Mary Panttaja

On the route to Jackson, WY, we took a small detour through Southeastern Idaho to a place called Gray’s Lake. We’ve been here before and never found the lake. And there is a reason we never found the lake—it’s really a very large marshland of reeds with a little bit of surface water. The lake is important as a national wildlife refuge and a major breeding site for Sand Hill Cranes. (Which I learned about reading Aldo Leopold’s famous book “The Sand County Almanac”—one of my favorite thinkers and one of my favorite books.)

So we drove around the lake and saw many pairs of cranes foraging in the cut hay fields, one pair with a baby. Many flocks of cranes soared overhead, each so gigantic that even a small group is very impressive.

As we left the visitor center we found a dirt road that I remembered fondly. It runs from Gray’s Lake through the headwaters and drainage of Tincup Creek. Where the creek hits the main road (Hwy 34) there stands the remnants of an old establishment that is vaguely called Tincup.

This is a very delicate 14 miles through the Rockies: Aspen groves, long creek meaders, open sage brush, and valleys forming from dozens of beaver damns. It is just as beautiful as I remember—and yet such a small thing, just a creek running through its own little neighborhood. And still, it is somewhere I will visit again, just to see it or to sit in its shadows and carefully watch.

Rain yesterday afternoon, but things are dry, and crisp and cold, this morning.

It is almost 20 years to the month since Jim and I started the original joint business that became Panttaja Consulting Group, Inc. As we start into helping launch another new business it will be interesting to note the similarities and differences. So far:

• You still have to hire people, get medical insurance and workman’s compensation insurance. But it seems to be easier and cheaper to outsource the process than it was. In fact, it seems to be a no-brainer to have a Human Resources outsourcing provider, so setting up the corporate structure for having employees is pretty much a menu driven process. Not so much to figure out.
• You have to find space to house the business. Of course, this depends on whether you are building a “virtual” company or one you want to locate in space and time. (That is, get everyone together much of the time.) We can choose not to “co-locate” people because of all the technology at hand that brings us together virtually: conference calls, virtual meetings, email, instant messaging, video chat, etc. It looks like we will be going “physical” with this new company, so we need the whole facilities and furniture scene. Though I will admit that, having been through it several times before, it is less daunting than that first foray into renting an office.
• The challenge of establishing the technology to support a company has more options these days. You can outsource it all with hosting companies and a wide variety of software tools. If you are not a software development company, you don’t need to install much of any software (you usually need a browser), but you can get away without buying much. Some of the online software choices (like Salesforce) are subscription-based with a fee (it’s called “software as a service”), but others like Google Notebooks are free. You will find free solutions for most of the general tasks you want software for, though they may or may not meet specific requirements.
• Even in the software business, many development environments are free or relatively cheap. They do not require the substantial investments we had to make 20 years ago.

So things stay the same, and things change. And the less you are dependent on physically gathering people, the more you can radically outsource your whole operation.

This follows a theme in the blogosphere (world of blogs) these days, which is outsourcing your life. Some of it is very cool. But yesterday I found myself with one of the ultimate non-outsourced projects—harvesting food for the week from the garden, picking the cherry tomatoes, pear-apples, and strawberries one by one. And it was great. Sometimes you want your life just to be your life.

We are preparing to head out traveling again. This time just the two of us and the pop-up tent camper. The entire rig is small but pretty complicated. We carry the following with our car and a 10 foot trailer:

• Our traveling office includes the following:
  • 2 Macs (now running SlingPlayer to our SlingBox at home to help us follow the Tour de France next week)
  • EVDO cellular network
  • Network hub that can work off the car battery (or the camper battery)
  • Cellular camera and a digitial media transfer device
  • Digital voice recorder
  • HP all-in-one (printer, fax, copier; which we have yet to use)
  • Garmin GPS unit
  • Of course, the two IPhones (a different wireless network)
  • We are also currently maintaining a T-Mobile account for really fast wireless where it’s available (Starbucks for example)

• An old Yakima space case (Gorrila tape patches and stickers abound) carrying our folding flat water kayak
• An extra set of old bike racks on the car for when we want to shuttle without the trailer
• Riding on top of the camper: Two Jackson white water kayaks (for only up to class 3; we’re wooses)
• Two Ibis mountain bikes–much more worn this year than ever before. (Ibis Cycles is back in business in Scotts Valley, which is good news.)

The camper itself is minimially outfitted: no air conditioning, no microwave, no shower. The only indulgence is that these little Fleetwood campers are the only RV’s that come with king-size beds—still using sleeping bags—but they are wide and long. When we are on the road, while we like having access to electricity and tables and chairs for our work, we’d rather feel a little more like we are camping and spend a lot of our days out of doors rather than be coddled inside a house-like environment. So the tent-camper is fitting.

As we prepare our for our sojourn, I realize how fickle I am. Sometimes I really want to be just wandering around the world. (Currently reading “Vagabonding” by Rolf Potts.) Live the footloose life, unattached to a place, mirroring an international version of “On the Road”. And other times, I really want to sit and be still and focus. And home is a really productive place to do that. In addition, the two life styles have some difficulty sychronizing. If you want to be engaged in group activities (like play in a band, working in a writing group, or having a personal social life) you need to be around much of the time—making you less free to wander in time and space, even if you can make your work travel with you. So maybe “work” can go where you go, but “community” is a harder thing to take on the road.

Well, if this is the worst problem we have to resolve, then life is good. It does look like we may be settling in for a bit of a work challenge come our return, so this is an important R&R trip. I hope to make significant progress on the the next draft of the novel, and maybe start thinking about finding a professional editor. Fun stuff.

(No, not bets, nor funds.)

We were riding north on highway 128 early one morning last week (a small meandering road that runs north on the west side of the Alexander Valley), when we came around a corner to see a mysterious mechanical monster. It was rounding the end of a long row of vines, heading back into a vineyard. About 12 feet tall, the driver sitting on top, it had long sides and and undercarriage about 5 feet up off the ground. Between the sides hung two panels evenly dividing the deep space under the machine, like a gigantic 4-toothed comb. The result of driving this contraption through the vineyards is that the vines are all precisely 5 feet tall and about 12 inches wide. The grapes nestled close to the main trunk are exposed to the sun and air–supposedly good for the ripening fruit.

I’ve always wondered how they got the vines to look like that—was it some amazingly constraining gene pool that made some vineyards grow so to be so tidy? No, it turns out to be a very large hedging machine that wields its grooming power on early July mornings in the valley.

On another note, we are about to head out on a meander, part work, part vacation, part vocation. I’ll keep you posted but we’ll likely be moving July 24 through August 15.

In discussing our current (as in time) search for the next thing to do (and its current direction), a close friend commented that she didn’t know if it was the “right” thing to do. And I agree that I’m not quite sure yet that it is the right thing—though getting close.

But that’s the quandry isn’t it? What is the right thing? What does “right thing” mean? The whole point of updrafting is to find the right current (as in a moving force) and catch a ride, so getting a sense of rightness is important. But I don’t think you can use “logic” (or any set of rules) to find it—though you use logic to help you understand it.

An updraft is an established movement of potential. It flows into your life without stress, because its part of your updraft, part of you. And if you recognize it, that is, see it at all, you have to then examine your relationship to it. Why are you interested? Why has it come to you? Are you compelled? Is there any negative relationship to it? (That is, are you shifting into it from fear or dread or because you just want to get things settled. Or are you enjoying an ego trip because it came your way?)

It seems like you have to let the current play out and just bob in it freely seeing how it moves and exploring how it interplays with other currents and drafts in your life. Time will tell. Time always tells because the actual world is always presenting itself to you. And if you can be simple and honest with yourself, you will evolve your choice and find yourself in a current. And whether it is “right” or something else, it will become your life and then every new updraft will meet you there. No worries.

So, today’s post on Catching the Updraft has been a nightmare. It has so few words—but 9 images. So many things didn’t work right:

1. First, 4 of the images were missing—and I had to recapture them from a document (their source seems to be missing, but they aren’t really right and need to be redone anyway. But not today.) This took most of yesterday’s writing time.
2. Last night our sites were down. Our hosting provider is not very dependable and may have to be replaced. When I have time to write and post I am dependent on the site being up at that moment—a serious flaw in the blogging process exacerbated by the fact that I use images. 90% of my time on this post has been uploading the images.
3. Wordpress, my blogging platform, doesn’t really allow you to put open space in the post. I need it to format around the images. Therefore the ugly periods that I had to use to create some space.
4. The upload failed 70% of the time this morning, so it took an hour to get them up.
5. My “cloud” images were made for a white background and therefore look terrible on my gray background, but fixing them today can’t fit into the schedule.

So my apologies. I obviously need to upgrade some technology. I was commiserating with a colleague yesterday about the horrible state of blog and wiki editing. A truly grim situation.

All good. Done now. Fewer images coming up.

An apology to my dedicated readers for disappearing the last few weeks. The flow of thoughts has been quite distracted by family, travels, and new work projects. Any day now things will simplify themselves and the updraft of new ideas will start again. Isn’t that what we always tell ourselves? Sometimes it is true. But we need to be compelled by simplicity instead of complexity so we give up the distractions as soon as they can be released.

In addition, Jim and I have stepped up our riding. 10 days ago we started targeting 100-mile weeks—and now we’ve been days with over 120 mile trailing 7 days. This can’t last as our work time grows, but it is a good transition period. (We finally did our “block”; if you leave our place and keep turning right (or left) and take the smallest loop possible—30 miles and one big-ish hill.)

Okay, it seems cheesy to talk more about the iPhone, but it is taking up a lot of mips at my house, including Jim’s post on his iPhone. So here goes.

What amazes me about the phone:

1. It’s damn beautiful. Really. The unit is beautiful, the images are beautiful, the interface is beautiful. The box it came in is beautiful, as is the bag the box came in. Wow. Every bit of it is a pleasure to look at and hold.
2. The color and resolution enable the images to just glow; and I love the way the images flip when you twist the unit 90 degrees.
3. It’s fabulous to actually just pull up a web pages and browse them. Extra fun that our website, which is so sparely designed, looks elegant on the iPhone. And you can actually read our blogs easily.
4. But what I really love, which is only mentioned in all the writeups, is access to the maps of the entire world with corresponding satellite images. I can see houses in villages in Spain—on my phone. So clearly. The waves coming in from Alaska off the coast of California are as clear as the eddies and drops in the Urumbamba River that surrounds the walls of Machu Picchu—also visible on the phone. Of course, this is just what Google maps does, but to have it always with me is like having a atlas to dream over whenever I want. Very cool.

I’m sure that there will be things wrong with the phone in the long run, but the initial experience really is quite joyous. Now we’ll have to deal with data synchronization (which applications can be made to work, etc) and more nitty-gritty details of contacts and calendars (though musics, photos, email, bookmarks all work easily).

So, is it worth it? Not clear. But if you really enjoy seeing beautiful technology that can change how we think about things—maybe so.

We’ve been traveling light this trip—no car rentals, as few taxis as possible. In Boston, nothing but the T (the Boston subway system) and walking. Yesterday’s trip back to the Newark airport went as follows:

• A mile walk to the subway station with our roller bags and computers.
• A longish subway ride to the train station
• An Amtrak train ride from Boston South Station to New York Penn Station
• A New Jersey transit train from NY Penn to Newark Liberty Airport (on which I penned most of this post)
• A monorail, the AirTrain, across the airport to Portal P
• A phone call to order up the Day’s Inn hotel van to take us to the hotel

All in all, very efficient. Though it was a big day of travel (and today was more of the same: bus to Newark airport, AirTrain to the terminal, flight to LA and then to SF; bus to the car park, and the drive home), we got a lot done. It is really possible to read and work on the trains and subways, so the time is not lost. The airplane is a little more difficult to work on for several reasons (space, power, network access, and that grim sleepiness that overtakes me on the plane), so today was not quite as productive.

Meanwhile, New Jersey was just there gliding by the window.

It’s interesting to watch the updraft of my work change momentum. Some moments I can barely contain all the ideas and energy that is trying to get things to happen. Other moments, like today, I can’t quite figure out what wants to get done. It may be some mild tiredness from a week of travel, or just a flux in the flow. In those moments, I go to the to-do list and try to knock some tedious things off the list, or clean out my email, or edit the to-do list. There is always something that can be done. That way, those things aren’t in my way when I’m really ready to do something more creative.

We are sitting at a table on the train working, and the bays along the Atlantic Ocean are sliding by the window: boats in moorage, small harbors, sun and clouds, flat islands lying offshore, small towns and little parks.

Working while traveling has been pretty effective this trip. We could always find a way to use stray moments at coffee, at the station, on the train. The train is particularly great because it provides electricity with every seat (at least in business class). So with Jim’s Verizon wireless we have the whole working environment.

Okay. Now there’s a beach with sunbathers and bright umbrellas. We haven’t tried that working environment yet—always something new to try. Maybe with a mojito…