Blog Archives 070218 to 070122

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

070218 Davis, CA
Having all my stuff here is a little bit of a mixed blessing, because it is almost all my stuff (*). Matchbox race cars from when I was six? Check. My drawing of a dog from when I was eight? Check. The up side is that I now have lots of neat stuff, some of which I'd forgotten I had. It is like a memorabilia exhibition of every enthusiasm I have ever had. There are books on magic tricks, origami, medieval life, cryptography, etc., but more special than the books are the assorted objects from those various enthusiasms; a drinking horn (yes, made of real horn), an old italian cypher tube, etc. Still, 36 years of life result in accumulating a lot of clutter for one small apartment. The hard part now is sorting through the stuff and making good decisions about what is clutter and what is clutter worth keeping... These decisions are complicated by a life-time habit of being a pack-rat. I wouldn't have half so much stuff to deal with if it weren't for my keeping everything for years and years. It's a big change to go from habitually keeping everything to attempting to cut down to a minimum and I'm not sure how successful I'm going to be at doing that.

I bring this up again (yeah, yet again), simply because this has been another clean-up weekend. The original plan was to play host to my brother, sister-in-law, and their kids this weekend. I left work early Friday... Er, by "early", I mean "early for me", i.e. 5 PM. Actually, the office closed at 3 PM in honor of the long weekend, but anyway, as I was saying, I left work early Friday and rushed home to clean up and get ready. I totally cleaned up the downstairs, vaccuumed, wiped down the kitchen, cleaned the bathroom and then made things a bit "kid friendly", moving a selection of books (Paddington Bear, The House At Pooh Corner, Alice in Wonderland, etc.) and stuff (the Matchbox race cars, etc.) downstairs, while shifting other stuff (delicate or sharp things) upstairs. The visit was cancelled but I'd already gotten a good start on the cleanup, so I decided to keep going.

It will probably be a months-long project to slowly trim down to a good level of stuff, but the pay-off is two-fold: a relatively clutter-free apartment and (hopefully) future moves should not be the nightmare that is typical of a move. Until I am happy with the degree of culling, I won't be buying much stuff. Heck, I'm not planning on taking on any more stuff even if it's free. Since my brother is moving soon, he offered me a nice, big, relatively new TV for free. I declined. I'll only be willing to have more stuff once the upstairs looks as clutter-free as the downstairs.

Fortunately, after all this moving, I have a pretty good feeling for the "weight" of possessions. I put "weight" in quotes because I'm not just talking about physical weight or bulk of things, but also the psychological weight. The aim in reducing clutter is to minimize the physical weight and bulk of stuff while simultaneously maximizing the psychological impact of the remaining items.

Oh, I thought I'd share with you two recent finds: one is a packet of poems I wrote when I was about fifteen. The other is my first essay from a freshman year Introduction to East Asian Civilizations course, a paper called "Chinese Folk Religion: Its Popularity, Repression, and Role in Late Rebellions". Now that these have been shared electronically, I have consigned them both, along with lots of other notebooks and papers, to the recycling bin.

(*) The reason I had to write "almost" is due to a very small amount of stuff - some stuffed animals, a little wooden suitcase my father made, etc. This stayed with my parents (by their decision) purely as items for grandchildren to look at. I remember visiting my grandmother's house and seeing the old toys that my father used to play with when he was a little boy. Some of them were pretty interesting; the old-style not-very-soft teddy bear, a painted metal car made from pressed scrap metal, etc.

070213 Davis, CA
Too dang busy of late to do much writing up of stuff... I have assorted notes from ... Ah, forget the excuses: Here's the post.
I drove down to Berkeley again, this past Saturday. I've been visiting Berkeley relatively often on the weekends. Living in Berkeley now, I know three different sets of people from various other locations and times in my life. I'd be visiting San Jose more often just now, but my brother and his family have been crazy-busy the last few weekends. Anyway, the route to Berkeley is the same route I take when heading for San Jose, but it is 45+ minutes shorter. Being in the car for one hour (the drive time to Berkeley) is about my limit. Anything past an hour stuck in the car, and I'm drumming my fingers, shifing in my seat, and generally annoyed by the drive time. Anyway, between the visits to San Jose, San Francisco, and Berkeley, I'm now very familiar with the ~60 mile stretch of highway between Berkeley and Davis.

Saturday, I went to Berkeley to visit Ron and Anna for a rainy day of boardgames. Very heavy rain and a car accident along the route turned an hour's drive into an hour and a half of white-knuckled driving. Still the rest of the day was great fun and I was introduced to a good game: Ticket to Ride: Europe. I have not played Ticket to Ride (the original, with an American map), but most of the people gathered (Ron and Anna's Berkeley friends) agreed that the Europe map more interesting. Ron's friends were discussing Ticket to Ride: Europe as a "gateway" game; a game that was accessible, fast, and fun and could be attractive to people who had previously only played poker or monopoly... leading them into the world of other Spiel des Jahres-winning games. Also recommended as "gateway" games were Carcassonne, Bohnanza, and Settlers of Catan. The games went late and the conversation afterwards went even later. I was back on the road heading to Davis at 1:30 AM Sunday morning. As you might imagine, I slept in Sunday and didn't get much done on that day.

I've been writing haiku again, but I've not updated my haiku page. So here is one as part of the main blog post:

Cool breeze and blue sky
Show that spring is coming soon,
When will flowers bloom?

070209 Davis, CA
So, this morning, I wrapped up a presentation to the site about the work I've been up to lately (my project's turn in a rotating schedule) and then had a couple of meetings. After that, though, I thought about it and decided that I've done enough work this week. So, I caught up on some personal email, made a few phone calls and then decided to type up a few things that I'd been meaning to add for a little while: a few more random quotes went into the random quote file and I finally added my reviews of Tempranillo and Viognier wines to my wine reviews page. I'll even save you the need to click on the link: the Tempranillo (Casa Solar, 2004) was cheap and poor quality while the Viognier (Castle Estate, 2004) was excellent.

I don't know if any of you actually look at the wine reviews page, but in all honesty, it's for me rather than for you. I tend to forget what I liked and didn't like and posting the reviews here makes them accessible from any computer so I can pull up the reviews before I go buy a wine.

070207 Davis, CA
As you may have guessed by the lack of blog posts, I've been working too much of late. I'm not being driven by my boss or job expectations; I just like the feeling of "getting something done" and on my current work project it is very easy to see the milestones and progress, while that is not so easy to do in stuff outside of work. On the plus side, my boss is really happy with me and wants to send me to Japan to train our group there on some of the methods I've developed. I'd love to do that, since, were I to go, I'd take a week or two of vacation and tour around Japan so long as I was there. On the minus side, I've been trying to do too much and getting home late almost every night. I know it would be healthier if I spent more time away from work.

Now that it is warming up a little, I have started running again. There is a nice jogging path a short distance north of my apartment. I don't get home before dark, but the path has lights, the neighborhood is safe, and I like the night sky. I couldn't make my thoughts fit a nice haiku form, but the night sky as I was running last night made me think of these lines:

Orion hunts in clear western skies
while the moon hides its luster
behind layers of high cirrus clouds

Maybe I'll find a way to squeeze this image down the the haiku 5-7-5 form, but probably not.

The only other news is in the "odd foods" category. I don't use milk on my breakfast cereal, thanks to allergies, so I have tried everything else under the sun, goat milk (yuck!), soy milk, rice milk, brown rice milk, almond milk, walnut milk (tasted vaguely like eggs), and more. Whenever I go to get more soy milk, I wander around and look at the new "milk replacement" substances that are being introduced. Like other "healthy food" categories, the "milk replacement" field has a lot of fad items being introduced and disappearing. This most recent shopping trip yielded "hemp milk", made from "hemp nuts" (shelled hemp seeds). The product contains no THC, and the taste is a little odd, with a delicate flavor balanced between the smell of fresh mown grass, the taste of mixed nuts (almond/walnut?), and the smell of a "head shop". The flavor is faint and it's not bad, but the vague grassy taste means it's not that good either. Still, it's an interesting variation from the usual soy.

070131 Davis, CA
Warning; Politics and spelling mistakes ahead... I wrote this fast after reading about something that is definitely one for the "Oh crap!" files:
President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops. Now, you might be thinking "This is not so bad; these are rules and policy statements prepared by the government anyway, so what does it matter if the White House has a directive about these?" Well, for one thing this is yet another unprecedented increase in Executive branch power over the Legislative branch, for another thing it is adding another layer of bureaucracy, and finally it is aimed at injecting overt political objectives into otherwise purely regulatory matters.

Essentially, Bush has gotten around to following the final few recommendations from the Heritage Foundation that he didn't already have in place. The Heritage Foundation whitepaper is quite clear in stating that its goal is to end (quoting from the whitepaper) "a value-free 'scientific' program of government administration, based on objective management and policy principles, which is technically administered by neutral career public officials"... Hm. Does ending a neutral, objective, evidence-based policy strategy sound like a good thing to you?

I guess we should have expected this. Facts are not Bush's friends, and he has sought to use politics to trump them, be it in the realm of Intelligence, Finances, Science, or even simply the guidelines for existing programs. Just think how much easier it will be to get things done when the President no longer needs to cherry pick the facts since his political appointees will have already rewritten the reports to fit his political needs. Right now, there is no bureaucratic organization in place to aid the President in surpressing scientific data, well except for the political operatives put in place to "correct" the EPA's air pollution regulations, and all those appointees rewriting reports at the Department of the Interior, and the manipulation of the Department of Energy findings on topics ranging from climate change, to fuel efficiency to national power requirements. You know, except for all those and the political rewriting of National Park Service documents, geological data, education statistics, etc., the poor Bush Administration has still not conquered all the isolated pockets of fact-based, neutral administration. This new directive is designed to fix that. It looks like the War on Facts is progressing towards "victory" far more quickly than the War on Iraq. Oh, crap.

070130 Davis, CA
Well, I finally have decided to try yoga... A fitness club right by work was having some special introductory lessons, so I signed up and went Monday evening. It was easy, but a good workout. Meaning, the poses chosen were ones that you could get into without being a gymnast or anything, but holding those poses resulted in shaking limbs, twitching muscles, and a good bit of sweat. I liked it. The gym just opened, so the class size was tiny and the other people were not advanced. I think I'll keep going. Next week, I'll give their Pilates class (another introductory offer) a try just to see what that's all about.

I have to admit, having the club right next to work greatly increases my probability of going to that fitness club, since I need not stop work to attend; I need only put things on hold for 30-60 minutes and then I can still finish up work without too much disruption. I've decided that the key is no longer denying that I'm a workaholic; the key is to find ways of living fully around that fact.

070128 Davis, CA
I'm back from Chicago (and have been back since the 25th)... And still keeping very busy. Today's thought is about options. It's nice to know you have a lot of options. Here's an example: a previous co-worker and her husband decided they wanted to try a different pace of life than what California had to offer. He's American, but she's Spanish-Italian. They moved to Italy, where she got herself a Biotech job and he is staying at home doing contract cartography work while learning Italian and taking care of the kids. Their house is lovely (old stone, with a modern interior, etc.) and they are really enjoying their new life. The price difference between living in California and living in central Italy meant that the sale of a house in Davis paid for the house in Italy as well as leaving a sufficient funds for the husband to be out of work for a bit.

I just heard from them and that inspired my thoughts about options. I figure that is part of the difference between living a "smaller" life and living a "larger" life; knowing that your options include some "wild" ideas and dramatic departures from previous choices.

070124 Chicago, IL
I'm staying in the Westin O'Hare hotel for a work meeting. I like a number of things about the Westin; the high rate of air exchange, high ceilings, the "Tranquility Hour" in the evenings, a good pool, relaxing and unobtrusive atmospheric background music, etc. One example of this pervasive choice is that the first floor restaurant is not a frenetic senses-overwhelming Sports Bar, but is instead called a "Chill Lounge" and is more of a very relaxed wine bar than anything else. The evening "Tranquility Hour" is in a lounge on the first floor where cups of high quality Chinese tea can be made, self-serve. There is the atmospheric background music and information cards along with each kind of loose tea. I was happy that I recalled enough Chinese to read the accompanying characters (which gave slightly different information than the English).

070122 Chicago, IL
I'll be too busy for updates for the next little while, so I'll just leave you with a few haiku expressing thoughts from my plane trip to Chicago.

Wind-swept hills and vales
the earth, a wrinkled white sheet
pretty morning flight.

Geometric lines
lace hills' natural contours
the thumb-print of Man

Clouds' white cotton puffs
tinged nicotine yellow-brown
by our pollution

Descending through clouds
diving into the unknown
the future revealed

Page Last Modified: 2007 09 29, 21:53:12

 

 

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