For the last five years or so, I’ve used the space next to my driveway for raised beds. I’ve got a 3,100 gallon rain cistern in my backyard and I hand dug a trench to the front yard for my drip irrigation system.


It’s worked pretty well, but there are pros and cons. For starters, the beds are pretty close to the driveway, and my wife already ripped my bumper off once and tried to pass it off as if nothing ever happened (I caught it on camera). That was just a one-off incident, thankfully.

Another negative is that I’ve had kids cutting through my side yard on the way to the light rail or on their way home from school. They’ve trampled my pumpkins and zucchini squash a handful of times, and it’s pretty annoying to have put in so much work to grow a few healthy plants from seed only to have them trampled under foot by a careless teenagers.


I’ve also had little old ladies stop by and help themselves to some tomatoes, which isn’t a huge concern, but it does feel a little weird to know my neighbors regularly steal from my garden. I’d gladly give them the food if they’d just ask. In fact, I’ve put extra food out with a “take me” sign before.

But really, I’d like to use that space along my driveway for something else someday. I’ve had this crazy idea for a while now to make our house look a bit like an old craftsman by converting the garage into living space and a front porch.


If we do decide to go through with the renovation, I’d like to shift our driveway to the right to make room for a walkway to the entrance. Since our backyard is so shaded, that leaves my front lawn as a new location for our garden beds. This poses a couple of issues though.

First, I’d have to get the beds moved pretty soon; something I’m not really looking forward to doing in the dead of rainy season. Another issue is the situation with the rain cistern and having to figure out a new solution since the underground pipes can’t really traverse the underside of the driveway and would need to go around the other side — loads of work that could be done later, but a job I don’t want to do. Finally, there’s the issue of my lawn and the appropriate way to retire it without making my yard a complete mess and nuisance.


I’m not sure I have the time, energy, budget, or motivation to tackle all of this. It’s a hobby, and one I quite enjoy, but the food is merely supplemental and the cost-benefit ratio can get out of hand fairly quickly if one’s not careful. Yet I don’t want to give it up.

Maybe some interim solutions will present themselves in my brainstorming, but right now, I’m coming up short as to how best to approach the issue.

We had some wind last night and it knocked out our electricity at around 1 a.m. My son was already sleeping in our bed, but my daughter woke up screaming bloody murder and wouldn’t go back to sleep, so I had to bring her into our bed as well.

The worst part about power outages is that I can’t sleep without my CPAP machine anymore. I have a battery for it to get me by, but I must not have charged it after camping last summer. I got another hour out of it before I was awakened again not being able to breathe.

I had to get creative because I needed sleep. I had an early morning meeting today and needed to get the kids to daycare/preschool earlier than normal since my wife is still in California and couldn’t help.

I started my car, plugged in an inverter into the cigarette lighter, and ran two extension cords connected together from my car and upstairs to my CPAP machine. I got a few more hours of sleep before I had to start getting ready for the day.

I got enough sleep to get by, but I’m charging my big back-up battery in case it happens again.

This morning, I accidentally bumped my HomePod while cleaning off the desk and some music started. Land Locked Blues by Bright Eyes came on, from his 2005 album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. It’s making me nostalgic. That is about the time I stopped listening to Bright Eyes and stopped buying CDs altogether.

I was 24 that year. It was before smart phones became popular, and 2005 was about a year after I got my first iPod. I still actively managed my library for a few more years, but that slowly started to change as streaming became more popular.

My music listening habits are so much more random since streaming became a thing. I struggle to even answer when people ask “who’s your favorite band?” or “what kind of music do you listen to?” I miss the more intentional nature of it all when I’d manage an actual library, even if it wasn’t in the form of physical media.

I have tried to go back at times and explored the underground and alternative music that I didn’t have the privilege of knowing or experiencing in my younger years before the Internet, and in this way, I love the archeological digging and discovering. However, that takes a lot of work and patience because it’s really easy to find a shinier new object of my affection, however fleeting.

I don’t think breadth of content has improved anything about the experience for me. If anything, it’s too easy to push things aside without giving them a chance and I don’t listen to entire albums very often anymore.

I’ve toyed around with having my own library again on a Plex server, but adding new music is not easy, and if we’re being honest, it can get expensive in a way that feels unnecessary. Also, I have so many other things going on in my life that I don’t have a lot of down time to manage it. But these are just excuses. If it were important enough for me, I’d make it happen.

It’s entirely likely that the shift in music medium has caused a psychological shift in me in such a way that I care much less about music now than I once did. If I sit with that feeling for any amount of time, I feel a little guilty about it.

All this to say, music feels very cheap to me these days. It’s everywhere in abundance and therefore it feels much less valuable. As a musician myself, this feels strange to admit, but it’s what I feel in my gut. I don’t have a solution, but I wish it were different.

I want that feeling of freedom again, driving around on the first warm day of the year with the windows down, listing to my favorite album. I want that feeling of finding an album and it becoming the soundtrack that defines a season, a year.

Recently I got into the world of management and I’ve noticed e-mails coming my way in the evenings and on the weekends from director types and such.

I am committed to my job and enjoy the work, but I’m not sorry to say that I’m not getting into a habit of responding to emails on Friday night, midday Saturday, etc.

What I did do yesterday was take my two young ones to a birthday party at Conestoga Recreation Center and ran around a gym for a couple hours while they had the time of their lives. We had a lot of fun and we all got some exercise playing soccer, basketball, etc.

My wife leaves for a trip to California today to visit her grandparents and I will be very busy with the kids by myself until Wednesday night. I’m happy she’s going but also a little bit jealous. We’ll be good, though.

I slept in until about 8 this morning and watched some Italian IPTV after I blogged a bit about our trip planned for later in the year. I’ve been trying to get into the mindset.

Our friend offered to watch our kids for a couple hours, so we took her up on it so that me and my wife could go to the gym. We went for a swim. I tried to talk her into doing laps outside, but we only made it one lap before she was too cold, so we went back inside and soaked in the salty indoor pool and then hot tub.

I made a single serving friend named John who was in his 70s and seemed lonely, so we talked a bit. He spoke of his nearly 30 years at Intel as a project manager of some sort, how he tried to retire many times but it just wasn’t the right time and his job kept offering him more flexibility and money. He’d take summers off with his wife and go sailing around Norway and Sweden, spent a lot of time in Mexico, etc.

He’d recently had heart surgery and was trying to get back into being a little more active, and his doctor told him that exercising in the pool was good, low-impact activity.

It’s hard for me not to envision myself at the end of my life speaking similarly, having similar experiences. Not that I felt sorry for him; he had lived a good life. But with every sentence I imagined myself near the last 10% of my life and looking back and I imagined myself missing the time I am in now.

My kids are still so young but I don’t want the time to move any quicker right now. They are the loves of my life and I don’t even like being away from them. I hope that I am able to provide them a life they can look back on with fondness, to see me as someone they are proud of.

I am in a bit of a winter funk right now, but they bring me joy. We are heading out the door for a birthday party for some of my wife’s friends’ kids, at a recreation center. They’ve rented out the gym. Hopefully chasing around some kids will help shake off the blues. If not, I’ve got a date with the treadmill later.