It’s been a while….again.  Life has a way of whisking you away from what you want to do sometimes and I’ve been away living and learning new things.  I have been thinking about how much cold rain I am so very tired of having dropped on my head these recent days when so much of the rest of the country is beginning to enjoy the newness of spring.  It’s been feeling like I live in a rain-soaked moss-pit and frankly I’m tired of it.  It’s been depressing!

In the last few years I have had a chance to really look around me and see just how much stuff I have accumulated those times when I might be able to use it or wear it again or build something out of it.  The “it” is stuff.  Clothing, shoes, gadgets, raw materials like metal and wood and so on.  I have collected such items for one reason or another but it’s never been about simply having the thing but it has been about what I could do with it.  At one time I was trying to outfit my shop to be able to share it with family but there just hasn’t been any interest and I’ve come to the conclusion that aside from the one time I did help my father fix a wheel bearing in a pinch, there’s not been any interest it at all.  Sadly I somehow left the impression that I was about owning the things rather than being able to share the things with those I cared about.  It was supposed to be about the experience and not the stuff…I failed in my plan to be able to share what I was doing because I guess it came off as showing off when it was really about wanting to share experiences of doing things together and helping family with little things like oil changes and so on.  Now I just do that stuff when I need to and it’s not the same anymore.

I’m beginning to look at doing things outside of the home more and enjoying the experiences of seeing more of the world.  I’m finding that the “things” are while still useful, also weight when it comes to being more mobile.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s always a need for the person who has the ability to build or fix things but life is less about that these days and more about being light and compact.  Small footprints with great big accomplishments seems to be the goal.  We’ve moved from creating much of anything unless it’s somehow connected to a computer somewhere and typically the creation is about how to capture or present information in another exciting way with new angles and electronic connections to other information for deeper reference or research.  We can ask our talking internet household spy infotainment gadget what the weather is going to be for the day and what traffic looks like on our way to the office and for fun, we can ask that same device to make the sounds of a kitten or tell us where the daily earthquakes have happened.   More to come…soon.