Ramble in a Box

As suggested yesterday, I need to get out to the lab. But I don't wannoo yet. Just got my banana and machine-made push-button mocha. In a minute I'll go into the lab and grab a breakfast bar. I'm trying to feed myself on zero dollars. How? Well.

The cafeteria coffee and fruit are free to employees, while the lab manager has a program of stocking a cabinet with all kinds of snack food. It's a brilliant idea for a space three floors above the ground, filled with old former engineering students who oftentimes work odd hours. How does he pay for this stuff? By selling our recyclable toxic waste, which largely consists of obsolete lab-use-only printed circuit boards, which by the way were typically designed by my team, so I should get double privs, but I don't.

This ramble in a box is about how I ramble in my box. Everyone needs a space to work in, a place where their mind can engage without having to watch out for friends or housework or crosstraffic. My space has long since defaulted to my cubicle at work. I think my cube became my mental home sometime in the mid 1990s when I was trying to ramp my technical career and started working towards a Master's degree while my house was full of the laughter and demands of two rambunctious young boys. My cube became the place I could not just work and study but was also where I re-awakened my interest in writing fiction after discovering the internet was full of fellow enthusiasts as exemplified at that time by the crowd at misc.writing. I dropped out of that round about 2002 when it trended towards becoming totally worthless, as the social internet is sometimes wont to do (depends on who's dominating the process -- Zuckerberg, for all that we love to hate him, has generally done it well). None of that interaction helped my career much, obv. But the cubicle is still my go-to place for balancing personal accounts and sketching plotlines and shopping for Christmas and researching auto repair and so on. I try that at home, but it only works if I'm in that tiny bedroom designated as the office, and I don't really like being in there. It's too messy and I haven't figured out where to put all the things.

In other words, there are boxes, and there are boxes. None of my boxes are neat and clean. I'd like them to be but if I make one so, it doesn't last.

Thank you for reading so far. Now I am going to write about positive crankcase ventilation (PCV) systems.

Wait, no. Go read The Ghost in the Canteen. I really liked it. I am marinating a bit before I contribute my own review.

I'm thinking to take Friday off so I can replace the PCV kit in the Volvo. This way it doesn't impact anyone's plans for Saturday. The job needs doing and while the shop can do it for a tad over $600, I don't have that as readily as I have the $115 I spent on parts and the eight hours I'll probably need to do it myself. While reading up on it I realized that the PCV is probably also one of the troubles with the Jeep. Too many symptoms lined up. And I've had that thing for twenty five years and don't recall ever touching the PCV stuff. So there's another thing on the list (along with brakes, which are clearly past their due date). Somehow, in the past few months I've rediscovered the usually-dubious joys of working on cars. Something to do with accomplishing something (e.g. saving money) with one's own hands. Plus there's a coolness factor when in the vicinity of teenaged boys.

Which swiftly returns me to the space another sentence further back flew me near, which is how much I love and miss my own boys. K (long ago ID'd in this blog as Skzx) is in Germany at this time and in regular contact via Facebook mostly, and J (aka Sktr) is working extraordinarily hard (as engineering students do) to finish up his engineering degree in San Jose. Thus I don't see them much, though I saw J last weekend (pictured). I feel like a bad daddy much of the time, because I spent so much energy while they were young pursuing a degree I don't use, and am now just super busy and finding it a challenge to make time for them (i.e. go down to SJ) ... and while my experience was that when their age I wanted almost nothing to do with my own father, I admit to the understanding that this doesn't necessarily project to them. So.

One last thing. The link above took me to a usenet group -- Google long since turned usenet into Google Groups, though you can still get there without Google -- and I found therein a link to some words by Ian Fleming on writing.

One of the essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work - whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat ... I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual "life" as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application ... The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine.

And thus another successful writer shows me what I probably ought to be doing. Will I ever learn? Keep tuning in to find out.