A few thoughts for today. Nothing incredibly insightful. Most of the extra security I wanted to put into and onto the house has been done. Brother has been gone for almost a week now, and that’s a change. I haven’t really been doing much with the camera because the weather around here has been poor as of late. Mostly rain, fog, and not much worth taking photos of, outside. So, I’m looking inside now, in the hopes of finding something I can do something with. Possibly aquarium photos. It’s been a while since I’ve really done much macro/aquarium photography, so maybe I should get back into that again.

Life continues to surprise. I suppose this is good, although I generally don’t like surprises. I think everyone says that, though. I wonder if that’s because most people assume that a surprise will be a bad one?

Christmas in a month. Hard to believe. Still trying to find some place to go, something to do. Maybe a quick trip some place. Any place. We’ll see.

I realized something on the way home from work today. Everything in my life is driven by the promise of some sort of reward. What’s interesting to me about this is that the rewards are often something not really reward-like in their nature. Also, the lack of a reward seems to dictate how enthusiastic I’d be willing to something.

A good example is my morning coffee. I dearly love my mug of coffee in the morning. I need it. But, as long as I know for certain that I can get it, I am willing to put it off, suffer a bit, and do something dumb before I can have it. I can convince myself to hold my coffee hostage until I walk or bike for a few hours. It’s strange, I know. I need this coffee. I am sub human without it, yet, I can force myself to do something painful before I let myself have it.

The converse of this is interesting. No amount of poking or prodding will make me do something for bad coffee. Walk into town for a coffee and then walk home? Please. The coffee in town is crap. I’d rather walk the whole loop in one go and have coffee at the end, the drink it in the middle and risk ruining a good stroll.

That is all.

As I sit here munching on the stem of a buttercup squash (yes, the stem), I’m looking back with my mind’s very tired eye at the last week. A lot has happened this week. It’s been almost a week since the break-in. I am sleeping okay, probably because I run myself into the ground every day and by bed time I am a drooling idiot and couldn’t stay away from bed if I tried. I’ve begun to feel more comfortable in the house again, but I still find myself perking up at noises occasionally. It will probably be a while before that completely stops. This morning, around 5 am, I was cutting some apples in the kitchen, with my back to the same stairs the intruder used. While cutting the apples, a pile of onions in a small bag sitting on the butcher block table behind me, shifted. The noise sounded suspiciously like the rustle of a nylon jacket, and I caught myself spinning around to look down into the basement. I am not so much angry any more as I am disappointed. I had hoped that Fredericton would be more … polished. Refined, even.

My brother moves out this weekend, in preparation of his attending school in Ottawa. The three months he has spent with me have passed quickly. While working, our schedules did not coordinate well, so I didn’t see him that often during the week. Still, I will miss his presence in the house. He is not only my brother, but a stalwart friend, and I wish him all the best.

I am still trying to see if a trip over the Christmas break is feasible. It’d be great to get away, even for a week. I’d love to go back over to the Middle East, but perhaps Central America is an option. There are some magnificent Mayan ruins in Guatemala that I’d love to see.

My squash is getting cold. I better get on with it.

Albert Einstein once said that “A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be. ” The quote probably deals with the exploration and discovery of science and truth, but it applies equally well to resolving conflicts between the heart and mind. It’s good advice, but sometimes it’s really difficult to heed. The annoying thing is that it utterly conflicts with another of my favourite quotes, “The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing”, from Blaise Pascal.

I’ll spare most of the details, but a few nights ago I had an intruder in my house. It was late at night, around 3 am or so, and I ended up chasing him out of my house with a bokken that I keep behind the door. He didn’t take anything, but there is now a cloud of taint over my house that bothers me. Fredericton and I have never really seen eye to eye on a lot of things, and when I lose arguments with this city I was always thankful that I had a place to go and think about life. Read a book, watch a movie, and so on. It is going to take a while to get that feeling back.

If I am to try and go for the silver lining in all of this, I suppose that certain questions are no longer hypothetical. The “What would you do if …” question has been answered. I know what I’d do. You want to come into my sanctum, uninvited, and attempt to take what isn’t yours, and possibly inflict harm on me, my friends, or my family? Wear a helmet.

It also proves a point I’ve been trying to make to people when they tell me that I’m foolish for wanting to visit countries that might be less than touristy. They fear for my safety. You know what? I feel safer when I travel, most days, than I do around here now.

A side effect of this whole thing is that photography has been impacted. The once beautiful colours I’ve tried to capture now seem muted somewhat. I suppose the antidote to that poison is to force myself to get out and keep going.

A day of reflection and memories today. My Dad died 5 years ago, today, and while I think about him almost daily in some capacity, for obvious reasons this day seems like an equinox of the mind. I had a tough time dealing with the passing of my Father, because I didn’t ask for help and I didn’t have a frame of reference for how to deal with grief. It called into question many beliefs that I had just assumed had to be the way I thought they were. Untested. Well. Yeah that didn’t work out as planned.

I’ve been trying to tie some of these posts to lyrics or passages in music I like. This time, I’ll pick something from Crematory, from a track called Left the Ground.

Touch the skies, just like butterflies
Leave the thoughts behind, let the sun go blind
I will see the next one from a higher ground
However it will make things turn, I will have
Left the ground

It’s a nice passage. It’s funny to listen to a very large tattooed Scandinavian dude with long hair a sing about butterflies though.