Why is it that kids accept with equanimity every oddball thing that you do out on the ice?

Just up the hill and around the bend a deserted ice field. Very inviting. 

What'ya doing?
I’m carving figure eights.
Neat!

(This was the exchange between a little tyke on the ice field at Garner and myself at dusk today. But had he been a few years older, he may have queried further thus:)

Huh?
Figure eights. Except I’m doing it with my car key for the heck of it.

see the contours of a figure eight? 

How old are you?
Fifty-one.

Carving figure eights with a car key seems like something my little sister would do. She’s five.
Yes, well she and I have this in common.

Whom are you skating with?
Alone. I like to skate alone. I don’t do it very often, but sometimes the urge strikes and so here I am, just me and the ducks and you. Pretty empty out here, isn’t it?Why not skate with someone?Because when you skate alone you can speed! Like, go really fast! And when you get tired, you can stop.

Don’t you fall when you go really fast?
No, I never fall.

What a smug attitude! Even Olympic champions fall.
I am not an Olympic champion. If I fell, it would hurt, so I don’t fall. The day I start falling, I’ll stop skating. It’s like driving on ice: you figure out how fast you can go to stay within the margins of safety so that you do not crash. I try not to crash in cars, nor fall on skates.

Speaking of figures, can you do fancy stuff on the ice?
I can do a mean imitation of an Olympic contestant coming out onto the ice to begin a performance. You know how they lift a foot in sort of a curtsey? Yeah, I can do that well. And I can do a half-leap in an inconsequential way that lands me back on ice but resembles nothing anyone has ever done in a professional skating capacity.

Oh. Was it cold today?
Well, I had these terrific Polish wool mittens, except they were joined together with a string and I could not rip it apart so for a while I skated as if I was praying, like this (imagine the other hand in the mitten -- the one that is out at the moment taking the photo and getting frostbite all for the sake of The Blog):

tied at the wrist 

Otherwise, I was fine. Skating like a person possessed. Hans Brinker one minute, Irena Tatyanova Illyanovich (or some such Russian skater name) the next. You can let your mind wander out there on the ice.

Then what?
Then I went to Whole Foods and shopped for dinner. Skating was just an impulsive detour on the way to the store.

A smooth sheet of ice, a setting sun. Bliss. 

Dear readers: Ocean does not bite the karmic weenie

Fortune magazine’s long article on Why There’s No Escaping the Blog (linked to via boingboing – thanks) describes the impact blogs have on business. It’s tough to lie when bloggers are there to quickly spread the story of your inconsistencies and untruths (emphases are mine):

"If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie," says Steve Hayden, vice chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, which creates blogs for clients. "The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug."

Okay, not always. But it is at least slightly amusing that blogs, fabricated at the whim and fancy of people who may or may not themselves speak truthfully have the power to discredit someone else’s phony statements.

True, we are reminded that “these are still the early days of blogging, and the form is still morphing.” But if these are the early days, where will we be two years from now? Technorati claims that 23,000 new blogs are born every day. Fortune predicts that blogs will replace email very quickly:

Says Bill Gates, who claims he'd like to start a blog but doesn't have the time: "As blogging software gets easier to use, the boundaries between, say, writing e-mail and writing a blog will start to blur. This will fundamentally change how we document our lives."

It’s hard to believe that email is on its way out even as I sit here bemoaning the lost art of letter-writing. But then, has anyone apart from me noticed how hard it is to actually manually write things down these days? The hand is no longer positioned to hold a pen most of the time. I can see it now – a sort of revolution in our evolution as our hands become permanently curved into menacing shapes with calluses at our finger tips. All because of blogs.

Freeze is off, Freese is on

In case you haven’t noticed, the blog that continues to dazzle and chirp with wit and humor (and includes the nicest ever anniversary wishes for Ocean) has awakened from a month’s repose.

But the idea of hibernating in cyberspace has me thinking: should every blog be required to take a mandatory vacation, to invigorate, refresh and inspire anew its author? Is blogging year-round without a day’s break so commendable that I want to brag about it? Look at me! Weeeeee! I never stopped for a minute, EVEN WHEN I HAD NOTHING TO SAY! I continued, I wrote, I posted! And the band played on.

In fact, I am not ready for a blog vacation. I wrote to a friend back in December – stay tuned, I may take a break from blogging after I reach my first anniversary on January 2nd. Here I am on January 3rd, posting about it. And worse, I have to admit that my very favorite blog posting is done when I am ON vacation. My number three* job choice would be to go places and be paid to blog about them.

So, no freeze for me, not for a while anyway. If I could blog through the obstacles placed squarely in Ocean’s lap in the year 2004 (two tense times come to mind: one in Nagano, Japan where I could only post through dial up via a faulty connection to Wisconsin at hundreds of yen per minute and the other in the farmhouse in Todi, Italy where there was not even a phone to hook into, forcing me to walk the streets with my laptop under my arm and beg strangers to let me use their phone lines), I surely would not pause now when I am wired and not even tired (yet) of the entire adventure.

Enough celebrating. Time to get down to the business of grading and visualizing (as a reminder I am acquiescing to the idea that I must see myself as a writer in order to actually come closer to achieving any writing goals). Here is today’s image, fresh from a … well, you can guess:

* Number one job choice: the job I have, of course (Dean, are you reading this?). Number two job choice: leave that one for another blog post in the distant future. It’s nothing racy or original, believe me.

Yep, writing and writing, from early on, until way into the night (am I doing this visualizing thing right, Mr. Optimum Performance? -- because frankly, it's getting rather tedious).