June 17th // Something You Are Working At

It’s a metaphor, dumdum.

The difference, or so I’m finding, between “just doing something” and “being passionate about something” is that when you are just doing something you tend not to notice the doors. Y’know: the closed doors, the locked doors, the doors barring you from getting things done.

Doors are all over the place when you feel strongly about some kind of work you’ve been involved with or a cause you are trying to support. Where as if you are just “phoning it in” you tend to be content sitting in the space you’ve been given and not worrying about those doors.

Doors can come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and I’d be remiss if I started penning out a list here, simply because it could never fully inventory such a list.

Of course, astute people will be frustrated by those doors but at the same time look up from their feet and see the windows. Those windows may be high up on the walls, or low down close to the floor. Those windows might just be large enough to peek through or big enough to leap through.

The problem is that the proper way to go is through the doors, no matter how much extra work it sometimes seems to take. But, and I’ll cautiously admit, sometimes you spend weeks banging on doors and find the breeze blowing through the window oh-so-tempting it breaks your heart and soul not to just leap through it and get on with things, particularly when there is so much good to be done on the other side of that wall.

I knock. I rattle the various knobs. I shuffle through a big key ring trying every one in futile hope. But sometimes I stand on my tiptoes and look through the glass of a window and… well, that’s just what I sometimes need to do.

But I’m working at it.

June 16th // Something You Are Thinking About

It’s dad’s day today.

If you read this blog as frequently as I do, you might have noticed a trend in my writing over the last six or so years. That is, I’ve been writing a lot about fatherhood in those years and it has shaped a lot of what I’ve had the opportunity to write upon. And, It’s shaped me.

I may have mentioned in a previous post, but we were at a banquet the other night with some of my wife’s colleagues. And as these thing go, one quickly tends to find oneself in a situation peppered with slightly awkward social interaction. You know the kind: the oh-and-who-are-you-and-what-do-YOU-do-here handshake followed by a few minutes of pleasantries and informal social banter.

We sat beside one of her boss’s-bosses, the reason of which is tough to explain here but the point of which is much more simple: he asked me a pointed question early on in that social pleasantries phase of the conversation: “So, are you enjoying being a father?” to which I found myself, sans hesitation, replying “You know what? I am. And it’s made me a better person.”

I got home from a twenty-six kilometre run shortly after lunch today, and Claire was standing at the door with a small green fit bag in her hand and a ready-made plan for the rest of our day. Now, no dad worth his salt would have turned to such an eager I-just-want-to-be-with-you moment and say, sorry hun, but dad just ran for three hours and you’re out of luck. And neither did I. I made her some lunch, changed the battery in my camera, and less than an hour later we were in the car an off for a Sunday afternoon adventure at Fort Edmonton Park.

And, man, are my legs tired. Aching. Painful.

But, she’s in bed, and I’m sitting here late at the tail end of dad’s day reminding myself, thinking about it all, that I think I did the best I could today and that being a dad probably, perhaps, and just maybe really has made me a better person.

June 15th // Something You Are Craving

I started writing this while riding in the car on the way home from a couple days spent in Calgary, pecking out the words on my phone as Karin drives through the sporadic rain.

Every so often you get a few days like this, days when you are so busy that it all turns into a blur of lost moments.

We’ve been driving. We’ve been eating.We’ve been socializing. And we’ve been driving some more.

Yesterday I spent an hour and a half in rush hour traffic in Calgary. Oh… the pain.

Then I spent a couple long hours being present, talkative and sociable with my wife’s various bosses at a banquet. I won’t claim it wasn’t fun. It was a great evening. It’s just that the introvert in me doesn’t thrive in situations like that.

Today, more driving and more food. Stopping to pick up critters. Eating out. Eating out more. And still not much sleep. And tomorrow? An epic twenty-six kilometer run.

So, yeah, I’m craving sleep.

June 14th // Something You Are Watching

Netflix has turned us retro.

As much as I almost hate to admit it, Karin and I have found ourselves sitting on the couch many nights frequently –usually after a tough day of work and life, tired from the office, or soccer practice, or a long run– and flipping into some old sitcoms from the nineties.

Our recent favourite, a series we opted to watch after enjoying reading his book “Familyhood” is the Paul Reiser-Helen Hunt comedy, Mad About You.

Is watching old goofy stuff still cool, or am I officially weird yet?

June 13th // Something You Are Reading

I’ve always kinda liked the sprawling science fiction epics of Dan Simmons.

A few years ago I trudged my way through the far-future story of the Shrike in Simmons’ Hyperion saga, a four book compendium of mind-blowing magnitude and complexity.

A co-worker recommended I have a look at some of his other books, specifically Ilium and Olympos,a two-book series that is a far-future mash-up… retelling… analog or whatever you want to call it of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, respectively.

I picked up the first book more than once, never quite getting into it at first. Rinse. Repeat… maybe, say, three times. Then for whatever reason, as books sometimes are in the habit of doing to me, it stuck in my head and suddenly I couldn’t put them down.

I’m almost… but not quite… finished the second. Maybe soon. And maybe I’ll write a review at some point, too.

Or maybe you can tell from this post that I’d probably recommend it. Or, at least, it’s just something I’m reading.

June 12th // Something You Are Learning

You’ve gotta run slower if you wanna run fast.

Doesn’t make any sense, does it? Well, unless you’ve been running with me lately, maybe.

I’ve been learning to run slower. My whole marathon training group has been learning to run slower, in fact. And as counter-intuitive as that bit of logic may seem, it’s for a good cause.

See, when you learn to run the goal tends to be this: I want to go faster. I want to go further. I want it to feel good.

And then you do, and it does, and… and you tend to hit a plateau.

One of the pieces we’ve been working on in our clinic is running at different speeds for different reasons. And not just at different speed, I should add, but rather breaking apart the whole process of running into isolated little bits and honing each of those bits in turn.

To build strength we do hill repeats, going up and down the same bit of slope a counted number of times until your quads burn and your calves ache and all you want to do is sit down and then stand right back up again because it hurts.

To build stamina we do tempo runs, kicking up our pace for an incrementally longer push against our comfortable pace, getting into a zone where the heart picks up and decides that something actually is going on down there in your legs.

To build our speed we do fartleks, borrowing the Swedish term for “speed play” as we leapfrog and sprint and change our stride and our pace and our cadence in quick succession to confuse our muscles and teach our bodies to fly down the trails.

And to build endurance we run slow, isolating the variable of time and stretching it out, elongating the moments we’re on the run, extending our clocks while keeping our kilometers in the range of impressive but run-able.

So, I’ve been learning to run slower. Our long slow runs have crossed into the territory of the mid-twenty kilometer distances, and we’ve been running them at a slow — an often angonizingly slow– pace, putting in those all important hours across a shorter distance than which we’d be otherwise capable.

It’s all part of the plan, but in many ways it’s like learning all over again.

June 11th // Something You Are Doing

There is something about the spring and summertime that leaves me in the mood for fine-tuning design.

Perhaps it is the stereotypical feeling of post-winter renewal, or maybe it’s just because I’m in the groove with cleaning, yard work, and kicking up the training regimen, but whatever the cause, the result has –over the last number of years– turned into a parallel effort online.

This year has been no exception. But instead of a complete overhaul of my websites I’ve decided that I actually kinda like the design these days and I’ve just been, well, tweaking them.

A bit of padding here, a new feature space there, a bit of an adjustment on the font down this line, and perhaps getting rid of this gradient to make room for something a little cleaner on the edge… uh, there… no… right there.

That’s what I’m doing. And I write it here not only because it fulfils today’s topic of “Something I am Doing” but because over the next couple weeks you’ll probably notice little nudging adjustments if you’re a regular visitor to this site or one of my other ones.

On this site? A change to some of the feature spaces, adding more imagery in the sidebar and footer, and killing a bunch of the long, long list of links. (If you were linked there… sorry. You should update your blog more often and I’ll consider adding you back in.) I’ve also nudged some of the padding on the fonts and cleaned up the post-cards, as well as giving a bunch of the images a bit more breathing room.

On my gallery? If you haven’t stopped by there lately, I’m happy to invite you back. I’m still working on that one, but in the last couple weeks I’ve really moved away from the built-in Gallery3 templates and given it a simpler, cleaner, and (I think) more unified look. I’d like to do something about the buttons and other UI, but that’s a bigger project and… yeah, still working on it.

In the meantime: enjoy and watch. If you’re interested in that sort of thing let me know and maybe I’ll be inspired to write a longer post on my design inspirations. But for now… it just is something I’m doing.

June 10th // Something You Have Felt

I’d be the first to admit it: Our first few nights at soccer practice have been anything but a prime example of athleticism.

I’m also not exactly one to talk. My earliest memories of team sports were the dawdling not-quite-all-star, filling my baseball mitt with sand, far out in the field on a t-ball team where no one ever –ever– hit it outside the diamond.

Claire spent her first few soccer games emulating her father. Not the new-and-improved athletic dad, the dad who is leading marathon groups and getting Facebook kudos for being a great coach. No, the dawdling kid who squatted down and pulled grass while his team mates made the runs and the goals and the scores.

So we sat down and chatted.

“What’s the most important thing?” I asked her.

We’d talked about this. She had been worried about being no good. She had been worried about not knowing what to do. “To just have fun.” She replied.

After a few fumbling, dawdling evenings of soccer practice, I had finally taken the time to try and elevate her out of the funk. She has always been a determined kid, but the determination kicks in more often when she’s got either a clear goal or a sense that she can at the very least perform proficiently. When it comes to trying new things –honestly– she’s tended to throw in the towel pretty quick.

“To just have fun.” She replied.

“That’s right.” I agreed. “Now, here’s the thing: when you’re having fun you still need to listen to the coach and help the other kids have fun, too, right?”

“Yup.”

“And the other kids there probably want to kick the ball and play soccer, right?”

“Yup.”

“And if you can, try to get in there and kick that ball to the other kids on your team. Y’know, help them out.”

“Ok, dad.”

We were bundled up. It was freaking cold out this evening. It’s mid-June and the temperatures are only a few degrees above freezing. I was wearing three layers and a toque and I was still sitting there on the sidelines shivering, my toes slightly numb.

They practiced. The did some games and some drills.

I shivered.

They ran some short laps and kicked their balls at the nets.

I bundled up in my blanket and lawn chair.

Then a game: and I settled in kinda expecting a replay of the last few games. I expected to sit on the side nudging my daughter to “pay attention” and “quit pulling up the grass” while the game went on at the other end of the field.

But something had clicked. Maybe. She was in there. She was fighting for the ball. She was aggressively booting it away from the other team, intercepting and stealing the play to her advantage.

a grin so big I could see it from the far end of the field

And then it happened. She stole it and broke away. She was a good three paces ahead of the other kid and she handled it a third of the length of the field and right into the net. Goal! Her very first goal.

With cheers from the crowd, a high five from her coach, and a grin so big I could see it from the far end of the field she ran back to us and we let her have her moment, bragging it up right then and there.

A dad can be a little proud, can’t he?

June 9th // Something You Have Heard

I had a list of things I thought I might write here today, then I read the post I wrote two years ago. Two years ago I wrote this: “I’m thinking, pretending, assuming, skipping-the-caring-bit-and-just-telling-you what you want to read here is perhaps a snapshot of the many different things I’ve heard over the course of today, as weirdly random as that might be. Care or not, it fulfills my daily blog obligations.”

So, again (but different) those random things are:

• my daughter, reading me a storybook at six in the morning, while I –barely awake– stuffed my head into a pillow and tried to ignore her for at least another thirty minutes
• huff, puffs, and a mixed bag of complaining, exclaiming, and proclaiming (of victories) along a twenty-three kilometer morning run with my group
• bagpipes, as that same group ran through a park where eight men in kilts were playing, oddly, randomly, and without further explanation
• the chanting of kids yelling my name to “push them” on the swings, spinny-things, and other places as I took Claire and her two cousins to the playground afer lunch
• the chime of my text message notification as I recieved a disproportionatly high number of texts today
• the patter of rain drops on the sidewalk and my shirt as we dashed from the car to the gates of our show
• the high-decible, engergetic rock-crush stylings of the Amaluna soundtrack performed live under the big top as we attended the Cirque du Soliel show of the same name
• a lot of giggling as I entertained my niece on the way home from the circus
• almost ten minutes of perfect, akward silence as I drove the babysitter home
• the hum of the traffic carried over the evening air from the distant highway as I sit in my living room with windows open, feeling the cool breeze, and writing this post.

And probably a thousand more things that didn’t make quite as much of an impression.

June 8th // Something You Have Fixed

While some folks might suggest that in putting a hole in a perfectly good fence you are –in fact– doing the exact opposite of “fixing it” I would contest that in this particular case understanding our reasoning for doing just that most definitely factors into the consideration.

It’s been about a month since I tacked up a few extra bits of lumber to the fence, pulled out a saw, and cut an eighteen inch square portal in the fence adjoining our yard with that of our next door neighbors.

We had a problem that needed fixing, see. The problem: the kids played together all the time, Claire with the two kids next door and also the two more kids two doors down. (That’s not the problem.) The problem was that to get next door one or all of those kids needed to route around the front of the house, around to the far side and then into the other back yards.

It’s not that I’m paranoid about kid safety or particularly concerned with convience for a group of little kids. Quite the opposite: kids should be boht independent and challenged. But it was more that I was forever opening gates, throwing balls over the fence, answering frantically ringing doorbells, replying to pointless requests for permission, and debating the merits of “just go over there and play” with a kid who had to “walk all the way over there” and couldn’t be bothered.

Fix: a new hole in the fence. Now everyone just hops back and forth, through and back. And life in our backyards just got a little more fun.