Just Because It's June 23

June 23, 2010

OK, so I’m doing some thinking. Thinking about constructive stuff that keeps my mind busy and doesn’t let me think about stuff that really is not good for me considering where I’m at emotionally right now.

To Dad and Mac: bless you immensely for teaching me to build things in my mind before I built them here in the physical world. I don’t know where I got the ability to think in 3-D, but I’m grateful for it and I know when it came to me building things with Dad, he was amazed. He marveled at something that was for me innate.

And Mac would have smiled at my solution to one particular problem a mechanic had with that monster 440 V-8 a few days ago.

These days I’m focusing attention on a few things:

1. Tomatoes (in the ground – see #2 in a minute…) 16 plants, half of them heirloom, 92.7% of them thriving. Right now we’ve got the perfect combination of hot days (gonna be around 100 degrees for the next few days), and cool (around 59 degree) nights. Battling blossom end rot on one plant, but all others are fine.

2. Making the late Billy Mays proud: I have 2 “Topsey Turvey” tomato growers, one filled with Italian San Marzano Roma Tomatoes, and the other filled with “Heartland” heirloom tomatoes and one heirloom cherry tomato. Miracle of miracles – these things actually work! I’ve had to support some stalks with string so they wouldn’t fall over and break!

3. Roses. My “Twin Popes”. I have 2 Jackson & Perkins John Paul II roses that I planted this year. They are struggling. I made some modifications to their bed, and with some divine intervention (c’mon – can’t ask for luck when a rose named for a Pope is concerned!) they will come back and flourish. Some of the most gorgeous brilliant white blossoms you’ll ever see!

4. Music – on a mission to find acoustic versions of classic songs. Don’t have enough to fill a CD yet, but I’m getting there. Thank you Eric Clapton for legitimizing “MTV Unplugged”.

I have about three more projects in my head, always working there and every now and then getting worked on in real life. OK, 4 projects. No, 6. Some of which nobody would be interested in anyway. One involves "Arkansas Stones", another "classic Craftsman". Told 'ya so.

Emotionally: Better to figure out beforehand those things that you can just deal with and make happen in a day, than to try and figure out problems that are gonna be there for a very long time. The big stuff you just have to deal with as it comes. Because it will always be there, and will always present itself unexpectedly. And when it does, you deal with what is presented to you at the time. Old joke, but pertinent here: “How do you eat a whole elephant?” One bite at a time.

Just a brain dump from Jay’s Brain at 6:17 PM on June 23, 2010.