Whateverman's Pad

Well, this place is lookin a bit dusty, isn't it...

 

Reader's Digest verion of my life:

 

Gram passed away, the job situation is ok but sketchy, the car is still fun as hell but showing serious signs of age, I've spent a lot of time at www.wearesmrt.com/bb, I bought a Kindle, I'll be sitting in with the jazz band tomorrow, bought some great new hardware and spent a week rebuilding the kit, I've been reading more (woot), I've got great plans for late summer early fall (having something to look forward to is key), um...

 

There's more, but that's the short version.  Will I be more active here soon?  I'm not sure - I miss blogging about the stuff on my mind, but I might move to a different platform (wordpress, blogger.com, etc).

 

I hope 'all are doin well!

 

- W

The family's in a very weird place right now.  Gram is definitely deteriorating, and it's hard both on her and my parents (they live together).

 

This time of year is normally pretty hectic for us - Mom and Dad's birthdays and anniversary are between Dec 16 and Dec 19, my gram's birthday is on Christmas - and all that regular holdiay stuff.  But this year, we're not going to be celebrating.  It's not that everyone's depressed (though that's true to some extent) - it's that a celebration would almost fly in the face of what's going on.  Gram can't enjoy any food with us, and she can't move fast - and rather than pretend otherwise, everyone decided it'd be better/easier to not do anything and simply hang around the house.  So, less stress is the goal.

 

I managed to get her talking about politics and religion again last night.  Afterwards, my Mom and I agreed that the debate seemed to bring her spirits up - she got all spunky and opinionated, and looked happier for it.  I'll be stopping by their house again a few times this week.

 

The parents now have hospice care coming to the house several times a week.  This has been an education for us, in that we now understand how it works, and the value it provides.  It's not just healthcare - it provides mental and spiritual support for everyone involved, and is focused on helping those who only have a limited time left to be more happy and comfortable.  Pretty neat, actually...

Nothing deep and meaningful to write about today.  But I think it's time I say hi to all the Facebook people.  If you haven't figured out from the lame formatting of my entries, I'm typing this junk up on another blog and exporting it.  It screws up the paragraphs and all the effort I take at making this junk entertaining to read - so, yeah, sorry about that.

 

I really need to be more active in Facebook, too.  New people, friends from highschool (hey there Mrs. Brandon!), friends from college (Chris, Rick!  Yo!), friends from work and back home and all that good stuff - I've been neglecting y'all.  Hopefully, I'll start blathering more seriously over there...

... I'm simply living my life.  I seem to write an awful lot about the former, so I'm gonna babble about the latter today.

 

The commute is a solid 2 hours, and it's literally killing me.  After hours, I've been working at home too - during the week I'm always on this laptop, documenting or emailing or trying to figure out how to solve some problem.  In general, it's not very healthy, but I'm pretty scared about losing my job.  The company is looking for ways to downsize, and my position sticks out like a sore thumb.

 

So, for now I'm sticking with it.  I know I have to change something soon though...

 

The new office in Billerica has serious issues: the network is very slow, and just this morning, they moved my cube upstairs to the 2nd floor.  Talk about killing my productivity (let's temporarily ignore the fact that I'm blogging right now :).  The plan in 2 months is to move us back down stairs again - but that's not the best part.  The rumor mill from several reliable sources states that they're going to move me back to Lowell again - permanently.  if this happens, I will both be overjoyed (my commute is back down to 75-90 minutes) and angered (WFT are they thinking wasting the company's time and money with this crap).

 

Thanksgiving was nice, and a little weird too.  I wrote about this on someone else's blog, but were were faced with both Life and Death this year.  My Gram's not going to be around for much longer; we can all see her deteriorating.  This is the reason my Mom asked the whole family to come to her house this year, which is where Granm lives.  40 frikkin people - it was fun and chaotic and all because we're going to be losing someone very soon.  Anyhow, in the midst of this soberness, 5 noisy little entities suddenly appeared this year and began crawling around and making spectacles of themselves.  I've never seen so many babies in one place - and it was a lot of fun.

 

So yeah - it was a weird juxtaposition.  But wholly enjoyable.

 

That's enough for now.  have a nice weekend everyone...

Recently I found myself saying something quite amusing over at Vulture's pad.  Several days later, that idea has fermented into something very much more potent than what I'd originally intended.

 

I was right: I really don't have much to add to the conversations I engage in.  Almost without exception, my sole purpose in participating is to comment on the methodology people use to arrive at their conclusions.

 

If I think about it, I would approach a discussion of whether the Holocaust occurred or not the same way - I'd look for assumptions, point them out, and see what happens.  I'm sure things would get heated, of course, but I wouldn't enter the fray with the idea that the original subject needed to be debunked.  I'd really just want to observe the effect of challenging the original idea.

 

I'm not sure what I think of this.

It's less hedonistic than it sounds...

 

I've been super busy these last 2 months.  Work, the new commute, random weirdness getting in my way - I'm just tired.  Like, plain ol' weary I Rilly Need A Frikkin Vacation tired.  Stuff like this tends to put my head in a less than positive place, which is why I haven't done much writing lately.

 

Besides: rumination is just mental masturbation :)  This fact hasn't stopped me before, but these days I seem to be accutely aware of it.  So, I decided a while ago to simply listen to other people.  I figured burying myself in the thoughts of others might help bring some perspective to my own.  Thus I've spent a decent chunk of my previous blogging time reading other folks' blogs.

 

Like everyone else, I'm guilty of thinking myself more intelligent than most people.  I wont claim this as fact - and I'll certainly be the first to admit that this "intelligence" is limited.  It's confined to the narrow band of understanding that might be labelled "Wisdom", rather than knowledge or the ability to process information very quickly, or memory, etc.  And this brings me to my guilty pleasure:

 

I've been stroking my ego in regards to this Wisdom thing.

 

Rather than babble any longer about it, I'll just leave it at that.  I consider myself overdue for providing some serious thought here, so I'm going to try to produce a bit in the next few days.  I hope y'all had a nice holiday here in the US...

Well, it's been roughly an hour since I arrived at the new office location.  The commute: a cool 2 hours.

 

The facilities are nice, just off the highway in a wooded industrial park.  On the first floor I can even see trees just outside of a window (not mine, the one about 100ft from me).  There's construction all through the building, though; the place sounds like a battleship with lots of creaking and strange booming sounds.  Kinda funny.

 

The cube walls are 3/4 height; I can hear every single conversation in a quarter mile radius.  To be honest, my job & department kept me from interacting with people, so this might actually be a nice change.  However, as I look around, I can see that I'm stuck in the middle of the support group - and they're constantly on the phone.  I'm sure the novelty of being able to see/hear people is going to wear thin soon.

 

My phone doesn't work.  It's pretty snazzy and all: one of those IP video jobbies - I can actually have a face-to-face with our German co-workers, which will be nice.  For now, though, I get no sound out of it.  it's sitting here, mocking me with it's 21st century coolness...

 

I'm going to spend some time unpacking now.  I've got lots to do.  Cheers...

 

PS. I'm looking for a new job.  2 hours each way isn't happening

Last night, I whipped up a batch of some epic pasta sauce.  My Mom's going to be out of town for a while, due to my other grandmother having health problems too (when it rains, it pours).  Since this leaves my Dad to fend for himself, I figure bringing both him and Gram (who lives downstairs) food will be helpful.  At the very least, he wont have to worry about helping his Mom so much, and she wont have to fuss in the kitchen.

 

She's slowly losing her appetite.  She was small to begin with, and though I'm sure she'd be the first to argue this point, she doesn't need to lose any more weight.  From what I understand, this is expected to happen as the cancer starts to take hold. 

 

Kris and I did the dinner thing last weekend in part to be around her, but we also wanted to be sure she eats well.  It was a bit funny, actually.  Before the recent surgery, the doctors told her to immediately begin a low fat diet (I think it was to make recovery a bit faster, etc).  Gram's now a bit paranoid about it, and perhaps is using it as an excuse for not eating.  Well, Sis and I decided to try to sneak calories into her somehow.  Everything we served that day was designed to look low-cal, but we'd actually spiked most of it with tastiness (olive oil over the pasta, bacon in the meat loaf, etc).

 

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I need this weekend.  I'm stressed out from work, and I just need to get the heck away from this laptop.  I bring it home every night, and usually end up working at some point.  I have to force myself to leave it in the car or something.  Additionally, I'm going to put in for some vacation time after October - nothing like knowing you've got some time off to put a little light at the end of the tunnel.

 

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The office is moving this weekend; today I'm stationed in Lowell, but on Monday I'll be in Billerica.  I'm not happy about it, as it's going to mean a slightly longer commute.  But, at the very least, I'm not expected to be productive today.  I'm in the mniddle of packing most of my stuff up - and should actually get back to doing that, rather than blogging.

 

Hope y'all have a nice weekend.  With luck, you wont see me online :)

I can not shake the niggling idea that the smarter a person is, the less likely he/she is liable to stand up and say "I know how to fix our problems..."

 

Let's be honest here: this idea is quite convenient for me.  I tend to listen before speaking, and rarely trust the information I have enough to claim I understand the situation involved.  Whether the topic is politics, the economy, religion, history, philosophy - it doesn't matter; you simply learn more by letting other people speak.

 

Is this characteristic of intelligence?  Maybe it's more fair to call it wisdom than anything else, so I guess I shouldn't be too enthusiastic about this topic.  However, it sure seems to me that less intelligent people are very quick to stand up and offer their thoughts as Fact, or as being valid solutions for whatever issue they're talking about.  Let's take the presidential elections as an example...  It's not only stereotypical but factually apparent that opinionated Americans accept the Democrat/Republican dichotomy.  Do a bit of browsing, and you'll find all kinds of people asserting Republicans suck!  or  Democrats will destroy everything this country stands for!. 

 

If you happen to be perusing religious forums, you'll find that people eagerly split themselves along iconoclastic lines, and there's very little opinion that straddles them.  All Christians are idiots, or all atheists secretly believe in God, or other trash that labels entire groups based on the opinions/actions of a few.

 

To be sure, you'll find intelligent people doing this as well.  But it seems to me there is always a group watching quietly, opining only when someone makes an obvious mistake, or when they're asked personally.  Doesn't it make sense that, if you want to learn more about a subject, you'd sit and watch for a while?

 

What causes people to feel they understand a situation enough to come down solidly on one side or the other, and loudly proclaim this?