My Mind: Lifesized

You may be wondering where I've been hiding the past few weeks...my posts are becoming less frequent and not as full of juicy details. I've been a busy boy this , working more than usual trying to get 4 reviews completed and preparing for the holiday. I've also been stepping up my workouts, trying to speed up my conditioning so I can try a move to a different workout regimen being used by my friends John and Rick. It's called Crossfit and it's used by the military and police forces as a total body conditioning program. It is very difficult and challenging and to date I've only been able to do a few of the exercise with any degree of success. So I'm now working out daily and I've also started to change my diet to accompany the new regimen. I'm hoping my renewed focus on my physical condition will spill over and keep my mental condition positive. This is always a tough time of year for me, Winters onset (at this stage the theme is cold and grey

This song, Mean Flower, by Joe Henry (from the Album Scar )has been dancing around in my head for days. So much of my idle mind has been filled with it that I had to make a new mixed CD with Mean Flower as the centerpiece. What a gut wrenching and beautiful song. I have to admit though, it's added to the mood of melancholy I've been in ever since the election ended and the skies over the Missoula Valley turned grey...if we see the sun in the valley again before March it will be marked with great joy. The elections...yuck, yuck and yuck. We've probably all had enough talk about that but for me, it's not that I even liked Kerry that much, it's just that I don't like Bush at all. And my fears about what will come next are only heightened by the nomination today of Cond0leezza Rice to replace Colin Powell as the Secretary of State (SOS). I fear for the future, if her nomination is approved. Anyone who is a student of history, especially since the war of 181

Today is Veterans Day here in the USA, a day where most people only know something is different because the banks and the schools are closed. I put my flag out this morning to honor the soldiers who have served and lived. I'm always a little self-conscious about the act of putting my flag out...but I do feel it is the appropriate thing to do, especially on a day like today. We celebrate Memorial day as the day to honor fallen soldiers, but we don't pay much attention to the ones who survive the messes we put them in. I have tremendous respect for those who are willing to serve in harm's way, who work for terrible wages and who suffer the mental wars long after the physical ones desist. In our medical practice we deal with a population that is overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly over the age of 50...we have many veterans. Today we made a sign thanking them and put cookies out. It's the least we could do. I called one of our doctors, who was a Navy surgeon in V

My little house has a detached garage that opens onto an alley, well sort of opens into the alley. The garage, like my house, is quite old; but unlike the house there doesn't appear to have been much of an effort made to at least keep it functional. The roof is sagging and the shingles are only half there, with the remaining ones curled up like a snarled lip. There are two sets of swing-out doors, one I've made permanently unusable after a break-in and the other is barely hanging on...I've sort of rigged them to stay shut. There were two couples that lived here between 1920 and 2001, and then the yay-who who bought it as a rehab before selling it to me after one year (he is supposedly a contractor, but based upon the quality of the work he did in here I would say he will be out of business soon). Until today I only knew that the last couple (before the yay-who) lived here for about 40 years. But today I learned a whole lot more from an 83 year-old German man named Ot

Wow, what a feeling...I arrived at the old Lowell School, the polling place for precinct 89 (my precinct) this morning shortly after 7:00 AM; that's the time the polls opened and there was already a line. The electricity in the air was evident the minute I stepped inside the building. People were EXCITED to vote. And what an important election this is. No matter which of the aisles you fall beside, this election matters more than possibly any other since Hoover v. FDR and the New Deal. In Montana we have 5 choices for President/Vice President...5!!!!!! Personally, I think that is awesome. Nader is on as an independent, we have a Constitutionalist candidate, a Libertarian candidate, a Green candidate and the two major parties. In Montana we're also electing a Governor/Lt. Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Three Supreme Court Justices, a Congressman, School superintendent, State Auditor, District Court Judge, County Commissioners and City Commissioners and cho