That's the famed beekeeper from New Zealand, Edmund Hillary, on the right, who died yesterday at the ripe old age of 88. I love this classic picture of him and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. It's about as badass as it gets. They were the first to summit Mt. Everest in 1953 and when they made it back down to base camp, Edmund famously said, "We finally knocked the bastard off!" Then they sat down on their gear and had coffee, apparently.

In its day it was a hell of an accomplishment, given that they were without such luxuries as GPS, Gore-Tex, satellite phones, and corporate sponsors. In my mind, Hillary was the last of the real adventurers, at least until we develop interstellar space travel. Sure, there's all those guys who balloon around the world and so forth, but big deal, I say. Ballooning? Now, seriously. And then there's this guy, another Kiwi, who plans on skateboarding around the world. Magellan he is not. Jobless, yes.

There's all kinds of annoying firsts up Everest now -first without oxygen, first woman, first blind guy, youngest to summit, oldest to summit, first one from each country, first one in a purple jacket, etc. I suggest everyone try to do it using the same assortment of utilities that Hillary had: wool socks, leather straps, etc. Let's see who's really the badass now, hmmm? Climbing Everest has become something of a novelty for the wealthy, nowadays, as, if you have enough cash, you can pay a Sherpa to carry you to the top on his back. These Sherpas are the real climbers, too, as they just go up and down the mother-of-all-mountains all day long, with big smiles on their faces.

But Edmund Hillary was more than just a mountain climber, he was a good guy, too -generous, kind, and determined. He always refused to say whether he or his Sherpa was the first to set foot on the summit, claiming they'd done it as a team. When they got to the top they pulled out the camera to get some pictures, but Tenzing didn't know how to work it, so Hillary just took a picture of Tenzing, his Sherpa.


Well, what would you do? Edmund Hillary spent the rest of his life raising money to help the poor Sherpa people of Nepal, figuring he owed them at least that for making him famous. He built schools and hospitals and an airstrip in the Himalayas, and he was well-loved for it. He was the first New Zealander to get his face on the money while he was still alive. He immediately autographed a bunch of the five-dollar notes and auctioned them off, raising thousands for the Sherpa people.

Hillary Clinton once boasted to Edmund himself that her parents had named her after him after he conquered Everest. Edmund found it amusing, no doubt, that someone would name their daughter after an unremarkable beekeeper from New Zealand, given that she was born five years before he'd become famous from the feat. Since then, Clinton has backpedaled furiously about it. She may backpedal all the way up Everest, as far as I can tell. Another first.

Edmund Hillary did a bunch of other bitchin' things in his lifetime like journeying to the South and North Poles (with Neil Armstrong no less) and jetboating up the Ganges river to its source. He always considered himself nothing more than an ordinary guy and lectured schoolchildren that anyone could accomplish anything if they worked hard enough. He was no stranger to the pains of life, too, when his wife and only daughter were killed in a plane crash. (He later remarried and had another family.) He was a titan in New Zealand, but his local obituary called him "humble, hard-working, and honest" and claimed "we will not see his kind again," which is altogether sad for humanity.

Hillary did not want his ashes scattered over the Himalayas, as you might imagine. Rather, he wished them to be tossed into the sea near his birthplace.

"To be washed gently ashore, maybe on the many pleasant beaches near the place I was born. Then the full circle of my life will be complete," he said.




~

There is a difference between English Chestnut and Golden Oak. Evidently I'd been using two different stains in the house and didn't notice it until I put two separately stained pieces next to each other. This was a vast sky of disappointment that opened up above me when I put the two together. There was no going back. With all the projects I've got backing up, I'm not going to go and rebuild everything just because the color is a little off.

And by "backing up" I mean in the manner of life's incessant constipation, and I'm not referring to my hard drives (though that remains a matter of some concern.) Part of everything that is going on right now is the tax accounting of 2007 amidst the organizing and paying of old bills. I'm better at the organizing part, which is why I went ahead and stained the office organizer. (The wrong color. See? Do you really want me paying the bills?) I found a pile of bills and could not make heads nor tails of them -so I asked Mrs. Ditchman. She said the pile was so big it defied organization. While not encouraging, I was up to the task!

Or, whatever. I actually put the first check of 2008 in the bank today -which covers nothing, I know. It's gonna take another ten or twenty of these, really. Times like this you want to get outside and run for it, but really I just need to get outside and work for it. I actually chickened out on my long run the other day because of impending work. I put it off, and will have to add a couple of miles in the end to feel good about it.

But I'm glad I'm not the only one! I still have October to do, myself, but then again I jump around a lot, depending on what my attention fancies. I failed to do a quadruple backup of everything in my recent Great Memory Migration, and paid the price. Some of Hawaii 2005 is gone forever, unfortunately. Let my lessons be lessons for us all. The Digital Age has its drawbacks.

So I will burn everything to discs from now on. Or just burn everything. I've been slowly sifting through old boxes of pics and such, trying to cull a few memories back into their rightful places on the new computer, and it is a near impossible task. A lot of the files, it turns out, were corrupt to begin with, and it only takes a couple of computers to really set things afoul. Then again, maybe I got a bad MacPro. Could be, as the new ones came out just the other day! "A Tower of 8-core power!" Grrr... Well, I know, I know... I just couldn't wait! But no one can -which is the Digital Age's most defining trait.

So back to the grind, back to the organizing of Life. I persist, I really do, because when the pile is neat, I am more comfortable. And when I am more comfortable, I am more tolerable. I do it for all of you.

Oh thank you! Thank you! Just what is it that makes you so tolerable today, Sean?

Why, I just organized my bathroom toiletries into a clever arrangement of "Soaps and Cleansers", "Lotions and Ointments", and "Vitamins and Medicinals" and it's all put me in a rather sunny demeanor!

God bless us, everyone!

~

Dear FBI, we missed your call yesterday when we were out. Please call back!

I go all day at work collecting things to blog about. It keeps me interested and attentive and prevents my ADD from getting in the way of tasks at hand. Unfortunately I've taken to posting in the morning, after the tide of sleep rolls out and takes with it all the mental detritus accumulated from the previous day. So where does it all go? Back out to sea, I guess. (I should be grateful.)

Speaking of the sea, and speaking of detritus, there is one nasty critter slithering around beneath the rocks of my reef aquarium. Referring to my collection of reef critter identification volumes, I've pegged it as a "Bristleworm", which does not please me. It could be any one of the ten thousand or so species from the Polychaete (worm) family, and the behavior on these creatures differs and is poorly understood. It's a nocturnal beasty, and lately seems to be aroused when I feed the fishes at night. Bristleworms smuggle themselves in on the imported live rock, feeding on aquarium detritus -old food, fish crap, and the like. Normally they're a beneficial critter, cleaning up after everyone. They're beneficial and irrelevant because they're usually about an inch long, but the one in my living room is at least six inches long. I'm not sure of his total length because he's never fully out in the open -I just see his bristled segments sliding past in the dark spaces between the rocks, ad infinitum. Shine a flashlight on him and he speeds up.

So I guess there's not enough fish crap for him. He'll probably start eating the corals soon, if I fail to feed him. He's like the monster in The Little Shop of Horrors, or some other Sci-fi flick, and it's beginning to worry me, lest I become a slave to the appetite of the family bristleworm. I could have him removed via some trap I suppose, but I'll keep this handy.

The gruesome weirdness of this creature cannot be understated. It has a proboscis with folded in teeth that can shoot out when "hunting or alarmed" as one book says. (Oh, great.) Aquarists call them "fireworms" because that's what it feels like when you accidentally rub against their bristles when you're unwittingly rearranging the rocks in your tank. You could try killing him if only you could get to him, but he's a Polychaete, as I mentioned, which means that if cut in half you'll suddenly have two of them, munching on your expensive corals on either side of the tank. There are a few natural predators, some crustaceans, that I could procure to go after him, but from what I've read they won't take on a worm this size, and then they'll just start eating your pretty fish. I imagine that that would leave you with a graveyard of a tank, with an ugly worm on one side and a nasty crab on the other, hating one another like bad neighbors. And I don't need those bad vibes in my home.

Here's a picture of a typical Bristleworm (not mine, who eludes the camera):



Just look at that ugly head!

It could be worse. It could be a Mantis Shrimp. I've heard stories of the hidden razor-sharp dagger that the Mantis Shrimp ejects in a flash, lobbing off the tips of fingers and, in some cases, cracking whole tanks. Take a gander at this beauty, which every aquarist who has ever encountered one will tell you is the most loathsome creature in all the hobby!


If Science Fiction writers ever run out of material, there's plenty of untold stories from beneath the sea.

~

It's Primary Day! This makes the previous seven days of the year sound like a book jacket, and to tell you the truth, they've been about as meaty. I was going to type some about the current politics, but what would I say? It would just fritter away into a shameless opinionated take on the world you've heard somewhere else. And why would I want to alienate my readers now, when I could keep you interested for a year and alienate you to utter perfection in November? Additionally, all I wanted to say about the candidates was captured clearly and easily by Lileks, so it's no use being redundant (as if I could.)

Today, the Internet brings you this:

	I received 79 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Guess the Sci-Fi Movie Sounds hereCanon powershot

I'm so disappointed I only got 79! To be honest, I went back and played it a second time because I wasn't sure about one of the answers, so I did get to boost my score a couple. I guess it's going to be one of those days where I'm just not the geek I aspire to be. Certainly I'm not geek enough to figure out how to work the paragraph and line spacing in HTML code.

Still, I believe it will be a good year, even though Hillary has been crying lately. We will have a new president come November, which should make about half of the country happy, and we'll have a new Indiana Jones movie in May, which should make the other half of the country happy. Or the same half. Not sure. It will also be the year of Potty Training, as I noticed this morning. The Little Ditchman was perched up on the commode with an Elmo picture book in her lap. Whatever it takes, I guess. Me? I read the Opinion section.

But the mighty rains have passed for Southern California, and much of it was not washed out to see, or to sea, thank goodness. All we need in 2008 is another media spectacle to reenforce global warming fears and foster distain for our poor leaders. All the same, there was a bit of panic in these parts when people looked up at the grey sky over their mud-faced hillside in the backyard. I noticed on the news that they were handing out free sandbags on various street corners around town. "A city employee will be there to help you load up your truck!" they exclaimed on the news. It was nighttime. A city employee? Loading sandbags into my truck? In the dark? In the rain? America's Finest City indeed!

~

Well, they did say it was coming. It finally got here on Friday, though my new 50 cent rain gauge sat dry and idle for a day or so, but look! Nearly three and a half inches! That'll be it for the next ten or twelve months, so go ahead and roll the patio furniture back on out. I'm no stranger to a deluge such as this. We had more than that in the first three miles of the Honolulu Marathon.

It's that time of year again! Time to back up all the files in the hard drives! Yes, that's what I did with the bulk of my weekend, and my, what an insanely boring task that is. There are few things less fulfilling. It's the kind of act where you just wish for an unexpected calamity to demand that you pull out your backup. Now that I've backed everything up, I expect a calamity-free year. If everyone did the same, why, we'd have world peace by Memorial Day.

Also spent a little bit of time on Google Analytics, where I can monitor all of you monitoring me. I know who you are! I'm nearing 100 unique visitors to this site, averaging about 15 regulars a day, peaking at about 10AM, which means many of you are probably wondering what happened to me this morning -I won't bore you. It has to do with the router. (See? Boring.) I'm hoping that bells, whistles, and a free pizza go off when I actually do reach a hundred people. I'd like to honor the 100th customer. Send them a congratulatory Email with a coupon for free scrap aluminum. I hear you all clamoring for it in the distance as I type this.

I find it interesting the Google searches people have used to find me here at TMST. Of note: "full moon on christmas" and "pomegranate cocktails" will both direct you here. Also used: "backdoor santa meaning", "buddhist christmas salutations for christians", "brain cancer glossy eyes", "definition of poofta", and notably: "walrus dicks" and "poo dangler". See what you've been missing?

More disturbingly, I rather innocently wrote the phrase (encoded here) "my n@k3d d@ught3r" only to find that someone had come to the site using a Google search on that phrase. I have since corrected it, you sick bastard, wherever you are. Let that be a lesson to all of us. The Internet can be a dangerous place.

And so is all the world. Speaking of the world, I've had visitors from nearly twenty countries, including a reader in Svenke, Finland. Hello, Finland! Or, as they say in Finland: "Tervetuloa!" As well, nearly every state in the union has come around TMST, which is nice. Greetings strangers! Also a number of visitors from Canada. (Dear Canadians, when I refer to your country as "America's hat", I mean it in a kind, head-warming sort of way.)

May this week be a productive one, and in the interest of making it so, that's all for today.

~

Fits and starts. That's what's come of this year so far. Fortunately, I know that the whole year doesn't have to be like this. Sometimes you trip at the sound of the starter gun, but you get up and run a bit faster for a time, and pretty soon you're running alongside everyone else.

The Most Significant Thing was not supposed to be all the alcohol that was consumed at the New Year's party. Looking at the crate of aftermath, I spy a number of champagne bottles that went into the punch bowl potion, which ended up going down the drain the next morning. I also see a bottle of port in there that had been finished off weeks previous, as well as a couple of other familiar bottles, so we really didn't drink that much. (Of note: do you see my reflection in the bottle of Monticelli Brothers there in the foreground? Neat! -click to make bigger-) I wonder what the neighbors thought. I wonder what they thought of me taking a picture of it.

The rains were supposed to come last night. "Brace yourself for the powerful Pacific storm!" they said. Uh huh, I'm still bracing. I hadn't planned on running this morning and had scrapped a bunch of plans for yesterday and the weekend that involved me moving everything out of the garage, so this morning I awoke to discover that I could have achieved a lot more yesterday, which always bums me out. It runs alongside of "I could have achieved a lot more last year", and so I felt somewhat depressed. Yesterday it seemed the only thing I did right was lift up the Little Ditchman to see the fish tank, but this morning I'd had two cups of coffee, then I read this, and it wasn't raining. So I ran.

I had a couple glasses of wine last night. The past month or so, I've experimented with my habit of drinking half a carafe of coffee in the morning and three beers in the evening. Wonder of all wonders! When I don't drink alcohol the night before and then keep it to one cup of coffee in the morning, I feel better, run better, and end up less dehydrated after the workout! Imagine that! So I've taken to my new training method, more or less, with some optimism. I hadn't planned to run this morning on account of the rainy forecast, so I had a couple glasses of wine last night and a couple mugs of coffee this morning, and then found myself feeling some early January hopelessness. So I ran anyway.

To a second, I got the exact same time I did yesterday, running the exact same distance. The body is a wonder. If you take care of it, it can accomplish the unthinkable. If you fail to take care of it, it can bounce back pretty fast when you finally decide to.

The truth is I probably would have wound up running faster today if I had kept with the regimen, but I felt good today nonetheless. It was about the fifth mile where I started to feel really strong. A song came on that got me thinking about things, all the unfinishedness in my life that burdens me, and I started to get choked up. I could feel the chest tighten, my legs pushing a bit harder on the hill that I was on, and it was like mile 18 in just about every marathon I've ever run.

A few weeks ago I received an E-mail from someone I hadn't heard from in maybe ten years. It was just a friendly E-mail from a classmate in my 8th grade Algebra class. I think I last saw him at our ten year reunion, which was ten years from when I saw him the time before that. He's a great guy, married now with a kid, like me. He'd seen the blog and just wanted to say hi and good job at the Hawaii marathon. Wow.

And then the other day I received an E-mail from another guy whom I also hadn't seen in ten years or so. He had just left the military, and had been in Iraq and Afghanistan. Looked me up and found the blog. Wanted to say hi. What a surprise.

And then yesterday I heard that a family friend had died. There seems to have been a lot of death in our little circle of blogs lately, so I didn't want to expound on it. Joan was our real estate agent who found us the house, and I didn't know her very well. She'd been retired for a while, but kept a hand in the business and helped people out from time to time. This was not the house we wanted, and at the time I felt that Joan talked us into the place. She took one look at Mrs. Ditchman and I and had us figured out immediately. "This place is trashed," I said. "It's a joke." She waved her hand and dismissed it. "Oh, Sean you can fix all that." She was right, I did. Our lives changed. I don't think she made more than a few dimes off the sale. A year later she came to our baby shower and we proudly showed off to her what we'd done to the place. I swear she smiled knowingly.

The house at New Year's was filled with some of our closest friends and all their children and I took a look around at one point and thought my, my.

Well, what would you say? Life moves ever forward, grows and stretches, bends, breaks, and finishes. All the significance of it gets sidelined by unfinished projects, cluttered desktops, worldly distractions, and the ever-present minutiae of a seemingly endless line of mild disappointments which build on each other if we let them. Like walking into a cloud of gnats at the mountaintop, we get too busy swatting to see the view, but in our own small ways we lift each other above it.

And so, on the run this morning it all flooded in. Good. The running works.

May we rise and be lifted above it all this year.

~

Damage Report: New Year's Eve

January 3rd. I resolve this year to blow off petty responsibilities in the name of getting something more significant accomplished.

Just kidding.

But, oh how that would please Mrs. Ditchman. I don't know why I didn't get around to posting yesterday or the day before. Could be the hangover. (And you just know it was a good party when you're still hung over on January 3rd.) Last night my wife made the suggestion that I just not have a beer. That's a suggestion you really can't turn down, lest you pull up the on-ramp on the highway to alcoholism. Then, with a smile on her face, she said, "Do you think you can?" where at once it became a challenge. We were out of beer anyway.

I don't know what I had more of in December, alcohol or cheese. If there is a cheese hangover, I have it. Seems like I ate enough cheese over the holidays to dam the Seine, and there's no way that can be healthy. I love cheese, though. I love the smell of it, the texture, the exotic nature of the stuff, but every now and then you get a piping hot pizza delivered and you pop open the box to see a pool of grease in the middle of the dough and you think, "Where does all that grease come from?" Answer: the cheese, of course. You eat it anyway.

And I like wine. And beer. It's the Day-Glo punch that sends me sleeping on the bathroom floor, so I try and stay away from the stuff. A Monticelli Brother brought a bunch of wine to the party and even he was impressed by how much we drank. Believe me, when the winemaker at your party has a hangover the next morning, it was a good party.


Anyway, 2007 was a lesser year and lesser years demand good New Year's Eve parties, I'm sure you'll agree. But hey, it was an odd year. And by odd year I mean literally an odd year. Somehow the odd years don't seem to resonate as the good ones throughout history. 1941. 2001. It's the even years that seem most memorable. (Then again, I got married in an odd year, to someone who was born in an odd year. I don't know, maybe I'm my wife's bad luck.) At least our house didn't burn down in 2007. In 2008, may God richly bless those whose did last year.

I count about 28 empty bottles of wine there in the recycling bin, but there were only 12 of us. Doing the math, I find it surprising that so much was consumed -unless the toddlers were sneaking it. I don't know, maybe that's why they went to bed so early.

It was a fun party. So fun, in fact, that at one point we were breaking off all the doorstops and writing on the ceiling. It was that kind of party. Hopefully 2008 will be the kind of excellent year where we are so extraordinarily prosperous and successful that the New Year's Party will be a dull uneventful segue between Christmas and work.



On second thought, it was a good party.