I am back

Took a break. What can I say but that this blog is for me and I don't feel compelled to write if I am not in the mood.

I went to the BMW dealer in Nashville this past Tuesday (No, not the car dealer. The motorcycle one.) Turns out that they are also a Piaggio dealer (I knew that), a Vespa dealer (I didn't know that) and a Ducati dealer (big surprise, I had no idea). After looking at the BMW's I went downstairs to see the Piaggio MP3's and I first waded into a sea of beautiful Ducati motorcycles. I drooled all the way to the back of the lower area where the Piaggio's were and found I was in for a surprise. The Piaggio scooters were also beautiful. I didn't know they had imported so many large displacement scooters into the USA. 250 and 500 cc scooters all around me. I am so glad I wasn't ready to spend lots of money. I didn't buy a new bike - I don't need one and I can't afford the burden of a motorcycle payment while Wes is still in college. But I can dream.

Peace,
Doug

After the break...

After a break here, I am back at the keyboard. In the interim, Michelle has had her surgery and is doing pretty good post op. She struggles some with food and eating but I feel confident that it will work itself out.

I have the driveway and sidewalks done finally. Now, today Wes and a friend are coming over to put a retaining wall in beside the driveway and topsoil behind it(might as well pay them as paying someone I don't know). We are also going to re-do the Zen Garden that I have right in the front of the house. It never was much more that some white rock before. Now it will be much much better (I hope!).

My back continues to hurt a lot. I am going to make an appointment with my neurosurgeon to see what is going on. I hope I don't have to have more back surgery.

Found my Bodi seed bracelet. I thought I had lost it, had been looking for it for over a month. This is a good thing.

I am going to stop here, Wes should be here within the next 10 minutes.

Peace,
Doug

An eventful day

Today has been an eventful day and it isn't even 7PM yet. I started the day hearing someone outside the house right after the alarm clock went off. Going to investigate I found the guys from the Concrete company that was sub-contracted to do my sidewalks and driveway. I had last seen them 3 weeks ago when they had come to the house and installed the forms for my sidewalks. It has rained every day except one since then so they couldn't do any more on the job. Today, no rain. So they were there. There was only one problem. Today was also the day that we were going to Nashville as Michelle is having surgery tomorrow. We talked it over, the guys told me that they would be done by 1PM so we waited to leave for Nashville. It was a good wait, I went out and watched them work. It was enjoyable to watch them and I learned a great deal about concrete, pouring concrete and finishing concrete. They finished at about 2 PM and Michelle and I left the house for Nashville.

After a nice drive down to Nashville and through the city we arrived at our hotel. It is a Holiday Inn and it is directly across the street from Centennial Park which has a copy of the Parthenon. We are close to Vanderbilt University and in a "nice" part of town. The lobby is nicer than anything we have in Bowling Green. We were pleasantly surprised when we got to our room. The room was pretty good sized and looked luxurious. We were greeted by a Swan on our bed made from towels and washcloths. We also found more Swans in the bathroom on the counter and hanging from the grab rail in the shower. We also have a large HDTV in a cabinet at the foot of our bed. All the furnature is finished Cherry. All in all, one of the nicest hotel rooms I have ever encountered. I took pictures and (hopefully) we be adding them to the blog in days to come.

We will be getting up early tomarrow morning, we have to be at the hospital by 5:30 AM in the morning.

Peace,
Doug

Good Morning

Good Morning! Michelle and I both are up and out on the back porch before 10am. Not bad for an old retired guy and his wife who is off work today. It is pretty out here, temperature 78 and of course shady with our new roof over this back deck. I am using my computer and she is reading a "paper book" propped up against her Kindle. Now that is a new use for a Kindle - a book rest!
We are going out in a little while to get Michelle part of her mothers day gift, a necklace to go on a pendant that just came in. The new pendant is kinda neat as well as being beautiful. The beautiful part comes from it being a sterling silver filigree and decoration over a white jade back. The kinda neat part is that it was hand made my Tibetan Artisans in either Nepal or India.
It came from a shop online that I have ordered stuff from for years. The owner of the shop is Buddhist and goes to the area where the Dali Lama has set up his government in exile. He does this at least once a year to buy from these artisans. Part of the purchase price also helps support Tibetan artisans living in Nepal and India.
If you are interested in looking at this man's web site it is http://dharmashop.com and is a really nice place to look (and buy!) Prices are reasonable considering that you are buying hand made stuff made by artisans.

Regifting

I set up a computer that we have here in the house for regifting today. We bought this computer new for our son in 2000. It is old enough now that it won't run any modern operating system except Windows XP and Linux. I decided not to use Win XP for a couple of reasons, one being that XP is at end of life and the other is that I don't have a handy license for XP laying around. Linux on the other hand is powerful, works fine on an older system such as this and is free. Free in cost as well as in other ways that I won't go into right now. I chose to use Ubuntu 9.04 for this system. It installed easily, the old old wireless card on this system which has never been very compatable (a Broadcom card) is now well supported, and the system is rather snappy for a 9 year old computer. After I got it set up and running with all the mutimedia drivers working I called the person it is going to be given too. He will pick it up in the next day or two. And here goes another computer saved from the trash heap.

My lost keys

Today, after a friend visited I decided to go out and get some lunch (I am not cooking in the house right now to help Michelle with her diet before her surgery). Returning home after lunch I found I had grabbed a set of keys to the truck without a house key on it (that is fixed now, I have a house key on all our key rings I think). Finding I could not get into the house, I tried to call my son (who has keys) but to no avail. No problem, I will just go over to the hospital at get Michelle's keys. On arrival there I find that she is in a class and shouldn't be distrubed. This was at 1:50 PM, and they say she will be back by 2. I return at 2 to be told she will be back at 2:30. I return to find that she will "be back any moment." I ask that they have her call me and go out to sit in my truck and read. She calls at 3:10 and I finally get her keys.

The point to this story?

Before today I would have been beside myself with anger. At myself for not taking the keys I should have had in the first place At my son for not answering his phone. At the hospital for not knowing when Michelle would be back for sure and finally with Michelle for being in a class instead of in the Unit where I expected her to be. Now this would not have been rational, but that is the way it would have been.

But today, I decided to take action instead of allowing anger to control me. I said mantras over and over finding myself becoming calm instead of angry. Instead of having a terrible afternoon, I had a good one. I got to talk to several old friends that I ran into in the hospital while waiting for Michelle to return. I got to listen to NPR in my truck and I got to read some of a good book. I had a wonderful afternoon instead of a terrible one. All because I did not let anger control me.

The I Ching found!

Just a short post tonight as the hour is late but I want to make writing here a habit...

I have been reading The Way of Zen and the part I read today referenced the I Ching. I mentioned this to Michelle which led to a book hunt tonight. We have found her old hardback copy of the I Ching. She is over at her desk pouring over it as I write this. Otherwise a pretty mundane day running errands and such. Actually all in all, it was a pretty good day.

Peace,
Doug

Michelle and I went out last night and picked up my book. I don't know if she can tell it yet but her diet is already affecting her. Last night she had enough energy left to go with me to the book store and pick up my book.

This leads me to the thing I want to talk about right now. Before last night, she would have come home exhausted after a bad day at work and would have been unable to do anything except come home and collapse. She had one of those days yesterday, they are coming much too frequently now it seems. The hospital needs to staff better (not just her hospital but all hospitals). Until this happens, being a patient in a hospital endangers the patient as the staff cannot care for them properly. Being a staff member in the hospital overworks the person and causes unbelievable amounts of stress on that person as the personality types that go into health care are not doing it for the money, they are doing it because they are caretakers. It is a lose lose situation. Even physicians, who we frequently vilify, are overworked, overstressed and are unable to care for their patients properly. The only answer I can see from my vantage is to remove hospitals and health care from the corporate board rooms and return them to the public trust. Hospitals should not be in the "business" to make money. It is all supposed to be about caring for patients. Nurses, lab techs, nursing techs and even doctors should be able to make a living wage from medicine. They should not starve or become wealthy because they are taking care of ill people.

Michelle has just arrived home early. I just heard the car beep as she set its alarm system. I am going to go check why she is home (I am always glad to have her home but am curious as to why).

Peace,
Doug

Picked up The Way of Zen by Alan W. Watts this evening and have started reading it. I have accepted a one month challange; the challenge of reading, thinking and discussing this book with myself, my wife and with any other friends who might read this blog and wish to provide positive feedback.
-- May Peace be with you.

Called Barnes and Noble to order The Way of Zen by Alan W. Watts this evening. I was surprised to find that they have one copy in stock. They are holding it for me. I will pick it up this evening or tomarrow.

Taking Michelle down to Nashville for surgery labs and pre-op today. I didn't sleep well last night, was up for several hours from four-thirty on. Four-thirty is a not unreasonable hour to get up until you consider that I didn't even go to bed until one-thirty. My butt is dragging right now. Just finishing a cup of java to hopefully add that caffeine kick before going in to get dressed. It may be a long day.

Saw a slashdot article What Did You Do First With Linux? today. I found the article very interesting, I remember the first time I tried to use Linux. It was Slashdot, 1994 or so. A friend loaned me a bunch of floppies (around 15) and I tried to load it onto the 386 I had at the time. I am still not sure if the problem was me or that I was trying to put the OS on too small of a computer but it didn't work.
I next tried Linux in around 1995. I bought a box set of Red Hat version 2 and installed it on a spare computer I had. This time it took and I had a running OS. I set it up and got FVWM running as my windowing system (talk about ugly!). I have run a distro of Linux since. I followed Red Hat until Mandrake forked off of it and then ran Mandrake until Mandrake 10. I then went back to Red Hat for a while. I read about a new distro that would be arriving soon called Ubuntu. It was being started by this rich South African dude and was going to be a fork off of Debian. It was said it would be a desktop version of Debian that would be easier to install (not hard to be easier to install than Debian was at that time). I moved to Ubuntu when it was released and have used it since pretty much full time.

Today, I decided to change to focus of this blog so it will not be so limiting to me. Instead of my original idea to just discuss my feelings as a liberal in a community that is strongly conservative, I will expand to cover my feelings and ideas in general. A public diary, so to speak.

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Last night, I installed the new Ubuntu verson 9.04 that was released yesterday. It looks pretty good so far (very earlly in the process). The install was pain free and the system has had no stumbles (so far). All in all, good. Todays blog post has been made from within it.

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Mike telephoned me this morning to tell me that he had been to the BMW motorcycle dealership in Louisville to look at bikes. We had talked last night about new motorcycles for him and I suggested that he would not be doing himself well unless he at least went and looked at the BMW line. He was excited when he called but we did not talk long as my hips were hurting bad this morning when I got up and I had gone back to bed after taking a pain pill.

I called him back a little after noon, and we talked again about the BMW lineup. I suspect that he is going to try to buy one of their smaller bikes. The big downside for him is that they do not take any motorcycles on trade so he is going to have to sell his bike first. I hope he gets what he wants.

A Start...

It is a few minutes after 1AM here in south-central Kentucky and my brain is somewhat foggy. In spite of this and the fact that at the best of times my literacy is suspect, I feel compelled to start this log.

My log is called A voice in the forest because I feel more and more that I am alone, a liberal adrift in a community of conservatives. Not just conservatives, but conservatives leaning far, far to the right. I have been trying to cope with this by mainly keeping my mouth shut and venting to a few close friends and to my wife. More and more this isn't helping so I am going to try to keep a blog of my feelings and venting about things that bug me. Hopefully this will help keep me from "blowing a gasket" so to speak.

I expect to tell you (who ever "you" turns out to be) more about me in the short future but am signing off tonight (this morning?) for now.

Peace to you,
Doug