Life at 3 miles an Hour

Back to the beach today on a beautiful Fall morning. I’m surrounded here on National Coffee Day by the retirement clan, dad’s with kids before school, and the assorted fitness freaks trying to no avail to make me feel guilty for my “just say no to spandex” stance. It seems as if my posts will be rather spotty of the next several months. I am in “finish or die trying” mode when it comes to grad school and to tell you the truth, I am now in a love / hate relationship with my laptop. Between an increased course load, the regular correspondence that flows through this thing and my need to develop a message for my community o’ faith each week, I cannot even bear to look at the screen much longer. On top of that, in the past months I have put all of my reference material for the Book of Books on my laptop and also purchased a Nook (like a Kindle only better) so I now spend most of my waking hours looking at a screen. Something has to give

It’s a foggy morning at the beach, making it a bit difficult to see some of the finer features of the Seattle skyline. If you were to drive along the beach here this morning you would not be all that impressed by the images that you were seeing. You wonder about those picture postcard views and impressive claims of snow capped mountains and the space needle and all that. You’d begin to buy into all the claims of rain and gloom and images of umbrellas and fleece. Well ok …. The part about the fleece is actually true. I think it was invented here. My point is that there is another view here,

It’s just another day in paradise. Even in the rain, there is no place I’d rather be… at the moment. That feeling has a habit of changing, all in a glimpse, in my experience. I’m pretty sure that I’ve felt that way just about every place we’ve lived. Today is the first day of school for many in my part of the country. Even though I’m beyond the days of new clothes, new pencils, and new pictures of faces caught between the excitement of a new year and the mortal embarrassment of having parents with cameras. Actually, as I think of it, after 20 some years, this is actually the first that we haven’t dealt with a child and the start of a new year. Now that my youngest is married, we no longer have to drop her off at college. It’s her husbands deal now to make sure she’s up and away on her first day. In a perverted twist of fate though, I find myself still a perpetual state of learning. Yesterday was the first day of my final year of grad school journey number 1. I am now termin...

Well……….. remember what I said last week about “as long as I have my chair and my coffee” that everything would be alright. I have my coffee. Guess what’s missing from this picture? That’s right…tell them what they’ve won Johnny. Crime of Crimes…my chair is gone. I’m trying to be optimistic and think that perhaps it went to some Smithsonian tribute to Starbucks. The whole feel to this place has changed, probably for the better I guess. The baristas really like the change and since they’re the ones who look at it every day, I’m thinking they have a better handle on it than I do. It’s a visual reminder to me that change doesn’t always turn out the way you had anticipated. I’m living that right now anyway so I might as well live it here too. Last week I also shared that I was wrestling with the question “Is anonymity too high a price to pay for significance?”. One more week of pondering has also resolved that question for me as well. All of my preconceived ideas on what my ans...