changes

The school district received a herd of ponies. I was supposed to catalog them, barcode them, and figure out a good protocol for checking them out to students.

They were all in an old corral out in the desert, and seemed wild and restless, as if perhaps they had just been captured and swept in from that desert and we hadn’t exactly been told the truth about their (lack of) training. Also, it didn’t seem like anyone was taking care of them out there so it was maybe going to fall to me to feed them, scrape out their hooves, and do whatever else needs to be done for horses. I don’t know anything about horses.

I felt I needed to learn all the proper descriptive terms for horse coloration so I could create accurate descriptions in the MARC records, but I was afraid to admit my lack of knowledge of horse culture to anyone. I’d never even ridden a horse.

I remember thinking I would probably put the barcodes on their saddles, until I realized that horses only wear saddles when a human is riding or about to ride on them. I was reluctant to brand the barcodes on them, and it would be tedious work to get the symbology and coding correct each time.

Years ago I was driving around out in some rural area and I turned a corner on a lane and in front of me were two pickup trucks, engines running but stopped in the middle of the road while going opposite directions. The drivers were chatting with each other through their windows, and had been for who knows how long. I want to say one truck was brown and the other tan or grey with some white or turquoise trim, but I can’t truly remember. Their colorings definitely weren’t entirely un-horseish, though.

In the pastures parallel to where the trucks were idling, two horses stood on either side of a fence. They were doing that thing horses sometimes do where they stand next to each other but face opposite directions, their tails occasionally flipping a little bit in each others' faces. Like idling engines.

Two trucks and two horses, opposite but parallel. Perfect composition if I could pull it off. It might have even been the golden hour; let’s go ahead and say the lighting was good. I was too afraid of what the drivers might say or do about a random city kid in a tiny Japanese car taking their picture. They just as likely might not have even noticed if I had stopped and taken the picture, though.

Encountering horses in the human world often just makes me feel sad, guilty, a little bit afraid, and like maybe what I should do is sneak back at night and set them all free. I’m occasionally concerned that if I get too close they might bite me, kick me, or trample me, and I’d deserve it for standing there gawking at them or otherwise being complicit in the nonsense. A horse certainly doesn’t owe me anything. But in actuality I understand they are mostly too broken to ever attempt such things against a strange human.

I said “herd” above because it sounded better to me, but in the dream it was definitely first described to me as a “set” of ponies. Catalog our new set of 40 ponies and prepare them for checkout.

I’d settled on a 1 week check out period per student. They could walk or ride the ponies home from the school, but I wasn’t sure how they were going to be able to take enough hay home to feed the pony for a week. We’d need horse carts, or a delivery truck.

At one point a vice-superintendent and a district PR person videocalled me at the corral to check in on “where we were at” in getting the ponies ready and out to students. It was a district priority.

My wife’s cousin’s horses were being ridden around in circles by my nieces, my kids, and some other cousin kids. Everyone needed multiple turns. I was informed that one of the horses was called Dreamer. Right as I was told this I noticed an insect crawling around the edge of Dreamer’s deep, brown eye, accentuating the misty, faraway look I saw there. However faraway and inscrutable that look, I intuited that the dreams that Dreamer dreamed behind those eyes were reasonable and close, centered in the here and now: I think that Dreamer longed to stop walking around in circles in the heat. I think this dreamful creature, itself fulfilling the dreams of so many cabin children with its steady legs and unfathomable eyes, actually just wanted to eat some fucking grass. It was growing all around the edges of the riding ring, and Dreamer kept breaking the circle to go snag some bites of green stuff, before being pulled back into semi-compliance by the child at the reigns.

I could be wrong about all of this, though; I don’t know anything about horses.

Standalone post link: A Horse Called Dreamer

Making some little moves again on my website in prep to possibly come out of social media retirement.

Been like a year - remains to be seen whether I can finally dissuade myself from getting distracted, disheartened, disinterested, dispirited, or otherwise discouraged.

Maybe I need to disco for it.

Yeah, I did that.

Standalone post link: ''makingmoves-disco''

Coming out of social media retirement to tell you about the Tandoori Chicken Tin I had for lunch today from O’Falafel Etc. Wish I had taken a photo of this dish, because the picture on their website doesn’t do justice to the masterpiece of fresh take-out I received.

If I had taken a picture, what you would see is this yummy grilled chicken (just a little bit spicy) mixed with grilled onions and zucchini in a pink, creamy sauce (I think pink from paprika and maybe tomato), served over the most beautiful yellow long grain basmati-ish rice, with a fresh green salad, a cucumber-yogurt-salsa-type thing, a creamy green cilantro salad dressing, and an optional spicy salsa. I think it might be something like harissa but they just call it “the spicy sauce.” I like to just mix it all up together in the tin. One of the best lunches I’ve had in a long time, sitting alone in my car in the parking lot of Fairmont Park chowing it down.

Some meme I saw a local business share on Instagram one time said that one of the best things you can do for businesses (besides buying their stuff, of course) is post good things about them, so this is me trying to start doing that. I’ve liked O’Falafel for quite a while, but I’ve only ever tried three or four things from their extensive menu; those three things have been so good that I generally just want to get one of them again. My other favorites besides the tandoori tin are the falafel sandwich and the smothered chicken shawarma tin.

Standalone post link: ''ofalafeltandooritin''

So I have digital and physical notebooks and a phone and computer filled with photos and random things from the last year that I haven’t shared or done anything with, and I’m seriously considering just starting to go through and post backdated stuff on this website, and on the various social media channels. We will see if I have the guts to be that consistent and that obnoxious.

Standalone post link: ''backdated''

Start of a new month and almost start of a new school year (I don’t go to school or teach but my work still goes by school years) seems like as good a time as any to restart on my blog and social media…

https://www.youtube.com/jVTHFnctLFs

Standalone post link: ''imbackimbackimback''

Could not get enough writing random stuff in my notebook this morning - now I have to type random stuff in my digital notebook this afternoon - and post random stuff on my website this evening.

Also learned tonight that if I put an apostrophe in the first few words of a notes update it messes up the title when it appears - I’ll need to see if there is a way I can fix that in the code, but until then I’ll just avoid apostrophes in the first few words of a notes post. For example, I just changed “couldn’t” to “could not” in this post.

Standalone post link: ''randomstuff''

Going to start posting one new thing (or new-old thing) each day here on my website. I’m finally moving to make this little place my central home on the web, an activity archive, etc.

A daily new thing might be:

• a new or old photograph
• a book or article I’m reading
• music I’m listening to
• a film I watched
• a video game I played
• some random thought or thing I did
• a thing I bought and liked
• a place I went
• a recipe I used
• a page from my notebook
• a notice if I write something or make something that is more than a brief note
• a reposting of an item from one of my old, defunct websites or social media accounts
• whatever else I feel like or think of to share

I always talk big that I am going to start doing this sort of thing, and then I fall off the face of the Internet again. We will see if this time is different - one important change is that I am fully at peace with everything just being over here in my little corner of the Internet. I’m no longer concerned with propagating or syndicating my stuff anywhere else; I’m truly getting over my involvement with most of the silos. This will be my personal archive, available just in case anyone ever happens to look here.

Standalone post link: ''one-new-or-new-old-thing-each-day''

So it looks like I finally have the syndication of short posts set up how I wanted (from my personal Hugo static site to Micro.blog, then to my more obscure Twitter account) at just the time I don’t think I care about doing such things anymore. Oh well.

Standalone post link: ''syndication''

I’ve been slowly making my way through Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. By “slowly” I mean I still consider it as a book I am currently reading, though I hadn’t read a word of it in several weeks until this morning.


So it is taking me months to get through Thoreau’s week- it started on “Saturday” and I’m in “Sunday” still. But to be fair to myself, I think it took Thoreau years to write through his week.

This all started from reading Desert Solitaire earlier this year, and realizing I loved nature writing but hadn’t read much of it. So, I borrowed this Library of America anthology American Earth from the library, and read the Thoreau selections, and then got sidetracked with the idea that I wanted to read more Thoreau before proceeding with the rest of that anthology. So Walden was the first obvious choice, but as I started investigating Thoreau’s bibliography I found that he had this other book he had published before Walden, the project he finished at Walden, filled with a mix of poetry and prose, about a river journey with his brother. The process and style of this appealed to me, and the narrative idea reminded me of Abbey’s account of his river journey through Glen Canyon, which was one of my favorite parts of Desert Solitaire. So, in my ever expanding reading goals, I decided I needed to read A Week before reading Walden, and then after Walden move on to the essays or directly to selections from Thoreau’s journals, because I am fascinated by journals.

Likewise I’ve made the selection of my reading text convoluted - I started by sourcing via archive.org what I think is a 1st Edition scan from the Boston Public Library, and I was reading that directly on my phone as a PDF. (Sometimes I just really like to read these scans of old editions of books - it makes me feel like I am in a rare book room of a library or have tons of money to own vintage editions myself, but I’m just on my phone.)

Then, wanting references and footnotes, I found that the city library had a Library of America edition and so borrowed that and read a bit from that, so as to figure out who he is quoting, or when he has inserted his own verse into the narrative. But I tend to read more readily on my phone these days, and so this tome fell by the wayside and I need to take it back soon.

Finally, yesterday while looking for something else[^1] I rediscovered Standard Ebooks, and found that they had an edition of A Week, and so I am giving that a go, though it has no footnotes. (They also have what looks to be a nice and, dare I say, thorough collection of Thoreau’s essays; and, of course, Walden.)

I might start contributing to Standard Ebooks at some point, if they will have me and if my desires sync up well enough with their priorities for next texts and their style guidelines. If not, I may just learn and steal their methods to make my own ebooks according to my preferences.

[^1]: De Quincey, via the term “dream fugue” that came into my mind as a possible description for the finale of Summer in the City of Roses, which I finished reading yesterday. But more on that in another post I need to write soon once I have fully processed that book.

Standalone post link: A week, but so far a month

Attending the AASL national conference for the next three days, but I don’t play the edu/librarian twitter game anymore, so I’m only sharing anything about it here on my little site in nowhereland. I just hope to learn some things and probably not even talk to anybody? Not sure why I’m even sharing it here. #nohashtags

Standalone post link: ''AASL21innowhereland''