Daily Meditation

"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." -C.S. Lewis

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam: "All for the Greater Glory of God"

Memento Mori: "Remember, you will die"

http://www.bakersfield.com/news/2015/07/25/inside-fracking-chevron-offers-rare-look-at-controversial-practice.html
At 2,250 ft, these guys are super shallow by our standards. Come on out to the Marcellus and Utica and see some 21,000 footers.

Professional achievement

So, at work, my position is graded based upon performance; specifically in accuracy of execution as compared to intended design. People at a much higher pay grade than I design jobs to be performed by people like me, and then my performance is graded on accuracy to that design. On Saturday, I performed a perfect job. 100% accuracy, 100% quantity. The royal flush of my profession.  My performance is also graphed, so this particular result, a flat-lined graph, is colloquially known as a "heart attack". I work hard to be always improving at my work, and I had performed very close to that before, but it was awesome to achieve it. There is still a lot of room to grow beyond a perfect score; there are lots of ways I could still do my job better, but I am a little bit proud of myself right at this moment. I am thankful to God that he has chosen this way to work through me.

Why is moving so hard?

What is it about moving that is so difficult? I love to travel, I love to be in new places. When I lived super lean, moving wasn't that physically difficult. Yet moving is so tremendously emotionally taxing. Why does it have to be this way? When we moved the last time, we moved to a spot that was very different from most of the places I'd lived before, but primarily in the attitude of the locals. It was also a physically difficult move, traveling thousands of miles in a week; changing climate and habitat. The result was a very hard move and a long acclimation period. This time, the move should have been so easy. SHOULD have. I like the people I work with, I love my job, and yet I still feel a little bit of an outsider. We don't have a concrete place to live yet, though we are working on it. All these things will resolve themselves, and yet, right now, life is unpleasant. Does it have to be this way? Is this in the nature of the act of moving? No. I submit that there have been very dramatic moves in my past which did not render this same fish-out-of-water loneliness. I don't believe this is inexplicable or random, this is certainly the result of very specific circumstances and choices, some of which I myself made. No less unpleasant, though. Can't wait for it to pass.

Moving again

one week until we move. This move is less far than the previous ones, only about 175 miles. Very exciting, lots of professional opportunities. We are even contemplating buying a house.

break from normalcy

this week has been our summer vacation week. We picked up and left our Western PA home in favor of rural Wisconsin. The departure from the day to day has been very nice. The country air and the opportunity to embed in the scenery has been good medicine for the soul. I won't be sad to go back to work, but I will be sad to leave the country. The funny thing is that one could argue that our current living place is very rural, yet it distinctly lacks a certain bucolic splendor inherent in the northern part of the American Midwest.

The beauty of creating art is that a person viewing your work may not like it, but they can never say "that brush stroke was wrong". There is no right or wrong in self expression. The concept simply does not apply.