First Frost

Afterflakes

In the thick of a teeming snowfall

I saw my shadow on snow.

I turned and looked back up at the sky,

Where we still look to ask the why

Of everything below.

If I shed such a darkness,

If the reason was in me,

That shadow of mine should show in form

Against the shapeless shadow of storm,

How swarthy I must be.

I turned and looked back upward.

The whole sky was blue;

And the thick flakes floating at a pause

Were but frost knots on an airy gauze,

With the sun shining through.

Robert Frost

 

 

The following link is less introspective and more from the lighter side of falling flakes.  For over 25 years Letterman has made a tradition of closing the last show before Christmas with the soulful power of Darlene Love.  This version is from 2000 when she is backed up by the Singing Sergeants - enjoy. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsgINL3cDpk

 

 

Gadzooks

As a kid I always loved this time of year. Still do. In our house growing up it meant putting the train platform under the tree with our Santa Fe engine and an assortment of box cars chugging around the oval and a slot car track on the inner circle. The houses from Plasticville were arranged behind the slot car track and you had to turn some of the houses just so, in order to hide the walls that had been partially melted by the lava hot Christmas light bulbs placed inside of them.

I would play with the train and slot cars for hours. I would only get into moderate trouble as I’d break ornaments during my missions crawling under the tree branches to retrieve a slot car that has leaped off the track into the plastic neighborhood.

Most of all, during the season I loved when the Sears Christmas catalog would arrive. An inch think, with colored pages showing all the possibilities of the season. Laid before me in this catalog was the unabridged dictionary of toys! I would study it each evening as if some aspect of the toys had escaped me during the first 19 reviews of the selections.

There was nothing quite as satisfying as hot cocoa in the left hand, a red pen in the right, thumbing through the pages and circling toys that looked particularly awesome that Christmas season.

Gadzooks! Times sure have changed when prospecting for gifts.  A click of the mouse and a swipe across the tablet have replaced the magic of the catelog.

As further proof, I offer the following Christmas list from my youngest. To assist her parents she not only listed the items, but categorized them for easy reference and gift navigation.

I especially like the ‘auto filters’ on the Excel columns enabling quick filtering down to a specific category when reviewing the list. Also notice the festive colors and the ‘Duck Tape’ request categorized as 'Other Stuff'. You can never have enough Duck Tape, even at the age of 9.

Gone are the days when a $25 piece of pink plastic delivers wide eyed wonderment on Christmas morning.

Please note: while the story is true in spirit, portions of this narrative have been exaggerated for the literary impact.

Peaks and Valleys

Nothing elongates pain like baseball. Think about it. It’s the only sport where there is no time limit. Football, Basketball and Hockey all time box the pain of watching your team lose. But in Baseball there are 162 games that could go on forever.

Photo from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

My friend Larry (a Mucking Fets fan) and I (Pirates fan) had this very conversation back in April. April, that magical time when everyone has a chance. Well not really, but it’s nice to have optimism for at least as long as opening day. He was smacking down his hometown team and asking me about the Bucs’ chances. I explained how I don’t get pulled into dreaming anymore. See the Pirates have just completed their major sports record, 20th consecutive losing season. While some blame ownership, or the leagues revenue disparity or poor drafts followed by a lack of player development, I blame my niece.

The last time the Pirates had a winning season was the year she was born. Then Sid slid and the slow, elongated pain began. She has never witnessed a winning season for the Bucs. A never ending Band-Aid being pulled off a not yet healed wound. A wound requires 108 stitches to close. Even a beautiful new ballpark only relocated the pain a few hundred yards up the Allegheny River. And boy does the pain continue. September of this year is being referred to ‘Collapse II’ after the Pirates went 7 and 22 to finish below .500 yet again.

Fast forward to the Texas Rangers. It looks like their high water mark may have been game six of the 2011 series. I still remember Jill Jumping up and saying, ‘We just won the……..” as she watched the ball go wide right of Nellie’s glove and bounce off the right field wall. Follow that with this year’s squandering of a 13 and a half game division lead. Baseball is all about numbers and history. So it was baseball poetry that the A’s beat the Rangers in game 162 to win the west. That day was the 61st anniversary of Bobby Thompson’s shot heard round the world – “The Giants win the pennant, The Giants win the pennant." Thompson’s homerun completed a 13 and a half game comeback as well. Sometimes the pain just keeps coming.

The center field philosopher Andy Van Slyke once said,

"Every season has its peaks and valleys. What you have to try to do is eliminate the Grand Canyon.”

The Pirates have been in the canyon 20 years and counting.

The following video is how baseball should be (retread Friday’s Note reference), it almost gives me hope for next year - almost:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1WXtbUEWcA

On a lighter note, remember Monday is National Perogie Day or as they call it in Pittsburgh – Monday.

Come Monday

If change is such a wonderful thing, why are there so many books that try so hard to convince us that change is good? Saying goodbye to a number of friends this week at work seems to amplify the rate of change. There has always been change here. One only look at a 5 or 10 year old office phone listing to see how things change, but this time seems different somehow.

So here are my two takes on change. It’s been a long time since I’ve leaned on the source of all TV wisdom Northern Exposure (which is now seriously having it’s TV wisdom spot challenged by The Big Bang Theory).

The first reflection is a melancholy ballad from the closing montage of the series.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRlaZ5zBDjA

The second video snippet frames each of us moving forward from this point.

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJgt-HO0_kY&feature=related

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” James Joyce

Perhaps another time I’ll tell the story about how I wrote a whole term paper around “It’s not the thing you fling, but the fling itself!” for an MBA class – got an A.

The most wonderfully creative thing I’ve heard this summer came from South West Airlines announcing that they are introducing Flt: 717 Lubbock to Dallas and Flt 1984 Dallas to Lubbock will be added to their schedule in memory of a fallen team member of theirs. July 17th, 1984, being Greg’s birthday. Greg was a Texas Tech grad and football fan. Having to park in the far corner of the auxiliary church parking lot just to get a space for his service spoke volumes to the quality of change he brought to so many others.

Holy Chihuly

Date Night at the Dallas Arboretum starts with the debate of how to negotiate rush hour traffic. Of course Jill knows Dallas routes like nobody's business. She is like having turn-by-turn navigation and Siri wrapped into one, but with more colorful language.


We headed to the night time show of the Chihuly glass exhibit, eager to see how the pieces looked in the evening light. The artwork has survived the recent hailstorm, now could it survive the throngs of wannabe photographers roaming the grounds.

The first picture captures likely my favorite of the displays. And as with any of the displays the need to tap into endless patience for the crowd of people and the inevitable lingerers who had an uncanny ability to creep into the picture frame and wait and wait and check their watch … and read their program…, and then call over their husband and show them the program …. and then discuss, and wait … then finally decide this isn’t the piece described in the program, the piece they want to see is somewhere else. After all of that, here is the picture.

Blue Marlins

The second picture defies the fact that approximately 50+ photographers (not kidding about that number) were all competing for the same end of the day shot. The lady next to me sporting the nice tripod and professional grade Nikon summed it up well, “It’s not that hard people, it’s a picture, point the camera and snap the picture!” I liked her immediately.

Here is one of the dozen, ‘just take it pictures’ that I captured.

Carnival Boat and Float Boat

The adventure continued with this same photographer as we moved over to an even more crowded area that had an endless supply visitors who must have been glass coinsures for how long they lingered in full frame of the picture we waited to take.  It’s then I said –“Watch this.  Jill we need someone to run interference and block that path.”  After smartly allowing a couple wheelchair folks through Jill delayed the swell of crowds just long enough for us to have seconds to snap the following picture.  My new photographer friend was dutifully impressed and thankful of Jill’s crowd control abilities. 

Scarlet and Yellow Asymmetrical Towers behind the Neodymium Reeds which frame the Mirrored Hornets.

The following two shots are of the Sun. I love the first picture with the contrasting sky.

The Sun

The second picture is a portion of the same sculpture with the sunset highlighting the pieces from behind. Loved that piece and have absolutely no idea how you would assemble such a sculpture.

The Sun

For the following picture is was my turn to create the log jam of photographers behind me as I played with the shutter speed in order to get the water fall behind the sculpture to look like a curtain. Three or for takes and holy H2O batman, the effect I wanted.

Blue and Pink Marlins

The next shot is of the lily pond sculpture, backlit from the sunset. Again, it’s amazing how often a large guy, unaware of his surroundings can get between the setting sun and the sculpture. Ahhhh, move already.   Did I say that out loud?!

Persian Pond

Hope you have enjoyed these selections from the SD card full adventure that we had last night.

The night ended with two for one chocolate shakes at Sonic. Yep, I’m still the big spender.


All pictures presented as taken (in camera), no photo editing to date.

and Duck Tape For All

This past weekend my oldest and her Destination Imagination team competed. It turned out to be quite a rollercoaster ride.

This adventure started in October when the girls selected the ‘Coming Attractions’ challenge. This challenge had the following rules:

• Create a live performance in the style of a movie trailer
• The movie is to have characters from two cultures
• Create an original soundtrack
• The team gets 1 min to setup
• The performance has to be less than 4 min
• Budget must be under $125
• No chemicals, explosives, dry ice or silly string

And my favorite DI rule, if the rules don’t say you can’t, then you can.

Within DI, all aspects of the work is to be kid driven. From the origins of the idea to the, creation of the script, set, props and costumes the kids have to do it all. The girls had put together a very creative skit and then the day of discovery occurred. Two weeks before the competition the team was working at the house and we decided to reread the challenge rules. As I read the rules, “Must have representatives from two nations (see definition of nation in the margin). Nation: a real nation that you can find on a map, historical or current times.

Then came the silence.

I broke the silence, “Does everyone understand the problem we have?”

“Yes.”

See after the first night of reading the rules, the team had just plowed ahead and their knucklehead team manager hadn’t reviewed the rules again. The problem was that the whole skit was around two made up cultures. Specifically, the cultures of Pens and Pencils and what occurs in a classroom over summer break.

After 5 mins of holy cow.  I mean holy COW!  I told the team that I think they had three choices and the team had to make the decision. 1) They could put on the play as is to have fun but knowing they wouldn’t score well. 2) They could decide there is too much work to do in two weeks and decide to not participate in the competition or 3) They could figure out how to change the play that they have in order to fit within the rules.

Instantly the girls said, “we are doing number 3!” This was the third best moment of the whole DI season.  I couldn't have been more proud of them for that decision.

The girls quickly figured out that the fight between pens and pencils could fit within the story of the American Revolution which they had just finished studying in school. Within 2 hours the girls had scrubbed the script making the Pens the British and the Pencils the American Colonist fighting for independence.  Work in a little midnight ride, give me liberty! and a unique take on Valley Forge and before you can say Concord and Lexington it was a brilliant adaptation packaged up and ready to go.

The girls went on to give a wonderful performance. Then Alex and I went back for the scores. Scores, that were to be returned within an hour, weren’t done and it was now more than two hours. We asked a coordinator for the challenge and were told they were having some trouble with the judging since things can be “so subjective”.  I took that to mean we were just at the top of the rollercoaster hill and there is only one way to go. Sure enough the scores came out 23 minutes later and we had not scored well. The most striking line item was a score of zero for the ‘second nation’ and zero for ‘interaction between nations’. Alex asked about the zeroes trying to understand. It was explained to us that since the 13 Colonies were part of the British Empire that the team really presented one country not two and that is why we had zeroes. After questioning some other aspects of the scores we headed home crest fallen, knowing really bad news that we would then have to share with the rest of the team.

During the trip home came the second best moment. Alex asked, “Dad, when does a nation start? When people sign a piece a paper or when people decide to risk their lives for what they believe is right?” What a fantastic question and statement all in one.

Then came the awards ceremony. The girls attended knowing that the chance of reaching their goal of qualifying for the state wide tournament was out of reach. So we watched team by team get awards then came our grouping. Out of sixteen teams they start with awarding sixth place, not us, fifth place, not us, fourth place, not us – the faces were getting mighty long on the girls. I knew they had pretty much passed up their likely chances of placement. Third place, not us.

Then the announcement – “We have a special award to hand out at this time. Team ‘Steele the Show’ is awarded the Da Vinci award.” The girls were frozen for a moment (the best DI moment) – they turned looking back at me. “Well, go get your medals!’ I yelled back. The team scrambled up to the stage and the medals were placed around their necks.  I don't think they touched the floor all the way back to me. They were beside themselves, especially when they found out the description of award.

Da Vinci Award

This award is offered for exceptional creativity, a unique approach to the problem and /or risk taking.

The solution need not be successful to qualify for this award.

This is Destination ImagiNation's most prestigious award and should not be given lightly.

After all of that – here is their performance. I hope you enjoy it. The girls were a little soft spoken (they need better coaching on projection) so you will likely need to turn up the volume to take it all in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5sF9Cb4SwY&feature=youtu.be

Remember the best DI rule – if the rules don’t say you can’t, then you can.