There is a Japanese saying I heard once along the lines of “He who climbs Mount Fuji is a wise man; He who climbs it twice is a fool.” A similar thing can be said about visiting Graceland.

I of course, have visited Graceland twice which means, well, yeah, pretty much.

The first time I went to Graceland I went because I felt it was something I ought to do. I lived in Oxford, Mississippi and had friends from Albania (Mom and Dad Two) who lived in Memphis and they agreed to drive me to Graceland, but wouldn’t go back inside. Instead Dad Two sat in the cafe across the street (which served Elvis specialties like deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches) and drank coffee whilst I went inside.

I visited the car museum and the planes (both of which are worth a visit) and then crossed the street to the mansion.

A couple things struck me about the mansion. First, except for the jungle room, and some random leopard skin, it was less gaudy than I was expecting, or at least I was surprised by how it all seemed to work. Also, I remember how bored the room guides were. They weren’t tour guides, instead they were human tape players who waited in a room and recited the same speech many times a day and had grown bored and robotic about it all. When the young woman explained how Elvis saw the jungle furniture and decided to build a room around it, she could have been a text to speech computer.

The second time I went with my father and step-mother. That time the bored human tape players had been replaced with actual tape players (with headphones) and Priscilla Presley’s voice guided visitors through the mansion and the museum of Elvis guitars and jumpsuits. There were two problems with this.

First, many tourists followed the tapes so exactly that when Priscilla Presley told them to move they moved. She didn’t tell them to look though, so I got stepped on and bumped into a lot.

Second, the recordings couldn’t be hurried. You moved at Priscilla Presley’s pace and no faster. If you weren’t interested in the subtleties of the American Eagle jumpsuits from the Aloha Via Satellite from Hawaii concert, you were out of luck. You had to listen to the explanation before you got to move to the Mexican Sundial jumpsuit.

I ended up just letting the tape run and moved along at my own pace. This though, proved rather creepy, as I found myself surrounded by people who moved silently when Priscilla Presley told them to. I also got to visit a back building that had been closed the first time I visited.

I recommend everyone visit Graceland once, mostly because Memphis is worth visiting. Graceland is in a rough neighborhood, though, and don’t go in mid-August around the anniversary of Elvis death unless you have a place to stay. That’s when all the Elvis fans and Elvis impersonators do their annual hajj to Graceland. It’s kind of fun, but you’ll never get a room and you never, ever, criticize Harum Scarum.

2015 started with me feeling stressed—at least that’s what I wrote in my log. However, it says a lot that I don’t remember why I was stressed.

I think it’s because I had just stopped going to karate classes and was, at least at the time, feeling confused about if I was doing the right thing for the right reasons. A year later, I’m sure I did. I haven’t missed karate class at all and haven’t felt compelled to find a replacement class. I miss the people, sometimes, but not enough to go back.

I seem to have eventually calmed down and settled into a new Sunday pace. I also didn’t have my usual October stress, which was a very pleasant surprise. There have been other stresses (I have teen and tween daughters) and we have some family decisions to make and some things to organize, but those haven’t been overwhelming. (Knock on wood.)

There’s also been a change in my work conditions.

Reviewing the log, I can’t say I accomplished a lot in 2015.

I got some stuff done. I finished the first draft of novel number three and then did very little with it except scribble a few ideas for changes. I started typing the text of novel number two from the handwritten “assembled” draft but got sidetracked.

I had a lot of ideas for other websites and for monetizing the ones I have, but this has also been a year with a profound lack of follow-through. There’s a strong streak of fear disguised as perfectionism involved with that. That fear also frequently translates as “Ooh, let’s try this, too!” distraction and old fashioned time wasting. There’s also a strong streak of being uncomfortable reaching out to others for help in doing things. This leads me to not only reinvent the wheel, but to try to carve them from stone.

Sitting in piles are unfinished–and in a couple cases unsubmitted articles–and a finished novel I’ve trunked for a while after a lukewarm reception. There’s also the pieces of a business I never started except on paper.

I mostly kept the log going and kept up the daily entries on this blog. It is interesting to see how the log slowly developed a format: Date and weather; summary of the morning; summary of the day, with weather and lunch; summary of the evening including a sketch of some key theme from the day. Quite frankly, it became more of a diary than I’d intended, but I did make entries at different times of the day rather than all at once in the evening.

I’ll keep writing the log, although I’ve got a new journal that’s going to change the format a bit.

The blog as it approaches its two year anniversary has yet to settle into a format. That failure stems from a mix of laziness and indecision. I’d still like to make it more hobby based, but also include random personal entries. The theme for 2016 will be “pens, paper, life”.

2016 will be a big year for a lot of personal reasons. My goal is to make the entries in the log more interesting and make the year more productive. (More on that tomorrow.)

Truth be told, there’s a thin line between teaching your kids to fend for themselves and sitting around being lazy. I’m not sure if today crossed that line, but it may have.

In my defense, because our oldest was/is on the naughty list, I had little trouble assigning her the job of hanging the laundry out to dry. There was a bit of huffing and puffing but I helped her out by taking everything out of the washing machine and putting it in a basket on the table. Her job was to take it out of the countless mesh bags She Who Must Be Obeyed likes to use–giving us the very rare “individually wrapped” laundry–put it on drying racks or hangers and put it all outside so the sun could do the rest of the work.

After that, I shaved and took a shower (which for me, when I’m on vacation is a major accomplishment) and settled down to do some sorting and winter cleaning and print our new year’s cards and play some games. (Yeah, I know, one of these things is not like the other, but so what?)

Because I’d had the better part of an apple after I got up, I didn’t actually decide to eat breakfast until around noon. That’s when the first dilemma hit: should I cook for the girls, or leave them to fend for themselves? Was that the responsible thing to do, especially as our oldest is also responsible for doing dishes until she’s 20 (give or take a few years), or was I shirking my responsibilities as a father to make sure they were 1) fed and 2) fed properly.

That dilemma lasted a few seconds as I’m of the school that if our oldest doesn’t wash her school eating utensils then she can just take them the school dirty the next day. It’s not my lunch, it’s hers. I, therefore, went ahead and made myself breakfast for lunch.

After that, I kept reminding the girls that they had to make their own lunch and received the usual noncommittal grunts of “yes, there is a voice speaking to me” but no one actually moved until much later.

Eventually they managed to make lunch, and even tracked down and heated some items from the freezer. After that, our oldest washed and put away the dishes. I was impressed and proud.

I feel that’s what I’m supposed to do to help teach the girls some responsibility and I did feel a sense of accomplishment when they were working and I wasn’t. Of course, I also enjoyed being able to do nothing, so perhaps my motives weren’t as pure as they could have been.

I’ll have to ponder that more when they do dishes and hang the laundry tomorrow.