Gum Flappin'

The one who guards his mouth preserves his life; The one who opens wide his lips comes to ruin. -Proverbs 13:3

So, what are you to do when your job is to keep a room of 40 people talking until problems are solved? It's all well and good for each of them to remain quietly in their chairs until they feel ready to speak, but when you are the team leader it's your job to uncover every nugget of knowledge in the room in order to build a consensus pointing in the best direction. So, half of your questions make you look like an idiot, and the other 40 attendees have a chance to show how smart they are. Properly handled, even the most taciturn of the group contribute their knowledge, which is often substantial. If the guy at the head of the table says nothing, the biggest natural talkers just take over and whatever they want is the outcome (at least in the short term). Of course, being a natural talker is what got me here in the first place. So, I look like a fool crawling through the conversation, we hopefully get to the right answers, the project rolls on, and I get paid every two weeks. It works for now.

Presque Isle River

The picture above is one of several waterfalls on a stretch of the Presque Isle River in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The circular cutouts in the bedrock are not just from water flowing downstream. Each one has been carved by an eddy of water that appears to the eye to be completely unaffected by the mainstream of the river. Inside the cutout, water just circles inexorably and slowly bores away the stone. These steady, hydraulic drills have bored as deep as 75 feet in an otherwise relatively shallow river, I am told. Walking by rivers like this in the Upper Peninsula, you can stumble upon green rocks, which are laden with copper. Some of them are perfect cylinders, core samples taken by geologists, or mining engineers, or whoever has a drill 1" diameter, 6" deep bit like that.

When I visited the waterfalls with some college classmates in 2000, I mentioned a line my father told me in my own childhood. I had asked him if it would be fun to jump in the water and ride down the waterfalls, and he replied "those rocks would skin a man like a deer". I suddenly recalled, in this young adult excursion perhaps 15 years later, that very thing had almost happened to me at that exact spot. My father and I wandered along the rocky banks of the river, high above its tumult. I don't know what happened, but misty spray on rock is not a safe combination with a child's boots. I slipped, and then I was looking straight up at the edge of the bank, holding on with my hands. My father darted the step or two it took to reach me, then quickly hauled me up. I hadn't though much of it, but I could tell it was a big deal because my father really looked shaken up. That reaction didn't happen again until the day he had to draw his firearm with the intent of shooting a fugitive, so the situation must have been pretty hairy, if one were mature enough to grasp it.. And that whole episode had been shelved in my mind, completely forgotten, until I revisited that exact spot many years later.

Clear As Mud

Writing is thinking, to write well is to think clearly, that is why it is so difficult

-David McCullough, author

So true, and something that I have had to learn so slowly within the engineering field. I used to think other people were dense when they didn't understand my arguments, until the sun shone through the clouds and I realized that I was doing an AWFUL job of explaining my perfectly reasonable points. So, if my blog does not make sense, read it again. If it still makes no sense, I was not thinking clearly. The quote above comes from a free podcast available on iTunes, APM: Garrison Keillor's Writers' Almanac. Not my favorite, but there are a few gems and each segment runs only 5 minutes. I also listen to APM: A Prairie Home Companion/The News For Lake Wobegon, which is more consistently excellent. There's a lot of great free media out there, if you just poke around a bit.

The Holy Spirit Indwells the Big 10

From an article on AOL:

In South Bend, Ind., plans should be underway to replace the mural of Jesus on the south wall of the Hesburgh Library with one of Job.

Right on. This was after the delightful overtime win over Notre Dame by Michigan State on a fake field goal. We all know Jesus does NOT cheer for independent NCAA programs. Or the SEC, for that matter.

March to the Sound of Nones

I got home today and immediately had a sense something was wrong. The sort of sense that something is out of place, or that something imminent was loitering in the air, or, that's it, something is missing. I stood for a moment, and I could hear myself breathing. That was it, I could hear myself breathing. The house was still, somehow even more still than when I awaken at 5:30'ish in the dark hours of the morning. Maybe it was the contrast of coming back home from a hectic day at work as opposed to coming downstairs right after waking up, but it was the most still sensation I have had in a long, long time. Five seconds after closing the door, I knew with complete confidence that Wifey and the children were out of the house running errands, which was perfectly fine. If they were not coming back, that would not be fine.

Having adjusted (more or less) to the daily pace of a young family and the centrifugal struggle of having three children and their energy flowing through our home, this one moment was positively shocking. And, cosmetically, I would expect to treasure any moment of peace. Surprisingly, I missed the energy, I missed the focus, I missed the purpose of having every second balanced on a knife's edge of joy and exhaustion.

The thought of living without children, maybe even combined with retirement down the road, seems like a husk or cruel facade of a life. This is enjoyable, so long as my youthful strength and vigor hold up.