Air?

There hasn’t been much time to come up for air lately, it’s just the way life goes sometimes.

Days can be a flurry of activity and before you know it they are gone.

I like days like that because I like feeling I’ve made some kind of progress. Last weekend I spent almost seven hours shoveling out from what I hope is the last snow of the season. I’m of two minds on the whole shoveling experience:

• One being that it is this onerous task which confronts me every time it snows.
• Two being it is a good means of engaging in some kind of physical activity which becomes more and more necessary as the years pass.

Considering how much snow there was and how long I was out there shoveling the miracle was getting up the next day and not having any aches or pains resulting from all that work. I spent much of Friday cooking (the beneficiaries being my co-workers) and turned in early.

I woke up at 1am and made myself busy and finally around 5 Saturday morning decided I shouldn’t put it off any longer and got myself out there to shovel. I spent a good four hours managing to get about half the job done at which time I just used my newly cleared space as a means of escape and ventured forth to get the paper and some bagels.

After making myself a nice breakfast as a bit of a reward for all that hard work, it was time for a nap and when I got up late in the afternoon I attacked the remainder of the job.

Nice.

So, the week has gone by with lots of work and other things happening and here it is Thursday already! 

How did that happen?

Once again another ‘season’ is quickly drawing to a close and they just get shorter and shorter each year. The whole dynamic of how work gets done is changing and I can see some people are struggling with that. I can’t say I am oblivious to it because I’ve seen it happening now for the last five years, the funny thing is I can remember a friend filming me a few years ago and asking me the very question about work and me giving an accurate forecast of just the way things have shaken out.

 Last night, I had one task which landed in front of me and it was so effortless, so painless as to not require a lot of thought on my part. Thing is, that wouldn’t have been the case for some other people.

I’ve been lucky. I pay attention and I’ve been really fortunate to work with some very good people.

This is another of those aimless drafts that was sitting in my drafts queue. Started in March 2007, I’m trying to remember where it was I was working at the time. There are a couple of suspects but really who cares at this point?

This just confirms a couple of things to me...

My life really hasn’t changed all that much so no matter how much I may give lip service to being a different kind of person, I simply am the person I am. Also, nothing about shoveling snow or winter has ever really appealed to me.

Something is in the offing in the near future that I just found out about a few days ago. I don’t like where I live... I never have liked it all that much. If I had a choice of a location I can honestly say that this would not be where I would have picked but then again, I didn’t pick it.

The EYOC picked this spot and he picked it because of the woman he was with at the time. He picked the town and the location purely on the basis of it being close to HER parents who interestingly enough are long gone having moved and sold the home tey were living in which has since been demolished and turned into a commercial building (an endodontist I’ve seen has an office in that building).

The street I’m on is a busy street with a double yellow line. The lot is small. I’ve got driveways within 10 or 12 feet of either side of my house and no kind of green wall was ever planted so there’s no privacy whatsoever. The neighbors on one side shovel their snow when they clear their driveway onto my lot which I hate. The neighbors on the other side take the form of three houses the middle of which is cut up into apartments that have had a series of lousy tenants some of which think it’s all fine to toss empty liquor bottles into my backyard. The neighbors all the way in the back use a loud leaf blower to clear the stupid driveway obsessively and last year they cut down greenery which I loved because it separated me from them (that’s a story for another day though).

I really hate this fucking place.

The one thing that’s actually nice for me is that across the street it’s the back end of a large plot of land that had gone undeveloped so I can look out my window and see a hillside which I love but I just found out that they’re likely developing that property and changing zoning making it much denser and making living here even less desirable.

Aside from finding another job, I really have to fucking move.