Maebius Musings

Because everyone and their brother keeps asking what Maebius is interested in this holiday season,  I offer you the following list.  I’ll just post it here to avoid email spams back and forth. 
I’ll leave it to you all to coordinate any purchases and avoid dual-gifting.  MwaHaHaHa

Nothing – seriously people, there’s not a whole lot of stuff I really NEED right now.   And we are trying to reduce the amount of stuff we have cluttering up the house already.    But if you insist on something beyond a holiday card (which is more than enough), here are some suggestions….

Card game “Set”
http://www.setgame.com/set/index.html

SPORE – PC game   (not the expansion, not the Heroes combat game, just plain old SPORE)
http://www.spore.com/
http://eastore.ea.com/store/ea/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/ThemeID.1252400&productID=91619200?intcmp=eaint47

And Another Thing – (Book 6 in the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Another_Thing…_%28novel%29
http://www.6of3.com/

Dinner and a movie.   Preferably something awesome like Sushi.   or Tai.

Nothing.

Febreeze Flameless Luminary (green tea citrus, or any scent really as I plan to re-cycle the shades using essential oils or card-stock that Doug and I paint on for customized awesomeness)
http://www.febreze.com/en_US/producttype/febreze_home_collection_luminary.do
http://www.drugstore.com/products/prod.asp?pid=220795&catid=63435&aid=337953&aparam=febreze_home_collection_&CAWELAID=360460440

Nothing.

Gift card for Kohls, or other clothing store, since I’m going to need new jeans by spring time. 
Gift cert for heirloom seeds – choose your favorite company.
This way, my family will enjoy your gift all summer long and for potentially years to come!

Nothing.

Did I mention nothing yet?   *grin*

Happy Holidays!!

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I hope everyone had a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving holiday, and for those outside the US of A, I hope the last few days have been likewise Thankful and Blessed as well.

I’m recovering from the turkey-day feasts (we ate at our house, with Chef Maebius presiding over the bird and associated sides.) and the back to a normal day-shift schedule of work, so it’s nice to enter December with a fresh outlook on things.

In place of a real muse-worthy post, I’ll redirect you to this one from around this time in years past.
http://everthorn.net/musings/2008/12/monday-muse-countdown-to-christmasolstiyule/?p=312

We hung the ‘Advent’ tree and started filling it with treats for the kid starting tomorrow.   This tree needed soem serious repairs as mice or other furry critters found their way into the plastic storage bin it was kept in (chewed a hole through the side?!) and thus some parts of it were eaten up.   Soem deft green felt patches later, and its’ at least suitable for this year.    Sadly, this probably means I’ll be re-designing another big crafty one for next Yule.   Any suggestions, or should I keep the general festive-tree theme?

Enjoy, and I’ll see you all again shortly once I get back in the swing of things.

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Title says it all.

As a foil to my Mornings suck, musing, here’s a cheery one for you. 

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I am not a morning person.  Morning people confuse and confound me.  Yet I am becoming one in the very near future due to my job.

In general, I have long maintained that my perfect “work shift” is 4pm-midnight, with the option to sleep in until around 10:00am.  If left to my own devices in one of those sleep-study caves, this is generally the time-frame Iwould gravitate to with my schedule.   I feel most productive just around dinner time, and early evening.

The quiet of the evening, with darkness settling in like a comfortable blanket of non-light, helping to focus my attentions and remove distractions of daily life.  That is zen to me.   Lamplight or candlelight with the soft glow of a monitor is comforting.

Yet soon, within a month or so, I will be adjusting to a completely different sleep cycle.   I had a taste of it these past two weeks.   4am-noon.  Blech!

I understand, intellectually, the concept of waking with hte sun bringing a promise to a new day, and all that.  I admit I’ve heard the “whole day before you” inspirations.  But I found I still don’t like it.

Mornings are when everything bustles up, revs into gear, and starts moving.  The birds sing, Life Happens, and folks start their day.    With this new shift, those things mean I’m halfway through and get to go home soon.

If I want to spend any time with my family on this new shift, I try to stay awake until dinner time, to join in on board games, book reading, and such.    I’m finding that this also means I get around 5 hours of good sleep, and taking a short nap from 1-3pm just makes me over-tired and washed out during dinner.

So if this blog starts to ramble a bit or sound slightly incoherent in January, blame early mornings.

I plan to. 

I’ll take the sunsets any day. [pun intended]

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Recently, I sent a series of short emails to a number of friends, ex co-workers, and other acquaintances to say hello.  The emails (and letter in one case) all said something like:

This is just me, coming out of his hermit cave and saying hello before another week of “I should email you” passes and Life gets distracting again.   Hi!  Hope you and your family is doing well.

I sent these out in the spirit of the season, where Thanksgiving, and post-Samhain, and pre-Yule all draw us to reflect on friends and family.   I meant nothing more than a hello, and expected nothing really in return.

Granted, the anticipation of a reply even like “Hi to you too, bye!”  did spring up in my head, but if silence was given, I still would not be offended. The message, and the vaguely cheery energy attached to it was sent out to the E-ether, and thus completed in my thoughts.

What surprised me, and still stings a bit, is one particular reply stating “Oh hi.  Just because it’s the holiday and we haven’t talked all year doesn’t mean you can be all happy now and expect to start exchanging cards/gifts all the sudden because we emailed. Don’t bother.”

I’m not even sure how to react, and without going into details, I figure this means that person will be taken off my email contact list for good now.   This individual isn’t even one who I last communicated with harshly, or had any sort of “falling out” with.

It is a distant relative, for whom the sum total of our relationship mainly consists of cards at holidays.  I haven’t physically seen them in years.

I’m guessing I touched an unknown nerve, or they are going through some sort of emotional experiences recently that I an not privy too.  Did my unexpected hello touch off some hidden feud, as family sometimes harbors?   I don’t think I’ll ever know the details, nor do I want to pry.

Yet, should I react to this with hugs, or a cold shoulder?   The cynic in me says “To heck with them, and Life’s too short for Drama.“, but then the striving-to-be-better Spiritual side of me wants to reach out again to acknowledge their concern and offer warmer wishes regardless.  This of course gets the cynic all fired up to counter “why stir the coals?“.

Interesting, how the unexpected conflict can throw our own soul-searching into clarity and help us redefine ourselves, or at least highlight the efforts of our hearts.

Any thoughts? I’d love to hear them.

(Advice on how to deal is not necessarily requested, more-so I’m after the musing on how such an incident would make you ponder things/people/Life)

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At church yesterday, the theme was of the coming Harvest Holiday, we here in the USA call Thanksgiving.  As part of this, our UU Minister read a few words from Rev. Max Coots, relating to friendship, community,  and gardens.  I’d like to share that here, since it really was awesome.

Garden Meditations

by Rev. Max Coots

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people.

For children who are our second planting, and though they
grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may
they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where
their roots are.

Let us give thanks;

For generous friends…with hearts…and smiles as bright
as their blossoms;

For feisty friends, as tart as apples;

For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers,
keep reminding us that we’ve had them;

For crotchety friends, sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and
as elegant as a row of corn, and the others, as plain as
potatoes and so good for you;

For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts and
as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes;

And serious friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle
as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as
dill, as endless as zucchini and who, like parsnips, can be
counted on to see you through the winter;

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time,
and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;

For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold
us, despite our blights, wilts and witherings;

And finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past
that have been harvested, but who fed us in their times that
we might have life thereafter.

For all these we give thanks.

So, for all of you reading this, be ye garlic or rhubarb, or corn or zucchini. Thank you, and may your Thanksgiving season be as blessed and bountiful as possible.

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It’s on Fox news, gotta be mainstream news now…

I refer to the debacle of hanging one’s laundry outside of course.

Referenced somewhat recently here: http://everthorn.net/musings/2009/10/i-can-see-your-underwear/?p=677

The subject is now on Fox News, where it will obviously cause mass hysteria and rioting between the believers and those godless heathens who ascribe to the mere notion of outdoor clothes drying.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,575698,00.html

… gee, can you detect a little cynical sarcasm here?

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Well, I am shifting my schedule at work, to one which brings me no real joy, other than that of continued employment.   This is one reason I hadn’t blogged yet this week, and most likely will be a bit light on the ‘daily post’ challenge I made myself earlier in the month, until I get my sleep patterns coordinated again.   4am-noon is a horrible timeframe to be awake, which leaves me two chunks of 4 hours by which to get my regular dream-time accomplished. To whit: before kid gets home from school, and after he is asleep before I go to work, since I want to have some awake-time with him in the afternoons.  Wish me luck!

This somewhat foul-mood-towards-corporate-employment made the most recent XKCD comic (hotlinked below) strike a cynical nerve, and rings all too true for me. Enjoy!

However, in other news, I read this article on TreeHugger blog, about an artist who visited both the ‘dirtiest’ most polluted city in the world, and one of the cleanest/purist.   The observation that stood out to me is how people there lived.  Interesting read -> right here.

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**edit: still  trying to fix formatting. Blog exploded again.  Must be a weekend thing….

I have been reading an interesting book, which I referenced in a prior post, called “Dies the Fire“, which describes a post-apocolyptic world where humanity is struggling to survive after an Event causes technology to fail.

After finishing the first book in the series, I vividly recalled the poem by Robert Frost, pertaining to the end of the world.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Now, the physisist in me always reads this and thinks the poem relates to how the universe will end, either collapsing upon itself in a reverse Big-Bang, or expanding forever into a cold infinity.

Then, I realize that in speaking of desire and hate, perhaps it relates to how the earth itself will end for us.  Either in the cold calamity of a Nuclear Winter, or some unknown firey ending that has to do with passions overwhelming rationality?

Yet, then beyond these things, the Druid in me realizes that the poem itself is slightly flawed.  The world will not really end, not really.

It may be absorbed into the churning inferno of our star, which may in turn collapse within the Universe itself, or we may explode it with a Doomsday Device, but it will not end.  No more than the leaves that fall on the ground each autumn are gone.   They merely transform and rejoin the bio-stream as compost and creature.

A wise man once said, “We are all Star Stuff”, and I agree.  To stardust we will all return, and when the stars fade, we’ll still be Universe-stuff.   We just might not recognize it as ourselves.

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No deep musing today, as I am recovering from night-shift-day-shift-night-shift schedule this week at work, but I wanted to mention a cute inspiring comment I heard this morning.

I’ve been reading ‘Dies the Fire‘ recently and was briefly explaining “The Change” that happens at the start of the novel. This Change is a plot device essentially causing electricity and gunpowder to stop functioning, leading to a return to a bronze-age level of technology.

This morning, as I drove my son to school, he started excitedly telling me that some Changes use a different magic, and cars still work.

I was a bit confused, since he was “asleep” when my wife and I were talking, but he followed with this observation:

“The melting frost on the car window is going UP, and the sky’s all white instead of blue! I wonder what else can magic change?!”

His eyes were shining and a grin brightened his face. I had to simply look outside and smile, with a slight awe-tingle on my neck as well.

Aren’t kids amazing?

What can’t magic, and the hope that drives it, change?!!
So mote it be.

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