eight hours mowing cutting and hauling. I’m now enjoying that blissful exhaustion that comes from a good day’s work and listening to the wind in the trees accompanied by cicadas and the intermittent pho-xylophone of an ice cream truck several blocks away. Now there is the low rumble of distant thunder as evening storms build a few miles to the west. This is one of those “real” moments, those rare instances of clarity when all the aggravations of daily living can be seen as the trivial matters that they are. Sitting in the midst of your handiwork at the end of the day and simply enjoying being… anyone who says that there is more to life than that is entirely delusional.

The moon is somewhere near the half phase, I’m not sure whether it is waxing or waning, but it looked very cool this morning in the western sky bracketed by bows of fresh growth from the ear tree in my yard. The thunder is getting louder now and the wind is picking up a bit. I love summer in Florida, if I had a porch or a small (home-built) tin-roofed shelter to watch the storms from life would indeed be perfect.

Things at the lab, particularly the culture, have really been getting to me for the past few weeks. Worrying about work is foolish. I am in no position to effect any kind of change there and I feel my vestment is bankrupt. Better that I should just clock in for the forty hours each week that I owe and leave it all there once I drive away. I know from past experience that some are going to see a marked decrease in my performance at work and I would say to them that this is just dropping back to 100% instead of the 120% that I’ve given for over a decade. Maybe, if I can discipline myself to not put in the extra effort at the lab, I can finally make the time to write and do things that I actually enjoy. I think I’ve finally realized that work should not own me body and soul.

17:22
The thunder is no louder. Perhaps the storms will go around us today. The clouds are moving with haste from the west and the thunder I hear is far too south to impact us, maybe later.

Last week I applied for an aquaculture job about 40 miles south of Malabar. I don’t have a high degree of hope that they will call me, (based on my salary history, aquaculture does not pay that well) but it is nice to entertain the notion for a few moments. It would be kind of nice to get “back in the pond.” I think I can be satisfied at the lab though if I completely separate work from life. That has really been my problem. I throw myself into work with all that I have and as a result I take far too many things at work personally. The other extreme is not caring at all, (which is where I am at right now) but this isn’t good either. I need to find some kind of balance. Evenings such as this, with the symphony of wind, cicadas, and thunder, can go a long way towards righting this severely listing ship.

17:32
The wind is blowing a little harder and I can see dark gray to the west. Perhaps we will have our regularly scheduled storm after all.

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Subject:	Lunchtime Ruminations
Time:	12:58 pm.
Mood:	contemplative.
Music:	Antonio Vivaldi - Violin Concerto, for violin, strings & con.

Part I, Post-Action report:

At three days after the official end of JACON I am still not fully recovered. Full throttle for over seventy two hours with only short catnaps here and there is going to take a few days to recover from. This was without doubt the most grueling JACON I've ever worked. There were quite a few issues evolving from me not following my instincts and throwing more people on the scheduled Volunteer Corp. Lesson learned, next year I will do all of the schedules and have them done well ahead of time. Amazingly enough average convention goers seemed to not perceive the chaos that was ensuing. I guess we are better at handling issues than I thought at the time. Kudos to my fellow Directors, and special thanks to my younger brother who is a one-man security squad.

Part II, Back to the Real World:

The return to work on Tuesday morning was not quite as happy an occasion as it could have been. In addition to being still incoherently tired, I learned that the results of a marathon experimental session in the lab had not turned out nearly as well as hoped. Not long after that, the corporate bureaucracy that has been driving me mad for the past three years swung through my door and came at me like a spider monkey on crack. To help me keep a good attitude when dealing with said monkey, I have hung a new sign over my desk, paraphrasing lines from Deep Rising and The Transporter, "If The Money Is There, We Don't Care". The rest of the quote from both movies goes something like "any cargo, any place, any time, no questions asked." I use this to try and remind myself that as long as the paychecks are coming in, I shouldn't get tied in knots over lost productivity at work. And there is a lot of lost productivity. In the past I took a substantial amount of work home with me and came to the lab on my own time. I've pretty much stopped doing that. I don't think it's right that I subsidize mandated inefficiency from my own wherewithal.

Part III, Commentary:

May 9th and we have our first tropical storm of the season? I had a feeling back around Christmas that this summer's season was going to be doozy, and unfortunately for those of us living near the coast, things aren't looking too promising. Weather patterns are changing, that much is certain, but what's really causing it? Is it fossil fuel emissions? Is it part of an ongoing natural climatic cycle? I think there is some truth in both statements. The world has been gradually warming since the last ice age and we know from the fossil record that it has been far warmer in the distant past than it is today. With that said, there is no denying that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have jumped dramatically in the last century and while that by itself may not affect climate change it is reasonable to think that it can exacerbate an underlying trend. The thing to remember here is that we are stuck on this nice blue marble and as its health goes, so does ours. Maybe we aren't the cause, but I'm not really willing to gamble that we aren't.

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Time:	8:49 pm.
Mood:	blank.
Music:	The Magnetic Fields - 100,000 Fireflies .

I am about out of patience with the lab making institutional changes to address what is really a problem with improper technique in the lab. I don't care how many times you change shoe covers (or shoes the way they are headed!) it is not going to make up for sloppy lab work. All that this does is make the rest of us jump through more hoops to do our job. If I don't have a stroke soon it is going to be a miracle. On a better note Saturday offered up a great fishing trip and of course here are some pictures...

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Here we are at the ramp, getting ready to launch the canoe into a nineteen knot headwind. That was... intersting

After rounding a bend in the river we got a reprieve from the gale, it was only blowing around ten knots here.

The Intrepid Polywog fly fishing from a canoe. I really expected to sink during this part of the trip.

And here 'tis meself, paddling away from the shelter of the lee shore back out towards the open water.

On the way back we stopped at Malabar Mo's for some much needed wings and beers.

I decided to snap a picture inside the Mo's, I plan to use the interior description in my current writing project.

The day ended with the boat safely in her berth. And I started the next day by finding strained muscles in my shoulder that I never knew existed. Paddling against the wind for several hours was probably not the wisest return to the water after a year and half hiatus from canoeing.

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