| 03 January 2006 Quiet Week The quiet week is over, or at least the quiet here in Arlington . The affairs of the world have continued as we boxed up the decorations. I got the willies when I heard about the miners trapped a mile underground in West Virginia . I thought of all that dirt and rock and coal, working under it stooped over with the low excavating machines attacking the seam of glittering black coal. Then the smell of methane gas and the explosion in the tunnel behind the miners, and the darkness. It makes Any time you hear me complain about life in the big city, just chuck a lump of coal at me. Remind me that there are people that work for a living, and it is a hard and dirty life for many with the potential for a nasty end. I hope they are rescued, as I hope for the people trapped in a collapsed ice-rink in Germany. The rains are pummeling the wine country in California, people running for the hills even as the dirt is washing down. Some prime vineyards are under water, and I wonder if I should stock up on wine. Arnold the Governator is declaring five or six counties disaster areas. I love the Golden State, but made a note that I should take a raincoat when I go out there next week. Time to count blessings. I do not have to wrest coal from the earth, and the Russians do not control the natural gas that heats Big Pink. T The traffic news in the background is telling me that the idiots are all back from vacation, probably a little nuts after watching six football games yesterday, eyes bleary, ready to get back to writing important policy documents, creeping north over the bridge at the Occoqquan River, heading for the capital, drinking increasingly cold coffee and talking on cell phones in the darkness, the light rain making the concrete shine. I spent the time around the games in quiet dread, trying to get my blood moving for the year ahead. I am apprehensive that this will be the first lousy commute of the year, but I keeping it in perspective. It could be a lot worse, after all. It could be snowing and Congress could be back. There will be fireworks up on the Hill this month. The witch-hunts for corruption in the affair of Lobbyist Jack Abramoff have not yet started, nor the hunt for the leakers in the NSA eavesdropping affair. I reveled in the quiet week between the holidays. It was not like the old days when I was in government, jousting in the budget wars. The holidays were the busiest time of the year. We had to incorporate the changes from the Office of Management and Budget, and write the Congressional Budget Justification Books for the President's Roll-out submission in February. Ugh. At the Phone Company, the culture is different. The company encourages employees to take vacation, since carry-over time represents a liability that must be funded. Consequently, there was no one around to talk to and no customers in the office to bother. So the office at the Bus Depot was empty and the silence a little eerie. My sons came and went, but the younger boy left his truck up in Michigan and he has been a bit of a hostage out there in house in the suburbs. It brought home to me why I like living close-in at Big Pink. In a pinch, I can walk to the Metro, and I never feel trapped. I feel a little giddy as the New Year begins. I am possibly on travel in this shortened week, but won't know until I get to the office this morning and start to reconnect the threads that were dropped as people lost attention and began to concentrate on merry-making. I am pretty sure I am on travel next week, and confident that I made the arrangements to do it, but the month already looks like it is out of control. I wish I could say that I was excited to get back on the job, but I can't. In the quiet days I started a project that has me very engaged. The tattered notebooks of my Great Grandfather detail his grand tour of Europe in 1903. I never talked to him, of course, or even to anyone who met him. My Dad would have been very small when he died in 1927, and all the others of the generation after him are gone now, too. Dad was the baby of his family, and he is now the patriarch, as mom is the dowager of hers. So it is curious to read the words of a vigorous man in his middle years, speaking from beyond the tomb, and seeing the stately world of Crowned Heads of State through the eyes of a Pennsylvania shop-keeper. It is a bit of a forensic exercise, since his style of handwriting was molded by the keeping of legers and accounts. But there is the occasional gem of observation, supplemented by his love of the technology of his new century. He not only sent post-cards, but took pictures with his Kodak box camera. That was the genesis of the project; Mom found a scrapbook with the post cards lovingly pasted on the crumbling pages. They are colorful still, and I realized when Great Aunt Nellie's house was broken up thirty years ago, furniture and furnishings flying to the winds, another scrapbook of photos had come to me, along with the little travel journals. Through the magic of technology, I can integrate them all together again, the words and the pictures and the post cards, and add the context of what was happening in those foreign lands before their world blew apart in the Great War. I feel like I want to shout to him, across the years: "Look out!" I would much rather be doing that today, rather than trying to pick up the tangled strands of in-year revenue streams. But it is the Brave New Year, and three days of it gone already. Quiet time is over. Put your game face on, 2006, and get to work. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |