I’m sitting on the couch at my parents’ house in the mountains of north east Georgia. We’re watching an old movie with Frank Sinatra on the AMC movie chanel. I’m eating vanilla wafers and drinking coffee with my dad. It’s a relaxing day that I need.

I’ve been up here in the mountains since late Saturday night. NCYC lasted from Thursday to Saturday night, and Mom and Andrew came picked me up in Atlanta and the three of us drove up here to the mountains.

The most rewarding part of the past two days was working on projects with my Dad and brother Andrew. A couple years ago, Dad and Mom installed a small pond and a small water fall in the backyard with a plastic tub and a water pump. When I was younger, our family lived on a farm with two ponds and a stream. Now that Mom and Dad live on a mountain side, they miss the water. The tub has been ripped out and replaced with heavy plastic. The rocks have been torn out and rearranged. There’s a leak somewhere in the ten foot stream, so Dad figured it was time to tear it out and start all over. This time, he wanted my creative spin on the whole thing.

Most of what I tried to do is make it look more natural with more interest. We pulled some big flat rocks out of the woods. We traveled up the street and pulled buckets of pebbles out of the stream. I applied all that I’ve learned from reading books about Asian landscapes and Zen gardens. After two days of work, it really looks fantastic. At any given moment, two of us are standing there, staring at the drizzling water in ten minutes of silence.

The other project I’ve worked on is my brother’s website: WeBuildBanners.com. We spent several hours brainstorming and writing notes. We talked about his business strategy from beginning to end. I didn’t want to just do it all for him, so I played the role of the the person who asks all the right questions, and he gave all the right answers. Then finally we redesigned the site. It’s small, but it’s clean and to-the-point. My memories of living with Andrew was him running around as a little kid, so to work through this with him was fun but a little bizarre.

Alright, I can’t keep writing because this black and white movie in front of my has finally grabbed my attention. It’s time to relax again.