aoeuhtns
I got back from our Indiana trip to find my Great Divide maps had arrived in the mail, which is awesome.  I’ve spent the morning poring over them and realizing just how out there I’m going to be.  The route is surrounded by National Forests, Wilderness Areas, BLM land, and National Parks for realllly long stretches.  I wish I could get these maps in the hands of lots of people.
“Pretty office girls in heels click around me as if I’m a hobo, which I kind of am.”
— Great Divide Bike Race | Outside Online by Jon Billman

I’ve been at the lake since Friday night.  This is where Angela’s parents have a little place, once just a house trailer but these days much expanded on and improved.  It’s always a lot of fun to come here.

Here is vacationland and the local economy is mostly based upon serving the folks who come up here weekends all summer long:  liquor store, grocery store, marinas, restaurants, gift shops, hardware store, and notably a strip club.  Everybody sells live bait, except (maybe) the strip club.  By and large, it’s still just rural northern Indiana, and in that way, it often feels like a trip back in time to come here.  It feels a bit less like that this time.  I guess this change is inevitable, and I suppose the place seems extremely changed from when Angela’s dad was a boy coming out here summers, but it still makes me a little blue.

Angela’s folks and assorted family friends, other successful businessmen and their families from Marion and Fort Wayne, together own 4 trailers here on a little boat basin just off the main shore of the lake.  They brag and home improve and drink and try to outdo each other all summer long.

Between them, there are now three sit on top kayaks.  The other morning Angela’s mom, Angela, and I took them out for a nature cruise.  I took the slow boat and kept forcing them to wait up.  We got close to some mute swan and saw turtles sunning on rotten logs.  I picked a water lily for Angela, and it’s still out on the deck in a bowl, but it won’t open again.  They close the first night in captivity and that’s it for the cut water lily, apparently.

Yesterday, I took out a fast boat and was stunned at the difference.  I saw much the same stuff, but as it was a weekday, I was able to relax a little more with fewer ski boats in the water.

Today we swam a little.  It’s the hottest day so far, and I don’t think it really hit the predicted 82, at least not here, right on the lake.  I biked around the lake, an 8 or 9 mile ride, on the Cross-Check.  I rode through North Webster, which is the town here.  I love the Jenga style way that land gets developed near water, like in Marblehead, MA or on lake shores, and I frequently stopped to enjoy looking at a weird trapezoidal yard or the clever way a dead end lot holder had taken advantage of the nearby road for his own purposes.

I’ve read one thriller, a volume by Jeffrey Deaver, the guy who wrote The Bone Collector, and have started on a second one.  It’s the thing to do when you’re here.

There are some ribeyes and chicken breasts thawed out in the fridge.  Stuff that Angela’s folks had in the freezer.  I’ve already started a glass of Old Granddad and we’ll soon get out mini pretzels and start dipping them in horseradish cheddar cheese spread.  The XM radio is playing the blues channel, but we might switch it to Fine Tuning—”No genres.  The greatest music in the world.”

Angela is setting some potatoes to boil and I guess I’m going to make some home fry thing to go with the meat and sweet corn for dinner.  So, later.

“Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.”
— Dr Johnson
“western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry.”
— Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have | 43 Folders
Ride Lugged » Spokes are so last week
“Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what he loves.”
— Blaise Pascal

The existing blog templates offered by Tumblr are great.  I’d like a couple more for reviews or reports of book and movies.  Being able to do comics and TV would be nice, too, but the first 2 are probably easier to do.  I would expect a little cover or movie poster picture, and a link to amazon or IMDB.

Is this already out there?  Is there some API by which I can add templates to tumblr?  I’d really like that, if there’s not.

TR2N Teaser Trailer bootlegged from Comic-Con

I remember as a young and apparently successful sysadmin being asked repeatedly for advice about how to go places in ‘the profession’, or even to break in to it.  I only really had 2 ideas.

First, confidence is 99% of growth.  The confidence I mean is both the confidence that you can rise to most of the challenges, whatever they are, and that you can weather your failures, whenever they come.  I can’t give you any kind of morsel to make you more confident, but there it is.  I still believe that.

Second, there is no substitute for being in over your head.  You are forced to perform and the learning curve is steep.  So, you learn rapidly or fail rapidly.  The latter is acceptable as long as you bounce from that failure in to another situation where you are in over your head, though perhaps slightly less so.

As a young person with my signature on a Bloomington lease, but having been asked by Indiana University to please take a couple years off classes so that my skill at keeping a GPA above 2 might mature, I was extremely lucky to get in over my head at a computing-heavy research lab on campus.  I was much less qualified for the job than my main competitor.  Most would have said I was not qualified for the job.

The in over your head bit is the bit I like best anyway.  Without it, much work can seem dreadfully boring.  I guess another way to spin that is to say that the work I find most fulfilling is learning and applying new material.

Currently, I need to simply earn some money for next summer’s adventures, with lesser concern for my own personal fulfillment within the job.  Riding the GDMBR should be personally fulfilling.  But in the long run, I have no desire to give up the steep learning curve part just because I have N years of experience in my career, even though this seems to be the norm.  It will require creativity, effort, a willingness to take a pay cut, and some salesmanship to do that, but “life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”