Everyday poetry

The days and weeks have a rhythm to them - some might call it a rut. I'm going with rhythm.

So nothing special about this Sunday. The usual gentle start to the day. Papers, breakfast, cats snoozing in the sun.

And music. Sacred music for sure, this is Sunday after all, and the two of us do have a depth of formal religion deep in our background. So, the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom by Rachmaninoff poured out of the music system (our neighbor is away on a trip) and washed over us. Can't understand a word of it - and you don't have to. 

Truth be told, I do catch a word or two here and there. I have an ear that picks up patterns. But mostly I let it flow over me.

The afternoon had little more than lunch out at a family restaurant, noisy, sit where you please, and have lemon meringue pie and fun banter with the waiter. A few errands - coffee beans being of importance, else Monday cannot be survived.

More music, even if dishes and laundry needed tending. Then reading later into the evening while Gaelic or Italian or Deep Southern English set to music wove tales of love, loss, heartbreak.

Yes, I'll go with rhythm.

Time - the simplest thing...

Clifford Simak will, probably, forgive me for making use of his story title: Time is the Simplest Thing as the title of this entry. It just fits.

There's another title that might do just as well. More of that later.


I have used the photograph to the side of this text before. It is a photo of the clock that hangs on the wall beside the desk where I write. Who knows what it says about my writing, or my writing process. There is the risk that it explains many, many things.

I had thought, up until recently, that it was just me and Dalí sharing a passion for odd clocks. Not so.

My sister, her husband and daughter, visited recently (for a few days before and after our home was actually presentable). My sister took one look at the clock and said, "you too?"

I am the furthest away, out, let's go with furthest west, of all my family and so did not immediately understand her question. It seems we all have likings for strangeness when it comes to clocks.

In parts East we are known as the "wacky Mackeys" because of it. Seems someone has a fondness for rhyme.

So, I come by my wackiness honestly it would seem. I never doubted it.

And the other title? Wacky Mackeys, of course. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's somewhere between 8 and 5 past whatever...

Sorry, no guarantees this side of...

Sometimes plans change, but I prefer that there be reason other than pique behind it.

For a month or more we have been looking at real estate listings in Kansas City, MO. The intent was (and remains) to move there at some point in the future. Nice as where we live is, it will become too expensive at some point.

There had been much back-and-forth communication with a realtor in KC. He had sent us some listings. We had found some. There was even overlap - which suggested the realtor "got it".

Dick had arranged a trip there, four days. Tickets, car, hotel, all done.

Then an email from the realtor saying he couldn't even show any place unless we had all the financing arranged and, in effect, he was assured of the sale.

Further back-and-forth ensued, with the temperature rising. Ending in the cancellation of the trip - and a final email from me freezing everything solid. A bad habit, or character trait, but when I am sufficiently annoyed, everything gets very cold and very formal. It does not seem likely we will ever deal with this particular realtor again.

So, the long term goal remains. But thinking of it is a little toxic right now. 

Well, there's always the lottery.

And so, on to June

We're already heading for the longest day in the year. Somehow, it seems far too short a time ago when the longest night was with us. We must be having fun, time is flying so.

But yes, last week did bring fun with it. Our house is still in quite good condition. 'Twas even better when our friends from KC, MO dropped by. Music in the background, munchies available, wine, wide-ranging and good conversation - for hours.

The cats came to investigate - even Sonja put in an appearance, to the pleasure and amazement of everyone.

All our work cleaning up was worth it, and Jane and Pat were kind enough not to notice where we missed. Good friends.

Then out to dinner - they're gourmet cooks, the two of them. We're not stupid.

That week also provided the opportunity to bury the Lady C in flowers, for her birthday. This elicited a voicemail complaining about all the weeds taking up every available vase in her home. Worth doing for that alone.

The weekend brought a pot luck on Saturday at the Emmaus Community in San Jose. Again, friends gathered around a table, sharing food and time with one another.

Can't think of any better way.

The Care and Feeding of Fountain Pens

Convenience is something at the heart of many efforts in this modern world of ours. I invoke it myself - for example in the convenience of carting around over 100 books on my Kindle. I'm never short of something to read.

Convenient, no?

Wireless networks - yes, the plural is needed, don't ask - running around the house because the printers - I know, another plural - need to be accessible by any of the computers - sigh - so no wires make things convenient.

Let's not talk about the wireless repeaters for remotes, nor wireless headphones either.

Modern technology makes many things convenient. In theory giving back time which we can put to good use. Or waste in an enjoyable and creative way.

In the midst of all this convenience is my fountain pen collection. Not actually in the midst, more standing apart from it. Were I to wish convenience I should have ballpoint pens, or rollerballs if I preferred a more "ink like" experience.

Fountain pens are not convenient. They run out of ink more frequently than the above-mentioned types of pens. Their nibs are more fragile. They need to be cleaned with some regularity or their ink delivery mechanism gets blocked.

But they are beautiful. They are functional works of art. They are personal, they actually shape themselves to your handwriting. The ritual of cleaning, inking, caring for them, has an appeal all of its own.

They. Slow. Me. Down.

And that, in the final analysis, is the best thing they do.

Water? No ice please.

When I arrived here in the US, in 1993, I began the process of rebuilding a life and, in very real terms, a self.

The apartment complex I lived in in Cupertino was unlike anything I had seen in Ireland. A pool, ducks, swans even, if memory serves. Of course the monthly rental on the one-bedroom was only a little less than the mortgage on a four-bedroom home back in Dublin.

Still, it was Cupertino. I was working at Apple. I was in silly-con Valley!

The apartment rental included all the hot water I could use. It was a month before I had any furniture other than a kitchen stool. Sometimes, in that month, I stood in the shower and had the longest hot showers I had ever had. I felt wealthy, not to say prune-like.

Today brought that to mind. Very many things have changed since the early nineties. The condo fee, however, does go towards providing hot water.

Except today. Today there was none. Still isn't any. It seems the heater died. That might have been reparable within a reasonable amount of time, but someone in the complex had water pouring down their walls. That took precedence. No surprise really, nor any complaint.

Except I've really wanted a hot shower all day. A case of wanting only that which you can't have? Probably.

And it's been far too long, Salamanca if I recall rightly, since I've have cold showers. And I was young then.

A musical few days - with interruptions

Lamentable really. Yes, really - not unlike that pun.

Friday played out against a soundtrack that included the Tenebrae of Good Friday sung by the monks of the Abbey of St. Peter, Solesmes. These are the monks I heard when I first heard recordings of Gregorian Chant. This was some years (nay decades, in truth) ago.

The french "ue" sound in the word "Sanctus", or the phrase "sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper", remains with me to this day.

Saturday brought the Lamentations of Jeremiah by Thomas Tallis - sung by the Tallis Scholars.

Two and a half-hours of Easter Vigil liturgy brought Saturday to a close and today was to have begun with Handel's Messiah - but we had a five-and-a-half hour power outage instead. Personally I prefer music.

We couldn't even leave, for anywhere some distance away, as the car was imprisoned in the garage. There is something delicious about the irony there - for a long time our garage was packed too full of boxes from the work done on our home to allow us to garage the car. Now, when the car fits with much room to spare - we can't get at it.

Power being restored, sorry - the Latin of the Gregorian Chant does that to me sometimes, we left for a late Easter Sunday brunch.

When we returned there was still time for the Messiah. The recording is from the 250th anniversary performance in Dublin; the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields orchestra and chorus. I was there for the performance.

While some of the reviewers on Amazon suggest that this is not a good performance, I was there. They know nothing.

While it is impossible to reproduce the dynamics of a live performance, the main music system we have does a mighty job.

All one can say, fitting for the day, is Hallelujah!

In the quiet of the night, ideas come calling

MIdnight, and the witching hour is upon us. The house would be quiet but for the clock that steadily marks the seconds off to my left. That and the cat behind me.

Sonja, like myself, is a night owl. Right now she is engaged in the process of aligning herself along some meridian only she knows about that, somehow or other, runs through Dick's office chair. That's the only explanation I can come up with for the production she makes of settling herself down on it.

She sleeps there part of the night. Cat naps more like. Frequently during the night she goes downstairs to snack. And then back to the chair. However, that is not where she is to be found in the morning. Where she spends the remainder of the night remains a mystery.

This mystery is already eight years old.

Me? I'm typing. I'd say writing but the writing's written. I'm in the transfer from page to screen phase of the writing process. And the Internet beckons, and my blog beckons, as does email, as does iTunes and so on.

This is why I write on paper. The only "click" involved there is the cap on my fountain pen.

But this is a "school night" so I had better save what I'm typing, back it up to the cloud and turn in. The weekend is a better time for padding about in the dark.

The computer giveth...

My personal computer of choice for the past few years has been a Mac. No surprise, I'm a sucker for design. Plus, in all honesty, I don't like to fight with my computer anymore just to get something done - and I spend many of my working days doing that in the Windows world. But I used to use PCs for personal use.

My HP laptop needed a refresh last year, because of a bad motherboard. So, a disk wipe. My main system of some years before that, a mini-tower, died as happens.

Dad and I used to correspond via email. So there existed this wonderful archive of interaction between us - but inaccessible from my Mac. The email was in Outlook Express format and I had taken the time to file his emails to me in a separate folder - and many of mine to him in the same folder. Outlook Express keeps folders in separate files.

On last piece of good fortune. I had taken the precaution of storing my email information on an external disk. So it had survived computer and motherboard deaths. Not to mention internal hard disk wipes.

It took some doing but I managed to persuade the latest version of Outlook Express to deign to read files that are more than four years old. It was good to hear his voice again - and, yes, I could hear him.

The computer taketh away...

In our Mac environment we have an external half-terabyte drive attached to our wireless router. I found it useful when I had my MacBook Air to store "stuff" out there. Some of the "stuff" was my iTunes library. Useful because the Air had limited disk space available.

When I changed to a simple MacBook one of the things I gained was a larger disk, but I continued to keep "stuff" on the external drive.

Just last week I decided that having my iTunes library local to my computer was a good idea and transfered it back to my Mac. Two days later, the external drive died.

I know I lost some backup copies of files. But almost all of my writing is secure. I have a distinct recollection of a file named "Dad's Eulogy" in one of the folders of the now dead drive. I'm certain I have a copy of that elsewhere. Other files now gone? Some for sure. Exactly what, no idea.

Sic transit...and all that.

Mac's Time Machine takes care of my main system. In addition, folders with my writings are pushed to "the cloud" automatically each week.

Sometimes, I hate computers.

Words...words...words

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.'

And the world tumbled down a rabbit-hole or, thinking of the above quote, slipped through a looking-glass.

I recall, a long time ago, getting praise from a Marketing Director in Ireland (I was working for DEC at the time and had just finished a presentation/demonstration of an Office Automation product to a group of Consultants - yes, they did think of themselves as having a capital C). Bill, the Marketing Director, said to me after the hour-long event, awe in his voice, "You didn't say 'No' once the whole time."

And, in truth, I had not. Many things I had said, that might have added up to "Well, no, our product can't do what you're asking it to do" but I have always known that most people don't listen that carefully.

Even so, reading the caveat card accompanying one of those "memory foam" mattress covers yesterday gave me pause. Pause, and concern for the atrocities committed against language.

The card hints that, upon removing the product from the packaging, one may notice a newness scent. The possibility of not noticing suggested by the use of may can only be attributed to the hope on the part of the manufacturer that the consumer's olfactory sense is long dead.

The sharp and ugly scent, a word chosen no less carefully than may because odor carries too many negatives, that greeted me nearly brought about the demise of my olfactory sense (and mine's not all that good to begin with).

The card goes on to suggest that, if after 8 or more hours of airing - in a well ventilated space (because of the danger of suffocation?) - some consumers find themselves hyper-sensitive to the newness scent, use can be discontinued and the product returned to the retailer.

Newness scent. I suppose the words were chosen to evoke the new car smell.

I suppose they might, were it not for the stink.

...and ne're a cat in the house washed!

The second week of the New Year and already it is difficult to remember the Christmas vacation. In the main that is. For some of our neighbors, Christmas (as far as lights go anyway) endures.

Perhaps that's not such a bad thing. I know of those who took decorations down the very evening of Christmas itself. Having grown up in a home where the tree remained until "little Christmas" - January 6th - at least, removing decorations while still in December is foreign to me.

There was the year that some of the decorations, paper lanterns if memory serves, remained strung up for the entire year. Festive, that's what we called it.

As we move forward into this year 2009, it is nice to think that some of the light and color that mark the Holidays might be carried with us.

To Naomi and Gertrude, one Young Woman and one Grand Lady, Happy Birthday.

Music...music...music

The speakers speak!

We finished up the assembly and connections for the music system over the weekend and into Monday. Dick had, on Monday, the final task of strapping one of the amplifiers with cable I bought over the weekend. We don't want KjM doing anything with wires other than pointing at them to a salesperson and requesting "a foot of that and another foot of that please".

It is good to know one's limitations.

And so I receive a call in the afternoon on Monday and music pours out of my cellphone. Clear, airy, full of no intrusion by electronics, music.

The system we have attached to our television is quite good. It served its purpose while the living room was silent. Ah but...ah but...

Music pours out of these new speakers, driven by the 1,200 watts per channel amplifiers, in such a pure and clear way that - well, it's obvious, words fail me. <sigh>

It's just good to have them back. Music is very good for the soul. That makes me wonder - how would the Carthusians "Office of the Night" sound? I will need to check that out. Given the speakers ability to render the space within which the music was recorded this may be the closest I will ever get to being in the Grande Chartreuse.

On the subject of music - we spent the evening in San Francisco yesterday. Haydn's Symphony No. 60 and Beethoven's No. 6 with Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 sandwiched in between.

As always, the San Francisco Symphony was a joy to hear and MTT enjoys his job far too much to be fair. And we enjoyed the fruits of his labor.

You would think by now...

Work continued on getting the music system back in shape. One thing, glad we hadn't contacted the supplier of the speakers to complain about the lack of new plugs to hide the holes for the screws to say nothing about the differences between the old and new speakers.

We opened the box containing the second of the interfaces today. What did we find? A container of plugs - for hiding the holes for the screws. And, of course, two sheets of paper describing exactly how to extract the old speaker cores and how to insert the new ones - with minimal impact to the speaker frame.

Sigh.

We had opened one of the boxes containing the interfaces before going to work on the speakers, just not the other one.

You would think by now...

Seems not.

...came tapping, tapping at my chamber...

The Homeowners Association for our complex engaged contractors to re-roof all the buildings. No longer flat, pitch and gravel as of old, the new are still flat but with a slight slant (or pitch?) and are some form of metal. Truly the roof will remain long after the building in which we live has gone to dust.

Still, the metal will keep out the damp and reduce the incidence of dry rot - something that has plagued a number of the residents.

And keep out the rain it does. Because of the slant there is no more standing water. It, rather, runs to strategically located drain-pipes through which it falls from one raised area to another. Channeled, collected, controlled.

"Falls" - ah, yes. There's the rub. The drain-pipes are metal. To quote Tolstoy in the latest translation of "War and Peace" - "Drops dripped". The Russian phrase, "kappli, kappali", has the happy accident of sounding like the action being described. And, in another happy accident, the English translation (from the latest by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) has the same brevity and sound quality.

And the sound is the thing. One of these drain-pipes is located near our bedroom. The steady and insistent dripping of drops can be heard clearly - but only from our bed. Water hitting metal, drop by drop, all night.

And the clocks went back and hour. So, a longer night.

Don't you just love it when all your blessings come together?

Some assembly required...

After this many a year we are finally getting our main music system back together. The speakers went out on us, after a botched installation of an audio/video system in our family shorted out our high-end audio system (destroying one of our speakers in the process).

Then came the work on our living room, the disconnection of the main audio gear, etc.

A number of years gathering dust. The speaker repairs (upgrades having been made in the intervening years) were costly, and there were always other things to be done with the money.

No more. The new cores for the speakers arrived from Utah this week. In discussions with the factory the replacement seemed simple enough.

Not so much.

The speakers we own are over 15 years old. As mentioned above, there have been upgrades in this family of speakers in that time. It is possible that swapping out speaker cores from a few years back for new ones is an exercise in simplicity. Our speakers, however, were not constructed with such a view to maintenance.

Almost total disassembly of the speaker was required to remove the existing core. So the living room looks like a workshop still.

Tomorrow everything will be back in its place. Of course it will.

Did I mention that these speaker cores are six feet tall and weigh far too much?

See below for photos of one of the cores and the crate (yes, I said "crate") in which it arrived.

Reflections in a pool - thirty years and more deep

Saturday marked the 31st anniversary of my return from Salamanca, Spain - a date my dad used to remind me of each year. Not a remainder of failure as he saw it, of this I am certain. He was a believer in dates. Dates as markers of events, transitions, steps in a person's growth.

My sister found his calendar program on his PC after his death - a calendar program he wrote himself because the standard programs did not deliver the functionality he wished. It contained a wide variety of such dates - including the one marking the anniversary of his first day at work. His first job, shy young man that he was, placed him behind the pubic counter of the General Post Office in Dublin.

There is something about such a juxtaposition that carries within it the essence of the man. Later in his career, this still shy man became secretary of the Telephone Officers Union in Ireland - known to be a fierce negotiator.

Still later in his career he sat on telecommunications committees across Europe involved with standards definition. A cautious eater, Irish after all, he found himself in Finland, Denmark, Holland.

My return from Salamanca marked the end of my formal life as a Roman Catholic Religious - vows of poverty, chastity and obedience included.

Years later, when I lived just over the border from Geneva, my dad told me that he and my mother discovered I had grown up, become an adult when I arrived back from Spain. They spent a number of months "waiting for the other shoe to drop". It didn't - at least not until much later.

This "growing up", "becoming" has continued for many years. I had, in him, a good model on which to base my efforts.

Some sort of order on things

There are sites on the web I shouldn't go to (no, no those sites - well, yes, those too). Sites such as Levenger.

From this site (a friend of ours intoned "Oh those people" one day when I mentioned the site - he is a fountain pen collector) I have purchased writing pads - designed to take ink beautifully and with a very smooth writing surface - fountain pens - well, they were on sale you know - and now, furniture.

A particular type of furniture. Bookcases. Revolving Bookcases.

Since I first saw one such in my Aunt Eileen's apartment 'way back when - I have been very taken by them. Something to do with very much packed into very little space. And just the sheer "neatness" ("neat" as in "cool" rather than any connotation of "tidy" - anyone who knows me knows that).

Eileen's was, and yet is, rectilinear. Our new ones, round.

They are two-tiered but, being modular, could have been as many-tiered as we might have wished. Two is sufficient. We don't need to build a tower by our chairs. That said, given the number of books we have...

Beautiful dark cherry. Smoothly, and independently, turning. A set of books, and other "stuff", to hand in far less space than linear shelving would require.

A set each and very handsome they look. Now comes the question of which books to populate our revolving bookcases with. But that's another day's work.

Work in progress...

Work on our house is continuing - not by our hand (or checkbook, at least not directly).

The roofs of the condo units are flat. They have been for thirty years and more. Living equidistant from two major faults (the San Andreas and Hayward faults) we had the comfort of knowing that, come the "Big One", we could stand on the roof and hope that the Bay would only come up to our toes.

But, while it may never rain in Southern California, as the song goes, it does rain here. Sometimes with great vigor and abandon. And so there have been leaks throughout the complex. Not in our home mind you, but in sufficient others for the Homeowners Association to take action.

The flat roofs are being given a slight slant. This means there have been people clambering all over it this week. Hammering, banging, generally creating noise - and dust (my nose was not happy - breathing became difficult this morning).

The cats have not been happy about it either. Far too many loud noises, footsteps on the roof, coverings over the skylights making areas darker than previously. None of this can bode well when you such a creature of habit as cats generally are. Sonja knows the world has ended - and has expressed herself loudly on the topic.

But the weekend has brought relief. Sonja is curled up on a chair, napping. Her sister, Nema, is somewhere else in the house figuring out new ways in which she can become a nuisance. She is quite creative, in her way.

I should be thankful I have it at all...

I'm very fond of silk. As I type that I hear my Mother's voice very clearly in my head - "it's far from silk you were reared."

True, very true. It still doesn't take away from the fact that - I'm very fond of silk! My Dad used to buy me hand-painted silk ties - amused by the fact that I lived and worked in the non-tie-wearing San Francisco Bay Area. Hand-painted by a French woman living in Ireland for delivery to an Irishman living in California. Indeed, The World is Flat.

My remaining long-sleeved silk shirt went the way of all things some time ago - fraying along the seam, not at the seam so that I could repair it, just along it, the fibers coming apart (there are some days in which I know how each and every one of those fibers felt).

WinterSilks is an online store which has provided me clothing from time to time over the years. Good clothing and, often, reasonable priced. So I was very happy to see long-sleeved silk shirts advertised. Surprisingly, for me that is, I ordered only one. Just to check size, nothing more. If all went well, I would order others - they have quite a range of colors.

I love silk - as I mentioned above. It breathes. It looks - well, silky I suppose (ah, the wordsmith as ever). And is lightweight.

Did I mention the name of the web site - WinterSilks? This is the sort of stuff to keep you warm on those long winter nights (failing other options, that is).

It's a very nice shirt. Really. It is. Nice color. Well put together. Stylish even.

100% silk and woven in such a way that I will have no trouble staying warm. But a little problematic in California in the height of Summer. It's been suggested to me that I should search for a "SummerSilks" web site. Google - don't fail me now!

And, we'll leave any and all discussion of the silk thermal underwear for another time and forum.