jetset/lag blues

Flew the red eye to London over Sunday night / Monday morning. Fortunately I was able to sleep in my coach window seat for about...4 hours total? I dunno, combining three interrupted naps. The crappy thing about flying that far east is that hours of your day / night literally vanish into thin air. The flight took off at 8:40pm, Mountain Time, and landed in London at lunch time, 12:30pm the next day. But the flight was just under 9 hours and I felt like I had slept sitting up for only a few. Because I had.

It's a good thing I slept a bit on the plane, because last night, Monday night, I was up all night waiting and working on materials for a client meeting today, and finally closed my eyes just before 5am, then woke up every 45 minutes to check my email for the the next 4 hours, before taking a shower and going to the office.

So today, Tuesday, I'm a wee bit tired. Tired I can handle. What's really annoying is that right around dinner time (it's now 6pm in London), my eyes still sting a little, I'm still breathing heavily (a not very commonly portrayed symptom of being really tired - I sigh a lot), but mentally, I've been active and firing enough of the day now that I'm warmed up and it's going to be hard to slow down to go to sleep. So now I'm finding myself in the place where I should go to bed soon and just sleep through the night, but I'll be lucky if I get to bed before midnight.

UPDATE: 7:50pm. 

After an invigorating urban walk to the grocery store and then home, I felt even more awake. Made and ate a delicious burger and salad. Ate. Glorious food coma coming on. There may be hope for me tonight after all

UPDATE 7:51pm. Bon Iver's "Re: Stacks" just came on shuffle. I think if I listen to this song over and over again, I could sleep. Love that song. Buy it today. So beautiful and simple. That's my plan tonight. Re: Stacks on repeat and a Tylenol PM. 

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Boulder show on Wednesday.

Laughing Goat poster.pdf Download this file

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So cliché.

We spend a lot of effort trying to be unique and avoiding clichés. I just (mostly inadvertently) had the most cliché Boulder / Happy Valley experience and decided that cliché isn't so bad. I want more cliché.

I drove my Subaru to go fly fishing at the neighborhood Louisville, CO lake. So cliché.

Then there I was, fly fishing in my plaid shirt and trucker hat. So cliché.

As I was wrapping up, I enjoyed the perfect weather and gorgeous sunset over Boulder and the Indian Peaks Wilderness. So cliché.

I walked around the lake, back to my Subaru and said hi to two friends from the neighborhood that happened to be there. So cliché.

I put the key in the ignition and opened up the car doors before I broke down my fly rod and, of course, Nick Drake's Pink Moon was playing on the stereo. So cliché.

So I happily drove home to my happy, beautiful wife and happy, loyal Black Labrador. So cliché.

We wanted pizza. So we're going to go get delicious pizza. So cliché. (Okay, that's just super cliché for me, and I never plan to fight it.)

I'm gladly cliché. At least around here.

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Happy belated Easter, indeed.

I spent Easter weekend lounging around the beautiful and luckily sun-soaked, quaint country roads and fields of Somerset, England with Jaime, her visiting parents and some old and new friends. We were surrounded by sunshine, very early Christian history, family and friends the entire trip. Away from the hustle and bustle of central London, with a 4-day weekend to slow down, enjoy God's sunlight bathing over the rebirth of spring's green, green grass and wax philosophical, I used it as best I could.

The topic of caring for your elderly ailing parents has been coming up in various real and fictional stories I've crossed lately. I think about my mom and worry about the day (decades from now, I'm sure) when she might fall to an unfortunate physical ailment that makes her life difficult. It happens.

But of course, I also think about my dad. And how he'd be glad he went out in a quick blaze of glory on his motorcycle at 53 years old. This is taboo to say. We all miss him so much, my mom most of all, but there's no denying that his sudden departure also knocked some light into a lot of lives. It made people close to him think about the man he was, and who he'd want and already encouraged us to be. In that hard-to-admit sense, something good came of it, which wouldn't have happened if those same people were 40 years older and he slowly slipped away after years of hospice care, or battling Alzheimer's in one of his sons' family's basement. He didn't want it to happen that way. He even made the effort to bring it up quite clearly a couple times in my teenage years. I certainly know he didn't want to leave as soon as he did. But I do believe he hoped, but certainly didn't plan, to go as suddenly as he did, while still sharp as a tack.

Might I be so lucky: Live long enough to leave an amazing legacy, but not so long as to feel like a burden.

Of course, nobody likes to talk about how they want to die. Not in any serious sense, at least. We'd rather just live forever. So that's what I plan to do. With Jaime and my mom and dad and brothers and progeny. Live forever. I'm dead serious. No pun intended.

And that's the totally practical application this year's "Happy Easter."

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