Conner's Blog

I have this little voice in my head. Sometimes I ignore it, sometimes I only sort of listen, but on occasion it starts to drown out everything else. It makes me worry, this voice, it tell me things I know aren’t true, but since it’s in my head it seems plausible.

Now this voice isn’t actually whispering to me, it doesn’t use words, it just implants thoughts. Thoughts about girls, about jobs, about friends. Why didn’t she call you back? Oh, because she’s just as busy as you are? No, the voice says, again without words, it’s because she doesn’t like you that much, never mind the fact that when you do talk to her she always seems excited to hear your voice.

This is what the voice does, it makes me illogical, it makes me feel like I’m in high school again. It ignores the fact that I have more good friends around me now than I had people in my high school. It distracts me, puts me on edge, makes me forget that I’m a 27 year old guy who has a pretty fucking awesome life.

And the voice always wins, unless of course I find ways to ignore it. Reading used to do it for me, also video games. But those don’t work that well anymore. Cooking is one way I thwart the voice now, something about sauteing onions and garlic just does it. Biking does it too, though only if I go for  ride without a destination, biking for transport is good but not the same. And writing, I never thought I would be someone who needed to write. But I do, when I focus my attention on putting words into sentences, and creating thoughts that at least partially make sense, I can ignore the voice. All things things help for more than just the action, they are drugs in a sense, but good drugs.

The truth is I don’t think any of these things actually stops the voice, I think they change it. I think they make it recognize just how good things are. True, I’m still single, it’s not like money is never a worry, and everyone who knows me knows I’m job searching. But I have amazing friends, live in an amazing city, and all of my problems are  first world problems. Something about writing, cooking, or biking, makes those things so much clearer. It reminds me that pining on the negatives doesn’t make them better, that I need to let things happens and not worry about things I can’t control.

Maybe it’s because I can control all three things. Cooking is good because I can take the last farmer’s market haul and figure out how to make it into something tasty. Biking is good because I can focus on my pace, my breathing, and how the bike is running. Writing is the same, I make the words connect to each other and hopefully what I write will resonate with one other person.

So I need to focus on doing these things more often. More cooking, more biking, and definitely more writing.

(Or I could just shut the voice up and realize I can’t control everything and life will happen as it happens, but I think I’ll stick with doings things I love)

I’m going home this weekend. Back to Montana to see my parents, my brothers, and some of my extended family. I’m going to be gone or a little over a week. I’m leaving here Thursday afternoon and will be heading back here on the following Friday.

For the most part I’m very excited. Except for the driving part. That’s right, I decided to drive home this time as opposed to flying like I have in the past. This means I’m planning on a 15 hour drive through Minnesota, North Dakota, and the most boring part of Montana. This is why I’m leaving Thursday night. I’m meeting my brother in Fargo and we are planning on driving all the way through the night, getting to Bozeman around 6 in the morning.

Back when I was in college this wouldn’t have phased me. But now I’m a little nervous. Will I be able to sleep while my brother drives? Will my car make it? Will I be a functioning member of society when I arrive? How am I going to survive being cooped up in a car for 15 hours? This is insane? I’m booking a flight tonight? Ahhhhh?

Ok, I got that out there. Honestly I think it will be fine. I have plans to download a number of podcasts, load up the iPhone with a ton of good music, and invest in a case of both caffeinated and uncaffeinated energy drinks. I bought carrots this weekend that I’ll be cutting up to bring with me, so I can hopefully avoid buying too much junk. I think I’ll brew a large batch of iced tea or coffee as well.

So maybe that’s the difference. I used to just throw a bag in the car and go. Now I have plans, but with planning comes realizing everything that can go wrong. Then again maybe I’m just going crazy in my old age. Who knows.

I plan on writing while I’m out there, and depending on the cell coverage I may even use Twitter. If I do, follow along at #mtrt2010. It should be fun, lots of time with the family, but I also hope to see what sort of local food scene is happening in Bozeman and Helena. I’ll be reporting here and over at Garlic and Onion.

In an attempt to blog more than once every 3rd blue moon, I’m going to focus my attention on short posts that are too long for Twitter, yet not what I normally wrote.

It wasn’t too long ago that I spent more time at home then I did going out. Right now, I’m pretty sure the birds flying by my apartment see it’s interior more often than I do. I always considered myself an introvert, I liked reading, playing video games, and doing anything else that only required a seat in my house. Now, no one would believe I was introverted if I told them. I’m always out attending an event of some sort or getting a beer with friends. Hell, I’ve even tried my hand at event planning a few times in the last six months.

So what changed? Well, in hindsight I have always been an extrovert. I’ve never been scared of anyone, could always hold a conversation with a brown paper bag, and loved meeting new people. What has changed is my avenues for finding things to do. I became friends with some busy people, started marking things on my calendar so I wouldn’t forget about them, and kept myself informed via whatever methods I could as to what was going on. It’s a snowball effect because by doing more I meet more people and they invite me to more things where I meet more people. In the last two years I went from wishing I had things to do and compensating by being introverted, to being myself.

Now if I can only get that brown paper bag to shut up.

I’ve lost the drive to blog. There, I said it. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, or things to share, it’s just a lack of motivation to actually put those things into words. It’s frustrating because I spent almost a year and a half blogging 2-3 times per week consistently. I really enjoyed it, I developed some fantastic connections because of it, and I like being able to look back at what I was doing a year ago.

Something changed about three months ago though; I lost my enthusiasm, I cut back on my Twittering, wrote Facebook off, and as anyone who used to read this blog knows pretty much stopped blogging. What caused this change? I really don’t know. Many things changed, some events kind of messed with my head. I launched a couple different projects that sucked up my attention for a while, though one of them kind of died on liftoff.(I promise to write in my food blog when I’m back, I have lots of photos to share and stories to tell) This blog, this place that has my name affixed to it, suffered as a results.

Now I’m a firm believer that a personal blog is your place and your place alone, and if you don’t want to write then you shouldn’t. Still, this blog has been a lot of fun for much to long for me to watch it wither away and die. In an attempt to resuscitate it, I’m setting a goal for myself starting on Memorial Day. I’m going to publish something every weekday until the end of June. It may be something mundane, it may be a list of what I ate that day, or a rant about Toaster Strudels, but I will hit the publish button before midnight Every Single Day.

A few other goals for June

1. Actually finish the theme for Garlic and Onion and start posting to the site
2. A minor theme refresh on this site
3. Get The Tour TC going again, and recruit some new folks to be tour members
4. Meet 21 new people from Twitter to push my IRL list to 200
5. Plan a trip home to see my parents

June will also be full of beers on patios, bike rides, photo walks, dinner parties, live music, and other fun stuff. Rock the Garden is this month and Picnic Club and True Blood Nights begin. I’m going to kayak/canoe/boat around the Chain of Lakes for the first time, try and go on a 50 mile bike ride, and try at least 3-4 new restaurants before months end. I’m looking forward to getting back to my city, hopefully my city is ready to have me back.

A list of a few of the things I experienced in the past couple weeks while I’ve been basically silent around here.

• Watching one of my best friends deal with the loss of his mother was really hard. This is a guy I lived with for almost five years and I knew how close he was to her. Somewhere he drew the strength to speak at her funeral and it was really amazing. He’s a stronger person than I.
• Running into a friend outside of The Bulldog after finding the bar completely full on the night I found out about Shadow. All I wanted was a burger and a beer and wasn’t looking for companionship, instead I spent the night talking Ashley’s ear off about this that and the other thing. I’m pretty sure she kept me sane.
• Seeing friends I hadn’t seen in a long time come to Minneapolis to support my friend and celebrate his birthday. The circle of friends I developed in college is incredible.
• Randomly getting text after walking down Nicollet saying “We see you”, weird, random, and coming from some the new friends I’ve made this year who are pretty cool.
• Having a high school classmate call me up to hang out on Sunday night, we hadn’t seen each other in too long considering with both live in the metro, it was great to catchup.
• Meeting the founder of Rribbitz to discuss freelancing. It was a lot of fun talking to her, and she didn’t discourage me in the slightest. In fact she made a video, which I could barely watch because I hate seeing myself.
• Having my mother tell me I’m a great writer after reading my post about Shadow.
• Having another new friend send me an email telling me that this blog is part of her inspiration to start a blog of her own. I think her blog will rock. Now to just convince her to stop being scared and just start writing already.
• My amazing circle of Twitter followers and blog readers, you rock.
• The bike ride I went on last night which was tagged bikeridegang. Basically 10+ people met up and biked around Minneapolis, stopping at a couple bars for food and beer. It was the perfect kick-off to my 2010 biking season.

So, I’m back, I’ll possibly be blogging about the WCHA tournament, blogging about food of course, and announcing a new project that is live, but not quite ready for prime time. Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone, drink some beer and celebrate the coming of spring.

I got the news today I’ve been dreading for a while. My parents had to put our dog Shadow to sleep. It didn’t come as a surprise, she was something like 16-17 years old, and has had a lot of health problems the last few years.*

I’m kind of heartbroken right now. Anyone who knows me well knows I love animals as much as I love people.  But she had a great life for a dog. She spent most of her years on a farm, roaming around, getting dirty, finding smells, and doing all the things dogs love to do.

Shadow wasn’t exactly the most playful of dogs though, she never played fetch, never wanted to play tug-o-war, or any other games dogs normally love. Instead she just wanted to be with people. She was always this way, whenever she had a chance she’s cuddle up right next to you, leaning all her weight against your leg to let you know she was there. She loved riding in our old pickup, not so much for the ride, but because she knew that when you where in the truck you couldn’t get away from her, she’d slowly creep over to the driver’s side and press herself against you.

Of course she had passions, nothing made her happier than chasing cattle. She wasn’t trained for this but usually did a pretty solid job of doing what you wanted and not getting in the way. When she really got into it she’d actually run behind a cow and grab it’s tail and swing along behind it. It probably wasn’t the best thing for keeping the herd calm but she had a lot of fun doing it.

She was kicked by cows, run over by all four wheels of a 4-wheeler once, was hit by a van and broke her shoulder, and got in a few fights with barn cats. She always survived though, and was up running around following us on whatever chores we had.

During the fall when harvest was going on she loved riding in the grain trucks and then trying to catch the mice that were scared up by all the machinery in the fields. She’d try to catch rabbits as well, but I’m pretty sure she never caught one. She never went too far away though, I don’t think she ever made us wonder if she ran away.

We got her because someone rescued her from a ditch where she had been left. She was always a calm dog when she was around people, even those she didn’t know well. I don’t think she ever really disliked anyone.

Until my parents moved to a town and she was forced to socialize, she was never really a fan of other dogs. I still remember the winter we had a black lab wander onto the farm. He was obviously pretty young, probably 2 years old at the most, so of course he had a ton of energy. She didn’t hate him, but she just barely tolerated him. She was quite happy when we finally found his owners and sent him on his way.

She wasn’t allowed on the furniture, but she figured out at some point that the couch was really comfortable. She’d wait until everyone was in bed before she got up on it, who knows how long she did this before she no longer woke up the second my dad got out of bed and he found her laying on the couch.

As she got older she learned more and more ways to get attention. She could have the saddest face in the world and of she would paw at you if you weren’t paying attention to her. Thankfully she was pretty good about not doing this to strangers. To her family though, she always wanted to make sure she wasn’t forgotten.

Going home will never be the same without her smiling face and wagging tail. She was always the sixth part of our family and a constant that I will always remember.

* I wrote this a few weeks ago when my parents first thought they were going to have to say goodbye. I’m glad it’s remained in my drafts since then as it gave them more time with her. She is a dog I’ll never replace in my heart no matter how many pets I have in my life.

** This week has been incredibly draining, the world also lost an amazing woman and one of my best friend’s mother’s to cancer this week. I’m probably going to be kind of quiet around the webs for a few days.

First, I should apologize for leaving you all hanging with such a strange and confusing last post. For the record, I’m doing fine, still living life, cooking, and spending more time away from home then at home.

Still, I think I needed last week off, it was good to avoid any self imposed pressure to write. That post gave me the ability to just shrug off any pangs of guilt that creeped into my conscious thinking about all of you readers sitting at your computer hitting refresh every minute or so hoping I would write something new. Don’t lie to me, I know you did this all week.

But after a lot of great conversations with some really awesome friends, hanging out with some of my best friends from college who I don’t see nearly enough, I think I finally at least have a general goal for the next few months in place. As I stated before, I’m working on several projects, all website, that I hope to have launched in the next two months or so. I’m not ready to publicly announce what they are, but if you see me in person and want to know, I’ll give you the inside scoop. I’m really excited about two of them and the third is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’m not 100% certain I can make it work, but I’m going to try.

I have a few other things I’m working on and also need to do as well, some of which I can post here; others that I have to keep close to the chest for now. Still, I can give you a short list of a few things I’m working on, and am planning on doing in the coming weeks.

• Make ricotta and mozzarella cheese – I recently began getting whole milk from a local farm, and since I don’t drink much milk, I need to work on using up a half-gallon of milk a week. My goal is to try making some different cheeses and see if it’s something I can do weekly.
• The gym – I’ve been awful the last two weeks, and it’s time to remedy that. I enjoy food way too much to not be at the gym three days a week.
• Cook, cook, cook – I’ve been slacking in the kitchen as well and I need to start cooking again.
• Talk to some freelancers – This may be giving somethings away, but I really need to sit down with some people who do freelance work and figure out how one goes about getting started. I have some ideas of what I want to do, I just don’t know what I need to do to do them.

Well that’s a short list, some of which are always on my list, others are new. I like putting things up on my blog because I always feel guilty when I can’t write about how I succeeded. So now I need to get to work on accomplishing some of these things.

Have a great Monday everyone, time to get this week off to a great start.

I vowed to not post until January, but I couldn’t let the New Year come without saying something. (Shocking I know)  I’ll be posting a Friday Five tomorrow of incredible reflections on the year past. I’m amazed at how many great posts I stumbled across this week, but I think that tells you how important it is to write with your heart on your sleeve. Putting it all out there is terrifying, but those who do it affect others in amazing ways.

As I stated in my 2009 roundup this year has been a great year. So many new experiences, new friends, and a new outlook on life. I don’t have a lot of resolutions this year. I do have few though. I need to work hard on trying to take things that I want, even if the attempt might hurt. I need to stop being afraid of failure. I’ve made strides in this, but failure still terrifies me. So I’m making a promise to myself to fail more in 2010.  Sounds weird I know, but it’s what I need to do. Second, work hard at finding what I am passionate about that I can get paid for. I think my first resolution will help with this, but I’m not sure. I have told a few people I’m looking for a career change, but when anyone asks, “What do you want to do” I have no answer. I love so many things, but I don’t know what combination of them I need in a career. So I need to spend some of this coming year searching for what I want to do for a career, and being willing to fail in the attempt to get there.

Anyway, have a great new year, and if you are reading this before 2010 actually get’s here I wish you a happy and safe evening. If you read it after 2010, I don’t know what to say, I’m disappointed, I thought this blog was all you cared about.

2009 was an great year, between my online life and my social life, I’ve expanded my circles in so many ways it’s almost unbelievable.  I’ve posted on this blog 92 times and received 497 comments . I’ve taken 696 photos that I felt were good enough to be posted on Flickr. I’ve made jam, curry, gnocchi, and more than a few pizzas. I’ve met so many new people it’s not even funny, and have made a bunch of new friends.

That being said I didn’t accomplish a lot of the goals I set for myself at the start of the year.  I’ve hardly put a dent in my MN to do list and I only accomplished three of my seven goals for the year. But I’m fine with that. If I had known how my year was going to go, I wouldn’t have set those goals like I did. Instead I would have made the following list.

• Meet close a 100 new people in real life by using the Internet
• Break out of my comfort zone and do some crazy public speaking
• Shop locally as much as possible
• Eat out at many new restaurants
• See more live musical performances than I had in all previous years combined
• Get a photo on Minnpics
• Fall in love with street food
• Discover a ton of new music, including lots of local artists

Yet that’s the beauty of life. You set goals for yourself and even if you don’t accomplish those goals, you usually end up better for it. I’m going to maintain a few of the goals from 2009 going into 2010. I will bike a century and I will look up my relatives. My MN to do list is going to undergo a major renovation and I will try to do more of it.

My major goals for 2009 are to move my career to a place I’m happier with, keep meeting new and interesting people using whatever resources I find, and keep doing what I’m doing. I’m not going to say my life is anywhere near perfect, but it is great. I can’t wait to see what 2010 brings.

Last night I suddenly got an overwhelming urge to go home for Christmas. Up until then I hadn’t really felt bad about missing Christmas. The reason I wasn’t going home is because I can’t get much time off for Christmas and flying is ridiculously expensive. Tickets are over $400 and going home for 2-3 days for that kind of money doesn’t exactly seem worth it.

There are a few issues at work here. One, the cost to fly is now $600+ and rising quickly. Two, the drive is at least 12-13 hours and goes right through the heart of North Dakota which is not only exceedingly boring, but also notorious for nasty snow storms. Three, I’m dog sitting for Nicky and even though I know Ninja can travel well, getting stuck with her seems like a bad idea. I also don’t completely trust my car, though I’m sure it will be fine, it doesn’t have any problems and is running great when I do drive it.

Anyway, I’m working on making a decision. If I do go it will be a quick trip and next week will be a drag, but spending Christmas with my family is really tempting. It also would lead to mountain photo opportunities which would be fun.