# Quarters _(Howell Creek Radio address for April 6, 2013 -- )_ When I woke up, I was standing downstairs by the kitchen sink at 6:29 am, rubbing my eyes. "Wear her down," the voice was saying, "that's the only way to win. Wear her down." It was my super-ego, I suppose, prodding me on. It started two weeks ago Friday night. Gwen, my sister who rents a room here at Swaledale House, had come out of the bathroom, and sat across from me in the dining room where I was puttering. Trixie was in the kitchen. "Joel," she said -- and she mainly uses my name when she really wants to pose me a question; slide it under my nose, like. "What," she continued "would you say to a little...competition?" Not enough information to render a verdict, was my first thought, and I said as much. "What time do you try to get up in the morning?" she asked. Six o'clock, or six-thirty, I said. Let's say six-thirty. Very well, she said. Suppose we have a little contest; a contest of wills. If you're downstairs and awake at six-thirty, according to the time shown on our cell phones, you get one point. The first one of us to gain a ten-point advantage over the other would be entitled to a coffee shop gift card. I didn't know about this at all. Well, I said, thinking aloud and trying to do the arithmetic: "one of the dangers would be that if one of us developed a small edge it could be ridiculously hard for the other person to ever catch up..." "Yes," said Gwen in a tone that suggested that she viewed this as a feature, and not a weakness, in her plan. Well, we talked some more. After a good 48 hours' due consideration, I shook her hand on it, and with Trixie serving as referee, we hammered out the details in trilateral negotiations in the upstairs hallway. Hence my being next to the kitchen sink at six-thirty in the morning. "She's competitive," I heard my super-ego saying, "but consistency is not in her playbook. Consistency -- the Long View -- that's your trump card." And I could just hear it mutter, "maybe your only card." I understand super-egos can be critical like that. * * * It used to be that waking up at 6 am would give me a good half-hour to wake up, and then a couple of hours to write, in addition to the evenings and weekends. Nowadays, getting up that early somehow gives me only enough time to wake up and eat and wake up a little more and look presentable and walk to work. It somehow reminds me of something that happened a couple of weeks ago. We were singing the final song at Sunday morning service, and I noticed a quarter on the floor at the end of our row. I made a mental note to sidle over there nonchalantly at the end of the song, and nonchalantly step on the coin. I don't know, I guess I just wanted the schoolboy satisfaction of having scored a mote off the church service. Well, the song ended, I sidled over and placed my shoe over the coin -- but quickly took it away again, because right at that exact moment, my friend Theo's cute little five year-old daughter had stooped over my foot, with such innocent and obvious intent that I had no choice but to smile and cede her the prize. Looking up again I saw Red, the guy sitting in the next row up, looking down too, and smiling in his vacant, gregarious way. It had been _his_ quarter that Breanna was now making off with. "Just as well to let her have it eh?" I said, and then added something to the effect of, "after all, it's only a quarter." Red didn't take me up on that thought, though. "Oh no," he said, "they _add up_. Every year I take my quarters into the bank: last time the total came to a _couple few hundred dollars_," and I quickly smiled and said "aha, oh yeah, for sure, wow" and changed the subject, which is what I do when I disagree on something too trivial to argue about. I can remember a time when I had a lot of change in my pocket every day too, and I kept an apple cider jar to save it up in, and just like Red, would watch it "add up" and look forward to my next windfall of a couple few hundred dollars. I used to do this, that is, until I realized that all these dimes, nickels and quarters are merely the leftovers from dozens and dozens of much larger transactions. For every couple quarters I saved in the jar, I'd _spent_ at least sixteen or twenty times that much in order to get those quarters in change. My couple few hundred dollars' windfall was really just the remainder from thousands in _spent_ cash. It's one of those things where the more you think you're winning, the more you're probably losing. Which is it better to save: your quarters or the original five-dollar bills they got shaved off of? So it is with the early mornings and stolen lunch breaks in between office work. Yeah, it adds up. It's also the leftovers from vastly larger blocks of time you spent muddling away on grunt work. So that's kind of depressing. But you also have to ask yourself: when you save up that half-hour for something creative, is it more like stashing it away in a jar -- or is it really more like giving it away to that five year old girl? * * * Thanks for listening to Howell Creek Radio, my little fifty-cent early-morning production. Sorry about the unscheduled break last week. The snow cover in the front yard is down to about 40, so good enough for me. I'll put a bland, informative photo about that on the website. . See you next week. Synopsis ------------ Radio address for April 6, 2013. We contemplate the value of stolen and saved moments doing what you love in between work and sleep. This address was partly inspired by a satirical article at The Onion that is so depressing and close to home that I won't even bother linking it here. Music is [_The Journey Home_][tjh] by Phil Keaggy. [![Photo: Snow cover in my front yard, April 5, 2013][psc]][psc-flickr] [psc]: http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8115/8622597431_9a5a293761_b.jpg [psc-flickr]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/otherjoel/8622597431/ [tjh]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YOR27S/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B003YOR27S&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20