The highs and the lows

So in the last week, I've gotten two mass emails from friends... these are the excusable kind of mass emails, one where there's big news that needs to be shared quickly. One of them was an engagement (the subject line was "Puffs" and the message said that all the boxes of puffs that were flying off the shelf were due to all the ladies blowing their noses because he got engaged). The other one was someone who's company was bought out and her job eliminated. Luckily, most of the mass emails of those sort I've gotten it's been appropriate to write back with a hearty congratulations. Engagments, promotions, new jobs...

As for my life, so far it's been very neutral... no mass emails sent out for either case. I'm not the type that looks for a roller coaster life, but sometimes I wonder if I'm too level. So I've come to the following conclusion and follow ups, the second of which I'm going to need the help of my friends. I'm going to appreciate every day that I don't need to send out a mass email of the unlucky kind. And someday when I do send out something of the happy kind, I want all of you to help me celebrate it!

Big things vs. small things

OK, this is based off a posting by Winston, a long time friend of mine who now lives in Cali... His blog talked about people who get overly pissed off at little things.

There are people in my life who do that... I'll give you a slightly dramatized example. For those who don't know, whenever I go somewhere I mail myself back a postcard from the place and put it up on a board. I need to mail a postcard. I have a wallet full of postcard stamps and regular first class mail stamps. However, they just raised postage by 2 cents. So I stick a 37 cent stamp on a postcard, and subsequently get yelled at because I'm giving the post office 10 cents. I get a lecture about money and not wasting it... when I say it's only 10 cents, I get a lecture about "the principle" of it all.

So the line of thinking is a person who doesn't care about saving 10 cents spends their weekends setting bonfires to $100 bills. Well, guess what... I gave the post office 10 cents, but I figure that I am smarter with my money than 75% of the population. And who knows, maybe I've saved myself 10 cents worth of gas and frustration trying to find a 2 cent stamp.

More thoughts on "principles." I'm sick of people who use that as an excuse to get mad at little things. Your principles should govern your life as a whole, not used to pick fights. And yes, you can let little stuff go to go after big stuff and not be a hypocrite.

The World's Biggest Random Thing That They're Famous For

So apparently, the neighboring town of High Point, NC is famous for the world's tallest chest of drawers (known as the "Bureau of Information" in a previous life, that's what it said!). As an aside, I learned today that the name of the city comes from when they were putting down the location for major plank road to intersect with the railroad, they chose the highest point in the area. The city grew from around there, and then they decided what the heck, let's build a really big ass piece something that looks like furniture. I guess the area was known for its furniture before China decided to start letting people take advantage of cheap labor (Thomasville, which I assume is home of Thomasville furniture, is around here... kinda like how Johnsonville is the home the Johnsonville brats for my Wisconsin readers). So, I was told (tongue firmly pressed in cheek) that this was THE thing to see. So I drove the 40 minutes round trip to go see it. Without tongue firmly pressed in cheek, it was totally lame. But the tongue was well buried within cheek, so I'm more than happy with my decision to go see it! I even had my postcard of this thing that I had bought when I was here like 4 years ago mailed back from a mail box a block away.

Oh, it doesn't end here. It gets even better! See if you notice something that doesn't belong in this picture (other than the socks sticking out):


That's right! It's a For Sale sign! This thing is for freakin' sale! So, of course I can't leave it at that. I looked up the website it was for sale on, and it's being offered for $195,000. This four story piece of art (hard to say that with a straight face) can be mine! So that got me thinking... what can I do with this thing? Museum? Bar? Restaurant? Actually, I feel a top ten list coming on... Top 10 things you can do with a giant 4 story dresser drawer with 2 socks sticking out... I'll hafta work on that.

Balls, shafts, screws, and head

Guess what I did today? That's right, learned about all those things today in... professional engineering school! Back in the day, our American Institute of Chemical Engineers had a t-shirt that I designed that had the top 10 Chem E words that sound dirty. I got to relive about half of those words today! When I introduced myself to the class today and told them I'd been with the company about 5 years, they were all surprised. Boy do I feel old! I still... or maybe think I still... relate to them. It was actually a nice breath of fresh air to be with them. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but later I realized why. Everyone's questions, conversation, actions, were innocent and not geared towards trying to sell themselves, wanting to hear themselves talk, or personal agendas. The cynic in me says it's because they haven't figured out the way the company works yet, but it was like the sounds of silence... when there's so much noise all the time, the silence can be loud.

The ice wasn't the only thing that was cold during the ice dancing competition tonight. The Italian couple had apparently fallen last night, and they weren't speaking to each other. Right after the dance, during when they usually take their bows, she did nothing but give her partner/husband a cold stare. Behind the scenes cameras showed them continuing the cold stares right up to their performance tonight. I just can't stand that. Yeah, there are times when you aren't happy with each other, but there's no need to make a show out of it, especially in public. What sucks is being the guy, you can't fight back. You just hafta take it, and it hurts just as much.

Greensbor... ing?

Hello from Greensboro NC, or as a friend's sister calls it, Greensboring (apparently she didn't find it exciting when she lived here). I've been told (sarcastically) that I need to go visit the giant, 4 story chest of drawers in nearby High Point. But in the tradition of trying to find anything unique to the area where I am traveling in, I had dinner at Bojangle's fried chicken and got a 6 pack of Cheerwine soda. Oh, I also bagged a Carolina Blonde. Unfortunately, that's literal, as that's a type of beer, and I just removed it from the bag I bought it in and am drinking it now.
Tomorrow begins a week of training... many people have been here for three weeks already, I'm only gonna be here for one. Hopefully there will be people there to have dinner with. Maybe some real Carolina blonds. :)

So I checked into the Mariott Residence Inns, where people who are gonna be here for like the whole 9 weeks stay. I became a silver member of whatever their CRM program is (customer relations managment... something we learned in marketing). And because of that, I was given a full complement of... a bottle of Vasa natural spring water. The clerk literally said, "and for being a silver member, you get a bottle of water." I thought she was being funny, but no, that's all I got. I guess when you get to be a gold member you might get a soda. At the Wyndham in the Bahamas, we got water, drinks, and chocolate chip cookies. And I was only a measly normal member, not silver!

Olympic word of the day: Twizzle. From ice dancing... it's when you do turns on one skate without your partner. Apparently the two guy announcers couldn't resist making fun of the word either:

Guy announcer 1: So that twizzle was not a fizzle?
Guy announcer 2: There's no schnizzle about that twizzle.

I'm sure if there was a camera shot on the lady ice dancing expert commentator, she would've had a dirty look.

So OK, the goal for this week is to use the words "holeshot" and "twizzle" in context.

Quote from a Beautiful Mind

Maybe I should use this line someday...

"Is our relationship worthy of long term committment? I need some kind of proof, some kind of verifiable empirical data."

Conversation with IT people

I was just reminded of a conversation from an on-line IT class on the term "vaporware":

Me: Why is it called vaporware?
Prof: Because it doesn't really exist, like steam
Me: Um, being a Chemical Engineer, steam is very real to me :)

Obligatory winter olympics commentary

So I'm watching olympics tonight, and on TV is ice dancing. Now, I always respect the abilities of all the olympic athletes... however ice dancing has got to be one of the least televisible "sports" there is out there. They not only don't do any quad toe loops or triple axels, but they all skate THE EXACT SAME STEPS. Commentary goes something like "You can tell how good they are by how they kick their legs up." And of course the next team does the same thing, same kicks, same twirls.

On Tuesday before our volleyball game, we watched some curling at the bar we were at. One of my teammates said it'd be funny if we would ask the bartender to turn up the volume of the curling competition. Anyways, remember taking the SATs, and we had to do analogies? Well, here's one I came up with:

Curling : Winter olympics :: Rhythmic gymnastics : Summer olympics

So what sports do I like out of these olympics? I love the one where they snowboard race down the hill and they can inadvertantly take out people. I learned what a "holeshot" was (it's the first position, that way you don't get caught up in the "carnage" (that's the term they use)). The American who was favored was coasting to a victory when she inexplicably forgot that there were no style points awarded in a race and pulled some sort of a trick and fell. NBC then showed a replay of Leon Lett raising the ball up as he was running and Don Beebe knocking it out of his hands. The only difference was that the Cowboys won that game by 35 points.

Blog II

OK, now I'm two blogs into my life... I looked up what blogs were supposed to be, and I found out that blogs (originally called weblogs) were used to chronicle content on the web. So it was a written down history of what was happening on the internet. Apparently, it has turned into a place where people can write down their personal thoughts and stuff.

I've started replying to Karen's blog, and what she said about blogs is very clear to me now. She said that now she starts caring about what are happening to people's lives in their blogs even though she never cared about it before. I have a theory on that; I think this is like a reality show, except even better because you can write back and forth to the person in the show. So Karen being mad at her boss, or gossiping about people's dresses, etc. is like one big reality TV show except you know the person!

For my Wisconsin friends, they are right now sitting in the midst of a snowstorm. Which is completely weird to me because today's high here in Cincinnati was 63 degrees! I called my dad at work today to tell him that I scheduled my Lasik, and he wasn't there. My sister wasn't around either, and I finally got a hold of my mom, and she told me that she was leaving early because of the snowstorm. Pretty weird.

So this is a blog. The inspriation for this started when I was cleaning out files in my old computer before I reformatted it to get rid of all the viruses, adware, and random Microsoft programs. As I was clearing out my computer, I found a treasure chest full of old personal journal entries, old emails, and my very first website from my days at Wisconsin. It was fun going through those again, so I thought I should get started on that stuff again. And it turns out the current version of that is blogging.

I am still trying to figure out how best to blog. Mainly, how much and how private of stuff should I be posting. One the one hand, you could go totally public with your most private stuff. I think I decided that wouldn't be good, especially cause you never know when someone you're talking about (or your boss) may be reading this. On the other hand, you could post only "press release" like stuff, or editorial type stuff. That doesn't fulfill my desire to "blog" my life so when I hafta clean out this Dell Inspiron 600m laptop because I've bought a laptop that fits in my pocket, I'll have a blog to look back on.

So for now, I've made this a non-public blog... So I still can't rip on people, but at least I can be open enough to properly chronicle my life. And I chose this site (for now) based on two things: 1. Karen E has one here, and 2. It's a Google site (and with their stock down, it looks like they could use some help). We'll see as things go on.