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skyringBack into the swing of things.
Last Friday, I flew out of San Francisco after a glorious holiday. I am blest with some amazing friends, and I give thanks every day to Bookcrossing for being such a marvellous treasure of literate, generous, caring and quirky people.
Saturday. There was no Saturday, unless there were random bursts of it over the International Dateline, which we crossed somewhere near midnight. I looked out as dawn came, somewhere north of New Zealand, and the sight of the Southern Cross hanging over the wingtip told me I was back home again.
Sunday. We came in low over the coastline south of Sydney, circled around for the glide path over Botany Bay, and home again. Slight touch of giardia, and I really regretted picking up my bags as soon as I saw them on the carousel, because it seemed an age before I was through customs, rechecked, through security, on the transfer bus and into the lounge.
A couple of hours to spend having a shower, drinking coffee, catching up on email, and then the quick propjet flight to Canberra, where I was picked up by smiling family.
Distribution of goodies - the lollies/sweets/candy that had attracted the time-consuming interest of Customs - and then a nap. Somewhere along the way came the news that there wasn't going to be a cab for me to drive on Monday as planned. We went out to dinner at Mecca Bah in Manuka, coffee at Artoven, and life was good.
Monday and Tuesday just kind of passed by. The touch of the guts, a developing cold (probably pict up on the plane), and just general fatigue kept me in bed a lot of the time, so I was kind of glad there was no cab to drive, though heaven knows I need the income now.
Tuesday was especially galling, as it was Melbourne Cup day, and the night shift is a great one for earning money. Oh well. Went to see Kerri playing table tennis, and I drove back past the Kingston rank at about nine with no cabs and a lot of passengers waiting.
Wednesday, I pulled out the maps and dockets and tickets from the trip and began to paste them into my travel journal. Then the owner rings about noon, he's got a car ready and can I come pick it up? So I got DD to drive me over, picked up the cab, and had a nap before starting work at the usual time. I needed that nap.
Wednesday nights from now own are going to be taken up with Kerri's philosophy course, which takes about three hours out of the night. Enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. I spent a lot of time thinking hard about the material we were being given. It's fairly lightweight as philosophy goes, but the theme of the course ties in very well with my own recent thinking about how to make best use of my life.
Thursday was another light shift. It's quiet in Canberra, that's all there is to it. And there are too many cabs on the road. I bought a new modem - one without a wireless router.
Friday, I took advantage of an empty house to set up a new wireless network, feeding the modem into the Apple Time Capsule I bought a year ago. It claims that it will add into an existing network, but research (and experience) told me that unless that existing network was built on Apple products, forget it. So we now have a wireless network that cures many of the problems of the earlier one, does transparent backups, and enables wireless printing.
That night I bought an inverter for the car, running the Air off it. Typically I get maybe two hours of battery time, which isn't long enough to last me an entire shift. Particularly galling if I get hours of free time and want to do some work between passengers.
Saturday, we went shopping in the morning, and spent a lot of the rest of the day resting. Had a cider on the balcony in the late afternoon with Kerri and it was soooo pleasant. Lovely to be sitting out in the evening this time of year.
Last Friday, I flew out of San Francisco after a glorious holiday. I am blest with some amazing friends, and I give thanks every day to Bookcrossing for being such a marvellous treasure of literate, generous, caring and quirky people.
Saturday. There was no Saturday, unless there were random bursts of it over the International Dateline, which we crossed somewhere near midnight. I looked out as dawn came, somewhere north of New Zealand, and the sight of the Southern Cross hanging over the wingtip told me I was back home again.
Sunday. We came in low over the coastline south of Sydney, circled around for the glide path over Botany Bay, and home again. Slight touch of giardia, and I really regretted picking up my bags as soon as I saw them on the carousel, because it seemed an age before I was through customs, rechecked, through security, on the transfer bus and into the lounge.
A couple of hours to spend having a shower, drinking coffee, catching up on email, and then the quick propjet flight to Canberra, where I was picked up by smiling family.
Distribution of goodies - the lollies/sweets/candy that had attracted the time-consuming interest of Customs - and then a nap. Somewhere along the way came the news that there wasn't going to be a cab for me to drive on Monday as planned. We went out to dinner at Mecca Bah in Manuka, coffee at Artoven, and life was good.
Monday and Tuesday just kind of passed by. The touch of the guts, a developing cold (probably pict up on the plane), and just general fatigue kept me in bed a lot of the time, so I was kind of glad there was no cab to drive, though heaven knows I need the income now.
Tuesday was especially galling, as it was Melbourne Cup day, and the night shift is a great one for earning money. Oh well. Went to see Kerri playing table tennis, and I drove back past the Kingston rank at about nine with no cabs and a lot of passengers waiting.
Wednesday, I pulled out the maps and dockets and tickets from the trip and began to paste them into my travel journal. Then the owner rings about noon, he's got a car ready and can I come pick it up? So I got DD to drive me over, picked up the cab, and had a nap before starting work at the usual time. I needed that nap.
Wednesday nights from now own are going to be taken up with Kerri's philosophy course, which takes about three hours out of the night. Enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. I spent a lot of time thinking hard about the material we were being given. It's fairly lightweight as philosophy goes, but the theme of the course ties in very well with my own recent thinking about how to make best use of my life.
Thursday was another light shift. It's quiet in Canberra, that's all there is to it. And there are too many cabs on the road. I bought a new modem - one without a wireless router.
Friday, I took advantage of an empty house to set up a new wireless network, feeding the modem into the Apple Time Capsule I bought a year ago. It claims that it will add into an existing network, but research (and experience) told me that unless that existing network was built on Apple products, forget it. So we now have a wireless network that cures many of the problems of the earlier one, does transparent backups, and enables wireless printing.
That night I bought an inverter for the car, running the Air off it. Typically I get maybe two hours of battery time, which isn't long enough to last me an entire shift. Particularly galling if I get hours of free time and want to do some work between passengers.
Saturday, we went shopping in the morning, and spent a lot of the rest of the day resting. Had a cider on the balcony in the late afternoon with Kerri and it was soooo pleasant. Lovely to be sitting out in the evening this time of year.
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-07 09:32 pm (UTC)Perhaps I looked nervous - more the thought of a long wait before I could get to a toilet than anything else - but they pulled me aside and went through my bags. My BookCrossing tote bag they found the most interesting, perhaps because for the size of it, it was grossly overweight.
"Books," I said, but they opened it up and yes it was books all the way down.
"The tricky part now," I said, "is packing them all back in again!"
The lollies didn't hold their interest much. I don't mind if customs has a look in my bags. I'm innocent, but if for some reason there's something in there that shouldn't be - forgotten fruit or a slice of leftover summer sausage - I'd rather it be picked out and disposed. I'm a big fan of the "Borderline security" program on TV.
Kerri has just given me a tiny pink rose from the garden. How I love her!
Philosophy course. Eight weeks and I mist the first three by being overseas. The first night I was still here, but we thought we were doing the Saturday course not Wednesday, but they didn't have the numbers for Saturday so they moved us to Wednesday, and so we both missed the first session.
Session four, and we began by doing an exercise - draw away from normal routine by engaging the senses. Feel your place in the chair, in the room, in the community, in the world. Listen to the sounds, the smells, the light.
We talked about states of awareness, from deep sleep to fully awake, aware and engaged. Mostly we are in "waking sleep", on automatic pilot. We go about our lives, not thinking much about anything, just doing the everyday things we do every day.
We talked about justice and wisdom, how they cannot be absolute, but "in the opinion of the best" we can have a good idea of what they are. How emotions detracted from the absolute. Making decisions in hatred - or love - might not be the best choice.
And how fear of consequences holds us back from doing things. We'd rather go on being comfortable instead of moving on, moving up, moving ahead.
But the point that engaged me was a triangular diagram, resting on bases of "Need or Opportunity" and "Stillness" with "Inner resources" inside the triangle and the uppermost point labelled "Potential manifest".
We can realise our full potential by directing our resources at the right time. But we can only do it by being focussed. That point of stillness represented in the movies when the hero has to kick the crucial goal but the crowd is roaring at him and his team-mates are looking at him and the opposing team is are doing the same and the ref is blowing his whistle and it all goes quiet as the hero puts his attention on the ball and the goal and the wind, exactly as he has been trained, and the distractions are but distant sounds and he kicks - and wins!
Or to put it another way, “Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war, said Clausewitz.
The theory of war is simple. One knows where to put the guns, where to defend, where to attack, what resources your side has and what the enemy has. It's a chess game, pure and simple.
But when the other side is shooting at you, when you are tired and hungry and scared, when your officers are pumped full of adrenalin, when one mate wants to win a medal and the other wants his mother, and the horses have not been fed and the screwdrivers to undo the ammunition boxes have not been found and everything has to be done in a super hurry, then it becomes difficult.
Which is another way of saying that emotions shouldn't intrude into decision making.
I found my own stillness, thinking deeply about what I was hearing, sorting it out in my mind. I love being in such a state. I think hard about a painting or a poem, or a situation - or a person. And I can find the way.