What Happens While You're Making Other Plans

 

You know the saying life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. It defines my relationship with long term planning. Yes. I need a plan, it provides direction without being as bossy as the GPS in my car. Plans, for me, have to be loosely held otherwise all life gets crushed out of them.

Owning the boat we do and living aboard it were long term plans that came to fruition. Publishing - also a long term plan that worked. Sorta. In true plot-twist fashion, nothing quite works out the way you'd envisioned. I'd imagined a long string of scifi titles to my name by now. Instead, the publisher asked for anything that wasn't scifi. Well okay. There's that bossy GPS after all, yelling at me that I'm taking a left NOW into other genres until I find home.

The reason the cat in the sunbeam is up there is that he illustrates one of the finer points of long term planning. Every single one of us tucks our hopes and ambitions and drives into our goals. Those goals reflect some of the finest points of our aspirations for ourselves. And then the universe hands us a situation that shows us that our priorities weren't what we thought they were. Or maybe I'm just a terrible planner. Point is, the elderly gentleman above has set his paws on his path out of this life. It's a long slope for him, one that could take another year to two years, if I'm lucky. The trade off is that I'm on call for him 24x7. Medications. Shoveling food into him. He cannot be left for more than four hours at a time. I understand it's a little like having itty bitty kids - cause he gets me up every few hours of the night to tend him. And not a bit of this was factored into my long term plans. Any plans, really. Sure. I still have long term plans and I am still working toward them. But let me stress how this guy getting sick utterly altered what I believed were my priorities.

Most of us think we understand our priorities. I'd submit that we don't. Not entirely. We're human and we operate from a particular blindness that assumes everyone and everything we love will remain the same - unchanged. Forever. Intellectually, we get that's not true. But until the severe mental illness strikes you or one of the people you most count on in the world, until that panicked midnight emergency run somewhere with someone you'd trade places with in a heartbeat, your priorities haven't been put to the test.

Every one of us are going to run into bumps in the long term planning road. It's why I've learned to hang onto my plans loosely. Because when life happens, it sometimes pays to examine your fistful of plans and cast aside any that no longer make sense. Once you've done that, though, the vital thing is to keep going. Creep toward the goal. Crawl if that's what you have to do. Just keep moving in the direction of the dream. Whatever it may be. That's where you'll find me. Out there hobbling along my road, muttering at my GPS to shut the fuck up.

Golden Gardens Tour

BWA HA HA! The word of the week thing is dead, which means I am without a topic. Or boundaries. You know what that means??

PICTURES!

This is the beach at Golden Gardens - a city park directly north of the marina where we live. This is Seattle at 7:30 in the morning in May. The sun is coming up on the right hand side of the photo. Left is west. You're looking north. It's almost impossible to see in this little photo, but there's a guy swimming in that frigid water. Sure, he was wearing a wet suit, but daaaang. The water temps around here are between 50 and 55 degrees F. Also? May is jelly fish breeding season. Noooo, thank you.

Yeah, sure. Seagull. Great wildlife score there, Marcella. Mostly, I was just impressed with how sharp the image is when I've got the telephoto dialed way in on the bird. Kind of impressed, too, that he deigned to look at me just as I snapped a photo. See the point sticking out in the water in the photo above? That's where the seagulls were hanging out. It's true that we have more than our fair share of seagulls. They nest in the breakwater. (Huge sea wall of great big boulders that shelter boats from wave action, creating a sheltered moorage.) Every evening, the seagulls swarm, shrieking and alarm-calling because the bald eagles soar low over the rookery looking for seagull chicks to snack upon.

These pilings are all that are left from a couple of docks and boardwalks. The park had originally been developed in 1907 by a real estate speculator trying to lure people out of the city (and sell them a lot somewhere along the way...) The problem with docks in this location is that the sand spit juts way out into the water and the slope down is so gradual, that low tides dry the whole thing. Any boats tied up to this dock would have been aground for half the day. So when the city took over the park, the docks and boardwalks were removed. Walking paths have been established above the tide line, but the beach sand is always available for strolling. 

And even though Puget Sound is technically inland water, it still packs a powerful punch. Storm surge throws all kinds of stuff around. Including rocks into the hollows of beach logs.










This is probably plenty of graphics to ask your browser to load. So I'll leave you with one last shot from the morning of this photo expedition. 8:30. I came home to this:

 

Weight of a Contract

Contracts. Ah, contracts - the sole reason odd paper sizes persist. Does anyone else look forward to the day when contracts are all online just so you don't have to attempt to fold a contract to fit into a physical file folder?

 

Contracts come in all manner of variety. They imply obligation. Expectation. They list out a set of requirements and actions to be taken. Course, they're a two way street. Usually. In theory, you're supposed to receive compensation for whatever it is you contracted to do. Or be. Or sell. Or whatever hellish combination thereof has been devised.

 

There are explicit contracts which you sign, implicit contracts which you don't. You know about explicit contracts - book contracts, real estate contracts, etc. Implicit ones, though, those are relationships - more specifically, they're the unspoken expectations most of us bring to our relationships. Let me explain...no. Let me SHOW you. This is what an implicit contract, nay - expectation - looks like:

 

 

This is Autolycus. No. He's not a spoiled rotten brat. Why do you ask? Okay. Yes. It IS true that he goes into the bathroom, stands beside the sink (where he has a water dish, thank you very much) and howls until someone comes to feed him water from a syringe. What? It's not so bad. At least I got him to stop howling for water at 2AM. He waits until 6, now. O_o