Posts

Showing posts with the label focus

Fuzzy-Focused Time in the Sonoran Desert

Image
The desert outside of Scottsdale while enjoying an ATV tour. And so here I am. Sitting at an oasis in the Sonoran desert. I'm in Phoenix, AZ at the Arizona Grand Resort (& Spa), sitting on the patio just outside the resorts golf pro-shop. The coffee is tasty as I watch the upper middle class (does that still exist) play the high handicap version of golf that is probably still way better than my game.  Along the patio are a good, but not overly crowded, mix of mom's with their kids, non-golfing dads and the occasional youth baseball player who looks like they just received gear from the bat armory and has their marching orders for the day's tournament. The speakers are playing some motown, funk and classic rock/folk classics. I'm finding myself frequented by birds, namely a precocious sparrow hoping to find some dropped crumbs. Sorry, I've only got coffee at the moment. So, this is my spring break. It's a small escape from the stress good people in MN had to,...

Springtime!

Image
Image by Jeon Sang-O from Pixabay Spring is officially here! The vernal equinox was this past week and now we have more daylight than night. It is amazing how fast the days have become long, extending natural light well into the evening hours. One of my favorite things about Minnesota are the long summer evenings with light on the horizon until nearly 10 pm Naturally, the season change, here in Minnesota, was greeted with sub-freezing temperatures. It is also quite blustery out with a stiff north wind with what is perhaps winter's last hurrah. However, it is more likely the penultimate or antepenultimate hurrah. Snow in May has happened in recent memory.  With the weather fluctuating between nice and friggin' freezin' we dance between getting outdoors and hunkering down. The earlier week witnessed temperatures in the 60s F. Comfortable enough for a jog around my favorite little lake (sub-20 minutes for two miles!) in shorts and a light jacket. It was a little cooler a coup...

Hitting Reset, Part I (Softball)

Image
Image by Cheryl Holt from Pixabay The reset, Ctrl+Alt+Delete for those Windows and Linux users out there, Open Apple+Ctrl+Reset for the Apple Macintosh afficionados (well what it used to be, I haven't used a Mac in well over a decade). The circle-y arrow inside a circle for most everything else. It's what you do when your system becomes frozen or experiences some other form of discombobulation. Often it fixes whatever problem the device was having, although it's not really an ideal solution if you have to do it multiple times a day; or a week for that matter. I spent some time this weekend thinking about hitting reset in a different context: human behavior and response. My pondering came about while watching my daughter's team play fastpitch softball. Sports tend to have a preponderance of "reset" activities. In the case of fastpitch you have the at-bat, the pitch, the play, the base running, the call, the start of the game, the start of the inning. That...

Random Grade School Art

Image
I remember doing a project like this in fifth or sixth grade. Space time, to me, is represented in a  rather '80s contemporary way in these images. As if staring into black, or worm, holes. Some meetings recently have had me doodling along this theme. I tried to do a slightly more complicated version. The result was a merging of same radius centers forming what look like saddle points as the texture defines the centers. Whatever it is/was, it was a good time to be present and focused on just the drawing for a couple of hours.