bierkergaard

I am a sucker for motivational quotes. Posted this above meme today on Facebook. Progress, as it is said, not perfection. I am heading out of town again this weekend (early Friday actually) for Portland, Maine. The other Portland. I have been wanting to get up there for a couple of years for the scenery (Portland is on the Atlantic Ocean), food, and craft beer. I also have some friends who live up around Portland and we, my buddy and I, will partake of these three items over the days and nights we're are up there. So, I will be busy tomorrow packing and making plans for an early Friday departure and won't be back until Monday sometime. So, I am blogging now because I certainly won't be doing it up in Portland. The time is too valuable. All week I have been trying to keep to my plan of eating healthier. Essentially, eating well but better. That translates to a lot of vegetables in two out my three meals a day. Frankly, I have never liked vegetables. Can't say th...

Just returned from the Jersey Shore from a family event. I was able to catch up with all of my cousins as well as my brothers. There are 8 boys and only one girl in our generation of children. Within a couple of generations, there will be a lot more Bierker's in the U.S. Not from me in all likelihood, unless something Abrahamic happens. It was neat to get to know my cousins' kids' better or even meet them for the first time. One of them was wiping wedding cake frosting on his face like war paint last night at dinner and my older brother and I were egging him on. His dad, at a different table, was super chill about it and found it amusing too. Good parenting. Let kids have some fun. Adulthood will beat fun out of them if they are not able to keep that kid fire alive and part of this sustainability is the ability to be a kid when a kid. I have worked with far too many teens who are prematurely parentified for one reason or another. I don't believe I would be a good p...

This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”   C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory I had a one of the students in my class, after the school year had ended on Friday afternoon and she was outside of the school front entrance on a bench with another student who had also been in my class, ask me if I had been the class clown when I was in high school. In my class I had tried to have a sense of humor with the kids. Forty-five days for 90 minutes daily is a looooong time to teach Study Skills to rammy and restless 9th graders. She thought I was funny.   I did have them period 1/2 and most of them were still sleepy...that was a plus. Easier to dial up than dial down.     Humor was both tactical and strategic, to keep the kids guessin...

The rolling estate and garden in Molumbia (my own duchy protectorate) For the 15 years or so, I have had a garden growing out back. Both at my previous house and then my current house. At the current domicile, since 2011. In the Old Testament, land was to lay fallow every 7th year. So, this is year 7. Technically, I have added new dirt every couple of years, so it is not entirely the same soil. But, the principle stands. This year I am contemplating not growing vegetables. Take a year off. Chill. Ar my previous house, I would plant a multitude of tomatoes, peppers, kale, beans, squash, etc., and lay down some weed block sheets, and then let the strong survive. Good Plants vs. the Weeds. A Darwinian death-match for scarce resources. But, then the groundhogs came and it all ended in a spectacular collapse.  My back-yard fastidious pain-in-the ass neighbor no doubt took glee in watching the fiasco. He'd get all riled about the garden chaos but then hire exterminators to spray...

I was driving the back-way home through the woods from work the other day on a road that meanders roughly along the Susquehanna River with all of its twists and turns. There isn't a lot of traffic there and I dodge suburban congestion of the other route. I figure that I drive the forested route at least two hundred times a year (I do go the other way in the morning sometimes because it is so early that the traffic is sparse). So, after 25 years, I am around 5000 times that I have driven this woodsy way. Yet, if I pay mind to it, I always see something new. Until the economic downturn of a few years ago, the woods were starting to be taken over by new construction. Since then, things have slowed but telltale sewer upgrades are happening and that predicts that the lumberyard that owns all of the hundreds of acres of trees is going to sell to the highest bidder soon. It makes me sad, for as the trees go, so do people. We literally need each other to breathe. Not that this is real...

The other week, I was hanging out in my kitchen minding my business and without warning the C.S. framed illustration that I had received from good friends this last Christmas, affixed to the wall by that 3M sticky device and hanger, came off the wall and the portrait crashed into my kitchen table. I was pleased that the glass didn't shatter. I think my box of cigars softened the blow. It wasn't one of those cheap Chinese knock-off picture hangers. It was the real 3-M deal. The portrait, glass, and frame, aren't very heavy, measuring both less that one foot in distance in regards to the X and Y axis. But, crash it did. I surmise that it was because the kitchen wall is painted with semi-gloss paint which is slicker as it has a compound in it that resists water and allows it to be scrubbed which is of importance with the kitchen water vapors and messes emanating from my latest culinary masterpiece.  I was wary of putting the C.S. Lewis illustration back up in the kitch...

After a very difficult week where one of our student's passed away, I came home Friday night fairly emotionally concussed. There is really only one therapeutic response for this...sleep. My mind needs to rest and rejuvenate in total silence. After about an hour and change of deep rest, I was ready to roll and do something. The neurons had cooled. One of my good buddies had FB Messaged me while I dozed, announcing that it was the weekend. He knows me well enough to realize that I was napping. It is fairly common on Friday afternoons. If I don't nap, then a quiet night at home is usually my next best option. School counseling typically takes a pound of flesh from me, and sometimes much more. This was one of those weeks.   Thus, we planned to hang out with the agreement that it needed to be outside and include beer. So, we decided upon Columbia Kettleworks, our go-to in this part of the county. Close to my haus, great beer, and the town needs cash. As we sipped our brews...