Birds

I am sitting at my kitchen counter, looking out the window, which faces east. Several times a week, around 5:30 or 6am, I sit here having my coffee, talking on Skype with my primary developer, who is in India. He marvels at all the birds he hears out my window, and it’s true – there are a lot of birds.

It’s also kind of wondrous that these birds are being heard all the way in Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta) and that they can form the backdrop to what can often be stressful conversations, as the KISS Principle of design (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is one that my place of work is determined not to follow.

The birds wake me up every morning around 5am. They rise with the dawn.

There is an ice-cream truck on the street that plays a piece of classical music my mother used to play on the piano when I was a kid. I cannot remember the name of the composer. I wonder what he would have thought had he known his music would be the theme song of an ice-cream truck.

Summer of ’77, in Paphos, then a very sleep little village in Cyprus, there was a guy with an ice-cream bike. He was everywhere. You’d see him at one remote beach, and then, a few hours later, at another remote beach 15 miles away, with a whole lot of nothing in between. The only english he knew was “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream” You’d hear him singing it, and his bell ringing, and the sound would get louder, and then he’d crest the hill on his ice-cream bike and you’d see him. Like the birds outside my window heard in Kolkata, another sound that travelled across the world.

In a couple of hours I’m heading back up to Bishop to run the Bishop High Sierra 100K. My last time up there was not such a success. You can read the race report. There are some nice pictures to go with it.