Ho hum, here's a post. . .

Immediately, all the potted plants on the back deck, our "garden" this year,  are dying of thirst as if they haven't been watered in days. I placed reservoirs under as many as I could fit and hope that the wilting isn't as permanent as it looks. It's the dog days of summer and my bees are displaying an inordinately high level of activity this morning around the entrance to their hive. I don't have enough experience yet to judge as to whether or not this is normal or what might be the cause of it, I just know I haven't seen them this active since the day I hived the colony. I fired up the smoker and went in briefly looking for something obvious but there was nothing but busy bees to be seen, and a single small hive beetle in the feeder portending trouble I do not yet have. I've decided to dump the vermiculture bin that I've kept in the basement for composting kitchen scraps by way of worms because I believe it might be the source of fruit flies that plague Mrs. in the kitchen. The bin is supposed to be full of worms but springtails and the curious scattering of what appears to be fruit fly pupae attached all along the underside of the lid are more the rule than the exception lately. I shall try again later with  a place in the basement where Mrs. can put kitchen scraps this winter but in the mean time I will construct something quick and simple for outdoor use.

While in the basement  this morning, I noticed a strange pattern of dried liquid that had recently streamed across the floor like the ancient "ocean beds" of the martian surface and had pooled under the furnace. Oil? No, there's mold growing on it. Water, of course, but it's not from streaming in through the gap under the door from the outside stairwell that sometimes happens after a heavy rain . I followed it back to . . . the water heater that BiL had only just installed a few months earlier (panic!!!) but luckily that wasn't the source, either. Last week I put a small wine rack over in that corner of the basement that we'd rescued from a dumpster some years earlier, and there I discovered that fully half of the dozen bottles of homebrewed cherry lambic I had stored on their side there the previous week had ruptured their corks and spewed all over the concrete floor.  Joy! I had expected to have and keep those for a while, to break out on the rare occasions when we actually have company. I'll set one of  the remaining bottles aside for Mr Lange, the comptroller of the hospice organization I work for who brews beer with his church, and take the rest to the honey extraction/BBQ I've been invited to attend tomorrow. Better enjoyed now, for certain, than saved for a possible calamity, later. Four and a half liters wasted. . . . It seems that everything I try to save for a rainy day only ends up getting washed away in the deluge, and I'm reminded that there is only this moment. Relax, it's later than we think.

Next, my job: I stopped by (local sports bar) after work yesterday evening for barley pops and oat sodas with Todd, the consultant who is assisting with our capital campaign and James, one of our IT managers. Being a rank-n-file, non-exempt employee with little business sense for the organization beyond what I do there in the Philanthropy dept. (and do well, I might add) the conversation with these two was a way for me to "check the vitals", in a sense, to get an overview of the organization that recently went through a location transition, and a couple years prior to that replaced their (our)  CEO with a woman from West Virginia who is decidedly from a more clinical background than what the organization is accustomed to. Since then she has adopted a business model put forth by a company called Multi-View, Inc (sketchy much?) that is in keeping with her clinical experience. Within this multiview model there's precious little in the budget for technology and nothing in the way of fundraising, or development as it's sometimes referred to. So, I'm getting a sense of an early, distant warning of my impending lay-off despite that the director of my department is actively trying to retain me with flexible schedules and promises of a decent increase in compensation. We've been counting on my job as a source of health insurance, at least, because my income there is fairly marginal (and outright crap for the market we live in).  I do okay for a guy lacking certain educational credentials, I earn just enough in wages and benefits to make my job very difficult to replace. But worse, it keeps me from moving to the valley, an hour and a half west of D.C. on a full time basis. Oh, something has to give eventually! In what we know as the future there exist perceptual corners around which logic and speculation cannot sense and I shall remain cautious with what I wish for!

But all those are possible future scenarios, and isn't this supposed to be a blagh about babies and diapers and daddyhood, and such. I have to admit that I really don't have the time/mental capacity right now for the "examined life" as it were. Far from wanting to be the main source of angst here at GA, I'll try to chime in here occasionally over the next few months, preferably when I actually have something relevant to share. Daddies like me, the reluctant type, come into these things from the outside-in especially being that all the real action currently is still happening in utero. I still have 87 days until Bunky's here, 87 days to  live what I call "my life": working my job establishing and maintaining adequate distance between shit and fan and sorting paperclips for hospice, tending to my bees and garden, hopefully putting some libations aside for when I don't have the luxury of time nor the peace of mind.  87 days of cleaning and mending, deep breathing and learning and re-learning to rise to meet the needs and expectations of the beautiful mommy-to-be-again at my side. 87 days to get my house in order, whatever that means. And after that I die again, or at least the world I enjoy goes into remission to make way for a new life. His, mine, and ours.