Spine and Open

The snow has finally melted away here, and the sun actually came out this morning.  I opened the front door and was inundated with the sounds of bird calls.  Sweet bird calls.  They had been missing in the silence of the deep snow.  Where do they go when it is snowing?  Yesterday, when it first started melting off a shrubbery outside the kitchen window, about 5 sparrows appeared and nibbled excitedly on the shrub.   I didn’t notice that the bird calls were gone, just when they returned.  What other sights, smells and sounds have I grown so accustomed to that I would only notice if they were gone and then joyously returned?

The nice people part of this post relates to hockey.  Last night the Flames defeated the Senators, and one of the Flames had a hat trick.  At the end of the night he threw his stick to the fans.  3 grown men scrambled for it, one of them endedup with it, and then gave it to a young boy not tall enough to fight for the stick.  My though was, only in hockey, and possibly, only in Canada would a crowd give the memorabilia to the kid.  I’ve seen stuff like that go down at an NBA game (free T-shirts) and grown men will push each other out of the way, my own brother pushed my dad out of the way.  There would be no handing that T-shirt on to a kid.  And this is a stick that scored a hat trick, much more valuable than a free t-shirt.  Hockey fans, so sweet.

First sorry for no posts…stupid computer issues.  Things are all better now, now that the mac is sitting by itself thinking about what it has done.  Trusty PC here doesn’t have a problem loading the admin page.

This post is about SNOW.  Here is Quez in the snow, he pretty much hates snow; this was the last time he went outside.

Tangerine Tabby + Snow = angry meow meow

On Sunday, unlike Quez, I was so in love with the snow.  I got comfy clothes out and went for a big long walk.  Threw snowballs at Brian and Hynuju’s house and they gave us cookies!  Ginger cookies and chocolate goo cookies.  They were awesome.  Then went sledding at Greenlake.  I love sledding.  I loved the crunch of just trouncing around in the snow.  We got some food at St. Andrew’s.

I hadn’t been into St. Andrews because it is on Aurora Ave N, and looks like a complete dive bar from the outside.  Now, I have no problem with dive bars, but a dive bar on that section of aurora, didn’t seem promising.  I was wrong.  They were playing Manu Chao. They have a veggie burger, they have boundary bay on tap, and they specialize in Scotch:

WOW that is a lot of Scotch.  This is dangerous information.

It is now Friday and I am done with snow in the city.  Snow in the city is making me have to go to work on Saturday, so that I can make up for Tuesday.  I tried to go to work on Tuesday.  The bus never came.  I need some Scotch just thinking about it.

First off, I think it is a little bizarre that my first three posts feature the letter F in the title.  I think the letter F is generally underrepresented in my vocabulary.

I was checking my previous post for spelling errors, as I always have them, spell check or not.  I had written “…we were working against to much fiction…”  I meant to say, “…we were working against to much friction…”  I thought working against too much - oh and now I see that I used the wrong form of to -  too being the correct word.  Anyway, I though working against too much fiction is a funny thing to say.  Which got me thinking, how different are fiction and friction really?

Fiction - “a. An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.”

Friction -  I have to take two of the definitions here, “ 2. Conflict, as between persons having dissimilar ideas or interests; clash. 3. Physics A force that resists the relative motion or tendency to such motion of two bodies in contact.”

Is it safe to say that fiction often leads to friction?

Or for example, you are thinking of friction in the physics way - say you are getting busy with someone - now that is often under some fictional pretext, acknowledged or not.

For utility purposes what if we got rid of fiction or friction so that there would be no more inadvertent spelling errors.  Which one would you like to get rid of?  Our society is pretty much based on fiction,  and I often wonder if human existence would be possible without fiction.  However, friction is so useful.  Starting and stopping cars or bikes requires friction.  I’ll take friction.  Now imagine your whole existence without the concept of fiction.

none can stop us now, we are all stars

I was supposed to hit the slopes this weekend for the first skiing of the year, but the Blizzard Warning ruined that plan.  We don’t get Blizzard Warnings very often in Seattle.  The lack of skiing meant that I could go to my friend Charlie’s 35th birthday party, featuring a guest of honor called Whiskey.  Jason and I brought a bottle of Elija Craig 20 year, which I really like.  Folks in Seattle are either extremely overconfident, or massive wimps when it comes to driving in the snow.  We do have a layer of ice down, but pretty much there is no one on the road.  We picked up Jed on the way and we parked at the bottom of the hill to Charlie and Alexis’s place.  Ilsa and Paul cross country skied there!

We sat around drinking whiskey until the topic of sledding down the hill came up.  Charlie offered that he had a Queen sized air mattress, I said I was in.  We inflated the air mattress and thought we were in for an out of control ride down the hill (the hill is very steep and was actually closed by the DOT).  We got on, nothing happened.  Jed pushed us, then got on, we went a little ways.  Turns out the air mattress has a lot of surface area, and we were working against to much friction for the amount of speed we could get going (our combined weight was not helping us either).  We finally got a pretty cool ride, employing a trick I had learned as a youngster.  The trick is using hedges to your advantage.  We set the air mattress on the snow, on a hedge, in a position that allowed for much potential energy.  We would ride two at a time, count to 3, then run and jump on the thing.  There are few things more entertaining than sledding.  The only comparable feeling for me is riding roller coasters.

Later, we decided to play poker, and instead of money, chips were worth fun points.  It is a nice feeling to try and explain the value of 300 fun points, when you are trying to scare someone out of a pot.  I think I equated 300 funpoints with hanging out with Episode 4 era Han Solo.

It is still snowing.  The city will be shut down.  I look forward to sleeping in, if the stir crazy cat will let me.

As part of the emotional aftermath finally identified as a combination of post-election blues and winter, I have been getting used to the fact that I am a radical.  This was not an easy concept to align myself with.  I am not an in-your-face type of person.  I believe in people doing what they will, and if I got a better idea, than simply leading by example and keeping my opinions to myself (unless someone asks…). Radicals don’t fit into societal mores, and while, at times, this leads to battling self-richeousness, it also often leads to depressing realities.  The result is that I spend a great deal of time contemplating the society I attempt to live in.  At last, I have embraced the blog as a catalog of these wrestling matches and sideline commentary.  I also plan to post some pretty pictures.