The Glaciers retreat

The last of the snow seems to be behind us now, and the neighborhood is showing signs of spring. Snowbanks are receding, and things we'd lost for the last few months -- curbs, sidewalks, room to pass a parked car on a narrow street -- are returning to us again.

But, the glacier's retreat isn't uniform. Walking up the hill, the sunny side of the street is bare and purple flowers are blooming in clusters at the foot of each stone wall. Shaded by the trees across the street, the snow is still piled deep and slow streams of melt water dampen the roadway. Unlike the glaciers of old that scoured most of Canada and dropped it here in New England, our annual ones seem to be content in leaving mounds of sand and cinders, along with a goodly number of empty bottles and cans. This leads to a few more quaint New England customs of spring; the coming of the Town's orange street-sweeper truck to brush away the sand, and the addition of an extra plastic baggie on the dog walk to carry off those bottles and cans to the recycling center.

The dogs are confused by this, as in their experience baggies are normally carried for a different purpose on our walks, and there is not usually so much pleasure seen when one is filled to near bursting. Still, they're content to let me have my little amusements as long as it doesn't interfere with their primary objectives, which are (in order) getting petted and ooh'ed over by every person we meet, and sniffing every item of interest along our path. The good weather certainly helps them in the former case, as the number of other walkers we meet seems to be doubling daily.

As for the sniffing, I'm wondering if some critical gene is missing from their heritage. You see, the foxes are back, or at least it smells like they're back. Walking over the crest of the hill, we run into pockets of definite fox-smell on the breeze, but the dogs don't seem to notice anything. This is doubly odd, as my inability to smell most anything is rather a running joke in our family. Perfume, nope. Soured milk, nope. Gas-smell-in-the-basement, hardly. Luckily for my sanity, Elissa has also taken note of the smell when she walks the dogs, so this isn't all some furry fantasy of mine.

For completeness sake, I should also report that the snow has finally cleared away from the fish pond, and I've gotten the filter cleaned out and the pump running again. It appears we lost two of our largest and oldest fish over the winter, but three or four smaller fish survived. I'll monitor the situation for a couple of weeks, and then see about moving the indoor fish out again when the water's gotten warmer.

What's all This, Then?

So, the question has finally come up as to what exactly I'm trying to do here. Having been a fairly private person all my life (personal motto: "Keep a Low Profile") why the public introspection all of a sudden? Let's just say that I got to a point where figuring out what I've been doing all this time became important to me, and this is part of that process.

The trajectory of my life (as with most other folks, I suspect) involved lots of planning, directing, and thought in the beginning, followed by a rather long run of just letting things happen. Then, one morning you wake up and ask yourself where you are on that path, which can lead to the far more disturbing question of whether that place you aimed at so many years ago is still of interest to you.

There's a running joke I've maintained for many years, fed by the all-consuming "decision meetings" that modern businesses seem to generate with disturbing frequency. Whether the decision on the table was whether to sell the company, scrap a failed development effort, or to paint the trade show booth pale green, hours were spent in agonizing discussion, argument, and persuasion. Unwinding afterwords, I'd often muse "a hundred years from now, will anyone actually care whether we choose 'A' or 'B' today? Will they even remember that there once was a company named 'X' or even products that did 'Y'? And if they do, will they laugh?"

Being a technologist is like that, as technology (meaning science as applied to the creation of objects) feeds on itself dynamically, giving any one static bit of it a very short shelf life. Or as Douglas Adams once put it: "They were so backward, that they still though digital watches were really cool."

And I grew up to be a Digital Watch-maker.

And I, as middle-aged guys are wont to do, wondered if that was in itself a good and sufficient result to justify my life's efforts. Or, extrapolating a bit, whether I'll be happy being fed gruel in the Old-Digital-Watch-Maker's home, reminiscing with the other ODWM's about the time someone accidentally made a watch that counted to 13 rather than 12.

So, think of this as a bit of an interim inventory, assessing the random bits I've gathered up in my life which may be of some interest to myself and to others. And, contrary to the nerdy expectations of my youth, a disturbingly large number of those bits seem to be comprised of remembered experiences, relationships, life-lessons learned, and other non-numeric truths.

Like the pleasures of walking dogs in the snow.