Magic
The sun out over Higgins Lake.
I don’t know about everyone else out there, but to me, August is just one of those magical times of year.
So, what exactly am I basing this on? Well, let me try to tell you…
August invokes raw emotion, excitement and hope, it’s that exhilarating feeling of having the best part of your summer stretched out before you, with seemingly all the time in the world to discover the mysteries and possibilities that await you at each turn.
August is an illusion, the seasonal mirage that we willfully pretend it to be, a fantasy world that we look forward to escaping to each summer, the place where we believe we’ll be able to conjure up our next epic adventure, look to stir up our next batch of special memories.
August is a wonderful contradiction, an unsolvable puzzle, an entire summer’s worth of lazy carefree days and frantic last-minute activities that we try to squeeze into a single month.
August is unpredictable, an unfinished script or blank canvas, that nobody, including the artists themselves, quite know how the work will turn out, or exactly when it will be finished.
Regardless of how old I get, no matter what I have going on in my life, there’s just something inexplicable that happens each time this year, something that just automatically kicks in and takes over. It’s like some primal region of my brain switches on and says, “Hey, I know you probably had an idea of how you saw the next month going, but I’m August, and I have something altogether different in store for you.”
Maybe its that I associate August with the spontaneity and infinite possibilities of summer, the warm weather and long days that you can choose to pack with endless activity and adventure, or spend doing nothing at all.
August is relaxing, extended weekends at the lake, or the occasional opportunity to take a family vacation to explore and discover those other parts of our beautiful state. For anyone who has ever vacationed with their family in the Upper Peninsula, for example, you know that it usually takes until at least August before the Great Lakes have sufficiently warmed to make the water comfortable enough to swim in, and the overnight temperatures are finally just right to produce the perfect tent camping weather.
August is about all of those things that are uniquely summer, barbecues and picnics, ice cold beer and cornhole, taking a quick dip and drip drying in the sun, or just being lazy and enjoying a good book under the shade of a tree.
August is waking up at sunrise and sipping your morning cup of coffee out on the back deck. Its putting in a full day’s work, and still having several hours of daylight left in the evening to grab dinner and drinks on an outdoor patio of a favorite restaurant, check out a concert at a local park, happen upon a seasonal farmer’s market, or just unwind with a long walk or bike ride at dusk.
August is taking an evening drive through the countryside, with the windows open and the top down, the warm summer air rushing past you, inducing one of those out-of-body type experiences where your senses feel both heightened, and somehow numbed at the same exact time. It’s about sitting around a fire gazing up at the stars for hours, or hanging out in the open hatch of a SUV with your kids, staring up at the screen of a drive-in movie theater.
August is also bittersweet, it’s a time for reflection, looking back at summers past with a sense of nostalgia and reverence.
August is the sensation of feeling like you have all of the time in the world one moment, and then in a blink of an eye, realizing that another summer has ended, and yet another year is soon to be in the books.
August is about shared experience, those residual memories that start to bubble up from some pit in the deep recesses of our subconscious when we think about all of the kids who’s summers are about to end, like some Pavlovian response that triggers the same nervous anticipation and uncertainty that our younger selves had once felt at the beginning of each new school year.
August is about the tragic irony of life, how much faster time seems to fly by the older we get, how the satisfaction of each new chapter completed is always met with the sobering realization that eventually all of our stories will come to an end.
Mostly though, I think what makes August magic, is about recognizing it for what it is, those roughly four weeks of splendor that life gifts to us each year, that we are free to do with what we please, and regardless of your plans or expectations, never seems to disappoint.
Like I said, just a magical time of year.
As for me, I began this month by rereading the Ernest Cline novel Ready Player One, or more specifically, I spent an entire weekend binge listening to the Audible book production of Ready Player One as narrated by Wil Wheaton. This may be one of my all-time favorite books, a virtual treasure hunt of sorts that is set in a futuristic world and alternative reality that is still plausible enough to make the plight of the fictional protagonist seem all too real. And for anybody else like me, who grew up in the 1980’s, you will certainly enjoy all of the nostalgic arcade game, Dungeons & Dragons, and MTV era references that Cline has so creatively woven into his ingenious storyline.
In addition, this month I finally got around to reading my colleague Chuck Severance’s 2011 book, “Sakai: Building an Open-Source Community” which is a great behind-the-scenes look at the origins of the Sakai Project, as told from Chuck’s perspective as Chief Architect of the Sakai LMS. Whether you are specifically interested in learning more about Sakai, or more generally about Learning Management Systems or open-source software projects, I would definitely recommend this quick, but informative read. You can order copies of Chuck’s book on Amazon or by visiting his website: https://www.dr-chuck.com/.
Speaking of Sakai, I spent a good portion of August performing manual functional verification testing on the Lessons tool, which really got me into the whole “back to school” frame of mind. This month, Accessiversity also continued to ramp up a new project that we recently started with Brian Krantz and his team at the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, which we will be sharing more about in the coming months.
DTE Energy Theater marquis from the Dave Matthews Band concert.
On August 11, my wife, kids and I joined my best friend, his wife and kids to attend the Dave Matthews Band concert at DTE Energy Theater in Clarkston, Michigan. For us adults, it had been several years since we had been able to enjoy an outdoor concert of any sort, and our first chance in several years to see our old friend Dave. But of course, what made this time particularly special, is that it was the kids first ever concert, which I have to say, has to rank way up there as far as first ever concert experiences go!
The next day, I had the privilege of presenting to the Capital Area IT Council Software Development Peer Group. My talk, which I had titled, “The Current and Future State of Software Testing: The Accessiversity Case Study” drew on my own experiences as an accessibility consultant and Quality Assurance tester to illustrate how individuals with disabilities can perform user testing to supplement/enhance an organization’s existing QA team/testing efforts. One of the big take-aways was the prospective workforce implications of the Accessiversity model, and this idea, that with the right approach and some basic accommodations, you can develop individuals with disabilities into entry-level Quality Assurance Analysts, Software Testers, Business Analysts, and some of these other peripheral roles that are critical to the software development life cycle.
Here is a picture of the 30th anniversary Dave Matthews Band commemorative sticker that my son Ryan and I snuck away to purchase from one of the souvenir stands down on the main concourse. While we were down there, we heard the band start to play their classic song “What Wud You Say?” and I thought back to the epic 4-hour concert that we attended back in 2015, when Blues Traveler frontman John Popper joined the band on stage to play his iconic harmonica, and I had a momentary panic attack thinking that we might be missing out on something similarly special.
After an abbreviated eight week break, my sons Carson and Ryan started back to school on August 18, and even though our district has been making this gradual move toward adopting a year-round, balanced calendar, the mid-August/pre-Labor Day start still takes some getting used to.
Before time completely ran out in the month of August, I was able to get in that round of golf with my friends Jim, Bob and Rey that I had referenced in last month’s “No Time Like the Present” blog. It was great to get the gang back together and spend the day out on the golf course catching up, sharing laughs, and exchanging insults, even if our collective, and thoroughly pathetic 18-hole putting debacle cost us multiple strokes, and handed Rey the victory for having the closest “best ball” prediction, along with the $3 in prize money. In case you’re wondering, my streak of not making a divot came to an unceremonious end about two holes into the round, and Bob immediately started back up with his “digging to China” jokes, so yeah, it was just like old times!
Finally, my wife Teresa, her brother Jeff, sister Anne and our three families spent a weekend camping up at North Higgins Lake State Park as a memorial for their dad Mick who had passed away from COVID-19 back in January. Mick must have been looking down on us, because we had absolutely gorgeous weather the entire weekend, and Teresa and her siblings were able to share a bunch of special moments, and make even more special memories, in a place that had been such a big part of theirs, and their dad’s life.
Picture of Teresa’s Uncle Rick swimming down to place the Micky Mouse shaped paver stone memorial that they had created for their dad Mick at a site in Higgins Lake where people leave miscellaneous sunken treasures.
In a word, it was magic.
What else would you expect from August in Michigan?