2018: Day 99 the one with some April snow in Denver
Word count 189,491 + 1,226 or 190,717 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
Things are starting a little bit later today. The clock is about to strike 20:00 hours. Yesterday turned out pretty well. My writing effort was on point. Maybe 10% of that post was nearing Almost Famous (2000) incendiary. Ok —- it was probably not rising to that level. It was enough to get me thinking and that is pretty good. Today three separate Margaritaville shirts arrived. Sure thinking about Hawaiian shirts is hard on a day when it snows during the month of April. Snowy weather aside it was not very cold. All three of my new shirts are in the washing machine on the delicate cycle. Soon enough they will be handing on the rack drying and waiting for a day without snow where they can bring joy to the world. That day of joy will not be this day. Today was a day of strange expectations and unusual snowfall. Maybe writing a few words of a short story will help…
Short Story: Under foot and forgotten
Under foot the ground was hard. The ground had no give at all. It was like walking on rock. All of the fallen pine needles had vaded. You start to notice how the seasons change changes. Those pine needles were getting to be closer to dirt than they were to being a part of the tree. Each step required a little more effort. This hike has been harder than the map had indicated. This was not a trail or a parth. It was something else. Somebody had obviously come this way. Every step had displaced the pine needles enough to be noticable. Even to the untrained eye tracking the path would be pretty easy. Something about that made the whole thing every more confusing. Whoever it was must have been in a hurry. Looking at the evidence on the ground it was pretty clear that however it was had moved pretty quickly and slowed down in spurts. The strides changed from something of a longer gallup to shorter steps.
Tracking those steps was not enough to get into a rhythm. Those steps were not really part of a natural cadence. The ground being hard and pretty uneven probably made for a difficult trip. This had to be one of those point A to Point B excursions. It had to be about getting somewhere. None of the footprints, needle patterns, or broken branches seemed to indicate a return trip. Maybe whoever it was had doubled back in a different way. During this type of tracking you doing really explore that type of possibility. You stay with what you can see and follow the path that makes the most sense. Deep in the woods these types of adventures usually ended up the same. You either find it or you don’t. Like a binary system of logic that produces one good outcome and one back one. Tracking down a trail like this would take a certain amount of effort and time.
After looking back up at the sun for a second time it seemed like the right time to check the path so far on the Garmin. The path had been curving for some time. It was enough to raise questions about doubling back. That may have been the case. Whoever had left these prints taking a very gradual turn for some reason. Very few folks would have spent this much time off the path without a reason. Very few branches were broken along the way. That usually indicates that whoever it was was in control. Avoiding branches takes a certain amount of skill. None of the footsteps seemed to indicate retracing or really anything other than a single path. Each step was still fresh enough. None of the pine needles or anything else had been blown in to cover where the toe of the shoe or maybe a boot had impacted. Sometimes really hard ground can make it hard to tell what type of shoe it was. Soft ground can be more informative. It can tell a more complete story. This story was almost forgotten at this point. No sound stood out in these woods.
—– End Short Story —–
Maybe writing about nature was not the best idea to get things going. Sometimes just the act of writing is enough to get things going. This might be one of those nights that I’m writing right up until the deadline. It may be one of those nights that my writing is just not up to the standard befitting my epic prose. Sure my mind has been wondering a little bit today. My intentions to sit down and write 3,000 words were pure. I recognize that perhaps during the first two hours of the day I should have sat down and written a thousand words to offset the need to produce such a large onslaught of single serving thoughts packing into a blog post. Part of this is my fault for setting a blog post to be based on the title selected for today. Writing about snow in April may not be enough to inspire 3,000 words. Sure I could probably figure out how to work that into a series of short stories. That might be enough to help push this thing over the finish line.
Visiting Myrtle Beach, South Carolina has been the major topic of advertisements on my Pandora station. Seriously, they really want me to travel to South Carolina apparently. The clock is about to roll over to 21:00 hours. That means that the next 60 minutes will be telling. All of this writing has gotten us about 1,000 words down the rabbit hole. The next 60 minutes are going to count down on just how far down this rabbit hole things are going to go at the end of day 99 of my big year writing blog posts. Maybe the snow changed my mood or maybe it was something else. At the moment my attention is shifting from topic to topic and my focus is not 100% on my writing efforts. Sure that is something that I should probably be able to get under control.
This is one of those days where I should have picked a more inspiring topic to write about. My ASUS Flip Chromebook is fully charged and ready to go. I’m not sure if now would be the right time to pick up my thoughts on the nature of inquiry and go with it. This might be the 99th blog post of the year, but I’m not sure exactly what value would come from reading the entire series from start to finish. It was written to be an episodic journey of essays that could be ingested in order and without any need to shuffle things around. At the moment, my outlook on things does not compel me to avoid shuffling things around. Maybe that is the key to making things work.
What I am realizing is that on days where the word count does get passed the 3,000 word mark I’m going to need to just keep on pushing until the point of exhaustion. Building up a buffer would be better than trying to work from behind during a big writing year.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
