Cloudy Guy

Last night I started scanning through the photos on my cell phone looking for a new screensaver and was, more or less, stunned to see I had over 130 shots on it. Many of them I had forgotten I'd taken. I began saving them over to the memory card and was surprised at all I found (cuz I don't really use it very often). Quite a variety and just a few that needed to be deleted. Very few with people in them - a couple of Lynda, a couple that had been taken of me with Owen or Zeph - my grandsons, one or two of my daughter Sarah during our visit to Vancouver or her visits here, one of the counsellors here clowning around.

There were a number of building shots and architectural details and landscape scenes. But the vast majority were shots of the sky and especially cloud formations. Stormy clouds, sunlit clouds, clouds at sunset and sunrise, clouds shot while driving, stacked clouds, high thin ones, lowdown and dirty ones, armadas of clouds sailing across the skies..... I came to the conclusion that I'm just a 'cloudy' guy. There must have been 70 of them taken over the last 2 years. I must get a USB cable connection for various sizes and types of storage media so I can download a few here - some of them are startlingly good. I'm constantly amazed at the clarity and vivid colour captured by such a dinky little lens.

Getting up today I was a different sort of cloudy guy - as in 'head in the clouds'. I had slept very soundly for a change and had great difficulty waking up and getting aware. Even with having been up for 4 hours before coming to work I really wasn't 100% with it and didn't feel like coming in. Concentrate - hah! Thoughts cascading like a blizzard of butterflies. I couldn't follow the path of any of them and gave up trying. Go with the flow Norm.......

What did wake me up was the half hour drive to work over snowy and icy roads. Yikes! Nothing like very real danger to kick your senses fully into gear. My mindset and mood improved once we made the bus trip to our meeting. Our driver has been sober for 15 years but hadn't ever joined a local group since relocating here from the west a number of years ago. I introduced her to one of the women I know well at that group and she wound up joining it. I nodded a hello at a guy I didn't recognize and we talked for a bit - it was his first ever meeting so I showed him some of the available literature and introduced him to some of the members. Paul was chairing the meeting and asked if I would come up and do the slogans so I got to take part. I rambled a bit but I can get carried away talking about recovery - I don't think anyone minded. The sister-in-law of one of our recent graduates came up to thank me after the meeting and promptly burst into tears; I can't recall ever getting that reaction before but there's always a first time, I suppose. The guy who spoke is a friend of mine from my first days in A.A. and his talk was brilliant - just what I needed to hear tonight.

Tonight has been much quieter around here than the last couple so I've had a chance to roam the blogosphere and check out the usual suspects. There are a few of you 'out there' that I generally keep in fairly regular email contact with but I haven't over the last few weeks. I might play catch up Friday night on that but if in the meantime you fell like dropping me a line - feel free. I'll be around.