When in a Pickle

A friend and webizen recently posted some new photos and stories about "the pickle." It's not my pickle, but in the pickle genre, here is my wife Abby at The Chubby Pickle Restaurant in Phillipsburg, Kansas.
A friend and webizen recently posted some new photos and stories about “the pickle.” It’s not my pickle, but in the pickle genre, here is my wife Abby at The Chubby Pickle Restaurant in Phillipsburg, Kansas.

“I love sleeping. It’s my favorite thing to do,” someone at the office said.

“I love eating. That’s my favorite thing.”

Another coworker asserts that playing the bag-tossing game “cornhole” is his favorite thing to do.

The discussion got me pondering what some of my favorite things to do are, and it marries well with my recent Dream Job post.

All of these items can be appended with the phrase “with Abby.”

  • Photography is almost all of its incarnations
  • Hiking in all its incarnations, including walking our Wolfhound.
  • Travelling, especially in the Four Corners region
  • Gardening and working in the yard
  • Flying
  • Teaching photography
  • Writing, especially outside-the-box fiction and experimental writing, and writing that I can share online or in front of a microphone, or when I commit pen to paper.
  • Speaking in public about myself or my craft

Okay, about two items mentioned by my coworkers…

  • Sleeping: I don’t sleep without some kind of assistance, and only like to sleep as a remedy for exhaustion.
  • Eating: thought we all enjoy eating to some degree, for decades I have been an adherent of the maxim, “Don’t live to eat. Eat to live.”

Finally, I love the self-expression afforded me by the internet, with some important caveats…

  • I stay out of comment wars, since there is no way to win, and internet commentiers tend to deliberately push your buttons to get a response. It’s a lot like being in a sixth grade boys basketball locker room. Thus, this web site.
  • I don’t take quizzes, for two reasons. First, if they are legitimate, I always ace them. Quizzes are aimed at adjudicating egos, not actually finding out anything. Secondly, most quizzes are data mines for corporations.
  • There’s been a lot of promise of rejuvenated web presences recently, and I guess we’ll see.

As I write this, I feel like I am in the midst of my usual August-heat-waves writing doldrums. My writer friend and next door neighbor Jen has recently “lost her mojo” in the same fashion, but recently told me she got it back. As a journalist and columnist, I can’t really afford the luxury of  letting my mojo sleep, so my favorite thing to do when I am in heat (August heat, that is) is to power through it. I start a paragraph and type, or pick up a journal and write. It works.

This is me with a pickle, but not "the" pickle.
This is me with a pickle, but not “the” pickle.