adventures of a canoelover

Sitting through a challenging sermon can be excruciating. Note I prefer to use the word challenging rather than boring. It’s just that sometimes you aren’t in the mood to hear someone talk about what someone else wrote about some other person’s experiences. For me, the good part about worship is hearing other people talk about how a specific topic affected their lives.

Bad Example: “Here’s what some guy who has been dead for 300 years said about forgiveness.” Blah blah blah, etc.

Good Example: “I really struggled with forgiving my friend who betrayed my trust, but here’s how I did it, and here are some things that might help you.”

That doesn’t always happen. The good news is that I had my church bag, which contains a set of the scriptures (natch), but also has a note pad, pencils, and a few Dr. Seuss books. You see, if I’m bored, imagine how the three year-old sharing my pew feels about it.

Fortunately, I was sharing a pew with Cordelia and family. Cordelia is one of my favorite people, despite our age differences. She was in the nursery when I was in the nursery as a teacher, and we both like to read and draw. So as the talk progressed, we caught each other’s eye. I was already drawing, so she sneaked around her mom and plopped down next to me.

Her brother suggested I draw a cow. Cordelia nodded. So I produced this Cow/Dachshund cross with a three-teated mutant udder all jacked up on espresso.

“Dachshundmilchkine mit Espresso” by Canoelover

Cordelia was impressed, which is why I love little kids. They’re easily impressed. Her brother, of course, noticed that the three-teater wasn’t going to fly, but I told him that one was hiding behind one of the others. He didn’t believe me, but I was the better entertainment option.

Cordelia mimed for me to give her the notepad (she is a quiet, respectful and reverent child). She worked on the creature below for quite some time, wanting to get the hair just right. Which is ironic. Since it’s supposed to be me. And a cow.

Inside she wrote a cryptic message. Her brother translated it for me. “It says ‘I love you.'” Cordelia looked at me and smiled.

Okay, so the neck is too long and she gave me a toupée worthy of Robert Goulet. But in my Spongebob Squarepants body Cordelia left me a sweet message.

I lof Cordelia too.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

Once every 212.35 days, we have a Friday the Thirteenth.

This means I have lived through and survived approximately 75 or so Friday the Thirteenths.

The most important one, however, was the first one. I was born on April 13, 1962. Problem is I was supposed to be born sometime in June. As a result of arriving on stage before my cue, I weighed a whopping three pounds, six ounces. This was well over 40 years ago, when anything under five was considered a fairly hopeless cause.

The odds the doctor gave my parents were as follows:

1) He has about a 25% chance of living 24 hours.

2) If he lives 24 hours, he has about a 50% chance of living a week.

3) If he lives a week, he’ll probably keep living.

4) He’ll have lung problems his whole life and might be blind.

I beat the odds. Never had a lung problem, and had 20/10 vision until my middle-aged eyes started their obstinate, quiet march toward reader glasses. I now weigh over 200 pounds (probably could stand to lose ten).

I’ve had my share of challenges in the past 47 years, 7 months. Apparently none of them have registered as anything but pale in comparison to the first one…just surviving a week. If I can survive that one, chances are I can survive this one too.

As Hans Solo said to C-3PO in the first Star Wars, “Never tell me the odds.”

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

These items are not lost, per se. I just don’t know where they are.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover, sans cerveau

Wife 1.1 celebrated her 45th birthday last Saturday. I gotta say she looks pretty dang good for 35. As a gift to her, Wisconsin gave her a 67 degree day, sunny with a few puffy clouds just for accent.

May I offer you a reminder, gentle reader, than just a few weeks ago, we froze our collective heinies off. Snow and wind. Hoarfrost on every conceivable surface.

Weather vagaries such as this are what make Wisconsin, for me anyway, a special place. Just as you can know no bitter without tasting the sweet, one cannot really appreciate a perfect day without experience a fair number of imperfect ones. Enough of the sermon already.

Wife 1.1 wanted to be outside on her birthday. This is because:

1. She’s SuperWife 1.1, outdoor goddess and companion.
2. Normally her birthday is celebrated watching it rain, the outside temperature hovering around 34 to 35 degrees, with the full knowledge that if it were just a few degrees colder, we’ve have a really good snow pack to get things going. Instead, it all goes down the storm drain.

But this year…this year the weather was perfect. If I were a pretentious English major who believed the world revolved around Robert Browning, I’d write about the gentle zephyrs that caressed the trees and carried the song of the lark through the wooded glade, where it mingled with the melodious song of the brooklet. Thankfully for both of us, I’m not.

We decided to try a new Rails to Trails bike path, the Glacial Drumlin Trail. I will not explain what a drumlin is, that’s what Wikipedia is for. But it is a lovely trail starting just east of Madison and going almost all the way to Milwaukee. For no discernible reason we usually head south or west, but Wife 1.1 wanted something new. The Glacial Drumlin it was.

It’s really nice. More open and sunny than some of the other paths we frequent, it was the perfect path for one of the last days of the year where biking could happen in shorts and a light wool jersey. Soon the studded tires come out. I hate that part.

Happy Birthday, Wife 1.1. May we have another 45 together. Actuarially the odds are against that, but stranger things have and will continue to happen.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

I think this rather idealistic. I have found both beauty in nature and foolishness in humanity, but at the same time, I have found nature to be somewhat harsh and unforgiving at times, and I have found the best of all possible in human beings.

On the other hand (can you sense ambiguity here?), I am often comforted by nature and disappointed by humanity.

I am wrestling with a problem. I am an avowed and chronic bungler. I am a mistake waiting to happen. I do dumb things and find myself thinking, “What were you thinking?” The answer usually is that I was thinking about doing what’s best, but with a limited set of data.

There are few things that are more aggravating than writing a detailed blog post about the Coleman lantern and having it get sucked into the black hole that is cyberspace. It was a pretty good post. Trust me, it was excruciatingly detailed and had a lot of history about the evolution of the Coleman lantern.

The good news is that now I have done my first edit, and it’ll be a lot shorter and probably more interesting. Buh-bye, unnecessary details.

The facts of the matter are these:

1. We own three Coleman lanterns that we know of: a 5155 (propane), a 288 (white gas), and a 220F (see #4) .
2. There may be a fourth. We’re not sure.
3. Some of them are newer and without personality, which means they start quickly, don’t flare up and make sooty black smoke, and are utterly boring. But good.
4. One of them is a 1969 220F, a common enough lantern to be noncollectable unless they are in the original box with the original documentation. Then the Japanese buy them for $250.00. The Japanese are weird about vintage gear.

Once the 220F is fired up and settles down, it works okay. A little bit dimmer than its newer cousin, our 288, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. It just isn’t quite right.

A few blocks from the shop is an old-school Coleman camper dealer with all the parts necessary to rebuild the 220F. It might cost me ten bucks to buy a new generator and get her all overhauled and rebuilt. Which would be fun for me because I like futzing with old gear.

At the same time, it’s probably a waste of ten bucks because it’s still running fine, just a little rough. If it were a V8 it would be missing on one cylinder occasionally when down-shifting. You might get to it, you might not.

While contemplating this small dilemma, I got all profound and stuff. It happens to me at the weirdest times, like while polishing the glass of the 220F when a flare-up blackened the top of it with nasty greasy soot.

My realization is that I am a lot like this 220F. I am not temperamental and I don’t flare up, but I am sure I am not running at 100%, physically or spiritually.

It was an eagle-eyed Canoelover Jr. who first spotted her. She had built a lovely web between our downspout and a juniper a full six feet away. The strands of silk that connected the downspout to the juniper were thick and cable-like, and the web was lovely, symmetrical and a work of art, despite the repairs needed after an evening of collecting moths.

In Autumn I often put my little camper trailer in our driveway, pop it up, plug it in, and get busy writing orders I wouldn’t be able to write in the office. The Shack is awesome but sometimes I want to be on my portable screen porch and have power too. So I set up the trailer and in twenty minutes I’m working away via remote link to the office.

I put the dog blanket on the smaller of the two beds and Gracie will spend some time sleeping while I work, but one can never have too many pets. Agatha was hiding under a leaf, maybe four feet from where I was sitting. In my peripheral vision I could see her, front legs resting lightly on a couple of key threads that would allow her to pick up the smallest vibration. Once in a while out of the corner of my eye I’d see a little jump, and Agatha would be on that juicy little fly like a pro wrestler dropping off a corner post onto another pro wrestler. Except with Agatha, it was real.

Agatha is (they winter over so she’s probably still alive) an Araneus diadematus, a lovely name for a lovely arachnid. Commonly named a Cross Spider (easy to see why), I prefer my own name for her: Bejeweled Orbweaver. Agatha looks like she’s covered in diadems, and to be honest these pictures don’t do her justice. Her coloring was much more vibrant but the light was flat.

I think they’re beautiful. I am supported by David Hume, who stated that “beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” Or to quote Benjamin Franklin (a.k.a. Poor Richard), “Beauty, like supreme dominion, is but supported by opinion.”

You don’t have to think Arachnids are beautiful, but if you can suspend whatever cultural biases that were inflicted upon your psyche at an early age, I promise you’re going to enjoy a great many more beautiful things.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

This is my office.

It’s not the office I work in the most, but I am working in it right now. Okay, not right now, but I am writing, and this is, without a doubt, my favorite place to move ideas from brain waves to

words.

The wood stove is creaking, its first fire of the year burning out the cobwebs and the little bit of creosote that has accumulated in the stovepipe. I threw some chunks of hickory into it, a mistake because hickory burns so hot that I usually only use it in the winter. It’s only in the 40s outside and the door is open so I don’t roast.

I did fall cleaning today, washing the windows (three times on the outside, twice on the inside) until they are almost invisible. The screens have been vacuumed and safely stowed behind the dry sink, and there’s more light in here than there has been in months. The sun is lower and clears the eaves. The pine carsiding glows like burnished gold.

I sucked up a few hundred fly husks, sucked dry by the house spiders who often live in the windows during the summer. I let ’em stay, they eat the stray mosquitoes that blunder in and then go to the light. I guess going to the light is a bad idea for skeeters too.

My little oak table is now clean and ready for the laptop, a connection provided by Verizon’s wireless. Amazing that I can sit here in the gas light, heated by wood, the ticking of my alarm clock, and the only modern noise is the fan on my laptop.

I just adjusted the damper on the stovepipe to allow a single puff of smoke into the room. The pine was never varnished, so when it gets some heat from the stove it starts to smell a little like a sawmill in here, and the only thing to do is to add a puff of hickory smoke. The Shack is a censor, releasing perfume to the faithful Shack Dwellers. In this case, me.

The alarm clock is ticking 120 bpm. One loud click, one soft click, as the escape mechanism ticks, then tocks. I like the sound, it reminds me of laying on a pew in church, my grandfather’s arm around me, my head laying on his arm, my ear against his watch, trying to hear the soft tick. Then quartz watches came out and ruined it for everyone.

I don’t even own a watch, I own a wrist computer. Barometer. Compass. Altimeter. Stopwatch. It doesn’t tick. It doesn’t tock. It makes no sound at all, unless I tell it to beep sometimes. On the hour, when the barometric pressure drops too fast, etc.

The temperature at the ridgepole is 103 degrees. This is good, as one of the cedar shingles was damaged by a limb a few years ago, and a small leak has developed. Once I get the area dried out (probably tonight), I can climb up and re-shingle that area. Working with cedar beats working with asphalt shingles any day ending in y.

I have to turn the gas light up another notch. It’s getting darker.

Better get back to my real work.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover