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November 28th, 2000
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A Long Daily Walk
The train arrived on time at nine thirty this morning, nineteen hours after leaving Portland. Still, a good night's sleep going up, a good night's sleep coming back with plenty of time to think. What I like about a sleeper on the train is the time away from absolutely everything: from work and home, from the vacation itself, just me in a small room, watching the country roll by. I always come back with resolutions, bite size little bitty resolutions, none of which I seem to really keep. No fucking diets, however. Let weight loss come from some other place: The Land of the Tooth Fairies, Instructions from God, a Winning Lottery Ticket. Stick with the possible, my son, add the improbable if you must, but cut out the impossible altogether and give yourself some slack.
The resolutions from this Portland trip seem at least on their surface to be reasonably easy: move the
stuff still packed in the boxes next to the living room window into storage (a simple phone call to tell them I'm coming), upgrade the computer to the new Windows 2000 operating system using the hard drive I've had sitting on the shelf now for over a month (six weeks? two months?). The one last step necessary to make this happen is to order the SilverFast scanning software that works under Windows 2000 where the Nikon scanner software does not (Discontinued model, no impetus to update the drivers). So I ordered it over the web in Portland and it should be here tomorrow. One motivating factor was in reading a comment on the Photo News Network that SilverFast was wonderful and the Nikon stuff was crap. (We'll see about that.) No excuses for not doing it then over the weekend. (There's a whole bunch of things going on here in the background about my using the Windows 2000 software at home. Some of it has to do with practice, some of it with commitment. Boring topics both, but I've really got to do something about them.)
One motivating reason for these particular resolutions is seeing how the nine of us managed to keep things so clean and neat over the four day weekend at my sister's house. (They did all the work while I just sat and watched. I have not been able to come up with a solution here that doesn't require my own involvement.) Everything was in its place. I can do that. One little corner at a time. Start with getting the icky dark stuff off the kitchen floor.
I have many bottles of colorful liquids accumulated over these years under the kitchen sink, seals
intact, to accomplish this. Says so on the labels. Wonderful stuff. I can do it. There are a couple of other things on my list, but all of them stem from getting my "stuff" in order and not goofing off (rain is no excuse) and walking rather than driving to work. Success in life comes from three things: a clean kitchen floor, Windows 2000 on my home computer and walking to work. Everything else will then fall into place. You can say you learned it (The Meaning of Life) here if you wish. No need now to go to the guy on the mountain. Lemon fresh Pledge, Microsoft 2000 and a long daily walk.
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The photographs of Silvie, Gilles and Danielle were taken with a digital camera in Portland over the holiday weekend. The quote is by Jane Wagner.
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