Good evening, friends and neighbors!
This week has been more than a little crazymaking and exhausting, and as such, I don’t have a really solid blog post ready for today.
Good evening, friends and neighbors.
It’s a Sunday afternoon in Portland. The sky has been spitting rain all day and threatening more, but in Portland you tend to just get used to a constant state of moisture. I didn’t even bother with a jacket or umbrella on my way out today. I’ll be under cover or shelter long before the wetness can bother me, and the cool air feels sweet to breathe.
I’ve just gotten off the phone with an old friend of mine who had more than a few words to say about self-publishing, and I researched some new technology to make doing my work as the Black Hat Baker easier. Now, I find myself (finally) getting ready to tell you all about whatever’s on my mind this week.
Just another day at the office… except this office I share with the rest of the city.
Good afternoon, friends and neighbors! It’s good to be back behind the keyboard. Emily and I had a great time down in Florida, despite a few hiccups along the way- a bit of motion sickness, misplaced forms of ID, you know… the usual. Right?
As I hoped, or possibly feared, Florida gave me a lot of quiet time to think. Of course, my wife, mother, and in-laws were present to streamline things and make sure I didn’t spend the entire time sleeping or lost in thought- but there were plenty of moments when I knew I had to get my head in order, and more than a little worried about what that order might mean.
It’s a very frustrating and disconcerting thing to be afraid of your own thought processes. Here I was, trying to take a vacation that I sorely needed, and I couldn’t even do THAT right. My parents-in-law- who were putting us up in their house in the Lakeland area of Florida- gave us a blank ticket for whatever we wanted to do. “Treat yourself!” they said. “Whatever it is you want to do, do it because you can. You need to relax!”
A wonderful invitation, and certainly something Emily and I availed ourselves of- but self-care is not the same as “treating yourself.” Self-care is often doing things you don’t want to do- or are afraid to do- because they need to be done to make yourself better.
Good evening, friends and neighbors.
I’ve been looking back over my last few entries here and, frankly, it seems like I’ve been a bit down recently. Especially after that last one. One of my old poetry teachers, Peter Murphy, would often tell us that if what we were writing wasn’t surprising or scaring us about ourselves, we weren’t doing it right. If that’s the case, after this past week I suppose my Pulitzer is lost in the mail.
In general the past few weeks have been a bit of a bumpy road emotionally, and while I stand by everything I’ve written, it can’t rain all the time. Yes, I am WELL aware of the usual winter weather in Portland by now.
Good evening, friends and neighbors.
It never feels like there’s enough hours in the day.
The days when I could feel content crashing out on my bed till late afternoon, gaming or watching cartoons are long over. Since getting my body into a shape that, to be blunt, I WANT to do things with, I’ve had way more energy and interest in life than I ever had before.
That can sometimes be a curse, though. When my interests are pulled between homebrewing, writing, playing guitar, gaming (still kept that up a bit), reading, and exercise, I find myself unable to be satisfied with a day where I feel I didn’t accomplish something. Simply put, I’ve lost the ability to enjoy a lazy day- much to the frustration of my wife.
The Black Hat Baker 