Started raining while I was in the bank, but my flat cap did the trick. Now luxuriating with a Divine Hammer DIPA while I wait for the other Esperantists to arrive.
Author Archives: Philip Brewer
2019-11-25 19:33
Shuttled to DC for the IMST OA which fell through by just 0.25 points.
Source: Weeknote 47 – Shasta’s First | Srikanth Perinkulam
IMST OA?
2019-11-25 17:29
I’m having a strong beer while @jackieLbrewer has to make do with a weak beer, because I have a Y chromosome, which somehow means I can metabolize twice as much alcohol?
A little vitamin W
Since reading a couple of weeks ago about the importance of blue places for both physical and mental health, I’ve been trying to spend a little more time near water, and to pay attention when I’m there.
Today Jackie and I took a short walk along the little creek that runs just south of Winfield Village. It’s really a spectacular amenity that I don’t appreciate nearly as much as I should. (I spend a lot of time admiring our little prairie and our little woods, but I mostly just cross the creek itself with scant notice—nowhere near what it deserves.)
Perhaps you can help me catch up on appreciating our creek. Is it not admirable?
It got me some vitamin W for the water and some vitamin N for the nature, but sadly no vitamin D. The vitamin D window has closed, and won’t open again for 57 days.
2019-11-24 11:46
Great run! My sore foot didn’t hurt until I was just a few steps from home. My knee didn’t hurt at all. My heart rate held exactly where I wanted it.
2019-11-23 19:52
Latest in the long-running series, “Studies that reinforce my preconceptions just from reading the headline”:
Vegans have twice as many sick days as their meat-eating colleagues in the UK, according to a new report.
Source: Report finds vegans have twice as many sick days as meat-eaters
2019-11-23 13:49
Me: There’s a frightening number of dirty dishes in the kitchen.
Jackie: It’s not unexpected. I was just in there before you brought coffee.
Me: I didn’t say it was unexpected. I said it was frightening.
2019-11-23 09:34
Struck by Brett Scott’s great line in “The war on cash“:
It’s not a “cashless society” – but a “bankful society,”
I went to follow @Suitpossum, only to find I already do.
Optimizing the unimportant stuff
I often describe myself as having an inclination to try and optimize things. I have observed in the past that I tend to bring this inclination to bear particularly on the unimportant stuff, which always seemed odd. But just this minute I have come to understand why: I do it this way to free up time to do the important stuff exactly the way I want, whether optimal or not.
Take reading, for example. There are all kinds of ways to optimize your reading—ways to read faster, ways to absorb more of what you read, ways to organize what you’re going to read, ways to keep track of what you have read, etc. I have no interest in any of those things, because reading is important. I want to do it exactly the way I want to do it.
Figuring out some trivial reordering of exactly how I put toothpaste on my toothbrush so that I can save 5 seconds a day is much more likely to be the sort of thing I’d do—because I don’t care. I have no interest in how I brush my teeth (as long as my teeth don’t fall out), but freeing up 5 seconds a day that I can spend doing what I want to do is motivating out of all proportion to the actual time savings.
(It’s actually not so disproportionate. It takes just 240 days saving 5 seconds per day to break even on spending 20 minutes figuring how how to save those seconds. Every 5 seconds after that is pure gravy.)
Anyway, since I mentioned recently that my optimization efforts tended not to have much payoff, in my post on getting better at life under late-stage capitalism, and having literally just now realized why that was, I though I should add that bit.
2019-11-19 11:36
I had such a good time sitting in front of the fireplace last week, I decided to bring @jackieLbrewer and do it again.