After work I went out back with a lawn chair to clear my head and watch the clouds. There was a flat spot to put my beer glass on a stump, from the plum tree we had taken out last fall. I blipped out for a second and saw myself sitting there and thought how lucky we are, this is our yard. And the waving branches, the dog chewing her bone, the cat scampering by to climb something. It felt like a poem, in a sense.

I’d spent half the day reading about machine learning, deep learning, virtual machines, ways in which to categorize data as structured, unstructured, semi-structured. Data clusters, machine clusters. There seemed an order to it all, and it drew me in. It struck me how much is going on I’m not aware of.

I reworked a speech and had a couple meetings, took a walk in the morning before it got too warm. (Once I get busier at work, I’ll miss the quick, clear-your-head walks I’ve come to rely on.)

I stopped by the store on my way home for dinner and stood in line with my basket, realizing how tired I felt. I’ll have to recondition my brain. I backed out of the lot and retrieved the empty trash/recycling cans from up the street. It was like the morning ritual in reverse, once I got home.

I checked the thermostat and changed, fed the animals, went out back with the lawn chair to watch the clouds. There were no strange shapes, though they did have that look of late summer/early fall, when the atmosphere’s clean and you can follow them across the sky.

I went down to the den to write, put on a record of some piano music by a woman from Ethiopia my friend Loren gave me for Christmas. I took my socks off and put a sweater on, and there wasn’t much to think about except rubbing the fish, and starting the potatoes.

Categories: Memoir, musings

Tags: creative nonfiction, journal writing, mindfulness, nature therapy, pacific northwest, slice of life, stream-of-consciousness, William Pearse writer, work-life balance