Life at 3 miles an Hour

So this morning I’m in a different Starbucks and a different city, but I will say that I’ve found the match to my chair. It feels like a long lost friend, even though it really means that I’m once again contributing to the cooking of my upper thighs. Whatever....You get the bad with the good. It’s a mixed bag. In my headphones, Bruce is traveling down Thunder Road as I get ready to head home after being gone way too long. Ten of the past fourteen days have been spent trying in vain to fill my head with stuff that will eventually become a graduate degree. It’s a time that I always look forward to, and then can’t wait to get out of. What it will eventually get me I have no idea, but I do know that you get the bad with the good. It’s a mixed bag. In the midst of it I was able to spend a few days

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...

My Starbucks by the beach is being renovated this week and the evidence is all around me this morning. The good news is that, so far, my chair is still here. I’m guessing that they could tear the place down around me and as long as I still have my chair and my coffee I’d survive the change. On week 2 of my sabbatical, it kind of resembles what I might look like on the inside while I attempt some renovation time of my own. From my own DIY projects I have learned that renovation goes through phases. There is demolition. There are glimpses of vision of what the project may look like. There is the reality of the mess that things become and the feeling that it might get worse before it gets better, and then…..

Yesterday, I and the love of my life celebrated year 26 of our incredible marriage journey. We relaxed, wandered some of our favorite parts of Seattle and then finished off the day with an amazing dinner on a patio overlooking the water of Puget sound while the setting sun made lavender silhouettes out of the mountains against a clear blue sky. A few tables away a young couple sat celebrating their first anniversary. This began a conversation between my wife and I about where we had been on our first anniversary , trying to recall where we have spent subsequent anniversaries, and how much more madly in love we are now than when we began. Unfortunately, try as I might, I cannot remember where we spent each of our anniversaries. I can remember a good percentage, but I have to admit once more, “I ain’t as good as I once was”. I do know, or at least have a good feeling, that most of them were reflective of our lives at that moment. In other words, as I look back on where we were ...