no more girl kats

Love the mamakat, I do, but its a love-hate thing.   She’s a biter: not just love nibbles either, but deep in your flesh rip you apart might need stitches bites.    Been more than one occasion where the bite was vicious enough that she was in my rifle sights as she fled the suddenly pissed off openly bleeding hooman slave.   I’ve never pulled the trigger, obviously, but she HAS been that close to splattered-kat.

She is cantankerous, ornery, and flat MEAN and thats on her good days.  Her bad days are more feral. And that ‘change’ can happen in the flicker of quark.  All of us ‘boys’ walk on eggshells around her, never knowing if she is gonna ‘give us a bath’ or strike for blood.  Voo has to be escorted into the house these days because she seems to have taken a serious dislike of him, reasons unknown,,,

No more girl kats,,,,

It’s domestic duties day, laundry, set up Da’s meds for the week, and anything else that may have been put off for whatever reasons (like mowing my yard, not for the grass, but to mulch up the leaves). 

And I may end up on a lake or river yet,,,   Blue Jean is still riding high on Buffalo: just need to toss the gear I hung to dry, back in the truck.  IF I do that, its gonna be close, fuel costs are back up (like they ever really came down, dammit)(we had a very short spell where they were under that $3 mark, they are creeping back up to the $4 mark again)(Thank you Uniparty of the ‘free’world and their puppet with too many hands up his ass.)

How to change the future; start with YOU.

Funny how the illustrious Mrs Hoyt comes up with posts that hit home on me so well.   My thoughts have been percolating around those very things she mentions in that post.  And that if I want change, I need to make it happen: the rest of the world will do as it will and I can’t affect that.   That change for me must be long term and focused since I am not the young buck I was, and time is not on my side anymore.  Funny how that happens huh?  You wake up one morning and realize “I’m OLD!!!!” and that day is when you start to get serious,,,

54 doesn’t ‘seem’ old, not when you are sitting on its porch, but when you start to look back and see events piling up closer and closer together and yet it feels like years in between them, when its actually just months,,,    Time does NOT slow down as we age, it accelerates.   I was just looking back at some pics and vids of my kayaking stuff. One in particular jumped out at me: a vid of me rolling Ghost Boat.   The time stamp is in the lower corner and I realize that the day I made that vid was just prior to a crux of events that tossed my twenty-twenty-WON into a maelstrom.  I lost a plate to the fish, converted to Macintosh computers, lost my Ma, almost lost my Da, quit work three times, and scraped through the year on less the 12grand, while maintaining a kayak hobby and even gaining a boat or two,,,   All of that was spread out over 12 months, but the majority of it covered 4 months and it was me bouncing around like a pinball the entire time.   (I also realized that those four months were the birth of my anxieties I have been fighting while kayaking,,, More on that in a later post.)

Even this year, has gone by so fast I’m finding the transition from summer to winter feels as if the seasons are doing an Eight-ball while pushing the engine to WOT with full nitrous feed and a blower.   Screaming and smoking tires buried under the roar of tortured mechanical parts.  It’s not fact that things are moving faster: I am just moving slower and things are keeping to their normal pace: the speed is just my perception of it.

I don’t know how to throttle time back, and I wouldn’t be struggling financially if I did.   But I do know that the future I hold is MINE, and how I want to go about it is all ME, with adaptations to those around me as needed.   May be a minor form of solipsism in there, but to hell with it, I don’t live in their world and they don’t live in mine; we just rub edges.  I can’t make big changes, YET, but I can put the peices in place for that time.   And that is what my goal is right now.   

And to do that, I need to be in better shape.   Getting ready for race season is part of that, but the goal is not just for race; its for the remaining years.   Or I guess you could say it is for the race,,,,   Because things are moving faster these days, at least in my minds eye.  I am back below the 200# mark, and still need to work on the spare tire and wind issues, but I am doing better. More time on things at home will help with the workouts on the water, but I AM building that ‘habit’ of doing what I should, not what I wanna (which is “sit and veg” most nights) 

“If I’d known then what I know now,,,, ”   We all say it, maybe in our own minds, but we all have said it in one form or another. Can’t change the past, you can only change YOU, here and now, and how you change determines what your future may hold.   No regrets, learn and move on.   Hold on to the value, and discard the valueless.      Cliches, but cliches hold truths, truths we need.

And I am waxing eloquent,,,,   That means I need to hit publish and get on with my day or I am going to sit here and stew in cliches and blurbs.