Personal Status

Night Work

2016 didn’t go the way I thought it would, or wished it would. But it’s over, and it’s time to look ahead.

I see adversity coming up.

I feel protected from the worst of it. I was way less protected back in 1981, when Reagan took office, and somewhat less in 2001, when it was George W. Bush, God help us.

In ’81, I was living above a pawnshop in downtown Brooklyn, young and broke. My friends were few and distant. I soon moved to a mostly abandoned building in a mostly burned-out block on the Upper West Side, sharing government cheese with my neighbors, and sleeping with one eye open and watching for the landlord’s thugs. In ’01, when Bush Jr. was the president-elect, I quit my consulting job and traveled most of the year, returning to find a worsening desperation in my South Berkeley neighborhood.

When they get into power, Republicans make hell for Americans who are struggling. The suffering is going to be really awful. It will be worst among those already most desperate. If you’ve never lived in a low-income neighborhood, you have no idea.

As for me, I thrived during those times. In the early ‘80s, I made a quixotic decision to go to engineering school, and spent my mid-20s setting type on the swing shift, and sometimes the lobster shift, still fighting the landlord, and making my way up through Harlem to City College for daytime classes. In the early ‘00s, I started my consulting business, stretching my limited expertise and even-more-limited social skills, often working late in my home office until even the dealers outside had gone home.

I’ll turn 59 this year, if the fates allow. I live in a quiet suburb and an even more quiet exurb. I’m more relaxed. I’m less likely to jump into a new challenge. When I get together with friends, we’re already sharing our catalogs of where our bodies hurt and don’t work the way they used to. I don’t really want to be working hard at something new.

But I’m going to be doing exactly that, I think. Maybe a lot of new things, or maybe a lot of new angles on old things, or maybe a renewed focus and vigor on things I’ve picked up and set aside, at various times, over a lifetime.

Because the times demand it, and also because of this. Continue reading…

January 1, 2017 by dan Personal Status 0

What Xmas Means to Me

I was raised strict atheist. We had a Christmas tree and gave gifts. We admired seasonal revelry in a Currier-and-Ives kind of way, without taking much part in it.

In adulthood, I learned to appreciate the blend of ritual and melancholy captured so well in the original lyrics to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” I can’t say I’ve ever looked forward to the Christmas season, but I have sought, each year, to find some transformative moment in it. I’ve found that moment, sometimes, while walking alone on a crowded shopping street, or hanging an ornament on the tree, or just sitting in a warm armchair and listening to medieval carols.

At 50, I fathered a child. My new relatives are assimilated Jews. I’ve done seven Christmas Eves their way; I’ve felt more and more each year that something was missing.

So this year, I started to explore various meanings of Christmas.

I should say: By this time in life, I’m a lapsed atheist. I still discount the truth of religious doctrine, but I don’t discount the value of faith.

My exploration was helped when I read this piece by Bill Muehlenburg, who seems to take his Bible straight up.

He says Christmas is about incarnation and redemption. Now here are ideas I can wrestle with. I mean, Christmas is also about finding light in the darkest hours, and it is about fully experiencing joy, and while it is not a given to achieve either of those things, I don’t question their value, or the value of trying.

But incarnation? The existence of God in human form, who walks (or walked) among us, like an ordinary man? I need to think harder about that.

As an evolution of belief, I like it. It’s way better than believing in a God who doesn’t walk among us. I can squint and appreciate Jesus in an immanentist way, as the experience of the divine in the mundane. We all could use more of that, I think, in a time when people tend to act as if their own fate, and the fate of the world, are things to be trifled with. We could have a little more awe, and conduct ourselves more as embodiments of spirit, and be less reactive to what gets served up daily in the earthly vale.

The idea of redemption had me digging a little harder. Even if we are non-believers, we can be attracted by concept of God’s unconditional love. Again, as a belief, it’s way better than believing in an Old Testament God, who is the kind of prick who smites you if he doesn’t like your looks (and even if you’re his biggest fan, invites you to kill your kid to demonstrate that you really believe).

The unconditional love thing looks easier than it really is, because to accept and fully experience unconditional love, you also have to accept yourself, just as you are, you sinner you. That’s hard, but once you achieve that self-acceptance, your relationship to God has to change, and I think that change must be profoundly liberating.

Which brings us back to the problem of belief. The great good deal, according to Christian doctrine, is that you get that unconditional love, along with everlasting life—and all you have to do is believe.

I don’t believe, and I look askance at the idea that one believes what one wills to believe. That idea is all too common, and you and I would do well to reject it. Like I said, I don’t discount the value of faith, but just up and deciding to have faith, to get the benefits it provides, strikes me as cheap and easy, and cheap and easy is not what I want at Christmas.

So here’s what Christmas means to me, at least for now: A celebration of the divine in everyday life. An awe of what it means to be human, and of the gifts and responsibilities that come with that. A time to stretch myself to accept myself and to accept others, and to revel in the changes that practice brings. And a little melancholy as I look at the passage of another year.

Calibrating

USGS operates a stream gauge at the Hacienda Bridge, which is just downstream from here. The data is posted on the web in real time.

Taking the final difference in elevation, between a mark on the stairs down to the river and the slab inside the basement door.

However, I didn’t know what gauge elevation corresponds to the waters reaching my house.

Now I do know, I think, fairly accurately. That will help next time, especially if I’m looking at the stream gauge data remotely, or at night.

Here’s how I calibrated the gauge to my house: I found the high water mark from the most recent event (an obvious mark on the path down to the river), and used a construction level to measure the difference in elevation to my basement slab. This took two setups of the instrument. I make a crude sketch as I went along.

The flood crest at the Hacienda gauge was 29.77 feet, and the basement slab is 9.7 feet above the high water mark. Adding those together, I get 39.5 feet, a number I hope I won’t be watching for anytime soon. That 9.7 feet might seem like a lot–except that in this relatively minor event, the river rose more than 20 feet, at a rate of about a foot an hour.

A crude sketch, good enough notes for my purpose.

1986 flood at Forest Hills market, a block away from me, and on higher ground.

Fortunately, the house’s first floor elevation is a little more than 12 feet above the basement slab–higher than the floodwaters reached in 1986.

But you never know.

December 19, 2016 by dan Personal Status 0

River’s Rising

riverrising1

There are a number of joys here, beginning with being comfortably nested at my table by the window, a warm drink and electronic devices close at hand. There is a gauge by the bridge just downriver, and I’ve found the link where I can view real-time data corresponding to what I’m seeing out my window. Cool. I’ve got some interesting work that I’ll be getting back to in a moment. Great.

And then there’s that metaphor of imminent deluge. Oh well.

Real time data from the gauge at near Hacienda Bridge

December 15, 2016 by dan Personal Status 0

Thanks

With some help, I’ll be preparing and serving Thanksgiving dinner for 12.

Personally, I have a lot to be thankful for.

Still, I’m searching for something, the right thing, to say to my guests as we sit down. The youngest is seven, the oldest 84. Two are struggling with cancer.

And we all face a struggle we didn’t want, but must accept. There is something in there to appreciate, and be thankful for, and I’m sure that by Thursday I’ll be able to articulate it.

November 23, 2016 by dan Personal Status 0

Work Therapy

I was up into the wee hours this morning, crafting a database management structure for tracking land development projects, stormwater treatment facilities, and inspections of same. I’d been in bed about an hour shen the kid called out, needing me to come in there and cuddle her back to sleep. 3:30 is a special hour for such business, and I felt, as always, grateful to be able to do it.

In the morning, I had an extra cup of coffee, and once the family was off to school and work, jumped into a little damage control with a client, then to getting the graphic artist going on some illustrations for the new Guidebook. Then it was afternoon and time for the teleconference about the database.

During the usual preliminaries (What are our objectives for this call?) I managed to run around the house picking up toys and clothes, getting some laundry started, and packing for a weekend trip with the kid. By the time the group was reviewing the database structure item-by-item, I was on my way out the door to drive over to the elementary school. I parked and wandered through the crowded schoolyard, my notes in hand, earpiece in my ear, discussing the generation of primary keys, the organization of each table, the independent and dependent relationships, the need for flexible options to accommodate the differing practices of the three dozen or so municipalities who will be the users, which parameters needed restricted selections and which could be narrative, and other technical and regulatory ins and outs, while at the same time finally spotting the kid and sharing grins and looking surprised and properly awestruck at her wiggly cuspid, and using hand gestures and gentle touches to carefully guide her across the busy avenue and toward the truck.

About half way home I pulled over to the side before wishing everyone a good weekend and hanging up on the call. Without turning around, I reached into the back seat and gave the kid’s leg a squeeze.

For over an hour, I hadn’t thought once about the disaster unfolding in Washington and about to spread across the country and the world.

November 19, 2016 by dan Personal Status Stormwater Pollution Prevention Work Status 0

Silly Olympics

It was a long day. I picked up coffee and pastries for the volunteers at 7:00 am. Just before 5:00 pm, I found myself walking away from the schoolyard, wonderfully unburdened. The last of the games had been dismantled, and the pieces stored away, and the 21st Annual Cornell Elementary School Silly Olympics was done.
The forces of entropy worked hard on this one: The event was rained out last Sunday, and rescheduled for today, a Saturday. We needed about 200 volunteer hours today, and many of the parent volunteers couldn’t reschedule. The new coordinator–that’s me–had never even attended a Silly Olympics, and the old coordinator was out of town for the weekend. The documentation for most of the activities was from 2010. We needed about 400 white powdered mini donuts for one of the games, and when we went to pick up the order yesterday, it had come in with donut holes instead of donuts, and this wouldn’t have worked because you can’t string donut holes and hang them from a clothesline.
The school district scheduled a custodian, but when he arrived at 8:00 this morning it wasn’t the regular custodian, and he didn’t know where anything was, let alone where and how it was to be set up.
That last caused my faith to waver. An hour later, more volunteers showed up. I was busy organizing on the fly and answering questions. (My answer to about every third question was: “I have no idea.”)
At 10:00, an hour before the gates opened, I began to see the miracle of order emerging from chaos. The volunteers were working together, finding their own resources, solving their own problems. No one just stopped and waited for help. People shared their knowledge, remembering from past years how the games were arranged and put together.
Preparation paid off, too. During the previous month, we’d had three work parties to fix up and refurbish some of the games. The old coordinator had, as it turned out, warned me about just about everything I needed to be warned about, and had organized and restocked bins of materials needed for the games. The volunteer in charge of the pizzas and hot dogs and drinks and cotton candy was flawless and unflappable.
About 10:45, it got kind of quiet, volunteers aware they had only a few minutes left.
And then the gates opened, and we had a lot of parents and kids walking in and checking out the cupcake walk and lining up to get faces painted, or running straight for the cardboard maze.
And at the Super Splash, when the first kid hit the target with the beanbag, and that swung the beam hard enough that the nail on the other end punched through the water balloon hanging in the basketball hoop, and the balloon broke and the water drenched the other kid sitting in the chair below, and wet kid laughed uproariously, I knew everything was going to work out OK. Before long, even the school principal got in on the action.

October 24, 2016 by dan Personal Status 0

2016 – A Look Ahead

Building on what worked in 2015, I’m ready to wave my arm around and point in some general directions of where I’d like to go over the next 366 days.

First on the list—because I’m convinced it helps with everything else—is to continue my meditation practice. In the latter part of 2015, I meditated on 35% of days, and for 2016 I’ll up that to 50% of days.

Currently, I do a little yoga before sitting, and I’m going to expand that by attending a regular weekly class, as I did prior to being injured back in early 2012. I’ll begin by attending a Level 1 class by my old yoga teacher, Vicki Russell Bell, for a few months. If it goes well, and I can build up some strength and flexibility, I’ll begin attending her Level 2-4 class weekly.

I journal a bit after each sitting meditation, and I will continue that part of the practice as well.

With support from my practice, I aim to be more aware, more of the time, of my breath and presence and of being grounded in contentment.

In particular, I’ll make further progress accepting my PTSD, examining it, familiarizing myself with it, inviting it in for tea. At the same time, because I don’t want or need to guarantee it permanent residence, I’ll continue with therapy, including investigating, during the course of 2016, some adjunct somatic therapies (such as EMDR).

I’m identifying two values on which I intend to strengthen my attention:

Parenting and family life, and
Cultivating my creativity.

During 2016, Zoe will go from being six-and-a-half to being seven-and-a-half, a significant leg of her journey through childhood. Right now, Melanie and I are pondering how best to help her learn about disappointment. For all of us, it’s a revealing (and never-completed) life lesson and a big piece of what makes up character.

Parenting happens in the now, and effective parenting is all about achieving and maintaining a calm, loving, engaged, and contingent mindset. No one can do that always, but I’m going to be looking back, as I review each day, and coach myself to be here now whenever I can, but most of all when I’m interacting with my kid.

The most satisfying times I’ve had as an engineer—and in retrospect, the ones that have opened the doors to success—have been when I was creating something new. Of course, I’ve also had creative moments that brought on conflict and led to disappointment. Sometimes people don’t want a new and better solution. Sometimes what looked like a good solution, in that creative moment, just isn’t.

Outcomes aside, those creative moments haven’t been as frequent as I’d like. It’s not so much that I’m risk-averse; it’s that I haven’t yet connected my grounding in contentment, so recently and tentatively achieved, with exercising my right-brain. I create, but to create with soul… that’s been like a prize to which I’ve felt I’m not entitled.

In 2016, I’m going to stretch and work my corpus callosum—that connection between the brain’s hemispheres. I’m going to start with putting more time, and more of myself, into practicing the guitar. And writing.

Those are the main intentions I have for the coming year. I have quite a few others, having to do with finances, the amount of time I spend working, and my domicile. I’ll write about those things another time.

January 2, 2016 by dan Personal Status 0

2015 – What Worked

2015 was a whopping good year for me. Before I start setting goals or making resolutions for 2016, I’m going to focus on some things that worked out well in the past year.

The best thing I did all year was to participate in David Weinberg’s 10-week course, “Advancing in Stillness,” which advanced my mindfulness practice and helped me get focused on living my values. The prerequisite 8-week mindfulness course—which I completed in 2014—was useful in its own right. The 10-week graduate course, which ran from January to April, marked a turning point in my personal development. In particular, I made progress accepting how PTSD affects me, and how it has affected me throughout my life.

Most importantly, after finishing the course, I continued to meditate regularly for the rest of the year. I use Insight Timer, and after a free update came in May, the app started tracking my sessions. So I know I meditated on 35% of the days since May. My routine usually includes some yoga poses before I settle into my zafu.

I continued my weekly psychotherapy sessions—something I have done for eight years now. At times during 2015 I felt it might be time to cut back or even stop, because in general I’m happier than I’ve ever been. However, I continued and plan to continue this work as long as it is expanding the horizons of my emotional experience. It contributes a lot to my effectiveness as a parent and partner.

Throughout the year, I continued to bicycle regularly. I participated in roughly half the Saturday rides with the Oakland Yellowjackets. When I could, I went out for a solo ride mid-week as well. On the Yellowjackets rides, I didn’t hold back taking the lead of our Advanced Intermediate group. I found that I could be comfortable doing that, and I found that I could measure my success in the strength of the group’s camaraderie and by the glow in the faces of my fellow riders. And I could accept, with only mild frustration, the times when the group didn’t hold together as well as I’d like.

I finished one century ride in May. I trained for another in October, but a sudden bout of flu caused me to abandon that ride at the last minute. Most of the year, I felt fine and strong, if a bit more creaky than in 2014. Best of all, I remember feeling, on a few of those Saturday rides, that I was having about the best experience anybody ever had, rolling through the impossibly scenic Bay Area in the company of friends.

I got some inspiration from reading Joel Friel’s book, Fast After 50, in particular the advice about continuing to train near your cardiovascular limits as you age.

Another big help: Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert), in his somewhat odd and throw-away collection of thoughts titled How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, has some good advice on changing eating habits. I followed that advice—principally about refocusing your cravings to protein and vegetables, and staying away from carbs—and quickly lost about half of the extra 10-15 pounds I’ve been carrying around for a few years now.

As a parent, I accompanied Zoe into the “big kid” stage, with big emotions and suddenly, a lot of differentiation. She’s managing a big portfolio—including first-grade expectations, navigating the elementary school social landscape, and shuttling between Melanie’s household and mine. Looking back on the year, my recollection of her occasional tantrum is muted, as is my frustration with her not-so-occasional resistance to following my direction. Brighter, and sharper, are my memories of a lot of playful roughhousing, the pleasures of beginning to read together, and sharing the fun of learning new games and new skills. I drew a lot of insights from these books: Siegel and Bryson, No-Drama Discipline, and Ames and Ilg, Your Six Year Old: Loving and Defiant.

I worked a lot this year, billing over 1,600 hours, in addition to time administering the business and the occasional gig done for promotion or pro bono.

I liked almost all of it. My working environment is beautiful and suits me well. My clients are good people; I’ve known some of them for decades, others for a few years; we share values and for the most part common perspectives on environmental protection, bureaucracy, and other aspects of the work we do. My interactions with them are a real pleasure.

I got a lot of satisfaction from presenting my accumulated knowledge to new audiences and from preparing documents and tools that are used by many people in their work. This year, I often left meetings and presentations exhausted but also feeling validated and appreciated.

During the course of the year I realized I was enjoying planning and designing projects a lot more than I enjoyed dealing with policy and regulations. However, I’m not ready to give up the higher-level side of my work, as I am way invested in advancing in my ideas about how urban runoff should be managed, and I like seeing those ideas take hold (and less worthy ideas held at bay), when it comes to mandates and funding.

Toward the end of the year I invested in renewing my technology—moving my files to the cloud and upgrading my software to subscriptions. It’s taken a lot of effort to reorganize and reconfigure things, but I now can access email, calendar, contacts, and files—and do various levels of editing—on three devices: a Windows 10 desktop (with two monitors), an iPhone 6s+, and a iPad Pro. To my mind, this is another aspect of having a work environment that is, in fact, very pleasurable to be in.

I think that as time passes and I look back on this year from a more distant perspective, what I will remember most vividly—what I hope to remember most vividly—will be the vacations and trips, short and long. There were a lot of them:

 Our family started the year where I am as I write this: In Monterey, tide pooling on New Years Day at Point Lobos State Reserve.
 Late January: The first of four seasonal family trips to Yosemite, sightseeing in the valley and stopping near Crane Flat to find a patch of snow—rare in the drought winter of 2014-2015..
 February: Four nights backcountry truck-camping in Death Valley National Park with Zoe, including a memorable day wandering down upper Monarch Canyon.
 April: Spring Break exploring Mexico City, with day trips to Teotihuacan and Xochimilco.
 Memorial Day: Another family trip to Yosemite, leaving the crowds behind to bicycle around the Valley.
 June: two nights family birthday backpacking to Coast Camp, in Point Reyes National Seashore, including tide pooling at Sculptured Beach. Another day playing in Stinson Beach.
 July: an 8-day family road trip through Humboldt County. Bicycling on the Avenue of the Giants. Whitewater kayaking (in IKs) and rapid-surfing on the Trinity River.
 August: I joined my old friend Stephen Zunes for a 4-day backpacking trip through the Hoover Wilderness and Yosemite Wilderness.
 September: A weekend at Camp Tawonga, and then another family trip to Yosemite, this time to Tuolumne Meadows, on the last day before the high country closed for the season.
 December: Zoe and I visited by dad Ted and his wife Laura in Albuquerque, and awoke to a lovely snowfall.
 Also in December, our fourth trip to Yosemite, skating at Curry Village and stopping on the way out to sled in fresh, abundant snow near Crane Flat.
 And back to Monterey for New Years Eve. This is the fourth year we’ve done that, both times including kayaking in nearby Elkhorn Slough.

Politically, I found the year frustrating, painful, and more than a bit enlightening. Donald Trump is astonishing in his crudeness and directness, but he is characteristically American, and his popularity shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Bernie Sanders’ 15 minutes of fame, on the other hand, is more troublesome to me. He is a leftist, and I have been a leftist all my life, and what is wrong with his campaign is—I’m thinking—what is wrong with the left, and has been wrong with the left. I think Barack Obama has been a great President and I think Hillary Clinton will be an even better President (I’m just finishing reading Hard Choices, and though I’m a critic of US foreign policy, and don’t accept many of her assumptions and views that are consistent with that policy, I think she is thoughtful, and capable.) I think that in a few more cycles liberal Democrats will control all three branches of the Federal government, which is cause for hope.

I found some time to improve my mind through reading, and I advanced my perspectives on science and society: Ta Nahesi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and the strange and wonderful The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time (Ungar and Smolin), which I am still working on, have been especially worth the time invested.

So those are my reflections on the outgoing year. Next up: My view ahead.

December 31, 2015 by dan Cycling Personal Status 0

Weekend

I’m still recovering, and have a ways to go.

It all started Friday, when some kid on a BMX came tearing across the mulched median that separates the newly renovated Ohlone Greenway path from a neighboring apartment building parking lot. I didn’t see him until way too late. I remember grabbing for the brake and probably slowed just a little before the front wheel of my bicycle clipped the rear wheel of his, and over the handlebars I went.

I picked myself up off the pavement, and tersely explained my feelings regarding the relative wisdom of his recent actions. &#8220I think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen someone do&#8221, I said, which in retrospect is certainly an exaggeration. However, I didn’t feel that way at the time.

He rode off, and I pursued, making sure I got some video of our eventual conversation, neither of which (conversation or video) was to any purpose.

What pissed me off most was, I was planning to meet friends for a very long bike ride the next day. I slept poorly, waking again and again to plan and re-plan the coming day. Spend the day nursing my injuries? Go on a shorter ride? Wait until the afternoon to see how I felt?

For some reason (well, the usual reason) I was up sometime before 7. I felt OK. I’d already laid out all my gear and stuff I needed to take with me, and so only 20 minutes later I’d had some breakfast and was rolling off to BART.

It was a great day. Nine hours, 95 miles, 8,000 feet of climbing, across the Golden Gate Bridge, up and across Mt. Tamalpais, out the Fairfax-Bolinas Road to Fairfax, then to Nicasio, Point Reyes Station, Stinson Beach, back to Sausalito and across the bridge again. I got the agony on the climb up from Stinson, but a few minutes rest brought my legs back. I could feel my wrenched back and neck the whole day, and the bumps on the descents made my head ring, but I didn’t care. At about mile 90, on the way back through the Marina, I saw a fellow cyclist get hit by a cab. Right in front of me. He survived, probably with nothing broken, but it was an ugly thing to see.

The next morning I went to turn on my laptop. It had been in my satchel Friday night, of course, and when it booted up I saw it must have been underneath me when I landed. Maybe that’s why I barely had any bruises. One more laptop with a damaged screen (I’ve got a small pile of them) and the last couple files I was working on Friday&#8230 recoverable, but only after I figured out to use an HDMI cable to connect the broken laptop to the TV.

And I wasn’t going to miss some Sunday time with Zoe and Melanie, on bikes and Skuut out on the Bay Trail in Richmond.

So the week starts with a new laptop and all the connectivity and upgrade problems that come with a new version of Windows and MS Office.

And now I’m leaving for Buellton, where I’ve got a meeting in the morning.

April 23, 2013 by dan Cycling Personal Status 0