KattyWilly

Halley blogs about The Good Life.

“Things you should have in your life today:”

Okay, lets see if I’m living “”The Good Life”” or not.

“A nice well-cooked meal with friends or family that lasts at least an hour and a half;

I’m starting off on the right foot. Last night I cooked a meal of Pan seared Mango Snapper with stir fried Zucchini and angel hair pasta. The girls were there for dinner even though Chelsey was starving and had to eat her left over Subway sandwich rather than wait for me to finish cooking. And Lindsey’s new friend Sam was over so he joined us at the dinner table for a sit down meal. It was good.

“someone to give you a hug;”

What can I say. I really miss hugs. Definately not the good life for me.

“time to exercise;”

I’m really working on this one. I take Lindsey to the ice rink each weekday and have been watching her skate. I enjoy the time to watch her work on her skating, and it gives me some down time where I’m not running from one place to the next. But I’ve decided that is a luxury I can’t afford any more. So, I’ve taken the bike and put it in the trunk of the car and I’ve been trying to ride while she skates. In the few weeks I’ve been trying I’ve been able to ride about three times. I’ve had trouble with weather, and things to do right after skating that require I not be all hot and sweaty, and a few times I didn’t have time to get the bike in the trunk, or change clothes before I had to rush to get Lindsey to the rink on time.

And then there are the weekend yard work duties. Each week I have to mown the lawn, edge the sidewalks and do general maintenance around the yard. When I have time I try to get one additional task done each week. In the fall /winter that ends up being rake the leaves, but during the summer it is a different chore each week. This weekend was trying to trim the hedge in the back yard. It has gotten so tall that I can’t reach anymore. I get up as far as I can on the ladder and try to stretch over the top to get as much as I can. It was quite a workout. Then I have to neatly bundle all the trimmings into nice little three foot sections or the trash guys won’t take it. Even then sometimes they will only take some of it and I have to put it out again the next trash day.

So I guess I’m sort of almost, not quite good, but I’m working on it.

“time to be silly, laugh, have fun;”

It’s been a rough few months on the silly, laugh, fun front. But I hear the girls laughing and having fun sometimes 🙂

“time to read;”

I stopped bringing my book to work. My friends here are so tired of seeing that same little paperback for the past year or two that they have been teasing me and I can’t take the teasing anymore. I did get a few days of reading when we were at the beach. Does 5 days of reading time a year count?

“time to be outdoors;”

I get to be out on the weekend when I’m working on the yard. That’s sort of good.

“time to meet up with friends for coffee in a local joint;”

Before I was taking Lindsey to the rink I actually did this a couple of times. There was one day a week when the girls had a ride home from the rink and I had about 45 minutes that I spent with an old friend at a restaurant that has a cute little outdoor patio. Lately the closest I get to this is sitting on the front patio sucking down water after I finish working on the yard. So no good life right now but maybe when the girls are off to college :O

“time for work.“

No problem with that. Somehow it feels like I spend the majority of my time at work. I think that is partly because during the summer I know the girls are home and I’m not. Hopefully that feeling of wanting to be somewhere other than here at work won’t be so overwhelming once school starts back, tomorrow! Yikes!

So all in all based on Halley’s criteria I’m not quite living the good life right now. I think that I’d like to make up my own list of things that define “A Good Life” if not “The Good Life”, because, even though as my beer coozie can holder says “This isn’t the life I ordered” it is still a pretty good life. But my list will have to wait as I don’t have time right now.

Dave Winer writes on the web.  I’ve been reading his writing and using his software for a long time.  My first exposure to Dave’s software was with ThinkTank/More, back when I sold all my darkroom equipment so I could afford to buy my first Mac, a two floppy Mac SE.  I’ve always wanted to be able to use an outliner, but for some reason my brain just isn’t wired that way.  It never really makes sense to me.

The time I spent time with Bernie was yet another attempt for me to use outlines to help organize my thoughts and ideas.  It was so easy for Bernie to work with outlines.  It was amazing to watch him take my thoughts and ideas and organize them using outlines.  When I try it on my own I just get lost, sort of whelmed at trying to take ideas that have so many different aspects to them and somehow pare it down into one idea and put in it the appropriate slot.

Then it was when Dave released the free Windows version of Frontier.  As much as I couldn’t wrap my head around Outlining, I could understand the concepts in Frontier for generating web content.  It was fun playing with UserTalk and when Manila started happening I could see that this was how I wanted to put things on the web.  When work started on Pike which would one day become Radio Userland I enjoyed watching it be a music tool and then finally turning into the program I had been looking for to put my thoughts on the web.

I’m not a writer but since Cindy died I have used writing and journaling as a healing method.  I’ve found many other people using weblogs for the same purpose.  Dave mentioned one today,  Brian Buck who is fighting for his life.  In the long view we are all fighting for our lives, but those who are sick are fighting a battle against a more impending threat.

I was reading Doonesbury the other day and ran across another of the weblogs that I read.  CaringBridge.  About a year after our accident I found out that the daughter of one of Cindy’s cousins, Haley, was sick. She has Embryonal Rhabdomyosarcoma (ERMS) cancer.  I didn’t really think about it but I’ve been reading Haley’s “weblog” for over two years.  I would go and read with hope.  Haley is a little girl and I so wished for her to win her battle.  Like Brian Haley is fighting for her life.  It is so hard to read about the difficulties and at the same time realize that the battles I fight everyday can seem so insignificant compared to the fight they have to go through every day.

There has been discussion recently about to role of weblogs and those that write them.  I find it amazing to see the different ways that different people have been using this new tool for recording thoughts and emotions.  Some are journalists, some are writers, and many are just people who have discovered a way to reach out and tell a story.

 

Sorry about the flood of posts.  I haven’t been up writing this morning, I was writing earlier in the week but only got around to posting them now.  I had actually wanted to finish some of these but figured I better post them or they’ll get too stale.

Here is a geeky link too.

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I think I would like to meet this couple. They have some trivial similarities to Cindy and I.  We had silly sentimental attachments to the places from our past.  And I also feel some sense of commradery in that they have suffered a great loss and have survived and recovered.

“Teresa, about their son Wade, ‘There are times when we think about Wade, a sort of, `Gosh, he would have enjoyed this.’ Part of the reality of losing a child is that you never know when it’s going to hit you.”

I know exactly what that feels like. I just wonder when that will stop happening a dozen times a day every day.

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Baby I CAN Live Without You

But I really don’t want to.

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Sadness in the news.

From the actual survey (PDF):

“Fourteen percent of women felt sad for all, most, or some of the time during the 30 days prior to the interview compared with 8% of men. Women were also more likely than men to have feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, or that everything is an effort during the 30 days prior to the interview.”

Maybe I shouldn’t be trying so hard to be a mom.

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The St. Pete Times the other day had an interesting article about personal coaches who help with life or transition coaching, in this case in relation to retirement, who help people rediscover what their goals are. It made me realize what I am currently trying to do with my life and how I’m living it. In many ways I am going through a process of life transition and I am working through the process of reevaluating my goals and workingthrough the changes in my life.

In the first months after the accident I found DeepFun and Bernie Dekoven. I wonder looking back how my life might be different if I hadn’t found Bernie. He spent time with me vitrually as a “Fun Coach” of sorts, although I don’t think he had a name for it back then.

Bernie was my personal fun coach back then as he worked with me on a strange concept Fun and Grief. He taught me techniques and gave me tools that helped start on the process of going through a major transition and helped me to focus on the fun aspects of life during a time when my life was focused on things that were anything but fun. I don’t think I can ever thank or repay Bernie for being there at a time when I really needed someone.

Recently Bernie posted an item that mentions “learning by dying“ on his Funlog. This has been talked about by others recently in different contexts. I have to admit that my initial thoughts were understandably different than most of the others.

Ming looks at how the concept is “maybe closer to how nature works than any other educational system we’ve cooked up” and how “We’re too stuck in things we really ought to drop and move on from. Go to the next level.”

Doc looks at some successful people and how they learn in his post titled “Survival of the funnest“. He mentions Steve Case, and how his continuing success can be looked at in how he reacts to the seeming failure of the Time-Warner AOL deal. Will he grow and learn from that experience and become more successful? Doc also mentions Lance Armstrong and how his competitors have to learn and grow from the experience of losing to Lance. I wonder how Ulrich and others would respond to that.

Julie though gets to a similar place to my thoughts with her comments “Death forces one to face what has been lost” and “I may be healed but I still have the history.”

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An interesting item on Boing Boing pointing to an item from Joey “AccordionGuy” DeVilla about getting dumped via email. Tee Hee! I guess this is the new version of getting dumped by voice mail?

I keep having these dreams. Nothing too out of the ordinary. Except that Cindy is in them. And every time that realization changes the dream into reality. In the beginning I would suddenly sense that this wasn’t right and just wake up. Now in the dream I go through this process of trying to figure out if this is a dream. The one last night was really vivid in that in the dream I’ve convinced myself that this time it isn’t a dream and she really is here and is really alive and with us again. Of course that doesn’t last nearly long enough. I think that there are loose connections between the conscious brain and sub conscious world of our dreams. Those connections eventually let enough of reality to slip through to the sub conscious and the dream is broken, smashed and reality crashes down and wakes me up.

Dave Barry sends me off on a trip where I end up in the exhibit of none other than Antonin Kratochvil.