Jun
19th
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nxogiVub7g
I’m just happy. Thanks to all those who attended (and/or were part of the ceremony).
Mar
5th
(posted here because loving our country doesn’t suck)
It’s a Finnish rock band and the Red Army Choir singing “Sweet Home Alabama.”
Take that, Lenin!
Feb
15th
Files under General Posts |
Leave a Comment
Blessings on all of you recently married or soon to be married people…
Feb
8th
Here’s (what should be) an easy SLED. Don’t get late fees! I just called to get a late fee removed from an account that I paid a week late. It wasn’t late because of funds shortage - I just forgot to pay it.
Dumbass.
Fortunately the pleasant woman at the call center was able to remove the fee. I’m pretty sure she said something along the lines of “Well, you don’t have too much dumb, so we can remove this.”
Feb
5th
Files under Strength & Fitness |
1 Comment
It’ll be a bit before I set any strength goals. I’ll wait until my life settles so I make some reasonable goals.
But one fitness goal that I’m finally going to knock down is the James Joyce Ramble. I’ve been running it for years, but this is the year to do it with sub seven minute miles. I’ll post back when I’ve got some sort of training schedule.
Feb
5th
Taking a cue* from Jon, I’ve been plowing through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It’s been mostly plane and train reading, which is perfect. It’s the kind of book that necessitates periodic interruptions (and the occasional nap). And since it’s about rethinking the way we find balance in our lives, it’s also the kind of book that’ll probably come up on OpSLED more than once.
One very small point covered is that when stuck, just look at the problem. Don’t try to solve the problem, just look at the whole scenario. Not, “what is wrong,” but just “what is it?” If you skip this step, you’ll try to solve a problem that wasn’t broken, or apply a solution that fixes the symptom but not the problem. Or you might find out that there isn’t actually a problem at all: It’s not supposed to work that way**.
So how is this relevant? Well, it turns out I might be a cat person after all.
My fiancé (yes, that is still fun to say, even if it annoys all sorts of Seinfeldians out there) recently brought up getting a cat. My initial response was that I’m really not a cat person; I’m a dog person. So this immediately led to thoughts about how getting a dog isn’t really feasible due to work/travel/etc. So getting a pet just wasn’t possible at this time. Unless it was the famous goat riding jousting monkey that we’ve been talking about since high school.
And I had the obligatory thoughts about how cats are sinister and dastardly and just generally the Iago of the animal kingdom. All the things that a dog person would naturally think.
Of course, she had arguments on the flip side: cats are cute and fuzzy and cleaner, etc. But I wasn’t biting (unlike an ungrateful cat).
But the reading got me thinking, and I started to identify why I wasn’t a “cat person.” I couldn’t think of a reason. It’s not that the critters don’t have their drawbacks. That was never the problem; dogs can be a pain in the ass too. It’s just that I’d set up a giant divide for myself, and it was a crappy divide. It cut out 50% of the fuzzball pet joy. So I’ve divided to chuck it. And now there’s twice as many pets out there to make us happy! Great!
* so I just found out that the correct spelling is the billiards cue, not the “get in line” queue. Opsleds, big and small!
** This reminds me of selling cars. I had an older couple come in insisting that new brakes didn’t work because when they drove the breaks were always shuddering and thumping, and they’d had this problem in multiple newer cars. It turned out that they were engaging the anti-lock breaks nearly every time they came to a stop. I had to explain that (1) the shuddering is actually helping you stop, (2) it doesn’t mean that you should take your foot off the brake, and (3) probably you should drive a little less aggressively.
(more…)