Saint Swithin’s Day 2012

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Happy St. Swithin’s Day to everyone in the northern hemisphere temperate zone. I hope everyone has by now put their first crop of hay into the barn. Summer is half over, and winter is long.
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-Zenwind.
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Slow Going

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Brain fog, overheating computer, muggy weather, fatigue, and bodily aches and pains – it is hard to get much done these days. All my life I have alternated between meditative repose on the one hand versus big ambitions, high goals and intense action on the other. E.g., days of frantic climbing and then days spent lounging on a rock in the quiet forest. There has always been a rhythm to it, a natural timing of which mode is appropriate for me at certain moments. Listening to this rhythm (not trying to futilely fight against it) is the harmony of eudaimonia -- living according to and up to one’s “truest spirit” – mentioned by Aristotle as being “happiness”, the goal of the art of ethical endeavor.
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Recently I had set too high of a scholarly objective with too close a deadline (and I’m terrible at deadlines): I wanted to finish reading Batman and Philosophy (2008) and write a review of it before the next Christopher Nolan Batman movie comes out this month. Philosophy has always been so much work for me, and I can never push it. Philosophy is a labor of love for me, but I must accept that there must be a balance and that I must rest sometimes. This review was a new goal from scratch, not a posting of a previously drafted document. What I will do is read the book, annotating the margins, and wait until a future time to come back to it and start writing.
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I’ve been working out more regularly on our treadmill, and it will take time to get my strength built back up. (I had to stop lifting again because of back pain, so I’m working on my legs.) The trick to beating the boredom of treadmills is to have a TV/DVD system of some kind right in front of you. Also, have a good rig in place to have a book in front of you.
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The treadmill workouts are exhausting me, but the time lengths of sessions are increasing with more ease than before, and the heart-rate monitor shows that it now takes more and more exertion (in both speed and incline steepness) to reach my optimal training heart-rate. My heart is getting stronger – I just wish my brain would become clearer.
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My legs are sore today from long workouts. The stormy monsoon weather is making the barometer go up and down, making my spine ache. The computer is hot. Time to stop writing.
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-Zenwind.
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Writer’s Block

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The Muse has flown. I feel like my IQ has taken a sudden plunge into the low dullard range. My replies to emails and any work on writing projects are completely stalled out. Dead head.
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I noticed it a few weeks ago with the change of season as the monsoon rains started. The barometric pressure has been erratically going up and down, and that encourages FMS symptoms: pain, fatigue and brain fog. Top that off with a bad head cold that hit me last week and I sit here Dazed and Confused (without any help from booze or drugs, which would be more fun!).
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-Zenwind.
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Tropical Sun

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The Northern Hemisphere moves closer to its solstice. We are still north of the Equator here, yet at 14-degrees N. latitude the Sun is north of us at noon. That always amazes me.
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-Zenwind.
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A Cool Break

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We had a mercifully cool break yesterday and last night as thunderstorms passed through. Clouds blocking out the blazing sun make a big difference, and the strong breezes are refreshing. This hot spell that we have been experiencing for so long is now said to be extreme even for Thailand’s Hot Season norm. So it wasn’t just my imagination after all.
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-Zenwind.
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New Visa, Old Hot Weather

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27 April: We successfully renewed my visa for another year, and this is always a nightmare, trying to scrape up enough money in our bank accounts to qualify and to get the paperwork right. But this morning we did it. Time for celebration.
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The weather is another matter entirely. Brutally hot and humid. We must get new electrical wiring and then install a/c before next year’s Hot Season.
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Yearning for a cool breeze.
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-Zenwind.
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High and Dry Here

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In case anyone wonders, we are okay here. Didn't even feel the quakes. Apparently there will not be any tsunami on southern Thai beach areas.
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-Zenwind.
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Cold Steel Tanto

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I have always tried to go with the “fast and light” ethos – in Boy Scouts, in the military, in hiking, and in backpacking and climbing. Strip all excess weight from pockets and packs. Cut every once. Especially in this heat, I don’t want anything that is not needed weighing me down when I go out on foot.
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I have a great daypack here, a North Face “Recon.” I like it because it has enough compression straps to tighten it down into a very small capacity pack – and small packs do not temp you to fill them up with a lot of junk. “Simplify, simplify”, said Thoreau (and Yvon Chouinard). In a pinch, the Recon will expand to hold a respectable amount of extra stuff, and I only started using it as a bigger capacity pack during the floods when I was foraging for food. Since then, I have been regularly expanding it on food runs and shopping trips to bookstores. A great versatile pack.
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And yet I have been wondering why this pack always feels so heavy when I am starting off from home with it empty. I go through the pockets again and again, dumping out any extra pens and paper, loose change, paperbacks, small flashlights, etc. Even though it is heavy-duty North Face construction, it still felt too heavy for their designers’ proven mountaineering roots. It didn’t make sense.
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So I was astounded recently when for some reason I dug deep into the very bottom of the pack’s padded computer sleeve, which I only use once or twice a year. What is this at the very bottom? It was something I’d been searching for ever since the flooding in October, something I thought was lost downstairs when the water was knee-deep. There, wrapped in padding at the bottom of the sleeve, was my heavy knife, my Cold Steel 7-inch Tanto blade (a Magnum Tanto II) in a thick leather sheath. I had always kept it under my pillow, but I must have put it there in the bottom of the pack when I was packing “bale-out” bags in case the floods forced us to move out, and then I forgot about where I had put it.
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Not only is this a very thick and heavy blade – much too heavy to carry around every day – but it is most probably very illegal here. I got it for home defense use only, because 7-inch blades (like the USMC’s traditional K-Bar) are combat knives with their deep penetration. Damn! I’m glad I didn’t try to visit the embassy with it.
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-Zenwind.
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Hardware Meltdown. Offline

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Sometimes I hate being right in my predictions. The terrible heat seems to have killed my computer, so I have no regular access to the internet.
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-Zenwind.
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Too Hot to Compute

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Our winter here is over, and we have gone straight into the Hot Season. Brutal temperatures and humidity. I am afraid to have my computer running for very long because I think the heat might kill it. So my postings here will be sporadic and usually made up of pieces of draft material that I never finished. I am not spending much time researching online or trying to polish my writing.
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One of the reasons we are feeling the heat more than usual is that we now live in an upstairs room that heats up quickly. Before the floods we lived downstairs in a tiled room without windows, and it stayed relatively cooler there. Moving back down there is not a good idea since it was flooded for three weeks and that dampness will never leave.
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One of our dreams is to someday have the house re-wired with a good, safe, grounded system. Then we could install air conditioning. Until then, it is Sweat City.
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-Zenwind.
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