It is a mac. I don’thate myself yet. But i’m not so in love with it that I drank the cool aid yet.

but it is a nice tool to have. it fits in my purse, and i am getting work done with it.

That’s what it is for. Working. I have a lot of that to do

Yesterday was the hottest day of the year so far.

We were messed up. Both Chris and i are uncomfortable. And I woke up at three AM

Ah ha! I know what to do. I got up as soon as I figured out I was awake and went to the living room to stretch.

But chris woke up. And he came out and asked me what was wrong.

Insomnia should not have conversations. So, bakc and forth and toss and turn and discussion and visiting the bathroom and dog wanting out and dog wanting IN and loudly blowing one’s nose

AND HE NEEDED KILLING

sometimes a man needs killing.  But I wanted him for later, so I didn’t kill him.

instead I went to turn off my alarm because I might as well be up. But I crawled into bed to reach it, and bed felt really good. So I set the alarm for a half hour later

(I didn’t really need to brush my hair, did i?)

and had a WHOLE HOUR to lay in bed.

and I managed to scrape probably 15 minutes of sleep into that hour.

Felt good.

And we shall survive to live another day.

Veronica slept perfectly

So Jeff bezos just did a presentation and everyone is talkign about how he copied Steve Jobs.

He used a powerpoint, but he used pictures and not bulletpoints. For example, when he was illustrating the battery life of the new Kindle, he didn’t have a bullet point saying

• 8 weeks battery life between charges

Instead, he had a picture of a calendar showing two months, with the dates of charging circled.

There are a lot of reasons why this is awesome. But I want to talk about something else.

my blog is not that picture heavy. I have some pictures.

but I use words. So, how should words use the “picture superioity” of communication.

It’s the old adage “show don’t tell”

don’t say “I was angry” Talk about what physical reality is happening. Increased heart rate? Heated face?

That is how we should leave our audience

Veronica and I went to the farmers market, because we needed something to do on a Sunday morning.

We looked at bicycles and doggies and various kinds of fruits.

But I bought some flowers. I like to buy the lilies when they are all still ovoid pods, not open yet.

Then I can anticipate when they will spring open into huge beautiful flowers.

I cut them and put them into the vase, and told Veronica,

Look. These are closed now, but after time, they will open into flowers. Wait and see!

That night while eating she asked me “Open it!”

They were not open yet. “We have to wait”

Then, a full day later when I wasn’t paying attention, She said “Open!”

I looked, and Yes! The first flower was splayed open and beautiful.

She told me.

In toastmasters the other day, a table topic was
have you ever acted without thinking and how was that?

well, I am paraphrasing. I love table topics and wanted to shoot myhand up in teh air and say “Pick me pickme!”

But I do not think I have ever acted without thinking. i think a lot without acting. But I cannot imagine acting without thinking. I just am not wired that way.

The man who answered the question said that practice is what enables us to act without thinking. That athletes practice and practice so that they do not have to wait when their moment comes.

Now. That is more like it. I have definitely acted without hesitation before. I do like to think things through completely and know what my next action should be in different circumstances.

once I recognize a trigger, a decision that I’ve already thought through, I act quickly.

The rest of the time I think think think about what I might have to do one day.

Driving to San Diego as the sun rose, I was admiring the clouds and the colors they reflected. I had started out in the dark, but I had to stop to try to get the podcast I was listening to loaded onto the pod that had lost signal.

I lost valuable time, but I was back on the road with my entertainment restored.

Then I saw a patch of cloud separate from the other spotty curtain of colorful cloud. This patch was directly over the sun. The cloud and the sun behind it were in front of a gorgeous green hill with rocks dotting it. The freeway wove into these huge hills straight ahead.

But the cloud, covering the sun, had 5 distinct rays of sunlight as a corona above it. It was so beautiful! I stared at it and thought

“I should stop and take a picture.”

but there was no good place to pull over.

And my camera was the one in my phone, which is also not so good.

I felt like I should do something about this gorgeous sight though.

What would I do if I stopped and took a picture? Well, I could share it on facebook. I could store it in dropbox and then hold it in Flickr. I do that all the time, and in fact have several thousand photos on Flickr.

But those are with my good camera, not this crappy one on my phone.

What was I supposed to do about it?

I thought.

I should look at it. I should admire it.

Perhaps I had forgotten that is what one does with a beautiful sun.

I was getting some help, or to be more precise, getting the runaround from somebody at work. I’ve been working on this runaround for a while.

Early on, a particular woman had helped me. Today, she saw me again and said “You STILL haven’t got that thing you needed yet?”

No. No I haven’t.

And then it became clear that I would need some rubber stamping from some other somebody. An important sombody.

She said to me, “You shouldnt’ have to do that. You don’t really belong here.”

WHAT?!

‘You know where I see you? You should be in hollywood”

I do not know where this is comign from.

But then it seemd to make sense. She was saying that I was a creative person. She could jsut tell, from the handful of times we had spoken, that I was an artist.

I think there are people who respond to that, and understand that is who and what I am.

And to be honest. I think pretty much everybody can tell that I don’t belong here.

Here being almost anywhere. THe artist does not belong.

The artist, the creative type, is apart from thing.

Some people admire that.

Some people fear it.

That explains a lot.

It takes time to take a journey. It takes time and effort.

We don’t transition immediately.

I was worrying last night. I do not like to worry. So I walked the dog. If I can’t do anything about my problems, I can at least move.

So me and the dog were walking, and I was considering. There are a lot of things I could be worried and unhappy about. There are also a lot of things I could be very happy and pleased about.

I can pick.

But right then I didn’t feel pleased. I was worried and unhappy. Because anybody at any moment can pick. It is not amazing, or special to be able to pick being happy. phooey on seeing the glass half full. If anybody can do it, why bother?

It felt good to walk though. And I thought about the hard things. And I got a little mad. And I had some conversations with people I couldn’t see.

And I thought some more about the big picture.

In this big world there are places between places. And the between places are places too.

I am in a between. Neither here nor there. Part of the transition to there is under my control. But some is not. And in either case it takes time.

The edge is it’s own place.

Someone said I should make sure to capture the Veronica cuteness on my blog.

This era, right now – maybe the last week of July and all of August 2012 so far is really the ascendancy of cuteness. I like that she is telling me things.

One night, in the middle of the night, while she would NOT let me leave because I was Mommy and she was awake, she mused “Where does the sun go?”

I LOVE that question. I was leaning back in the dark on the chair in her room trying to think of a way of explaining the horizon of a sphere and orbiting. I didn’t answer because it was time to sleep. I look forward to answering.

But beyond her new curiousity, she is also bossing me. I should probably not encourage this, in the same way you should not let a puppy jump on your legs…because the 5 pound puppy *will* one day be 50 pounds, and that is a lot more meaningful jumping against one’slegs.

But she is bossy. “Be quiet!” she says .

We were at the store yesterday. I had walked away to select some produce…melon? Banana…? No, I think the walnuts were on sale.

But when I returned to the cart where she perched, she took my face in her dimpled hands and said “Mommy! You are not listening to me!”

I like your style, kid. “What do you want to tell me?”

And then she looked around and said a few things in Veronish. It appeared that the issuewas not what she had to say, the main point was that I should listen to whatever it was.

So we are dialoguing. And I like that a lot. Took a while to get here. I think it will last quite a while.

I had a lot of trouble getting Veronica to sleep tonight.

She did not want me to go. SHe wanted me to hold her hand until she fell asleep. Well, she would prefer that I hold her hand and not stop. But she didn’t know what happened after she fell asleep, so I knew when the getting was good.

Anyway, I don’t like to indulge this preference of hers. I was trying to leave. I picked her up, before the meltdown, and took her to daddy in teh living room.

“She’s having a hard time. She could use help.

She said “Very hard”

It’s hard sometimes.

She did not accept the daddy substitute. I had to hold her hand til she slept.

It happens.