Audeo has moved!

Not that my moving means much to you all, but it does mean I have a domain name again for the first time in eons. ;) There’s no design yet, but as always, it will be a continual work in progress as I experiment with things.

You can find me at Serendipitous Design. (Yeah, isn’t spelling a bitch?!) So update your bookmarks! Yes, I mean all three of you. ;)

A Place in My Mind

Ahhh… Sunday morning in Houston, Texas. Supposedly the temperature outside is 71°F, but inside it’s a nippy 65°F. Yes, nippy, damnit! I didn’t move south to feel chilly.

The thing I like most about living in Texas (over Florida) is that there’s more of a change in seasons here. Leaves actually do fall from trees, and there’s a real possibility (though not probability) of snow once in awhile. This is a good thing in that it allows me to edge my way into feeling… let’s call it homey.

This is the time of year when instead of clicking through the holiday tunes that are always on my iPod, I let them play out. It’s also the time of year I think more and more about my island home in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Sugar Island is where Mum grew up, and where I spent every single summer of my own childhood.

So why do lower tempuratures in Texas remind me of a summer place in Michigan? Ha! You jest. I said it was in the 70s and chilly here. 70° a perfect summer day Up North. The chilly feeling reminds me, not of the summers we spent almost entirely in the water, but the winters when we would visit my grandma on the Island.

Gram heated her house with a kitchen wood stove. The chimney ran up through the middle of the house, and on chilly mornings I can remember running to press my body against that upstairs brick wall before making the mad dash down to the warmth of the kitchen.

In the living room there was a second wood burning stove that was only fired up during really cold weather. It would blow hot air out from the bottom, and after breakfast you could almost always find me sitting in front, toes tucked under the edge. Someone was always telling me to get back before I burned myself.

We have nothing like that here, unless I count the puny gas fireplace that does nothing but draw what heat we do have right up the chimney. I can almost see the dollar signs as they float up and away. No, instead of snuggling around a smoky smelling wood stove, here I huddle next to my electric stove for the few minutes it takes to make my morning coffee.

As the water heats enough to boil up and collect in the reservoir, I cup my hands over the burner as if it were a tiny bonfire. If I close my eyes and focus on the warmth permeating my hands, I can almost remember the feeling of cold mornings at Grandma’s Roy’s. It’s one of my favorite memory places.

Gary: 2002

I wrote the following in two separate mini writing sessions in the summer of 2002. I thought I’d post it here and maybe inspire myself to dig a little deeper into Gary’s story. What do you think?

The tree was a huge, clawing thing. Its inky, leafless branches snaked out Medusa-like from a trunk more than twenty feet across. After Gary got over its sheer size, it was obvious that that was not all that made the tree unique. The surface was a shiny black, or was it silver? As he moved around it seemed to change with the light. It reminded him of hematite. Gary wondered if maybe it was formed of stone. It surely wasn’t alive, was it?

“What the…?”

He approached it from the road side, since coming at it from the opposite side would involve climbing a good hundred feet or so of sheer rocky cliff. The cobbled road led right up to the base of the tree and stopped there, wrapping slightly around tits base at the edges, the stones buckled where it met the tree, as if it had sprung up just moments before in the center of the path. Of course, the road ending at the bottom of a steep drop would seem almost as strange he supposed.

There was writing on the trunk. Or no, it was gone again. A trick of the light? The surface was extremely reflective. In fact Gary could see a dark image of himself as he moved around it. Carefully he reached out a hand to touch what he supposed should be the tree’s bark, expecting the shiny darkness to feel cold to the touch, but it was not. He jerked back as he felt the almost pulsing warmth beneath his fingers.

Eyes wide he reached out again and this time, as his fingers trailed across the smoothness, golden writing appeared under his touch, only to fade as his fingers moved on. At least he assumed it was writing, although he’d never seen anything like it before.

He rested his palm flat against the tree and the golden words flowed outwards from his hand. This time they did not disappear, but wrapped themselves around the tree and up into the branches until the tree shimmered with them. Gary, staring up into the tree, forgot about his hand against it and let it drop to his side. As soon as he did, the writing completely vanished, leaving Gary blinking up into the black branches.

Gary looked from his hand to the tree and back again several times before his brain began to process what had just happened… what he’d just discovered. Once his synapses started sparking, it was all he could do to just stand there and stare as the entire plan began to click into place in his mind. It was all making sense. He could hardly believe that this.. thing.. was what he had been searching for the entire time, and to stumble across it like this, well it was beyond believing.

Once his mind slowed to a reasonable pace and Gary could focus, he again lifted a palm and placed it flat against the side of the tree. Again he watched in awe as the golden symbols spread from his fingertips to cover the warm, dark surface. They wrapped around the trunk and snaked up into the branches until even the tiniest twig of a limb was shimmering gold and black. Then, all at once, it seemed as though the end of each and every branch burst into its own small flame. It looked to Gary as if, having nowhere else to go, the writing simply exploded from the ends of each branch, creating fiery leaves that flickered silver-gold.

This time when he lifted his palm from the side of the glowing tree, the words did not fade, but continued to writhe serpent-like across the inky surface. The tree had virtually transformed in minutes from a dead looking thing into something that literally sparked with life from every branch. Still amazed and staring up into the flickering “leaves”, Gary didn’t hear the man approaching until he spoke from directly behind him.

Mum & Dad go boating

Life with my parents has never been dull, and apparently some things don’t change with age. I grew up thinking vacations were spent on a 27″ cabin cruiser tied to some cliff in Ontario. Staying in a hotel was something entirely foreign to me until at least my teens, and even then it only happened once every few years and was always tied in with some meeting Dad had to attend for school.

When Dad retired, ten or thirteen years ago now (I’m bad with dates), they sold the old wooden boat (the “Nicole”. Gotta love that!) and bought a fiberglass Searay monstrosity. Thankfully I had already moved away, so I’ve never had to deckhand on the narrow, badly designed beast. Alas, that left Mum as sole deckhand having to navigate the narrow sides of this monste… but I digress.

A couple weeks ago, Mum and Dad (M&D) took off on a little jaunt to Richard’s Landing, Ontario (a frequent weekend destination for them). About two hours into the three hour tour (yes, I just said that), Dad noticed he was having to throttle up more and more to keep the same speed. This, of course, happened in Lake George just about the same place our old boat sank when I was seven.

By the time they made it through the rapids not far from their destination, they were at full throttle and barely making headway, but they somehow managed to avoid the rocks. The engine finally died all together just yards from the marina, and they coasted the last several feet. Apparently Dad, all 5’6″ and 70 years of him, lept the last few.

Apparently something had broken, and water was being pumped into the bilge rather than out of it, slowly sinking the boat. So they called the local boat fix-it guy who came down to the dock with his little toolbox and fixed the problem after several trips back and forth the 30+ miles to get parts. Dad, of course, made fast friends, and the man (and his dog) ended up hanging with M&D on the docks, drinking into the late evening. That’s my Dad… making friends with everyone.

Now a lot of people would be wary of taking off in a boat that had all but landed at the bottom of the river three days before. Not M&D. They waved goodbye and started their merry way back upriver. Now the trip back takes them through the shipping channel. This means they’re in hundreds of feet of water with 1,000 foot freighters sharing the waterway. It can be quite dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, or are incapacitated somehow. You see where this is going?

An hour or so from home, the engine died. Kaput. Nada. The current in the channel is fierce, but luckily no freighters in sight to drag them into their wake. Finally Dad finally resorted to calling in a Mayday to the local Coast Guard (ah the memories). They tell M&D that they’ll be along as soon as they can get there, and to sit tight. So my parents drift until they’re outside the boundaries of the shipping channel, and throw out an anchor to await rescue. An hour and a half later said rescue appears to tow them to the nearest marina.

Now I’m just guessing here, but knowing my parents as I do, they likely passed the time having an afternon drink and some snacks.

What Comes Around

2005 by ishrona at Flickr.com

Christian is taking an online networking class, so, for all intents and purposes, I am taking an online networking class. That’s how it works around here. One jumps in, the other follows to make sure all the bases are covered. The fact that it’s Cisco networking and I’ve been certified before is neither here nor there. That was eight years ago, ancient history in Computer Land.

We bought the book, which is the same book I studied from for my exam with an updated cover and several new pages. Flipping through I quickly relived those painful weeks of what I lovingly refer to as Acronym Hell. It was a time I have often hoped to never have to face again, and yet here I am willingly taking it on, albeit at a much slower pace. They actually break the book into two classes over two eight week sessions. I crammed the entire thing into a month of self-induced learning mania.

I do love to learn, and things are much clearer this time around, but if I had the choice I’d have never cracked open a Cisco book again in my life. Yet somehow, in the depths of my mind, I knew I wasn’t done with it all after I was laid off in 2001. Despite the fact that the tech crunch left me jobless, it felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I was free!

So what does Nicole do when she’s free to do anything in the world that she wants to do? She moves south, of course. And so the story went. I moved to Florida, bounced in and out of both the travel and website design businesses and somehow ended up in Houston with Christian where we have a cozy little business. He’s a Field Engineer for Samsung, and I take care of the paperwork side of things from home. He goes to school in the evenings studying electronics, and I take care of the Cisco networking side of things.

It seems I have come full circle.