Best Hampton Inn Ever

I am staying at the Hampton Inn Downtown Vancouver right now, and it is by far the best Hampton Hotel I have stayed at. The Location is great, the service is friendly. There is a spa on the 16th floor, and the beds are super comfortable. Everything looks very new. There were belgian chocolates waiting on my pillows. Oh, and such pillows.

We took a very liesurely stroll down Robson Street to the Lost Lagoon at Stanley Park. We found a few nesting swans, and had no idea how very large these birds are. So passive, and very accustomed to people passing by. The birds took notice of us, but did not move away.

Return of the Wild

I saw the raccoon last night. We stepped outside, and ten feet past the door was a raccoon. He saw us, and bolted across the street. The old raccoon from last year was lame in one foot. Could this be that same one, or only another? Do raccoons have good health plans and get casts during the winter? I don't know if my last year raccoon was limping to favor a sore foot, or had a broken leg. He was a sure slow tree climber, you have to admit that.

Happy Day

1. I mowed the lawn. I ran out of fuel just as I started the front, and had to walk to the gas station four blocks away to get another gallon. I believe I had just finished the gallon of fuel from August '05, so I feel good about the amount of gas I used over the last few months for the lawn. The oil is still very nearly full.
2. The tulips are opening. I had daffodils growing last month, they have wilted and the tulips are now very bright, some red, some yellow, and quite a few 'sunset' orange and red. The insides are so very flowery. By late afternoon they had closed again, but it was fine to see them open.
3. I got a sunburb yesterday, and was looking to see some inside time, but the sun shone here all day, and I had to take it down to a wife beater by the time I was raking.
4. Starting to see wasps. A few yellow jackets are buzzing around. I saw a small green frog in the front lawn. Three weeks ago when last I mowed the lawn, there was a frog (maybe the same one?) in the back yard.
5. No dead birds this time, though there were a few rather brazen black birds pecking about the lawn after I cut it, oblivious to the man with the lawn mower passing four feet away. Hunger, or acclimatization?
6. Sent all my paperwork off, phoned in a raise, and ordered some parts. In short, the world is in good order. I even paid the mortgage.
7. The moss on the front lawn has gotten so long that I trimmed it with the mower when I passed through. I guess I should be more agressive in getting rid of moss, but it is both inevitable and pleasant. To walk barefoot on a thick mat of moss, inches long, and soft, is one of the dearest pleasures the north can offer.

Happy Easter

Like all the other C&E catholics, I will be attending the late morning mass before heading out to see family today. Hope all your kneeling and rising goes as well as mine will.

Rehab part 3

Rehab part 2

These are from a few weeks ago.

Engaged

Beth and I will be marrying this fall. Tentatively Sept 30th 2006. Invitations to follow final arrangements.

the need to create bonds and the urge to tear them apart

Ah, the curious position of humanity! Bonds... the things which enable our society to exist, our lives to be productive, our joys to multiply in the lives of others, how onerous they all must be. Isn't that the key to a bond, that in giving your word you give up your freedom... and each of us jealously measures the value of each of these promises, contrasts them against the freedom we can reclaim through a few simple assertions. Anyone who has ever broken up with someone from caprice will attest to this. It is easy, it only stings a little, and the joy of doing something new rather compensates for the cost of a hard won tie.
I have been selected as a groomsman for my friend Kevin's wedding. It is a joy to me, kind of funny to get measured for a tux every summer, but I am glad that most of my trips have been to see my friends become married men since my return to life a little more than a year ago. Still, I think it is cruel to marry on a monday, and many of us have jobs, and there is the cost involved. Will I go? Will I attempt to squirm out of it? I most likely will go.
I am very happy to be young enough not to be attending funerals of my friends. That will be in thirty or forty years, I hope. What do we do with our friends after they have started on the path toward their family, and we on ours, and until they are old and dying? What bonds do I have. What value can I get from these connections, and what obligations do they entail.
I would happily shelter any of my 'tribe', for a time, and expect my friends to not overstay a welcome extended. Welcomes, I imagine, are good for the amount of days it will be a pleasure to see you. I believe my father set his limit at two weeks. After two weeks, I would become a lodger, a burden, and a bore. That's for his own fruit!
I suppose I would joyfully put up any friend for a weekend, some for a week, and some strangers for so much as two (most friends are not welcome for two!). I will endure anyone, even foul smelling and beligerent people, on my doorstep for five minutes.
I never send christmas cards. I very seldom make gifts on birthdays, and have been mostly buying wedding cards on the day of the event. Are christmas cards a way of territory marking when it comes to people you expect a funerary invite from, and plan to extend one to? Would you invite people to your funeral whom you would not send a christmas card? Would you keep someone on a christmas card list and not expect flowers on your departure?
Will anyone be attending my funeral? Please send a SASE and the name of your particular holiday each year, and I may yet reply with a few short lines to say how well off I am.

I think I have matured somewhat in the centrifugal urge to break away from entanglements. I had a solitary life for quite a while. It has its advantages. Monks are pretty clever, and there is some very selfish aspect to solitude. I did not like to keep a job, a girl, a friend. Some people I know take this to the extreme of moving apartments annually. Yes, with every new situation there is a thrill. Then the thrill goes, and all you have is the situation. Its merits are weighed again when clearer heads can see.
Endurable and enriching situations strengthen themselves, and the others pass away. Long distance relationships fail partly because of a lack of oversight and judgement--the idea that you can get away with cheating certainly facilitates it-- and partly because they are not as enriching as the authors of literature would have us believe.
But the urge to break away from what you have is, like all other urges, manageable.
The need to form a bond? That's a necessary condition of human life. There is no state of nature, and never has been. Man is a political animal.