Scrappy Blog

Well, after a frantic day of packing and trying to wrap up Friday’s work before 2 PM when we were due to leave for the airport (which included a meeing in which one of my most promising job prospects fell apart in front of my eyes when the relevant department learned their 2006 budget would be cut by 15% – boo), we then cooled our heels in the airport for a few extra hours until the Atlanta weather cleared up enough to let people fly there. As a result we dragged in late and slept not long enough.

Not long enough, that is, for the Saturday we had today. Started with a breakfast date at 8, followed by heading to my nephews’ basketball game immediately after. My oldest nephew, the hyperactive one who tugs my heartstrings because everyone’s yelling at him all the time, managed to be the star of the game, which I think will be great for his self-confidence. Apparently he hadn’t even scored all season, then today he managed to grab a rebound and get it in the basket (of course his parents and grandmother missed it because they were busy chatting). This gave him a surge of confidence that led to a couple more baskets and success on 1 of 2 freethrows, which made him the top scorer in a game that ended at an amazing 22 to 24 score. Those baskets are really high up when you’re 8 years old…

So this was just the start of the day … more relatives came rolling in, we grabbed lunch and took public transpo downtown, walked a half-mile in freezing weather to spend three hours running madly through the Atlanta Aquarium, which is very cool. Very cool. Did I mention it is cool? I got given the particular fun of chasing after the hyperactive nephew, mostly because it meant he could actually have fun without people yelling at him all the time, and thus didn’t sit down even for a moment the whole time. Then the walk back to the train, in weather that had gotten even colder as the sun set, with the nephew who still wanted to race to every stoplight (hey, kid, didn’t you just play 4 quarters of basketball and then run around the aquarium for three hours? Why aren’t you sacked out asleep like your brothers?) and I chased after him, which means I got a pretty decent cardio workout in…

We all staggered out for dinner at one of those salad/pasta/potato/soup/pizza/bread/dessert bar places, adding a full stomach to my list of reasons to be somnolent, then staggered back home again. So not it’s 10:30 PM, which is 9:30 my time, and I feel like I’m ready to sleep for a week.

Boy, I bet this suppresses Keith’s desire to have kids for a while…

Cool stuff: I’ve been getting to know my aunt’s husband a bit better and am more and more impressed with him. She’s had a tough life in many ways and it really pleases me that she has ended up with such a great guy. Each seems happiest when the other is around. He’s the owner of an auto shop, and a former racecar driver, which means he knows all kinds of stuff about things I know very little about, and he’s amazingly modest about both his auto expertise and his driving skills. He and my aunt are as cute together as a pair of teenagers. It warms my heart.

Well, time to sleep now. Or canoodle a bit…

continues the discussion about food in an interesting direction: “More and more my inner voice has been telling me that the answers to my weight issues lie in being vegan.”

While the following thoughts may not apply to the above quote at all, it reminded me of something I see often in others and in myself:

It’s hard to mentally separate choices about the maintenance of the machine that is our bodies, from choices about our spiritual and ethical paths. This is unfortunate, because those things should be perfectly distinct.  For example, there’s plenty of ways to eat badly as a vegan; there are also  healthy diet choices for us meat-eaters.  Why is it important to recognize that the issues are unrelated?

One reason that’s important is because of the guilt factor.  I am prone to feel guilty about my imperfections.  If I’ve not been exercising and I’ve been eating badly, I feel guilty that I’m ignoring my body’s needs. But, if I add on the guilt that I’m somehow flawed at a higher spiritual level just because I like fried food and ice cream, I think the emotional burden would cripple me from making any forward progress whatsoever. 

A second issue is that of accurate expectations.  (I’m having trouble expressing this concisely).  If you adopt a behavior change in expectation that something will change, and you don’t see that change, it’s easy to abandon that new behavior. Which is a problem, if there were other reasons (ethical, spiritual) why you chose the behavior. 

So, analyzing such thoughts to sort out the true associations from the false ones helps me avoid guilt and avoid disappointment in the long run.  Not sure what the point of all this is, except that trying to express this in writing has helped me see more clearly how to live my own life more peacefully…

Over the years I’ve bemoaned the lack of an electronic calendar that meets my needs. I still looking for the ideal product. Really, I’m hoping those gmail people will assemble a calendar to interface with mail, or that the Firefox/Mozilla calendar project will produce something with all the features I want.  I have found some products that improve (but don’t totally fix) the use of the Outlook calendar, but better would be:

General:

Views: I should be able to see day and week views that show detailed appointments, as well as a month view with appointment listings. A list view that shows several months worth of upcoming stuff would also be cool.

Color-coding: the calendar views should allow me to set color codes for various items – color cues could be used for location, nature of appointment (work, personal, etc), multiple user information,
etc.
Communication:  It’d be great if it interacted with my gmail account that I use for work.  Perhaps a gmail plug-in that creates buttons:  “Add appointment to calendar” and “add task to calendar” would do the trick. 
Online/offline:  I’d like the primary calendar to be offline; I’d like each of several machines (with various OS’s) to automatically sync with it for the times I work offline.
Compatibility:  needs to be able to work with multiple OS platforms – I use both Windows and Mac and want to be free to expand to Linux as well.

Appointments:

People:  it would be good if you could identify people involved, especially if it automatically grabbed contact info for those people for further conversation about the meeting.
Transporation:  It would be good if you could put estimated transportation time to/from the meeting in a way that was clearly shown on the display – have the meeting shown and a little greyed out space on either side for transit time that is clearly not part of the meeting but clearly has to be kept free on the schedule.
Recursion:  repeating appointments with various options for type of recursion and duration of recursion is a must.  It should be possible to edit one of a series or all of a series.

Tasks:
(here’s where I’m most demanding and dissatisfied with current products)
Basics:  the task list should be visible while looking at the actual calendar view as well.  A given task should be associated with info about estimated time to complete, amount complete, amount assigned (see below), due dates, dependencies (see below), importance, recurrence. 
Assignment to times:  I should be able to assign a task to a particular time block on the calendar.  The calendar should reflect this as an appointment (time not avail) but should also update the time estimates – e.g. this task is projected to take 2 hours.  You’ve completed 30 minutes, and have assigned one hour for future work, leaving 30 minutes of unassigned to-do.  This assignment function should not screw up with recurring tasks – I should be able to assign appropriate times to do this week’s task, and then have next week’s iteration of the task appear with the original time estimate showing as neither completed or assigned.
Gantt view – it would be cool to be able to view the to-do list as a scheduled workflow like a gantt view, where you ordered your to-do list in a way that showed dependencies.  This view should take into account the time on your schedule that’s unavailable because of appointments.  An internal logic that actually laid out the work schedule for you would be really cool. 

If a product exists that offers all this, I haven’t found it (would love to hear about it).  Otherwise, from my fingers to google’s ears! 

has been talking recently about healthy eating. This is a topic I muse on often, since I don’t do it all that well myself and I’m supposed to be able to guide other people in the subject.

My primary problem, and that of many of the people I talk to, is that I don’t have lots of free time and only enjoy cooking sometimes.

An additional problem is that I cook for my sweetie as well, and he’s prone to want to eat the junk I shouldn’t be eating. In principle he wants to eat well; in practice he instinctively chooses the junk food. So if we order chinese, I suggest chicken with veggies and he counter-proposes something that involves bits of deep-fried meat slathered in high-sugar sauce.

There’s actually a lot of decent convenience diet food out there, fr’ex healthy choice, south beach, and weight watchers frozen dinners. But, like , I am not willing to think about weight loss right now. There’s a real need for “quick food” (frozen dinners and the like) which is low-sugar, low-fat, rich in protein and complex carbs, and not reduced-calorie.

I did just work out, which is a step in the right direction.

So I seem to be spending as much time browsing other peoples’ journals as doing anything with my own.  Obviously there’s spiffy stuff I can do; offered to give me a tour but (1) we haven’t found time to yet, and (2) I have a predilection for trying to figure things out on my own.

So today’s achievement is finding a page style I like and figuring out how to link to peoples’ usernames on my own post.

Perhaps people can suggest other skills they find useful or entertaining?  I find self-education is more effective when there’s a goal to be achieved.

So…. had the sort of afternoon where I found myself really appreciating my own life. Lotsa other people have it far, far worse than I! Also had one of those “what are the chances of that” kind of day – two patients in a row whose problems turned out to be unintended pregnancy, both people whose health wouldn’t make a pregnancy easy, and whose life situations won’t make a pregnancy (or a child) at all easy to deal with. Sigh. My heart went out to both. Makes me think of friends who have tons to offer a child, and aren’t able to have one – life’s not fair, sometimes.

Also lost (part of) my keys today. Not sure how. Must’ve had them when I left the house because I did lock the door. But then a few hours later after three meetings in three different locations, realized my keychain felt too light and realized I still had carkey, cell phone, and the key to Keith’s car, but no other keys. On what appeared to be an intact keyring. No luck with retracing my steps. Odd, must be one of those quantum things?

Demo’d a new form I’d revised for our clinic in the faculty meeting this AM. Revisions based on a set of comments I’d gathered from the group about a month ago. My change addressed every one of those comments, which was nice. The main result in the meeting? A whole new set of even more ambitious requests. How will I get the computer to give them foot massages while they fill out this form, anyway? Main result after the meeting was over: over half of the faculty found the chance to approach me privately and thank me effusively for the changes I made. That felt good.

Now if I can get someone to hire me to do this for a living…

Thinking on my drive home about the need to get a job – it’s come up twice today that my funding runs out in a few months. Not even sure how to go about it; I haven’t ever really looked for a job before. But it seems a little foolhardy to sit around hoping someone will drop an opp in my lap (just because it always worked before…) so I suppose I should start… um… looking at stuff like people do when they look for jobs.

Heck, I don’t even know where WE advertise when we have a position. Other than those ads in the back of journals, I mean, which always seems a little like the ads in the back of Rolling Stone magazine where anything might go…

Maybe I’ll try a little networking and see if someone wants to save me the trouble of actually looking for work. Sigh. I should think about stuff like this when I haven’t actually seen patients until 8 PM, and have a bit more energy.

Also realized that I’ll see my parents and brother in just over a week, so it’s probably time to go buy them Christmas presents. Inspiration, I need you!

Sigh.

I was going to present this spiffy new tool to my colleagues Friday AM. Part of the fun would be saying “and this is finished, so you can have it RIGHT NOW instead of waiting six months like you usually have to.”

Then I had this … inspiration. The tool could be so much better than I’d made it. The version I’d made was clearly a big improvement on what we had before, but it could be better still… with some major re-programming.

So I’ve spent the week programming madly and cussing over the fact that it’s not going fast enough for me to be able to present the finished product to the group in two days. Sigh. I’ll have something to show them, just not enough…

Hopefully I don’t fall prey to this “never-finished” syndrome where I keep thinking of ways it could get better, and hence never actually put anything out into action.

I just interviewed a young lady who’s applying for college. It’s always a challenge for me to assess how mature and competent these kids are “supposed” to be. My memory of my own college interview amazes me – I asked a variety of idiotic questions that utterly assumed I’d be accepted. I’m surprised they didn’t reject me just based on that.

The interview form asks if the kids have any significant barriers to achievement in their lives. This is intended to reflect things like physical handicaps, financial hardship, etc. But sometimes I’m tempted to say “this child has a significant barrier to development in that she has had an utterly wonderful, sheltered life in which she’s never wanted for anything. She can’t possibly have developed any coping skills because she’s never had to cope with anything!”

How do you raise your kids to feel secure and loved and yet give them the drive to develop competence?

I started yesterday with a migraine. A totally undeserved headache since I spent the eve before in quiet social time with friends, no alcohol or decadance; I was in bed (but not sleeping ;> ) by midnight. So of all the headaches in the city, mine was the least deserved…

So I’ve decided today is the first day of the New Year. So there!