published weekdays
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inflated inconvenience
The whole point in buying an inflatable kayak was convenience.
A watercraft of any size is not trivial, but an inflatable boat tends to be smaller.
More convenient to store.
More convenient to transport.
More convenient to keep out of sight and out of mind over the long winter while the river is frozen and the lakes are little more than sheets of snow-covered ice.
The price of that convenience is in the inflation of the craft itself.
At the best of times, this includes unpacking a cumbersome object made of cloth and plastic and ropes and valves and zippers. This involves finding an open space and a block of free time to unroll the kayak in the grass, connect the bits and pieces that need to be connected and then dutifully working to fill it with air using a plastic pump.
All this is incovenient enough when it works.
When the pump stops working, begins to stall and jam up for no clear reason, while the half-inflated boat is sitting in the only patch of grass at the edge of the off leash dog park parking lot that doesn’t contain obvious dog shit, while dozens of curious dog owners walk up and by and past and all the while oggle the effort of struggle with a broken pump, the level of inconvenience skyrockets. There is little to be done by the two impatient teenage girls standing to the side already wearing their life jackets and holding their paddles, as if an adventure down the river is on the cusp of happening and not actually half-derailed because of defective technology.
In the end, perserverence won the day, convenience be damned, and the trek down the river proceeded, but it did leave at least one of us wondering just how much easier it might be to just go buy a proper kayak after all.
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clicking open windows
Even as the first drops of rain began to fall I was racing around the house from window to window, sliding them as wide as they would open to the rapidly cooling outdoor air.
After four days of sweltering heat and unrelenting sunny skies, the upper floors of the house has slowly heated sauna-like temperatures and no amount of air circualtion by our sad little fans would slow the climbing temperatures.
But hope appeared as a dark grey smudge on the western horizon shortly after dinner, and within an hour that smudge had defined itself as a ridge of storm clouds sweeping across the prairies towards the city.
Salvation was coming in the form of a thunderstorm. The rain spit down with a pitiful few drops at first, but within fifteen minutes the outdoor air temperature had dropped from the low 30s into the low 20s, and cracks of thunder were shaking the house sending the dog into fits of terror.
But I was opening all the windows, puddles forming on the inner sils be damned, and begging that rain cooled air to flush through the house and wash away some of the heat now baking itself into the walls and furniture.
I flung open the front door, the back window screens already begging for a cross current, and stood there feeling the gush of, what was that, maybe even a slight chill slip across my sweaty skin and a welcome reverie of how refreshing that night’s sleep was going to feel traced in waves across my heat addled brain.
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little ol’ you
You are self-contained.
No matter how much you may think that you are interconnected with other people, interdependent with someone else or aligned in either a positive or negative way to the existence of another, at the end of the day biology and physics dictate that you cannot be merged, combined, subdivided, or otherwise change the definition of you in any meaningful way.
You are just you.
Forever and always.
And as this is the case, the fact that you were born as a singular unit, will ultimately die when the vessel known as your personal body ceases to function, and are the only one who will experience the whole of your life from start to finish, what any other person—spouse, parent, child, employer, politician, religious leader, or even the friendly barrista at your favourite coffee shop—thinks or says about you is only as important or worthwhile inasmuch as the self-contained object known as you allows it to be.
Of course we can hurt each other.
Of course we can love another.
Of course we can have an affect on or be affected by anyone and everyone around us, but in many more ways we can mediate and moderate all of those things and be open to the good things and regulate the negative from having an undue influence on each of us as individuals.
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toot sweet
I stepped into the shed.
If I had thought that the heat was sweltering outside, then inside that little eight by eight plywood box it was narry an exaggeration to call it an oven.
Alas, I should have checked in on my backyard storage sooner, but thankfully I was only almost too late. The gasoline for my lawnmower was stored in the back corner of the shed and inside one of those red plastic jerrycans. That warm summer dy had pressurized and inflated the jug from it’s proper form as a neat red rectangular vessel into a orb-like balloon puffed out on all six sides including the top and bottom, all of which looked fit to burst.
The truth of it was that had the vessel ultimately exploded—either burst from pressure or combusted from heat—it would have either made a mess or a small fireball that destroyed the shed itself and done some serious damage—I didn’t know which and I didn’t care to find out, either.
It didn’t burst, but I’m sure only by virtue of a bit of luck on my part.
And worst of all, this result all but unnecessary because I had gone and sold my gasoline-powered lawnmower two years before and hadn’t bothered getting around to disposing of the gas along with it.
What a shame, the neighbours would surely have thought while pondering the remnants of my new electric battery powered grass cutting machine all but incinerated to nothing by the inevitable fire.
Or maybe my imagination runs wild, sure, but I made sure to depressurize that jerrycan toot sweet and dispose of the veritable time bomb lurking inside.
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beta testing words
I’m kinda hung up on the idea of beta testing my writing these days.
How does that work? Well, the thing is that each time I’ve written something—anything—and then published it online there is usually a bit of metrics attached to that. Clicks. Read throughs. Search presence. All of those things form a pretty robust picture of what people find interesting.
I’m not here to get rich writing blogs. It’s not in the cards for me.
But I’m also not here to scream into the wind and pretend to have an audience. I really do want people to read what I write and find it useful.
So the idea that each of my posts on this site, for example, are not reambling screeds about my life but instead encapsulated and focused ideas that have been on my mind, each fleshed out in a couple hundred words, means that I can tell from my metrics how each of those encapsulated ideas has tested out in the real world. Are people interested? Do they click? Do they keep reading?
And once one has beta tested something, one then refines and iterates: I write another piece on the same idea, a few months wiser and with some clarity of having written those thoughts out once before, maybe twice before, and again and again. Does the idea get the same broad level of attention and interest? Was it the idea itself or a fluke of word usage or timing?
Write. Test. Repeat.